Parable of the Talents

Multiple award winner Octavia E. Butler's astonishing novels have made her a powerful, acclaimed voice in women's fiction, African-American literature, and modern science fiction. PARABLE OF THE TALENTS is her mesmerizing vision of a near-future world filled with irrational hatred...and divine hope.

EARTHSEED

Lauren Olamina's love is divided among her young daughter, her community, and the revelation that led Lauren to found a new faith that teaches "God Is Change." But in the wake of environmental and economic chaos, the U.S. government turns a blind eye to violent bigots who consider the mere existence of a black female leader a threat. And soon Lauren must either sacrifice her child and her followers— or forsake the religion that can transform human destiny.

************************************

to my aunts

Irma Harris and

Hazel Ruth Walker,

and in memory of my mother

Octavia Margaret Butler

************************************

PROLOGUE

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

By Lauren Oya Olamina

Here we are—

Energy,

Mass,

Life,

Shaping life, Mind,

Shaping Mind, God,

Shaping God.

Consider—

We are born

Not with purpose,

But with potential.

THEY'LL MAKE A GOD of her.

I think that would please her, if she could know about it. In spite of all her protests and denials, she's always needed devoted, obedient followers—disciples—who would listen to her and believe everything she told them. And she needed large events to manipulate. All gods seem to need these things.

Her legal name was Lauren Oya Olamina Bankole. To those who loved her or hated her, she was simply "Olamina."

She was my biological mother.

She is dead.

I have wanted to love her and to believe that what hap­pened between her and me wasn't her fault. I've wanted that. But instead, I've hated her, feared her, needed her. I've never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was—so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me. I still don't understand. And now that she's dead, I'm not even sure I ever will. But I must try because I need to understand myself, and she is part of me. I wish that she weren't, but she is. In order for me to understand who I am, I must begin to understand who she was. That is my reason for writing and assembling this book.

It has always been my way to sort through my feelings by writing. She and I had that in common. And along with the need to write, she also developed a need to draw. If she had been born in a saner time, she might have become a writer as I have or an artist.

I've gathered a few of her drawings, although she gave most of these away during her lifetime. And I have copies of all that was saved of her writings. Even some of her early, paper notebooks have been copied to disk or crystal and saved. She had a habit, during her youth, of hiding caches of food, money, and weaponry in out-of-the-way places or with trusted people, and being able to go straight back to these years later. These saved her life several times, and also they saved her words, her journals and notes and my father's writ­ings. She managed to badger him into writing a little. He wrote well, although he didn't like doing it. I'm glad she bad­gered him. I'm glad to have known him at least through his writing. I wonder why I'm not glad to have known her through hers.

"God is Change," my mother believed. That was what she said in the first of her verses in Earthseed: The First Book of the living.

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

The words are harmless, I suppose, and metaphorically true. At least she began with some species of truth. And now she's touched me one last time with her memories, her life, and her damned Earthseed.

************************************

2032

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

We give our dead

To the orchards

And the groves.

We give our dead

To life.

Chapter 1

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Darkness

Gives shape to the light

As light

Shapes the darkness.

Death

Gives shape to life

As life

Shapes death.

The universe

And God

Share this wholeness,

Each

Defining the other.

God

Gives shape to the universe

As the universe

Shapes God.

from Memories of Other Worlds

by taylor franklin bankole

I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and iner­tia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because in­adequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.

What is left of it now, what it has become, I do not know.

************************************

Taylor Franklin Bankole was my father. From his writings, he seems to have been a thoughtful, somewhat formal man who wound up with my strange, stubborn mother even though she was almost young enough to be his granddaughter.

My mother seems to have loved him, seems to have been happy with him. He and my mother met during the Pox when they were both homeless wanderers. But he was a 57-year-old doctor—a family practice physician—and she was an 18-year-old girl. The Pox gave them terrible memories in common. Both had seen their neighborhoods destroyed—his in San Diego and hers in Robledo, a suburb of Los Angeles. That seems to have been enough for them. In 2027, they met, liked each other, and got married. I think, reading between the lines of some of my father's writing, that he wanted to take care of this strange young girl that he had found. He wanted to keep her safe from the chaos of the time, safe from the gangs, drugs, slavery, and disease. And of course he was flattered that she wanted him. He was human, and no doubt tired of being alone. His first wife had been dead for about two years when they met.

He couldn't keep my mother safe of course. No one could have done that. She had chosen her path long before they met. His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, september 26, 2032

Today is Arrival Day, the fifth anniversary of our establish­ing a community called Acorn here in the mountains of Humboldt County.

In perverse celebration of this, I've just had one of my re­curring nightmares. They've become rare in the past few years—old enemies with familiar nasty habits. I know them. They have such soft, easy beginnings This one was, at first, a visit to the past, a trip home, a chance to spend time with beloved ghosts.

************************************

My old home has come back from the ashes. This doesn't surprise me, somehow, although I saw it burn years ago. I walked through the rubble that was left of it. Yet here it is restored and filled with people—all the people I knew as I was growing up. They sit in our front rooms in rows of old metal folding chairs, wooden kitchen and dining room chairs, and plastic stacking chairs, a silent congregation of the scattered and the dead.

Church service is already going on, and, of course, my fa­ther is preaching. He looks as he always has in his church robes: tall, broad, stern, straight—a great black wall of a man with a voice you not only hear, but feel on your skin and in your bones. There's no corner of the meeting rooms that my father cannot reach with that voice. We've never had a^- sound system—never needed one. I hear and feel that voice again.

Yet how many years has it been since my father vanished? Or rather, how many years since he was killed? He must have been killed. He wasn't the kind of man who would abandon his family, his community, and his church. Back when he vanished, dying by violence was even easier than it is today. Living, on the other hand, was almost impossible.

He left home one day to go to his office at the college. He taught his classes by computer, and only had to go to the col­lege once a week, but even once a week was too much ex­posure to danger. He stayed overnight at the college as usual. Early mornings were the safest times for working people to travel. He started for home the next morning and was never seen again.

We searched. We even paid for a police search. Nothing did any good.

This happened many months before our house burned, be­fore our community was destroyed. I was 17. Now I'm 23 and I'm several hundred miles from that dead place.

Yet all of a sudden, in my dream, things have come right again. I'm at home, and my father is preaching. My step­mother is sitting behind him and a little to one side at her piano. The congregation of our neighbors sits before him in the large, not-quite-open area formed by our living room, dining room, and family room. This is a broad L-shaped space into which even more than the usual 30 or 40 people have crammed themselves for Sunday service. These people are too quiet to be a Baptist congregation—or at least, they're too quiet to be the Baptist congregation I grew up in. They're here, but somehow not here. They're shadow peo­ple. Ghosts.

Only my own family feels real to me. They're as dead as most of the others, and yet they're alive! My brothers are here and they look the way they did when I was about 14. Keith, the oldest of them, the worst and the first to die, is only 11. This means Marcus, my favorite brother and al­ways the best-looking person in the family, is 10. Ben and Greg, almost as alike as twins, are eight and seven. We're all sitting in the front row, over near my stepmother so she can keep an eye on us. I'm sitting between Keith and Marcus to keep them from killing each other during the service.

When neither of my parents is looking, Keith reaches across me and punches Marcus hard on the thigh. Marcus, younger, smaller, but always stubborn, always tough, punches back. I grab each boy's fist and squeeze. I'm bigger and stronger than both of them and I've always had strong hands. The boys squirm in pain and try to pull away. After a moment, I let them go. Lesson learned. They let each other alone for at least a minute or two.

In my dream, their pain doesn't hurt me the way it always did when we were growing up. Back then, since I was the oldest, I was held responsible for their behavior. I had to control them even though I couldn't escape their pain. My father and stepmother cut me as little slack as possible when it came to my hyperempathy syndrome. They refused to let me be handicapped. I was the oldest kid, and that was that. I had my responsibilities.

Nevertheless I used to feel every damned bruise, cut, and burn that my brothers managed to collect. Each time I saw them hurt, I shared their pain as though I had been injured myself. Even pains they pretended to feel, I did feel. Hyper­empathy syndrome is a delusional disorder, after all. There's no telepathy, no magic, no deep spiritual awareness. There's just the neurochemically-induced delusion that I feel the pain and pleasure that I see others experiencing. Pleasure is rare, pain is plentiful, and, delusional or not, it hurts like hell.

So why do I miss it now?

What a crazy thing to miss. Not feeling it should be like having a toothache vanish away. I should be surprised and happy. Instead, I'm afraid. A part of me is gone. Not being able to feel my brothers' pain is like not being able to hear them when they shout, and I'm afraid.

The dream begins to become a nightmare.

Without warning, my brother Keith vanishes. He's just gone. He was the first to go—to die—years ago. Now he's vanished again. In his place beside me, there is a tall, beau­tiful woman, black-brown-skinned and slender with long, crow-black hair, gleaming. She's wearing a soft, silky green dress that flows and twists around her body, wrapping her in some intricate pattern of folds and gathers from neck to feet. She is a stranger.

She is my mother.

She is the woman in the one picture my father gave me of my biological mother. Keith stole it from my bedroom when he was nine and I was twelve. He wrapped it in an old piece of a plastic tablecloth and buried it in our garden between a row of squashes and a mixed row of corn and beans. Later, he claimed it wasn't his fault that the picture was ruined by water and by being walked on. He only hid it as a joke. How was he supposed to know anything would happen to it? That was Keith. I beat the hell out of him. I hurt myself too, of course, but it was worth it. That was one beating he never told our parents about.

But the picture was still ruined. All I had left was the memory of it. And here was that memory, sitting next to me.

My mother is tall, taller than I am, taller than most peo­ple. She's not pretty. She's beautiful. I don't look like her. I look like my father, which he used to say was a pity. I don't mind. But she is a stunning woman.

I stare at her, but she does not turn to look at me. That, at least, is true to life. She never saw me. As I was born, she died. Before that, for two years, she took the popular "smart drug" of her time. It was a new prescription medicine called Paracetco, and it was doing wonders for people who had Alzheimer's disease. It stopped the deterioration of their in­tellectual function and enabled them to make excellent use of whatever memory and thinking ability they had left. It also boosted the performance of ordinary, healthy young people. They read faster, retained more, made more rapid, accurate connections, calculations, and conclusions. As a re­sult, Paracetco became as popular as coffee among students, and, if they meant to compete in any of the highly paid pro­fessions, it was as necessary as a knowledge of computers.

My mother's drug taking may have helped to kill her. I don't know for sure. My father didn't know either. But I do know that her drug left its unmistakable mark on me—my hyperempathy syndrome. Thanks to the addictive nature of Paracetco—a few thousand people died trying to break the habit—there were once tens of millions of us.

Hyperempaths, we're called, or hyperempathists, or sharers. Those are some of the polite names, And in spite of our vulnerability and our high mortality rate, there are still quite a few of us.

I reach out to my mother. No matter what she's done, I want to know her. But she won't look at me. She won't even turn her head. And somehow, I can't quite reach her, can't touch her. I try to get up from my chair, but I can't move. My body won't obey me. I can only sit and listen as my fa­ther preaches.

Now I begin to know what he is saying. He has been an indistinct background rumble until now, but now I hear him reading from the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, quoting the words of Christ:

" 'For the kingdom of Heaven is as a man traveling into a far country who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto One he gave five talents, to an­other two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.' "

My father loved parables—stories that taught, stories that presented ideas and morals in ways that made pictures in people's minds. He used the ones he found in the Bible, the ones he plucked from history, or from folk tales, and of course he used those he saw in his life and the lives of people he knew. He wove stories into his Sunday sermons, his Bible classes, and his computer-delivered history lec­tures. Because he believed stories were so important as teaching tools, I learned to pay more attention to them than I might have otherwise. I could quote the parable that he was reading now, the parable of the talents. I could quote several Biblical parables from memory. Maybe that's why I can hear and understand so much now. There is preaching between the bits of the parable, but I can't quite understand it. I hear its rhythms rising and falling, repeating and varying, shout­ing and whispering. I hear them as I've always heard them, but I can't catch the words—except for the words of the parable.

" "Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same and made them another five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained an­other two. But he that had received one went out and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.' "

My father was a great believer in education, hard work, and personal responsibility. "Those are our talents," he would say as my brothers' eyes glazed over and even I tried not to sigh. "God has given them to us, and he'll judge us according to how we use them."

The parable continues. To each of the two servants who had traded well and made profit for their lord, the lord said, " 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.' "

But to the servant who had done nothing with his silver talent except bury it in the ground to keep it safe, the lord said harsher words." "Thou wicked and slothful servant...' " he began. And he ordered his men to, " 'Take therefore the talent from him and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' "

When my father has said these words, my mother van­ishes. I haven't even been able to see her whole face, and now she's gone.

I don't understand this. It scares me. I can see now that other people are vanishing too. Most have already gone. Beloved ghosts....

My father is gone. My stepmother calls out to him in Spanish the way she did sometimes when she was excited, "No! How can we live now? They'll break in. They'll kill us all! We must build the wall higher!"

And she's gone. My brothers are gone. I'm alone—as I was alone that night five years ago. The house is ashes and rubble around me. It doesn't burn or crumble or even fade to ashes, but somehow, in an instant, it is a ruin, open to the night sky. I see stars, a quarter moon, and a streak of light, moving, rising into the sky like some life force escaping. By the light of all three of these, I see shadows, large, moving, threatening. I fear these shadows, but I see no way to escape them. The wall is still there, surrounding our neighborhood, looming over me much higher than it ever truly did. So much higher.... It was supposed to keep danger out. It failed years ago. Now it fails again. Danger is walled in with me. I want to run, to escape, to hide, but now my own hands, my feet begin to fade away. I hear thunder. I see the streak of light rise higher in the sky, grow brighter.

Then I scream. I fall. Too much of my body is gone, van­ished away. I can't stay upright, can't catch myself as I fall and fall and fall....

************************************

I awoke here in my cabin at Acorn, tangled in my blankets, half on and half off my bed. Had I screamed aloud? I didn't know. I never seem to have these nightmares when Bankole is with me, so he can't tell me how much noise I make. It's just as well. His practice already costs him enough sleep, and this night must be worse than most for him.

It's three in the morning now, but last night, just after dark, some group, some gang, perhaps, attacked the Dove-tree place just north of us. There were, yesterday at this time, 22 people living at Dovetree—the old man, his wife, and his two youngest daughters; his five married sons, their wives and their kids. All of these people are gone except for the two youngest wives and the three little children they were able to grab as they ran. Two of the kids are hurt, and one of the women has had a heart attack, of all things. Bankole has treated her before. He says she was born with a heart defect that should have been taken care of when she was a baby. But she's only twenty, and around the time she was born, her family, like most people, had little or no money. They worked hard themselves and put the strongest of their kids to work at ages eight or ten. Their daughter's heart problem was always either going to kill her or let her live. It wasn't going to be fixed.

Now it had nearly killed her. Bankole was sleeping—or more likely staying awake—in the clinic room of the school tonight, keeping an eye on her and the two injured kids. Thanks to my hyperempathy syndrome, he can't have his clinic here at the house. I pick up enough of other people's pain as things are, and he worries about it. He keeps want­ing to give me some stuff that prevents my sharing by keep­ing me sleepy, slow, and stupid. No, thanks!

So I awoke alone, soaked with sweat, and unable to get back to sleep. It's been years since I've had such a strong re­action to a dream. As I recall, the last time was five years ago right after we settled here, and it was this same damned dream. I suppose it's come back to me because of the attack on Dovetree.

That attack shouldn't have happened. Things have been quieting down over the past few years. There's still crime, of course—robberies, break-ins, abductions for ransom or for the slave trade. Worse, the poor still get arrested and inden­tured for indebtedness, vagrancy, loitering, and other "crimes." But this thing of raging into a community and killing and burning all that you don't steal seems to have gone out of fashion. I haven't heard of anything like this Dovetree raid for at least three years.

Granted, the Dovetrees did supply the area with home-distilled whiskey and homegrown marijuana, but they've been doing that since long before we arrived. In fact, they were the best-armed farm family in the area because their business was not only illegal, but lucrative. People have tried to rob them before, but only the quick, quiet burglar-types have had any success. Until now.

I questioned Aubrey, the healthy Dovetree wife, while Bankole was working on her son. He had already told her that the little boy would be all right, and I felt that we had to find out what she knew, no matter how upset she was. Hell, the Dovetree houses are only an hour's walk from here down the old logging road. Whoever hit Dovetree, we could be next on their list.

Aubrey told me the attackers wore strange clothing. She and I talked in the main room of the school, a single, smoky oil lamp between us on one of the tables. We sat facing one another across the table, Aubrey glancing every now and then at the clinic room, where Bankole had cleaned and eased her child's scrapes, burns, and bruises. She said the at­tackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics—black dresses, she called them—which hung to their thighs. Under these, they wore ordinary pants—either jeans or the kind of camouflage pants that she had seen soldiers wear.

"They were like soldiers," she said. "They sneaked in, so quiet. We never saw them until they started shooting at us. Then, bang! All at once. They hit all our houses. It was like an explosion—maybe twenty or thirty or more guns going off all at just the same time."

