Plato's Cave During the Slicer Wars and other short stories by Terri Kouba
The next two months were a flurry of activity, learning all about satellites, geostationary orbit, drag, decay, orbital velocities, apogees and perigees, inertia and gravity. Derrick and Kendra led the team to create a new caravan, salvaged from the parts of our Irish caravan, but improved by Marla’s technology. Robert didn’t say a word when Marla told him she was leading the expedition to the Moscow colony. He just looked at her and a light behind his eyes silently extinguished. He nodded once and walked out of the lab. He continued as leader of Plato’s Cave, some say after that he was a better leader, with more clarity and purpose than he had before, but he was a man who had lost that which was most dear to him. His Marla was leaving her cave.
A storm blew in the day we left and stayed with us for the first two weeks. You all know the tale of our trip from Greece to Moscow, so I won’t tell it again here except it say it was both better and worse than our trip from Ireland to Plato’s Cave. It was in what used to be the Ukraine that I met your father and we were married the week after we arrived at the Moscow colony. The oldest of my second set of children was conceived on that caravan, on the roof of the train, under the light of the full moon, the Slicers wings flashing high above us.
Sarah came with us and was instrumental in convincing her brother to experiment with his satellites. He had lost his six children to the Slicers and the satellites had become his surrogate children. He doted on them, checking their orbits and running diagnostics multiple times a day.
We spent five months running calculations. We determined that we could, in fact, remotely tune the satellites’ lone beacon light to the same frequency as the Eigengrau wavelength, in the indigo/violet spectrum. Where ever it cast its violet-grayish glow, Slicers turned to gray ash. But it wasn’t enough. The Slicers just avoided the beams. We still had the same problem as we had in Plato’s Cave; how to create a mesh dome that could cover the entire planet all at once.
“I cannot believe we travelled all this distance, and have lost as much as we have lost, just to end up at the exact same place we started.” Marla threw her half eaten sandwich on her plate. She glanced at the empty chair next to her, picked up her plate and threw it against the wall. It shattered in a dozen pieces and fell to the concrete floor. She dropped her head in her hands. “It hurts too much,” she whispered.
Marla had gotten to the point where she hardly spoke anymore. And when she did speak, her voice was the sound of hardening lava. Sometimes I could hardly make sense of her words, so overwhelmed were my ears by the depths of her sadness. This grief we shared, though, and I placed my hand on her arm, covering her black arm band. “I miss him too.”
My father had been killed by marauders as we rode through the Giurgeu Valley at the southern end of the Carpathian Mountains. To call them marauders, though, is to insult marauders. These things that were once people had devolved, into something less than human. They were brutally savage, even by the lowest standards, and they had descended on our caravan at dusk. They killed twenty of our guards, two humanists and my father. They used weapons but they had lost all ability to speak anything more complicated than grunts and howls.
It was at our peril that we had ignored the whispers from the nomads about the Olts. We thought them horror stories, tales told around the camp fire, insane stories of cannibalism, vampirism, actual worshipping of the Slicers as gods with rituals of human sacrifice. We had chosen the shortest route over the safest route and had paid for it with more than a third of our group.
She sat in the moving caravan in a stupor for more than a week after my father was murdered, as if the cannibals had eaten a piece of her heart along with my father’s. Then she created a new black armband, dried her eyes, and plunged herself into work. It had been six months and she still cried herself to sleep every night, when she slept, that is.
She pulled her arm away from under my hand. “It is still too early to speak of that,” she whispered harshly, her voice like a bucket of gravel thrown over broken glass. Her eyes glared at mine, as if to say ‘you know better’. She was right, I did know better, but she dealt with her pain by carrying it with her in silence and I dealt with mine by letting it out.
She rose and stood in front of the model Jonas had built. He had taken a globe and attached a metal skeleton around it. On the metal cage he had placed tiny models of each of the three thousand six hundred and twenty four man-made satellites. The more than sixteen hundred Russian satellites were distinct models; the rest were just malformed globs. Jonas had access to the Russian satellites, but not the others. He wasn’t even sure they flew anymore. She placed her finger on the metal skeleton and it moved in the same direction and speed as the globe itself. “We can’t launch more satellites; what else can we use that can cover the entire earth at once?”
