Earthseed

Cast on new ground Must first perceive That it knows nothing.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING MONDAY, AUGUST 2, 2027

(cont. from notes expanded AUGUST 8)

HERE ARE SOME OF THE things I’ve learned today:

Walking hurts. I’ve never done enough walking to learn that before, but I know it now. It isn’t only the blisters and sore feet, although we’ve got those. After a while, everything hurts. I think my back and shoulders would like to desert to another body. Nothing eases the pain except rest. Even though we got a late start, we stopped twice today to rest. We went off the freeway, into the hills or bushes to sit down, drink water, eat dried fruit and nuts. Then we went on. The days are long this time of year.

Sucking on a plum or apricot pit all day makes you feel less thirsty. Zahra told us that.

“When I was a kid,” she said, “there were times when I would put a little rock in my mouth. Anything to feel better. It’s a cheat, though. If you don’t drink enough water, you’ll die no matter how you feel.”

All three of us walked along with seeds in our mouths after our first stop, and we felt better. We drank only during our stops in the hills. It’s safer that way.

Also, cold camps are safer than cheery campfires. Yet tonight we cleared some ground, dug into a hillside, and made a small fire in the hollow. There we cooked some of my acorn meal with nuts and fruit. It was wonderful. Soon we’ll run out of it and we’ll have to survive on beans, cornmeal, oats— expensive stuff from stores. Acorns are home-food, and home is gone.

Fires are illegal. You can see them flickering all over the hills, but they are illegal. Everything is so dry that there’s always a danger of campfires getting away from people and taking out a community or two. It does happen. But people who have no homes will build fires. Even people like us who know what fire can do will build them. They give comfort, hot food, and a false sense of security.

While we were eating, and even after we’d finished, people drifted over and tried to join us. Most were harmless and easily gotten rid of. Three claimed they just wanted to get warm. The sun was still up, red on the horizon, and it was far from cold.

Three women wanted to know whether two studs like Harry and me didn’t need more than one woman. The women who asked this may have been cold, considering how few clothes they had on. It’s going to be strange for me, pretending to be a man.

“Couldn’t I just roast this potato in your coals?” an old man asked, showing us a withered potato.

We gave him some fire and sent him away—and watched to see where he went, since a burning brand could be either a weapon or a major distraction if he had friends hiding. It’s crazy to live this way, suspecting helpless old people. Insane. But we need our paranoia to keep us alive. Hell, Harry wanted to let the old guy sit with us. It took Zahra and me together to let him know that wasn’t going to happen. Harry and I have been well-fed and protected all our lives. We’re strong and healthy and better educated than most people our age. But we’re stupid out here. We want to trust people. I fight against the impulse. Harry hasn’t learned to do that yet. We argued about it afterward, low voiced, almost whispering.

“Nobody’s safe,” Zahra told him. “No matter how pitiful they look, they

can steal you naked. Little kids, skinny and big-eyed will make off with all your money, water, and food! I know. I used to do it to people. Maybe they died, I don’t know. But I didn’t die.”

Harry and I both stared at her. We knew so little about her life. But to me, at that moment, Harry was our most dangerous question mark.

“You’re strong and confident,” I said to him. “You think you can take care of yourself out here, and maybe you can. But think what a stab wound or a broken bone would mean out here: Disablement, slow death from infection or starvation, no medical care, nothing.”

He looked at me as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know me anymore. “What, then?” he asked. “Everyone’s guilty until proven innocent? Guilty of what? And how do they prove themselves to you?”

“I don’t give a piss whether they’re innocent or not,” Zahra said. “Let

them tend to their own business.”

“Harry, your mind is still back in the neighborhood,” I said. “You still think a mistake is when your father yells at you or you break a finger or chip a tooth or something. Out here a mistake—one mistake—and you may be dead. Remember that guy today? What if that happened to us?”

We had seen a man robbed—a chubby guy of 35 or 40 who was walking along eating nuts out of a paper bag. Not smart. A little kid of 12 or 13 snatched the nuts and ran off with them. While the victim was distracted by the little kid, two bigger kids tripped him, cut his pack straps, dragged the pack off his back, and ran off with it. The whole thing happened so fast that no one could have interfered if they’d wanted to. No one tried. The victim was unhurt except for bruises and abrasions—the sort of thing I had to put up with every day back in the neighborhood. But the victim’s supplies were gone. If he had a home nearby and other supplies, he would be all right. Otherwise, his only way of surviving might be to rob someone else—if he could.

“Remember?” I asked Harry. “We don’t have to hurt anyone unless they

push us into it, but we don’t dare let our guard down. We can’t trust people.”

Harry shook his head. “What if I thought that way when I pulled that guy off Zahra?”

I held on to my temper. “Harry, you know I don’t mean we shouldn’t trust or help each other. We know each other. We’ve made a commitment to travel together.”