And that wasn't the way gangs operated. Gangsters would have fired raggedly, not in unison. Then they would have tried to make individual names for themselves, tried to grab the best-looking women or steal the best stuff before their friends could get it.

"They didn't steal or burn anything until they had beaten us, shot us." Aubrey said. "Then they took our fuel and went straight to our fields and burned our crops. After that, they raided the houses and barns. They all wore big white crosses on their chests—crosses like in church. But they killed us. They even shot the kids. Everybody they found, they killed them. I hid with my baby or they would have shot him and me." Again, she stared toward the clinic room.

That killing of children... that was a hell of a thing. Most thugs—except for the worst psychotics—would keep the kids alive for rape and then for sale. And as for the crosses, well, gangsters might wear crosses on chains around their necks, but that wasn't the sort of thing most of their victims would get close enough to notice. And gang­sters were unlikely to run around in matching tunics all sporting white crosses on their chests. This was something new.

Or something old.

I didn't think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won't be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn't help won­dering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don't think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaugh­ters people. Jarret's people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, "simpler" time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone be­lieved in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different There was never such a time in this coun­try. But these days when more than half the people in the country can't read at all, history is just one more vast un­known to them.

Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a "cultist," or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that's worth stealing. And "cultist" is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn't quite match Jarret's version of Christianity. Jarret's people have been known to beat or drive out Unitari­ans, for goodness' sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of "heathen houses of devil-worship," he has a simple answer: "Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again." He's had notable success with this carrot-and-stick approach. Join us and thrive, or whatever happens to you as a result of your own sinful stubbornness is your prob­lem. His opponent Vice President Edward Jay Smith calls him a demagogue, a rabble-rouser, and a hypocrite. Smith is right, of course, but Smith is such a tired, gray shadow of a man. Jarret, on the other hand, is a big, handsome, black-haired man with deep, clear blue eyes that seduce people and hold them. He has a voice that's a whole-body experi­ence, the way my father's was. In fact, I'm sorry to say, Jar­ret was once a Baptist minister like my father. But he left the Baptists behind years ago to begin his own "Christian Amer­ica" denomination. He no longer preaches regular CA ser­mons at CA churches or on the nets, but he's still recognized as head of the church.

It seems inevitable that people who can't read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give Jarret an even greater advantage.

Jarret's people see alcohol and drugs as Satan's tools. Some of his more fanatical followers might very well be the tunic-and-cross gang who destroyed Dovetree.

And we are Earthseed. We're "that cult," "those strange people in the hills," "those crazy fools who pray to some kind of god of change." We are also, according to some rumors I've heard, "those devil-worshiping hill heathens who take in children. And what do you suppose they do with them?'' Never mind that the trade in abducted or orphaned children or children sold by desperate parents goes on all over the country, and everyone knows it. No matter. The hint that some cult is taking in children for "questionable purposes" is enough to make some people irrational.

That's the kind of rumor that could hurt us even with peo­ple who aren't Jarret supporters. I've only heard it a couple of times, but it's still scary.

At this point, I just hope that the people who hit Dovetree were some new gang, disciplined and frightening, but only after profit. I hope

But I don't believe it. I do suspect that Jarret's people had something to do with this. And I think I'd better say so today at Gathering. With Dovetree fresh in everyone's mind, peo­ple will be ready to cooperate, have more drills and scatter more caches of money, food, weapons, records, and valu­ables. We can fight a gang. We've done that before when we were much less prepared than we are now. But we can't fight Jarret. In particular, we can't fight President Jarret. Presi­dent Jarret, if the country is mad enough to elect him, could destroy us without even knowing we exist.

We are now 59 people—64 with the Dovetree women and children, if they stay. With numbers like that, we barely do exist. All the more reason, I suppose, for my dream.

My "talent," going back to the parable of the talents, is Earthseed. And although I haven't buried it in the ground, I have buried it here in these coastal mountains, where it can grow at about the same speed as our redwood trees. But what else could I have done? If I had somehow been as good at rabble-rousing as Jarret is, then Earthseed might be a big enough movement by now to be a real target. And would that be better?

I'm jumping to all kinds of unwarranted conclusions. At least I hope they're unwarranted. Between my horror at what's happened down at Dovetree and my hopes and fears for my own people, I'm upset and at loose ends and, per­haps, just imagining things.

Chapter 2

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Chaos

Is God's most dangerous face—

Amorphous, roiling, hungry.

Shape Chaos—

Shape God.

Act

Alter the speed

Or the direction of Change.

Vary the scope of Change.

Recombine the seeds of Change.

Transmute the impact of Change.

Seize Change.

Use it.

Adapt and grow.

THE ORIGINAL 13 SETTLERS of Acorn, and thus the original 13 members of Earthseed, were my mother, of course, and Harry Balter and Zahra Moss, who were also refugees from my mother's home neighborhood in Robledo. There was Travis, Natividad, and Dominic Douglas, a young family who became my mother's first highway converts. She met them as both groups walked through Santa Barbara, California. She liked their looks, recognized their dangerous vulnerability— Dominic was only a few months old at the time—and con­vinced them to walk with Harry, Zahra, and her in their long trek north where they all hoped to find better lives.

Next came Allison Gilchrist and her sister Jillian—Allie and Jill. But Jill was killed later along the highway. At around the same time, my mother spotted my father and he spotted her. Neither of them was shy and both seemed willing to act on what they felt. My father joined the growing group. Justin Rohr became Justin Gilchrist when the group found him cry­ing alongside the body of his dead mother. He was about three at the time, and he and Allie wound up coming to­gether in another small family. Last came the two families of ex-slaves that joined together to become one growing family of sharers. These were Grayson Mora and his daughter Doe and Emery Solis and her daughter Tori.

That was it: four children, four men, and five women.

They should have died. That they survived at all in the un­forgiving world of the Pox might qualify as a miracle—al­though of course, Earthseed does not encourage belief in miracles.

No doubt the group's isolated location—well away from towns and paved roads—helped keep it safe from much of the violence of the time. The land it settled on belonged to my father. There was on that land when the group arrived one dependable well, a half-ruined garden, a number of fruit and nut trees, and groves of oaks, pines, and redwoods. Once the members of the group had pooled their money and bought handcarts, seed, small livestock, hand tools, and other necessities, they were almost independent. They van­ished into their hills and increased their numbers by birth, by adoption of orphans, and by conversion of needy adults. They scavenged what they could from abandoned farms and settlements, they traded at street markets and traded with their neighbors. One of the most valuable things they traded with one another was knowledge.

Every member of Earthseed learned to read and to write, and most knew at least two languages—usually Spanish and English, since those were the two most useful. Anyone who joined the group, child or adult, had to begin at once to learn these basics and to acquire a trade. Anyone who had a trade was always in the process of teaching it to someone else. My mother insisted on this, and it does seem sensible. Public schools had become rare in those days when ten-year-old chil­dren could be put to work. Education was no longer free, but it was still mandatory according to the law. The problem was, no one was enforcing such laws, just as no one was protect­ing child laborers.

My father had the most valuable skills in the group. By the time he married my mother, he had been practicing medicine for almost 30 years. He was a multiple rarity for their loca­tion: well educated, professional, and Black. Black people in particular were rare in the mountains. People wondered about him. Why was he there? He could have been making a better living in some small, established town. The area was littered with tiny towns that would be glad to have any doc­tor. Was he competent? Was he honest? Was he clean? Could he be trusted looking after wives and daughters? How could they be sure he was really a doctor at all? My father appar­ently wrote nothing at all about this, but my mother wrote about everything.

She says at one point: "Bankole heard the same whispers and rumors I did at the various street markets and in occa­sional meetings with neighbors, and he shrugged. He had us to keep healthy and our work-related injuries to treat. Other people had their first aid kits, their satellite phone nets, and, if they were lucky, their cars or trucks. These vehicles tended to be old and undependable, but some people had them. Whether or not they called Bankole was their business.

"Then, thanks to someone else's misfortune, things im­proved. Jean Holly's appendix flared up and all but ruptured, and the Holly family, our eastern neighbors, decided that they had better take a chance on Bankole.

"Once Bankole had saved the woman's life, he had a talk with the family. He told them exactly what he thought of them for waiting so long to call him, for almost letting a woman with five young children die. He spoke with that in­tense quiet courtesy of his that makes people squirm. The Hollys took it. He became their doctor.

"And the Hollys mentioned him to their friends the Sullivans, and the Sullivans mentioned him to their daughter who had married into the Gama family, and the Gamas told the Dovetrees because old Mrs. Dovetree—the matriarch—had been a Gama. That was when we began to get to know our nearest neighbors, the Dovetrees."

Speaking of knowing people, I wish more than ever that I could have known my father. He seems to have been an im­pressive man. And, perhaps, it would have been good for me to know this version of my mother, struggling, focused, but very young, very human. I might have liked these people.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

monday, september 27, 2032

I'm not sure how to talk about today. It was intended to be a quiet day of salvaging and plant collecting after yesterday's uncomfortable Gathering and determined anniversary cele­bration. We have, it seems, a few people who think Jarret may be just what the country needs—apart from his religious nonsense. The thing is, you can't separate Jarret from the "religious nonsense." You take Jarret and you get beat­ings, burnings, tarrings and featherings. They're a package. And there may be even nastier things in that package. Jar­ret's supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret's talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.

Nevertheless, some of our people—the Peralta and Fair-cloth families in particular—might be leaving us soon.

"I've got four kids left alive," Ramiro Peralta said yester­day at Gathering. "Maybe with a strong leader like Jarret running things, they'll have a chance to stay alive."

He's a good guy, Ramiro is, but he's desperate for solu­tions, for order and stability. I understand that. He used to have seven kids and a wife. He'd lost three of his kids and his wife to a fire set by an angry, frightened, ignorant mob who decided to cure a nasty cholera epidemic down in Los Angeles by burning down the area of the city where they thought the epidemic had begun. I kept that in mind as I an­swered him. "Think, Ramiro," I said. "Jarret doesn't have any answers! How will lynching people, burning their churches, and starting wars help your kids to live?"

Ramiro Peralta only turned away from me in anger. He and Alan Faircloth looked across the Gathering room—the school room—at one another. They're both afraid. They look at their children—Alan has four kids, too—and they're afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their power-lessness. And they're tired. There are millions of people like them—people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!

Anyway, we had a stormy Gathering and an uneasy an­niversary celebration. Interesting that they fear Edward Jay Smith's supposed incompetence more than they fear Jarret's obvious tyranny.

So this morning, I was ready for a day of walking, think­ing, and plant collecting with friends. We still travel in groups of three or four when we leave Acorn because the mountains, on the roads and off them, can be dangerous. But for nearly five months now, we've had no trouble while sal­vaging. I suppose, though, that that can be dangerous in itself. Sad. Raids and gangs are dangerous because they kill outright. Peace is dangerous because it encourages compla­cency and carelessness—which also kills sooner or later.

In spite of the Dovetree raid, we were, to be honest, more complacent than usual because we were heading for a place that we knew. It was a burned, abandoned farmhouse far from Dovetree where we'd spotted some useful plants. In particular, there was aloe vera for use in easing burns and in­sect bites, and there were big mounds of agave. The agave was a handsome, variegated species—blue-green leaves edged in yellow-white. It must have been growing and prop­agating untended for years in what was once the front yard of the farmhouse. It was one of the large, vicious varieties of agave, each individual plant an upturned rosette of stiff, fi­brous, fleshy leaves, some of them over a meter long in the big parent plants. Each leaf was tipped with a long, hard, dagger-sharp spike, and for good measure, each leaf was edged in jagged thorns that were tough enough to saw through human flesh. We intended to use them to do just that.

On our first visit, we had taken some of the smallest plants, the youngest offsets. Now we meant to dig up as many of the rest as we could bundle into our handcart. The cart was already more than half full of things we had sal­vaged from the rotting storage shed of a collapsed cabin a couple of miles from where the agave grew. We had found dusty pots, pans, buckets, old books and magazines, rusted hand tools, nails, log chains, and wire. All had been dam­aged by water and time, but most could be cleaned and re­paired or cannibalized for parts or at least copied. We learn from all the work we do. We've become very competent makers and repairers of small tools. We've survived as well as we have because we keep learning. Our customers have come to know that if they buy from us, they'll get their money's worth.

Salvaging from abandoned gardens and fields is useful, too. We collect any herb, fruit, vegetable, or nut-producing plant, any plant at all that we know or suppose to be useful. We have, always, a special need for spiny, self-sufficient desert plants that will tolerate our climate. They serve as part of our thorn fence.

Cactus by cactus, thornbush by thornbush, we've planted a living wall in the hills around Acorn. Our wall won't keep determined people out, of course. No wall will do that. Cars and trucks will get in if their owners are willing to absorb some damage to their vehicles, but cars and trucks that work are rare and precious in the mountains, and most fuels are expensive.

Even intruders on foot can get in if they're willing to work at it. But the fence will hamper and annoy them. It will make them angry, and perhaps noisy. It will, when it's work­ing well, encourage people to approach us by the easiest routes, and those we guard 24 hours a day.

It's always best to keep an eye on visitors.

So we intended to harvest agave.

We headed for what was left of the farmhouse. It was built on a low rise overlooking fields and gardens. It was sup­posed to be our last stop before we went home. It came near to being our last stop, period.

There was an old gray housetruck parked near the ruin of the house. We didn't see the truck at first. It was hidden be­hind the larger of two chimneys that still stood like head and footstones, commemorating the burned house. I mentioned to Jorge Cho the way the chimneys looked. Jorge was with us because in spite of his youth, he's good at spotting useful salvage that other people might dismiss as junk.

"What are head and footstones?" he asked me. He meant it. He's 18 and an escapee from the Los Angeles area like I am, but his experience has been very different. While I was being cared for and educated by educated parents, he was on his own. He speaks Spanish and a little remembered Korean, but no English. He was seven when his mother died of flu and twelve when an earthquake killed his father. It collapsed the old brick building in which the family had been squat­ting. So at 12, Jorge alone was responsible for his younger sister and brother. He took care of them, somehow, and taught himself to read and write Spanish with occasional help from an old wino acquaintance. He worked at hard, dangerous, often illegal jobs; he salvaged; and when neces­sary, he stole. He and his sister and brother, three Korean kids in a poor neighborhood of Mexican and Central Amer­ican refugees, managed to survive, but they had no time to learn nonessentials. Now we're teaching them to read, write, and speak English because that will enable them to commu­nicate with more people. And we're teaching them history, fanning, carpentry, and incidental things—like what head and footstones are.

The other two members of the salvage team were Natividad Douglas and Michael Kardos. Jorge and I are sharers. Mike and Natividad aren't. It's too dangerous to send out a majority of sharers on any team. Sharers are too vulnerable. We suffer no matter who gets hurt. But two and two is a good team, and the four of us work well together. It's unusual for us all to be careless at the same time, but today, we managed it.

The fireplace and chimney that had concealed the truck from us had been the end wall of what was once a large liv­ing room. The fireplace was big enough to roast a whole cow. The whole affair was just big enough to conceal a medium-sized housetruck.

We saw the thing only an instant before it opened fire on us.

We were armed, as usual, with our automatic rifles and our sidearms, but against the armor and the firepower of even a modest housetruck, those were nothing.

We dropped to the ground under a spray of dirt and rock kicked up by bullets hitting the ground around us. We scrambled backward, down the rise on which the house was built. The crest of the rise was our only cover. All we could do was lie at the foot of its slope and try to keep all our body parts out of sight. We didn't dare stand or even sit up. There was nowhere for us to go. Bullets chewed the ground in front of us, then behind us, beyond the protection of the rise.

There were no trees nearby—not even a large bush be­tween us and the truck. We were in the thinnest part of the remains of a desert garden. We had not reached our agaves yet—could not reach them now. They couldn't have shielded us anyway. The only thing some of us might have at least concealed ourselves behind was a young, far-from-bulletproof young Washingtonia palm tree that we had passed on the way in. Its fronds were spread around it, low and green like a big bush, but it was at the north end of the house, and we were pinned down at the south end. The truck, too, was parked at the south end. The tree would be of no use to us. Nearest to us were a few aloe vera plants, a prickly pear, a small yucca, and a few weeds and tufts of grass.

None of these would do us any good. If the people in the truck had been making full use of their equipment, even the rise would not have done us any good. We would already be dead. I wondered how they had managed to miss us when we arrived. Were they just trying to scare us off? I didn't think so. The shooting had gone on for too long.

At last, it stopped.

We lay still, playing dead, listening for the whine of a truck engine, for footsteps, for voices, for any of the sounds that might tell us we were being hunted—or that our as­sailants had gone. There was only the low moan of the wind and the rustling of some of the plants. I lay, thinking about the pine trees that I had seen on the high ridge far behind the house. I could see them in my mind's eye, and somehow, it was all I could do to stop myself from raising my head to get a look at them, to see whether they were as far away as I thought they were. The weed-strewn fields of what had been the farm swept back and up into the hills. Above them were the pines that could shelter and conceal, but they were far beyond our reach. I sighed.

Then we heard the sound of a child, crying.

We all heard it—a few short sobs, then nothing. The child sounded very young—not a baby, but young, exhausted, helpless, hopeless.

