Parable of the Sower

Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.

“I should have headed north when Sharon died,”

Bankole said. “I thought about it.”

“But you stayed.” I turned away from the water and looked at him. “Why?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know what to do, so for some time I didn’t do anything. Friends took care of me, cooked for me, cleaned the house. It surprised me that they would do that. Church people most of them. Neighbors. More her friends than mine.”

I thought of Wardell Parrish, devastated after the loss of his sister and her children— and his house.

Had Bankole been some community’s Wardell Parrish? “Did you live in a walled community?” I asked.

“Yes. Not rich, though. Nowhere near rich. People managed to hold on to their property and feed their families. Not much else. No servants. No hired guards.”

“Sounds like my old neighborhood.”

“I suppose it sounds like a lot of old neighborhoods that aren’t there any more. I stayed to help the people who had helped me. I couldn’t walk away from them.”

“But you did. You left. Why?”

“Fire— and scavengers.”

“You too? Your whole community?”

“Yes. The houses burned, most of the people were killed… . The rest scattered, went to family or friends elsewhere. Scavengers and squatters moved in. I didn’t decide to leave. I escaped.”

Much too familiar. “Where did you live? What city?”

“San Diego.”

“That far south?”

“Yes. As I said, I should have left years ago. If I had, I could have managed plane fare and resettlement money.”

Plane fare and resettlement money? He might not call that rich, but we would have.

“Where are you going now?” I asked.

“North.” He shrugged.

“Just anywhere north or somewhere in particular”

“Anywhere where I can be paid for my services and allowed to live among people who aren’t out to kill me for my food or water.”

Or for drugs, I thought. I looked into his bearded face and added up the hints I’d picked up today and over the past few days. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

He looked a little surprised. “I was, yes. Family practice. It seems a long time ago.”

“People will always need doctors,” I said. “You’ll do all right.”

“My mother used to say that.” He gave me a wry smile. “But here I am.”

I smiled back because, looking at him now, I couldn’t help myself, but as he spoke, I decided he had told me at least one lie. He might be as displaced and in distress as he appeared to be, but he wasn’t just wandering north. He wasn’t looking for just anywhere he could be paid for his services and not robbed or murdered. He wasn’t the kind of man who wandered. He knew where he was going. He had a haven somewhere— a relative’s home, another home of his own, a friend’s home, something— some definite destination.

Or perhaps he just had enough money to buy a place for himself in Washington or Canada or Alaska. He had had to choose between fast, safe, expensive air travel and having settling-in money when he got where he was going. He had chosen settling-in money. If so, I agreed with him. He was taking the kind of risk that would enable him to make a new beginning as soon as possible— if he survived.

On the other hand, if I were right about any of this, he might disappear on me some night. Or perhaps he would be more open about it— just walk away from me some day, turn down a side road and wave good-bye. I didn’t want that. After I’d slept with him I would want it even less.

Even now, I wanted to keep him with me. I hated that he was lying to me already— or I believed he was. But why should he tell me everything? He didn’t know me very well yet, and like me, he meant to survive. Perhaps I could convince him that he and I could survive well together. Meanwhile, best to enjoy him without quite trusting him. I may be wrong about all this, but I don’t believe I am. Pity.

We finished the guns, loaded them, and went down to the water to wash. You could go right down to the water, scoop some up in a pot, and take it away. It was free. I kept looking around, thinking someone would come to stop us or charge us or something. I suppose we could have been robbed, but no one paid any attention to us. We saw other people getting water in bottles, canteens, pots, and bags, but the place seemed peaceful. No one bothered anyone. No one paid any attention to us.

“A place like this can’t last,” I told Bankole. “It’s a shame. Life could be good here.”

“I suspect that it’s against the law to live here,” he said. “This is a State Recreation Area. There should be some kind of limit on how long you can stay. I’m certain that there should be— used to be— some group policing the place. I wonder if officials of some kind come around to collect bribes now and then.”

“Not while we’re here, I hope.” I dried my hands and arms and waited for him to dry his. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

I didn’t laugh, though I wanted to. I just looked at him.

After a while he frowned and shook his head. In a little more time, he moved back against me, touching my face, my shoulders, my breasts.

“You’re not just eighteen,” he said.

I shrugged.

“When were you born? What year?”

“Twenty oh nine.”

“No.” He drew the word out: “Nooo.”

I kissed him and said in the same tone, “Yesss. Now stop your nonsense. You want to be with me and I want to be with you. We’re not going to split up because of my age, are we?”

After a while he shook his head. “You should have a nice youngster like Travis,” he said. “I should have the sense and the strength to send you off to find one.”

That made me think of Curtis, and I cringed away from thinking of him. I’ve thought as little as possible about Curtis Talcott. He isn’t like my brothers. He may be dead, but none of us ever saw his body. I saw his brother Michael. I was terrified of seeing Curtis himself, but I never did. He may not be dead.

He’s lost to me, but I hope he’s not dead. He should be here with me on the road. I hope he’s alive and all right.

“Who have I reminded you of?” Bankole asked me, his voice soft and deep.

I shook my head. “A boy I knew at home. We were going to get married this year. I don’t even know whether he’s still alive.”

“You loved him?”

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2027

I’ve spent all of today talking, writing, reading, and making love to Bankole. It seems such a luxury not to have to get up, pack, and walk all day. We all lay sprawled around the campsite resting aching muscles, eating, and doing nothing. More people flowed into the area from the highway and made their camps, but none of them bothered us.

I began Zahra’s reading lesson and Jill and Allie looked interested. I included them as though I had intended to from the first. It turned out that they could read a little, but hadn’t learned to write.

Toward the end of the lesson, I read a few Earthseed verses to them in spite of Harry’s groans.

Yet when Allie proclaimed that she would never pray to any god of change, Harry was the one who corrected her. Zahra and Travis both smiled at that, and Bankole watched us all with apparent interest.

After that, Allie began to ask questions instead of making scornful proclamations, and for the most part, the others answered her— Travis and Natividad, Harry and Zahra. Once Bankole answered, expanding on something I told him yesterday. Then he caught himself and looked a little embarrassed.

“I still think it’s too simple,” he said to me. “A lot of it is logical, but it will never work without a sprinkling of mystical confusion.”

“I’ll leave that to my descendants,” I said, and he busied himself, digging a bag of almonds out of his pack, pouring some into his hand, and passing the rest around.

Just before nightfall a gun battle began over toward the highway. We couldn’t see any of it from where we were, but we stopped talking and lay down. With bullets flying, it seemed best to keep low.

The shooting started and stopped, moved away, then came back. I was on watch, so I had to stay alert, but in this storm of noise, nothing moved near us except the trees in the evening breeze. It looked so peaceful, and yet people out there were trying to kill each other, and no doubt succeeding. Strange how normal it’s become for us to lie on the ground and listen while nearby, people try to kill each other.

22

As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God is Infinite Potential:

God is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2027

We’ve had over a week of weary, frightening, nerve wracking walking. We’ve reached and passed through the city of Sacramento without real trouble.

We’ve been able to buy enough food and water, been able to find plenty of empty places in the hills where we could make camp. Yet none of us have had any feelings of comfort or well-being along the stretch of Interstate-5 that we’ve just traveled.

I-5 is much less traveled than U.S. 101, in spite of the earthquake chaos. There were times when the only people we could see were each other. Those times never lasted long, but they did happen.

On the other hand, there were more trucks on I-5.

We had to be careful because trucks traveled during the day as well as at night. Also, there were more human bones on I-5. It was nothing to run across skulls, lower jaws, or bones of the pelvis and torso.

Arm and leg bones were rarer, but now and then, we spotted them too.

“I think it’s the trucks,” Bankole told us. “If they hit someone along here, they wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t dare. And the junkies and alcoholics wouldn’t be that careful where they walked.”

I suppose he’s right, although along that whole empty stretch of road, we saw only four people whom I believed were either not sober or not sane.

But we saw other things. On Tuesday we camped in a little hollow back in the hills to the west of the road, and a big black and white dog came wandering down toward our camp with the fresh-looking, bloody hand and forearm of a child in its mouth.

