eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Isolated in the desert with his brother, Hasan learns that there is more to the legends of the dunes than he initially believed.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780765391872 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 32 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dune Time
By Jack Nicholls, Mark Smith
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2016 Jack NichollsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9187-2
CHAPTER 1
The angels and spirits ascend to Him in a day, the measure of which is fifty thousand years.
— The Holy Quran, Sura 70.4
When he arrived, the dunes were singing.
It wasn't just the wind, though there was that too, a steady whine that filled his ears with sand. But laid over that was a low-pitched vibration that rose and fell like the call of the muezzin — insistent and magnetic. It came from the west, where the crests of the orange dunes swirled. Tariq felt a long way from home.
Hasan was waiting for him beneath the awning of his concrete hut on the edge of the desert. He had grown his beard since Tariq had seen him last year, and thinned out beneath his white robe. He looked like an imam. Tariq's own jeans and T-shirt were already drenched in sweat.
"Salaam alaikum," said Hasan, extending his arms. "Welcome, little brother."
"Alaikum, salaam," replied Tariq, a little weirded out by the formality. The old Mercedes taxi, his last link to civilization, turned and began to nose its way back along the track to town.
Tariq crunched across the sand and into the shade of the awning. Hasan drew him into a tight embrace and they kissed four times, twice on each cheek. Then Hasan drew back and ran his hand over the racing stripes Tariq had carefully shaved above his temples.
"Not so little anymore," he said.
Tariq slapped his hand away. "It's only been, like, six months."
"It goes fast at your age ..." Hasan murmured. They lapsed into uncomfortable silence. Tariq felt the sting of sand grains against his bare arms.
"So, what do you think of your new home?" asked Hasan, with a proprietary gesture across the sand.
Tariq looked around. The road from town petered out here, on the shore of the Sahara. The hut was depressingly basic, though at least it had a solar panel rigged up on its roof. Two bunks within; a laptop closed on the table; an independence-era rifle hung in brackets on the wall. A hammock was strung under the awning. Beside the house, Hasan's jeep was a ghost beneath weeks of desert dust.
And then there was the desert itself. Humming, impossibly orange and wind-sculpted into shapes more fantastic than anything his friends at home had ever managed with their hair. He had expected the dunes of the erg to rise slowly, but they sprang fully formed from the stony earth and filled the horizon. They looked Photoshopped. It was the strangest and most beautiful place he had ever seen.
"It's all right," he conceded. "What's that noise?"
"The Berbers say it's spirits, calling to each across the desert," Hasan said. "The land is haunted by the Ghaib, the unseen."
Tariq raised a withering eyebrow. Hasan held a poker face for a few moments until the old lopsided smile finally broke through. "Come on, I'll show you the camera," he said, picking up a plastic water bottle.
About a hundred meters from the house, there was a rickety metal tripod concreted into the sand. It was approximately three meters high, with a suitcase-sized black box at its apex that was reachable by a steel ladder. Facing the dunes was a dark lens behind a thin sheet of transparent plastic. Standing beneath it, Tariq could see a fishbowl reflection of his head, with the desert curving up like wings behind him.
"That's a Kumai X5 DSLR camera in there," said Hasan. "Very expensive. It's how we film the dunes moving."
Tariq's reflection looked sullen and tired after two days of bus and taxi rides. He straightened his posture and waved into the lens. "Sand doesn't move, donkey," he said.
"Yes it does — very slowly, like your brain. The camera takes a photo every three hours while there's light. Then the BBC can run them together to make a time-lapse film of the desert at noon, or sunset, or whatever."
"Does it have a Bluetooth connection?"
"Yes, back to the house. We can check the photos on the laptop they gave me."
"So this is the big job you told us about? You watch a camera watch the desert? I can see why you needed a man of my talent. This is heavy stuff, Hasan." As he spoke, Tariq drew his phone out to check his messages. One bar, no Internet coverage. He frowned at it, feeling the familiar tightness in his temples that came on whenever he was cut off from the world.
"Hey!"
Hasan's irritated clap was like a gunshot. "You think I needed you down here? Mum begged me to look after you, to get you out of the city. This is a serious job, all right? This is going to be on international TV. We're working for Mr. Attenborough! And it means more money in nine months than Dad could make in five years — unless they fire me because they find out that my little brother is in trouble with the police."
"So you think I'm a criminal, then? I suppose the independence fighters were all criminals too? Do you care that the government is snatching people off the street and torturing them? Do you care about freedom? Do you even vote?"
Hasan turned to stare out across the sand, debating something with himself. Then he laughed softly. "You're a clueless donkey."
Before Tariq could retort, Hasan's phone beeped. He glanced at it, then relaxed.
"Prayer time," he said, unscrewing the top of his water bottle. He poured a little into his hands and splashed himself, then offered the bottle to Tariq. He unrolled his simple tan mat and laid it on the sand, checking the angle to Mecca on a plastic compass he drew from his pocket. Hasan was always on top of that kind of detail.
