Parable of the Talents (29 page)

We have not given ourselves away, yet, we sharers of Earthseed. We've worked hard at concealing ourselves, and, I admit, we've been lucky. None of us has been pushed beyond our limits at a time when our "teachers" might notice. All of us have had years of hiding in plain sight to help us. Even the Mora girls, only 14 and 15, have managed to hide what they are.

I kept up my search for someone who could tell me at least a little about the outside. In the end, I didn't find my in-formant. He found me. He was a young Black man, bone thin, scarred, careful, but not beaten down. His name was David Turner.

"Day," he said when we found ourselves digging side by side in the stupid, dangerous cesspit that was later aban-doned. I think now that he only spoke to me because we weren't supposed to speak.

I looked a question at him as I threw a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.

"Name of David," he said. "Call me Day."

"Olamina," I said without thinking.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Yes."

"Different kind of name."

I sighed, glanced at him, liked the stubborn, unbeaten look of him, and said, "Lauren."

He gave me a quick grin. "People call you Laurie?"

"Not if they expect me to answer," I said.

I guess we were a little careless. Above, one of our

"teachers" lashed me hard, and I convulsed and fell. I've no-ticed before that if a collared man and woman are talking together, it's the woman who tends to be lashed. Women are temptresses, you see. We drag innocent men into trouble.

From the time of Adam and Eve women have dragged inno-cent men into trouble. Anyway, I was lashed hard, but only once. After that, I was more careful.

Being lashed hard several times is enough to induce tem-porary coordination problems and memory loss. Day told me later that he'd seen a man lashed until the man didn't know his own name. I believe him. I know that when I saw Bankole's dead body, and I turned on my bearded guard, I had never in my life been more intent on killing another per-son. I was dropped where I stood with a hard shock, then lashed several more times, and Allie tells me that the way I jerked and flopped around the ground, she thought I'd break my bones. I woke up very sore, covered in bruises, sprains, abrasions, and bloody rock cuts, but that wasn't the worst The worst was the way I felt afterward. I don't mean the physical pain. This place is a university of pain. I mean what I wrote before. I was a zombie for several days after the lashing. At first I couldn't even remember that Bankole was dead. Natividad and Allie had to tell me that all over again more than once. And I couldn't remember what had happened to Acorn, why we were all shut up in one room of our own school, where the men were, where the children were....

I haven't written about this until now. When I understood it, it scared me to death. It scared me into mewling in a cor-ner like a terrorized three-year-old.

After surviving Robledo, I knew that strangers could ap-pear and steal or destroy everything and everyone I loved.

People and possessions could be snatched away. But some-how, it had not occurred to me that. . . that
bits of my

own mind
could be snatched away too. I knew I could be killed. I've never had any illusions about that. I could be disabled. I knew that too. But I had not thought that another person, just by pushing a small button, then smiling and pushing it again and again……………….

He did smile, my bearded teacher. That came back to me later. All of it came back to me. When it did……….Well, that's when I retreated to my corner, whimpering and moaning. The son of a bitch smiled and pressed his button over and over as though he were fucking me, and he grinned while he watched me groaning and thrashing.

My brother said a collar makes you envy the dead. As bad as that sounds, it didn't, couldn't, convey to me, how a col-lar makes you hate. It teaches you whole new magnitudes of utter hatred. I knew almost nothing about hate until this thing was put around my neck. Now, sometimes it's all I can do to stop myself from trying again to kill one of them and then dying the way Emery did.

I've been talking off and on to Day Turner. Whenever we can, when we pass one another or are put to work in the same general area, we've talked. I've encouraged Travis and Harry and the other men to talk to him. I think he'll tell us anything he can that will help us. This is a summary of what he's passed on to us so far:

Day had walked over the Sierras from his last dead-end, low-paying job in Reno, Nevada. He had drifted north and west, hoping to find at least a chance to work his way out of poverty. He had no family, but for protection, he walked with two friends. All had been well until he and his friends reached Eureka. There, they had heard that one of the churches offered overnight shelter and meals and temporary work to willing men. The church was, no surprise, the Church of Christian America.

The work was helping to repair and paint a couple of old houses that the church intended to use as part of their orphaned-children's home. There were no orphans on site—or none that Day saw, or I suppose we would all have bad-gered him to death about our own children. You would think that there were enough real orphans in this filthy world.

How dare anything that calls itself a church create new or-phans with its maggots and its collars?

Anyway, Day and his friends liked the idea of doing something for kids and earning a few dollars as well as a bed and a few meals. But they were unlucky. While they slept on their first night in the church's men's dormitory, a small group of the men there tried to rob the place. Day says he had nothing to do with robbery. He says he doesn't give a damn whether we believe him or not, but that he's never stolen, except to eat, and he'd never in his life steal from a church.

He was raised by a very religious uncle and aunt, now dead, and thanks to their early training, there were some things he just wouldn't do. But the thieves were said to be Black, and Day and his friends were Black, so Day and his friends were presumed guilty.

I found myself believing him. That may be stupid of me, but I like him, and he doesn't strike me as a liar or a church robber.

He says the church's security people swarmed over the dormitories, and the men awoke and ran in all directions.

They were all free poor men. When trouble erupted, and there was no real profit to be had, most of them never thought of doing anything other than getting

away—espe-cially when the shooting started.

Day didn't have a gun. One of his friends did, but the three of them got separated. Then they all got caught.