The dog spotted us, froze, turned, and ran back the way it had come. But we all got a good look before it went, and we all saw the same thing. That night, we posted a double watch. Two watchers, two guns, no unnecessary conversation, no sex.

The next day we decided not to take another rest day until we had passed through Sacramento. There was no guarantee that anything would be better on the other side of Sacramento, but we wanted to get away from this grim land.

That night, looking for a place to camp, we stumbled across four ragged, filthy kids huddled around a campfire. The picture of them is still clear in my mind. Kids the age of my brothers— twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, three boys and a girl. The girl was pregnant, and so huge it was obvious she would be giving birth any day. We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were, roasting a severed human leg, maneuvering it where it lay in the middle of their fire atop the burning wood by twisting its foot. As we watched, the girl pulled a sliver of charred flesh from the thigh and stuffed it into her mouth.

They never saw us. I was in the lead, and I stopped the others before they all rounded the bend. Harry and Zahra, who were just behind me, saw all that I saw. We turned the others back and away, not telling them why until we were far from those kids and their cannibal feast.

No one attacked us. No one bothered us at all. The country we walked through was even beautiful in some places— green trees and rolling hills; golden dried grasses and tiny communities; farms, many overgrown and abandoned, and abandoned houses.

Nice country, and compared to Southern California, rich country. More water, more food, more room… .

So why were the people eating one another?

There were several burned out buildings. It was obvious that there had been trouble here too, but much less than on the coast. Yet we couldn’t wait to get back to the coast.

Sacramento was all right to resupply in and hurry through. Water and food were cheap there compared to what you could buy along the roadside, of course. Cities were always a relief as far as prices went. But cities were also dangerous. More gangs, more cops, more suspicious, nervous people with guns. You tiptoe through cities. You keep up a steady pace, keep your eyes open, and try to look both too intimidating to bother and invisible. Neat trick. Bankole says cities have been like that for a long time.

Speaking of Bankole, I haven’t let him get much rest on this rest day. He doesn’t seem to mind. He did say something that I should make note of, though.

He said he wanted me to leave the group with him.

He has, as I suspected, a safe haven— or as safe as any haven can be that isn’t surrounded by high-tech security devices and armed guards. It’s in the hills on the coast near Cape Mendocino maybe two weeks from here.

“My sister and her family have been living there,” he said. “But the property belongs to me. There’s room on it for you.”

I could imagine how delighted his sister would be to see me. Would she try to be polite, or would she stare at me, then at him, then demand to know whether he was in his right mind?

“Did you hear what I said?” he demanded.

I looked at him, interested in the anger I heard in his voice. Why anger?

“What am I doing? Boring you?” he demanded.

I took his hand and kissed it. “You introduce me to your sister and she’ll measure you for a straitjacket.”

After a while, he laughed. “Yes.” And then, “I don’t care.”

“What does she do for a living? Farm the land?”

“Yes, and her husband does odd jobs for cash-which is dangerous because it leaves her and the children alone for days, weeks, even months at a time. If we can manage to support ourselves without becoming a drain on her few resources, we might be useful to her. We might give her more security.”

“How many kids?”

“Three. Let’s see…eleven, thirteen, and fifteen years old by now. She’s only forty herself.” His mouth twitched. Only. Yeah. Even his little sister was old enough to be my mother. “Her name’s Alex.

Alexandra. Married to Don Casey. They both hate cities. They thought my land was a godsend. They could raise children who might live to grow up.” He nodded. “And their children have done all right.”

“How have you kept in touch?” I asked. “Phone?”

“That was part of our agreement,” he said. “They don’t have a phone, but when Don goes to one of the towns to get work, he phones me and lets me know how everyone is. He won’t know what’s happened to me. He won’t be expecting me. If he’s tried to phone, both he and Alex will be worried.”

“You should have flown up,” I said. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Are you? So am I. Listen, you are coming with me. I can’t think of anything I want as much as I want you.

I haven’t wanted anything at all for a long time. Too long.”

I leaned back against a tree. Our campsite wasn’t as completely private as the one at San Luis had been, but there were trees, and the couples could get away from each other. Each couple had one gun, and the Gilchrist sisters were baby-sitting Dominic as well as Justin. We had put them in the middle of a rough triangle and given them my gun. On I-5 they and Travis had had a chance to do a little target practice. It was all of our duty to look around now and then and make sure no strangers wandered into the area. I looked around.

Sitting up I could see Justin running around, chasing pigeons. Jill was keeping an eye on him, but not trying to keep up with him.

Bankole took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. “I’m not boring you, am I?” He asked for the second time.

I had been trying not to look at him. I looked now, but he had not yet said what he had to say if he wanted to keep me with him. Did he know? I thought he did.

“I want to go with you,” I said. “But I’m serious about Earthseed. I couldn’t be more serious. You have to understand that.” Why did this sound strange to me?

It was the absolute truth, but I felt odd telling it.

“I know my rival,” he said.

Maybe that’s why it sounded strange. I was telling

him there was someone else— something else.

Maybe it would have sounded less strange if the something were another man.

“You could help me,” I said.

“Help you what? Do you have any real idea what you want to do?”

“Begin the first Earthseed Community.”

He sighed.

“You could help me,” I repeated. “This world is falling apart. You could help me begin something purposeful and constructive.”

“Going to fix the world, are you?” he said with quiet amusement.

I looked at him. For a moment I was too angry to let myself speak. When I could control my voice, I said, “It’s all right if you don’t believe, but don’t laugh. Do you know what it means to have something to believe in? Don’t laugh.”

After a while he said, “All right.”

After a longer while, I said, “Fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about.”

“The stars. I know.” He lay flat on his back, but turned his head to look at me instead of looking up.

“This world would be a better place if people lived according to Earthseed,” I said. “But then, this world would be better if people lived according to the teachings of almost any religion.”

“That’s true. Why do you think they’ll live according

to the teaching of yours?”

“A few will. Several thousand? Several hundred thousand? Millions? I don’t know. But when I have a home base, I’ll begin the first community. In fact, I’ve already begun it.”

“Is that what you need me for?” He didn’t bother to smile or pretend it was a joke. It wasn’t. I moved over closer to him and sat next to him so that I could look down into his face.

“I need you to understand me,” I said. “I need you to take me the way I am or go off to your land by yourself.”

“You need me to take you and all your friends off the street so you can start a church.” Again, he was altogether serious.

“That or nothing,” I said with equal seriousness. He gave me a humorless smile. “So now we know where we stand.”

I smoothed his beard, and saw that he wanted to move away from my hand, but that he did not move.

“Are you all that sure you want God as your rival?” I asked.

“I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?” He covered my caressing hand with one of his own.

“Tell me, do you ever lose your temper and scream and cry?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t picture it. In all honesty, I can’t.”

And that reminded me of something that I hadn’t told him, had better tell him before he found out and felt cheated or decided that I didn’t trust him— which I still didn’t, quite. But I didn’t want to lose him to stupidity or cowardice. I didn’t want to lose him at all.

“Still want me with you?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I intend to marry you once we’ve settled.”

23

Your teachers

Are all around you.

All that you perceive,

All that you experience,

All that is given to you

or taken from you,

All that you love or hate,

need or fear

Will teach youŃ

If you will learn.

God is your first

and your last teacher.

God is your harshest teacher:

subtle,

demanding.

Learn or die.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2027

We had another battle to try to sleep through before dawn this morning. It began to the south of us out on or near the highway, and worked its way first toward, then away from us.

We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running… . Same old stuff— tiresome, dangerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.

I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over being angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can’t stop them by staying awake. If that wasn’t altogether true, I didn’t care. I slept.

And somehow, during or after the battle, in spite of the watch, two people slipped into our camp and bedded down among us. They slept too.

We awoke early as usual so that we could start walking while the heat wasn’t too terrible. We’ve learned to wake up without prompting at the first light of dawn. Today, four of us sat up in our bags at almost the same time. I was crawling out of my bag to go off and urinate when I spotted the extra people— two gray lumps in the dawn light, one large and one small, lying against each other, asleep on the bare ground. Thin arms and legs extended like sticks from rags and mounds of clothing.

