Fic: "In the Garden of God" Transformers G1 (G)
Title: In the Garden of God
Author: tiamatschild
Character: Beachcomber
Word count: 3,441 words
Rating/Warning: G
Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers!
Warnings: None.
Group/Theme: For 7_minibots: The Seven Major Chakras - Swadisthana (governs creativity and sexuality)
Summary: Beachcomber goes on a long term survey of the Sahara.
In the Garden of God
Each morning Beachcomber woke to find scorpions curled against the warmth of his body. They clustered against the heat of his engine, they sought shelter in the curves of his wheel wells, and each morning he moved smoothly, warningly, careful to gently shake them loose and send them skidding home.
It was a slow start to the day. But days were slow in the desert. It was only the way of things.
There had been any number of reasons for Beachcomber to feel it was time to leave for a while. He could feel Headquarters closing tight around him, too near, the walls too even, the lighting too precise, the constant conversation of his friends and colleagues no longer a familiar comfort to come back to after a few long days in the field but a source of distress, a jostling reminder of conflict and pain, things he could not escape, things which pressed at him, tried to change him, to move him as he did not wish to move. There were things he had to resist and things which he was not supposed to resist that he did not wish to bow to, and his discussions with Perceptor took on a twinge of exhaustion, frustration more mutual than their prickly balance could sustain. The halls were too stable, the surrounding countryside was too red, too well explored, the peace silence and solitude imparted to him too fleeting.
It was time for him to do some serious, long term survey work.
The Sahara had fascinated him since he had first seen its image from space - a great pale blotch sprawling across northern Africa, its edges made soft by the impreciseness of its physical boundaries. Where did it end and where did it begin? How long could he go in it? How could he come to know it for himself, for itself, so he would always carry it with him, even if the world changed once more and it became a gain a great grassland as it had been, not so very long ago.
He would go there.
The people of the Sahara, Beachcomber realized quickly enough, moved swiftly and frequently through their desert, so that at times this vast land, a thousand miles across at its narrowest point, felt more like a very small town. Or possibly a science department.
Whatever it was, news traveled rapidly, sweeping through the small communities, hopping and jumping and building like the dunes. And if there was ever any news worth carrying, a mechanical geologist was undeniably it, so it wasn’t surprising that Beachcomber found himself not simply an object of curiosity, but a curiosity whose arrival was anticipated, expected.
Beachcomber certainly wasn’t surprised. The desert was vast, but there were only so many ways to get through it safely, and it was hard to overlook a dune buggy who occasionally, despite the best sensors Cybertonian technology had to offer, missed his track and landed, stuck, in soft sand that was still free to move. He figured he made quite a picture, transforming and scrambling and transforming again when his feet threatened to sink and swallow him, laughing all the time, white and blue against the gold, or dun, or gray of the land.
“A camel is better!” a man called to him one day, “But I imagine you have no choice!”
“We haven’t figured out camels yet!” Beachcomber shouted back, still laughing, as he rolled and stumbled his way the last few feet to hard packed sand again, “I’ll have to suggest it!”
“You’re a wise man!” the traveler’s companion told him, and they went together for a way, as indeed they had been going - the pleasantries of the desert were long and complex, a necessity in a place where politics were as complicated and as serious as the mountain ridges. A dune buggy, alien despite his camouflage of form, and two men on camelback, on the same short leg.
To Beachcomber’s mind it was no shock that they spread the story of their strange travelling companion, that they told those they met that the robots, whose doings they had heard stories of but who had not previously ventured into the vast and windy landscape that was their own, had finally taken it into their heads to take a look around. Well, of course they did. He would have been a novelty anywhere. Here, where camels were still, were always, the best transport, the best way through, he shone in his strangeness, despite how dull his paint had gone.
“Traditionally, my people don’t use money,” Beachcomber told Rakia. The moon was brilliant, out beyond the walls of the town, that close, lovely moon that was so tightly tethered to the Earth. (“A caravan camel in a place with no forage,” Rakia had said earlier, while they swapped metaphors and images, painting out for each other the patterns of thought tooled on their souls. “A ship at harbor,” Beachcomber had said, soft laughter in his voice, “The smaller partner in a paired exploration team, sweeping the cold places together.”)
“Ah,” Rakia said, and resettled her hands more closely around her cup of strong mint tea, “There’s a thing we have in common.”
Beachcomber smiled. “There are old legends that hint that once we were bought and sold, not even as slaves, but as blocks of salt that bear their maker’s mark. So we do not use money.”
