Parable of the Talents (28 page)
"First we've got to get rid of these collars," I said. "Then we have to find out what happened to the kids. If. . . if they're alive, we have to find out where they are."
"Do you think they are alive?"
"I don't know." I drew a deep breath. "I'd give almost anything to know where my Larkin is and whether she's all right." Another pause. "These people lie about almost every-thing. But there must be records somewhere. There must be
something.
We've got to try to find out. Gather information. Seek weakness. Watch, wait, and do what you have to to stay alive!"
A "teacher" was coming toward us. Either he had spotted us whispering as we worked or he was just checking. I let Harry move past me. Our few moments of talk were over.
? ? ?
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
When vision fails
Direction is lost.
When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.
When purpose is forgotten
Emotion rules alone.
When emotion rules alone,
Destruction . . . destruction.
FROM ACORN, I WAS TAKEN to a reeducation camp that was housed in an old maximum-security prison in Del Norte County, just north of Humboldt County. Pelican Bay State Prison, the thing had been called. It became Pelican Bay Christian Reeducation Camp. I have no memory of it, I'm glad to say, but people who spent time there as adults and older kids have told me that even though it was no longer called a prison, it reeked of suffering. Because of its prison structure, it lent itself more easily than did Acorn to isolating people. not only from society but from one another. It also provided enough room for a nursery that was completely separate from the heathen inmates who might contaminate the chil-dren. I was cared for at the Pelican Bay nursery for several months. I know this because I was fingerprinted, footprinted, and geneprinted there, and my records were stored at the Christian American Church of Crescent City.
They were sup-posed to be accessible only to camp authorities, who were to prevent me from being adopted by my heathen biological parents, and to whoever did adopt me.
Also, there I was given my name: Asha Vere. Asha Vere was the name of a char-acter in a popular Dreamask program.
Dreamasks—also known as head cages, dream books, or simply, Masks—were new then, and were beginning to edge out some of the virtual-reality stuff. Even the early ones were cheap—big ski-mask-like devices with goggles over the eyes.
Wearing them made people look not-quite-human. But the masks made computer-stimulated and guided dreams available to the public, and people loved them. Dreamasks were related to old-fashioned lie detectors, to slave collars, and to a frighteningly efficient form of audiovisual subliminal suggestion. In spite of the way they looked, Dreamasks were lightweight, clothlike, and comfortable. Each one offered wearers a whole series of adventures in which they could identify with any of several characters. They could live their character's fictional life complete with realistic sensation.
They could submerge themselves in other, simpler, happier lives. The poor could enjoy the illusion of wealth, the ugly could be beautiful, the sick could be healthy, the timid could be bold
Jarret's people worried that this new entertainment would be like a drug to the "morally weak." To avoid their censure, Dreamasks International made a number of religious programs—programs that particularly featured Christian Ameri-can characters. Asha Vere was one of those characters.
Asha Vere was a tall, beautiful, Amazon-like Black Christian American woman who ran around rescuing people from hea-then cults, anti-Christian plots, and squatter-camp pimps. I suppose someone thought that naming me after such an up-right character might stifle any hereditary inclination in me toward heathenism. So I was stuck with the name. And so, by the way, were a lot of other women. Strong female characters were out of fashion in the fiction of the time.
President Jarret and his followers in Christian America believed that one of the things that had gone wrong with the country was the in-trusion of women into "men's business."
I've seen recordings of him saying this and large audiences of both men and women cheering and applauding wildly. In fact, I've discov-ered that Asha Vere was originally intended to be a man, Aaron Vere, but a Dreamask executive convinced his col-leagues that it was time for a hit series starring a tough-tender, Christian American female. He was right. There was such a hunger for interesting female characters that, as silly as the Asha Vere stories were, people liked them. And sur-prising numbers of people named their girl children
"Asha" or "Vere" or "Asha Vere."
My name, eventually, was Asha Vere Alexander, daughter of Madison Alexander and Kayce Guest Alexander. These were middle-class Black members of the Church of Christian Amer-ica in Seattle. They adopted me during the Al-Can war when they moved from Seattle—which had been hit by several misiles—down to Crescent City, where Kayce's mother Layla Guest lived. Ironically, Layla Guest was a refugee from Los Angeles. But she was a much richer refugee than my mother had been. Crescent City, a big, booming town among the red-woods, was so near Pelican Bay that Layla volunteered at the Pelican Bay nursery. It was Layla who brought Kayce and me together. Kayce didn't really want me. I was a big, dark-skinned, solemn baby, and she didn't like my looks. "She was a grim, stone-faced little thing," I heard her say later to her friends. "And she was as plain as a stone. I was afraid for her—afraid that if I didn't take her, no one would."
Both Kayce and Layla believed it was the duty of good Christian Americans to give homes to the many orphaned children from squatter settlements and heathen cults. If one couldn't be an Asha Vere, rescuing all sorts of people, one could at least rescue one or two unfortunate children and raise them properly.
Five months after Layla introduced her daughter to me, the Alexanders adopted me. I didn't exactly become their daughter, but they meant to do their duty—to raise me prop-erly and save me from whatever depraved existence I might have had with my biological parents.
FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2033
They have begun to let us alone more on Sundays after ser-vices. I suppose they're tired of using up their own Sundays to lash us into memorizing chapters of the Bible.
After five or six hours of services and a meal of boiled vegetables, we are told to rest in our quarters and thank God for his good-ness to us.
We aren't permitted to do anything. To do anything other than Bible study would be, in their view, "work," and a vio-lation of the Fourth Commandment. We're to sit still, not speak, not repair our clothing or our shoes—we're all in rags since all but two sets per person of our clothing have been confiscated. We're allowed to read the Bible, pray, and sleep.