He spread his arms and looked out toward the cobalt horizon. "Allahu Akbar," he intoned.
"Allahu Akbar," Tariq repeated sulkily. The desert swallowed the ritual words, made them seem small. Hasan fell to his hands and knees and, after a self-conscious moment loitering above him, Tariq knelt and pressed his forehead to the hot sand. The sun beat down mercilessly on his back.
"Glory to God," Tariq whispered. The grains were hot and coarse against his nose and forehead and they stuck to his lips. With his face pressed against the sand he could feel faint vibrations, like a tiny earthquake beneath his fingers or a vast one, hundreds of miles away. The singing of the sand.
* * *
"Tariq."
He opened his eyes. Hasan stood above him, wrapped in shadow. The air was bitterly cold.
"What?"
"There's someone outside."
Tariq half-rose, bunching the sheets around him. Out the window the darkness was smeared with cold stars. Hasan had taken up the rifle and moved to the doorway. All Tariq could hear was the distant desert hum, like the sound of the surf. Voomvoomvoom.
"I don't hear ..." he began, but Hasan bolted out the door.
Tariq groggily fumbled out of his blankets. There was a flashlight somewhere, but he couldn't find it, so he snatched his phone and ran outside shining its screen ahead of him like a lantern.
The stars overhead were disorienting in their brightness, but their light sank without a trace into black desert. Tariq strained to pinpoint his brother's form. He directed his phone at his bare feet, terrified of scorpions emerging into the tiny circumference of blue light it gave off.
"Come on!" shouted Hasan, chasing shadows into the dunes.
"Wait!" called Tariq, but the wind snatched at his words and bore them away into the darkness. Moments later, he heard his own cry distantly repeated from upwind, as if his voice were spinning around him like an eddy of fluttering paper.
Tariq struggled after Hasan. The sand that had seemed as smooth as glass by day now flowed beneath his bare feet like a river. He dug his toes in for purchase, and beneath the crust the underlayer was still hot with yesterday's warmth.
Hasan had reached the ridge of the nearest dune. Tariq could make him out now as a deeper black silhouette against the radiance of the stars. Hasan raised the rifle toward the sky, and the sound of a shot broke across the desert. Memories of tear gas and street fights flashed across Tariq's mind and he found himself diving to the slope for protection.
The shock of it seemed to silence the hum of the desert for a moment, then it washed back like a wave. Tariq spat sand from his mouth and crawled up to the ridgeline, where Hasan was crouched with his head cocked intently.
"Can you hear them?" Hasan whispered.
Hasan's fear seemed to people the void before them with menacing figures, black against black beneath the vibrating stars, but Tariq could only hear the sand, the wind, and his own strained breathing. He lay against his brother, shivering in the darkness.
"We must have scared them off," Hasan said at last. "Probably kids trying to boost the camera."
He led them to the camera tower and took Tariq's phone to examine the equipment, pointing with satisfaction to a confusion of scuffed sand beneath the tower, although Tariq couldn't tell if it was made up of their own tracks or someone else's. There was no sign of damage to the camera or its case.
"We can't risk any tampering with the equipment," Hasan said firmly. "We'll have to sleep out here from now on, in shifts."
Tariq wrapped his arms around himself. He was shivering, and not just from the cold — the thrum of the desert was more overwhelming at night, like helicopters patrolling the sky.
"I am not sleeping here," he said.
"Then I will," said Hasan, staring blankly into the dark. "We have to do our job."
* * *
Hasan was serious about guarding the equipment. He kept his bedroll and rifle by the camera, just out of sight of its lens, and slept under the stars. He would wake with sand in his hair and nostrils and wash himself from a bucket of cloudy water before dawn prayer. In the afternoons he had taken to disappearing on long walks along the tops of the dunes. Tariq would think his brother was reading one of his National Geographic magazines in the chair behind him, then be startled to see a shadow stalking along the ridgeline high above the house.
Tariq was struggling not to sleep through prayer times. He had built himself a nest of cushions, power cords, and water bottles in the hammock outside the door, and rarely stirred from it. He would swing in the hammock, obsessively checking his phone's Wi-Fi like a fisherman angling for a catch that never came. The cloud was as remote and elusive in the desert as its namesakes above..
Some days it was so silent that he could hear the tiny shutter-click of the camera every three hours. Other times, the horizon hummed like a field of locusts. It was just vibrations from wind rolling sand grains down the slopes, Google told him, but it was unnerving, and he kept his earphones in at those times.
Today there was something wrong with the music on Tariq's phone. The beats of all his songs had sped up, the singers sounded like chipmunks. He experimented with settings and playback for five minutes until he gave up and threw the phone into the sand with a curse.
The drone of the wind bored into his head. Hasan seemed unfazed by the sound. He sat in a sagging deck chair beside Tariq, peacefully contemplating the dunes.
"Hasan, let's sing. Remember when we did our own version of 'Buffalo Soldier'? Old camel herdman! Sand in his turban!"
