Free Hegira by Greg Bear Page B

clouds into thin, smooth ribbons and shot them with desert dirt. Mur-es-Werd was covered by a pink pall, and everyone walked warily as in a dangerous dream.
    By evening it was clear and the winds died down. But the city was restless that night. The bars stayed open later than was normally allowed by law. Gangs of drunken men were herded home angrily in the early morning by women wielding cane brooms. The women wore dark dresses with strips of white tied around their arms. From a distance doves seemed to flutter around the men, driving them along the street with angry swishes.
    Bar-Woten sat on the sand with his legs curled beneath him, watching and listening to the foamy waves. He thought they could tell him something. But they glowed and tossed and fussed incoherently, less powerfully than usual. Suddenly, they slowed to an oily trickle, rushing along the shore with a drawing bead of light. His neck hair prickled, and he sat up on his knees wanting to run. It was near dawn — soon the sky would turn green at the zenith as it always had.
    But ten minutes passed and the dark remained. Two fire doves twinkled pink and orange just above the northern horizon. A third, bluish in color, hovered above the western mountains.
    They winked out.
    Thousands in the city were awake, watching the sky with him. A low moan rose from the city, the sound of distant screams and wailing. Barthel and Kiril awoke abruptly and asked what was happening. Bar-Woten couldn't answer. How could anyone describe something they had never seen before?
    The blackness of the sky turned muddy. Not a single fire dove was to be seen. Like the opening of two palms clasped together, the muddiness drew aside, and a vortex of dun purple, barely visible, spread across the sky, leaving another sort of darkness at its center.
    This wasn't the warmly immediate, empty black that had always meant night for Hegira. It was a velvety dark strewn with glowing ribbons, and between and around and in these, twinkled points of light so fine no shape could be discerned. Gouds of light filled the sky. For the first time in memory of anyone living, starshine visibly brightened the land.
    The city was silent under the frosty gaze of the stars. Barthel made a growling sound deep in his throat, and tears streamed down his cheeks. “Holy Allah,” he said. “Blessed Allah.”
    Kiril's hand tightened around his belt. He felt like rolling in the sand and screaming.
    The streets were soon crowded with crying, stumbling mobs. They washed onto the beaches and human waves met the water waves, forming a splashing tumult as the citizens of Mur-es-Werd tried to put out the mad fevers that caused them to see such visions.
    The stars were crossed by sudden, silky ripples. Kiril's stomach sank. He felt his body crawling this way and that, yet he wasn't moving; his muscles weren't twitching. His head threatened to turn inside out, but painlessly — a dreamy sort of dizziness, disorientation. The ocean waves grew brighter, became almost turquoise. He heard a deep bass note like the buzzing of giant bees. If the whole world had been a tapestry and somebody had started flapping it to shake out the dust, perhaps this was how it would feel — he didn't know. For a time he thought he would be better off dead.
    The rippling in the sky stopped, and the stars steadied. The beach was encased in silence. The people around them moved slowly; even falling they drifted like puffs of down.
    Looking up, Bar-Woten thought he was going to black out. At the periphery of his eye he could see darkness close in, cutting out the stars. But the dizziness was gone, and his head seemed all right. The stars were being obscured again. At the edge of the closing circle the points of light became lines of purple, twisted, and winked out. The familiar empty black returned. One by one, flickering, the fire doves resumed their glows. The sky at zenith turned green, then purple, then bronze; the dawn was picking up where it had