Parable of the Talents (21 page)

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

Bankole nodded.

He stopped us as close to Zahra's watch station as the truck could get. We all took one more look around, then Harry opened the door. Before we could call her, Zahra darted from cover and jumped into the truck. She was bleed-ing from the left side of her face and neck, and that took me by surprise.

At once, I felt pain in my own face and neck, but managed not to react. Habit. Harry grabbed Zahra and yelled for Bankole.

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

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

"Your watch, too, Bankole. I think you're going to be busy."

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

"Of course."

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

We all looked at her.

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

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

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

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

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

Were they armed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brother and sister have rope burns at their wrists, ankles, and necks. Also, Bankole says, they've suffered a great deal of sexual abuse. The girl told him they were forced "to do it with strangers for money." Dan has endured even more beat-ing than Nina has, and both have what Bankole calls,

"the usual infections and tissue damage." Nina says she got preg-nant, but one night during her captivity, she had a miscar-riage. She hadn't known what was happening, but one of the other slaves told her. Well, I suppose it would be surprising if she hadn't gotten pregnant. For her sake, I'm glad she miscarried.

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

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

FRIDAY, MARCH
18, 2033

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

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

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

It had taken an incredible amount of abuse over the past few months.

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

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

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

"What about his sister?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

but he did it!"

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

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

Now the long day is over.

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

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

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

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

"As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and

destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God

Is Infinite Potential.

God

Is Change."

The other dead—the intruders—were four men and a woman, all in their twenties or early thirties. They were dirty and scratched up, but well-dressed, well-armed, well-heeled.

They had plenty of Canadian money in their pock-ets. Were they slavers? Drug dealers? Thieves? Rich kids slumming?

Even Nina wasn't sure. She and Dan had es-caped from their original captors and had been on the high-way, headed for Acorn when this new group spotted them and came after them.

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

The intruders' guns are, like our own, good-quality, well-cared-for automatic rifles with laser sites. One is German, one's American, and the three newest are Russian.

They're all as illegal as hell and as common as oranges. We'll hide them in our survival caches scattered through the mountains. The only thing they had that we'll keep with us and use, as we need it, is some of their money. Most of that will go in the caches too. It's all worn and wrinkled and not identifiable. The fact that there's so much of it—more per person than any group of us would carry around—tells us that these people were either rich or involved in some profitable illegal activity, or both.

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

Chapter 10

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

We can,

Each of us,

Do the impossible

As Long as we can convince

ourselves

That it has been done before.

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

They had reason to be.

On the other hand, I'm not at all surprised that Uncle Marc left. There really was no place for him at Acorn. He was

"Olamina's little brother" or, as my mother said, a nice boy.

He could have married and begun a family in one more little cabin. That would have been intolerable to him. He was a world saver, after all, like my mother. Or not like her, since Earth was the only world that interested him. Like the Peral-tas, he was in religious and political disagreement with Acorn, and, like the Peraltas, he was probably wise to leave when he did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and

persistent, posi-tive obsession. Without

persistence, what remains is an en-thusiasm of

the moment. Without adaptability, what remains

may be channeled into destructive fanaticism.

Without positive obsession, there is nothing at

all.

FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
FRIDAY, JULY
22, 2033