The Glass Mountains (29 page)

After an hour we reached a path. The going was nothing compared to some of the walking I’d done in the past. The remnants of sickness had worn off and I felt exhilarated by the humidity and surfeit of green around us.
 

We heard voices in the distance. Moor had had his hand on his knife, which he always hid in his clothes. Now his arms hung at his side, but I saw the readiness in his limbs.
 

We came upon a man and a woman who looked at us guiltily and hurried off.
 

“They didn’t even seem curious about us,” I said.
 

“They’re probably taking time off from work. Forma is a working society like no other, but they think they’re free.”
 

“How can they think they’re free?”
 

“Because they’re free to quit their jobs if they wish, but food, water, clothes, and so on, can only be bought. And energy and seeds can be supplied only by the state. The fruit from these seeds they buy bears seeds that themselves cannot bear fruit.”
 

“I’m glad they didn’t ask any questions. I was raised to tell the truth.”
 

“And why do you who by tradition lie to your lovers tell the truth to strangers? Those strangers might harm you.”
 

“Let them try. I’ll tie them up and bury them in the dirt.”
 

“Your words are violent, Bakshami girl. You’ve learned to speak thus during our travels.”
 

“And cut them into pieces the size of my fingers!” said Zem’s voice, from behind us.
 

We turned around. Zem stood panting a few feet away.
 

“I didn’t hear you,” said Moor. “I’m disappointed with myself.”
 

“We made enough noise. But you were distracted by sparring with Mariska. If I fall in love someday, must I contest every point with my mate as you do?”
 

“If so, you’ll have my sympathies,” said Moor.
 

“And mine as well,” I said. “But I encourage you, anyway. Find a tall Soom Kali woman when you get back and have the tallest children on the planet.”
 

“I was feeling better and came to see you off.”
 

We climbed down a slope and sat along the rocky banks of a river.
 

“It must be nice to have a home,” I said wistfully. “It’s odd to think of people having a home, here where we don’t belong. It’s very pretty.”
 

“What, do you grow timid?” said Zem. “Who comes to a strange land for a home and not adventure? That doesn’t mean I like adventure, but unlike you I don’t wish for what cannot be.”
 

“What I really would wish is only to stay with Moor forever, even when he only walks from one end of a room to the other,” I said, following the Bakshami ritual once more. “He’s my universe now. Nothing in the world matters to me except Moor. My love for him dwarfs my love for my dogs and for my family.”
 

“How long must I tolerate these ritualistic lies?” said Moor. But he spoke with the satisfaction I used to see in my parents as they bantered.
 

“Until they become the truth,” I said.
 

“Ah, you mean to say I must engage in the ritual with you in order to end the ritual.”
 

I turned to Zem. “Who has merit here?”
 

Zem sighed and watched the water. “Being with you two has made me realize I don’t understand merit when it comes to love.” Zem threw several pebbles into the water, and we watched the ripples. “I’ve become more Artroran than Soom Kali,” he mused.
 

“In Soom Kali we don’t disturb a stone unless we plan to use it,” Moor explained.
 

“Look here,” said Zem. “Let’s make it twenty-four sunrises. If there is danger I must leave, but not before then. And you must not hesitate to abandon me as well if I’m not at the ship within that time. The Formans’ weapons are as good as anyone’s.”
 

He tripped over a rock and good-naturedly laughed it off. “Ah, the rocks get their revenge,” he said. He was disarming when he wasn’t lying. Because his engaging qualities and his lying lived side by side, each seemed more potent.
 

Zem and Moor hugged passionately, and we watched Zem walk off with his bags. He made surprisingly little noise as he traversed through the greenery.
 

“He loves you more than I do!” I said.
 

Moor and I sat and watched the lively river, reluctant to start our journey. Instead we sat and ate dried meat and hard bread. Such a meal would have seemed satisfying enough while I trekked through the desert; in this new land it seemed barely palatable.

3

We followed the first road we came upon and reached a town at nightfall. On many roads someone stood in plain dress, just watching, and we learned that these people were there to watch for law-breakers. At five inns we offered to work for a room, but two innkeepers told us they were full because of some sort of town celebration, and three told us they didn’t take “partials.” They told us this politely enough, but suspicion clouded their eyes. So we spent our second night in Forma sleeping outside behind an inn. We’d inquired about a driver but had been told there were few people who would work for partials, especially partials who owned only a few provisions with which to pay for a driver. Apparently a minuscule minority of partials had sufficient funds to purchase other partials, but one look at us told all onlookers that we were not among the privileged—if it was a privilege to buy another human being. The person who told us all this chastised us for speaking only Artroran and not bothering to learn Forman. She said the “best” partials were the ones who learned the language. In this crowded land where lived the greatest enemies my people had ever known, perhaps I would find the guidance of which my grandfather once spoke. I could smell something sweet and grainy, and felt sure a dead Bakshami lay nearby; but it turned out to be baking nearby. The food the Formans cooked smelled like death!
 

For several days we walked through town after town, our strong legs never tiring. There were few motorsleds—only people authorized by the state could own them. Apparently, the government made people buy licenses for motorsleds, pay taxes for owning property, and even buy licenses for owning dogs!
 

There were amazing places in this sector where there were nothing but roads, curling and tying into each other in complicated and beautifully symmetrical patterns, up and down and past fields and forests lit only by the moons at night. In the towns, we saw inns and fueling stations with lots lit in purplish lighting that seemed to wash away color. But for some reason I found those colorless lots rising out of the darkness poignant. Like the plain lights in the immigrant sections of Artroro, these purplish lights of Forma seemed to symbolize a struggle to me, against what I didn’t know. But such a struggle might mean both dejection and hope, and that’s what moved me. I couldn’t understand why these people we saw, most of whom possessed only a perfunctory hostility toward us, would want to destroy my sector. What I saw didn’t fit with what I had hated all this time.
 

