Parable of the Talents

In fact they've only burned copies of the legal papers. I'm not sure that matters, but it's true. Since we got our first truck, we've kept the originals in a safe-deposit box in Eureka—Bankole's idea. And we keep other copies in our var­ious caches, along with a few books, other records, and the usual weapons, food, money, and clothing. I had been scan­ning Bankole's writing and my journal notebooks and hid­ing disk copies of them in the caches too. I don't know why I did this. In the case of my journals, it's an indulgence that I've always been a little ashamed of—wasting money copy­ing my own stuff. But I remember I felt much better when I began to do it. Now I only wish I had scanned Emery's plays and Travis's and Gray's music. At least, as far as I know, the caches are still safe.

I've hidden my writing paper, pens, and pencils away in our prison room. Allie and Natividad have helped me loosen a couple of floorboards near the window. With only sharp stones and a couple of old nails as tools, we made a small compartment by scraping a hollow in one of the big lumber girders that supports the floor joists. The joists themselves were too slender and too obvious if anyone noticed a loose board. We hoped no "teacher" would peer down into the darkness to see whether anything might be in the girder. Na­tividad put her wedding ring there too, and Allie put in some drawings that Justin had done. Noriko put in a smooth, oval green stone. She and Michael had found it back when they had gone out salvaging together—back when they could be together.

Interesting that we could scrape into the girder without pain from our collars. Allie thought it meant we might be able to escape by loosening more floorboards and crawling out under the school. But when we got Tori Mora, the slen­derest of us, to try to go down, she began to writhe in pain the moment her feet reached the ground. She convulsed and we had to pull her out. So we know one more thing. It's a negative thing, but we needed to know it.

So much is gone. So much has been taken from us and de­stroyed. If we haven't found a way out, at least we've found a way to keep a few small things. I find myself thinking sometimes that I could bear all this better if I still had Larkin and Bankole, or if I could see Larkin and know that she was alive and all right. If I could only just see her....

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

I don't know whether the actions of these so-called Cru­saders have any semblance of legality. It's hard to believe they might—stealing the land and freedom of people who've followed the law, earned their own livings, and given no trouble. I can't believe that even Jarret has so man­gled the constitution as to make such things legal. At least, not yet. So how could a vigilante group have the nerve to set up a "reeducation" camp and run it with illegally collared people? We've been here for over a month and no one has noticed. Even our friends and customers don't seem to have noticed. The Gamas and the Sullivans aren't rich or power­ful, but they've been in these hills for a couple of genera­tions. Hasn't anyone come asking questions about them?

Maybe they have. And who has answered the questions? Crusaders in their other identities as ordinary, law-abiding patriots? I don't think it's too much to assume they have such identities. What lies have they told? Any group wealthy enough to have seven maggots, to support at least several dozen men, and to have what seems to be an endless num­ber of expensive collars must be able to spread any lies it chooses to spread. Perhaps our friends outside have been told believable lies. Or perhaps they've just been frightened into silence, given to know that they shouldn't ask too many questions lest they get into trouble themselves. Or maybe it's just that none of us has powerful enough friends. We were nobodies, and our anonymity, far from protecting us, had made us vulnerable.

We at Acorn were told that we were attacked and enslaved because we were a heathen cult. But the Gamas and the Sul­livans aren't cultists. I've asked women from both families why they were attacked, but they don't know either.

The Gamas and the Sullivans owned their land just as we did, and unlike the Dovetrees, the Gamas and the Sullivans had never raised marijuana or sold alcoholic beverages. They worked their land and they took jobs in the towns whenever they could find them. They worked hard and behaved themselves. And in the end, what did it matter? All their hard work and ours, all Bankole's attention to dead-and-gone laws, and all my hopes for my Larkin and for Earthseed……..I don't know what's going to happen. We will get out of this! We'll do that somehow! But what then? From what I've been able to hear, some of our "teachers" come from important families in the Churches of Christian America in Eureka, Arcata, and the surrounding smaller towns. This land is mine now. Bankole, with his trust in law and order, made a will, I've read it. The copy we kept here has been destroyed, of course, but the original and other copies still exist. The land is mine, but how can I take it back? How can we ever rebuild what we had?

When we break free of our "teachers," we will kill at least some of them. I see no way to avoid this. If they have to, and if they can, they'll kill us to stop our escape. The way they rape us, the way they lash us, the way they let some of us die—all that tells me they don't value our lives. Do their families know what they're doing? Do the police know? Are some of these "teachers" cops themselves or relatives of cops?

A great many people must know that something is going on. Each shift of our "teachers" stays with us for at least a week, then goes away for a week. Where do they tell people they've been? The area must be full of people who know, at least, that something unusual is happening. That's why once we've freed ourselves, I don't see how we can stay here. Too many people here will hate us either because we've killed their men in our escape or because they won't be able to for­give us for the wrongs that they, their families, or their friends have done us.

Earthseed lives. Enough of us know it and believe it for it to live on in us. Earthseed Lives and will live. But Jarret's Crusaders have strangled Acorn. Acorn is dead.

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

I keep saying that I need to write about Bankole, and I keep not doing it. I was a zombie for days after I saw his body thrown into the bare hole they made Lucio Figueroa dig. They said none of their prayers over him, and, of course they refused to allow us to have services for him.

I saw him alive on the day the Crusaders invaded. I know I did. What happened? He was a healthy man, and no fool. He would not have provoked armed men to kill him. We're not allowed to talk to our men, but I had to find out what happened. I kept trying until I found a moment to talk to Harry Balter. I wanted it to be Harry so I could tell him about Zahra.

We managed to meet in the field as we worked with only our own community members nearby. We were harvest­ing—often in the rain—salad greens, onions, potatoes, car­rots, and squashes, all planted and tended by Acorn, of course. We should also have been harvesting acorns— should already have harvested them—but we weren't per­mitted to do that. Some of us were being made to cut down both the mature live oak and pine trees and the saplings that we had planted. These trees not only commemorated our dead and provided us with much protein, but also they helped hold the hillside near our cabins in place. Somehow, our "teachers" have gotten the idea that we worshipped trees, thus we must have no trees nearby except those that produce the fruit and nuts that our "teachers" like to eat. Funny how that worked out. The orange, lemon, grapefruit, persimmon, pear, walnut, and avocado trees were good. All others were wicked temptations.

This is what Harry told me, bit by bit, during the times we managed to be near one another in our work.

"They used the collars, you know?" he said. "On that first day, they waited until we were all conscious. Then they came in and one of them said, 'We don't want you to make any mistakes. We want you to understand how this is going to work.' Then they started with Jorge Cho, and he screamed and writhed like a worm on a hook. Then they got Alan Fair­cloth, then Michael, then Bankole.

"Bankole was awake, but not really alert. He was just sitting on the floor, holding his head between his hands, star­ing down. They had taken all the furniture out by then, and piled it in a heap out where the trucks were. So none of us fell on anything but the floor. When they used the collar on him, he didn't make a sound. He just toppled over onto his side and twitched, sort of convulsed. He never screamed, never said a word. But he went into worse con­vulsions than any of the others had. Then he was dead. That was all. Michael said the collar had triggered a massive heart attack."

Harry didn't say more for a long time—or maybe he did, and I just didn't hear it. I was crying in spite of myself. I could be quiet, but I couldn't stop the tears. Then I heard him whisper, as we passed one another again, "I'm sorry, Lauren. God, I'm sorry. He was a good guy."

Bankole had delivered both of Harry's children. Bankole had delivered everyone's children, including his own daugh­ter. Without believing in Earthseed, or even in Acorn, he had stayed and worked hard to make it all work. He had done more than anyone to make it work. How stupid and point­less that he should die at the hands of men who didn't know him or care about him or even intend to kill him. They just didn't know how to use the powerful weapons they pos­sessed. They gassed Zahra to death by mistake because they didn't take her size into consideration. They shocked Bankole into a heart attack by mistake because they didn't take his age into consideration. It must have been his age. He'd had no heart trouble before. He was a strong, healthy man who should have lived to see his daughter grow up and maybe later father a son or another daughter.

It was all I could do not to fold up among the rows of plants and just lie there and moan and cry. But I stayed upright, somehow managed not to attract our "teachers'" attentions.

After a time, I told him about Zahra. "I really believe it was her size," I finished. "Maybe these people don't know much about their weapons. Or maybe they just don't care. Maybe both. None of them lifted a finger to help Teresa."

There was another long, long silence. We worked and Harry got himself under control. When he spoke again, his voice was steady.

"Olamina, we've got to kill these bastards!"

He almost never called me Olamina. We'd known each other since we were both in diapers. He called me Lauren except during the more important Gathering Day ceremonies. He had called me Olamina for the first time when I Welcomed his first child into the Acorn community, and into Earthseed. It was as though for him the name were a title.

"First we've got to get rid of these collars," I said. "Then we have to find out what happened to the kids. If... if they're alive, we have to find out where they are."

"Do you think they are alive?"

"I don't know." I drew a deep breath. "I'd give almost anything to know where my Larkin is and whether she's all right." Another pause. "These people lie about almost every­thing. But there must be records somewhere. There must be something. We've got to try to find out. Gather information. Seek weakness. Watch, wait, and do what you have to to stay alive!"

A "teacher" was coming toward us. Either he had spotted us whispering as we worked or he was just checking. I let Harry move past me. Our few moments of talk were over.

Chapter 13

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

When vision fails

Direction is lost.

When direction is lost

Purpose may be forgotten.

When purpose is forgotten

Emotion rules alone.

When emotion rules alone,

Destruction ... destruction.

FROM ACORN, I WAS TAKEN to a reeducation camp that was housed in an old maximum-security prison in Del Norte County, just north of Humboldt County. Pelican Bay State Prison, the thing had been called. It became Pelican Bay Christian Reeducation Camp. I have no memory of it, I'm glad to say, but people who spent time there as adults and older kids have told me that even though it was no longer called a prison, it reeked of suffering. Because of its prison structure, it lent itself more easily than did Acorn to isolating people. not only from society but from one another. It also provided enough room for a nursery that was completely separate from the heathen inmates who might contaminate the chil­dren. I was cared for at the Pelican Bay nursery for several months. I know this because I was fingerprinted, footprinted, and geneprinted there, and my records were stored at the Christian American Church of Crescent City. They were sup­posed to be accessible only to camp authorities, who were to prevent me from being adopted by my heathen biological parents, and to whoever did adopt me. Also, there I was given my name: Asha Vere. Asha Vere was the name of a char­acter in a popular Dreamask program.

Dreamasks—also known as head cages, dream books, or simply, Masks—were new then, and were beginning to edge out some of the virtual-reality stuff. Even the early ones were cheap—big ski-mask-like devices with goggles over the eyes. Wearing them made people look not-quite-human. But the masks made computer-stimulated and guided dreams available to the public, and people loved them. Dreamasks were related to old-fashioned lie detectors, to slave collars, and to a frighteningly efficient form of audiovisual subliminal suggestion. In spite of the way they looked, Dreamasks were

lightweight, clothlike, and comfortable. Each one offered wearers a whole series of adventures in which they could identify with any of several characters. They could live their character's fictional life complete with realistic sensation. They could submerge themselves in other, simpler, happier lives. The poor could enjoy the illusion of wealth, the ugly could be beautiful, the sick could be healthy, the timid could be bold

Jarret's people worried that this new entertainment would be like a drug to the "morally weak." To avoid their censure, Dreamasks International made a number of religious programs—programs that particularly featured Christian Ameri­can characters. Asha Vere was one of those characters.

Asha Vere was a tall, beautiful, Amazon-like Black Christian American woman who ran around rescuing people from hea­then cults, anti-Christian plots, and squatter-camp pimps. I suppose someone thought that naming me after such an up­right character might stifle any hereditary inclination in me toward heathenism. So I was stuck with the name. And so, by the way, were a lot of other women. Strong female characters were out of fashion in the fiction of the time. President Jarret and his followers in Christian America believed that one of the things that had gone wrong with the country was the in­trusion of women into "men's business." I've seen recordings of him saying this and large audiences of both men and women cheering and applauding wildly. In fact, I've discov­ered that Asha Vere was originally intended to be a man, Aaron Vere, but a Dreamask executive convinced his col­leagues that it was time for a hit series starring a tough-tender, Christian American female. He was right. There was such a hunger for interesting female characters that, as silly as the Asha Vere stories were, people liked them. And sur­prising numbers of people named their girl children "Asha" or "Vere" or "Asha Vere."

My name, eventually, was Asha Vere Alexander, daughter of Madison Alexander and Kayce Guest Alexander. These were middle-class Black members of the Church of Christian Amer­ica in Seattle. They adopted me during the Al-Can war when they moved from Seattle—which had been hit by several misiles—down to Crescent City, where Kayce's mother Layla Guest lived. Ironically, Layla Guest was a refugee from Los Angeles. But she was a much richer refugee than my mother had been. Crescent City, a big, booming town among the red­woods, was so near Pelican Bay that Layla volunteered at the Pelican Bay nursery. It was Layla who brought Kayce and me together. Kayce didn't really want me. I was a big, dark-skinned, solemn baby, and she didn't like my looks. "She was a grim, stone-faced little thing," I heard her say later to her friends. "And she was as plain as a stone. I was afraid for her—afraid that if I didn't take her, no one would."

Both Kayce and Layla believed it was the duty of good Christian Americans to give homes to the many orphaned children from squatter settlements and heathen cults. If one couldn't be an Asha Vere, rescuing all sorts of people, one could at least rescue one or two unfortunate children and raise them properly.

Five months after Layla introduced her daughter to me, the Alexanders adopted me. I didn't exactly become their daughter, but they meant to do their duty—to raise me prop­erly and save me from whatever depraved existence I might have had with my biological parents.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, december 4, 2033

They have begun to let us alone more on Sundays after ser­vices. I suppose they're tired of using up their own Sundays to lash us into memorizing chapters of the Bible. After five or six hours of services and a meal of boiled vegetables, we are told to rest in our quarters and thank God for his good­ness to us.

We aren't permitted to do anything. To do anything other than Bible study would be, in their view, "work," and a vio­lation of the Fourth Commandment. We're to sit still, not speak, not repair our clothing or our shoes—we're all in rags since all but two sets per person of our clothing have been confiscated. We're allowed to read the Bible, pray, and sleep. If we're caught doing anything more than that, we're lashed.

Of course, the moment we're left alone, we do as we like. We hold whispered conversations, we clean and repair our things as best we can, we share information. And I write. Only on Sundays can we do these things in daylight.

We're permitted no electric light and no oil lamps, so we have only the window for light. During the week, it's dark when we get up and dark when we're shut in to sleep. Dur­ing the week, we are machines—or domestic animals.

The only conveniences we're permitted are a galvanized bucket which we must all use as a toilet and a 20-liter plas­tic bottle of water fitted with a cheap plastic siphon pump. We each have one plastic bowl from which we both eat and drink. It's odd about the bowls. They're bright shades of blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. They're the only colorful things in our prison room—bright, cheerful lies. They're what you see first when you walk in. Mary Sulli­van calls them our dog dishes. We hate them, but we use them. What choice do we have? Our only "legal" individ­ual possessions are our bowls, our clothing, our blankets— one each—and our Camp Christian-issued paper King James Bibles.

On Sundays when we're fortunate enough to be let alone early, I take out paper and pencil and use my Bible as a desk.

My writing is a way for me to remind myself that I am human, that God is Change, and that I will escape this place. As irrational as the feeling may be, my writing still comforts me.

Other people find other comforts. Mary Sullivan and Allie combine their blankets and make love to one another late at night. It comforts them. Their sleeping place is next to mine, and I hear them at it. They aren't the only ones who do it, but they're the only pair so far that stays together.

"Do we disgust you?" Mary Sullivan whispered to me one morning with characteristic bluntness. We had been awakened later than usual and we could just see each other in the half-light. I could see Mary sitting up beside a still-sleeping Allie.

I looked at her, surprised. She's a tall woman—almost my size—angular and bony, but with an interesting-looking, ex­pressive face. She looked as though she had always had plenty of hard, physical work to do, but not always enough to eat. "Do you love my friend?" I asked her.

She blinked, drew back as though she was about to tell me to mind my own business or to go to hell. But after a mo­ment, she said in her harsh voice, "Of course I do!"

I managed a smile, although I don't know whether she could see it, and I nodded. "Then be good to one another," I said. "And if there's trouble, you and your sisters stand with us, with Earthseed." We're the strongest single group among the prisoners. The Sullivans and the Gamas have tended to group themselves with us, anyway, although nothing had been said. Well, now I've said something, at least to Mary Sullivan.

After a moment, she nodded, unsmiling. She wasn't a woman who smiled often.

I worry that someone will break ranks and report Allie and Mary, but so far, no one has reported anyone for anything, al­though our "teachers" keep inviting us to report one another's sins. There has been trouble now and then. Squatter-camp women have gotten into fights over food or possessions, and the rest of us stopped things before they got too loud—before a "teacher" arrived and demanded to know what was going on and who was responsible.

And there is one young squatter-camp woman, Crystal Blair, who seems to be a natural bully. She hits or shoves peo­ple, takes their food or their small possessions. She amuses herself by telling lies to cause fights. ("Do you know what she said about you? I heard her! She said...") She snatches things from people, sometimes making no secret of what she's doing. She doesn't want the pitiful possessions. Some­times she makes a show of breaking them. She wants the other women to know that she can do what she damned well pleases, and they can't stop her. She has power, and they don't

We've taught her to let Earthseed women and our posses­sions alone. We stood together, and let her know we're will­ing to make her life even more of a misery to her than it already is. We discovered by accident that all we had to do was hold her down and tug on her collar. The collar punishes her, and it punishes me and the other sharers among us if we were stupid enough to watch her suffering, but it leaves no marks. If we use her clothing to tie and gag her, then with just an occasional tug on her collar we can give her a hellish night. After we put her through one such night, she let us alone. She tormented other women. Tormenting people was her particular comfort.

We worry about her. She's crazier than most of us, and she's trouble, but she hates our "teachers" more than we do. She won't go to them for help. In time, though, one of her victims might. We watch her. We try to keep her from going too far.

sunday, december 11, 2033

More new people have been brought here—ragged, scrawny people, all strangers. Every day this week, a mag­got has arrived to unload new people in groups of three, four, or five. We've finished building a long, shedlike ex­tension onto the school with lumber that the "teachers" trucked in. This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house 30 people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head. The new people are each given what we have: a blanket, a plastic bowl, a Bible, and a shelf where they must sleep and store their things. We still sleep on the floor in our rooms, but everything else is the same.

