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HYDRATION


Alan Dean Foster


Miriam Fethri was dying. She found this immensely frustrating because she was now rich. Several weeks ago she’d had a grubstake and no money. But plenty of water. Now she had hovering before her the prospect of millions of credits. But no water. She would gladly have traded all of the former for a cold glass of the latter.

She could not put the blame on her leased crawler’s subsurface scanner. It had done its job by warning her of the crustcrease ahead. Traversing a geological zone that was seemingly sound, she had felt safe making tea. The thought of tea, even hot tea, caused her parched throat to clench. She fought not to cough. Because where she was now physiologically, if she coughed she might choke. Dying of thirst was something every prospector prepared for mentally.

Choking to death was not.

When the alarm in the crawler’s cabin had cried out she abandoned the tea making and rushed back to the driver’s seat. She was too late. Camouflaged by heavy sand, the crease had appeared with shocking suddenness. By the time she was seated and back at the controls the vehicle was already nosing downward into the abyss. Frantic jabs and finger thrusts at the control screens had sent it howling into reverse, but there was too much pulverized grit and not enough stable stone for the treads to get a grip. Slipping, slipping, toward oblivion, she had no choice but to jettison.

The crawler’s treads had been unable to find rock, but there was plenty of it where the driver’s seat landed.

The impact was enough to send her spilling out of her restraints. Though they had deployed automatically upon jettisoning, they were as old and indifferently maintained as the rest of the crawler. They snapped, sending her flying out of the seat but, fortunately, onto soft sand.

Dazed, she carefully checked herself before trying to stand. Legs, straightening. Arms, functional. Eyes, ears, nostrils, all present and accounted for. Brain—brain was very, very angry. Only anger, though. It was too soon yet for it to fill with fear.

Spitting out sand, she made a quick search for the crawler. Thanks to the randomness of her emergency eject, it took her a while. The sand-covered crevasse into which it had fallen was so deep she could not see the bottom. Or any sign of the vanished crawler. So, no recovery of supplies, then. Redirecting her attention, she walked back to the ejection seat. Old and dated though it was, it had saved her life.

Her spirits sank as she examined it. Like her hopes, it was crushed, having smashed itself against the flank of one of several pale, pillar-like rock outcroppings. The portable cylindrical concentrator that fit neatly into one armrest, and was capable of drawing moisture out of the air, had cracked. Another compartment held multiple packets of dehydrated food, largely useless in the absence of liquid. She could consume the powdery concentrates straight, if she could stomach eating the gourmand equivalent of flavored sawdust. As for the emergency communicator and transponder that would send out a signal indicating a problem, she couldn’t even locate it in the wreckage.

Ordinarily, she would have been delighted to encounter protruding rock pillars. The buried ones she had located, before she had turned back toward town, had set her to dancing with glee. They were richly veined with chromal. Chromal was what had brought her to Nonus III. It was what brought everyone to Nonus III. There was no other reason, earthly or otherwise, to come to the undistinguished, largely featureless world of Nonus.

But chromal was enough.

Scientists still did not fully understand the complex chemical structure of the mineral or its unique internal bonds. Found in the spidery veins of local sandstone, the best of it looked like pinfire opal flecked with stainless steel. Only, the mineral’s internal play of color was more spectacular than anything else known and, unlike opal, it rated a 9 on the Mohs Hardness Scale. Impossible to synthesize, the gemstone commanded absurd prices. Finding a single short vein of gem-quality chromal a few centimeters wide could make a prospector rich. Finding multiple, thicker veins would make one the envy of old man Midas.

That was what she had discovered, concealed beneath a massive dune. After using the crawler’s powervac to remove the overlying sand she had carefully chipped out enough chromal on which to support herself comfortably for the rest of her life, fully intending to come back for more. Now her hard-won stash lay at the bottom of crease along with the crawler and the remainder of her dreams.

Rich one moment, poor the next, dead the following. It was not how her last-minute decision to risk everything on adventuring to distant Nonus was supposed to end.

Maybe it wouldn’t, she told herself determinedly. The coordinates of the deposit were locked in her memory. She could find the location of the strike again. All she to do was come back.

If she could get out.

