Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

D o not go out to the dunes, the Chief says to Isiuwa. You’d do well not to awaken the wrath of the whistling gods.

This does not stop Nata from trying to leave again.

Once the New Moon assembly is over, she slinks away to the community market. This early in the morning, the desert haze hangs heavy, and everything moves in stutters, like tortoises in the sand. The sun is out and warm, not hot because Isiuwa isn’t really in a desert; or at least, not like the deserts the Elders speak of when they tell about the world before it was all dunes.

Isiuwa moves like a buzz, like sandflies in formation. The market is a manifestation of this, laid out in wide corridors of bamboo and cloth, a neat crisscross of pathways. Bodies scuttle along, dressed in cloth wrapped to battle every iteration of dust-laden wind. No one pays Nata any heed—no one ever does—as she drags a bag too big for her frame, folds of cloak falling over her arm multiple times so that she has to stop every now and then to wrap them again. Her hair is wild with fraying edges, and her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, but Isiuwa does not notice.

First, she goes to the molder. The bulk of what she has available for barter here is household jars and utensils she will no longer need. The man takes everything without a word and pays her in sugarcane, which is just as well because quenching thirst is the number one priority out there. Next, she takes Mam’s big old metal box, the one with which she used to make those contraptions for the village. No one in Isiuwa has tools like these any longer; strange, archaic, from the time before sand. It was the only thing salvageable after Mam’s disappearance. It still contains all her tools for carving and repairing artifacts no longer here. When she places it in front of Isiuwa’s prime fruit merchant, he stares at it for a long time.

“They will catch you,” he says. “Again.”

“Maybe,” Nata says. “Maybe not.”

He nods and gives her brown sugar and dried fruit for it.

She leaves her most valuable barter for last. She hefts her flatwood under her arm and visits the woodworker, the same woman who helped her find the bulk of old tree Mam carved for her into this sleek, flat thing polished with paraffin wax. Wood is so scarce now, unlike in the early days of sand, Mam used to say. This could literally be Nata’s most prized possession.

The woodworker isn’t there, but her apprentices are, and they offer her a good amount of water in an earthen jar. She haggles and gets some bread and roasted termites thrown in before she lets them have it, staring as they discuss butchering it to barter in bits.

She remembers how she cried and cried to Mam that she must, must have a flatwood. One just like those in the books the Elders keep in the archives of artifacts before dunes, which only they, the Chief, and their novitiates are allowed access to (though Mam somehow managed to have that one). She remembers having hopes that one day, even if for just a day, she would go out to the dunes with the flatwood and slide down the upflow like the children did in the pictures in that book. But it’s too late for that. This dream will belong to someone else now.

Nata leaves them without saying goodbye. Goodbye would mean that she is bidding positive farewell to Isiuwa, but no, she really isn’t. She hopes that the minute she steps out of the bamboo fence, the sun will lean down and slap the settlement with fire, for everything they have done to her, to Mam. She hopes that all the dunes will whistle at once, a harmony of dooming dissonance, and the sand will flow and sweep over all of Isiuwa like a great ocean so that no one will ever need to know pain like hers again.

But first, she must get Tasénóguan.

Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief tells Isiuwa. The gods will whistle you to death.

Isiuwa listens to a dune whistle about once every moon-cycle. Each time, the sand advances on Isiuwa, moving with a morose, flutelike song, the only sound to plant tears in their chest that does not come from a living being. A shrill, underlined by wind rushing through a tube. The Chief calls it the whistle of the gods and says it is the sound of an errant person being taken. Every time an errant person dares venture beyond their allowance and ends up taken by the dunes—as they always are—the dunes move toward Isiuwa. The whistle is a warning, a warning that those of the world before it was punished with sand refused to heed. The Chief tells a story of a time before the old world, when it was once punished in the same way, but by the gods of water. It is Isiuwa’s duty to preserve this order and bring forth the next world.

Isiuwa knows the Chief is right because he bears a cross on Isiuwa’s behalf, along with the troupe of Elders, sentries, and novitiates: the cross of going beyond the fence and seeking solutions, praying to the gods and asking them to stop moving the dunes closer. The troupe sometimes returns with strange things they’ve salvaged from the sand, things that look like they belong to another time, and the Elders keep them in the archive. The Chief reminds Isiuwa that this is not a privilege but a burden, for it is impossible to look upon the faces of the gods and live; and every time the troupe returns home intact is a blessing from the whistling gods. Isiuwa nods and remains behind the fence; remains grateful.

Not Nata’s Mam, though.

Nata’s Mam was born stubborn. She said so often herself, that it wasn’t wise to take things that came from the mouth of man, which confused Nata because those words came from her mouth. Mam lived by this practice too. Nata knows how many times Mam disregarded Isiuwa and slipped out of the fence (five). The dry bamboo barricade wasn’t really what kept Isiuwa in, Mam said. Bamboo was easy to slip through. Words planted in the mind, not so much.

Mam was an expert at that, the slipping; slipping through the fence, slipping through time and space, slipping in and out of proper reason, so that many times Isiuwa forgot she was even there, that Nata was even there. Isiuwa was surprised when they appeared, struggled to remember where they were from, wondered why they were still here and had not been offered to the gods already as appeasement.

It was easy for Nata and Mam to fade from the mind, being shunted to the edge, living in the outermost corner of the settlement where scorpions abound and only those deemed unworthy are offered land to build shelter. Nata blamed Mam in the beginning, believing it was her fault, that she could’ve just stopped arguing with the Elders, telling them that there were no whistling gods, that the civilization under the sand was just swallowed by an extreme ecological disaster. She insisted there were thriving civilizations out there and she was going to find them, that the whirlwind of time would take her there. She insisted she had seen it for herself.

So, when Mam kissed Nata on the forehead and said, “Let’s go,” she knew then that Isiuwa was right: Mam was a madwoman. A whirlwind that took people to a world where there was no sand? Going willingly into the dunes to be swallowed by the gods?

She refused to go, of course. Mam even tried to force her, after multiple arguments, them both screaming at the top of their voices in the shelter. Mam said she was just trying to save them, and Nata reminded her that Isiuwa was trying to save them, that was why they had rules. Mam saw then that Nata would never be ready, so she tied her wrists and ankles when she was asleep, gagged her mouth and put her in a cart, but she couldn’t even pull it from the shelter to the fence. She untied Nata, and Nata ran as fast as she could.

She went back to the shelter and waited for Mam to return because, of course, there was no whirlwind of time, there was no magical dust storm roaming the dunes, waiting for people to save. So, she waited.