Pennsylvania

(14 THE SOMA

The old man paced the command deck, hands behind him, eyes fixed on the floor before him as he walked out his frustrations. Despite his age and the weight of responsibility he carried on his back, he stood tall, exuding an air of noble authority.

His body reminded him that authority, like age, comes with sufferings that youth and ambition never consider. Tension in his neck caused his head to throb with dull, radiating pain. To say his headache was splitting would be accurate on multiple levels: his parents would have said he was of two minds; his brother would have told him that he was conflicted; the elders would have declared that his natural man was at war with his spirit man. But however his problems were characterized, they were inarguably rooted in conflict—both the internal and external kind.

Double-mindedness is frowned upon in Amish society. Still, he was torn. There had been a time when his brother would have told him to just grow up and do as he was told. A much simpler time. But that path was no longer available to him—not now, not here, in this world. He’d already grown old, and there was no one to tell him what he should do. Even the bishop would’ve said only for him to do nothing until he’d prayed and received an answer from God. He yearned for the early years when simple prayer would have been enough. But for a very long time now he’d been operating without even the pretense of being guided by Amish culture and community. A plain person wouldn’t fight a physical war for freedom or survival. Perhaps in his heart he was still Amish, but to the Amish he was on his own. Not one of them at all.

And now, on top of all of his other responsibilities, he had his brother to deal with. A specter from his own past. A reminder of who he’d once been… of his Amish beginnings. So his mind was bifurcated, split in twain like that of many men who hold the reins of power.

For most of his adult life he’d been a part of the rebellion, a part of TRACE, and for all of that time TRACE had been at war… a war the resistance must win if freedom was ever again to raise its graying head in the universe. And now his brother had become the key pawn in the game.

He smoothed his hair. This isn’t a game. This is about liberty, life, death… blood… peace.

One part of his mind wanted him to put his worries behind him, to concentrate on the war and the immediate concerns on his plate—problems over which he had some real tactical control. That part of his mind did not recognize ancient clan loyalties, familial bonds, and brotherly love. In fact, his carnal side didn’t bow to any higher power at all. It was coldly rational and without natural affection. His carnal man was all about fighting and destroying Transport until the government decided it would allow men and women to live freely.

The other part of him—his spirit man—rebelled against his sterile, more mathematical inclinations. This second portion of his mind wanted to do whatever he must—damn the revolution—to save Jed at all costs. His older brother was out there, just a boy, young and afraid, with no understanding of the intricacies of this otherworldly conflict. Jed was pure. Maybe the only pure thing left in the universe.

The Tulsa—his flagship, and the largest ship in TRACE’s fleet—hung still in space, five hundred miles southwest of the City and twenty-five miles above the battle-ravaged ground of New Pennsylvania. His mind reeled at the technology on display in the Tulsa. Its stillness alone was remarkable. The ship was virtually invisible to all existing technology: radar, laser, thermal, radiological tracking and scanning. If he ordered it, the Tulsa could sit directly over the City, and Transport wouldn’t even know she was there. Her okcillium-powered weapons systems were unmatched—and some were even untested. The ship was that new.

If he didn’t think about it, when his mind drifted, he could forget he was on a ship at all. The new okcillium drives didn’t even hum, much less vibrate. And the Tulsa was twenty times larger than any other ship ever operated by anyone other than Transport. In fact, dozens of TRACE ships could fit inside the hold of the Tulsa. They not only could, they did. The Tulsa was going to put an end to the long war at last, and Transport didn’t even know she existed. The tide had turned, and the end was very near. And it was all because he—the SOMA—controlled the mines where okcillium was extracted.

He glanced across the command deck. The Tulsa was a secret, even to most of the resistance military leaders who were currently in the field. He’d hand-picked the workers on this ship himself. Now he watched as the men and women of the Tulsa worked. TRACE officers and soldiers went about their shipboard duties unaware—so far—that their long-time commander was vacillating. Hindered from performing his own responsibilities while he waited to hear word about his brother. His hesitation, at this critical moment, was something completely out of character for him. His decisiveness was universally credited as the main reason that TRACE still existed, still fought, and still breathed in the air of liberty.

An assistant approached him and handed him a sheet of clear plastic. When his hands touched it, his BICE activated the sheet and it became, to his eyes only, a document that could be read.

It was a report on the latest movements of Transport forces. This information had already been made available to his mind through his BICE—as it had been to every officer with the appropriate clearance. It was included here just for context and clarity. Nothing had changed in the last half hour.

There was a notation from the armorer that the weapons had been checked and readied. TRACE was poised to attack, but its leader waited.

It still amazed him to see so much firepower under his command. Things had surely changed in the past six decades. When he’d first arrived in Oklahoma, the rebels fought against Transport with sticks and rocks and ancient firearms that were as untrustworthy as they were rare. He remembered spending his eighteenth birthday making arrows from elm and hickory harvested from old, abandoned farms in the green country of northeastern Oklahoma. Now, in this one ship, he commanded enough power to take the City once and for all. Taking the City wouldn’t end the war, not by a long shot, but it would signal the beginning of the end. His spies informed him that Transport—anticipating that a full-scale attack from TRACE could commence at any time—had already removed most executive functions and a good part of their military to the frontier cities behind the Great Shelf.

The old man sighed. They say the crown weighs heavy on the head of a king. He was the SOMA—the title given to him forty years ago when he became the supreme commander and administrator of the Southern Oklahoma Militia. He was the king of the rebels, the absolute monarch of the revolutionary powers at war with Transport on New Pennsylvania. His authority was unquestioned, even by the members of the Council. He had the power to dissolve the Council with a wave of his hand—and every Councilor would happily obey him and be glad to be rid of the responsibility. He was the one who’d insisted on a governing council to begin with. There were no challengers to his power, no loyal opposition. He enjoyed complete support, which was something unheard of except in times of war. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that his universal approval would ever last past the war. But for now, the authority—and the responsibility—were fully his. That knowledge would have been crippling to a lesser man.

He had never asked for either the office or the power. Both had been thrust on him against his will, and he was not ignorant of the fact that in everything he did, he was watched—studied—on every side. And now, everyone was looking to see how he handled this business with his brother. They expected a miracle. Or they expected him to sacrifice his brother for the greater good—something horrific to imagine, but glorious and selfless just the same. Or they expected him to magically save his brother while using the opportunity to deal a crushing blow to the enemy. They all just expected these things, although no one offered him any comfort or solace—or advice as to how such miracles might come to pass.

He was an old man now, and tired. He’d tried to resign several times, but the council would never accept his resignation again while the war with Transport raged. Abdication? He’d tried that too, only to watch as the resistance faltered, headless and unable to maintain and extend the victories he’d given them over the many decades of battle. His retirement had lasted all of a month before he’d been re-drafted by universal mandate and forced back into power.

An ensign, a recruit, young and without any of the physical or mental scars of war, walked up to the SOMA and snapped to attention. “A moment, sir?”

“Go ahead.”

“A report on Jedediah Troyer, sir.”

“I said go ahead.”

A slight nod. “According to intercepted signals coming from Transport, he is on the verge of being captured at any moment.”

The SOMA flinched. “Captured?”

“The TRACE team has been unsuccessful in getting him to the Amish Zone, and they’ve been engaged by a superior force in the No Man’s Land west of the City.”

“Do we have any larger units nearby that can engage?”

Now it was the young soldier’s turn to grimace. “Yes… sir, we have.”

The SOMA stared at the young recruit. “And why haven’t they been activated?”

“Based on the situation on the ground, they wouldn’t be able to guarantee the safety of your brother, sir.”

(15 NO MAN’S LAND

Jedediah Troyer screwed up his face in disgust. His sense of decency rebelled against the foulness of this man who’d captured him, this salvager who had dragged him from the wreckage of the airbus. The savage was chewing on some greenish vegetative concoction, and slobber ran down his beard and clumped in slobbery globules near the bottom of his lip.

“What the—”

The salvager cut Jed off before he could get the question out. “Being shut yourself, boy.”

More thick, mucusy goo dripped from the man’s beard as he earnestly chewed the wad of greenery.

Jed inhaled carefully, hissing, hoping not to catch a whiff of anything floating his way from the wild Englischer. “I just have to know what you’re chewing and why.”

“Shutting yourself.”

“That’s just not right,” Jed said, “and you’re making me sick having to watch you.”

“Don’t watching me then.”

Jed tried to look away, but he couldn’t for long. “Seriously, what are you chewing?”

The salvager glanced at Jed and exhaled in frustration. A large quantity of greenish viscous material flew out in various directions with his breath.

“Tobac.”

Jed furrowed his brow. “Tobacco?”

“Yes. Tobac.”

Again, Jed tried to look away, but it was like trying to not watch when his father had to pull a calf from a heifer giving birth for the first time. “Sir, you’re doing it all wrong,” Jed said.

“Shutting yourself. Being chew the tobac, and you shutting. That is all.”

“Listen, you. Whatever your name is…”

“Goa Eeguls.”

Jed hesitated. He stared at the salvager, expecting the man to explain, or at least repeat himself. The chewing had stopped for a moment. “Your… your name is Boll Weevils?”

“No. Not being boll weevils, stinking cronad. Name being Goa Eeguls. GOA. EEGULS.” He paused for effect. “Goa. Eeguls.” Pause. “Goa. Eeguls. Being understood?”

Jed narrowed his eyes and tried it. “Goa Eeguls.”

The salvager nodded his head and pointed at himself. “Goa Eeguls.”

“Is this name from your own language?” Jed asked. “Because you almost speak English, albeit poorly. Is Goa Eeguls a family name or something?”

The salvager shook his head and reached into his rough tunic—a filthy, handmade overcoat consisting of animal skins from indeterminate creatures mended here and there by reclaimed patchwork cloth. Withdrawing his hand, he produced an ancient green hand towel, and on it Jed could see a picture and some faded words. The picture he recognized. He’d seen it before, on the shirts and coats of some of the English tourists who would stop in front of the farm in airbuses and buy the Troyers’ baskets, vegetables, and furniture. The image on the towel was of something called a “football helmet.”

Football, like all major sports, was a game played at one time by the English in large stadiums all across the land. That was before the wars came and changed the world. After the wars, private travel was banned and large gatherings of people became magnets for terrorist bombs. Eventually—according to what Jed had learned from the elders and by rumor—the sporting events became available only via television, with the games and players manufactured artificially by computers. According to the English, the winners were supposedly determined secretly and fairly by private accounting firms using complicated data modeling. According to the elders, the whole thing was a sham, with the games being created and distributed by big entertainment corporations in order to keep the sheep occupied while they were being sheared. Bread and circuses.

Jed had seen a football once when he and his father took an airbus to Cruville to bid on some farmland. English children had been throwing the oblong ball back and forth in the park. One of the children would catch the ball and take off running, and all the other children would chase him and wrestle him to the ground and pounce up and down on him like wild beasts. To Jed, as a boy, it all looked like great fun.