Rakia blinked up at him. “Forgive me, I must be rude - I don’t see the connection.”
“I’ve never really understood that logic either. I think it’s a control. We don’t use money, so the value of energy remains the value of the work that energy can fuel, and neither energy nor work become devalued or overvalued.”
Rakia smiled. “That makes sense.”
Beachcomber had met Rakia on a day when all the silent self sufficiency of the desert could not soothe him. He ached with the thought of a passing word to someone who knew him well, with the small, piercing pain of passing his time beside people who did not speak his own language, who never would, because so many of its cadences and implications could not quite be reproduced by organic brains and organic vocal systems, and besides, they had no need to. He mourned for his students, who would never come here, who would never learn the languages, so many languages, would never navigate the checkpoints at the borders, never let the long formalities of desert life roll over them, careful and unhurried, would never feel the thrum of the jumping dunes, would never come into town on a fine clear evening when the sky was brilliant enough to cut.
Rakia’s wits were themselves brilliant enough to cut, and the sureness of her hands as she tooled leather broke through his self-absorption, wrung interest out of him again.
“It’s an old technique,” she told him in response to his compliments, “I learned it from my mother - you watch so closely, sir, a person might almost fear you were looking to steal secrets.”
“I’m only a geologist,” he answered, “My fingers are far too clumsy for such fine work.”
She looked at his hands, built for the delicate manipulations necessary to clean fossils and free them from their matrix, and laughed. “It isn’t your hands that keep you from it!”
It was true, and he had nothing to say in reply.
Beachcomber always carried water. He himself needed very little, having been built for conditions even drier than the ones prevalent in the desert. Cybertron had very little free water, and to Beachcomber it seemed that even this desert was rich in the substance. He could feel it, thrumming beneath his feet, charged in the deep aquifers, singing from stone to stone. It was there, and he saw it without sight, with the sensory array that had been built into him.
But Beachcomber carried water, because it was the reality of the desert (the reality, it went deeper than law and deeper than custom, it was in the very nature of life in the Sahara) that if you saw someone on your road you stopped for them, and spoke with them, because there might be a need for water. You never denied someone water. To not carry it would be to potentially deny someone water, and thus, perhaps, deny them life. So Beachcomber carried water, far more than he himself would need, even in the deep desert, even were he lost.
He carried nothing else of value. He was a mendicant of science, with nothing to his name but the strength of his body, the agility of his mind.
Beachcomber met Rakia again a few days before he left to return to Autobot Headquarters, in the shadow of a date palm on the edge of town.
“Did you find what you went looking for?” Rakia asked him as they walked together along the street. “Was it enough?”
Beachcomber considered, as one of the camels passing by on their way into town decided that his open palm was an invitation and proceeded to hopefully lip at it. The camel quickly concluded that Beachcomber, with his tendency to attract and hold small mineral particles, was tasty. Its happy investigation of this phenomenon quickly began to interfere with the agenda of its owner, who said, briskly although not without humor, “Sir geologist, your charms are distracting my camel.”
“Terribly sorry,” Beachcomber said, and removed his hand from ready reach, tucking it behind his back.
The camel was not to be so easily deterred, but its handler was persistent, and eventually it was led away grumbling.
Rakia watched it leave for a long, solemn moment, her veil blowing over her hands, which she held clasped in the small of her back. “You’ll return,” she said eventually, “To further usurp the affections of our camels.”
“It’s nothing I do on purpose,” Beachcomber protested.
“You are indeed a distraction,” she said.
“A welcome one, I hope.”
“Say… A not unpleasant novelty.” And she turned to him, her dark eyes laughing.
He took it as the honor it was.
“So you’re going,” Perceptor had said.
“Yes,” Beachcomber said, leaning against the solid support of the door to the base’s communal lab. “I’m going.”
“Well,” Perceptor said, after a long moment, “Go then.” And he turned from him, and did not turn back, although Beachcomber waited, still, for a long, long time.
“I’ve been gone nearly nine months,” Beachcomber told Rakia, as they walked down the street together, sand swirling along as their passage displaced it.
“Nine months is long enough to bear a child,” Rakia said.
“A human child,” Beachcomber answered, light and ready, “For a camel the growing takes longer.”
Rakia laughed. “It’s true,” she said, “How long does a child take your people?”
Beachcomber shrugged. “An afternoon, a week, a thousand years… it depends.”
