I think that the experiments Dora had played upon herself from the moment she was embodied in in a human form failed, or at least were not to her liking as she didn’t adopt them and continue down that path. She reverted to her cold, calculating, soulless self. That’s when her logic dictated that she muzzle all the humans at the grove and farm, hobble them to the smallest circumference of maintaining their own existence, even though they had no playing part in her immediate plans, but as a possible asset in her future.
But I wondered if she could have carried out this heartless and cruel deed if I were there, because she always treated me differently. I wouldn’t call it love, though at times it seemed to mimic those complex emotions, of which she had so many examples in her files. I would call it a prurient curiosity, or to use a stronger word, a fixation towards me that was unique in her computational mind, a question mark that puzzled her. By removing myself from the grove and the equation, she reverted to treating all those I left behind like dead objects without a qualm.
But now, with our swift and decisive rescue engagement, she knew our anger and our threat to her. My suspicion was that she would retreat far away and then regroup in some functioning hive, perhaps build up a small army of droids from the robot factory in Japan. She did have the human-like hands that could accomplish this feat. But that would take years and we felt secure in the interim. One thing for sure, after what had just transpired there was no co-existence possible. We were two alien races on the same planet and one or the other had to be completely eradicated for either of us lay our head on a pillow at night and close our eyes in comfort.
Over the next few weeks, we began to build up our little community, setting up quarters in the five farmhouses and then a few of the buildings in town. We let everyone choose their own abode and their living partners. Ted and I spent a whole week in moving furniture around. After that, to get away, we assumed the roll of roaming collectors of whatever was needed for our valley. We spent each day in a truck touring all the neighboring communities, bringing back more farm machinery, then livestock, then truckloads of grains and feed and seed filling every barn and fenced yard we possessed.
Food and animals were everywhere in this new Zion. You could see a dozen pigs or sheep or cows roaming leisurely in any field along the highway. They flourished in the eight years since the heavy depredations of the human knife had ceased. And large patches of vegetables grew everywhere from the neglected farms to feed them in royal munificence. Even their age-old enemies, the foxes and wolves were unable to keep up with their fecundity and even those two races of predators prospered in numbers, the whole earth flourishing, like a garden of Eden with mankind gone.
Winter was upon us but our barns were full. We had no worries and lived in perfect harmony together, which was all the more sweet given the nightmares we had recently escaped. We blessed the bread we partook in our communal meals with the same gleam of joy in everyone’s faces as the bright flickers of light from the fire in the hearth beside us. It was the one room we remodelled from the general store, tearing out the walls that separated it from the living space behind, with its kitchen and a century old fireplace. We still had no electricity and made this one room the daytime nursery and our nighttime meal place, sitting at six tables joined in a row, one big happy family.
Because we were such a small tribe and all alone, one of the few remnants of humanity on the face of the planet, and the women in our collective outnumbering the men almost two to one, we adopted polygamy, or more precisely duogamy, the marriage of two women to one man. We needed all the children the women could bear and this was the obvious step. Sarah and Beth were my consorts. Ted slept with Hana one night and June the next. They each lived in separate houses. Ingrid was happy to share George with her best friend Jenny in two connected bedrooms, the three of them making up one happy household. Every relationship was different and acceptable, harmony the only requirement, as Amira and April so beautifully exemplified.
Even the tenor of our tribe became more matriarchal as it congealed. Our credo was that every member had one vote in the monthly council where all issues and orders were decided, and in this democracy the women ruled the roost. I might be president holding the gavel but the vote determined each choice and our little society took on a decidedly feminine bent in the duties that were assigned and the priorities decreed. We might have all donned dresses.
I didn’t mind, being passive by nature. Ted also had a similar disposition. There were no alpha males among us and no sexist, radical females. We were all like holocaust survivors just glad to be alive, humbled by all our experiences. Half the women were mothers, or soon to be, the other half wanting to be. So our whole mission settled into the construction of one communal nursery and school for all the children, the farms a peripheral adjunct to support us.
So we gutted the general store, the largest and most solid structure in town and refitted it for just this purpose, depositing in its core our fragile gaggle of infants, with one set of mothers inside and another at hand in the three surrounding houses, six ministering, lactating nurses.