He sang the verse out into the sky, then waited for Hasan to chime in on the chorus.
"I don't remember," said Hasan, after a pause. "I don't listen to music much anymore. Sorry."
Tariq rolled his eyes. He picked up one of the National Geographic magazines, flipped through it, flung it back down.
"You act like an animal in a cage," Hasan commented, without turning his head. "What happened to your love of freedom? This is as free as you have ever been. Rich Westerners pay thousands of dollars to come to the desert."
"It's a desert of shit."
Hasan glanced at him pityingly. "In the old days, caravans used to take fifty-two days to cross the Sahara. Without phones. Out there, it's just you and God. The Tuareg say that the journey puts you in a trance, that you can wake up in the evening and not remember anything from the day. They call it Dune Time."
"This whole country's in a trance! I should be helping my friends, not hiding down here."
"You should be as far away from those friends as possible. They're not looking to make things better, they just want to be martyrs. How does throwing rocks at the police help your cause?"
"The police broke Ali's fingers!"
"The police are people. Some good, some bad. They need to earn bread for their family. When was the last time you put family first?"
"Everyone putting their own family first is the whole reason the country is messed up."
Like a reclining imam, Hasan flung his arms out in mock admonishment, "Be maintainers of justice, bearers of witness for God, though it may be against your own selves, your parents, or your relatives."
"There you go, then," said Tariq. "It's clear."
"So clear, so clear." Hasan repeated, drumming his fingers on his knees. Then, abruptly — "Did you know that Dad had a visit from the police last month? They threatened to close his business down if he didn't pull you into line."
The wind hissed between them for long moments. At last Tariq said, "Why didn't he tell me that?"
"I'm telling you now."
Tariq turned away, onto his side. "Well, I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment to you all," he said bitterly.
Hasan sighed. "You're not a disappointment, Tariq. Why do you think Dad didn't say anything? We're all proud of you. You just need to gain some perspective."
Tariq held his silence.
"Things will get better," Hasan went on. "We just need to show the world we're responsible, that we can do the same jobs as Westerners and the Chinese. The government will adapt to keep the investment flowing. Trust in God."
"And just hope that happens before we die of old age?"
"Inshallah," said Hasan.
His family's favorite way to shut down a difficult conversation. Tariq gave his hammock a few passive-aggressive swings and watched a ball of dead grass blow up against the dune and roll back again.
The sun glinted on the casing of his phone, taunting him. He retrieved it and blew the sand from its screen. This time it showed the elusive one-bar signal.
Hasan forgotten, Tariq started circling the house, waving his arms in the air. The bar came and went. Desperate, he put his foot up on the window ledge and chased the signal onto the blistering concrete of the roof. And there, wedged beneath the solar panel for shade, he could finally reach the life-giving waters of the information sea.
Tariq felt the tension ease from his shoulders as his browser loaded. While the signal lasted, he opened as many tabs as he could. He checked Al-Jazeera and the BBC. There had been more unrest since he'd gone into exile, and the government had backed down on its proposed curfew law. His friends' Twitter feeds were exultant. He should be there.
A pop-up blinked at him. Freedom21 had come online. Ali. Tariq eagerly called him and leaned in toward the screen.
Ali's image appeared, pixelated and bleached of its normal color. He squinted at his screen uncertainly for a moment, then relaxed into a grin.
"Hey, the Bedouin is back! How's the desert?"
There was a bad lag in the visual, giving a creepy de-synchronization effect. When Ali's voice did come through it sounded hollow and far away, like he was at the bottom of a well.
"It's as exciting as watching my fingernails grow. What's happening there?"
Ali spread his hands — so much. "We need you, man! The walls are crumbling, but there're rumors that the army is going to come back in. Fucking pigs. We need men on the street!"
According to Ali, the walls had been crumbling for three years now. Tariq could see a mound of comic books piled behind him on his bed. "I can't, I've got to stay low," he said.
"Because of that warrant? Don't worry about it; we'll hide you in the medina. And remember, 'Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.'"
"It's not that, brother."
"Then what?"
"The police threatened my parents. If I got in trouble again."
Ali shrugged. "Sorry, man. But it just goes to show that we have to keep going, you know? This is important, Tariq."
"So's my family!"
The pixelated Ali looked taken aback. Tariq paused, embarrassed at the way his voice had boomed across the emptiness. He glanced down, but Hasan sat with his hands behind his head and showed no signs of having heard.
"Shit, man, of course they are. Sorry."
"I'm sorry too. Can you tell me more about what's happening?"
He saw Ali rub his chin doubtfully and glance at something offscreen. "I don't know, man, it's been crazy. Things are moving so fast. Look, I have to go; we've got a strategy meeting soon. I'll let everyone know you're doing good, eh? Salaam, brother."
"Salaam," murmured Tariq. Ali switched off the connection and his image withdrew five hundred miles to the north.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dune Time by Jack Nicholls, Mark Smith. Copyright © 2016 Jack Nicholls. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Begin Reading,
Copyright,