There being nothing useful to salvage from the crumpled ejection seat except the small packets of food concentrate, she stuffed those into her pockets and started off on what she hoped was a course that would lead her back to Haze. There were three towns on Nonus: Haze, Blech, and Sunburn. None was situated more than thirty kilometers from another. So if she missed Haze, she’d make it to one of the others. It did not matter that she was now dead broke. Prospectors took care of their own. Because the ruined, down-on-their-luck prospector you helped today might be the one to save you tomorrow when you found your own ass on the line.

Some systems had two suns. Some three. Nonus had only a single solitary star. It didn’t need any help to fry a lone trekker. There were no landmarks save for the occasional rock outcropping, most of which were indistinguishable from one another. No trees, no aboveground vegetation of any sort. Other than the rocks, there was only sand.

She tried to maintain what she thought was the correct route while keeping as much as possible to the more solid ground between the dunes. Maintaining a straight course was possible in the powerful crawler. It was not possible on foot. Even a strong woman would be worn out after surmounting and descending a hundred meters or so of soft sand. She also had to keep alert for slingers, mots, and other dangerous local fauna. Envelopment by a poisonous slinger would bring a faster death than from thirst, but she did not relish the prospect.

The argument could be made that her best chance of survival was to remain with the derelict ejection seat. Except that prospectors purposely kept their course vague lest eager colleagues track them to their diggings. Better to ensure security and take one’s chances with possible equipment failure.

I can do this, she told herself. She was healthy and strong. Too strong for most women, not soft enough for most men. Her independence further mitigated against any long-term relationship, though she had engaged in plenty of short-term swapping of bodily fluids. She was lean and muscular while her height gave her the advantage of a long stride. Black eyes set in a narrow, almost girlish face were framed by dark green hair cut short. While her mouth was small, full lips were fully capable of disgorging the most inventive expletives. As a soloing prospector on a backwater world, she had to be able to hold her own verbally as well as physically. She would have cursed up a storm right now save for the need to conserve as much energy as possible. Cussing out a sand dune blocking her intended path was a sign of incipient madness, not strength.

Reaching down, she adjusted the color of her singlesuit from brown to off-white. Bright red would be more likely to draw the attention of a passing craft but would soak up more heat. Black would be better still for catching the eye, be it human or electronic. It would also be suicide.

A light breeze blew granules off the top of the dunes she was walking between. The sky was a solid, almost metallic blue. It would have been a beautiful sight—from inside the air-conditioned crawler’s main cabin.

Before long, the chromal was forgotten. The crawler was forgotten. All she could think about was water.

Miriam reached the point where she was not sure how many days she had been walking. Her lips were now painfully chapped, and it was increasingly difficult to keep the sand out of her eyes. An object floated in the sky ahead of her. A cloud, not a skimmer. White and pregnant with implied moisture, it taunted her. She fought not to lick her lips. Digging into a pocket she drew out a packet of powdered food. Beef stroganoff. She almost laughed. Mixed a little at a time in her mouth with her dwindling supply of saliva, the resultant paste supplied some energy. It also tasted only a little different from the sand surrounding her. She trudged on, her increasingly irregular thoughts filled with images of thundering waterfalls and deep, dark forest pools.

The wadi she had been following dead-ended against a massive slope of sand. She could not go back, could not turn around. Maybe, she thought tiredly through the shimmering heat, the ravine was intersected only by this one dune and continued on the other side. Keeping a wary eye out for slithering mots, she started to climb.

For every two steps forward, it seemed she took one back, slipping and sliding on the unstable slope. She persevered, using her long legs to advantage. Her calf muscles screamed. Eventually sand disappeared from her immediate line of vision, to be replaced by a descending curtain of cerulean sky.

Triumphant, if only momentarily, she stood staggering at the crest of the dune, staring at the eastern horizon. It was filled, overwhelmed, with more dunes, more sand, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. Only—off in the distance, slightly to her left. Something broke the otherwise straight line of the horizon. A thin, barely perceptible irregularity. Buildings? Rough-and-tumble Haze, or one of its equally sorry-ass sibling urbanities? She couldn’t tell. She did not have scope glasses on her, and her visual perception, like the rest of her senses, was succumbing to the heat. If it was a mirage she was looking at, at least it was a goal of some sort. She took a step forward.

