SAND
The desert was wide and empty. No one ever tried to pass through it; it was too dangerous, too frightening. The desert-bridge stood in the air; there was nothing for it to support on; the planet was hollow.
Niap was walking. Step after step, she separated her legs from the sandy land and pushed herself forward. The great desert of the Nahvim asked for everything one could give it. The weak did not survive. Niap continued walking. She was probably the only one who had escaped from the second attack. No one else could; no one else had the chance she had.
The first attack was unpredicted. In one beautiful morning all the northern half of the eastern hemisphere happened to be found completely depopulated. In the evening before the tragic event, all the businesses closed up and the gamblers left unsatisfied with the stock market. Since then, nothing was heard from that part of the planet. When the same kind of money addicted people opened the stock market in the eastern hemisphere, and sent the regular signal to begin the cruel trade with the dying north, nothing came back. The amazed people, who were hoping to finally have a good day by crushing the northern economy for good, just stood there waiting to the huge monitors to display the image of the balding man who was the official speaker of the north, but they never had that pleasure. The monitor stayed gray and no sound came out of it. When people began to worry whether they would take home another suitcase filled with money that could stop the sun from spinning in its orbit, they sent for the ship they considered the fastest in the world.
When "Six Seconds" returned to her mother-port, the two observers reported that no living creature was found on that ancient land. No bodies were seen either, only piles upon piles of clothes, which were lying without owners on the old streets. As one of the observers described it: "A nation evaporated, leaving its cloth behind…."
The news was delivered to the hungry journalists almost immediately. Everybody found something to do with the exciting information: biophysicists went straight to their labs to see if the opportunity to break the matter conservation law would be given to them as well; tabloid writers were trying to find out what celebrities were wearing (or if they were lucky, not wearing) during the unpleasant incident; physicians pushed aside their disagreements with physicists about the ethical issues of trying to produce electric energy out of people and were trying to figure out if evaporation could hurt the human body and if it did, what kind of treatment those people needed.
A small group of people, however, was trying to get into that mysterious zone to see if any of their friends or family had survived the disaster.
Niap was among those humans. All her family used to live in Yawen, the city that was built near the desert-bridge that connected the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere.
When she burst into the small room that was her house, she found the same piles of clothes she saw in the streets, piles upon piles of them. Not even one person was left, just textile. From the smell of the cloth and the appearance of the house she understood that her mother was already too old to manage the house, and of course no one of her male relatives could hurt his honorable social status of "official town beggar" by helping her mother with the house management.
As the strange way of luck assured it, Niap was not present at the second attempt upon the world population. In less than one day, the eastern population decreased to null. For the first time since the bursting of earth, the wide streets emptied; the big houses quietened; the flying cars landed, creating no noise at all; poor people stopped suffering; and rich people stopped pitying themselves.
But Niap knew nothing of that. She sat in her empty house weeping over her family and her uncertain future. She had nowhere to go; the south had nothing to give her.
Since she already was near the great bridge, Niap thought that seeking the west might be a good idea. Things couldn't go worse; she had nothing to lose anyway.
And so she began walking. She walked day and night, resting during the few hours when sunrise or sunset blinded her, eating the bread crumbs she found in her house, drinking the water vapors that were in the air, sleeping on the rough sand that no human foot had ever stepped upon.
The nights were cold and unpleasant; the days were hot and tiring. For the first time since her eighth year of miserable life she opened her scarf. She remembered the day that same scarf closed her face and changed her life forever. It was a sad day. How could a day that marked the family as poor and in need be happy? It couldn't. But she remembered that day better than all her family; for it was she who had to close her face as a sign of poverty; it was she who had to lock herself in the house as a sign of shame; it was she who had to refuse the road to success as a sign of womanhood. She remembered the day when she couldn't play with her friends anymore. They wore blue; she wore brown. How grateful she felt towards them when they pretended to ignore her, as if never knowing her, as if never sharing life with her. And how thankful she was when they didn't sell her change in status. She remembered the day when doors stopped opening, when people stopped smiling, when the playground stopped being so inviting. What a sad day it was. She was only eight.
Now she walked where? Why? She did not know.
It was sundown, the fourth day. The dust filled Niap's eyes and hair. The horizon was empty. Niap did not know how much she passed or how much she still had to walk. The bread pills almost ended, the thirst bothered her mind.
