Parable of the Talents

But Marcus must not be shot.

"You told me Zahra Balter saw your stepmother and your brothers shot down back in Robledo," Bankole said to me as we lay in bed together. "Well, he's been beaten, shot, and burned. I can't imagine how he survived. Someone must have taken care of him, and it wouldn't have been your friend Cougar."

"No, it wouldn't have been Cougar," I agreed. "I want to know what happened. I hope he'll tell us. How was he with you when I left you two alone together?"

"Silent. Responsive and unembarrassed, but not speaking one unnecessary word."

"You're sure you can cure his infections?"

"They shouldn't be a problem. Let alone, any one of them would have killed him sooner or later. But with treatment, he should be all right—physically, anyway."

"He was 14 when I saw him last. He liked playing soccer and reading about the past and about foreign places. He was always taking things apart and sometimes getting them back together again, and he had a huge crush on Robin Balter, Harry's youngest sister. I don't know anything about him now. I don't know who he is."

"You'll have plenty of time to find out. I've told him he's going to be an uncle, by the way."

"Reaction?"

"None at all. At the moment, I don't think that even he knows who he is. He seems willing enough to be looked after; but I get the feeling he doesn't much care what hap­pens to him. I think... I hope that that will change. You may be his best medicine."

"He was my favorite brother—and always the best-looking person in the family. He's still one of the best-looking peo­ple I've ever seen."

"Yes," Bankole said. "In spite of his scars, he's a good-looking boy. I wonder whether his looks have saved him or destroyed him. Or both."

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

It seems that things can never go well for long.

Dan Noyer has run away. He slipped past the watch and out of Acorn at least in part because of the instructions I gave to the night watch. Beth Faircloth says she saw someone—a man or boy, she thought.

"I thought the figure was too tall to be Marcus," she said when she phoned me. "But I wasn't sure—so I didn't shoot" The running figure had been dressed in dark cloth­ing with something dark over the head and face.

Not until I had verified that Marcus was still there did I think of Dan.

To tell the truth, I had forgotten about Dan. My mind had been filled with Marcus—getting him back, keeping him, wondering what had happened to him. I had paid no atten­tion to Dan. Yet Dan had suffered a terrible disappointment. He was in real pain. I knew that, and I left him to the Balters, who, after all, have two energetic little kids of their own to deal with.

I got Zahra out of bed and asked her to check on Dan. He had been staying with them for four months now. Of course, he was gone. His note said, "I know you'll think I'm wrong, but I have to find them. I can't let them be with someone like that Cougar. They're my sisters!" And after his signature, a postscript: "Take care of Kassi and Mercy until I come back. I'll work for you and pay you. I'll bring Paula and Nina back and they'll work too."

He's only 15. He saw Cougar and his crew. He saw my brother. He saw Georgetown. And seeing all that, he learned nothing!

No, that's not true. He's learned—or finally realized—all the wrong things. I had assumed he knew what his sisters' fate might be if they were alive—that they might be prosti­tutes, might wind up in some rich man's harem or working as slave farm or factory laborers. Or, I suppose, they might wind up with some pervert who likes cutting out female tongues. They might even wind up as the property of some­one who cares for them and looks after them even as he makes sexual use of them. That would be the best possibil­ity. The worst, perhaps, is that they might survive for a while as "specialists"—prostitutes used to serve crazies and sadists. These don't live long, and that's a mercy. Theirs is a fate that could also befall a big, baby-faced, well-built boy like Dan. I wonder how much of this Dan understands. He is a good, brave, stupid boy, and I suspect he'll pay for it.

He might come back, of course. He might come to his senses and come home to help take care of Kassia and Mercy. Or we night find him through our outside contacts. I'll have to make sure that the word is out on him as well as on Nina and Paula. Problem is, finding him won't help if he's still intent on hunting for his sisters. We can't chain him here. Or rather, we won't If he insists on dying, he will die, damn him. Damn!

Chapter 7

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

The child in each of us

Knows paradise.

Paradise is home.

Home as it was

Or home as it should have been.

Paradise is one's own place,

One's own people,

One's own world,

Knowing and known,

Perhaps even

Loving and loved.

Yet every child

Is cast from paradise—

Into growth and destruction,

Into solitude and new community,

Into vast, ongoing

Change.

from Warrior by marcos duran

When I was a kid, I never let anyone know how much the future scared me. In fact, I couldn't see any future. I was born into a world that was no bigger than the walled neigh­borhood enclave where my family lived. My father had lived there as a boy and inherited the house from his father.

My world was a cage. When one of my brothers dared to leave the cage, to run away from home, someone outside caught him and cut and burned all the flesh from his living body. Sometimes I catch myself wondering how long it took him to die.

I admit, my brother was no angel. He was mean and not very bright He loved our mother, and he was her favorite, but I don't think he ever gave a damn about anyone else. Still, even though he was as tall as our father, he was only 14 when he was killed. To me, that makes the men who killed him worse than he ever was. How could they be human and do a thing like that to somebody? I used to imagine them— the killers—waiting for me whenever neighborhood adults with guns risked taking us out of the cage for a little while. The world outside was like my brother at his worst multi­plied by about a thousand: stupid, mean, so out of control that it might do anything. It was like a dog with rabies, tear­ing itself to pieces, and wanting to do the same to me.

And then it did just that.

Oh, yes. It did.

I could return the compliment. I could have reached for the power to do that. But I would rather fix the problem. What happened to me shouldn't happen to anyone, yet such things have happened to thousands of people, perhaps mil­lions. I've read history. Things weren't always this way. They don't have to go on being this way. What we have bro­ken we can mend.

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

My Uncle Marc was the handsomest man I've ever seen. I think I fell more than half in love with him before I even met him. There were also times when I was afraid for him. I don't know what to make of our family. My grandfather was, from what I've heard, a good and dedicated Baptist minister. He looked after his family and his community and insisted that both be armed and able to defend themselves in an armed and dangerous world, but beyond that, he had no ambitions. It never seemed to occur to him that he could or should fix the world. Yet he was the father of two would-be world-fixers. How did that happen?

Well, my mother was a sharer, a little adult at 15, and a sur­vivor of the destruction of her whole neighborhood at 18. Perhaps that was why she, like Uncle Marc, needed to take charge, to bring her own brand of order to the chaos that she saw swallow so many of the people she loved. She saw chaos as natural and inevitable and as clay to be shaped and di­rected. As she says in one of her verses:

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.

And so she tried to adapt and to grow. Perhaps she feared being like her own mother, who looked for help in a "smart" drug and wound up damaging her child and killing herself. Chaos. Whatever my mother's reasoning, she decided that she knew what was wrong with her world, and she knew what would fix it: Earthseed. Earthseed with all its defini­tions, admonitions, requirements, purpose. Earthseed with its Destiny.

My Uncle Marc, on the other hand, hated the chaos. It wasn't one of the faces of his god. It was unnatural. It was de­monic. He hated what it had done to him, and he needed to prove that he was not what it had forced him to become. No Christian minister could ever hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control. He was a man with a wound that would not heal until he could be cer­tain that what had happened to him could not happen again to anyone, ever.

My father called my mother a zealot. I think that name ap­plies even more to Uncle Marc. And yet, I think Uncle Marc was more of a realist. Uncle Marc wanted to make the Earth a better place. Uncle Marc knew that the stars could take care of themselves.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

saturday, december 18, 2032

Dan hasn't come back. I had no reason to expect him to give up and come home so quickly, but I did hope. Jorge, Dia­mond Scott, and Gray Mora are going to trade at the Coy street market today. I've told them to leave word with the few people we know in Coy, and on the way back, to tell the Sullivan family. Their quickest way home takes them past the Sullivan place.

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

Marcus slept through the night, causing no trouble to him­self or to us. Bankole happened to be in the kitchen when he awoke, and that was good. Bankole took him out to one of our composting toilets. I didn't see him until later when he had washed and dressed. Then he came hesitant and tenta­tive, to my kitchen table.

"Hungry?" I asked. "Sit down."

He stared at me for several seconds, then said, "When I woke up, I thought all this was just a dream."

I put a piece of fruit-laden acorn bread in front of him. We had both been raised on the stuff because our old neighbor­hood happened to have several very fruitful California live oak trees within the walls. My father didn't believe in waste, so he found out how to use acorns as food. Native Ameri­cans did it. We could do it. He and my mother worked at learning to use not only acorns but cactuses, palm fruit, and other plants that might otherwise be seen as useless. For Marcus and me, all this was food from home.

Marcus took the acorn bread, lit into it, and chewed slowly. First he looked delighted, then tears began to stream down his face. I gave him a napkin and a glass of what had once been a favorite morning drink of his—a mug of hot, sweet apple juice with a lemon squeezed into it. The apples we pressed in southern California were of a different variety, but I don't think he noticed. He ate, wiped his eyes, looked around. He stared at Bankole as Bankole came in, then fo­cused on the rest of his breakfast, all but huddling over it the way a hawk does when it's claiming and protecting its kill. There was no more talk for a while.

When we had all had enough to eat, Bankole looked at Marcus and said, "I've been married to your sister for five years. During all that time, we believed that you and the rest of her family were dead."

"I thought she was dead, too," Marcus said.

"Zahra Balter—she was Zahra Moss when you knew her—she said she saw all of you killed," I told him.

He frowned. "Moss? Balter?"

"We didn't know Zahra very well back home. She was married to Richard Moss. He was killed and she married Harry Balter."

"God," he said. "I never thought I'd hear those names again. I do remember Zahra—tiny, beautiful, and tough."

"She's still all three. She and Harry are here. They've got two kids."

"I want to see them!"

"Okay."

"Who else is here?"

"A lot of people who've been through hard times. No one else from home, though. This community is called Acorn."

"There was a little girl... Robin. Robin Balter?"

"Harry's little sister. She didn't make it."

"You thought I didn't."

"I... saw Robin's body, Marc. She didn't make it."

He sighed and stared at his hands resting in his lap. "I did die back in '27.1 died. There's nothing left."

"There's family," I said. "There's me, Bankole, the niece or nephew who'll be born next year. You're free now. You can stay here and make a life for yourself in Acorn. I hope you will. But you're free to do what you want. No one here wears a collar."

"Have you ever worn one?'" he asked.

"No. Some of us have been slaves, but I never was. And I believe you're the first of us who's worn a collar. I hope you'll talk or write about what happened to you since the old neighborhood was destroyed."

He seemed to think about that for a while. "No," he said. "No."

Too soon. "Okay," I said, "but... do you think any of the others could have survived? Cory or Ben or Greg? Is it pos­sible ... ?"

"No," he repeated. "No, they're dead. I got out. They didn't."

Sometime later, as we got up from the table, two men ar­rived by truck from the little coastal town of Halstead. Like Acorn, Halstead is well off the main highway. In fact, Halstead must be the most remote, isolated town in our area with the Pacific Ocean on three sides of it and low moun­tains behind it.

In spite of all that, Halstead has a major problem. Hal­stead used to have a beach and above the beach was a palisade where the town began. Along the palisade, some of the biggest, nicest houses sat, overlooking the ocean. On one side of the peninsula were the old houses, large, well-built wood frame structures. On the other side were newer houses built on land that was once a seaside golf course. All of these are ... were lined up along the palisade. I don't know why people would build their homes on the edge of a cliff like that, but they did. Now, whenever we have heavy rains, when there's an earthquake, or when the level of the sea rises enough to saturate more land, great blocks of the pal­isades drop into the sea, and the houses sitting on them break apart and fall. Sometimes half a house falls into the sea. Sometimes it's several houses. Last night it was three of them. The people of Halstead were still fishing victims out of the sea. Worse, the community doctor had been deliver­ing a baby in one of the lost houses. That's why the com­munity was turning to Bankole for help. Bankole had been on good terms with their doctor. The people of Halstead trusted Bankole because their doctor had trusted him.

"What are you people thinking?" Bankole demanded of the weary, desperate Halstead men as he and I snatched up things he would need. He was adding to his medical bag. I was packing an overnight case for him. Marcus had looked from one of us to the other, then moved off to one side, out of the way.

"Why do you still have people living on the cliffs?" Bankole demanded. He sounded angry. Unnecessary pain and death still made him angry. "How many times does this kind of thing have to happen before you get the idea?" he asked. He shut his bag and grabbed the overnight case that I handed him. "Move the damned houses inland, for heaven's sake. Make it a long-term community effort."

"We're doing what we can," a big red-haired man said, moving toward the door. He pushed his hair out of his face with a dirty, abraded hand. "We've moved some. Others refuse to have their houses moved. They think they'll be okay. We can't force mem."

Bankole shook his head, then kissed me. "This could take two or three days," he said. "Don't worry, and don't do any­thing foolish. Behave yourself!" And he went.

I sighed, and began to clear away the breakfast things.

"So he really is a doctor," Marcus said.

I paused and looked at him. "Yes, and he and I really are married," I said. "And I'm really pregnant. Did you think we were telling you lies?"

"... no. I don't know." He paused. "You can't change everything in your life all at once. You just can't"

"You can," I said. "We both have. It hurts. It's terrible. But you can do it"

He reached for the plate I was about to take, and scav­enged a few crumbs of Acorn bread from it "It tastes like Mama's," he said, and he looked up at me. "I didn't believe it was you at first Yesterday in that godforsaken shanty-town, I saw you, and I thought I had finally lost my mind. I remember, I thought, 'Good. Now I'm crazy. Now nothing matters. Maybe I'll see Mama, too. Maybe I'm dead' But I could still feel the weight of the collar around my neck, so I knew I wasn't dead. Just crazy."

"Then you knew me," I said. "And you looked away be­fore Cougar could see that you knew me. I saw you."

He swallowed. Nodded. A long time later, he shut his eyes and leaned his face into his hand. "If you still want me to," he said, "I'll tell you what happened."

I managed not to sigh with relief. "Thank you."

"I mean, you've got to tell me things, too. Like how you wound up here. And how you wound up married to a man older than Dad."

"He's a year younger than Dad. And when we had both lost almost everything else and everyone else, we found each other. Laugh if you want to, but we were damned lucky."

"I'm not laughing. I found good people too, at first. Or rather, they found me."

I sat down opposite him, and waited. For a time, he stared at the wall, at nothing, at the past

"Everything was burning on that last night," he said. His voice was low and even. "There was so much shooting………Hordes of bald, painted people, mostly kids, had rammed their damned truck through our gate. They were every­where. And they had their fun with Ben and Greg and Mama and me. In all the confusion, Lauren, we didn't even know you were gone until we had almost reached the gate. Then a blue-painted guy grabbed Ben—-just snatched him and tried to run off with him. I was too small to do any good fighting him one-on-one, but I was fast. I ran after him and tackled him. I might not have been able to bring him down by my­self, but Mama jumped on him too. We dragged him down, and when he fell, he hit his head on the concrete and he dropped Ben. Mama grabbed Ben and I grabbed Greg. Greg had hurt his foot—stepped on a rock and twisted it—while we were running.

"This time, we made it out through the wrecked gate. I didn't know where we were going. I was just following Mama, and we were both looking around for you." He paused. "What happened to you?"

"I saw someone get shot," I said, remembering, shudder­ing with the memory. "I shared the pain of the gunshot, got caught up in the death. Then when I could get up, I found a gun. I took it from the hand of someone who was dead. That was good because a moment later, one of the paints grabbed me, and I had to shoot him. I shared his death, and in the confusion of that, I lost track of you guys and of time. When I could, I ran out of the gate and spent the rest of the night a few blocks north of our neighborhood huddling in some­one's half-burned garage. The next day I came back looking for you. That's when I found Harry and Zahra. We were all pretty beaten up. Zahra told me you guys were dead."

Marcus shook his head. "I wish we had been with you. Then we could have been just 'beaten up.' Everything went wrong for us. Just as we went through the gate another group of paints arrived."

He paused. "You know, I met some paints later. Most of them killed themselves off, with their drugs, or with their drug-induced love of fire. But there are still a few around. Anyway... I was collared with some a few months ago. They said their whole deal was to help the poor by killing off the rich and letting the poor take their stuff. If you lived in a place where the houses weren't falling down, and espe­cially if you had a wall around your neighborhood or your house, that meant you were rich. The crazy thing was, a lot of the paint kids really were rich. One of the girls I met, her family had more money than our whole neighborhood put together. She had pretty much given up everything for the paints, but in the end her friends betrayed her. One day while she was spaced out on something, they sold her to be col­lared because she was still young and cute, and they needed money for drugs. But she still thought she'd done some good. We couldn't convince her. We figured the drugs had wiped out her mind.''

"She had to believe in something," I said. "And after all, what did she have left?"

"I guess. Anyway, we were caught between these two groups of goddamn saviors of the poor." He sighed. "They were shooting—most of them firing into the air at first—and waving torches More fire We couldn't do anything but run back in through the gate.

''Everything was crazy. Ben and Greg were crying. Peo­ple were running everywhere. All the houses were burning. Then someone shot me. I was knocked down, stunned. At first I didn't understand what had hit me. Then I felt this un­believable pain. I must have dropped Greg. I tried to look around for him. That's when I understood that I was down on the sidewalk. I felt slammed down, stomped, plus stabbed through the right shoulder and arm by a hot poker. I never knew who shot me or why. We didn't have guns. I guess they just shot us for fun.

"Then I saw Mama get shot The truth is, it all happened so fast—first me, then her, bang, bang. I know that But at the time 1 remember seeing it all, taking it all in as though I had plenty of time. And yet I was desperate to get out of there, and scared to death. Jesus God, there's no way I can make you know how bad it was.

"I saw Mama stagger and collapse She made a horrible noise, and I saw blood pouring from her neck. I knew then that... she... that she was dying. I knew it

"I tried to get up, tried to make myself go to her. But while I was struggling to stand, a green-painted woman ran up and shot her through the head.

"I slipped in my own blood and fell back. From the ground, I saw a red guy shoot Ben twice through the head, then step over him and shoot Greg. I saw him. I was yelling. The red guy had an automatic rifle—an old AK-47. He shot Ben while Ben was trying to get up. Ben's head... just... broke apart.

"But Greg was down on the sidewalk—moving, but down. When the guy shot him, the bullets must have rico­cheted off the concrete. They hit another paint in the legs. He screamed and fell down. That made all the paints nearby mad. It was like they thought we had shot their man—like his being wounded was our fault. They grabbed all four of us and dragged us over to the Balter house. It was burning, and they threw us into the fire.

