Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  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.

  Of course, if any passenger was heading out of the AZ, by law they had to stop at the Columbia checkpoint and get papers. And on any bus that stopped or took on passengers outside the Amish Zone, the Plain People had to have their papers with them at all times. If not, things would get bad for them.

  -o0o-

  Columbia was just like Jed remembered it. The hustle and bustle was disconcerting, and the city buzzed with a strange mixture of Plain People and the English. It was a place where two cultures met, and it was the last checkpoint for anyone traveling into or out of the Amish Zone.

  The Transport station at Columbia ran smoothly and efficiently. Travel had been streamlined a lot since the wars. In general, people were more docile. Most of them were on the drug Quadrille and stayed online anytime they weren’t actually standing in front of a government official; and those who weren’t on the new drug, and who weren’t online, had learned that resistance and misbehavior didn’t pay. No one wanted to get sent to Oklahoma, and that was exactly what would happen to you if you got out of line anytime during transport.

  The Amish travel advisor had warned Jed numerous times not to “mess up” during transport. Private transport had been almost uniformly outlawed since the end of the wars, and transport law was now rigid, inflexible, and merciless. The Transport Police were feared like no one else in the society.

  Jed got in line for his papers, and there were only a dozen or so other Plain People in front of him. The English all had implanted TRIDs, and they just flowed through ticketing and security without having to stop at all.

  When he reached the front of the line, Jed presented his emigration papers without saying a word. The customs worker, a pretty young woman, glanced through them with disinterest before stamping each of them with a transport code. Next, the woman smiled at him as she reached over and yanked out a few strands of his hair—without warning him—and placed them into a small glass tube, which she then filled with a bluish liquid. She asked him to roll up his sleeve, and she took a skin sample by scraping the dry skin on his elbow with a sharp tool. She caught the flakes of skin in a second tube which was also filled with a blue liquid. He was asked to look into some kind of eye machine, and there was a flash. Whatever the eye thing was (she didn’t explain), Jed knew that Transport was permitted to take material from the Plain People, but they couldn’t implant anything. No invasive procedures were allowed. The Richmond Ruling was ironclad and court-tested, and the Plain People had won their right, on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs, not to be implanted with any identifying devices or markers. Jed figured that the eye scan was some way of identifying him biometrically, much like the hair and skin samples. No one messed with fingerprints anymore. Those had become too easy to fake.

  Other than politely barked instructions, the pretty customs lady made no idle chit-chat. A couple of times she looked up with just her eyes, as if she was sizing him up, but other than that she was going through her checklist almost robotically. She slid the two blue tubes and something in the form of a small plastic chip into a hard rubberized band and slid the band over Jed’s left hand, securing it on his wrist. Then she forced his hand into another machine, and he felt the band tig
hten on his wrist in a way that made it seem like it had been permanently attached, even while he could still feel that it didn’t hinder the flow of blood to his hand. Strange.

  “Unilets?” the woman said with a smile. Not really a question, more of a statement. She stepped out from behind the computer desk for a moment, and as she did he saw her name tag. Dawn.

  It took Jed a moment to understand what Dawn was asking. Money. The English now paid one another in unis, and his money had been converted for him when he’d picked up his approval papers. Unilets were originally designed to be a fair representation of time worked. Back when they were first introduced, after the wars, there was some computer algorithm that supposedly determined the value of unis day by day. Eventually, the original idea of unilets as a form of straight trade or barter of human work hours had been dropped, as everyone knew they would be co-opted by governments and banks.

  Jed knew a lot about unis because the Plain People had considered accepting the currency early on, back when the new money system was just called LETS. The LETS were initially designed to be a local trade and barter system, and that was something Jed’s community could really appreciate. But the “wait and see” attitude of the Plain People had paid off once again. It didn’t take long before LETS were changed to unilets, and the Plain People chose not to participate in the system. Unilets were not accepted as money anywhere in the AZs.

  Jed pulled the plastic card from the front pocket of his vest and handed it to the customs woman. She thanked him and waved the card in front of the monitor on her computer, and then she looked back and forth between his face and whatever now appeared on the screen. She sat staring at the computer for several minutes as if she were frozen in place. She didn’t press any keys, and her eyes didn’t scan back and forth like she was reading. She just stared blankly for a very long time.

  Jed wondered if Dawn was on the Internet in her head. He didn’t know what else to call it. He wasn’t even really sure what an “Internet” was, except that it was how the English did everything on computers. Now they had some way to get this Internet in their head, and he’d seen the far-off, blank gaze in the faces of tourists before.

  After what seemed to be an interminable wait, the customs woman stuck his plastic card into a slot and did some procedure on the computer, typing furiously for a few seconds. Satisfied at last that everything was good and ready to go, she again grabbed his wrist—the one with the black band on it—and flipped it over so it was facing her. She took the card out of the computer and touched it against the armband. A light blinked on the band, which apparently convinced the woman that his unilets were now resident on his band. She then let his wrist down onto the desktop and stared at the computer for a few more seconds.

  “Yep,” she said. “You’re good to go now. Do you know how to use the band to buy things?

  “Not really, ma’am.”

  She smiled, and for the first time it was like a light went on in her mind that indicated to her that she was dealing with a real human. He smiled back, and he noticed that she even blushed a little. Maybe he did, too.

  “Okay, well, the band has your unis in it,” she said. “Place the wrist portion against or near a charging station and the amount indicated on the charging window will be deducted from your total … got it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Any other questions?”

  “Well … yes. Couldn’t somebody steal this plastic band and make off with all of my money … or, er … um … my unilets?”

