Parable of the Talents (20 page)

MONDAY, FEBRUARY
28, 2033

Marc spoke at Gathering yesterday. This is the third time he's done it. Each time he learns more about Earthseed and tries harder to convince us that our beliefs are nonsense. He seems to have decided that the unity, the Christianity, and the hope that Jarret has brought to the country makes Jarret not the monster we all feared but a potential savior. The country, he tells us, must get back to God or it is finished.

"The Earthseed Destiny," he said yesterday, "is an airy nothing. The country is bleeding to death in poverty, slavery, chaos, and sin. This is the time for us to work for our salva-tion, not to divert our attention to fantasy explorations of extrasolar worlds."

Travis, trying to explain, said, "The Destiny is important for the lessons it forces us to learn while we're here on Earth, for the people it encourages us to become. It's impor-tant for the unity and purpose that it gives us here on Earth. And in the future, it offers us a kind of species adulthood and species immortality when we scatter to the stars."

My brother laughed. "If you're looking for immortality in outer space," he said, "you've been misled. You already have an immortal soul, and where that soul spends eternity is up to you. Remember the Tower of Babel! You can follow Earthseed, build your way to go to the stars, fall down into chaos, and wind up in hell! Or you can follow the will of God.

And if you follow God's will, you can live forever, se-cure and happy, in God's true heaven."

Zahra Balter, loyal in spite of her personal beliefs, spoke up before I could. "Marc," she said, "if we have immortal souls, don't you think we'll take them with us even if we go to the stars?"

"Why do you find it so easy," Michael Kardos asked, "to believe we go to heaven after we die, but so hard to believe we can go into the heavens while we're alive? Following the Earthseed Destiny is difficult. Massively difficult. That's the challenge. But if we want to do it, someday we'll do it. It's not impossible."

I had spoken the same words to him shortly after he came to live at Acorn. He had said then with bitter contempt that the Destiny was meaningless. All he wanted to do, he said, was to earn enough money to house, feed, and clothe his family. Once he was able to do that, he said, then maybe he'd have time for science fiction.

Indeed.

SUNDAY, MARCH
6, 2033

Marc has gone.

He left yesterday with the Peraltas. They're gone for good too. They were the ones Marc managed to reach. They've al-ways felt that we should be more Christian and more patri-otic. They say Andrew Jarret is our elected leader—Ramiro Peralta and his daughter Pilar helped elect him—and a min-ister of God, so he deserves our respect.

Esteban Peralta is going to enlist in the army. He believes—the whole family believes—it's our patriotic duty, everyone's duty, to support Jarret in his "heroic" effort to revive and reunify the coun-try. They don't believe Jarret's a fascist. They don't believe that the church burnings, witch burnings, and other abuses are Jarret's doing. "Some of his followers are young and ex-citable," Ramiro Peralta says.

"Jarret will put their asses into uniform. Then they'll learn some discipline. Jarret hates all this chaos the way I hate it That's why I voted for him. Now he'll start putting things right!"

It's true that there haven't been any burnings or beatings since Jarret was inaugurated—or none that I've heard of, and I've been paying attention to the news. I don't know what this means, but I don't believe it means everything's all right. I don't think the Peraltas believe it either. I think they're just scared, and getting out of any potential line of fire. If Jarret does crack down on people who don't fit into his religious notions, they don't want to be here at Acorn.

My brother on the other hand, used to despise Jarret Now he says Jarret is just what America needs. And I'm afraid that it's me he's begun to despise. He blames me for the fail-ure of his Gathering Day sermons. He's gained no followers. The Peraltas like him and sort of agree with him. Pilar Per-alta is more than half in love with him, but even they don't see him as a minister. They see him as a nice boy. In fact, that's the way most people here in Acorn see him. He thinks this is my fault. He believes, he insists, that I coached peo-ple to attack and humiliate him at all three Gatherings. And he says with a weary, irritating,
honest
smile, "I forgive you.

I might have done the same thing to protect my turf if I had any turf to protect."

