Parable of the Talents (4 page)

So this morning, I was ready for a day of walking, think-ing, and plant collecting with friends. We still travel in groups of three or four when we leave Acorn because the mountains, on the roads and off them, can be dangerous. But for nearly five months now, we've had no trouble while sal-vaging. I suppose, though, that that can be dangerous in itself. Sad. Raids and gangs are dangerous because they kill outright. Peace is dangerous because it encourages compla-cency and carelessness—which also kills sooner or later.

In spite of the Dovetree raid, we were, to be honest, more complacent than usual because we were heading for a place that we knew. It was a burned, abandoned farmhouse far from Dovetree where we'd spotted some useful plants. In particular, there was aloe vera for use in easing burns and in-sect bites, and there were big mounds of agave. The agave was a handsome, variegated species—blue-green leaves edged in yellow-white. It must have been growing and prop-agating untended for years in what was once the front yard of the farmhouse. It was one of the large, vicious varieties of agave, each individual plant an upturned rosette of stiff, fi-brous, fleshy leaves, some of them over a meter long in the big parent plants. Each leaf was tipped with a long, hard, dagger-sharp spike, and for good measure, each leaf was edged in jagged thorns that were tough enough to saw through human flesh. We intended to use them to do just that.

On our first visit, we had taken some of the smallest plants, the youngest offsets. Now we meant to dig up as many of the rest as we could bundle into our handcart. The cart was already more than half full of things we had sal-vaged from the rotting storage shed of a collapsed cabin a couple of miles from where the agave grew. We had found dusty pots, pans, buckets, old books and magazines, rusted hand tools, nails, log chains, and wire. All had been dam-aged by water and time, but most could be cleaned and re-paired or cannibalized for parts or at least copied. We learn from all the work we do.

We've become very competent makers and repairers of small tools. We've survived as well as we have because we keep learning. Our customers have come to know that if they buy from us, they'll get their money's worth.

Salvaging from abandoned gardens and fields is useful, too.

We collect any herb, fruit, vegetable, or nut-producing plant, any plant at all that we know or suppose to be useful. We have, always, a special need for spiny, self-sufficient desert plants that will tolerate our climate. They serve as part of our thorn fence.

Cactus by cactus, thornbush by thornbush, we've planted a living wall in the hills around Acorn. Our wall won't keep determined people out, of course. No wall will do that. Cars and trucks will get in if their owners are willing to absorb some damage to their vehicles, but cars and trucks that work are rare and precious in the mountains, and most fuels are expensive.

Even intruders on foot can get in if they're willing to work at it. But the fence will hamper and annoy them. It will make them angry, and perhaps noisy. It will, when it's work-ing well, encourage people to approach us by the easiest routes, and those we guard 24 hours a day.

It's always best to keep an eye on visitors.

So we intended to harvest agave.

We headed for what was left of the farmhouse. It was built on a low rise overlooking fields and gardens. It was sup-posed to be our last stop before we went home. It came near to being our last stop, period.

There was an old gray housetruck parked near the ruin of the house. We didn't see the truck at first. It was hidden be-hind the larger of two chimneys that still stood like head and footstones, commemorating the burned house. I mentioned to Jorge Cho the way the chimneys looked. Jorge was with us because in spite of his youth, he's good at spotting useful salvage that other people might dismiss as junk.

"What are head and footstones?" he asked me. He meant it. He's 18 and an escapee from the Los Angeles area like I am, but his experience has been very different. While I was being cared for and educated by educated parents, he was on his own. He speaks Spanish and a little remembered Korean, but no English. He was seven when his mother died of flu and twelve when an earthquake killed his father. It collapsed the old brick building in which the family had been squat-ting. So at 12, Jorge alone was responsible for his younger sister and brother. He took care of them, somehow, and taught himself to read and write Spanish with occasional help from an old wino acquaintance. He worked at hard, dangerous, often illegal jobs; he salvaged; and when neces-sary, he stole. He and his sister and brother, three Korean kids in a poor neighborhood of Mexican and Central Amer-ican refugees, managed to survive, but they had no time to learn nonessentials. Now we're teaching them to read, write, and speak English because that will enable them to commu-nicate with more people. And we're teaching them history, fanning, carpentry, and incidental things—like what head and footstones are.

