Parable of the Talents, Page 2

  Now I begin to know what he is saying. He has been an indistinct background rumble until now, but now I hear him reading from the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, quoting the words of Christ:

  “ ‘For the kingdom of Heaven is as a man traveling into a far country who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto One he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey’ ”

  My father loved parables—stories that taught, stories that presented ideas and morals in ways that made pictures in people’s minds. He used the ones he found in the Bible, the ones he plucked from history, or from folk tales, and of course he used those he saw in his life and the lives of people he knew. He wove stories into his Sunday sermons, his Bible classes, and his computer-delivered history lectures. Because he believed stories were so important as teaching tools, I learned to pay more attention to them than I might have otherwise. I could quote the parable that he was reading now, the parable of the talents. I could quote several Biblical parables from memory. Maybe that’s why I can hear and understand so much now. There is preaching between the bits of the parable, but I can’t quite understand it. I hear its rhythms rising and falling, repeating and varying, shouting and whispering. I hear them as I’ve always heard them, but I can’t catch the words—except for the words of the parable.

  “ ‘Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same and made them another five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained another two. But he that had received one went out and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.’ ”

  My father was a great believer in education, hard work, and personal responsibility. “Those are our talents,” he would say as my brothers’ eyes glazed over and even I tried not to sigh. “God has given them to us, and he’ll judge us according to how we use them.”

  The parable continues. To each of the two servants who had traded well and made profit for their lord, the lord said, “ ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.’ ”

  But to the servant who had done nothing with his silver talent except bury it in the ground to keep it safe, the lord said harsher words. “ ‘Thou wicked and slothful servant…’ ” he began. And he ordered his men to, “ ‘Take therefore the talent from him and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ ”

  When my father has said these words, my mother vanishes. I haven’t even been able to see her whole face, and now she’s gone.

  I don’t understand this. It scares me. I can see now that other people are vanishing too. Most have already gone. Beloved ghosts…

  My father is gone. My stepmother calls out to him in Spanish the way she did sometimes when she was excited, “No! How can we live now? They’ll break in. They’ll kill us all! We must build the wall higher!”

  And she’s gone. My brothers are gone. I’m alone—as I was alone that night five years ago. The house is ashes and rubble around me. It doesn’t burn or crumble or even fade to ashes, but somehow, in an instant, it is a ruin, open to the night sky. I see stars, a quarter moon, and a streak of light, moving, rising into the sky like some life force escaping. By the light of all three of these, I see shadows, large, moving, threatening. I fear these shadows, but I see no way to escape them. The wall is still there, surrounding our neighborhood, looming over me much higher than it ever truly did. So much higher… It was supposed to keep danger out. It failed years ago. Now it fails again. Danger is walled in with me. I want to run, to escape, to hide, but now my own hands, my feet begin to fade away. I hear thunder. I see the streak of light rise higher in the sky, grow brighter.

  Then I scream. I fall. Too much of my body is gone, vanished away. I can’t stay upright, can’t catch myself as I fall and fall and fall…

  I awoke here in my cabin at Acorn, tangled in my blankets, half on and half off my bed. Had I screamed aloud? I didn’t know. I never seem to have these nightmares when Bankole is with me, so he can’t tell me how much noise I make. It’s just as well. His practice already costs him enough sleep, and this night must be worse than most for him.

  It’s three in the morning now, but last night, just after dark, some group, some gang, perhaps, attacked the Dovetree place just north of us. There were, yesterday at this time, 22 people living at Dovetree—the old man, his wife, and his two youngest daughters; his five married sons, their wives and their kids. All of these people are gone except for the two youngest wives and the three little children they were able to grab as they ran. Two of the kids are hurt, and one of the women has had a heart attack, of all things. Bankole has treated her before. He says she was born with a heart defect that should have been taken care of when she was a baby. But she’s only twenty, and around the time she was born, her family, like most people, had little or no money. They worked hard themselves and put the strongest of their kids to work at ages eight or ten. Their daughter’s heart problem was always either going to kill her or let her live. It wasn’t going to be fixed.

