Soldier at the Door(225)

Mrs. Hersh’s eyes bulged, and she looked uncomfortably at Mahrree’s hand. Mahrree hadn’t realized that she had been gesturing with Perrin’s underpants. She tossed them behind her into the basket.

That made Mrs. Hersh only slightly more at ease.

“Who cares?” she said as threw her hands in the air. “Mountains are dangerous! Stay away! That’s even what your husband says, so why fight it?”

Mahrree took a few more steps to the fence.

Mrs. Hersh took a defensive step away.

“Why fight it? Because what if everything we believe is wrong?”

Mahrree saw her poor neighbor’s eyes glaze over. She knew better than to get into a debate with Mrs. Shin. That was something else everybody ‘knew.’ If Mahrree didn’t break people down by logic, she did so out of sheer persistence. Mrs. Hersh realized too late she’d been dragged into the discussion, and the dread in her eyes demonstrated a frantic desire to escape.

But there was also something else there: a sudden loyalty to her society that demanded no one step out of bounds.

“Then we’re wrong together,” Mrs. Hersh decided. “Being united is important,” she said as if realizing she actually believed that. “What everyone thinks together is correct,” she reasoned out loud, “and so if you follow the crowd, you’ll never be wrong.”

Mahrree’s shoulders fell. How can you open someone’s eyes who holds them firmly shut, yet claims she sees just fine?

“It’s like the river,” Mrs. Hersh went on, emboldened by Mahrree’s discouraged silence. “Everything flows downstream. Simply . . . go with that flow. It’s just easier that way.”

Mahrree saw her way back in. “Fish don’t flow downstream.”

“Yes they do.”

“No, they don’t.”

Mrs. Hersh put her hands on her hips. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because then there’d be no more fish up here in Edge!” Mahrree pointed out. “I’ve seen them when I’ve taken my students to see the river, and when I’ve dragged my fishing husband home again. Many fish swim in the same spot, fighting the current. A few species even swim upstream, against everything pushing them to the southern ocean.”

Mrs. Hersh pondered for a moment. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t they just go with the flow of the river?”

“Because,” Mahrree tried not to sigh at her neighbor’s inanity, “maybe they don’t like where the river is going! Salty water at the end of it likely kills them.”

Mrs. Hersh squinted. “How would they know about the salty water? Besides, so what? At least they had an easy time getting to it. They’re going die eventually, so might as well go easily instead of fighting the current.”

And right then Mahrree realized, to her horror, that the Administrators had won.

People didn’t need to think for themselves, they only needed to think what everyone else thought. They didn’t need to worry about the color of the sky, because everyone agreed it was only blue. They didn’t need to worry if they were drifting to an irreversible tragedy, as long as they were doing it together, united.

Because as long as everyone else was doing it, you should too. Hold hands and jump off the crevice together, never questioning why.

“I’d rather fight the current,” Mahrree said quietly.

Mrs. Hersh shrugged her shoulders. “You’re a lovely neighbor, Mrs. Shin, always willing to lend an egg, but I truly don’t understand you.”

The debate was over.

Mrs. Hersh glanced at the mountains, shuddered so dramatically she should have been performing in the amphitheater, and marched back to her house.

There was only one thing left for Mahrree to do.

She turned to face the peaks fully. She could see things in any way she wanted to. And to her, the mountains seemed the way they had in her dreams of a large house with weathered gray wood and window boxes filled with herbs.

They were majestic. Powerful. Awe-inspiring.

Beautiful.

And then, for a brief moment, she thought that she could see almost everything in them and beyond. She’d always regarded them as a barrier of some sort, made of tall dead things like the stockade fence that surrounded the fort.

But the mountains were alive.

Even at this distance she could see trees sway as a wind blew past. The yellow specks weren’t flowers, but leaves being blown off of high spindly trees, like tiny flakes. Surely there was even more alive up there. Where did the bears, mountain lions, and wolves that visited the forest, and sometimes the villages, come from?

What else might be there, alive?

She’d asked Perrin about the other side of the mountains over a year ago, but even then she’d never actually looked at them. Now she couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from them. She wished she had her husband’s spy glass to peer up into the crevices of the rocky terrain. Surely there would be something peering back at her!