away.”
“If there is no one alive to appreciate the community,” I said, “then it is all pointless.”
“You believe this is all pointless, then.”
“No.” I leaned my head against the horse, smelling its musky sweat. It shifted. “No. But it
“Did you anticipate being torn like this? Before you came to New Pennsylvania?”
“No,” I said. “I was wrong. I thought on a world with total freedom that a doctor would be free to cure the sick.”
“But you do tend to the sick.”
“With methods and cures that haven’t changed in five hundred years,” I said bitterly. “Out there”—I waved my hand at the stars—“they replace hearts and lungs as easily as you replace a torn shirt.
“You should have looked deeper into your heart before making the decision to come here.”
“Then who would have tried to save Mark Suderman?” I said. “I lose far too many patients, patients I could save anywhere else—but I do save some.”
“He was saved the day he made the decision to join the church,” David Yoder said with a certainty that I wished I possessed. About anything.
“It’s getting near dark,” I said. “I will be going now.”
“Gute nacht.”
I pushed the horse to a run after I was out of sight.
I threw two suitcases of clothes together. In my desk I pulled out something I never thought I would need, but had kept anyway. It was a wallet, and inside were plastic cards that on any other world would link me to lines of credit and old friends. I hitched the new horse to my spare buggy and tossed the suitcases in the back.
A horse and buggy turned onto the gravel of my drive. I was sure it was David Yoder, but I was wrong. Two Elders, Zebediah Walshman and his brother, Paul, pulled aside the storm curtains.
“William Hostetler?”
I walked up to the buggy.
“Yes.”
“We talked to Brother Yoder. He feels you are going through a crisis,” Paul said.
Zebediah looked over at my buggy. “Are you leaving for a while, William?”
“Possibly,” I said.
“You are going to the Englanders?”
I didn’t reply.
“We can’t deny you that choice,” Paul said. “But you will not take Rebecca with you.”
They turned the buggy back around and rattled off down the road. My heart pounded, my throat dried with nervousness. I walked back to my buggy and kicked at a wheel with my boot. The pain was briefly satisfying.
The air was chilly, and as I turned up the road toward the house I extinguished the buggy’s road lamp. I stopped the horse a bit down from the usual post, tying him to a tree. I patted his neck and jumped the ditch onto David Yoder’s farm.
It took me a few long minutes in the pitch black to find a ladder. The notion of it—a clandestine meeting
with a ladder in the twenty-third century—struck me as ludicrous. But there was nothing ludicrous about the purpose of it. I walked it over to the point under Rebecca’s window and leaned the ladder against the side of the house as gently as I could.
She was waiting. She opened the window, bunched up her skirts, and got onto the ladder. It creaked as she came down step by agonizing step.
I led her around the house toward the waiting buggy.
We didn’t get far before David Yoder’s gentle but firm voice came from the porch.
“Rebecca, come back inside the house,” he said.
She froze.
“Come on,” I said. “Keep walking. You’re free to leave. He can’t stop you.”
“I can’t stop you,” David agreed. “But think about what you are leaving. Rebecca, you are already saved, no matter what you do here. But when you leave, you will no longer be able to come back. You will be healthy, but unable to ever see us or speak to us again. Do you think there will be a family out there, with the Englanders, for you? What sort of lives do they lead? Good lives, or will they be confused, and spiritually cluttered, caught up with worldly goods.” He paused. “Remember,” he concluded, “if you leave, you can never come back. Your children can never come back.”
Rebecca’s tears trickled down her cheeks and collected along her jaw. “I can’t do this!” she told me. “I can’t!”
“Then you’ll die,” I said. “Probably within a couple of months. And in terrible pain that I am not permitted to alleviate on this world.” I took off my hat, trying to do something useful with my hands.
“I know,” she said. She brushed the side of my face with her hand and kissed me lightly on the lips. “I’m sorry, but I cannot be other than what I am. Better to die as what I am than to live as what I am not.”
I watched her go back up into the house.
David and I stood there watching each other.
“She’s free to go,” I said.
“She was never free to go,” said David. “There are certain laws that are unwritten, and these are the most powerful laws of all.”
“You’ve signed her death warrant,” I said bitterly.
“Do you think
And I suddenly realized that he was caught in the same web that had ensnared Rebecca and me. I had thought, just a moment ago, that I hated David Yoder. Now I knew that I could never hate him; I could only pity him, as I pitied us all.
“What will you do now, Dr. Hostetler?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
I turned and began walking across his yard.
I rode the horse hard. My hat blew away, and the cold wind played with my hair. The horse started to lather by the time I saw my house, and I slowed us down, struck by remorse. There was no reason to take my anger out on the poor beast.
I hadn’t cried in a long time, but I cried that night.
And along with crying, I examined my life and my options. DY-99 was only a few miles away. It would be so easy to get on it, to go out into the galaxy where I could use all my skills.
And if I did, who would take care of Rebecca? Who would deliver Esther’s child, and help make sure it grew into a healthy adult? Who would even try to save all the Mark Sudermans after I left?
I turned the buggy around. With a snap of the reins I sent us both trotting back toward the Yoders. In the coming days and weeks I was going to preside at two more miracles, the miracle of death and the miracle of birth. I was going to do it under adverse conditions, like a racehorse carrying extra weight, but Rebecca had not asked to die and Esther’s child has not asked to be born, so in a way we were all running handicapped.
In a moment of clarity, I realized that it just meant that we had to try harder. If we were already saved, then it was only right that God wanted a little extra effort in return, whether it was dying with grace or struggling to save people who placed so very many restrictions on their savior.
Somewhere along the drive back, I took the wallet from my pocket and threw it into the dark forest along the road.
