Parable of the Talents (26 page)

The man waited until I was able to look up at him, until I did look up.

"You don't speak unless you're spoken to," he said. "You do what you're told when you're told to do it, and you keep your mouths shut!"

I didn't say anything. Somehow, I managed to nod. It oc-curred to me that I should do that.

Allie stepped toward me to help me up, her hands already out to help me. Then she doubled up in agony of her own.

Echoes of her pain burned through me, and I froze, teeth clenched. I was desperate not to announce my extra vulner-ability, my sharing. If I was held captive long enough, they would find out. I knew that. But not now. Not yet.

The man didn't seem to take any special notice of me. He watched us both and waited in seeming patience until Allie looked up, bewildered and angry.

"You do what you're told and only what you're told," he said. "You don't touch one another. Whatever filth you're used to, it's over. It's time for you to learn to behave like de-cent Christian women—if you've got the brains to learn."

So that was it, then. We were a dirty cult of free lovers, and they had come to straighten us out. Educate us.

I believe Allie and I were chosen because we were the biggest of the women. We were ordered to carry first Zahra, then Teresa, out to a patch of ground where we grew jojoba plants for their oil. There, we were given picks and shovels and ordered to dig graves—long, deep holes—among the jojobas. We had had no food and no water. All we got was a jolt of agony now and then when we slowed down more than our overseer was willing to permit. The ground was bad—rocky and hard. That was why we used it for jojoba plants.

The plants are tough. They don't need much. Now, it seemed that we were the ones who didn't need much. I didn't think I could do it—dig the damned hole. It's been a long time since I've felt so bad in every possible way, so horrible, so scared.

After a while, all I could think of was water, pain, and where was my baby? I lost track of everything else.

I was digging Zahra's grave, and I couldn't even think of that. I just wanted the digging to be over. She was my best friend, my Change-sister, and she lay uncovered, waiting beside the hole as I dug, and it didn't matter. I couldn't focus on it.

The other women were brought out of the school and made to watch us dig. I knew that because my attention was caught by the sudden movement of silent, approaching peo-ple. I looked up, saw the women shepherded toward us by three black-tunic-and-cross-wearing men. Sometime later, I realized that the men had also been marched out They were kept separate, and it seemed that some of them were digging too.

I froze, staring at them, looking for Bankole . . . and for Harry.

The sudden pain tore a grunt from me. I fell to my knees in the hole I was digging.

"Work!" my slave driver said. "It's time you heathens learned to do a little work."

I had not seen whom the men were burying. I saw Travis, shirt off, swinging a pick into the hard ground. I saw Lucio Figueroa digging another hole and Ted Faircloth digging a third. So they had three dead to our two. Who were their dead? Which of our men had these bastards killed?

Where was Bankole?

I hadn't spotted him. I had had such a quick look. I man-aged to look again and again as I shoveled dirt out of the hole. In the cluster of men, I spotted Michael, then Jorge, then Jeff King. Then the pain hit again. I didn't fall this time. I held on to the shovel and leaned back against the side of the hole I was digging.

"Dig!" the son of a bitch above me said. "Just dig!"

What would he do if I passed out? Would he go on trig-gering the collar until I died like Teresa? Was he enjoying himself? He didn't smile as he hurt me. But he did keep hurting me, even though I had shown no signs of rebellion.

Submission was no protection. If any of us were to sur-vive, we must escape these people as quickly as possible.

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

That was how Harry learned that Zahra was dead and how Lucio Figueroa, who had only this year begun to take an in-terest in Teresa Lin, came to know of her death. That was how I learned that Vincent Scolari was dead, as his wife and sister believed. And Gray Mora was dead—bloody and bro-ken and dead. And that was how I learned that my Bankole was dead.

There was chaos. Emery Mora and both her daughters began to scream when they saw Gray's mangled body.

Na-tividad and Travis ran into each other's arms. Lucio Figueroa dropped to his knees beside Teresa's grave, and his sister Marta tried to comfort him. Both Scolari women tried to go down into the grave to touch Vincent, to kiss him, to say good-bye. We were all lashed electronically for talking, screaming, crying, cursing, and demanding answers.

And I was lashed into unconsciousness for trying to kill my bearded keeper with a pickax. It would have been worm any amount of pain if only I could have succeeded.

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Beware:

Ignorance

Protects itself.

Ignorance

Promotes suspicion.

Suspicion Engenders fear.

Fear quails,

Irrational and blind,

Or fear looms,

Defiant and closed.

Blind, closed,

Suspicious, afraid,

Ignorance

Protects itself,

And protected.

Ignorance grows.

I MISS ACORN. Of course, I have no memory of being there, but it was where my parents were together and happy during their brief marriage. It was where I was conceived, born, and loved by them both. It could have been, should have been, where I grew up—since it was where my mother had insisted on staying. And even if, in spite of my father's intentions and my mother's dreams, the place had gone on looking more like a nineteenth-century fanning village than a stepping-stone toward the Destiny, I wouldn't have minded. It couldn't have been as grim as where I did grow up.

From the coming of Jarret's Crusaders—that is what they called themselves—my life veers away from Acorn and from my mother. The only surprising thing is that we ever met again.

My mother was right about the gas. It was intended to be used to stop riots, to subdue masses of violent people. Unlike poison gases that kill or maim or gases that caused tears and choking, or nausea, this gas was supposed to be merciful. It was called merciful. It was a paralysis gas. Most of the time, it worked fast and caused no pain and had no nasty after-effects. But occasionally, children and small adults died of it. For that reason, an antidote was developed to be adminis-tered to small people who were overcome. It was given to me, to the rest of the little children of Acorn. For some rea-son it wasn't given to Zahra Balter. She was obviously an adult, in spite of her small size. Maybe the Crusaders thought age was more important than size. There were no physicians among them. There were no health workers of any land. These were God's people come to bring the true faith to the cultist heathens. I suppose if some of the heathens died of it, that wasn't really very important
FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER
24, 2033

Thanksgiving Day.