I glanced around at the others and saw that they were staring where I was staring— all of them except Jill, who was supposed to be on watch. We began trusting her to stand night watch last week with a partner. This was only her second solitary watch.

And where was she looking? Away into the trees.

She and I would have to talk.

Harry and Travis were already reacting to the figures on the ground. In silence, each man was peeling out of his bag in his underwear, and standing up. More fully clothed, I matched them, move for move, and the three of us closed in around the two intruders.

The larger of the two awoke all at once, jumped up, darted two or three steps toward Harry, then stopped. It was a woman. We could see her better now. She was brown-skinned with a lot of long, straight, unkept black hair. Her coloring was as dark as mine, but she was all plains and angles— a wiry, hawk-faced woman who could have used a few decent meals and a good scrubbing. She looked like a lot of people we’ve seen on the road.

The second intruder awoke, saw Travis standing nearby in his underwear, and screamed. That got everyone’s attention. It was the high, piercing shriek of a child— a little girl who looked about seven. She was a tiny, pinched image of the woman— her mother, or her sister perhaps.

I could see that. “Just take what we give you and nothing more than we give you,” I said. “That will be pay enough.”

“We won’t steal. We aren’t thieves.”

Of course they were thieves. How else could they live. Some stealing and scavenging, maybe some whoring… . They weren’t very good at it or they’d look better. But for the little kid’s sake, I wanted to help them at least with a meal.

“Wait, then.” I said. “We’ll put a meal together.”

They sat where they were and watched us with hungry, hungry eyes. There was more hunger in those eyes than we could fill with all our food. I thought I had probably made a mistake. These people were so desperate, they were dangerous. It didn’t matter at all that they looked harmless. They were still alive and strong enough to run. They were not harmless.

It was Justin who eased some of the tension in those bottomless, hungry eyes. Stark naked, he toddled over to the woman and the girl and looked them over. The little girl only stared back, but after a moment, the woman began to smile. She said something to Justin, and he smiled. Then he ran back to Allie who held on to him long enough to dress him. But he had done his work. The woman was seeing us with different eyes. She watched Natividad nursing Dominic, then watched Bankole combing his beard. This seemed funny to her and to the child, and they both giggled.

“You’re a hit,” I told Bankole.

“I don’t see what’s so funny about a man combing his beard,” he muttered, and put away his comb.

I dug sweet pears out of my pack, and took one each to the woman and girl. I had just bought them two days before, and I had only three left. Other people got the idea and began sharing what they could spare. Shelled walnuts, apples, a pomegranate, Valencia oranges, figs… . Little things.

“Save what you can,” Natividad told the woman as she gave her almonds wrapped in a piece of red cloth. “Wrap things in here and tie the ends together.”

We all shared corn bread made with a little honey and the hard-boiled eggs we bought and cooked yesterday. We baked the corn bread in the coals of last night’s fire so that we could get away early this morning. The woman and the girl ate as though the plain, cold food were the best they had ever tasted, as though they couldn’t believe someone had given it to them. They crouched over it as though they were afraid we might snatch it back.

“We’ve got to go,” I said at last. “The sun’s getting hotter.”

The woman looked at me, her strange, sharp face hungry again, but now not hungry for food.

“Let us go with you,” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “We’ll work. We’ll get wood, make fire, clean dishes, anything. Take us with you.”

Bankole looked at me. “I assume you saw that coming.”

I nodded. The woman was looking from one of us to the other.

“Anything,” she whispered— or whimpered. Her eyes were dry and starved, but tears streamed from the little girl’s eyes.

“Give us a moment to decide,” I said. I meant, Go away so my friends can yell at me in private, but the woman didn’t seem to understand. She didn’t move.

“Wait over there,” I said, pointing toward the trees nearest to the road. “Let us talk. Then we’ll tell you.”

She didn’t want to do it. She hesitated, then stood up, pulled her even more reluctant daughter up, and trudged off to the trees I had indicated.

“Oh God,” Zahra muttered. “We’re going to take them, aren’t we?”

“That’s what we have to decide,” I said.

“What, we feed her, and then we get to tell her to go away and finish starving?” Zahra made a noise of disgust.

“If she isn’t a thief,” Bankole said, “And if she doesn’t have any other dangerous habits, we may be able to carry them. That little kid… .”

“Yes,” I said. “Bankole, is there room for them at your place?”

“His place?” three others asked. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them about it. And I hadn’t had the nerve.

“He has a lot of land up north and over by the coast,”

I said. “There’s a family house that we can’t live in because his sister and her family are there. But there’s room and trees and water. He says… .” I swallowed, looked at Bankole who was smiling a little. “He says we can start Earthseed there— build what we can.”

“Are there jobs?” Harry asked Bankole.

“My brother-in-law manages with year-round gardens and temporary jobs. He’s raising three kids that way.”

“But the jobs do pay money?”

“Yes, they pay. Not well, but they pay. We’d better hold off talking about this for a while. We’re torturing that young woman over there.”

“She’ll steal,” Natividad said. “She says she won’t, but she will. You can look at her and tell.”

“She’s been beaten,” Jill said. “The way they rolled up when we first spotted them. They’re used to being beaten, kicked, knocked around.”

“Yeah.” Allie looked haunted. “You try to keep from getting hit in the head, try to protect your eyes and. .

.your front. She thought we would beat her. She and the kid both.”

Interesting that Allie and Jill should understand so well. What a terrible father they had. And what had happened to their mother? They had never talked about her. It was amazing that they had escaped alive and sane enough to function.

“Should we let her stay?” I asked them.

Both girls nodded. “I think she’ll be a pain in the ass for a while, though,” Allie said. “Like Natividad says, she’ll steal. She won’t be able to stop herself. We’ll have to watch her real good. That little kid will steal too. Steal and run like hell.”

Zahra grinned. “Reminds me of me at that age.

They’ll both be pains in the ass. I vote we try them. If they have manners or if they can learn manners, we keep them. If they’re too stupid to learn, we throw them out.”

I looked at Travis and Harry, standing together.

“What do you guys say?”

“The next one might.” I leaned toward her. “The world is full of crazy, dangerous people. We see signs of that every day. If we don’t watch out for ourselves, they will rob us, kill us, and maybe eat us.

It’s a world gone to hell, Jill, and we’ve only got each other to keep it off us.”

Sullen silence.

I reached out and took her hand. “Jill.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” she said. “You can’t prove I— ”

“Jill!”

She shut up and stared at me.

“Listen, no one is going to beat you up, for heaven sake, but you did something wrong, something dangerous. You know you did.”

“So what do you want her to do?” Allie demanded.

“Get on her knees and say she’s sorry?”

“I want her to love her own life and yours enough not to be careless. That’s what I want. That’s what you should want, now more than ever. Jill?”

Jill closed her eyes. “Oh shit!” she said. And then, “All right, all right! I didn’t see them. I really didn’t. I’ll watch better. No one else will get by me.”

I clasped her hand for a moment longer, then let it go. “Okay. Let’s get out of here. Let’s collect that scared woman and her scared little kid and get out of here.”

The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Here’s their story, put together from the fragments they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tanaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis.

Tori is nine years old, not seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life.

She’s tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole’s shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only 23. At 13, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else’s gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from victimization and starvation in the streets.

Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three children over the next three years— a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers’

shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing-new or used— for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages— surprise!— were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts.

That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.

.

Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be “disciplined” if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or escaped.

Emery’s husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive over-the-counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing.

But then, there’s nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.

Emery and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without both their parents. Yet they were taken.

Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to “quiet her down.” She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.

She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with their thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn’t something they could escape by remaining slaves. As for the cannibals…well, perhaps they were only fantasies— lies intended to frighten slaves into accepting their lot.

“There are cannibals,” I told her as we ate that night.

“We’ve seen them. I think, though, that they’re scavengers, not killers. They take advantage of road kills, that kind of thing.”

“Scavengers kill,” Emery said. “If you get hurt or if you look sick, they come after you.”