The other two members of the salvage team were Natividad Douglas and Michael Kardos. Jorge and I are sharers. Mike and Natividad aren't. It's too dangerous to send out a majority of sharers on any team. Sharers are too vulnerable. We suffer no matter who gets hurt. But two and two is a good team, and the four of us work well together. It's unusual for us all to be careless at the same time, but today, we managed it.

The fireplace and chimney that had concealed the truck from us had been the end wall of what was once a large liv-ing room. The fireplace was big enough to roast a whole cow. The whole affair was just big enough to conceal a medium-sized housetruck.

We saw the thing only an instant before it opened fire on us.

We were armed, as usual, with our automatic rifles and our sidearms, but against the armor and the firepower of even a modest housetruck, those were nothing.

We dropped to the ground under a spray of dirt and rock kicked up by bullets hitting the ground around us. We scrambled backward, down the rise on which the house was built. The crest of the rise was our only cover. All we could do was lie at the foot of its slope and try to keep all our body parts out of sight. We didn't dare stand or even sit up. There was nowhere for us to go. Bullets chewed the ground in front of us, then behind us, beyond the protection of the rise.

There were no trees nearby—not even a large bush be-tween us and the truck. We were in the thinnest part of the remains of a desert garden. We had not reached our agaves yet—could not reach them now. They couldn't have shielded us anyway. The only thing some of us might have at least concealed ourselves behind was a young,

far-from-bulletproof young Washingtonia palm tree that we had passed on the way in. Its fronds were spread around it, low and green like a big bush, but it was at the north end of the house, and we were pinned down at the south end. The truck, too, was parked at the south end. The tree would be of no use to us. Nearest to us were a few aloe vera plants, a prickly pear, a small yucca, and a few weeds and tufts of grass.

None of these would do us any good. If the people in the truck had been making full use of their equipment, even the rise would not have done us any good. We would already be dead. I wondered how they had managed to miss us when we arrived. Were they just trying to scare us off? I didn't think so. The shooting had gone on for too long.

At last, it stopped.

We lay still, playing dead, listening for the whine of a truck engine, for footsteps, for voices, for any of the sounds that might tell us we were being hunted—or that our as-sailants had gone. There was only the low moan of the wind and the rustling of some of the plants. I lay, thinking about the pine trees that I had seen on the high ridge far behind the house. I could see them in my mind's eye, and somehow, it was all I could do to stop myself from raising my head to get a look at them, to see whether they were as far away as I thought they were. The weed-strewn fields of what had been the farm swept back and up into the hills. Above them were the pines that could shelter and conceal, but they were far beyond our reach. I sighed.

Then we heard the sound of a child, crying.

We all heard it—a few short sobs, then nothing. The child sounded very young—not a baby, but young, exhausted, helpless, hopeless.

The four of us looked at one another. We all care about kids. Michael has two and Natividad has three. Bankole and I have been trying to have one. Jorge, I'm glad to say, hasn't made anyone pregnant yet, but he's been a surrogate father to his younger sister and brother for six years. He knows as well as the rest of us do what dangers lie in wait for unpro-tected children.

I raised my head just enough to get a quick look at the truck and the area around it. A housetruck, armed, armored, and locked up tight shouldn't—couldn't let the sound of a child's crying escape. And the sound had seemed normal, not amplified or modified by truck speakers.

Therefore, one of the truck's doors must be open. Wide open.

I couldn't see much through the weeds and grasses, and I didn't dare to raise my head above them. All I could make out were the sunlit shapes of the chimney, the truck beside it, the weeds in the fields behind both chimney and truck, the distant trees, and....

Movement?

Movement far away in the weeds of the field, but coming closer.

Natividad pulled me down. "What is the matter with you?"

she whispered in Spanish. For Jorge's sake, it was best to stay with Spanish while we were in trouble. "There are crazy people in that truck! Do you want to die?"

