Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,11

tell us we were being hunted—or that our assailants had gone. There was only the low moan of the wind and the rustling of some of the plants. I lay, thinking about the pine trees that I had seen on the high ridge far behind the house. I could see them in my mind’s eye, and somehow, it was all I could do to stop myself from raising my head to get a look at them, to see whether they were as far away as I thought they were. The weed-strewn fields of what had been the farm swept back and up into the hills. Above them were the pines that could shelter and conceal, but they were far beyond our reach. I sighed.

Then we heard the sound of a child, crying.

We all heard it—a few short sobs, then nothing. The child sounded very young—not a baby, but young, exhausted, helpless, hopeless.

The four of us looked at one another. We all care about kids. Michael has two and Natividad has three. Bankole and I have been trying to have one. Jorge, I’m glad to say, hasn’t made anyone pregnant yet, but he’s been a surrogate father to his younger sister and brother for six years. He knows as well as the rest of us do what dangers lie in wait for unprotected children.

I raised my head just enough to get a quick look at the truck and the area around it. A housetruck, armed, armored, and locked up tight shouldn’t—couldn’t let the sound of a child’s crying escape. And the sound had seemed normal, not amplified or modified by truck speakers.

Therefore, one of the truck’s doors must be open. Wide open.

I couldn’t see much through the weeds and grasses, and I didn’t dare to raise my head above them. All I could make out were the sunlit shapes of the chimney, the truck beside it, the weeds in the fields behind both chimney and truck, the distant trees, and…

Movement?

Movement far away in the weeds of the field, but coming closer.

Natividad pulled me down. “What is the matter with you?” she whispered in Spanish. For Jorge’s sake, it was best to stay with Spanish while we were in trouble. “There are crazy people in that truck! Do you want to die?”

“Someone else is coming,” I said. “More than one person, coming through the fields.”

“I don’t care! Stay down!”

Natividad is one of my best friends, but sometimes having her along is like having your mother with you.

“Maybe the crying is intended to lure us out,” Michael said. “People have used children as lures before.” He’s a suspicious man, Michael is. He questions everything. He and his family have been with us for two years now, and I think it took him six months to accept us and to decide that we had no evil intentions toward his wife or his twin girls. This, even though we took them in and helped them when we found his wife alone, giving birth to the twins in a ruin of a shack where they had been squatting. The place was near a stream, so they had water, and they had a couple of scavenged pots. But they were armed only with an ancient, empty .22 target pistol and a knife. They were all but starving, eating pine nuts, wild plants, and an occasional small animal that Michael trapped or killed with a rock. In fact, he was away looking for food when his wife Noriko went into labor.

Michael agreed to join us because he was terrified that in spite of his odd jobs, begging, stealing, and scavenging, his wife and babies might starve. We never asked more of them than that they do their share of the work to keep the community going and that they respect Earthseed by not preaching other belief systems. But to Michael, this sounded like altruism, and Michael didn’t believe in altruism. He kept expecting to catch us selling people into slavery or prostituting them. He didn’t begin to relax until he realized that we were, in fact, practicing what we preached. Earthseed was and is the key to us. We had a way of life that he thought was sensible and a goal, a Destiny that he thought was crazy, but we weren’t up to anything that would harm his family. And his family was the key to him. Once he accepted us, he and Noriko and the girls settled in and made Acorn very much their home. They’re