by Nōnen Títi
“Kun DJar is as close to Kun as it’ll ever be,” Yako explained why it appeared so big. “Hopefully it’ll raise the temperature as well, but at least it gives us plenty of light to walk by.”
Under the warm yellow of the star, the bright yellow of the grasses had slowly made way for some other colours and a greater variety of shapes. Each new plant was tested by Gos and Marya before being allowed to go into the prut, which was now their staple. The different Kun DJar foods were all equally tasteless, so it mattered little which of them was used. They no longer had an evening meal and nobody, not even Sinti, complained about the prut, even with the sweetness being reduced now they ran out of honey.
Luckily, Sinti never bothered Kunag anymore; all her attention was for Leyon. The two of them were very alike, though Leyon was a lot stronger than he looked and never moaned about the walking, not even when Nini had to treat his feet for being injured by his broken footwear. Maike asked how Leyon’s shoes could have worn so fast, but Leyon didn’t tell her he’d been climbing over the rocks near the jelly cave. He seemed to make it a sport to see if he could annoy people as soon as camp was set up. He’d been in trouble with Maike more than once already.
“Why?” Kunag asked, after Leyon had taken a scolding for tying everybody’s shoes together.
“It’s just so boring. We get up, we rush to eat, we walk all day, and make camp. No fun.”
“Why did you come then?”
Leyon raised his voice to answer that. “Why do you think? Because they made me. Nobody ever asks me anything: Go to Kun DJar, go on the expedition, carry the logs, build the shelters. It never stops.”
He was almost two years younger than Kunag and had not finished Learners. “No way. I was out before I was thirteen. Nobody cared anyway. My dad was never home and if he was, he beat me.”
Kunag frowned. In his mind was an image of a man waiting for him at the door – his best friend.
“So I ran away,” Leyon continued. “My mother didn’t want me, afraid the inspectors would come after her, so I lived on the streets for a while, first in the city, and later on Southland.”
“Why didn’t you ask for help? Somebody would have come to stop your dad.”
Leyon slowed down his steps. “Sure they would have. I’d have ended up in a home and Dad in the Land Beyond.”
“But he was hurting you?”
Leyon picked up a piece of rock and threw it as far as he could over the field. “I got a job in some factory for a while, unregistered, of course, but then they caught me taking tokens from the office and I ended up in a home anyway.”
“Are you sure you’re not making all this up?” Kunag asked.
“It wasn’t so great, you know. Rules everywhere. It didn’t get better ’til SJilai.”
“So how come you got sent to Kun DJar?”
“Some kids picked a fight with me. They thought I was easy prey, you know, being small and skinny. Only I wasn’t and one of them burst his skull open when he fell. Then it was all my fault, of course. Anyhow, had it not been for this trip I’d be in Breberer by now.” Leyon threw another rock.
“Why did your dad beat you anyway?” Kunag asked what was bothering him.
“I guess, because he was stuck with me when Mom left and being a worker, being yelled at by his boss, he needed to get it out at the end of the day, and I was the only one there.”
Kunag stopped asking. When Leyon threatened to annoy Maike the next day, Kunag quickly pulled him away.
Leyon gave him a push. “Who are you, my guardian? I’m just playing. Maike’s all right,” he said.
From then on they’d walked together if Sinti let them.
Now the mountains were within reach, Kunag felt like the tiniest creature ever, looking up at the massive rock wall as he approached it in search of a waterhole very early in the morning.
Much faster than normal, a thick, smooth-edged cloud began moving down from the otherwise cloudless sky, headed for the same mountain pass the expedition was aiming for. It moved soundlessly and independent of the wind. By the time Kunag remembered the beach and Remag, he was already under its spell. As if held constraint he was compelled to stand there and watch, unable to move, yet aware of what he was seeing and that he should warn the others; aware, also, of the dryness of his throat, the icy cold of his skin, and the noise of his own heartbeat. This was like the fog that could kill with sound and it knew Kunag was there.
