Parable of the Talents (14 page)

"They shouldn't be a problem. Let alone, any one of them would have killed him sooner or later. But with treatment, he should be all right—physically, anyway."

"He was 14 when I saw him last. He liked playing soccer and reading about the past and about foreign places. He was always taking things apart and sometimes getting them back together again, and he had a huge crush on Robin Balter, Harry's youngest sister. I don't know anything about him now.

I don't know who he is."

"You'll have plenty of time to find out. I've told him he's going to be an uncle, by the way."

"Reaction?"

"None at all. At the moment, I don't think that even he knows who he is. He seems willing enough to be looked after; but I get the feeling he doesn't much care what hap-pens to him. I think. . . I hope that that will change. You may be his best medicine."

"He was my favorite brother—and always the best-looking person in the family. He's still one of the best-looking peo-ple I've ever seen."

"Yes," Bankole said. "In spite of his scars, he's a good-looking boy. I wonder whether his looks have saved him or destroyed him. Or both."

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

It seems that things can never go well for long.

Dan Noyer has run away. He slipped past the watch and out of Acorn at least in part because of the instructions I gave to the night watch. Beth Faircloth says she saw someone—a man or boy, she thought.

"I thought the figure was too tall to be Marcus," she said when she phoned me. "But I wasn't sure—so I didn't shoot"

The running figure had been dressed in dark cloth-ing with something dark over the head and face.

Not until I had verified that Marcus was still there did I think of Dan.

To tell the truth, I had forgotten about Dan. My mind had been filled with Marcus—getting him back, keeping him, wondering what had happened to him. I had paid no atten-tion to Dan. Yet Dan had suffered a terrible disappointment. He was in real pain. I knew that, and I left him to the Balters, who, after all, have two energetic little kids of their own to deal with.

I got Zahra out of bed and asked her to check on Dan. He had been staying with them for four months now. Of course, he was gone. His note said, "I know you'll think I'm wrong, but I have to find them. I can't let them be with someone like that Cougar. They're my sisters!" And after his signature, a postscript: "Take care of Kassi and Mercy until I come back.

I'll work for you and pay you. I'll bring Paula and Nina back and they'll work too."

He's only 15. He saw Cougar and his crew. He saw my brother. He saw Georgetown. And seeing all that, he learned nothing!

No, that's not true. He's learned—or finally realized—all the wrong things. I had assumed he knew what his sisters' fate might be if they were alive—that they might be prosti-tutes, might wind up in some rich man's harem or working as slave farm or factory laborers. Or, I suppose, they might wind up with some pervert who likes cutting out female tongues. They might even wind up as the property of some-one who cares for them and looks after them even as he makes sexual use of them. That would be the best possibil-ity. The worst, perhaps, is that they might survive for a while as

"specialists"—prostitutes used to serve crazies and sadists.

These don't live long, and that's a mercy. Theirs is a fate that could also befall a big, baby-faced, well-built boy like Dan. I wonder how much of this Dan understands. He is a good, brave, stupid boy, and I suspect he'll pay for it.

He might come back, of course. He might come to his senses and come home to help take care of Kassia and Mercy. Or we night find him through our outside contacts. I'll have to make sure that the word is out on him as well as on Nina and Paula. Problem is, finding him won't help if he's still intent on hunting for his sisters. We can't chain him here. Or rather, we won't If he insists on dying, he will die, damn him.

Damn!

Chapter 7

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

The child in each of us

Knows paradise.

Paradise is home.

Home as it was

Or home as it should have

been.

Paradise is one's own place,

One's own people,

One's own world,

Knowing and known,

Perhaps even

Loving and loved.

Yet every child

Is cast from paradise—

Into growth and destruction,

Into solitude and new

community,

Into vast, ongoing

Change.

FROM
Warrior
BY MARCOS DURAN

When I was a kid, I never let anyone know how much the future scared me. In fact, I couldn't see any future. I was born into a world that was no bigger than the walled neigh-borhood enclave where my family lived. My father had lived there as a boy and inherited the house from his father.

My world was a cage. When one of my brothers dared to leave the cage, to run away from home, someone outside caught him and cut and burned all the flesh from his living body. Sometimes I catch myself wondering how long it took him to die.

I admit, my brother was no angel. He was mean and not very bright He loved our mother, and he was her favorite, but I don't think he ever gave a damn about anyone else. Still, even though he was as tall as our father, he was only 14 when he was killed. To me, that makes the men who killed him worse than he ever was. How could they be human and do a thing like that to somebody? I used to imagine them— the killers—waiting for me whenever neighborhood adults with guns risked taking us out of the cage for a little while. The world outside was like my brother at his worst multi-plied by about a thousand: stupid, mean, so out of control that it might do anything. It was like a dog with rabies, tear-ing itself to pieces, and wanting to do the same to me.

And then it did just that.

Oh, yes. It did.

I could return the compliment. I could have reached for the power to do that. But I would rather fix the problem. What happened to me shouldn't happen to anyone, yet such things have happened to thousands of people, perhaps mil-lions. I've read history. Things weren't always this way. They don't have to go on being this way. What we have bro-ken we can mend.

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

My Uncle Marc was the handsomest man I've ever seen. I think I fell more than half in love with him before I even met him. There were also times when I was afraid for him. I don't know what to make of our family. My grandfather was, from what I've heard, a good and dedicated Baptist minister. He looked after his family and his community and insisted that both be armed and able to defend themselves in an armed and dangerous world, but beyond that, he had no ambitions. It never seemed to occur to him that he could or should fix the world. Yet he was the father of two would-be world-fixers.

How did that happen?

Well, my mother was a sharer, a little adult at 15, and a sur-vivor of the destruction of her whole neighborhood at 18.