Like us, the new people are using buckets as toilets. Some of us are being made to dig a cesspit. I took some lashes for pointing out that it was being put in a bad place. It could contaminate the underground water that feeds our wells. That could make us all sick, including our "teachers."

But our "teachers" know everything. They don't need ad­vice from a woman, and a heathen woman at that. It was en­tirely their own decision a few days later to relocate the cesspit downhill and far away from the wells.

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

Someone has put up a sign at the logging-road gate: "Camp Christian Reeducation Facility." The Crusaders have sur­rounded the place with a Lazor wire fence, so there's no safe entry or exit except at the gate. Lazor wire is made up of strands of wire so thin that they're hard to see. They slice into the flesh of the wild animals who blunder into them.

I've asked some of the strangers what's happening out­side. Do people know what a reeducation camp really is? Are there other camps? Is there resistance? What's Jarret doing? What's going on?

Most of the new people won't talk to me. They're weary, frightened, beaten people. Those who are willing to talk know only that they were either arrested or snatched from their lives as squatters, drifters, or petty crooks.

Several of the new people are sharers. "Bad seed if there ever was bad seed," our "teachers" say. "The heathen chil­dren of drug addicts." They treat known sharers as objects of suspicion, contempt, and ugly amusement They're so easy to torment. No challenge at all.

We have not given ourselves away, yet, we sharers of Earthseed. We've worked hard at concealing ourselves, and, I admit, we've been lucky. None of us has been pushed beyond our limits at a time when our "teachers" might notice. All of us have had years of hiding in plain sight to help us. Even the Mora girls, only 14 and 15, have managed to hide what they are.

I kept up my search for someone who could tell me at least a little about the outside. In the end, I didn't find my in­formant. He found me. He was a young Black man, bone thin, scarred, careful, but not beaten down. His name was David Turner.

"Day," he said when we found ourselves digging side by side in the stupid, dangerous cesspit that was later aban­doned. I think now that he only spoke to me because we weren't supposed to speak.

I looked a question at him as I threw a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.

"Name of David," he said. "Call me Day."

"Olamina," I said without thinking.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Yes."

"Different kind of name."

I sighed, glanced at him, liked the stubborn, unbeaten look of him, and said, "Lauren."

He gave me a quick grin. "People call you Laurie?"

"Not if they expect me to answer," I said.

I guess we were a little careless. Above, one of our "teachers" lashed me hard, and I convulsed and fell. I've no­ticed before that if a collared man and woman are talking together, it's the woman who tends to be lashed. Women are temptresses, you see. We drag innocent men into trouble. From the time of Adam and Eve women have dragged inno­cent men into trouble. Anyway, I was lashed hard, but only once. After that, I was more careful.

Being lashed hard several times is enough to induce tem­porary coordination problems and memory loss. Day told me later that he'd seen a man lashed until the man didn't know his own name. I believe him. I know that when I saw Bankole's dead body, and I turned on my bearded guard, I had never in my life been more intent on killing another per­son. I was dropped where I stood with a hard shock, then lashed several more times, and Allie tells me that the way I jerked and flopped around the ground, she thought I'd break my bones. I woke up very sore, covered in bruises, sprains, abrasions, and bloody rock cuts, but that wasn't the worst

The worst was the way I felt afterward. I don't mean the physical pain. This place is a university of pain. I mean what I wrote before. I was a zombie for several days after the lashing. At first I couldn't even remember that Bankole was dead. Natividad and Allie had to tell me that all over again more than once. And I couldn't remember what had happened to Acorn, why we were all shut up in one room of our own school, where the men were, where the children were....

I haven't written about this until now. When I understood it, it scared me to death. It scared me into mewling in a cor­ner like a terrorized three-year-old.

After surviving Robledo, I knew that strangers could ap­pear and steal or destroy everything and everyone I loved. People and possessions could be snatched away. But some­how, it had not occurred to me that... that bits of my own mind could be snatched away too. I knew I could be killed. I've never had any illusions about that. I could be disabled. I knew that too. But I had not thought that another person, just by pushing a small button, then smiling and pushing it again and again……………….

He did smile, my bearded teacher. That came back to me later. All of it came back to me. When it did……….Well, that's when I retreated to my corner, whimpering and moaning. The son of a bitch smiled and pressed his button over and over as though he were fucking me, and he grinned while he watched me groaning and thrashing.

My brother said a collar makes you envy the dead. As bad as that sounds, it didn't, couldn't, convey to me, how a col­lar makes you hate. It teaches you whole new magnitudes of utter hatred. I knew almost nothing about hate until this thing was put around my neck. Now, sometimes it's all I can do to stop myself from trying again to kill one of them and then dying the way Emery did.

I've been talking off and on to Day Turner. Whenever we can, when we pass one another or are put to work in the same general area, we've talked. I've encouraged Travis and Harry and the other men to talk to him. I think he'll tell us anything he can that will help us. This is a summary of what he's passed on to us so far:

Day had walked over the Sierras from his last dead-end, low-paying job in Reno, Nevada. He had drifted north and west, hoping to find at least a chance to work his way out of poverty. He had no family, but for protection, he walked with two friends. All had been well until he and his friends reached Eureka. There, they had heard that one of the churches offered overnight shelter and meals and temporary work to willing men. The church was, no surprise, the Church of Christian America.

The work was helping to repair and paint a couple of old houses that the church intended to use as part of their orphaned-children's home. There were no orphans on site— or none that Day saw, or I suppose we would all have bad­gered him to death about our own children. You would think that there were enough real orphans in this filthy world. How dare anything that calls itself a church create new or­phans with its maggots and its collars?

Anyway, Day and his friends liked the idea of doing something for kids and earning a few dollars as well as a bed and a few meals. But they were unlucky. While they slept on their first night in the church's men's dormitory, a small group of the men there tried to rob the place. Day says he had nothing to do with robbery. He says he doesn't give a damn whether we believe him or not, but that he's never stolen, except to eat, and he'd never in his life steal from a church. He was raised by a very religious uncle and aunt, now dead, and thanks to their early training, there were some things he just wouldn't do. But the thieves were said to be Black, and Day and his friends were Black, so Day and his friends were presumed guilty.

I found myself believing him. That may be stupid of me, but I like him, and he doesn't strike me as a liar or a church robber.

He says the church's security people swarmed over the dormitories, and the men awoke and ran in all directions. They were all free poor men. When trouble erupted, and there was no real profit to be had, most of them never thought of doing anything other than getting away—espe­cially when the shooting started.

Day didn't have a gun. One of his friends did, but the three of them got separated. Then they all got caught.

He and 18 or 20 other men were caught, and all the Black ones went to jail. Some were charged with violent crimes— armed robbery and assault. The rest were charged with vagrancy—which is a far more serious crime than it once was. The vagrants were found guilty and indentured to the Church of Christian America. Day's friends were charged with felonies as part of the first group because they were found together and one had a gun. Day was in the vagrant group. He had been indentured to work for 30 days for the church. He had already been shifted around and forced to work for more than two months. They lashed him when he complained that his sentence was up. At first they said he could go free if he could prove he had a job waiting for him outside. Of course since he was a stranger to the area, and since he had no free time to look for a job, it was impossi­ble for him to get outside work. Local vagrants, on the other hand, were, one by one, rescued by relatives and friends, who promised to either give them jobs or feed and house them so that they would no longer be vagrant.

Day had done construction work, painting, grounds-keeping, and janitorial work. He had been given a thor­ough physical examination, then been required to donate blood twice. He had been encouraged to offer to donate a kidney or a cornea, after which he could heal and go free. This terrified him. He refused, but he couldn't help knowing that his organs, and, in fact, his life could be taken from him at any time. Who would know? Who would care? He wondered why they had not killed him already.

Then they moved him to Camp Christian for reeducation. He was told that there was hope for him—that he could, if he chose, learn to be a servant of God and God's true church and a loyal citizen of the greatest country in the world. He said he was already a Christian. They said, in effect, "Prove it." They said he would be accepted among them when they judged him truly penitent and educated in the truths of the Bible.

Then Day quoted them Exodus 21:16—"And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death." Day was lashed for his choice of scripture, of course, and he was told that the peo­ple of Christian America well knew that the devil could quote scripture.

Most people don't know about the camps, Day says. He's learned from talking to other collared men that there are a few small camps like Camp Christian and at least two big ones—much bigger than Camp Christian. One of the big ones is up at an abandoned prison in Del Norte County and the other is down in Fresno County. People don't realize how free poor vagrants are being treated, but he's afraid that even if they did know, they wouldn't care. The likelihood is that people with legal residences would be glad to see a church taking charge of the thieving, drug-taking, drug-selling, disease-spreading, homeless free poor.

"Back when I was at home, my aunt and uncle would have felt like that," Day said. "We walk the highways and scrounge and scavenge and ask for work, and all of that reminds people that what's happened to us can happen to them. They don't like to think about stuff like that, so they get mad at us. They make the cops arrest us or run us out of town. They call us names and wish somebody would do something to make us disappear. And now, somebody is doing just that!"

He's right. There are plenty of people who would think the Church was doing something generous and necessary— teaching deadbeats to work and be good Christians. No one would see a problem until the camps were a lot bigger and the people in them weren't just drifters and squatters. As far as we of Earthseed are concerned, that's already happened, but who are we? Just weird cultists who practice strange rites, so no doubt there are nice, ordinary people who would be glad to see us taught to behave ourselves too.

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tor­mented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the ma­jority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know. There's war, for instance.

In fact, we are at war. The United States is at war with Alaska and Canada. People are calling it the Al-Can war. I know Jarret wanted a war, was working to get one started. But until Day told me, I hadn't realized it had begun. There have already been exchanges of missiles and a few vicious border battles. I told Allie about this later, and she thought about it for a moment.

"Who's winning?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Day didn't tell me. Hell, I didn't ask."

She shrugged. "Yeah. It doesn't much matter to us, does it?"

"I don't know," I said.

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

We are roughly 250 inmates, and, by my most recent count, 20 guards. Just think: if we could all move at the same time, 10 orl2 people per guard, we might be able to... to....

We might be able to die like Teresa. Just one "teacher" could, with one finger, send us all sprawling and writhing on the ground. We might be able to die, every one of us, with­out doing much more than startling our guards.

sunday, december 18, 2033

Now I have been raped.

It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

sunday, december 25, 2033

I need to write about what has been happening to me. I don't want to, but I need to.

To be a sharer is to feel the pleasure and the pain—the ap­parent pleasure and the apparent pain—of other people. There have been times when I've felt the pleasure of one of our "teachers" when he lashed someone. The first time it happened—or rather, the first time I understood what was happening, I threw up.

When someone cries out in pain, I'm careful not to look. If I happen to see someone double up, so far I've been able to lean against a wall or a tool or a friend or a tree. Somehow, though, it never occurred to me that I had to protect myself from the pleasures of our "teachers."

There are a few men here, though, a few "teachers," who lash us until they have orgasms. Our screams and convul­sions and pleas and sobs are what these men need to feel sexually satisfied. I know of three who seem to need to lash someone to get sexual pleasure. Most often, they lash a woman, then rape her. Sometimes the lashing is enough for them. I don't want to know this as clearly as I do know it, but I can't help myself. These men feast on our pain—and they call us parasites.

Rape is done with a pretense of secrecy. After all, these men come to the camp and do a tour of duty. Then at least some of them must go home to their wives and kids. Except for Rev­erend Joel Locke and his three top assistants, who work here full time, the men who come here still live in the real world. They rape, but they pretend they don't They say they're reli­gious, but power has corrupted even the best of them. I don't like to admit it, but some of them are, in a strange way, decent, ordinary men. I mean that they believe in what they are doing. They're not all sadists or psychopaths. Some of them seem truly to feel that collecting minor criminals in places like Camp Christian is right and necessary for the good of the country. They disapprove of the rape and the unnecessary lash­ings, but they do believe that we inmates are, somehow, ene­mies of the country. Their superiors have told them that parasites and heathens like us brought down "America the mighty." America was the strongest country on Earth, but people like us went whoring after foreign religions and re­fused to do our duty as citizens. We women lost all modesty and offered ourselves in the streets, and the men who should have controlled us became our pimps.

That's the short version of how evil we are and why we deserve to be in collars. The other side of this picture is how our hardworking, long-suffering "teachers" are trying to "help" us.

One of the men who has been after Jorge's sister Cristina specialized in this strange, self-pitying attitude. He talked to her about his wheelchair-bound wife, about his disrespectful children, about how poor they all are. She says she begged him to let her alone, and he threw her down and forced her. He said he was a loyal, hardworking Christian American, and he was entitled to some pleasure in his life. But when he had finished, he begged her to forgive him. Insanity.

My rape happened at the end of a very cold, rainy day. I had been given cooking duties. This meant I got to clean myself up, stay warm and dry, and, for once, get enough to eat I was feeling both grateful for this and ashamed of my gratitude. I worked with Natividad and two of the Gama women, Catarina and Joan, and at the end of the day, we were all taken away to the cabins and raped.

Of the four of us, only I was a sharer. Of the four of us, only I endured not only my own pain and humiliation, but the wild, intense pleasure of my rapist. There are no words to explain the twisted, schizoid ugliness of this.

We can't bathe often enough. We get no hot water and lit­tle soap unless we get kitchen duty. If we ask to be allowed to bathe, it's called vanity. Yet we are viewed with disgust and contempt if we stink. We are said to "stink with sin."

So be it.

I have decided to stink like a corpse. I have decided that I would rather get a disease from being filthy than go on at­tracting the attentions of these men. I will be filthy. I will stink. I will pay no attention to my hair or my clothing.

I must do this, or I will kill myself.

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

2035

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Self is.

Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self invents its own reasons for being. To shape God, shape Self.

Chapter 14

^{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Take comfort.

Each move toward the Destiny,

Each achievement of the Destiny,

Must mean new beginnings,

New worlds,

A rebirth of Earthseed.

Alone,

Each of us is mortal.

Yet through Earthseed,

Through the Destiny,

We join.

We are purposeful

Immortal

Life!

SOMEHOW, MY MOTHER ENDURED more than a year of slav­ery at Camp Christian. How she did it, how she survived it, I can only guess from her writings of 2033 and 2035. Her record of 2034 has been lost. She did write during 2034. 1 have no doubt of that. She couldn't have gone for a year without writing. I've found occasional references to notes made then. No doubt by then, she was writing on whatever scraps of paper she could find.

She obviously liked to keep her writing when she could, but I suspect that somehow it helped her just to do it, whether she was able to keep it or not. The act of writing it­self was a kind of therapy.

The most important loss is this: There was at least one major escape attempt. The people of Acorn took no part in it, but of course they suffered for it later along with the rest of Camp Christian. Its leader was the same David Turner that my mother had met and liked in 2033. I know this because I've spoken to people who were there, who survived the ef­fort, and who remember the suffering.

My best informant was a plainspoken woman named Cody Smith, who in December of 2034 had been arrested for vagrancy in Garberville and transported to Camp Christian. She was one of the survivors of the rebellion, although as a result of it, she suffered nerve damage and eventual blind­ness. She was beaten and kicked as well as electronically lashed. Here's her story as she told it to me:

"Day Turner's people were convinced that they could overwhelm the guards by piling onto them three or more to one. They believed they could kill the guards before their collars disabled them. Lauren Olamina said no. She said the guards were never all together, were never all outside at the same time. She said one guard missed was one guard who could kill all of us with just one finger. Day liked her. I don't know why. She was big like a man and not pretty, but he liked her. He just didn't believe she was right. He thought she was scared. But he forgave her because she was a woman. That drove her crazy. The more she tried to talk him out of it, the more determined he was to do it. Then he asked her if she was going to give him away, and she got really quiet and so mad he actually took a step back from her. She could do that. She didn't get loud when she got mad, she got real quiet. She scared people.

"She asked him who the hell did he think she was, and he said he was starting to not be sure. There was some bad feeling after that. She stopped talking to him and began talking to her own people. It was hard to talk, dangerous to talk. It was against the rules. People had to whisper and mutter and talk without moving their lips and not look at the people they were talking to. They got lashed if they were caught. Messages got passed from one person to an­other. Sometimes they got changed or messed up and you couldn't tell what people were trying to tell you. Some­times someone told the guards. New people brought in from the road would do that—tell what they had no busi­ness telling. They got a little extra food for it or a warm shirt or something. But if we caught them at it, they never did it again. We saw to that. There were always a few, though. They did it for a reward or because they were scared or because they had started to believe all those ser­mons and Bible classes and prayer meetings and the other stuff they made us sit through or stand through when we were almost too tired to live. I think a few of the women did it so the guards would treat them better in bed. Some guards liked to hurt you. So for us, talking was dangerous even if no guard saw you do it.

"Anyway, it didn't seem that anyone gave Day Turner away. Lauren Olamina just told her people that when it hap­pened, they should lie face-down on the ground with their hands behind their necks. Some of them didn't want to. They thought Day was right. But she kept at them, pushing them, asking them about lashings they had seen—one guard lashing eight or nine people at the same time with just one finger.... She got herself lashed over and over, try­ing to talk to them—to the men in her group especially. I think Day worked on them at night when men and women were locked up separate. You know the kind of shit men say to one another when they want to stop other men from lis­tening to a woman. From what I heard, Travis Douglas was the one who kept Olamina's men in line. He wasn't all that big, but he had a force to him. People trusted him, listened to him, liked him. And for some reason, Travis trusted Olam­ina. He didn't like what she was telling them to do, but he ... like he believed in her, you know.

"When the break came, most of Olamina's people did what she had told them to do. That saved them from being shot or from being beaten as badly as the ones like me who didn't get on the ground fast enough. Day's people started grabbing guards, and the Acorn people dropped like stones. When the pain hit, they were already getting down on the ground, all but a guy named King—Jeff King—big, good-looking blond guy—and three women. Two were named Scolari—sisters or something—and Channa Ryan. I knew Channa Ryan. She just couldn't stand it anymore. She was pregnant, but not showing much yet. She figured if she died taking one of the guards and a guard's baby with her, it would be a good deal. There was this one particular guy— ugly son of a bitch who washed himself maybe once a week. But he used to make her go to his cabin two or three times a week. He had his fun with her. She wanted to get him. She didn't, though.