The four of us looked at one another. We all care about kids. Michael has two and Natividad has three. Bankole and I have been trying to have one. Jorge, I'm glad to say, hasn't made anyone pregnant yet, but he's been a surrogate father to his younger sister and brother for six years. He knows as well as the rest of us do what dangers lie in wait for unpro­tected children.

I raised my head just enough to get a quick look at the truck and the area around it. A housetruck, armed, armored, and locked up tight shouldn't—couldn't let the sound of a child's crying escape. And the sound had seemed normal, not amplified or modified by truck speakers.

Therefore, one of the truck's doors must be open. Wide open.

I couldn't see much through the weeds and grasses, and I didn't dare to raise my head above them. All I could make out were the sunlit shapes of the chimney, the truck beside it, the weeds in the fields behind both chimney and truck, the distant trees, and....

Movement?

Movement far away in the weeds of the field, but coming closer.

Natividad pulled me down. "What is the matter with you?" she whispered in Spanish. For Jorge's sake, it was best to stay with Spanish while we were in trouble. "There are crazy people in that truck! Do you want to die?"

"Someone else is coming," I said. "More than one person, coming through the fields."

"I don't care! Stay down!"

Natividad is one of my best friends, but sometimes hav­ing her along is like having your mother with you.

"Maybe the crying is intended to lure us out," Michael said. "People have used children as lures before." He's a suspicious man, Michael is. He questions everything. He and his family have been with us for two years now, and I think it took him six months to accept us and to decide that we had no evil intentions toward his wife or his twin girls. This, even though we took them in and helped them when we found his wife alone, giving birth to the twins in a ruin of a shack where they had been squatting. The place was near a stream, so they had water, and they had a couple of scavenged pots. But they were armed only with an ancient, empty .22 target pistol and a knife. They were all but starving, eating pine nuts, wild plants, and an occasional small animal that Michael trapped or killed with a rock. In fact, he was away looking for food when his wife Noriko went into labor.

Michael agreed to join us because he was terrified that in spite of his odd jobs, begging, stealing, and scavenging, his wife and babies might starve. We never asked more of them than that they do their share of the work to keep the com­munity going and that they respect Earthseed by not preach­ing other belief systems. But to Michael, this sounded like altruism, and Michael didn't believe in altruism. He kept ex­pecting to catch us selling people into slavery or prostituting them. He didn't begin to relax until he realized that we were, in fact, practicing what we preached. Earthseed was and is the key to us. We had a way of life that he thought was sen­sible and a goal, a Destiny that he thought was crazy, but we weren't up to anything that would harm his family. And his family was the key to him. Once he accepted us, he and Noriko and the girls settled in and made Acorn very much their home. They're good people. Even Michael's suspi­ciousness can be a good thing. Most of the time, it helps us keep alert

"I don't think the crying was intended to lure us out," I said. "But something is wrong here. That's obvious. The people in that truck should either make sure we're dead or they should leave."

"And we shouldn't hear them," Jorge said. "No matter how loud that kid yells, we shouldn't hear a thing."

Natividad spoke up. "Their guns shouldn't have missed us," she said. "In a truck like that, the guns should be run by a computer. Automatic targeting. The only way you can miss is if you insist on doing things yourself. You might forget to put your guns on the computer or you might leave the com­puter off if you just wanted to scare people. But if you're se­rious, you shouldn't keep missing." Her father had taught her more about guns than most of the rest of our community knew.

"I don't think they missed us on purpose," I said. "It didn't feel like that."

"I agree," Michael said. "So what's wrong over there?"

"Shit!" Jorge whispered. "What's wrong is the bastards are going to kill us if we move!"

The guns went off again. I pressed myself against the ground and lay there, frozen, eyes shut. The idiots in the truck meant to kill us whether we moved or not, and their chances for success were excellent.

Then I realized that this time, they weren't shooting at us.

Someone screamed. Over the steady clatter of one of the truck's guns, I heard someone scream in agony. I didn't move. When someone was in pain, the only way I could avoid sharing the suffering was not to look.

Jorge, who should have known better, raised his head and looked.

An instant later he doubled up, thrashing and twisting in someone else's agony. He didn't scream. Sharers who sur­vive learn early to take the pain and keep quiet. We keep our vulnerability as secret as we can. Sometimes we manage not to move or give any sign at all. But Jorge hurt too much to keep his body still. He clutched himself, crossing his arms over his belly. At once, I felt a dull echo of his pain in my own middle. It is incomprehensible to me that some people think of sharing as an ability or a power—as some­thing desirable.

"Fool," I said to Jorge, and held him until the pain passed from both of us. I concealed my own pain as best I could so that we wouldn't develop the kind of nasty feedback loop that I've learned we sharers are capable of. We don't die of the pains that we see and share. We wish we could some­times, and there is danger in sharing too much pain or too many deaths. These are individual matters. Five years ago I shared three or four deaths fast, one after another. It hurt more than anything should be able to hurt. Then it knocked me out. When I came to, I was numb and sick and dazed long after there was any pain to share. With lesser pains, it's enough to turn away. In minutes, the pain is over for us. Deaths take much longer to get over.

The one good thing about sharing pain is that it makes us very slow to cause pain to other people. We hate pain more than most people do.

“I'm okay," Jorge said after a while. And then, "Those guys out there... I think they're dead. They must be dead."

"They're down anyway," Michael whispered as he looked where Jorge had looked. "I can see at least three of them in the field beyond the chimney and the truck." He squirmed backward so that he could relax and no longer see or be seen over the rise. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must be like to look at pain and feel nothing. My current recurring nightmare is the closest I've come to that kind of freedom, not that it felt like freedom. But to Michael feeling nothing must be... well... normal.

Everything had gone quiet. The truck had not moved. It did nothing.

"They seem to need a moving target," I said.

"Maybe they're high on something," Natividad said. "Or maybe they're just crazy. Jorge, are you sure you're okay?"

"Yes. I just want to get the hell out of here."

I shook my head. "We're stuck here, at least until it gets dark."

"If the truck has even the cheapest night-vision equip­ment, the dark won't help us," Michael said.

I thought about that, then nodded. "Yes, but it shot at us and missed. And it hasn't moved, even though two sets of people have found its hiding place. I'd say either the truck or the people in it are not in good working order. We'll stay here until dark, then we'll run. If we're lucky, no one will wander in behind us before then and give us trouble or draw the truck's attention back this way. But whatever happens, we'll wait."

"Three people are dead," Michael said. "We should be dead ourselves. Maybe before the night is over, we will be."

I sighed. "Shut up, Mike."

We waited through the cool autumn day. We were lucky that two days before, the weather had turned cool. We were also lucky that it wasn't raining. Perfect weather for getting pinned down by armed lunatics.

The truck never moved. No one else came along to trou­ble us or to draw fire. We ate the food we had brought along for lunch and drank what was left of our water. We decided that the trackers must think we were dead. Well, we were content to play dead until the sun had set. We waited.

Then we moved. In the dark, we began to crawl toward the northward edge of our cover. Moving this way, we hoped to put so much of the big chimney between ourselves and the truck that the people in the truck would not have time to see us and open fire before we got to better cover behind the second chimney. Once we reached the second chimney, we hoped to keep both chimneys between ourselves and the im­mobile truck as we escaped. That was fine as long as the truck remained immobile. If it moved, we were dead. Even if it didn't move, there would be a moment when we were easy targets, when we had to run across open ground.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god," Jorge whispered through clenched teeth as he stared at the stretch of open ground. If the truck managed to shoot anyone, and he saw it, he would col­lapse. So would I.

"Don't look around," I reminded him. "Even if you hear shots, look straight ahead, and run!"

But before we could start, the crying began again. There was no mistaking the sound. It was the open, uninhibited sobbing of a child, and this time, it didn't stop.

We ran. The sound of the crying might help to cover any sounds we made over the uneven ground—although we weren't noisy. We've learned not to be.

Jorge reached the smaller chimney first. I was next. Then Michael and Natividad arrived together. Michael is short and lean and looks as quick as he is. Natividad is stocky and strong and doesn't look quick at all, but she tends to surprise people.

We all made it. There were no shots fired. And in the time it took us to reach the smaller chimney, I found that I had changed my mind about things.

The crying had not stopped or even paused. When I looked around the small chimney toward the truck, I could see light—a broad swatch of dim, blue-gray light. I couldn't see people, but it was clear that we had guessed right. A side door of the truck was wide open.

We were all bunched together at the smaller chimney, the others peering toward the down slope north of us. That was where they still expected to go. There was starlight enough to light the way, and I could see Jorge, bent down, his hands on his thighs as though he were about to run a race.

The child was not sobbing now, but wailing—a thin, ex­hausted sound. Best to move before the crying stopped. Also best to move before the others understood what I meant to do—what I now knew I had to do. They would follow me and back me up as long as I moved fast and didn't give them time to think or argue.

"Let's go," Michael said.

I paid no attention. There was, I realized, a bad smell in the air, swelling and fading in the evening breeze. It seemed to be coming from the truck.

"Come on," Michael urged.

"No," I said, and waited until all three of them had turned to look at me. Timing, now. "I want to see about that child," I said. "And I want that truck."

I moved then, just ahead of their restraining hands and words.

I ran. I ran around the carcass of the house, shifting for an instant from reality into my dream. I was running past the stark ruin of a house, its chimneys, its few remaining black bones just visible against the stars.

Just for an instant, I thought I saw shadowy dream forms. Shadows rising, moving_

I shook off the feeling and stopped as I reached the larger chimney. I edged around it, willing the truckers not to shoot me, terrified that they would shoot me, moving fast in spite of the terror.

The blue-gray light was brighter now, and the smell had become a sickening stench of rottenness that I found all too familiar.

I crouched low, hoping to be out of sight of the truck's cameras, and I crossed in front of the truck—near enough to it to put out my hand and touch it. Then I had reached the far side of it where the light was, where the door must be open.

As I went, I almost fell over the crying child. It was a lit­tle girl of perhaps six or seven. She was filthy beyond my ability to describe filthiness. She sat in the dirt, crying, reaching up to wipe away tears and rearrange some of the mud on her face.

She looked up and saw me just as I managed to stop my­self from falling over her. She stared at me, her mourn open, as I swung past her to level my rifle into the blue-gray light of the truck's interior.

I don't know what I expected to see: Drunken people sprawled about? An orgy? More filth? People aiming their weapons at me? Death?

There was death nearby. I knew that. The smell was un­mistakable.

What I did see in the blue-gray light was another child, another little girl, asleep at one of the truck's monitors. She had put her head down against the edge of the control board, and was snoring a little. The blue-gray light came from the three screens that were on. All three showed only gray, grainy electronic "snow."

There were also three dead people in the truck.

That is, I thought they must be dead. It was clear that all had been wounded—shot, I thought—several times. In fact, they must have been shot some time ago—days ago, per­haps. The blood on their bodies had dried and darkened.

I don't share any feeling with the unconscious or the dead, I'm glad to say. No matter how they look or smell, they don't bother me that much. I've seen too many of them.

I climbed into the truck, leaving the crying child outside to the care of the others. I could already hear Natividad talk­ing to her. Natividad loves kids, and they seem to trust her as soon as they meet her.

Jorge and Michael had come up behind me as I climbed into the truck. Both froze as they saw the sleeping child and the sprawled bodies. Then Michael moved past me to check the bodies. He, Natividad, Allie Gilchrist, and Zahra Balter have learned to assist Bankole. They have no official med­ical or nurse training, but Bankole has trained them—is training them—and they're careful and serious about their work.

Michael checked the bodies and discovered that only one, a slender, dark, middle-aged man, was dead. He had been shot in the chest and abdomen. The other two were a big, naked, middle-aged, blond woman shot in the legs and thighs and a clothed blond boy of about 15 shot in the legs and left shoulder. These people were covered with dried blood. Nevertheless, Michael found faint heartbeats in the woman and the boy.

"We've got to get them to Bankole," he said. "This is too much for me."

"Oh, shit," Jorge moaned, and he ran outside and threw up. I couldn't blame him. He had just noticed the maggots in the man's eyes, mouth, and wounds, and in the wounds of the other two. I looked away myself. All of us can deal with that kind of thing, but no one enjoys it. To tell the truth, I was more concerned about whether one or both of the wounded people would come to. I positioned myself so that I would not have to look at them. They were in no shape to attack us, of course, but they would drag me into their pain if they were conscious.

Keeping my back to Michael and his patients, I awoke the sleeping child. She wasn't quite as filthy as the little girl we'd found outside, but she did need a bath.

She squinted up at me, groggy, uncomprehending. Then she gave a little squeal and tried to dart past me, and out the door.

I caught her and held her while she struggled and screamed. I spoke to her, whispered to her, tried to reassure her, did all I could to bring her out of her hysteria. "It's all right, honey, it's all right. Don't cry. You'll be all right. We'll take care of you, don't worry. We'll take care of you...." I rocked her and crooned to her as though to a much younger child.

The dead and wounded were no doubt her family. She and the other child had been alone here with them for... how long? They would need all the care we could give them. After much more screaming and struggling, she began to take refuge in my arms, holding on to me instead of trying to escape. From my arms, she stared, huge-eyed, at the others.

Jorge stood watch at the monitors once his stomach set­tled. Natividad had calmed the other little girl and found a clean cloth and some water. These she used to wash the child's face, hands, and arms. Michael had left the wounded woman and boy to examine the truck's controls. Of the four of us, he was the only one who knew how to drive.

"Any trouble?" I asked him.

He shook his head. "Not even any sign of boobytraps. I guess they would have worried about the kids springing them."

"Can you drive it?"

"No problem."

"Drive it, then. It's ours. Let's go home."

************************************

The truck was all right. There was plenty of power in its bat­teries, and Michael had no trouble finding and using its night-vision equipment. It carried infrared, ambient light, and radar devices. All of these were of good quality, and all worked. The little girls must not have understood how to use them—as they had not known how to drive. Or perhaps they had known how to operate everything, but had not known where to go with it. Who could little children go to for help, after all? If they had no adult relatives, even the police would either sell them ille­gally or indenture them legally. Indenturing indigents, young and old, is much in fashion now. The Thirteenth and Four­teenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaran­teeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they've been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legis­latures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don't much matter. Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it's just one more way of get­ting people to work for nothing or almost nothing. Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor.

No doubt these two girls have been taught to be terrified of strangers. Then, with their parents and brother out of ac­tion, they had been left on their own to defend their family and their home. In their blind fear, they had, they must have, shot at us and shot and hit three men who gave no sign of being anything worse than wanderers, perhaps salvagers. Michael and Natividad did go out to check on these men be­fore we left while Jorge and I loaded our handcart and its contents onto the truck.

The three men were dead. They had hard currency and holstered guns—which Michael and Natividad collected. We covered them with rocks and left them. But they had been even less of a danger to the housetruck than we were. If they had walked right up to the truck, a locked door would have kept them out. Their old nine-millimeter semi-automatics would have had no chance against the truck's armor. But the little girls hadn't realized that.

We got them home to Acorn, and they're getting baths, food, comfort, and rest. Bankole is working on their mother and brother. He was not happy to have new patients. Our clinic has never been so full, and he has all his students and some volunteers helping him. He says he doesn't know whether he'll be able to save this new mother and son. He has a few simple instruments and an intricate little diagnostic unit that he saved when he fled his home in San Diego five years ago. And he has a few medicines—drugs to ease pain, fight infection, and otherwise keep us healthy. If the boy lives, Bankole doesn't know whether he'll walk again.

Bankole will do his best for them. And Allie Gilchrist and May are taking care of the little girls. The girls have been lucky, at least, in having us find them. They'll be safe with us.

And now, at last, we have something we've needed for years. We have a truck.

wednesday, september 29, 2032

With all the work that my Bankole has had to do to help the wounded woman and boy and the wounded Dovetrees, he didn't get around to shouting at me over the truck incident until last night. And, of course, he didn't shout. He tends not to. It's a pity. His disapproval might be easier to take if it were quick and loud. It was, as usual, quiet and intense.

"It's a shame that so many of your unnecessary risks pay off so well," he said to me as we lay in bed last night. "You're a fool, you know. It's as though you think you can't be killed. My god, girl, you're old enough to know better."

"I wanted the housetruck," I said. "And I realized we might be able to get it. And we might be able to help a child. We kept hearing one of them crying."

He turned his head to look at me for several seconds, his mouth set. "You've seen children led down the road in con­vict collars or chains," he said. "You've seen them displayed as enticements before houses of prostitution. Are you going to tell me you did this because you heard one crying?"

"I do what I can," I said. "When I can do more, I will. You know that."

He just looked at me. If I didn't love him, I might not like him much at times like these. I took his hand and kissed it, and held it. "I do what I can." I repeated, "And I wanted the housetruck."

"Enough to risk not only yourself, but your whole team— four people?"

"The risk in running away empty-handed was at least as great as the risk of going for the truck."

He made a sound of disgust and withdrew his hand. "So now you've got a battered old housetruck," he muttered.

I nodded. "So now we have it. We need it. You know we do. It's a beginning."

"It's not worth anyone's life!"