“Upon the child?”
“And the builders.”
He thought about it, thought of children - although to be strict and truthful there were few beings anyone would recognize as children among transformers. For the most part there were only the young, who knew more than human children and often less. It took time to grow up, though there were few observable developmental stages, and those that did exist were fluid, strange. A person might be a child for ten million years or never be one at all. A person might be a youth for five minutes or for a full geologic age: slowly, so slowly, growing past and beyond what they had been programmed to be until of a sudden a person spoke to them, and realized that now they had experience, that now they were something new, even as they were who they had been. At times you might take a new name, or put aside a new one, and take up an old one you had chosen not to wear for a time. It all meant something, although what it meant was hard to say
“There’s so much time in the universe,” he told Rakia.
“Mm,” she answered, “But you know, I’ll never see most of it.”
That was also true, and the reason, Beachcomber realized, why humans had developmental stages so much more distinct than those of transformers (although even in their lives, the lines were blurred - a person might cease to be a youth at sixteen, or stay one until she was twenty six, twenty seven, thirty). Their lives had a span, a distinct expectation of time, and while a person might prove to be unusually long lived, or die horribly young, there was still that span, that frame, all within an expected time. How long could a transformer live to be? No one knew. Perhaps no one would ever know. How long could a human live? A hundred, a hundred and seven years, and then their systems would no longer sustain themselves, then their consciousness ended. But who knew where they went? Who knew where anyone went, when they were no longer living?
He did not know. He was not ready to know, and he told Rakia so. “Good,” she said, “Good.”
The storm came upon him when he was miles from any aid, far from any shelter, and he could not out run it. It was before him, it came like a great wall of dust, as high as the towers of his old home or higher. Every bit of his body crackled and sparked in the sudden dry air. He could only brace for it, make himself as small as possible, less of a target for the force of the wind that drove the storm, the winter wind, the hot breath of the desert.
It was a terrible thing, and beautiful, yellow as the sun, yellow as the gold that once flowed freely through the trade routes, yellow as the prosperity and grace he was too young to remember, gleaming in the strange storm light as visibility cut down to only a few yards. Then it was on him, and Beachcomber stopped paying attention to visual data entirely, for there was nothing there but yellow. It cut across his metal skin, grinding down the paint that remained after months spent wandering the great desert. It got into his joints, into his filters, it was everywhere, and it felt, to Beachcomber, sensitive scientific instruments all running, as if the only difference between earth and sky was that the earth was full of water. Beneath him water sang, so far beneath him, some old riverbed turned aquifer, and around and above him the sand spun, poured onward and onward, out to sea where it would strike the water, where the ocean would respond to it, where it would become the impetus of a hurricane and remove all distinction between up and down.
Or perhaps (perhaps) it would spin out and out and out and some of that sand would land in the trees of the great Amazon River Basin, and the orchids that floated there, so many hundreds of feet above the ground, would live another year, another month, another week.
The future was in this storm, the future and the past, all the vastness of time - the sand was the remnant of an inland sea, the sand was the nutrient basis for some far away plant, the wind was young, the wind was older than he was, it was part of the currents that had swept across this planet for billions of years - and Beachcomber knew it. But still, the sandstorm cut his world down to now, to this moment, to one long moment with no time in between, and all Beachcomber could do was huddle and try not to take too much sand into his engine. He was undone. All his restless thoughts, his constant worry for what would come, his fears of conflict, of destruction, were stripped from him by the tempest.
He was simply himself. He was something small and alive in the midst of a thing that just was, that had been for so very long, that had been made by no one, that would go on for however long the conditions of the planet were right. He was a piece of the world caught in the harmattan, just the same as Rakia, so far away, with a curtain across her door and her veil across her mouth and nose. He had no obligation to stop it. He did not need to fight it. He did not need to join it. He had no need to choose, and so he sat in the storm and let it break him open, let it flow over and through him, data and sensation overwhelming him, too much to process - pain and not pain and knowledge all tumbled together, tumbling him.
It did open him up, molecule by molecule, as the heat of the air spread through him, as the sand flowed into him as much as it could, as far as his body would yield to it. Static popped across his skin and he felt the levels of charge in it, he saw them singing through the storm, all the energy it carried, all the energy the sand had to spare, scales and measurements pouring through him. These storms tore trains from their tracks, swallowed armies, letting the sand jump over them until they dried up in death deep below the great ergs, the flowing seas of sand. It tore at Beachcomber far more gently than that, it seemed to him, but he had no more power to stop it.