"Day's people killed one guard. Just one, and it was a woman who got him—that evil bitch Crystal Blair. She died for it, but she got him. I don't know why she hated the guards so much. They didn't rape her, didn't pay that much attention to her. 1 guess it was just that they took her free­dom. She was a big pain in the ass while she was alive, but people kind of respected her after she was dead. She ripped that guard's throat out with her teeth!

"Day's people hurt a couple of other guards, but it cost them 15 of their own. Fifteen dead just to start with. Some others were lashed to death or almost to death later. Some were kicked and stomped as well as lashed. I was because I was too close to Crystal Blair when she killed that one guard. Day got killed too, but not until later. Later, they hanged him. By then, he was so busted up, I doubt he knew what was going on. The rest of us got hurt, but not so bad. The ones who could walk had to go out the next day to work. If we had headaches or teeth kicked in or bad gashes or bruises from being kicked with boots, it didn't matter. The guards said if they couldn't beat the devil out of us, they'd work him out of us. The ones who couldn't walk dis­appeared. I don't know what happened to them—maybe killed, maybe taken away for medical treatment. We never saw them again. Everyone else worked for sixteen hours straight. They lashed you if you stopped to pee. You had to just do it on yourself and keep working. They did that for three days straight. Work sixteen hours—dig a hole. Fill it up. Chop trees. Make firewood. Dig another hole. Fill it up. Paint the cabins. Chop weeds. Dig a hole. Fill it up. Drag rocks from the hills. Break them to gravel. Dig a hole. Fill it up.

"A couple of people went crazy. One woman just fell down on the ground and started screaming and crying. She wouldn't stop. The other one, a big man with scars all over his face, he started running and screaming—going nowhere, running in circles. They disappeared too. Three days. We didn't get enough to eat. You never got enough to eat unless you got kitchen duty. Every night they preached hellfire and damnation at us and made us memorize Bible verses for at least an hour before they'd let us sleep. Then it was like we hadn't slept at all and they were getting us up to do it all again. It was hell. Plain hell. No devil could have made a better one."

Cody Smith. She was an old woman when I met her—il­literate, poor, and scarred. If her version of the break and its aftermath is true, it's no wonder my mother never wrote much about it after her captivity. I've never found anyone who heard her talk much about it.

But at least she got most of her own people through the rebellion. She lost only three, and two others—the Mora sisters—had given away their status as sharers. I wonder that all the sharers hadn't given themselves away. On the other hand, when everyone is screaming, I suppose sharers' screams don't draw special attention. 1 don't know how the Moras gave themselves away, but Cody Smith and other in­formants have told me they did. It may have been the rea­son that after the rebellion, they were raped more often than the other women were. They never gave any other sharer away.

That was my mother's 2034. I wouldn't have wished it on her. I wouldn't have wished it on anyone.

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

What was done to my mother and to many other interned people of her time was illegal in almost every way. It was never legal to collar non-criminals, never legal to confiscate their property or separate husband from wife or to force ei­ther to work without pay of some kind. The matter of sepa­rating children from parents, however, might have been managed almost legally.

Vagrancy laws were much expanded, and vagrant adults with children could lose custody of the children, unless they were able to establish homes for them within a specified period of time. In some counties, job-placement help was available from churches and local businesses, and the jobs had to provide at least room and board for the family, even if there were no salary. Vagrant women often became un­salaried household help or poorly paid surrogate mothers. In other counties, there was no help at all for vagrants. They had to make a proper home for their children or their chil­dren would be rescued from their inadequate, unfit hands.

Not surprisingly, children were "rescued" this way much more often from vagrants who were considered heathens than from those who were seen as acceptable Christians. And "heathens" who were poor, but not true vagrants, not homeless, might find themselves reclassified as vagrants so that their children could be placed in good Christian Amer­ica homes. The idea, of course, was to make good Christian Americans of them in spite of the wickedness, or at best, the errors of their parents.

It's hard to believe that kind of thing happened here, in the United States in the twenty-first century, but it did. It shouldn't have happened, in spite of all the chaos that had gone before. Things were healing. People like my mother were starting small businesses, living simply, becoming more prosperous. Crime was down in spite of the sad things that happened to the Noyer family and to Uncle Marc. Even my mother said that things were improving. Yet Andrew Steele Jarret was able to scare, divide, and bully people, first into electing him President, then into letting him fix the country for them. He didn't get to do everything he wanted to do. He was capable of much greater fascism. So were his most avid followers.

For people like my mother, Jarret's fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret's first year in office, the worst of his followers ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordi­nary citizens who only wanted order and stability, the fa­natics set up the camps. Meanwhile, Jarret himself was busy with the ridiculous, obscene Al-Can war. If Jarret's thugs weren't locking poor people into collars, Jarret himself was seducing them into the military and feeding them into what turned out to be a useless, stupid exercise in destruction. The already-weakened country all but collapsed. Too many Americans, whether or not they belonged to CA, had family and friends in both Canada and Alaska. People deserted or left the country to avoid the draft—there was one, at last— and the saying was, during the war, that healthy young men were America's biggest export.

There was much slaughter on both sides of the Canadian border and there were air and naval attacks on the coastal cities of Alaska. The war was like an exaggeration of the attempted breakout at Camp Christian. Much blood was shed, but little was accomplished. The war began in anger, bitter­ness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide.

Then the war just petered out. At first, there was much fighting, much destruction, much screaming and flag-waving. Then, gradually, over 2034, a terrible, bitter weari­ness seemed to creep over people. Poor families saw their sons drafted and killed, as they said, "for nothing!" It was harder than ever to buy decent food. Much of our grain over the past few years of climate change and chaos had been im­ported from Canada, after all. In the end, in late 2034, peace talks began. After that, except for a lot of hard feelings and occasional nasty incidents, the war was over. The border be­tween Canada and America stayed where it had been, and Alaska remained an independent country. It was the first state to officially, completely, successfully secede from the union. People were saying that Jarret's home state of Texas would be next.

In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, al­most the Second Coming in some people's minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn't matter. I don't mean that everyone changed their feelings toward him. Many people never did. My adopted parents never did, even though he cost them a beautiful, intelligent, loving daughter. I grew up hearing about that daughter endlessly. Her name was Kamaria, and she was perfect. I know this because my mother told me about her at least once during every day of my childhood. I could never look as good as Kamaria did or straighten my room as well or do as well with my studies or even clean a toilet as well—although I find it difficult to believe the perfect little bitch ever cleaned a toilet—or used one.

I didn't know I was still bitter enough to write a thing like that. I shouldn't be. It's foolish to hate someone you've never met, someone who's never harmed you. 1 believe now that I shifted my resentment safely onto Kamaria, who wasn't there, so that at least until my adolescence, I could love Kayce Alexander. She was, after all, the only mother I knew.

Kamaria Alexander died in a missile attack on Seattle when she was 11 years old, and my adopted parents never stopped blaming—and hating—the Canadians in their grief for her. But they never blamed Jarret—"that good man," "that fine man," "that man of God." Kayce talked that way. So did her friends when she finally moved back to them in Seattle where her neighborhood and her church were scarred, but still standing. Madison Alexander barely spoke at all. He murmured agreement with whatever Kayce said, and he felt me up a lot, but apart from that, he was quiet. My strongest memory of him, when I was four or five, was of his picking me up, putting me in his lap, and feeling me. I didn't know why I didn't like this. I just learned early to stay out of his way as much as I could.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, february 25, 2035

I've been too cold and too miserable, and too sick to do much writing. We've all had flu. We're made to work any­way. Four people died last week during a long, cold rain. One was pregnant. She gave birth alone in the mud. No one was allowed to help her. She and her baby both died. Two were worked until they dropped. When they dropped, the teachers called them lazy parasites and lashed them. Dur­ing the night, they died—two men. They were all strangers, highway paupers—"vagrants" who had been forced to come here. They were sick and half-starved when they ar­rived. Thanks to the cold, wet weather, the lack of heat in our barracks, and the bad diet, we all catch any contagious disease brought to us from the highway or from the towns. Even our "teachers" are suffering with colds and flu. And when they suffer, they take their misery out on us.

All this, and one other thing has made us decide that the time has come to make our own break—or die trying.

We have information—some of us have learned things from our rapists, others just from keeping our eyes and ears open. Also, we have 23 knives—that is, Earthseed, the Sul­livans and the Gamas have 23 knives. That's more than one for each guard. Some we've stolen from the trash heap where our "teachers" teach us wastefulness and slovenli­ness. Other knives are just sharp bits of metal that we've found and wrapped with tape or cloth to protect our hands. They're crude, but they'll cut a human throat. As soon as we've shut our collars off, we'll use the knives. If we're quick and if we move together as we've planned, we should be able to surprise several of our guards before they even think to use their maggots against us.

We know some of us will die in this. Maybe we'll all die. But the way things are going, we'll die anyway. None of us know how long we're to be kept collared. No one who's come here has been released. Even the few people who try to suck up to the "teachers" when they don't have to are still here, still collared. None of us have heard anything about what's happened to our children. And most of us are sick. None of Earthseed has died since Day's rebellion, but we're sick. And Allie... Allie might die. Or she might be permanently brain damaged. She's one of the reasons I've decided we've got to risk a breakout soon.

Allie and her lover Mary Sullivan were caught last Sunday.

No, I take that back. They weren't caught. They were be­trayed. They were betrayed by Beth and Jessica Faircloth. That's the worst They were betrayed by people who were part of us, part of Earthseed. They were betrayed by people whom Allie and the rest of us had helped to rescue from starvation and slavery back when they had nothing. We took them in, and when their family decided to join Earth-seed, when they had done their probationary year, we Wel­comed them.

I watched the betrayal. I couldn't stop it I couldn't do anything. I'm worthless these days, just worthless.

Last Sunday, we had the usual six hours of preaching, this time on the evils of sexual sinfulness. First we heard from Reverend Locke, who runs this place. Then we heard from Reverend Chandler Benton, a minister from Eureka who sometimes drives out to inflict himself on us. Benton preached a vicious and weirdly salacious sermon on the evil, depraved wickedness of bestiality, incest, pedo­philia, homosexuality, lesbianism, pornography, masturba­tion, prostitution, and adultery. It went on and on—stories from current news, Bible stories, long quotations of Old Testament laws and punishments including death by stoning, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the life and death of Jezebel, disease, hellfire, on and on.

But there was nothing at all said about rape. The good Reverend Benton himself has, during earlier visits, made use of both Adela Ortiz and Cristina Cho. He goes to the cabin—once the Balter house—that is reserved now for visiting VIPs and has the woman of his choice brought to him.

We endure these sermons. They give us a chance to come in out of the rain. We are allowed to sit down and not work. We aren't cold because our "teachers" don't want to be cold. They build a big fire in the school's fireplace once a week. And so for a few hours on Sundays, we are warm, dry, and almost comfortable in our rows on the floor. We're hungry, but we know we'll soon be fed. We're in a drowsy, passive state. Without the rest we get on Sundays, several more of us would be dead. I'm sure of that. Nevertheless, we're being preached at while we're in that drowsy, pas­sive state. I doze sometimes, though we're lashed if we're caught sleeping. I sit up, lean against a wall, and I let my­self doze.

I didn't realize it, but the two female Faircloths, it seems, had begun to listen. Worse, they had begun to believe, to be frightened, to be converted. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they had other motives.

We're always being called upon to testify, to give public thanks for all the kindness and generosity that God has shown us in spite of our unworthiness. And we must con­fess that unworthiness and make a public repentance and a public appeal for God's mercy. We have each been required to do this many times. The more you yield, the more you are required to yield. Our teachers know we don't mean it, know we act out of fear of pain. We simply do as we are told. They hate us for this. They look at us with unmistakble hatred, disgust, and contempt, and they insist that it's love that they feel. Their God requires them to love us, after all. And it's only love that makes them try so hard to help us see the light. They say we're blinded by our own sinful stubbornness to the love and the help that they offer. Spare the rod and spoil the child," they tell us, and we are, at best, still children as far as morality is concerned. Right.

Anyway, Reverend Benton issued a call to testify. Three people had been ordered to testify. I was one of them. How I was selected, I don't know, but a scrawny "teacher" with bad teeth had put his hand on my shoulder before services began and ordered me to give testimony. The other two who had been ordered to testify were Ed Gama and a red-haired, one-armed woman, fresh from the highway. Her name was Teal, she had been with us for less than a week, and she was afraid of her shadow. Ed and I have done it before, so we went first to show the stranger what to do. This was the usual practice. I gave thanks for my many bless­ings, then I confessed to sinful thoughts, to anger, and to resistance to my teachers who were only trying to help me. I apologized to God and to all present again and again for my wickedness. I begged for forgiveness, begged for the strength and the wisdom to do God's will.

That's how you do it. That's how I've done it for over a year.

When I finished, Ed did pretty much the same thing. He had his own scripted list of sins and apologies. Teal was bright enough to do as we had done, but she was very frightened. Her voice trembled, and she all but whispered.

In his loud, nasty voice, Reverend Benton said, "Speak up, sister. Let the church hear your testimony."

Tears spilled from the woman's eyes, but she managed to raise her voice and repent and ask forgiveness for "all the things I have done wrong." She must have forgotten the kind of thing that the sermons had "suggested" she confess to. Then she collapsed to her knees and began to sob, out of control, terrified, begging, "Don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me. I'll do anything."

If I had tried to go to her, help her up, and take her back to her space on the floor, I would have been lashed. Human decency is a sin here. Ed and I looked at each other, but neither of us dared to touch her. I suspect that some "teacher" would have helped her back to her place. Lash­ing her back to her place wouldn't be quite the thing to do under the circumstances.

But there was an interruption. Beth and Jessica Faircloth had gotten up and were picking their way through the con­gregation, trying not to step on anyone, heading for the altar. When they reached the altar, they fell to their knees. People did this sometimes, gave voluntary testimony in hope of currying favor with the "teachers." It was harmless—or had always been harmless before. And it might buy you a piece of bread or an apple later. In fact, the Fair-cloths had done it several times. Some of us sneered at them for it, but it had never seemed important to me. Stu­pid me.

"We've sinned too," Beth cried. "We didn't mean to. We didn't know what to do. We knew it was wrong, but we were afraid."

They were not lashed. I saw Reverend Benton hold up his hand, no doubt telling the "teachers" to let them alone. "Speak, sisters," he said. "Confess your sin. God loves you. God will forgive."

They didn't follow the form this time. Instead they spoke the way they do when they're afraid, when they know they've done something other people might not like, when they're standing together against others. They're not twins. In fact, they're 18- and 19-year-old sisters, but under stress, they act much younger, and they act like twins, finishing one another's sentences, speaking in unison, or repeating one an­other's words. Their testimony was like that.

"We saw them doing it," Beth said.

"They've been doing it for a long time now," Jessica added. "We saw them."

"At night," Beth continued. "We knew it was wrong."

'It's dirty and filthy and perverted!" Jessica said.

"You can hear them kissing and making noises," Beth said, making a face, to show her disgust. "Perverted!"

"I never knew Allie was like that, but even before you came to teach us, she lived with another woman," Jessica said. '1 thought she was okay because she had a little boy, but now I know she wasn't."

"She must have been doing it with women all the time," Beth echoed.

"Now she does it with Mary Sullivan." Jessica had begun to cry. "It's wrong, but we were afraid to tell before."

"She's strong like a man, and she's mean," Beth said. "We're afraid of her."

And I thought, Oh no, damnit, no! Our "teachers" have mistreated us every day, humiliated us and harangued us. But the misery has gone on for so long, and the sermons have gone on for so long, and we've stood together against it all....

But I suppose something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I only wish the traitors had been strangers from outside. That's happened before in lesser ways, but after a night or two, we've always managed to teach out­siders to keep their mouths shut about anything they've seen among their fellow inmates. No member of Earthseed has ever betrayed us in any way—until now.

As Allie was dragged to the front of the room to be pun­ished, she shouted at Beth and Jessica, "They'll still rape you, and they'll still lash you and when they're done with you they'll still kill you!"

And I screamed at them, "She gave you food when you were hungry!"

So the "teachers" lashed me too.

But what they did to Allie and to Mary Sullivan, that went on and on. Mary Sullivan's father Arthur begged them to stop, managed to hit one of them and knock him down. So, of course he was lashed. But he bought no mercy for his daughter. Mary was having terrible convul­sions, and they went on lashing her. They lashed both women until neither could scream anymore. They made us watch. I didn't watch. To survive, I kept my head down, my eyes half shut. I've been lashed for this behavior from time to time, but not today. Today, all attention was on the two "sinners."

They lashed Allie and Mary until Mary died.

They lashed them until Allie was lost somewhere within herself. She hasn't spoken a full sentence since the lashing.

Because I spoke for Allie, I was made to dig Mary's grave. Better me than Mary's father. He isn't in his right mind either. He was forced to watch his child tortured to death. He just wanders around, staring. Our teachers lash him, and he screams from the pain, but when they finish, he's no different. They seem to think they can torture him into forgetting his terrible grief and his hate.

I can't stand this. I can't. I don't care if they kill me. I will break free of this or I will be dead.

The Faircloth girls have been given a room in what used to be the King house. They have a whole room to them­selves now instead of a room shared with thirty other women. They still wear collars, but they're on permanent cooking duty now. They don't have to chop wood or do fieldwork or construction work or clear brush or dig wells or graves or do any of the other hard, heavy, dirty work that the rest of us must do. And they don't know how to cook. Somehow, they've never learned to put together a decent meal. So they don't cook for our "teachers." They just cook for us.

Of course, they're hated. No one talks to them, but no one does anything to them either. We've been warned to let them alone. And they have been given a certain power over us. They can season our food with spit or dirt or shit, and we know it. Maybe that's what they're doing, and that's why the food is so much worse than it was. I didn't think that was possible—for it to get worse. The Faircloths have managed to ruin garbage. The Sullivan brothers and sisters might kill both Faircloth girls if they get the chance. Old Arthur Sullivan has been sent away. We don't know where. He's out of his mind and our "teachers" weren't able to lash him back to sanity, so they got rid of him.

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

We've learned that the master unit, the unit that powers or controls all the collars in Camp Christian, is in my old cabin. For months it was kept in one of the maggots—or we heard that's where it was kept. We've had to put to­gether hints, rumors, and overheard comments, any of which might be misinterpreted, or untrue. But at long last, I believe we have it right.

Reverend Locke's two assistants live in my cabin, and from time to time, some of us are taken there for the night. The next time that happens, we'll make our break.

The women who have been taken there most often are Noriko, Cristina Cho, and the Mora girls.

