Hot Sleep (28 page)

"What do you mean? What could I do to them?"

"Promise you won't. Promise you won't quarrel with them, please, Billin."

"What do you think I could do? Hoom's the murderer around here, Wix is the adulterer, all I do is talk and now nobody's listening."

"Promise me, and then I'll tell you."

"Tell me what?" Billin asked, suspiciously.

"What they did."

Billin looked at her carefully. "I promise. What did they do?"

"I didn't want to tell you before you went out because you wouldn't have believed me and if you'd known you would have gotten so angry —"

"Get to it, Cirith, dammit, tell me what you know!" Billin paced to the window. "They told everybody for the last two days, while you mostly slept, they told them that you had been badly hurt in a fall and it damaged your mind —"

"I cut my hand, the bastards, where do they think my mind is?"

"I know that, but they told the others that you invented a dream place, a place where everything is perfect, but that it doesn't exist —"

Billin roared with rage. The child in the bedroom cried louder, and another cry joined in. "Do they say I'm a liar! They dare to call me a liar!"

"No, no, no," Cirith said. "They only say that you were hurt. They say that you really believe what you say, that your mind isn't working right — Stipock had a name for it, he called it ‘hallucinations', I think —"

"Stipock has a name for everything —"

"Billin, you can't fight it, the more you say you know what you saw, the crazier they'll think you are —"

"Cirith!" Billin said, striding to her, looking her in the eye, "do you believe them? Or do you believe me?"

She looked at him for a long time, but then she looked away. "I don't know," she finally said.

This time Billin did not roar, because this time his anger dissipated in despair. "If you don't believe me, Cirith —"

"I do believe you, I do, Billin, I want to believe you so much, but that's it — what you tell about is so perfect, how can I trust it? It makes everything here so terrible, and Stipock says that this is the best place —"

"He says that because of the iron —"

"I know, I know, please go to bed now, Billin, you're tired —"

"I can't sleep."

But he did, and woke in the morning still filled with despair. Because sometime in the night he had wakened after dreaming of the place he had been to. The dream had seemed so real. He had tasted the fruits again, and swum again in the bay, and drunk from the cold river and lain in the grass growing thickly on the riverbanks. He had felt the rain cover him again, beating warm and fresh on his skin, making him clean.

And he wondered if it had been a dream before.

And, once he wondered, he knew that it had. How could it be real? He closed his eyes and tried to picture the place, tried to imagine the taste of the berries. But all he could taste was the dust that always hung in the air; all he could see when he closed his eyes was red.

So he didn't speak of it anymore, not for weeks.

It was time for the rains to come. The rains didn't come.

"Don't worry," Stipock said. "These things vary by as much as two or three weeks."

After six weeks the rains still hadn't come; but the winds came on schedule. Last year the winds had been cooling, drying out the soaking earth (for that short time of rain and then wind, the colony had been bearable); this year the winds were hot and dry, the breath of dying, and after four days of dust and sand whipping into ears and eyes and noses and mouths, burning the skin of those caught outside, drying out or silting up every barrel of water, every cistern, filling every ditch, tearing leaves off the trees, after four days of that one of Serret's and Rebo's younger twins died.

They buried him in the sand during one of the brief lulls in the wind.

The next morning the dessicated body was in the open, the skin flayed away. The wind, by one of those cruel freaks of nature, had blown the baby so that it jammed its parents' front door closed. Serret swore as he shoved the door open that morning — screamed and wept when he found what had closed it so tightly.

They burned the body at noon. The wind kept putting the fire out.

And the next day two more babies died, and Wevin, Weerit's wife, died when her baby tried to come four months early.

They couldn't bury the bodies, and they couldn't burn them, so they carried them out into the sand and left them, knowing the desert would surely dry them out.

That evening Billin huddled into his last cloak and crept against the wind to Serret's and Rebo's house. While there he told them what the water had tasted like in the land he had found. But he knew they hated him for saying it, since they believed he was insane, and it made it hurt even worse.