"It didn't cost any of our lives!" I sat up and looked down at him. I needed to have him see me as well as he could in the dim light from the window. I wanted to have him know that I meant what I was saying. "If I had to die," I said, "if I had to get shot by strangers, shouldn't it be while I was try­ing to help the community, and not just while I was trying to run away?"

He raised his hands and gave me an ironic round of ap­plause. "I knew you would say something like that, Well, I never thought you were stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid. That being the case, I have a proposition for you."

He sat up and I moved close to him and pulled the blan­kets up around us. I leaned against him and sat, waiting. Whatever he had to say, I felt that I'd gotten my point across. If he wanted to call my thinking obsessive, I didn't care.

“I’ve been looking at some of the towns in the area," he said. "Saylorville, Halstead, Coy—towns that are a few miles off the highway. None of them need a doctor now, but one probably will someday soon. How would you feel about living in one of those towns?"

I sat still, surprised. He meant it. Saylorville? Halstead? Coy? These are communities so small that I'm not sure they qualify as towns. Each has no more than a few families and businesses huddled together between the highway—U.S. 101—and the sea. We trade at their street markets, but they're closed societies, these towns. They tolerate "for­eign" visitors, but they don't like us. They've been burned too many times by strangers passing through—people who turned out to be thieves or worse. They trust only their own and long-established neighboring farmers. Did Bankole think that they would welcome us? Except for a larger town called Prata, the nearest towns are almost all White. Prata is White and Latino with a sprinkling of Asians. We're you name it: Black, White, Latino, Asian, and any mixture at all—the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a city. The kids we've adopted and the ones who have been born to us think of all the mixing and matching as normal. Imagine that.

Bankole and I both Black, have managed to mix things up agewise. He's always being mistaken for my father. When he corrects people, they wink at him or frown or grin. Here in Acorn, if people don't understand us, at least they accept us.

"I'm content here," I said. "The land is yours. The com­munity is ours. With our work, and with Earthseed to guide us, we're building something good here. It will grow and spread. We'll see that it does. But for now, nothing in any of those towns is ours."

"It can be," he said. "You don't realize how valuable a physician is to an isolated community."

"Oh, don't I? I know how valuable you are to us."

He turned his head toward me. "More valuable than a truck?"

"Idiot," I said. "You want to hear praise? Fine. Consider yourself praised. You know how many of our lives you've saved—including mine."

He seemed to think about that for a moment. "This is a healthy young group of people," he said. "Except for the Dovetree woman, even your most recent adoptees are healthy people who've been injured, not sick people. We have no old people." He grinned. "Except me. No chronic problems except for Katrina Dovetree's heart. Not even a problem pregnancy or a child with worms. Almost any town in the area needs a doctor more than Acorn does."

"They need any doctor. We need you. Besides, they have what they need."

"As I've said, they won't always."

"I don't care." I moved against him. "You belong here. Don't even think about going away."

“Thinking is all I can do about it right now. I'm thinking about a safe place for us, a safe place for you when I'm dead."

I winced.

"I'm an old man, girl. I don't kid myself about that."

"Bankole—"

"I have to think about it. I want you to think about it too. Do that for me. Just think about it."

Chapter 3

^{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

God is Change,

And in the end,

God prevails.

But meanwhile ...

Kindness eases Change.

Love quiets fear.

And a sweet and powerful

Positive obsession

Blunts pain,

Diverts rage,

And engages each of us

In the greatest,

The most intense

Of our chosen struggles

from Memories of Other Worlds

I cannot know what the end will be of all of Olamina's dreaming, striving, and certainty. I cannot recall ever feeling as certain of anything as she seems to be of Earthseed, a be­lief system that she herself created—or, as she says, a net­work of truths that she has simply recognized. I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are ir­rational states of mind.

Olamina believes in a god that does not in the least love her. In fact, her god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity. It is not consciously aware of her— or of anything. It is not conscious at all. "God is Change," she says and means it. Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics. "God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails."

Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even the Earthseed Destiny seems to have little to do with religion.

"We are Earthseed," Olamina says. "We are the children of God, as all fractions of the universe are the children of God. But more immediately we are the children of our par­ticular Earth." And within those words lies the origin of the Destiny. That portion of humanity that is conscious, that knows it is Earthseed, and that accepts its Destiny is simply trying to leave the womb, the Earth, to be born as all young beings must do eventually.

Earthseed is Olamina's contribution to what she feels should be a species-wide effort to evade, or at least to lengthen the specialize-grow-die evolutionary cycle that humanity faces, that every species faces.

"We can be a long-term success and the parents, our­selves, of a vast array of new peoples, new species," she says, "or we can be just one more abortion. We can, we must, scatter the Earth's living essence—human, plant, and animal—to extrasolar worlds: 'The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.'"

Grand words.

She hopes and dreams and writes and believes, and per­haps the world will let her live for a while, tolerating her as a harmless eccentric. I hope that it will. I fear that it may not.

************************************

My father has, in this piece, defined Earthseed very well and defined it in fewer words than I could have managed. When my mother was a child, protected and imprisoned by the walls of her neighborhood, she dreamed of the stars. Literally, at night she dreamed of them. And she dreamed of flying. I've seen her flying dreams mentioned in her earliest writings. Awake or asleep, she dreamed of these things. As far as I'm concerned, that's what she was doing when she created her Earthseed Destiny and her Earthseed verses: dreaming. We all need dreams—our fantasies—to sustain us through hard times. There's no harm in that as long as we don't begin to mistake our fantasies for reality as she did. It seems that she doubted herself from time to time, but she never doubted the dream, never doubted Earthseed. Like my father, I can't feel that secure about any religion. That's odd, considering the way i was raised, but it's true.

I've seen religious passion in other people, though—love for a compassionate God, fear of an angry God, fulsome praise and desperate pleading for a God that rewards and punishes. All that makes me wonder how a belief system like Earthseed—very demanding but offering so little comfort from such an utterly indifferent God—should inspire any loy­alty at all.

In Earthseed, there is no promised afterlife. Earthseed's heaven is literal, physical—other worlds circling other stars. It promises its people immortality only through their chil­dren, their work, and their memories. For the human species, immortality is something to be won by sowing Earthseed on other worlds. Its promise is not of mansions to live in, milk and honey to drink, or eternal oblivion in some vast whole of nirvana, its promise is of hard work and brand-new possibili­ties, problems, challenges, and changes. Apparently, that can be surprisingly seductive to some people. My mother was a surprisingly seductive person.

There is an Earthseed verse that goes like this:

God is Change.

God is Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

God is Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay—

God is Change.

Beware:

God exists to shape

And to be shaped.

This is a terrifying God, implacable, faceless, yet malleable and wildly dynamic. I suppose it will soon be wearing my mother's face. Her second name was "Oya." I wonder what­ever possessed my Baptist minister grandfather to give her such a name. What did he see in her? "Oya" is the name of a Nigerian Orisha—goddess—of the Yoruba people. In fact, the original Oya was the goddess of the Niger River, a dynamic, dangerous entity. She was also goddess of the wind, fire, and death, more bringers of great change.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

monday, october 4, 2032

Krista Noyer died today.

That was her name: Krista Koslow Noyer. She never re­gained consciousness. From the time we found her beaten, raped, and shot, lying naked in her family's housetruck, she's been in a deep coma. We've kept her and her wounded son in the clinic together. The five Dovetrees have moved in with Jeff King and his children, but it seemed best to keep Krista Noyer and her son at the clinic.

Zahra Baker and Allie Gilchrist helped to clean them up, then assisted Bankole when he removed five bullets from their bodies—two from the mother and three from the son. Zahra and Allie have been working with Bankole longer than Mike and Natividad have. They're not doctors, of course, but they know a lot Bankole says he thinks they could function well as nurse practitioners now.

He, all four of his helpers, and others who gave volunteer nursing care did their best for the Noyers. After Krista Noyer's surgery, Zahra, Natividad, Allie, Noriko Kardos, Channa Ryan, and Teresa Lin took turns sitting with her, tending her needs. Bankole says he wanted women around her in case she came to. He thought the sight of male strangers would panic her.

I suspect that he was right. Poor woman.

At least her son was with her when she died. He lay on the bed next to hers, sometimes reaching out to touch her. They were only separated by one of our homemade privacy screens when personal things had to be done for one of them. There was no screen between them when Krista died.

The boy's name is Danton Noyer, Junior. He wants to be called Dan. We burned the body of Danton Noyer, Senior, as soon as we got it back to Acorn. Now we'll have to burn his wife. We'll hold services for both of them when Dan is well enough to attend.

sunday, october 17, 2032

We had a double funeral today for Danton Noyer, Senior and his wife Krista.

Under Bankole's care, Dan Noyer is recovering. His legs and shoulder are healing, and he can walk a little. Bankole says he can thank the maggots for that. Not only did the dis­gusting little things keep his wounds clean by eating the dead tissue, but they did no harm. This particular kind have no appetite for healthy, living tissue. They eat the stuff that would putrefy and cause gangrene, then, unless they're re­moved, they metamorphose and fly away.

The little girls, Kassia and Mercy, had, at first, to be kept inside so that they would not run away. They had nowhere to go, but they were so frightened and confused that they kept trying to escape. When they were allowed to visit their brother they had to be kept from hurting him. They ran to him and would have piled onto his bed for reassurance and comfort if May and Allie had not stopped them. May seems best able to reach them. They seem to be adopting both women—and vice versa—but they seem to have a special liking for May.

She's something of a mystery, our May. I'm teaching her to write so that someday she'll be able to tell us her story. She looks as though she might be a Latina, but she doesn't understand Spanish. She does understand English, but doesn't speak it well enough to be understood most of the time. That's because sometime before she joined us, someone cut out her tongue.

We don't know who did it. I've heard that in some of the more religious towns, repression of women has become more and more extreme. A woman who expresses her opin­ions, "nags," disobeys her husband, or otherwise "tramples her womanhood" and "acts like a man," might have her head shaved, her forehead branded, her tongue cut out, or, worst case, she might be stoned to death or burned. I've only heard about these things. May is the first example of it that I've ever seen—if she is an example. I'm glad to say her terrible wound had healed by the time she came to us. We don't even know whether May is her real name. But she can say, "May," and she's let us know we're to call her that. It's al­ways been clear that she loves kids and gets along well with them. Now, with the little Noyer girls, it seems that she has a family. She's been sharing a cabin with Allie Gilchrist and Allie's adopted son Justin for the better part of a year. Now I suppose we'll have to either expand Allie's cabin or begin work on a new one. In fact, we need to begin work on two or three new ones. The Scolari family will be getting the next one. They've been cooped up with the Figueroas long enough. Then the Dovetrees, then the Noyers and May.

Dan Noyer is staying with Harry and Zahra Balter and their kids now that he's well enough to get around on his own a little. It seemed best to get him out of the clinic as soon as possible once his mother died. May is already sharing her one room with the two little girls, so Bankole looked for space for Dan elsewhere. The Balters volunteered. Also, May's a sharer, and Dan still has bouts of pain. He doesn't complain, but May would notice. I do when I'm around him. There's no hyperempathy in the Balter family, so they can care for injured people without suffering themselves.

It's been a busy few weeks. We've done several salvage runs with the truck and gathered things we've never been able to gather in quantity before: lumber, stone, bricks, mor­tar, cement, plumbing fixtures, furniture, and pipe from dis­tant abandoned ruins and from the Dovetree place. We'll need it all. We're 67 people now with the Noyer children. We're growing too fast.

And yet in another way, we're only creeping along. We're not only Acorn, we're Earthseed, and we're still only a sin­gle tiny hill community squeezed into too few cabins, and sharing an almost nineteenth-century existence. The truck will improve our comfort, but... it's not enough. I mean, it may be enough for Acorn, but it's not enough for Earthseed.

Not that I claim to know what would be enough. The thing that I want to build is so damned new and so vast! I not only don't know how to build it, but I'm not even sure what it will look like when I have built it. I'm just feeling my way, using whatever I can do, whatever I can learn to take one more step forward.

************************************

Here, for our infant Earthseed archives, is what I've learned so far about what happened to the Noyers. I've talked to Kassia and Mercy several times. And over the past three days, Dan has told me what he could remember. He seemed to need to talk, in spite of his pain, and with me around to complain to Bankole for him and see that he has his medi­cine when he needs it, he's had less pain. On his own, he seems willing to just lie there and hurt Well, there's nothing wrong with being stoic when you have to be, but there's enough unavoidable suffering in the world. Why endure it when you don't have to?

The Noyers had driven up from Phoenix, Arizona, where food and water are even more expensive man they are in the Los Angeles area. They sold their houses—they owned two—some vacant land, their furniture, Krista Noyer's jew­elry, sold everything they could to get the money to buy and equip an armed and armored housetruck big enough to sleep seven people. The truck was intended to take the fam­ily to Alaska and serve as their home there until the parents could get work and rent or buy something better. Alaska is a more popular destination than ever these days. When I left southern California, Alaska was a popular dream— almost heaven. People struggled toward it, hoping for a still-civilized place of jobs, peace, room to raise their chil­dren in safety, and a return to the mythical golden-age world of the mid-twentieth century. They expected to find no gangs, no slavery, no free poor squatter settlements growing like cancers on the land, no chaos. There was to be plenty of land for everyone, a warming climate, cheap water, and many towns new and old, privatized and free, eager for hardworking newcomers. As I said, heaven.

If what I've heard from travelers is true, the few who've managed to get there—to buy passage on ships or planes or walk or drive hundreds, even thousands, of miles, then somehow sneak across the closed border with Canada to the also-closed Canadian-Alaskan border—have found some­thing far less welcoming. And last year, Alaska, weary of regulations and restrictions from far away Washington, D.C., and even more weary of the hoard of hopeful paupers flooding in, declared itself an independent country. It se­ceded from the United States. First time since the Civil War that a state's done that. I thought there might be another civil war over the matter, the way President Donner and Alaskan Governor—or rather, Alaskan President—Leontyev are snarling at one another. But Donner has more than enough down here to keep him busy, and neither Canada nor Russia, who have been sending us food and money, much liked the idea of a war right next door to them. The only real danger of civil war is from Andrew Steele Jarret if he wins the elec­tion next month.

Anyway, in spite of the risks, people like the Noyers, hopeful and desperate, still head for Alaska.

There were seven people in the Noyer family just a few days before we found the truck. There was Krista and Dan­ton, Senior; Kassia and Mercy, our seven- and eight-year-old orphans; Paula and Nina, who were 12 and 13; and Dan, the oldest child. Dan is 15, as I guessed when I first saw him. He's a big, baby-faced, blond kid. His father was small and dark-haired. He inherited his looks and his size from his big, blond mother, while the little girls are small and dark like Danton, Senior. The boy is already almost two meters tall—a young giant with an oldest-child's enhanced sense of responsibility for his sisters. Yet he, like his father, had been unable to prevent Nina and Paula from being raped and ab­ducted three days before we found the truck.

The Noyers had gotten into the habit of parking their truck in some isolated, sunny place like the south side of that burned-out farmhouse. There they could let the kids spend some time outside while they cleaned and aired the truck. They could unroll the truck's solar wings and spread them wide so that the sun could recharge their batteries. To save money, they used as much solar energy as possible. This meant driving at night and recharging during the day— which worked all right because people walked on the high­ways during the day. It's illegal to walk on highways in California, but everyone does it. By custom now, most pedestrians walk during the day, and most cars and trucks run at night. The vehicles don't stop for anything that won't wreck them. I've seen would-be high-jackers run down. No one stops.

But during the day, they park to rest and refuel.

Danton and Krista Noyer kept their children near them, but didn't post a regular guard. They thought their isolation and general watchfulness would protect them. They were wrong. While they were busy with housekeeping, several men approached from their blind side—from the north—so that the chimney that had not quite hidden them had blocked their view. It was possible that these men had spotted the truck from one of the ridges, then circled around to attack them. Dan thought they had.

The intruders had rounded the wall and, an instant later, opened fire on the family. They caught all seven Noyers out­side the truck. They shot Danton, Senior; Krista, and Dan. Mercy, who was nearest to the truck, jumped inside and hid behind a box of books and disks. The intruders grabbed the three other girls, but Nina, the oldest, created such a diver­sion with her determined kicking, biting, gouging, and struggling, breaking free, then being caught again, that Kas­sia, free for an instant, was able to slither away from her captor and scramble into the truck. Kassia did what Mercy had not. She slammed the truck door and locked it, locked all doors.

Once she had done that, she was safer than she knew. In­truders fired their guns into the truck's armor and tires. Both were marked, but not punctured, not much damaged at all. The intruders even built a fire against the side of the truck, but the fire went out without doing damage.

After what seemed hours, the men went away.

The two little girls say they turned on the truck's monitors and looked around. They couldn't find the intruders, but they were still afraid. They waited longer. But it was terrible to wait alone in the truck, not knowing what might be hap­pening just beyond the range of the monitors—on the other side of the chimney wall, perhaps. And there was no one to take care of them, no one for them to turn to. At last, stay­ing in the truck alone was too much for them. They opened the door nearest to the sprawled bodies of their parents and big brother.

The intruders were gone. They had taken the two older girls away with them. Outside, Kassia and Mercy found only Dan and their parents. Dan had come to, and was sitting on the ground, holding his mother's head on his lap, stroking her face, and crying.