I think it was the smile that made me say more than I should have. "The truth is," I told him, "you were given a special privilege. If you were anyone else, you could have been expelled for preaching another belief system. I let you do it because you've been through so much hell, and I knew it was important to you. And because you're my brother." I would have called back the words if I could have. He would hear pity in them. He would hear condescension.

For a long moment, he stared at me. I watched him get angry—very angry. Then he seemed to push his anger away.

He refused to react to it He shrugged.

“Think of the Gatherings you've attended," I said to him.

"Name even one that didn't involve questions, challenges, argument It's our way. I did warn you. Anyone can be ques-tioned on any subject they choose to teach or advocate.

I told you that we were serious about it. We learn at least as much by discussion as by lecture, demonstration, or experi-ence."

"Forget about it," he said. "It's done. I don't blame you.

Really. I shouldn't have tried my hand here. I'll make a place for myself somewhere else."

Still no anger expressed. Yet he was furious. He wouldn't show it and he wouldn't talk about it, but it came off him like heat Perhaps that's what a collar teaches—a horrible kind of self-control. Or perhaps not. My brother was always a self-contained person. He knew how to be unreachable.

I sighed and gave him as much money as I could afford, plus a rifle, a sidearm, and ammunition for both. He's not a very good shot with anything yet, but he knows the basics, and I couldn't let him go out and wind up in the hands of someone like Cougar again. The Peralta family had been with us for two years, so they had money and possessions as a result of their work with us. Marc did not We drove him and the Peraltas into Eureka. There, they might find homes and jobs, or at least they might find temporary shelter until they could decide what to do.

"I thought you knew me," I said to my brother just before he left us. "I
wouldn't do what you're accusing me of."

He shrugged. "It's okay. Don't keep worrying about it" He smiled. And he was gone.

I don't know how to feel about this. So many people have come here and stayed or wanted to stay even if, for some reason, they couldn't. I had to expel a thief a year ago, and he cried and begged to stay. We had caught him stealing drugs from Bankole's medical supplies, so he had to go, but he cried.

As they left us, even the Peraltas looked grim and fright-ened. They were Ramiro, the father; Pilar, 18; Esteban, 17; and Eva, who was only two and whose birth at a rest stop along the highway had cost her mother's life. They had no other relatives left alive, no friends outside of Acorn who would help them if they got into trouble. And Esteban would be leaving them soon to enlist They had good reason to look worried.

Marc would be in the same situation once he left us.

Worse, he would be all alone. Yet he smiled.

I don't know whether I'll ever see him again. I feel almost as though he's died. . . died again.

THURSDAY, MARCH
17, 2033

Dan Noyer found his way back to us last night.

He came back. Amazing. I think he's been gone longer than he was with us. We tried to find him—for his little sis-ters'

sakes as much as for his. But unless you have the money to hire a small army of private cops like that guy in Texas, finding people in today's chaos is almost impossible. My finding Marcus was an accident. Anyway, Dan came home on his own, poor boy.

It was a cold night. We had all gone to bed except for the first watch of the night.

The watchers were Gray Mora and Zahra Balter.

Zahra was the one who spotted the intruders. As she de-scribed it to me later, she saw two people running, stagger-ing, sometimes seeming to hold one another up. If not for the staggering, Zahra might have fired a warning shot, at least. But before she revealed herself, she wanted to see who or what the runners were escaping from.

As she scanned the hills behind them, she tapped out our emergency signal on her phone.

There were five people chasing the staggering runners—or, with her night-vision glasses, she could see five. She kept looking for more.

One of the five shouted, then fell, and Zahra realized that that one must have blundered into the edge of our thorn fence. In the dark, some of our thorn bushes don't look that savage. They're pretty if you don't touch them. Some will even be covered with flowers soon. But they grab clothing and flesh, and they tear.

The injured one's four companions slowed, seemed to hesitate, then sped up again as the injured one limped after them.