“I’m not sure we do know each other.”

“I am. And we can’t afford your denial. You can’t afford it.” He just stared at me.

“Out here, you adapt to your surroundings or you get killed,” I said. “That’s obvious!”

Now he did look at me as though I were a stranger. I looked back, hoping I knew him as well as I thought I did. He had a brain and he had courage. He just didn’t want to change.

“Do you want to break off with us,” Zahra asked, “go your own way without us?”

His gaze softened as he looked at her. “No,” he said. “Of course not. But we don’t have to turn into animals, for godsake.”

“In a way, we do,” I said. “We’re a pack, the three of us, and all those other people out there aren’t in it. If we’re a good pack, and we work together, we have a chance. You can be sure we aren’t the only pack out here.”

He leaned back against a rock, and said with amazement, “You damn sure

talk macho enough to be a guy.”

I almost hit him. Maybe Zahra and I would be better off without him. But no, that wasn’t true. Numbers mattered. Friendship mattered. One real male presence mattered.

“Don’t repeat that,” I whispered, leaning close to him. “Never say that again. There are other people all over these hills; you don’t know who’s listening. You give me away and you weaken yourself!”

That reached him. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s bad out here,” Zahra said. “But most people make it if they’re careful. People weaker than us make it—if they’re careful.”

Harry gave a wan smile. “I hate this world already,” he said. “It’s not so bad if people stick together.”

He looked from her to me and back to her again. He smiled at her and nodded. It occurred to me then that he liked her, was attracted to her. That could be a problem for her later. She was a beautiful woman, and I would never be beautiful—which didn’t bother me. Boys had always seemed to like me. But Zahra’s looks grabbed male attention. If she and Harry get together, she could wind up carrying two heavy loads northward.

I was lost in thought about the two of them when Zahra nudged me with her foot.

Two big, dirty-looking guys were standing nearby, watching us, watching Zahra in particular.

I stood up, feeling the others stand with me, flanking me. These guys were too close to us. They meant to be too close. As I stood up, I put my hand on the gun.

“Yeah?” I said. “What do you want?”

“Not a thing,” one of them said, smiling at Zahra. Both wore big holstered knives which they fingered.

I drew the gun. “Good deal,” I said.

Their smiles vanished. “What, you going to shoot us for standing here?” the talkative one said.

I thumbed the safety. I would shoot the talker, the leader. The other one would run away. He already wanted to run away. He was staring, open- mouthed, at the gun. By the time I collapsed, he would be gone.

“Hey, no trouble!” the talker raised his hands, backing away. “Take it easy, man.”

I let them go. I think it would have been better to shoot them. I’m afraid of guys like that—guys looking for trouble, looking for victims. But it seems I can’t quite shoot someone just because I’m afraid of him. I killed a man on the night of the fire, and I haven’t thought much about it. But this was

different. It was like what Harry said about stealing. I’ve heard, “Thou shalt not kill,” all my life, but when you have to, you kill. I wonder what Dad would say about that. But then, he was the one who taught me to shoot.

“We’d better keep a damn good watch tonight,” I said. I looked at Harry, and was glad to see that he looked the way I probably had a moment before: mad and worried. “Let’s pass your watch and my gun around,” I told him. “Three hours per watcher.”

“You would have done it, wouldn’t you?” he asked. It sounded like a real question.

I nodded. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t have wanted to, but those guys were out for fun. Their idea of fun, anyway.” He glanced at Zahra. He had pulled one man off her, and taken a beating for it. Maybe the obvious threat to her would keep him alert. Anything that would keep him alert couldn’t be all bad.

I looked at Zahra, kept my voice very low. “You never went shooting with us, so I have to ask. Do you know how to use this?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Richard let his older kids go out, but he wouldn’t let me. Before he bought me, though, I was a good shot.”

Her alien past again. It distracted me for a moment. I had been waiting to ask her how much a person costs these days. And she had been sold by her mother to a man who couldn’t have been much more than a stranger. He could have been a maniac, a monster. And my father used to worry about future slavery or debt slavery. Had he known? He couldn’t have.

“Have you used a gun like this before?” I asked. I reengaged the safety and handed it to her.

“Hell, yeah,” she said, examining it. “I like this. It’s heavy, but if you shoot somebody with it, they go down.” She released the clip, checked it, reinserted it, rammed it home, and handed it back. “I wish I could have practiced with you all,” she said. “I always wanted to.”

Without warning, I felt a pang of loneliness for the burned neighborhood. It was almost a physical pain. I had been desperate to leave it, but I had expected it still to be there—changed, but surviving. Now that it was gone, there were moments when I couldn’t imagine how I was going to survive without it.

“You guys get some sleep,” I said. “I’m too wound up to sleep now. I’ll take the first watch.”

