Parable of the Talents

  “You’ll have plenty of time to find out. I’ve told him he’s going to be an uncle, by the way.”

  “Reaction?”

  “None at all. At the moment, I don’t think that even he knows who he is. He seems willing enough to be looked after; but I get the feeling he doesn’t much care what happens to him. I think… I hope that that will change. You may be his best medicine.”

  “He was my favorite brother—and always the best-looking person in the family. He’s still one of the best-looking people I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yes,” Bankole said. “In spite of his scars, he’s a good-looking boy. I wonder whether his looks have saved him or destroyed him. Or both.”

  It seems that things can never go well for long.

  Dan Noyer has run away. He slipped past the watch and out of Acorn at least in part because of the instructions I gave to the night watch. Beth Faircloth says she saw someone—a man or boy, she thought.

  “I thought the figure was too tall to be Marcus,” she said when she phoned me. “But I wasn’t sure—so I didn’t shoot.” The running figure had been dressed in dark clothing with something dark over the head and face.

  Not until I had verified that Marcus was still there did I think of Dan.

  To tell the truth, I had forgotten about Dan. My mind had been filled with Marcus—getting him back, keeping him, wondering what had happened to him. I had paid no attention to Dan. Yet Dan had suffered a terrible disappointment. He was in real pain. I knew that, and I left him to the Balters, who, after all, have two energetic little kids of their own to deal with.

  I got Zahra out of bed and asked her to check on Dan. He had been staying with them for four months now. Of course, he was gone. His note said, “I know you’ll think I’m wrong, but I have to find them. I can’t let them be with someone like that Cougar. They’re my sisters!” And after his signature, a postscript: “Take care of Kassi and Mercy until I come back. I’ll work for you and pay you. I’ll bring Paula and Nina back and they’ll work too.”

  He’s only 15. He saw Cougar and his crew. He saw my brother. He saw Georgetown. And seeing all that, he learned nothing!

  No, that’s not true. He’s learned—or finally realized—all the wrong things. I had assumed he knew what his sisters’ fate might be if they were alive—that they might be prostitutes, might wind up in some rich man’s harem or working as slave farm or factory laborers. Or, I suppose, they might wind up with some pervert who likes cutting out female tongues. They might even wind up as the property of someone who cares for them and looks after them even as he makes sexual use of them. That would be the best possibility. The worst, perhaps, is that they might survive for a while as “specialists”—prostitutes used to serve crazies and sadists. These don’t live long, and that’s a mercy. Theirs is a fate that could also befall a big, baby-faced, well-built boy like Dan. I wonder how much of this Dan understands. He is a good, brave, stupid boy, and I suspect he’ll pay for it.

  He might come back, of course. He might come to his senses and come home to help take care of Kassia and Mercy. Or we might find him through our outside contacts. I’ll have to make sure that the word is out on him as well as on Nina and Paula. Problem is, finding him won’t help if he’s still intent on hunting for his sisters. We can’t chain him here. Or rather, we won’t. If he insists on dying, he will die, damn him. Damn!

  SEVEN

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  The child in each of us

  Knows paradise.

  Paradise is home.

  Home as it was

  Or home as it should have been.

  Paradise is one’s own place,

  One’s own people,

  One’s own world,

  Knowing and known,

  Perhaps even

  Loving and loved.

  Yet every child

  Is cast from paradise—

  Into growth and destruction,

  Into solitude and new community,

  Into vast, ongoing

  Change.

  FROM Warrior BY MARCOS DURAN

  WHEN I WAS A kid, I never let anyone know how much the future scared me. In fact, I couldn’t see any future. I was born into a world that was no bigger than the walled neighborhood enclave where my family lived. My father had lived there as a boy and inherited the house from his father.

  My world was a cage. When one of my brothers dared to leave the cage, to run away from home, someone outside caught him and cut and burned all the flesh from his living body. Sometimes I catch myself wondering how long it took him to die.