Zahra put her rifle on automatic and fired a short burst across the path of the two front runners. They stopped short and dived into the thorn bushes and cactuses. One began to fire in Zahra's general direction. There were shouts of pain and loud curses. Then all five were shooting. Down in Acorn, we could hear the gunfire. Even without the phone, we would have known that it was corning from the area around Zahra's watch station.

Zahra and Harry are my oldest friends, and I'm Change-sister to them and Change-aunt to their kids Tabia and Rus-sell. For that reason, I paid no attention to Bankole when he told me to stay in the house. I remember thinking that if this were another Dovetree-like raid, staying inside was only asking to burn.

But this didn't sound like what happened at Dovetree. It wasn't loud enough. There weren't enough attackers. This sounded like a small gang raid of a kind we hadn't had for years.

Bankole and I slipped out of the house together and headed for the truck. For most of the run, we were protected by the bulk first of our own cabin, then of the school. I suppose that's why Bankole didn't try as hard as he might have to make me stay behind. We couldn't be seen, let alone shot at. We keep the truck parked in its own space on the south side of the school. It's protected there in the center of the community, and during the day we can spread its solar wings and let it recharge its batteries.

Harry Balter reached the truck just as Bankole and I got there. He opened a side door, and all three of us scrambled in.

Harry and I have gotten comfortable with the truck's computers. In our earlier lives down south, we both used our parents' computers. We're unusual. Most adults at Acorn had never touched or even seen a computer before. Still oth-ers are afraid of them. For now, although we're passing on our knowledge, we're still among the few who take full ad-vantage of what the truck can do with its weapons, maneu-verability, and sensory systems.

We turned everything on, and Bankole drove us toward Zahra's current watch station. As we rode, we used the truck's infrared viewer to locate each of the intruders. Bankole is a good, steady driver, and he has confidence in the truck's armor. It didn't seem to bother him at all that peo-ple were shooting at us. In fact, it was a good thing the in-truders were wasting ammunition on us. That gave Zahra some relief.

Then we had a look around, and we decided that one of the intruders was much too close to Zahra—and creeping closer.

He could have been trying to get away, but he wasn't None of them were. We made sure the targets we had iden-tified were, in fact, targets, and not our own people. Once we were sure, we pointed them out to the truck and let it open up on them. Along with the truck's ability to "see" in the dark via infrared, ambient light, or radar, it also has very good

"hearing," and an incorrectly designated sense of "smell."

This last is based on spectroscopic analysis rather than on actual smelling, but it is a kind of chemical analysis over a distance. It could be used on anything that emitted or reflected electromagnetic radiation—light—of some kind.

And the truck had plenty of memory. It could, and had, recorded all that it could of each of us—our voices, hand and foot prints, retinal prints, body sounds, and our general shapes in several positions to help it recognize us and not shoot us.

When the truck began shooting, I left the forward moni-tors to Harry. I didn't need to see anything that might make me useless, and the truck didn't need any more help from me. Once we were between Zahra and the attackers, I checked Zahra on an aft screen. She was alive and still at her station. Most of her body was concealed within the depression and behind the stone shelter that was intended to shield her. Some distance away, Gray Mora was still at his station and still alive. He wasn't involved in this, and his duty was to hold his position and guard the other most likely approach to Acorn. It had taken a while for us to learn not to be dis-tracted by people who might rattle the front door while their friends slipped in through the back.

The intruder nearest to Zahra was dead. According to the truck, he was no longer changing the chemistry of the air in his immediate vicinity in a way that indicated breathing, and he wasn't moving. Once the truck was stopped, its ability to detect motion was as good as its hearing. Put the two to-gether and we could detect breathing and heartbeat—or their absence. We've tried to trick it—fool it into mistaking one of us playing dead for an actual corpse—and we've never been able to. That's comforting.

"All right," Harry said, looking up from his screen. "How's Zee?"

"Alive," I told him. "Are all the shooters down?"

"Down and dead, all five of them." He drew a deep breath.

"Bankole. le's go pick up Zahra."

"Has anyone given Gray an all-clear?" I asked.

"I have," Bankole answered. "You know, I've got the next watch. In another hour, I would have relieved Zahra."