"They say they like small, ladylike women," Noriko says with terrible bitterness. "Those flabby, ugly men. They like us because it's easy for them to hurt us. They like to use their hands, leave bruises, make you beg them to stop."

She, Cristina, and the Moras all say they would rather risk death than go on with things as they are. Whichever of them is taken to my cabin next will cut their rapists' throats during the night. They can do that now. I don't believe they could have a few months ago. Then they will try to find and disable the master unit. Problem is, we don't know what the master unit looks like. None of us has ever seen it.

All we know—or think we know about it—we've learned from those among us who have been collared be­fore. They say once you disable the master unit, the smaller units won't work. The only way I can understand this is to compare it to one of the phones in the Balter house down south in Robledo, so long ago. This was a big, old-fash­ioned dinosaur of a "cordless" phone. You had to plug the base unit into an electrical outlet and a phone jack. Then you could walk around the house and yard talking into the hand unit. But unplug the two cords of the base, and the hand unit didn't work anymore. I'm told that that's close to what happens with a network of collars.

I don't know anything for sure. I only half believe that we can do what we think we can and survive. Tampering with the master unit might kill the woman who does it. It might kill us all. But the truth is, we couldn't last much longer, no matter what. We're only just human now—most of us. I've said this to the people I trust—people who have helped me gather the fragments of information that we have. I've asked each of them if they're willing to take the risk.

They are. We all are.

wednesday, february 28, 2035

Day before yesterday, we had a terrible storm—truly terri­ble. And yet, it was a wonderful thing: wind and rain and cold... and a landslide. The hill where our cemetery once was with all its new and old trees, that hill has slumped down into our valley. Our teachers had made us cut down the older trees for firewood and lumber and God. I never found out how they came to believe we prayed to trees, but they went on believing it. We begged them to let the hill alone, told them it was our cemetery, and they lashed us. Because they forced us to do this, the hillside has broken away and come rumbling down to us. It has buried a mag­got and three cabins, including the cabin that Bankole and I had built and then lived in for our six brief years together.

Also, it buried the men who slept alone in that cabin. I'm sorry to say that there were two women in each of the other cabins. They were from squatter camps. Natividad had been friendly with one of them, but I didn't know them at all. They are dead, however, buried and dead. Six "teach­ers," four captive women, and all of our collars were dead. Last Sunday, we resolved to free ourselves or die trying. Now, instead, the weather, and our "teachers'" own stupid­ity has freed us.

Here is what happened.

The storm began as a cold rain whipped by a brisk wind on Monday afternoon, and for a while, we were made to go on working in it. At last, though, our "teachers," who are much more willing to inflict suffering than to endure it, drove us back to our prison rooms to sit in the cold dimness while they went to our cabins, to warm fires, light, and food.

After a while, the lowest-ranking "teacher" brought Beth and Jessica Faircloth out with our disgusting dinner—a lot of half-boiled, half-spoiled cabbage with potatoes.

We had put Allie where the Faircloths could not avoid seeing her, being confronted by her when they came in. She is a little better. I've looked after her as best I could. She walks like a bent old woman, talks in monosyllables, and does not always seem to understand when we speak to her. I don't believe she even remembers what the Faircloths did to her, but she seems to trust me. I told her to watch them— watch them every second.

She did.

The Faircloths trembled and stumbled over one another, putting down pots of awful food and backing out. We all stared at them in silence, but I suspect they saw only Allie.

After dinner, we rested as best we could, feeling cold, stiff, miserable, and damp on the bare wood floor wrapped in our filthy blankets. Some of us slept, but the storm grew much worse, shaking the building and making it creak. Rain beat against the window and blew roofing off cabins, limbs off trees, and trash from the dump that the teachers had made us create. We had had no dump before. We had a salvage heap and a compost heap. Neither was trash. We could not afford to be wasteful. Our teachers have made trash of our entire community.

Sometimes there was lightning and thunder, sometimes only heavy rain. It went on all night, tearing the world apart outside. Then sometime this morning before dawn, not long after I had managed to get to sleep, I was awakened by a terrible noise. It wasn't like thunder—wasn't like any­thing I'd ever heard. It was just this incredible rumbling, breaking, cracking noise.

I reacted without thinking. My place is near the window, and I jumped up and looked out. I leaned against the sill and peered out into the darkness. A moment later there was a flare of lightning, and I saw rock and dirt where my cabin should have been. Rock and dirt.

It took me a moment to understand this. Then I realized that I was leaning against the windowsill, leaning halfway out the window. And I had not convulsed and fallen to the floor. No pain. None of that filthy, twisting agony that made us all slaves.

I touched my collar. It was still there, still capable of de­livering the agony. But for some reason, it no longer cared that I leaned against the windowsill. In the dark room, I reached for Natividad. She slept on one side of me and Allie slept on the other. Natividad trusts me, and she knows how to be quiet.

"Freedom!" I whispered. "The collars are dead! They're dead!"

She let me lead her to the door between our quarters and the men's. We managed to get there, each of us waking people as we went, whispering to them, but not stepping on anyone, feeling our way. At the door, Natividad pulled back a little, then she let me lead her through. The door's never been locked. Collars were always enough to keep everyone away from it. But not this time.

No pain.

We woke the men—those who were still asleep. We couldn't see well enough to wake only the men we trusted. We woke them all. We couldn't do this with silent stealth. We were quiet, but they awoke in confusion and chaos. Some were already awake and confused and grabbing me, and realizing that I was a woman. I hit one who wouldn't let me go—a stranger from the road.

"Freedom!" I whispered into his face. "The collars are dead! We can get away!"

He let me go, and scrambled for the door. I went back and gathered the women. When I got them into the men's room, the men were already pouring out of the building. We followed them through the big outside doors. Travis and Natividad, Mike and Noriko, others of Earthseed, the Gamas, and the Sullivans somehow found one another. We all clustered together, male and female members of fami­lies greeting one another, crying, hugging. They had not been able even to touch one another through the eternity of our captivity. Seventeen months. Eternity.

I hugged Harry because neither of us had anyone left. Then he and I stood together watching the others, probably feeling the same mixture of relief and pain. Zahra was gone. Bankole was gone. And where were our children?

But there was no time for joy or grief.

"We've got to get into the cabins now," I said, all but herding them before me. "We've got to stop them from fix­ing the collars. We've got to get their guns before they know what's going on. They'll waste time trying to lash us. Groups of four or more to a cabin. Do it!"

We all know how to work together. We've spent years working together. We separated and went to the houses. Travis, Natividad, and I grabbed the Mora girls and we burst into what had been the Kardos house just as the screaming began outside.

Some of our "teachers" came rushing out of their cabins to see what was wrong, and they were torn to pieces by the people they had so enjoyed tormenting.

Some of the captives, desperate to escape while they could, tried to find their way through the Lazor wire in the dark, and the wire cut their flesh to the bone when they ran into it.

Earthseed made no such lethal mistake. We went into the cabins to arm ourselves, to rid ourselves of our "teachers," and to cut off our damned collars.

My group piled onto the two "teachers" who were there, out of bed, one with his pants and shirt on, and one in long underwear. They could have shot us. But they were so used to depending on their belts to protect them that it was the belts they tried to reach.

One stood and said, "What's going on?" The other lunged at Natividad and me with a wordless shout.

We grappled with them, dragged them down, and stran­gled them. That simple. Even simple for me. It hurt when they hit me. It hurt when I hit them. And it didn't matter a good goddamn! Once I had my hands on one of them, I just shut my eyes and did it. I never felt their deaths. And I have never been so eager and so glad to kill people.

We couldn't see them very well anyway in the dark cabin, but we made sure they were dead. We didn't let go of them until they were very, very dead. Our makeshift knives were still in the walls and floor of our barracks, but our hands did the job.

And then we had guns. We used a chair, then a night table to smash open a gun cabinet.

More important, then we had wire cutters.

Tori Mora found the cutters in what had once been Noriko Kardos's silverware drawer. Now it was full of small hand tools. We took turns cutting one another's col­lars off. As long as we wore them, we were in terrible dan­ger. I was afraid every minute, anticipating the convulsing agony that could end our freedom, begin our final torture. Our "teachers" would kill us if they regained control of us. They would kill us very, very slowly. The collars alone would kill us if they somehow switched back on while we were trying to cut through them and twist them off. I had learned over the months that nothing was more tamper-proof than a functioning collar.

I cut the Mora girls' collars off, and Tori cut off mine. Travis and Natividad did the same for one another. And then we were free. Then, no matter what, we were truly free. We all hugged one another again. There was still dan­ger, still work to do, but we were free. We allowed our­selves that moment of intense relief.

Then we went out to find that our people and some of the others had finished the job. The teachers were all dead. I saw that some of the inmates still wore their collars, so I went back into the Kardos cabin for the wire cutters. Once people realized what I was doing—cutting off collars— both outsiders and members of the Earthseed community made a ragged line in front of me. I spent the next several minutes cutting off collars. It was cold, the wind was blow­ing, but at least it had stopped raining. The eastern sky was beginning to brighten with the dawn. We were free people, all of us.

Now what?

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

We stripped what we could from the cabins. We had to. The outsiders were running around grabbing things, tearing or smashing whatever they didn't want, screaming, cheering, ripping curtains from windows, breaking windows, grab­bing food and liquor. Amazing how much liquor our "teachers" had had.

We took guns first. We didn't try to stop the outsiders from their orgy of destruction, but we did guard the things we collected: guns, ammunition, clothing, shoes, food. Outsiders understood that. We were like them, taking what we wanted and guarding it. Some of them had found guns, too, but there was a respectful wariness between us. Even people who got crazy drunk didn't come after us.

Someone shot the locks off the gate, and people began to leave.

Several people tried to shoot their way into the single un­buried maggot, but it was locked and impervious to any ef­fort we could make. In fact, if even one of our "teachers" had slept in the maggot, he could have defeated our escape. He could have killed us all.

Our own trucks were long gone. One had been destroyed when Gray Mora said his final "no" to slavery. The other had been taken and driven away. We had no idea where. When it was light, I counted seven people dead on the Lazor wire. I suspect most had bled to death, although two had opened their own abdomens, even slicing into their in­testines propelled by their mindless lunge for freedom. Lazor wire is impossible to see at night in the rain, and even the lowest street pauper should know the dangers of it. When we were ready to leave, I collected Allie, who had stayed inside the school and just stood at a window, staring out at us. I cut off her collar, then I thought about the Fair­cloths. I had not cut off their collars. They had not come to me. The two Faircloth boys, of course, had been taken away with the rest of our young children. Alan Faircloth, the father of Beth and Jessica, must have taken his daugh­ters and slipped away—or perhaps the Sullivans had found them and taken their revenge.

I sighed. Either the girls were dead or they were with Alan. Best to say nothing. There had been enough killing.

I gathered what was left of the Earthseed community around me. The sun wasn't visible through the clouds, but the wind had died down, and the sky was pale gray. It was cold, but for once, with our fresh clothing, we were warm enough.

"We can't stay here," I told my people. "We'll have to take as much as we can carry and go. The church will send people here sooner or later."

"Our homes," Noriko Kardos said in a kind of moan.

I nodded. "I know. But they're already gone. They've been gone for a long time." And a particular Earthseed verse occurred to me.

In order to rise

From its own ashes

A phoenix

First

Must

Burn.

It was an apt Earthseed verse, but not a comforting one. The problem with Earthseed has always been that it isn't a very comforting belief system.

"Let's take one last look through the houses," I said. "We need to look for evidence of what they've done with our children. That's the most important thing we can do next: find the children."

I left Michael and Travis to guard the goods we had col­lected, and the rest of us went in groups to search the ruins of the houses.

But we found nothing that related to the children. There was money hidden here and there around the cabins, missed by the marauding inmates. There were piles of reli­gious tracts, Bibles, lists of "inmates" brought from Garberville, Eureka, Arcata, Trinidad, and other nearby towns. There was a plan for spring planting, a few books written by President Jarret, or by some ghostwriter. There were personal papers, but nothing about our children, and no addresses. None. Nothing. This could only be deliberate. They feared being found out. Was it us they feared, or someone else?

We searched until almost midday. Then we knew we had to go, too. The roads were mud and water, and it was un­likely that anyone would try to drive up today, but we needed to get a good start. In particular, I wanted to go to our secret caches where we had not only the necessities but copies of records, journals, and in two places, the hand and foot prints of some of our children. Bankole took hand and foot prints of every child he delivered. He labeled them, gave a copy to the parents, and kept a copy. I had distributed these copies among two of our caches—the two that only a few of us knew about. I don't know whether the prints will help us get our children back. When I let myself think about it, I have to admit that I don't know even whether our children are alive. I only know that now I have to get to those two caches. They are back in the mountains toward the sea, not toward the road. We can disappear in that country. There are places there where we can shelter and decide what to do. It's one thing to say that we must find our children, and another to figure out how to do that, how to begin.

Who to trust?

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

We burned Acorn. No. No, we burned Camp Christian. We burned Camp Christian so that it couldn't be used as Camp Christian anymore. If Christian America still wants the land it stole from us, it will have some serious rebuilding to do. We spread lamp oil and diesel fuel inside the cabins that we built from the trees we cut and the stone and concrete we hauled. We spread oil in the school Grayson Mora had designed and we had all worked so hard to build and make beautiful. We spread it on the bodies of our "teachers." All that we could not take with us, all that the other inmates had not taken or destroyed, we burned. The buildings might not burn to the ground because the rain had soaked every­thing, but they would be gutted and unsafe. The furniture that we had built or salvaged would burn. The hated flesh would burn.

So, once more, we watched our homes burn. We went into the hills, separating from the last of the other inmates, who went their own ways back to the highway or wherever else they might want to go. From the hills, for a time, we watched. Most of us had seen our homes burn before, but we had not been the ones to set the fires. This time, though, it's too late for fire to be the destroyer that we remembered. The things that we had created and loved had already been destroyed. This time, the fires only cleansed.

Chapter 15

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

We have lived before.

We will live again.

We will be silk,

Stone,

Mind,

Star.

We will be scattered,

Gathered,

Molded,

Probed.

We will live

And we will serve life.

We will shape God

And God will shape us

Again,

Always again,

Forevermore.

THE CRUSADERS DELIBERATELY divided siblings because if they were together, they might support one another in secret heathen practices or beliefs. But if each child was isolated and dropped into a family of good Christian Americans, then each would be changed. Parent pressure, peer pressure, and time would remake them as good Christian Americans.

Sometimes it did, even among the older children of Acorn. Look at the Faircloth boys. One became a Christian American minister. The other rejected Christian America completely. And sometimes the division was utterly destruc­tive. Some of us died of it. Ramon Figueroa Castro commit­ted suicide because, according to one of his foster brothers, "He was too stubborn to try to fit in and forget about his sin­ful past." Christian America was, at first, much more a refuge for the ignorant and the intolerant than it should have been. Even people who would never beat or burn another person could treat suddenly orphaned or abducted children with cold, self-righteous cruelty.

"Give in," my mother said to the adults of Acorn. "Do as you're told and keep your own counsel. Don't give them ex­cuses to hurt you. Bide your time. Watch your captors. Lis­ten to them. Collect information, pool it, and use it against them." But we kids never heard any of this. We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking peo­ple is much easier than putting them together again.

So much agony caused, so much evil done in God's name.

And yet, Christian America had begun by trying to help and to heal as well as to convert. Long before Jarret was elected President, his church had begun to rescue children. But in those early days, they only rescued kids who really needed help. Along the Gulf Coast where Jarret began his work, there were several Christian American children's homes that were over a decade old by 2032. These homes collected street orphans, fed them, cared for them, and raised them to be "the bulwark of Christian America." Only later did the fanatics take over and begin stealing the chil­dren of "heathens" and doing terrible harm.

In preparation for this book, I spoke with several people who were raised in "CA" children's homes or were adopted from CA homes into CA families. What they told me re­minded me of my own life with the Alexanders. The homes and adoptive families were not meant to be cruel. Even in the homes, there were no collars except as punishment for the older children, and then only after warnings and lesser pun­ishments had failed. The homes weren't kept by sadists or perverts but by people who believed deeply in what they were doing—or at least by workers who wanted very much to please their employers and keep their jobs. The believers wanted "their" children to believe absolutely in God, in Jarret and in being good Christian American soldiers ready to do battle with every sort of anti-American heathenism. The mer­cenaries were easier to please. They wanted no children in­jured or killed while they were on duty. They wanted the required lessons learned, the required tests passed. They wanted peace.

The Alexanders were like a combination of the believer and the mercenary. The Alexanders wanted me to believe, and if they did not love me, at least they took care of me. By the time 1 was old enough for school—Christian American school, of course—I had learned to be quiet and keep out of their way. When 1 succeeded at this, Kayce and Madison would reward me by letting me alone. Kayce took a break from telling me how much inferior I was to Kamaria. Madi­son took a break from trying to get his sweaty hands under my dress. I would take a book to a quiet corner of the house or yard and read. My earliest books were all either Bible sto­ries or stories of Christian American heroes who, like Asha Vere, did great deeds for the faith. These influenced me. How could they not? I dreamed of doing great deeds myself. I dreamed of making Kayce so proud of me, making her love me the way she loved Kamaria. Both my biological parents were big, strong people. Thanks to them, I was always big for my age, and strong—one more strike against me, since Kamaria had been "small and dainty." i dreamed of doing great, heroic things, but all I really tried to do was hide, van­ish, make myself invisible.

It should have been hard for an oversized kid like me to hide that way, but it wasn't. If i did my chores and my home­work, I was encouraged to vanish—or rather, I wasn't en­couraged to do anything else. In my neighborhood there were only a few kids, and they were all older than I was. To them I was either a nuisance or a pawn. They ignored me or they got me into trouble. Kayce and her friends didn't appre­ciate any attempts I made to join in their adult conversation. Even when Kayce was alone, she wasn't really interested in anything I had to say. She either told me more than I wanted to know about Kamaria, or she punished me for asking ques­tions about anything else.

Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. I was to be like a sheep in Christ's flock—or Jar­ret's flock. I was to be quiet and meek. Once I learned that, my childhood was at least physically comfortable.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, march 4, 2035

So much has happened....

No, that's wrong. Things haven't just happened. I've caused them to happen. I must get back to normal, to know­ing and admitting, at least to myself, when I cause things. Slaves are always told that they've caused something bad, done something sinful, made stupid mistakes. Good things were the acts of our "teachers" or of God. Bad things were our fault. Either we had done some specific wrong or God was so generally displeased with us that He was punishing the whole camp.

