by Marco Panessa

read by Norm Sherman

This story has not been published previously

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The Lone and Level Sands

By Marco Panessa

I don’t know how they found us. Beneath this eternal torrent of dust, our dulled marble shells should be hidden forever; and furthermore, it occurs to me to wonder how they even found this planet. But as the shining ship descends from the stars, my brother and sister and I look on in amazement before turning to one another.

Saphida’s voice is a hoarse whisper, her words echoing down my empty corridors and fading away in the false treasure chambers and dead ends full of traps. She says, “Why do they bother us? We have so much to do.”

“They should bow down in our presence!” Kalesh’s voice shakes dust from my ceilings. “Unworthy, lowly creatures–”

“We never reached other stars.” My voice silences his rage at once. “Whoever they are, they achieved far more than we managed to do. Be quiet. Reserve judgment.”

Beneath a sky of sand and a million years of silence, we await our visitors tall and proud. To my left, Saphida rears in defiance of the stars, her gargantuan funeral runes weathered to illegibility in the constant blast of grit. Her tomb faces the wind in death like she did in life, and she breathes sand as she once breathed the hot foundry air. Every so often a windstorm deposits a pebble or two at her golden gates. Enough time has passed that fifty men could not tunnel their way through to her sealed doors.

To my right, Kalesh broods. A column in his neoclassical portico has fallen down, taking a corniced chunk of marble with it. The lost marble weathered into dust a long time ago. His outlying temples and shrines are all worn away now, like mine and our sister’s. Behind the crumbling façades, the wind has whittled us all down to hemispheres with radii equal to the range of our repair nanorobots. Within this range, they’ve expunged every trace of erosion with fanatical precision. Beyond, there is only the sand. I can hardly see my siblings, a few hundred meters away through the grit.

I am the grandest tomb, as I was the grandest sibling. We three, we kings and a queen. We grew up together, reigned together, bled together, triumphed together. We died separately. But we stand together again in eternal repose.

Look upon my countenance! Did the holy armies of Dakess not tremble before me? Was it not my hand that slew the Forgotten King, and ushered in a thousand years of peace and plenty? Deserve I not the trappings of eternal life, if not the truth of it? My tomb erodes. No, no! The tomb is Isturath; Isturath, I, am the tomb… I erode. The tomb is my body.

They pulled out my brain and sealed it in this tomb. Listen to me, they pulled out my brain, and it is your king who speaks to you–after a million years! Of all human beings, my sister and my brother and I are the last ones left on Earth. The rest of them are sand now.

Our nanorobots hurry to put together cameras. As their crude lenses slip out of reinforced hatches into the howling sands, we peer together up through the grit. The spidery lander quivers in midair, its parachutes fighting the wind. Gossamer tendrils undulate from the spacecraft’s flanks: all flashing blues and iridescent greens like dragon scales, or plankton glimpsed in ocean shallows. These feelers snap around in the turbulence of the descent. Somehow they avoid wrapping around the parachute cords, waving outward into our familiar stifling haze.

Retrorockets slow the lander to a walking pace fifty meters above the ground. It hovers a moment and sets down. The tentacles drift in my direction. I cannot shake the feeling that the passengers can already see me. Not merely my tomb; my tomb is brilliant at their distance. No, I cannot shake the feeling that this alien vessel is peering through my thousands of tons of piled rock and my million year[...]