And from time to time during the terrible three weeks that the wind lasted, Billin dropped a word here and there. "Fruit," he would say, "growing off the trees. Wet and sweet." The person he was talking to would frown and move away.

"Sweet water in a wide, cool river." And the person would lick his lips and then say, "Dammit, keep your madness to yourself."

"Rain," he would say, and a child nearby would say, "What's rain, Mama?" and the mother would weep and curse Billin for his cruelty.

And Billin cursed himself, for he, too, wondered if he were mad. For now that he himself doubted what he had seen, he didn't know why he kept talking about it, why every morning and every night and the hours in between he would keep seeing that fruit before his eyes again, bushes more red than green, and water.

"Am I crazy?" he asked Cirith.

"Hopelessly," she answered, and kissed him. But he didn't know if she was teasing; finally was sure that she was not.

And then the wind stopped. One morning everyone awoke to the sudden silence, to the sudden heat (even before sunrise) when the wind didn't penetrate the cracks in the woodwork.

They put on their ragged clothing and went outside to see. The sky was clear. The dust had settled (mostly) to the ground. And now, for the first time, they could see the damage. They saw their suffering by moonlight, and realized before daybreak that they were through.

The sand had built up against the trees, in some places ten or eleven meters above the old level. Houses that had been on level ground now seemed to have been built leaning against sand dunes that were higher than they.

The irrigation ditches were all gone, with no trace left of where they had even been.

Two hundred meters to the west lay the new course of the stream, a wide shallow trickling stream, full of mud and barely drinkable.

The few sheep were all dead, except a couple of lambs that had been kept indoors.

There was no scrap of food anywhere that was not impregnated with sand. That was no surprise, since sand was the main seasoning and the main flavor that they had known for months. But the people, as they talked, realized that all the children were complaining of the pain of defecating, for their stools were filled with sand. And now all the bellies were distended, because food was short.

And water less yet.

And then, as the sun broke over the horizon, promising the terrible, unending heat they had known before, Billin scrambled up a sand dune that leaned against a house and cried out at the top of his voice, "It's enough! We're finished here!"

They turned and looked at him.

"There's no hope here anymore! We have no water, we have no food, we have no clothing, our children are dying!"

In alarm, Wix and Hoom came running to him. "Don't talk like that," Wix said.

"I take no orders from you," Billin said. Then he shouted to everyone, "It's listening to Stipock and Wix and Hoom and the Bitch that's got us where we are! I say I'm through taking their orders! Who made them Wardens! Who put them in charge?"

Hoom climbed up the dune and took Billin by the arm. "What did you call my wife, you bastard!" Hoom shouted at him.

"How did you know I meant your wife?" Billin said triumphantly. At that Hoom swung back his arm to hit him, but Billin dodged and cried out, "See! The murderer wants to kill again! Murderer!"

And at the word Hoom backed away, confused. By now all the people had gathered, even Stipock, who watched dispassionately from a few meters behind the rest.

Billin pointed his finger at Stipock and shouted (and his mouth was dry and it was hard to make the words come, but still he shouted), "There he is! The man who taught us that Jason wasn't God! Well, that's true enough. But neither are you, Stipock! You and your damned iron. Machines that fly through the sky! Where are they! What about a machine that keeps our children alive, what about that? Where's that, Stipock?"

People began to murmur to each other. Cirith came to the foot of the dune and spoke to her husband. "Billin, don't make people lose their hope," she said.

"Damn right," he answered. To the crowd he said, "I'm making you lose your hope, my wife says. Damn right, I say. Look around you! They say I'm crazy, but only a crazy man would look at this and still hope!"

"He's crazy!" Dilna shouted. "Don't listen to him!"

Billin ignored her. "Think for a minute! Think of this! You all saw how much food I took with me. Enough for three weeks! How long was I gone? How long?"

