fh_trips | Arrakis - Sietch Tabr

When the students exited the portal, they'd find themselves on a large ledge high above the desert floor; sun blazing overhead and sand stretching out for as far as the eye can see.

"Move along," Ghanima sang as she started herding them towards what appeared to be a small cave in mountain. Once inside the entryway, the students would find themselves confronted with the giant moisture seal doors that led into the sietch. "If you didn't put on sunscreen before we left, get inside. Once you can get settled into your rooms, you can come back out or explore the sietch, but I don't want anyone getting sunburned before our ride."

"K-Mart, Tahiri, and Leto are my lieutenants for as long as we are here. If they tell you not to do something, you listen. And please do not be dismayed if the locals aren't very chatty," she said. "Fremen are notoriously wary of outsiders." Even ones brought by Ghani, daughter of Chani, daughter of Liet. "Oh, and Leto? If I catch you causing paradox, you'll get detention for the rest of your life."

"Which reminds me." Ghanima leveled a finger at her brother. "His name is 'Gavin Darklighter' for the rest of this trip, no matter what anyone asks you. I would like to keep the world from ending, thank you."

Ghanima had a rather odd sense of humor sometimes.

"Now shoo, you've got about five hours or so before we meet back here."

[OCD up!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If Zack thought that was impressive, he should talk to Ender when he was 37; it'd be 20,000 years by then, by the magic of relative space travel.

"It's the same as it has always been," Ender said, and it was the truth. It just didn't have any of the details. "Except that we're finally starting to spread out to other planets."

"Other planets," Zack echoed, looking up at the ceiling thoughtfully.

He supposed he kind of had experience with that by default, now, having been to Earth and now to this world as well. But the getting here had seemed almost too easy. There had been no vast expanse of nothingness along the way.

"And humanity keeps adapting."

Awesome.

"We're a pretty resilient species, especially if we have the space."

The latter part was more important than the former, all things taken into account.

"Hence the 'other planets' thing, huh?" No limit to space if you could just up and take off to another world, was there? "And if you can't make room going out, there's always up. We're really only limited by the directions we choose to head in, aren't we?"

"And by the walls we might run into," Ender said, shrugging just a little. "But we haven't had any problems with that, as of late."

What with him killing the wall, and all.

"No walls? Or are they just coming down a little more easily?"

Hey, so far as Zack knew, tearing down walls was typically a great thing to do. Right?

"We broke the big one," Ender said, lightly, "The 'bad guys' who were in the way."

You had to pay attention to catch the quote marks, but they were there, neatly hidden just under the surface. "Now humanity has all the space it needs."

Zack squinted a little. Tilted his head sideways, some. There was something to that 'bad guys' thing, but he couldn't quite put his thumb on it, and so he let it drop. Easy as pie.

"More room to adapt. All the better for breaking down more walls, I guess. Space, huh?" That seemed like such a loaded word, didn't it? So much bigger than just some extra elbow room, suddenly. "The freedom to grow. Now I'm really interested in learning what the years bring along."

If Zack's world was anything like his, which might not be entirely likely, then it would mean a lot of war and a lot of death before people even went anywhere - and even then, Ender suspected they would go out and do the same, from planet to planet, leaving death and misunderstanding in their wake.

After all, if you were human, and you couldn't kill...

"So there's no space travel where you come from?" Ender asked, unwilling to give his thoughts a voice.

"Not yet, no," Zack agreed, nodding faintly as he crossed his arms over his chest. "The company I work for has a space program started. They're working on a ship and all of that. But we've never actually gotten to space, yet. Coming to Fandom was a bit of an eye-opener, that way. I never thought I'd see so many people who could just up and leave the planet behind without giving it a second thought."

"I think some second thoughts were involved," Ender said, sounding a little amused by now. "It takes a lot of money, manpower and machinery to send something into space, let alone enable emigration." A pause. "And depending on what system of space travel you have, a lot of time."

"For some people around Fandom, it seems like it's almost as easy as turning on a car and going for a Sunday drive," Zack noted. "But I guess they had to get to that point first, huh?"

"A lot of it doesn't exactly follow the laws of physics, from what I hear," Ender offered, ~~having no idea of the irony~~. "We shouldn't be able to hop from one planet to another in under an hour, but in some universes, they manage."

Physics were difficult and required thinking and math and following the laws of gravity. So Zack mostly didn't bother with them.

It was easier that way!

"Well, it really didn't take long to get to Arrakis from Earth, either," he noted. "Do you suppose that the portals that let us planet-hop from Fandom were a human creation, too?"

"There might be magic involved."

That tended to explain why the laws of physics got bent so easily around here. Ender... spent a lot of time thinking about physics and math and the laws of gravity.

"Or so I keep saying. It takes a lot longer to get back home for me."

"See, magic is an explanation that makes sense," Zack replied, in the sort of tone that suggested that magic made sense if only by virtue of the fact that it was, indeed, magic.

In the same way that parents might tell their children, 'it's magic,' to get them to stop asking questions that they didn't know the answers to, yes.

"I'm not from Earth, myself, and getting to Fandom is really a matter of getting dropped off at the right bus station and then getting a pickup and a drive across the causeway. There's no way that that's natural."

It was nice to know the 'it's magic' strategy worked on Zack.

"It does offend the laws of probability," Ender had to admit, amused. "I have to take a shuttle and a long round trip."

When they sent him off from Command School, he'd been twelve. In Fandom, fourteen. Mind, at least a good chunk of that had to be substracted because they'd been stalling him. Still, a month.

"I guess that's just the way of Fandom," Zack decided, putting his hands behind his head and then flopping backward on his bed to smile up at the ceiling. Hi, ceiling! "If someone has a way to get there, then great! They can get there. If there are people like me, who don't really have space travel, then it'll bend over backwards to accommodate. Or something."

It was totally magic, darn it.

Arrakis - Sietch Tabr - Tuesday Morning

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