Plato’s Cave During the Slicer Wars
And Other Short Stories
By
Terri Kouba
Copyright © 2011 Terri Kouba
All rights reserved.
Smashwords edition
ISBN-13: 978-1456532444
ISBN-10: 1456532448
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Table of Contents
Plato’s Cave During the Slicer Wars
The Devil Dwells in a Red House
To Wear Your Grief Upon Your Sleeve
Plato’s Cave During the Slicer Wars
The first time I laid my Irish eyes upon Plato’s Cave, I was half starved, the bullet wound in my leg was infected and everything was seen through the orange haze of pain. I remembered they carried me through the entry tunnels on a gurney; it must have been one of theirs because we didn’t have any left in the caravan. Everything else is lost to the clouds of pain and the lost memories have been replaced by the thousands of times I have walked through the welcoming entrance to Plato’s Cave since that day.
It is a sight to behold. A fortified castle on the coast of the Aegean Sea, near what used to be Thessaloniki, in the shadow of Mount Olympus. I have been told my eyes are the color of the Aegean Sea but I do not believe it. The Aegean Sea has not one color; it has every color. White sun sparkles off a blue sea reflected in a blue sky reflected in a blue sea in a continuous circling dance of the gods.
Slate grey waves crash upon yellowed stones during storms that once pushed Odysseus past these shores. Dolphins splash in the green azure of its tepid waters. During the gloaming it is the color of dark wine, spilt by careless gods. During the algae blooms the sea turns red and against the pink clouds of a setting sun it looks like the inside of a fig, freshly picked off a fig tree.
But that is now. When I first arrived at Plato’s Cave, the Aegean Sea, like the entire world during the Slicer Wars, had no color. All we had was pain and fear and death.
As I write this, fear pounds against the walls I have built to hold back the memories of those days. I want to record them, to tell you, my children, what we have done, what it was like during the Slicer Wars, but I fear you will condemn us for our mistakes. I fear that you will read these words and think of all the things you would have done differently, knowing what you now know.
You know the facts of how the Slicers were created, how they killed so many, how humans and animals barely survived. You read the facts and will not hear our confusion, our fears, our intentions.
Do not be deceived by the words, by the facts. They hold little meaning in and of themselves. The meaning comes when you turn away from the facts, when you turn away from the shadows against the wall and see the things that cast the shadows.
The fears I face now, though, are translucent apparitions compared to those liquid metal fears I faced in my youth. My fears today are like the sounds of bat wings in the corners of my mind, whispered reminders of my failures and follies. The sounds of the Slicer’s wings, though, even today the memory of that sound fills me with terror that crushes my lungs and dulls my eyesight. Those sounds whir in my ears, those fears pound in my head, but for you, my children, I will once again confront my fears so you can hear the words and learn the meaning behind them. Beware, though. Do not write the words on your hearts, my children. The words themselves are illusions. Their meaning is reality.
The first time I saw Marla was three days after I arrived at Plato’s Cave suffering the woes of an infection fever. I won’t tell you of my young days other than to say that from the age of ten to thirty were difficult. They were more difficult than you can imagine and more difficult than I would ever want to tell you. Mankind had descended into that beastly state where might makes right, where the strong took from the weak and let me just say that my father and I were weak. We were physically weak, but in the end, we learned we were stronger than most others in the ways that truly mattered.
Marla had come to welcome me to Plato’s Cave. They had removed the bullet in my leg and given me medicine the day I arrived. My fever broke the next day and I slept for twenty hours. When I woke, she was there with the sweetest tasting water. I have never known anything to taste as divine before or since.
She had come to speak with my father. He was the lead scientist in our caravan, but he would not leave my side until I woke and so she came to him. She came to him. That was her way. She was called many things. Marla the Magnificent by those who studied her outstanding science. Marla the Miracle-worker by those who directly benefited from her technology but didn’t understand it. Marla the Monster by those who felt her unerring, steely gaze. She has become a legend, something larger than she really was.
If I strip away all the legend, all of the accomplishments, all the fame, she was, under it all, average. She was an average woman, of average height and average beauty who was thrust into horrific circumstances and, when everything else fell away, she was better than the best of all who remained.
I often wonder what would have happened had the Slicers been more discriminating. Slicers gorged on flesh good and bad alike. They killed sweet grandmothers as quickly and easily as they killed murdering thieves. They made no distinction between the positive and negative forces in a society. If they had killed only the bad people, only those who broke our laws and were users of society, rather than benefiters of society, I don’t think we would have wiped the Slicers off the planet. I think we would have justified their existence by convincing ourselves that our society was better off without those who were dragging us down.
But then my musings bring me to the question of, if everyone in society is “good” and we are only good or bad when compared to each other, who would be the “bad” people? Would all “bad” people be eliminated until there was only one human being left alive, only one person without others to compare against and deem good or bad?
Marla was good. She was the best we had in those days. She will continue to be the best for many generations to come. Eventually, though, someone will be smarter than she, for she was, after all, just average.
She was an average scientist, an average thinker, thrust into circumstances that no one in their most horrific nightmares could have dreamt of, and she shined. She rose above her circumstances to save not only herself but all of humanity. She is the reason why all of you are here today.
Through it all, though, she retained her modesty, which is why she came to my see my father instead of demanding that he come to see her. She could have, you know. She was that important. She was the reason why we came to Plato’s Cave. Of course, we didn’t know that then, not yet. It wasn’t until later that we realized that she was the savior of mankind.