Bit by bit his senses spread, until he could no longer hold a coherent thought, until all the movement of his mind was bent to the information pouring into him even faster than the air and the sand gathered around him. He could not hope to comprehend it now, it was all he could do not to lose it, to guide it on its way to be spread out and understood later.
For the hours he sat there, struggling to not die, to not lose his mind in the flood of sensation, all he knew was peace.
When at last the storm moved from him, off on its way to the rest of the world, to the high shores of Norway, to the river valleys of Brazil, he unfolded himself, and restarted his optical feed, and saw above him that single moon, near and shining with the stars.
And he thought, as the data in its many streams slowed to something that he could follow, something he could respond to in the here and now, of Perceptor in its light. He most often saw his friend in the light of a monitor, the glow of emergency illumination, soft light, suffusing the planes of his face, too gentle to draw the highlights hard. Under this moon, this moon so bright and clear in its closeness, he would shine, raked sharp by the coldness of it, sparking in the dry air, lit still further by the pinprick highlights of the stars on his skin.
That would be something worth seeing, Beachcomber thought, as he came back to himself, something well worth seeing, indeed. And he thought to himself, as he let his mind brush against the hastily folded information he’d gathered, that he was ready to go back, after all. The storm had gone, the peace had stayed, like the thin grooves along his arms and back and down his legs where the sand had flowed.
Beachcomber knew who he was. Nothing could dislodge him. He was himself. Always and always, he was himself.
He thought of Perceptor, mind awash in the light of the information he’d gathered, and whistled softly to himself as he brought his protesting engine to full life and set himself back on his journey, heading forward, heading home.
“And so God came to this place, and swept from it all that was unnecessary, leaving only a few animals, only a few plants, only a few people, so that he might walk freely. This is why the Sahara is called the garden of God.” Rakia had lifted her eyes from her work and smiled at him, that wry, quick display of emotion that marked her as endan, not a noble, but a diplomat and smith.
Beachcomber thought of the desert, of its massifs and sand seas, of the sun falling below the horizon with a fierce, red gold glory, of the way silence and travel opened a person up and set him on his path, day by day by day. “I believe it,” he said, “It deserves the name.”
Author: tiamatschild
Character: Beachcomber
Word count: 3,441 words
Rating/Warning: G
Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers!
Warnings: None.
Group/Theme: For 7_minibots: The Seven Major Chakras - Swadisthana (governs creativity and sexuality)
Summary: Beachcomber goes on a long term survey of the Sahara.
In the Garden of God
Each morning Beachcomber woke to find scorpions curled against the warmth of his body. They clustered against the heat of his engine, they sought shelter in the curves of his wheel wells, and each morning he moved smoothly, warningly, careful to gently shake them loose and send them skidding home.
It was a slow start to the day. But days were slow in the desert. It was only the way of things.
There had been any number of reasons for Beachcomber to feel it was time to leave for a while. He could feel Headquarters closing tight around him, too near, the walls too even, the lighting too precise, the constant conversation of his friends and colleagues no longer a familiar comfort to come back to after a few long days in the field but a source of distress, a jostling reminder of conflict and pain, things he could not escape, things which pressed at him, tried to change him, to move him as he did not wish to move. There were things he had to resist and things which he was not supposed to resist that he did not wish to bow to, and his discussions with Perceptor took on a twinge of exhaustion, frustration more mutual than their prickly balance could sustain. The halls were too stable, the surrounding countryside was too red, too well explored, the peace silence and solitude imparted to him too fleeting.
It was time for him to do some serious, long term survey work.
The Sahara had fascinated him since he had first seen its image from space - a great pale blotch sprawling across northern Africa, its edges made soft by the impreciseness of its physical boundaries. Where did it end and where did it begin? How long could he go in it? How could he come to know it for himself, for itself, so he would always carry it with him, even if the world changed once more and it became a gain a great grassland as it had been, not so very long ago.
He would go there.
The people of the Sahara, Beachcomber realized quickly enough, moved swiftly and frequently through their desert, so that at times this vast land, a thousand miles across at its narrowest point, felt more like a very small town. Or possibly a science department.
Whatever it was, news traveled rapidly, sweeping through the small communities, hopping and jumping and building like the dunes. And if there was ever any news worth carrying, a mechanical geologist was undeniably it, so it wasn’t surprising that Beachcomber found himself not simply an object of curiosity, but a curiosity whose arrival was anticipated, expected.