I nodded, and she went on with her story. Late one night, she and Tori slipped out past the armed guards and electrified fences, the sound and motion detectors and the dogs. Both knew how to be quiet, how to fade from cover to cover, how to lie still for hours. Both were very fast. Slaves learned things like that— the ones who lived did. Emery and Tori must have been very lucky.

Emery had some notion of finding her sons and getting them back, but she had no idea where they had been taken. They had been driven away in a truck; she knew that much. But she didn’t know even which way the truck turned when it reached the highway. Her parents had taught her to read and write, but she had seen no writing about her sons.

She had to admit after a while that all she could do was save her daughter.

Living on wild plants and whatever they could “find”

or beg, they drifted north. That was the way Emery said it: they found things. Well, if I were in her place, I would have found a few things, too.

A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you’re in individual gang territories, you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.

“One group was coming closer to us,” Emery said.

“They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn’t let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn’t see you. You know how to hide.”

That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that’s possible.

Most of the time it isn’t. Tonight it isn’t. And tonight we watch two at a time.

“He doesn’t trust us. Why should he? We’ll have to watch all four of them for a while. They’re…odd.

They might be stupid enough to try to grab some of our packs and leave some night. Or it might just be a matter of little things starting to disappear. The children are more likely to get caught at it. Yet if the adults stay, it will be for the children’s sake. If we take it easy on the children and protect them, I think the adults will be loyal to us.”

“So we become the crew of a modern underground railroad,” I said. Slavery again— even worse than my father thought, or at least sooner. He thought it would take a while.

“None of this is new.” Bankole made himself comfortable against me. “In the early l990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this— holding people against their wills and forcing them to work without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latins in the south… . Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”

“But Emery says there’s a new law— that forcing people or their children to work off debt that they can’t help running up is legal.”

“Maybe. It’s hard to know what to believe. I suppose the politicians may have passed a law that could be used to support debt slavery. But I’ve heard nothing about it. Anyone dirty enough to be a slaver is dirty enough to tell a pack of lies. You realize that that woman’s children were sold like cattle— and no doubt sold into prostitution.”

I nodded. “She knows too.”

“Yes. My God.”

“Things are breaking down more and more.” I paused. “I’ll tell you, though, if we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one will fight harder to keep it. We need better guns, though. And we need to be so careful… . It keeps getting more dangerous out here. It will be especially dangerous with those little girls around.”

“Those two know how to be quiet,” Bankole said.

“They’re little rabbits, fast and silent. That’s why they’re still alive.”

24

Respect God:

Pray working.

Pray learning,

planning,

doing.

Pray creating,

teaching,

reaching.

Pray working.

Pray to focus your thoughts,

still your fears,

strengthen your prupose.

Respect God.

Shape God.

Pray working.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2027

We read some verses and talked about Earthseed for a while this morning. It was a calming thing to do— almost like church. We needed something calming and reassuring. Even the new people joined in, asking questions, thinking aloud, applying the verses to their experiences.

God is Change, and in the end, God does prevail.

But we have something to say about the whens and the whys of that end.

Yeah .

It’s been a horrible week.

We’ve taken both today and yesterday as rest days.

We might take tomorrow as well. I need it whether the others do or not. We’re all sore and sick, in mourning and exhausted— yet triumphant. Odd to be triumphant. I think it’s because most of us are still alive. We are a harvest of survivors. But then, that’s what we’ve always been.

This is what happened.

At our noon stop on Tuesday, Tori and Doe, the two little girls, went away from the group to urinate.

Emery went with them. She had kind of taken charge of Doe as well as her own daughter. The night before, she and Grayson Mora had slipped away from the group and stayed away for over an hour.

Harry and I were on watch, and we saw them go.

Now they were a couple— all over each other, but at arm’s length from everyone else. Strange people.

So Emery took the girls off to pee— not far away.

Just across the hill face and out of sight behind a patch of dead bushes and tall, dry grass. The rest of us sat eating, drinking, and sweating in what shade we could get from a copse of oak trees that looked only half dead. The trees had been robbed of a great number of branches, no doubt by people needing firewood. I was looking at their many jagged wounds when the screaming began.

First there were the high, needle thin, needle sharp shrieks of the little girls, then we heard Emery shouting for help. Then we heard a man’s voice, cursing.

I died with someone else. Someone laid hands on me and I came within a finger’s twitch of squeezing the trigger once more.

Bankole.

“You stupid asshole!” I whimpered. “I almost killed you.”

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

I was surprised. I tried to remember whether I’d been shot. Maybe I had just come down on a sharp piece of wood. I had no sense of my own body. I hurt, but I couldn’t have said where— or even whether the pain was mine or someone else’s. The pain was intense, yet diffuse somehow. I felt… disembodied.

“Is everyone else all right?” I asked.

“Be still,” he said.

“Is it over, Bankole?”

“Yes. The survivors have run away.”

“Take my gun, then, and give it to Natividad— in case they decide to come back.”

I think I felt him take the gun from my hand. I heard muffled talk that I didn’t quite understand. That was when I realized I was losing consciousness. All right then. At least I had held on long enough to do some good.

Jill Gilchrist is dead.

She was shot in the back as she ran toward the trees carrying Tori. Bankole didn’t tell me, didn’t want me to know before I had to because, as it turned out, I was wounded myself. I was lucky. My wound was minor. It hurt, but other than that, it didn’t matter much. Jill was unlucky. I found out about her death when I came to and heard Allie’s hoarse screaming grief.

Jill had gotten Tori back to the trees, put her down, then, without a sound, folded to the ground as though taking cover. Emery had grabbed Tori and huddled, crying with her in terror and relief.

Everyone else had been busy, first taking cover, then firing or directing fire. Travis was the first to see the blood pooling around Jill. He shouted for Bankole, then turned Jill onto her back and saw blood welling from what turned out to be an exit wound in her chest. Bankole says she died before he reached her, No last words, no last sight of her sister, not even the assurance that she had saved the little girl. She had. Tori was bruised, but fine.

Everyone was fine except Jill.

My own wound, to be honest, was a big scratch. A bullet had plowed a furrow straight through the flesh of my left side, leaving little damage, a lot of blood, a couple of holes in my shirt, and a lot of pain. The wound throbbed worse than a burn, but it wasn’t disabling.

“Cowboy wound,” Harry said when he and Zahra came to look me over. They looked dirty and miserable, but Harry tried to be upbeat for me. They had just helped to bury Jill. The group had, with hands, sticks, and our hatchet, dug a shallow grave for her while I was unconscious. They put her among the trees’ roots, covered her, and rolled big rocks atop her grave. The trees were to have her, but the dogs and the cannibals were not.

The group had decided to bed down for the night where we were, even though our oak copse should have been rejected as an overnight camp because it was too close to the highway.

“You’re a goddamn fool and too big to carry,” Zahra told me. “So just rest there and let Bankole take care of you. Not that anyone could stop him.”

“You’ve just got a cowboy wound,” Harry repeated.

“In that book I bought, people are always getting shot in the side or the arm or the shoulder, and it’s nothing— although Bankole says a good percentage of them would have died of tetanus or some other infection.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said.

Zahra gave him a look, then patted my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “No germ will get past that old man.

He’s mad as hell at you for getting yourself shot.

Says if you had any sense, you would have stayed back here with the babies.”

“What?”

“Hey, he’s old,” Harry said. “What do you expect.”

I sighed. “How’s Allie?”

“Crying.” He shook his head. “She won’t let anyone near her except Justin. Even he keeps trying to comfort her. It upsets him that she’s crying.”

“Emery and Tori are kind of beaten up, too,” Zahra said. “They’re the other reason we’re not moving.”

She paused. “Hey, Lauren, you ever notice anything funny about those two— Emery and Tori, I mean?

And about that guy Mora, too.”

“How many times did you die?” Mora asked me.

“Three at least,” I answered, as though this were a sane conversation. “Maybe four. I never did it like that before— over and over. Insane. But you look well enough.”

His expression hardened as though I’d slapped him.

Of course, I had insulted him. I’d said, Where were you, man and fellow sharer, while your woman and your group were in danger. Funny. There I was, speaking a language I hadn’t realized I knew.