"Someone else is coming," I said. "More than one person, coming through the fields."

"I don't care! Stay down!"

Natividad is one of my best friends, but sometimes hav-ing her along is like having your mother with you.

"Maybe the crying is intended to lure us out," Michael said. "People have used children as lures before." He's a suspicious man, Michael is. He questions everything. He and his family have been with us for two years now, and I think it took him six months to accept us and to decide that we had no evil intentions toward his wife or his twin girls. This, even though we took them in and helped them when we found his wife alone, giving birth to the twins in a ruin of a shack where they had been squatting. The place was near a stream, so they had water, and they had a couple of scavenged pots. But they were armed only with an ancient, empty .22 target pistol and a knife. They were all but starving, eating pine nuts, wild plants, and an occasional small animal that Michael trapped or killed with a rock. In fact, he was away looking for food when his wife Noriko went into labor.

Michael agreed to join us because he was terrified that in spite of his odd jobs, begging, stealing, and scavenging, his wife and babies might starve. We never asked more of them than that they do their share of the work to keep the com-munity going and that they respect Earthseed by not preach-ing other belief systems. But to Michael, this sounded like altruism, and Michael didn't believe in altruism. He kept ex-pecting to catch us selling people into slavery or prostituting them. He didn't begin to relax until he realized that we were, in fact, practicing what we preached. Earthseed was and is the key to us. We had a way of life that he thought was sen-sible and a goal, a Destiny that he thought was crazy, but we weren't up to anything that would harm his family.

And his family was the key to him. Once he accepted us, he and Noriko and the girls settled in and made Acorn very much their home. They're good people. Even Michael's suspi-ciousness can be a good thing. Most of the time, it helps us keep alert

"I don't think the crying was intended to lure us out," I said. "But something is wrong here. That's obvious. The people in that truck should either make sure we're dead or they should leave."

"And we shouldn't hear them," Jorge said. "No matter how loud that kid yells, we shouldn't hear a thing."

Natividad spoke up. "Their guns shouldn't have missed us,"

she said. "In a truck like that, the guns should be run by a computer. Automatic targeting. The only way you can miss is if you insist on doing things yourself. You might forget to put your guns on the computer or you might leave the com-puter off if you just wanted to scare people. But if you're se-rious, you shouldn't
keep
missing." Her father had taught her more about guns than most of the rest of our community knew.

"I don't think they missed us on purpose," I said. "It didn't feel like that."

"I agree," Michael said. "So what's wrong over there?"

"Shit!" Jorge whispered. "What's wrong is the bastards are going to kill us if we move!"

The guns went off again. I pressed myself against the ground and lay there, frozen, eyes shut. The idiots in the truck meant to kill us whether we moved or not, and their chances for success were excellent.

Then I realized that this time, they weren't shooting at us.

Someone screamed. Over the steady clatter of one of the truck's guns, I heard someone scream in agony. I didn't move.

When someone was in pain, the only way I could avoid sharing the suffering was not to look.

Jorge, who should have known better, raised his head and looked.

An instant later he doubled up, thrashing and twisting in someone else's agony. He didn't scream. Sharers who sur-vive learn early to take the pain and keep quiet. We keep our vulnerability as secret as we can. Sometimes we manage not to move or give any sign at all. But Jorge hurt too much to keep his body still. He clutched himself, crossing his arms over his belly. At once, I felt a dull echo of his pain in my own middle. It is incomprehensible to me that some people think of sharing as an ability or a power—as some-thing desirable.

"Fool," I said to Jorge, and held him until the pain passed from both of us. I concealed my own pain as best I could so that we wouldn't develop the kind of nasty feedback loop that I've learned we sharers are capable of. We don't die of the pains that we see and share. We wish we could some-times, and there is danger in sharing too much pain or too many deaths. These are individual matters. Five years ago I shared three or four deaths fast, one after another. It hurt more than anything should be able to hurt. Then it knocked me out.