If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it. You weight yourself down with blame for all the world's pain. Or you decide that you're an innocent victim. Your masters are at fault or God is or Satan is—or maybe things just happen on their own. Slaves protect themselves in all sorts of ways.

But we're not slaves anymore.

I've done this: I sent my people away. We survived slav­ery together, but I didn't believe that we could survive free­dom together. I broke up the Earthseed community and sent its parts in all directions. I believe it was the right thing to do, but I can hardly bear to think about it. Once I've writ­ten this, perhaps I can begin to heal. I don't know. All I know now is that I've torn a huge hole in myself. I've sent away those who mean most to me. They were all I had left, and I know I may not see them ever again.

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

On Tuesday we escaped from Camp Christian, burning the camp and our keepers as we went. We left behind the bones of our dead and the dream of Acorn as the first Earthseed community. The Sullivans and the Gamas went their own ways. We would not have asked them to leave us, but I was glad they did. We had between us only the money in our caches and the money we had taken from our "teachers." Since we are all now homeless, jobless, and on foot, that money won't go far.

I did ask both families who were going to stay with rela­tives or friends to get whatever information they could about the children, about the legality of the camp, about the existence of other camps. We all must find out what we can. I've asked them to leave word with the Holly family. The Hollys were neighbors, more distant than the Sullivans and the Gamas, but neighbors. They were good friends of the Sullivans, and there was no rumor of their having been en­slaved. We must be careful not to get them into trouble, but if we are careful, and if we check with them now and then, we can all exchange information.

Problem is, we didn't dare take any of the phones from Camp Christian. The outsiders took some of them, but we were afraid we could somehow be traced if we used them. We can't take the chance of being collared again. We might be enslaved for life or executed because we've killed good Christian American citizens. The fact that those citizens had stolen our homes, our land, our freedom, and our children just might be overlooked if the citizens were influential enough. We believe it could happen. Look what had already happened! We're all afraid.

Among ourselves—Earthseed only—we've agreed on a place that we can use as a message drop. It's down near what's left of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. There any of us can leave information to be read, copied, and acted on by the rest of us. It's a good place because we all know where it is and because it's isolated. Getting to it isn't easy. We don't dare leave information or meet in groups in some more convenient place near the highway or near local roads, and we need a way of reaching one another without depending on the Hollys. We'll check with them, but who knows how they'll feel about us now. We'll communicate among ourselves by leaving messages at our secret place, and perhaps by meeting there.

But I'm going too fast. We had some time together after leaving Camp Christian.

We walked deeper into the mountains, away from paved roads, south and west to the largest of our caches where we knew there was the cold shelter of a small cave. At the cave, we rested and shared the food that we had brought from Camp Christian. Then we dug out the supplies that we had stored in heavy, heat-sealed plastic sacks and stored there. That gave us all packets of dried foods—fruit, nuts, beans, eggs, and milk—plus blankets and ammunition. Most im­portant, I passed out the infant foot and hand prints that had been stored at this particular cache to the parents present. I gave the Mora girls their younger brothers' prints and they sat staring at them, each holding one. Both their parents were dead. They have only each other and their little broth­ers, if they can find them.

"They should be with us!" Doe muttered. "No one has the right to take them from us."

Adela Ortiz folded her son's prints and put them inside her shirt. Then she folded her arms in front of her as though cradling a baby. Larkin's prints and those of Travis and Natividad's kids were at a different location, but I found the prints of Harry's kids, Tabia and Russell, and I gave them to Harry. He just sat looking at them, frowning at them and shaking his head. It was as though he were trying to read an explanation in them for all that had happened to him. Or maybe he was seeing the faces of his children, and Zahra's face, long gone.

We sat warming ourselves around the fire we had finally dared to start. We had collected wood outside during the last hour of daylight, but we waited until it was dark to try to use it. The wood was wet and wouldn't burn at first. When we did get a small fire going, it seemed to make more smoke than heat. We hoped no one would see the smoke sliding up and out of the cave, or that if people did see it, they would think it was from one of the many squatter camps in the mountains. In winter, these mountains are cold, wet, uncomfortable places, difficult places in which to live without modern conveniences, but they're also places where sensible people mind their own business.

I sat with Harry, and he went on staring at the prints and shaking his head. Then he began to rock back and forth. His expression in the firelight seemed to crack, to break down, somehow, unable to hold itself together.

I pulled him to me and held him while he cursed and cried in a harsh, strained, whisper. I realized at some point that I was crying too. I think that within ourselves, we both howled, but somehow, we never got much above a whisper, a rasp. I could feel the howling straining to get out of my throat, the screams that came out as small, ragged cries, his and mine. I don't know how long we sat together, holding one another, going mad inside ourselves, wailing and moaning for the dead and the lost, unable to contain for one more minute 17 months of humiliation and pain.

We wept ourselves to sleep like tired children. The next day Natividad told me she and Travis had done much the same thing. The others, alone or in groups, had found their own comfort in cathartic weeping, deep sleep, or frantic, furtive lovemaking at the back of the cave. We were to­gether at last, comforting one another, and yet I think each of us was alone, straining toward the others, some part of ourselves still trapped back in the uncertainty and fear, the pain and desolation of Camp Christian. We strained toward some kind of release, some human contact, some way into the normal, human grieving that had been denied us for so long. It amazes me that we were able to behave as sanely as we did.

The next morning Lucio Figueroa and Adela Ortiz awoke tangled together at the back of the cave. They stared at one another first in horror and confusion, then in deep embarrassment, then in resignation. He put his arm around her, pulled one of the blankets we had salvaged around her, and she leaned against him.

Jorge Cho and Diamond Scott awoke in a similar tangle, although they seemed both unsurprised and unembarrassed.

Michael and Noriko awoke together and lay still against one another for a long time, saying nothing, doing nothing. It seemed enough for each of them that at last they could wake up in each other's arms.

The Mora girls awoke together, their faces still marked with the tears they had shed the night before.

Somehow Aubrey Dovetree and Nina Noyer had found one another during the night, although they had never paid much attention to one another before. Once they were awake, they moved apart in obvious discomfort.

Only Allie awoke alone, huddled in fetal position in her blanket. I had forgotten her. And hadn't she lost even more than the rest of us?

I put her between Harry and me, and we started a break­fast fire with the wood we had left over from the night. We put together a breakfast of odds and ends, and Harry and I made her eat. I borrowed a comb from Diamond Scott, who had, in her neatness, managed to find one before we left Camp Christian. With it I combed Allie's hair, then my own. Things like that had begun to matter again, somehow. We all began to try to put ourselves together as respectable human beings again. For so long we had been filthy slaves in filthy rags cultivating filthy habits in the hope of avoiding rape or lashing. I found myself longing for a deep tub of hot, clean water. Thanks to our "teach­ers," filth and degradation had become so ordinary that sometimes we forgot that we were in rags and that we stank. In our exhaustion, fear, and pain, we came to trea­sure those moments when we could just lie down and for­get, when no one was hurting us, when we had something to eat. Such animal comforts were all we could afford. Remembering wasn't safe. You could lose your mind, remembering.

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can't begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren't.

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

“Today or tomorrow, we must separate," I said. "We must leave here in small groups." Breakfast was over, and we had all made ourselves a little more presentable. I could see that the others had begun to look at one another, begun to wonder what to do next.

I knew what we had to do. I had known almost from the time we were collared that even if we managed to free our­selves, we wouldn't be able to stay together.

"Earthseed continues," I said into the silence, "but Acorn is dead. There are too many of us. We would be too easy to spot, too easy to recapture or kill."

"What can we do?" Aubrey Dovetree demanded.

And Harry Balter said in a dead voice, "We've got to split up. We've got to go our separate ways and find our kids."

"No," Nina Noyer whispered, and then louder, "No! Everybody's gone, and now you want me to go away by myself again? No!" Now it was a shout.

"Yes," I said to her, only to her, my voice as soft as I could make it. "Nina, you come with me. My family is gone :oo. Come with me. We'll look for your sisters and my daughter and Allie's son."

"I want us all to stay together," she whispered, and she began to cry.

"If we stay together, we'll be collared or dead in no time," Harry said. He looked at me. "I'll go with you too. You'll need help. And ... I want my kids back. I'm scared to death of what might be happening to them. That's all I can trunk about now. That's all I care about."

And Allie put her hand on his shoulder, trying to give comfort.

"No one should leave alone," I said. It's too dangerous to be alone. But don't gather into groups of more than five or six."

"What about us?" Doe Mora said, holding her sister's hand. It was hard at that moment to remember that the two were not blood relatives. Two lonely, frightened ex-slaves met and loved one another and married, and their daughters Doe and Tori became sisters. And they're sisters now, or­phaned and alone. I envy their closeness, and I fear for them. They're still kids, and they were abused almost past bearing at Camp Christian. They look starved and haunted. In a way that I can't quite describe, they look old. Our "teachers" realized that they were sharers back during Day's rebellion, and abused them all the more for it, but the girls never gave any of the rest of us away. Yet in spite of their courage, it would be so easy for them to wind up with new collars around their necks. Or they could wind up de­ciding to prostitute themselves—just to eat.

"You come with us," Natividad said. "We intend to find our children. If we can, we'll find your brothers as well."

Doe bit her lips. "I'm pregnant," she said. 'Tori isn't, but I am."

"It's a wonder we all aren't," I said. "We were slaves. Now we're free." I looked at her. She's a tall, slender, delicate-looking girl, large-eyed like her namesake. "What do you want to do, Doe?"

Doe swallowed. "I don't know."

"We'll take care of her," Travis said. "Whatever she de­cides to do, we'll help her. Her father was a good man. He was a friend of mine. We'll take care of her."

I nodded, relieved. Travis and Natividad are two of the most competent, dependable people I know. They'll sur­vive, and if the girls are with them, the girls will survive too.

Others began forming themselves into groups. Adela Ortiz, who first thought that she would join Travis, Nativi­dad, and the Moras, decided in the end to stay with Lucio Figueroa and his sister. I'm not sure how she and Lucio wound up in each other's arms the night before, but I think now that Adela may be looking for a permanent relation­ship with Lucio. He's much older than she is, and I think she hopes he'll want her and want to take care of her. But Adela is pregnant too. She's not showing yet, but according to what she's told me, she believes she's at least two months pregnant.

Also, Lucio is still carrying Teresa Lin around with him. Her death and the way she died has made him very, very quiet—kind, but distant. He wasn't like that back in Acorn. His own wife and children were killed before he met us. He had invested all his time and energy in helping his sister with her children. He had only begun to reach out again when Teresa joined us. Now ... now perhaps he's decided that it hurts too much to begin to care for someone, then lose her.

It does hurt. It's terrible. I know that. But I know Adela, too. She needs to be needed. I remember she hated being pregnant the first time, hated the men who had gang-raped her. But she loved taking care of her baby. She was an at­tentive, loving mother, and she was happy. What's in store for her now, I don't know.

And yet in spite of my fears for my friends, my people, in spite of my longing to hold together a community that must divide, all this was easier than I had thought it would be—easier than I thought it could be. We'd all worked so well together for six years, and we'd endured so much as slaves. Now we were dividing ourselves, deciding how to go our separate ways. I don't mean that it was easy—just that it wasn't as hard as I expected. God is Change. I've taught that for six years. It's true, and I suppose it's paved the way for us now. Earthseed prepares you to live in the world that is and try to shape the world that you want. But none of it is really easy.

We spent the rest of the day going around to the other caches and parceling out the supplies we'd left in them and gathering the other sets of children's hand and foot prints. Then we had one more night together. Once we had gone to all the caches—one had been raided, but the rest were in­tact—we spent the night in another shallow cave. It was raining again, and cold. That was good because it would make tracking us pretty much impossible. On that last night, when we'd eaten, we dropped off quickly to sleep. We'd been tramping through the mountains all day, carry­ing packs that got heavier with each stop, and we were tired. But the next morning before we parted, we held a final Gathering. We sang Earthseed verses, to the tunes that Gray Mora and Travis had written. We Remembered our dead, including our dead Acorn. Each of us spoke of it, Re­membering.

"You are Earthseed," I said to them, at last. "You always will be. I love you. I love you all." I stopped for a moment, struggling to hold on to what was left of my self-control.

Somehow, I went on. "Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret," I said. "We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have sur­vived. We have tools that other people don't have, and that they need. The time will come again when we can share what we know." I paused, swallowed. "Stay well," I told them. 'Take care of one another."

We agreed to visit the newly designated Humboldt Red­woods information drop every month or two for a year—at least that long. We agreed that it was best that each group not know yet where the other groups were going—so that if one group was caught, it couldn't be forced to betray the others. We agreed it was best not to live in the Eureka and Arcata area because that's where most of our jailers lived, both the dead ones and the off-shift ones who were still alive. Each city was home to a big Christian American church and several affiliated organizations. We might have to go to these cities to look for our children, but once we've found them and taken them back, we should go elsewhere to live.

"And change your names," I told them. "As soon as you can, buy yourselves new identities. Then relax. You're hon­est people. If anyone says otherwise, attack their credibil­ity. Accuse them of being secret cultists, witches, Satanists, thieves. Whatever you think will endanger your accusers the most, say it! Don't just defend yourselves. Attack. And keep attacking until you scare the shit out of your accusers. Watch them. Pay attention to their body language. Then-own reactions will tell you how best to damage them or scare them off.

"I don't think you'll have to do much of that kind of thing. The chances of any of us running into someone who knew us at Camp Christian are small. It's just that we need to be mentally prepared for it if it happens. God is Change. Look after yourselves."

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

And we went our separate ways. Travis said we would be better off not walking on the highway unless we could lose ourselves in a crowd. If there were no crowds, he said, we should walk through the hills. It would be harder, but safer. I agreed.

We hugged one another. It took a lot of hugging. It took the possibility of coming together again someday in another state or another country or a post-Jarret America. It took tears and fear and hope. It was terrible, that final leavetaking. Deciding to do it was easier than I thought. Doing it was much harder. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

Then I was alone with Allie, Harry, and Nina. We four slogged through the mud, heading north. We traveled through the familiar hills, to the outskirts of Eureka, and finally, to Georgetown. I was the one who suggested George­town once we had separated from the others.

"Why?" Harry demanded in a cold voice that didn't sound much like Harry.

"Because it's a good place to pick up information,'' I said. "And because I know Dolores Ramos George. She may not be able to help us, but she won't talk about our being there."

Harry nodded.

"What's Georgetown?" Nina asked.

"A squatter settlement," I told her. "A big, nasty one. We went there when we were looking for you and your sister. You can get lost in there. People aren't nosy, and the Georges are all right."

"They're all right." Allie agreed. "They don't turn people in." These were her first voluntary sentences since her lash­ing. I looked at her, and she repeated, "They're all right. We can look for Justin from Georgetown."

Chapter 16

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

It is to live and to thrive

On new earths.

It is to become new beings

And to consider new questions.

It is to leap into the heavens

Again and again.

It is to explore the vastness

Of heaven.

It is to explore the vastness

Of ourselves.

MY FIRST CLEAR MEMORY is of a doll. I was about three years old, maybe four. I don't know where the doll came from. I still don't know. I had never seen one before. I had never been told that they were sinful or forbidden or even that they ex­isted. I suspect now that this doll had been thrown over our fence and abandoned. I found it at the foot of the big pine tree that grew in our backyard.

The doll had been made in the image of an adolescent blond-haired blue-eyed girl. I remember that it was very straight and thin. It was dressed in a scrap of pink cloth. I remember feeling the knot in the back of it where three ends of the scrap were tied over one shoulder and around the waist. The knot was an oddly soft lump against the hard plastic of the doll's body, and as soon as my fingers found it, I began to pick at it Then I chewed on it Then I examined the coarse, yellow hair. It looked like hair, but when I touched it it didn't feel right And it both­ered me that the legs didn't move. They just stuck out stiff, the feet shaped in permanent tiptoes. I didn't know how to play with a doll, but I knew how to look at it feel it taste it, file it away in my memory as one of the new, strange things to come into my world.

Then Kayce was there, snatching the doll from me. When I reached for it, wanting it back, she slapped me. She had come up behind me, seen what was in my hands, and in her sudden rage, lost control. She was a stem disciplinarian, but she rarely hit me. To give her her due, this was the only time I remember her just lashing out at me that way in anger. Maybe that's why I remember it so well.

A man who grew up at the Pelican Bay Christian American Children's Home told me about a Matron who went into a similar rage and killed a child.

Her victim was a seven-year-old boy who had Tourette's syndrome. My informant said, "We kids didn't know anything about Tburette's syndrome, but we knew this particular kid couldn't help yelling insults and making noises. He didn't mean it Some of us didn't like him. Some of us thought he was crazy. But we all knew he didn't mean the things he yelled out. We knew he couldn't help it. But Matron said he had a devil in him, and she was always screaming at him— every day.

"Then one day she hit him, knocked him into the edge of a kitchen cabinet. He hit the cabinet with his head, and he died.

"I don't believe Matron was sentenced and collared, but she was fired. I just hope that she couldn't find another pro­fessional job and had to indenture herself. One way or another, a person like her should wind up wearing a collar."

There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Amer­icans—about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul. Kayce wasn't that bad, but she was more rigid and literal-minded than any human being with normal intelli­gence should have been, and I suffered for it.

Anyway, she snatched the doll from me and began slap­ping my face. All the while, she was shouting at me. I was so scared, and screaming so loud myself that I didn't know what she was saying. Looking back now, I know it must have been something to do with idolatry, heathenism, or graven im­ages. Christian America had created whole new categories of sin and expanded old ones. We were not permitted pictures of any kind. Movies and television were forbidden, but some­how Dreamasks were not—although only religious topics were permitted. Later, when I was in school, older kids would pass around secular masks that offered stories of adventure, war, and sex. I had my first pleasurable sexual experience, wearing a deliberately mislabeled Dreamask. The label said "The Story of Moses." In fact, it was the story of a girl who had wild sex with her pastor, the deacons, and anyone else she could seduce. I was eleven years old when I discovered that Mask. If Kayce had ever known what it was, she might have done more than just slap my face. I kept the dirty Mask well hidden.

But at three, I hadn't known enough to hide the doll. Only Kayce's reaction told me what a terrible thing it was. She made me watch while she dug a hole in our backyard, put the doll in, covered it with cooking oil and old papers, and burned it. This, she said, was what would happen to me if I went on defying God and working for Satan. I would go down to hell, and what she had done to the doll, the devil would do to me. I remember she made me look at the shapeless blackened plastic lump that the doll had become. She made me hold it, and I cried because it was still hot, and it burned my hand.

