“But we are on Earth, right?” Jed said.
“That’s the thing,” Amos replied. “Everything mostly lines up with that theory. But it still… it still seems to be another Earth altogether. Like maybe we came to a parallel Earth, where subtle things are different.”
“Subtle things?” Jed said. His mind was racing back through the facts he knew, trying to make sense of this new information.
“Like the weather, for example,” Amos said. “The weather here is more stable and predictable, with fewer devastating storms. In the years the Amish have been here, the dates of the first and last freeze have been so consistent that they don’t even speak of those events in relation to ‘dates’ anymore. They predict the first and last freeze of the season to the closest hour!”
Jed just shook his head. He thought of all the times a late freeze had done damage to the fruit trees or to the gardens on the old farm.
“And there were very few humans on the planet when it was discovered… or re-discovered.”
Jed was taken aback. He shook his head, “Very few humans? So there were some?”
“Yes,” Amos said.
“Because I was told that the planet was devoid of intelligent life when the first explorers arrived here.”
“That’s not true,” Amos said. “There were the wild people. Your friend Eagles is one of them. These were indigenous people, or maybe humans who had reverted back to a more wild and natural kind of life. They didn’t come here through the portal. They lived through the time in between.”
“How many years was that?” Jed asked. “Because Dawn told me it’s now the year 2121. So it was like… I don’t know, fifty years?”
Amos grimaced.
“You said fifty-three years, Amos,” Jed said.
“I did say that, but it’s not… It’s just what we say. You don’t know, and nobody else does either,” Amos said. “The current year has been reckoned based on the differences in the ages of people who came through the portal at different times, and on estimations of the age of ruins and rubble found here when we got here.”
“Couldn’t we determine the year by looking at the stars and the locations of the planets?”
“That’s one of the problematic things,” Amos said. “Remember? I said that some subtle things were different? Well, that’s one of them.”
“The stars?”
“The stars. The planets. All the heavenly bodies,” Amos said. “Things just don’t add up.”
Jed was speechless. He stared at his brother, not sure exactly what he should be thinking or believing.
“Anyway,” Amos continued, “the indigenous people mostly lived in the wilderness, like the tribes in early America: warlike and highly intelligent. They’d developed their own very peculiar language that seemed to have its roots in our own English.”
Jed nodded his head. “The ‘salvagers,’ right?”
“There are a lot of names applied to them. The salvagers are just a subset. Others have established trading clans. Some of them live in the remote areas of the wastes and are very peaceful and pastoral—almost like they’re Amish. Our people get along very well with most of them.”
“And they speak a form of English?” Jed asked.
“It’s a strange thing, brother,” Amos said. “It’s a form of English, but if you listen very closely, you can almost hear an Amish foundation to it. In Old Pennsylvania, many of our people spoke a broken English that was a combination of Pennsylvania Deutsch and English, with a lot of made-up words thrown in here and there. The wild people have some hints of this in their own dialect.”
“So maybe they’re made up of people who left, or were kicked out of, the Amish communities.”
“This too,” Amos said, “lends credence to the theory that we’re in the future. But we can’t be certain. There are other theories that could also be true. We could be all the way across the universe, on another Earth that developed in parallel to our own. That one is tough for me to swallow, because I don’t know what intelligence had us land here instead of on any of the billions of planets that could never support human life… or in the middle of the vacuum of space where we would all have died instantly.
“So yes, we could be on the same planet on which we were born. That’s my prevailing theory. Or we could be on a different plane of existence altogether, as if this planet is right on top of the other one, only with each inhabiting different dimensions of space-time. We just don’t know. And for most of the Amish, this isn’t a question they spend too much time thinking about. They don’t reckon it’s profitable. To them, they left one place and ended up in another.”
Jed inhaled deeply, then exhaled. Amos was right: this was too much to take in all at once. “I want to learn all of this,” he said finally, “but maybe in a way that’s a little more spread out.”
“Now you see what I’ve been saying,” Amos said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
Jed paused, then broached a new subject. “Tell me about your plans against Transport.”
“I thought you were a man of peace.”
“I am,” Jed said.
“Then you have no need to know of my plans,” Amos said. “You have your BICE, and you can do your own research. I would appreciate one thing, though: if you do learn anything that will be of assistance in protecting and serving the people of New Pennsylvania, will you inform me?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Amos.”
For a long moment, there were no words. Then, when the silence became too heavy for either of them to lift, Amos spoke.
“I’m not asking you to fight, brother. I know you wouldn’t, and you’ve helped us enough already. I respect who you are and what you are, and I always will. I hope you know that. I’m just asking you to go be what the rest of us are fighting for. Maybe that’s something we can both get behind.”
(34
DIGGING IN
WEDNESDAY
On Wednesday, after the chores were done, two of the Amish elders showed up at Matthias’s farm to help with the next step of preparing for the barn-raising. These were the two men who had the most experience with these events, so they were put in charge of the construction of Matthias’s barn.
As part of the overall project, Matthias would also, eventually, be getting a springhouse. Just like Tom Hochstetler’s, the partially buried building would serve as a place for him to store his fresh milk until it could be delivered or processed into another product. The springhouse wouldn’t be built on Saturday, but the hole for the project was going to be dug now. It was really the dirt from the hole that they needed immediately, in order to bank the barn—the hole for the future springhouse was just an additional benefit.
A banked barn is a handy thing, because it means that the barn (usually) is built into a hillside. Having the barn built into the side of a hill means that the upper level of the barn is reachable directly by vehicle. So rather than lift heavy hay bales or other weighty items using a block and tackle, the farmer can haul these items into the barn directly from a wagon or other conveyance, which can be pulled up to—even backed into—the barn from the upper level. Hay or other crops can be easily stored upstairs, and then, as needed, dropped through a great opening in the middle of the barn to the animals—who, in the wintertime, are housed in the lower level.