“I had to get Doe out of danger,” he said. “I had no gun, anyway.”

“Can you shoot?”

He hesitated. “Never shot before,” he admitted, dropping his voice to a mumble. Again I’d shamed him— this time without meaning to.

“When we teach you to shoot, will you, to protect the

group?”

“Yeah!” Though at that moment, I think he would have preferred to shoot me.

“It hurts like hell,” I warned.

He shrugged. “Most things do.”

I looked into his thin, angry face. Were all slaves so thin— underfed, overworked, and taught that most things hurt? “Are you from this area?”

“Born in Sacramento.”

“Then we need all the information you can give us.

Even without a gun, we need you to help us survive here.”

“My information is to get out of here before those things up the hill throw paint on themselves and start shooting people and setting fires.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “So that’s what they are.”

“What’d you think they were?”

“I didn’t have a chance to think about them. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Harry, did you guys strip the dead?”

“Yeah.” He gave me a thin smile. “We got another gun— a .38. I put some stuff in your pack from the ones you killed.”

“Thank you. I don’t know that I can carry my pack yet. Maybe Bankole— ”

“He’s already got it on his cart. Let’s go.”

We headed out toward the road.

“Is that how you do it?” Grayson Mora asked,

walking next to me. “Whoever kills takes?”

“Yes, but we don’t kill unless someone threatens us,” I said. “We don’t hunt people. We don’t eat human flesh. We fight together against enemies. If one of us is in need, the rest help out. And we don’t steal from one another, ever.”

“Emery said that. I didn’t believe her at first.”

“Will you live as we do?”

“…yeah. I guess so.”

I hesitated. “So what else is wrong? I can see that you don’t trust us, even now.”

He walked closer to me, but did not touch me.

“Where’d that white man come from?” he demanded.

“I’ve known him all my life,” I said. “He and I and the others have kept one another alive for a long time, now.”

“But…him and those others, they don’t feel anything. You’re the only one who feels.”

“We call it sharing. I’m the only one.”

“But they… . You… .”

“We help each other. A group is strong. One or two people are easier to rob and kill.”

“Yeah.” He looked around at the others. There was no great trust or liking in his expression, but he looked more relaxed, more satisfied. He looked as though he had solved a troubling puzzle.

Testing him, I let myself stumble. It was easy. I still

had little feeling in my feet and legs.

Mora stepped aside. He didn’t touch me or offer help. Sweet guy.

I left Mora, went over to Allie, and walked with her for a while. Her grief and resentment were like a wall against me— against everyone, I suppose, but I was the one bothering her at the moment. And I was alive and her sister was dead, and her sister was the only family she had left, and why didn’t I just get the hell out of her face?

She never said anything. She just pretended I wasn’t there. She pushed Justin along in his carriage and wiped tears from her stony face now and then with a swift, whiplike motion. She was hurting herself, doing that. She was rubbing her face too hard, too fast, rubbing it raw. She was hurting me too, and I didn’t need any more pain. I stayed with her, though, until her defenses began to crumble under a new wave of crippling grief. She stopped hurting herself and just let the tears run down her face, let them fall to her chest or to the broken blacktop. She seemed to sag under a sudden weight.

I hugged her then. I put my hands on her shoulders and stopped her half-blind plodding. When she swung around to face me, hostile and hurting, I hugged her. She could have broken free. I was feeling far from strong just then, but after a first angry pulling away, she hung on to me and moaned.

I’ve never heard anyone moan like that. She cried and moaned there at the roadside, and the others stopped and waited for us. No one spoke. Justin began to whimper and Natividad came back to comfort him. The wordless message was the same for both child and woman: In spite of your loss and pain, you aren’t alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.

She nodded, then glanced sidelong at Bankole.

“He knows,” I assured her. “But…look, you and Grayson are the first sharers I’ve known who had children.” There was no reason to tell her she and Grayson and their children were the first sharers I’d known period. “I hope to have kids myself someday, so I need to know…do they always inherit the sharing?”

“One of my boys didn’t have it,” she said. “Some feelers— sharers— can’t have any kids. I don’t know why. And I knew some who had two or three kids who didn’t have it at all. Bosses, though, they like you to have it.”

“I’ll bet they do.”

“Sometimes,” she continued, “sometimes they pay more for people who have it. Especially kids.”

Her kids. Yet they had taken a boy who wasn’t a sharer and left a girl who was. How long would it have been before they came back for the girl?

Perhaps they had a lucrative offer for the boys as a pair, so they sold them first.

“My god,” Bankole said. “This country has slipped back 200 years.”

“Things were better when I was little,” Emery said.

“My mother always said they would get better again.

Good times would come back. She said they always did. My father would shake his head and not say anything.” She looked around to see where Tori was and spotted her on Grayson Mora’s shoulders. Then she caught sight of something else, and she gasped.

We followed her gaze and saw fire creeping over the hills behind us— far behind us, but not far enough.

This was some new fire, whipping along in the dry evening breeze. Either the people who attacked us had followed us, setting fires, or someone was imitating them, echoing them.

We went on, moving faster, trying to see where we could go to be safe. On either side of the highway, there was dry grass, there were trees, living and dead. So far, the fire was only on the north side.

We kept to the south side, hoping it would be safe.

There was a lake ahead, according to my map of the area— Clear Lake, it was called. The map showed it to be large, and the highway followed its northern shore for a few miles. We would reach it soon. How soon?

I calculated as we walked. Tomorrow. We should be able to camp near it tomorrow evening. Not soon enough.

I could smell the smoke now. Did that mean the wind was blowing the fire toward us?

Other people began hurrying and keeping to the south side of the road and heading west. No one went east now. There were no trucks yet, but it was getting late. They would be barreling through soon.

And we should be camping for the night soon. Did we dare?

The south side still seemed free of fire behind us, but on the north side the fire crawled after us, coming no closer, but refusing to be left behind.

We went on for a while, all of us looking back often, all of us tired, some of us hurting. I called a halt and gestured us off the road to the south at a place where there was room to sit and rest.

“We can’t stay here,” Mora said. “The fire could jump the road any time.”

“We can rest here for a few moments,” I said. “We can see the fire, and it will tell us when we’d better start walking again.”

“We’d better start now!” Mora said. “If that fire gets going good, it will move faster than we can run! Best to keep well ahead of it!”

“Best to have the strength to keep ahead of it,” I

said, and I took a water bottle from my pack and drank. We were within sight of the road and we had made it a rule not to eat or drink in such exposed places, but today that rule had to be suspended. To go into the hills away from the road might mean being cut off from the road by fire. We couldn’t know when or where a windblown piece of burning debris might land.

Others followed my example and drank and ate a little dried fruit, meat, and bread. Bankole and I shared with Emery and Tori. Mora seemed to want to leave in spite of us, but his daughter Doe was sitting half asleep on the ground against Zahra. He stooped next to her and made her drink a little water and eat some fruit.

“We might have to keep moving all night,” Allie said, her voice almost too soft to hear. “This might be the only rest we get.” And to Travis, “You’d better put Dominic into the carriage with Justin when he’s finished eating.”

Travis nodded. He’d carried Dominic this far. Now he tucked him in with Justin. “I’ll push the carriage for a while,” he said.

Bankole looked at my wound, rebandaged it, and this time gave me something for the pain. He buried the bloody bandages he had removed, digging a shallow hole with a flat rock.

Emery, with Tori gone to sleep against her, looked to see what Bankole was doing with me, then jumped and looked away, her hand going to her own side.

“I didn’t know you were hurt so much,” she whispered.

“I’m not,” I said, and made myself smile. “It looks nastier than it is with all the blood, but it isn’t bad. I’m damned lucky compared to Jill. And it doesn’t stop me from walking.”

“You didn’t give me any pain when we were walking,” she said.

I nodded, glad to know I could fake her out. “It’s ugly,” I said,“but not too painful.”

She settled down as though she felt better. No doubt she did. If I moaned and groaned, I’d have all four of them moaning and groaning. The kids might even bleed along with me. I would have to be careful and keep lying at least as long as the fire was a threat-or as long as I could.

