Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

“A place like this can’t last,” I told Bankole. “It’s a shame. Life could be good here.”

“I suspect that it’s against the law to live here,” he said. “This is a State Recreation Area. There should be some kind of limit on how long you can stay. I’m certain that there should be— used to be— some group policing the place. I wonder if officials of some kind come around to collect bribes now and then.”

“Not while we’re here, I hope.” I dried my hands and arms and waited for him to dry his. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

I didn’t laugh, though I wanted to. I just looked at him.

After a while he frowned and shook his head. In a little more time, he moved back against me, touching my face, my shoulders, my breasts.

“You’re not just eighteen,” he said.

I shrugged.

“When were you born? What year?”

“Twenty oh nine.”

“No.” He drew the word out: “Nooo.”

I kissed him and said in the same tone, “Yesss. Now stop your nonsense. You want to be with me and I want to be with you. We’re not going to split up because of my age, are we?”

After a while he shook his head. “You should have a nice youngster like Travis,” he said. “I should have the sense and the strength to send you off to find one.”

That made me think of Curtis, and I cringed away from thinking of him. I’ve thought as little as possible about Curtis Talcott. He isn’t like my brothers. He may be dead, but none of us ever saw his body. I saw his brother Michael. I was terrified of seeing Curtis himself, but I never did. He may not be dead.

He’s lost to me, but I hope he’s not dead. He should be here with me on the road. I hope he’s alive and all right.

“Who have I reminded you of?” Bankole asked me, his voice soft and deep.

I shook my head. “A boy I knew at home. We were going to get married this year. I don’t even know whether he’s still alive.”

“You loved him?”

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2027

I’ve spent all of today talking, writing, reading, and making love to Bankole. It seems such a luxury not to have to get up, pack, and walk all day. We all lay sprawled around the campsite resting aching muscles, eating, and doing nothing. More people flowed into the area from the highway and made their camps, but none of them bothered us.

I began Zahra’s reading lesson and Jill and Allie looked interested. I included them as though I had intended to from the first. It turned out that they could read a little, but hadn’t learned to write.

Toward the end of the lesson, I read a few Earthseed verses to them in spite of Harry’s groans.

Yet when Allie proclaimed that she would never pray to any god of change, Harry was the one who corrected her. Zahra and Travis both smiled at that, and Bankole watched us all with apparent interest.

After that, Allie began to ask questions instead of making scornful proclamations, and for the most part, the others answered her— Travis and Natividad, Harry and Zahra. Once Bankole answered, expanding on something I told him yesterday. Then he caught himself and looked a little embarrassed.

“I still think it’s too simple,” he said to me. “A lot of it is logical, but it will never work without a sprinkling of mystical confusion.”

“I’ll leave that to my descendants,” I said, and he busied himself, digging a bag of almonds out of his pack, pouring some into his hand, and passing the rest around.

Just before nightfall a gun battle began over toward the highway. We couldn’t see any of it from where we were, but we stopped talking and lay down. With bullets flying, it seemed best to keep low.

The shooting started and stopped, moved away, then came back. I was on watch, so I had to stay alert, but in this storm of noise, nothing moved near us except the trees in the evening breeze. It looked so peaceful, and yet people out there were trying to kill each other, and no doubt succeeding. Strange how normal it’s become for us to lie on the ground and listen while nearby, people try to kill each other.

22

As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God is Infinite Potential:

God is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2027

We’ve had over a week of weary, frightening, nerve wracking walking. We’ve reached and passed through the city of Sacramento without real trouble.

We’ve been able to buy enough food and water, been able to find plenty of empty places in the hills where we could make camp. Yet none of us have had any feelings of comfort or well-being along the stretch of Interstate-5 that we’ve just traveled.

I-5 is much less traveled than U.S. 101, in spite of the earthquake chaos. There were times when the only people we could see were each other. Those times never lasted long, but they did happen.

On the other hand, there were more trucks on I-5.

We had to be careful because trucks traveled during the day as well as at night. Also, there were more human bones on I-5. It was nothing to run across skulls, lower jaws, or bones of the pelvis and torso.

Arm and leg bones were rarer, but now and then, we spotted them too.

“I think it’s the trucks,” Bankole told us. “If they hit someone along here, they wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t dare. And the junkies and alcoholics wouldn’t be that careful where they walked.”

I suppose he’s right, although along that whole empty stretch of road, we saw only four people whom I believed were either not sober or not sane.

But we saw other things. On Tuesday we camped in a little hollow back in the hills to the west of the road, and a big black and white dog came wandering down toward our camp with the fresh-looking, bloody hand and forearm of a child in its mouth.

The dog spotted us, froze, turned, and ran back the way it had come. But we all got a good look before it went, and we all saw the same thing. That night, we posted a double watch. Two watchers, two guns, no unnecessary conversation, no sex.

The next day we decided not to take another rest day until we had passed through Sacramento. There was no guarantee that anything would be better on the other side of Sacramento, but we wanted to get away from this grim land.

That night, looking for a place to camp, we stumbled across four ragged, filthy kids huddled around a campfire. The picture of them is still clear in my mind. Kids the age of my brothers— twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, three boys and a girl. The girl was pregnant, and so huge it was obvious she would be giving birth any day. We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were, roasting a severed human leg, maneuvering it where it lay in the middle of their fire atop the burning wood by twisting its foot. As we watched, the girl pulled a sliver of charred flesh from the thigh and stuffed it into her mouth.

They never saw us. I was in the lead, and I stopped the others before they all rounded the bend. Harry and Zahra, who were just behind me, saw all that I saw. We turned the others back and away, not telling them why until we were far from those kids and their cannibal feast.

No one attacked us. No one bothered us at all. The country we walked through was even beautiful in some places— green trees and rolling hills; golden dried grasses and tiny communities; farms, many overgrown and abandoned, and abandoned houses.

Nice country, and compared to Southern California, rich country. More water, more food, more room… .

So why were the people eating one another?

There were several burned out buildings. It was obvious that there had been trouble here too, but much less than on the coast. Yet we couldn’t wait to get back to the coast.