Pennsylvania Omnibus (35 page)

Jed just nodded. He still
didn’t know what to say, and it didn’t seem like Dawn expected him to say
anything. It was like she was unburdening her soul. Like she was clearing the
decks so that her relationship with him could go forward unhindered. So he just
let her talk.

“Billy was in love with me
too,” Dawn said. “Still is, I think. There could never be anything between us,
though. But we both loved Ben very much. I think of Billy as if he were my
brother.” She nodded very faintly, as if giving herself permission to admit
something. “In that way, he
is
my brother.”

“Having a brother can be
tough,” Jed said.

“Yes. And pretty great.”

“Yes.”

As they walked up the lane, Jed
was getting the strong feeling that he’d been on this property before. The bend
of the road, even though it was unkempt and covered over with weeds, was very
familiar to him.

“I was ordered to make you fall
in love with me, Jed,” Dawn said. “Might as well get it all out in the open at
once.”

Jed stopped and looked at her.
It was all so overwhelming, so he just blinked and nodded his head. Somehow he
knew that what she was saying was the truth.

Dawn pulled him by his hands
until he took a reluctant step toward her. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t
really
fall in love with
you
.”

“So how does it stand with us
now?” Jed asked.

“I love you,” Dawn said.

“I love you, too.”

“This is my old farm,” Jed
said, and pointed out at the land. “It just feels like it. It has to be. I
halfway recognize some of the trees, though they’re a lot larger than I
remember.”

Dawn didn’t say anything for a
few moments. They walked up onto a low hill that seemed to have been made
artificially.

“This would be where the barn
was,” Jed said.

Dawn just nodded.

“What happened to it all?” Jed
asked.

“Fire,” Dawn said.

“Everything?” Jed asked.
“Everything burned?”

“Twenty percent of the homes
and other structures burned down when the community first got here.”

“The community?”

“The whole thing. The entire
Amish Zone,” Dawn said.

“I don’t get it,” Jed said. “If
this is my old farm, then it has always been here.”

Dawn shook her head. “You’ll
need to talk to Amos to get all the details.”

“Are you saying the whole
community, land and all, was somehow transported here from the old world?”

Dawn nodded. “Talk to your
brother, Jed.”

TUESDAY

The next morning, the Amish women
from the community showed up to clean and work on Matthias’s little house. This
was a common practice in plain communities, a unifying tradition that, renewed
generation by generation, tied the people together and made everyone’s life
easier. Even weekly worship meetings are held house to house, every other
weekend, so that a different family hosts the meeting each time. Every two
weeks, on the weekend when a meeting was scheduled to be held, a group of
community members would show up at the host’s house—usually on Friday
afternoon—and the home would be readied for the meeting. Needful repairs would
be made, no questions asked. Sprucing up, sometimes even including major
projects, would be completed so that the house would be ready for the Sunday
meeting.

On the Saturday afternoon
before a typical Sunday meeting, a wagon appears at the host’s home. In the
wagon are all of the portable pews for the Sunday fellowship. The pews are
unloaded, and the wagon is carefully re-loaded with furniture from the parts of
the house that are to be used for the meeting. Then the pews are arranged in
the vacated rooms. In this way, the plain people believe that they are carrying
on the practices of the Apostles and the early Church in holding their
fellowship meetings house to house.

The cleaning going on in
Matthias’s house, however, was not for a scheduled Sabbath meeting. This was
instead for the barn-raising scheduled for Saturday. On this Tuesday morning in
Matthias’s cottage, screens were fixed, blinds were dusted, and the whole house
was given a thorough cleaning from top to bottom. Dawn joined in, and spent
most of the day chatting and making friends with the young Amish women from the
community, many of whom were close to her age. Though she’d been raised Amish,
she’d been gone for many years, and was surprised to find out that the Amish
girls were so goofy and full of joy. They joked around a lot, and teased one
another incessantly. And even though Dawn was dressed in Amish garb, the girls
all called her “The Englischer,” but they did so with a wink and a smile.
Overall, she felt very comfortable with the girls of the community. That is,
until two of the girls asked her about Jed.

For the most part, this was a
forbidden thing in an Amish society, this talking about an unmarried young man.
Girls did not talk about boys, except maybe to their closest sisters. Dawn was
a little surprised that in this young colony, the girls seemed to be more
forward about male/female relationships than she remembered from her own
district back in the old world. In most traditionalist districts, there was no
talk at all about relationships between men and women. Most people (even
parents and siblings) found out that a young couple was in love at the moment
they announced their marital intentions to the family. But that had been a long
time ago.

Dawn couldn’t really tell if
these girls were actually interested in Jed, or if they were just curious and
looking for gossip, but both girls specifically asked if Jed might be looking
for a wife, and if Dawn had any intentions toward him. Although she was
embarrassed to be asked, and she blushed when she answered, she admitted that
she did care very much for Jed, and that she was hopeful that he cared for her
too. Both girls smiled and seemed to be authentically happy for her. Their
curiosities sated, they all got back to work.

How exciting to be thinking
about love
, Dawn thought.
Even if things don’t work out for us, it has
been a pleasant interlude in my life of war: to be dressed for peace, and in
love with a man like Jed.