She walked at a slow tempo; she had no power in her at all. Suddenly the light reflected over a piece of glass. Niap saw the twinkling and was already sure that her eyes had finally betrayed her. This was not the case.
At a distance was a small town. If you had supplies and water with you the town was irrelevant, but for Niap it could be the last hope for life. She walked toward the settlement. She walked slowly, the energy slipping through her bones.
She slowly examined the town. It was filled with odd-looking houses: small, big, tall, short, pink, black, rich, poor... Each kind of house stood with others that resembled it, and a wide road separated them from all the other kinds.
Niap grew closer. She saw a well, it was dirty, but she didn't care. She rushed to the source of water and looked down into it. There was no bucket, but the well was not really deep, or at least it did not appear so to her at that moment. She jumped into the hole and began drinking violently. She drank and drank and drank. Her mind cleared and she was fully conscious again. She sat in the water and breathed. A feeling of relief came to her gradually. First her muscles loosened, then her bones felt rest from the weight of her body and, last, her jaw released all the tension that it had held since Niap left home. Finally she was able to relax.
Her mind was putting her to sleep. Slowly her head fell to her chest, her breath became stable...
"Dabsi yrots siht dog?" a loud voice was shouting downwards.
From the confused look on Niap's face the shouter understood that the language should be changed. "What are you doing there?" A small, chubby woman repeated in the spoken language.
Niap was frightened and she replied in a guilty voice: "I just wanted to drink."
The woman looked at Niap with pity on her face: "Come up, it's probably cold in there." The woman talked with a strong accent.
Niap climbed up to the surface using the sticking rocks in the well's walls. She looked at the woman. She was small, very small actually. She wore a black dress with a white apron. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she had round pleasant face.
The woman examined Niap closely: "You must be very tired and hungry," she said in a less pleasurable voice than her face signified.
"I am," Niap answered a little ashamed of herself. Her dress lost any color it had previously and she lost her scarf in the desert; now she felt naked without her status.
"Where am I?" she looked at the city that was in front of her.
"This is Yawdlo, the first city that was built on that planet and the last one to stay on it." The woman said proudly. "We live a peaceful life in here and we refuse to be known to the world…"
"There is no world to be known to…" Niap murmured under her nose.
"What did you say, dear?"
"Nothing… I said nothing." Niap felt that the environment should be studied more before any information could be given away.
"Fine, dear…so as I was saying, we live a nice, quiet life, and we ignore the world outside. Our ancestors were the first settlers here and we continue their exact culture and tradition..."
Niap was amazed: "But the first people were different from each other. They almost killed themselves while coming here. What culture is kept in here?"
"Oh, we solved that old problem long time ago. Anyway I was telling about our culture. We have our master and he knows everything! There was that time when the main cow got sick... the master looked at her and he immediately said that she was pregnant. A couple of days later the cow died, but the master said that the calf killed her and her meat is perfectly fine. My master is so smart…"-Pure admiration was on the woman's face- "We ate the cow for three whole days. What a feeling it was..."
In the meantime they walked towards the town.
The streets in the town were very wide. The forty yard sidewalks were completely empty and an unpleasant silence ruled the town. The town started with tall glass buildings. The buildings' entrances were facing each other and formed a closed circle using their backs. Niap observed that the back of the buildings were oblique. After a couple of miles the tall buildings ended and another wide street separated the blocks from the next type of houses.
The next couple of blocks were filled with wooden cabins, which were separated by streets narrower than previously, only thirty-two yards long. Each block of cabins was distinguished by color. In addition, Niap saw that darker colors were always in the back and brighter colors were mostly in the front.
Niap and her companion stopped near a red cabin with three stars on it.
"Oh by the way, I am Gniyonna. Who are you? And actually I forgot to ask you, what master do you serve?"
Niap was a little embarrassed by the question. "I am a poor girl from the north-east." She was trained to say that. "I have no one in the world and I do not have a master."
Gniyonna's face changed a couple of times before it stopped on a questioning expression: "You have no master, you say?"- A long pause- "You have to excuse me, but I took you to the wrong part of the city. I have to go now. I have something to do. Please, go back on that street and take the left street on the third block." The woman ran away almost in terror.