At the time all I knew was waking up in a bed. A bed! I hadn’t slept in a bed, a real bed, with down pillows and soft, clean sheets and warm wool blankets for twenty years. The Slicers came when I was ten. My father and I hid from the Slicers in an underground military bunker in Ireland for fifteen years. We spent five years in a caravan travelling from Ireland to Greece, to Plato’s Cave. To the sanctuary. To the place where my head rested on a soft, downy pillow.
She leaned over me, looked into my Irish eyes and smiled.
“Sweetie, we’re so glad you’re awake.”
Her voice jarred my ears and I thought my hearing had been damaged.
She slipped her hand behind my neck and lifted my head slightly so I could drink from the wooden cup she held before me. The water was cool as it ran down my parched throat. And it was clean. I could taste that it was clean, clear water. I had been drinking muddied water for so long that I had forgotten that this is what water was supposed to taste like. Not laden with salt or heavy with a mineral after-taste or full of silt that gritted in my teeth. That’s when I knew that we were someplace different, someplace special. I don’t think the others knew it then. They didn’t figure it out until a few months later.
One sip of that water, the feel of her smooth hand under my neck and I knew. I hadn’t felt a smooth hand since before the Slicers came. Everyone I knew had calloused hands from hard manual labor, dirty hands from not enough washing, or Slicer-ravaged hands, scars so thick they looked like knuckles. I remember, though, how her cool hand felt as it slid around the back of my hot neck. It felt like silk. It felt like your hands feel today, my children, soft from years of being caressed with olive oil. It felt like the hand of a goddess.
My father turned toward the window to wipe away tears of relief.
“Welcome to Plato’s Cave, Eliza” she said, her voice scratchy and old.
She wasn’t old yet. She was only forty-three when I met her, but her voice sounded like it was a thousand years old. I learned later that she carried her pain in her voice and it would sound that way for the rest of her life. Robert says her voice changed the day her husband died.
That’s when I returned my gaze to my father; to where my father stood. A window. My father was standing at a window. It was a clear window. I could see through it. We hadn’t seen a window in over fifteen years. The Slicers broke through windows and walls alike in their flesh-consuming quest. I could see them outside, their metal wings catching the sunlight, flashing bright sparks in my eyes as precursors to the daggers their wings would become. Yet the Slicers didn’t break through the windows. The Slicers dove and darted through the air, with their uncanny ability to not collide with each other even though there must have been five Slicers for every square foot of air, with a speed that made them blur together in a stream of metal, but none of them paid any attention to the flesh on the other side of the window.
My father turned toward me and knelt at my side. “How are you, my daughter.”
I stroked his hair. It was clean. He had washed and smelled slightly of olives. “I will be well soon, oh father of mine.”
“I am pleased.” His Irish eyes smiled upon mine until he bowed his head and laid it against my hip. “I am very pleased.” He breathed out heavily.
“Dr. Chandler says you’ll…” Marla started to say, but I dozed off again, exhausted from my one sip of water.
I woke hours later to hear them discussing their science quietly as they stood over a paper-strewn desk. The chairs were pushed back and they leaned over the desk, writing on some papers, pushing others out the way.
“No, it doesn’t work like that. Think of the glass as a mirror on one side and glass you can see through on the other. The Slicers can’t see us but we can see out the window,” Marla explained to my father.
“But the Slicers don’t have eyes. How can they see anything?”
He picked up a dead Slicer and I shuddered. I had never seen a dead Slicer below. He held it in his fingers as if it wasn’t all the evil in the world encompassed into a shiny marble the size of my eyeball. Its silver tendrils drooped lazily down the sides.
“They don’t see like you and I do, with our eyes,” Marla admitted. “But as you know, we humans don’t really see with our eyes anyway. Our brains interpret the signals our optical nerves send to our brain and that’s how we understand what we are seeing. With the Slicers, they don’t have eyes per se, but they have sensors that their brain centers interpret as sight.”
My father pulled on the marble and it broke in two. “I didn’t even know Slicers had organic brains.”
“It took us a long time to capture one and contain it before it disintegrated. It was even longer before we were able to dissect it. Their metal is the hardest substance on the planet. Even our diamond-tipped drills broke against it.”
“How did you dissect it?”
Even from across the room I could see her eyes flash with excitement. She sat in one chair and pulled the other one closer with her foot, motioning for him to sit. “It’s a long story, but fascinating. I think you’ll like it.”
My father looked to my bed and my eyes were too slow to close. “El.”
Marla followed him over to my bedside. “I’ll get you some warm soup, sweetie.”
Father sat on the edge of the bed. “You look better.” He touched my cheek. “You have your color back.” I was about to argue with him, to remind him that my skin was as fair as white snow because I hadn’t seen the sun in twenty years, but I was too tired.
“We finally arrived, three days ago,” he whispered. It was then that I noticed that I wasn’t alone in the large room. All of the beds were occupied. I recognized all of the sleeping people.
“I wish you could have seen it, El. They just opened their tunnels, took us all in, mended, fed, washed, clothed us. They didn’t ask questions, they didn’t send us away, they didn’t shoot at us.”
He blinked tears out of his eyes. “It was like we had been trudging through a rainstorm at night and when we arrived the dawn broke the clouds and the sun shone through.”
I smiled wearily.