I looked outside the window at the white Russian sky. One of the first things we installed was an Eigengrau light mesh to cover the compound and the Slicer’s swarmed around the compound at a distance of three hundred yards.
I looked at the white sky and mumbled, “The ozone.”
The room was silent, everyone lost in their own thoughts, trying to solve our conundrum.
Marla turned away from the globe.
“What?” she asked. Granite hit marble.
I looked up at her. “Huh?”
“What did you say?” she repeated.
I thought back. “I said ‘I miss him too’.”
Marla returned to the lunch table. “No, after that.” Sandstone slid across limestone, crumbling.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Did I say anything?”
“You said the ozone.”
“Oh, that’s right. You asked what covers the entire planet. The ozone does,” I replied.
“What’s the ozone made of?”
“What do you mean? Ozone is a molecule,” Pavel, the lead Russian scientist responded.
“Ozone. Trioxygen. O3. Consisting of three oxygen atoms.” She had a smile on her face that I didn’t understand.
Pavel’s face joined hers in that crazy, wild smile. “Ground-level ozone is an air pollutant. But ozone in the upper atmosphere filters potentially damaging ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth’s surface.”
“Ozone is present in low concentrations throughout the Earth’s atmosphere,” she added. “And it filters and refracts.”
“The entire atmosphere,” Pavel emphasized.
Marla hugged me. “That might work.”
“What might work?”
I still didn’t know what they were talking about.
“That certainly might work,” Pavel added.
And that is how I came up with the idea that destroyed every last Slicer. I’d love to have it recorded that I studied and thought and experimented and labored under the glow of midnight oil before discovering the solution in a Eureka moment, but I can no more rewrite history than I can take full blame or credit for the idea. If Marla wouldn’t have phrased it like a casual trivia question, I wouldn’t have answered while not listening to myself.
It took us six months to figure out how to make the Eigengrau light be absorbed by the atmosphere long enough to condense; to make the particles sticky my father would have said. I miss him so.
We learned how to adjust their magnetic field so the particles would spin and the Eigengrau light was refracted downward, covering the planet in a violet-gray glow. We probably needed to keep the sky glowing only for ten minutes or so, but we wanted to be sure every Slicer died, even the new hatchlings that were still dissolving their hosts, so we kept the beam going for a full seven days and seven nights. During the first ten minutes, anyone outside was covered with the grey ash of dissolved Slicers as their remains fell from the sky. I relished standing outside the doorway and having my hand coated in their death ash.
It felt strange, like we had traveled in a cosmic circle. We had created the Slicers and now a little over twenty years later we obliterated the Slicers. Our world was, not as it once had been, but at
The end of the seventh night was a full moon and our rendition of The Allegory of Plato’s Cave took on a new meaning. When we cast off those shackles and turned from the shadows playing on the cave wall, in our hearts we were turning away from the Slicers, putting the last two decades behind us. The cave opening never looked so good, never held such promise. It was that night that my second eldest, Menacius, was conceived, on a hillock under the full moon, with a slight breeze in the air.
I would like to be able to tell you that the trip back to Plato’s Cave was carefree and full of smiles, but even though the skies were free of Slicers, marauders still swarmed the ground. It was beyond comprehension. We had freed the world from the scourge that haunted us for twenty years and we were still haunted by ourselves. Humankind did not show its best face, even after the Slicers were annihilated.
Why he didn’t tell us I’ll never know. He has tried to explain it to me since then, but I cannot accept his reasoning. He says he didn’t want us to worry. He says he didn’t want to distract us from our mission. He says he didn’t want to be the one who called Marla back to gaze at the cave wall. But no matter how well he tries to explain it, Robert’s words cannot assuage the shock and horror we felt upon returning to Plato’s Cave.
We saw it as we drew near, an indentation in the rolling hills. We stared at the concave crater as our caravan drove by.
“That’s where we were building the underground extension when we left,” Marla said. She turned to where I sat.
My feet were swollen in the last month of my pregnancy and I had to slightly lift myself and my full belly off the chair to see the crater. I fully rose to my feet and shook my head.
