The Glass Mountains (32 page)

Karrid was leading us to some underground tunnels that he’d discovered as a child. He said we might regroup there, hiding until the authorities moved on to fresh game. Then we might continue to Zem’s ship. Karrid never told his law-abiding parents about the tunnels because they would have been obligated to tell the authorities, and he wanted the tunnels to remain a secret. As he spoke about the tunnels he seemed almost to forget his torment.
 

“I used to go down there first by myself, and then with my brothers and sisters. The tunnels stretched on forever. You could live there if you wanted! You could hide there! Across the sector there are other tunnels where certain mathematical cults live and speak in mathematical languages that only they understand. I’ve heard they spend all day discussing whether the number two is the number one split in half or two separate number ones. That the government tolerates them is proof that we’re a free world. But the tunnels I’m taking you to are unknown. My brothers and I planted trees in front to hide them when we moved from there.”
 

He fell asleep then, and Moor wondered aloud whether Karrid could be hallucinating, remembering a childhood that had never existed. So then I had a new fear to add to all the other fears overwhelming me. But on the outside I managed to appear calm. This thought gave me still another fear, that perhaps underneath his outer calm Moor was as scared as I was. I didn’t like to think of Moor scared.
 

“Are you—” I started.
 

“No,” he interrupted sharply.
 

“I was going to ask whether you’re scared,” I said.
 

“I know. I’m not.”
 

“Not even somewhat?”
 

“I am always scared since I met you.”
 

We came to a fork and tried to rouse Karrid, but he merely groaned. The tunnels were in the opposite direction from Zem’s ship. We needed to decide whether to try to reach Zem’s ship or to find the tunnels. Moor wanted to find the tunnels. He thought that we would not be able to make it to the ship in time. My parents did not voice an opinion. I searched the predictions and traditions for an answer, but none came. Therefore I voted with my logic, and with Moor.
 

Once, we saw a group of boisterous people walking toward us, and we immediately hid in some bushes. They stopped in the distance and huddled around something. Half the night seemed to pass before the group reached us and walked on. They moved in silence now, men and women but no children, and I could tell nothing from their expressions.
 

We continued after they’d left our sight. When we got to where they’d huddled, Moor pointed out something: a body sitting upright by the side of the road. It was a Bakshami—a partial—who looked eerily like my brother Maruk and whose bloodied face held insolence even in death. The body was still warm.
 

My mother fell to her knees before the Bakshami man and cried out, “Maruk! My son.”
 

My father took her by the shoulders and said simply, “No.”
 

“We must continue,” said Moor urgently.
 

I formed a circle of leaves and rocks around the dead man, and we continued. “That will help to send him back to the hotlands, to become a part of the sand that bore him.”
 

“We need to hurry,” Moor said.
 

I stared at the dead Bakshami, whose life no doubt had been ruled by prediction as mine had been. Before the war few Bakshami who survived childhood died before their time. Seeing that dead man—whose life had been ruled by the same forces as mine and who so strongly resembled my brother—made me fear that all was chance now, for if he could die so might I. I could not know whether stopping would aid or hinder us, or whether hurrying would destroy us or save us. I saw this man watching the beautiful, peaceful road where flowers bloomed under the stars and promised all things to all passers. I remembered how many compulsive people stayed in the hotlands forever asking the elders questions about the future. They reasoned that each day circumstances changed; thus did their futures change in minute ways. What an elder might predict for me this day I had no idea. All was random now.
 

And in any case I was no longer in Bakshami. I was a partial now, in Forma, and I must act accordingly or else end up by the side of the road staring insolently at the flowers in the fields.
 

“He’s dead,” said Moor.
 

“I know,” I said. “I was thinking he looked like my oldest brother.”
 

“I mean Karrid.”
 

He set down Karrid by the road as well, just a measure away from the Bakshami. I smelled an odor that was a mixture of Karrid’s festering legs and the death of two friends.
 

“His legs won’t bother him now,” said Moor. Moor folded his legs so that you couldn’t tell one was longer than the other. He hesitated. “Do you need to form a circle around him?”
 

“Perhaps I will.” So again I placed rocks and leaves around a dead man. Only then did we move on.
 

What we were looking for now was trees that looked as if they might be hiding an entrance to some tunnels. But I had no idea how a tree hiding an entrance might look different from any other tree. Karrid had told us which town he’d lived in as a child, and told us also what kind of trees he and his brothers had planted. In other words, he’d told very little of use to us. That night was the twenty-second from the time we’d arrived in Forma.
 

We slept all day and walked at night, and when we reached Karrid’s old town we were aghast to see a huge sign in fifty different languages, apparently saying fifty times: “Visit the Legendary Tunnel—Purchase Passes Here.” There was a map showing the location of the tunnel, and a pamphlet in Forman, Artroran, and a language I didn’t recognize about how the tunnels attracted people from all over the planet and how this town had flourished after the tunnels were discovered a few years earlier by an amorous couple. Moor read to me from the Artroran.
 

Several branches of the tunnels were off limits, including one branch where, legend said, there existed a crevice where gravity was warped and people fell so slowly to their deaths that they would, according to the top scientists, probably starve before they burned to death at the center of the planet. Down another branch lived people who could see in the dark and hated all but themselves. One off-limit branch remained unexplored simply because for some reason people grew so frightened when they neared the branch that none dared venture forth. And so on, for eleven off-limit branches. If you even leaned over the crevice you would be caught in its pull and fall to your death, and if you even neared those who saw in the dark they would try to destroy you. A few people had accidentally learned these things, but whatever else was known about these branches had been learned through experiments with dogs. So said the signs and pamphlets Moor read to me.
 