The truth was, those blood-saturated bandages scared the hell out of me, and the wound hurt worse than ever. But I knew I had to keep going or burn.

After a few minutes, Bankole’s pills began to take the edge off my pain, and that made the whole world easier to endure.

We had about an hour’s rest before the fire made us too nervous to stay where we were. Then we got up and walked. By then, at some point behind us, the fire had already jumped the road. Now, neither the north nor the south side looked safe. Until it was dark, all we could see in the hills behind us was smoke. It was a terrifying, looming, moving wall.

Later, after dark, we could see the fire eating its way toward us. There were dogs running along the road with us, but they paid no attention to us. Cats and deer ran past us, and a skunk scuttled by. It was live and let live. Neither humans nor animals were foolish enough to waste time attacking one another.

Behind us and to the north, the fire began to roar.

We put Tori in the carriage and Justin and Dominic between her legs. The babies never even woke up while we were moving them. Tori herself was more than half asleep. I worried that the carriage might break down with the extra weight, but it held. Travis, Harry, and Allie traded off pushing it.

Doe, we put atop the load on Bankole’s cart. She couldn’t have been comfortable there, but she didn’t complain. She was more awake than Tori, and she had been walking on her own most of the time since our encounter with the would-be kidnappers. She was a strong little kid— her father’s daughter.

Grayson Mora helped push Bankole’s cart. In fact, once Doe was loaded aboard, Mora pushed the cart most of the time. The man wasn’t likeable, but in his love for his daughter, he was admirable.

At some point in the endless night, more smoke and ash than ever began to swirl around us, and I caught myself thinking that we might not make it. Without stopping, we wet shirts, scarves, whatever we had, and tied them around our noses and mouths.

The fire roared and thundered its way past us on the north, singeing our hair and clothing, making breathing a terrible effort. The babies woke up and screamed in fear and pain, then choked and almost brought me down. Tori, crying herself with their pain and her own, held on to them and would not let them struggle out of the carriage.

I thought we would die. I believed there was no way for us to survive this sea of fire, hot wind, smoke, and ash. I saw people— strangers— fall, and we left them lying on the highway, waiting to burn. I stopped looking back. In the roar of the fire, I could not hear whether they screamed. I could see the babies before Natividad threw wet rags over them. I knew they were screaming. Then I couldn’t see them, and it was a blessing.

We began to run out of water.

There was nothing to do except keep going or burn.

The terrible, deafening noise of the fire increased, then lessened, and again, increased, then lessened.

It seemed that the fire went north away from the road, then whipped back down toward us.

It teased like a living, malevolent thing, intent on causing pain and terror. It drove us before it like dogs chasing a rabbit. Yet it didn’t eat us. It could have, but it didn’t.

In the end, the worst of it roared off to the northwest.

Firestorm, Bankole called it later. Yes. Like a tornado of fire, roaring around, just missing us, playing with us, then letting us live.

We could not rest. There was still fire. Little fires that could grow into big ones, smoke, blinding and choking smoke… . No rest.

But we could slow down. We could emerge from the worst of the smoke and ash, and escape the lash of hot winds. We could pause by the side of the road for a moment, and gag in peace. There was a lot of gagging. Coughing and gagging and crying muddy tracks onto our faces. It was incredible. We were going to survive. We were still alive and together-scorched and miserable, in great need of water, but alive. We were going to make it.

Later, when we dared, we went off the road, unloaded my pack from Bankole’s cart, and dug out his extra water bottle. He dug it out. He’d told us he had it when he could have kept it for himself.

“We’ll reach Clear Lake sometime tomorrow,” I said.

“Early tomorrow, I think. I don’t know how far we’ve come or where we are now, so I can only guess that we’ll get there early. But it is there waiting for us tomorrow.”

People grunted or coughed and downed swallows from Bankole’s extra bottle. The kids had to be prevented from guzzling too much water. As it was, Dominic choked and began to cry again.

We camped where we were, within sight of the road.

Two of us had to stay awake on watch. I volunteered for first watch because I was in too much pain to sleep. I got my gun back from Natividad, checked to see that she had reloaded it— she had— and looked around for a partner.

“I’ll watch with you, ” Grayson Mora said.

That surprised me. I would have preferred someone who knew how to use a gun— someone I would trust with a gun.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep until you do,” he said. “It’s that simple. So let’s both put our pain to good use.”

I looked at Emery and the two girls to see whether they’d heard, but they seemed to be already asleep.

“All right.” I said. “We’ve got to watch for strangers and fire. Give me a yell if you see anything unusual.”

“Give me a gun,” he said. “If anybody comes close, I can at least use it to scare them.”

In the dark, sure. “No gun,” I said. “Not yet. You don’t know enough yet.”

He stared at me for several seconds, then went over to Bankole. He turned his back to me as he spoke to Bankole. “Look, you know I need a gun to do any guarding in a place like this. She doesn’t know how it is. She thinks she does, but she doesn’t.”

Bankole shrugged. “If you can’t do it, man, go to sleep. One of us will take the watch with her.”

“Shit,” Mora made the word long and nasty. “Shiiit.

First time I saw her, I knew she was a man. Just didn’t know she was the only man here.”

Absolute silence.

Doe Mora saved the situation to the degree that it could be saved. At that moment she stepped up behind her father and tapped him on the back. He spun around, more than ready to fight, spun with such speed and fury that the little girl squealed and jumped back.

“What the hell are you doing up!” he shouted. “What do you want!”

Frightened, the little girl just stared at him. After a moment, she extended her hand, offering a pomegranate. “Zahra said we could have this,” she whispered. “Would you cut it?”

Good thinking, Zahra! I didn’t turn to look at her, but I was aware of her watching. By now, everyone still awake was watching.

“Everyone’s tired and everyone’s hurting,” I told him.

“Everyone, not just you. But we’ve managed to keep ourselves alive by working together and by not doing or saying stupid things.”

“And if that’s not good enough for you,” Bankole added, in a voice low and ugly with anger, “tomorrow you can go out and find yourself a different kind of group to travel with— a group too goddamn macho to waste its time saving your child’s life twice in one day.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2027

Somehow, we’ve reached our new home— Bankole’s land in the coastal hills of Humbolt County. The highway— U.S. 101— is to the east and north of us, and Cape Mendocino and the sea are to the west. A few miles south are state parks filled with huge redwood trees and hoards of squatters. The land surrounding us, however, is as empty and wild as any I’ve seen. It’s covered with dry brush, trees, and tree stumps, all far removed from any city, and a long, hilly walk from the little towns that line the highway. There’s farming around here, and logging, and just plain isolated living. According to Bankole, it’s best to mind your own business and not pay too much attention to how people on neighboring plots of land earn a living. If they hijack trucks on 101, grow marijuana, distill whisky, or brew up more complicated illegal substances… . Well, live and let live.

Bankole guided us along a narrow blacktopped road that soon became a narrow dirt road. We saw a few cultivated fields, some scars left by past fires or logging, and a lot of land that seemed unused. The road all but vanished before we came to the end of it. Good for isolation. Bad for getting things in or out.

Bad for traveling back and forth to get work. Bankole had said his brother-in-law had to spend a lot of time in various towns, away from his family. That was easier to understand now. There’s no possibility here of coming home every day or two. So what did you have to do to save cash? Sleep in doorways or parks in town? Maybe it was worth the inconvenience to do just that if you could keep your family together and safe— far from the desperate, the crazy, and the vicious.

Or that’s what I thought until we reached the hillside where Bankole’s sister’s house and outbuildings were supposed to be.

There was no house. There were no buildings.

There was almost nothing: A broad black smear on the hillside; a few charred planks sticking up from the rubble, some leaning against others; and a tall brick chimney, standing black and solitary like a tombstone in a picture of an old-style graveyard. A tombstone amid the bones and ashes.

25

Create no images of God.

Accept the images

that God has provided.

They are everywhere,

in everything.

God is ChangeŃ

Seed to tree,

tree to forest;

Rain to river,

river to sea;

Grubs to bees,

bees to swarm.

From one, many;

from many, one;

Forever uniting, growing, dissolvingŃ

forever Changing.