  I admit, my brother was no angel. He was mean and not very bright. He loved our mother, and he was her favorite, but I don’t think he ever gave a damn about anyone else. Still, even though he was as tall as our father, he was only 14 when he was killed. To me, that makes the men who killed him worse than he ever was. How could they be human and do a thing like that to somebody? I used to imagine them—the killers—waiting for me whenever neighborhood adults with guns risked taking us out of the cage for a little while. The world outside was like my brother at his worst multiplied by about a thousand: stupid, mean, so out of control that it might do anything. It was like a dog with rabies, tearing itself to pieces, and wanting to do the same to me.

  And then it did just that.

  Oh, yes. It did.

  I could return the compliment. I could have reached for the power to do that. But I would rather fix the problem. What happened to me shouldn’t happen to anyone, yet such things have happened to thousands of people, perhaps millions. I’ve read history. Things weren’t always this way. They don’t have to go on being this way. What we have broken we can mend.

  My Uncle Marc was the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. I think I fell more than half in love with him before I even met him.

  There were also times when I was afraid for him. I don’t know what to make of our family. My grandfather was, from what I’ve heard, a good and dedicated Baptist minister. He looked after his family and his community and insisted that both be armed and able to defend themselves in an armed and dangerous world, but beyond that, he had no ambitions. It never seemed to occur to him that he could or should fix the world. Yet he was the father of two would-be world-fixers. How did that happen?

  Well, my mother was a sharer, a little adult at 15, and a survivor of the destruction of her whole neighborhood at 18. Perhaps that was why she, like Uncle Marc, needed to take charge, to bring her own brand of order to the chaos that she saw swallow so many of the people she loved. She saw chaos as natural and inevitable and as clay to be shaped and directed. As she says in one of her verses:

  Chaos

  Is God’s most dangerous face—

  Amorphous, roiling, hungry.

  Shape Chaos—

  Shape God.

  Act.

  Alter the speed

  Or the direction of Change.

  Vary the scope of Change.

  Recombine the seeds of Change.

  Transmute the impact of Change.

  Seize Change,

  Use it.

  Adapt and grow.

  And so she tried to adapt and to grow. Perhaps she feared being like her own mother, who looked for help in a “smart” drug and wound up damaging her child and killing herself.

  Chaos. Whatever my mother’s reasoning, she decided that she knew what was wrong with her world, and she knew what would fix it: Earthseed. Earthseed with all its definitions, admonitions, requirements, purpose. Earthseed with its Destiny.

  My Uncle Marc, on the other hand, hated the chaos. It wasn’t one of the faces of his god. It was unnatural. It was demonic. He hated what it had done to him, and he needed to prove that he was not what it had forced him to become. No Christian minister could ever hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control. He was a man with a wound that would not heal until he could be certain that what had happened to
him could not happen again to anyone, ever.

  My father called my mother a zealot. I think that name applies even more to Uncle Marc. And yet, I think Uncle Marc was more of a realist. Uncle Marc wanted to make the Earth a better place. Uncle Marc knew that the stars could take care of themselves.

  FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2032

  Dan hasn’t come back. I had no reason to expect him to give up and come home so quickly, but I did hope. Jorge, Diamond Scott, and Gray Mora are going to trade at the Coy street market today. I’ve told them to leave word with the few people we know in Coy, and on the way back, to tell the Sullivan family. Their quickest way home takes them past the Sullivan place.

  Marcus slept through the night, causing no trouble to himself or to us. Bankole happened to be in the kitchen when he awoke, and that was good. Bankole took him out to one of our composting toilets. I didn’t see him until later when he had washed and dressed. Then he came hesitant and tentative, to my kitchen table.

  “Hungry?” I asked. “Sit down.”

  He stared at me for several seconds, then said, “When I woke up, I thought all this was just a dream.”

  I put a piece of fruit-laden acorn bread in front of him. We had both been raised on the stuff because our old neighborhood happened to have several very fruitful California live oak trees within the walls. My father didn’t believe in waste, so he found out how to use acorns as food. Native Americans did it. We could do it. He and my mother worked at learning to use not only acorns but cactuses, palm fruit, and other plants that might otherwise be seen as useless. For Marcus and me, all this was food from home.