“What kind of insane people would throw dogs down a crevice?” I asked.
 

When we went to the caves we found wooden booths apparently open during the day and selling all manner of tunnel paraphernalia.
 

“We should go in,” Moor said.
 

My father spoke up for the first time since we’d left the farm. “But the sign says it’s open only during the day.”
 

Moor politely did not reply, but I replied for him. “Shall we let a sign stop us when we’ve come so far?”
 

“To what purpose do we enter against the law?”
 

“We will go in,” I said firmly.
 

“Karrid insisted the tunnels were elaborate,” said Moor. “He seemed to believe we could hide out in them.”
 

“Again I ask, to what purpose?”
 

“We can hide in there, I tell you,” I said. “Fate has brought us here for a reason.” Or, for no reason, I thought. And even though I’d sworn not to abide by the predictions, I added, “It’s dark in tunnels, the opposite of our world full of blinding sunlight. Maybe that’s what my grandfather meant when he said I would find a guide somewhere the opposite of Bakshami. And Karrid says the tunnels are a way of getting to Hathatu-me. No one will pay attention to us there.”
 

Father did not answer, so we entered the tunnels, which were artificially lit for as far as we could see. We walked until the dogs grew restive, and still we could not see the end of the light in the main tunnel in which we walked. We began randomly to take offshoots, all of them marked with signs and lit by lights that emphasized their jagged shapes.
 

Apparently the Formans drove through here with vehicles during tours. We knew that, outside the tunnels, daylight might come at any moment, and a vehicle might then travel through these caves. So we didn’t stop. I grew as exhausted as I ever had during all my walking. At least during the trek to the hotlands, I could sleep each night. Here there was no night or day. My legs felt stiff and arthritic, and the artificial lights made my head throb. Beyond the point when I first felt I could go no further, we were relieved and overjoyed to see that an offshoot of the tunnel through which we walked was not lit at the end. Moor’s superior eyes spotted this sheltering darkness. As we hurried toward it we could hear noises far away, and as the noises neared we heard laughing. We hid in a lighted offshoot. A motorsled whizzed by full of people laughing. After that scare we rushed into the darkness, running desperately so that we could be engulfed by the safety of darkness. Unlike those who fear first what they don’t know and then what they do, we feared only what we knew, which was the sounds of laughter behind us. When we reached the darkness we collapsed briefly, and then rose and kept going until we collapsed again. This time I fell asleep.
 

When I awoke I felt Moor at my right, Shami upon my chest at the left, and Artie at my feet. I heard my parents’ breath. I felt a warm happy comfort and wished to stay in this cool cave forever. One by one my companions awoke, and when I could sit up without disturbing the sleep of another I sat up and gazed in the direction from which I thought we’d come. But in that and every direction only darkness met my eyes.
 

“We ran so far I can no longer see any light,” I said.
 

“Speak softly.”
 

“Do you suppose it is daylight outside the caves?”
 

“I don’t know.” He touched my arm to silence me, and we sat listening. There was no noise anywhere except my own breathing. There was not the slightest breeze against my face. I could see nothing and hear nothing. But Moor’s senses were keener than mine, and he didn’t lift his silencing touch from my arm. So we sat and sat until I could hear it, too, a soft sound, almost like the sound of water trickling. But, just as skin is unmistakable even when it is hiding among items of like color, the faraway sound of human voices was unmistakable to me. And I knew the voices were getting closer—that’s why I could hear them now.
 

Moor pulled me and the dogs up and led us away, whispering that he would lead us in the direction opposite the voices he heard. We dared not turn on the lights Karrid had given us. Instead we moved away from the sounds of life in the same way that, earlier, we had fled the lights in the tunnels. Again we moved until I felt I could move no more. My parents never complained, but I knew they were exhausted. The dogs, also tired, whined occasionally. Though stronger, faster, and more agile than me, they needed more sleep.
 

Because I could not hear the voices unless I concentrated and stood still, I trusted Moor completely and found the same sense of relief in this trust that I’d once found in my trust of my parents. Finally he removed his hand from my arm and spoke. “I haven’t heard them for a long time,” he said softly.
 

My mother, who hardly spoke anymore, said, “If it’s been a long time, why do you tell us only now when we’ve been so exhausted? Whether it’s night or day outside, we have been walking a night and a day’s time.”
 

“Whoever’s following us is probably resting, and we must as well,” said Moor. “We must hope that when we leave this cave we will be somewhere safe.”
 

My mother persisted. “Who are they? Why don’t they take a motorsled?”
 

“They have one,” said Moor. He spoke in my ear, though, so my mother couldn’t hear, and I knew he’d grown angry with her. “Perhaps they don’t know exactly where we are, just that someone is in here. They may have lights, but my hearing so exceeds the power of my sight that I can’t know with certainty.”
 

Moor didn’t speak again, just sat down. We ate some of the provisions we’d brought and then lay on the rock ground. I could feel in the darkness that Moor’s mood had softened, and though much still troubled him, he also seemed strangely relaxed and content, almost complacent. This was something new, something I’d never known in him. As he sank into sleep, I soothed him with affectionate ritualistic lies, about how my only desire in the world was to knead his feet when they tired of walking, and to kiss his temple when his head hurt, and to rub against his skin like a dog in the mud. But then I found I really did desire these things, and I kneaded his feet, kissed his temple, and rubbed against him like a dog in the mud.