“You may have the brain of a scientist, but you have the heart of a poet,” Marla said from behind him in her gravely voice. She set her hand gently on his shoulder and he didn’t flinch. My father always flinched whenever anyone touched him.
My father helped me sit up in bed and she set a warm bowl of soup in my hands. “You hold it. I’ll feed you,” she said.
I started to object but my father shook his head slightly.
Her steady hand ladled soup into my mouth without spilling a drop. She whispered to me, telling me about Plato’s Cave and how happy she was that we had arrived. She, the one whose mind saved all of us, sat there and fed soup to a sick woman with her own hand. That’s the kind of woman she was. Not the legend of Marla, which would have you believe she walked on water, but just Marla. Modest Marla. Average Marla.
It wasn’t until much later that I would realize how outstanding average could be.
For the first four months my father and I spent most of our time at Plato’s Cave in Marla’s laboratory. We were the only two scientists who had survived the trip. When our caravan left the Irish Isles, we were one hundred strong; twenty scientists, twenty humanists and sixty soldiers. Only twenty-two of us limped into Plato’s Cave and two died of their wounds after reaching our destination. Two scientists, eight humanists and twelve soldiers survived the trip. Marauders had killed seven, three soldiers died when they were attacked by a colony which wouldn’t let us in, accidents took five of us, disease took four, but the rest, fifty-nine from our caravan died a Slicer death. Can you imagine, my children, of the one hundred attendees at your school, only twenty of you being alive for school tomorrow. The hole that leaves in one’s heart can never be mended.
Marla would say that it shouldn’t be mended. The hole is what reminds us of what we have lost and why it’s important to fight for what we want. I think she is wrong. She would be the first to admit she was wrong about many things. I have carried this hole in my heart for a long time. It is something that should have been mended a long time ago, so I could have some semblance of peace. Instead I have a void which cannot be filled, cannot be covered, cannot be hidden. I hope I can fill the void by telling you, my children, of Marla and my father. Of what they have done, how they have loved, what they have lost. Maybe in their losses we can find what we’re looking for.
And we have all lost so much. On the caravan trip alone we lost eighty souls. At our underground compound in Ireland we heard about Plato’s Cave from the nomads, the travelling singers and traders. For fifteen years they arrived, every couple years, to tell us the news of what was left of the world. From them we heard about the unattended nuclear power plants in France and Germany leaking. We heard from them that the large cities were crumbling, abandoned ghost towns, that the fields of Holland were run amuck with tulips, that the River Ganges once again ran clear. Every year we would ask of news from the Americas and every year they would shake their heads. It was a great puzzle to us. Did the Americas fare better or worse than us? Was anyone else alive half way around the world, across the great seas?
With every visit by the nomads we became more obsessed with the number of humans on the planet. You, my children, will not believe me; even I have a hard time believing the world was once filled with seven billion people, jostling elbows, fighting over water, taking weekend excursions to the moon. Yes, my children, the earth’s population was more than seven billion people. I have lived almost ninety-five years and in that time I have seen the earth’s population fall from seven billion to less than one percent of one percent of that, to less than seven hundred thousand. But now we are rebuilding and by last count we are up to a little over a million people on the entire planet. A million is a wondrous number, considering how effective the Slicers were. Having seen the Slicers in person, having felt their metal daggers cut my own flesh, I am amazed even that many people survived.
In the early years the nomads named each of the newly-founded colonies, their population status, each colony’s areas of plenty and need. We tried to send what we could, but we had so little ourselves. As the years grew to a decade, the list of colonies grew shorter, the population count shrank, the list of needs exploded while the areas of plenty were reduced to an afterthought, often mixed with a joke. The Norwegian colony had a lot of snow. The South African colony had a lot of sun. The Arabian colony had a lot of sand.
They spoke of the colonies in the same colorful voices that they told the tales of life before the Slicer Wars began, but when they spoke of the colony at Plato’s Cave, their voices took on a softness usually reserved for pillow talk. They spoke with tenderness and respect for the people at Plato’s Cave. Plato’s Cave prospered while every other colony decayed. Plato’s Cave grew, they were well fed, they had electricity, furniture, children. Every other colony was shrinking but at Plato’s Cave they had children. Healthy children. One nomad wept as he spoke of holding a newborn in his arms. I could hear the baby’s cries echo in his voice as he strummed his lyre and described touching each tiny finger and toe.
That was why we selected Plato’s Cave as our destination. We knew we couldn’t stay where we were. It wasn’t working in Ireland. Every year our colony was fifteen percent smaller. Our food was scarce and getting scarcer. Our water was dirty, disease took our children before they reached the tender age of ten. We had one child live to be twelve but a Slicer got to him.
The colony voted and selected the brightest and strongest to make the trip. I can tell you that while most of us wanted to be at Plato’s Cave, not one of us relished the task of getting there.
We spent three years building the train our caravan would use to travel from Ireland to Greece. Once we crossed the strait, the train ran on conveyor belts, like military tanks, instead of rails. It was powered by solar power and dirt instead of steam or coal or electricity. It was heavily fortified to keep out the Slicers. Not fortified heavily enough, we learned later, but there were many things we learned later.
The trip was difficult, even harder I think than staying in Ireland would have been. There was less food and water than we had in Ireland and more danger from marauders and Slicers. For me, though, the hardest part was leaving behind my three children; two boys and a girl. The oldest was six and they had to pull him from my arms at our departure. Feeling his body stripped from mine is part of that hole in my heart. I never again saw my first three children. The youngest boy survived the Slicer Wars but was killed in a farming accident a year later. Sometimes the gods can be cruel. To make him live through the Slicer Wars and then to take him in an accident. On my bad days I believe the gods are punishing me for my many mistakes.
