Your teachers
Are all around you. All that you perceive,
All that you experience, All that is given to you or taken from you,
All that you love or hate, need or fear
Will teach you— If you will learn.
God is your first
and your last teacher.
God is your harshest teacher: subtle,
demanding. Learn or die.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2027
WE HAD ANOTHER BATTLE to try to sleep through before dawn this morning. It began to the south of us out on or near the highway, and worked its way first toward, then away from us.
We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running… Same old stuff—tiresome, dangerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.
I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over being angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can’t stop them by staying awake. If that wasn’t altogether
true, I didn’t care. I slept.
And somehow, during or after the battle, in spite of the watch, two people slipped into our camp and bedded down among us. They slept, too.
We awoke early as usual so that we could start walking while the heat wasn’t too terrible. We’ve learned to wake up without prompting at the first light of dawn. Today, four of us sat up in our bags at almost the same time. I was crawling out of my bag to go off and urinate when I spotted the extra people—two gray lumps in the dawn light, one large and one small, lying against each other, asleep on the bare ground. Thin arms and legs extended like sticks from rags and mounds of clothing.
I glanced around at the others and saw that they were staring where I was staring—all of them except Jill, who was supposed to be on watch. We began trusting her to stand night watch last week with a partner. This was only her second solitary watch. And where was she looking? Away into the trees. She and I would have to talk.
Harry and Travis were already reacting to the figures on the ground. In silence, each man was peeling out of his bag in his underwear, and standing up. More fully clothed, I matched them, move for move, and the three of us closed in around the two intruders.
The larger of the two awoke all at once, jumped up, darted two or three steps toward Harry, then stopped. It was a woman. We could see her better now. She was brown-skinned with a lot of long, straight, unkempt black hair. Her coloring was as dark as mine, but she was all planes and angles—a wiry, hawk-faced woman who could have used a few decent meals and a good scrubbing. She looked like a lot of people we’ve seen on the road.
The second intruder awoke, saw Travis standing nearby in his underwear, and screamed. That got everyone’s attention. It was the high, piercing shriek of a child—a little girl who looked about seven. She was a tiny, pinched image of the woman—her mother, or her sister perhaps.
The woman ran back to the child and tried to scoop her up. But the child had folded herself into a tight fetal knot and the woman, trying to lift her, could not get a grip. She stumbled, fell over, and in an instant she too had rolled herself into a tight ball. By then everyone had come to see.
“Harry,” I said, and waited until he looked at me. “Would you and Zahra keep watch—make sure nothing else surprises us.”
He nodded. He and Zahra detached from the cluster, separated, and took up positions on opposite sides of the camp, Harry nearest to the approach from the highway and Zahra on the approach from the nearest lesser road. We had buried ourselves as well as we could in a deserted area that Bankole said must once have been a park, but we didn’t kid ourselves that we were alone.
We’d followed I-5 to a small city outside Sacramento, away from the worst of the sprawl, but there were still plenty of poor people around—local paupers and refugees like us.
Where had this pair of ragged, terrified, filthy people come from?
“We won’t hurt you,” I said to them as they lay, still rolled up on the ground. “Get up. Come on, get up. You’ve come into our camp unasked. You can at least talk to us.”
We didn’t touch them. Bankole seemed to want to, but he stopped when I grasped his arm. They were already scared to death. A strange man, reaching out to them, might make them hysterical.
Trembling, the woman unrolled herself and gazed up at us. Now I realized she looked Asian except for her coloring. She put her head down and whispered something to the child. After a moment, the two of them stood up.
“We didn’t know this was your place,” she whispered. “We’ll go away.
Let us go away.”
I sighed and looked at the terrified face of the little girl. “You can go,” I said. “Or if you like, you can eat with us.”
They both wanted to run away. They were like deer, frozen in terror, about to bolt. But I’d said the magic word. Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have said it, but I said today to these two starved-looking people: “eat.”
“Food?” the woman whispered.
“Yes. We’ll share a little food with you.”
The woman looked at the little girl. I was certain now that they were mother and daughter. “We can’t pay,” she said. “We don’t have anything.”
I could see that. “Just take what we give you and nothing more than we give you,” I said. “That will be pay enough.”
“We won’t steal. We aren’t thieves.”
Of course they were thieves. How else could they live. Some stealing and scavenging, maybe some whoring… They weren’t very good at it or they’d look better. But for the little kid’s sake, I wanted to help them at least with a meal.
“Wait, then,” I said. “We’ll put a meal together.”