  Now it had nearly killed her. Bankole was sleeping—or more likely staying awake—in the clinic room of the school tonight, keeping an eye on her and the two injured kids. Thanks to my hyperempathy syndrome, he can’t have his clinic here at the house. I pick up enough of other people’s pain as things are, and he worries about it. He keeps wanting to give me some stuff that prevents my sharing by keeping me sleepy, slow, and stupid. No, thanks!

  So I awoke alone, soaked with sweat, and unable to get back to sleep. It’s been years since I’ve had such a strong reaction to a dream. As I recall, the last time was five years ago right after we settled here, and it was this same damned dream. I suppose it’s come back to me because of the attack on Dovetree.

  That attack shouldn’t have happened. Things have been quieting down over the past few years. There’s still crime, of course—robberies, break-ins, abductions for ransom or for the slave trade. Worse, the poor still get arrested and indentured for indebtedness, vagrancy, loitering, and other “crimes.” But this thing of raging into a community and killing and burning all that you don’t steal seems to have gone out of fashion. I haven’t heard of anything like this Dovetree raid for at least three years.

  Granted, the Dovetrees did supply the area with home-distilled whiskey and homegrown marijuana, but they’ve been doing that since long before we arrived. In fact, they were the best-armed farm family in the area because their business was not only illegal, but lucrative. People have tried to rob them before, but only the quick, quiet burglar-types have had any success. Until now.

  I questioned Aubrey, the healthy Dovetree wife, while Bankole was working on her son. He had already told her that the little boy would be all right, and I felt that we had to find out what she knew, no matter how upset she was. Hell, the Dovetree houses are only an hour’s walk from here down the old logging road. Whoever hit Dovetree, we could be next on their list.

  Aubrey told me the attackers wore strange clothing, She and I talked in the main room of the school, a single, smoky oil lamp between us on one of the tables. We sat facing one another across the table, Aubrey glancing every now and then at the clinic room, where Bankole had cleaned and eased her child’s scrapes, burns, and bruises. She said the attackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics—black dresses, she called them—which hung to their thighs. Under these, they wore ordinary pants—either jeans or the kind of camouflage pants that she had seen soldiers wear.

  “They were like soldiers,” she said. “They sneaked in, so quiet. We never saw them until they started shooting at us. Then, bang! All at once. They hit all our houses. It was like an explosion—maybe twenty or thirty or more guns going off all at just the same time.”

/>   And that wasn’t the way gangs operated. Gangsters would have fired raggedly, not in unison. Then they would have tried to make individual names for themselves, tried to grab the best-looking women or steal the best stuff before their friends could get it.

  “They didn’t steal or burn anything until they had beaten us, shot us.” Aubrey said. “Then they took our fuel and went straight to our fields and burned our crops. After that, they raided the houses and barns. They all wore big white crosses on their chests—crosses like in church. But they killed us. They even shot the kids. Everybody they found, they killed them. I hid with my baby or they would have shot him and me.” Again, she stared toward the clinic room.

  That killing of children…that was a hell of a thing. Most thugs—except for the worst psychotics—would keep the kids alive for rape and then for sale. And as for the crosses, well, gangsters might wear crosses on chains around their necks, but that wasn’t the sort of thing most of their victims would get close enough to notice. And gangsters were unlikely to run around in matching tunics all sporting white crosses on their chests. This was something new.

  Or something old.

  I didn’t think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won’t be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

  Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a “cultist,” or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that’s worth stealing. And “cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn’t quite match Jarret’s version of Christianity. Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.” He’s had notable success with this carrot-and-stick approach. Join us and thrive, or whatever happens to you as a result of your own sinful stubbornness is your problem. His opponent Vice President Edward Jay Smith calls him a demagogue, a rabble-rouser, and a hypocrite. Smith is right, of course, but Smith is such a tired, gray shadow of a man. Jarret, on the other hand, is a big, handsome, black-haired man with deep, clear blue eyes that seduce people and hold them. He has a voice that’s a whole-body experience, the way my father’s was. In fact, I’m sorry to say, Jarret was once a Baptist minister like my father. But he left the Baptists behind years ago to begin his own “Christian America” denomination. He no longer preaches regular CA sermons at CA churches or on the nets, but he’s still recognized as head of the church.

