Parable of the Talents (12 page)

edition—books of history, how-to books, and dozens of novels. Jeff King ran across the books being all but given away at a street market in Arcata.

"Someone was clearing out a room so that relatives could move into it," he told me. "The owner of the books had died.

He was considered the family eccentric, and no one else in the household shared his enthusiasm for reading big, bulky books made of paper. I didn't think you'd mind my buying them for the school."

"Mind?" I said. "Of course not!"

"Lucio said he wasn't sure we should spend the money, but Zahra said you were crazy for more books. I figured she'd know."

I grinned. "She knows. I thought everyone knew."

There were fifteen boxes of books. We took them into the school, and today we recovered as best we could from the stuff on the Worldisk by looking through the books and shelving them. We read bits of this and that to one another.

People got excited and interested, and everyone carried away a book or two to read. After hearing the news, we all needed to read something that wasn't depressing.

I wound up with a couple of books on drawing. I haven't tried to draw anything since I was seven or eight. Now, all of a sudden, I find myself interested in learning to draw, learning to draw well—if I can. I want to learn something new and unrelated to any of our troubles.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2032

I'm pregnant!

No surrogates, no computerized eggs, no drugs. Bankole and I did it the good old-fashioned way—at last!

It's crazy that it should happen now, just when America has elected a wild man to lead it. Bankole and I began try-ing as soon as we could see that we were going to survive here at Acorn. Bankole's first wife couldn't have children. As a young woman back in the 1990s, she was in a serious car accident and wound up with a hysterectomy, among other things. Bankole claimed he never minded. He said the world was going to hell just as fast as it could, and it would be an act of cruelty to bring a child into it. They talked about adopting, but never did.

Now he's going to be a father, and in spite of all his talk, he's almost jumping up and down—that is, whenever he isn't being scared to death. He's talking about moving into an established town again. He hadn't said anything about that since right after we got the truck, but now the subject is back, and he's serious. He wants to protect me. I realize that. I suppose I should be glad he feels that way, but I wish he would show his protective feelings in another way.

"You're a kid yourself," he said to me. "You don't have the sense to be afraid."

I can't seem to get angry with him for saying things like that. He says them, then he thinks for a moment, and if he doesn't watch himself, he begins to grin like a boy. Then he remembers his fears and looks panicked. Poor man.

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

God is Change

And hidden within Change

Is surprise, delight,

Confusion, pain.

Discovery, loss,

Opportunity, and growth.

As always, God exists

To shape

And to be shaped.

IT'S A GOOD THING, I suppose, that my mother's God was Change. Her life had a way of changing in abrupt, important ways. I don't suppose she was really any more prepared for sudden changes than anyone else, but her beliefs helped her cope with them, even take advantage of them when they came.

I enjoyed reading about the way she and my father reacted to my conception. Such mismatched people, yet such a nor-mal reaction. She couldn't know that she was in for other major changes even before she could get used to being pregnant

FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2032

Spokesmen for Christian America have announced that the Church will be opening homeless shelters and children's homes—orphanages—in several states, including Califor-nia, Oregon, and Washington. This is just a beginning, they say.

They hope in time to "extend a helping hand to the peo-ple of every state in the union, including Alaska." I heard this on a newsdisk that Mike Kardos bought at a Garberville street market yesterday. Time to begin to clean up the Chris-tian America image, I suppose. I just hope the California shelters and orphanages will be put where they're most

needed—down around San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I don't want them up here. Christian America is made up of scary people, and I find it impossible to believe mat they intend only to do good and to help others.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER
17, 2032

Today I found my brother Marcus.

This is impossible, I know, but I found him. He's sick, fearful, confused, and angry—but he's alive!

I found him in Eureka, California, although five years ago, down in Robledo, he died.

I don't know what to say about this. I don't know how to deal with it Writing about it helps. Somehow, writing al-ways helps.

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

Bankole needed medical supplies and we had a couple of deliveries of winter vegetables and fruit to make to small, independent stores who have already begun to buy our pro-duce. After that, we had a special errand.

Bankole hadn't wanted me to come. He worries about me more than ever now, and he's always after me to move to an established town. We could have a nice little house and he could be town doctor. We could live nice empty little antique lives, and I could forget I've spent the past five years strug-gling to establish Acorn as the beginning of Earthseed.

Now that we've got the truck, traveling is a lot less dangerous than it used to be, but my Bankole is more worried than ever.

And, to tell the truth, there are still things to worry about.

We've all been looking over our shoulders since Dovetree.

But we've got to live. We've got work to do.

"So Acorn is safe now?" I said to Bankole. "I'll be safe if I stay there?"

"Safer than you are traveling all over the county," he mut-tered, but he knew me well enough to let it go. At least he would be along to keep an eye on me.

Dan Noyer would also be along because our special er-rand concerned him. On our way home we were going to meet with a man who had contacted us through friends in Georgetown, claiming that he had one of Dan's younger sis-ters, and that he would sell her to us. The man was a pimp, of course—"a livestock man, specializing in lamb and chicken" as one of the euphemisms went. That is, a man who puts slave collars on little children and rents their bod-ies to other grown men. I hate the idea of having anything to do with a slug like that, but he was exactly the kind of walk-ing filth who would have Nina and Paula Noyer.

I had asked Travis and Natividad Douglas to come along with us, to ride shotgun, and in Travis's case, to fix the truck if anything went wrong with it. I've trusted them both more than once with my life. I trust their judgment and their abil-ity to fight. I felt a need to have people like that behind me when I was dealing with a slaver.