They sat where they were and watched us with hungry, hungry eyes. There was more hunger in those eyes than we could fill with all our food. I thought I had probably made a mistake. These people were so desperate, they were dangerous. It didn’t matter at all that they looked harmless. They were still alive and strong enough to run. They were not harmless.
It was Justin who eased some of the tension in those bottomless, hungry eyes. Stark naked, he toddled over to the woman and the girl and looked them over. The little girl only stared back, but after a moment, the woman began to
smile. She said something to Justin, and he smiled. Then he ran back to Allie who held on to him long enough to dress him. But he had done his work. The woman was seeing us with different eyes. She watched Natividad nursing Dominic, then watched Bankole combing his beard. This seemed funny to her and to the child, and they both giggled.
“You’re a hit,” I told Bankole.
“I don’t see what’s so funny about a man combing his beard,” he muttered, and put way his comb.
I dug sweet pears out of my pack, and took one each to the woman and the girl. I had just bought them two days before, and I had only three left. Other people got the idea and began sharing what they could spare. Shelled walnuts, apples, a pomegranate, Valencia oranges, figs…little things.
“Save what you can,” Natividad told the woman as she gave her almonds wrapped in a piece of red cloth. “Wrap things in here and tie the ends together.”
We all shared corn bread made with a little honey and the hard-boiled eggs we bought and cooked yesterday. We baked the corn bread in the coals of last night’s fire so that we could get away early this morning. The woman and the girl ate as though the plain, cold food were the best they had ever tasted, as though they couldn’t believe someone had given it to them. They crouched over it as though they were afraid we might snatch it back.
“We’ve got to go,” I said at last. “The sun’s getting hotter.”
The woman looked at me, her strange, sharp face hungry again, but now not hungry for food.
“Let us go with you,” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “We’ll work. We’ll get wood, make fire, clean dishes, anything. Take us with you.”
Bankole looked at me. “I assume you saw that coming.”
I nodded. The woman was looking from one of us to the other. “Anything,” she whispered—or whimpered. Her eyes were dry and
starved, but tears streamed from the little girl’s eyes.
“Give us a moment to decide,” I said. I meant, Go away so my friends can yell at me in private, but the woman didn’t seem to understand. She didn’t move.
“Wait over there,” I said, pointing toward the trees nearest to the road. “Let us talk. Then we’ll tell you.”
She didn’t want to do it. She hesitated, then stood up, pulled her even more reluctant daughter up, and trudged off to the trees I had indicated.
“Oh God,” Zahra muttered. “We’re going to take them, aren’t we?” “That’s what we have to decide,” I said.
“What, we feed her, and then we get to tell her to go away and finish starving?” Zahra made a noise of disgust.
“If she isn’t a thief,” Bankole said. “And if she doesn’t have any other dangerous habits, we may be able to carry them. That little kid…”
“Yes,” I said. “Bankole, is there room for them at your place?”
“His place?” three others asked. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them about it. And I hadn’t had the nerve.
“He has a lot of land up north and over by the coast,” I said. “There’s a family house that we can’t live in because his sister and her family are there. But there’s room and trees and water. He says…” I swallowed, looked at Bankole who was smiling a little. “He says we can start Earthseed there— build what we can.”
“Are there jobs?” Harry asked Bankole.
“My brother-in-law manages with year-round gardens and temporary jobs.
He’s raising three kids that way.” “But the jobs do pay money?”
“Yes, they pay. Not well, but they pay. We’d better hold off talking about this for a while. We’re torturing that young woman over there.”
“She’ll steal,” Natividad said. “She says she won’t, but she will. You can look at her and tell.”
“She’s been beaten,” Jill said. “The way they rolled up when we first spotted them. They’re used to being beaten, kicked, knocked around.”
“Yeah.” Allie looked haunted. “You try to keep from getting hit in the head, try to protect your eyes and…your front. She thought we would beat her. She and the kid both.”
Interesting that Allie and Jill should understand so well. What a terrible father they had. And what had happened to their mother? They had never talked about her. It was amazing that they had escaped alive and sane enough to function.
“Should we let her stay?” I asked them.
Both girls nodded. “I think she’ll be a pain in the ass for a while, though,” Allie said. “Like Natividad says, she’ll steal. She won’t be able to stop herself. We’ll have to watch her real good. That little kid will steal, too. Steal and run like hell.”
Zahra grinned. “Reminds me of me at that age. They’ll both be pains in the ass. I vote we try them. If they have manners or if they can learn manners, we keep them. If they’re too stupid to learn, we throw them out.”
