But she had the bad luck to begin her work at almost the same time that Andrew Steele Jarret began his, and he was, at least in the short term, much the stronger. Her only good luck was that he was so much stronger than she was that he never noticed her. His fanatical Crusaders, very much one of the fingers of his hand, utterly destroyed her first effort, but there’s no record at all of her ever having come to Jarret’s attention. She was just an ant that he happened to step on.
If she had been anything more than that, she would not have survived.
It is interesting, however, to see that after Acorn, she seemed to lose her direction until she found Belen Ross. She had written about wanting to find me, then begin her Earthseed work again—but begin it how? By establishing another Acorn? One even more hidden away and low-key?
Surely, a new Acorn would be just as vulnerable as the first one. One gesture of authority could erase it completely. What then? She needed a different idea, and, in fact, she had one. She knew that she had to teach teachers. Gathering families had not worked. She had to gather single people, or at least independent people—people who would learn from her, then scatter to preach and teach as, in effect, her disciples. Instead, she was still, reflexively, looking for me. I’m not sure there was much left of that search but reflex by the time Belen Ross came into the picture. I’ve wondered whether Allison Gilchrist—Allie—guessed this and brought her together with Len just to shake her up.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
TUESDAY, JUNE 19, 2035
There are three of us now, in a way. We’ve had an interesting time becoming three, and I’m not altogether comfortable with the way I brought it about. It isn’t exactly what I expected to do, but I’ve found it interesting. We’re on the road again, just north of a shiny, new company town called Hobartville. We bought supplies outside of the walls of Hobartville at the inevitable squatter settlement. Then we circled around the town and moved on. It’s good to be moving again. We’ve been three days in one place.
Until three days ago, we had been walking and making no lingering contacts on the road—which is an odd way for me to behave. Back in ʼ27 when I was walking from Los Angeles to Humboldt County, I gathered people, gathered a small community. I thought then that Earthseed would be born through small, cooperating communities. Once Acorn was established, I invited others to join us. This time, I haven’t felt that I could invite anyone other than Len to join me.
This time, after all, I was only going to Portland to look for my daughter and to get my brother to help me find her whether he wanted to or not.
And was that any more realistic a goal than Len’s intention to walk to Alaska to rejoin her family? It was, perhaps less suicidal, but…no more sensible.
It is my uneasiness, my fear that perhaps this is true, that has kept me from reaching out to people. I’ve fed a few ragged parent-child groups because it’s hard for me to see hungry children and do nothing at all. Yet I couldn’t do much. What’s a meal, after all? With Acorn, I had done more. With Earthseed, I had hoped to do much more. So much more… I still have hopes. Even during the 17 months of Camp Christian, I never forgot Earthseed, although there were times when I thought I might not survive to teach it or use it to shape our future.
But all I’ve been able to do on this trip is to feed a mother and child here, a father and child there, then send them on their ways. They don’t always want to go.
“How do you know they won’t lie in wait and rob us later?” Len asked as we tramped along I-5 after leaving a father and his two small, ragged boys eating what I suspected was their first good meal in some time.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s unlikely, but it could happen.”
“Then why take the chance?”
I looked at her. She met my eyes for a second, then looked away. “I know,” she said in a voice I could hardly hear. “But what good is a meal? I mean, they’ll be hungry again soon.”
“Yes,” I said. “Jarret would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children’s bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls.”
“My father voted for him,” she said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“My father said he would bring order and stability, get the country back on its feet again. I remember that. He got my mother to vote for him too, not that she cared. She would have voted for the man in the moon if he had told her to, just so he would let her alone. I was still living at home during the ʼ32 election. I had never been outside our walls. I thought my father must know what he was talking about, so I was for Jarret, too. I was too young to vote, though, so it didn’t matter. All the adult servants voted for him. My father stood by the only phone in the house that servants were allowed to use. He watched as their finger and retinal prints were scanned in. Then he watched them vote.”
“I wonder whether it was your abduction that made your father give up on Jarret.”
“Give up on him?”
“On him and on the United States. He’s left the country, after all.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Yes. Although I’m still having trouble thinking of Alaska as a foreign country. I guess that should be easy now, since the war. But it doesn’t matter. None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids are the future if they don’t starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?”