He and 18 or 20 other men were caught, and all the Black ones went to jail. Some were charged with violent crimes—armed robbery and assault. The rest were charged with vagrancy—which is a far more serious crime than it once was. The vagrants were found guilty and indentured to the Church of Christian America. Day's friends were charged with felonies as part of the first group because they were found together and one had a gun. Day was in the vagrant group. He had been indentured to work for 30 days for the church. He had already been shifted around and forced to work for more than two months. They lashed him when he complained that his sentence was up. At first they said he could go free if he could prove he had a job waiting for him outside. Of course since he was a stranger to the area, and since he had no free time to look for a job, it was impossi-ble for him to get outside work. Local vagrants, on the other hand, were, one by one, rescued by relatives and friends, who promised to either give them jobs or feed and house them so that they would no longer be vagrant.

Day had done construction work, painting,

grounds-keeping, and janitorial work. He had been given a thor-ough physical examination, then been required to donate blood twice. He had been encouraged to offer to donate a kidney or a cornea, after which he could heal and go free.

This terrified him. He refused, but he couldn't help knowing that his organs, and, in fact, his life could be taken from him at any time. Who would know? Who would care? He wondered why they had not killed him already.

Then they moved him to Camp Christian for reeducation.

He was told that there was hope for him—that he could, if he chose, learn to be a servant of God and God's true church and a loyal citizen of the greatest country in the world. He said he was already a Christian. They said, in effect, "Prove it." They said he would be accepted among them when they judged him truly penitent and educated in the truths of the Bible.

Then Day quoted them Exodus 21:16—"And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death." Day was lashed for his choice of scripture, of course, and he was told that the peo-ple of Christian America well knew that the devil could quote scripture.

Most people don't know about the camps, Day says. He's learned from talking to other collared men that there are a few small camps like Camp Christian and at least two big ones—much bigger than Camp Christian. One of the big ones is up at an abandoned prison in Del Norte County and the other is down in Fresno County. People don't realize how free poor vagrants are being treated, but he's afraid that even if they did know, they wouldn't care. The likelihood is that people with legal residences would be glad to see a church taking charge of the thieving, drug-taking, drug-selling, disease-spreading, homeless free poor.

"Back when I was at home, my aunt and uncle would have felt like that," Day said. "We walk the highways and scrounge and scavenge and ask for work, and all of that reminds people that what's happened to us can happen to them. They don't like to think about stuff like that, so they get mad at us. They make the cops arrest us or run us out of town. They call us names and wish somebody would do something to make us disappear. And now, somebody is doing just that!"

He's right. There are plenty of people who would think the Church was doing something generous and necessary—teaching deadbeats to work and be good Christians. No one would see a problem until the camps were a lot bigger and the people in them weren't just drifters and squatters. As far as we of Earthseed are concerned, that's already happened, but who are we? Just weird cultists who practice strange rites, so no doubt there are nice, ordinary people who would be glad to see us taught to behave ourselves too.

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tor-mented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the ma-jority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care?

There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know. There's war, for instance.

In fact, we are at war. The United States is at war with Alaska and Canada. People are calling it the Al-Can war. I know Jarret wanted a war, was working to get one started.

But until Day told me, I hadn't realized it had begun. There have already been exchanges of missiles and a few vicious border battles. I told Allie about this later, and she thought about it for a moment.

"Who's winning?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Day didn't tell me. Hell, I didn't ask."

She shrugged. "Yeah. It doesn't much matter to us, does it?"

"I don't know," I said.

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

We might be able to die like Teresa. Just one "teacher"

could, with one finger, send us all sprawling and writhing on the ground. We might be able to die, every one of us, with-out doing much more than startling our guards.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER
18, 2033

Now I have been raped.

It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday.

It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2033

I need to write about what has been happening to me. I don't want to, but I need to.

To be a sharer is to feel the pleasure and the pain—the ap-parent pleasure and the apparent pain—of other people.

There have been times when I've felt the pleasure of one of our "teachers" when he lashed someone. The first time it happened—or rather, the first time I understood what was happening, I threw up.

When someone cries out in pain, I'm careful not to look. If I happen to see someone double up, so far I've been able to lean against a wall or a tool or a friend or a tree. Somehow, though, it never occurred to me that I had to protect myself from the pleasures of our "teachers."

There are a few men here, though, a few "teachers," who lash us until they have orgasms. Our screams and convul-sions and pleas and sobs are what these men need to feel sexually satisfied. I know of three who seem to need to lash someone to get sexual pleasure. Most often, they lash a woman, then rape her. Sometimes the lashing is enough for them. I don't want to know this as clearly as I do know it, but I can't help myself. These men feast on our pain—and they call us parasites.

Rape is done with a pretense of secrecy. After all, these men come to the camp and do a tour of duty. Then at least some of them must go home to their wives and kids. Except for Rev-erend Joel Locke and his three top assistants, who work here full time, the men who come here still live in the real world. They rape, but they pretend they don't They say they're reli-gious, but power has corrupted even the best of them. I don't like to admit it, but some of them are, in a strange way, decent, ordinary men. I mean that they believe in what they are doing. They're not all sadists or psychopaths.

Some of them seem truly to feel that collecting minor criminals in places like Camp Christian is right and necessary for the good of the country. They disapprove of the rape and the unnecessary lash-ings, but they do believe that we inmates are, somehow, ene-mies of the country. Their superiors have told them that parasites and heathens like us brought down "America the mighty." America was the strongest country on Earth, but people like us went whoring after foreign religions and re-fused to do our duty as citizens.