It sank to the ground and settled itself there before Kunag felt he was being let go of. He swallowed, picked up the empty water container and walked away, backward at first, before turning to run.
“If we all stick together we can walk through it. It’s still only a cloud,” Hani said once they’d all watched it for a while.
“It does not want us there,” Kunag said.
He got a whole series of comments for that, from Wolt saying that was ridiculous to Sinti crying because she was scared of it.
“As long as we won’t be able to see where we’re going, it’s nonsense to go in,” Yako concluded.
Maike agreed and decided to wait for it to lift. It sat on the ground all day. They kept their eyes on it, but it never moved.
“What if it comes over us in the night?” Saski asked.
“I don’t think it will. As long as we respect its boundaries, it will leave us alone,” Nini answered. Though everybody looked at her, none said out loud what they had to Kunag.
Maike organized turns for keeping watch overnight; two at a time, three pairs per night. Kunag had the first shift with Wolt. The cloud, now a dark mass against the bare, moonlit mountain, stayed where it was. Kunag tried to make a drawing of it. When the position of the nearest moon indicated that an hour had passed, they woke Yako and Leyon. In the morning, Maike, who’d had the last watch, woke them all with the news that the cloud was moving away.
“Maybe it only travels around dawn,” Doret suggested.
Over breakfast they discussed what to do. It could come back, but they couldn’t very well stay and wait another day.
“We’ll have to be on guard from now on,” Maike said. “No more vacationing. The rough and wild awaits us.”
With that they packed up and walked on, eyes and ears alert. Before them the forbidding wall of the mountain dwarfed their existence. Only Nini was convinced they’d been invited in.
THE GLOBULAR FOREST
Once in the mountains, the feeling of stepping into forbidden territory vanished. Behind the bare walls lay valleys of greenery, which weren’t green, full of bushes and trees, though they were not. If anything they resembled balls – or fruit, maybe. Everything was round, so they called it the Globular Forest, but since nobody had a better term to describe them, they stuck to DJar words for the individual animals and plants, even if some were neither and others were both. Like the bulbs growing upward from a common base were much like plants, but when one of the elongated shapes that clung to it moved on its own accord when Gos tried to pick it off, they called it an animal.
Thus the mountains were forested, at least at the lower elevations. Some of the ‘trees’ even stood as tall as a person. It made walking a lot harder, as did the continuous rise and fall of the land. Apart from that, Kunag felt heavy again, as if walking through a layer of something thicker than air, but it was neither fog nor clouds. The sky was clear and pink in all directions.
The difficult climb drained their energy and talking was only done at night. That, along with their increased alertness, had them all more easily irritated. They now relied on Yako’s compass, but it didn’t always seem to work. Twice an argument broke out between Yako and one of the others, who insisted that Kun or the moons had come up from a different direction the day before.
Maike was getting fed up with Sinti’s constant shrieks whenever she encountered something that resembled a bug. Leyon didn’t help matters when he took a piece of plant and tickled her with it in the middle of the night, earning him a slap across the ear.
Ma
ike was also not happy with what she called the “pairing up”, which had caused an argument between her and Yako, who told her to get off his back. “I understand that you’re responsible, but Marya and I are not children, Maike. We are not stupid and we are no longer users.”
After that, Yako and Marya occasionally disappeared together, but while in camp they kept to the gender separation. But when Leyon and Sinti assumed they could also take off together for a while, Maike had such a fit that nobody dared to ask favours for the rest of the day. Yet, Leyon and Sinti weren’t children either; Leyon was two and a half kor and Sinti two years older than that. She’d been committed and had even been pregnant on SJilai before Kunag met her. On DJar, they would be making their own decisions.
“You should let them go. See how quick Sinti overcomes her fear of creepy crawlies then,” Hani suggested, but Maike didn’t give in, no matter how much Sinti pouted and Leyon complained.
A third pair was formed between Saski and Gos, who had come on the expedition together, already friends. They made no trouble for Maike, but they did walk together most of the time. Due to this pairing up, Doret walked with Hani or with Wolt. Nini switched between Hani and Maike, and Kunag walked with whoever was alone. He didn’t mind that too much. He didn’t feel like talking all the time. Either his feet were sore from walking downhill all day, or his legs were sore from climbing.