“That’s what Earthseed was about,” I said. “I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.”
“It is,” Len said.
“It is,” I repeated. “There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They’ll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it’s only to begin a new one, a different one.
“Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It’s about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It’s about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. It’s…” I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. “It’s about a lot more than that,” I said. “But those are the bones.”
“Makes a strange sermon.”
“I know.”
“You need to do what Jarret does.”
“What!” I demanded, not wanting to do anything Jarret did.
“Focus on what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it. Tell folksy stories that illustrate your points and promise the
moon and stars—literally in your case. Why should people want to go to the stars, anyway? It will cost a lot of money, and time. It will force us to create whole new technologies. And I doubt that anyone who’s alive when the effort starts will live to see the end of it. Some scientists might like it. It will give them the chance to work on their pet projects. And some people might think it’s a great adventure, but no one’s going to want to pay for it.”
Now I smiled. “Exactly. I’ve been saying things like that for years. Some people might want to do it for the sake of their children—to give them the chance to begin again and do things right this time. But that idea alone won’t do it. It won’t bring in enough people, money, or persistence. Fulfilling the Destiny is a long-term, expensive, uncertain project—or rather it’s hundreds of projects. Maybe thousands. And with no guarantees of anything. Politicians, on the other hand, are short-term thinkers, opportunists, sometimes with consciences, but opportunists nevertheless. Business people are hungry for profit, short- and long-term. The truth is, preparing for interstellar travel and then sending out ships filled with colonists is bound to be a job so long, thankless, expensive, and difficult that I suspect that only a religion could do it. A lot of people will find ways to make money from it. That might get things started. But it will take something as essentially human and as essentially irrational as religion to keep them focused and keep it going—for generations if it takes generations. I suspect it will. You see, I have thought about this.”
Len thought about it herself for a while, then said, “If that’s what you believe, why don’t you tell people to go to the stars because that’s what God wants them to do—and don’t start explaining to me that your God doesn’t want anything. I understand that. But most people won’t understand it.”
“The people of Acorn did.”
“And where are they?”
That hurt like a punch in the face. “No one knows better than I do how miserably I failed my people,” I said.
Len looked away, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just mean that what you’re saying just isn’t something people are going to understand and get enthusiastic about—at least not quickly. Did people join Acorn for Earthseed or in the hope of feeding their kids?”
I sighed and nodded. “They did it to feed their kids and to live in a community that didn’t look down on them for being poor or enslave them when they were vulnerable. It took some of the adults years to accept Earthseed. The kids got into it right away, though. I thought the kids would be the missionary teachers.”
“Maybe they would have been, if they’d had the chance. But that way didn’t work. What are you going to do now?”
“With Jarret’s Crusaders still running loose? I don’t know.” This wasn’t entirely true. I did have some ideas, but I wanted to hear what Len had to say. She had been interesting and thoughtful so far.
“You’re good at talking to people,” she said. “They like you. Hell, they trust you. Why can’t you just preach to them like any other minister? Preach the way Jarret does. Have you ever heard any of his speeches? Most of them are sermons. Newspeople have a hard time opposing anything he wants because he’s always on God’s side. Guess whose side that puts them on?”
“And you think I should do that?”
“Of course you should do that if you believe what you say.”
“I’m not a demagogue.”
“That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.”
We walked in silence for a while, then I said, “What about you?”
“What do you mean? You know where I’m going.”
“Stay with me. Go somewhere else.”
“You’re going to Oregon to see your brother and find your child.”
“Yes. And I’m also going to make Earthseed what it should be—the way we humans finally manage to grow up.”
“You intend to try again?”
“I don’t really have any choice. Earthseed isn’t just what I believe. It’s who I am. It’s why I exist.”
“You say in your book that we don’t have purpose, but potential.”
I smiled. She had a photographic memory or nearly so. But she wasn’t above using it unfairly to win an argument.
I quoted,
“We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.”
“We choose our purpose,” I said. “I chose mine before I was old enough to know any better—or it chose me. Purpose is essential. Without it, we drift.”
“Purpose,” she said, and with an air of showing off, she quoted:
“Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.”