“It can’t be.” I lowered myself gently back into the seat.
Marla closed her eyes and I recognized the set of her face. She was bracing herself to absorb more pain. I didn’t think her voice could hold any more.
We were greeted with shouts of joy, tempered by averted eyes. Marla was the first to notice the small numbers. “Where is everyone?” she asked.
“Robert wants to be the one to tell you,” Peter, the cook, replied, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Come, I’ll take you to him.”
He slipped his other arm in mine and we walked to the library. The main library had been moved upstairs, now, and overlooked the Aegean Sea. The setting sun had turned the world the color of a peach and library ceiling refracted the glow into the room.
Robert stood near the fireplace, they had added a fireplace since we left, and he turned to face us as we entered. He cast a silhouette against the flames and his shape caused my footsteps to falter. I hoped it was the angle at which he stood or maybe a trick of the eye caused by the flickering evening shadows.
My swollen feet stumbled but Marla marched across the room in strong strides. She slid her arms around Robert in a hug and buried her face in his neck. By the time I arrived at the fireplace I could hear them both softly crying. Their tears were a mixture of sorrow and joy.
Peter helped me into a chair and retrieved a footstool for my feet. Robert placed Marla in the chair next to me and he pulled a chair forward for himself, to face us. His back was to the fire and his face was lost in shadow. As he sunk into the chair his entire body was almost lost in the shadows cast by the wide chair back.
“Three months after you left there was an accident in the far eco-system,” he began. His voice sounded like it came from nowhere and everywhere at once. It bounced off the books and returned to my ears from behind.
“The cavern ceiling was unstable and caved in.” He hesitated, letting us work out the implications in silence. “It was a relatively small hole, ten feet by five feet, but it was large enough for the Slicers. They flew into the cavern in a swarm. We lost ninety percent of the workers in the cavern; forty-nine of us died.” I heard him swallow thickly.
“They weren’t wearing their belts?” Marla asked, her voice like rocks smashing together under water.
Robert shook his head. “Underground? Most saw no need.” He took a deep breath. “The cavern doors were open so we could transport materials.” He paused again, letting us work out the implications again in silence. The sun was swallowed by the sea and the shadows overtook the room.
“The Slicers got into the living quarters.” Silence again. Neither Marla nor I rushed him. Neither of us wanted to hear it sooner. “We lost almost two hundred that day before we contained the Slicers.” His voice sounded eerily like Marla’s. “Seventy-one were children.”
The room’s silence matched the darkness. It rolled over our feet and seeped into our bones. I started to cry, tears silently dropping into the dark pool of my lap, above my bulging belly. Marla rose to her feet and had to steady herself against the back of Robert’s chair. She lit a piece of kindling and brought it to where we sat in the shadows. Robert turned his face away.
“Yes, I was in the far cavern that day.”
“But you were wearing your personal armor shield.”
“Yes.” I was having difficulty telling their voices apart. Both sets of voices sounded like tectonic plates shearing apart.
“You tried to shelter others by pulling them into your field.”
Robert nodded.
“But so many bodies caused the field to weaken.”
Marla touched her finger to his chin and Robert allowed her to turn his head. The kindling brought light to what he had kept in shadow. Robert had lost his left ear and his left arm at the shoulder. A scar ran across his left cheek to his chin. Marla’s fingers gently followed the scar to the empty side of his head.
Robert’s face shifted in surprise and I turned to look at Marla. Her face glowed in the firelight. Her lips broke into a slight smile.
She handed me the kindling. “Leave us.”
Peter helped me rise as I saw her reach for Robert with both hands.
I heard her whisper to him as Peter and I left the library. Her voice was the light swish of sand flowing through a sieve.
“Every time I looked at you, I saw your brother’s face and felt only the pain of my loss.” I knew her fingers were on his face. “Now I can finally see the man whom I have loved for these many years. Now I can finally see you, Robert.”
As you know, my children, the Aegean Sea swallowed them both during a wicked storm, some twenty-five years later. But by then the light they had both brought to the world was so bright that even their deaths couldn’t dim it.
The End
The Devil Dwells in a Red House