Should I be thankful still to be alive? I'm not sure.

Today is like Sunday—better than Sunday. We have been given extra food and extra rest, and once services were over this morning, we were let alone. I am thankful for that. For once, they aren't watching us. They don't want to spend their holiday guarding us or "teaching" us, as they put it. This means that today I can write. On most days, by the time they let us alone, it's too dark to write and we're exhausted. After our work outside, we're watched and made to memo-rize and recite sections of the Bible until we can't think or keep our eyes open. I'm thankful to be writing and I'm thankful not to hear my own voice chanting something like, "Unto woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

We're not permitted to speak to one another in our

"teach-ers' " presence, and yet not allowed to be quiet and rest

Now I must find a way to write about the past few weeks, to tell what has happened to us—just to tell it as though it were sane and rational. I'll do that, if for no other reason than to give some order to my scattered thoughts. I do need to write about. . . about Bankole.

All of our young children are gone. All of them. From Larkin, the youngest, to the Faircloth boys, the oldest, they've vanished.

Now we are told that our children have been saved from our wickedness. They've been given "good Christian homes."

We won't see them again unless we leave our "heathenism"

behind and prove that we've become people who can be trusted near Christian children. Out of kindness and love, our captors—we are required to address them each as

"Teacher"—have provided for our children. They have put our children's feet on the pathway to good, useful American citizenship here on Earth, and to a place in heaven when they die. Now we, the adults and older kids, must be taught to walk that same path. We must be reeducated. We must ac-cept Jesus Christ as our Savior, Jarret's Crusaders as our teachers, Jarret as God's chosen restorer of America's great-ness, and the Church of Christian America as our church. Only then will we be Christian patriots worthy to raise children.

We do not struggle against this. Our captors order us to kneel, to pray, to sing, to testify, and we do. I've made it clear to the others through my own behavior that we should obey.

Why should anyone resist and risk torture or death? What would be the good of that? We'll lie to these murder-ers, these kidnappers, these thieves, these slavers. We'll tell them anything they want to hear, do all that they require us to do.

Someday they'll get careless or their equipment will malfunction or we'll find or create some weakness, some blind spot. Then we'll kill them.

But even though we obey, the Crusaders must have their amusements. In their loving kindness, they use the collars to torment us. "This is nothing compared to the fires of hell,"

they tell us. "Learn your lessons or you'll suffer like this for all eternity!" How can they do what they do if they believe what they say?

They eat our food and feed us their leavings, either as bowls of obvious table scraps or boiled up in a watery soup with turnips or potatoes from our gardens. They live in our houses and sleep in our beds while we sleep on the floor of the school, men in one room, women in another, no com-munication between the two permitted.

None of us is decently married, it seems. We were not married by a minister of the Church of Christian America.

Therefore, we have been living in sin—"fornicating like dogs!" I heard one Crusader say. That same Crusader dragged Diamond Scott off to his cabin last week and raped her. She says he told her it was all right. He was a man of God, and she should be honored. Afterward, she kept cry-ing and throwing up. She says she'll kill herself if she's pregnant.

Only one of us has done that so far—committed suicide.

Only one: Emery Mora. She took revenge for what hap-pened to her husband and for the abduction of her two little boys.

She seduced one of the Crusaders—one of those who had moved into her own cabin. She convinced him that she was willing and eager to sleep with him. Then sometime during the night, she cut his throat with a knife she had al-ways kept under her mattress. Then she went to the Crusader sleeping in her daughters' room and cut his throat. After mat, she lay down in her bed beside her first victim and cut her own wrists. The three of them were found dead the next morning.

Like Gray, Emery had taken substantial revenge.

For her own sake and the sake of her daughters, I wish she had chosen to live. I knew she was depressed, and I tried to encourage her to endure. At night when we were locked up together, we all talked, exchanged news, and tried to en-courage one another. But the truth is, if Emery had to die, she chose the best possible way to do it She's let us know that we can kill our captors. Our collars would not stop us. If Emery had not been confined by her collar to that one cabin, she might have killed even more of them.

But
why
had her collar not stopped her from killing?

Ac-cording to what Marc told me about his captivity, collars protected holders of control units. Was this a matter of a different kind of collar? Perhaps. We couldn't know that None of the information we had collected and shared in the night had to do with different kinds of collars. What we had learned was that all our collars were linked together some-how in a kind of collar network. All could be controlled by the units that our captors wore as belts, but the belts themselves were powered or coordinated or somehow controlled from a larger master unit that Diamond Scott believed was kept in one of the two maggots that are always here. Things Di's rapist had said while she was with him waiting to be raped again made her certain that this was true.

A master control unit protected by the guns, locks, and armor of a maggot was beyond our reach, for now. We had to learn more about it. It occurred to me, though, that the reason the belt unit of Emery's rapist had not saved its owner's life was simple: he had taken it off. What man wore his belt to bed? Both of the men Emery had killed had taken their belts off. Why not? Emery was a slender little woman. A man of ordinary size wouldn't doubt his ability to control her with or without the collar.

Once she had killed, Emery would have tried to use the belt units to free herself, either to escape, to try to free us, or to take further revenge. She would have tried. I'm sure of that. And she would have failed either because she had the wrong fingerprints or because she lacked some other neces-sary key. It was important to know that, but there was more: she had tried the units, no doubt caused herself pain, but she had failed to set off any alarms. Perhaps there were no alarms. That could be very important someday.