Parable of the Talents (37 page)

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 fore-fingers 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 any-thing 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 an-other 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 Califor-nia." 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. Adop-tions, 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 an-other'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.

? ? ?

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 sur-vive 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 mes-sages 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 au-tomatically in Georgetown. Strange to say, no one objected. People sometimes looked puzzled, sometimes disagreed or agreed with enthusiasm, but no one complained.

Some peo-ple 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 con-nected 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 com-plete 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 un-derstanding 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 commu-nity. 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 en-dangering 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 be-lieving 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 peo-ple 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 neigh-borhoods, 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.