  Marcus took the acorn bread, lit into it, and chewed slowly. First he looked delighted, then tears began to stream down his face. I gave him a napkin and a glass of what had once been a favorite morning drink of his—a mug of hot, sweet apple juice with a lemon squeezed into it. The apples we pressed in southern California were of a different variety, but I don’t think he noticed. He ate, wiped his eyes, looked around. He stared at Bankole as Bankole came in, then focused on the rest of his breakfast, all but huddling over it the way a hawk does when its claiming and protecting its kill. There was no more talk for a while.

  When we had all had enough to eat, Bankole looked at Marcus and said, “I’ve been married to your sister for five years. During all that time, we believed that you and the rest of her family were dead.”

  “I thought she was dead, too,” Marcus said.

  “Zahra Balter—she was Zahra Moss when you knew her—she said she saw all of you killed,” I told him.

  He frowned. “Moss? Balter?”

  “We didn’t know Zahra very well back home. She was married to Richard Moss. He was killed and she married Harry Balter.”

  “God,” he said. “I never thought I’d hear those names again. I do remember Zahra—tiny, beautiful, and tough.”

  “She’s still all three. She and Harry are here. They’ve got two kids.”

  “I want to see them!”

  “Okay.”

  “Who else is here?”

  “A lot of people who’ve been through hard times. No one else from home, though. This community is called Acorn.”

  “There was a little girl… Robin. Robin Balter?”

  “Harry’s little sister. She didn’t make it.”

  “You thought I didn’t.”

  “I…saw Robin’s body, Marc. She didn’t make it.”

  He sighed and stared at his hands resting in his lap. “I did die back in ʼ27. I died. There’s nothing left.”

  “There’s family,” I said. “There’s me, Bankole, the niece or nephew who’ll be born next year. You’re free now. You can stay here and make a life for yourself in Acorn. I hope you will. But you’re free to do what you want. No one here wears a collar.”

  “Have you ever worn one?” he asked.

  “No. Some of us have been slaves, but I never was. And I believe you’re the first of us who’s worn a collar. I hope you’ll talk or write about what happened to you since the old neighborhood was destroyed.”

  He seemed to think about that for a while. “No,” he said. “No.”

  Too soon. “Okay,” I said, “but…do you think any of the others could have survived? Cory or Ben or Greg? Is it possible…?”

  “No,” he repeated. “No, they’re dead. I got out. They didn’t.”

  Sometime later, as we got up from the table, two men arrived by truck from the little coastal town of Halstead. Like Acorn, Halstead is well off the main highway. In fact, Halstead must be the most remote, isolated town in our area with the Pacific Ocean on three sides of it and low mountains behind it.

  In spite of all that, Halstead has a major problem. Halstead used to have a beach and above the beach was a palisade where the town began. Along the palisade, some of the biggest, nicest houses sat, overlooking the ocean. On one side of the peninsula were the old houses, large, well-built wood frame structures. On the other side were newer houses built on land that was once a seaside golf course. All of these are…were lined up along the palisade. I don’t know why people would build their homes on the edge of a cliff like that, but they did. Now, whenever we have heavy rains, when there’s an earthquake, or when the level of the sea rises enough to saturate more land, great blocks of the palisades drop into the sea, and the houses sitting on them break apart and fall. Sometimes half a house falls into the sea. Sometimes it’s several houses. Last night it was three of them. The people of Halstead were still fishing victims out of the sea. Worse, the community doctor had been delivering a baby in one of the lost houses. That’s why the community was turning to Bankole for help. Bankole had been on good terms with their doctor. The people of Halstead trusted Bankole because their doctor had trusted him.

  “What are you people thinking?” Bankole demanded of the weary, desperate Halstead men as he and I snatched up things he would need. He was adding to his medical bag. I was packing an overnight case for him. Marcus had looked from one of us to the other, then moved off to one side, out of the way.