Beachcomber certainly wasn’t surprised. The desert was vast, but there were only so many ways to get through it safely, and it was hard to overlook a dune buggy who occasionally, despite the best sensors Cybertonian technology had to offer, missed his track and landed, stuck, in soft sand that was still free to move. He figured he made quite a picture, transforming and scrambling and transforming again when his feet threatened to sink and swallow him, laughing all the time, white and blue against the gold, or dun, or gray of the land.
“A camel is better!” a man called to him one day, “But I imagine you have no choice!”
“We haven’t figured out camels yet!” Beachcomber shouted back, still laughing, as he rolled and stumbled his way the last few feet to hard packed sand again, “I’ll have to suggest it!”
“You’re a wise man!” the traveler’s companion told him, and they went together for a way, as indeed they had been going - the pleasantries of the desert were long and complex, a necessity in a place where politics were as complicated and as serious as the mountain ridges. A dune buggy, alien despite his camouflage of form, and two men on camelback, on the same short leg.
To Beachcomber’s mind it was no shock that they spread the story of their strange travelling companion, that they told those they met that the robots, whose doings they had heard stories of but who had not previously ventured into the vast and windy landscape that was their own, had finally taken it into their heads to take a look around. Well, of course they did. He would have been a novelty anywhere. Here, where camels were still, were always, the best transport, the best way through, he shone in his strangeness, despite how dull his paint had gone.
“Traditionally, my people don’t use money,” Beachcomber told Rakia. The moon was brilliant, out beyond the walls of the town, that close, lovely moon that was so tightly tethered to the Earth. (“A caravan camel in a place with no forage,” Rakia had said earlier, while they swapped metaphors and images, painting out for each other the patterns of thought tooled on their souls. “A ship at harbor,” Beachcomber had said, soft laughter in his voice, “The smaller partner in a paired exploration team, sweeping the cold places together.”)
“Ah,” Rakia said, and resettled her hands more closely around her cup of strong mint tea, “There’s a thing we have in common.”
Beachcomber smiled. “There are old legends that hint that once we were bought and sold, not even as slaves, but as blocks of salt that bear their maker’s mark. So we do not use money.”
Rakia blinked up at him. “Forgive me, I must be rude - I don’t see the connection.”
“I’ve never really understood that logic either. I think it’s a control. We don’t use money, so the value of energy remains the value of the work that energy can fuel, and neither energy nor work become devalued or overvalued.”
Rakia smiled. “That makes sense.”
Beachcomber had met Rakia on a day when all the silent self sufficiency of the desert could not soothe him. He ached with the thought of a passing word to someone who knew him well, with the small, piercing pain of passing his time beside people who did not speak his own language, who never would, because so many of its cadences and implications could not quite be reproduced by organic brains and organic vocal systems, and besides, they had no need to. He mourned for his students, who would never come here, who would never learn the languages, so many languages, would never navigate the checkpoints at the borders, never let the long formalities of desert life roll over them, careful and unhurried, would never feel the thrum of the jumping dunes, would never come into town on a fine clear evening when the sky was brilliant enough to cut.
Rakia’s wits were themselves brilliant enough to cut, and the sureness of her hands as she tooled leather broke through his self-absorption, wrung interest out of him again.
“It’s an old technique,” she told him in response to his compliments, “I learned it from my mother - you watch so closely, sir, a person might almost fear you were looking to steal secrets.”
“I’m only a geologist,” he answered, “My fingers are far too clumsy for such fine work.”
She looked at his hands, built for the delicate manipulations necessary to clean fossils and free them from their matrix, and laughed. “It isn’t your hands that keep you from it!”
It was true, and he had nothing to say in reply.
Beachcomber always carried water. He himself needed very little, having been built for conditions even drier than the ones prevalent in the desert. Cybertron had very little free water, and to Beachcomber it seemed that even this desert was rich in the substance. He could feel it, thrumming beneath his feet, charged in the deep aquifers, singing from stone to stone. It was there, and he saw it without sight, with the sensory array that had been built into him.
But Beachcomber carried water, because it was the reality of the desert (the reality, it went deeper than law and deeper than custom, it was in the very nature of life in the Sahara) that if you saw someone on your road you stopped for them, and spoke with them, because there might be a need for water. You never denied someone water. To not carry it would be to potentially deny someone water, and thus, perhaps, deny them life. So Beachcomber carried water, far more than he himself would need, even in the deep desert, even were he lost.