But for all the cruelty of the gods, mankind is even more cruel. At the time we didn’t really know how many people had died or survived but we knew the survival number was horrifically small. Still, humans treated each other with such cruelty that you would have thought we had an abundance of ourselves. I can understand killing another for food, I have done it myself, but many of the people we saw during our trip killed for no purpose other than the sake of killing. It was as if they wanted to die but didn’t have the courage to kill themselves, so they tried killing someone else until they eventually lost the fight. Many lost their fight at our hands.
Once we reached Plato’s Cave, though, everything changed. I could almost forget, for a few days at a time at least, that I had seen men cut each other’s throats and felt their warm blood splatter across my face. At Plato’s Cave, with Robert and Marla, things were different. It’s not that they didn’t have tension or dissent; they did, most of it between their leaders, Robert and Marla themselves. That was back in the days when he loved her fiercely and she still mourned her dead husband and children. And then my father arrived. Throwing him in the mix stirred the tensions even higher.
“We have three rules here in Plato’s Cave by which everyone, including guests, must abide,” Robert said at the welcoming meal a week after we arrived. It was the night of the full moon and they had pulled back the covers from the skylights and we ate by the light of the moon.
Honor the moon, my children, every night it grants you the privilege of seeing its face. During the hiding of the Slicer Wars it is true we hardly ever saw the sun, but what pained me the most was not seeing the glorious moon. The Slicers skin, that liquid metal that transformed into scalpel-sharp knives to pierce flesh, it captured the moon’s glow and flashed silver daggers at us in the darkness. During the day, at least, we could see death approaching on the metallic wings of the Slicers, but at night, in the darkness, the only things people saw a moment before death enveloped them were flashes of mercury, nature’s cruelty as she transformed the sweetness of the silver moon into destructive knives of death.
“We don’t take other people’s belongings.” Robert hung his head at this next part and his voice sounded like it was pleading. “We each have so little that belongs to us, individually, that this rule is so important that it’s the first rule. “ He looked up again and his eyes were sad. I knew then that he had many belongings before the Slicer Wars and he remembered how much he had and he coveted his current meager belongings all the more so because of it.
“With the death of so many, monogamy has died with them. Those who wear the yellow bands around their wrists are willing to share themselves with another. You may offer, but if that person declines, a no is a no. Do not try to convince them, do not attempt to force them.” He glanced at Marla’s wrist and the sadness of his lost belongings transformed into a pain of never having had that which he longed for most. “Those who wear a black band on their wrists are in mourning and request to not even be asked.”
“And lastly, there are some doors downstairs that are locked. These doors are off limits to our guests.” He looked at Derrick, our Irish military commander.
“We are not hiding anything, it’s just that behind these doors are our most precious belongings. They house our library. Books we have gathered, at great cost of life, so to retain the knowledge of our ancestors for our children. We will gladly escort you through the libraries, but we ask that you do not attempt to pass through any locked door.”
Derrick rose, winced, and glowered at his few remaining soldiers. “You will abide by these three rules.”
“Yes sir,” they answered in unison.
Derrick looked to his left. “That goes for you bookish people too. I know the temptation of books will be greater for you than it will be for my soldiers. Just respect their rules while we’re in their house.” Derrick sat down with a grunt. His back had been sliced from shoulder to waist outside of Prague and hadn’t healed well.
After a meal of goat curry and rice with raisins the Platonists performed their monthly ritual. Every full moon, just like we still do today, my children, they portrayed the Allegory of Plato’s Cave. They gave us pears for dessert. Real pears. Fresh pairs, not from a can. I was so amazed I didn’t even stop to wonder where they had grown them. I don’t think any of us Irish did.
While we ate our dessert, six of their members were shackled to the floor, facing a blank wall roughed to look like a cave wall. Behind them roared a fire and between them showmen danced with puppets, casting shadows upon the cave wall.
The prisoners were unable to turn their heads and so were unable to see these puppets, the real objects that passed behind them. What the prisoners saw and heard were shadows and echoes cast by objects that they did not see. They mistook appearance for reality.
A man named Frank read Plato’s Allegory, each paragraph first in ancient Greek and then translated in English. His voice was smooth in the moonlight, burnished in the firelight. He stood behind us and his voice came from nowhere and everywhere. It washed over us and under our feet and enveloped us with the timbre of gravitas. His words seeped into my bones and though I didn’t really understand the words, I felt the importance of their meaning.
A masked man rushed onto the stage and swung at the prisoner’s shackles with a hammer, freeing them. The prisoners turned around and saw the puppeteers behind them and they looked wildly between the showmen and the shadows their puppets cast. The prisoners realized that what they had thought was real were only shadows and they ringed their hands and pulled at their hair. A few of the prisoners raised their fists at the showmen and threatened to advance, but the masked man pulled them back. He turned his masked face away from the showmen and waved his hand at them, dismissing them as unimportant artifacts of the past.
He directed the prisoners to an opening in the cave where they saw sunlight for the first time. He nudged the prisoners forward. Some were reluctant to walk into the brightness and looked back at the cave wall with melancholy, bare now of shadows except those cast by their own bodies. Two of the prisoners returned to their seats and willingly put the shackles around their own ankles. The showmen raised their puppets and the prisoners smiled and rocked back and forth like children at the shadows dancing on the cave wall.