  “Why do you still have people living on the cliffs?” Bankole demanded. He sounded angry. Unnecessary pain and death still made him angry. “How many times does this kind of thing have to happen before you get the idea?” he asked. He shut his bag and grabbed the overnight case that I handed him. “Move the damned houses inland, for heaven’s sake. Make it a long-term community effort.”

  “We’re doing what we can,” a big red-haired man said, moving toward the door. He pushed his hair out of his face with a dirty, abraded hand. “We’ve moved some. Others refuse to have their houses moved. They think they’ll be okay. We can’t force them.”

  Bankole shook his head, then kissed me. “This could take two or three days,” he said. “Don’t worry, and don’t do anything foolish. Behave yourself!” And he went.

  I sighed, and began to clear away the breakfast things.

  “So he really is a doctor,” Marcus said.

  I paused and looked at him. “Yes, and he and I really are married,” I said. “And I’m really pregnant. Did you think we were telling you lies?”

  “…no. I don’t know.” He paused. “You can’t change everything in your life all at once. You just can’t.”

  “You can,” I said. “We both have. It hurts. It’s terrible. But you can do it.”

  He reached for the plate I was about to take, and scavenged a few crumbs of Acorn bread from it. “It tastes like Mama’s,” he said, and he looked up at me. “I didn’t believe it was you at first. Yesterday in that godforsaken shantytown, I saw you, and I thought I had finally lost my mind. I remember, I thought, ‘Good. Now I’m crazy. Now nothing matters. Maybe I’ll see Mama, too. Maybe I’m dead.’ But I could still feel the weight of the collar around my neck, so I knew I wasn’t dead. Just crazy.”

  “Then you knew me,” I said. “And you looked away before Cougar could see that you knew me. I saw you.”


  He swallowed. Nodded. A long time later, he shut his eyes and leaned his face into his hand. “If you still want me to,” he said, “I’ll tell you what happened.”

  I managed not to sigh with relief. “Thank you.”

  “I mean, you’ve got to tell me things, too. Like how you wound up here. And how you wound up married to a man older than Dad.”

  “He’s a year younger than Dad. And when we had both lost almost everything else and everyone else, we found each other. Laugh if you want to, but we were damned lucky.”

  “I’m not laughing. I found good people too, at first. Or rather, they found me.”

  I sat down opposite him, and waited. For a time, he stared at the wall, at nothing, at the past.

  “Everything was burning on that last night,” he said. His voice was low and even. “There was so much shooting… Hoards of bald, painted people, mostly kids, had rammed their dammed truck through our gate. They were everywhere. And they had their fun with Ben and Greg and Mama and me. In all the confusion, Lauren, we didn’t even know you were gone until we had almost reached the gate. Then a blue-painted guy grabbed Ben—just snatched him and tried to run off with him. I was too small to do any good fighting him one-on-one, but I was fast. I ran after him and tackled him. I might not have been able to bring him down by myself, but Mama jumped on him too. We dragged him down, and when he fell, he hit his head on the concrete and he dropped Ben. Mama grabbed Ben and I grabbed Greg. Greg had hurt his foot—stepped on a rock and twisted it—while we were running.

  “This time, we made it out through the wrecked gate. I didn’t know where we were going. I was just following Mama, and we were both looking around for you.” He paused. “What happened to you?”

  “I saw someone get shot,” I said, remembering, shuddering with the memory. “I shared the pain of the gunshot, got caught up in the death. Then when I could get up, I found a gun. I took it from the hand of someone who was dead. That was good because a moment later, one of the paints grabbed me, and I had to shoot him. I shared his death, and in the confusion of that, I lost track of you guys and of time. When I could, I ran out of the gate and spent the rest of the night a few blocks north of our neighborhood huddling in someone’s half-burned garage. The next day I came back looking for you. That’s when I found Harry and Zahra. We were all pretty beaten up. Zahra told me you guys were dead.”