The helmet on the towel was printed in white on faded green, and the cloth was marked with stains and a few rips here and there, but Jed could still see the stylized wings wrapping from the front of the helmet toward the rear. Under the helmet were the words GO EAGLES! Apparently the towel was a relic of some football competition.

“So you took the name ‘Go Eagles’ because it was written on that towel?”

The salvager nodded his head. “Name being Goa Eeguls. Being my name.”

“Can I just call you Eagle?”

The salvager gave Jed a look of irritation, and spat a huge amount of greenish goo in a disgusting pile between himself and Jed. “Yes. Being Eeguls.” The salvager emphasized the “s” at the end of the name. “Eegulsss. Now shutting yourself.”

Jed pointed at Eagles’s face. “You shouldn’t chew that tobacco while it’s green, Eagles. It’s loaded with bad poisons that are only eliminated by aging and curing.”

Eagles stood up and glared at Jed for a moment, then stomped off a couple of paces. “Boy need shutting himself!” Eagles spat and then, after a few seconds of preparation, began urinating on a bush.

Jed looked away and shook his head. His nerves were still on edge and his hands still shook when he rubbed his face. He’d been clean-shaven when he left the Amish Zone back home. They told him his hair wouldn’t grow while he was in suspended animation, but apparently it had started again. Now, for the first time since he’d left on the trip, he noticed that he had the beginnings of a beard. He stretched his fingers out in front of his face and tried to will his hand to stop shaking. Only twenty minutes had passed since his airbus had been shot out of the sky—with him in it. He’d barely escaped death, and now here he was with this wild man named Eagles who chewed toxic green tobacco and hated to talk.

Where are Pook and his team? Is Dawn out looking for me?

In his post-crash confusion he’d momentarily forgotten that the team would be searching for him and that his job was to delay so that the TRACE unit could locate and rescue him. He reached down and unlaced his boot, and started to pull it off. Any minute now Eagles would want to move on. Removing his shoes was the only thing Jed could think to do as a means of delaying.

Eagles turned around and held up his hand before pointing at Jed. “No! Doing not that!” The salvager grimaced. “Shoes on, boy!”

“I have a stone in there I need to remove.”

“Shoes on, boy! Going.”

Jed ignored Eagles and finished unlacing his boot. He pulled it off and slowly shook it, looked down into it, and then reached deep into the toe area as if searching for the non-existent pebble. After a few seconds, he began feeling on the ground, as if the pebble had come out and now he was trying to find it.

Eagles spat and chewed and then spat again, his jaw working furiously. “Hurry, boy.”

Jed straightened his sock and then, as slowly as he could manage without enraging the salvager even more, he began putting his boot back on. He tried not to look up at the wild man for a full minute, but when he did, he saw that Eagles was lifting his rifle very slowly, and crouching down at the same time. The rifle came up and Jed could see all the way down the barrel. Thinking that Eagles was about to shoot him, he dove to the ground and put his hands over his head.

Eagles whispered. “Stopping that, boy. Friends being near. Making the noise too muches.”

“Your friends?” Jed asked.

“Shhh… No. Being not mine. Being yours. Stupid cronads.” Eagles looked down at Jed and spat. The green saliva landed a foot from Jed’s head. “Getting up, boy!”

Crawling to his knees, Jed felt the rifle barrel pressed against his temple.

Eagles shouted, and the sudden, scary holler drove Jed back to the ground.

“Getting out the open, Pook! Eeguls knowing you being out there!”

Jed turned his head, but couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t hear anything moving at all.

“Getting out the open, Pook! Or Eeguls shooting boy!”

Jed heard a snapping of twigs and a shuffling of feet before Pook—and about ten others, including Ducky, Jerry, Jeff, and Dawn—appeared from out of the heavy brush.

“Don’t shoot him, you old nasty bastard,” Pook said.

Ducky made a hand signal and the rest of Pook’s team lowered their weapons.

“Give him to us, Eagles. You know who he is, and you know where he needs to go.”

Eagles shook his head and spat. “Nope. Boy will bringing Eeguls many much moneys.”

Pook reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to Eagles, who declined and pointed to the wad of green nastiness in his mouth. Pook screwed up his face and then popped one out of the pack for himself, lit it with the okcillium lighter, and smiled at Eagles. “We don’t have time for this, old man.”

“Boy being with me. Making Eeguls much rich.”

Pook looked down at Jed, who began climbing back to his feet. “Didn’t you offer him the gold like we said?”

“I did. He turned it down. Said my brother would pay more for me.” Jed knelt down and finished lacing up his boot. “What did he mean by that, Pook?”

“He meant exactly what he said. Your brother would pay way more than one gold coin to get you back.”

“My brother is either on his way here, in suspension, or he never left Old Pennsylvania. And he’s four years younger than me.”

“You’re wrong, Jed. Way wrong. And on every count. But that’s to be expected, since you don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

“So why not tell me? It’s not like I haven’t asked.”

Pook shrugged and pointed at Jed with the cigarette. “We have cross purposes, Jed. The first thing you should know is that I don’t care about you. Don’t care what you know, or who you are by accident of birth. You want to know things, and we’ve all been ordered to keep things secret.” Pook took a long draw from the smoke and then closed his eyes as he exhaled. “But… but it looks like now the cat is out of the bag.” Pook cocked his head and gave Jed a look that was half apology, and half “deal with it.”

Dawn stepped up and grabbed Jed by the arm, pulling him closer to her. Eagles smiled, but he didn’t lower his rifle. He kept it trained on Jed’s head, and around his grin, spittle glistened in his facial hair.

Dawn reached over, and with a snarl she pushed Eagles’s rifle barrel down, and Eagles let her. He looked amused. “Jed,” Dawn said. “We’ve all known that you have a lot of questions, and I’m sorry we haven’t answered them. It’s frustrating, I know. But your brother had his reasons for keeping you in the dark. He wanted you to see things and understand them in their proper order and context.”

“So my brother, Amos—he’s here, in New Pennsylvania? Now?”

“Yes, Jed, he is.” Dawn reached over with her other hand and pulled Jed even closer to her so that she could look him in the eye. “Everyone gets frustrated when there are more questions than answers. You’re not the only one. We all do. And your brother understood that. He’s the one who contacted me via my BICE when I met you at the Transport desk. He messaged me in my head—as you would say it—and ordered me to escort you here. He said that he wanted you to get to the City, and then to the Amish Zone, so you could see everything for yourself. You have to understand—”

“I have to understand? What do I have to understand, Dawn?”

Dawn’s eyes narrowed, and he could tell that she was irritated. “Do you think we’ve all not wanted to answer your questions? Do you think Ducky’s men wanted to die last night to protect you and to try to get you where you want to go? Do you think Donavan wanted to bleed out onto the floor of an antique shop just so we could all keep secrets from you? Get some freaking perspective, will you Jed?”

Jed didn’t respond. He didn’t know what to say. The English were always trying to make the Amish feel guilty for decisions the strangers had made totally on their own. He was sorry about the deaths. Truly sorry. But he hadn’t asked for anyone to die. He hadn’t asked for any of this.

Dawn took a deep breath and softened her voice before continuing. “You have to understand that the story you need to know is bigger than you can possibly grasp all at once. You really need to see it all, so that you’ll believe it and comprehend it. Your brother knew that. He’s wiser than you can imagine, Jed. If we just dumped everything on you as soon as you got to the antique shop, you’d be even more overwhelmed than you already are. He believed that without the ability to see some things for yourself, you’d just be getting context-less information and you’d be liable to make bad decisions.”

“That’s what my brother said?”

“Yes.”

“He’s just a boy!”

“He’s not a boy, Jed. Not at all. He’s the leader of the revolution against this present tyranny. And that isn’t just what he said… that’s what your brother knows,” Dawn said.

“So where is he?”

Dawn hesitated. Jed tried to read her, but it was difficult. There were so many social and cultural differences. To him it seemed as if she was still trying to think of a way to continue on the mission as it had been designed.

“Our job is to keep you alive and get you to the Amish Zone,” she said finally. “A lot of people have been hurt or killed to make sure that this is what happens. None of them asked a bunch of questions about what and why. They were all taking orders, and that’s what we’re doing too. We all trust your brother—the SOMA—with our lives. If we’re going to have a future, we have to see the bigger picture, and we have to follow orders.”

“The SOMA?” Jed shook his head. “Is that some kind of resistance joke? Because his name is Amos?”

“I can see why you’d think that.”

There was a loud harrumph. Eagles had heard enough talk. He pushed Dawn aside and grabbed Jed by the coat, twisting him around until he was kneeling again. The old salvager pushed the rifle barrel up under Jed’s chin and then turned to Pook. “Talking is enough now. Boy being with me.”

Without needing a signal and in perfect synchronization, Ducky and the rest of the men fanned out so that there would be no crossfire. In unison, their pistols came up to the ready position, aimed directly at Eagles. Eagles just smiled and spat again. “Let’s… partying!” he said, which made him laugh.

Pook raised his hands, trying to calm nerves and to interdict any itchy trigger fingers. “You monkeys calm down. Everybody get your booger-hooks off the bang buttons. Nobody’s getting shot right now.”

Eagles had fire in his eyes and a huge grin on his face. He was ready for some action. He looked at Pook and raised his eyebrows, then winked.

“Wanting boy? You paying me rich right now.”

Jerry Rios, with his pistol aimed at the old man’s head, whistled for Pook to look over to him. “Say the word, Pook,” Jerry said. “Just say the word.”

Pook didn’t reply; he just held up his hand in a “stop” signal and turned back to Eagles. “Eagles, the only reason you’re not dead and we’re not already moving toward the AZ is because you’re my friend. Keep that in mind. The Amish fellow offered you the gold and you turned him down. Now you want money?”

Eagles pointed at Pook and crooked his finger. “No gold. Gold being easy. Eeguls can always getting gold.”

“Earlier you wanted gold from the SOMA, but now you don’t? Well, how do you propose I pay you if you don’t want gold?”

Eagle winked and crooked his finger again. “Giving Eeguls firing stick.”

“Firing stick?”

“Putting in pocket. Firing stick. Give to Eeguls for boy.”

Pook looked around the group from face to face. “Firing stick?”

“The okcillium lighter, Pook,” Dawn said. “He wants the lighter.”

Pook furrowed his brow. “Noooooo,” he said slowly, shaking his head.

Dawn nodded her head and implored her cousin with her eyes.

“Not a chance,” Pook said. He exhaled deeply and looked over at Ducky, who lowered his pistol and took a few steps toward Pook.

“Just give him the lighter, man! Let’s get outta here. You know this is taking too long. We’re exposed here, Pook.”

Pook closed his eyes—then reached into his pocket and pulled out the lighter. He rubbed it longingly, then tossed it to Eagles, who caught it cleanly and almost immediately lowered his rifle.

Ducky was already in motion, “All right team, we’re heading to the AZ taking Route Bravo. Everyone got it?”

Each member of the team said, “Roger that” in unison. Dawn took Jed by the hand and brought him over behind Ducky as the unit fanned out again, each member then dropping to a knee and checking weapons, waiting for an order from Pook or Ducky to move out.