Perhaps that was why she, like Uncle Marc, needed to take charge, to bring her own brand of order to the chaos that she saw swallow so many of the people she loved. She saw chaos as natural and inevitable and as clay to be shaped and di-rected. As she says in one of her verses:

Chaos

Is God's most dangerous

face—

Amorphous, roiling, hungry.

Shape Chaos—

Shape God.

Act

Alter the speed

Or the direction of Change.

Vary the scope of Change.

Recombine the seeds of

Change.

Transmute the impact of

Change.

Seize Change,

Use it.

Adapt and grow.

And so she tried to adapt and to grow. Perhaps she feared being like her own mother, who looked for help in a "smart"

drug and wound up damaging her child and killing herself.

Chaos. Whatever my mother's reasoning, she decided that she knew what was wrong with her world, and she knew what would fix it: Earthseed. Earthseed with all its defini-tions, admonitions, requirements,
purpose.
Earthseed with its Destiny.

My Uncle Marc, on the other hand, hated the chaos. It wasn't one of the faces of his god. It was unnatural. It was de-monic. He hated what it had done to him, and he needed to prove that he was not what it had forced him to become.

No Christian minister could ever hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control.

He was a man with a wound that would not heal until he could be cer-tain that what had happened to him could not happen again to anyone, ever.

My father called my mother a zealot. I think that name ap-plies even more to Uncle Marc. And yet, I think Uncle Marc was more of a realist. Uncle Marc wanted to make the Earth a better place. Uncle Marc knew that the stars could take care of themselves.

FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2032

Dan hasn't come back. I had no reason to expect him to give up and come home so quickly, but I did hope. Jorge, Dia-mond Scott, and Gray Mora are going to trade at the Coy street market today. I've told them to leave word with the few people we know in Coy, and on the way back, to tell the Sullivan family. Their quickest way home takes them past the Sullivan place.

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

Marcus slept through the night, causing no trouble to him-self or to us. Bankole happened to be in the kitchen when he awoke, and that was good. Bankole took him out to one of our composting toilets. I didn't see him until later when he had washed and dressed. Then he came hesitant and tenta-tive, to my kitchen table.

"Hungry?" I asked. "Sit down."

He stared at me for several seconds, then said, "When I woke up, I thought all this was just a dream."

I put a piece of fruit-laden acorn bread in front of him. We had both been raised on the stuff because our old neighbor-hood happened to have several very fruitful California live oak trees within the walls. My father didn't believe in waste, so he found out how to use acorns as food.

Native Ameri-cans did it. We could do it. He and my mother worked at learning to use not only acorns but cactuses, palm fruit, and other plants that might otherwise be seen as useless.

For Marcus and me, all this was food from home.

Marcus took the acorn bread, lit into it, and chewed slowly. First he looked delighted, then tears began to stream down his face. I gave him a napkin and a glass of what had once been a favorite morning drink of his—a mug of hot, sweet apple juice with a lemon squeezed into it. The apples we pressed in southern California were of a different variety, but I don't think he noticed. He ate, wiped his eyes, looked around. He stared at Bankole as Bankole came in, then fo-cused on the rest of his breakfast, all but huddling over it the way a hawk does when it's claiming and protecting its kill.

There was no more talk for a while.

When we had all had enough to eat, Bankole looked at Marcus and said, "I've been married to your sister for five years. During all that time, we believed that you and the rest of her family were dead."

"I thought she was dead, too," Marcus said.

"Zahra Balter—she was Zahra Moss when you knew her—she said she saw all of you killed," I told him.

He frowned. "Moss? Balter?"

"We didn't know Zahra very well back home. She was married to Richard Moss. He was killed and she married Harry Balter."

"God," he said. "I never thought I'd hear those names again. I do remember Zahra—tiny, beautiful, and tough."

"She's still all three. She and Harry are here. They've got two kids."

"I want to see them!"

"Okay."

"Who else is here?"

"A lot of people who've been through hard times. No one else from home, though. This community is called Acorn."

"There was a little girl. . . Robin. Robin Balter?"

"Harry's little sister. She didn't make it."

"You thought I didn't."

"I. . . saw Robin's body, Marc. She didn't make it."

He sighed and stared at his hands resting in his lap. "I did die back in '27.1 died. There's nothing left."

"There's family," I said. "There's me, Bankole, the niece or nephew who'll be born next year. You're free now. You can stay here and make a life for yourself in Acorn. I hope you will. But you're free to do what you want. No one here wears a collar."

"Have you ever worn one?'" he asked.

"No. Some of us have been slaves, but I never was. And I believe you're the first of us who's worn a collar. I hope you'll talk or write about what happened to you since the old neighborhood was destroyed."

He seemed to think about that for a while. "No," he said.

"No."

Too soon. "Okay," I said, "but. . . do you think any of the others could have survived? Cory or Ben or Greg? Is it pos-sible . . . ?"

"No," he repeated. "No, they're dead. I got out. They didn't."

Sometime later, as we got up from the table, two men ar-rived by truck from the little coastal town of Halstead.

Like Acorn, Halstead is well off the main highway. In fact, Halstead must be the most remote, isolated town in our area with the Pacific Ocean on three sides of it and low moun-tains behind it.

In spite of all that, Halstead has a major problem. Hal-stead used to have a beach and above the beach was a palisade where the town began. Along the palisade, some of the biggest, nicest houses sat, overlooking the ocean. On one side of the peninsula were the old houses, large, well-built wood frame structures. On the other side were newer houses built on land that was once a seaside golf course. All of these are

. . . were lined up along the palisade. I don't know why people would build their homes on the edge of a cliff like that, but they did. Now, whenever we have heavy rains, when there's an earthquake, or when the level of the sea rises enough to saturate more land, great blocks of the pal-isades drop into the sea, and the houses sitting on them break apart and fall.