“We should gather more wood for the fire first,” Harry said. “It’s burning low.”

“Let it go out,” I said. “It’s a spotlight on us, and it messes up our night vision. Other people can see us long before we see them.”

“And sit here in the dark,” he said. It wasn’t a protest. At worst, it was grudging agreement. “I’ll take the watch after you,” he said, lying back and pulling up his sleepsack and positioning the rest of his gear to serve as a pillow. As an afterthought, he took off his wrist watch and gave it to me. “It was a gift from my mother,” he said.

“You know I’ll take care of it,” I told him.

He nodded. “You be careful,” he said, and closed his eyes.

I put the watch on, pulled the elastic of my sleeve down over it so that the glow of the dial wouldn’t be visible by accident, and sat back against the hill to make a few quick notes. While there was still some natural light, I could write and watch.

Zahra watched me for a while, then laid her hand on my arm. “Teach me to do that,” she whispered.

I looked at her, not understanding. “Teach me to read and write.”

I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. Where, in a life like hers, had there been time or money for school. And once Richard Moss bought her, her jealous co-wives wouldn’t have taught her.

“You should have come to us back in the neighborhood,” I said. “We would have set up lessons for you.”

“Richard wouldn’t let me. He said I already knew enough to suit him.” I groaned. “I’ll teach you. We can start tomorrow morning if you want.”

“Okay.” She gave me an odd smile and began ordering her bag and her few possessions, bundled in my scavenged pillowcase. She lay down in her bag and turned on her side to look at me. “I didn’t think I’d like you,” she said. “Preacher’s kid, all over the place, teaching, telling everybody what to do, sticking your damn nose in everything. But you ain’t bad.”

I went from surprise into amusement of my own. “Neither are you,” I said.

“You didn’t like me either?” Her turn to be surprised.

“You were the best looking woman in the neighborhood. No, I wasn’t crazy about you. And remember a couple of years ago when you tried your hardest to make me throw up while I was learning to clean and skin rabbits?”

“Why’d you want to learn that, anyway?” she asked. “Blood, guts, worms… I just figured, There she goes again, sticking her nose where it don’t belong. Well, let her have it!’”

“I wanted to know that I could do that—handle a dead animal, skin it, butcher it, treat its hide to make leather. I wanted to know how to do it, and that I could do it without getting sick.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought someday I might have to. And we might out here. Same reason I put together an emergency pack and kept it where I could grab it.”

“I wondered about that—about you having all that stuff from home, I mean. At first I thought maybe you got it all when you went back. But no, you were ready for all the trouble. You saw it coming.”

“No.” I shook my head, remembering. “No one could have been ready for that. But… I thought something would happen someday. I didn’t know how bad it would be or when it would come. But everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside.”

She turned again and lay on her back, staring upward at the stars. “I should have seen some of that stuff,” she said. “But I didn’t. Those big walls. And everybody had a gun. There were guards every night. I thought… I thought we were so strong.”

I put my notebook and pen down, sat on my sleepsack, and put my own pillowcased bundle behind me. Mine was lumpy and uncomfortable to lean on. I wanted it uncomfortable. I was tired. Everything ached. Given a little comfort, I would fall asleep.

The sun was down now, and our fire had gone out except for a few glowing coals. I drew the gun and held it in my lap. If I needed it at all, I would need it fast. We weren’t strong enough to survive slowness or stupid mistakes.

I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the tops of hills. I saw groups and individuals. Twice I saw dogs, distant, but alarming. I heard a lot of gunfire—individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire. That last and the dogs worried me, scared me. A pistol would be no protection against a machine gun or automatic rifle. And dogs might not know enough to be afraid of guns. Would a pack keep coming if I shot two or three of its members? I sat in a cold sweat, longing for walls—or at least for another magazine or two for the gun.

It was nearly midnight when I woke Harry, gave him the gun and the

watch, and made him as uncomfortable as I could by warning him about the dogs, the gunfire, and the many people who wandered around at night. He did look awake and alert enough when I lay down.

I fell asleep at once. Aching and exhausted, I found the hard ground as welcoming as my bed at home.

A shout awoke me. Then I heard gunfire—several single shots, thunderous and nearby. Harry?

Something fell across me before I could get out of my sleep-sack— something big and heavy. It knocked the breath out of me. I struggled to get it off me, knowing that it was a human body, dead or unconscious. As I pushed at it and felt its heavy beard stubble and long hair, I realized it was a man, and not Harry. Some stranger.

I heard scrambling and thrashing near me. There were grunts and sounds of blows. A fight. I could see them in the darkness—two figures struggling on the ground. The one on the bottom was Harry.

He was fighting someone over the gun, and he was losing. The muzzle was being forced toward him.