Niap did as her guide told her. She went three blocks, passed three times seven yard streets and turned right. The houses here disappeared and now only doors were seen. The 'lonely door' sight was so unusual for Niap that she feared to knock on them. She passed four doors and at the fifth one she decided to knock. Her weak knock opened the squeaking door. No one stood behind it. Niap almost thought about moving, but then she reconsidered. On the ground there was an opening and a staircase was leading down. Near the opening she saw a sign: "" "If you cannot read the above message you are not welcome here. Stay out of our neighborhood and do not come back. (If you still want to enter, consider yourself warned. The life of a Greenhand does not mean anything to us.)"
Because Niap could not read at all, she decided not to go to a place where she could be humiliated. She left the house and went another six blocks.
Here the view changed again. Now the streets were still empty, but different sounds came out of the concave houses. Frightened from the next event she might experience, Niap did not knock on the doors. She went for a quarter of a mile and then she saw that in the next block walking people were on the streets. She hurried to the next block, hoping to find a pleasant face to talk to, but exactly in the middle of the intersection, when she was so close to those human faces she wanted to see, a silvered robot flew near her and she stopped.
A button was pressed and a metal voice came out of the amplifiers: "You are passing to the green zone. Please show documents."
Niap was used to those procedures and she said in a loud and clear voice: "I do not have my documents with me."
The robot did not answer. It stood near Niap and blocked her way from the people that stood across the street. The robot produced a mechanical sound, but Niap was too anxious and she decided to pass by the robot. The robot stayed in its place and it stretched out a long metal hand that grabbed Niap's throat. Niap, who was totally unprepared for the sudden attack, waved her hands violently and tried to hit the long handed robot. In a while she succeeded and stroked the robot on its head. The robot stopped choking her, and a loud mechanical sound came out of its skull. Then the robot caught Niap. This time it took her hand and pronounced: "You are arrested for attacking the robot "DRUSBA #7684" and having no available documents. You have no rights and you are under the responsibility of :…( the robot stopped for a second)…me! (MuHaHaHaHaHa…). The robot's lousy attempt to laugh annoyed Niap and she decided to shout. She shouted as loud as she could, she did it well.
In a few seconds all the people who were walking in the nearby block turned their heads and looked at struggling Niap. They all wore green clothes and strange looking hats. They looked at each other and in a terribly fast way arranged themselves in rows. They started moving their mouths and waving their hands. No sound was heard from them. They began moving towards the road where Niap and the robot stood, but they did not cross the end of their block.
They stood in well-arranged lines and rows. They were all shouting, protesting, but not even one of them produced a sound or crossed the imagined line. In a short while the number of people doubled on one side of the road, and on the opposite side robots began gathering.
Five minutes after Niap was strangled, she found herself in the center of the strangest fight ever. One side produced no sound at all and the other made only mechanical noise that meant nothing Niap could understand.
The robot released Niap's hand and moved towards the robot's side of the road. Both of the sides grew larger and larger and both acted stranger and stranger. The green people continued shouting and gesturing, making no sound at all. Niap observed that though the people were shouting together and their gestures resembled each other, each one of them stood alone; in his own spot, with his own radius. On the robot side nothing like that was happening. Instead the robots closed their rows and stretched their metal arms, connecting the great group with thin little bridges and producing more noise than before.
In the meantime, from the left streets came more people. On one side white people came. They wore black robes and white scarves. Their faces were snow white and golden rings and bracelet, hung on their hands and legs. They were shouting in the spoken language, but their words were so mixed and messy that Niap could not understand them.
From the opposite side another kind of people gathered slowly. They all were small and chubby and wore similar dresses of different colors. Each dress color concentrated in its own place and never mixed with the others. The small people were shouting in a different language.
Niap did not understand them either.
Now Niap stood in a middle of the intersection, surrounded by four different kinds of people. Each was shouting in its own language, unknown, unfamiliar.
She closed her eyes and shut her ears. The noise was horrible. Niap fell on her knees, her dress torn. She fainted.
Her eyes opened. She was not in the town anymore. She was alone.
She stood up, looked at her dress; it was dirty. She looked at her surroundings and started walking. She walked, again; leg up, leg down, one step after the other.
In a couple of days she will discover that she left the last populated town on the planet. She will discover that the west has evaporated as well. She will discover how painful it is to be completely alone.
But for now let her walk. She has hope; she has faith. Leave her at least those things. She worked hard for them. Life gave her nothing but them. This was the only thing people did not figure out how to take from her.