I looked at Travis and Harry, standing together. “What do you guys say?” “I say you’re going soft,” Harry said. “You would have raised hell if we’d
tried to take in a beggar woman and her child a few weeks ago.”
I nodded. “You’re right. I would have. And maybe that’s the attitude we should keep. But these two… I think they might be worth something—and I don’t think they’re dangerous. If I’m wrong, we can always dump them.”
“They might not take to being dumped,” Travis said. Then he shrugged. “I don’t want to be the one to send that little kid out to be one more thief- beggar-whore. But think, Lauren. If we let them stay, and it doesn’t work out, it might be damned hard to get rid of them. And if they turn out to have friends around here—friends that they’re scouting for, we might have to kill them.”
Both Harry and Natividad began to protest. Kill a woman and a child?
No! Not possible! Never!
The rest of us let them talk. When they ran down, I said, “It could get that bad, I suppose, but I don’t think it will. That woman wants to live. Even more, she wants the kid to live. I think she’d put up with a lot for the kid’s sake, and I don’t think she’d put the kid in danger by scouting for a gang. Gangs are more direct out here, anyway. They don’t need scouts.”
Silence.
“Shall we try them?” I asked. “Or shall we turn them away now?”
“I’m not against them,” Travis said. “Let them stay, for the kid’s sake. But let’s go back to having two watchers at once during the night. How the hell did those two get in here like that, anyway?”
Jill shrank a little. “They could have gotten in anytime last night,” she said. “Anytime.”
“What we don’t see can kill us,” I said. “Jill, you didn’t see them?” “They could have been there when I took over the watch!”
“You still didn’t see them. They could have cut your throat—or your sister’s.”
“Well. They didn’t.”
“The next one might.” I leaned toward her. “The world is full of crazy, dangerous people. We see signs of that every day. If we don’t watch out for ourselves, they will rob us, kill us, and maybe eat us. It’s a world gone to hell, Jill, and we’ve only got each other to keep it off us.”
Sullen silence.
I reached out and took her hand. “Jill.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” she said. “You can’t prove I—” “Jill!”
She shut up and stared at me.
“Listen, no one is going to beat you up, for heaven sake, but you did something wrong, something dangerous. You know you did.”
“So what do you want her to do?” Allie demanded. “Get on her knees and
say she’s sorry?”
“I want her to love her own life and yours enough not to be careless. That’s what I want. That’s what you should want, now more than ever. Jill?”
Jill closed her eyes. “Oh shit!” she said. And then, “All right, all right! I didn’t see them. I really didn’t. I’ll watch better. No one else will get by me.”
I clasped her hand for a moment longer, then let it go. “Okay. Let’s get out of here. Let’s collect that scared woman and her scared little kid and get out of here.”
The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Here’s their story, put together from the fragments they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tanaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis. Tori is nine years old, not seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life. She’s tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole’s shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only twenty-three. At thirteen, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else’s gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from victimization and starvation in the streets.
Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three
children over the next three years—a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers’ shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing—new or used—for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages— surprise!—were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.
Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less
pay, could be “disciplined” if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents
died, became disabled, or escaped.
Emery’s husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive over-the-counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing. But then, there’s nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.
Emery and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without both their parents. Yet they were taken. Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to “quiet her down.” She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.
She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with their thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn’t something they could escape by remaining slaves. As for the cannibals…well, perhaps they were only fantasies—lies intended to frighten salves into accepting their lot.
“There are cannibals,” I told her as we ate that night. “We’ve seen them. I think, though, that they’re scavengers, not killers. They take advantage of road kills, that kind of thing.”
“Scavengers kill,” Emery said. “If you get hurt or if you look sick, they come after you.”
I nodded, and she went on with her story. Late one night, she and Tori slipped out past the armed guards and electrified fences, the sound and motion detectors and the dogs. Both knew how to be quiet, how to fade from cover to cover, how to lie still for hours. Both were very fast. Slaves learned things like that—the ones who lived did. Emery and Tori must have been very lucky. Emery had some notion of finding her sons and getting them back, but she had no idea where they had been taken. They had been driven away in a truck; she knew that much. But she didn’t know even which way the truck turned when it reached the highway. Her parents had taught her to read and write, but she had seen no writing about her sons. She had to admit after a
while that all she could do was save her daughter.
Living on wild plants and whatever they could “find” or beg, they drifted north. That was the way Emery said it: they found things. Well, if I were in
her place, I would have found a few things, too.
A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you’re in individual gang territories, you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.