"They did that They threw us into the fire. I was the only one who was conscious. I was maybe the only one alive, but I couldn't stop them. Somehow, though, once they threw me in, I got up and ran out. I just ran, panicked out of my mind, blind with smoke and pain, not human anymore. I should have died.

"Later, I wished I had died. Later, all I wanted to do was die."

Marcus stopped and sat silent for several seconds.

"Someone must have helped you," I said when I thought the silence had gone on long enough. "You were only 14."

"I was only 14," he agreed. After another silence, he went on. "I think I must have fallen down in the Balter yard. I was on fire. I didn't think about rolling on the ground to put the fire out, but I must have done it. I was just scrambling around in panic and pain, and the fire did go off. Then all I could do was lie there. I must have passed out at some point. When I woke up—I have a clear memory of this—I was on a big wooden wagon on top of a lot of scorched clothes and some pots and pans and junk. I could see the sidewalk pass­ing under me—broken concrete, weeds growing in the holes and cracks, and I could see the backs of a man and woman walking ahead, leaning forward, pulling the wagon with rope harnesses. Then I passed out again.

"A pair of scavengers, picking over the bones of our neighborhood had found me groaning—although I don't re­member groaning or being found—and they had loaded me onto their salvage wagon. They were a middle-aged couple named Duran, believe it or not. Maybe they were distant rel­atives or something. It's a pretty common name, though."

I nodded. Not unusual at all, but the only Duran I hap­pened to know was my stepmother. Duran was her maiden name. Well, if these Durans had saved my brother's life five years ago when he couldn't have lived without their help, I was more than willing to be related to them.

"They had had an 11-year old daughter kidnapped from them the year before they found me," Marcus said. "They never found her, never found out what happened to her, but I can guess. You could sell a pretty little girl for a lot then. Just like now. I've heard people say things are getting better. Maybe so, but I haven't noticed. Anyway, the Durans were handsome people. Their daughter could have been really pretty."

He sighed. "The kid's name was Caridad. They said I looked enough like her to be her brother. The woman said that. Inez was her name. She was the one who insisted on collecting what was left of me and taking it home to nurse back to health.

"I'm surprised I even looked human when she found me. My face wasn't too bad—blood and bruises from falling down a few times. But the rest of me was a hell of a mess.

"There was no way these people could afford a doctor— not even for themselves. So Inez herself worked on me. She worked so hard to save me—like a second mother. The man thought I would die. He thought it was stupid to waste time, effort, and valuable resources on me. But he loved her, so he let her have her way.

"These people were a lot poorer than we used to be, but they did what they could with what they had. For me that meant soap and water, aspirin and aloe vera. Why I didn't die of 20 infections I don't know. I goddamn sure wanted to die. I'll tell you, I'd rather blow my own brains out than go through that again."

I shook my head. I had no medical training beyond first aid, and I doubt that I'd be much good administering that, but I'd lived with Bankole long enough to know how nasty burns could be. "No complications at all?" I demanded.

Marcus shook his head. "I don't know, really. Most of the time I was in so much pain I didn't know what was going on. How could I tell a complication from the general run of misery?"

I shook my head, and wondered what Bankole would say when I told him. Soap and water and aspirin and aloe vera. Well, a little humility would be good for him. To Marcus, I said, "What happened to the Durans?"

"Dead," he whispered. "At least I guess they're dead. So many died. I never found their bodies, though, and I tried. I did try."

Long silence.

"Marcus?" I reached over and put my hand on his.

He pulled away and put his hands to his face. I heard him sigh behind them. Then he began to talk again. "Four years after our neighborhood burned, the city of Robledo decided to clean itself up. The Durans and I were squatters. We shared a big, abandoned stucco house with five other fami­lies. That meant we were part of the trash that the new mayor, the city council, and the business community wanted to sweep out. It seemed to them that all the trouble of the past few years was our fault—poor people's fault, I mean. Homeless people's fault. Squatters' fault. So they sent an army of cops to drive out everyone who couldn't prove they had a right to be where they were. You had to have rent re­ceipts, a deed, utility receipts, something. At first, there was a hell of a business in fake paper. I wrote some of it my­self—not for sale, but for the Durans and their friends. Most people couldn't read or write or at least not in English, so they needed help. I saw that some of them were paying hard currency for crap, so I started writing—rent receipts, mostly. In the end, it was all for nothing. Between them, the city and the county owned most of the rotting buildings in our area, and the cops knew we didn't belong there, no matter what papers we had. They drove us all out—poor squatters, drug dealers, junkies, crazies, gangs, whores, you name it."

"Where were you living?" I asked. "What part of town?"

"Valley Street," Marcus said. "Old factory buildings, parking structures, ancient houses and stores, all packed with people."

"And vacant lots full of weeds and trash where people dump inconvenient dead bodies," I continued for him.

''That's the area, yes. The Durans were poor. They worked all the time, but sometimes they didn't even get enough to eat—especially sharing with me. When I was well enough, I worked with them. We cleaned, repaired, and sold anything we could salvage. We took whatever jobs we could get—cleaning, assembling, constructing, repairing. They never lasted long. There were a lot of people like us and not so many jobs, so wages were terrible. Just food and water sometimes, or some old clothes or shoes or something. They'd even pay you in American money if they thought they could get away with palming it off on you. Hard cur­rency if they gave a damn about treating you right. Most didn't. Also, hard currency if they were a little bit afraid of you or of your friends.

"In spite of all our efforts, there was no way we could af­ford to rent even a shabby little apartment or house. We lived on Valley Street because we couldn't do any better. With all that, though, it probably wasn't as bad as you think. People looked after one another there, except for the worst junkies and thugs. Everyone knew who they were. I did reading and writing for people even before the fake-paper craze. They paid me what they could. And... I helped some of them hold church on Sundays. There was an old carport behind the house we lived in. It projected from a garage where three families lived, but as it happened, no one lived under the carport. We met for church there and I would preach and teach as best I could. They let me do it. They came to hear me even though I was a kid. I taught them songs and everything. They said I had a gift, a calling. The truth was, thanks to Dad, I knew more about the Bible than any of them, and more about real church."

He paused, looked at me. "I liked it, you know? I prayed with them, helped them any way I could. Their lives were so terrible. There wasn't much I could do, but I did what I could. It was important to them that I had recovered from burns and gunshots. A lot of them had seen me back when I looked like vomit They thought if I could recover from that, God must have something in mind for me.

"The Durans were proud of me. They gave me their name. I was Marcos Duran. That's who I was during my four years with them. That's who I still am. I found a real home there.

"Then the cops came and drove us into the street Behind them came demolition crews to push down the houses, blow up the buildings, and destroy everything we had been forced to leave behind. People were dragged or driven into the street without all kinds of things—spare clothing, money, pictures, personal papers Some people who couldn't speak English were even driven out without relatives who had managed to hide or who were too sick or disabled to run. The cops dragged some of these out and put them in trucks. They didn't find them all. I sent them to get seven that I knew of, and they brought them out

"But everything was chaos. People kept trying to run back to get their things, and the cops kept stopping them—or try­ing to. Some of the cops were in armored personnel carriers. The ones on foot had full body armor, masks, shields, auto­matic rifles, gas, whips, clubs, you name it, but still, some people tried to stop them, or at least to hurt them. The peo­ple threw rocks, bottles, even precious cans of food.

"Then someone fired three shots, and one of the cops went down. I don't know whether he was wounded or he tripped, but there were the shots, and he fell. And that was that. Everything went to hell.

"The cops started shooting. People ran, screamed, shot back if they had guns. I got separated from the Durans. I started looking for them even before the shooting stopped. No one shot me this time, but I didn't find the Durans. I never found them. I tried for days. I looked at as many dead bodies as I could before they were collected. I did every­thing I could think of, but they were gone. After a while, I knew they must be dead, and I was alone again."

Marcus sat still, staring into space. "I loved them," he said, his voice soft and filled with pain. "And I loved being Marcos Duran—the little preacher. People trusted me, respected me.... It was a good life. Most of them were good people—just poor. They deserved so much better than they got." He shook his head.

"I didn't know what to do," he continued after a moment. "I hung around the Valley Street area for two more weeks, saw all the buildings go down and the rubble carried away. I stole food where I could, avoided the cops, and kept look­ing for the Durans. I'd said they were dead, and on some level, I believed they were, but I couldn't stop looking.

"But there was nothing. No one." He hesitated. "No, that's not quite right. Some people from my poor, half-assed church came back to see what was left. I met three families of them. They all asked me to stay with them. They had rel­atives squatting in other hovels, overcrowded like you wouldn't believe, but they figured they could take in one more. I had nothing, but they wanted me. I should have gone with them. I probably would have set up another church out­side of town, gotten married, and raised a family—Dad all over again. I would have been okay. Poor, but okay. Poor doesn't matter as much if you can make a place for yourself and be respected. I know that now, but I didn't then.

"I was 18. 1 figured it was time for me to be a man, get out on my own. I figured there was nothing for me in south­ern California. It was a place where you could only be poor unless you were born rich or you were a really successful crook. I thought that meant I had to go north. There was al­ways a river of people walking north on the freeway. I thought they must know something. I talked to people about Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon ... I never intended to stay in California."

"Neither did I," I said.

"You walked up?"

"I did. So did Bankole, Harry, Zahra A lot of us did."

"Nobody bothered you?"

"A lot of people bothered us. Harry, Zahra, and I survived because we stuck together and one of us always kept watch. We started out with my one gun. We gathered more people and more guns along the way. I lost count of the number of times we were nearly killed. One of us was killed. There may be an easy way to get here, but we didn't find it."

"Neither did I. But why did you come here? I mean, why didn't you keep going to Oregon or someplace?"

"Bankole owns this land," I said. "By the time we got near here, well, he and I wanted to stay together, but I also wanted... I wanted to keep the rest of the group together. I was building a community—a group of families and single people who were still human."

"You walk the roads for a while, and you wonder if any­one is still human."

"Yeah."

"The people you brought here—they built this place?"

I nodded. "There was nothing here when we got here but the ashes of a house, the bones of Bankole's relatives, some untended crops and trees, and a well. There were only 13 of us then. There are 66 of us now—67 with you."

"You just let people come here and stay? What if they rob you, cheat you, kill you? What if they're crazy?"

"Give me some credit, Marc."

His face changed in an odd way. "You. You personally." He paused. "I thought at first this was Bankole's place, that he'd taken you in."

"I told you, this is his land."

"But it's your place."

"It's our place. I've shaped it, but it doesn't belong to me. I've invited people to come here and build lives for themselves, to join us." I hesitated, wondering how much he still believed in religion as our father had taught it to us. When he was little, he always seemed to take Dad's reli­gion as real, as obvious, as a given. But what did he be­lieve now that he had suffered the destruction of two homes and the loss of two families, then endured prostitu­tion and slavery? He still had not talked about that last part of his story. Had his religion given him hope, or had it withered and fallen away when his God did not rescue him? Back in Robledo, he had run a simple outdoor church, had been serious about it. But where was he now? I made myself continue. "And I've given them a belief sys­tem to help them deal with the world as it is and the world as it can be—as people like them can make it."

"You mean you're their preacher?" he asked.

I nodded. "We don't call it that, but yes."

He looked surprised, then gave a short bark of laughter. "Religion is in our genes," he said. "It must be. Either that or Dad did a hell of a job on us."

"We call our system Earthseed," I said. "My actual tide is 'Shaper.'"

He stared at me for several seconds, saying nothing. He still looked surprised, and now confused. "Earthseed?" he said at last. "My god, I've heard of you guys. You're that cult!"

"So we've been called."

"There was a politician. He was running for the state sen­ate, I think. He won. He was a Jarret supporter. He was mak­ing a speech in Arcata when I was up there, and he was listing devil-worshiping cults. He named Earthseed as one of them. I'd never heard of it, but I remember because he was going on about how the name actually referred to the devil, the seed deep in the earth and growing like a poison­ous fungus to spread its evil to more and more people."

"Oh, Marc...."

"I didn't make it up. He really said that."

I drew a deep breath. "We don't worship the devil. In fact, we don't worship anyone. And we are Earthseed. Human be­ings are Earthseed. We have no devils. But we're so small that I'm surprised your politician had ever heard of us. And I wish he hadn't Such lies!"

He shrugged. "It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything. But why would you stop being a Chris­tian? Why would you make up a new religion?"

"I didn't make it up. It was something I had been think­ing about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn't the whole truth. It isn't the only truth. It's just one collection of thoughts that are true. I could never say any­thing about it at home. I never wanted to hurt Dad. But his way didn't work for me. I wanted it to. I would have been a lot more comfortable if it had. But it didn't. Earthseed does."

"But you made Earthseed up. Or if you didn't make it up, you read it or heard about it somewhere."

I had heard this many times before. It seemed to be one of the things that every new potential member said. I even kept a simple teaching tool near at hand to deal with it. I got up and went to a bookshelf where a beautiful piece of rose quartz that Bankole had given me acted as a bookend for the few books I kept here in the house and not in the library sec­tion of the school.

"Look at this," I said, "and tell me something." 1 put the rock in his hands. "If I were to analyze this stone and find out exactly what it's made of, would that mean I made it up?"

"That's not a good comparison, Lauren. The rock exists. Earthseed didn't exist until you made it up."

"All the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn't make any of them up."

"You just put them together."

"Yes."

"Then you did make Earthseed up the same way you would have made a novel up if you wrote one. You wouldn't have to find anything brand-new for your characters to do or be in a novel. I don't think you could if you wanted to."

"Except that by definition, a novel is fiction. Don't call Earthseed fiction. You don't know anything about it except the lies told by an opportunistic politician." I took down a copy of The First Book of the Living and handed it to him. "Come and talk to me after you've read this."

"You wrote this?"

"Yes."

"And you believe in it?"

"I believe it. I wouldn't teach people that things were true if I didn't believe them."

"Back in Robledo, I remember you were always writing. Keith used to sneak into your room and read your diary. Or at least he said he did."

I thought about that for a moment. "I don't think he ever read my journal," I said. "I mean, I know I was always chas­ing him out of my room. I chased you out, too, plenty of times. But I think if Keith had read my journal, he wouldn't have been able to resist using it against me. Besides, Keith never read anything unless he had to."

"Yeah." He paused, gazing down at the table. "It's weird to think I'm older now than he ever got to be. He still seems older and bigger when I think about him. He was such a goddamn asshole." He shook his head. "I think I really hated him, you know, the way he was always making trou­ble for everybody, beating the rest of us up—except you. He was afraid of you because you were so much bigger. And Mama... she loved him more than she loved all of us put together."

"It wasn't that bad, Marc."

He looked up at me, solemn-eyed. "It was, though. She wasn't your mother, so maybe you didn't feel it the way I did, but it was that bad and then some."

"I felt it. Toward the end when she and I needed each other most, I'm not sure she loved me at all. But she was so scared and so desperate.... Forgive her, Marc. She was in a hellish place with four children to look out for. If it made her less rational than she should have been ... well, forgive her."

There was a long silence. He stared at the book, open at the first page:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

I couldn't tell whether he had read the words at first. He seemed to stare the way blind people do, unseeing, blank. Then he whispered, "Oh, god," and it sounded like a prayer. He shut the book and closed his eyes. "I'm not sure I want to read your book, Lauren," he said. He opened his eyes and looked at me. "You haven't asked how I wound up with Cougar."

"I want to know," I admitted.

"Simple. My first night walking the freeway, three guys jumped me—big guys. I didn't have much money and that pissed them off—you know, like I was supposed to be rich so that robbing me would be worth their while. If I wasn't rich, then I had cheated them, and they had a right to get me for it. Shit."

He was staring at the table again, and I imagined him as he must have been then, facing three big men. He had always been slight and much too attractive for his own good—a beau­tiful boy, and now, such a handsome young man. I had seen the girls and women of the community staring at him as we brought him from the truck to the house last night If he stayed, they would be all over him.

He would be stronger now. He had a look of wiry strength about him. But even now, he wouldn't be strong enough to hold off three attackers. And he'd had no friends with him, watching his back on the freeway that night

After a while, he spoke again, still staring at the table. "They didn't just beat the hell out of me and rape me and let me go," he said. "They kept me so they could do it over and over again. And when they got tired of me, they sold me to a pimp. Not Cougar. He came later. The first one called himself Zorro. All these guys seem to have stupid names. Anyway, Zorro was the first to put a collar around my neck. After that people didn't have to bother beating me up—unless they felt like it. Some people get turned on by beating the shit out of a guy who can't fight back. And You know the worst thing about a collar, Lauren? They can torture you win it every day. Every goddamn day. And you never have any marks to mess you up and drive down your price, and you never die of it! Or most people don't die of it Some are lucky. They have heart attacks or strokes and they die. But the rest of us live no mat­ter what And if we try to find some other way to die, to kill ourselves, they can stop us. The guy with the control unit can play you the way Mama used to play her piano. You get so you'll do anything—anything!—just to get him to let you alone for a few minutes. You walk past a corpse on the road— some poor old guy who couldn't walk any farther or a woman someone had raped and killed. You walk past the corpse, and you wish like hell it was you."

He sighed and shook his head. "That's it, really. I had one more owner between Zorro and Cougar, but he was walking shit too. You can't own people and torture them for fun and profit without being shit A pimp would sell his mother and his daughter if the price were right And if I ever get the chance, I swear to god, Lauren, I'll stake all three of them out and I'll burn them—like Jarret's people do with their so-called witches." After a moment, he added, "I saw that done once— a burning. Sargent—my second owner—did it to a woman who tried to kill him in his sleep. She was a beautiful woman. Sargent and his friends wiped out her family to get her, but then he slept with her before she had learned the rules.

"These are the rules: Once you've got a collar on, you can't run. Get a certain distance from the control unit and the collar chokes you. I mean it gives you so much pain that you can't keep going. You pass out if you try. We called that getting choked. Touch the control unit and the collar chokes you. It won't work for you anyway. It's got a fingerprint lock. And if the fingers trying to use it are wrong or are dead, it chokes you and stays on choke until someone with the right living fingers turns it off. Or until you die. When someone threatens a pimp, sometimes he'll make his oldest, least popular whores fight for him, shield him. The truth is, while they're wearing the collars, all his whores will fight for him, no matter how much they hate him. They'll fight hard. They might not even care whether or not they get killed.

"And, of course, if you try to cut, burn, or otherwise dam­age the collar, it chokes you.