Dan had played dead while the intruders were there. He had given no sign of life, even when one of the intruders kicked him. Stoic, indeed. He heard them trying to get into the truck. He heard them cursing, laughing, shouting, heard two of his sisters screaming as he had never heard anyone scream. He heard his own heart beating. He thought he was dying, bleeding to death in the dirt while his family was murdered.

Yet he did not die. He lost consciousness and regained it more than once. He lost track of time. The intruders were there, then they were gone. He could hear them, then he couldn't. His sisters were screaming, crying, moaning, then they were silent.

He moved. Then gasping and groaning with pain, he man­aged to sit up. His legs hurt so as he tried to stand that he screamed aloud and fell down again. His mind, blurred by pain, blood loss, and horror, he looked around for his fam­ily. There, near his legs, wet with his blood and her own was his mother.

He dragged himself to her, then sat holding her head on his lap. How long he sat here, all but mindless, he did not know. Then his little sisters were shaking him, talking to him.

He stared at them. It took him a long time to realize that they were really there, alive, and that behind them, the truck was open again. Then he knew he had to get his parents in­side it. He had to drive them back down to the highway and into a town where there was a hospital, or at least a doctor. He was afraid his father might be dead, but he couldn't be sure. He knew his mother was alive. He could hear her breathing. He had felt the pulse in her neck. He had to get help for her.

Somehow, he did get them both into the truck. This was a long, slow, terrible business. His legs hurt so. He felt so weak. He had grown fast, and been proud of being man-sized and man-strong. Now he felt as weak as a baby, and once he had dragged his parents into the truck, he was too exhausted to climb into one of the driver's seats and drive. He couldn't get help for his parents or look for his two lost sisters. He had to, but he couldn't. He collapsed and lay on the floor, unable to move. His consciousness faded. There was nothing.

************************************

It was a familiar sort of story—horrible and ordinary. Al­most everyone in Acorn has a horrible, ordinary story to tell.

Today we gave the Noyer children oak seedlings to plant in earth that has been mixed with the ashes of their parents. We do this in memory of our own dead, present and absent. None of the ashes of my family are here, but five years ago when we decided to stay here, I planted trees in their mem­ory. Others have done the same for their dead. Nina and Paula Noyer's ashes aren't here of course. Nina and Paula may not even be dead. But they will be remembered here along with their parents. Once Dan understood the cere­mony, he asked for trees for Nina and Paula as well as for his parents.

He said, "Some nights I wake up still hearing them screaming, hearing those bastards laughing. Oh, god……..They must be dead. But maybe they're not. I don't know. Sometimes I wish I were dead. Oh god."

We've phoned our neighbors and friends in nearby towns about Nina and Paula Noyer. We've left their names, their descriptions (garnered from what Dan told me), and the offer of a reward in hard currency—Canadian money. I doubt that anything will come of it, but we have to try. It isn't as though we have an abundance of hard currency to spread around, but because we're so careful, we do have some. Because of the truck, we'll soon have more. To tell the truth, I'd try to buy the girls back even if there were no truck. It's one thing to know that there are children on the roads and in the towns being made to suffer for someone else's pleasure. It's another to know that the two sisters of children you know and like are being made to suffer. But there is the truck. All the more reason for us to do what we can for the Noyer children.

We brought Dan to the funeral services on a cot that we used as a stretcher. He can stand and walk. Bankole makes him do a little of that every day. But he's still not up to standing or sitting for long periods of time. We put him next to the slender young trees that Bankole planted five years ago in memory of his sister and her family, who had lived on this property before us. They were murdered before we ar­rived. Their bodies were burned with their home. All we found of them were their charred bones and a couple of rings. These are buried beneath the trees just at the spot where Dan lay for the funeral.

The little girls planted their seedlings under our guidance, but not with our help. The work was done by their hands. Perhaps the planting of tiny trees in earth mixed with ashes doesn't mean much now, but they'll grow up knowing that their parents' remains are here, that living trees grow from those remains, and that today this community began to be their home.

We moved Dan's cot so that he could use the garden trowel and watering can, and we let him plant his own seedlings. He, too, did what he had to do without help. The ritual was already important to him. It was something he could do for his sisters and his parents. It was all he could do for them.

When he had finished, he said the Lord's Prayer. It was the only formal prayer he knew. The Noyers were nominal Christians—a Catholic mother, an Episcopalian father, and kids who had never seen the inside of a church.

Dan talked his sisters into singing songs in Polish—songs their mother had taught them. They don't speak Polish, which is a pity. I'm always glad when we can learn another language. No one in their family spoke Polish except Krista, who had come with her parents from Poland to escape war and uncertainty in Europe. And look what the poor woman had stepped into.

The girls sang their songs. As young as they were, they had clear, sweet voices. They were a delight to hear. Their mother must have been a good teacher. When they had fin­ished, and all the seedlings were watered in, a few members of the community stood up to quote from Earthseed verses, the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, the Bhagavad-Gita, John Donne. The quotations took the place of the words mat friends and family would have said to remember and give respect to the dead.

Then I said the words of the Earthseed verses that we've come to associate with funerals, and with remembering the dead.

"God is Change," I began.

Others repeated in soft voices, "God is Change. Shape God." Habits of repetition and response have grown up al­most without prompting among us. Sad to say, we've had so many funerals in our brief existence as a community that this ritual in particular is very familiar. Only last week, we planted trees and spoke words for the Dovetrees. I said,

"We give our dead

To the orchards

And the groves.

We give our dead

To We."

I paused, took a deep breath, and continued in slow mea­sured tones.

"Death

Is a great Change—

Is life's greatest Change.

We honor our beloved dead.

As we mix their essence with the earth,

We remember them,

And within us,

They live."

"We remember," the others whispered. "They live."

I stood silent for a moment, gazing out toward the tall per­simmon, avocado, and citrus trees. Bankole's sister and brother-in-law had planted these trees, had brought them as young plants from southern California, half expecting them to die here in a cooler climate. According to Bankole, many of them did die, but some survived as the climate changed, warmed. Old-timers among our neighbors complain about the loss of their fog, rain, and cool temperatures. We don't mind, those of us from southern California. To us it's as though we've come to a somewhat gentler version of the homes we were forced to leave. Here, there is still water, space, not too much debilitating heat, and some peace. Here, one can still have orchards and groves. Here, life can still come from death.

The little girls had gone back to sit with May. May hugged them, one small, dark-haired child in each arm, all three of them still, solemn, listening.

I began a new verse, almost a chant, "

Darkness

Gives shape to the light

As light

Shapes the darkness.

Death

Gives shape to life

As life

Shapes death.

God

And the universe

Share this wholeness

Each

Defining the other:

God

Gives shape to the universe

As the universe

Shapes God "

And then, after a moment of silence, the last, the closing words:

"We have lived before

We will live again

We will be silk,

Stone,

Mind,

Star,

We will be scattered,

Gathered,

Molded

Probed.

We will live,

And we will serve life.

We will shape God

And God will shape us

Again,

Always again

Forevermore."

Some people whispered that last word—echoed it. Zahra quoted in a voice almost too soft to be heard,

"God is Change,

And in the end

God prevails."

Her husband Harry put his arm around her, and I saw that her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She and Harry may be the most loyal, least religious people in the community, but there are times when people need religion more than they need anything else—even people like Zahra and Harry.

Chapter 4

□ □□

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

To shape God

With wisdom and forethought,

To benefit your world,

Your people,

Your life,

Consider consequences,

Minimize harm

Ask questions,

Seek answers,

Learn,

Teach.

from Memories of Other Worlds

Our coast redwood trees are dying.

Sequoia sempervirens is the botanical name for this tallest of all trees, but many are evergreen no longer. Little by lit­tle from the tops down, they are turning brown and dying.

I do not believe that they are dying as a result of the heat. As I recall, there were many redwoods growing around the Los Angeles area—Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, places like that. I saw them there when I was young. My mother had relatives in Pasadena and she used to take me with her when she went to visit them. Redwoods growing that far south reached nothing like the height of their kind here in the north, but they did survive. Later, as the climate changed, I suppose they died as so many of the trees down south died—or they were chopped down and used to build shelters or to feed the cooking fires of the homeless.

And now our younger trees have begun to die. This part of Humboldt County along the coast and in the hills—the local people call these coastal hills "mountains"—was cooler when I was a boy. It was foggy and rainy—a soft, green climate, friendly to most growing things. I believe it was already changing nearly 30 years ago when I bought the land that became Acorn. In the not-too-distant future, I sup­pose it will be little different from the way coastal southern California was a few decades ago—hot, semiarid, more brown than green most of the time. Now we are in the mid­dle of the change. We still get a few substantial fall and win­ter storms each year, and there are still morning fogs in the spring and early summer.

Nevertheless, young redwood trees—those only about a century old, not yet mature—are withering. A few miles to the north and south of us in the old national and state parks, the groves of ancient giants still stand. A few hundred acres of them here and there have been released by the govern­ment, sold to wealthy, usually foreign interests, and logged. And squatters have cut and burned a number of individual trees, as usual, to build shelters and feed cooking fires, but the majority of the protected ones, millennia old, resistant to disease, fire, and climate change, still stand. If people let them alone, they will go on, childless, anachronistic, but still alive, still reaching futilely skyward.

************************************

My father, perhaps because of his age, seems to have been a loving pessimist. He saw little good in our future. According to his writing, our greatness as a country, perhaps even the greatness of the human species, was in the past. His greatest desire seems to have been to protect my mother and later, to protect me—to somehow keep us safe.

My mother, on the other hand, was a somewhat reluctant optimist. Greatness for her, for Earthseed, for humanity al­ways seemed to run just ahead of her. Only she saw it, but that was enough to entice her on, seducing her as she se­duced others.

She worked hard at seducing people. She did it first by adopting vulnerable needy people, then by finding ways to make those people want to be part of Earthseed. No matter how ridiculous Earthseed must have seemed, with its starry Destiny, it offered immediate rewards. Here was real com­munity. Here was at least a semblance of security. Here was the comfort of ritual and routine and the emotional satisfac­tion of belonging to a "team" that stood together to meet challenge when challenge came. And for families, here was a place to raise children, to teach them basic skills that they might not learn elsewhere and to keep them as safe as possi­ble from the harsh, ugly lessons of the world outside.

When I was in high school, I read the 1741 Jonathan Ed­wards sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." its first few words sum up the kinds of lessons so many children were forced to learn in the world outside Acorn. Edwards said, "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire." You're worthless. God hates you. All you deserve is pain and death. What a believable the­ology that would have been for the children of the Pox. No wonder, some of them found comfort in my mother's God. If it didn't love them, at least it offered them some chance to live.

If my mother had created only Acorn, the refuge for the homeless and the orphaned.... If she had created Acorn, but not Earthseed, then I think she would have been a wholly ad­mirable person.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, october 24, 2032

Dan is much better. He's still limping, but he's healing fast. He sat through Gathering today for the first time. We held it indoors at the school because it's been raining—a good steady cold rain—for two days.

Dan sat through a welcoming and a discussion that his family's truck had helped to provoke. The welcoming was for Adela Ortiz's baby, Javier Verdugo Ortiz. Javier was the child of a brutal highway gang rape, and Adela, who came to us pregnant only seven months ago, had not known whether she wanted us to welcome him, had not even known whether or not she wanted to keep him. Then he was born and she said he looked like her long-dead younger brother, and she loved him at once, and couldn't think of giving him up and would we welcome him, please? Now we have.

Adela has no other family left, so several of us made lit­tle gifts for him. I made her a pouch that she can use to carry the baby on her back. Thanks to Natividad, who has carried each of her babies that way, backpacking babies has become the custom for new mothers here at Acorn.

Adela chose Michael and Noriko to stand with her. They took their places on either side of her as the baby slept in her arms, and we filed past, each of us looking at Javier and giv­ing him gentle, welcoming touches on each tiny hand and the black-haired head. He has the full head of hair of a much older child. Adela says her brother was that way too. She had helped to take care of her brother when he was a baby and now she feels very much that God has given him back to her. I know that when she talks about God, she doesn't mean what I mean. I'm not sure that matters. If she stays with us, obeys our rules, joins in our joys, sorrows, and celebrations, works alongside us, it doesn't matter. And in the future, when her son says "God," I think he will mean what I mean.

These are the words of welcoming:

"Javier Verdugo Ortiz

We, your people

Welcome you.

We are Earthseed.

You are Earthseed—

One of many

One unique,

One small seed,

One great promise.

Tenacious of life,

Shaper of God,

Water,

Fire,

Sculptor,

Clay,

You are Earthseed!

And your Destiny,

The Destiny of Earthseed,

Is to take root

Among the stars."

They're good words. Not good enough to welcome a child into the world and into the community. No words are good enough to do that, and yet, somehow, words are needed. Ceremony is needed. As I spoke the words, the peo­ple sang them softly. Travis Douglas and Gray Mora have set several Earthseed verses to music. Travis can write music. Gray can hear it inside himself and then sing it to Travis.

When the words, the music, and the touching were over, when the Kardoses had accepted Adela as their sister and Javier as their nephew and Adela had accepted them, when all three had given their sworn promise before the community, Javier woke up wanting to nurse and Adela had to go back to her seat with him. Beautiful timing.

So many members of our community have come to us alone or with only little children that it seems best for me to do what I can to create family bonds that take in more than the usual godparent-godchild relationship. All too often, back in my old neighborhood in Robledo, that was no rela­tionship at all. Aside from giving occasional gifts, people did not take it seriously. I want it taken seriously here. I've made that clear to everyone. No one has to take on the responsibil­ity of joining in this way to another family, but anyone who does take that responsibility has made a real commitment The family relationship is not only with the new child, but with its parents as well. We are too young a community for me to say for sure how well this will work in the future, but people seem to accept it. We're used to depending on one an­other.

Once the welcoming was over, we moved on to the weekly discussion. Our Gatherings, aside from weddings, funerals, welcomings, or holiday celebrations, are discus­sions. They're problem-solving sessions, they're times of planning, healing, learning, creating, times of focusing, and reshaping ourselves. They can cover anything at all to do with Earthseed or Acorn, past, present, or future, and anyone can speak.

During the first Gathering of the month, I lead a looking-back-looking-forward discussion to keep us aware of what we've done and what we must do, taking in any necessary changes, and taking advantage of any opportunities. And I encourage people to think about how the things we do help us to sustain purposeful religious community.

This morning Travis Douglas wanted to talk about ex­panding our community business, a subject dear to my own heart. First he read his chosen Earthseed texts—verses that, like any good texts, could be used to start any number of dif­ferent discussions.

"Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. Civilization provides ways of combining the information, experience, and creativity of the many to achieve on­going group adaptability."

And then,

"Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.

Seek them out.

Any Change may bear seeds of harm.

Beware.

God is infinitely malleable.

God is Change."

"We have an opportunity that we have to take advantage of," Travis said. "We have the truck, and we have no real competition. I've gone over the truck, and in spite of the way it looks, it's in damned good shape. The solar wings just drink sunlight—really efficient. If we recharge the batteries during the day, we should save a bundle in fuel. For short trips there isn't even any need to use anything but the batter­ies. We have the best vehicle in the area. We can do minor professional hauling. We can buy goods from our neighbors and sell them in the cities and towns. People will be glad to sell us their stuff for a little less if we're the ones who do the work of getting it to market. And we can contract to grow crops for businesses in Eureka-Arcata, maybe down in Garberville."

Several of us have talked about this off and on, but today was our first Gathering on the subject since we got the truck. Travis, more than most of us, wanted to risk becoming more involved with our neighbors. We could contract with them to buy the specific handicrafts, tools, and crops that they produce well. We know by now who's good at what, who's dependable, and who's honest and sober at least most of the time.

Travis and I have already been asking around on our now more frequent trips to Eureka to see which merchants might be interested in contracting to buy specific produce from us.

Travis cleared his throat and spoke to the group again. "With the truck," he said, "only our first truck if we're suc­cessful, we've got the beginnings of a wholesale business. Then, instead of depending only on what we can produce and instead of only bartering with near neighbors, we can grow a business as well as a community and a movement It's important that we become a self-sustaining economic entity or we're liable never to move out of the nineteenth century!"

Well put, but not all that well received. We say "God is Change," but the truth is, we fear change as much as anyone does. We talk about changes at Gathering to ease our fears, to desensitize ourselves and to consider consequences.

"We're doing all right," Allie Gilchrist said. "Why should we take on more risk? And why, when this guy Jarret is li­able to win the election, should we draw attention to ourselves?" She had already lost her infant son and her sister. She had only her adopted son Justin, and she would do al­most anything to protect him.

Michael surprised me. "We could do it, I suppose," he said, and I waited for the "but." There was bound to be one with Michael. He obliged. "But she's right about Jarret. If he gets elected, the last thing we'll need is higher visibility."

"Jarret is down in the polls!" Jorge said. "His people are scaring everyone to death with their burning churches, burn­ing people. He might not win."

"Who the hell do they poll these days?" Michael asked, shaking his head. And then, "We'd better keep an eye on Jar­ret anyway. Win or lose, he'll still have plenty of followers who are eager to create scapegoats."