Jed looked to the northwest, unconsciously gazing in the direction he believed the Amish Zone to be. That was where he wanted to go, and by their preparatory movements, it appeared to be the direction the team intended to go as well. As he stared off into the distance, it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. In the distance, a half-dozen TRACERs—hovering white globes equipped with lenses and flashing lights—were approaching in formation, rapidly advancing toward the group. Jerry must have seen the drones at the same time, because Jed heard the big man’s voice, thick with tension, “Here they come!” just as the fullness of what was happening flashed across Jed’s mind.

Pook barked, “TRACERs! Everyone move!”

Eagles fired first; his shot caused one of the drones to shudder. The sound of the shot was like a starter’s pistol and everyone sprang into motion just before a loud explosion rocked the ground and Jed felt dirt and debris raining down on him. It wasn’t a miss. Some rebel had instantly ceased to be. Jed pulled Dawn to him and made for a low hill to the southwest just as a blast of laser light fried the ground where they’d been standing. The team opened fire at the drones, and orders echoed through the air like cracks of lightning as Jed now pulled Dawn into a low crawl. Another laser crackled past his head, and he could feel the heat and the electrical sensation of static as the shot went by.

The assault was overwhelming and brutal, and was met in earnest by Pook, Ducky, and the rest of the TRACE fighters. Billy—the man who had some kind of history with Dawn—raced through an electric mist of smoke and flying debris and slid in next to Dawn and Jed behind the low hill.

Billy grabbed Dawn’s hand and pulled her closer so that he could be heard over the din of battle. “Take Jed now and get moving! Head northwest!”

Dawn shook her head. “We shouldn’t leave the group!”

“They’re looking for him!” Billy said with a jerk of his head toward Jed. “They’ll kill everyone ’til they find him. If you don’t want to die—with him dead beside you—then you need to get out of here, now!”

“We’re staying with the team until Pook or Ducky order me to leave!” Dawn shouted over the noise.

Jed’s attention was drawn to Ducky, who had moved out from behind cover and was systematically firing his pistol at one of the drones. Ducky had a good angle on the TRACER and was taking advantage of his position to try to bring the drone down with small-arms fire. As the soldier fired away, Jed saw another drone swinging into position to fire on Ducky. Before he could shout a warning, Eagles, who must have seen the same thing, sprinted the distance between himself and the rebel fighter and tackled him to the ground just as the second drone opened fire. The move saved Ducky’s life, and Eagles rolled with the smaller man until they were both safely behind a low mound.

The drone Ducky had been firing at then took another direct hit from rebel fire, and it spun into the ground with a squeal and a piercing whistle. It crashed into the ground about fifty yards in front of Jed’s hiding spot, and the explosion sent a shudder through the air that stunned everyone for a moment.

Ducky stared at Eagles for a moment, and then both warriors began laughing and Ducky slapped the salvager hard on his shoulder—his way of thanking the strange man for saving his life. Eagles just laughed and laughed, green slobber running down his face, before deciding to rejoin the fight.

The moment of victory was short-lived. Jed turned away from the remnants of the TRACER explosion just in time to see three of Ducky’s men instantly vaporized in a shower of laser light and smoke, and a fourth cut cleanly in half by a phosphorescent round that hit him in the hip as he ran for cover. The suddenness and brutality of it all stunned Jed into closing his eyes for a moment, but the images of death and destruction seemed to be burned into his retinas. Closing his eyes changed nothing; the hellish assault on his senses continued. There was no escape. The land had become a killing field, and men were dying to his left and to his right.

Jed had almost despaired of any of their lives being spared when, as suddenly as the attack had commenced, the firing coming from the attacking Transport craft stopped, and the remaining drones retreated and disappeared from view.

The smoky, mercurial haze sat low upon the ground. Small fires in the low brush crackled and hissed, and added more smoke that clouded the battlefield and stung the eyes. Jed found himself looking around dumbfounded—like everyone else in the rebel group—when a loud, amplified voice trembling with bass blasted over the battle scene.

“Attention rebel militia currently engaged in illegal combat with lawful Transport administration authorities! Pay strict attention to the following commands

“Give up Jedediah Troyer, alive or dead, and you will all be allowed to depart unhindered. I repeat: Give up Jedediah Troyer, alive or dead, and you will not face immediate death and/or capture.

“If our attack commences again, you will almost certainly be killed—and in the unlikely event that you are captured, you will be tried according to Transport law. If you do not face execution for your crimes against the people, you will face rehabilitation and resettlement to the frontier cities.

“This area is surrounded. There can be no escape. We have airships and ground units moving in on your location. Give up Jedediah Troyer and you will be allowed to depart unimpeded. You have sixty seconds to comply.”

(16 CAPTURED

Pook, Ducky, and the surviving resistance fighters were using the sixty seconds to reload and to prepare themselves for the renewal of the fight. It was obvious to Jed that Pook had no intention of surrendering. He and his team would battle to the death. There were no heroic speeches. The music did not build amid flashbacks to better times and shorter odds. No debate prevailed upon the stage. The men and women of TRACE simply went about their preparations as if living or dying were something completely outside of their control—and thus none of their concern.

Seeing the inevitability of defeat, and torn between competing duties and affections, Dawn finally succumbed to Billy’s wishes and began pulling at Jed’s hand, wordlessly making known her intention to sneak him off the battlefield toward the Amish Zone. Her orders came from the SOMA himself, and she had every intention of keeping Jed alive and getting him to his destination.

Jed watched all of this as the seconds ticked by, knowing that he alone had the power to save these brave men and women.

That was when he decided.

It wasn’t a conscious thing. He didn’t spend minutes pondering the different options that were available to him. He’d seen enough. Enough good people had died.

For what? For a poor farmer boy?

It was all too much to take in anyway, so he acted. Dawn had told him his brother was alive and leading the rebellion. How was that possible? And the Amish do not fight! He felt like he was in a bad dream, and that he couldn’t wake up. At the same time, he hadn’t slept or had anything to eat since… when? It was all too confusing. What he did next was more of an involuntary reflex than a decision.

Jed shook his hand loose of Dawn’s grip, climbed to his feet, and walked out into the open field with his hands up.

“I am Jedediah Troyer! And I surrender!”

Pook sputtered and then shouted. “What? What the hell? Jed! Somebody grab—!”

Jed kept walking, and picked up his pace, making sure he was out in the open and easily identifiable. “I am Jedediah Troyer, and I accept the terms of surrender!”

A drone appeared and zipped toward him until it came to hover about fifty yards west of his position. A thin red beam lit the ground in front of Jed, scanning a few feet left to right before moving up and coming to rest squarely on Jed’s chest. Ducky and his men raised their weapons again, ready to reengage on Pook’s order, but everyone could see that it was too late. The drone could fire in a thousandth of a second and Jed would be dead before they could return fire. There was no way they could take the drone out fast enough to save him.

“Damn you, Jed!” Pook shouted, just as Transport foot soldiers appeared in the distance, moving their way inward from three different directions.

“Rebel forces! Follow these instructions and you will be permitted to depart safely. Leave Jedediah Troyer and exit the area to the south. If your forces move in any other direction, you will be engaged and terminated. Lower your weapons and move to the south immediately. You have thirty seconds to comply.”

Pook’s hand went up, and he commanded the rebel team to break contact and move out. Weapons were lowered and the team began slowly backing out of the area, heading south as instructed. It was obvious that Pook didn’t trust Transport, but he had no other option. Retreat was the only way the team might live to fight another day. Transport wanted Jed, and it seemed like they wanted him alive. The government wanted him so badly that they were willing to let an armed resistance group escape when it could have been destroyed. Pook shouted to his men to stay alert, to be ready in case the Transport offer was a trap.

Billy tried to pull Dawn away, but she wasn’t having it. She dropped his hand and shook her head. “I’m staying with Jed. No matter what.”

Billy reached out to Dawn again, “But Dawn—”

“No matter what!”

She turned her back on Billy and walked out with her hands raised. Transport troops were moving in now, and Billy reluctantly turned and joined the retreating rebel force as Dawn joined Jed. He watched over his shoulder as Dawn and Jed were surrounded.

Dawn slowly put her hands behind her head, showing Jed by her actions what he should do to make sure that no Transport goon with an itchy trigger finger was going to shoot them.

As the soldiers arrived, those that were not involved in capturing the suspects moved outward to set up a defensive perimeter. Their training made them wary of a counterattack, but they seemed confident that the battle was over. Two soldiers grabbed Jed and pushed him roughly to the ground face first, then began zip-tying his hands behind him. The two troopers did not speak.

Dawn bristled. “Take it easy! He’s surrendering!”

A gloved hand grabbed Dawn by the face and shoved her roughly to the ground. Jed struggled, both against the men and against his conscience, but it was too late.

With Jed restrained, the troopers turned their attention to Dawn, and soon had her cuffed as well. The soldiers had just lifted both arrestees to their knees when a Transport officer walked up and lifted the visor on his helmet. He stared at Jed for several seconds without saying a word. After a few more intense moments of silence, he shifted his gaze to Dawn, and then back to Jed.

“So you’re Jedediah Troyer, eh?”

Jed nodded his head. “Yes, sir.”

The officer knelt down on one knee so that his face was only about eight inches from Jed’s face. “Well Jed, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Teddy Clarion, but you can just call me Clarion. Only my mom calls me Teddy.”

Jed nodded his head again, but said nothing.

A small airship hovered in from the east and landed softly about seventy feet from where Jed and Dawn were being held. Clarion moved some of the soldiers out of the captives’ field of view, and Jed and Dawn watched as two more arrestees were dragged from the ship. These men were also cuffed, but in addition they had black bags over their heads that had been tied loosely around their necks with white rope. They were thrown violently to the ground by Jed and Dawn, and struggled to rise to their knees in protest against their captors. Clarion walked over to the two new arrivals and, one at a time, loosened the ropes and removed the bags from the men’s heads.

Jed recognized the men immediately. They were Hugh Conrad and Officer Rheems, formerly of Transport and currently rebels against the state.

Clarion pulled a pistol from his holster, and without any cinematic soliloquies or impassioned or sarcastic speeches, shot both men through the head. Their bodies flipped backward and shook on the ground, gyrating in their violent death throes.

Clarion watched the bodies as they twitched. “Disturbing, isn’t it? Jed Troyer, I’m sure you haven’t watched many movies, but the lady probably has. It’s criminal they way they show people just falling over dead when they’re shot in the head—flopping over like a sack of grain. In reality, the nerves and synapses continue to fire for some time. Muscles twitch, even if the whole brain is destroyed. It’s quite gruesome and troubling, wouldn’t you agree?”

Jed and Dawn just stared, neither of them able to respond.

Clarion walked back over to Jed with the pistol in his hand and pointed it at Jed’s head. “So you surrender?”

Jed watched the bodies of Conrad and Rheems as the nerves that animated their spasms died, and their sickening jerks and twitches came to a halt. He just nodded his head.