And went down.

On her side, rolling, rolling, picking up speed as she tumbled, too weak to put out an arm or leg to stop or even slow her descent. The sand beneath her was hot, soft, and abrasive. She did not stop rolling until she reached the base of the dune. The only thing that saved her was that the surface was covered in deep sand instead of rock or hardpack.

Breathing one heave shy of wheezing, she lay motionless on her side and took stock of what was left of herself. As with the ejection from the crawler, nothing seemed to be broken. How fortunate she was, she mused sardonically. She could still walk, still stumble toward her goal, the thin irregular line that was possibly Haze. If she could stand.

Get up. It was an internal shout, directed solely at her leg muscles. Get. Up.

No response. There was no movement in her legs. Her brain insisted they were functional, but somewhere along the neurological line there appeared to be some disagreement. A foot moved. That was insufficient for her purpose.

Catch your breath, she admonished herself. Don’t rush things. Just because you’re dry as a desiccated goat, just because you’re starting to hallucinate, just because the big crazy forking round oven up in the sky is trying to cook you, doesn’t mean you have to rush it. Just relax. Maybe take a nap. That’s it: a nice, long, motionless nap. Right here in the pleasantly hellish sunshine.

She lay like that for what might have been an hour. Or four. Until something besides blowing sand aggravated her eyes. Movement. Her eyes grew a little wider while her brain determined that, irrespective of the identity of what she was seeing, naptime was over.

The creature emerged slowly from near the base of the dune down which she had taken her interminable tumble. Grains of quartz and feldspar slithered down smooth, hairless, curved flanks. Not as long as her but much stouter and heavier, the alien resembled a cross between a pile of golden potatoes and a freshly scoured pig. Its body was a mass of lumps and bulges, some twice the size of her fist. Each was a slightly different shape and tinted to match a slightly different color of sand.

Cryptic coloration. Camouflage. She wondered what for. It was too big for a mot to tackle and a slinger’s net would not be strong enough to restrain so much mass. Which implied there were other things as yet undocumented on Nonus that were big enough to kill one of these creatures. The thought was unsettling.

One lump slightly more protrusive than the rest was the nearest thing the being had to a head. Two very tiny, almost vestigial, pupil-less black eyes glistened in the sun. Set well below these miniscule oculars was a larger black circle that pulsated slightly and appeared to go deep. She could not see any sign of teeth. No dentition in the indentation, she told herself wildly.

The creature advanced slowly toward her. Humping along the ground like a spasmed seal in the absence of limbs, there was no mistaking its route. The slow-motion charge, or attack, or whatever it was, provided sufficient motivation for her to get one leg up under her right hip. Shoving with all her strength she managed to get her hips and right thigh a few centimeters off the ground. When even this meager effort proved too much for her enfeebled, overheated body, she collapsed back onto the sand.

The creature was now perhaps a meter away from her face. This close she could see that its face, if that was indeed what the three black circles represented, was surrounded by dozens and dozens of slender cilia. Reaching outward from the body, they were fluttering hypnotically in her direction. Even for an alien creature, the hydra (as she had decided in her semi-delirium to call it) presented a particularly unsettling visage.

If it was going to eat her, she mused, it ought by now to be showing some teeth. Unless it was going to use its tiny toothless mouth to gum her to death.

It stopped about half a meter away from the supine, weakly breathing creature lying before it. She had the impression it was studying her. Would it wait for her to die and then somehow, via some as yet unperceived alien gustatory mechanism, begin consuming her flesh?

It walked, or rather oozed, still nearer. Insofar as she could tell, it gave off no odor. So close now that she could make out hundreds of pores pockmarking what heretofore had appeared to be smooth skin. Tiny hairs grew out of the pores.

The hairs started to extend toward her.

She couldn’t move. Nothing functioned below her waist, and said non-functionality was beginning to creep down her arms, as well.

Try to look on the bright side, she told herself. You are now potentially wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, whoever he was, and you are also most likely the discoverer of a new charismatic alien species, which may try to kill and eat you.

So very near it was now, the lumpy desert hydra-thing. Scarcely a couple of handsbreadths away from her face. Long filaments extending outward from dark pores, quivering in her direction like hair in the wind. Something glistened at the tip of each of them: a clear liquid.