"The girl, she tried to take revenge for her family. She never knew why the other whore Sargent had with him that night stopped her. The other whore begged her not to do it He tried to explain, but she wouldn't listen. Then Sargent woke up. The next day, he gathered all his whores together, and he staked the girl out naked and made us all gather wood and stack it around her and on top of her with just her head showing. Then he made us watch while he... while he burned her."

It occurred to me that Marcus was the "other whore" who saved Sargent's life. Maybe he was. I would not ask. Per­haps on some level, the "other whore" was him even if it wasn't, really. A collar, my brother was saying, makes you turn traitor against your kind, against your freedom, against yourself. This was what had been done to him. And what had it made of him? Who and what was he now? No one could go through what he has gone through and not change somehow. No wonder the first of the Earthseed verses had reached him.

I took him to see Zahra and Harry, and they both hugged him, amazed. Zahra, in particular, who had seen him shot and thrown into the fire, kept staring at him and touching him. He stared back at them the way I've seen half-starved people stare at food that they couldn't beg, buy, or steal.

sunday, december 19, 2032

"Call me Marcos," my brother said to me as I showed him our school-library-Gathering Hall. He was about to attend his first Gathering, but I had brought him to the school early so that he could see more of what we had built He seemed impressed with the building and with our collection of sal­vaged, purchased, and bartered books, but I had gotten the impression that there was something else on his mind. Now here it was.

"I've been Marcos Duran for more than five years now," he said. "I don't really know how to be Marcus Olamina anymore."

I didn't know what to make of that. After a while, I said, "Do you... ? Is it that you don't want people to think of me as your sister?"

He looked horrified. "No, Lauren. It's not like that" He paused, thought for a moment. "It's more like Marcus Olam­ina was my childhood name. I'm not that kid anymore. I'll never be him again."

I nodded. "Okay." And then, “Thanks to Bankole, just about everyone here calls me Olamina, so maybe it's just as well. Less confusing."

"Your husband calls you by your maiden name?'

"He doesn't like my first name, so he ignores it That's fair. I didn't like his first name either. It's 'Taylor,' by the way, and I ignore it."

My brother shrugged. "Your business, I guess. Just call me Marcos."

I shrugged too. "All right," I said.

wednesday, december 22, 2032

Bankole is home. He says the doctor in Halstead is dead, and the people there—the mayor and town council—have asked him to move there and become their doctor full time.

He wants to. For my sake and the baby's as well as his own, be wants to more than anything. It's a chance that may not come his way again, he says. He's an old man, he says. He's got to think of the future, and I've got to think of the baby, he says. I've got to be realistic, for god's sake, and stop dreaming, he says.

I'm not conveying the full flavor of this. It's the same old stuff. He's said most of it before, and I'm damned tired of it But it's worse now. It's scarier. Bankole means it more than he ever has before because he has an offer now—a real offer. And he means it because there is this small new life between us, growing inside me. I've had no morning sickness, none of the swellings and discomforts and moodiness that Zahra has when she's pregnant. And yet, I don't doubt for a mo­ment that my daughter is within me. Bankole's checked, and he says she's a girl. In gentler moments, we bicker about her name—Beryl like his mother or, from my point of view, almost anything that isn't Beryl. Such an old-fashioned name.

But sometimes all of the ease and the joy and the love that I feel because of our child growing and developing within me seems lost on Bankole. All he seems to see is what he calls my immaturity, my irrational, unrealistic faith in Earth-seed, my selfishness, my shortsightedness.

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

2033

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life.

Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live.

Chapter 8

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Purpose

Unifies us:

It focuses our dreams.

Guides our plans.

Strengthens our efforts.

Purpose

Defines us,

Shapes us.

And offers us

Greatness.

I'M NOT ENTIRELY SURE why I've spent so much time looking at my mother's life before I was born. Perhaps it's because this seems the most human, normal time of her life. I wanted to know who she was when she was a young wife and soon-to-be mother, when she was a friend, a sister, and, inciden­tally, the local minister.

Should she have left Acorn and gone to live in Halstead as my father asked? Of course she should have! And if she had, would she, my father, and I have managed to have normal, comfortable lives through Jarret's upheavals? I believe we would have. My father called her immature, unrealistic, self­ish, and shortsighted. Shortsighted, of all things! If there are sins in Earthseed, shortsightedness, lack of forethought, is the worst of them. And yet shortsighted is exactly what she was. She sacrificed us for an idea. And if she didn't know what she was doing, she should have known—she who paid so much attention to the news, to the times and the trends. As an adolescent, she saw her father's error when he could not see it—his dependence on walls and guns, religious faith, and a hope that the good old days would return. Yet what more than that did she have? If her good days were to be in the future on some extrasolar world, that only made them more pathetically unreal.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, january 16, 2033

People keep pet dogs in Halstead, as they do in most local cities and towns.

I know that, but I grew up down south, where poor peo­ple and dogs didn't run together. They ate one another. Dogs ran in packs, and they were one of the things we were glad our walls kept out. Some of the very rich used vicious dogs to guard their property. They were the only ones who could afford to buy meat, then feed it to a dog. The rest of us, if we got meat, were glad to eat it ourselves.

Even now, it startles me every time I see people and dogs together and peaceful. But the people of local towns and family farms, while not rich, have food enough to share with dogs—even dogs who do no work and only lie around all day with their mouths open and their long, sharp teeth show­ing. Children play with them. More than once in the past few days, I've had to quell my impulse to snatch a child away from those teeth and beat off the dog.

It's interesting to see that dogs don't like me any more than I like them. We keep out of one another's way. Bankole, on the other hand, likes dogs. He scratches their ears and talks to them. They like him. When he was a boy down south, he kept two or three big ones as pets. Hard to believe that people did that in San Diego or Los Angeles, even thirty or forty years ago.

To please Bankole, I went with him into cold, windy Hal­stead for a couple of days. I told him it would do no good, but he wanted me to go anyway. I've pleased him so little re­cently that I agreed to go. He's in love with the place. It's just what he wants: long established, yet modern, familiar, and isolated. There are comfortable big houses—three and four bedrooms. And, thanks to the wind turbines in the hills, along the ridges, there's plenty of electricity most of the time. And there's modern plumbing. We have a little of that now, but it's been a long struggle. Halstead, except for its crumbling coastline, is about as well protected as any town could be. Its population is about 250. That includes the near­est farm families.

Bankole and I have been promised the home of a family who is emigrating—going to homestead in Siberia. Two young-adult sons and the husband of the family have al­ready gone to prepare a place for the women, the younger children, and the grandparents. For this family named Can­non, Bankole's protected, promised land of Halstead is just one more piece of the worn-out, unlivable "old country" that they want to leave behind. They're nice people, but they can't wait to get out of the United States. They say it just doesn't work anymore. The election of Jarret was, for them, the last straw.

And yet the Halstead trip was a good experience for me. I don't get to travel as much as I did before I got pregnant— no salvaging and not as much trading. Bankole nags me to stay home and "behave myself," and most of the time, I give in.

I had forgotten what living in a big modern house was like. Even the cold and the wind weren't that bad. I kind of liked them. The house rattled and creaked, but it was warmed both by electric heaters and by fires in the fire­places, and it was set far enough back from the coastal bluffs to be in no danger for many years, if ever.

During the first day, I walked out to the bluffs and stood looking at the Pacific Ocean. We can see the ocean every time we travel up the highway to the Eureka-Arcata area and farther north. Up there, it has washed away long stretches of sand dunes and done real damage along the Humboldt and Arcata Bay coastlines. This is all the fault of the steadily ris­ing level of the sea and of occasional, severe storms.

But still, the sea is beautiful. I stood there in the buffeting wind, staring out at the whitecaps and enjoying the sheer vastness of the water. I didn't hear Bankole come up behind me until he was almost beside me. That says something about how safe I felt. I'm more watchful at home in Acorn.

Bankole put his arm around me, and the wind whipped his beard. He smiled. "It is beautiful, isn't it?"

I nodded. "I wonder how people used to living here are going to like living on the vast Siberian plains, even if the plains are warmer than they once were."

He laughed. "When I was a boy, Siberia was a place where the Russians—the Soviets, we called them then— sent people they thought of as criminals and political trou­blemakers. If anyone then had said that Americans would be giving up their homes and their citizenship and going to make new lives in Siberia, the rest of us would have looked around for a straitjacket for him."

"I suspect it's a human characteristic not to know when you're well off," I said.

He glanced at me sidewise. "Oh, it is," he said. "I see it every day."

I laughed, wrapped an arm around him, and we went back to the Cannon house to a meal of broiled fish, boiled pota­toes, Brussels sprouts, and baked apples. The Cannon house sits on a large lot, and, like Bankole and I, the Cannons raise much of their own food. What they can't raise, they buy from local farmers or fishermen. They're also part of a co­operative that evaporates salt for their own use and for sale. But unlike us, they use few wild foods or seasonings—no acorns, cactus fruit, mint, manzanita, not even pine nuts. Surely there will be new foods in Siberia. Would they learn to eat them or would they cling to whatever they could grow or buy of their bland familiar foods?

"Sometimes I can't stand the thought of leaving this house," Thea Cannon said as we sat eating. "But there'll be more opportunity for the children when we leave. What is there for them here?"

I'm not so pregnant that most people notice, and I do wear loose clothing now. But I did think that Thea Cannon, who has seven kids of her own, would have noticed. Maybe she's just too wrapped up in her own worries. She's a plump, pretty, tired-looking blond woman in her forties, and she always seems a little distracted—as though she has a lot on her mind.

That night, I lay awake beside Bankole, listening to the sounds of the sea and the wind. They're good sounds as long as you don't have to be outside. Back at Acorn, being on watch during rough weather is no joke.

"The mayor tells me the town is willing to hire you to re­place one of their teachers," Bankole said, his mouth near my ear and his hand on my stomach where he likes to rest it. "They've got one teacher who's in her late fifties and one who's 79. The older one has been wanting to retire for years. When I told them that you had pretty much set up the school at Acorn and that you taught there, they almost cheered."

"Did you tell them that all I've got is a high school edu­cation, a lot of reading, and the courses I audited on my fa­ther's computer?"

"I told them. They don't care. If you can help their kids learn enough to pass the high school equivalency tests, they'll figure you've earned your pay. And by the way, they can't ac­tually pay you much in hard currency, but they're willing to let you go on living in the house and raising food in the garden even after I'm dead."

I moved against him, but managed not to say anything. I hate to hear him always talking about dying.

"Aside from the older teacher," he continued, "no one around here has a teaching credential. The older people who do have college degrees do not want second or third careers teaching school. Just install some reading, writing, math, history, and science in these kids' heads, and everyone will be happy. You should be able to do it in your sleep after what you've had to put up with in Acorn."

"In my sleep," I said. "That sounds like one definition of life in hell."

He took his hand off my stomach.

"This place is wonderful," I said. "And I love you for try­ing to provide it for the baby and me. But there's nothing here but existence. I can't give up Acorn and Earthseed to come here and install a dab of education into kids who don't really need me."

"Your child will need you."

"I know."

He said nothing more. He turned over and lay with his back to me. After a while I slept. I don't know whether he did.

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

Later, back at home, we didn't talk much. Bankole was angry and unforgiving. He has not yet said a firm "No" to the people of Halstead. That troubles me. I love him and I believed he loves me, but I can't help knowing that he could settle in Halstead without me. He's a self-sufficient man, and he truly believes he's right. He says I'm being childish and stubborn.

Marc agrees with him, by the way, not that either of us has asked Marc what he thinks. But he's still staying with us, and he can't help hearing at least some of our disagreement. He could have avoided mixing in, but I don't think that ever occurred to him.

"What's the matter with you?" he demanded of me this morning just before Gathering. "Why do you want to have a baby in this dump? Just think, you could live in a real house in a real town."

And I got so angry so fast that my only choices were ei­ther to be very quiet or to scream at him. He, of all people should have known better than to say such a thing. We had reached out from our dump with money made at our dump. We had found him and freed him. But for us and our dump, he would still be a slave and a whore!

"Come to Gathering," I said in almost a whisper. And I walked out of the house away from him.

He followed me to Gathering, but he never apologized. I don't think he ever realized that he had said something vile.

After Gathering, Gray Mora came up to me and said, "I hear you're leaving."

I was surprised. I don't suppose I should have been. Bankole and I don't scream at one another and broadcast our troubles the way the Figueroas and the Faircloths do, but no doubt it's clear to everyone that there's something wrong between us. And then there was Marc. He might tell people— just out of a need to be important. He does have a consum­ing need to be important, to reassert his manhood.

"I'm not leaving," I told Gray.

He frowned. "You sure? I heard you were moving to Hal­stead."

"I'm not leaving."

He drew in a long breath and let it out. "Good. This place would probably go to hell without you." And he turned and walked away. That was Gray. I thought back when he joined us that he might be trouble, or that he wouldn't stay. Instead, he turned out to be dependability itself—as long as you didn't want a lot of conversation or demonstrative friendli­ness. If you were loyal to Gray and his family, he was loyal to you.

Later, after dinner, Zahra Balter pulled me out of a set of dramatic readings that three of the older kids were giving of their own work or of published work that they liked. I was enjoying Gray's stepdaughter Tori Mora's reading of some comic poetry that she had written. The more laughter in Acorn, the better. And I was drawing Tori, tall and lean and angular, a handsome girl rather than a pretty one. I had dis­covered that drawing was so different from everything else I did that it relaxed me, and at the same time, it roused me to a new alertness—a new kind of alertness. I've begun to perceive color and texture, line and shape, light and shadow with new intensity. I go into these focused, trancelike states and draw really terrible stuff. My friends laugh at the draw­ings, but they tell me they're getting better, getting recog­nizable. Zahra told me a couple of weeks ago that a drawing I'd done of Harry looked almost human.

But this time Zahra hadn't come to talk about my draw­ing.

"So you're going to leave!" she hissed at me as soon as we were alone. She looked angry and bitter. Here and there around us, people found their own Gathering Day amuse­ments. May was teaching Mercy Noyer how to weave a small basket from tree bark. A few adults and older kids had gotten a soccer game going in spite of the cold. Marc and Jorge were out there on opposite sides, having a great time running up and down the field, getting filthy, and collecting more than their share of bruises. Travis, who also loves soc­cer, has said, "I think those two would kill each other for a chance to score."

If only Marc would confine himself to scoring in soccer.

Of course, I wasn't as surprised at Zahra's question as I had been at Gray's. "Zee, I'm not leaving," I said.

Like Gray, she didn't believe me at first "I heard you were. Your brother said... Lauren, tell me the truth!"

"Bankole wants me to move to Halstead," I said. "You know mat I don't want to go. I think we've got something worthwhile going here, and it's ours."

“I heard they offered you a house by the ocean?"

"Within sight of the ocean, but not that close. You don't want to be too close to the ocean in Halstead."

"But a real house, I mean. A house like back in Robledo."

"Yes."

"And you turned them down?"

"Yes."

"You're crazy as hell."

That did startle me. "You mean you want me to go, Zee?"

"Don't be stupid. You're the closest thing I got to a sister. You know damned well I don't want you to go. But... you should go."

"I'm not"

1 would."

I stared at her.

"I'd go to a better place if I could. I got two kids. Where do they go from here? Where's your little baby going from here?"

"Where would they go from Halstead? Halstead is like Robledo with a better wall. Why do you think there are peo­ple there who are planning to emigrate to Russia or Alaska and others who are just trying to hang on to their little piece of the twentieth century until they die? None of them is try­ing to build anything to replace what we've lost or to boost us to something better."

"You mean like Earthseed? The Destiny?"

"Yes."

"It ain't enough."

"It's a beginning. It's a way of trying to build tomorrow instead of cycling back into some form of yesterday."

"Do you ever stop preaching?"

"Am I wrong?"

She shrugged. "You know I'm not religious the way you are. Besides, even if you go to Halstead, we'll still be here. And Earthseed will still be Earthseed."

Would it? Maybe. But Earthseed is a young movement I couldn't walk away and leave it to a "maybe." I wouldn't walk away from it any more than I'd walk away from the baby I would soon be having. Someday, I want people to go from here and teach Earthseed. And I want what they teach to still be recognizable as Earthseed.

"I'm not going," I said. "And, Zee, I think you're a liar. I don't think you'd go either. You know that here at Acorn we're with you if you get into trouble. And you know we would take care of your kids if anything happened to you and Harry. Who else would do that?" She had been raised in some of the nastier streets of Los Angeles, and she knew about loyalty, about depending on her friends and having them depend on her.

She looked at me, then looked away. "It's good here," she said, staring out toward the hills to the west of us. "It's bet­ter than I thought it could be when we got here. But you know it's nothing like as good as we had back in Robledo. For your baby's sake, you ought to go."

"For my baby's sake, I'm staying."

And she met my eyes again. "You sure? Think about the fu­ture."

"I'm sure. And you know damned well I am thinking about the future."

She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed. "Good." Another silence. "You're right. I wouldn't want to go, and I wouldn't want you to go either. Maybe that's because I'm as big a fool as you are. I don't know. But... we do have something good here. Acorn and Earthseed—they're both too good to let go of." She grinned. "How's Bankole dealing with things?"

"Not well."

"No. He tries to give you what any sane woman would want and you don't want it. Poor guy."

She went away, smiling. I was heading back to the read­ing and my sketch pad when Jorge Cho came up to me, sweaty and filmy from the game. He was with his girlfriend Diamond Scott, tiny and black and every hair in place as usual. I saw the question on their faces before Jorge spoke.

"Is it true that you're leaving?"

thursday, january 20, 2033

Jarret was inaugurated today.

We listened to his speech—short and rousing. Plenty of "America, America, God shed his grace on thee," and "God bless America," and "One nation, indivisible, under God," and patriotism, law, order, sacred honor, flags everywhere, Bibles everywhere, people waving one of each. His ser­mon—because that's what it was—was from Isaiah, Chap­ter One. "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers."

And then, "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they will be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

Then, he spoke of peace, rebuilding and healing. "A strong Christian America," he said, "needs strong Christian American soldiers to reunite, rebuild, and defend it." In almost the same breath, he spoke of both "the generosity and the love that we must show to one another, to all of our fel­low Christian Americans," and "the destruction we must visit upon traitors and sinners, those destroyers in our midst."

I'd call it a fire-and-brimstone speech, but what happens now?

sunday, february 6, 2033

Yesterday Marc told Bankole that he intended to hold ser­vices of his own on Gathering Day. He would, he said, speak just before our regular gathering. It seemed that he was remembering his time with the Durans in Robledo, remem­bering his carport church, and wanting to recapture that image of himself.

