by Terri Kouba
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 disin
tegrated. 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.