Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,37

Earthseed. Now that we’ve got the truck, traveling is a lot less dangerous than it used to be, but my Bankole is more worried than ever.

And, to tell the truth, there are still things to worry about. We’ve all been looking over our shoulders since Dovetree. But we’ve got to live. We’ve got work to do.

“So Acorn is safe now?” I said to Bankole. “I’ll be safe if I stay there?”

“Safer than you are traveling all over the county,” he muttered, but he knew me well enough to let it go. At least he would be along to keep an eye on me.

Dan Noyer would also be along because our special errand concerned him. On our way home we were going to meet with a man who had contacted us through friends in Georgetown, claiming that he had one of Dan’s younger sisters, and that he would sell her to us. The man was a pimp, of course—“a livestock man, specializing in lamb and chicken” as one of the euphemisms went. That is, a man who puts slave collars on little children and rents their bodies to other grown men. I hate the idea of having anything to do with a slug like that, but he was exactly the kind of walking filth who would have Nina and Paula Noyer.

I had asked Travis and Natividad Douglas to come along with us, to ride shotgun, and in Travis’s case, to fix the truck if anything went wrong with it. I’ve trusted them both more than once with my life. I trust their judgment and their ability to fight. I felt a need to have people like that behind me when I was dealing with a slaver.

We made our deliveries to the two independent markets early, as we had promised—produce from our fields and from what was left of Dovetree’s huge kitchen garden and small grove of fruit trees. The Dovetree truck and farm tractor had both been stolen during the raid that destroyed Dovetree. The houses and outbuildings had been torched along with the stills and fields. But a number of fruit trees and garden crops survived. Since the five surviving Dovetrees have decided to stay with us—to join us as members of Earthseed once their required probationary year has ended—we’ve felt free to take what we could from the property. The two Dovetree women have relatives elsewhere in the mountains, but they don’t much like them, and they don’t want to be squeezed into crowded houses with them. They do get along with us, and they know that while they’re crowded now, they will have their own cabin by the time they’re Welcomed as members.

Of course, they could go back and live on their own land. But two women and three children wouldn’t survive on their own. They wouldn’t survive alone even in a place as hidden and protected as Acorn. Trying to live right off the highway at Dovetree, they would be enslaved or killed in no time. Any home or farm that can be seen from the highway is bound to be tempting to the desperate and the opportunistic, and now the fanatical. Dovetree as it was survived because the family was large, well armed, and had a reputation for toughness. That worked until a small, determined army came along. The attackers really were Jarret loyalists, by the way. They came from the Eureka-Arcata area, from the new Christian America churches that have sprung up there. They have no government-sanctioned authority, but they believe God is on their side, and the cleansing work they do is God’s work. Somehow, this kind of thing doesn’t tend to make it to the news nets or disks. I’ve picked it up by talking to people. I know a few good sources of local news.

Bankole bought his supplies next. They’re the most expensive things we buy, but they’re also the most necessary. We are, as Bankole says, a healthy, young community, but the world around us isn’t healthy. Thanks to malnutrition, climate change, poverty, and ignorance, a lot of old diseases are back, and some of them are contagious. There was an outbreak of whooping cough in the Bay Area last winter, and it came up the highway as far north as Ukiah down in Mendocino County. Why it stopped there, I don’t know. And there was rabies last summer. Several people in squatter camps were bitten by rabid dogs or rats. They died of it, and a couple of teenagers were