Bankole sent him to me. "Don't go out of your way to make trouble," Bankole told him. "Your sister has been good to you. Tell her what you intend to do."

"She can't stop me!" my brother said.

"Do what's right," Bankole told him. "You have a con­science. Don't go behind your sister's back."

So later in the day, Marc found me sitting with Channa Ryan, sorting and cataloging books. We're always behind in that, and it needs to be done. All of our kids work on projects as part of their education. Each kid does at least one group project and one individual project per year. Most kids find the two unrelated projects influencing one another in unexpected ways. This helps the kids begin to learn how the world works, how all sorts of things interact and influence one another. The kids begin to teach themselves and one an­other. They begin to learn how to learn. With their mentors' help, they each choose some aspect of history, science, math, art, or whatever and learn it well enough to teach it. Then they do just that. They teach it. To do a good job, they need to be able to find out what information we have avail­able here and what they're going to have to go to the nets for. Since we aren't rich yet, the more we can offer them from our own library, the better.

Still, cataloging is tedious. I was almost glad when Marc came and interrupted my work. He and I went outside to talk.

"I want to get back to what I really care about," he said as we sat together on a handsome bench that Allie Gilchrist had made. Allie's discovered a real liking for building furniture, and she's worked as hard to learn to do it well as she has to learn to assist Bankole well.

"What?" I asked Marc, hoping that what he wanted was something that we could accommodate. No one wanted more than I did for him to find his own interests and get into work that he cared about.

"I want to start my church again," he said. "I want to preach. I'm not asking your permission. I'm just letting you know. With Jarret in office, you need someone like me any­way so that you'll be able to say you're not a Satanist cult."

I sighed. All of a sudden I could feel myself all but sagging with weariness and dread. But I only said, "If Jarret noticed us and wanted to call us a Satanic cult, your preach­ing wouldn't stop him. Would you be willing to speak at Gathering?"

That surprised him. "You mean while you're having your services?"

"Yes."

"I won't talk about Earthseed. I want to preach."

"Preach, then."

"What's the catch?"

"You should know. You've been to our services. You choose the topic. You say what you want. But afterward there will be questions and discussion."

"I'm not out to teach a class. I want to preach a sermon."

"That's not our way, Marc. If you speak, you have to face questions and discussion. You need to be ready for that. Be­sides, no matter what you call it, a good sermon is just a les­son that you're trying to teach."

"But... you won't try to get in the way of my preaching at the Gathering if I take questions afterward?"

"That's right."

"Then I'll do it."

"It's no joke, Marc."

"I know. It's no joke to me either."

"I mean we're as serious about the discussion as you are about the sermon. Some of our people might probe and dis­sect in ways you won't like."

"Okay, I can handle it."

No, I didn't think he could. But an unpleasant thing should be done quickly if it must be done at all. My brother had a sermon ready. He'd been working on it in his spare moments. Since I was scheduled to speak at the Gathering this morning, I was able to step aside for him, let him speak at once.

He didn't pull his punches. He confronted us, challenged us directly from the Bible—first from Isaiah again, "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God will stand for ever." Then later from Malachi, "For I am the Lord. I change not" And then from Hebrews, "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever. Be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines."

Marc doesn't have our father's impressive voice, and he knows it. He uses what he has skillfully, and, of course, it helps that he's so good-looking. But once he had preached his sermon on the changelessness of God, Jorge Cho spoke up. Jorge was next to Diamond Scott as usual. He has told me he intends to marry Di, but Di has been looking at my brother in a way that Jorge doesn't like at all. There's a ri­valry between Marc and Jorge anyway. They're both young and competitive.

"We believe that all things change," Jorge said, "even though all things don't necessarily change in all ways. Why do you believe God doesn't change?"

My brother smiled. "But even you believe that your God doesn't change. Your God promotes change, but he stays the same."

That surprised me. Marc shouldn't have made such avoid­able mistakes. He's had plenty of time to read, talk, and hear about Earthseed, but somehow, he's misunderstood.

Travis was the first to point out the error. "God is Change," he said. "God promotes nothing. Nothing at all."

And Zahra, of all people, said, "Our God isn't male. Change has no sex. Marc, you don't know enough about us yet even to criticize us."

Jorge began repeating his question before Zahra had fin­ished. "Why do you think your God doesn't change? How can you prove it?"

"I have faith that it's true," Marc said. "Belief must be based on faith as much as on proofs."

"But there must be some test," Jorge said. "You must have a way to know when your faith is sensible and when it makes no sense."

"The test is the Bible, of course. When the Bible tells us something—in this case, it tells us several times—we can believe it. We can have faith that it is true."

Antonio Cortez, Lucio's oldest nephew, jumped in. "Look," he said, "in the Bible, God does things. Things hap­pen and he reacts. He makes things. He gets angry. He de­stroys things...."

"But he, himself, doesn't change," my brother said.

"Oh, come on," Tori Mora shouted in open disgust. 'To take action is to change. It's to go from action to inaction. And he goes from calmness to anger—he gets angry a lot And—"

"And in Genesis," her stepsister Doe said, "he lets some of his favorite men have children with their sisters or daugh­ters. Then in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, he says anyone who does that should be killed."

"Right," Jorge said. "I was just reading that last week. It is no good to say that something is true because the Bible says it is true and then forget that a few pages later, the Bible says—or shows—something completely different."

"Every time any god is accepted by a new group of peo­ple, that god changes," Harry Balter said.

"I think," Marta Figueroa Castro said in her gentlest voice, "that the verses you read, Marc, mean that God is al­ways God, always there for us, always dependable that way. And, of course, it means that God and God's word will never die."

"Yes, so much of the Bible is metaphor," Diamond Scott said. She, too, spoke very gently. "I remember that my mother used to try to take it absolutely literally, but it just meant she had to ignore some things and twist others." Be­side her, Jorge smiled.

The discussion went on for a while longer. Then other people began to take pity on Marc. They let him end the dis­cussion. They had never been out to humiliate him. Well, maybe Jorge had, but even Jorge had been polite. Things would have gone better for Marc if he had done his home­work, and things would have been more interesting and in­volving for his audience. He might even have won over a Faircloth or a Peralta. I had worried about that

The truth is, I let him speak today because I wanted him to speak before he was truly ready. I wish I hadn't had to do that I wish he had wanted to do something else—anything else—to get his self-respect back and begin to rebuild him­self. I have tried to interest him in the several kinds of work we do here. He isn't lazy. He pulls his weight. But he doesn't like fieldwork or working with animals or trading or teaching or salvaging or carpentry. He tried repairing sal­vaged tools, but it bothered him that he had so much to learn even about simple things. He all but ruined a pair of heavy-duty shears that he was supposed to be sharpening. He tried to grind their almost square edges to thin, sharp blades, and Travis gave him the chewing out he deserved.

"If you don't know, ask," Travis had shouted. "Nobody expects you to know everything. Just ask! This shit is easy to do if you just take the trouble to learn a few basics. Work with me for a while. Don't try to go off on your own."

But my brother needed to "go off on his own," to have his own turf where he was the one who said yes or no, and where everyone respected him. He needed that more than he needed anything, and he meant to have it all at once.

But now, instead of feeling important and proud, he feels angry and embarrassed. I had to let him inflict those feelings on himself. I couldn't let him begin to divide Acorn. More important—much more important—I couldn't let him begin to divide Earthseed.

Chapter 9

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

To make peace with others,

Make peace with yourself:

Shape God

With generosity

And compassion.

Minimize harm. .

Shield the weak.

Treasure the innocent.

Be true to the Destiny.

Forgive your enemies.

Forgive yourself.

MY MOTHER WAS QUITE OPEN in her journal about the fact that she didn't know what she was doing, and that this was a terrible frustration to her. She meant to make Earthseed a na­tionwide movement, but she had no idea how to do this. She seemed to have vague plans to someday send out Earthseed missionaries, to use Acorn as a kind of school for such mis­sionaries. Perhaps this is what she would have done if she'd had the chance. It might even have worked. It's worked for other cults. It might have gained her a larger following, more recognition.

But she didn't want simple recognition. She wanted people to believe. She had a truth that she wanted to teach and an outer-space Destiny that she wanted taken seriously and someday fulfilled. And it's obvious from her treatment of Uncle Marc that she was very territorial about the whole thing. I don't know whether Uncle Marc ever realized how she set him up to fail and to make a bad first impression with her people. Such a simple, subtle thing. He imagined that she had done something much more obvious and complicated.

She didn't fight people unless she was pretty sure she was going to win. When she wasn't sure, she found ways to avoid fighting or go along with her opponents until they tripped themselves up or put themselves in a position for her to trip them up. Smart, I suppose—or treacherous, depending on your point of view.

She learned from everyone and everything. I think if I had died at birth, she would have managed to learn something from my death that would be useful to Earthseed.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

saturday, february 19, 2033

I feel more strongly man I ever have that there will soon be war.

President Jarret is still stirring up bad feelings over Alaska, or as he describes it, "our truant forty-ninth state." He paints Alaska's President Leontyev and the Alaskan legislature as the real enemies—as "mat gang of traitors and thieves who are trying to steal a vast, rich portion of these United States for themselves. These people want to treat all of Alaska as their own personal, private property. Can we let them get away with it? Can we let them cheat us, rob us, de­stroy our country, use our sacred constitution as waste paper? Can we forget that 'If a house be divided against it­self, that house cannot stand?' Jesus Christ spoke those words 2000 years ago. President Abraham Lincoln paraphrased them in 1858. Was Lincoln wrong? Was—dare we ask it? Dare we imagine it? Was Christ wrong? Was our Lord, wrong?"

He's so good at asking nasty rhetorical questions—so good at encouraging young men—not young women, only men—to "Do your duty, to your country and to yourselves. Prove yourselves men worthy to be called good Christian American soldiers. Serve your country, now that it has such great need of you." They're to do all this by joining the armed services. I've never heard a president talk this way— although I have read about presidents and leaders of other nations who talked this way when they were preparing for war. Jarret said nothing about drafting people, but Bankole says that may be next. Bankole was down in Sacramento a couple of days ago, and he says a lot of people think it's "time we taught that bunch of traitors up in Alaska a lesson."

It shouldn't be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.

"Who was doing the talking?" I asked him as he un­packed medical supplies. He keeps most of his supplies in our cabin until they're needed at the clinic. That way they're less likely to tempt children or thieves. "I mean, was it most of the people you talked to or just a few?"

"Mostly men," he said. "Some young and some old enough to know better. I think a lot of the younger ones would like a war. War is exciting. A boy can prove himself, become a man—if he lives. He'll be given a gun and trained to shoot people. He'll be a powerful part of a powerful team. Chances are, he won't think about the people who'll be shooting back at him, bombing him, or otherwise trying to kill him until he faces them."

I thought about the young single men of Acorn—Jorge Cho, Esteban Peralta, Antonio Figueroa, and even my brother Marc, and shook my head. "Did you ever want to go to war?" I asked.

"Never," Bankole answered. "I wanted to be a healer. I was damned idealistic about it. Believe me, that was a daunting enough challenge for a young Black boy in the late twentieth century—much harder than learning to kill. It never occurred to me back in the 1990s when I was in med­ical school that in spite of my ideals, I would have to learn to do both."

monday, february 28, 2033

Marc spoke at Gathering yesterday. This is the third time he's done it. Each time he learns more about Earthseed and tries harder to convince us that our beliefs are nonsense. He seems to have decided that the unity, the Christianity, and the hope that Jarret has brought to the country makes Jarret not the monster we all feared but a potential savior. The country, he tells us, must get back to God or it is finished.

"The Earthseed Destiny," he said yesterday, "is an airy nothing. The country is bleeding to death in poverty, slavery, chaos, and sin. This is the time for us to work for our salva­tion, not to divert our attention to fantasy explorations of extrasolar worlds."

Travis, trying to explain, said, "The Destiny is important for the lessons it forces us to learn while we're here on Earth, for the people it encourages us to become. It's impor­tant for the unity and purpose that it gives us here on Earth. And in the future, it offers us a kind of species adulthood and species immortality when we scatter to the stars."

My brother laughed. "If you're looking for immortality in outer space," he said, "you've been misled. You already have an immortal soul, and where that soul spends eternity is up to you. Remember the Tower of Babel! You can follow Earthseed, build your way to go to the stars, fall down into chaos, and wind up in hell! Or you can follow the will of God. And if you follow God's will, you can live forever, se­cure and happy, in God's true heaven."

Zahra Balter, loyal in spite of her personal beliefs, spoke up before I could. "Marc," she said, "if we have immortal souls, don't you think we'll take them with us even if we go to the stars?"

"Why do you find it so easy," Michael Kardos asked, "to believe we go to heaven after we die, but so hard to believe we can go into the heavens while we're alive? Following the Earthseed Destiny is difficult. Massively difficult. That's the challenge. But if we want to do it, someday we'll do it. It's not impossible."

I had spoken the same words to him shortly after he came to live at Acorn. He had said then with bitter contempt that the Destiny was meaningless. All he wanted to do, he said, was to earn enough money to house, feed, and clothe his family. Once he was able to do that, he said, then maybe he'd have time for science fiction.

Indeed.

sunday, march 6, 2033

Marc has gone.

He left yesterday with the Peraltas. They're gone for good too. They were the ones Marc managed to reach. They've al­ways felt that we should be more Christian and more patri­otic. They say Andrew Jarret is our elected leader—Ramiro Peralta and his daughter Pilar helped elect him—and a min­ister of God, so he deserves our respect. Esteban Peralta is going to enlist in the army. He believes—the whole family believes—it's our patriotic duty, everyone's duty, to support Jarret in his "heroic" effort to revive and reunify the coun­try. They don't believe Jarret's a fascist. They don't believe that the church burnings, witch burnings, and other abuses are Jarret's doing. "Some of his followers are young and ex­citable," Ramiro Peralta says. "Jarret will put their asses into uniform. Then they'll learn some discipline. Jarret hates all this chaos the way I hate it That's why I voted for him. Now he'll start putting things right!"

It's true that there haven't been any burnings or beatings since Jarret was inaugurated—or none that I've heard of, and I've been paying attention to the news. I don't know what this means, but I don't believe it means everything's all right. I don't think the Peraltas believe it either. I think they're just scared, and getting out of any potential line of fire. If Jarret does crack down on people who don't fit into his religious notions, they don't want to be here at Acorn.

My brother on the other hand, used to despise Jarret Now he says Jarret is just what America needs. And I'm afraid that it's me he's begun to despise. He blames me for the fail­ure of his Gathering Day sermons. He's gained no followers. The Peraltas like him and sort of agree with him. Pilar Per­alta is more than half in love with him, but even they don't see him as a minister. They see him as a nice boy. In fact, that's the way most people here in Acorn see him. He thinks this is my fault. He believes, he insists, that I coached peo­ple to attack and humiliate him at all three Gatherings. And he says with a weary, irritating, honest smile, "I forgive you.

I might have done the same thing to protect my turf if I had any turf to protect."

I think it was the smile that made me say more than I should have. "The truth is," I told him, "you were given a special privilege. If you were anyone else, you could have been expelled for preaching another belief system. I let you do it because you've been through so much hell, and I knew it was important to you. And because you're my brother." I would have called back the words if I could have. He would hear pity in them. He would hear condescension.

For a long moment, he stared at me. I watched him get angry—very angry. Then he seemed to push his anger away. He refused to react to it He shrugged.

“Think of the Gatherings you've attended," I said to him. "Name even one that didn't involve questions, challenges, argument It's our way. I did warn you. Anyone can be ques­tioned on any subject they choose to teach or advocate. I told you that we were serious about it. We learn at least as much by discussion as by lecture, demonstration, or experi­ence."

"Forget about it," he said. "It's done. I don't blame you. Really. I shouldn't have tried my hand here. I'll make a place for myself somewhere else."

Still no anger expressed. Yet he was furious. He wouldn't show it and he wouldn't talk about it, but it came off him like heat Perhaps that's what a collar teaches—a horrible kind of self-control. Or perhaps not. My brother was always a self-contained person. He knew how to be unreachable.

I sighed and gave him as much money as I could afford, plus a rifle, a sidearm, and ammunition for both. He's not a very good shot with anything yet, but he knows the basics, and I couldn't let him go out and wind up in the hands of someone like Cougar again. The Peralta family had been with us for two years, so they had money and possessions as a result of their work with us. Marc did not We drove him and the Peraltas into Eureka. There, they might find homes and jobs, or at least they might find temporary shelter until they could decide what to do.

"I thought you knew me," I said to my brother just before he left us. "I wouldn't do what you're accusing me of."

He shrugged. "It's okay. Don't keep worrying about it" He smiled. And he was gone.

I don't know how to feel about this. So many people have come here and stayed or wanted to stay even if, for some reason, they couldn't. I had to expel a thief a year ago, and he cried and begged to stay. We had caught him stealing drugs from Bankole's medical supplies, so he had to go, but he cried.

As they left us, even the Peraltas looked grim and fright­ened. They were Ramiro, the father; Pilar, 18; Esteban, 17; and Eva, who was only two and whose birth at a rest stop along the highway had cost her mother's life. They had no other relatives left alive, no friends outside of Acorn who would help them if they got into trouble. And Esteban would be leaving them soon to enlist They had good reason to look worried.

Marc would be in the same situation once he left us. Worse, he would be all alone. Yet he smiled.

I don't know whether I'll ever see him again. I feel almost as though he's died... died again.

thursday, march 17, 2033

Dan Noyer found his way back to us last night.

He came back. Amazing. I think he's been gone longer than he was with us. We tried to find him—for his little sis­ters' sakes as much as for his. But unless you have the money to hire a small army of private cops like that guy in Texas, finding people in today's chaos is almost impossible. My finding Marcus was an accident. Anyway, Dan came home on his own, poor boy.

It was a cold night. We had all gone to bed except for the first watch of the night.

The watchers were Gray Mora and Zahra Balter.

Zahra was the one who spotted the intruders. As she de­scribed it to me later, she saw two people running, stagger­ing, sometimes seeming to hold one another up. If not for the staggering, Zahra might have fired a warning shot, at least. But before she revealed herself, she wanted to see who or what the runners were escaping from.

As she scanned the hills behind them, she tapped out our emergency signal on her phone.

There were five people chasing the staggering runners— or, with her night-vision glasses, she could see five. She kept looking for more.

One of the five shouted, then fell, and Zahra realized that that one must have blundered into the edge of our thorn fence. In the dark, some of our thorn bushes don't look that savage. They're pretty if you don't touch them. Some will even be covered with flowers soon. But they grab clothing and flesh, and they tear.