We made our deliveries to the two independent markets early, as we had promised—produce from our fields and from what was left of Dovetree's huge kitchen garden and small grove of fruit trees. The Dovetree truck and farm trac-tor had both been stolen during the raid that destroyed Dovetree. The houses and outbuildings had been torched along with the stills and fields. But a number of fruit trees and garden crops survived. Since the five surviving Dove-trees have decided to stay with us—to join us as members of Earthseed once their required probationary year has ended—we've felt free to take what we could from the prop-erty. The two Dovetree women have relatives elsewhere in the mountains, but they don't much like them, and they don't want to be squeezed into crowded houses with them. They do get along with us, and they know that while they're crowded now, they will have their own cabin by the time they're Welcomed as members.

Of course, they could go back and live on their own land.

But two women and three children wouldn't survive on their own. They wouldn't survive alone even in a place as hidden and protected as Acorn. Trying to live right off the highway at Dovetree, they would be enslaved or killed in no time. Any home or farm that can be seen from the highway is bound to be tempting to the desperate and the opportunistic, and now the fanatical. Dovetree as it was survived because the family was large, well armed, and had a reputation for toughness.

That worked until a small, determined army came along. The attackers really were Jarret loyalists, by the way. They came from the Eureka-Arcata area, from the new Christian America churches that have sprung up there. They have no government-sanctioned authority, but they believe God is on their side, and the cleansing work they do is God's work.

Somehow, this kind of thing doesn't tend to make it to the news nets or disks. I've picked it up by talking to peo-ple. I know a few good sources of local news.

Bankole bought his supplies next. They're the most ex-pensive things we buy, but they're also the most necessary. We are, as Bankole says, a healthy, young community, but the world around us isn't healthy. Thanks to malnutrition, climate change, poverty, and ignorance, a lot of old diseases are back, and some of them are contagious.

There was an outbreak of whooping cough in the Bay Area last winter, and it came up the highway as far north as Ukiah down in Men-docino County. Why it stopped there, I don't know. And there was rabies last summer. Several people in squatter camps were bitten by rabid dogs or rats. They died of it, and a couple of teenagers were shot because they pretended to have rabies just to scare people. Whatever money it costs to keep us healthy, it's worth it.

When our business in Eureka was finished, we went to meet the slaver at the place he and I had agreed on, just south and east of Eureka in Georgetown. The squatter settlement called Georgetown extends well back from the high-way in coastal hills. The place is a human-made desert, dusty when the weather is dry, muddy when it rains, almost treeless, plantless, filled with the poorest of the poor and their open sewers, their malnutrition, their drugs, crime, and disease.

Bankole says it was once a beautiful area of farms, trees, and bills. That must have been a long time ago. The settlement is called Georgetown because the most permanent-looking thing in it is a cluster of shabby-looking redwood buildings. They're on a flattened hilltop and can be seen from just about everywhere in the settlement There's a store, a café, a games hall, bar, a hotel, a fuel station, and a repair shop where tools, guns, and vehicles of all kinds might be restored to usefulness. The whole complex is called George's, and is run by a huge family surnamed George. At the cafe, George's has a lot of rentable cubby-hole mailboxes where packages and paper messages can be left, and there's a big bank of pay phones where, for a seri-ous fee, you can access almost any network, service, group, or individual. This service in particular has made the place a combination message center, meeting place, and Old West saloon. It's natural to arrange to meet people there to trans-act business of all kinds. Elroy George and his sons, his sons-in-law, his brothers, and his brothers' sons see to it that people behave themselves. The Georges are a formidable tribe. They stick together, and people respect them. Their prices are high, but they're honest.

You get what you pay for with the Georges. Sad to say, some of the things that get paid for in the cafe or elsewhere at the complex are slaves and drugs. The Georges aren't slavers, but they've been known to handle drugs. I wish that weren't so, but it is. I just hope they don't go the way of the Dovetrees.

They're stronger and more entrenched, and better connected politically than the Dovetrees, but who knows? Now that Jarret has been elected, who knows?

Dolores Ramos George, the matriarch of the tribe, runs the store and the care and she knows everyone. She's got a reputation for being a hard, mean woman, but as far as I'm concerned, she's just a realist. She speaks her mind. I like her.

She's one of the people with whom I left word about the Noyer girls. When she heard the story, she just shook her head. "Not a chance," she said. "Why didn't they keep a watch? Some parents got no sense at all."

"I know," I said. "But I have to do what I can—for the sake of the other three kids."

"Yeah." She shrugged. "I'll tell people. It won't do no good."

But now it looked as though it had done some good. And in thanks, I had brought Dolores a basket of big navel or-anges, a basket of lemons, and a basket of persimmons. If we found one or both of the Noyer girls as a result of her spreading the word, I would owe her a percentage of the re-ward—a kind of finder's fee. But it seemed wise to make sure she came out ahead, no matter what.

"Beautiful, beautiful fruit," she said, smiling as she looked at it and handled it She was a stout, old-looking 53, but the smile took years off her. "Around here, if you don't guard a fruit tree and shoot a couple of people to prove you mean it, they'll tear off all the fruit, then cut down the tree for firewood. I won't let my boys kill people to save trees and plants, but I really miss oranges and grapes and things."

She called some of her young grandchildren to come and take the fruit into the house. I saw the way the kids were looking at everything, so I warned them not to eat the per-simmons until they were soft to the touch. I cut one of the hard ones up and let each child have a taste of it so they would all know just how awful something so pretty could taste before it was ripe. Otherwise, they would have ruined several pieces of fruit as they tried to find a tasty, ripe per-simmon. Just yesterday, I caught the Dovetree kids doing that back at Acorn. Dolores just watched and smiled.

Any-one who was nice to her grandkids could be her friend for life—as long as they didn't cross the rest of her family.

"Come on," she said to me. "The shit pile that you want to talk with is stinkin' up the café. Is this the boy?" She looked up at Dan, seeming to notice him for the first time. “Your sister?" she asked him.