Pennsylvania Omnibus (32 page)

He came to a
stop and hovered in space, just studying it all awhile, reveling in the same
beauty that had made Amish communities the target of tourism for hundreds of
years. After a bit of reflection, Jed took a few deep breaths and then brought
up his BICE control interface. He examined the file drawers for a moment.

He tried
unsuccessfully to bring up Dawn’s avatar, but wasn’t surprised by that; he was
starting to suspect that her BICE had somehow been removed or turned off while
she was being held by the Yoders. He regretted now that he hadn’t cleared up
that little mystery with Dawn before setting her up in his bedroom for the
night. When he’d told her goodnight, she’d given him the bottle of Quadrille,
so he knew she expected him to get online. But if she’d planned on joining him
in cyberspace… well, he had no way of knowing.

Regardless,
Jed certainly wasn’t going to waste the whole night sleeping. He wanted to know
more about what was going on, and how he was being used by both his brother and
Transport. It was like he was being pulled in a single direction, but by two
diametrically opposed forces—if such a thing could be possible. He wanted to be
online, because he wanted to know more about this place, and what was happening
to him, and, at the same time, he wanted to find out why he was being used… why
his being online was so important to his brother.

He started
reading through the files again, repeating his process of hacking into
Transport’s system. He accessed the information on how Transport had determined
that they could mine okcillium from the road base back on Earth. It was all
right there in a memo sent to Transport command:

“We already
ripped up the roads the first time around, only for a different purpose. This
time, we’ll just put the road base material through a few more steps, and we
can extract the okcillium at the rate of ten grams per one hundred metric
tons.”

This
information perplexed Jed. If Transport hadn’t harvested the okcillium from the
road base the “first time around” (whatever that meant), and had only
subsequently learned that the okcillium was in the road base, then what did
that mean? That they went back to Earth to get it? 
So they went back in
time?

He’d always
liked puzzles, but this one seemed to be unsolvable. So he switched gears.
Rather than study events in time, why not study time itself? He searched for
anything he could find about the basis and science of time… and time travel. He
studied documents and reports from throughout written history. For the most
part, these papers were written in a style and manner that was completely over
his head. He couldn’t make head nor tail out of them. So he closed his eyes,
looked out into the universe above the Amish Zone, and tried to imagine what
time must
look
like. He tried visualizing many different concepts, but
every time he would encounter some flaw in his analogy. That is, until he
struck on the idea of thinking of time as a long string—or, rather, an immense
fabric made up of a large number of strings. This analogy wasn’t perfect, but
it held up better than any other he’d come up with.

He remembered
that as a boy his father had once told him that space was like an enormous
blanket, or carpet, which God had stretched into place starting from a single
point. Not like a blanket that swaddled the Earth like a baby, but more like an
unimaginably large fabric that stretched through nothingness and the void. And
the planet Earth was just one little element embedded in the fabric.

He’d seen
Amish women making fabric on looms, so he understood that process. And, he
thought, his own life had been like a journey along one of these threads. It
started at one point and had progressed “normally” in one direction. Even if
someone had tied a knot in the string (a concept he could understand), he’d
still only traveled forward, and never any other way.

Two ants
traveling on a string in this manner could have different journeys. An ant
walking along the top of a taut, straight string would never loop back to where
he’d already been. But another ant, perhaps walking along the bottom of the
same string, could detour around a loose, hanging knot or loop, circling back
to where he’d been before, while the ant on top of the thread kept right on
walking.

Now Jed
thought of an almost (but not quite) infinite number of threads—enough threads
to form a fabric containing everything that is. Any single thread in that
fabric could be crossed or looped at any point along any of the threads. This
thought process helped him get his bearings, even if it didn’t help him solve
any of his immediate problems.