The injured one's four companions slowed, seemed to hesitate, then sped up again as the injured one limped after them.

Zahra put her rifle on automatic and fired a short burst across the path of the two front runners. They stopped short and dived into the thorn bushes and cactuses. One began to fire in Zahra's general direction. There were shouts of pain and loud curses. Then all five were shooting. Down in Acorn, we could hear the gunfire. Even without the phone, we would have known that it was corning from the area around Zahra's watch station.

Zahra and Harry are my oldest friends, and I'm Change-sister to them and Change-aunt to their kids Tabia and Rus­sell. For that reason, I paid no attention to Bankole when he told me to stay in the house. I remember thinking that if this were another Dovetree-like raid, staying inside was only asking to burn.

But this didn't sound like what happened at Dovetree. It wasn't loud enough. There weren't enough attackers. This sounded like a small gang raid of a kind we hadn't had for years.

Bankole and I slipped out of the house together and headed for the truck. For most of the run, we were protected by the bulk first of our own cabin, then of the school. I suppose that's why Bankole didn't try as hard as he might have to make me stay behind. We couldn't be seen, let alone shot at. We keep the truck parked in its own space on the south side of the school. It's protected there in the center of the community, and during the day we can spread its solar wings and let it recharge its batteries.

Harry Balter reached the truck just as Bankole and I got there. He opened a side door, and all three of us scrambled in.

Harry and I have gotten comfortable with the truck's computers. In our earlier lives down south, we both used our parents' computers. We're unusual. Most adults at Acorn had never touched or even seen a computer before. Still oth­ers are afraid of them. For now, although we're passing on our knowledge, we're still among the few who take full ad­vantage of what the truck can do with its weapons, maneu­verability, and sensory systems.

We turned everything on, and Bankole drove us toward Zahra's current watch station. As we rode, we used the truck's infrared viewer to locate each of the intruders. Bankole is a good, steady driver, and he has confidence in the truck's armor. It didn't seem to bother him at all that peo­ple were shooting at us. In fact, it was a good thing the in­truders were wasting ammunition on us. That gave Zahra some relief.

Then we had a look around, and we decided that one of the intruders was much too close to Zahra—and creeping closer. He could have been trying to get away, but he wasn't None of them were. We made sure the targets we had iden­tified were, in fact, targets, and not our own people. Once we were sure, we pointed them out to the truck and let it open up on them. Along with the truck's ability to "see" in the dark via infrared, ambient light, or radar, it also has very good "hearing," and an incorrectly designated sense of "smell." This last is based on spectroscopic analysis rather than on actual smelling, but it is a kind of chemical analysis over a distance. It could be used on anything that emitted or reflected electromagnetic radiation—light—of some kind.

And the truck had plenty of memory. It could, and had, recorded all that it could of each of us—our voices, hand and foot prints, retinal prints, body sounds, and our general shapes in several positions to help it recognize us and not shoot us.

When the truck began shooting, I left the forward moni­tors to Harry. I didn't need to see anything that might make me useless, and the truck didn't need any more help from me. Once we were between Zahra and the attackers, I checked Zahra on an aft screen. She was alive and still at her station. Most of her body was concealed within the depression and behind the stone shelter that was intended to shield her. Some distance away, Gray Mora was still at his station and still alive. He wasn't involved in this, and his duty was to hold his position and guard the other most likely approach to Acorn. It had taken a while for us to learn not to be dis­tracted by people who might rattle the front door while their friends slipped in through the back.

The intruder nearest to Zahra was dead. According to the truck, he was no longer changing the chemistry of the air in his immediate vicinity in a way that indicated breathing, and he wasn't moving. Once the truck was stopped, its ability to detect motion was as good as its hearing. Put the two to­gether and we could detect breathing and heartbeat—or their absence. We've tried to trick it—fool it into mistaking one of us playing dead for an actual corpse—and we've never been able to. That's comforting.

"All right," Harry said, looking up from his screen. "How's Zee?"

"Alive," I told him. "Are all the shooters down?"

"Down and dead, all five of them." He drew a deep breath. "Bankole. le's go pick up Zahra."

"Has anyone given Gray an all-clear?" I asked.

"I have," Bankole answered. "You know, I've got the next watch. In another hour, I would have relieved Zahra."

"For the rest of the night," I said, "whoever's on duty should watch from the truck. Whoever these guys are, they might have friends."

Bankole nodded.

He stopped us as close to Zahra's watch station as the truck could get. We all took one more look around, then Harry opened the door. Before we could call her, Zahra darted from cover and jumped into the truck. She was bleed­ing from the left side of her face and neck, and that took me by surprise. At once, I felt pain in my own face and neck, but managed not to react. Habit. Harry grabbed Zahra and yelled for Bankole.

"I'm okay," Zahra said. "I just got hit by broken rock when those guys were shooting. There was rock flying everywhere."

I went up to take Bankole's place, and he went back to check on her. I'm a pretty decent driver now, so I got us back to the houses. "I'll take what's left of Zahra's watch," I said. "Your watch, too, Bankole. I think you're going to be busy."

"Watch from the truck!" Bankole ordered as though I hadn't just made the same suggestion myself.

"Of course."

"Whatever happened to the two people those gunmen were chasing?" Zahra asked.

We all looked at her.

"They were staggering toward Acorn," she said. "They couldn't have gotten far. I didn't shoot them. They were al­ready hurt."

This was the first we knew of the running pair. Zahra thought they were both wounded, and both men. Yet we hadn't spotted them. Of course, we hadn't looked back to­ward Acorn for more intruders. I hadn't even used the aft screens to do that. Stupid of me.

We looked around Acorn now, and found the usual signs of life—plenty of heat and some sound from the houses. The people were no doubt watching, but in the middle of the night, they wouldn't come rushing out until they got an all-clear from us. The older kids would be keeping an eye on the younger ones, and the adults would be watching us. No one was showing a light or moving around where they could be seen. The only loud sound was that of a baby crying from the Douglas house. Even that came to an abrupt stop.

If this had been a drill, it would have been a good drill.

But where were the two runners? Were they hiding? Had they found their way into the school or into one of the houses? Were they crouching behind one of the trees?

Were they armed?

“1 don't think they had guns," Zahra said when I asked her.

Then I spotted them—or spotted something. I drove to­ward it, toward our own cabin, in fact—Bankole's and mine.

"The truck says they're still alive," I said. "They're not moving much, and Zee's right. They're not armed. But they're alive."

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

The runners were Dan Noyer and a young girl. The moment I saw her—tall like Dan, but slender, pretty, dark-haired with a sharp little chin like Mercy's—I knew she must be one of Dan's sisters. As it turned out, she was Nina Noyer.

Both brother and sister had been beaten bloody with both fists, and with something else. Bankole says they look as though they've been lashed with whips.

"I suppose," he said with great bitterness, "that people who don't have access to convict collars might have to exert themselves—resort to older methods of torture."

Brother and sister have rope burns at their wrists, ankles, and necks. Also, Bankole says, they've suffered a great deal of sexual abuse. The girl told him they were forced "to do it with strangers for money." Dan has endured even more beat­ing than Nina has, and both have what Bankole calls, "the usual infections and tissue damage." Nina says she got preg­nant, but one night during her captivity, she had a miscar­riage. She hadn't known what was happening, but one of the other slaves told her. Well, I suppose it would be surprising if she hadn't gotten pregnant. For her sake, I'm glad she miscarried.

And Dan had somehow found her, rescued her, and brought her home in spite of pursuers chasing him right down into our valley. How had one 15-year-old done so very much?

And in the end, what would it cost him? In the end, did that matter?

friday, march 18, 2033

"This is no way to live," Bankole said to me when he came in from tending Dan and Nina this morning. He sat at the table and put his head down on his arms.

I had taken his watch, as I promised, to free him to do what he could for Dan and Nina. Allie and May were help­ing him, since they have all but joined the Noyer family by taking care of Kassia and Mercy for so long.

Bankole had spent most of his time with his two patients, and had once again found himself fighting for Dan's life. The boy stopped breathing twice, and Bankole revived him. But at last, the young body, once strong and healthy, just gave up. It had taken an incredible amount of abuse over the past few months.

"His heart just quit," Bankole said. "If I had more modern equipment, maybe Goddamnit, Olamina, can you see now why I need to get out of here and get you out of here?"

"He's really dead?" I whispered, not believing it—not wanting to believe it.

"He's dead. It's obscene! A young boy like that"

"What about his sister?"

"She wasn't as badly beaten as he was. I believe she'll be all right"

Would she, after all that had happened? I doubted it Bankole and I sat silent for a while, each of us thinking our own thoughts. What would it have meant to Dan that he had saved his sister, even though he had not been able to save himself? Did he ever imagine such a thing? Would it some­how have been all right? Enough?

"Where's the other sister—Paula?" I asked. "What hap­pened to her?"

Bankole sighed. "Dead. Some trouble on the road up north around Trinidad. Three men tried to steal her. They got caught. Her owners and the thieves shot it out, and she was in the middle. Nina says her owners just cursed her for getting in the way and getting killed. They left her body lying among the rocks by the sea. Nina said Paula loved the sea when the family saw it for the first time last year. She said she hoped the tide came in and carried her away."

I shook my head. Bankole got up and went to lie on the bed.

"But Dan did it," I said more to myself than to him. "He found his sister, and he brought her home. It was impossible, but he did it!"

"Shit," Bankole said, and turned his face to the wall.

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

Now the long day is over.

We've cleaned up the hillside battlefield and thrown ground pepper over parts of it so that any smell of blood that still clings to it wouldn't hold the attention of wild dogs.

We've collected the dead, searched their bodies, then after dark, surrounded them with scrap wood, soaked them in lamp oil, and burned them. We do a thorough job, and the smoke is less noticeable at night—less of a lure to scav­engers and to the curious.

I hate doing this—burning the dead. Of course, whether they're our dead or someone else's, it has to be done, but I hate it

We burned Dan separate from his attackers. I set his pyre alight myself. Allie chose the verse and spoke it. We'll have a full service for Dan when Nina is well enough to attend. For now, though, I think Allie made a good choice.

"As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God

Is Infinite Potential.

God

Is Change."

The other dead—the intruders—were four men and a woman, all in their twenties or early thirties. They were dirty and scratched up, but well-dressed, well-armed, well-heeled. They had plenty of Canadian money in their pock­ets. Were they slavers? Drug dealers? Thieves? Rich kids slumming? Even Nina wasn't sure. She and Dan had es­caped from their original captors and had been on the high­way, headed for Acorn when this new group spotted them and came after them.

The intruders weren't carrying identification or even a change of clothing. That means they had homes or a base of some kind nearby. We thought about that and decided to burn their clothing along with their bodies. It's of much better qual­ity than our own—newer, more fashionable, and more expen­sive. If we wear it, it might be recognized at one of the street markets. And another thing. Two of the intruders were wear­ing black sweatshirts with white crosses embroidered on them—embroidered, not printed. These weren't the long tu­nics that Aubrey Dovetree mentioned, but they were interest­ing imitations. The intruders were thugs of some kind who had decided it was fashionable to look like Jarret's people.

The intruders' guns are, like our own, good-quality, well-cared-for automatic rifles with laser sites. One is German, one's American, and the three newest are Russian. They're all as illegal as hell and as common as oranges. We'll hide them in our survival caches scattered through the mountains. The only thing they had that we'll keep with us and use, as we need it, is some of their money. Most of that will go in the caches too. It's all worn and wrinkled and not identifiable. The fact that there's so much of it—more per person than any group of us would carry around—tells us that these people were either rich or involved in some profitable illegal activity, or both.

Well, now they're gone. People vanish in this world. Even rich people out for fun and greater profit vanish. It happens all the time.

Chapter 10

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

We can,

Each of us,

Do the impossible

As Long as we can convince ourselves

That it has been done before.

LIFE AT ACORN involved a lot of hard physical work. It says a great deal about the world of the early 2030s that most of the people who stumbled onto the community chose to join Earthseed and stay. That being the case, it must have taken a lot to get the Peralta family to leave. There may have been more reasons than my mother gives for their leaving, but I haven't been able to find evidence of them. Perhaps the Per­altas actually did disagree with the religious and political feelings of the rest of Acorn. Perhaps also, they were afraid of the way the political situation in the country was going. They had reason to be.

On the other hand, I'm not at all surprised that Uncle Marc left. There really was no place for him at Acorn. He was "Olamina's little brother" or, as my mother said, a nice boy. He could have married and begun a family in one more little cabin. That would have been intolerable to him. He was a world saver, after all, like my mother. Or not like her, since Earth was the only world that interested him. Like the Peral­tas, he was in religious and political disagreement with Acorn, and, like the Peraltas, he was probably wise to leave when he did.

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

I got the impression that my mother didn't pay much at­tention to being pregnant, it wasn't that she resented it There's no indication that she did. She simply ignored it I was due in July. Between running out into the firefight with the thugs who chased Dan and Nina Noyer and actually giv­ing birth to me, she worked hard to increase both Acorn's wholesaling and its retailing businesses. She was so suc­cessful at this that by the time I was born, the community was in the process of negotiating to buy another truck. They did eventually buy it. Most people had been nervous about having only the one truck. Travis and his helpers had kept the old housetruck running well, and hadn't had to spend much money on it since they made repairs them­selves, but one major accident would put the whole com­munity out of business—or at least out of its new businesses.

With two trucks, the beginnings of a fleet, my mother was looking forward to what she saw as a pleasant, reason­ably secure future. She began to think less about Acorn and more about Earthseed—about spreading Earthseed to whole groups of new people. She wrote more than once in her journal that she hoped to use missionaries to make conversions in nearby cities and towns and to build whole new Earthseed communities—clones of Acorn. I think she especially liked this last idea. She even imagined names for the Acorn clones like a girl thinking up names for imaginary children that she hopes to have someday. There was a Hazelnut, a Pine, a Manzanita, a Sunflower, an Almond.... "They should be small communities," she said. "No more than a few hundred people, never more than a thousand. A community whose population grew to more than a thou­sand should split and 'parent' a new community."

In small communities, she believed, people are more ac­countable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you're doing.

My mother was not a fanciful woman apart from her be­lief in Earthseed. That, I think, was why the people of Acorn trusted her so. She was practical, straightforward, fair, hon­est, and she liked people. She enjoyed working with them. She was a better-than-average community leader. But be­neath it all was always Earthseed and a longing, an obses­sion, that was far stronger than anyone seemed to realize. People who are intelligent, ambitious, and at the same time, in the grip of odd obsessions can be dangerous. When they occur, they inevitably upset things.

In The First Book of the Living, my mother says,

Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and persistent, posi­tive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an en­thusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

friday, july 22, 2033

On July 20, I turned 24. More important, on that day my daughter Larkin Beryl Ife Olamina Bankole was born.

We've named her all that, poor little one. "Larkin" is from the same root as "Lauren" and my father's name, "Lau­rence." All three names derive from "Laurel" and that from the ancient Greek habit of rewarding the victorious by crowning them with wreaths of laurel leaves. And there is a pleasant similarity between "Larkin" and "lark," the name of a songbird that neither Bankole nor I have ever seen or heard, but whose voice, we have read, is beautiful. I had planned to call our daughter Larkin even before she was born on my and my father's birthday. What a lovely con­nection. Three generations of beginning on July 20 is more than just a coincidence. It's almost a tradition.

"Beryl" was the name of Bankole's mother. Bankole and I had been bickering over it for months, and I had known that it would show up somewhere in our daughter's name. As long as it wasn't her first name, it was endurable. It has a good denotative meaning. A beryl is a very hard clear or cloudy mineral which, when properly shaped and polished, has great potential for beauty. The emerald is a kind of beryl.

"Ife" is the Yoruba personal name we've chosen to go with our two Yoruba surnames—since my grandfather and Bankole's father had chosen to take Yoruba surnames back in the 1960s. "Ife" was Bankole's idea. I didn't remember it We had pooled our memories of Yoruba names, and as soon as Bankole came up with "Ife," it seemed right to both of us. It means "love," Bankole says.

And, of course, she was "Olamina" and "Bankole." So many names for one little girl. When she's older, she'll no doubt choose a couple of them and drop the others.

She's whole and beautiful and healthy, and I love her more than I would have thought possible. I'm still sore and tired, but it doesn't matter. She weighs three and a half kilos, has a big appetite, and a good loud voice.

Bankole sits, now, holding her as she sleeps—holding her and looking down at her, rocking her in the beautiful, ornate wooden rocking chair that Gray Mora paid Allie Gilchrist to make for him. Gray likes to build big things—cabins, store­houses, buildings of any kind. He designs them, organizes the building, and works on them. As long as he's building something, he's a happy man. The school is his doing, and if he were any more proud of it, he'd be impossible. But he leaves the designing and building of small things, furniture in particular, to Allie Gilchrist. She taught herself her craft not only by reading salvaged books, but by taking apart sal­vaged furniture to see how it was made. Now, at street mar­kets, she sells the chairs, tables, cabinets, chests, toys, tools, and decorative items that she makes, and she gets good prices for them. Her son Justin is only nine, but he's already pleased her very much by picking the work up from her, learning it and enjoying it. May and the Noyer girls are also beginning to learn the craft, although May is more interested in weaving grasses, roots, bark, and other fibers into mats, baskets, and bags.

Four years ago, after Bankole delivered Gray's first son, Gray paid Allie to build a fine rocking chair for "the doctor." Gray and Bankole hadn't gotten along very well at first—Gray's fault, and he knew it. He pretended to be con­temptuous of Bankole—"a pussy-whipped old man!"— when, in fact, Bankole's age, education, and personal dignity intimidated him. Until Gray's wife had become pregnant with their first son, the two men barely spoke. Then Bankole took care of Emery during her pregnancy and during Joseph's difficult birth—he was breech. After that, the handsome, oaken chair, given in stolid silence, had served as Gray's peace offering. Now Bankole sits in it rocking, looking into his daughter's sleeping face, touching it as though he can't quite believe it's real, and yet, as though it's more real, more important than anything else in his world.

He seems to have taken his cue from Adela Ortiz. He says Larkin looks just like his younger sister did when she was a baby. That's the sister whose bones we found when we ar­rived here. Her bones, her husband's, her children's. After their deaths, Bankole must have felt cut off from the future, from any immortality of the flesh, the genes. He had no other relatives. Now he has a daughter. I'm not sure he even realizes how much of the time over the past couple of days that he's been smiling.

sunday, july 24, 2033

Today we Welcomed Larkin into the community—into Acorn and into Earthseed.