The remaining four freed prisoners covered their faces with their arms, protecting their eyes from a sunlight they had never before seen. The light they used to see was pale compared to the real light of the sun. They stepped through the opening and into a world of color. Music started to play and the freed prisoners danced in delight on a carpet of green grass.
Soon everyone in the audience had risen and was dancing on the grass in the sunlight. I looked down and saw that the grass was real. I looked up and saw that the sunlight was a special kind of lamp. Even so, I felt its heat pulsate through me. I danced with my father and laughed in the sunlight and I was happy. I had been at Plato’s Cave for less than seven days and already I was happy. I remembered my children back in Ireland, in the underground bunker, dank and dark. They were cold, hungry and frightened. Hunted by the Slicers. Maybe sick and dying for all I knew. I fled the stage for a dark corner and began to weep.
Robert found me there. He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed them for comfort. “Do not cry, my child. Tonight we celebrate the living. The remaining thirty days of the month are long enough for us to mourn those we have lost or left behind. But tonight the full moon blesses us with its light and we dance.”
He took my hand in his and guided me back to the stage where he wrapped his strong arms around me and we swayed to the rhythm of the music in the glow of the full moon while soft grass tickled between my bare toes.
Many people slipped yellow bands on their wrists that night and shared their beds with another. I myself laid for the first time with Jeremiah, a man originally from Israel. My father left with a woman named Sarah. Marla left early and alone, twisting at the black band around her wrist as if it was a protective shield. Robert started to follow her, stared pointedly at the black band and turned away, heading downstairs instead. I thought he would find solace in his books. I knew so little then.
I think my father realized how much he loved Marla that sunny day when he risked his life for hers. She had taken us down to the Library of Metals. Even then Plato’s Cave had so many books that they had to store them in different underground rooms. They categorized the rooms; the Library of Metals, the Library of Chemicals, the Library of Wood and so on. I had personally seen twenty different Libraries, but there were even more locked doors behind which I had not yet peered.
My father and I were trying to understand how the metal could so quickly transform between liquid and solid. The Slicers were created by man, in a sense, but that’s giving us too much credit that we actually knew what we were doing. If we had known what would happen, not one of the seven billion alive at the time would have made the choice to create the Slicers. We weren’t trying to create Slicers. We were just trying to build stronger, lighter trains and tractors and patio furniture. We had created liquid metal. It was stronger than forged steel and yet as thin as one strand of a spider’s web. We had enough knowledge to modify its DNA so it would remain stable at room temperature and then bind solid when we showered it with a mist of a special chemical wash made with chameleon DNA.
It would have allowed us to create incredible things. Cars used to weigh at least a ton and would buckle at the slowest of speeds; we would have had cars that weighed less than I do and yet would have protected its occupants at speeds of over five hundred kilometers per hour. Our spaceships were lumbering dinosaurs; the new ones would have used almost no fuel to eject themselves from our atmosphere. Ah, the possibilities, the opportunities, the things we could do and didn’t stop to ask whether we should. They say that justice is blind but I think hubris is blind also. We were blind to the things that, in hindsight, were apparent. Whether they showed their faces to us while we were creating the Slicers, I’ll never know.
I was only ten when the Slicer Wars started but I say we because if it was ‘we’ who solved this mess, I feel it must have been ‘we’ who caused it as well. One person does not arrive at any destination on his own. He builds upon the foundations of his ancestors, upon their mistakes and successes alike. I was there, in the very room of scientists who developed the method by which we obliterated the Slicers. It was my idea to use the particles in the atmosphere to refract Marla’s Eigengrau wavelength, but I did not develop the solution on my own. I had but one small part in its development. All of mankind had a hand in building the knowledge by which we destroyed the Slicers. And I have to believe that all of mankind had a hand in building the knowledge by which we created the Slicers as well.
And so in our prideful blindness we created something that became something else, something which none of us ever intended. These accidents have happened many times in our past, often with positive outcomes. This outcome was not positive. It was dreadful. The metal formed itself into a round marble. Out of that round center sprouted five-inch-long tendrils which flattened and curved, spinning the center, allowing it to fly almost as fast as the speed of sound.
The center had sensors, I cannot bring myself to call them a nose or eyes, that sought out flesh in which to plant its cloned particulates to reproduce. Upon finding the flesh, any flesh, that of humans, birds, horses, it didn’t matter, the tendrils reshaped into metal points with edges so sharp they could cut clean through a tree trunk. The Slicer would burrow its way into the flesh, plant its clone, retreat and die. Upon death the liquid metal disintegrated and all that would be left would be the decaying dust of a silver marble. The clone would emerge within twenty-four hours and in the birthing process, the newborn Slicers created a mucus that dissolved every iota of the host’s flesh.
In a way, in a very strange, unsettling way, the loss of most of the earth’s inhabitants through Slicer death was a blessing. Had seven billion people died by nuclear war or a virulent biological agent, those of us remaining would have been overwhelmed with rotting corpses. The Slicers dissolved the flesh and left the bones. Bones don’t decompose like bodies, leaving festering pulp full of parasites and disease. Exposed bones are terrible to look at, we see them still, even after all these years there are just too many to collect or cover, but at least the bones didn’t kill us. At least the bones didn’t harm our bodies. What seeing that many bones of our own species does to the human mind I cannot say. There are those who speculated, but even they admit that their musings into how our social psyche has changed are speculations at best.