Clarion stared at Jed with a fierce intensity—attempting, it seemed, to peer into Jed’s soul. After a long pause, he jerked his head a little to one side and smirked.

“Pity.”

Just as the mystery of the word struck him, Jed was grabbed from behind; he flinched at the sharp stick of a needle going into the meat at the base of his neck. He tried to turn his head, but could only move it enough to see one of the soldiers jabbing Dawn as well before the darkness overwhelmed him and the lights went out.

With the captives secured, Teddy Clarion surveyed the battlefield. Dead rebels were strewn here and there, and small fires burned among the ashes. As he took a step forward, he saw a small object near the toe of his boot. He picked it up and examined it. An odd item—a cigarette lighter, but strange in its manufacture. Some kind of rebel technology, he thought to himself. I know someone who will want to take a look at this.

Lost in darkness, Jed felt like he was swimming toward a faint light, but he couldn’t feel his body moving, and only sensed its motion by the cloudy shimmering of iridescence caused by his struggles. He could breathe easily enough, but the occlusion of his vision gave him the impression that he was underwater, and an unspecific panic reflex took hold of his mind.

Floating in the brown-gray darkness he saw images of things that he knew, visions floating in the water, or behind it and through it. He saw Zoe, his milk cow, struggling in the murk; he saw the window with the coffee can that had replaced the missing pane; and he saw the face of his brother leaning over to reach for him from the other side of a gulf that stretched between them. He reached up for his brother’s hand, and as he did so he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head and his vision cleared instantaneously, as if someone had flipped a switch. And as instantly as his sight was made perfect, he now found that he was standing (if it can be called standing—he couldn’t feel his body) on a hillside that was covered in the greenest grass he’d ever seen.

He realized that it may not have been his real self standing on that hillside. Maybe he was a boy; or maybe he was someone else entirely. He couldn’t rightly tell. He looked up. The sky was so blue that it took his breath away, and as he looked around he could see the minutest details, as if his eyesight had improved a thousandfold in a moment.

He glanced back up at the blue sky—a blue like the blue he’d only seen on his mother’s palette when she painted patterns on smoothed boards that she would sell to the tourists. His mother never painted natural things, like people, birds, or trees, because creating images of anything God had made was forbidden. It was against the ordnung: the rules of their community. But she did like to paint patterns and hex signs in bright colors on pieces of plywood, cut round and sanded. The myth that Amish hex signs were always religious or superstitious, or that they were put up on barns to keep evil spirits away, was one that had been trumpeted by secular authorities and governments—and of course by the tourist industry, to add mystery to the Amish story, and thus attract tourist dollars. To the Troyer family, the hex signs were just a way for Jed’s mother to express her artistic side, to display her ethnic identity, and experience the joy of painting. She always picked the most beautiful colors to use in her projects.

Jed was staring up into a sky that was this color of blue when he saw what looked to be meteors—or missiles?—falling from the sky and impacting the ground in brilliant oranges, reds, and browns. The display lasted for only seconds, but to Jed it felt like it went on much longer.

Then from the same blue sky—or, rather, in front of that sky, between him and the blueness—he looked on as numbers appeared, long rows of digits moving quickly from right to left, zeroes and ones and symbols that meant nothing to him. These numbers flashed and disappeared, and then he was in a darkened room and there was a screen of white suspended in the air in front of him. He looked down at his arms and legs and hands, and it was just as if they were his own, from his point of view, but the parts were somehow different, foreign to him. He lifted his hands and saw them rise up in front of his face. He examined them, but they looked artificial; he was moving them, but they didn’t feel like his. It wasn’t that they weren’t right, it was that they were… too right. The tiny hairs on the backs of his hands moved as if molested by a gentle breeze that he could not feel. He could flutter his fingers and touch his nose, but the feelings were still just—not… quite… right.

On the white screen—which brought to mind what he’d heard of Englischers’ televisions or movie screens—he could see his family’s farm, as if from the road, and he found he could reach out and touch the screen and the image would react to his touch. He could zoom in any direction and look around the farm.

And they made an image of the beast, and did worship it…

The words of a sermon preached in his church by an elder came to him almost in spoken form, but then the thought was gone and he found he could interact with the picture on the screen simply by opening and closing his hand in front of him. He was just getting the hang of manipulating the image of the farm when everything in his view flashed white, and again he was submerged in the dirty waters, unable to feel anything, floating, reaching for the light. Feeling the urge to panic. Then blackness swarmed over him again, and he slept.

Jed awoke upon a firm and thin mattress in a darkened room. The only light came in through a small square window on a door that was six or seven feet away from the bed. As his eyes slowly adapted to the darkness, he could make out that he was in some kind of cell. He was still wearing his Amish clothing—his broadfall pants, long-sleeved white shirt, suspenders, black boots—and his hat was near him on the bed. His hands and feet were no longer bound. He sat up on the bed, and as he did so a light came on in the room and some music started to play from somewhere. Soft piano music with no lyrics. He was trying to gather his mind and to get his thoughts in order when he heard a buzz, and the sound of air… like when an air compressor on one of his more liberal neighbors’ farms was being voided of its compressed contents. He looked up, and from a crevice in the brick walls of his cell he saw a mist descending on him. It smelled like orange zest, and his mind zoomed back to the time when he was interrogated by Hugh Conrad in the Transport Security office and a canister had sprayed into the room, releasing that very same smell.

The scent relaxed him, and he leaned back on the bed and felt his vision go still and black. Once again the white screen appeared before him, and he felt like he was standing in front of it. The screen expanded until it wrapped all the way around him and over him, and on the screen a farm appeared. It was his farm, and he was standing in the paddock next to the milk barn, and Zoe walked up to him and reached toward him with her nose. She was hoping he had some sweet treat, some cow cubes perhaps, to give her. When he touched her nose she realized that he didn’t have anything for her to eat, so she turned away, uninterested, and sauntered across the green grass of the paddock, her empty udder swinging with each step.

This time it was more real. Well… it felt real. There was still just the slightest hint of that sense of everything being too perfect, but for some reason Jed’s mind was now taking over and fixing the “too-right” things that should have been “wrong.” His brain roughed up the image until he agreed to be convinced that what he was experiencing was real. He looked up into the clouds and he could see the three dimensional wispiness that modern artists never seem to get right. (He’d seen art before, in school, or on trips to town with his father.) He looked toward the road, and his attention fell on a mud hollow the pigs had dug out while rooting. A recent rain had filled the little hollow with muddy water.

Jed turned and saw the barn. That beautiful, glorious structure that held so much meaning for him. His eyes tracked upward and he saw the place where the special window should have been in the gabled end of the uppermost peak of the barn. The window—frame and all—was missing. He looked back down, and at the base of the barn he saw a set of hay hooks he’d dropped there on the day he’d left for New Pennsylvania. He’d forgotten to put the hooks back in the barn—and there they were. Still there. The hay hooks were a detail, one of a thousand that convinced him the vision was real, not something concocted in order to trick him. Then he looked toward the house.

And he saw Dawn.

So beautiful. He heard the thought, and it embarrassed him.

She was standing only ten feet from him, and she was the most captivating thing he’d ever seen in his life. Everything about her was perfect, and she was smiling. Only, there was a sadness in her smile even though she looked authentically happy to see him. And she was dressed Amish, with cape and white apron and a white kapp with the ties hanging down.

He felt ashamed because a part of him knew that this wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, and that Dawn hadn’t consented to be seen this way. His mind—just below his consciousness, but still invading it—noted the irony of a man feeling shame for imagining a woman in modest, plain, and unrevealing dress. But a fantasy is a fantasy, isn’t it? It cannot be right. His face flushed red, and Dawn saw it.

She looked down at herself and smiled back at him. “Don’t be surprised, Jed. I really like these clothes. I love being dressed like this. It’s beautiful.”

Jed shook his head. “Only it’s not you saying that. It’s all in my mind. It’s what I would want you to say.”

“You’re wrong, Jed.”

Jed looked around. “So is this heaven? Were we killed?”

Dawn shook her head, and the sadness in her eyes multiplied. “No.”

Jed reached down and picked a piece of grass, then put it in his mouth. He chewed it and tasted its sweetness. He could feel the fibers on his tongue.

“Are you sure this isn’t heaven?” he said.

“I’m sure, Jed. In fact, this is a whole lot more likely to be hell.”

(17 Q

Jed and Dawn walked toward the house, and as they walked Dawn took his hand in hers. At the house, they sat on the porch in wooden chairs that his father had made in his workshop using only hand tools. His parents were nowhere around. He didn’t feel an urge to look around for them, because some part of him was still telling him that what he was seeing wasn’t the real world. A gentle breeze touched his hair, and he felt it this time, like the wispy fingers of evening and history. He removed his hat, and he smiled when he heard the familiar creak of the porch as he pushed his legs out and crossed his boots.

Glancing again at Dawn, he almost couldn’t stand to look upon her for fear that his heart would jump out of his chest, and because he thought that if she caught him looking she would read his thoughts. She was so stunning in her Amish dress that he had trouble controlling his breathing. He looked away rather than stare at her. “If this is hell,” he said, “and I know it might be blasphemous… but…”

Dawn flinched and interrupted him with an upraised hand. “We can’t stay here. It’s not real, Jed.” She pointed out across the farm. “This is all a lie.”

“But you said you were real.”

She grabbed his hand in hers and looked into his eyes. “I’m real, Jed, but this place is not. Transport Intelligence put a BICE unit in your head. In mine, too. I’m back online. And they have you on Quadrille—we call it Q—so that your mind will more easily accept the transplant… and believe the things you see and hear while they’re trying to reprogram you.”

Though he tried so hard not to, he found himself staring at Dawn’s face. It was so right that he wanted to kiss her. He didn’t want to talk at all. But then he knew it would be wrong to kiss her, so he tried to focus on what she was saying. “If this isn’t real—” But I know it isn’t real. “If this isn’t real, then why are they letting you tell me this? Don’t they control the computers? Aren’t they listening to us right now?”

Dawn smiled. “Well, they don’t know that TRACE has back doors, shells, and traps throughout their system. We’ve been infiltrating their programming for years, and there’s been nothing they could do about it. It’s a byproduct of a technological ecosystem: any system that relies on creative people to keep it running is going to be riddled with secrets and back doors. Most of the programmers who designed the BICE and integrated it with the Internet had hacker and rebel tendencies. Those people always do, God bless them. It’s always been that way and it always will be that way. There was no way to keep us out. That’s how the SOMA got in touch with me through my BICE when you were checking in at customs, back when I first met you.”

Dawn was holding Jed’s hand now, and she gave it a squeeze. He took it as a recognition of their shared adventure since that day, and how much they’d been through together.

She lifted his hand a little and looked at it closely before giving it another light squeeze. “Part of my job has been infiltrating Transport protocols and accessing TRACE backdoors to use the system against them. Right now they think we’re both unconscious and recovering from the surgery and the drugs they gave us. They know that you’re slowly adopting the BICE data into your cognitive stream. I have the data mirrored so they’re seeing what I want them to see. Basically, I’ve hacked your brain, Jed. And I’ve also communicated to TRACE command everything that’s happened.”