So far, I've been the one to Welcome each new child or adult adoptee. I don't conduct every Sunday Gathering, but I have Welcomed every newcomer. By now, it's expected— something I'm supposed to do. This time, though, I asked Travis to perform the ceremony. And, of course, we asked Harry and Zahra to stand with us. Bankole and I are already Change-sister and -brother to them and Change-aunt and -uncle to their children. Now it goes the other way as well. We each stand ready to parent one another's children. The Balters are my oldest friends and I trust them, but I hope the pledges we've given one another will never have to be kept.

It makes us more truly a community, somehow, now that so many of us have had children here ... now that I've had a child here.

Larkin Beryl Ife Olamina Bankole,

We, your people

Welcome you....

saturday, july 30, 2033

"I don't think you can truly understand how I feel," Bankole said to me last night as he sat down to eat the dinner I had kept warm for him. He had been on evening watch, sitting with binoculars at a mountain overlook where he could see whether some new gang of thugs was approaching to de­stroy his family. He's more serious than ever about main­taining our 24-hour watch, but for each of us, standing watch is still a tiresome duty. I didn't expect him to come home in a good mood, but he was still on enough of a new-daddy high not to be too bad-tempered.

"You just wait until Larkin starts waking him up more," Zahra has warned me.

No doubt she's right

Bankole sat down at the table and sighed. "Before I met you," he said, "there were times when I felt as though I were already dead." He looked at me, then at Larkin's crib where she slept, full of milk and, so far, dry. "I think you've saved me," he said. "I wish you'd let me save you."

That again. The people of Halstead had found themselves another doctor, but they didn't like him. There was some doubt as to whether he really was a doctor. Bankole thought he might have some medical training, but that he was some­thing less than or other than an M.D. He was only about 35, and these days, almost all young physicians—those under 50—were working in privatized or foreign-owned cities, towns, or huge farms. There, they could earn enough to give their families good lives and the company police would keep them safe from marauding thugs or desperate poor people. There had to be something wrong with a 35-year-old doctor who was still looking for a place to hang out his shingle.

Bankole said he thought a sick or injured person would be safer in the hands of Natividad or Michael than with Hal-stead's new "Doctor" Babcock. He had warned several of his Halstead friends, and they had let him know that he was still welcome. They didn't doubt his medical knowledge, and they preferred to have him. And he still wanted to save me by taking me to live among them.

"Acorn is a community of people who have saved one an­other in all kinds of ways," I told him. "Acorn is home."

He looked at me again, then set to work on his dinner. It was late, and I had already eaten. I had taken the baby and gone to eat with Zahra and Harry and their kids. But now, I sat with him, sipping hot mint tea with honey and enjoying the peace. The fire in our antique, salvaged woodstove had burned to almost nothing, but the stove's cast-iron body was still warm and the July night wasn't cold. We were using only three small oil lamps for light. No need to waste elec­tricity. The lamplight was soft and flickering.

I stared into the shadows, enjoying the quiet, family to­getherness, content and drowsy until Bankole spoke again.

"You know," he said, "it took me a long time to trust you. You seemed so young—so vulnerable and idealistic, yet so dangerous and knowing."

"What?" I demanded.

“Truth. You were quite a contradiction. You still are. I thought you would grow out of it. Instead, I've gotten used to it—almost."

We do know one another after six years. I can often hear not only what he says but what he does not say. "I love you too," I said, not quite smiling.

Nor did he allow himself to smile. He leaned forward, forearms on the table, and spoke with quiet intensity. 'Talk to me, girl. Tell me exactly what you want to do in this place, with these people. Leave out the theology this time, and give me some step-by-step plans, some material results that you hope to achieve."

"But you know," I protested.

"I'm not sure that I do. I'm not sure that you do. Tell me."

I understood then that he was looking for reasons to reevaluate his position. He still believed that we should leave Acorn, that we could be safe only in a bigger, richer, longer-established town. "Convince me," he was saying.

I drew a long, ragged breath. "I want what's happening," I said. "I want us to go on growing, becoming stronger, richer, educating ourselves and our children, improving our community. Those are the things that we should be doing for now and for the near future. As we grow, I want to send our best, brightest kids to college and to professional schools so that they can help us and in the long run, help the country, the world, to prepare for the Destiny. At the same time, I want to send out believers who have missionary inclina­tions—send them in family groups to begin Earthseed Gath­ering Houses in non-Earthseed communities.

"They'll teach, they'll give medical attention, they'll shape new Earthseed communities within existing cities and towns and they'll focus the people around them on the Des­tiny. And I want to establish new Earthseed communities like Acorn—made up of people collected from the high­ways, from squatter settlements, from anywhere at all. Some people will want to stay where they are and join Earthseed the way they might join the Methodists or the Buddhists. Others will need to join a closer community, a geographical, emotional, intellectual unit" I stopped and drew a long breath. Somehow I had never dared to say this much about my plans to any one person. I had been working them out in my own mind, writing about them, talking about them in bits and pieces to the group at Gathering, but never assem­bling it all for them. Maybe that was a mistake. Problem was, we'd been focused for so long on immediate survival, on solving obvious problems, on business, on preparing for the near future. And I've worried about scaring people off with too many big plans. Worst of all, I've worried about seeming ridiculous. It is ridiculous for someone like me to aspire to do the things I aspire to do. I know it. I've always known it. It's never stopped me. "We are a beginning," I said, thinking as I spoke. "It's as though Earthseed is only an infant like Larkin—'one small seed.' Right now we would be so very easy to stamp out. That terrifies me. That's why we have to grow and spread—to make ourselves less vulnerable."

"But if you went to Halstead," he began, "if you moved there—"

"If I went to Halstead, the seed here might die." I paused, frowned, then said, "Babe, I'm no more likely to leave Acorn now than I am to leave Larkin."

That seemed to rock him back a little. I don't know why, after all that I've already said. He shook his head, sat staring at me for several seconds. "What about President Jarret?"

"What about him?"

"He's dangerous. His being President is going to make a difference, even to us. I'm sure of it."

"We're nothing to him, so small, so insignificant—"

"Remember Dovetree."

Dovetree was the last thing I wanted to remember. So was that state senate candidate that Marc mentioned. Both were real, and perhaps both meant danger to us, but what could I do about either of them? And how could I let the fear of them stop me? "This country is over 250 years old," I said. "It's had bad leaders before. It survived them. We'll have to watch what Jarret does, change when necessary, adapt, maybe keep a little quieter than we have for a while. But we've always had to adapt to changes. We always will. God is Change. If we have to start saying 'Long live Jarret' and 'God bless Christian America,' then we'll say it. He's tem­porary."

"So are we. And living with him won't be that easy."

I leaned toward him. "We'll do what we have to do, no matter who's warming the chair in the Oval Office. What choice do we have? Even if we run and hide in Halstead, we'll still be subject to Jarret. And we'll have no good friends around us to help us, lie for us if necessary, take risks for us. In Halstead, we'll be strangers. We'll be easy to pick out and blame and hurt. If vigilante crazies or even cops of some kind come asking questions about us or accusing us of witchcraft or something, Halstead might decide we're more trouble than we're worth. If things get bad, I want my friends around me. Here at Acorn, if we can't save every­thing, we can at least work together to save one another. We've done that before."

"This is like nothing we've faced before." Bankole's shoulders slumped, and he sighed. "I don't know that this country has ever had a leader as bad as Jarret or as bad as Jarret might turn out to be. Keep that in mind. Now that you're a mother, you've got to let go of some of the Earth-seed thinking and think of your child. I want you to look at Larkin and think of her every time you want to make some grand decision."

"I can't help doing that," I said. "This isn't about grand decisions. It's about her and her future." I drank the last of my tea. "You know," I said, "for a long time, it terrified me—honestly terrified me—to think that the Destiny itself was so big, so complex, so far from the life I was living or anything that I could ever bring about alone, so far from anything that even seemed possible. I remember my father saying that he thought even the pitiful little space program that we've just junked was stupid and wrong and a huge waste of money."

"He was right," Bankole said.

"He was not right!" I whispered, my feelings flaring. After a moment, I said, "We need the stars, Bankole. We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species. We need to be­come the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we're to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars. That's why the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. I know you don't want to hear verses right now, but that one is... a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness." I stopped for a moment, then let myself say what I had never said to any­one. He had a right to hear it. "Early on, when I told people about the Destiny, and most of them laughed, I was afraid. I worried that I couldn't do this, couldn't reach people and help them see truth. Later, when the people of Acorn began to accept all the Earthseed teachings except the Destiny, I worried more. People seem to be willing to believe all kinds of stupid things—magic, the supernatural, witchcraft….But I couldn't get them to believe in something real, some­thing that they could make real with their own hands. Now... now most of the people here accept the Destiny. They believe me and follow me, and... damned if I don't worry even more."

"You never said so." Bankole reached out and took my hands between his.

"What could I say? That I believe in Earthseed, yet I doubt my own abilities? That I'm afraid all the time?" I sighed. "That's where faith comes in, I guess. It always comes sooner or later into every belief system. In this case, it's have faith and work your ass off. Have faith and work the asses off a hell of a lot of people. I realize all that, but I'm still afraid."

"Do you think anyone expects you to know everything?"

I smiled. "Of course they do. They don't believe I know it all, and they wouldn't like me much if I did, but some­how, they do expect it. Logic isn't involved in feelings like that"

"No, it isn't. I suspect that logic isn't involved in trying to found a new religion and then having doubts about it either."

"My doubts are personal," I said. "You know that I doubt myself, not Earthseed. I worry that I might not be able to make Earthseed anything more than another little cult." I shook my head. "It could happen. Earthseed is true—is a collection of truths, but there's no law that says it has to suc­ceed. We can always screw it up. I can always screw it up. There's so much to be done."

Bankole went on holding my hands, and I let myself go on talking, thinking aloud. "I wonder sometimes whether I'll make it. I might grow old and die without seeing Earthseed grow the way that it should, without leaving the Earth myself or seeing others leave, maybe without even focusing serious attention on the Destiny. There are so many little cults—like earthworms twisting and feeding, forming and splitting, and going nowhere."

"I'll die without seeing the results of most of your ef­forts," Bankole said.

I jumped, looked at him, then said, "What?"

"I think you heard me, girl."

I never know what to say when he starts talking that way. It scares me because, of course, it's true.

"Listen," he said. "Do you really think you can spend your life—your life, girl!—struggling and risking yourself, maybe risking our child for a... a cause whose fulfillment you... probably won't live to see? Should you do such a thing?" I could feel him holding himself back, trying so hard to discourage me without offending me.

He let my hands go, then moved his chair around closer to me. He put his arm around me. "It's a good dream, girl, but that's all it is. You know that as well as I do. You're an intelligent person. You know the difference between reality and fantasy."

I leaned against him. "It's more than a good dream, babe. It's right. It's true! And it's so big and so difficult, so long-term, and as far as money is concerned, it's po­tentially so profitless, that it'll take all the strong religious faith we human beings can muster to make it happen. It's not like anything humanity has ever done before. And if I can't have it, if I can't help to make it happen..." To my amazement, I felt myself on the verge of tears. "If I can't give it the push it needs, if I can't live to see it suc­ceed ..." I paused, swallowed. "If I can't live to see it succeed, then, maybe Larkin can!" I found the words all but impossible to say. It was not a new idea to me that I might not live to see the Destiny fulfilled. But it felt new. Now Larkin was part of it, and it felt new and real. It felt true. It made me frantic inside, my thoughts leaping around. I felt as though I didn't know what to do. All of a sudden, I wanted to go stand beside Larkin's crib and look at her, hold her. I didn't move. I leaned against Bankole, unsettled, trembling.

After a while, Bankole said, "Welcome to adulthood, girl."

I did cry then. I sat there with tears running down my face. I couldn't stop. I made no noise, but of course, Bankole saw, and he held me. At first I was horrified and disgusted with myself. I don't do that I don't cry on people. I've never been that kind of person. I tried to pull away from Bankole, but he held me. He's a big man. I'm tall and strong myself, but he just folded his arms around me so that I couldn't get away from him without hurting him. After a moment, I de­cided I was where I wanted to be. If I had to cry on some­one's shoulders, well, his were big and broad.

After a time, I stopped, all cried out, exhausted, ready to get up and go to bed. I wiped my face on a napkin, and looked at him. "I wonder if that was some kind of postpar­tum something-or-other?"

"It might have been," he said, smiling.

"It doesn't matter," I told him. "I meant everything I said."

He nodded. "I guess I know that."

"Then let's go to bed."

"Not yet. Listen to me, Olamina."

I sat still and listened.

"If we stay here, if I agree that you and Larkin and I are going to stay here, this place is not going to be just one more squatter's shanty."

"It was never that!"

He held up his hand. "My daughter will not grow up grub­bing for a living through the ruins of other people's homes and trash heaps. This place will be a town—a twenty-first-century town. It will be a decent place to raise a child—a place with some hope of survival and success. Whatever other grand things we do or fail to do, we will do that much!"

"It's an Acorn," I said, stroking his face, his beard. "It will grow."

He almost smiled. Then he was solemn again. “If I accept this, I'm in it for good! If you change your mind after a few hard times ..."

"Do I tend to do that, babe? Am I like that?"

He stared hard at me, silent, weighing.

"I helped you build this house," I said, referring to the literal meaning of his name, help me build a house. "I helped you build this house. Now there's so much more work to do."

Chapter 11

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Choose your leaders

with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward

is to be controlled

by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool

is to be led

by the opportunists

who control the fool.

To be led by a thief

is to offer up

your most precious treasures

to be stolen.

To be led by a liar

is to ask

to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant

is to sell yourself

and those you love

into slavery.

I'M NOT CERTAIN how to write about the next episode in my parents' lives and in my life. I'm glad to have no memory of it. I was only two months old when it happened.

It's all very strange, very bad, very confused. If only my mother had agreed to go with my father to live peacefully, normally in Halstead, it wouldn't have happened. Or at least, it wouldn't have happened to us.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

monday, september 26, 2033

They didn't shoot their way in. It seems that they don't in­tend to kill us. Yet. Since Dovetree, they have changed. Their leader has come to power. They have acquired... if not legitimacy, at least a shadow of sophistication. Roaring in, shooting everyone, and burning everything is perhaps too crude for them now. Or maybe it's just not as much fun.

I write, not knowing how long I will be able to write. I write because they have not yet robbed us of everything. Our freedom is gone, our two trucks, our land, our business, our homes are gone, stolen from us. But somehow, I still have paper, pens, and pencils. None of our captors values these things, so no one has yet taken them from me. I must keep them hidden or they will be taken. All possessions will be taken. They will strip us. They've made that all too clear. They will break us down, reshape us, teach us what it means to love their country and fear their God.

Our several secret caches of food, weapons, money, cloth­ing, and records have not been found. At least, I don't be­lieve they have been. No one has heard that they have.

We're shut up in two of the rooms of the school. Our books are still here on their shelves. The various projects of our students are still here. Our several phones and our five new teaching computers are gone. They have hard-currency value. Also, they were a means of communicating with the outside. We are not permitted to do that. That would inhibit our reeducation.

I must make a record of all this. I don't want to, but I must. And I must hide that record so that, someday, Earth-seed will know what Earthseed has survived.

We will do that We will survive. I don't yet know how. How is always a problem. But, in fact, we will survive.

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

Here is what happened.

Late Tuesday afternoon last week, I was sketching two of the Faircloth kids and talking with them about the project they wanted to work on for school. They had, in their re­quired study of history, just discovered World War II, and they wanted to build models of the battleships, submarines, and airplanes of the time. They wanted to report on the big battles and find out more about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were fascinated by all of the loud, explosive events of the War, but they had no idea what a huge subject they had chosen or, beyond the barest outline, why the War had been fought. I had decided to sketch them while the three of us talked about it and narrowed things down.

The Faircloth family had always been poor, had lived in a squatter settlement before they came to us. Alan Faircloth had small, badly creased, paper photos of the boys as babies, but nothing recent. He had pleased me more than I would have been willing to admit by asking me to draw the two of them. I had become vain about my drawing. It was finally somewhere near good. Even Harry, Zahra, and Allie had said so, and they were the ones who had the most fun with my earlier efforts.

The boys and I were outside behind the school, enjoying a warm, easy day. Larkin lay next to me, asleep in her crib in spite of the noise the boys made. She was already used to noise. The boys were 11 and 12, small for their age, always loud, and unlikely to be still for more than two or three min­utes at a time. First they peeked at Larkin, then they lost in­terest and shouted first at each other, then at me about weapons and battles, dive-bombers and aircraft carriers, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, London, Stalingrad, Tokyo, on and on. Interesting that a thing as terrible and as massive as a worldwide war could seem so wonderful and exciting to a pair of preadolescent boys whose grandparents weren't born in time for it—although they did have paternal grandparents who were born and raised in London.

I sketched the boys quickly while listening to their enthu­siasm and making suggestions. I was just finishing the sketches when the maggots arrived.

A maggot, nicknamed in its ugly shape, is something less than a tank, and something more than a truck. It's a big, armed and armored, all-terrain, all-wheel-drive vehicle. Private cops and military people use them, and people with plenty of money drive them as private cars. Maggots can go almost anywhere, over, around, or through almost anything. The people of Halstead have one. They've used it now and then to collect Bankole. Several small local towns have one or two for their cops or for search and rescue in the hills. But the things are serious fuel eaters—expensive to run.

That Friday, seven maggots came crawling out of the hills and through our thorn fence toward us. There had been no warning from the watchers. Nothing at all. That was my first thought when I saw them coming: Where were Lucio Figueroa and Noriko Kardos? Why hadn't they warned us? Were they all right?

Seven maggots! That was three or four times as much firepower as we could muster if we brought out every one of our guns. Only our truck guns would have even a ghost of a chance of stopping a maggot, anyway.

Seven of the damned things!

"Go home!" I said to the two boys. "Tell your father and sisters to get the hell out No drill. The real thing! Get out, fast and quiet! Run!"

Both boys ran.

I took my phone from my pocket and tapped out the emer­gency bug-out signal. We've had bug-out exercises. Bankole called them that, and the name spread. I thought of them as "melt into the mountains" exercises. Now we faced the real thing. It had to be real. No one came visiting in seven armed and armored maggots.