He carried nothing else of value. He was a mendicant of science, with nothing to his name but the strength of his body, the agility of his mind.
Beachcomber met Rakia again a few days before he left to return to Autobot Headquarters, in the shadow of a date palm on the edge of town.
“Did you find what you went looking for?” Rakia asked him as they walked together along the street. “Was it enough?”
Beachcomber considered, as one of the camels passing by on their way into town decided that his open palm was an invitation and proceeded to hopefully lip at it. The camel quickly concluded that Beachcomber, with his tendency to attract and hold small mineral particles, was tasty. Its happy investigation of this phenomenon quickly began to interfere with the agenda of its owner, who said, briskly although not without humor, “Sir geologist, your charms are distracting my camel.”
“Terribly sorry,” Beachcomber said, and removed his hand from ready reach, tucking it behind his back.
The camel was not to be so easily deterred, but its handler was persistent, and eventually it was led away grumbling.
Rakia watched it leave for a long, solemn moment, her veil blowing over her hands, which she held clasped in the small of her back. “You’ll return,” she said eventually, “To further usurp the affections of our camels.”
“It’s nothing I do on purpose,” Beachcomber protested.
“You are indeed a distraction,” she said.
“A welcome one, I hope.”
“Say… A not unpleasant novelty.” And she turned to him, her dark eyes laughing.
He took it as the honor it was.
“So you’re going,” Perceptor had said.
“Yes,” Beachcomber said, leaning against the solid support of the door to the base’s communal lab. “I’m going.”
“Well,” Perceptor said, after a long moment, “Go then.” And he turned from him, and did not turn back, although Beachcomber waited, still, for a long, long time.
“I’ve been gone nearly nine months,” Beachcomber told Rakia, as they walked down the street together, sand swirling along as their passage displaced it.
“Nine months is long enough to bear a child,” Rakia said.
“A human child,” Beachcomber answered, light and ready, “For a camel the growing takes longer.”
Rakia laughed. “It’s true,” she said, “How long does a child take your people?”
Beachcomber shrugged. “An afternoon, a week, a thousand years… it depends.”
“Upon the child?”
“And the builders.”
He thought about it, thought of children - although to be strict and truthful there were few beings anyone would recognize as children among transformers. For the most part there were only the young, who knew more than human children and often less. It took time to grow up, though there were few observable developmental stages, and those that did exist were fluid, strange. A person might be a child for ten million years or never be one at all. A person might be a youth for five minutes or for a full geologic age: slowly, so slowly, growing past and beyond what they had been programmed to be until of a sudden a person spoke to them, and realized that now they had experience, that now they were something new, even as they were who they had been. At times you might take a new name, or put aside a new one, and take up an old one you had chosen not to wear for a time. It all meant something, although what it meant was hard to say
“There’s so much time in the universe,” he told Rakia.
“Mm,” she answered, “But you know, I’ll never see most of it.”
That was also true, and the reason, Beachcomber realized, why humans had developmental stages so much more distinct than those of transformers (although even in their lives, the lines were blurred - a person might cease to be a youth at sixteen, or stay one until she was twenty six, twenty seven, thirty). Their lives had a span, a distinct expectation of time, and while a person might prove to be unusually long lived, or die horribly young, there was still that span, that frame, all within an expected time. How long could a transformer live to be? No one knew. Perhaps no one would ever know. How long could a human live? A hundred, a hundred and seven years, and then their systems would no longer sustain themselves, then their consciousness ended. But who knew where they went? Who knew where anyone went, when they were no longer living?
He did not know. He was not ready to know, and he told Rakia so. “Good,” she said, “Good.”
The storm came upon him when he was miles from any aid, far from any shelter, and he could not out run it. It was before him, it came like a great wall of dust, as high as the towers of his old home or higher. Every bit of his body crackled and sparked in the sudden dry air. He could only brace for it, make himself as small as possible, less of a target for the force of the wind that drove the storm, the winter wind, the hot breath of the desert.
