On his way back, Ellis paused, just standing in the yard to witness the morning. Birds sang, frogs peeped, and a light breeze brushed the blades of grass. The brilliance of the sun pierced leaves, casting shafts of gold that splashed against the weathered boards of the barn. Ellis felt as if caught in a coffee commercial. A lovely middle-aged blonde wrapped in a homey cardigan sweater should appear behind him with a steaming cup and a life-loving smile. The breeze blew, and Ellis, dressed only in his T-shirt and pants, shivered. This was the difference between reality and replication. Hollow World presented a beautiful picture, a movie of sight and sound; the real world addressed all the senses, delivering the bad with the good.
Behind him the screen door slapped. The sound, hardly noticeable the night before, cracked offensively.
“Come with me, Ellis Rogers,” Bob said. The former Ved must have worked by candlelight the night before, because Ellis saw the new name stitched where the old one used to be. Bob carried four bright steel buckets, swaying them as they walked to the barn. “Ren teaches us that nothing is free. That everything is reached through hard work and self-reliance. The Maker is a cheat and a sin. It makes life too easy, and a pain-free life is not the way God intended His children to live.”
“You believe in God? You’re a Christian?”
“I’m working on it. I want to please Ren, but…” Bob looked troubled. “I’ve lived five hundred and twenty-eight years now, and it’s hard to believe in something that’s supposed to be so vital, and yet I’ve never heard of it before. Plus, a lot of the teachings center around an afterlife, but everyone in Hollow World lives forever. I’m still trying to make sense of it all and it’s hard with everything based on the word of just one person.”
“And a book.”
“Yes, the book. Have you read it?”
“Parts.”
“Ren reads to us in the evenings. He won’t let us use the holos. He’s read several books, and, honestly, so far I prefer the ones by Agatha Christie.” Bob looked up at the sky. “I still have problems believing in something I can’t see.”
“No one heard about germs before either,” Ellis said. “And most had to take their existence on faith. Scientists are sort of like priests that way.”
Bob nodded. “I see your point, but germs don’t demand our belief in them in order to save ourselves from eternal suffering, do they?”
“They do if you’re visiting a leper colony.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
“Besides, the ISP has made everyone in Hollow World immune to germs. And people don’t die anymore, so this whole idea of a better afterlife is just…well…silly.” Bob frowned.
“So why are you here?”
“To be special—to be like you and Ren. You’re just so—I want you to know how much I admire you. We all do. Ren explains that to be like you, we need to build character. Can’t be an individual without character. He says it’s through pain and struggle that we grow as people and become unique. We need to be rocks like the two of you instead of what we are, dandelion puffs blown in the wind.”
“Ren called you that?”
Bob smiled. “No—my own thought. Nice, don’t you think?”
“Very poetic.”
Bob threw the latch on the barn and pulled the big doors open. Inside was a dark, manure-scented cave defined only by white slices of light cutting between vertical boards. “Everyone needs to be responsible for themselves. No free rides. If you can’t cut it, you don’t deserve to live. It’s that simple.”
Ellis grinned, hearing Warren’s words spilling out of Bob’s mouth. In his head, Ellis imagined a giant clown getting out of a tiny car.
“Survival of the fittest,” Bob said. “That’s the Darwins’ creed, isn’t it?”
“That was Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection—which traditionally hasn’t coexisted all that comfortably with Christianity.”
Standing before the row of cows, Bob paused, looking at Ellis with a puzzled expression. “I don’t know about such things, but”—Bob held out the buckets—“Ren said you’d want to contribute for your breakfast.”
“Oh, right, of course. No free lunch.” Ellis smiled and took the pails. “You’ll need to show me.”
Ellis expected milking a cow would be a complicated thing. It always was in movies, but, then again, according to Hollywood grown men, who could build highways and clean out putrid city-sewer tunnels, couldn’t manage to change a baby’s diaper without rubber gloves and a gas mask. The process was remarkably easy once he formed a rhythm and was assured he wasn’t hurting the cow by tugging. The hardest part was avoiding the swish of the manure-coated tail while sitting on the little stool and holding the bucket between his knees.
Bob watched until satisfied that Ellis was doing okay, then went about feeding and watering the barn’s other residents.
“How long have you been here—at this farm?” Ellis asked over the jet of milk hitting the side of the pail.
“Little less than half a year.”
Ellis couldn’t see Bob, who was on the other side of the cow that had been introduced as Olivia. “And you like it better than Hollow World?”
“Oh—much!” Ellis heard the scrape of a shovel. “I didn’t think I would, and I didn’t at first. Life in the forest must have been hard. Only Ren could appreciate thatchallenge. Too advanced for the rest of us. But here it’s much—well, it’s a lot easier.”
“Don’t you find it boring? Even a little stupid—I mean, struggling when you don’t have to?”
“That’s the point. It’s unpleasant living here—especially when you don’t feel well and you have to go out in a cold rain. I’ll stand at the door sometimes just looking out and wonder what the bleez I’m doing. Then I force myself, and a funny thing happens. I get the work done, hating all of it, but afterward I feel great. I mean, I’m exhausted and filthy, but I know I did something. We call it Ren’s magic. It’s like a delectation that you can get all by yourself. You don’t need a device to feel pleasure, and the good feeling lasts for days. I never really felt that back in Hollow World. Nothing anyone does really seems to matter there. That’s another part of character building—a sense of pride.”
By the time Ellis finished filling the four buckets, he had sore hands, and, as inclined as he was to ridicule Warren’s patchwork of philosophies, he had to admit it did feel good to do something worth doing. Everyone in the house would appreciate the milk, and the cows appeared to appreciate being relieved of their bloat. In all his years of ten- and twelve-hour days filled with thousands of hours of meetings, he had never felt that sort of pride or accomplishment. Somewhere along the way people had traded the virtues of work for a steady paycheck.
“It makes the food taste better when you’ve a hand in making it,” Bob explained, picking up two of the pails and leading the way back to the house, each of them sloshing buckets of steaming milk.
Breakfast was better than dinner, consisting of unburned blueberry muffins and omelets. After the meal, Warren abandoned him and disappeared upstairs with Pol and Dex. Ellis didn’t mind; he didn’t know exactly when Pax would return and preferred they meet alone. He helped Yal with dishes, then walked out the front door and down Firestone Lane, figuring Pax would port in about where they had separated the day before.
What am I going to say?
Hig was out cutting hay, and Ellis marveled at the ingenuity of the mowing machine. Circling the field in a clockwise manner, the two big horses—Noah and Webster—pulled the device, which appeared to be little more than two big wagon wheels and a seat. A crankshaft and connecting rod transformed the rotary power of the axle into the reciprocating motion of the saw blade that sliced back and forth between triangle ledger plates as they combed through the grass. The whole thing was just a larger version of hair clippers, but what Ellis found fascinating was how it was powered by the rotating wheels. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise; he’d seen the same concept in a push lawn mower. This just worked so much better cutting a wide swath with each pass as Hig drove the horses from the seat between the wheels.