As an Amish
man, Jed had never progressed beyond the eighth grade in his education. Amish
education existed mainly to prepare the plain people to deal with real-life
issues and challenges. Things like communication, simple work, fellowship,
humility, and submission were emphasized. For Amish men and women, education
and job training would go on for life, but the primary, community level of
education finished when one was about fourteen years old. Logic was learned by
solving real-life problems in real time.

Well
,
he thought.
Apparently, time travel has just become a real-life
issue
.

But Jed also
recognized that if an education beyond the eighth grade automatically helped in
solving time-travel problems, then probably a whole lot of the English would
already be bopping around time by now, and it didn’t seem like they were. So
maybe he didn’t need a public education. Maybe what he needed was just the
ability to think things through.

He wondered:
maybe some force had been applied to loop the thread of time back on itself. If
time is an immense fabric, then like fabric, it can be wrinkled, looped, or
folded. Jed remembered playing a game with Matthias where they would put a
heavy leather ball (a toy they called a “corner ball”) in a small baby’s
blanket, and then each of them would take two corners of the blanket. They’d
pull tight and rocket the corner ball into the air. Then, when the ball
descended, they would catch it in the blanket. As it came down with great
force, they would lessen the tension on the blanket, and the ball would push
the blanket down and curl the fabric back around on itself. From this loose
analogy, it seemed to Jed that bending time might be possible if only the one
wishing to do the bending could apply enough power, force, speed, or some such
expression of energy.

Bending the
fabric of time? That would take a lot of energy
, he thought.

It seemed
logical that the energy behind this time-bending force must be okcillium. He
didn’t even know what okcillium was or what it did, but he knew that it was a
unique and very efficient power source, and that both sides in the current war
were keen to have a lot of it. Perhaps some enterprising scientist working for
the government had been the first to use okcillium power to bend time?

Jed
immediately pulled up a file that discussed the attributes of okcillium. He had
dozens of documents to choose from, so he just pulled one randomly from the
cabinet and began to read. It was a paper done for a university back on Earth.
From what Jed could gather, okcillium was a completely new and different kind
of power source. And it was incredibly efficient; this fact was repeated over
and over again. Power generated by okcillium produced very little resistance as
it traveled through just about any material at all. That means it didn’t
produce a tremendous amount of heat, or a lot of noise either. A common piece
of copper electrical wire was sufficient to send enough power to light a small
town.

Here
,
he thought,
is enough energy to produce a bend or loop in the fabric of
time
. So somehow, during his travels, he’d been tossed forward in time. His
mind reeled at the thought of it.

He reflected
on his journey to New Pennsylvania. How Dawn had told him that he’d never
really ever gone to Texas. That apparently that part of the journey had been a
show—a sham—perhaps some government method used to track down rebels trying to
pass through time using Transport resources.

But then he’d
been released by the Transport Authority, put inside his pod, and prepped by
the woman whose job it was to monitor him on his trip. He remembered now that
the woman hooked a tube up to his catheter. That was supposed to be his
waste-processing system. Before now, he’d never considered that the catheter
might have been for some other purpose. He pressed his eyes closed and tried to
amplify his recollection of events. He remembered pushing the blue button, and
he recalled the almost immediate cool sensation of some liquid pulsing through
his veins. He remembered thinking that the cooling of his veins was odd, but
not unpleasant, and then he remembered being surprised to see Dawn in the pod
next to him, right before the lights went out for him.

Was it
possible that he’d been drugged just so that, while he took some strange loop
along the thread of time, he wouldn’t know what was happening? Could it be that
he’d never really left Columbia, Pennsylvania at all? That somehow he’d been
kept in suspended animation for some requisite time while he and the ship he
was in merely passed forward into another era?

Dawn
.
She said she’d been back and forth several times.

She knew Billy
and Pook and Ducky like they’d been friends forever. Yet she also knew Amos
from when they were both back on Earth, and Amos had contacted her and asked
her to travel with Jed to New Pennsylvania.