The universe

is God’s self-portrait.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2027

We’ve been arguing all week about whether or not we should stay here with the bones and ashes.

We’ve found five skulls— three in what was left of the house and two outside. There were other scattered bones, but not one complete skeleton. Dogs have been at the bones— dogs and cannibals, perhaps.

The fire happened long enough ago for weeds to begin to grow in the rubble. Two months ago?

Three? Some of the far-flung neighbors might know.

Some of the far-flung neighbors might have set the fire.

There was no way to be certain, but I assumed that the bones belonged to Bankole’s sister and her family. I think Bankole assumed that too, but he couldn’t bring himself to just bury the bones and write off his sister. The day after we got here, he and Harry hiked back to Glory, the nearest small town that we had passed through, to talk to the local cops.

They were, or they professed to be, sheriff’s deputies. I wonder what you have to do to become a cop. I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal. What did it used to be to make people Bankole’s age want to trust it. I know what the old books say, but still, I wonder.

The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing. They treated Bankole as though they doubted that he even had a sister, or that he was who he said he was. So many stolen IDs these days.

They searched him and took the cash he was carrying. Fees for police services, they said. He had been careful to carry only what he thought would be enough to keep them sweet-tempered, but not enough to make them suspicious or more greedy than they already were. The rest— a sizable packet-he left with me. He trusted me enough to do that. His gun he left with Harry who had gone shopping.

Jail for Bankole could have meant being sold into a period of hard, unpaid labor— slavery. Perhaps if he had been younger, the deputies might have taken his money and arrested him anyway on some trumped-up charge. I had begged him not to go, not to trust any police or government official. It seemed to me such people were no better than gangs with their robbing and slaving.

Bankole agreed with me, yet he insisted on going.

“She was my little sister,” he said. “I have to try, at least, to find out what happened to her. I need to know who did this. Most of all, I need to know whether any of her children could have survived.

One or more of those five skulls could have belonged to the arsonists.” He stared at the collection of bones. “I have to risk going to the sheriff’s office,” he continued. “But you don’t. I don’t want you with me. I don’t want them getting any ideas about you, maybe finding out by accident that you’re a sharer. I don’t want my sister’s death to cost you your life or your freedom.”

We fought about it. I was afraid for him; he was afraid for me, and we were both angrier than we had ever been at each other. I was terrified that he would be killed or arrested, and we’d never find out what happened to him. No one should travel alone in this world.

“Look,” he said at last, “you can do some good here with the group. You’ll have one of the four guns left here, and you know how to survive. You’re needed here. If the cops decide they want me, you won’t be able to do a thing. Worse, if they decide they want you, there’ll be nothing I can do except take revenge, and be killed for it.”

That slowed me down— the thought that I might cause his death instead of backing him up. I didn’t quite believe it, but it slowed me down. Harry stepped in then and said he would go. He wanted to anyway. He could buy some things for the group, and he wanted to look for a job. He wanted to earn some money.

“I’ll do what I can,” he told me just before they left.

“He’s not a bad old guy. I’ll bring him back to you.”

They brought each other back, Bankole a few thousand dollars poorer, and Harry still jobless-though they did bring back supplies and a few hand tools. Bankole knew no more than he had when he left about his sister and her family, but the cops had said they would come out to investigate the fire and the bones.

We worried that sooner or later, they might show up.

We’re still keeping a lookout for them, and we’ve hidden— buried— most of our valuables. We want to bury the bones, but we don’t dare. It’s bothering Bankole. Bothering him a lot. I’ve suggested we hold a funeral and go ahead and bury the bones. The hell with the cops. But he says no. Best to give them as little provocation as possible. If they came, they would do enough harm with their stealing. Best not to give them reason to do more.

There’s a well with an old-fashioned hand pump under the rubble of an outbuilding. It still works. The solar-powered electric pump near the house does not. We couldn’t stay here long without a dependable water source. With the well, though, it’s hard to leave— hard to walk away from possible sanctuary— in spite of arsonists and cops.

Bankole owns this land, free and clear. There’s a huge, half ruined garden plus citrus trees full of unripe fruit. We’ve already been pulling carrots and digging potatoes here. There are plenty of other fruit and nut trees plus wild pines, redwoods, and Douglas firs. None of these last were very big. This area was logged sometime before Bankole bought it.

Bankole says it was clear-cut back in the 1980s or l990s, but we can make use of the trees that have grown since then, and we can plant more. We can build a shelter, put in a winter garden from the seed I’ve been carrying and collecting since we left home.

Granted, a lot of it is old seed. I hadn’t renewed it as often as I should have while I was at home. Strange that I hadn’t. Things kept getting worse and worse at home, yet I had paid less and less attention to the pack that was supposed to save my life when the mob came. There was so much else to worry about-and I think I was into my own brand of denial, as bad in its way as Cory’s or Joanne’s mother’s. But all that feels like ancient history. Now was what we had to worry about. What were we going to do now?

“I don’t think we can make it here,” Harry said earlier this evening as we sat around the campfire. There should be something cheerful about sitting around a campfire with friends and a full stomach. We even had meat tonight fresh meat. Bankole took the rifle and went off by himself for a while. When he came back, he brought three rabbits which Zahra and I skinned, cleaned, and roasted. We also roasted sweet potatoes that we had dug out of the garden.

We should have been content. Yet all we were doing was rehashing what had become an old argument over the past few days. Perhaps it was the bones and ashes just over the rise that were bothering us.

We had camped out of sight of the burned area in the hope of recovering a little peace of mind, but it hadn’t helped. I was thinking that we should figure out a way to capture a few wild rabbits alive and breed them for a sure meat supply. Was that possible? Why not, if we stay here? And we should stay.

“Nothing we find farther north will be any better or any safer than this,” I said. “It will be hard to live here, but if we work together, and if we’re careful, it should be possible. We can build a community here.”

“Oh, god, there she goes with her Earthseed shit again,” Allie said. But she smiled a little as she said it. That was good. She hadn’t smiled much lately.

“We can build a community here,” I repeated. “It’s dangerous, sure, but, hell, it’s dangerous everywhere, and the more people there are packed together in cities, the more danger there is. This is a ridiculous place to build a community. It’s isolated, miles from everywhere with no decent road leading here, but for us, for now, it’s perfect.”

“Except that someone burned this place down last time,” Grayson Mora said. “Anything we build out here by itself is a target.”

“Anything we build anywhere is a target,” Zahra argued. “But the people out here before… . I’m sorry Bankole, I gotta say this: They couldn’t have kept a good watch— a man and a woman and three kids. They would have worked hard all day, then slept all night. It would have been too hard on just two grown people to try to sit up and watch for half the night each.”

“They didn’t keep a night watch,” Bankole said.

“We’ll have to keep one, though. And we could use a couple of dogs. If we could get them as puppies and train them to guard— ”

“Give meat to dogs?” Mora demanded, outraged.

“Not soon.” Bankole shrugged. “Not until we have enough for ourselves. But if we can get dogs, they’ll help us keep the rest of our goods.”

“I wouldn’t give a dog nothing but a bullet or a rock,”

Mora said. “I saw dogs eat a woman once.”

“There are no jobs in that town Bankole and I went to,” Harry said. “There was nothing. Not even work for room and board. I asked all over town. No one even knew of anything.”

I frowned. “The towns around here are all close to the highway,” I said. “They must get a lot of people passing through, looking for a place to settle— or maybe a place to rob, rape, kill. The locals wouldn’t welcome new people. They wouldn’t trust anyone they didn’t know.”

Harry looked from me to Bankole.

“She’s right,” Bankole said. “My brother-in-law had a hard time before people began to get used to him, and he moved up here before things got so bad. He knew plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, and motor vehicle mechanics. Of course, it didn’t help that he was black. Being white might help you win people over faster than he did. I think, though, that any serious money we make here will come from the land. Food is gold these days, and we can grow food here. We have guns to protect ourselves, so we can sell our crops in nearby towns or on the highway.”

“If we survive long enough to grow anything to sell,”

Mora muttered. “If there’s enough water, if the bugs don’t eat our crops, if no one burns us out the way they did those people over the hill, if, if, if!”