Three months, they realized.

"Why didn't I starve to death? I came back so weary I was sick, came back hungry because I had run out of food two days before. But not ten weeks before! That's because I found food! Whether you believe all that I said or not, you have to believe this: I found food out there! And that's more than you'll find here!"

Billin looked at Stipock and still the man didn't show any emotion at all. Billin looked at the impassive face and realized he had no hope of persuading anyone. When Billin had stirred crowds before, he had done it with the words Stipock had taught him. And now Stipock was silent and stood there uncaring, because he knew that Billin couldn't persuade the crowd on his own.

So Billin slumped his shoulders, then looked up at the crowd again and said, "Never mind. I don't care what you do. Stay here and keep digging for the damned iron and wait for the sand to come again. But I'm going. Because even if I'm crazy and there's nothing out there, it's better to die looking for something than to die here in the sand, with the wind to dry us out because we've lost our power even to bury or burn the dead."

And then Billin let himself fall backward and slide down the dune to where Cirith caught him and cradled his head. The crowd stayed for a while, then went back to their homes to begin sweeping out the dust.

That night the wind came up again, as hard as ever, and the dust came back in and hung in the houses.

And the next morning at dawn Billin, Cirith and their two children loaded pitifully scrawny packs on their backs and left their house. They walked west to the stream and then set their faces south, uphill into the shadeless trees that had been stripped by the storms.

They had not gone more than a hundred meters when they heard a hoarse cry behind them. Billin turned and saw Serret and Rebo and their two surviving children (one from each set of twins) also loaded with meager packs.

"Wait for us!" Serret called again.

They waited.

"Billin, may we go with you?" Serret asked.

"I thought you didn't believe me," Billin said.

Rebo shrugged. "Does it matter whether we believe you?"

Billin smiled, a dry, ghastly grin, he knew, but the first time he had smiled in weeks. "Come along then."

They went up the stream all day. Gradually, as the miles went by, the sand grew less, and the stream was deeper, better to drink. They filled their waterbags and went on (after drinking deeply and pouring the clean water on their heads). And finally they came to a place where the stream bent to the west and their path went to the east a little.

Billin went to a tree that bore a small cut, and with his knife made the cut deeper and more plain. He turned the mark into an arrow, pointing the way they went. Then he looked ahead until he saw a tree with another small mark, and led them to it, where again he made the mark plainer. "In case others follow."

They were nearly out of food when they came to the mountains, but already the land was far greener, the trees and undergrowth lusher, water more plentiful. Billin killed a tree squirrel and they ate the meat. And while they camped there, with a fire and water enough to wash all over, two more families joined them.

"We saw your fire," they said, "and realized you weren't so far ahead as we had thought."

So they waited a few more days, killing more squirrels and catching some small freshwater fish in a mountain lake one of them found while exploring the area. And when they finally left, heading downhill this time, there were thirty of them, counting women and children — half of the colony. Billin knew now that he hadn't dreamed — everything was as he had remembered it, and he couldn't stop talking about what they would find at the bottom of the mountains.

And after another week they reached the end of the craggy paths and found themselves by a placid bay, with a coldwater river rushing down, and fruit trees and berries so thick around that there was hardly need to plant. Of course they did plant, because one never knew what other seasons might be like in a place like this — but who needed to bother with watering and tending the fields, when they knew the seeds would grow and the harvest would come without worry?

And Billin's children stopped wearing clothing as they played in the sun, day after day.

Over the weeks more and more people came down the mountains and into the village, where the only houses were roofs — no walls were needed, and the roofs were just to keep a few things dry when the rains fell, and to keep the sun off during the heat of the day.

At last Billin counted who was there and realized that between those who had died and those who were there, only seven people remained unaccounted for: Stipock, Wix, and Hoom and Dilna with their three children.

He told Cirith.

"Will they come, too, do you think?" she asked.