“One group was coming closer to us,” Emery said. “They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn’t let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn’t see you. You know how to hide.”
That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that’s possible. Most of the time it isn’t. Tonight it isn’t. And tonight we watch two at a time.
Sunday, September 12, 2027
Tori Solis has found us two more companions today: Grayson Mora and his daughter Doe. Doe was only a year younger than Tori, and the two little girls, walking along, going the same way, became friends. Today we turned west on State Highway 20 and were heading back toward U.S. 101. We spent a lot of time talking about settling on Bankole’s land, about jobs and crops and what we might build there.
Meanwhile, the two little girls, Tori and Doe were making friends and pulling their parents together. The parents were alike enough to attract my attention. They were about the same age—which meant that the man had become a father almost as young as the woman had become a mother. That wasn’t unusual, but it was unusual that he had taken charge of his child.
He was a tall, thin, black Latino, quiet, protective of his child, yet tentative, somehow. He liked Emery. I could see that. Yet on some level he wanted to get away from her—and away from us. When we left the road to make camp, he would have gone on if his daughter had not begged, then cried to stay with us. He had his own food so I told him he could camp near us if he wanted to. Two things hit me as I talked to him.
First, he didn’t like us. That was obvious. He didn’t like us at all. I thought he might resent us because we were united and armed. You tend to resent the people you’re afraid of. I told him we kept a watch, and that if he could put up with that, he was welcome. He shrugged and said in his soft, cold voice, “Oh, yeah.”
He’ll stay. His kid wants it and some part of him wants it, but something’s wrong. Something beyond ordinary traveler caution.
The second thing is only my suspicion. I believe Grayson and Doe Mora were also slaves. Yet Grayson is now a rich pauper. He has a pair of sleepsacks, food, water, and money. If I’m right, he took them off someone— or off someone’s corpse.
Why do I think he was a slave? That odd tentativeness of his is just too much like Emery’s. And Doe and Tori, though they don’t look alike at all, seem to understand each other like sisters. Little kids can do that sometimes, without it meaning anything. Just being little kids together is enough. But I’ve never seen any kids but these two both show the tendency to drop to the ground and roll into a fetal knot when frightened.
Doe did just that when she tripped and fell, and Zahra stepped over to see whether she was hurt. Doe’s body snapped into a trembling ball. Was that, as Jill and Allie supposed, what people did when they expected to be beaten or kicked—a posture of protection and submission both at once?
“Something wrong about that fellow,” Bankole said, glancing at Grayson as we bedded down next to each other. We had eaten and heard more of Emery’s story, and talked a little, but we were tired. I had my writing to do, and Travis and Jill were on watch. Bankole, who had an early morning watch with Zahra just wanted to talk. He sat beside me and spoke into my ear in a voice so low that if I leaned away from him, I lost words. “Mora’s too jumpy,” he said. “He flinches if someone walks close to him.”
“I think he’s another ex-slave,” I said in a voice just as low. “That might not be his only problem, but it’s his most obvious one.”
“So you picked up on that, too.” He put his arm around me and sighed. “I agree. Both he and the child.”
“And he doesn’t love us.”
“He doesn’t trust us. Why should he? We’ll have to watch all four of them for a while. They’re…odd. They might be stupid enough to try to grab some of our packs and leave some night. Or it might just be a matter of little things starting to disappear. The children are more likely to get caught at it. Yet if the adults stay, it will be for the children’s sake. If we take it easy on the children and protect them, I think the adults will be loyal to us.”
“So we become the crew of a modern underground railroad,” I said. Slavery again—even worse than my father thought, or at least sooner. He thought it would take a while.
“None of this is new.” Bankole made himself comfortable against me. “In the early 1990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this—holding people against their wills and forcing them to work
without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latins in the south… Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”
“But Emery says there’s a new law—that forcing people or their children to work off debt that they can’t help running up is legal.”
“Maybe. It’s hard to know what to believe. I suppose the politicians may have passed a law that could be used to support debt slavery. But I’ve heard nothing about it. Anyone dirty enough to be a slaver is dirty enough to tell a pack of lies. You realize that that woman’s children were sold like cattle— and no doubt sold into prostitution.”
I nodded. “She knows, too.” “Yes. My God.”
“Things are breaking down more and more.” I paused. “I’ll tell you, though, if we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one will fight harder to keep it. We need better guns, though. And we need to be so careful… It keeps getting more dangerous out here. It will be especially dangerous with those little girls around.”
“Those two know how to be quiet,” Bankole said. “They’re little rabbits, fast and silent. That’s why they’re still alive.”