In the library Marla brought six or seven books over to a set of soft chairs and showed us how to use the electric light. They generated electricity by undersea turbines turned by the motion of the waves. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of that when we were in Ireland. We were close enough to the coast, we knew the Slicers didn’t go underwater, we had the equipment. Now I know why we hadn’t thought of it, but at the time I just hit my forehead and said “We should have done that.”
I can tell you the reason now, my children, but do not think the answers came as quickly as I can write them. It took months for us to realize the difference between Plato’s Cave and every other colony. To say the difference was Marla is to buy into the ideal that she was as great as her legend makes her out to be. In truth, the difference was a simple one. Plato’s Cave had hope. They had hope that they could conquer the Slicers, that they would survive the devastation we visited upon ourselves. That hope honed their focus, enabled them to create things to serve a purpose, to accomplish a task. That focus allowed them to build things that the rest of us, in our shock and despair, couldn’t even imagine.
Many people who didn’t live through it say that it was Marla’s hope which gave Plato’s Cave hope, but that is because they had never seen her in the darkest of days. She was not an optimistic woman, she was not a Pollyanna, a person who looked for the silver lining. She carried the grief of humanity on her shoulders and like Atlas, even while she struggled under its weight, she refused to set it down.
I believe it was her willingness to carry the grief for all of us that inspired the rest of us to have hope. Hope that we could, actually, make things better. Hope that we might actually survive. Hope that one day the Slicers would be gone and, even though we couldn’t reset things to be like they were before, at least we could make them better than they were now. It was not her hope that gave us hope, it was her sorrow.
Her grief was palpable. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t morose. She laughed at the simplest of things. I bet she laughed at least once an hour for most of her days. She could find a reason to laugh in the most dire of situations, if only sardonically.
I swear to you, my children, her smile was brighter than the sun. We, all of us, were drawn into that smile. We wanted her to smile so we could bathe in its warmth. Her eyes would sparkle and her teeth would flash and we could feel the warmth spilling from her. But as I said before, she carried her sorrow in her voice and when she laughed, it was like hearing a child laugh in this room, her voice bubbly and fresh. But underneath that, far away as if they were in a room at the other end of the house, you could hear a thousand children crying. If I could close my ears and see her face, her smile could make any horror flee, but when I would close my eyes and hear her laugh, it made me want to weep.
She carried the grief so we wouldn’t have to. We didn’t ask her to. She didn’t ask us if she could. Of all the things she has done for us, my children, all the science, the death of the Slicers, all the food, water and animals we have because of her, the greatest thing she did for us was to carry the collective grief of all of humanity. That alone enabled us to carry hope in our own hearts. That is why Plato’s Cave progressed while every other colony decayed. Her sacrifice is what gave Plato’s Cave its hope.
Marla had taken us down to the Library of Metals and returned to her lab to check on the latest tests she was running. She trusted us enough to leave us down there alone, sure that we would not try to sneak through any of the locked doors. If we had known what was behind them, her confidence would have been misplaced, but ignorant as we were, we followed their rules. After three hours of reading, our stomachs grumbling, we wandered upstairs to find Marla before seeking out lunch. We had missed the main lunch serving and would have to make our own lunches, which suited my father fine because he thought Marla was the best cook in the world.
We passed Jacob, her apprentice, in the hallway and he said Marla was in her lab. He asked us to tell her he would return after a quick game of ball. We entered her lab and didn’t see her there. A flash of light caught my eye out a small port window. I grabbed my father’s arm and ran to the window. Through the tiny window I could see Marla standing on her balcony, Slicers swarming around her.
“Marla,” my father shouted. He yanked the door open and entered an alcove no more than four feet across. He ran to the door on the other side of the small room and pulled at the handle, calling her name.
“No, Father!” I shouted to be heard over his strong voice. I was riveted to the place where I stood, in the first doorway. I could see the Slicers swarming around Marla, their metal wings transforming between wings and knives, wings and knives. They swirled around her naked body. She was clothed but I say naked because everyone knew that to go outside without multiple layers of metal armor was walking naked and meant certain death. Only those who wanted to end their lives went outside without protection. I thought of the grief in her voice and felt I should have realized she would eventually want to end it all. I didn’t realize then that she did want to end it, just not through suicide. She wanted to end it by killing the Slicers.
Father seemed oblivious to the fact that he, also, was not wearing any armor. He tugged at the door handle but by the grace of the gods it did not open. If it had, a swarm of Slicers would have entered Plato’s Cave and would have killed everyone before a minute had passed.
Father pounded at the door, shouting Marla’s name. I have to assume she could not hear him through the thick steel door for she remained standing with her back to us. Her black hair was bound in a tight braid that reached her waist. Her hands and feet were bare and her shirt flapped gently in the sea breeze. She stood with her face upturned toward the noon sun. She raised her hands and waved them slowly, as if trying to reach for a Slicer in the air. The Slicers moved away from her touch. They didn’t attack her, they didn’t slice her, they didn’t kill her. They moved away from her.
I wondered then if the Slicers knew she wanted to die and wouldn’t grant her wish. Or maybe they, too, felt how special she was and were reluctant to kill the most perfect thing remaining on the planet. I know now that it was neither of these foolish things, but such are our thoughts when fear has turned our bowels to water and our fingers to ice.