Jed just stared, unsure what he should accept and what was still too fantastic to be believed.

“There’s a war going on, Jed. And right now, one of the battlefields is your mind.”

“I just want to be out of it all. I just want to be home.”

“There is no out. There is no home. Unless we win.”

Jed shook his head. “It’s too much.”

“Listen,” Dawn said, “I don’t expect you to get all of this at once. It’s a lot to take in, and I understand that. We’re just lucky they didn’t shoot us back when they captured us just to be done with you.”

“Blessed,” Jed said.

“What?”

“Not lucky—blessed.”

Dawn shrugged. “All right. Blessed, then.”

“So what do we do next?”

Dawn stood up and turned to face him. She reached out with her hands and pulled him up out of his chair. When he stood, he was uncomfortably close to her, and she didn’t step back to increase the space between them. She looked up at him as she spoke. “Next? You’re going to go through all of their training and protocols.” She reached up and fixed a wisp of hair that had escaped from her kapp. “The system does that automatically as you sleep, so you won’t really notice it that much. Only fragments of notable instances here and there will occur to you. Without your even knowing about it, they’ll train you to use the system, to access information unconsciously, and they’ll program your BICE to send back information to Transport Intelligence. You’re going to pretend to go along with everything they do.”

She gave him a sideways smile, as if to say sorry about this part. “Actually, you won’t have to pretend. My guess is that they’re going to try to zap your memory of the last few days—going all the way back to when you first arrived at Transport Customs in Columbia, before you met me. I don’t know exactly how they’ll do it, but we’ll soon see. Then they’re going to deliver you to the Amish Zone—exactly as you’d originally intended before all hell broke loose. They’ll expect that you won’t know what’s happening, and their plan is for you to serve as an unwitting spy, gathering data and transmitting it back to Transport.”

Jed noticed that even though he was now standing, Dawn was still holding both of his hands. He wondered if that was part of the fantasy that his brain was concocting, or if she was really in control of what he saw in front of him.

“Why go to all of this trouble just to spy on the Amish? What harm can the plain people be to Transport?”

Dawn pushed the troublesome strand of hair back into her head covering and shrugged. “The plain people are never harmless.”

“But they are harmless,” Jed said. “They’re pacifist. They don’t take sides. They can’t help or hurt anyone.”

Dawn shook her head again. “Free people who produce everything they need to survive are never harmless, Jed. Because they’re not dependent on government—and that makes them dangerous when governments are wicked. Add to that the fact that people on both sides of this conflict depend on Amish production for food… which means the plain people are strategically important. And don’t forget that the resistance is led by a former Amish man.”

“My brother.”

“Yes.”

Jed took a deep breath. “When am I going to find out about Amos?”

“Soon.”

Jed reached over and touched Dawn’s sleeve. The green fabric felt cool and very real to him. When he touched her, she turned to him and smiled.

“Your brother wanted you to see everything, to experience what’s going on in the Amish Zone and in this world. He figured that maybe then you would understand his decisions.”

“I don’t understand them.”

“This whole thing,” Dawn said, “everything going on here… this is not some grand plan to torture you or keep you in the dark. You don’t think every single one of us in the resistance isn’t tired of saying ‘Not yet, we can’t tell you yet’? Of course we’d love to have just told you everything when you first arrived at customs. But then you’d never understand. You’d be like the elders here in New Pennsylvania—unable and unwilling to see what’s really happening.”

“The Amish will never change. They will never fight.”

Dawn smiled. “Your brother knows that. He doesn’t want them to change or fight. They’re too valuable to this world and the old world. He wants you to know the truth, so that at least you can communicate with them and let them know why he’s made the decisions he’s had to make. Why he’s chosen to fight.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I know,” Dawn said. “Hopefully someday you will.”

Jed didn’t reply. His hand moved up her sleeve, and then before he could stop himself he was touching her face. He couldn’t help it. He wanted to know what she felt like, to get an understanding of what was real and what was not. Her skin was soft to the touch, and she leaned in to the contact and closed her eyes.

“If they zap my memory,” Jed said, “then won’t what they’re trying to do to me… or with me… well, won’t it work? Won’t I forget everything and just go on without knowing what they’ve done to me?”

Dawn smiled again, and now she was the one to reach out and touch his face, as if she was checking to see if he was real. “They aren’t going to zap all of your memory, because I’m going to keep them from doing it. They might accomplish it for a bit, but in the end you’ll remember. I’m just going to teach you how to trick them so that they’ll think they succeeded.”

Jed didn’t respond. He just looked into her eyes.

After a moment, her hand traveled upward until she was pointing at the center of his forehead. “But never you worry, Jed.” She smiled and his heart leapt. “All the while, I’ll be right here.”

His hand found hers and he pulled her finger down from his forehead until it was pointing at his heart. He held it that way for a moment, and then he released her hand.

“You’re a very handsome man, Jed.”

Her eyes closed and he could see that she was going to kiss him, or that she wanted him to kiss her. She hesitated, only centimeters away from his lips, expecting that he would meet her there.

He did not.

“I can’t,” he said. Her eyes opened and he blushed. “I don’t know what’s real.”

Dawn dropped his hands, smiled again, then turned and stepped off the porch. She walked toward the water pump that was in the side yard under a large oak tree, and she turned and spoke over her shoulder as she walked. “Welcome to the world of the English, Jed. Almost no one knows what’s real.”

Jed worked the pump handle while Dawn gathered water in her hands and splashed it on her face. He had so many questions, he wasn’t completely sure where to start.

“What does the Q do? What part of what I’m feeling is the drug?”

Dawn wiped her face with her sleeve, and Jed was fascinated to see the water spots on the sleeve of the green dress. Whatever kind of computer simulation this was, it was mind-blowing.

“Q gives you a feeling of euphoria,” she said. “Of acceptance and acquiescence. It helps your brain meld the imagery that the computer is producing with the sensory perceptions that your brain adopts in order to help you believe the illusion. On Q, your brain ‘fixes’ things by adding in the imperfections and oddities that exist in real life. When computers try to do this alone, and your mind isn’t on Q, the animation comes across as clunky and artificial. Animators and programmers call this ‘the uncanny valley.’ It’s too real, so the mind rejects it as creepy and odd.” Dawn pumped the handle a few times until some water spurted out. She caught the moisture in her hand and let it drip through her fingers in front of Jed’s face. The sun glistened through the drops, and he was reminded of the drops on the grass on his last day in Old Pennsylvania, after he and Amos had milked Zoe.

Dawn continued. “The computer really only produces about fifteen percent of the image, and your mind produces the rest. Little-used parts of the brain are turned into supercomputers that render imagery based on the billions of microscopic memories stored throughout your brain. Your mind becomes the rendering chip. Q facilitates this pipeline. Back in the old world, television created these simulated realities—only slower and not as well. What the BICE can make is kinda cool and very technologically advanced, but even so, the brain always knows it isn’t right. The Q helps your brain stop being so naturally cynical. It helps you suspend your disbelief. You become more accepting of the data you’re receiving. That’s why I wanted to be here for your first experience. When Transport showed that they would rather capture you than kill you, I figured they had a plan that involved implanting you and putting you on Q.”

“Why didn’t they kill you?” Jed asked.

“Good question,” Dawn said. “I was hoping they wouldn’t.” She smiled at him, but he didn’t seem to like her answer. “Because they don’t know if they’ll need me in the future to help control you. And they need you more than they need just about anything else.”

“Why could they possibly need me?” Jed asked.

“Because every war has more than one facet. It’s not all guns and bombs. There are things like public relations, propaganda, and public opinion. They need you—to use you as a tool against your brother and the resistance.”

Jed was still worried about Dawn. “They already killed Conrad and Rheems as traitors. They’ll kill you too if they don’t think you can help them.”

“Well, you’re right. At some level, at least,” she said. “Conrad and Rheems didn’t have some of the capabilities that I have to disrupt and confuse their system if I need to.” Dawn winked at him. “I might even be able to arrange for my own escape if I really have to.”

“Then you should do that,” Jed said. “Get out of here and don’t look back.”

Dawn laughed. It was almost an ironic laugh. “If you think I would abandon you here, Jed, or that I would neglect my duty to TRACE or the SOMA, then you don’t know me as well as you should. As well as you will.”

Over the next few days, Jed’s life settled into a pattern. He slept most of the time, and during this sleep—at first, anyway—he recognized that his mind was going through training. Often he would be standing in front of the white screen and he would find himself manipulating data, or filing information in folders that would appear before him. He learned how to categorize data, parse conversations, and add rankings to information before he filed it away.

When he awoke, sometimes he would forget the overall gist of what he’d been doing in his sleep, but he’d always remember that the training was moving forward.

On occasion—at random times when it was quite unexpected—Dawn would appear in his visions, and she would teach him things he needed to know: how to hide things, how to recall and change data even after the information had already been filed. She even taught him how to authentically alter his memories, so that the information that was filed was substantively different than what had actually happened.

And sometimes Dawn would take him to another place entirely. She showed him battles and wars. They stood on hilltops and on buildings and watched men and machines destroy and kill, and Dawn talked to him of history and the process that had brought this world to the edge of ruin. She showed him that the colonization of New Pennsylvania had been troubled from the very beginning. The same conflict and civil war that had marked the old world had carried over into the new.

A lot of what Jed learned from Dawn was data without context. He didn’t gain true understanding because he didn’t have all of the supporting information and experience that would help him truly make sense of it. He felt like a spectator, watching a show that had nothing to do with him, like he was being forced to see a movie about the world and everything that was wrong with it. He willed it to stop, but he had no power to control anything that was happening to him in the dream state.

One day (or maybe it was night? he had no way to know), Dawn took him on a journey to an area in the west called “the Great Shelf.” There she showed him a massive line of limestone cliffs, hundreds and hundreds of feet high, bifurcating the whole continent from the north to the south. Atop the Shelf there were a dozen cities and towns, spread hundreds and hundreds of miles apart. Dawn explained that Transport had spent billions of tax unis to build cities that they’d hoped would eventually be filled with immigrants from the old world. But, she explained, things hadn’t worked out as Transport had planned.

There were millions of people living beyond the Shelf, but the bulk of those colonists—along with their young, born on New Pennsylvania—avoided the planned cities as if they were filled with the plague. So the cities had only a token civilian presence, mostly colonists who relied on the government for sustenance and survival. Some of the cities had no more than a thousand to ten thousand souls living in them. The Shelf cities survived only thanks to the massive infusion of tax unis grafted from both the old and the new worlds. The old philosophy—where consumption, rather than production, provided for an unnatural and unsustainable system of urban living—wasn’t workable in the new world. It didn’t work in the old world either, but the old world system was slow in collapsing because it had thousands of years of production propping it up.

“Why do they even keep the cities if they can’t support themselves?” Jed asked.