Harry spoke up. "We aren't invisible now," he said. "Peo­ple in the nearby towns know us, know what we are—or they think they do. I want my kids to have a chance at de­cent lives. Maybe this wholesaling idea will be the begin­ning of that chance."

Next to him, his wife Zahra nodded and said, "I'm for it too. We didn't settle here just to grub in the ground and live in log huts. We can do better."

"We might even improve things for ourselves with the neighbors," Travis said, "if more people in the area know us, know that we can be trusted, it might be a little harder for a rabble-rouser like Jarret or one of his local clones to make trouble for us."

I doubted that that would prove true—at least not on a large scale. We would meet more people, make more friends, and some of these would be loyal. The rest... well, the best we could hope for from them would be that they ig­nore us if we get into trouble. That might be the kindest ges­ture they could manage—to turn their backs and not join the mob. Others, whether we thought of them as friends or not, would be all too willing to join the mob and to stomp us and rob us if stomping and robbing became a test of courage or a test of loyalty to country, religion, or race.

On the other hand, making more of the right kinds of friends couldn't hurt us. We've already made some that I trust—near neighbors, a couple of people in Prata, and a few more in Georgetown, the big squatter settlement outside Eu­reka. And the only way to make more good friends is to make more friends period.

Adela Ortiz spoke up in her quick, soft, little-girl voice. She's only 16. "What if people think we're cheating them?" she said. "People always think that. You know, like you're trying to be nice to them and they just think everybody's a liar and a thief but them."

I was sitting near her, so I answered. "People will think whatever they like." I said. "It's our job to show by our be­havior that we're not thieves, and we're not fools. We've got a good reputation so far. People know we don't steal. They know better than to steal from us. And they know we're neighborly. In emergencies, we help out. Our school is open to their kids for a little hard currency, and their kids are safe while they're here." I shrugged. "We've made a good start."

"And you think this wholesaling business is the way for us to go?" Grayson Mora asked.

I looked over at him with surprise. He sometimes man­ages to get through a whole Gathering without saying any­thing. He isn't shy at all, but he's quiet. He and his wife were slaves before they met. Each had lost family members to the effects and neglects of slavery. Now between them they have two girls and two boys. They're ferocious in guarding their children, and suspicious of anything new that might af­fect those children.

"I do," I said. I paused, glanced up at Travis who stood at the big handsome oak podium that Allie had built Then I continued. “1 believe we can do it as long as the truck holds up. You're our expert there, Travis. You've said the truck is in good shape, but can we afford to maintain it? What new, expensive part will it be needing soon?"

"By the time it needs anything expensive, we should be making more money," he said. "As of now, even the tires are good, and that's unusual." He leaned over the podium, look­ing confident and serious. "We can do this," he said. "We should start small, study the possibilities, and figure out how we should grow. If we do this right, we should be able to buy another truck in a year or two. We're growing. We need to do this.''

Beside me, Bankole sighed. "If we're not careful," he said, "our size and success will make us the castle on the hill—everyone's protector in this area. I don't think that's wise."

I do mink it's wise, but I didn't say so. Bankole still can't see this place as anything more than a temporary stop on the way to a "real" home in a "real" town—that is, an already es­tablished town. I don't know how long it will take for him to see that what we're building here is as real and at least as im­portant as anything he's likely to find in a town that's been around for a century or two.

I foresee a time when our settlement is not only "the cas­tle on the hill," but when most or all of our neighbors have joined us. Even if they don't like every aspect of Earthseed, I hope they'll like enough of it to recognize that they're bet­ter off with us than without us. I want them as allies and as members, not just as "friends." And as we absorb them, I also intend to either absorb some of the storekeeper, restau­rant, or hotel clients that we'll have—or I want us to open our own stores, restaurants, and hotels. I definitely want to begin Gathering Houses that are also schools in Eureka, Ar­cata, and some of the larger nearby towns. I want us to grow into the cities and towns in this natural, self-supporting way.

I don't know whether we can do all this, but I think we have to try. I think this is what a real beginning for Earth-seed looks like.

I don't know how to do it That scares me to death some­times—always feeling driven to do something I don't know how to do. But I'm learning as I go along. And I've learned that I have to be careful how I talk about all this, even to Acorn. Bankole isn't the only one of us who doesn't see the possibility of doing anything he hasn't seen done by others. And... although Bankole would never say this, I suspect that somewhere inside himself, he believes that large, im­portant things are done only by powerful people in high positions far away from here. Therefore, what we do is, by definition, small and unimportant. This is odd, because in other ways, Bankole has a healthy ego. He didn't let self-doubt or the doubts of his family or the laughter of his friends stop him from going to college, and then medical school, surviving by way of a combination of scholarships, jobs, and huge debts. He began as a quietly arrogant Black boy of no particular distinction, and he ended as a physician.

But in a way, I suppose that's normal. I mean, it had been done before. Bankole himself had been taken to a Black woman pediatrician when he was a child.

What I'm trying to do isn't quite normal. It's been done. New belief systems have been introduced. But mere's no standard way of introducing them—no way that can be depended on to work. What I'm trying to do is, I'm afraid, a crazy, difficult, dangerous undertaking. Best to talk about it only a little bit at a time.

Noriko, Michael's wife, spoke up. "I'm afraid for us to get involved in this new business," she said, "but I think we have to do it This is a good community, but how long can it last, how long can it grow before we begin to have trouble feeding ourselves?"

People nodded. Noriko has more courage than she gives herself credit for. She can be shaking with fear, but she still does what she thinks she should do.

"We can grow or we can wither," I agreed. "That's what Earthseed is about on a larger scale, after all."

"I wish it weren't," Emery Mora said. "I wish we could just hide here and stay out of everything else. I know we can't, but I wish It's been so good here." Before she escaped slavery, she'd had two young sons taken from her and sold. And she's a sharer. She and Gray and his daughter Doe and her daughter Tori and their sons Carlos and Antonio—

all sharers. No other family is so afflicted. No other family has more reason to want to hide.

We talked on for a while, Travis listening as people protested, then either answering their protests or letting oth­ers answer them. Then he asked for a vote: Should we ex­pand our business? The vote was "yes" with everyone over 15 voting. Only Allie Gilchrist, Alan Faircloth, Ramiro Per­alta, and Ramiro's oldest daughter Pilar voted "no." Aubrey Dovetree, who couldn't vote because she was not yet a member, made it clear that she would have voted "no" if she could have.

"Remember what happened to us!" she said.

We all remembered. But we had no intention of trading in illegal goods. We're farther from the highway than Dovetree was, and we couldn't refuse this opportunity just because Dovetree had been hit.

We would expand our business, then. Travis would put to­gether a team, and the team would talk to our neighbors— those without cars or trucks first—and talk to more merchants in the cities and towns. We need to know what's possible now. We know we can sell more at street markets because now with the track we can go to more street mar­kets. So even if we don't manage to get contracts at first, we'll be able to sell what we buy from our neighbors. We've begun.

When the Gathering was over, we shared a Gathering Day meal. We spread ourselves around the two large rooms of the school for food, indoor games, talk, and music. At the front of the room near the podium, Dolores Figueroa Castro was planning to read a story to a group of small children who would sit at her feet. Dolores is Lucio's niece, Marta's daughter. She's only 12, but she likes reading to the younger kids, and since she reads well and has a nice voice, the kids like to listen. For the adults and older kids, we were to have an original play, written by Emery Mora, of all people. She's too shy to act, but she loves to write and she loves to watch plays. Lucia Figueroa has discovered that he enjoys staging plays, shaping fictional worlds. Jorge and a few others are hams and love acting in plays. Travis and Gray provide any needed music. The rest of us enjoy watching. We all feed one another's hungers.

Dan Noyer came over to me as I helped myself to fried rabbit, baked potato, a mix of steamed vegetables with a spicy sauce, and a little goat cheese. There were also pine nut cookies, acorn bread, and sweet potato pie. On Gather­ing Day. the rule is, we eat only what we've raised and pre­pared. There was a time when that was something of a hardship. It reminded us that we were not growing or rais­ing as much as we should. Now it's a pleasure. We're doing well.

"Can I sit with you?" Dan asked.

I said, "Sure," then had to fend off several other people who wanted me to eat with them. Dan's expression made me think it was time for him and me to have some version of the talk that I always seem to wind up having with newcomers. I thought of it as the "What the hell is this Earthseed stuff, and do I have to join?' talk.

Right on cue, Dan said, "The Balters say my sisters and I can stay here. They say we don't have to join your cult if we don't want to."

"You don't have to join Earthseed," I said. "You and your sisters are welcome to stay. If you decide to join us some­day, we'll be glad to welcome you."

"What do we have to do—just to stay, I mean?"

I smiled. "Finish healing first. When you're well enough, work with us. Everyone works here, kids and adults. You'll help in the fields, help with the animals, help maintain the school and its grounds, help do some building. Building homes is a communal effort here. There are other jobs— building furniture, making tools, trading at street markets, scavenging. You'll be free to choose something you like. And you'll go to school. Have you gone to school before?"

"My folks taught us."

I nodded. These days, most educated poor or middle-class people taught their own children or did what people in my old neighborhood had done—formed unofficial schools in someone's home. Only very small towns still had anything like old-fashioned public schools. "You might find," I said, "that you know some things well enough to teach them to younger kids. One of the first duties of Earthseed is to learn and then to teach."

"And this? This Gathering?"

"Yes, you'll come to Gathering every week."

"Will I get a vote?"

"No vote, but you'll get a share of the profit from the sale of the crop, and from the other businesses if things work out. That's after you've been here for a year. You won't have a decision-making role unless you decide to join. If you do join, you'll get a larger share of the profit and a vote."

"It isn't really religious—your service, I mean. You guys don't believe in God or anything."

I turned to look at him. "Dan, of course we do."

He just stared at me in silent, obvious disbelief.

"We don't believe the way your parents did, perhaps, but we do believe."

"That God is Change?"

"Yes."

"I don't even know what that means."

"It means that Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God."

"But... what can you do with a God like that? I mean ... it isn't even a person. It doesn't love you or protect you. It doesn't know anything. What's the point?"

"The point is. it's the truth," I said. "It's a hard truth. Too hard for some people to take, but that doesn't make it any less true." I put my food down, got up, and went to one of our bookcases. There, I took down one of our several copies of Earthseed: The First Book of the Living. I self-published this first volume two years ago. Bankole had looked over my text when it was finished, and said I should copyright and publish for my own protection. At the time, that seemed unnecessary—a ridiculous thing to do in a world gone mad. Later, I came to believe he was right—for the future and for a reason in the present that Bankole had not mentioned.

“Things will get back to normal someday," he had said to me. "You should do this in the same way that we go on pay­ing their taxes."

Things won't get back to what he calls normal. We'll set­tle into some new norm someday—for a while. Whether that new norm will recognize our tax paying or my copyright, I don't know. But there's a more immediate advantage to be had here.

People are still impressed, even intimidated, by bound, official-looking books. Verses, handwritten or printed out on sheets of paper just don't grab them the way a book does. Even people who can't read are impressed by books. The idea seems to be, “If it's in a book, maybe it's true," or even, “If it's in a book, it must be true."

I went back to Dan, opened the book, and read to him, "

Do not worship God

Inexorable God

Neither needs nor wants

Your worship.

Instead,

Acknowledge and attend God,

Learn from God,

With forethought and intelligence,

Imagination and industry,

Shape God

When you must,

Yield to God.

Adapt and endure.

For you are Earthseed,

And God is Change."

I paused, then said, 'That's what we believe, Dan. That's what we strive to do—part of what we strive to do, anyway."

Dan listened, frowning. "I'm still not sure what all that means."

"You'll learn more about it in school. We say education is the most direct pathway to God. For now, it's enough to say that verse just means that flattering or begging God isn't useful. Learn what God does. Learn to shape that to your needs. Learn to use it, or at least, learn to adapt to it so that you won't get squashed by it. That's useful."

"So you're saying praying doesn't work."

"Oh, no. Praying does work. Praying is a very effective way of talking to yourself, of talking yourself into things, of focusing your attention on whatever it is you want to do. It can give you a feeling of control and help you to stretch yourself beyond what you thought were your limits."

I paused, thinking of how well Dan had done just that when he tried to rescue his parents. "It doesn't always work the way we want it to," I said. "But it's always worth the effort."

"Even if when I pray, I ask God to help me?" he asked.

"Even so," I said. "You're the one your words reach and strengthen. You can think of it as praying to that part of God that's within you."

He thought about that for a while, then looked at me as though he had a big question, but hadn't yet decided how to ask it. He looked down at the book.

"How do you know you're right?" he asked at last. "I mean, that guy who wants to be President, that Jarret, he would call you all heathens or pagans or something."

Indeed, he would. "Yes," I said. "He does seem to enjoy calling people things like that. Once he's made everyone who isn't like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn't cause. That's easier than trying to fix the problems."

"My dad says ..." The boy stopped and swallowed. "My dad said Jarret's an idiot."

"I agree with your dad."

"But how do you know you're right?" he insisted. "How do you know Earthseed is true. Who says it's true?"

"You do, Dan." I let him chew on that for a while, then went on. "You learn, you think, you question. You question us and you question yourself. Then, if you find Earthseed to be true, you join us. You help us teach others. You help others the way we've helped you and your sisters." Another pause. "Spend some time reading this book. The verses are short and they mean what they say, although that may not be all that they mean. Read them and think about them. Then you can begin asking questions."

"I've been reading," he said. "Not this book, but other things. Nothing to do but read while I could hardly move. The Balters gave me novels and things. And... I've been thinking that I shouldn't be here, living soft, eating good food, and reading books. I've been thinking that I ought to be out, looking for my sisters Nina and Paula. I'm the old­est, and they're lost. I'm the man of the family now. I should be looking for them."

That was the most alarming thing he had said so far. "Dan, we have no way of knowing—"

"Yeah. No one knows if they're alive or where they are or if they're still together.... I know. I keep thinking about all that. But they're my sisters. Dad and Mom always told me to look out for them." He shook his head. "Hell, I didn't even look out for Kassi and Mercy. If they hadn't saved themselves, I guess we'd all be dead." He shoved his dinner away in self-disgust He had already eaten most of it But because we were on a bench rather than at a table, there was little room for shoving things. His plate fell off onto the floor and broke.

He stared at it, tears in his eyes—tears that had nothing to do with broken china.

I reached for his hand.

He flinched away, then looked up from the plate and stared at me through his tears.

I took his hand again, and looked back at him. "We have friends in some of the nearby towns," I said. "We've already left word with them. We're offering a reward for the girls or for information that leads us to them. If we can, we'll snatch them. If we have to, we'll buy them." I sighed. “I can't promise anything, Dan, but we'll do what we can. And we need you to help us. Travel with us to street markets, stores, and shops in nearby communities. Help us to look for them."

He went on staring at me as though I might be lying, as though he could find the truth in my face, if only he stared hard enough at it. "Why? Why would you do that?"

I hesitated, then drew a deep breath and told him. "We've all lost people," I said. "Everyone here has lost members of their families to fire, to murder, to raids.... I had a father, a stepmother, and four younger brothers. All dead. All. When we can save life ... we do. We couldn't stand it any other way."

And still, he stared at me. But now he was shaking. He made me think of a crystal thing, vibrating to sound, about to shatter. I pulled him to me, held him, this big child, taller than me. I felt his tears, wet on my shoulder, then felt his arms go around me, hugging back, still shaking, silent, des­perate, hanging on.

Chapter 5

^{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Beware:

At war

Or at peace.

More people die

Of unenlightened self-interest

Than of any other disease.

THE SELECTIONS I'VE OFFERED from my mother's journal make it clear that in spite of her near nineteenth-century ex­istence she paid attention to the wider world. Politics and war mattered very much. Science and technology mattered. Fashions in crime and drug use and in racial, ethnic, religious, and class tolerance mattered. She did see these as fashions, by the way—as behaviors that went in and out of favor for reasons that ran the gamut from the practical to the emo­tional to the biological. Human competitiveness and territo­riality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression. We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to took down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for di­rection and help.

My mother was always noticing and mentioning things like that. Sometimes she managed to work her observations into Earthseed verses. In November of 2032 she had bigger rea­sons than usual to pay attention to the world outside.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, november 7, 2032

News.

Tucked away at Acorn as we are, we have to make a spe­cial effort to get news from outside—real news, I mean, not rumors, and not the "news bullets" that purport to tell us all who we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, ver­bal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are sup­posed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights. Bullets are cheap and full of big dramatic pictures. Some bullets are true virtuals that allow people to experience—safely—hurricanes, epi­demics, fires, and mass murder. Hell of a kick.

Well-made news disks, on the other hand, or good satel­lite news services cost more. Gray and Emery Mora and one or two others say news bullets are enough. They say detailed news doesn't matter. Since we can't change the stupid, greedy, vicious things that powerful people do, they think we should try to ignore them. No matter how many times we're forced to admit we can't really hide, some of us still find ways to try.