Our shouting caught the attention of Derrick, our military commander, who was passing by. He hobbled into the room, pushed past me and grabbed my father’s arms. He pulled my father away from the door.
“Donny. Get a hold of yourself.” Derrick’s voice was loud, louder than either mine or my father’s.
My father looked into Derrick’s eyes and pleaded his objection. “They’ll kill her.”
“If you open that door, you’ll kill us all.”
We looked out the port window and our initial panic subsided slightly. The Slicers hadn’t killed her. We couldn’t understand it, but we had to accept what our eyes were telling us.
Marla was able to stand, unarmored, in the sunlight, unscathed, with Slicers swarming around her. It was an incredible moment. You, my children, of course, know about the invisible force-field she wore, but picture in your minds, if you can, that moment without that knowledge. For twenty years the Slicers had killed everyone they encountered. Everyone. And there stood Marla in the midst of a swarm and they ignored her.
I was sure she was protected by the gods. I wasn’t sure whether she was a goddess herself, though I would have easily believed it at that moment. She was doing what no one else had done before and I was a witness to it.
Marla turned around and saw our faces through the port window. She smiled. I couldn’t hear her sad voice, I could only see her smile and she made the Aegean Sea sparkle behind her. At that moment she truly looked like a goddess.
She walked toward the outer door and motioned for us to move back into the lab and shut the inner door. We did and we saw the light above the outer door turn green. She opened the door and the Slicers flew into the room before her. She closed the door behind her. Even in that small enclosed space the Slicers were careful not to get close to her. I could hear their metal wings glancing off the metal walls, sounding like metal fingernails clipping against a shale blackboard. Marla pulled a pair of black goggles off the wall and put them over her eyes. She pressed a button and the room was flooded with a violet, almost gray light. In mid-flight the Slicers fell, their metal bodies clanking against the floor. I looked down and saw the inert metal pieces disintegrate, leaving behind small mounds of silver ash.
Marla released the button and the violet light faded. She removed the goggles and looked around the room, checking for any errant Slicer that might have escaped. She pulled at her clothing and ran her fingers through her hair and along her braid. No Slicer survived her chamber of violet light. She pushed another button which unlocked the inner door.
My father pulled the door open and enveloped her in his arms. “Marla! Thank the gods you’re safe.” Relief was heavy in his voice.
She hugged him back.
“Did you see it? It worked. It worked!” Her heavy voice was as light with excitement as I would ever hear it; it sounded like sandpaper against tree bark.
My father was reluctant to let her go but she pulled herself out of his arms, looking at the three of us.
“Did you see? It works.” She held out her arms to inspect them. “Not even a scratch.” She ran her fingers down her legs, feeling for fabric tears. “They never touched me. Not once.”
Jacob entered the lab and she ran to the young man. “It works, Jacob. It works.”
Jacob’s eyes grew large. “You tested it? Yourself?”
She jumped up and down lightly on her toes. “Yes,” she giggled like a child and it sounded like pebbles falling on a pile of autumn leaves.
Jacob’s face turned ashen. “We are in so much trouble.”
She ruffled his hair. “Ah, Robert will be fine. It worked!”
Derrick touched her wrists gently to calm her. “That was amazing. Now can you tell us what it was that we just saw?”
She took a few deep breaths and motioned to the stools. She removed a broach from her belt. It looked like a purple stone, about the size of a large olive. She tossed it to Derrick who easily caught it.
“That…” she winked at Jacob, “…is your new armor.”
Derrick held it up between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it suspiciously.
She leaned forward and pushed a button on the broach. Derrick’s image shimmered before my eyes and then he returned to normal.
Jacob turned off the lab light and turned on another, special light.
A diaphanous violet light enveloped Derrick and the stool he sat on, casting him in a grayish purple glow. It was practically invisible in regular light but was distinct, if not dense, in the darker light.
“This particular wavelength, the Eigengrau, in the indigo/violet spectrum, is fatal to the Slicers,” Marla said simply, as if it wasn’t the most important discovery of all of humanity.
“Eigengrau?” my father asked.
“Intrinsic gray light,” she replied. “You know. When you sit in a completely dark room, but you can still see things? When you close your eyes but you still see brain gray. Dark light.”
Derrick dropped the broach from one hand to the other and the field around him didn’t waver. He handed it to my father and the field enveloped both of them. When Derrick pulled away the violet light left Derrick and enveloped my father and the stool he sat on.
“What does this do?” Derrick’s voice shook.
My father handed it to me and I played with it, switching the light off and on again. The field enveloped me, disappeared, enveloped me again. I waved my arms wildly and the violet light outlined my body where ever I moved it.
“You saw what happened when I turned on the Eigengrau light in the sequestering chamber. It kills the Slicers.”
Derrick rose to his feet. She couldn’t hear it but his voice was full of warning, like the soft hiss of a caged cougar. “You can kill Slicers?”
We had never been able to kill Slicers. We’d shoot them but their liquid metal would just reform and mend itself. Burning them didn’t work, liquids, chemicals, acids, crushing them, nothing could kill a Slicer. The only dead Slicers we had seen were after they had implanted their clones in our friends’ mutilated bodies. Only then did the Slicers shrivel up and die.
Marla shook her head. “No. Well, yes, but no.” She tried to explain. “We discovered a wavelength of light that kills them, but we don’t have the means of distribution. Right now, it’s like killing a swarm of house flies with a dart, one fly at a time. We can lure them into the chamber, but we can only kill a couple dozen at a time. That’s nothing compared to the number of Slicers flying around out there.”
