“But if they’re unconscious or dead, you don’t feel anything.”
“That’s right.”
“So that’s why you killed that guy?”
“I killed him because he was a threat to us. To me in a special way, but to you, too. What could we have done about him? Abandon him to the flies, the ants, and the dogs? You might have been willing to do that, but would Harry? Could we stay with him? For how long? To what purpose? Or would we dare to hunt up a cop and try to report seeing a guy hurt without involving ourselves. Cops are not trusting people. I think they would want to check us out, hang on to us for a while, maybe charge us with attacking the guy and killing his friend.” I turned to look at Harry who had not said a word. “What would you have done?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice hard with disapproval. “I only know I wouldn’t have done what you did.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you to do it,” I said. “I didn’t ask you. But, Harry, I would do it again. I might have to do it again. That’s why I’m telling you this.” I glanced at Zahra. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I knew I should, but talking about it is…hard. Very hard. I’ve never told anyone before. Now…” I took a deep breath. “Now everything’s up to you.”
“What do you mean?” Harry demanded.
I looked at him, wishing I could see his expression well enough to know whether this was a real question. I didn’t think it was. I decided to ignore him.
“So what do you think?” I asked, looking at Zahra.
Neither of them said anything for a minute. Then Zahra began to speak, began to say such terrible things in that soft voice of hers. After a moment, I wasn’t sure she was talking to us.
“My mama took drugs, too,” she said. “Shit, where I was born, everybody’s mama took drugs—and whored to pay for them. And had babies all the time, and threw them away like trash when they died. Most of the babies did die from the drugs or accidents or not having enough to eat or being left alone so much…or from being sick. They were always getting sick. Some of them were born sick. They had sores all over or big things on their eyes—tumors, you know—or no legs or fits or can’t breathe right… All kinds of things. And some of the ones who lived were dumb as dirt. Can’t think, can’t learn, just sit around nine, ten years old, peeing in their pants, rocking back and forth, and dripping spit down their chins. There’s a lot of them.”
She took my hand and held it. “You ain’t got nothing wrong with you, Lauren—nothing worth worrying about. That Paracetco shit was baby milk.”
How was it that I had not gotten to know this woman back in the neighborhood? I hugged her. She seemed surprised, then hugged back.
We both looked at Harry.
He sat still, near us, but far from us—from me. “What would you do,” he asked, “if that guy only had a broken arm or leg?”
I groaned, thinking about pain. I already knew more than I wanted to about how broken bones feel. “I think I’d let him go,” I said, “and I’m sure I would be sorry for it. It would be a long time before I stopped looking over my shoulder.”
“You wouldn’t kill him to escape the pain?”
“I never killed anyone back in the neighborhood to escape pain.”
“But a stranger…”
“I’ve said what I would do.”
“What if I broke my arm?”
“Then I might not be much good to you. I would be having trouble with my arm, too, after all. But we’d have two good arms between us.” I sighed. “We grew up together, Harry. You know me. You know what kind of person I am. I might fail you, but if I could help myself, I wouldn’t betray you.”
“I thought I knew you.”
I took his hands, looked at their big, pale, blunt fingers. They had a lot of strength in them, I knew, but I had never seen him use it to bully anyone. He was worth some trouble, Harry was.
“No one is who we think they are,” I said. “That’s what we get for not being telepathic. But you’ve trusted me so far—and I’ve trusted you. I’ve just put my life in your hands. What are you going to do?”
Was he going to abandon me now to my “infirmity”—instead of me maybe abandoning him at some future time due to a theoretical broken arm. And I thought: One oldest kid to another, Harry; would that be responsible behavior?
He took his hands back. “Well, I did know you were a manipulative bitch,” he said.
Zahra smothered a laugh. I was surprised. I’d never heard him use the word before. I heard it now as a sound of frustration. He wasn’t going to leave. He was a last bit of home that I didn’t have to give up yet. How did he feel about that? Was he angry with me for almost breaking up the group? He had reason to be, I suppose.
“I don’t understand how you could have been like this all the time,” he said. “How could you hide your sharing from everyone?”
“My father taught me to hide it,” I told him. “He was right. In this world, there isn’t any room for housebound, frightened, squeamish people, and that’s what I might have become if everyone had known about me—all the other kids, for instance. Little kids are vicious. Haven’t you noticed?”
“But your brothers must have known.”
“My father put the fear of God into them about it. He could do that. As far as I know, they never told anyone. Keith used to play ‘funny’ tricks on me, though.”
“So…you faked everyone out. You must be a hell of an actor.”
“I had to learn to pretend to be normal. My father kept trying to convince me that I was normal. He was wrong about that, but I’m glad he taught me the way he did.”
“Maybe you are normal. I mean if the pain isn’t real, then maybe—”
“Maybe this sharing thing is all in my head? Of course it is! And I can’t get it out. Believe me, I’d love to.”
There was a long silence. Then he asked, “What do you write in your book every night?” Interesting shift.