"If you think that hurts," she said, "you just wait until you get to hell."

Years later, when I was a grown woman, the small daugh­ter of a friend showed me her doll. I managed to stand up quickly and get out of the house. I didn't scream or thrust the doll away. I just ran. I panicked at the sight of a little girl's doll—real panic. I had to think and remember for a long time before I understood why.

The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet some­times now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don't think about order and stability or greatness or even places like Camp Christian or Pelican Bay. I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. I think about a little girl's doll and I try to banish the shadows of panic that I still can't help feeling when I see one.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

wednesday, march 28, 2035

We have found Justin Gilchrist—or rather, he has found us. In the weeks we've been at Georgetown, this is the best thing that's happened to us.

We've been working for the Georges for room and board while we regained our health, tried to find out where our children might be, caught up on the news, and tried to find ways of fitting ourselves into the world as it is now. Be­cause we've worked for our keep, we still have most of the money we arrived with. I've even managed to earn a little more by reading and writing for people. Most people in Georgetown are illiterate. I've begun to teach reading and writing to some of the few who want to learn. That's also bringing in a little hard currency. And I sell pencil sketches of people's children or other loved ones. This last, I must be careful about. It seems that some of the more rabid Christian America types have decided that a picture of your child might be seen as a graven image. That seems too extreme to catch on with most people even though Jar­ret is much loved in Georgetown. Many people here have sons, brothers, husbands, or other male relatives who have been injured or killed in the Al-Can War, but still, they love Jarret.

In fact, Jarret is both loved and despised here. The reli­gious poor who are ignorant, frightened, and desperate to improve their situations are glad to see a "man of God" in the White House. And that's what he is to them: a man of God.

Even some of the less religious ones support him. They say the country needs a strong hand to bring back order, good jobs, honest cops, and free schools. They say he has to be given plenty of time and a free hand so he can put things right again.

But those dedicated to other religions, and those who are not religious at all sneer at Jarret and call him a hypocrite. They sneer, they hate him, but they also fear him. They see him for the tyrant that he is. And the thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.

The working poor who love Jarret want to be fooled, need to be fooled. They scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior. Poor women, in particular, tend to be deeply religious and more than willing to see Jarret as the Second Coming. Religion is all they have. Their employers and their men abuse them. They bear more children than they can feed. They bear everyone's contempt.

And yet, whether or not extreme Jarretites say it is a sin, they want pictures of their little ones. And I charge less than local photographers. I'm kinder than photographers too. I've never drawn a child's dirt or its sores, or its rags. That isn't necessary. I've made older plain boys handsome and plain girls pretty for their lovers or for their parents. I've even managed after many tries to draw the dead, guided by the loving memory of a relative or friend. I don't know how ac­curate these drawings are, of course, but they please people.

I think I'll be able to earn a living sketching, teaching, reading, and writing for people as long as I stick to squatter settlements and the poor sections of towns. And mere is a bonus to my becoming acquainted with the people in these places. Many of the people in the squatter settlements work in the yards and homes of somewhat-better-off people in the towns and cities. The squatters do gardening, housecleaning, painting, carpentry, childcare, even some plumbing and elec­trical work. They serve people who have houses or apartments to live in but can't afford to support even unsalaried live-in servants. Such people pay small sums of money or provide food or clothing to get their work done. Squatters who do this kind of work get a chance to see and hear any number of useful things. If, for instance, new children have appeared at an employer's home or at a home nearby, regular day laborers know of it. And if the price is right, they'll tell what they know. Information is as much for sale here as is any­thing else.

In spite of my efforts, though, we found Justin not by buy­ing information, but because he escaped from his new fam­ily and came looking for us. He's 11 years old now—old enough to decide for himself what's true and what isn't and too old to be told that the woman he's called mother for eight of his 11 years was evil and worshiped the devil.

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

I had just finished a pen-and-ink sketch of a woman and her two youngest kids, sitting outside their wood-and-plastic shack. I was headed back up to my room at the hotel. The streets in Georgetown are all dirt tracks or trash-filled ditches—open sewers—where you might step in anything. The Georges were sensible enough to build their collection of businesses upslope from the worst of the mess, but I can only do my work by going down to where most of the peo­ple are. I haven't bought much since I've been here, but I have invested in a pair of well-made, water-resistant boots.

I was thinking, as I walked, about the woman whom I had just drawn with her three-month-old and her 18-month-old. The mother isn't 30 yet, but she looks fifty. She has nine kids, sparse, graying hair, and almost no teeth. I felt as though I had gone back in time. Farther back, I mean. We were nineteenth-century in Acorn. What is this, I wondered? Eighteenth? And yet, perversely, I found myself filled with envy. Sometimes I look at these poor, sad women and I'm almost sick with envy. At least they have their children. If they have nothing else, they have their children. I look at the children and I draw them, and I can hardly stand it.

As I tramped up the hill toward my room at George's, I saw a little boy squatting by the side of the path, his head in his hands. He was just another scrawny little kid in rags. I thought he might be having a nosebleed, and that made me want to hurry past him. My sharing makes me a coward sometimes. But it also makes me resist being a coward.

I stopped. "Are you all right, honey?" I asked.

He jumped at the sound of my voice, then stared up at me. He was not bleeding, but his Lips were cut and swollen and he had an old slash in his cheek and a big black-and-blue swelling on the left side of his forehead. I froze the way I had learned to freeze when confronted with unexpected pain, and the kid mumbled something that I didn't understand because his mouth was so swollen. Then he just launched himself at me.

I thought at first that it was some kind of attack. I thought he might have a knife or an old-style razor or even a skin patch of some poison or a drug. There's nothing new about thieving or murderous children. In a big squatter settlement like Georgetown, there were quite a few of them, although they tended to go after the small, the weak, or the sick. And they tended to travel in packs. Then somehow, before the boy touched me, I knew him. I recognized his wounded, dis­torted face in spite of the pain he was giving me.

Justin! Justin beaten and cut, but alive. I held him, ignor­ing the people around us who stared or muttered. Justin is small and wiry. I suspect he still has quite a bit of growing to do. He's White, red-haired, and freckled. In short, he doesn't look like someone who should be hugging me. But in Georgetown although people might stare, they don't interfere. They mind their own business. They don't need any­one else's trouble.

I held him away from me and looked him over. He was filthy and bloody, and he didn't look as though he had had much to eat recently. The cuts on his face and mouth and his bruised head weren't his only injuries. He moved as though he hurt elsewhere.

"Is Mama here, too?" he asked.

"She's here," I said.

"Where?"

"I'm taking you to her." We had begun to walk together up toward the George complex.

"Is the Doctor there too?"

I stopped, staring up toward the complex, and looked down, waiting until I could keep my voice steady. "No, Jus. He's not here."

The Justin I had known back before Camp Christian would have accepted these words at face value. He might have asked where Bankole was, but he wouldn't have said what this much older, wounded, wiser child said.

"Shaper?"

I hadn't heard that title for a while. In fact, I hadn't heard my name for a while. In Georgetown, I called myself Cory Duran. It was my stepmother's maiden name, and I used it in the hope of attracting my brother's attention if he hap­pened to be around. The false name is accepted here because even though I'd been to Georgetown several times before the destruction of Acorn, among the permanent residents, only Dolores George and her husband knew my name. And the Georges don't gossip.

As for the title, in Acorn, all the children called me "Shaper." It was the title that seemed right for one teaching Earthseed. Travis, too, was called Shaper. So was Natividad.

"Shaper?"

"Yes, Jus."

"Is the Doctor dead?"

"Yes. He's dead."

"Oh." He had begun to cry. He had not been crying over his own injuries, but he cried for my Bankole. I took his hand and we walked up the hill to George's.

Like the rest of us, Allie has been working for Dolores George. I never worried about my own ability to earn my way. I worried about Harry's depression, but not about his resourcefulness. He would have little trouble. Nina Noyer didn't give me time to worry about her. She arrived at Georgetown and almost immediately fell in love with one of the younger George sons. In spite of her two lost sisters, in spite of Dolores George's disapproval, Nina and the boy are so intense, so wrapped up in one another that Dolores knows she could only alienate her son by objecting. She hopes the sudden passion will bum itself out. I'm not so sure.

But I worried about Allie. She is healing. She talks now as much as she ever did—which is to say, not a lot She can think and reason. But not all of her memory has come back. For that reason, I told Dolores some of her story and hoped aloud that some permanent job could be found for her. Dolores first gave her small jobs to do, cleaning floors, repairing steps, painting railings When she saw that Allie worked well and made no trouble, she said Allie could stay as long as she wanted to. No salary, just room and board.

I stopped at a tree stump about halfway up the hill and sat down and took both of Justin's hands between mine. His face looked bad, and it was hard to look at him, but I made myself do it. "Jus, they hurt your mother."

He began to look afraid. "Hurt her how?"

"They put a collar on her. They put collars on all of us. They hurt her with the collar. I don't know whether you've ever seen—"

"I have. I saw collar gangs working on the highway and in Eureka, fixing potholes, pulling weeds, stuff like that. I saw how a collar can hurt you and make you fall down and twitch and scream."

I nodded. "Collars can do more than that. Someone got really mad at your mother and used the collar to hurt her badly. She's almost okay now, but she's still having some trouble with her memory."

"Amnesia?"

"Yes. Most of what she's lost is what happened in the weeks and months just before she was hurt. That was a bad time for us all, and it may be a mercy that she's lost it. But don't be surprised if you ask her about something and she doesn't remember. She can't help it."

He thought about that for a while, then asked in almost a whisper, "Will she remember me?"

"Absolutely. We've been in contact with all sorts of peo­ple trying to find out where you and the others were." Then I couldn't help myself. I had to ask a few questions for my­self. "Justin, were you with any of the other kids? Were you with Larkin?"

He shook his head. "They took us all to Arcata to the church there. Then they made us all separate. They said we were going to have new Christian American families. They said... they said you were all dead. I believed them at first, and I didn't know what to do. But then I saw how they would lie whenever they felt like it. They would say things about us and about Acorn that were nothing but lies. Then I didn't know what to believe."

"Do you know where they sent Larkin—or any of the others?"

He shook his head again. "They made me go with some people who had a girl and a boy of their own. I was almost the first one to go. I didn't get to see who got the other kids. I guess they went with other families. The people who got me, the man was a deacon. He said it was his duty to take me. I guess it was his duty to beat me up, too!"

"Did he do this to your face?"

Justin nodded. "He did and his son—Carl. Carl said my mother was a devil worshiper and a witch. He was always saying that. He's 12, and he thinks he knows everything. Then a few days ago, he said she was a... a whore. And I hit him. We got into a big fight and his father came out and called me an ungrateful little devil-worshiping bastard. Then they both beat the hell out of me. They locked up me in my room and I went out the window. Then I didn't know where to go, so I just went south, out of town, down toward Acorn. The deacon had said it wasn't there anymore, but I had to see for myself. Then a woman saw me on the road and she brought me here. She gave me some food and put some medicine on my face. She had a lot of kids, but she let me stay with her for a couple of days. I guess she would have let me live there. But I wanted to go home."

I listened to all this, then sighed. "Acorn really is gone," I said. "When we finally broke free, we burned what was left of it"

"You burned it?"

"Yes. We couldn't stay there. We would have been caught and collared again or killed. So we took what we could carry, and we burned the rest. Why should they be able to steal it and use it? We burned it!"

He drew back from me a little, and I was afraid I was scar­ing him. He's a tough little kid, but he had been through a lot. I felt ashamed of letting my feelings show more than I should have.

Then he came close and whispered, "Did you kill them?" So I hadn't been scaring him. The look on his thin, battered face was intense and angry and far more full of hate than a child's face should have been.

I just nodded.

"The ones who hurt my mother—did you kill them, too?"

"Yes."

"Good!"

We got up, and I took him to Allie. I watched them meet, saw Allie's joyous tears, heard her cries. I could hardly stand it, but I watched.

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

Then Harry got an idea about where his kids might be. He had gotten a job driving one of the George trucks or riding shotgun—something he had had plenty of experience doing back at Acorn. He was even able to make friends with the clannish George men. He would never be one of them, but they liked him, and once he'd proved himself by spotting and helping to prevent an attempted hijacking, they trusted him. This enabled him to see more of the state than he could have by just wandering on foot. But it also kept him on the job, with the trucks most of the time. He couldn't look for his children himself—couldn't walk through the little towns, looking at the children as they worked or played. Doing that would probably get him into trouble, anyway.

Justin had given us two sad, useful bits of information. First, all the kids' names were changed. Justin had been called Matthew Landis, just another of Deacon Landis's sons. The older kids like Justin would remember their real names and who their parents were, but the younger ones, the babies, my Larkin....

The second bit of information was that sibling groups were always broken up. This seemed an unnecessary bit of sadism, even for the Church of Christian America. Justin didn't know why it was done, hadn't seen it done, but he had heard Deacon Landis mention it to another man. So children who had already lost their homes and their parents or guardians had also had their sisters or brothers and their own names taken from them.

With all that, how will I find Larkin?

How will I ever find my child? I've asked all the day la­borers I know to look for a Black girlchild, dark-skinned, not yet two years old, but probably big for her age, who has suddenly appeared in a household where there had been no pregnancy, in a household that might not be Black, or in a foster home. I've pretended to be a day laborer myself and substituted for two of the cleaning women so that I could look at two children who had been reported to me as possi­ble candidates. Neither was anything like Larkin.

But is Larkin anything like the Larkin I remember any­more? How can she be? Babies grow and change so fast. She was only two months old when they took her. I'm afraid I won't know her now. But I still have the hand and foot prints. I've made copies of them so that I can always carry one. I've even gone to the police—the Humboldt County Sheriff—with my false name and told them a false story of how my daughter had been stolen from me as I walked along the highway. I left them a copy of the hand and foot prints and paid the "fee for police services" that you have to pay for anything other than an immediate emergency. I don't know whether that was wise or useful, but I did it. I'm doing everything I can think of.

That's why I don't blame Harry for what he's done. I wish like hell he hadn't done it, but I don't blame him. When you're desperate, you do desperate things.

Harry came to see me two days ago.

He'd just returned from a three-day trip up into Oregon and then over to Tahoe and back. The usual thing for him to do after a trip like that should have been to eat something and go to bed. Instead, he came to my room to see me. I was working at a small rickety table I had bought I had sketched a mother and her three children and made the table the price of the sketch. My tiny, closetlike room itself came with a window, a block of wood to wedge it open or bar it shut, a narrow shelfbed, a lot of dirt, and a few bugs. I had bought a pitcher and basin for quick washing, some soap, a chair and table for working, and a jug with the best available water purifier for drinking water. And bug spray.

"Fancy," Dolores had said when she came to look at it "Why the hell don't you spring for a decent room? You can afford it"

"When I find my daughter, maybe I'll be able to think about things like that," I said. "I don't know what it will cost me to find her, then maybe buy her. I don't know what I might have to do." And maybe, I did not say, maybe I'll have to kidnap her and run. Maybe I'll have to pay the Georges for a fast trip across one or two state lines. Maybe anything. I couldn't waste money.

"Yeah," she said. T haven't heard anything more, but my people are listening."

They're still listening. So are the freelancers to whom I had paid a little and promised a lot—people like Cougar, I'm sorry to say—except that they deal in even younger children. I feel filthy every time I have to talk to one of them. If anyone deserves to be collared and put to work, they do, and yet mere hasn't been any particular Christian American crackdown on them.

Apparently we represent the greater danger to Jarret's America. What was done to us was illegal, by the way. We've learned that much. No new laws have been made to okay any of it. But, as Day Turner said long ago, a lot of people are convinced that cracking down on the poor and the different is a good idea. There are now a number of legal cases—Hindus, Jews, Moslems, and others who have managed to avoid being caught when Crusaders came for them. But even among these people, young children who are taken away are not often returned. Charge after charge of neglect and abuse is made against the parents or guardians. In fact, the parents or guardians might wind up collared legally for the horrible things they were supposed to have done to their children. Sometimes brainwashed or terrorized children are produced to give testimony against biological parents they haven't seen for months or years. I wasn't sure what to make of that last. Justin had not turned against Allie, no matter what he had been told about her. What kind of brainwashing would make a child turn against its own parents?

So the legal road seems not to lead to a return of abducted children—or it hasn't so far. It hasn't even led to an end of the camps. Camps are mentioned on the nets and disks as being strictly for the rehabilitation and reeducation of minor criminals—vagrants, thieves, addicts, and prostitutes. That's all. No problem.

We are, as we have always been, on our own.

"I quit my job today," Harry said to me. He sat on my bed and leaned forward on my table, looking across at me with disturbing intensity. “I'm leaving."

I put aside the lessons I had been writing for one of my students—a woman who wanted to learn to read so that she could teach her children. My students can't or won't afford books of any kind. I write lessons for them on sheets of paper that they buy from George's and bring to me. I've taught them to practice first letters, then words on the ground in a smooth patch of dirt. They write with their fore­fingers to learn to feel the shapes of letters and words. Then I make mem write with sharp, slender sticks so they can get used to the feel of using a pencil or pen.

It seems I've always taught With four younger brothers, I feel as though I were born teaching. I like doing it. I'm just not sure how much good it does. How much good does any­thing do now?

"What have you heard?" I asked Harry.

He stared off to one side, out my window.

I reached across the table to take his hand. 'Tell me, Harry."

He looked at me and tried, I think, to smile a little. "I've heard that there's a big children's home run by Christian America down in Marin County," he said, "and there's an­other in Ventura County. I don't have addresses, but I'll find them. Truth is, I've heard there are a lot of children's homes run by CA. But those are the only two I know of in Califor­nia." He paused, looked out the window again. "I don't know whether they would send our kids to one of those places. Justin says he didn't hear anything about children's homes or orphanages. He says all he heard was that he and the other kids were going to new families to be raised the right way as patriotic Christian Americans."

"But you're going down to Ventura and Marin to find out for surer?”

“I have to."

I thought about this, then shook my head. "I don't believe they'd send kids as young as yours and mine down there. They have them adopted or fostered around here somewhere. At worst they'd be here in small group homes. The Ventura home would have kids pouring into it from all of southern California. The Marin home would be full of kids from the Bay Area and Sacramento."

