Jed looked down at his boots, and then back up at Dawn. He was still holding her hand, so when he turned again he pulled her gently behind him.
“Let me show you something,” Jed said softly over his shoulder.
“What? Here? In the shop?”
“Yes, it’s back here where Pook kept his forgery papers.”
“Okay” was all that Dawn could manage to say as she let herself be pulled down a dark aisle and then back up another row that was dimly lit by lantern light.
When they were back in the little nook where Pook had removed the old relic from the wall, Jed pointed to the antique window that now rested against an old, dusty couch. Jed went down to a knee and reached out to touch the flattened coffee can that served as a replacement to a long-ago broken pane.
“This window frame came from the old barn on my farm. Back in Old Pennsylvania.”
Dawn stood quietly a while, and when Jed finally looked up at her, she was staring at him, as if she wasn’t sure what she should say.
“I broke this window pane with my slingshot when I was fourteen years old. I replaced the pane myself with this coffee can. I looked up at this window in the gabled end of our barn only days ago, when I was leaving to board the airbus to start this trip.”
“That wasn’t days ago, Jed.”
“I know. I know that. But at the most it was nine years ago, and that’s if the window frame made the trip with us on the ship, and I don’t believe that it did. It was here when we got here, and it was covered in a lot of dust. Something is wrong.”
“Maybe it’s another window and it just really looks like yours. Maybe you’re homesick, and you remember a window a lot like this one?” Dawn didn’t say these things as though she believed them. She said them as if she were offering them up as excuses… reasons to suspend disbelief for just a little while longer.
“No, Dawn.” He touched the metal replacement pane again. “This is what I know. This is the only thing I know in the whole universe right now. This is my work. It was a point of humor between my dad and me. I looked at it all the time. I put this can here.” His fingers traced the raised lettering on the flattened, ancient coffee can.
“There are a lot of things that I just can’t tell you yet, Jedediah.”
“Just tell me where I am, and what happened to my home.”
“Where… well, where is an interesting question. And I don’t mean to sound mysterious, or to put you off when you’re obviously concerned and maybe worried too, but the real question—and it’s another one that I can’t yet answer for you—isn’t where are you, but when.”
Jed looked up at Dawn, but his hand didn’t leave the metal can in the window frame.
“So answer it, then. When am I, Dawn?”
Dawn shook her head and tried to smile, though the smile came off more like a grimace than anything else.
“I can’t tell you that, Jed. I just can’t. Not yet. I would if I could, and you have to believe that. When you’re safe, and when I have leave to tell you, I’ll tell you everything I can. For now, we have to go join the others. We have work to do.”
With that, Dawn turned and walked back through the piles of ancient goods toward the basement of Merrill’s Antique Shoppe.
(9
OKCILLIUM
The basement beneath the shop was lit by a dozen lanterns scattered around the place, and the flickering, golden light revealed a cavernous room that looked as old as anything Jed had ever seen in the Amish Zone back on Earth. Older even. The dark red bricks that made up the walls appeared to be of the handmade variety, imperfect and inconsistent, adhered together with ancient, sandy gray mortar that here and there had dripped down over the brick faces in haphazard fashion. The construction looked to Jed to be from the turn of the twentieth century, and widely scattered mold and mildew stains marked the faces of the walls. Bags and boxes of old clothing and antique bits and pieces of the flotsam of time were scattered in dusty piles around the basement and stacked high against the brick walls—all except for the north wall, which had been cleared of the residue of these once-loved, but now forgotten, material possessions. The detritus of former lives.
Along that north wall, standing like a line of mechanical soldiers—or the shiny, stainless steel milking machines that Jed had seen once in a more liberal Amish neighbor’s barn—were ten complicated-looking machines. The cords from the machines ran along the base of the wall and were taped together where they terminated in an enormous plug the likes of which Jed had never seen.
Pook followed Jed’s gaze. “We can’t use grid power, even if the power were up right now. They track any anomalies in power usage very closely.”
“Anomalies,” Jed repeated, absentmindedly, as he stared at the machines.
“Freakin’ anomalies,” Jerry repeated with a smile on his face. He seemed to be enjoying the entire adventure immensely.
“We had a friend who was running a single one of these machines using grid power out in one of the suburbs of the City,” Pook said as he worked. “This was years ago. Anyway, they toasted the whole subdivision with a micro-nuke just to make sure they got him. Killed hundreds of people.”
“Who did that?” Jed asked. “Who would kill hundreds of people to get one person for using a machine?”
“Transport, that’s who,” Pook said through a barely disguised sneer.
“I don’t understand what using a machine has to do with Transport,” Jed said.
“Everything has to do with Transport,” Pook said, holding his right hand out in a clenched fist. He squeezed the fist as if he were crushing anything that could have fit into it. “For all intents and purposes, Transport is the government here, just like where you’re from. It all goes back to the founding of the United States and the misinterpretation and misuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause found in the Constitution of America. Through time, governments used that clause to rationalize that everything—especially in a global world with instantaneous communication and the blurring of state, national, and international lines, laws, and responsibilities—fell under Transport law. After the wars of the early twenty-first century and the globalization of the ‘war on terror,’ micromanaging Transport became the easiest way to control populations and govern human behavior.”
“That’s when private transport was outlawed,” Jerry said, nodding his head toward Jed.
“That’s right,” Pook said. He was preaching now. It was a sermon he’d given before, and Jed got the feeling that Pook was very much a preacher at heart.
“They had to do it, considering their goals. The purpose of government had morphed from its original goal into the solitary objective of maintaining an environment in which business could take place without fear and panic. Government became nothing more than a mechanism of control, because the free flow of dollars and the success of markets were the only things keeping the whole thing afloat. If mitigating panic is the national goal and purpose, then you have to control the where, when, what, and how of transportation. It’s a maxim. You have to take away the risk of someone attacking transportation and crippling the country. To make that process easier and less irritating for the public, you make public transport the only way to travel, and you streamline everything with implanted chips so everyone can flow through transport smoothly. You sell it as ‘homeland security,’ as an economic necessity, as ‘greening’ the planet. It’s a cure-all for a broken and desperately sad world.