“No city of any meaningful size is ever self-sufficient,” Dawn said. “Every city relies on production that happens in the countryside. Food, raw materials, goods, et cetera.” Now she pointed out into the wilderness beyond the city. “In the old world, it took millennia to develop industrialized systems adequate to maintain large cities. Rome and Athens used slave labor, wars, and harsh taxation. Centuries later, machines did the job just as well, and even if the industrialized nations still relied on wars and taxation, they’d been around long enough to use sleight of hand to hide the reasons and purposes behind the wars.” Dawn looked at him and saw that even in cyberspace she was losing him. There was still a huge culture gap. The Amish weren’t dumb, she knew, they just had no point of reference when it came to human culture on such an urban scale.

“The point is that you can’t just drop a city onto a new planet and expect it to work.”

“I can see that,” Jed said.

Dawn continued. “The government thought that the old world system could just be duplicated and transferred into the new world, but in this thinking they’d missed one very important fundamental truth: without several millennia of the compounded productive labors of individuals who’d systematically made goods and products by hard work, using raw materials gleaned from the real, tangible world… your cities aren’t going to make it.

“The leaders of the world forgot where real wealth comes from. It’s like thinking that you can take all of the flesh, sinews, ligaments, and tissues that make up a human, and just stick them all together in the right places and somehow you’ll have life. You won’t. You’ll have a reconstituted corpse that’s still dead.

“The nuts and the bolts of the issue,” Dawn explained, “comes down to this: if the people of New Pennsylvania don’t work with their hands to create the means of survival, production, and expansion, this world will collapse and regress. The only thing they’ll be left with is the ancient Roman model of empire-building: endless war, slavery, and oppression. The people who have rejected the cities seem to grasp this. They’re out there, beyond the Shelf, working, living, and surviving. Everyone else doesn’t have a clue. This difference was the root of the war between TRACE and Transport,” Dawn said. “In the countryside, TRACE is embraced and supported. In the cities, Transport is idol, king, and god.”

Dawn was biased, and she admitted as much. According to her, TRACE wanted to free people from oppression so that they could work and produce and survive. According to her, Transport wanted to enslave generations of humans and force them to maintain a system that was already crumbling from its own internal corruptions and contradictions.

And whenever Jed was just beginning to get a modicum of understanding, the darkness and the sleep would overwhelm him again.

This became his pattern: sleep, training, long visits and conversations with Dawn. The information, relentless in its assault, pouring into his mind like water filling a cup. His thoughts alternated between murky confusion and stunning clarity. It became more and more difficult for him to keep track of what was real and what wasn’t. Time passed, but he had no idea how long this pattern continued, until finally, something changed. He felt himself coming out of that deep and bottomless slumber, his consciousness returning to him only in fits and starts. He was disoriented, and awareness of his surroundings was slow to return to him. He struggled to focus his mind, to concentrate on anything at all that would help him gain some kind of center.

After a few long moments of nothingness, Dawn appeared in his mind. Not in his vision, but it was her essence, incorporeal. She didn’t speak until his focus was entirely on her and not on his indistinct surroundings. When at last he’d cleared his mind enough to hear her, she spoke.

“Here we go.”

Dawn was gone. But Jed knew that he was coming awake. He realized—almost as an afterthought—that he was very cold, but concurrent with that thought he began to feel warmth expand and spread throughout his body, tracing along his veins and arteries. The warmth brought his consciousness into greater clarity, and he heard an unlatching sound, and then the sound of air escaping. He opened his eyes and the lid of the pod rose slowly and light penetrated the darkness around him and he felt himself stirring into consciousness. There was a voice speaking…

“…Medical for a release before entering the station. Do not be alarmed. The process of reanimation is proceeding normally. You will feel confused, lightheaded, and weak at first, but normal function will return quickly. Your muscles have been continuously stimulated during your voyage, and will function normally after a period of acclimation. After a short episode of reorientation, you will begin to be able to feel and move normally. Take your time exiting your pod. When you do exit, you will find Medical on your left as you disembark the ship. Everyone must stop at Medical for a release before entering the station. Do not be alarmed. The process…”

He realized that he was in the Transport station: he’d arrived in New Pennsylvania. He reached down into the tight joint between his seat and the frame of the pod. For some reason he couldn’t grasp, his hand searched there for something. Something that should have been there. But he found nothing.

What had he been looking for?

(18 MRS. BEACHY

From his desk in his office aboard the Tulsa, Amos Troyer could glance up and see a dozen paper-thin screens that fed him information from everywhere that TRACE had a presence. Whether he chose to receive his intel from the screens, or from the BICE in his head, was a matter of multitasking and how deeply he needed to examine information. Sometimes the BICE was too cumbersome and resource-dependent for regular, everyday jobs. For a cursory idea of what was happening in the war, the wall screens were sufficient. But if something really needed his complete attention, then he would use the BICE.

It was interesting to note that the BICE, designed to be the single most efficient means of gathering and utilizing information, was often too unwieldy for the job when it came to the millions of bits of ordinary information humans gather casually every day. The BICE had become—for many people, including the head of the insurrection—something that was for entertainment, for escape, for personal or sensitive communications, or for deeper research. But the system proved to be less than ideal for the multitudes of daily transactions and computations that didn’t require full concentration.

The human mind simply couldn’t function well with ten programs running in the brain at one time. In the exterior world, men and women could perform quite well working with a wall full of monitors offering different flows of information. The brain’s latent inhibitions sorted the information and threw most of it out as useless, focusing attention on what was most likely to be important. But the BICE system bypassed these latent inhibitions, and force-fed all of the information directly into the consciousness. Too much of that could cause insanity. The Q helped, but it couldn’t help everyone.

Amos sighed. Ages ago, humanity foolishly believed that with the advent of the digital age their lives would soon be paper-free, but that dream had never been realized. Quite the opposite, actually. It took more paper than ever to support the paperless society. Likewise, many people once hoped that integrated computers—brain chips—would one day replace all stand-alone processing stations and displays. Nope, Amos thought. We rely on them more now than we ever have.

On one of the heads-up wall screens, a remote camera displayed what was happening in a sector a hundred miles south and west of the City. Amos watched as four TRACE units engaged and destroyed an armed Transport convoy—most likely transporting goods confiscated from the small towns and villages of the frontier.

The tide of the battle on every front had turned. TRACE was no longer just a gadfly and a nuisance. Everywhere, people were starting to realize that Transport was on the run, and the resistance was rising.

TRACE was winning the propaganda war, too. They’d successfully portrayed Transport as heartless and tyrannical, while showing the rebels as compassionate, measured, and just.

But even success and victory carried their share of challenges. With their increased capabilities came the necessity of restraint. Amos knew that he could end Transport’s control of the capital city with the push of a button. Okcillium gave him that power. But then there would be no city left to claim. Scorched earth is a policy, it’s just not usually the best one.

The rise of the resistance was directly attributable to the fact that Amos had increased TRACE’s access to okcillium, an element that hadn’t yet been found in the new world. Maybe there wasn’t any okcillium on New Pennsylvania. The first decade here had seen an all-out search for the rare element.

And okcillium was thought to have been so completely depleted in the old world that for all intents and purposes it was considered an extinct element. However… okcillium did still exist in the old world; it had just taken the right man to know where to find it, and how to extract it. In fact, it was quite plentiful in one place on Earth: Oklahoma. But sometimes the hardest question isn’t where; sometimes there are also questions of when.

Having access to okcillium made all the difference to the resistance. The element was the most valuable and useful material in the war, and TRACE alone was able to use it for advanced propulsion applications and for game-changing weapons systems. The enemy did not yet know where—or when—TRACE was getting its supply. But if ever they figured it out, there would be a war over Oklahoma like nothing the world had ever seen.

Amos watched the screens as his forces mopped up after the attack on Transport. Another victory. Even without it, his people were calling for decisive action. They were calling for the Hiroshima Option, something he was unwilling to do. Just having okcillium was not reason, in his mind, to destroy a city with all of its population still in it.

The full brunt of TRACE’s newfound power could be unleashed on Transport’s forces in and near the City at any time, but still he waited. He knew that Transport was in the process of abandoning the City and hightailing it out west, beyond the Shelf, where it would be easier for the government to regroup and rebuild. Getting control of the City was a chief war aim, but when TRACE did finally take control, Amos wanted there to be a city left. And he didn’t want to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to occupy a city that, in the long run, he didn’t even want. So for now, it was a waiting game—and it seemed that Jed Troyer was the piece that was in play. What happened to him would determine the future of the City, and therefore the entire population of the east.

Amos knew that to the people, it might look like he was hesitating only because he wanted to spare Jed’s life. That wasn’t true, but the people didn’t always know his mind. Of course Jed’s life was critical to Amos as a man and as a brother, but TRACE—and eventual victory—was even more important. Amos knew that he didn’t have critics now, but with the tide of war turning… As soon as it looked like his people might win, he’d have plenty of them. He knew all about Churchill, MacArthur, Patton, and other war heroes who had been cast to the winds once the threat they had fought no longer occupied the forefront of the people’s minds, and ruling became all about the perks, with little risk. It was just the way of humanity, and he didn’t expect anything to change.

He opened his desk drawer and grabbed one of the little white pills that lay among the pens, tweezers, and paperclips. He held the pill up before his face and examined it. Such a tiny thing. The tool of the devil, no doubt, and the legal drug of choice among the English. Q was both bane and boon to Amos. He wanted to be free of it in his old age, but he needed it to help him assimilate and sift through so much information. He popped the pill in his mouth and chewed it deliberately. It was bitter: wormwood and gall. Consuming hell—he thought—one little white pill at a time.

He closed his eyes, and in a few moments the familiar feelings of peace and acceptance swept over him. He thought about home, and Jed, and milking Zoe in the mornings and evenings without a care in the world. He activated his BICE, and the unit booted up in a tenth of a second.

Now, in his mind, he stood confidently. His avatar was him—young, as he’d once been. His powerful muscles pressed against the uniform that stretched over him like armor. He was a vibrant youth of thirty, and unquestionably the man for the job at hand.

He was in a darkened room, and he saw a cube floating in the center of the space. This was the way he’d personalized his filing system. There were a million other ways to do it: one could have a long wall of drawers or lockers, an endless filing cabinet, buttons that floated, or numbered kittens that mewed as they relaxed on sofas. But Amos liked the spinning box. Each side of the cube was divided into different-sized squares—drawers, actually—and the size of each drawer was correlated with how much information was in it and how often it was accessed. The entire parent box was a perfect cube, four feet to a side, and it hung in the room without any visible means of support. No wires were needed, because Amos was in the Internet. This room was his control room. The parent cube could be rotated, spun, inverted, or reversed, all with the flick of his wrist. He turned the box slowly with one hand until he saw a drawer marked DB.

Dawn Beachy.

He opened the drawer with a flick of a wrist, and a flat card came out and floated in front of him. The big square faded until it was just a ghosted image, and the two-dimensional card became brighter once it was floating in the open. It then expanded into the third dimension until it became a cube as well, three feet to a side and also covered on all six faces with different-sized drawers. Amos spun this cube end over end until what had been the top faced him, and he found a drawer with the letters DM.