  “Nothing to worry about, sir. We’ve solved those problems long ago. The band can only be used when it’s touching your body, and only while you’re alive.” She nodded like this last part should make him feel more comfortable about carrying all of his money on his wrist. “The unique identifiers are digitized now, and the charging stations will scan your eyes and other biometric identifiers automatically to make sure it’s you that’s making the purchase and that you’re not under duress. So it’s totally safe. You have nothing to be concerned about, okay?”

  “Okay.” It was all Jed could think of to say.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just … well … thank you, Dawn. Thank you very much, and … where do I catch the airbus for the next leg of the trip to New Pennsylvania?”

  Dawn smiled again. This time there was another look in her eye. It was a far-off look that he couldn’t rightly quantify. Perhaps it was sadness, or maybe she felt sorry for him. He really wasn’t good at trying to figure out the motivations of the English, but she paused for just a moment, as if a thought, previously unconsidered, passed through her mind. Her smile tightened and she blinked before answering, and all of her mannerisms taken together gave him a weird feeling in his stomach.

  “Make a right directly at the end of this counter. Down at the end of the concourse, turn to your left. Then to the end of that walkway and you’ll be at Gate 13. Okay?”

  “Okay. And thanks.”

  “No problem. Have a safe and prosperous trip, Jed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jed looked into her eyes one more time before he turned to leave, and again he saw a hint of sadness there, as if she were saying, “After you are all gone, what will become of us?” But maybe he was projecting his own thoughts into a woman who might not even really care.

  -o0o-

  There was a vending machine at Gate 13 that purportedly served food, but Jed had learned in his few journeys among the English that the term “food” could only be loosely applied to whatever came out of a machine. He was hungry though, and the brochure plainly instructed pilgrims to eat before boarding the airbus to the SGT station out in West Texas. There would be no food for nine years once he boarded this airbus! He thought about that for a moment and shook his head. To think, this machine food was going to be his last meal. Ech!

  He selected a sandwich and a bowl of chicken soup, and noted that the two items would cost him a total of two thousand unis. Two thousand unis! For soup and a sandwich! It was difficult for him to do the conversion in his head, but he was pretty sure he could buy a new pair of work shoes for the equivalent of two thousand unis. He couldn’t find anything that was remarkably cheaper, so he tapped his wrist against the charging station on the right side of the glass, and the machine whirred into motion. As he leaned over to pull his meal tray from the slot in the machine, he noticed the computer screen above the slot.

  Your charge: 2,000 Unilets

  Your balance: 598,000 Unilets

  598,000 Unilets! Wait a minute. That’s way too much. Something is wrong.

  He tried to recall how the money system worked. After converting his AZ money into unis when he’d first picked up his transport orders, he’d had two hundred thousand unis for his trip. That was all. Two hundred thousand unis. No more. That was how much he’d brought with him. Now, for some reason, his uni account had just tripled! Maybe something is wrong with the machine. He looked up at the screen again, then glanced all around. His face flushed with embarrassment. He felt guilty for some reason, like maybe he’d stolen the extra unis. Balancing the tray with his right hand, he looked at his wristband to see if there was any readout that might tell him how many unis he really had. There was none … at least there wasn’t one that he knew about. He looked around again, and now he felt panic rise up in him; his heart began to beat faster. He felt sweat building up on his brow, and just as he turned around again, he saw Dawn walking quickly toward him.

  She wasn’t smiling.

  CHAPTER 3: En Route

  Most Plain People are used to feeling guilty when they’ve done nothing wrong. It’s part of the physiology and culture of being different. Usually this feeling only creeps up on them when they’re out among the English. There was something in the way the English looked at them that conveyed a sense of accusation. Even when tourists were smiling and pointing and saying “How cute!” and asking for pictures, or snapping them anyway while pretending not to, there was always a subtle covetousn
ess in the way the English looked at the Plain People. Maybe it was something around the eyes, but the gist of it was that somehow life had been unfair, or maybe the Plain People had done some great wrong to have to live an unadorned life of simplicity. The whole thing was an insoluble enigma. Even though the English man or woman may not want to be plain—wouldn’t change places even if they could—there was still the communication of some want, or need … or blame that made the Plain People cringe inside. An elder had once called it “a criminal charge that comes through without words.”

  Seated in the airbus, Jed was attuned to this feeling of guilt. The situation with Dawn and the extra unis was troubling enough, but now he was on an English airbus by himself for the first time, and the looks and stares from many of the English brought back that oppressive feeling of guilt that Jed could not explain, even to himself. The passengers who were on Quadrille or lost on the Internet in their minds didn’t pay him much heed. Others, not on the drug and not busy online, stared openly or secretly, usually one or the other, and always there was the wordless accusation … or maybe it was just a question … why?

  One man with slicked-back hair—a young man Jed did not know and had never met—openly showed his disdain for Jed. Slicked-back had a sneer on his face, and whenever he caught Jed’s eye (which Jed studiously tried to avoid) he’d emphasize the sneer and demonstrably look Jed up and down with disgust. There was hatred in Slicked-back’s eyes, and this was not the first time that Jed had seen this attitude among the English. It made matters worse that seats on an airbus were arranged like those on an old subway, with passengers facing one another across an aisle. Slicked-back was across the aisle from him, but one seat over and to his right. Jed decided not to look at him, and he thought back to the incident with Dawn.

  Back at the vending machine, when he’d been trying to grasp what was happening with the extra unis, the customs clerk named Dawn had approached him in a way that caused him to experience very real fear. Had he done something wrong?