Allie sighed. “Shit, it’s if, if, if anywhere you go. This place isn’t so bad.” She was sitting on her sleepsack, holding the sleeping Justin’s head in her lap. As she spoke, she stroked the boy’s hair. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that no matter how tough Allie tried to seem, that little boy was the key to her. Children were the keys to most of the adults present.

“There are no guarantees anywhere,” I agreed. “But if we’re willing to work, our chances are good here.

I’ve got some seed in my pack. We can buy more.

What we have to do at this point is more like gardening than farming. Everything will have to be done by hand— composting, watering, weeding, picking worms or slugs or whatever off the crops and killing them one by one if that’s what it takes. As for water, if our well still has water in it now, in October, I don’t think we have to worry about it going dry on us. Not this year, anyway.”

“And if people threaten us or our crop, we kill them.

That’s all. We kill them, or they kill us. If we work together, we can defend ourselves, and we can protect the kids. A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children— the ones we have now and the ones we will have.”

There was silence for a while, people digesting, perhaps measuring it against what they had to look forward to if they left this place and continued north.

“We should decide,” I said. “We have building and planting to do here. We have to buy more food, more seed and tools.” It was time for directness: “Allie, will you stay?”

She looked across the dead fire at me, stared hard at me as though she hoped to see something on my face that would give her an answer.

“What seed do you have?” she asked.

I drew a deep breath. “Most of it is summer stuff-corn, peppers, sunflowers, eggplant, melons, tomatoes, beans, squash. But I have some winter things; peas, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, winter squash, onions, asparagus, herbs, several kinds of greens… . We can buy more, and we’ve got the stuff left in this garden plus what we can harvest from the local oak, pine, and citrus trees. I brought tree seeds too: more oak, citrus, peach, pear, nectarine, almond, walnut, a few others. They won’t do us any good for a few years, but they’re a hell of an investment in the future.”

“So is a kid,” Allie said. “I didn’t think I would be dumb enough to say this, but yeah, I’ll stay. I want to build something too. I never had a chance to build anything before.”

Allie, and Justin were a yes, then.

“Harry? Zahra?”

“Of course we’re staying,” Zahra said.

Harry frowned. “Wait a minute. We don’t have to.”

“I know. But we are. If we can make a community like Lauren says and not have to hire out to strangers and trust them when they shouldn’t be trusted, then we should do it. If you grew up where I did, you’d know we should.”

“Harry,” I said, “I’ve known you all my life. You’re the closest thing to a brother that I have left. You aren’t really thinking about leaving, are you?” It wasn’t the world’s best argument. He had been both cousin and lover to Joanne, and he’d let her go when he could have gone with her.

“I want something of my own,” he said. “Land, a home, maybe a store or a small farm. Something that’s mine. This land is Bankole’s.”

“Yes,” Bankole said. “And you’ll be getting the use of it rent free— and all the water you need. What are those things going to cost you farther north— if you can get them at all farther north— if you can get yourself out of California.”

“But there’s no work here!”

“Not to work in those places. The women warned me.”

“I’ve heard of places like that,” Bankole said. “They were supposed to provide jobs for that northward-flowing river of people. President Donner’s all for them. The workers are more throwaways than slaves. They breathe toxic fumes or drink contaminated water or get caught in unshielded machinery… . It doesn’t matter. They’re easy to replace— thousands of jobless for every job.”

“Borderworks,” Mora said. “Not all of them are that bad. I heard some pay cash wages, not company script.”

“Is that where you want to go?” I asked. “Or do you want to stay here?”

He looked down at Doe who was still nibbling at a piece of sweet potato. “I want to stay here,” he said, surprising me. “I’m not sure you have a hope in hell of building anything here, but you’re just crazy enough to make it work.” And if it didn’t work, he’d be no worse off than he was when he escaped slavery. He could rob someone and continue his journey north. Or maybe not. I’d been thinking about Mora. He did a lot to keep people away from him-keep them from knowing too much about him, keep them from seeing what he was feeling, or that he was feeling anything— a male sharer, desperate to hide his terrible vulnerability? Sharing would be harder on a man. What would my brothers have been like as sharers? Odd that I hadn’t thought of that before.

“I’m glad you’re staying,” I said. “We need you.” I looked at Travis and Natividad. “We need you guys, too. “You’re staying, aren’t you?”

“You know we are,” Travis said. “Although I think I agree more than I want to with Mora. I’m not sure we have a prayer of succeeding here.”

“We’ll have whatever we can shape,” I said. And I turned to face Harry. He and Zahra had been whispering together. Now he looked at me.

“Mora’s right,” he said. “You’re nuts.”

I sighed.

“But this is a crazy time,” he continued. “Maybe you’re what the time needs— or what we need. I’ll stay. I may be sorry for it, but I’ll stay.”

Now the decision is acknowledged, and we can stop arguing about it. Tomorrow we’ll begin to prepare a winter garden. Next week, several of us will go into town to buy tools, more seed, supplies. Also, it’s time we began to build a shelter. There are trees enough in the area, and we can dig into the ground and into the hills. Mora says he’s built slave cabins before. Says he’s eager to build something better, something fit for human beings. Besides, this far north and this near the coast, we might get some rain.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2027

Today we had a funeral for Bankole’s dead— the five people who died in the fire. The cops never came. At last Bankole has decided that they aren’t going to come, and that it’s time his sister and her family had a decent burial. We collected all the bones that we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned.

“A thing like that should serve the living,” Bankole said when she offered it.

“You are living,” Natividad said. “I like you. I wish I could have met your sister.”

He looked at her for a while. Then he took the shawl and hugged her. Then, beginning to cry, he went off by himself into the trees, out of our sight. I let him alone for an hour or so, then went after him.

I found him, sitting on a fallen log, wiping his face. I sat with him for some time, saying nothing. After a while, he got up, waited for me to stand, then headed back toward our camp.

“I would like to give them a grove of oak trees,” I said. “Trees are better than stone— life commemorating life.

He glanced back at me. “All right.”

“Bankole?”

He stopped, looked at me with an expression I could not read.

“None of us knew her,” I said. “I wish we had. I wish I had, no matter how much I would have surprised her.”

He managed a smile. “She would have looked at you, then looked at me, then, right in front of you, I think she would have said, `Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.’ Once she got that out of her system, I think she would have gotten to like you.”

“Do you think she could stand…or forgive company now?”

“No.” He drew me to his side and put one arm around me. “Human beings will survive of course.

Some other countries will survive. Maybe they’ll absorb what’s left of us. Or maybe we’ll just break up into a lot of little states quarreling and fighting with each other over whatever crumbs are left. That’s almost happened now with states shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders. As bright as you are, I don’t think you understand— I don’t think you can understand what we’ve lost. Perhaps that’s a blessing.”

“God is Change,” I said.

“Olamina, that doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means everything. Everything!”

He sighed. “You know, as bad as things are, we haven’t even hit bottom yet. Starvation, disease, drug damage, and mob rule have only begun.

Federal, state, and local governments still exist— in name at least— and sometimes they manage to do something more than collect taxes and send in the military. And the money is still good. That amazes me. However much more you need of it to buy anything these days, it is still accepted. That may be a hopeful sign— or perhaps it’s only more evidence of what I just said: We haven’t hit bottom yet.”

“Well, the group of us here doesn’t have to sink any lower,” I said.

He shook his shaggy head, his hair, beard, and serious expression making him look more than a little like an old picture I used to have of Frederick Douglass.

“I wish I believed that,” he said. Perhaps it was his grief talking. “I don’t think we have a hope in hell of succeeding here.”

I slipped my arm around him. “Let’s go back,” I said.

“We’ve got work to do.”

So today we remembered the friends and the family members we’ve lost. We spoke our individual memories and quoted Bible passages, Earthseed verses, and bits of songs and poems that were favorites of the living or the dead.

Then we buried our dead and we planted oak trees.

Afterward, we sat together and talked and ate a meal and decided to call this place Acorn.

A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.

The Bible

Authorized King James Version

St. Luke 8: 5-8