"So you go on looking here," he said. "I want you to. If you find our kids, it will be as good as if I found them. They won't be in the hands of crazy people—of their own mother's murderers."

"Here is where it makes sense to look!" I said. "If CA is doing any moving of kids, chances are, it's from south to north. It's still crowded down there—with all the immigration from Latin America plus the people from Arizona and Nevada and those who were already there."

"I've got to go," he said. "I know you're right, but it doesn't matter. I don't know where to look up here. Adop­tions, foster homes, even small group homes don't call enough attention to themselves. We've been checking them, one by one, and we could go on doing that for years. But if the kids are down south, I might be able to get a job at first one, then the other of the big homes and get a look at them."

I sat back, thinking. "I believe you're wrong," I said. "But if you insist on going—"

"I'm going."

"You shouldn't go alone. You need someone to watch your back."

"I don't want you with me. I want you here, searching." He took two palm-sized debit phones from his jacket pocket and pushed one toward me. They were a cheap version of the prepaid renewable kind of satellite phone that we used to use at Acorn. "I bought these yesterday," he said. "I paid for five hours of in-country use. They're cheap, simple, and anonymous. All you can do with them is call and receive, voice only. No screen, no net access, no message storage. But at least we'll be able to talk to one another."

"But your chances of surviving alone on the road—"

He got up and walked toward the door.

"Harry!" I said, standing myself.

"I'm tired," he said. "I've got to get some sleep. I'm half dead."

I let him go. His depression was bad enough. Depression and exhaustion together were too much to fight against He hadn't been himself since Zahra's death. I would let him rest, then try to make him see reason. I wouldn't try to make him stay, but going alone was suicide. He knew it. Once he had rested, he would be able to admit it.

But the next day—today—Harry was gone.

He left George's early this morning, buying a ride in a truck headed for Santa Barbara. I didn't know about it until I saw Dolores this morning. She handed me the note that he had left with her for me.

“I have to go, Lauren," it said. "Keep the phone with you and stay put. I'll come back. If I don't find the kids down south, I'll help you continue the search up here. Don't worry, and take care of yourself."

All his life, he's been a funny, gentle, bright person with an undercurrent of seriousness. We've known one another all our lives, and felt comfortable enough together to be brother and sister. He and Zahra were my best friends. I've lost count of the number of times we've saved one an­other's lives.

And now it's over. Truly over. Zahra is dead. Harry is gone. Everyone is gone. Allie meant to live in Georgetown with Justin. She had the one thing she cared about: her son. And Nina Noyer just wanted to get married and settle down with people who could take care of her and protect her. I don't blame her, but I find I don't like her much. Her little sisters might be wearing collars now or living with people who abused and terrorized them in God's name. Or they might be in some huge warehouse of a children's home, lost in the crowd, but separated from one another if Justin was right—lost to everyone who had ever loved them.

It isn't that Nina doesn't care. She just doesn't think she can do anything to help them. "I'm not Dan," she's told me more than once. "Maybe it means I'm weak, but I can't help it I can't do what he did. I can't! It's not fair to expect me to. He was a boy—almost a man! I just want to get married and be happy!"

She's 16. Her brother was only 15 when he rescued her and brought her to us. But as she says, she's not him.

Chapter 17

□ □ □

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

All prayers are to Self

And, in one way or another,

All prayers are answered.

Pray,

But beware.

Your desires,

Whether or not you achieve them

Will determine who you become.

I WONDER WHAT my life would have been like if my mother had found me. i don't doubt that she would have stolen me from the Alexanders—or died trying. But then what? How long would it have been before she put me aside for Earth-seed, her other kid? Earthseed was never long out of her thoughts. If it didn't comfort her during her captivity—and I suspect it did—at least it sustained her. It enabled her to sur­vive without giving up or truly giving in to her captors. I couldn't have helped her. I was her weakness. Earthseed was her strength. No wonder it was her favorite.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

sunday, april 8, 2035

I'm on my own.

I've left Georgetown, left my students old and young, left my room furnished with junk. I left some of my money and one of my guns with Allie so that I'll have something to fall back on if I'm robbed. I've come first to the message cache—two days' walk—to see whether anything has been left. I'm there now. I'll sleep there in the shelter of a living coast redwood tree that time and rot have hollowed out enough to hold a human or three. I've found unsigned mes­sages from Travis and Natividad and from Michael and Noriko. Both identified themselves by referring to incidents that any member of the community would remember and understand but that would mean nothing to strangers. I did the same in the message I left.

Neither couple had found their kids. Both had left numbers. They had bought new phones—the cheap, talk-and-listen, debit phones like Harry's and mine. I left three numbers— mine, Harry's, and one where Allie could be reached. Then I wrote a message to those who might come later.

"Justin is with us again! He's all right. There is hope. God is Change!"

God is Change. I wrote the words, then settled back to think about that. I find that I haven't thought much about Earthseed in the past few months. I believe its teachings helped me, helped all of us to survive Camp Christian. God is Change. I've lost none of my belief. All that I said to Bankole so long ago—two years ago—is still true.

So much has been destroyed, but it is still true. Earthseed is true. The Destiny is as significant a human purpose as it ever was. Only Acorn is gone. Acorn was precious, but it wasn't essential.

I sit here now, trying to think, to plan. I must find my daughter, and I must teach Earthseed, make Earthseed real to as many people as I can reach, and send them out to teach others.

The truth is, when I taught reading, I used a few simple Earthseed verses. This is what I did in Acorn, and I did it au­tomatically in Georgetown. Strange to say, no one objected. People sometimes looked puzzled, sometimes disagreed or agreed with enthusiasm, but no one complained. Some peo­ple even seemed to think that what I read was from the Bible. I couldn't bring myself to let them go on thinking that.

"No," I told them. "It's from something else called Earthseed: The Books of the Living." And I showed them one of the few surviving copies—retrieved from one of the caches. Since I've been calling myself Cory Duran, no one con­nected me with the strangely named author, Lauren Oya Olamina.

Lines like the familiar,

"All that you touch,

You Change...."

And

"To get along with God

Consider the consequences of your behavior."

And

"Belief

Initiates and guides action Or it does nothing."

And

"Kindness eases Change."

People seemed to like brief fragments of verses or com­plete rhythmic verses because rhythmic verses are easy to memorize. And memorizing verses made it easier to spot individual words and learn to recognize them in their written forms. In that way, I guess I never stopped teaching Earth-seed. But without the Destiny, without a more complete un­derstanding of the belief system, what I taught was no more than a few scattered verses and aphorisms. Nothing unifies them.

I must find at least a few people who are willing to learn more, and who will be willing to teach what they've learned. I must build ... not a physical community this time. I guess I understand at last how easy it is to destroy such a commu­nity. I need to create something wide-reaching and harder to kill. That's why I must teach teachers. I must create not only a dedicated little group of followers, not only a collection of communities as I once imagined, but a movement. I must create a new fashion in faith—a fashion that can evolve into a new religion, a new guiding force, that can help humanity to put its great energy, competitiveness, and creativity to work doing the truly vast job of fulfilling the Destiny.

But first, somehow, I must find my child.

I am alone, and I know that's stupid. To travel alone is to make yourself more vulnerable than you need to be. I wish I could have talked Harry into working with me. He's en­dangering himself and wasting his time down in southern California and around the Bay Area. I don't believe there's any chance at all that our kids have been shipped down there. They're here. And his kids and mine are so young that they've surely been adopted. My Larkin could grow up be­lieving that she is the daughter of one her kidnappers. His kids were four and two when they were taken, so I suspect the same could happen to them—if we let it.

Tomorrow, I'll start walking toward Eureka. I'm armed. I've got the old .45 semiautomatic that made the trip up from Robledo with me. I had tucked it into one of the caches, thinking I wouldn't need it again. Also, I've done all that seemed reasonable to make myself look both poor and male. I'm big and plain. That's good camouflage, at least. It's not real protection, but it's the best I can do. If someone shoots me, I've got no backup, so chances are, I'm dead. But I'm not the only solitary walker out there, and maybe the robbers and the crazies will go for the smaller ones who look like less trouble. And there are fewer robbers and crazies. Or there were. At Georgetown and on my way here, I saw more and more men in military uniforms—or parts of uniforms. They helped fight Jarret's stupid Al-Can war. Now a lot of them are having a hard time earning a living—and they're often very well armed.

There are more slavers now that Jarret's Crusaders have joined Cougar and his friends in the game of collaring peo­ple and grabbing their kids. I'm hoping to be invisible to them. I want to keep quiet, do my work, and to look just crazy enough to encourage people to let me alone. As a man, though, I must be very careful how I follow up the few leads I have on small Black children who have appeared all of a sudden in families where no one was pregnant. I don't want to be mistaken for a lurking child molester or a kidnapper.

I hope to work for meals in Eureka and Arcata—a little yard work, some painting, some minor carpentry, wood that needs chopping.... If I stay away from the wealthier neigh­borhoods, I should be all right. Wealthy people wouldn't need to hire me anyway. They would keep a few servants— people working for room and board. I would be working for what was left of the middle class. I would be just one more day laborer working for his next meal.

Down south and in the Bay Area, a laborer's life would be harder. People are too distrustful of one another, too walled off from one another if they can afford walls. But up here, men are hired, and then at least decently fed. They might even be allowed to sleep in a shed, a garage, or a barn. And they might—often do—get a look at the kids of the family. They might—often do—hear talk that later proves useful. For most laborers, useful means they might be steered to­ward other jobs or away from trouble or let in on where peo­ple keep their valuables. For me, useful might mean rumors of adoptions, fosterings, and children's homes.

I'll wander around the Eureka-Arcata complex and the surrounding towns for as long as I can. Allie has promised to go on collecting information for me, and she says I can crash in her rooms at Georgetown when I need a rest in a real bed. Also, if I'm picked up and collared, Dolores will vouch for me—for a fee, of course. She knows what I'm doing. She doesn't think I've got a chance in hell of suc­ceeding, but she's got kids and grandkids, so she knows I have to do this.

'I'd do the same thing myself," she said when I talked to her. "I'd do all I could. Goddamn these so-called religious people. Thieves and murderers—that's all they are. They should wear the collar. They should roast in hell!"

There are times when I wish I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

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

sunday, april 15, 2035

I’ve spent my first week doing other people's scutwork. Odd how familiar all the jobs are—helping to plant vegetable or flower gardens, chopping weeds, pruning bushes and small trees, cleaning up a winter's accumulation of trash, repairing fences, and so on. These are all things I did at Acorn where everyone did everything. People seem pleased and a little surprised that I do good work. I've even earned some money by suggesting extra jobs that I was willing to take care of for a fee. People warn their kids away from me most of the time, but I do get to see the kids, from babies in their mothers' arms to toddlers to older kids and neighbor kids. I haven't seen any familiar faces yet, but, of course, I've just begun. I've gone to as many Black or mixed-race families as I could. I don't know what kind of people I should be check­ing, but it seemed best to begin with these people. If they seem at all friendly, I ask them if they have friends who might hire me. That's gotten me a couple of jobs so far.

My problem has turned out to be having a place to sleep. A guy offered to let me sleep in his garage that first night if I'd give him a blow job.

I wasn't sure whether he thought I was a man or had spot­ted that I was a woman, and I didn't care. I bedded down that night in a shabby park where a few redwood trees survive. There, among a small flock of other homeless people, I slept safely and awoke early to avoid the police. People in Georgetown have warned me that collaring vagrants is what cops do when they need some arrests to justify their pay­checks. It's also what some of the meaner ones do when they've had no amusement for a while.

It was cold, but I've got warm, lightweight clothing and a comfortable, shabby old sleepsack that I'd used on the trip up from Robledo. I woke up aching a little from the uneven ground, but otherwise all right. I needed a bath, but com­pared to the amount of crud I used to accumulate back in Camp Christian, I was almost presentable. I had already de­cided that I'd wash when I could, sleep sheltered when I could. I can't afford to let myself worry about things like that.

On Tuesday, I was allowed to sleep in a toolshed, which was a good thing, because it rained hard.

On Wednesday I was back in the park, although the woman I worked for told me that I should go to the shelter at the Christian America Center on Fourth Street.

Hell of a thought. I've known for weeks that the place existed, and I've kept well clear of it. Laborers at Georgetown say they avoid the place. People have been known to vanish from there. I'm afraid I'll have to go there someday, though. I need to hear more about what the CA people do with or­phans. Problem is, I don't know how I'll be able to stand it I hate those bastards so much. There are moments when I'd kill them all if I could. I hate them.

And I'm terrified of them. What if someone recognizes me? That's unlikely, but what if? I can't go to the CA Cen­ter yet. I'll make myself do it soon, but not yet. I'd rather blow my own brains out than wear a collar again.

On Thursday, I was in the park, but on Friday and Satur­day, I slept in the garage of an old woman who wanted her fence repaired and painted and her windowsills sanded and painted. Her neighbor kept coming over "to chat" I under­stood that the neighbor was just making sure that I wasn't murdering her friend, and I didn't mind. It turned out well in the end. The neighbor wound up hiring me herself to chop weeds, prepare the soil, and put in her vegetable and flower gardens. That was good because she was my reason for going to her part of town. She was a blond woman with a blond husband, and yet I had heard through my contacts at Georgetown that she had two beautiful dark-haired, dark-skinned toddlers.

The woman turned out to be not well off at all, and yet she paid me a few dollars in addition to a couple of good meals for the work I did. I liked her, and I was glad when I saw that the two children she had adopted were strangers. I write now in her garage, where there is an electric light and a cot. It's cold, of course, but I'm wrapped up and warm enough ex­cept for my hands. I need to write now more than ever be­cause I have no one to talk to, but writing is cold work on nights like this.

sunday, may 13, 2035

I've been to the Christian America Center. I've finally made myself go there. It was like making myself step into a big nest of rattlesnakes, but I've done it. I couldn't sleep there. Even without Day Turner's experience to guide me, I couldn't have slept in the rattler's nest. But I've eaten there three times now, trying to hear what there might be to hear. I re­member Day Turner telling me that he had been offered a bed, meals, and a few dollars if he helped paint and repair a couple of houses that were to be part of a CA home for orphaned children. He had not known the addresses of the houses. Nor had he known Eureka well enough to give me an idea where these houses might be, and that was a shame. Our children might not still be there—if they were ever there. But I might be able to learn something from the place. There might be records that I could steal or rumors, memo­ries, stories that I could hear about. And if several of our children had been sent there, then perhaps I could find one or two of them still there.

That last thought scared me a little. If I did find a couple of our kids, I couldn't leave them in CA hands. One way or another, I would have to free them and try to reunite them with their families. That would draw such attention to me that I would have to leave the area, and, I suspect, leave my Larkin. This is assuming that I would be able to leave, that I didn't wind up wearing another collar.

The food at the CA Center was edible—a couple of slices of bread and a rich stew of potatoes and vegetables flavored with beef, although I never found meat of any kind in it People around me complained about the lack of meat, but I didn't mind. Over the past several months, I've learned to eat whatever was put in front of me, and be glad of it If I could keep it down, and there was enough of it to fill my stomach, I considered myself lucky. But it amazed me that I could keep anything down while sitting so close to my ene­mies at the CA Center.

My first visit was the worst. My memory of it isn't as clear as it ought to be. I know I went there. I sat and I ate with several dozen other homeless men. I managed not to go crazy when someone began to preach at us. I know I did all that, and I know that afterward, I needed the long, long walk to the park to get my head back into working order. Walk­ing, like writing, helps.

I did it all in blind terror. How I looked to others I don't know. I think I must have seemed too mentally sick even to talk to. No one tried to make conversation with me, although some of the men talked to one another. I got in line and after that I moved automatically, did what others did. Once I sat down with my food, I found myself crouching over it, pro­tecting it, gulping it like a hawk who's caught a pigeon. I used to see people doing that at Camp Christian. You got so damned hungry there sometimes, it made you a little crazy. This time, though, it wasn't the food mat I cared about. I wasn't mat hungry. And if I'd wanted to, I could have changed my clothing, gone in to a decent restaurant, and bought a real meal. It's just that somehow, if I focused on the food and filled my mind with it as well as my body, I could keep myself still and not get up and run, screaming, out of that place.

I have never, in freedom, been so afraid. People edged away from me. I mean crazies, junkies, whores, and thieves edged away from me. I didn't think about it at the time. I didn't think about anything. I'm surprised that I manage to remember any of it now. I moved through it in a cloud of blank terror and an absolute readiness to kill.

I had wrapped my gun in my spare clothes and put it at the bottom of my pack. I did this on purpose so that there would be no quick way for me to get at it. I didn't want to be tempted to get at it. If I needed it inside the CA Center, I was already dead. I couldn't leave it anywhere, but I could unload it. I took a lot of time earlier that evening, unloading it and wrapping it up, watching myself wrap it up so that even in the deepest panic I would know I couldn't get at it.

It worked. It was necessary, and it worked.

Years ago, when my neighborhood in Robledo burned, when so much of my family burned, I had to go back. I got away in the night, and the next day, I had to go back. I had to retrieve what I could of that part of my life that was over, and I had to say goodbye. I had to. Up to that moment, and long afterward, going back to my Robledo neighborhood was the hardest thing I had ever done. This was worse.

When I went to the CA Center for the second time several days later, it wasn't as bad. I could look and think and listen. I have no memory of any word said during the first visit. I tried to listen, but I couldn't take anything in. But during the second, I heard people talking about the food, about em­ployers who didn't pay, about women—I was in the men's section—about places up north, out east, or down south where there was work, about joints that hurt, about the war.... I listened and I looked. After a while, I saw myself. I saw a man crouching over his food, spooning it into his mouth with intense and terrible concentration. His eyes, when he looked up, looked around, were vacant and scary. In line, he shambled more than he walked. If anyone got close to him, he looked insanity and death at them. He was barely human. People kept away from him. Maybe he was on something. He was big. He might be dangerous. I kept away from him myself. But he was me a few days before. I never found out what his particular problems were, but I know they were as terrible to him as mine are to me.

I heard almost nothing about orphaned children or Jarret's Crusaders. A couple of the men mentioned that they had kids. Most don't talk much, but some can't stop talking: their long-lost homes, women, money, brave deeds and suf­fering during the war.... Nothing useful.

Still I went back for the third time last night. Same food. They throw in different vegetables—whatever they happen to have, I suppose. The only inevitable ingredient in the stew is potatoes, but dinner is always vegetable stew and bread. And after the meal, there's always at least an hour of sermon to bear. The doors are shut. You eat, then you listen. Then you can leave or try to get a bed.

