“What if something bad happens to the ship along the way? What if it crashes or you die?”
“What if we were both struck by lightning right here in this field? Everyone dies, Amos. Zoe might’ve kicked either one of us in the head just now, and it would be over—just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Well, I think taking a spaceship to another galaxy is a little more dangerous than milking Zoe, brother.”
“Maybe, but we wouldn’t be here milking Zoe if our ancestors hadn’t braved the voyage to a new world. They came to escape religious bigotry and persecution, and to find new lands to farm. That’s the same reason I’m going to New Pennsylvania.”
“Are you all ready to go?”
“I am. They don’t let you take much, so I don’t have to pack. Basically you get there with what you’re wearing and not much more. They expect me to buy everything new when I arrive. That’s why I’ve been saving money.”
“And you won’t change your mind?”
“I will not.”
“Okay, brother. Then I’ll come after you. Four more years and I’ll be old enough. Besides, I’d like to see Matthias again. It’s been a year since he emigrated. It’s funny to think that he’s been gone a year and he’s not even there yet. It’ll be nice to see him again.”
Jed smiled and popped his brother’s hat up, then pushed it back down on his head. “Well, we’d better go eat. The airbus will be here in an hour.”
* * *
It was hard to say goodbye to his mother and father. They both masked their emotions as much as they could and smiled a lot, but he knew his mother wanted to cry because her eyes were damp and sparkled when the light hit them just right. Abraham Troyer, his father, shook his hand firmly, and then they all prayed together before Jed walked up the long drive to where the airbus would pick him up.
As he walked up, he thought about the journey, and what might lie before him. Jed couldn’t help but think about the Plain People who had first come to America to farm and tame the wilds of this Pennsylvania. When he reached the last bend in the drive, he turned slowly to look back at the farm, and his boots crunched the gravel as he rotated. A soft spring gust blew up through the paddock and past the split-rail fence, and it jostled the felt brim of his hat. The breeze carried the fragrance of foxglove and touch-me-not growing wild just outside the fence of the paddock, and the mingled scents—of the wildflowers, of soil, of horse manure and moist grass—framed for his memory the smell of home.
He froze for a moment when he saw the barn. That beautiful old barn. It had been the center of his life for most of his eighteen years. It was made of heavy stone two-thirds of the way up its height and then solid beams the rest of the way. The barn was more than two centuries old, and Jed knew that unless something bad happened to it, it would be standing there two hundred years hence. This Amish barn was constructed back when people built things with the future in mind. Back when people—even the English—thought about the generations to come, and built with the intention of blessing them. There was permanence to the Troyers’ old barn. In Jed’s mind it stood like a covenant between the ancestors and their progeny. In its Old World style it declared to the temporary society and impermanent culture around it that there had once been another way to live. Strangers in buses liked to tour these country roads just to see the old farms and barns and the Plain People going about their work in the fields. This old barn was definitely a favorite for the tourists due to its classical Amish design, but the structure did have one blemish.
He saw it up there near the top, on the window in the gabled end. The bottom-right pane of glass that wasn’t there. Jed had broken it accidentally with his slingshot four years ago. He’d been about Amos’s age when it happened, and his father had ordered him to “fix it.” So he’d fixed it, all right. What did a fourteen-year-old child know about fixing a window?
He’d found a coffee can—red with white printing, the old-timey kind—and had cut the can until he could stomp it flat. Measuring it out perfectly, he’d carefully snipped the can with metal shears until it fit where the glass pane had been; and now, there it was still, four years later. He’d expected his father to complain about it and to order a new pane of glass for the window, but for some reason the old patriarch thought that the whole thing was terribly funny. He laughed every time he looked up and saw it. He’d slap Jed on the shoulder and say, “Well, boy, your coffee can is staring down on us!”
He turned to finish his walk to the airbus stop. Maybe that coffee-can windowpane is part of the covenant too, he thought. Maybe in a hundred years, that coffee can will still be staring down from the height of the barn as a way of telling the world that it can change all it wants to, but, down deep, the people who live in this place will never change.
Chapter 2
Departure
The airbus picked him up right on time. Leaving his family was tough, but he’d been raised to be practical, and was not as sentimental as other people he’d heard about… as the English. He loved his parents very much, and he couldn’t yet imagine or fully grasp that he would never see them again, but they all believed in heaven, and Jed’s father had told him that the same God who ran the earth also ran every other planet too, so he did have hope that they’d all meet again someday.
Amos would be following on behind him… he hoped. Jed worried that perhaps his little brother had been spoiled a little too much; that he might be overly emotional and unable to see the greater good in emigration and colonization. The younger boy wasn’t as learned in the nuances and eccentricities of Amish history as his older brother. Amos couldn’t imagine a sailing ship, but then, neither could any of the Plain People who’d fled Europe for the New World. Their hesitancy to embrace technology did not mean that they would avoid it to their own detriment. The forefathers boarded great ships that, to them, were every bit as odd and scary as this airbus, and they had crossed the seas to start anew in a wild and untamed land. There was nothing new under the sun.
The airbus flew smoothly and silently, and even the buffeting of the wind against the cabin was silenced by a system that emitted a type of white noise that altogether contradicted and eliminated the sounds of air travel. That was one thing that Jed appreciated about the airbus: the quiet of it. He’d only flown a few times before, and the silence of flight made it somewhat magical and surreal to him—a lot different than riding into New Holland being pulled in the buckboard by Reba and Jesse.
There was that one time he’d gone with his father to Cruville to bid on some land. They’d lost the bid, but that was the first time he’d flown on an airbus. Another time was when he and his father flew to Richmond for the hearings on whether the Plain People were going to be forced to get TRIDs. That was a trip that ended with a positive outcome. As a result of the Richmond Ruling, there were now two distinct airbus systems: one that operated within the AZ and served the Plain People; and another for the English.
This was a Plain People airbus, and in it, the Plain People could travel anywhere in the AZ without papers. There were four AZs in the North American Union, and Plain airbuses traveled between them non-stop. These buses didn’t require TRIDs, either. The Plain People weren’t marked with biometric TRIDs like the English were; the Richmond Ruling had seen to that.