These were simple, albeit rigid, people, who worked incessantly and didn’t have time to worry much about world affairs. There were a surprising number of Bakshami refugees living here. We asked all the Bakshami we met for news of my parents, but many were scared to talk to us, and the rest knew nothing. Of course all of them were only partials, none full citizens, though there were rumors of interbreeding. Through odd jobs and overheard conversation we learned that the planet Artekka was becoming more dangerous all the time. Artroro and Forma had officially joined forces, turning the formerly unimportant sector of Forma into one of the most powerful sectors on the planet. There were four important alliances now forming. The strongest, led by Artroro, also had the greatest expansionist tendencies. The weakest, led by a kingdom called Cassan, consisted mostly of a group of monarchies with delusions of superiority. The third was a small and mysterious alliance headed by Ou-Nal, or Land of the Fish. The inhabitants of this dominion were rumored to be the only people on our planet not descended from the inhabitants of the Hooded Galaxy. The people of Ou-Nal supposedly descended from an amphibious tribe a hundred galaxies away.
 

The fourth alliance of Artekka, led by the formidable armies of Soom Kali, was the second strongest, thanks to the size and courage of Soom Kali’s warrior tribes. Artroro and Soom Kali were moving closer to one of their always fearsome wars, and Soom Kali was seeking to strengthen its alliances.
 

Several Bakshami had told us that there was a farm in a certain section of Forma that hired Bakshami servants. At one time or another, many Bakshami passed through there. We headed immediately to the farm.
 

After walking for a few hours one night through hilly darkness, Moor and I came to a shop. The purplish lights, after all that darkness and foliage outside, seemed to signal the entrance into a small store, a half-life world of what turned out to be containers of every size, shape, and texture: hard containers, round ones, malleable, rigid, shiny, bright and plain ones. One whole aisle of the store was devoted to medicines for every disease and its opposite—oily skin and dry skin, fatigue and an overabundance of energy, constipation and diarrhea, too much fat and too little fat. While many of the people we’d encountered certainly had the pasty look of ill health about them, I didn’t see how the populace could have one disease while it also had the opposite. The store taught me much about this culture, and how lost it was. And yet this culture possessed the strength to destroy mine.
 

With funds from odd jobs, mostly involving personal servant work for me and lifting work for Moor, I bought meat and dried fruit, which I felt quite addicted to. But we tried not to spend much money, even though there were consumer laws stating that you must spend at least half of the money you earned, with a large portion of the rest of your money going to taxes and licenses.
 

Though Forma was one of the more crowded sectors, most of the people lived in cities where employment could be found. Sometimes we didn’t see another person for long periods of time, yet even when we went through the smallest towns all the shops were open, with a few lonely motorsleds huddled around. Often Moor and I walked silently. As we walked I spent all my time thinking about my parents, going over everything they’d ever said and their expressions and gestures as they said it, and every so often I’d remember something new.
 

I thought a lot about how my mother used to come in and comb our hair and check on us every night; every night, no matter if someone she’d loved had just died, if we’d displeased her that day or if she’d argued with my father. One night after she checked on us, I had heard her in an argument with my father. Later I found her standing on the verandah. I’d heard a noise and had gone to check. I’d never seen her look so sad and asked her what was wrong. “Every day you’re mated, you learn anew how hard it is,” she said, with some bitterness. I didn’t know what my father had done, but I knew it had hurt her terribly. My father was a wonderful man, but somehow he had hurt her. And after that night, though my mother still loved my father, and though her soul was still joined to his in a way that transcended the rational world, she never again adored him in exactly the same way she once had. Thinking of that now broke my heart for them. I wished their lives had been flawless, unblemished. I wished they had never suffered for even a moment.
 

It was drizzling as we walked through a ragged community of houses fronted with huge trees, both fake and real rocks, and plain arrangements of flowers. Most of the lights inside the houses were off, but as we walked some sort of sensor lights snapped on at almost every house and bathed us in a warning glow.
 

A busy, dirty road stretched behind many of the houses. In these drab houses, we knew, lived the wealthiest partials.
 

I’d just come into season, and that night we lay in the drizzle and for the first time since Moor and I met we no longer just practiced breeding. We copulated with abandon, not knowing the consequences of giving birth on a planet we hardly understood; just as we’d come to Forma not knowing the consequences; and just as, despite all the predictions ruling the lives of the Bakshami, I hadn’t been able even to guess at the consequences of any of my actions since the day my family left our village. Mine was the opposite of most people’s lives on Bakshami, where the past was indistinguishable from the present and the future.
 

We were close to the Forman border with a sector called Hathatu-me, a sector as inconsequential as Bakshami had always been considered. Forma had supposedly annexed it long ago, and supposedly a few Formans wandered through the countryside every day looking for trouble, but aside from the freedom fees paid by Hathatu-me to Forma, the two sectors had little connection. The people of Hathatu-me were so unemotional and irresolute that when Forma approached them about taking over, they agreed readily and without fanfare.
 

Every day I saw partials throng the streets heading toward the rooms in the towns in which they worked, and all night they crowded the main streets, trekking quietly back to their homes. Theirs was a trek without purpose. They went home to rest so that the next day they could do more work.