My first sermon I couldn't remember if my life depended on it. The second was about Christ curing the sick and being willing to cure us too if we only asked. The third was about Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The lay minister who delivered this third sermon was Marc.

It was him, my brother, a lay minister in the Church of Christian America.

In fear and surprise, I lowered my head, wondering whether he had seen me. There were about two hundred other people in the men's cafeteria that night—men of all races, ethnicities, and degrees of sanity. I sat toward the back of the cafeteria, and off to the left of the podium or pul­pit or whatever it was. After a while I looked up without raising my head. Nothing of Marc's body language indicated that he had seen me. As he warmed to his sermon, though, he did mention that he had a sister who was steeped in sin, a sister who had been raised in the way of the Lord, but who had permitted herself to be pulled down by Satan. This sis­ter had, through the influence of Satan, done him a great in­jury, he said, but he had forgiven her. He loved her. It hurt him that she would not turn from sin. It hurt him that he had had to turn from her. He shed a few tears and shook his head. At last he said, "Jesus Christ was your Savior yesterday. He is your Savior today. He will be your Savior forever. Your sister might desert you. Your brother might betray you. Your friends might try to pull you down into sin. But Jesus will always be there for you. So hold on to the Lord! Hold on! Stand firm in your faith. Be courageous. Be strong. Be a sol­dier of Christ. He will help you and protect you. He will raise you up and never, never, never let you down!"

When it was over, I started to slip away with the crowd. I needed to think. I had to figure out how to reach Marc out­side the CA Center. At the last minute, I went back and left a note for the lay minister with one of the servers. It said, "Heard you preach tonight. Didn't know you were here. Need to see you. Out front tomorrow evening where dinner line forms up." And I signed it Bennett O.

One of our brothers was named Bennett Olamina. Olam­ina was an unusual name. Someone in CA might notice it and remember it from records of the inmates at Camp Chris­tian. Also, it occurred to me that signing the name I was using, "Cory Duran," might be cruel. Cory was Marc's mother, after all, not mine. I didn't want to remind him of the pain of losing her or hint that she might be alive. And if I had written Lauren O., I thought Marc might decide not to come. We hadn't parted on the best of terms, after all. Per­haps it's also cruel to hint to him that one of our two youngest brothers might still be alive. Perhaps he'll know or guess that I wrote the note. But I had to use a name that would get his attention. I must see him. If he won't do any­thing else, surely he'll help me find Larkin. He can't know what happened to us. I don't believe he would have joined CA if he knew it was made up of thieves, kidnappers, slavers, and murderers. He wanted to lead, to be important, to be respected, but he had been a slave prostitute himself. No matter how angry he was at me, he wouldn't wish me captivity and a collar. At least, I don't believe he would.

The truth is, I don't know what to believe.

An old man is letting me sleep in his garage tonight. I chopped weeds and cleared trash for him today. Now I'm content. I've spread some flat boards over the concrete and covered the boards with rags. In my sleepsack on top of these, I'm pretty comfortable. There's even a filthy old flush toilet and a sink with running water out here—a real luxury. I had a wash. Now I want to sleep, but all I can do, all I can think of is Marc in that place, Marc with those people. Maybe he was even there at the time of my first visit We might have seen each other and not known. What would he have done, I wonder, if he had recognized me?

Chapter 18

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Beware:

All too often,

We say

What we hear others say.

We think

What we're told that we think.

We see

What we're permitted to see.

Worse!

We see what we're told that we see.

Repetition and pride are the keys to this.

To hear and to see

Even an obvious lie

Again

And again and again

May be to say it,

Almost by reflex

Then to defend it

Because we've said it

And at last to embrace it

Because we've defended it

And because we cannot admit

That we've embraced and defended

An obvious lie.

Thus, without thought,

Without intent,

We make

Mere echoes

Of ourselves—

And we say

What we hear others say.

from Warrior by Marcos Duran

I've always believed in the power of God, distant and pro­found. But more immediately, I believe in the power of reli­gion itself as a great mover of masses. I wonder if that's odd in the son of a Baptist minister. I think my father honestly believed that faith in God was enough. He lived as though he believed it But it didn't save him.

I began preaching when I was only a boy. I prayed for the sick and saw some of them healed under my hands. I was given timings of money and food by people who had not enough to eat themselves. People who were old enough to be my parents came to me for advice, reassurance, and com­fort. I was able to help them. I knew the Bible. I had my own version of my father's quiet, caring, confident manner. I was only in my teens, but I found people interesting. I liked them and I understood how to reach them. I've always been a good mimic, and I'd had more education than most of the people I dealt with. Some Sundays in my Robledo slum church, I had as many as 200 people listening as I preached, taught, prayed, and passed the plate.

But when the city authorities decided that we were no more than trash to be swept out of our homes, my prayers had no power to stop them. The city authorities were stronger and richer. They had more and better guns. They had the power, the knowledge, and the discipline to bury us.

The governments, city, county, state, and federal plus the big rich companies were the sources of money, information, weapons—real physical power. But in post-Pox America, successful churches were only sources of influence. They offered people safe emotional catharsis, a sense of commu­nity, and ways to organize their desires, hopes, and fears into systems of ethics. Those things were important and neces­sary, but they weren't power. If this country was ever to be restored to greatness, it wasn't the little dollar-a-dozen preachers who would do it.

Andrew Steele Jarret understood this. When he created Christian America and then moved from the pulpit into pol­itics, when he pulled religion and government together and cemented the link with money from rich businessmen, he created what should have been an unstoppable drive to re­store the country. And he became my teacher.

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

I love my Uncle Marc. There were times when I was more than half in love with him. He was so good-looking, and a beautiful person, male or female, can get away with saying and doing things that would destroy a plainer one. I never stopped loving him. Even my mother, I think, loved him in spite of herself.

What Uncle Marc had been through as a slave marked him, I'm sure, but I don't know how much. How can you know what a man would be like if he had grown up unmarked by horror? What did my mother's time as a beaten, robbed, raped slave do to her? She was always a woman of obsessive purpose and great physical courage. She had always been willing to sacrifice others to what she believed was right. She recognized that last characteristic in Uncle Marc, but I don't believe she ever saw it clearly in herself.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

monday, may 14, 2035

I met with my brother earlier tonight

I spent the day helping my latest employer—a likable old guy full of stories of his adventures as a young man in the 1970s. He was a singer and guitar player, with a band. They traveled the world, played raucous music, and had wild sex with hundreds, maybe thousands, of eager young girls. Lies, I suppose.

We put in a vegetable garden and pruned some of the dead limbs from his fruit trees. I don't mean "we," of course. He said, "Well, how about we do this?" Or, "Do you think we can do that?" And he tried to help, and that was all right. He needed to feel useful, just as he needed someone to hear his outrageous stories. He told me he was 88 years old. His two sons are dead. His middle-aged granddaughter and his sev­eral young great-grandchildren live in Edmonton, Alberta, up in Canada. He was alone except for a neighbor lady who looked in now and then. And she was 74 herself.

He said I could stay as long as I wanted to if I would help him out in the house and outside. The house wasn't in good shape. It had been neglected for years. I couldn't have done all the repairs, of course, even if he could have afforded the needed materials. But I decided to stay for a few days to do what I could. I didn't dare stay long enough for him to begin to depend on me, but a few days.

I thought that would give me a base to work from while I got to know my brother again.

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

I'm trying to decide how to talk about my meeting with Marc. Tonight's walk back to the old man's house has helped me to relax a little, calm down a little. But not enough.

Marc was waiting near the long dinner line when I ar­rived. He looked so handsome and at ease in his clean, styl­ish, casual clothing. He had worn a dark blue suit when he preached the night before, and he had managed, even as he told a couple of hundred thieves and winos how awful I was, to look startlingly beautiful.

"Marc," I said.

He jumped, then turned to stare at me. He had glanced in my direction, but it was obvious that he hadn't recognized me until I spoke to him. He had been encouraging a man in line ahead of me to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Sav­ior and let Jesus help with his drinking problem. It seemed mat the CA Center had a rigorous drying-out program, and Marc had been working hard to sell it.

"Let's take a walk around the corner and talk," I said, and before he could recover or answer, I turned and walked away, certain that he would follow. He did. We were well away from the line and well away from any listening ears when he caught up.

"Lauren!" he said. "My God, Lauren, is it you? What in hell are you—?"

I led him around the corner, out of sight of the line, and onto a dirty little side street that led to the bay. I went on sev­eral steps down that street, then stopped and turned and looked at him.

He stood frowning, staring at me, looking uncertain, sur­prised, almost angry. There was no shame or defensiveness about him. That was good. His reaction on seeing me would have been different, I'm sure, if he had known what his Camp Christian friends had been doing to me.

"I need your help," I said. "I need you to help me to find my daughter."

This made nothing at all clear to him, but it did shift him away from anger, which was what I wanted. "What?" he said.

"Your people have her. They took her. I don't... I don't believe that they've killed her. I don't know what they've done with her, but I suspect that one of them has adopted her. I need you to help me find her."

"Lauren, what are you talking about? What are you doing here? Why are you trying to look like a man? How did you find me?"

"I heard you preach last night."

And again he was reduced to saying, "What?" This time he looked a little embarrassed, a little apprehensive.

"I've been coming here in the hope of finding out what CA does with the children it takes."

"But these people don't take children! I mean, they rescue orphans from the streets, but they don't—"

"And they 'rescue' the children of heathens, don't they? Well, they 'rescued' my daughter Larkin and all the rest of the younger children of Acorn! They killed my Bankole! And Zahra! Zahra Moss Balter from Robledo! They killed her! They put a collar around my neck and around the necks of my people. CA did that! And then those holy Christians worked us like slaves every day and used us like whores at night! That's what they did. That's what kind of people they are. Now I need your help to find my daughter!" All that came out in a rush, in a harsh, ugly whisper, my face up close to his, my emotions almost out of control. I hadn't meant to spit it all out at him that way. I needed him. I meant to tell him everything, but not like that.

He stared at me as though I were speaking to him in Chi­nese. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Lauren, come in. Have some food, a bath, a clean bed. Come on in. We need to talk."

I stood still, not letting him move me. "Listen," I said in a more human voice. "Listen, I know I'm dumping a lot on you, Marc, and I'm sorry." I took a deep breath. "It's just that you're the only person I've felt that I could dump it on. I need your help. I'm desperate."

"Come on in." He wasn't quite humoring me. He seemed to be in denial, but not speaking of it. He was trying to di­vert me, tempt me with meaningless comforts.

"Marc, if it's possible, I will never set foot in that poi­sonous place again. Now that I've found you, I shouldn't have to."

"But these people will help you, Lauren. You're making some kind of mistake. I don't understand it, but you are. We would rather take in whole families than separate them. I've worked on the apartments that we're renovating to help get people off the streets. I know—"

Now he was humoring me. "Have you ever heard of a place called Camp Christian?" I asked, letting the harshness come back into my voice. He was silent for a moment, but I knew before he spoke that the answer to my question was yes.

"I wouldn't have named it that," he said. "It's a reeduca­tion camp—one of the places where the worst people we handle are sent These are people who would go to prison if we didn't take them. Minor criminals, most of them— thieves, junkies, prostitutes, that kind of thing. We try to reach them, teach them skills and self-discipline, stop them from graduating to real prisons."

I listened, shaking my head. He was either a great actor or he believed what he was saying. "Camp Christian was a prison," I said. "For seventeen months it was a prison. Be­fore that, it was Acorn. My people and I built Acorn with our own hands, then your Christian America took it, stole it from us, and turned it into a prison camp."

He just stood there, staring at me as though he didn't know what to believe or what to do.

"Back in September," I said, keeping my voice low and even. "Back in September of '33, they came with seven maggots, smashing through our thorn fence, picking off our watchers. I knew we couldn't fight a force like that. I sig­naled everyone to run like hell, scatter. You know we had drills—drills for fighting and drills for fading into the hills. None of it mattered. They gassed us. Three people might have gotten away: the mute woman named May and the two little Noyer girls. I don't know. They were the only ones we never heard anything about. The rest of us were captured, collared, and used for work and for sex. Our younger chil­dren were taken away. No one would tell us where. My Bankole, Zahra Balter, Teresa Lin, and some others were killed. If we asked anything, we were punished with the col­lars. If we were caught talking at all, we were punished. We slept on the floor or on shelves in the school. Your holy men took our houses. And they took us, too, when they felt like it. Listen!"

He had stopped looking at me and begun to look past me, looking over my right shoulder.

"They brought in street people and travelers and minor criminals and other mountain families, and they collared mem too," I said. "Marc! Do you hear me?'

"I don't believe you," he said at last. "I don't believe any of this!"

"Go and look at what's left of Acorn. Look for yourself. Go to one of the other so-called reeducation camps. I'll bet they're just as bad. Check them out."

He began to shake his head. “This is not true! I know these people! They wouldn't do what you're accusing them of."

"Maybe some of them wouldn't. But some of them did. All that we built they stole."

"I don't believe you," he said. But he did believe. "You're making some kind of mistake."

"Go and see for yourself," I repeated. "Be careful how you ask questions. I don't want you to get into trouble. These are dangerous, vicious people. Go and see."

He said nothing for a few seconds. It bothered me that he was frowning, and again, not looking at me. "You were col­lared?" he asked at last.

"For seventeen months. Forever."

"How did you get away? Was your sentence up?"

"What? What sentence?"

"I mean did they let you go?"

"They never let anyone go. They killed quite a few of us, but they never released anyone. I don't know what their long-range plans were for us, if they had any, but I don't see how they could have dared to let us go after what they'd done to us."

"How did you get free? You don't escape once someone's put a collar on you. There's no escape from a collar."

Unless someone deals with the devil and buys your free­dom, I thought. But I didn't say it. "There was a landslide," I did say. "It smashed the cabin where the control unit was kept—my cabin. The control unit powered all the individual belt control units somehow. Maybe it even powered the col­lars themselves. I'm not sure. Anyway, once it was smashed and buried, the collars stopped working, and we went into our homes and killed our surviving guards—those who hadn't been killed by the landslide. Then we burned the cabins with their bodies inside. We burned them. They were ours! We built every one with our own hands."

"You killed people...?"

"Their names were Cougar, Marc. Every one of them was named Cougar!"

He turned—wrenched himself around as though he had to uproot himself to move:—and started back toward the corner.

"Marc!"

He kept walking.

"Marc!" I grabbed his arm, pulled him back around to face me. "I didn't tell you this to hurt you. I know I have hurt you, and I'm sorry, but these bastards have my child! I need your help to get her back. Please, Marc."

He hit me.

I never expected it, never saw it coming. Even when we were kids, he and I didn't hit each other.

I stumbled backward, more startled than hurt. And he was gone. By the time I got to the corner, he had already van­ished into the CA Center.

I was afraid to go in after him. In his present frame of mind, he might turn me in. How will I get to see him again? Even if he decides to help me, how will I contact him? Surely he will decide to help me once he's had time to think. Surely he will.

sunday, june 3, 2035

I've left the Eureka-Arcata area.

I'm back at the message tree for the night. I brought a flashlight so that I could have light where I wanted it with­out taking risks with fire. Now, shielding my light, I'm read­ing what's been left here. Jorge and Di have left a number, and Jorge says he's found his brother Mateo. In fact, as with Justin, his brother found him. On the northern edge of Gar­berville where there are still big redwoods, Mateo found Jorge's group sleeping on the ground. He had been looking tor them for months. Like Justin, he had run away from abuse, although in his case, the abuse was sexual. Now he's wounded and bitter, but he's with his brother again.

There was no news from Harry. Too soon for him to have gotten back, I suppose. I phoned him several times, but there was no answer. I'm worried about him.

I wrote a note, warning the others to avoid the CA Center in Eureka. I wrote that Marc had been there, but that he wasn't to be trusted.

He isn't to be trusted.

I made myself go back to the CA Center on Wednesday of last week—went back as a sane, but shabby woman rather than as a dirty, crazy man. It took me too long to get up the courage to do that—to go. I worried that Marc might have warned his CA friends about me. I couldn't really believe he would do that, but he might, and I'd had nightmares about them grabbing me as soon as I showed up. I could feel them putting on the collar. I'd wake up soaking wet and scared to death.

At last, I went to a used-clothing store and bought an old black skirt and a blue blouse. From a cheap little shop, I bought some makeup and a scarf for my hair. I dressed, made up, then dirtied up a little, like maybe I'd been rolling around on the ground with someone.

At CA, I got in line with the other women and ate in the small, walled-off women's section. No one seemed to pay any attention to me, although my height was much more no­ticeable when I was among only women. I slumped a little and kept my head down when I was standing. I tried to look weary and bedraggled rather than furtive, but I discovered that furtive wasn't all that unusual. Most of the women, like most of the men, were stolid, indifferent, enduring. But a few were chattering crazies, whiners, or frightened little rab­bits. There was also a fat woman with only one eye who prowled the room and tried to grab bread from your hands even while you were eating it. She was crazy, of course, but her particular craziness made her nasty and possibly dan­gerous. She let me alone, but harassed several of the smaller women until a tiny, feisty woman pulled a knife on her.

Then the servers called security, and security men came out of a back room and grabbed both women from behind.

It bothered me very much that they took both women away. The fat crazy woman had been permitted to go about her business until someone resisted. Then both victim and victimizer were treated as equally guilty.

It bothered me even more that the women were not thrown out. They were taken away. Where? They didn't come back. No one I spoke to knew what had happened to them.

Most troubling of all, I recognized one of the security men. He had been at Acorn. He had been one of our "teach­ers" there. I had seen him take Adela Ortiz away to rape her. I could shut my eyes and see him dragging her off to the cabin he used. There had to be many such men still alive and free—men who were not at Camp Christian when we took back our freedom, then took our revenge. But this was the first one that I had seen.

My fear and my hate returned full force and all but choked me. It took all my self-control to sit still, eat my food, and go on being the lump I had to seem to be. Day Turner had been collared after a fight that he said he had had nothing to do with. Christian America officials made them­selves judges, juries, and, when they chose to be, executioners. They didn't waste any effort trying to be fair. I had heard on one of my earlier visits that the all-male CA Center Se­curity Force was made up of retired and off-duty cops. That, if it were true, was terrifying. It made me all the more cer­tain that I was right not to go to the police with the true story of what had been done to me and to Acorn. Hell, I hadn't even been able to get my own brother to believe me. What chance would I have to convince the cops if some of them were working for CA?