“My thoughts,” I said. “The day’s events. My feelings.”
“Things you can’t say?” he asked. “Things that are important to you?”
“Yes.”
“Then let me read something. Let me know something about the you that hides. I feel as though…as though you’re a lie. I don’t know you. Show me something of you that’s real.”
What a request! Or was it a demand? I would have given him money to read and digest some of the Earthseed portions of my journal. But he had to be eased into them. If he read the wrong thing, it would just increase the distance between us.
“The risks you ask me to take, Harry… But, yes, I’ll show you some of what I’ve written. I want to. It’ll be another first for me. All I ask is that you read what I show you aloud so Zahra can hear it. As soon as it’s light, I’ll show you.”
When it was light, I showed him this:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
Last year, I chose these lines to the first page of the first book of Earthseed: The Books of the Living. These lines say everything. Everything!
Imagine him asking me for it.
I must be careful.
17
❏ ❏ ❏
Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2027
(from notes expanded AUGUST 8)
THERE’S A BIG FIRE in the hills to the east of us. We saw it begin as a thin, dark column of smoke, rising into an otherwise clear sky. Now it’s massive—a hillside or two? Several buildings? Many houses? Our neighborhood again?
; We kept looking at it, then looking away. Other people dying, losing their families, their homes… Even when we had walked past it, we looked back.
Had the people with painted faces done this, too? Zahra was crying as she walked along, cursing in a voice so soft that I could hear only a few of the bitter words.
Earlier today we left the 118 freeway to look for and finally connect with the 23. Now we’re on the 23 with charred overgrown wilderness on one side and neighborhoods on the other. We can’t see the fire itself now. We’ve passed it, come a long way from it, put hills between it and us as we head southward toward the coast. But we can still see the smoke. We didn’t stop for the night until it was almost dark and we were all tired and hungry.
We’ve camped away from the freeway on the wilderness side of it, out of sight, but not out of hearing of the shuffling hoards of people on the move. I think that’s a sound we’ll hear for the whole of our journey whether we stop in Northern California or go through to Canada. So many people hoping for so much up where it still rains every year, and an uneducated person might still get a job that pays in money instead of beans, water, potatoes, and maybe a floor to sleep on.
But it’s the fire that holds our attention. Maybe it was started by accident. Maybe not. But still, people are losing what they may not be able to replace. Even if they survive, insurance isn’t worth much these days.
People on the highway, shadowy in the darkness, had begun to reverse the flow, to drift northward to find a way to the fire. Best to be early for the scavenging.
“Should we go?” Zahra asked, her mouth full of dried meat. We built no fire tonight. Best for us to vanish into the darkness and avoid guests. We had put a tangle of trees and bushes at our backs and hoped for the best.
“You mean go back and rob those people?” Harry demanded.
“Scavenge,” she said. “Take what people don’t need no more. If you’re dead, you don’t need much.”
“We should stay here and rest,” I said. “We’re tired, and it will be a long time before things are cool enough over there to allow scavenging. It’s a long way off, anyway.”
Zahra sighed. “Yeah.”
“We don’t have to do things like that, anyway,” Harry said.
Zahra shrugged. “Every little bit helps.”
“You were crying about that fire a while ago.”
“Uh-uh,” Zahra drew her knees up against her body. “I wasn’t crying about that fire. I was crying about our fire and my Bibi and thinking about how much I hate people who set fires like that. I wish they would burn. I wish I could burn them. I wish I could just take them and throw them in the fire…like they did my Bibi.” And she began to cry again, and he held her, apologizing and, I think, shedding a few tears himself.
Grief hit like that. Something would remind us of the past, of home, of a person, and then we would remember that it was all gone. The person was dead or probably dead. Everything we’d known and treasured was gone. Everything except the three of us. And how well were we doing?
“I think we should move,” Harry said sometime later. He was still sitting with Zahra, one arm around her, and she seemed to welcome the contact.
“Why?” she asked.
“I want to be higher, closer to the level of the freeway or above it. I want to be able to see the fire if it jumps the freeway and spreads toward us. I want to see it before it gets too close. Fire moves fast.”
I groaned. “You’re right,” I said, “but moving now that it’s dark is risky. We could lose this place and find nothing better.”
“Wait here,” he said, and got up and walked away into the darkness. I had the gun, so I hoped he kept his knife handy—and I hoped he wouldn’t need it. He was still raw about what had happened the night before. He had killed a man. That bothered him. I had killed a man in a much more cold-blooded way, according to him, and it didn’t bother me. But my “cold-bloodedness” bothered him. He wasn’t a sharer. He didn’t understand that to me pain was the evil. Death was an end to pain. No Bible verses were going to change that as far as I was concerned. He didn’t understand sharing. Why should he? Most people knew little or nothing about it.
On the other hand, my Earthseed verses had surprised him, and, I think, pleased him a little. I wasn’t sure whether he liked the writing or the reasoning, but he liked having something to read and talk about.