Then there was
the window with the coffee-can pane. That was easy enough to explain if the
window had come through the same portal. Maybe not at the same time, but who
knew? Pook had stored his forged papers in the back of the window frame.
No
way was that a coincidence
. Jed knew that his brother had intended for him
to see the window. When he’d mentioned as much to Amos, his brother had
smiled.

Jed’s thoughts
raced now.

Here’s what he
knew. He was either completely insane, or… well, he felt like he could safely
assume four things: 1. The Columbia Transport Station was (or contained) some
kind of okcillium time-bending device. 2. Transport, at some point, had figured
out how to perform this time bending, and was using it to colonize… what? Some
future Earth? Was he in the future? Was he still on Earth? 3. The limited
amount of okcillium available on Earth at the time meant that TRACE was forced
to use Transport’s travel portal. 4. The City was gone.

Also this:
Transport now had access to a large supply of okcillium back on Earth.
Conclusion?
Everything has changed.

This Council meeting was unlike
any the SOMA had experienced in all his years of leading TRACE. For the first
time,
his
leadership and decisions were being questioned—openly. His
natural fighting instinct inclined him to threaten to retire again. In the
past, that ploy had usually worked to get the council to back off—but with so
many pieces of the endgame finally in place, he was just a little afraid they
might actually accept his resignation this time, and move on without him. That
was a fear he’d never really experienced before in all his time as the supreme
commander of TRACE forces. And now, at long last, he had his brother in play,
and things were going so well in that regard.

Councilman Bennings stood and
placed both hands on the table. Bennings was a traditionally contrarian voice
on the council. Slow to move and difficult to convince. Amos was also convinced
that the man wanted power, and the sooner the better.

“Now that Transport has
retreated beyond the Shelf, why have they not moved against the Amish? Either
to take the Amish with them, or to destroy their community so that it cannot
exist to support and feed the resistance?” Bennings asked. “We’re all sure that
the government didn’t bring the Amish here in order to abandon them to us. So
why not destroy them?”

Bennings didn’t direct his
questions to anyone in particular, but all eyes turned to Amos anyway. He was
always expected to have all the answers.

“The only reason the Amish
haven’t been destroyed in the new world,” Amos replied, “is because they
produce raw materials from nothing—from the ground—and most of the new world
would starve without them.” He put his hands behind his back and began to pace
slowly back and forth before the giant screen that showed a map of the Amish
Zone.

“Colonization of the Great
Shelf has largely failed,” he continued. “Despite all of Transport’s schemes
and machinations, the big cities are still only lightly populated, and the
immigrants who have chosen to live there work for slave wages, earning unbacked
and inflated unis in the factories and service industries, to support
Transport’s imperial plans. The cities are not cities in any real sense of the
word. They are basically large factory prisons. Just because the prisoners
choose to remain there as some quirk of their makeup doesn’t make the prison
any less real.”

Bennings nodded. “These are all
things we know, Commander. But they don’t explain why Transport hasn’t yet
attacked the AZ.”

“It is the foundation of my
answer, Councilman,” Amos said. “If you’ll allow me to continue?”

Bennings nodded and waved his
hand, almost dismissively.

Amos resumed his speech.
“Transport’s hope has been that the population of the cities would
explode—through immigration
and
through natural population growth. The
government’s erroneous belief has been that where there’s a growing population,
eventually productivity will follow suit. The theory, as backward as we know it
to be, is that the more consumers there are, the more consumables can be
produced in the factories, and the better everyone will do. Of course, we know
that population growth does not just magically spawn productivity. Building
factories and stocking them full of people does not mystically produce either
raw materials
or
good ideas. But understanding Transport’s thinking
helps us to predict how they might act. For example, since they believe that
population equals production, and that city folk are more compliant and more
easily governed, we can expect that they are incentivizing births in the
cities. We were able to predict this even before we learned from our spies that
the city folk up on the shelf are encouraged to reproduce offspring wildly,
while country folk—if they are caught—are
punished
for having children,
unless they commit to having their children schooled by the government and
trained for city work.