Parable of the Talents (33 page)

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 un-buried maggot, but it was locked and impervious to any ef-fort 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 in-testines 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 Fair-cloths. 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 daugh-ters 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 col-lected, 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 reli-gious 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 un-likely 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 every-thing, 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 destruc-tive. Some of us died of it. Ramon Figueroa Castro commit-ted suicide because, according to one of his foster brothers, "He was too stubborn to try to fit in and forget about his sin-ful 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 ex-cuses to hurt you. Bide your time. Watch your captors.

Lis-ten 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 peo-ple 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 chil-dren 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 re-minded 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 pun-ishments 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 mer-cenaries were easier to please. They wanted no children in-jured 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.

Madi-son 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 sto-ries 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, van-ish, 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 home-work, I was encouraged to vanish—or rather, I wasn't en-couraged 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 appre-ciate 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 ques-tions 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 Jar-ret'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 know-ing 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 slav-ery together, but I didn't believe that we could survive free-dom 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 writ-ten 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 rela-tives 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.