Pennsylvania Omnibus (36 page)

Jed could see it all happening
in his mind’s eye. But just in case he couldn’t, Amos brought up a white
screen, and a video began to play on it. It showed enormous pieces of
construction equipment clearing away the remains of a city.

Amos pointed with his finger.
“All of that debris went to build—”

“—the Great Wall,” Jed
interrupted.

Amos sighed deeply and began to
pace as he talked. “Yes. At some point, the decision was made by Transport to
construct a wall around the Amish Zone.”

The video screen began to show
images of the wall being constructed. “Many reasons were given for the
construction of the wall. Some said it was to protect the Amish from the war,
and from the refugees who flooded the AZ after the destruction of the cities.
Those were very real problems that needed to be addressed. Some said that the
wall was designed to keep the Amish from openly trading with the rebels.” Amos
had a sad look of chagrin on his face. “This was also a very real issue, I must
admit.” He flipped his hand as if indicating some imaginary other group. “Still
others—the more conspiracy-minded among us—believed that the plan all along had
been to intentionally… How should I say this?” He made a flipping motion with
his fingers, like he was turning on a light. “Transport… the AZ to New
Pennsylvania.”

Jed was confused. “But there
was already an AZ in New Pennsylvania before I even went through the emigration
process,” Jed said. “I saw pictures.”

“That’s right,” Amos said.

“Which was before the war
started.”

“That’s right. Think back on
those pictures, Jed,” Amos said. “Did they look anything like the Amish Zone
you found when you arrived here?”

Jed closed his eyes and tried
to access that part of his memory. “Well, now that you mention it,” Jed said,
“the brochures mentioned that the AZ in New Pennsylvania was still a tiny
village. It never mentioned a wall at all.”

“Over thirty-five thousand
miles
of copper cable and wiring—debris from destroyed cities—was laid
out in the construction of the wall. All the power lines, wire, and cable that
existed in several major metropolises near the AZ. Not to mention all the steel
rebar, re-mesh, and reinforcing materials that existed in the piles of
rubble.”

“What does that have to do with
anything?” Jed asked.

“It has everything to do with
everything
,” Amos said. “Basically, the designers of the wall created
the world’s largest portal—a huge Faraday cage that could take an unprecedented
burst of pure energy and cycle it through the walls.”

Jed narrowed his eyes and
chewed on his lip. He took a step closer and stared at the video screen. “You
say ‘energy.’ By that do you mean
electricity
?”

“Everyone still uses the term
‘electricity’ to explain the energy that is produced by okcillium, but strictly
speaking, it’s not electricity at all. It is a whole new thing altogether. It’s
like the English using the term ‘horsepower’ to describe the locomotive force
produced by their automobiles. It is something people understand because when
the term was coined it hearkened back to what they used to know. But it is not
strictly accurate.”

Jed nodded. “So okcillium
produces an enormous amount of energy, right? Enough to fundamentally affect
the physics around us?”

“It does,” Amos said.

“To bend time?” Jed asked.

“Yes,” Amos said. “To bend
time.” He brought up the image of a large coil of cables suspended in the
center of what looked to be a laboratory. “The first okcillium portals were
very simple and small-scale. How the scientists figured out that there was a
where
—a real location, even if they didn’t know where the
where
was—where all of the stuff that disappeared through this portal was going, is a
story in itself. Books could be written on the experiments that happened in a
very short window of time.”

“‘Window of time,’” Jed said
and smiled. “Very clever.”'

“Unintentionally so,” Amos said
with a dismissive wave. “Through trial and error, and a whole lot of math, the
people running the experiments were able to—in a general way—control the
process, and even came up with a way to send a human through the portal and
bring them back. They didn’t really go anywhere. It was time that moved, not
them… but that’s a lecture for another day. Anyway, within a few years the
phenomenon had been perfected, and Transport had the okcillium portal built
into the Transport Station at Columbia. The emigration system—the whole
process—was really an elaborate ruse designed to colonize New Pennsylvania
while leaving the rebellion and all elements of TRACE behind.”

“Wow,” Jed said.

“Yes. Wow. They hoped to steal
away with millions of potential slaves, and leave the rebellion behind on a
planet they’d ruined.”

“So they… they… took the
whole
AZ?”

Amos nodded. “Of course, at the
beginning they were just taking people, like you and hundreds of others. They’d
built in the nine-year delay to explain away the distance traveled and so
forth. But as the war heated up, they changed their plan. They took the whole
AZ, and all at one time.”

“Unbelievable!” Jed said.

“All it required was a
low-yield okcillium explosion, perfectly placed and timed, to send the whole
Zone away… into the future. Or, if you prefer, into another dimension.”

“That sounds impossible,” Jed
said.

“With all prior technologies,
it was,” Amos said. “And frankly, they didn’t know it would work. A lot of good
Amish folk died in the translation. Including…” He trailed off.

“Our parents.”

Amos couldn’t answer. He just
nodded. Both men were silent, and the old man wiped away a tear. After a long
period of quiet reflection, Amos continued. “There were a lot of fires… I…
can’t even think about it without…”

Jed nodded. “I understand.”

Amos gathered himself and
cleared his throat. “But okcillium changed everything. It allowed for a
shocking amount of power to be transmitted down wires and through metals
without it creating much heat or resistance. You know that when electricity
flows through a coil of wires it produces electromagnetism, right?”

Jed shrugged. “I guess. But I
never really thought about it.”

“In effect,” Amos said,
“Transport did the same thing. Only with the astronomical amount of energy
produced by okcillium, the process created enough gravitational disruption to
transport the entire Amish Zone.”

“So…
where
did it go?”
Jed asked.

“The Amish Zone? Well, in a way
it went here, to New Pennsylvania. It became part of the reality of this new
place.”

“In a way?”

“My scientist friends tell me
it never went anywhere. Einstein, they say, talked of time as if it were a
long, lazy, meandering river, and said that everything along that river of time
always existed at that place. We
perceive
time as passing because we are
traveling along with the river. But if we could go back up the river, we would
find that everything that has ever happened is
still happening
back
where we’d been. So, in this sense, the Amish Zone never went anywhere. The
Zone stayed in place. The time around it changed. In essence, you could say
that the zone just changed epochs or dimensions, but in reality it never
moved.”

Jed’s mind spun. “And New
Pennsylvania is the Earth in the future?”

Amos laughed. “Well, that’s the
joke of the thing, brother. We don’t know for sure.” Amos threw his hands up as
if his guess was as good as anyone’s. “No one does. We think so. Much of the
old world was still present in the new one. Basements in Columbia were still
intact when New Pennsylvania first began to be explored. You just recently saw
the foundations and ‘tells’ of our old farm. In some ways it was as if the
community was just transported forward in time. New Pennsylvania was very much
like the Earth… but in the future.”

Jed had a pensive look on his
face, and he narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Very much like?” He said. “But
in some ways it was different?”

“In some ways it was remarkably
different,” Amos said. “The Great Shelf, for example. The geography of the
planet is fundamentally changed in a lot of ways. So it’s like I said… very
much alike, but also changed. The Great Shelf looks as though the New Madrid
fault, running through the Midwest, suffered a massive, world-changing
earthquake that elevated the land to the west of it, and created the massive
cliffs we call the Shelf. That event would have changed the makeup of the
continent forever.” Amos looked at Jed, scanning him to see if the young man
believed what he was being told. “The Mississippi River, for another example,
isn’t there anymore.”

“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.”