by Terri Kouba
Oh children, my children, imagine if you can, being in a dark room. Now picture yourself knowing little other than that dark room for a full twenty years. Imagine Slicers in the darkness with you, striking at you, unseen until the bloom of pain flowers behind your eyes.
Imagine someone removing a dark curtain in front of a window. Diffuse light filters in. You cannot see out the window – the window covering is too thick – but for the first time in twenty years, light filters through into the room.
Then imagine, if you can, my children, having someone fling open wide not the window, not a door, but the entire wall of the room. Sunlight pours into the room and suddenly there are no Slicers. Color returns to your world. The cool blues of cold streams, the lush greens of grassy plains, the soft yellows of sand dunes.
That is what is what we saw, my children, when we saw the caverns for the first time. Not only had we never seen them before but we didn’t even know they existed. We didn’t even know such a wondrous thing could exist, not in a world wracked by the Slicer Wars.
My knees buckled and my father tried to catch me. His knees buckled too. Marla came up behind us and braced us. She helped us over to chairs that sat on a platform, high above the caverns.
We didn’t know where to look first. Our eyes wanted to drink every sight in at once.
“What is this?” Pappy asked barely above a whisper. He had managed to get to a chair on his own. He looked up and blinked a dozen times.
“Is that the sky?” Pappy asked.
“No,” Marla answered, pulling up a chair behind us. “We’re underground. Our artists have painted the roof of the cavern the color of a summer’s sky.”
“This is underground?” my father whispered. “But that has to be…”
“The cavern stretches forward a mile. At its apex, the roof is six hundred feet above the ground. That same point is three hundred feet below the surface of the earth.”
“My god,” Pappy whispered. His fingers trembled at his lips, wiped at his eyes.
“This eco-system is the smallest. We call it The Park,” she told us. She placed her hand on my father’s forearm. “We have three others.”
Pappy’s breath caught in his throat and he started to cough.
I won’t tell you what we saw, my children. You have seen it a thousand times. You grew up with it, as do your children. For you it is something duller than the real world up top, but for us, coming from such a dark place, it shocked our senses. The sights, the sounds, the smells, they overwhelmed us. I won’t tell you what we saw, but I will try to tell you what it meant to me.
I don’t remember much of what I saw anyway, so shocked I was at the sight. It was completely and utterly unexpected. One moment we were fleeing the Slicers, the marauders, death itself and the next moment we burst into this room that held everything beautiful in the world. The dichotomy was jarring. I felt it rend the air from my lungs, and when I breathed in again, I was sucking in everything good, everything right. This was the way the world was supposed to be. Everything up on top of the world was wrong, with the Slicers and the blood they spilled, but down here…down here is what the world was supposed to be like. Trees and flowers and birds and laughter. This is where humans were supposed to be, not hiding in dank metal boxes, but running barefoot through soft grasses along winding streams.
For me, my children, it was going from a place where everything was wrong to a place where everything felt right. Even though I had never been there and was more than a thousand miles from where I was born, I had come home. I had arrived where I should have been all along.
We sat in silence for more than hour. There was nothing to say. We were where we wanted to be and words weren’t necessary. At that time, we didn’t care how they had built an entire world beneath the world. We didn’t care how she managed to manufacture the sunlight that brightened everything. We watched a cloud form over a copse of trees and laughed when rain fell upon the beeches. We felt a soft breeze against our cheeks, carrying the warmth of the sun and a slight mist from the rain shower and didn’t wonder how they made the wind. None of the details mattered. We didn’t want to know how it worked for we were afraid it would break the spell. All we wanted to do was sit there and enjoy the most magnificent vision any of us had ever seen.
After a while Robert came through the door. I didn’t hear him until I heard Marla whisper a ragged “No”.
I turned to see Robert’s face a terrible shade of grey. He pressed his fist deep into his stomach and winced as he walked to her. His eyes were red-rimmed. He knelt at her feet.
“The marauders are dead,” he said quietly. After the sweet sounds of bird chirps and gurgling brooks, his voice sounded loud. He knelt by her chair.
“You did not do this,” he told her. “I made the decision to use it. The burden is mine, not yours.”
She shook her head. “No, no, no,” she repeated before she started to cry. Robert wrapped her in his arms and they held each other, weeping on each other’s shoulders.
Please don’t think badly of me, my children, but I wanted nothing of their sorrow, nothing of their tears. I rose and walked to the balcony railing to escape their pain. They had shown me the light of peace and I wasn’t ready to be pulled back into the darkness. My father and Pappy joined me. I’m sure they thought I was showing Robert and Marla respect, leaving them alone in their private moment but in truth they were a toxic sludge I wanted to flee.
I took my father’s arm and we walked down the many stairs to the base of the eco-system. We removed our shoes and stepped onto a carpet of grass. I looked up at the same moment a gust of wind blew spring petals off an almond tree and the soft pink blossoms showered over me. That was the happiest moment of my life, my children. It was then, at that moment, that I truly believed we would actually survive. I didn’t know whether we would win the Slicer Wars. All I knew was that in that shower of pink flowers I had found something worth fighting for. And that was worth everything.
When I found out later what had so pained Marla and Robert I have to admit I didn’t understand it. When I first met them I just assumed they had seen as much horror as I had. But they hadn’t. Or maybe they had but it wasn’t for such a prolonged time. Or maybe it was because they had been living with the knowledge of the caverns for too long, but I thought they were overreacting. I never told her that, of course, but I never understood why she was so torn up over the deaths of people who were trying to kill her, people who were trying to take this wonderful place away from her.
Derrick told me the story later, after he overcame the shock of seeing the underground caverns for the first time too. In the early years of the Slicer Wars, before they had completed the first cavern they called The Park, Marla and her husband had spent most of their time on building the defenses of Plato’s Cave. They designed the tunnels through which we could gain access without the Slicers getting into the living quarters. They invented the transparent polycarbonate material used for the windows. They designed the alarm systems, communications systems, everything, really.
To hear others tell it, Marla and her husband worked together better than the three of us, Marla, me and my father, did.
At the time, the council debated for a month whether to install a last resort defensive system. Eventually the council approved it, but even while creating it, Marla objected to it. In the end, though, Marla was a pragmatist and she designed the delivery system while her husband created the chemical gas that would be delivered through it. She made sure it had strong safety mechanisms so that the poisonous gases wouldn’t leak and that the system couldn’t be accidentally activated. They didn’t have to use the system for seventeen years. Some forgot about it, others didn’t even know it was there. But Marla knew. And Robert knew. And when the marauders breached the tunnels and our soldiers were forced to retreat to the libraries, Robert made the decision they had hoped would never have to be made. He released the poisonous gases. Over thirty-five marauders died within less th
an a minute. And Robert added another burden to his sack.
Marla carried the burden too. She stayed in her room for a week after the attack. I don’t think she was avoiding us as much as she was trying to figure out how to carry this new, very heavy burden, in addition to the heavy burden she was already carrying. She may have been average, but she was very, very strong.
We spent the week in the caverns, along with almost everyone else. Believe it or not, my children, but in the caverns we could actually forget that there was a world outside of this one. I could walk among the trees for hours and forget about Slicers. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I could ride the horses and forget about my children too. They say that those with few belongings are the most selfish because they have so little, but they are wrong. In the caverns beneath Plato’s Cave we had everything we could ask for, and having everything is when I found out how selfish I really was.