Out in the barn, Pook’s team
took the opportunity to clean their weapons. This was another thing that was
frowned upon in Amish society, but the squad felt that it was necessary that
they keep up their battle readiness even during this peaceful respite. Eagles
also gave knife-throwing lessons to any of the squad who were interested. He
just called it “knifing,” but nobody could get him to change his word for the
activity. Eagles was good at “knifing.”
Very
good. He always tried to
throw a knife in such a way that the blade would stick into the gouge left in
the beam from the last throw. He called his perfect throws “bullsings.” He
wasn’t always successful, but he was always close. And when he did hit the mark
perfectly, he would yell “Bullsing!” at the top of his lungs, and then crush
anyone within reach with an almost paralyzing bear hug. It got to the point
that when the soldiers of TRACE heard the cry “Bullsing!” they would all jump
out of the way and run to the corners of the shed.

After the knifing lesson, Jed
showed the squad how to hook up the milk wagon to the horses, and to prepare
the milk to be hauled away. Prepping the horses and the wagon was something all
the members of the TRACE team grew to love. Already, this early in the week,
they would race one another to get to work with the horses and attach the
wagon.

As for Jed, he wanted to find a
place where he could spend some time alone… so he could get on the Internet and
learn more about his situation. A man’s mind can float around untethered in the
sea for only so long before it seeks a lighthouse, or at least a bird with
leaves in its beak. So, after delivering the milk to the neighbor’s
springhouse, Jed received Tom Hochstetler’s permission to crawl up into the
man’s hayloft so he could “rest” while the women worked on Matthias’s house.
Eagles and Ducky drove the wagon back to Matthias’s place (Eagles loved driving
the horses) while Jed stayed behind.

After he’d found a good resting
spot in the loft, Jed took a Quadrille tablet and lay down. He calmed his mind
and tried his best to relax himself. Closing his eyes, he felt the calm feeling
grow in him, and when he felt he was ready, he brought up his BICE
interface.

This time he didn’t soar up
into the sky, something he dearly liked to do. He didn’t zip through immersive
Transport maps of the cities on the Shelf, and he didn’t study the geography of
New Pennsylvania from on high, trying to figure out the “where” of his life.
This time he immediately went to his messaging interface and sent an alert to
his brother. Only moments later, he saw Amos’s avatar, transparent and
seemingly sleeping, appear in the control room. As he watched, the avatar
became opaque, then the eyes opened, and Jed’s brother Amos was standing before
him.

When Jed saw his brother, he
felt a chill go up his spine. For the first time, he really got a sense of the
years having gone by in Amos’s life. Jed felt that the man he was looking at
wasn’t just an avatar displaying for him what his brother would look like as he
approached seventy. No, this really
was
his brother—though not in the
flesh—and those decades that showed so plainly on his skin and weighed so
heavily on his shoulders had really happened to the man.

“Jed,” Amos said with a nod, by
way of greeting.

“Amos,” Jed said, nodding in
return.

“How is life in the Amish Zone,
brother?”

Jed scowled a little at his
brother’s familiarity. “A little confusing, Amos.”

“Confusing? How so?”

“Dawn took me to the location
of our old farm. I could see the foundations of the house and the barn. It was
very troubling.”

“Fifty-three years have come
and gone since you left that place. A lot can happen in over five decades.”
Amos paused for a moment, choking back a sob. “A lot
has
happened…”

“She said that the whole Amish
Zone traveled to this new world.”

Amos looked at his brother. A
whole range of emotions flooded over the older man. He longed to bring his
brother into his arms—to hug him in a long embrace. And to tell the boy
everything… everything he could possibly want to know.
It won’t work
, he
thought.
You’ve known it from the beginning. He can’t take it all at once.
No one could.
“She did, did she?” he said.

“She did.”

“And what else did she say?”

Jed put one hand in his pocket,
but with the other he pointed at Amos. “She said I needed to talk to
you
about it.”

Amos nodded. He exhaled, and
his eyes scanned his brother’s face as he considered how best to explain things
in a way that wouldn’t confuse Jed even more than he already was. “I understand
that this is all still perplexing to you, Jedediah,” he finally said. “With
everything you’ve discovered, there is still so much about what’s going on that
you don’t know.”

“So why don’t you tell me about
this part,” Jed said.

The brothers stared at one
another for a long moment. Jed could see that even the idea of explaining it
all was taxing on Amos. The leader of the resistance was, after all, an old
man—regardless of the fact that he’d been born four years after Jed.

“There was a war that broke
out,” Amos began. “Shortly after you left for New Pennsylvania. We all call it
the Second Transport War. In fact, it was breaking out in Oklahoma even as you
were boarding your ship.” Amos put both hands in his pockets and rocked back on
his heels. “The war was confusing at first. There were a lot of factions.
Eventually foreign governments got involved. It got ugly fast.”

“A World War?” Jed asked.

“In a way,” Amos said. “And in
that war, several major cities not far from the Amish Zone on Earth were
destroyed. Most of Columbia, Pennsylvania was destroyed as well. That’s the
city from which you embarked on your journey, and the same city where you
landed when you arrived in New Pennsylvania. Now,” Amos raised up an old,
wrinkled hand, “not all of Columbia was destroyed. Luckily for you—and for all
of us—the Transport Station in Columbia survived. But most of the city became a
huge pile of rubble. And with all these cities reduced to nothing but bricks
and rocks and ashes, someone decided that all of the rubble—the shattered
structures, the concrete; the bricks, rebar, and wiring that make up a modern
metropolis—should be hauled off.”