I grabbed my Larkin as fast as I could and ran for the hills. I tried to keep the school building between the two of us and the nearest maggots. They were crawling toward us in what could have been a military formation. They could run us down, shoot us, do whatever they chose to do. The only thing we might be able to do that they couldn't do was vanish into the mountains. But could we even do that? If we kept still, the maggots' sensory equipment would spot us. And if we ran, the rocks and trees and thorn bushes wouldn't give us much protection from the maggots' guns. But what could we do but run? As long as no one came out of the maggots, we had nothing to shoot at.

Where was Bankole? I didn't know. Well, we had ren­dezvous points. We would find each other. The idea was not to waste time running around looking for relatives. Except for babies and very young children, everyone knew from the drills that a command to get out meant exactly that. "Get out now!"

And we were to go in all directions. We were not to fol­low one another or group together and provide our enemies with big, easy targets. As much as possible, we were to put trees and geographical features between ourselves and the enemy.

But what were we to do when the enemy was every­where?

Then, in the same instant, all seven of the maggots began firing. It took me a moment to realize that they were not fir­ing bullets, that, perhaps, we were not about to be killed. They were firing gas canisters. I kept running, hoping that others were doing the same. No matter what the gas was, it was not intended to do us good.

I headed through the young oak grove that was our ceme­tery toward the fold of a hill that I hoped would both shelter me and give me an easier path up over the first hill.

Then just ahead of me, a canister landed. Before it hit the ground, it began to spew out gas.

And my legs wouldn't hold me. I was running. Then I felt myself begin to fall. It was all I could do to manage not to fall on my baby, instead to have her fall on me. I heard her begin to cry—a thin, un-Larkinlike whimpering. I don't be­lieve I cried out. I know I never lost consciousness. It was a terrible gas. I still don't know the name of it. It took away most of my ability to move, but left me wide awake, able to hear and see, able to know that my people were being col­lected like driftwood, being carried or dragged away by uni­formed men.

Someone came to me, bent, and took Larkin from me. I couldn't move my head to see what he did with her. I couldn't struggle or protest or plead. I couldn't even scream.

Someone came for me and took me by the feet and dragged me over the ground, down the hill to the school. I was wearing denims and a light cotton shirt, and I could feel my back scraping over rocks and weeds. I could feel pres­sure—bumping and thudding. It didn't hurt as it was hap­pening, but I knew it would hurt. All the adults and older kids had been carried or dragged to the school. I could see several of them sprawled on the floor wherever their captors had dropped them. What I could not see were the babies and young children.

I could not see my Larkin.

At one point, I heard shooting outside. It came from the south side of the school, not far away. It sounded like the guns of our older truck. Perhaps one of us had reached the truck and tried to use it as Bankole, Harry, and I had back when Dan and Nina Noyer came home. That was hopeless. Our old housetruck wouldn't have been a match for even one maggot. Then I heard a huge explosion. After that there was silence.

What had happened? Were the children involved? Not knowing was an agonizing torment. Utter helplessness was even worse. I could breathe. I could twitch a hand or a foot. I could blink. Nothing more.

After a while, I could whimper a little.

Sometime later, a man wearing the uniform of the day— black pants and a belted, black tunic with a white cross on its front, came to do something to us, to each of us. I couldn't see what he was doing until he got to me, unbuttoned three buttons of my shirt, raised my head, and fastened the slave collar around my neck.

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

It was that simple. They took Acorn. Its name is Camp Christian now. We captives were not able to do more than twitch, blink, or moan for over an hour. That was plenty of time to collar almost all of us.

No one collared Gray Mora. He had been a slave earlier in his life. He had never worn a collar, but he had spent his childhood and young manhood as the property of people who treated him not quite as well as they treated their cattle. They had taken his wife from him and sold her to a wealthy man who had seen her and wanted her. She was, according to Gray, a short, slight, very pretty woman, and she brought a good price. Her new owner made casual sexual use of her and then somehow, by accident or not, killed her. When Gray heard about that, he took his daughter Doe and broke free. He never told us exactly how he got free. I've always assumed he killed one or more of his masters, stole their possessions, and took off. That's what I would have done.

But this time, there was no escape. And yet Gray would not be a slave again.

I found out later that he managed to get to the housetruck, lock himself in, and fire on some of the maggots. That scratched them more than a little. Then, as the maggots began to fire on him and blow the housetruck's armor to hell, he charged one of them. He rammed it. There was an explosion. There shouldn't have been. The housetruck was as safe as it could be. Making it explode had to take a con­scious effort—unless it was the maggot that exploded. I don't know for sure. But knowing Gray, I suspect he did something to cause the explosion. I believe he chose to die.

He is dead.

I can't believe that any of this is true. I mean . . . there ought to be a different way to write about these things—a way that at least begins to express the insanity and the terri­ble, terrible pain of it all. Acorn has always been full of ugly stories. There wasn't an adult among us who didn't have one. But we'd come together, lived together, helped one an­other, survived, thrived, we'd done that! We'd done all that! We'd made a good home for ourselves, were making an honest living. Now people with crosses have come and put slave collars on us.

And where is my baby? Where is Larkin?

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

They separated the women and older girls from the men and older boys while we were paralyzed. They left the men in the larger room of the school and dragged us women into one of the smaller ones. I didn't think about it at the time, but that was an odd thing to do because there were more women than men in the community. We were dumped onto the wooden floor, half atop one another, and left there. The windows were open, and I remember thinking it strange that no one bothered to board them up or even close them.

The only good thing was that as I was half lifted and half dragged, I saw Bankole. I don't believe he saw me. He was lying on his back, staring straight up, one scraped, bloody hand on his chest. I saw him blink. I did see that, so I knew he was alive. If only he had gotten away. He would have been more likely than anyone else to find some way to help the rest of us. Besides, what will our captors do to a man his age? Would they care that he was old? No. From the way he looked, it was clear that he had been dragged across the ground just as I was. They didn't care.

Would they care that my Larkin was only a baby?

And where was she? Where was she?

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

I was terrified every time someone came near me. All our captors were young men, and I'd seen two or three angry, bloody ones. I didn't know at the time that this was Gray's work. I didn't know anything. All I could think about was Larkin, Bankole, my people, and the damned slave collar around my neck.

As the sun went down, my body began to hurt—my back and my hands and arms burned where they had scraped along the ground as I was dragged. My head felt lumpy and sore. It also ached in a hard, throbbing way that might have had something to do with the gas.

It was dark when I began trying to move. For a long time, all I could do was flop around a little. Someone in the room groaned. Someone else began to cry. Someone gasped, choked, and began to cough. Someone said over and over again, "Ah shit!" and I recognized Allie Gilchrist's voice.

"Allie?" I said. I slurred the word, sounded drunk to my own ears, but she heard me.

"Olamina?"

"Yeah."

"Look, did you see Justin before they dragged you in here?"

"No. Sorry. Did you see Larkin?"

"No. Sorry."

"They took my baby too," Adela Ortiz said in a hoarse whisper. "They took him and I don't know where he is." She began to cry.

I wanted to cry myself. I wanted to just to lie there and cry because I hurt so much in so many ways. I felt too weak and uncoordinated to do anything but cry. Instead, I sat up, bumped someone, apologized, sat stupidly for a while, then found the sense to say, "Who else is here? One by one, say your names."

"Noriko," a voice said just to my left. "They took Debo­rah and Melissa," she continued. "I had Melissa and Michael had Deborah. We were running. I thought we were going to make it. Then that damned gas. We fell down, and someone came and pulled both girls away from us. I couldn't see anything but hands and arms taking them."

"And my babies," Emery Mora said. "My babies...." She was crying, almost incoherent, "My little boys. My sons. They took my sons again. Again!" She had had two young sons when she was a slave years ago, and they had been sold away from her. She had been a debt slave—a legally indentured person bound for her family's unpaid debts. The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt. It was against the law for the company to break up fam­ilies by selling minor children away from their parents or husbands from their wives. It was against both local and fed­eral law, so it shouldn't have happened. Just as what's hap­pened to us now shouldn't have happened.

I thought about Emery's older daughter and stepdaughter. "What about Tori and Doe?" I said. "Are they here? Tori? Doe?"

At first, there was no answer, and I thought of Nina and Paula Noyer. I didn't want to think of them, but Doe and Tori Mora were 14 and 15—far from babyhood. If they weren't here, where were they?

Then a very small voice said, "I'm here. Get off me."

"I'm trying to get off you," a stronger voice said. "There's no room in here. I can hardly move."

Tori and Doe, alive, and as well as the rest of us were. I shut my eyes and took a long, deep, grateful breath. "Nina Noyer?" I asked.

She began to answer, then coughed several times. "I'm here," she said at last, "but my little sisters ... I don't know what happened to them."

"Mercy?" I called. "Kassi?"

No answer.

"May?"

No answer. She couldn't talk, but she would have made a noise to let us know she was there.

"She had Kassia and Mercy with her," Allie said. "She's strong and fast. Maybe she got them away. She loved them like she gave birth to them."

I sighed. "Aubrey Dovetree?" I asked.

"I'm here," she said. "But I can't find Zoë or the kids ……….Zoë had all three of them with her."

And Zoë had a heart condition, I thought. She might be dead, even if no one meant to kill her. Not knowing what else to do, I went on with my role call. "Marta Figueroa?"

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, I'm here, all alone. My brother.... My children--------- Gone."

"Diamond Scott? Cristina Cho?"

"I'm here," said two voices at once, one in English and the other in Spanish. Cristina's English was good now, but under stress, she still reverted to Spanish.

"Beatrice Scolari? Catherine Scolari?"

"We're here," Catherine Scolari's voice said. She sounded as though she had been crying. "Vincent is dead." she said. "He fell against a rock, hit his head. I heard them say he was dead." Vincent was her husband and Beatrice's brother. He had only one arm because of an accident that happened before he joined us. He was, perhaps, more likely than most of us to be off balance when the gas collapsed him. But still...

"He might not be dead," I said.

"He is. We saw him " There were more sounds of crying. I didn't know what to say to them. All I could think was that maybe Larkin was dead too. And what about Bankole? I didn't want to think about death. I didn't really want to think at all.

"Channa Ryan?" I said.

"I'm here. Oh god, I wish I wasn't"

"Beth Faircloth? Jessica Faircloth?"

There was no sound at first, then in nearly inaudible whis­pers, "We're here. Both of us are here."

"Natividad?" I said. "Zahra?"

"I'm here," Natividad said in Spanish. Then, "If they've hurt my babies, I'll cut their throats. I'll kill all of them. I don't care what they do to me." She began to cry. She's strong, but her kids mean more than life to her. She had a husband and three kids. Now, they're all gone from her.

"All of our babies are gone," I said. "We have to find out where they're being kept and who's guarding them and... and what's going to happen to them." I shifted, trying to get more comfortable, but that was impossible. "My Larkin should be nursing now. Right now. We have to find out what we can."

"They've put slave collars on us," Marta Figueroa said in almost a moan. "They took our kids and our men, and they put slave collars on us! What the hell more do we need to know than that?"

"We have to know as much as we can," I answered. "They're not killing us. They could have wiped us out. They separated us from the men and from the young kids, but we're alive. We have to find a way to get our kids back. Whatever we can do to get our kids back, we have to do it!" I felt myself falling toward hysteria, toward weeping and screaming. I tensed my body. Milk was leaking from my breasts onto my shirt, soaking the front of it, and I ached so.

For a long time no one said anything. Then Teresa Lin, who had not spoken before, whispered, "That window is open. I can see the stars."

"Did they put a collar on you?" I heard myself ask. I sounded almost normal to my own ears. My voice was soft and low.

"What, this wide flat thing? They put one on me. I don't care. That window is open! I'm getting out of here!" And she began scrambling over people toward the window. Someone cried out in pain. Several voices cursed her.

"Everybody down," I said. "Down on your face!"

I could not see who obeyed me. I hoped all the sharers did. I wasn't sure what the collar would do to Teresa when she tried to get out the window. Maybe it was a fake. Maybe it wouldn't do anything. Maybe it would cut off her breath. Maybe it would collapse her, and cause her terrible pain.

She dived out of the window. She's a slim woman, quick and lithe like a boy. I looked up in time to see her arc out the window as though she expected to land on something soft or on water.

Then she began to scream and scream and scream. Allie Gilchrist got up, stepped to the window, and looked out at her. Then Allie tried to climb out to help her. The moment Allie touched the window, she screamed, then fell back into our prison room. Allie curled on her side against me, and grunted several times—hard, agonized grunts. I turned my face away, her pain twisting in my own middle. It helped that I hadn't been able to see Teresa once she fell below the level of the window, but I had already gotten a taste of her pain too.

Outside, Teresa went on screaming and screaming.

"No one's around," Allie said, still gasping. "She's just lying there on the ground, screaming and twisting. No one's even come out to see."

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

She lay there all night We couldn't help her. Her voice de­teriorated from full-throated screaming, the way any of us might scream in fear and pain, to hoarse terrible grunting. She didn't pass out—or rather, she did, but she kept corning to again and making her terrible noises.

Going near the door meant pain. Going to the window meant pain. Even if you didn't try to get out, just being there hurt, hurt bad. Diamond Scott volunteered to crawl around the floor, letting her own collar tell her what was forbidden. People complained when she crawled over them, but I asked them to put up with it and Di apologized and the complaints stopped. We were still human, still civilized. I wondered how long that would last.

"Someone's here!" Di said. She almost screamed the words. "Someone's dead here!"

Oh, no. Oh, no.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"I don't know. She's cool. Not cold yet, but... I'm sure she's dead!"

I followed Di's voice, and spotted her silhouette, a darker shape in the darkness. She was moving more than the oth­ers, scrambling away from the body that she was sure must be dead.

Who was it?

Then, as I crawled toward the body, trying to be careful, trying not to hurt anyone, I had a feeling, a memory. I was afraid I knew who it was.

The body was sitting upright in a corner, against the wall. It was small—child-sized. It was a black woman's body—a black woman's hair, nose, mouth, but so small__

"Zahra?"

She had not answered when I called her before. She was a bold, outspoken little woman, and she would not have kept quiet in all this. She might have been the one to go out the window before poor Teresa... if she could have.

She was dead. Her body wasn't yet stiff, but it would be soon. It was cooling. It wasn't breathing. I took the small hands between mine and felt the ring that Harry had worked so hard to buy for her. He's old-fashioned, Harry is, even though he's my age. He wanted his wife to wear his ring so that no one would make a mistake. Back when Zahra was the most beautiful woman in our Robledo neighborhood, she was beyond his reach, married to another man. But when that man was dead and Harry saw his chance, he moved right in. They were so different—black and white, tiny and tall, street-raised and middle class. She was three or four years older than he was. None of it mattered. They had managed, somehow, to have a good marriage.

And now she was dead.

And where were her children? I had another sudden, hor­rible thought. I felt for wounds on her, found scratches and dried blood, but no penetrating wound, no terrible soft place on her head. She had been brought in with the rest of us. Chances were, she was alive when she was brought in. Wouldn't our captors have noticed if she were dead? We were all dumped into this room and locked in by way of our collars during the same few minutes.

After that, no one had come in.

Perhaps, then, it was the gas that had been used on us. Could she have died of that? She was the smallest adult in the community, smaller, even, than Nina, Doe, and Tori. Was it possible that she got too much of the gas for her small size, and that killed her?

And if so, what did that say about our children?

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

Somehow, time passed. I sat rigid beside the body of my friend, and couldn't think or speak. I cried. I cried in grief and terror and rage. People told me later that I made no sound at all, but within myself, I cried. Within myself, I screamed with Teresa, and I cried and cried and cried.

After a time, I lay down on the floor, still crying, yet still making no noise. I could hear people around me moaning, crying, cursing, talking, but their words made no sense to me. They might as well have been in a foreign language. I couldn't think of anything except that I wanted to die. Everything that I had worked to build was gone, stolen or dead, and I wanted to be dead too. My baby was dead. She must be. If I could have killed myself, just then I would have. I would have been glad to do it I awoke, and mere was sunlight streaming through the window. I had slept How could I have slept?

I awoke with my head on someone's lap. Natividad's lap. She had come to sit against the wall next to Zahra's body. She had lifted my head off the floor and put it on her lap. I sat up, blinking and looking around. Natividad herself was asleep, although my moving woke her. She looked at me, then at Zahra's body, then back at me, as though the world were just coming back into focus for her, and it distressed her more and more every second. Her eyes filled with tears. I hugged her for a long time, then kissed her on the cheek.

The room was filled with sleeping women and girls. I counted 19 of us including myself and... not including Zahra and Teresa. Everyone looked dirty and scratched and abraded, and they lay in every possible position, some sprawled alone on the floor, some in pairs or larger groups, heads pillowed on laps, shoulders, or legs.

My breasts ached and leaked and I felt sick. I needed to use the bathroom. I wanted my child, my husband, my home. Near me, Zahra was cold and stiff, her eyes closed, her face beautiful and peaceful, except for its gray color.

I got up, stepped over people as they began to wake up. I went to an empty corner that I knew needed repair. A small earthquake a few months ago had caused a slight separation between the wall and floor in that corner. It wasn't obvious, but ants came in there, and water spilled near there ran out. Gray had promised to fix it, but hadn't gotten around to it.

I moved people away from the area—told them what I was doing and why. They nodded and gave no trouble. I wasn't the only one with a full bladder. I squatted there and urinated. When I finished, others followed my example.

"Is Teresa still there?" I asked Diamond Scott, who was nearest to the window.

Di nodded. "She's unconscious—or maybe dead." Her own voice sounded dead.

"I'm so hungry," Doe Mora said.

"Forget hungry," Tori said. "If I could just have some water."

"Hush," I said to them. "Don't talk about it. It just makes you feel worse. Has anyone seen our captors this morning?"

"They're building a fence," Diamond Scott said. "You can stand back from the window and see them. In spite of the collars they've put on us, they're building a fence."

I looked and saw maggots being used to string wire behind several of our homes, up the slope. As I watched, they smashed through our cemetery, breaking down some of the young trees that we planted to honor our dead. The maggots were well named. They were like huge insect larvae, weaving some vast, suffocating cocoon.

Our captors were keeping our land, then. Until that mo­ment, this had not occurred to me. They were not just out to steal or burn, enslave or kill. That was what thugs had always done before. That was what they did in my old neigh­borhood in Robledo, in Bankole's San Diego neighborhood, and elsewhere. A lot of elsewheres. But these were staying, building a fence. Why?

"Listen," I said.

Most of the room paid no attention to me. People had fo­cused on their own misery or on the maggots.

