Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,131

watchers. I knew we couldn’t fight a force like that. I signaled everyone to run like hell, scatter. You know we had drills—drills for fighting and drills for fading into the hills. None of it mattered. They gassed us. Three people might have gotten away: the mute woman named May and the two little Noyer girls. I don’t know. They were the only ones we never heard anything about. The rest of us were captured, collared, and used for work and for sex. Our younger children were taken away. No one would tell us where. My Bankole, Zahra Balter, Teresa Lin, and some others were killed. If we asked anything, we were punished with the collars. If we were caught talking at all, we were punished. We slept on the floor or on shelves in the school. Your holy men took our houses. And they took us, too, when they felt like it. Listen!”

He had stopped looking at me and begun to look past me, looking over my right shoulder.

“They brought in street people and travelers and minor criminals and other mountain families, and they collared them too,” I said. “Marc! Do you hear me?”

“I don’t believe you,” he said at last. “I don’t believe any of this!”

“Go and look at what’s left of Acorn. Look for yourself. Go to one of the other so-called reeducation camps. I’ll bet they’re just as bad. Check them out.”

He began to shake his head. “This is not true! I know these people! They wouldn’t do what you’re accusing them of.”

“Maybe some of them wouldn’t. But some of them did. All that we built they stole.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said. But he did believe. “You’re making some kind of mistake.”

“Go and see for yourself,” I repeated. “Be careful how you ask questions. I don’t want you to get into trouble. These are dangerous, vicious people. Go and see.”

He said nothing for a few seconds. It bothered me that he was frowning, and again, not looking at me. “You were collared?” he asked at last.

“For seventeen months. Forever.”

“How did you get away? Was your sentence up?”

“What? What sentence?”

“I mean did they let you go?”

“They never let anyone go. They killed quite a few of us, but they never released anyone. I don’t know what their long-range plans were for us, if they had any, but I don’t see how they could have dared to let us go after what they’d done to us.”

“How did you get free? You don’t escape once someone’s put a collar on you. There’s no escape from a collar.”

Unless someone deals with the devil and buys your freedom, I thought. But I didn’t say it. “There was a landslide,” I did say. “It smashed the cabin where the control unit was kept—my cabin. The control unit powered all the individual belt control units somehow. Maybe it even powered the collars themselves. I’m not sure. Anyway, once it was smashed and buried, the collars stopped working, and we went into our homes and killed our surviving guards—those who hadn’t been killed by the landslide. Then we burned the cabins with their bodies inside. We burned them. They were ours! We built every one with our own hands.”

“You killed people…?”

“Their names were Cougar, Marc. Every one of them was named Cougar!”

He turned—wrenched himself around as though he had to uproot himself to move—and started back toward the corner.

“Marc!”

He kept walking.

“Marc!” I grabbed his arm, pulled him back around to face me. “I didn’t tell you this to hurt you. I know I have hurt you, and I’m sorry but these bastards have my child! I need your help to get her back. Please, Marc.”

He hit me.

I never expected it, never saw it coming. Even when we were kids, he and I didn’t hit each other.

I stumbled backward, more startled than hurt. And he was gone. By the time I got to the corner, he had already vanished into the CA Center.

I was afraid to go in after him. In his present frame of mind, he might turn me in. How will I get to see him again? Even if he decides to help me, how will I contact him? Surely he will decide to help me once he’s had time to think. Surely he will.

SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 2035

I’ve left the Eureka-Arcata area.

I’m back at the message tree for the night. I brought a flashlight so that I could have light where I wanted it without taking risks with fire. Now, shielding my