“Poetry?” he said this morning as he looked through the pages I showed him—pages of my Earthseed notebook, as it happened. “I never knew you cared about poetry.”
“A lot of it isn’t very poetical,” I said. “But it’s what I believe, and I’ve written it as well as I could.” I showed him four verses in all—gentle, brief verses that might take hold of him without his realizing it and live in his memory without his intending that they should. Bits of the Bible had done that to me, staying with me even after I stopped believing.
I gave to Harry, and through him to Zahra, thoughts I wanted them to keep. But I couldn’t prevent Harry from keeping other things as well: His new distrust of me, for instance, almost his new dislike. I was not quite Lauren Olamina to him any longer. I had seen that in his expression off and on all day. Odd. Joanne hadn’t liked her glimpse of the real me either. On the other hand, Zahra didn’t seem to mind. But then, she hadn’t known me very well at home. What she learned now, she could accept without feeling lied to. Harry did feel lied to, and perhaps he wondered what lies I was still telling or living. Only time could heal that—if he let it.
We moved when he came back. He had found us a new campsite, near the freeway and yet private. One of the huge freeway signs had fallen or been knocked down, and now lay on the ground, propped up by a pair of dead sycamore trees. With the trees, it formed a massive lean-to. The rock and ash leavings of a campfire showed us that the place had been used before. Perhaps there had been people here tonight, but they had gone away to see what they could scavenge from the fire. Now we’re here, happy to get a little privacy, a view of the hills back where the fire is, and the security, for what it was worth, of at least one wall.
“Good deal!” Zahra said, unrolling her sleepsack and settling down on top of it. “I’ll take the first watch tonight, okay?”
It was okay with me. I gave her the gun and lay down, eager for sleep. Again I was amazed to find so much comfort in sleeping on the ground in my clothes. There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.
Sometime in the night I woke up to soft, small sounds of voices and breathing. Zahra and Harry were making love. I turned my head and saw them at it, though they were too much involved with each other to notice me.
And, of course, no one was on watch.
I got caught up in their lovemaking, and had all I could do to lie still and keep quiet. I couldn’t escape their sensation. I couldn’t keep an efficient watch. I could either writhe with them or hold myself rigid. I held rigid until they finished—until Harry kissed Zahra, then got up to put his pants on and began his watch.
And I lay awake afterward, angry and worried. How in hell could I talk to either of them about this? It would be none of my business except for the time they chose for doing it. But look when that was! We could all have been killed.
Still sitting up, Harry began to snore.
I listened for a couple of minutes, then sat up, reached over Zahra, and shook him.
He jumped awake, stared around, then turned toward me. I couldn’t see more than a moving silhouette.
“Give me the gun and go back to sleep,” I said.
He just sat there.
“Harry, you’ll get us killed. Give me the gun and the watch and lie down. I’ll wake you later.”
He looked at the watch.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I was more tired than I thought.” His voice grew less sleep-fogged. “I’m all right. I’m awake. Go back to sleep.”
His pride had kicked in. It would be almost impossible to get the gun and the watch from him now.
I lay down. “Remember last
night,” I said. “If you care about her at all, if you want her to live, remember last night.”
He didn’t answer. I hoped I had surprised him. I supposed I had also embarrassed him. And maybe I had made him feel angry and defensive. Whatever I’d done, I didn’t hear him doing any more snoring.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2027
Today we stopped at a commercial water station and filled ourselves and all our containers with clean, safe water. Commercial stations are best for that. Anything you buy from a water peddler on the freeway ought to be boiled, and still might not be safe. Boiling kills disease organisms, but may do nothing to get rid of chemical residue—fuel, pesticide, herbicide, whatever else has been in the bottles that peddlers use. The fact that most peddlers can’t read makes the situation worse. They sometimes poison themselves.
Commercial stations let you draw whatever you pay for—and not a drop more—right out of one of their taps. You drink whatever the local householders are drinking. It might taste, smell, or look bad, but you can depend on it not to kill you.
There aren’t enough water stations. That’s why water peddlers exist. Also, water stations are dangerous places. People going in have money. People coming out have water, which is as good as money. Beggars and thieves hang around such places—keeping the whores and drug dealers company. Dad warned us all about water stations, trying to prepare us in case we ever went out and got caught far enough from home to be tempted to stop for water. His advice: “Don’t do it. Suffer. Get your rear end home.”
Yeah.
Three is the smallest comfortable number at a water station. Two to watch and one to fill up. And it’s good to have three ready for trouble on the way to and from the station. Three would not stop determined thugs, but it would stop opportunists—and most predators are opportunists. They prey on old people, lone women or women with young kids, handicapped people… They don’t want to get hurt. My father used to call them coyotes. When he was being polite, he called them coyotes.
We were coming away with our water when we saw a pair of two-legged coyotes grab a bottle of water from a woman who was carrying a sizable pack and a baby. The man with her grabbed the coyote who had taken the water, the coyote passed the water to his partner, and his partner ran straight into us.