  It seems inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give Jarret an even greater advantage.

  Jarret’s people see alcohol and drugs as Satan’s tools. Some of his more fanatical followers might very well be the tunic-and-cross gang who destroyed Dovetree.

  And we are Earthseed. We’re “that cult,” “those strange people in the hills,” “those crazy fools who pray to some kind of god of change.” We are also, according to some rumors I’ve heard, “those devil-worshiping hill heathens who take in children. And what do you suppose they do with them?” Never mind that the trade in abducted or orphaned children or children sold by desperate parents goes on all over the country and everyone knows it. No matter. The hint that some cult is taking in children for “questionable purposes” is enough to make some people irrational.

  That’s the kind of rumor that could hurt us even with people who aren’t Jarret supporters. I’ve only heard it a couple of times, but it’s still scary.

  At this point, I just hope that the people who hit Dovetree were some new gang, disciplined and frightening, but only after profit. I hope…

  But I don’t believe it. I do suspect that Jarret’s people had something to do with this. And I think I’d better say so today at Gathering. With Dovetree fresh in everyone’s mind, people will be ready to cooperate, have more drills and scatter more caches of money, food, weapons, records, and valuables. We can fight a gang. We’ve done that before when we were much less prepared than we are now. But we can’t fight Jarret. In particular, we can’t fight President Jarret. President Jarret, if the country is mad enough to elect him, could destroy us without even knowing we exist.

  We are now 59 people—64 with the Dovetree women and children, if they stay. With numbers like that, we barely do exist. All the more reason, I suppose, for my dream.

  My “talent,” going back to the parable of the talents, is Earthseed. And although I haven’t buried it in the ground, I have buried it here in these coastal mountains, where it can grow at about the same speed as our redwood trees. But what else could I have done? If I had somehow been as good at rabble-rousing as Jarret is, then Earthseed might be a big enough movement by now to be a real target. And would that be better?

  I’m jumping to all kinds of unwarranted conclusions. At least I hope they’re unwarranted. Between my horror at what’s happened down at Dovetree and my hopes and fears for my own people, I’m upset and at loose ends and, perhaps, just imagining things.

  TWO

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  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.

  THE ORIGINAL 13 SETTLERS of Acorn, and thus the original 13 members of Earthseed, were my mother, of course, and Harry Balter and Zahra Moss, who were also refugees from my mother’s home neighborhood in Robledo. There was Travis, Natividad, and Dominic Douglas, a young family who became my mother’s first highway converts. She met them as both groups walked through Santa Barbara, California. She liked their looks,
recognized their dangerous vulnerability—Dominic was only a few months old at the time—and convinced them to walk with Harry, Zahra, and her in their long trek north where they all hoped to find better lives.

  Next came Allison Gilchrist and her sister Julian—Allie and Jill. But Jill was killed later along the highway. At around the same time, my mother spotted my father and he spotted her. Neither of them was shy and both seemed witting to act on what they felt. My father joined the growing group. Justin Rohr became Justin Gilchrist when the group found him crying alongside the body of his dead mother. He was about three at the time, and he and Allie wound up coming together in another small family. Last came the two families of ex-slaves that joined together to become one growing family of sharers. These were Grayson Mora and his daughter Doe and Emery Solis and her daughter Tori.

  That was it: four children, four men, and five women.

  They should have died. That they survived at all in the unforgiving world of the Pox might qualify as a miracle—although of course, Earthseed does not encourage belief in miracles.

  No doubt the group’s isolated location—well away from towns and paved roads—helped keep it safe from much of the violence of the time. The land it settled on belonged to my father. There was on that land when the group arrived one dependable well, a half-ruined garden, a number of fruit and nut trees, and groves of oaks, pines, and redwoods. Once the members of the group had pooled their money and bought handcarts, seed, small livestock, hand tools, and other necessities, they were almost independent. They vanished into their hills and increased their numbers by birth, by adoption of orphans, and by conversion of needy adults. They scavenged what they could from abandoned farms and settlements, they traded at street markets and traded with their neighbors. One of the most valuable things they traded with one another was knowledge.