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

When they dispersed, the Elders confiscating her artifacts for their archive, Tasé knelt in the dust with her, leaning close, his nose almost touching hers, his young breath racy with excitement.

“Did you smell it, then?” he whispered. “Did you feel it, outside? Did it smell like power?”

They leave at dusk, hand in hand, hearts racing in sync. It is harder for the sentries to spot them in the sand when it’s dark, when shapes no longer exist and the dunes in the distance are the only shadows left. They leave without a light, navigating the darkness through Nata’s mental memory alone, lugging the food and water she has gathered. They wear thinner cloaks so they can move faster. In the cold of the night, Tasé’s teeth chatter.

In every direction conceivable is nothing but sand and dust and wind, with only the peaks and crests of dunes, small and big, for company. The largest dunes, under which the greatest ruins of the perished people before Isiuwa lie, form a shadow against the red glow of failing light in the distance. They avoid walking up the crest of any of the miniature dunes they come across, to stay out of long-range sight. The sand is cool against their feet and leaves many holes for tracks. Nata knows that come morning, they will be easily found if their pursuers ride Isiuwa’s one camel hard enough, or if the fastest sentries are set on their trail.

Tasé is silent, for the most part. For a boy only slightly younger than Nata, his silence speaks well beyond his years. Nata remembers telling him the same thing Mam used to tell her, which she didn’t believe then, but does now: You, alone, are a god. You are a dune too, and the dune will not swallow itself. Don’t let Isiuwa tell you otherwise.

Nata watches him clutch his cloak tight about himself and stare ahead, his eyes fixed on the undulating shapes in the horizon. The Chief doesn’t know that when he punished her, he only gave her more light, see. She is meant to be Tasé’s companion because she is the only one who understands why he is the way he is, because the same questions that are asked of him roil within her. They both grew up listening to the constant susurrus of Isiuwa, wondering if they were sane or just as mad as their mothers, and the questions formed a knot within them that will only be unknotted by leaving. They have always known, in some way, that they are going to find the women who birthed them and breathed this fire of liberty that cannot be quenched; that they are going to find home only there.

They put more distance between themselves and Isiuwa, moving in a straight line, in the direction of the dunes. No one seems to be following them, a good sign. Nata hopes for them to reach a dune before dawn so they can rest in its shadow at high noon. But they can only stomp in the sand so long before their legs get tired. The undulating outlines still loom in the distance, and Nata cannot tell how close they are yet, but they are far enough from Isiuwa that it makes sense to rest.

They have some bread and the roasted termites. Nata lets Tasé have the allowable sip of water for today, while she settles for sugarcane. She munches, wondering what she’ll say when she finds Mam. She has focused so much on leaving that she has forgotten she might not be happy to see Mam at all, that her chest might become tighter, that she might never forgive her for leaving, for not sacrificing everything and coming back for her. But she also isn’t ready for whatever answer Mam has to give. Maybe this is why she found a way to take Tasé with her, despite the odds. Maybe she is trying to do it over, how it should’ve been.

“We should move,” Tasé says.

Nata lies on her back in the sand. “We don’t need to. It will come to us.”

He frowns. She sees this and says, “It’s a roaming whirlwind. That’s what causes the whistle. My Mam used to call it the wind of opportunity, that it comes for you only if you present yourself.”

He lies on his back next to her, wrapped from head to toe and becoming one with the sand. Soon, they fall asleep, and Nata dreams of meeting Mam, but Mam no longer recognizes her. She wakes once, and lies awake, remembering all Mam’s stories about the wind, about the five times she slipped beyond the fence and slipped back in, and what she saw. She called it the whirlwind of liberation, of return to a time when even though her tongue was just as tied, her body just as controlled, it was at least hers. It did not belong to Isiuwa.

Whatever time-place that is, Nata is sure Mam has somehow returned to it but has been unable to return as promised. Now she is going to find that whistle, and she is going to blow it herself.

People will kill what they do not understand, Mam used to say. They will flay it with their tongues if their hands are tied.

When the sentries catch up with Nata it is too late: the dune song has already begun.

It is almost the end of night when the whirlwind first starts to appear. Its coming is announced by a faraway lament, a deep-throated complaint, serving as the right augury for the arrival of feet and torches at the exact place where Nata and Tasé succumbed to fatigue and made camp.

The Chief has come along with the sentries. The light of the torch and shadow of his cloak darken his face in a manner that is representative of his heaving chest and his thoughts so clear they could’ve been bellowed: There will be no mercy this time.

“Take them,” is all he says.

There is a spat, sand flying in all directions, torches wavering in the wind of coming dawn, but all is soon settled. Nata is at one end, subdued; Tasé restrained at the other.

The Chief faces him first, stooping to his height. Then he raises his hand and deals Tasé a big slap in the middle of his face. There’s a snap of cartilage.

“Just offer me,” Tasé says, his voice loud for the first time, his speech bubbling with blood and snot and spittle. “Offer me, so this nightmare can end for the two of us.”

The silence that passes is filled only by the picking up of sand into dust, the whirlwind now visible in the distance, gathering force, a storm within a storm. Against the backdrop of the orange horizon of the rising sun, it is a roaring ghoul of black wind.

“No,” the Chief says, looking at the cloud as it approaches. “No.”

And in the midst of all this, with no one paying attention to Nata at all, she finds her opening.

She darts, moves too quickly, out of reach of the sentries’ arms, too quickly for their legs to find purchase in the silty sand. She flits with smaller feet, one step, five steps, and soon she is too far. The shouts behind her curse, yell, call her crazy, mad girl, selfish, putting Isiuwa in jeopardy, but she is deaf to them because her eyes are fixed on the glorious, glorious light ahead.

For the first time, she sees the whirlwind through her own eyes, and not through the eyes of Mam’s stories. The Chief is right in calling it the breath of the gods, because it holds within it a crackle, light and lightning, embraced by wind roiling within itself, gloved in sand and dust and debris. It moves like a cloud would if it were angry. It roars mightily now, up close, as if made of mouth alone. Sand hisses in its wake, an unending flute, an orchestra of whistles, a posse of snakes.

Glorious.

She halts then, right in its path, and turns, the wall of light and sound and dust right behind her. The Chief and the sentries have stopped chasing, standing well out of the path of the wind, Tasé held down between two sentries. This far out she cannot see their faces, but by the light of their angled flames, their postures say it all: that she is a waste of existence, that she has ruined all the good work Isiuwa has done.

Yes, she thinks. Yes.