When Wolt mentioned that they’d have to cross these mountains twice, Hani said she hoped they wouldn’t have to go back to town at all.
“We seem to have come at the right time. Just imagine doing this every day in the pouring rain,” Marya said, ever looking at the bright side. Kunag wasn’t sure if she meant the walking, the sleeping outside, or the cooking.
Both cooking and sleeping were more difficult in the mountains. The turf had gone moist and didn’t want to burn, and the one time they did get a little fire going it produced more smoke than heat. On the higher elevations it was increasingly cold and despite going to sleep right after having walked, they still woke up freezing long before Kunup.
“Wouldn’t it be much warmer in pairs?” Leyon tried, but Maike ignored him.
So when the women did sleep, because it was somehow okay for them to cuddle up together, the men shivered and walked around most of the night, until Yako managed to convince first Doret and later Wolt and Gos that they should consider this a survival situation. But Leyon refused to give in and made Kunag promise not to leave him alone. Maike didn’t listen to the protests and she was boss. Leyon might play with her, but so far he was the only one. Everybody else followed her commands, even the older people like Yako, Nini, and Wolt.
As their altitude increased, so the vegetation diminished – all except one species. It looked like coils of pink thread in a tangled mesh and lay scattered around a plateau they had reached close to Kundown. Some of the coils rolled around in the wind, but one of their threads was always stuck in the ground, like a leash.
Kunag classified them as plants without really thinking about it. The rest of the plateau was bare; a small stream came down from even higher ground and a few reddish-purple fungi-like shapes were spread along its banks.
It was rocky, without enough soil to dig a recess for a fire and too much wind to light one anyway. As Doret and Leyon weren’t needed to dig a fireplace they began running around the tethered coils, jumping over them while chasing each other. When Kunag had collected the water, Doret called for him to join. “It keeps you warm.”
Distracted and not looking where he was jumping, Doret’s foot landed in the middle of the coil, causing him to fall. At first he laughed along with Leyon, but then he couldn’t get his foot out of the tangle. As he pulled, the threads tightened. “Let me go!” he screamed at the plant.
Kunag got there first to try and help, but as he reached out to pull the threads away from Doret’s leg, one of the coils wound around his own hand and didn’t want to let go. Automatically, he tried to use his other hand to free it, but that, too, got stuck. Kunag stopped moving; he had no choice.
As there was now a risk to Doret’s blood supply, Nini told Leyon, who carried a knife, to cut the threads.
A loud squeal filled the air around them, followed by a gaseous yellow substance emerging from the cut surface. Immediately the coils let go of Kunag’s hands and all of them retracted into the ground. Then it was silent.
“Did that plant just now cry?” Doret asked, rubbing his foot.
“I think so,” Leyon answered, still holding the knife in mid-air.
As Kunag stood up, his eye caught one of the coils popping back up behind Yako. He was just about to warn him when other coils began reappearing next to the first one. By the time Kunag had spun a full circle, there were coils all around them, like a tangled fence. When Leyon tried to jump over it, the fence suddenly rose up high. Leyon was only just able to keep from running headlong into it.
“It’s got us trapped,” Saski said.
“Duh,” Hani commented.
Sinti started whimpering as she did when she was frightened. “What if we can’t ever get out?”
“We’ll get out,” Yako assured her.
“But you won’t if you don’t shut up,” Maike added, which did silence Sinti.
“We’ll set fire to it,” Leyon suggested, and took a firelighter out of his pocket.
“No!” Nini grabbed his hand. “We’ve already hurt it once.”
“Besides, if you set fire to it, we’ll be trapped inside a wall of flames which can move at random,” Marya said.
Nobody had a solution, so they stood and watched the coils as they slowly grew higher, while Kun was setting at a similar pace and one of the moons was already up.