Well, we can't hide. So it's best to pay attention to what goes on. The more we know, the better able we'll be to sur­vive. So we subscribe to a good phone news service and now and then we buy detailed world-news disks. The whole business makes me long for free broadcast radio like the kind we had when I was a kid, but that's almost nonexistent in this area. We listen to what little is left when we go into one of the larger towns. We can hear more now because the truck's radio picks up more than our little pocket radios can.

So here are some of the most significant news items of the past week. We listened to some of them on a new Worldisk today after Gathering.

Alaska is still claiming to be an independent nation, and it seems to have gotten into an even closer more formal al­liance with Canada and Russia—northerners sticking to­gether I suppose. Bankole shrugged when he heard that and shook his head. "Why not?" he said. "They've got all the money."

Thanks to climate change, they do have most of it. The climate is still changing, warming. It's supposed to settle at a new stable state someday. Until then, we'll go on getting a lot of violent erratic weather around the world. Sea level is still rising and chewing away at low-lying coastal areas like the sand dunes that used to protect Humboldt Bay and Arcata Bay just north of us. Half the crops in the Midwest and South are still withering from the heat, drowning in floods, or being torn to pieces by winds, so food prices are still high. The warming has made tropical diseases like malaria and dengue normal parts of life in the warm, wet Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic coast states. But people are beginning to adapt. There's less cholera, for instance, and less hepatitis. There are fewer of all the diseases that result from bad san­itation, spoiled food, or malnutrition. People boil the water they drink in cities where there's a problem and in squatter settlements with their open sewers—ditches. There are more gardens, and old-fashioned skills in food preservation are being revived. People barter for goods and services where cash is rare. They use hand tools and draft animals where there is no money for fuel or no power equipment left. Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one.

There are plenty of wars going on around the world now. Kenya and Tanzania are fighting. I haven't yet heard why. Bolivia and Peru are having another border dispute. Pakistan and Afghanistan have joined forces in a religious war against India. One part of Spain is fighting against another. Greece and Turkey are on the edge of war, and Egypt and Libya are slaughtering one another. China, like Spain, is tearing at itself. War is very popular these days.

I suppose we should be grateful that there hasn't been an­other "nuclear exchange." The one three years ago between Iran and Iraq scared the hell out of everyone. After it happened, there must have been peace all over the world for maybe three months. People who had hated one another for generations found ways to talk peace. But insult by insult, expediency by expediency, cease-fire violation by cease-fire violation, most of the peace talks broke down. It's always been much easier to make war than to make peace.

Back in this country, in Dallas, Texas, some fool of a rich boy went adventuring among the free poor of a big squatter settlement. He wound up wearing the latest in electronic convict control devices—also known as slave collars, dog collars, and choke chains. And with the collar to encourage him, he learned to make himself useful to a local pimp. I've heard that the new collars are damned sophisticated. The old ones—worn more often as belts—could only cause pain. They delivered shocks and sometimes damaged or killed people. The new collars don't kill, and they can be worn for months or years at a time and used often to deliver punish­ment. They're programmed to resist being removed or de­stroyed by delivering jolts of pain severe enough to cause unconsciousness. I've heard that some collars can also give cheap, delicious rewards of pleasure for good behavior by encouraging changes in brain chemistry—stimulating the wearer to produce endorphins. I don't know whether that's true, but if it is, the whole business sounds a little like being a sharer—except that instead of sharing what other people feel, the wearer feels whatever the person holding the con­trol unit wants him to feel. This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person's whole life. I've heard that some collared people kill themselves, not because they can't stand the pain, but because they can't stand the degree of slavishness to which they find themselves descending.

The Texas boy's father spent a lot of money. He hired pri­vate cops—the kind who'll do anything if you pay them enough—and they sliced through the squatter camp as though it were a ripe melon until they found the boy. And with that, bingo! Slavery was discovered in Texas in 2032. Innocent people—not criminals or indigents—were being held against their wills and used for immoral purposes! How about that! What I'd like to see is a state of the union where slavery isn't being practiced.

Here's another news item. On the planet Mars, living, multicellular organisms have been discovered ... sort of. They're very small and very strange inside, although outside they look like tiny slugs ... some of the time. They live at least four meters down in certain polar rock formations, and they're not exactly animals. They're a little like Terrestrial slime molds. And, like slime molds, they go through inde­pendent single-celled stages during which they eat their way through the rocks, multiplying by dividing, resembling little antifreeze-filled amoeba. When they've exhausted the food supply in their immediate neighborhoods, they unite into sluglike multicellular masses to travel to new sites where the minerals they ingest are available. They don't reproduce in their slug form as Terrestrial slime molds do. They seem to need the slug form only to produce enough of their corrosive antifreeze solution to enable them to migrate through rock to a fresh supply of food. They make soil in two ways. They eat minerals, pass these through their bodies, and shed a dust so fine and so slippery that, like graphite, it can work as a kind of lubricant. And they ooze through the rocks in men-slug form, their corrosive slime dissolving trails, cracks, and making more dust.

These creatures are living Martians! So far, though, all the specimens captured and examined at Leal Station died soon after being taken from their cold, rocky home. For that reason and others, they are both a great discovery and a They are the last discoveries that will be made by scientists working for the U.S. Government.

President Donner has sold the last of our Mars installations to a Euro-Japanese company, in fulfillment of one of his earliest campaign promises. The idea is that all nonmilitary space travel, manned and unmanned, should be priva­tized. "If it's worth doing at all," Donner said, "it should be done for profit, and not as a burden on the taxpayers." As though profit could be counted only as immediate financial gain. I was born in 2009, and for as long as I can remember, I've heard people complaining about the space program as a waste of money, and even as one of the reasons for the coun­try's deterioration.

Ridiculous! There is so much to be learned from space it­self and from the nearby worlds! And now we've found liv­ing extraterrestrials, and we're going to quit. I suppose that if the Martian "slime molds" can be used for something— mining, perhaps, or chemistry—then they'll be protected, cultivated, bred to be even more useful. But if they prove to be of no particular use, they'll be left to survive or not as best they can with whatever impediments the company sees fit to put in their paths. If they're unlucky enough to be bad for business in some way—say they develop a taste for some of the company's building materials—they'll be lucky to survive at all. I doubt that Terrestrial environmental laws will protect them. Those laws don't even really protect plant and animal species here on Earth. And who would enforce such laws on Mars?

And yet, somehow, I'm glad our installations have been sold and not just abandoned. Selling them was bad, but it was the lesser evil. Most people wouldn't have minded see­ing them abandoned. They say we have no business wasting time or money in space when there are so many people suf­fering here on Earth, here in America. I wonder, though, where the money received in exchange for the installations has gone. I haven't noticed any new government education or jobs programs. There's been no government help for the homeless, the sick, the hungry. Squatter settlements are as big and as nasty as ever. As a country, we've given up our birthright for even less than bread and pottage. We've given it up for nothing—although I'm sure some people some­where are richer now.

Consider, though: a brand-new form of life has been dis­covered on Mars, and it got less time on the news disk than the runaway Texas boy. We're becoming more and more iso­lated as a people. We're sliding into undirected negative change, and what's worse, we're getting used to it. All too often, we shape ourselves and our futures in such stupid ways.

More news. Scientists in Australia have managed to bring a human infant to term in an artificial womb. The child was conceived in a petri dish. Nine months later, it was taken, alive and healthy, from the last in a series of complex, computer­controlled containers. The child is the normal son of parents who could not have conceived or borne a child without a great deal of medical help.

Reporters are already calling the womb containers "eggs," and there's some foolish popular argument over whether a "hatched" person is as human as a "normally born" person. There are ministers and priests arguing that this tampering with human reproduction is wrong, of course. I doubt that they'll have much to worry about for a while. The whole process is still experimental and would be avail­able only to the very rich if it were being marketed to any­one—which it isn't, yet I wonder whether it will catch on at all in this world where so many poor women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers, carrying to term the child of wealthier people even when the wealthy people are able to have a child in the normal way. If you're rich, you can have a surrogate for not much more than the price of feeding and housing her for nine months. If she's smart and you're generous, you might also wind up agreeing to feed, house, and help educate her children. And you might give her husband a job. Channa Ryan's mother did this kind of work. Accord­ing to Channa, her mother bore 13 surrogate children, none of them genetically related to her. Her marriage didn't sur­vive, but her two genetic daughters were given a chance to learn to read and write, cook, garden, and sew. That isn't enough to know in this world, of course, but it's more than most poor people learn.

It will be a long while—years, decades perhaps—before human surrogates are replaced by computerized eggs. Con­sider, though: eggs combined with cloning technology (an­other toy of the rich) would give men the ability to have a child without the genetic or the gestational help of a woman. Such men would still need a woman's ovum, stripped of its genetic contents, but that would be all. If the idea caught on, they might be willing to use the ovum of some animal species.

And, of course, women will be free to do without men completely, since women can provide their own ova. I won­der what this will mean for humanity in the future. Radical change or just one more option among the many?

I can see artificial wombs being useful when we travel into extrasolar space—useful for gestating our first animals once they're transported as frozen embryos and useful for gestating children if the nonreproductive work of women settlers is needed to keep the colony going. In that way, per­haps the eggs may be good for us—for Earthseed—in the long run. But what they'll do to human societies in the meantime, I wonder.

I've saved the worst news item for last The election was on Tuesday, November 2. Jarret won. When Bankole heard the news, he said, "May God have mercy on our souls." I find that I'm more worried about our bodies. Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as "witches," and torch the churches and homes of people they don't like.

We all voted—all of us who were old enoughs—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used mat analogy more than once.

Here are some of the things that Jarret said back when he was shouting from his own Church of Christian America pulpit. I have copies of several of his sermons on disk.

"There was a time, Christian Americans, when our coun­try ruled the world," he said. "America was God's country and we were God's people and God took care of his own. Now look at us. Who are we? What are we? What foul, seething, corrupt heathen concoction have we become?

"Are we Christian? Are we? Can our country be just a lit­tle bit Christian and a little bit Buddhist, maybe? How about a little bit Christian and a Little bit Hindu? Or maybe a coun­try can be a little bit Christian and a little bit Jewish? How about a little bit Christian and a little bit Moslem? Or per­haps we can be a little bit Christian and a little bit pagan cultist?"

And then he thundered, "We are God's people, or we are film! We are God's people, or we are nothing! We are God's people! God's people!

"Oh my God, my God, why have we forsaken thee?

"Why have we allowed ourselves to be seduced and be­trayed by these allies of Satan, these heathen purveyors of fake and unchristian doctrines? These people... these pagans are not only wrong. They're dangerous. They're as destructive as bullets, as contagious as plagues, as poisonous as snakes to the society they infest. They kill us, Christian American brothers and sisters. They kill us! They rouse the righteous anger of God against us for our misguided gen­erosity to them. They are the natural destroyers of our coun­try. They are lovers of Satan, seducers of our children, rapists of our women, drug sellers, usurers, thieves, and murderers!

"And in the face of all that, what are we to them? Shall we live with them? Shall we let them continue to drag our country down into hell? Think! What do we do to weeds, to viruses, to parasitic worms, to cancers? What must we do to protect ourselves and our children? What can we do to re­gain our stolen nation?"

Nasty. Very nasty. Jarret was the junior senator from Texas when he preached the sermon that contained those lines. He never answered the questions he asked. He left mat to his listeners. And yet he says he's against the witch burn­ings.

His speeches during the campaign have been somewhat less inflammatory than his sermons. He's had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this non­sense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to con­quer and to rule?

Well, now he's conquered. In January of next year, he'll be sworn in, and he'll rule. Then, I suppose we'll see just how much of his own propaganda he believes.

************************************

Another, happier, more local event happened here at Acorn yesterday. Lucio Figueroa, Zahra Balter, and Jeff King came in with a huge load of books for our library. Some look al­most new. Others are old and worn, but they've all been pro­tected from the weather, from water, and from fire. There are textbooks, up to graduate level in several subjects, specialized dictionaries, a set of encyclopedias—2001 edition—books of history, how-to books, and dozens of novels. Jeff King ran across the books being all but given away at a street market in Arcata.

"Someone was clearing out a room so that relatives could move into it," he told me. "The owner of the books had died. He was considered the family eccentric, and no one else in the household shared his enthusiasm for reading big, bulky books made of paper. I didn't think you'd mind my buying them for the school."

"Mind?" I said. "Of course not!"

"Lucio said he wasn't sure we should spend the money, but Zahra said you were crazy for more books. I figured she'd know."

I grinned. "She knows. I thought everyone knew."

There were fifteen boxes of books. We took them into the school, and today we recovered as best we could from the stuff on the Worldisk by looking through the books and shelving them. We read bits of this and that to one another. People got excited and interested, and everyone carried away a book or two to read. After hearing the news, we all needed to read something that wasn't depressing.

I wound up with a couple of books on drawing. I haven't tried to draw anything since I was seven or eight. Now, all of a sudden, I find myself interested in learning to draw, learning to draw well—if I can. I want to learn something new and unrelated to any of our troubles.

SUNDAY, november 14, 2032

I'm pregnant!

No surrogates, no computerized eggs, no drugs. Bankole and I did it the good old-fashioned way—at last!

It's crazy that it should happen now, just when America has elected a wild man to lead it. Bankole and I began try­ing as soon as we could see that we were going to survive here at Acorn. Bankole's first wife couldn't have children. As a young woman back in the 1990s, she was in a serious car accident and wound up with a hysterectomy, among other things. Bankole claimed he never minded. He said the world was going to hell just as fast as it could, and it would be an act of cruelty to bring a child into it. They talked about adopting, but never did.

Now he's going to be a father, and in spite of all his talk, he's almost jumping up and down—that is, whenever he isn't being scared to death. He's talking about moving into an established town again. He hadn't said anything about that since right after we got the truck, but now the subject is back, and he's serious. He wants to protect me. I realize that. I suppose I should be glad he feels that way, but I wish he would show his protective feelings in another way.

"You're a kid yourself," he said to me. "You don't have the sense to be afraid."

I can't seem to get angry with him for saying things like that. He says them, then he thinks for a moment, and if he doesn't watch himself, he begins to grin like a boy. Then he remembers his fears and looks panicked. Poor man.

Chapter 6

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

God is Change

And hidden within Change

Is surprise, delight,

Confusion, pain.

Discovery, loss,

Opportunity, and growth.

As always, God exists

To shape

And to be shaped.

IT'S A GOOD THING, I suppose, that my mother's God was Change. Her life had a way of changing in abrupt, important ways. I don't suppose she was really any more prepared for sudden changes than anyone else, but her beliefs helped her cope with them, even take advantage of them when they came.

I enjoyed reading about the way she and my father reacted to my conception. Such mismatched people, yet such a nor­mal reaction. She couldn't know that she was in for other major changes even before she could get used to being pregnant

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, december 5, 2032

Spokesmen for Christian America have announced that the Church will be opening homeless shelters and children's homes—orphanages—in several states, including Califor­nia, Oregon, and Washington. This is just a beginning, they say. They hope in time to "extend a helping hand to the peo­ple of every state in the union, including Alaska." I heard this on a newsdisk that Mike Kardos bought at a Garberville street market yesterday. Time to begin to clean up the Chris­tian America image, I suppose. I just hope the California shelters and orphanages will be put where they're most needed—down around San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I don't want them up here. Christian America is made up of scary people, and I find it impossible to believe mat they intend only to do good and to help others.

friday, december 17, 2032

Today I found my brother Marcus.

This is impossible, I know, but I found him. He's sick, fearful, confused, and angry—but he's alive!

I found him in Eureka, California, although five years ago, down in Robledo, he died.

I don't know what to say about this. I don't know how to deal with it Writing about it helps. Somehow, writing al­ways helps.

************************************

Before dawn this morning, five of us drove into Eureka. Bankole needed medical supplies and we had a couple of deliveries of winter vegetables and fruit to make to small, independent stores who have already begun to buy our pro­duce. After that, we had a special errand.

Bankole hadn't wanted me to come. He worries about me more than ever now, and he's always after me to move to an established town. We could have a nice little house and he could be town doctor. We could live nice empty little antique lives, and I could forget I've spent the past five years strug­gling to establish Acorn as the beginning of Earthseed. Now that we've got the truck, traveling is a lot less dangerous than it used to be, but my Bankole is more worried than ever.

And, to tell the truth, there are still things to worry about. We've all been looking over our shoulders since Dovetree. But we've got to live. We've got work to do.

"So Acorn is safe now?" I said to Bankole. "I'll be safe if I stay there?"

"Safer than you are traveling all over the county," he mut­tered, but he knew me well enough to let it go. At least he would be along to keep an eye on me.

Dan Noyer would also be along because our special er­rand concerned him. On our way home we were going to meet with a man who had contacted us through friends in Georgetown, claiming that he had one of Dan's younger sis­ters, and that he would sell her to us. The man was a pimp, of course—"a livestock man, specializing in lamb and chicken" as one of the euphemisms went. That is, a man who puts slave collars on little children and rents their bod­ies to other grown men. I hate the idea of having anything to do with a slug like that, but he was exactly the kind of walk­ing filth who would have Nina and Paula Noyer.

I had asked Travis and Natividad Douglas to come along with us, to ride shotgun, and in Travis's case, to fix the truck if anything went wrong with it. I've trusted them both more than once with my life. I trust their judgment and their abil­ity to fight. I felt a need to have people like that behind me when I was dealing with a slaver.