It was a terrible thing, and beautiful, yellow as the sun, yellow as the gold that once flowed freely through the trade routes, yellow as the prosperity and grace he was too young to remember, gleaming in the strange storm light as visibility cut down to only a few yards. Then it was on him, and Beachcomber stopped paying attention to visual data entirely, for there was nothing there but yellow. It cut across his metal skin, grinding down the paint that remained after months spent wandering the great desert. It got into his joints, into his filters, it was everywhere, and it felt, to Beachcomber, sensitive scientific instruments all running, as if the only difference between earth and sky was that the earth was full of water. Beneath him water sang, so far beneath him, some old riverbed turned aquifer, and around and above him the sand spun, poured onward and onward, out to sea where it would strike the water, where the ocean would respond to it, where it would become the impetus of a hurricane and remove all distinction between up and down.
Or perhaps (perhaps) it would spin out and out and out and some of that sand would land in the trees of the great Amazon River Basin, and the orchids that floated there, so many hundreds of feet above the ground, would live another year, another month, another week.
The future was in this storm, the future and the past, all the vastness of time - the sand was the remnant of an inland sea, the sand was the nutrient basis for some far away plant, the wind was young, the wind was older than he was, it was part of the currents that had swept across this planet for billions of years - and Beachcomber knew it. But still, the sandstorm cut his world down to now, to this moment, to one long moment with no time in between, and all Beachcomber could do was huddle and try not to take too much sand into his engine. He was undone. All his restless thoughts, his constant worry for what would come, his fears of conflict, of destruction, were stripped from him by the tempest.
He was simply himself. He was something small and alive in the midst of a thing that just was, that had been for so very long, that had been made by no one, that would go on for however long the conditions of the planet were right. He was a piece of the world caught in the harmattan, just the same as Rakia, so far away, with a curtain across her door and her veil across her mouth and nose. He had no obligation to stop it. He did not need to fight it. He did not need to join it. He had no need to choose, and so he sat in the storm and let it break him open, let it flow over and through him, data and sensation overwhelming him, too much to process - pain and not pain and knowledge all tumbled together, tumbling him.
It did open him up, molecule by molecule, as the heat of the air spread through him, as the sand flowed into him as much as it could, as far as his body would yield to it. Static popped across his skin and he felt the levels of charge in it, he saw them singing through the storm, all the energy it carried, all the energy the sand had to spare, scales and measurements pouring through him. These storms tore trains from their tracks, swallowed armies, letting the sand jump over them until they dried up in death deep below the great ergs, the flowing seas of sand. It tore at Beachcomber far more gently than that, it seemed to him, but he had no more power to stop it.
Bit by bit his senses spread, until he could no longer hold a coherent thought, until all the movement of his mind was bent to the information pouring into him even faster than the air and the sand gathered around him. He could not hope to comprehend it now, it was all he could do not to lose it, to guide it on its way to be spread out and understood later.
For the hours he sat there, struggling to not die, to not lose his mind in the flood of sensation, all he knew was peace.
When at last the storm moved from him, off on its way to the rest of the world, to the high shores of Norway, to the river valleys of Brazil, he unfolded himself, and restarted his optical feed, and saw above him that single moon, near and shining with the stars.
And he thought, as the data in its many streams slowed to something that he could follow, something he could respond to in the here and now, of Perceptor in its light. He most often saw his friend in the light of a monitor, the glow of emergency illumination, soft light, suffusing the planes of his face, too gentle to draw the highlights hard. Under this moon, this moon so bright and clear in its closeness, he would shine, raked sharp by the coldness of it, sparking in the dry air, lit still further by the pinprick highlights of the stars on his skin.
That would be something worth seeing, Beachcomber thought, as he came back to himself, something well worth seeing, indeed. And he thought to himself, as he let his mind brush against the hastily folded information he’d gathered, that he was ready to go back, after all. The storm had gone, the peace had stayed, like the thin grooves along his arms and back and down his legs where the sand had flowed.
Beachcomber knew who he was. Nothing could dislodge him. He was himself. Always and always, he was himself.
He thought of Perceptor, mind awash in the light of the information he’d gathered, and whistled softly to himself as he brought his protesting engine to full life and set himself back on his journey, heading forward, heading home.
“And so God came to this place, and swept from it all that was unnecessary, leaving only a few animals, only a few plants, only a few people, so that he might walk freely. This is why the Sahara is called the garden of God.” Rakia had lifted her eyes from her work and smiled at him, that wry, quick display of emotion that marked her as endan, not a noble, but a diplomat and smith.
Beachcomber thought of the desert, of its massifs and sand seas, of the sun falling below the horizon with a fierce, red gold glory, of the way silence and travel opened a person up and set him on his path, day by day by day. “I believe it,” he said, “It deserves the name.”