“This is stupid. It’s closing us in. We can’t just stand here and do nothing,” Wolt said when the coil walls of their prison reached the height of a person, though not yet Wolt’s.
Most of the group agreed with him, but the ideas of how to get out varied. Yako suggested they form pairs to attack the coils from different sides simultaneously and then, if it retracted, make a run for it. Marya wasn’t sure the coils wouldn’t reappear at the place they were running to, seeing the speed with which they’d surrounded them the first time. “We have no idea how big or strong it is,” she said.
“So, what you’re saying is that it has consciously trapped us and therefore you concede to the idea that it can think, or at least respond to our actions?” Nini asked Marya.
“You have to admit it sounds crazy,” Marya answered.
“It is crazy. We’re not going to be imprisoned. I don’t care if it’s a person, an animal, a plant, or a flippin’ alien doing it.” With that Maike ordered everybody to take out what weapons they had.
Nini stepped in front of her. “No, Maike, we will not. We’ll wait until it lets us go, just like the cloud did. We’re the invaders and we have to respect the natives, regardless of how crazy it seems.”
They all stood silent, watching Maike, until Nini turned around and sat down on her mat to show that she wouldn’t go. Kunag looked around. Above him, the walls of coil started to draw together. All their stuff sat in a heap at the centre, even the water he’d collected; the enclosed area was the size of a home. They could spend the night if the coils left them alone. He believed that Nini was right. This was like an animal defending itself; they needed to respect it.
When he caught Nini smiling at him, he sat down beside her.
The next person to join them was Saski. “It feels right,” she said.
Gos soon followed, stating that the coil could easily strangle them if it wanted to. Then Yako and Marya, who had wanted to break out before, said they trusted Nini.
“So do I, so we’ll stay the night,” Maike decided then, but she wasn’t happy and she insisted on having night watches.
“But what if someone has to use the excretorial?” Leyon asked, surveying their total enclosure, which now only had a tiny opening at the top. Though not air-tight, the coils protecte
d them from the wind.
“We’ll be warm tonight,” Kunag said, which was enough to convince even Sinti.
“Maybe we can learn to communicate with this thing and hire it as a natural overnighter,” Yako joked.
The idea of being imprisoned had them all uncomfortable, and they slept little. When Kun returned to the sky, their shelter did not retract.
“Now what?” Marya asked.
“Give it time,” Nini answered.
“No, we’ve given it enough time.” Before anybody could stop her Maike grabbed Leyon’s knife and cut into one of the coils. It took the plant less time to respond than the people: Its coils wrapped around Maike, lifted her off the ground and rolled her in, like a spider would its prey, until she was packed against the shelter’s body. Then, at least four coils shot out to land with a thud on her body. It went so fast that only Leyon had jumped to her rescue. The coils took the same approach to his assault.
Kunag’s mind painted an image of them dying like that, each of them a parcel of food for this plant. He gasped when he saw Nini moving forward next, but Nini didn’t attack the coil. She very slowly placed her hands on the wall near where it had just hit Leyon. Nothing happened. The plant and Nini just stood there, while the rest of them held their breaths.
Then, without warning, the coils unrolled and deposited Maike and Leyon at their feet, before slowly coming apart, separating the walls as if a door was opened. Each carrying their pack, they left the treacherous plateau in a bit of a hurry.
They stopped where it was safe for Nini to have a look at the injuries the plant had caused Maike and Leyon. Long red welts ran over Leyon’s back from the whipping. He tried to pretend it was nothing, convinced that his father used to do worse, but Kunag could see that the pack hurt him when he walked.
Maike was no better, which didn’t improve her mood and, in turn, had everybody else on edge. Marya was the first to nearly get slapped for saying it was lucky Thalo wasn’t here to have seen that. Kunag got in trouble when Maike noticed him drawing the different actions of the plant, which he had labelled “the flagellant coils”, though he’d made sure that the person in the plant’s tentacles wasn’t recognizable. But it was Sinti who bore the grunt of Maike’s anger, because of her whimpering and repeated pleas to turn around and go home.