Marla took the device from me and Jacob turned the regular lights back on. “But this. This will allow us to walk outside without fear.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you could kill the Slicers?” Derrick asked. His tone did not hide his accusation.
Marla looked at his quizzically. “We’ve theorized about the Eigengrau for four years.” She shrugged. “I’ve been working to stabilize it so it can protect us as we move about, protect our vehicles, our boats, our animals.”
She grabbed my father’s hand. “We’ll be able to put this on collars on our cows and they’ll be able to wander the meadows again.”
“We didn’t know anything could kill a Slicer,” my father said gently.
Marla stopped moving and cocked her head. “Oh.”
My father blinked back tears. “If they can die….”
“It means we can win,” Derrick finished.
Marla shook her head apologetically. “I didn’t know you didn’t know.”
Derrick jumped off his stool and let out whoop. Derrick had a very loud voice. “Wait until I tell my men.” Derrick started to leave the room. He turned back, grabbed Marla’s head in his large, calloused hands and kissed her on the forehead.
He released her and pointed to my father and me. “Learn how this works.” He left the room. The way he walked with his injured back made it look like he was skipping.
Jacob took the device and put it in a box on the table. “When they find out, half the people here are going to love you and the other half are going to be as mad as hell.”
“Only Robert,” Marla corrected him.
Jacob looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “But he gets fifty-one percent of the vote.” Jacob turned and looked at me. “Make sure Robert knows that I was not here when she did this.” Jacob turned to leave. “And I’m not going to be around when he finds out, either.”
“What was that about?” my father asked, turning to Marla.
Marla waved her hand. “Ah, nothing. Just a long-standing disagreement between Robert and me.” Marla pulled a sheaf of paper onto her lap and started scribbling. “If we can boost the power source, we could build a dome of Eigengrau light around Plato’s Cave.”
I picked up a pencil off the table and drew on her diagram. “You don’t need to increase one power source,” I said. “All you need to do is place four of five power sources in strategic locations, like here, here, here and here. You saw how the light meshes. The light from each beacon will combine with the others to create a completely sealed dome.”
She looked at me with sparkling eyes. “You are so right.”
I felt proud. Proud to have been a witness to her accomplishment. Proud that she said I was correct. But her voice, as always, also made me feel sad, made me remember that so many had died before we got to this point. I don’t think there is a moment for any of us who lived through the Slicer Wars when we are completely happy. We carry this loss with us where ever we go, every day, with every breath. My only hope, my children, is that you, and if not you, then your children, will be able to experience pure joy one day. Joy without sorrow. Only joy. Only happiness.
Later that night I came to understand why Jacob made himself scarce following the afternoon’s successes. There were ten of us in one of the smaller eating rooms with Marla. From the Ireland colony there was me, my father, Derrick and Pappy, Ireland’s lead humanist. The Platonists included Deidra and Peter, two of the better cooks, the carpenters Paul and Zia-Lau, the biologist Pasquale and his companion Sarah. We were just finishing our desserts, a lemon sponge-cake slavered in quince-flavored whipping cream, when Robert entered the room. I have seen men’s face dark with rage before and I set my fork down and picked up my knife. I hid it in my lap, under my napkin.
“Tell me what I hear isn’t true,” Robert said to Marla as if she were alone in the room.
Marla smiled with mischief and started to respond “I do not know…”
Robert cut her off. “Do not toy with me.” His lips were two straight lines.
Marla sighed and set her fork across the top of her plate. “Yes. What you heard is correct. Today I figured out how to attach the Eigengrau light to my belt and I stood outside on my balcony, in the sunlight, without traditional armor, and the Slicers didn’t touch me.”
Deidra sucked in her breath and glanced at Peter .
Paul let out a whoop that echoed in the silence that followed.
I didn’t think was possible but Robert’s face turned even darker. A vein in the middle of his forehead pulsated intensely. “You tested it personally. On yourself.”
Marla rose to her feet and stood with her fingers barely touching the tabletop. She looked directly at him. Her voice was level. “Yes, I tested it myself.”
Robert picked up the only empty chair and flung it against the wall. The wood shattered, sending splinters everywhere. “Damn it, Marla. I told you not to do that.”
Everyone at the table jumped to their feet and stood with their backs pressed against the walls. I tightened my grip on the knife hidden under my napkin.
“And I told you that I was going to,” she countered.
Robert kicked at a broken chair leg and shook his head. “We’ve had this fight so many times, Marla. I just don’t know what to do anymore.”
Marla reached out but Robert pulled his arm away and he turned his back on her.
“Just let me be,” she replied.
Robert spun to look at her. “Just let you be?” he asked incredulously. “Just let you be, so you can continue to test these experiments on yourself until one day one of them doesn’t work out quite as you expected and it kills you?” His voice caught at the end. He cleared his throat. “You are too important to us. I can’t let you do that.”
“I keep on telling you, Robert. I’m no more important than anyone else here.”
He looked at her levelly. “And I keep on telling you how very wrong you are.”
She started to speak but he cut her off. He pointed at Paul who winced visibly. “If Paul has an accident and dies, Zia-Lau can take over for him. And even if we lose Zia-Lau and all of our apprentice carpenters, we can sit on the floor if we have to. But if you die, Marla, there is no one who can do what you do.”
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