If we're caught doing anything more than that, we're lashed.
Of course, the moment we're left alone, we do as we like.
We hold whispered conversations, we clean and repair our things as best we can, we share information. And I write.
Only on Sundays can we do these things in daylight.
We're permitted no electric light and no oil lamps, so we have only the window for light. During the week, it's dark when we get up and dark when we're shut in to sleep. Dur-ing the week, we are machines—or domestic animals.
The only conveniences we're permitted are a galvanized bucket which we must all use as a toilet and a 20-liter plas-tic bottle of water fitted with a cheap plastic siphon pump. We each have one plastic bowl from which we both eat and drink. It's odd about the bowls. They're bright shades of blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. They're the only colorful things in our prison room—bright, cheerful lies. They're what you see first when you walk in. Mary Sulli-van calls them our dog dishes. We hate them, but we use them. What choice do we have? Our only "legal" individ-ual possessions are our bowls, our clothing, our blankets— one each—and our Camp Christian-issued paper King James Bibles.
On Sundays when we're fortunate enough to be let alone early, I take out paper and pencil and use my Bible as a desk.
My writing is a way for me to remind myself that I am human, that God is Change, and that I will escape this place.
As irrational as the feeling may be, my writing still comforts me.
Other people find other comforts. Mary Sullivan and Allie combine their blankets and make love to one another late at night. It comforts them. Their sleeping place is next to mine, and I hear them at it. They aren't the only ones who do it, but they're the only pair so far that stays together.
"Do we disgust you?" Mary Sullivan whispered to me one morning with characteristic bluntness. We had been awakened later than usual and we could just see each other in the half-light. I could see Mary sitting up beside a still-sleeping Allie.
I looked at her, surprised. She's a tall woman—almost my size—angular and bony, but with an interesting-looking, ex-pressive face. She looked as though she had always had plenty of hard, physical work to do, but not always enough to eat. "Do you love my friend?" I asked her.
She blinked, drew back as though she was about to tell me to mind my own business or to go to hell. But after a mo-ment, she said in her harsh voice, "Of course I do!"
I managed a smile, although I don't know whether she could see it, and I nodded. "Then be good to one another," I said. "And if there's trouble, you and your sisters stand with us, with Earthseed." We're the strongest single group among the prisoners. The Sullivans and the Gamas have tended to group themselves with us, anyway, although nothing had been said. Well, now I've said something, at least to Mary Sullivan.
After a moment, she nodded, unsmiling. She wasn't a woman who smiled often.
I worry that someone will break ranks and report Allie and Mary, but so far, no one has reported anyone for anything, al-though our "teachers" keep inviting us to report one another's sins. There has been trouble now and then.
Squatter-camp women have gotten into fights over food or possessions, and the rest of us stopped things before they got too loud—before a "teacher" arrived and demanded to know what was going on and who was responsible.
And there is one young squatter-camp woman, Crystal Blair, who seems to be a natural bully. She hits or shoves peo-ple, takes their food or their small possessions. She amuses herself by telling lies to cause fights. ("Do you know what she said about you? I heard her! She said...") She snatches things from people, sometimes making no secret of what she's doing. She doesn't want the pitiful possessions.
Some-times she makes a show of breaking them. She wants the other women to know that she can do what she damned well pleases, and they can't stop her. She has power, and they don't
We've taught her to let Earthseed women and our posses-sions alone. We stood together, and let her know we're will-ing to make her life even more of a misery to her than it already is. We discovered by accident that all we had to do was hold her down and tug on her collar. The collar punishes her, and it punishes me and the other sharers among us if we were stupid enough to watch her suffering, but it leaves no marks. If we use her clothing to tie and gag her, then with just an occasional tug on her collar we can give her a hellish night. After we put her through one such night, she let us alone. She tormented other women. Tormenting people was her particular comfort.
We worry about her. She's crazier than most of us, and she's trouble, but she hates our "teachers" more than we do.
She won't go to them for help. In time, though, one of her victims might. We watch her. We try to keep her from going too far.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER
11, 2033
More new people have been brought here—ragged, scrawny people, all strangers. Every day this week, a mag-got has arrived to unload new people in groups of three, four, or five.
We've finished building a long, shedlike ex-tension onto the school with lumber that the "teachers" trucked in. This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house 30 people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head. The new people are each given what we have: a blanket, a plastic bowl, a Bible, and a shelf where they must sleep and store their things. We still sleep on the floor in our rooms, but everything else is the same.
Like us, the new people are using buckets as toilets. Some of us are being made to dig a cesspit. I took some lashes for pointing out that it was being put in a bad place. It could contaminate the underground water that feeds our wells. That could make us all sick, including our "teachers."
But our "teachers" know everything. They don't need ad-vice from a woman, and a heathen woman at that. It was en-tirely their own decision a few days later to relocate the cesspit downhill and far away from the wells.
************************************
I've asked some of the strangers what's happening out-side.
Do people know what a reeducation camp really is? Are there other camps? Is there resistance? What's Jarret doing? What's going on?
Most of the new people won't talk to me. They're weary, frightened, beaten people. Those who are willing to talk know only that they were either arrested or snatched from their lives as squatters, drifters, or petty crooks.
Several of the new people are sharers. "Bad seed if there ever was bad seed," our "teachers" say. "The heathen chil-dren of drug addicts." They treat known sharers as objects of suspicion, contempt, and ugly amusement They're so easy to torment. No challenge at all.