She sighed. “Sounds wonderful. But then a lot of things sound wonderful. What are you going to do?”
“I’m no Jarret,” I said, “but you’re probably right about the need to simplify and focus my message. You can help me do that.”
“Why should I?”
“Because it will keep you alive.”
She looked away again. After a long silence, she said with great bitterness, “What makes you think I want to be kept alive?”
“I know you do. But if you stick with me, you’ll have to prove it.”
“What?”
“As a matter of fact, if you stick with me, you’ll have all you can do to stay alive. Ideas like those in Earthseed aren’t going to be popular for a while. Jarret wouldn’t like them if he knew about them.”
“If you have any sense, you won’t draw attention to yourself. Not now.”
“I don’t intend to draw huge crowds or get on the nets. Not until Jarret has worn out his welcome, anyway. I do intend to reach out to people again.”
“How?”
And I knew. I had been wondering as we spoke, scrambling for ideas. Len’s comments had helped focus me. So had my own recent experience. “I’ll reach people in their homes,” I said. “There’s nothing new about door-to-door missionaries in small cities like Eureka, for instance. In L.A. you couldn’t do it. We may not be able to do it in Portland either. Portland’s gotten so big. But on the way there, and in the larger towns around Portland, it might work. Small cities and big towns. People in very large cities and the very small towns can be—will be—suspicious and vicious.”
“Free towns only, I assume,” Len said.
“Of course. If I managed to get into a company town, I might be collared for vagrancy. That can be a life sentence. They just keep charging you more to live than they pay you for your labor, and you never get out of debt.”
“So I’ve heard. You want to just knock on people’s doors and ask to tell them about Earthseed? I hear the Jehovah’s Witnesses do that. Or they did it. I’m not sure they still do.”
“It’s gotten more dangerous.” I said. “But other people did it too. The Mormons and some other lesser-known groups.”
“Christian groups.”
“I know.” I thought for a moment. “Did you know I was 18 when I began collecting people and establishing Acorn? Eighteen. A year younger than you are now.”
“I know. Allie told me.”
“People followed me, though,” I continued. “And they didn’t only do it because they were convinced that I could help them get what they wanted. They followed me because I seemed to be going somewhere. They had no purpose beyond survival. Get a job. Eat. Get a room somewhere. Exist. But I wanted more than that for myself and for my people, and I meant to have it. They wanted more too, but they didn’t think they could have it. They weren’t even sure what ‘it’ was.”
“Weren’t you wonderful?” Len murmured.
“Don’t be an idi
ot,” I said. “Those people were willing to follow an 18-year-old girl because she seemed to be going somewhere, seemed to know where she was going. People elected Jarret because he seemed to know where he was going too. Even rich people like your dad are desperate for someone who seems to know where they’re going.”
“Dad wanted someone who would protect his investments and keep the poor people in their places.”
“And when he realized that Jarret either couldn’t or wouldn’t do either, he left the country. Other people will turn their backs on Jarret, too, in different ways. But they’ll still want to follow people who seem to know where they’re going.”
“You?”
I sighed. “Perhaps. More likely, though, it will be people I’ve taught. I don’t really have the skills that will be needed. Also, I don’t know how long it will take to make Earthseed a way of life and the Destiny a goal that much of humanity struggles to achieve. I’m afraid that alone might take my lifetime and yours. It won’t be quick. But we’ll be the ones who plant the first seeds, you and I.”
Len pushed her black hair away from her face. “I don’t believe in Earthseed. I don’t believe in any of this. It’s just a lot of simplistic nonsense. You’ll get killed knocking on the doors of strangers, and that will be the end of it.”
“That could happen.”
“I want no part of it.”
“Yes, you do. If you live, you’ll accomplish more that’s good and important than anyone you’ve ever known. If you die, you’ll die trying to accomplish it.”
“I said I want no part of it. It’s ridiculous. It’s impossible.”
“And you have more important things to do?”
Silence.
We didn’t talk anymore until we came to a road leading off into the hills. I turned to follow it, ignoring Len’s questions. Where was I going? I didn’t know at all. Perhaps I would just have a look at what lay up the road, then turn back to the highway. Perhaps not.