We made our deliveries to the two independent markets early, as we had promised—produce from our fields and from what was left of Dovetree's huge kitchen garden and small grove of fruit trees. The Dovetree truck and farm trac­tor had both been stolen during the raid that destroyed Dovetree. The houses and outbuildings had been torched along with the stills and fields. But a number of fruit trees and garden crops survived. Since the five surviving Dove­trees have decided to stay with us—to join us as members of Earthseed once their required probationary year has ended—we've felt free to take what we could from the prop­erty. The two Dovetree women have relatives elsewhere in the mountains, but they don't much like them, and they don't want to be squeezed into crowded houses with them. They do get along with us, and they know that while they're crowded now, they will have their own cabin by the time they're Welcomed as members.

Of course, they could go back and live on their own land. But two women and three children wouldn't survive on their own. They wouldn't survive alone even in a place as hidden and protected as Acorn. Trying to live right off the highway at Dovetree, they would be enslaved or killed in no time. Any home or farm that can be seen from the highway is bound to be tempting to the desperate and the opportunistic, and now the fanatical. Dovetree as it was survived because the family was large, well armed, and had a reputation for toughness. That worked until a small, determined army came along. The attackers really were Jarret loyalists, by the way. They came from the Eureka-Arcata area, from the new Christian America churches that have sprung up there. They have no government-sanctioned authority, but they believe God is on their side, and the cleansing work they do is God's work. Somehow, this kind of thing doesn't tend to make it to the news nets or disks. I've picked it up by talking to peo­ple. I know a few good sources of local news.

Bankole bought his supplies next. They're the most ex­pensive things we buy, but they're also the most necessary. We are, as Bankole says, a healthy, young community, but the world around us isn't healthy. Thanks to malnutrition, climate change, poverty, and ignorance, a lot of old diseases are back, and some of them are contagious. There was an outbreak of whooping cough in the Bay Area last winter, and it came up the highway as far north as Ukiah down in Men­docino County. Why it stopped there, I don't know. And there was rabies last summer. Several people in squatter camps were bitten by rabid dogs or rats. They died of it, and a couple of teenagers were shot because they pretended to have rabies just to scare people. Whatever money it costs to keep us healthy, it's worth it.

When our business in Eureka was finished, we went to meet the slaver at the place he and I had agreed on, just south and east of Eureka in Georgetown. The squatter settlement called Georgetown extends well back from the high­way in coastal hills. The place is a human-made desert, dusty when the weather is dry, muddy when it rains, almost treeless, plantless, filled with the poorest of the poor and their open sewers, their malnutrition, their drugs, crime, and disease. Bankole says it was once a beautiful area of farms, trees, and bills. That must have been a long time ago. The settlement is called Georgetown because the most permanent-looking thing in it is a cluster of shabby-looking redwood buildings. They're on a flattened hilltop and can be seen from just about everywhere in the settlement There's a store, a café, a games hall, bar, a hotel, a fuel station, and a repair shop where tools, guns, and vehicles of all kinds might be restored to usefulness. The whole complex is called George's, and is run by a huge family surnamed George. At the cafe, George's has a lot of rentable cubby­hole mailboxes where packages and paper messages can be left, and there's a big bank of pay phones where, for a seri­ous fee, you can access almost any network, service, group, or individual. This service in particular has made the place a combination message center, meeting place, and Old West saloon. It's natural to arrange to meet people there to trans­act business of all kinds. Elroy George and his sons, his sons-in-law, his brothers, and his brothers' sons see to it that people behave themselves. The Georges are a formidable tribe. They stick together, and people respect them. Their prices are high, but they're honest. You get what you pay for with the Georges. Sad to say, some of the things that get paid for in the cafe or elsewhere at the complex are slaves and drugs. The Georges aren't slavers, but they've been known to handle drugs. I wish that weren't so, but it is. I just hope they don't go the way of the Dovetrees. They're stronger and more entrenched, and better connected politically than the Dovetrees, but who knows? Now that Jarret has been elected, who knows?

Dolores Ramos George, the matriarch of the tribe, runs the store and the care and she knows everyone. She's got a reputation for being a hard, mean woman, but as far as I'm concerned, she's just a realist. She speaks her mind. I like her. She's one of the people with whom I left word about the Noyer girls. When she heard the story, she just shook her head. "Not a chance," she said. "Why didn't they keep a watch? Some parents got no sense at all."

"I know," I said. "But I have to do what I can—for the sake of the other three kids."

"Yeah." She shrugged. "I'll tell people. It won't do no good."

But now it looked as though it had done some good. And in thanks, I had brought Dolores a basket of big navel or­anges, a basket of lemons, and a basket of persimmons. If we found one or both of the Noyer girls as a result of her spreading the word, I would owe her a percentage of the re­ward—a kind of finder's fee. But it seemed wise to make sure she came out ahead, no matter what.

"Beautiful, beautiful fruit," she said, smiling as she looked at it and handled it She was a stout, old-looking 53, but the smile took years off her. "Around here, if you don't guard a fruit tree and shoot a couple of people to prove you mean it, they'll tear off all the fruit, then cut down the tree for firewood. I won't let my boys kill people to save trees and plants, but I really miss oranges and grapes and things."

She called some of her young grandchildren to come and take the fruit into the house. I saw the way the kids were looking at everything, so I warned them not to eat the per­simmons until they were soft to the touch. I cut one of the hard ones up and let each child have a taste of it so they would all know just how awful something so pretty could taste before it was ripe. Otherwise, they would have ruined several pieces of fruit as they tried to find a tasty, ripe per­simmon. Just yesterday, I caught the Dovetree kids doing that back at Acorn. Dolores just watched and smiled. Any­one who was nice to her grandkids could be her friend for life—as long as they didn't cross the rest of her family.

"Come on," she said to me. "The shit pile that you want to talk with is stinkin' up the café. Is this the boy?" She looked up at Dan, seeming to notice him for the first time. “Your sister?" she asked him.

Dan nodded, solemn and silent.

"I hope she's the right girl," she said. Then she glanced at me, looked me up and down. She smiled again. "So you're finally starting a family. It's about time! I was 16 when I had my first."

I wasn't surprised. I'm only two months along, and not showing at all yet But she would notice, somehow. No mat­ter how distracted and grandmotherly she can seem when she wants to, she doesn't miss much.

We left Natividad in the housetruck, on watch. There are some very efficient thieves hanging around Georgetown. Trucks need guarding. Travis and Bankole went into the cafe with Dan and me, but Dan and the two men took a table together off to one side to back me up in case anything un­expected happened between the slaver and me. People didn't start trouble inside George's Cafe if they were sensible, but you never knew when you were dealing with fools.

Dolores directed us to a tall, lean, ugly man dressed com­pletely in black, and working hard to look contemptuous of the world in general and George's Café in particular. He wore a kind of permanent sneer.

He sat alone as we had agreed, so I went over to him alone and introduced myself. I didn't like his dry, papery voice or his tan, almost yellow eyes. He used them to try to stare me down. Even his smell repelled me. He wore some aftershave or cologne that gave him a heavy, nasty, sweet scent. Honest sweat would have been less offensive. He was bald, clean-shaved, beak-nosed, and so neutral-colored that he could have been a pale-skinned Black man, a Latino, or a dark-skinned White. He wore, aside from his black pants and shirt, an impressive pair of black leather boots—no ex­pense spared—and a wide heavy leather belt decorated with what I first thought were jewels. It took me a moment to re­alize that this was a control belt—the kind of thing you use when you're moving around a lot and controlling several people through slave collars. I had never seen one before, but I'd heard descriptions of them.

Hateful bastard.

"Cougar," he said.

Crock of shit, I thought. But I said, "Olamina."

"The girl's outside with some friends of mine."

"Let's go see her."

We walked out of the cafe together, followed by my friends and his. Two guys sitting at the table off to his right got up when he did. It was all a ridiculous dance.

Outside, near the big, mutilated, dead stump of a redwood tree, several kids waited, guarded by two more men. The kids, to my surprise, looked like kids. They were not made up to look older or, for that matter, younger. The boys—one looked no older than 10—wore clean jeans and short-sleeved shirts. Three of the girls wore skirts and blouses, and three wore shorts and T-shirts. All the jeans were a little too tight, and the skirts were a little too short, but none were really worse than things free kids of the same ages wore.

The slaves were clean and they looked alert and wary. None of them looked sick or beaten, but they all kept an eye on Cougar. They looked at him as he emerged from the cafe, then looked away so that they could watch him without seeming to. They weren't really good at this yet, so I couldn't help noticing. I looked around at Dan, who had followed us out with Bankole and Travis. Dan looked at the slave kids, stopped for a second as his gaze swept over the older girls, then shook his head.

"None of them are her," he said. "She's not here!"

"Hold on," Cougar said. He tapped his belt and four more kids came around the great trunk of the tree—two boys and two girls. These were a little older—mid-to-late teens. They were beautiful kids—the most beautiful I had ever seen. I found myself staring at one of them.

Somewhere behind me, Dan was whimpering, "No, no, she's still not here! Why did you say she was here? She's not!" He sounded much younger than his IS years.

And I heard Bankole talking to him, trying to calm him, but I stood frozen, staring at one of the boys—a young man, really. The young man stared back at me then looked away. Perhaps he had not recognized me. On the other hand, per­haps he was warning me. I was late taking the warning.

"Like that one, do you?" Cougar purred.

Shit

"He's one of my best. Young and strong. Take him instead of a girl."

I made myself look at the girls. One of them did look like the description we had given out of Dan's sisters: small, dark-haired, pretty, 12 and 13 years old. Nina had a scar just at the hairline where she had been burned when she was four and she and Paula and Dan had found some matches to play with. Some of her hair had caught fire. Paula had a mole— she called it a beauty mark—on the left side of her face near her nose. The girl that Cougar hoped we would buy did have a scar just at the hairline like Nina. She even resembled lit­tle Mercy Noyer quite a bit. Same heart-shaped face.

"Did she say she was Nina Noyer?" I asked Cougar.

He grinned. "Can't talk," he said. "Can't write either. Best kind of female. She must have said something bad to some­body, though, back when she could talk. Because before I bought her, somebody cut her tongue off."

I didn't let myself react, but there was no way I could avoid thinking of our May back at Acorn. We still don't know whose work this tongue cutting is, but we know that some Christian America types would be happy to silence all women. Jarret preached that woman was to be treasured, honored, and protected, but that for her own sake, she must be silent and obey the will of her husband, father, brother, or adult son since they understood the world as she did not Was that it? The woman could be silent or she could be si­lenced? Or was it simpler than that—some pimp in the area just liked cutting out women's tongues? I didn't believe Cougar had done it There was nothing about his body lan­guage that said he was lying or being evasive. That might just mean he was a very good liar, but I didn't think so. It seemed to me that he was telling the truth because he didn't care. He didn't give a damn who had cut the girl or why. I did. I couldn't help it How much more of this kind of muti­lation would we be seeing?

The beautiful young man moved his feet in a restless, noisy way, dragging my attention back to him. Not that I was in any danger of forgetting him. And he was the one I had to buy now.

"How much for him?" I asked. It was too late to pretend I wasn't interested. I had all I could do to just keep func­tioning—speaking sensible words in normal tones of voice, pretend that the impossible was not in the process of happening.

"Buying, are we?" asked Cougar, smirking.

I turned to face him. "I came here to buy," I said. In fact, I would chance making an enemy of the Georges and kill Cougar if I had to. I would not leave my brother in this man's hands. The thought that I had to leave any of these kids in his hands was sickening.

"I hope you can afford him," Cougar said. "Like I told you, he's one of my best"

I haven't had to do much haggling in my life, but some­thing occurred to me as Cougar and I began. "He looks like one of your oldest," I said. My brother Marcus would be almost 20 now. How old did one of Cougar's child-slaves have to be before he was too old?

"He's 17!" Cougar lied.

I laughed and told a lie of my own. "Maybe five or six years ago he was 17. Good god, man, I'm not blind! He's great-looking, but he's no kid." It amazed me that I could lie and laugh and behave as though nothing unusual were hap­pening when my long-dead brother stood alive and well just a few meters away.

To my further amazement, we haggled for over an hour. It seemed to me to be the right thing to do. Cougar was in no hurry, and I took my cue from him. He even seemed to be en­joying himself some of the time. Everyone else sat around on the ground, waiting, and looking bored or confused and angry. My people were the confused, angry ones. Dan in par­ticular looked first disbelieving, then disgusted, then furious. But he followed the example of the two men. He kept quiet He sat staring at the ground, his face expressionless. Travis watched me, then looked from me to Bankole, trying to fig­ure out what was going on. But he wouldn't ask in front of Cougar. Bankole maintained a perfect poker face. Later, the three of them would have a lot to say to me. But not now.

And Cougar did want to get rid of Marcus. Maybe it was Marcus's age, maybe something else, but I couldn't miss that veiled eagerness of his. What he said just didn't jibe with his body language. I think being a sharer makes me extra sensitive to body language. Most of the time, this is a disadvantage. It forces me to feel things that I don't want to feel. Psychotics and competent actors can cause me a lot of trouble. This time, though, my sensitivity was a help.

I bought my brother. No shooting, no fighting, not even much cussing. In the end, Cougar smirked, took his hard currency, and released Marcus from the slave collar. He had offered me the collar and a control unit too—at added cost. Of course I didn't want it. Filthy things.

"Nice doin' business with you," Cougar said.

No. It hadn't been nice at all. "I still want the Noyer girls," I said.

He nodded. "I'll keep my eyes open. That young one over there is a real good fit to the description you gave."

I turned to Dan. "Is she... anything like your sisters?"

The girl and Dan stared at one another, and it hit me again that I was going to have to walk away and leave these chil­dren to their pimp. I avoided looking at the girl.

"Yeah, she looks a little like Nina," Dan mumbled "But what good is that? She's not Nina. What good is anything?''

"Can you tell him anything more that would help him rec­ognize either of your sisters if he sees them?" I asked.

"I don't want him to recognize them." Dan turned to stare at Cougar. "I don't want him to touch them. I'd kill him! I swear I would!"

Bankole took him to the truck, and Travis, in spite of his confusion, followed with Marcus. I went back into George's and took care of Dolores. She hadn't found Dan's sister, but she had done me a favor that I would never have imagined anyone could do. She had more than earned her fee.

As for Dan I couldn't really blame him for his attitude. But we couldn't afford a fight now. I was too close to my own edge. Leaving the rest of the kids, especially the little ones, was horrible. I had been willing to fight for Marcus if I had to, but I might have gotten him and others killed. I would have gotten someone killed. I don't know how to stop people like Cougar, but I don't think killing off their victims, their human property, is the best way.

Inside the truck, I hugged my brother. He was as unre­sponsive as a stick at first, but after a moment he held me away from him and stared at me for at least a full minute. He didn't say anything. He just shook his head. Then he hugged me. After a while, he put his hand to his throat. He felt all around his neck where the damned collar had been. Then he just kind of curled up on himself. He lay on his side in fetal position, and I sat beside him. He flinched when I touched him, so I just sat there.

And I told the others. "He's my brother," I said. "I... for five years, I believed... that he was dead." And then I couldn't say anything more. I just sat with him. I don't know what the others did apart from keeping watch and driving us home. If they talked, I didn't hear them. I didn't care what they did.

************************************

In all, Bankole told me, my brother had three active venereal infections. Also, his upper back and shoulders, his left arm, and the outside of his left leg were covered with an ugly net­work of old burn scars. No wonder Cougar had wanted to get rid of him. He probably thought he'd cheated me, palmed a defective off on me. Someone might once have done the same to him. Marcus was so good-looking that Cougar might have been persuaded to buy him in a rush without stripping him to look him over. But Marcus had suf­fered terrible burns sometime in the past, and Bankole said he had been shot, too.

When Bankole had finished examining him, he gave him something to help him sleep. That seemed best. Marcus had not objected to being examined. I assured him before I left them together that Bankole was a doctor and my husband as well. He didn't say anything. I asked him what he wanted to eat.

He shrugged and whispered, "Nothing. I'm okay."

"He's far from okay," Bankole told me later. But because Marcus wasn't in serious physical pain, we could keep him with us. We gave him a space behind screens—room di­viders—in our kitchen. It was warm there, and we had set up a bed, a dresser, a pitcher and basin, and a lamp. Like every other household in the community, we sometimes had to take people in—strangers who were visiting, new people joining us, or neighbors within the community who weren't getting along with others in their own households.

I worried that Marcus, in his present state of mind, might get up in the night and run away. How long must he have dreamed of running away from Cougar and his friends?

Now, waking up in a strange place, and not quite remembering how he had gotten there………….Just to be sure even after he had taken his sleeping pill, I went out and told our night watch—Beth Faircloth and Lucio Figueroa—to be careful. I told them Marcus might awake confused, and try to run away, and that they should be careful about shooting at a lone figure trying to get away from Acorn. Under normal circumstances such a figure would be thought a thief, and might be shot. We'd had great trouble with thieves during our first year, and we learned that if we were to survive, we couldn't afford to have much sympathy for them.