Direct Message.

He opened the drawer with another flick, and in a split second, Dawn Beachy appeared before him. She was opaque, and her eyes were closed.

After a few seconds, her eyes flittered open and she became solid and real. Recognizing the younger Amos, she nodded. “Yes, sir. Awaiting your orders, sir.”

Amos waved his hand and the two boxes faded until they were virtually invisible. “No orders. I just wanted to talk.”

“Yes, sir,” Dawn said. She cast her eyes downward, looking uncomfortable.

“Is something the matter?”

“Everything is fine, sir.”

“Speak freely, Dawn. We’re old friends. Is something wrong?”

“No, sir. It’s just… I find it distracting to see you like this.”

“Why’s that?” Amos asked.

“Because you look like a slightly older version of your brother.”

Amos nodded and laughed. He looked down, and in a blink he was his older self again. Still in uniform, but older and frailer.

Dawn nodded. “Thank you, sir. Better.”

“How is everything progressing?” Amos asked.

Dawn put her arms behind her and came to an “at ease” position in front of the SOMA. “Things are going well enough, sir. He’s made it to the AZ and he’s going through their immigrant orientation. I’m giving him nudges now and then, to make sure his mind doesn’t become completely submerged, but pretty soon we’ll need to activate him.”

“Let him go for a while,” Amos said. “He needs to reconnect with his people, and then we’ll let him see the world for what it is, and he’ll have the context he needs.”

Dawn nodded. “Yes, sir. But you should know that Transport is going to be using him to gather information. And immersion like this can be tricky to undo. Every day that he remains oblivious to what’s going on inside his head, it will become increasingly difficult to pull him all the way out.”

Amos waved his hand again and a white screen appeared. He glanced over at Dawn. “Work with him at night. Underneath his consciousness. Erase your tracks when you’re done. But not every night. Randomly, and never more than a few times a week. Don’t be predictable.”

On the screen, the recording of Jed and Dawn talking near the water pump at the old farm appeared. Amos and Dawn both watched as Dawn almost kissed Jed before he pulled away at the last moment.

Dawn blushed and then nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll work with him as you direct.”

“Have you convinced him you love him?” Amos said. He flicked his wrist and the screen disappeared.

“I think so, sir.”

“Does he love you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Does he?”

“Maybe.”

Amos raised his hand and began to turn his wrist very slightly. The image of Dawn began to fade.

“You’re going to break his heart, Mrs. Beachy. You know that, right?”

Amos emphasized the word Mrs., and Dawn flinched. “I hope not, sir.” She took a step back, taking her leave, but just before she blinked out, she looked Amos Troyer in the face. “And Ben is dead… sir.”

Amos nodded, but Dawn was already gone.

(19 ARRIVAL

The airbus came in low, descending until it landed smoothly up against the platform dock. The bus was about two-thirds full, and Jed waited until it was almost empty before he followed the crowd out onto the platform. There had been only a handful of Amish on board, and they filed into line under a sign that read “Amish Residents.” The English flowed down a roped trail into a second line that terminated under a sign reading “Tourist Entry.” No one waited in line at a third counter, where the sign read “Amish Immigrants—Please Check In.”

Jed walked up to the Immigrants desk, and the woman behind the counter, who looked to be a Mennonite, was placing papers into a manila folder as he approached.

The woman smiled. “Welcome to York Amish Zone. For official purposes,”—the way she said this made it sound like “porpoises”—“I am speaking da English. Are y’uns having the papers?”

Jed remembered that when they’d removed his bio-identification band, he’d been handed an envelope with papers in it. He put his hand into his vest and found the envelope, then handed it to the heavyset Mennonite lady and smiled.

In the distance there was a rumbling sound, almost like thunder, and Jed turned his head, trying to identify the sound.

“Chust da Englischers, fighting,” the woman said. “Always da fighting. It wonders me they all han’t died.”

“Does the fighting ever come here, ma’am?” Jed asked.

The woman smiled at Jed as if he’d said something cute or amusing. “No. Never. The fightings never comes here, because we are growing da foods for many of the Englischers!” She stamped some of his papers, then pulled out a few notes and handed them to Jed. “Here are da moneys, young man.”

Jed saw that the customs official back at the Transport station must have exchanged his unis for Amish Barter Notes when his ID band was removed, because the small slips of paper she handed him were Amish notes.

“Do y’uns read, boy?” the woman asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Wunnerful gut.” She handed him another printed sheet. “Here listing ist da ordnung. Normally ordnung never ist written, but during the immigration periods, rule ist setting aside. Read when y’uns can.”

“I will, ma’am.” Jed suddenly had one of those strange feelings of déjà vu. It wasn’t really déjà vu, because it wasn’t the feeling that he’d done all of this before, but the Mennonite woman’s unique accent and dialect affected him strangely, as if he’d heard something similar to it recently. Similar, but not the same. Maybe a very rough and wild version of it.

Eagles.

Why did he think of the word Eagles just then? He shook his head and tried to push down the strange feeling. He’d been on a long journey. Perhaps he was just tired.

“Wunnerful gut. Okay,” the woman said, “now, y’uns following line on da floor until are arriving at da airbus that take y’uns to da Greeting Center. Not costing moneys, young man. Y’uns stay at der Greeting Center until other housings are arranged, or y’uns are receiving allotment of da farming lands. Mr. Zook will take wunnerful gut care of thee.”

“Okay, thanks,” Jed said. And as he said it, he could hear another woman’s voice—inside his head!—say, “This is real, Jed, but don’t forget what’s happening out there.” He turned his head, but there was no one near him who could have spoken the words.

The airbus floated over towering walls of indeterminate origin that circled the entirety of the York Amish Zone. Jed estimated that the walls must have been hundreds of feet high and at least as wide as a cornfield—stretching into the distance like the Great Wall of China he’d seen in a picture book, only far taller and wider. Taller than many of the great buildings he’d seen in photographic art books, and the outer portion that faced the world was a sheer wall that would only be scaled with much difficulty. Jed wondered who had built the walls and why. With airbuses and floating airships, the walls seemed kind of pointless and silly.

At the Immigrant Greeting Center, Jed was taken in by an Amish family who treated him like a king returning from a far country. He took a hot bath, and while he bathed his clothes were washed for him. He was given a loaner set of clothes while his dried on the line, and then he was measured for several more sets of Amish clothing. Jed was told that the women of the community would have his new clothes—made according to the local ordnung—ready for him in a week. In the meantime he’d have his own clothes and the ones he’d borrowed.

In this community, according to the ordnung, the button pattern was a little different on the front of the broadfall pants (there were two extra buttons that he felt were unnecessary, but those were the rules) and the hats had a slightly smaller brim and a narrower band. The work shirts—pullovers—could have pockets, and had three buttons instead of two. Other than that, Jed thought as he looked over the printed ordnung, not much was different than the ordnung he’d lived under his whole life. Buggies were the same color and styles, and the women’s dress was almost identical to what he was used to seeing at home. It looked to Jed like as soon as he had his new clothes, he should fit right in here, and he was happy about that.

The waiting list for land distribution wasn’t long, and he was thankful to learn that he’d be receiving his allotment of two hundred acres in a few weeks’ time. Until then he was slated to stay with his old friend Matthias, another young, single farmer who was just getting started on his own farm. Matthias was supposed to come pick him up sometime the next day, and Jed was looking forward to seeing a friendly face from Old Pennsylvania.

Mr. Zook, the patriarch of the family that ran the Center, a strong man in his early thirties, talked to him and kept shaking his hand and patting him on the back like he was really excited to have him there in the community. Jed noticed that behind his back, or when people thought he wasn’t looking, the local Amish stared at him and sometimes whispered.

The Greeting Center was more than a mile inside the AZ, and it was in a forested area dotted here and there with tobacco and cornfields fenced by split rails. Jed and Mr. Zook sat out on the porch of the Center, talking and watching the occasional buggy go by, and Jed experienced that peculiarly Amish feeling of peace that overwhelmed him whenever he heard the clip-clop of hooves and the rattle of buggies as they passed. Mr. Zook spoke remarkably good English, with no trace of the Pennsylvania Dutch accent or dialect.

Jed would learn later that Mr. Zook had been a backsliding Amish who’d once left the fold to join the world back in Old Pennsylvania. He’d only agreed to rejoin the Church when he learned of the opportunity to emigrate to New Pennsylvania. As the operator of the Greeting Center, he still had some contact with both worlds, and that was the way he liked it. Jed’s father had called men like Mr. Zook “political Amish” or “money Amish,” since they weren’t particularly religious men, and stayed in the Amish fold for reasons other than spiritual ones.

“Our community here is young, Jedediah. Our elders are mostly in their late twenties or early thirties. The few older folks we do have are converts who most likely came to New Pennsylvania as Englischers. Elders and bishops are still chosen by lots, so, as you can imagine, there are many more twenty-something-year-old Amishmen serving as elders than any other subset. That means we have a lot of energy but sometimes lack wisdom. I understand, though, and I know we’ll grow into things after a few more decades.”

An explosion, loud but distant, echoed through the air. Jed looked at Mr. Zook, who gave him a crooked half-grin.

“The war. It drags on and on. I follow the news more closely than many of the others. And I have the added opportunity to question a lot of travelers as they pass into the Amish Zone. It looks like the rebels have turned the tide. People are saying that the government is fleeing the city and moving their operations to the cities on the Shelf.”

“What does that mean for the Amish?” Jed asked.

“We won’t know for a while. There are some who say that the rebels are setting bombs in the roads and fields to harass Transport. Others say the rebels are honorable and would never do that. That they are careful not to kill civilians. But we have had some of our people die from the bombs. The rebels say it is because the government plants bombs so that they can blame it on the resistance. Both sides say they studiously avoid killing Amish.

“Most of our people just want the war to go away, but some whisper out of the other side of their mouths that they have to admit it: the Amish have grown wealthy selling food and supplies to both sides.”

Jed whistled. “The Amish materially assist the rebels?”

“Not out in the open, but some do. Transport avoids searching Amish wagons and buggies when they leave the AZ out of fear of being seen as tyrants. I believe some of the Amish take advantage of this to deliver goods to the rebels. And many of our food shipments heading to the City are captured by TRACE units operating outside of town. Some say that’s because our own people tip off the rebels as to when and where the shipments will be moving. Nobody cries or complains when shipments are taken. Nobody except the most mercenary among the Amish.” Zook smiled at his own ironic claim.

“You talk freely of these things here?” Jed asked.

“I do,” Zook said. “I find that it eliminates suspicion of all of the Amish if we are open about what is happening. And to be totally frank with you, most of the Amish don’t think of these things at all. They just hear the bombs and want them to stop.”

Zook’s wife had a full box of garden vegetables and other staples ready for Jed on the porch when Matthias pulled up in his buggy. Jed’s friend bounded up the walk and shook Jed’s hand vigorously with a huge smile on his face. “So good to see you, Jedediah Troyer!”