Hydrochloric acid, perhaps? Or something similar, to dissolve her flesh into easy to consume porridge. Surely not water. It couldn’t be water. Why would a sack of alien lumpiness be offering her water?

What the hell. Even if it was some kind of acid, maybe it was diluted enough not to kill her. At least, not outright. Whatever it was, it was wet. She was out of options anyway. Making a supreme effort, she raised her right hand and brought the index finger down toward the nearest filaments. When her hand drew near, a dozen of them curved toward her trembling digit. Contact was made.

There was no burning sensation, no irritation. Only dampness, surprisingly cool. Dare she, she wondered? If not, dead she. Carefully she brought the fingertip to her lips. It was only a couple of drops, but inside her mouth it felt like a long draught of a spring freshet.

Advancing, the creature cut the distance between itself and her face in half. No sound emerged from the tiny maybe-mouth. Glistening with moisture, dozens of light gray filaments extended in her direction. Was it, could it be—offering? But why? Not that it mattered. The droplets that had all but evaporated inside her parched mouth had caused no damage. Her entire body cried out for more. She grabbed at the nearest cluster of water-laden filaments.

They withdrew, sharply. The creature started to turn away.

No. Nonono. Come back.

She did not know if she whispered it or merely thought it. She lowered her hand. It required too much of her wisp of remaining energy to hold it out any longer, much less grab at anything.

After a few panicky moments, the inhabitant of the dune turned back to her, and its filaments extended toward her mouth once again. They fluttered around her perspiration-streaked face: testing, questing, exploring. For a second time, they found what they were looking for.

She might not be certain where the hydra’s mouth was, but it did not have the same problem with regard to her.

Dozens, maybe a hundred or more of the gray filaments pushed just inside her half-open mouth, past chapped, crusted lips. Then they began to exude—water. Still only droplets, but dozens at a time now. A continuous flow measurable in milliliters. Unexpectedly soon, there was enough to swallow. She felt pain in her dried-out throat, mixed with delight. Lying there, her breathing shallow, she let the alien dribble life-giving liquid into her. It was slightly alkaline, but utterly delicious.

She felt a pinch on the back of her left hand. So exhilarated was she by the slight but steady flow of water that she almost failed to notice it. Which was likely the evolutionary idea.

Tilting back her head, she saw a single filament that was different from all the others. Instead of being a light gray in color, it was nearly transparent. The tip that had eased its way into the vein on the back of her hand was probably very sharp. She could only assume such was the case because she could not see the tip. Could not see it because it had pushed its way into her vein. Fluid was flowing through the filament.

Not from the hydra to her, but from her to the hydra.

Her first instinct was to draw away. To break the connection. But her mind, recharging now toward sensibility, told her that if she did then the hydra would likely also retract every one of its life-giving water supplying filaments. Forcing herself to remain calm, she struggled to hold still and gauge the exchange. The creature’s actions toward her were neither philanthropic nor symbiotic. This was something else. A little blood for a lot of water. What did the hydra get out of the exchange?

Various proteins. White blood cells. Red blood cells—containing hemoglobin. Iron. Proteins and iron.

As near as she could tell, the hydra was supplying her mouth, which for the first time in days was able to gulp, with far more water than it was extracting in blood. Which suggested that water was easier for the creature to find than certain proteins or other necessary impurities. Useful information for a prospector on Nonus to know. Not that it mattered to her. Because she was going to leave this wretched sandbox of a world. Her memory was solid. She would go back to the chromal deposit. What she had mined was now gone, returned to the planet’s innards. But millions remained in the stone matrix, waiting for her to return and carefully, triumphantly, extract it. A few of the best chips, samples intended for assay, still rattled around in the depths of one tightly sealed side pocket. Not enough to purchase or lease an entire new outfit, but enough to attract all the investors she would need. She was going to make it. She was going to be rich.

And she was going to live.

She lay there on her side, trading blood for water with an unclassified alien dune dweller that seemed perfectly content to accept her otherworldly proteins, letting it sip of her self through a flexible organic straw, and feeling better and stronger and more optimistic than at any time since her expedition had come to near disaster.

It was not sex. But it felt like it.


The End



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Framed