"Listen!" I said, putting as much urgency as I could into my voice. "There are things we need to talk about."

Most of them turned to look at me. Nina Noyer and Emery Mora still stared out the window.

"Listen," I said once more, wanting to shout, but not dar­ing to. "Sooner or later, our captors will come in here. When they do, we need to be ready for them—as ready as we can be." I stopped, drew a deep breath, and saw that now they were all looking at me, all paying attention.

"We need to pretend to go along with them as much as we can," I continued. "We need to obey them and watch them, learn what they are and what they want, and where they're weak!"

People looked at me either as though they thought I'd lost my mind or as though it was good and hopeful news that our captors might, perhaps, have weaknesses.

"Anything they tell us may be lies," I said. "Probably will be. So any of us who get the chance should spy and eaves­drop and share information with the rest. We can escape from them or kill them if we can learn about them and pool our knowledge. Learn about the collars, too. Any little thing might help. And most important, most essential, learn about the kids."

"They'll rape us," Adela said, all but whimpering. "You know they will." She knew they would—she who had al­ready suffered so much rape. She and Nina and Allie and Emery. The rest of us had been lucky—so far. Now our luck has run out. Somehow, we'll have to cope with that.

"I don't know," I said. "They could already have raped us, and they haven't. But... I suspect you're right. When men have absolute power over women who are strangers, the men rape. And we're collared." I glanced toward the win­dow that Teresa's panic had driven her through. "If someone decides to rape one of us, we won't be able to stop him." I paused again. "I think... if you can't talk a guy out of it or beg and cry and get his pity or bluff him into believing you have a disease, then you'll have to put up with it." I paused, feeling inadequate and stupid. I shouldn't be giving these women this kind of advice. I, who had never been raped, had no right to tell them anything. I told them anyway. "Do put up with it!” I said. "Don't throw your lives away. Don't end up like Teresa. Learn everything you can from these people, and bring what you learn back to the rest of us. Even the stu­pid, ugly things that they say and do might be important. Their lying promises might hide a truth. If we collect what we see and hear, if we stay united, work together, support one another, then the time will come when we can win our freedom or kill them or both!"

There was a long silence. They just stared at me. Then someone—Nina Noyer—began to cry. "I was supposed to be free," she said through her tears. "All this was supposed to be over. My brother died to bring me here."

And all of a sudden, I felt such shame. All I wanted to do was lie down on the floor in a tight knot around my uselessness and my aching breasts and scream and scream. And I couldn't. I couldn't let myself fail my people in one more miserable way.

And these were my people—my people. They had trusted me, and now they were captives. And I could do nothing— nothing but give them galling advice and try to give them hope. "God is Change," I heard myself saying. "Our captors are on top now, but if we do this right, we will beat them. It's that or just... die."

"I haven't been able to take my medicine," Beatrice Sco­lari said into the near silence. "Maybe I will die." She had, in the past year, developed high blood pressure, and Bankole had put her on medication. Nina was still crying, now gath­ered against Allie, who rocked her a little as though she were much younger. Allie herself was crying, but in complete si­lence. Beatrice Scolari stared at me as though I could pro­duce her medicine.

"Your medicine is one of the first things we've got to ask for when they start talking to us," I told Beatrice. "The very first thing we need is help for Teresa—if it isn't too late."

But they must have seen Teresa. They must have heard her screaming earlier. Maybe they just didn't care. They knew she couldn't get away. Maybe they wanted to use her to

make sure we understood our position. "We ask about our kids and about your medicine, Beatrice." I continued. "Then ……..Then maybe they'll let us……take care of Zahra."

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

We waited until afternoon, hungry, thirsty, scared, miser­able, worried about our children, and wondering about our men. No one paid any attention to us. We saw the invaders going in and out of our homes, finishing their fence, eating our food, but we saw them only from a distance. Even Teresa, lying on the ground outside our window, was ignored.

The younger girls cried and quarreled and complained. The rest of us sat silent most of the time. We had all been through one kind of hell or another. We had all survived enough to know that crying, complaining, and quarreling did no good. We might forget that in time, but not yet.

Sometime around two or three o'clock, the door of our prison opened. A huge, bearded man filled the doorway, and we stared up at him. He wore the usual uniform—black tunic with white cross and black pants, and he was at least two meters tall. He stared down at us as though we smelled—which we did—and as though that were our fault.

"You and you," he said, pointing to me and to Allie. "Get out here and pick up this corpse."

By reflex, Allie got a stubborn look on her face, but we both stood up. "She's dead, too," I said, pointing to Zahra.

I never saw his hand move, but he must have done some­thing. I screamed, convulsed, dropped to the floor from a jolt of agony that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. I was on fire. Then I wasn't. Searing agony. Then nothing.

The man waited until I was able to look up at him, until I did look up.

"You don't speak unless you're spoken to," he said. "You do what you're told when you're told to do it, and you keep your mouths shut!"

I didn't say anything. Somehow, I managed to nod. It oc­curred to me that I should do that.

Allie stepped toward me to help me up, her hands already out to help me. Then she doubled up in agony of her own. Echoes of her pain burned through me, and I froze, teeth clenched. I was desperate not to announce my extra vulner­ability, my sharing. If I was held captive long enough, they would find out. I knew that. But not now. Not yet.

The man didn't seem to take any special notice of me. He watched us both and waited in seeming patience until Allie looked up, bewildered and angry.

"You do what you're told and only what you're told," he said. "You don't touch one another. Whatever filth you're used to, it's over. It's time for you to learn to behave like de­cent Christian women—if you've got the brains to learn."

So that was it, then. We were a dirty cult of free lovers, and they had come to straighten us out. Educate us.

I believe Allie and I were chosen because we were the biggest of the women. We were ordered to carry first Zahra, then Teresa, out to a patch of ground where we grew jojoba plants for their oil. There, we were given picks and shovels and ordered to dig graves—long, deep holes—among the jojobas. We had had no food and no water. All we got was a jolt of agony now and then when we slowed down more than our overseer was willing to permit. The ground was bad— rocky and hard. That was why we used it for jojoba plants. The plants are tough. They don't need much. Now, it seemed that we were the ones who didn't need much. I didn't think I could do it—dig the damned hole. It's been a long time since I've felt so bad in every possible way, so horrible, so scared. After a while, all I could think of was water, pain, and where was my baby? I lost track of everything else.

I was digging Zahra's grave, and I couldn't even think of that. I just wanted the digging to be over. She was my best friend, my Change-sister, and she lay uncovered, waiting beside the hole as I dug, and it didn't matter. I couldn't focus on it.

The other women were brought out of the school and made to watch us dig. I knew that because my attention was caught by the sudden movement of silent, approaching peo­ple. I looked up, saw the women shepherded toward us by three black-tunic-and-cross-wearing men. Sometime later, I realized that the men had also been marched out They were kept separate, and it seemed that some of them were digging too.

I froze, staring at them, looking for Bankole ... and for Harry.

The sudden pain tore a grunt from me. I fell to my knees in the hole I was digging.

"Work!" my slave driver said. "It's time you heathens learned to do a little work."

I had not seen whom the men were burying. I saw Travis, shirt off, swinging a pick into the hard ground. I saw Lucio Figueroa digging another hole and Ted Faircloth digging a third. So they had three dead to our two. Who were their dead? Which of our men had these bastards killed?

Where was Bankole?

I hadn't spotted him. I had had such a quick look. I man­aged to look again and again as I shoveled dirt out of the hole. In the cluster of men, I spotted Michael, then Jorge, then Jeff King. Then the pain hit again. I didn't fall this time. I held on to the shovel and leaned back against the side of the hole I was digging.

"Dig!" the son of a bitch above me said. "Just dig!"

What would he do if I passed out? Would he go on trig­gering the collar until I died like Teresa? Was he enjoying himself? He didn't smile as he hurt me. But he did keep hurting me, even though I had shown no signs of rebellion.

Submission was no protection. If any of us were to sur­vive, we must escape these people as quickly as possible.

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

The big, bearded slaver and perhaps three dozen of his kind stood around us as we stood around the graves. We were made to parade past each grave and look down at the dead. That was how Harry learned that Zahra was dead and how Lucio Figueroa, who had only this year begun to take an in­terest in Teresa Lin, came to know of her death. That was how I learned that Vincent Scolari was dead, as his wife and sister believed. And Gray Mora was dead—bloody and bro­ken and dead. And that was how I learned that my Bankole was dead.

There was chaos. Emery Mora and both her daughters began to scream when they saw Gray's mangled body. Na­tividad and Travis ran into each other's arms. Lucio Figueroa dropped to his knees beside Teresa's grave, and his sister Marta tried to comfort him. Both Scolari women tried to go down into the grave to touch Vincent, to kiss him, to say good-bye. We were all lashed electronically for talking, screaming, crying, cursing, and demanding answers.

And I was lashed into unconsciousness for trying to kill my bearded keeper with a pickax. It would have been worm any amount of pain if only I could have succeeded.

Chapter 12

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Beware:

Ignorance

Protects itself.

Ignorance

Promotes suspicion.

Suspicion Engenders fear.

Fear quails,

Irrational and blind,

Or fear looms,

Defiant and closed.

Blind, closed,

Suspicious, afraid,

Ignorance

Protects itself,

And protected.

Ignorance grows.

I MISS ACORN. Of course, I have no memory of being there, but it was where my parents were together and happy during their brief marriage. It was where I was conceived, born, and loved by them both. It could have been, should have been, where I grew up—since it was where my mother had insisted on staying. And even if, in spite of my father's intentions and my mother's dreams, the place had gone on looking more like a nineteenth-century fanning village than a stepping-stone toward the Destiny, I wouldn't have minded. It couldn't have been as grim as where I did grow up.

From the coming of Jarret's Crusaders—that is what they called themselves—my life veers away from Acorn and from my mother. The only surprising thing is that we ever met again.

My mother was right about the gas. It was intended to be used to stop riots, to subdue masses of violent people. Unlike poison gases that kill or maim or gases that caused tears and choking, or nausea, this gas was supposed to be merciful. It was called merciful. It was a paralysis gas. Most of the time, it worked fast and caused no pain and had no nasty after­effects. But occasionally, children and small adults died of it. For that reason, an antidote was developed to be adminis­tered to small people who were overcome. It was given to me, to the rest of the little children of Acorn. For some rea­son it wasn't given to Zahra Balter. She was obviously an adult, in spite of her small size. Maybe the Crusaders thought age was more important than size. There were no physicians among them. There were no health workers of any land. These were God's people come to bring the true faith to the cultist heathens. I suppose if some of the heathens died of it, that wasn't really very important

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

thursday, november 24, 2033

Thanksgiving Day.

Should I be thankful still to be alive? I'm not sure.

Today is like Sunday—better than Sunday. We have been given extra food and extra rest, and once services were over this morning, we were let alone. I am thankful for that. For once, they aren't watching us. They don't want to spend their holiday guarding us or "teaching" us, as they put it. This means that today I can write. On most days, by the time they let us alone, it's too dark to write and we're exhausted. After our work outside, we're watched and made to memo­rize and recite sections of the Bible until we can't think or keep our eyes open. I'm thankful to be writing and I'm thankful not to hear my own voice chanting something like, "Unto woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

We're not permitted to speak to one another in our "teach­ers' " presence, and yet not allowed to be quiet and rest

Now I must find a way to write about the past few weeks, to tell what has happened to us—just to tell it as though it were sane and rational. I'll do that, if for no other reason than to give some order to my scattered thoughts. I do need to write about... about Bankole.

All of our young children are gone. All of them. From Larkin, the youngest, to the Faircloth boys, the oldest, they've vanished.

Now we are told that our children have been saved from our wickedness. They've been given "good Christian homes." We won't see them again unless we leave our "heathenism" behind and prove that we've become people who can be trusted near Christian children. Out of kindness and love, our captors—we are required to address them each as "Teacher"—have provided for our children. They have put our children's feet on the pathway to good, useful American citizenship here on Earth, and to a place in heaven when they die. Now we, the adults and older kids, must be taught to walk that same path. We must be reeducated. We must ac­cept Jesus Christ as our Savior, Jarret's Crusaders as our teachers, Jarret as God's chosen restorer of America's great­ness, and the Church of Christian America as our church. Only then will we be Christian patriots worthy to raise children.

We do not struggle against this. Our captors order us to kneel, to pray, to sing, to testify, and we do. I've made it clear to the others through my own behavior that we should obey. Why should anyone resist and risk torture or death? What would be the good of that? We'll lie to these murder­ers, these kidnappers, these thieves, these slavers. We'll tell them anything they want to hear, do all that they require us to do. Someday they'll get careless or their equipment will malfunction or we'll find or create some weakness, some blind spot. Then we'll kill them.

But even though we obey, the Crusaders must have their amusements. In their loving kindness, they use the collars to torment us. "This is nothing compared to the fires of hell," they tell us. "Learn your lessons or you'll suffer like this for all eternity!" How can they do what they do if they believe what they say?

They eat our food and feed us their leavings, either as bowls of obvious table scraps or boiled up in a watery soup with turnips or potatoes from our gardens. They live in our houses and sleep in our beds while we sleep on the floor of the school, men in one room, women in another, no com­munication between the two permitted.

None of us is decently married, it seems. We were not married by a minister of the Church of Christian America. Therefore, we have been living in sin—"fornicating like dogs!" I heard one Crusader say. That same Crusader dragged Diamond Scott off to his cabin last week and raped her. She says he told her it was all right. He was a man of God, and she should be honored. Afterward, she kept cry­ing and throwing up. She says she'll kill herself if she's pregnant.

Only one of us has done that so far—committed suicide. Only one: Emery Mora. She took revenge for what hap­pened to her husband and for the abduction of her two little boys. She seduced one of the Crusaders—one of those who had moved into her own cabin. She convinced him that she was willing and eager to sleep with him. Then sometime during the night, she cut his throat with a knife she had al­ways kept under her mattress. Then she went to the Crusader sleeping in her daughters' room and cut his throat. After mat, she lay down in her bed beside her first victim and cut her own wrists. The three of them were found dead the next morning. Like Gray, Emery had taken substantial revenge.

For her own sake and the sake of her daughters, I wish she had chosen to live. I knew she was depressed, and I tried to encourage her to endure. At night when we were locked up together, we all talked, exchanged news, and tried to en­courage one another. But the truth is, if Emery had to die, she chose the best possible way to do it She's let us know that we can kill our captors. Our collars would not stop us. If Emery had not been confined by her collar to that one cabin, she might have killed even more of them.

But why had her collar not stopped her from killing? Ac­cording to what Marc told me about his captivity, collars protected holders of control units. Was this a matter of a different kind of collar? Perhaps. We couldn't know that None of the information we had collected and shared in the night had to do with different kinds of collars. What we had learned was that all our collars were linked together some­how in a kind of collar network. All could be controlled by the units that our captors wore as belts, but the belts themselves were powered or coordinated or somehow controlled from a larger master unit that Diamond Scott believed was kept in one of the two maggots that are always here. Things Di's rapist had said while she was with him waiting to be raped again made her certain that this was true.

A master control unit protected by the guns, locks, and armor of a maggot was beyond our reach, for now. We had to learn more about it. It occurred to me, though, that the reason the belt unit of Emery's rapist had not saved its owner's life was simple: he had taken it off. What man wore his belt to bed? Both of the men Emery had killed had taken their belts off. Why not? Emery was a slender little woman. A man of ordinary size wouldn't doubt his ability to control her with or without the collar.

Once she had killed, Emery would have tried to use the belt units to free herself, either to escape, to try to free us, or to take further revenge. She would have tried. I'm sure of that. And she would have failed either because she had the wrong fingerprints or because she lacked some other neces­sary key. It was important to know that, but there was more: she had tried the units, no doubt caused herself pain, but she had failed to set off any alarms. Perhaps there were no alarms. That could be very important someday.

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

We were all lashed for what Emery did. The men were made to watch.

We were marched out of the school and lashed as we were made to kneel and pray, to scream out our sins, to beg for forgiveness, and quote Bible verses on command. I kept thinking they would make a mistake and kill some of us. This was an orgy of abuse and humiliation. It went on and on for hours with our "teachers" taking turns, trading off, screaming their hate at us, and calling it love. I had no voice at all left by the time it was over. I was sore all over. An ac­tual beating couldn't have left me feeling any worse. And if anyone had been paying attention to me in particular, they would have seen that I was a sharer. I lost control. I couldn't have concealed anything.

I remember wishing I could die. I remember wondering if in the end they would force us all to go the way Emery did, each of us taking a few of them with us.

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

New people have been brought to live among us—men and women from squatter camps and from nearby towns. Most of them seem to be just plain poor people. Some were like the Dovetrees. They produced and sold drugs or homemade beer, wine, or whiskey. And our neighbors the Sullivan and the Gama families have been rounded up and brought here. Some of their children used to attend our school, but none were captured with us. I haven't seen any of them since our capture. Why have they been taken captive and brought here now? No one seems to know.

The new women were stuffed in with us or put into the empty third room of the school—the room that was once our clinic. The men were housed in the big room with our men.

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

I need to write about Bankole.

I meant to do that when I began. I need to but I don't want to. It just plain hurts too much.

The Crusaders are making us enlarge our prison and en­large our cabins, which are now their homes. And we work in the fields as before. We're feeding livestock and cleaning their pens. We're turning compost, we're planting herbs, we're harvesting winter fruits, vegetables and herbs, clear­ing brush from the hills. We're expected to feed ourselves and our captors. They eat better than we do, of course. After all, we owe them more than we can ever pay, you see, be­cause they're teaching us to forsake our sinful ways. They keep talking about teaching us the meaning of hard work. They tell us that we're no longer squatters, parasites, and thieves. I've earned myself more than one lashing by saying that my husband and I own this land, that we've always paid our taxes on it, and that we've never stolen from anyone.

They've burned our books and our papers.

They've burned all that they could find of our past It's all ungodly trash, they say. They made us do most of the fetch­ing and carrying, the stacking and piling of so much that we loved. They watched us, their hands on their belts. All the books on paper and on disk. All the collections that our younger kids had assembled of minerals, seeds, leaves, pic­tures ... All the reports, models, sculptures and paintings that our older kids have done. All the music that Travis and Gray wrote. All the plays that Emery wrote. All the bite of my journal that they could find All the legal papers, includ­ing marriage licenses, tax receipts, and Bankole's deed to the land. All these things, our teachers threw lamp oil on and burned, then raked and stirred and burned again.