Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,20

what it will look like when I have built it. I’m just feeling my way, using whatever I can do, whatever I can learn to take one more step forward.

Here, for our infant Earthseed archives, is what I’ve learned so far about what happened to the Noyers. I’ve talked to Kassia and Mercy several times. And over the past three days, Dan has told me what he could remember. He seemed to need to talk, in spite of his pain, and with me around to complain to Bankole for him and see that he has his medicine when he needs it, he’s had less pain. On his own, he seems willing to just lie there and hurt. Well, there’s nothing wrong with being stoic when you have to be, but there’s enough unavoidable suffering in the world. Why endure it when you don’t have to?

The Noyers had driven up from Phoenix, Arizona, where food and water are even more expensive than they are in the Los Angeles area. They sold their houses—they owned two—some vacant land, their furniture, Krista Noyer’s jewelry, sold everything they could to get the money to buy and equip an armed and armored housetruck big enough to sleep seven people. The truck was intended to take the family to Alaska and serve as their home there until the parents could get work and rent or buy something better. Alaska is a more popular destination than ever these days. When I left southern California, Alaska was a popular dream—almost heaven. People struggled toward it, hoping for a still-civilized place of jobs, peace, room to raise their children in safety, and a return to the mythical golden-age world of the mid-twentieth century. They expected to find no gangs, no slavery, no free poor squatter settlements growing like cancers on the land, no chaos. There was to be plenty of land for everyone, a warming climate, cheap water, and many towns new and old, privatized and free, eager for hardworking newcomers. As I said, heaven.

If what I’ve heard from travelers is true, the few who’ve managed to get there—to buy passage on ships or planes or walk or drive hundreds, even thousands, of miles, then somehow sneak across the closed border with Canada to the also-closed Canadian-Alaskan border—have found something far less welcoming. And last year, Alaska, weary of regulations and restrictions from far away Washington, D.C., and even more weary of the hoard of hopeful paupers flooding in, declared itself an independent country. It seceded from the United States. First time since the Civil War that a state’s done that. I thought there might be another civil war over the matter, the way President Donner and Alaskan Governor—or rather, Alaskan President—Leontyev are snarling at one another. But Donner has more than enough down here to keep him busy, and neither Canada nor Russia, who have been sending us food and money, much liked the idea of a war right next door to them. The only real danger of civil war is from Andrew Steele Jarret if he wins the election next month.

Anyway, in spite of the risks, people like the Noyers, hopeful and desperate, still head for Alaska.

There were seven people in the Noyer family just a few days before we found the truck. There was Krista and Danton, Senior; Kassia and Mercy, our seven- and eight-year-old orphans; Paula and Nina, who were 12 and 13; and Dan, the oldest child. Dan is 15, as I guessed when I first saw him. He’s a big, baby-faced, blond kid. His father was small and dark-haired. He inherited his looks and his size from his big, blond mother, while the little girls are small and dark like Danton, Senior. The boy is already almost two meters tall—a young giant with an oldest-child’s enhanced sense of responsibility for his sisters. Yet he, like his father, had been unable to prevent Nina and Paula from being raped and abducted three days before we found the truck.

The Noyers had gotten into the habit of parking their truck in some isolated, sunny place like the south side of that burned-out farmhouse. There they could let the kids spend some time outside while they cleaned and aired the truck. They could unroll the truck’s solar wings and spread them wide so that the sun could recharge their batteries. To save money, they used as much solar energy as possible. This meant driving at night and recharging during the day—which worked all right because people walked