“I’m glad to finally be here, Matthias.”

“How was your journey?”

“Just as the Englischers said it would be,” Jed replied. “Scary, but safe and without any real incidents.”

“Well, you’ll fit right in here. It’s very much like home. Today we will be helping my neighbors, the Schrocks, weed a cotton patch they’ve planted. I’m helping them with the crop from start to finish, and in the winter, the Schrocks will share some fabric with us.”

Jed nodded. “That sounds great.”

“It will be a short while before you get your allotment and can start on your own land, but take my word for it: without a family, it will be difficult. Many of the single men work together, and help out with the neighbors’ farms. When we build, we’ll have a lot of help too.”

“I’m ready to get started, Matthias.”

“Then off we go.”

As they were loading the Zooks’ vegetables into the buggy, Jed put his hand on Matthias’s shoulder and smiled at his friend. “When Amos gets here in four years, we’ll already be well on our way. In fact, Amos should be asleep right now in his pod, and when he opens his eyes, he’ll be here.”

Matthias didn’t respond. He looked at Jed with sadness in his eyes. It looked to Jed like his friend’s mouth wanted to form words, but could not. Then the moment passed, and Matthias smiled. “Let’s go hoe weeds, Jedediah.”

Jed’s hoe worked expertly between the plants. Cotton here grew tall, and this crop, though still in its early stages, was already taller than most of the finished cotton Jed had seen back in the old world. But then again, most people didn’t realize that cotton is a perennial bush, not an annual. In the old world, hybrid varieties were grown shorter so that machines and equipment could work the fields. Then chemicals were applied in the late fall to defoliate and kill the plant so that the stripping combines could get the cotton off cleanly. But true heritage cotton would grow as high as four or five feet, and once the bush became established, could produce crops year after year. This was the first year of this stand, and if things went well, Jed knew he’d be pulling cotton by October.

As he worked his blade between and around the plants, careful not to harm the roots, he thought of row crops he’d worked back in Old Pennsylvania. Moving up and down the rows with Amos and his father, talking and laughing. Sometimes they would forget that they were working at all, and then they’d get to the end of a row and realize how much work they’d done while lost in conversation.

This is all real, Jed. But you need to remember what you’ve been through to get here. Don’t forget the people who died in the City to get you out.

Jed heard the voice, but knew that there’d been no sound other than in his mind. It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded very familiar. He looked around, and even checked around the adjacent rows to see if maybe one of the Amish girls was playing a joke on him.

Don’t forget, Jed. I’m here for you, but they’re in here too.

He had a flash vision of a man holding a gun and pointing it at his face. He couldn’t recall the place or the man, or anything else about the vision. It happened in the blink of an eye, but it felt like the beginnings of a memory. Then Matthias walked over with a canteen full of water. They both drank deeply, and as Jed watched Matthias drink, he tried to remember the vision, but could not.

“I’d like to go to that great wall, Matthias. The one that surrounds the AZ. I’d like to stand on it and look out over the world.”

Matthias put the cap back on the canteen and wiped his mouth and his youthful beard with his sleeve. A drop of pure water glistened on the tip of his beard, and again Jed had that feeling that he should be remembering something.

“The Amish youth like to go up on the wall, but I’ve never seen the point in it,” Matthias said. “We know what the English world is like, so I don’t see any use in staring out at it.”

“I’m new here, Matthias Miller. I’m like the English tourists, staring at our homes. I want to see it all.”

Matthias chuckled. “All right, then. This evening, when work is done, we’ll go stand on the wall and stare at the English world.”

Jed smiled as he toured the tiny structure. Matthias’s house was small and comfortable—more of a Dawdi Haus than a full-sized Amish home. In Amish culture, the Dawdi Haus is usually a smaller home, attached to or near the main house, which the farmer moves into when he retires and sells the farm and main house to one of his children. A large Amish family may sometimes have two or three Dawdi homes where the parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents live and continue to participate as valuable members of the family.

It wasn’t common for a new farmer to start with a Dawdi Haus, but these were interesting times on this new world, and Jed understood the necessity. At some point in the next few months, the community would show up at Jed’s land and would build a similar house for him to live in. He heard his father’s voice telling him to be thankful for all graces, and this made him smile the more.

“Why are you smiling like a cat, Jedediah?” Matthias asked. “Are you laughing at my tiny house?”

“I love it,” Jed said. “I want one too.”

Matthias nodded. “Well, you’ll get one soon enough. In fact, the Church will be here to build my barn in a month’s time. I’ve already been here awhile, and my turn for a barn is coming up quickly.”

“A barn raising!” Jed said, and slapped Matthias on the shoulder. “I haven’t been to one since we put up the Stolzfuses’ barn last summer.”

“Not last summer, Jed,” Matthias said. “A long time ago. You’ve been asleep for years.”

Jed laughed. “Still. I’m looking forward to putting up a barn. You get out of practice, you know?”

Matthias showed him to his tiny room. It didn’t take long. “On cold nights you’ll want to do like me,” Matthias said. “I sleep on fleeces in the kitchen near the wood stove. Not too many freezing nights this time of year, but sometimes.” Matthias placed a full mason jar in Jed’s hand. “Lard, for the lamp. Use it sparingly.”

Once he’d shown Jed the room, Matthias left, and Jed checked out his new, temporary home. The small bed was of standard Amish make: instead of an Englischer mattress, ropes were stretched across the wooden frame to serve as springs, and these supported five boards, planed smooth, which in turn held piles of lamb’s fleeces. The bed was pushed up against a wall, with little room to spare at the foot, and there was no dresser or other furniture, save for seven pegs that were set into the wall across from the bed at eye level. There was a single lamp that looked to be a fat lamp, and that was to suffice for his lighting.

Jed hung his spare set of clothing on one of the pegs, then sat on the bed and pulled off his boots. He placed the jar of lard under the bed, stretched out on the fleeces, and closed his eyes.

Matthias had told him that the Yoders would be bringing by supper for a week or two, until Jed was settled in. “We’ll have many meals out as well,” Matthias had told him. “We work away a lot, so we eat very well.”

Since he had an hour before supper, Jed decided to rest and try to calm himself of his excitement. He could hardly believe it: he was finally in New Pennsylvania! His dream was now within reach. He pressed his eyelids together and tried to imagine what his farm would be like.

But with his eyes closed tight, what he saw in his mind’s eye was something else altogether. Jed saw the window from his barn back home. And strangely, it wasn’t in the barn—it was sitting on a dirty old sofa in a dark room, lighted only by a lantern. Jed stared for a while at the old coffee can pane he’d used to fix the window, and then he fell asleep, and everything went black.

Jed was standing in a darkened room, and the wall screen was there—a bright flat light that started out in two dimensions, and then grew until it surrounded him on every side like a cocoon. Then there were images on the screen, and they looked so real that he thought he was somewhere else entirely. His brother Amos was there, only he was an old man. And he seemed to be on trial. An Englischer read out crimes that Amos was supposed to have committed. Theft. Rebellion. Mass murder. The prosecutor offered evidence of these crimes, and Amos did not refute him. And images, like memories, flashed on the screen: of bombs, and war, and innocent people dead and dying. And then Amish men stood up, elders that Jed didn’t recognize, and they offered testimony too. They said that Amos was guilty, and that he’d become as murderous as the Englischers, making war and killing.

Don’t believe it, Jed. These are all lies.

Who are you? Jed thought.

It’s Dawn. I’m your friend.

I love you.

I know.

Later that evening, Jed and Matthias stood up on the great wall, facing east. It had taken them almost an hour to climb to the top, and Jed was exhausted. He’d been awakened from his nap by Matthias when the Yoders had shown up with the evening meal. After they’d supped, Matthias harnessed the horses and pulled the buggy out of the barn. It had taken forty-five minutes of driving to reach the wall.

“I don’t come here much anymore,” Matthias said. Darkness was falling, but from the top of the wall the two Amish men could see to the horizon. The blue of the gloaming was on the land, and lights were coming on in scattered country houses out in the English territory.

“Why not?” Jed asked.

“It’s just the English. They come to stare at us. I don’t spend much time staring back at them.”

Gazing out over the landscape outside the wall, Jed examined the English homes, just their outlines as the light of day disappeared into the night. “The English are not unlike us in many ways,” he said.

“That’s a strange thing to say.”

Jed looked over at his friend. “They just want to be happy, Matthias. They’re just confused about what to do about it.”

Matthias nodded. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

“I do,” Jed said.

“I suppose they could start by ending all of their wars,” Matthias said.

“That might be harder than we think.”

Matthias thrust his hands down into the pockets of his broadfall pants. “What can be hard about choosing not to kill one another?”

“I don’t think the English want to kill each other,” Jed said. “At least most of them don’t. They’ve been told what to want and what to think just like we have. They value different things.”

“The elders say the English will always be at war. It’s the way of their kind,” Matthias said.

“I hope they’re wrong,” Jed said. And as he spoke the words, a blinding light—brighter than that of the sun—erupted in the distance. In a microsecond, the bright cloud broke over the horizon, turning night to day, and Jed instinctively pulled off his hat and covered his face. He turned to Matthias, who was doing the same thing.

Matthias tried to speak, but found that he could not. “What…?”

The bright light was somehow turning even brighter, and surrounded them in a glow that made it look like noon up on the wall.

“Don’t look at it. We have to get down!” Jed shouted. He moved toward the stairs and pulled Matthias behind him. Once they were on the way down, they put their hats back on their heads and took the stairs two at a time. They were thirty feet down when the blast blew over the wall. It sounded exactly like they would have imagined the end of time would sound, and the hurricane winds blowing over their heads made a deafening roar.

“What could it be?” Matthias asked, out of breath from the running.

Jed steadied his friend as they continued their descent. “If it isn’t the return of Christ, then something terrible bad has happened.”

The City ceased to exist in a microsecond. Merrill’s Antique Shoppe, Ye Olde World English Tavern, and thousands of other businesses, homes, and lives flashed into dust, and then blasted outward in a wind that reached hundreds of miles an hour in the blink of an eye.

On the command deck of the Tulsa, hundreds of miles away, an old man watched a wall screen, and what he saw took his breath and his words away. The mushroom cloud grew and grew. The old man’s mouth flew open, but nothing came out.

From the telltale blues and purples, he could see that it had been an okcillium detonation. And because it was okcillium, the land would not be poisoned from radiation, and the sickness would not kill those who—thanks to distance or other geographical protection—weren’t killed in the initial detonation of the bomb. The river would have boiled away nearest the City, and the land would be flat as a tabletop when and if intrepid explorers chose to investigate this spot. This vast, empty spot that had once been a large urban area, but was now, for all intents and purposes, a parking lot.

An officer appeared between Amos and the wall screen, and the man’s eyes betrayed his fear and wonder. “Who—”

Amos didn’t hesitate. “It was them.” He ran his fingers through his graying hair. “They did it to themselves!”