That couldn’t happen. We couldn’t lose the gun or Harry. I took a small granite boulder from our fire pit, set my teeth, and brought it down with all my strength on the back of the intruder’s head. And I brought myself down.

It wasn’t the worst pain I had ever shared, but it came close. I was worthless after delivering that one blow. I think I was unconscious for a while.

Then Zahra appeared from somewhere, feeling me, trying to see me. She wouldn’t find a wound, of course.

I sat up, fending her off, and saw that Harry was there, too. “Are they dead?” I asked.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Are you all right?”

I got up, swaying from the residual shock of the blow. I felt sick and dizzy, and my head hurt. A few days before, Harry had made me feel that way and we’d both recovered. Did that mean the man I’d hit would recover?

I checked him. He was still alive, unconscious, not feeling any pain now.

What I was feeling was my own reaction to the blow I’d struck.

“The other one’s dead,” Harry said. “This one… Well, you caved in the back of his head. I don’t know why he’s still alive.”

“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Oh hell.” And then to Harry, “Give me the gun.” “Why?” he asked.

My fingers had found the blood and broken skull, soft and pulpy at the back of the stranger’s head. Harry was right. He should have been dead.

“Give me the gun,” I repeated, and held out a bloody hand for it. “Unless you want to do this yourself.”

“You can’t shoot him. You can’t just…”

“I hope you’d find the courage to shoot me if I were like that, and out here with no medical care to be had. We shoot him, or leave him here alive. How long do you think it will take him to die?”

“Maybe he won’t die.”

I went to my pack, struggling to navigate without throwing up. I pulled it away from the dead man, groped within it, and found my knife. It was a good knife, sharp and strong. I flicked it open and cut the unconscious man’s throat with it.

Not until the flow of blood stopped did I feel safe. The man’s heart had pumped his life away into the ground. He could not regain consciousness and involve me in his agony.

But, of course, I was far from safe. Perhaps the last two people from my old life were about to leave me. I had shocked and horrified them. I wouldn’t blame them for leaving.

“Strip the bodies,” I said. “Take what they have, then we’ll put them into the scrub oaks down the hill where we gathered wood.”

I searched the man I had killed, found a small amount of money in his pants pocket and a larger amount in his right sock. Matches, a packet of almonds, a packet of dried meat, and a packet of small, round, purple pills. I found no knife, no weapon of any kind. So this was not one of the pair that sized us up earlier in the night. I hadn’t thought so. Neither of them had been long-haired. Both of these were.

I put the pills back in the pocket I had taken them from. Everything else, I kept. The money would help sustain us. The food might or might not be edible. I would decide that when I could see it clearly.

I looked to see what the others were doing, and was relieved to find them stripping the other body. Harry turned it over, then kept watch as Zahra went through the clothing, shoes, socks, and hair. She was even more thorough than I had been. With no hint of squeamishness, she hauled off the man’s clothing and examined its greasy pockets, seams, and hems. I got the feeling she had done this before.

“Money, food, and a knife,” she whispered at last.

“The other one didn’t have a knife,” I said, crouching beside them. “Harry, what—?”

“He had one,” Harry whispered. “He pulled it when I yelled for them to stop. It’s probably on the ground somewhere. Let’s put these two down in the oaks.”

“You and I can do it,” I said. “Give Zahra the gun. She can guard us.”

I was glad to see him hand her the gun without protest. He had not made a move to hand it to me when I asked, but that had been different.

We took the bodies down to the scrub oaks and rolled them into cover. Then we kicked dirt over all the blood that we could see and the urine that one of the men had released.

That wasn’t enough. By mutual consent, we moved camp. This meant nothing more than gathering our bundles and sleepsacks and carrying them over the next low ridge and out of sight of where we had been.

If you camped on a hill between any two of the many low, riblike ridges, you could have, almost, the privacy of a big, open-topped, three-walled room. You were vulnerable from hill or ridge tops, but if you camped on the ridges, you would be noticed by far more people. We chose a spot between two ridges, settled, and sat silent for some time. I felt set-apart. I knew I had to speak, and I was afraid that nothing I could say would help. They might leave me. In disgust, in distrust, in fear, they might decide that they couldn’t travel with me any longer. Best to try to get ahead of them.

“I’m going to tell you about myself,” I said. “I don’t know whether it will help you to understand me, but I have to tell you. You have a right to know.”

And in low whispers, I told them about my mother—my biological mother—and about my sharing.

When I finished, there was another long silence. Then Zahra spoke, and I was so startled by the sound of her soft voice that I jumped.

“So when you hit that guy,” she said, “it was like you hitting yourself.” “No,” I said. “I don’t get the damage. Just the pain.”

“But, I mean it felt like you hit yourself?”

I nodded. “Close enough. When I was little, I used to bleed along with people if I hurt them or even if I saw them hurt. I haven’t done that for a few years.”

“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.