Plato's Cave During the Slicer Wars and other short stories by Terri Kouba

  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.