Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,92

the prisoners. The Sullivans and the Gamas have tended to group themselves with us, anyway, although nothing had been said. Well, now I’ve said something, at least to Mary Sullivan.

After a moment, she nodded, unsmiling. She wasn’t a woman who smiled often.

I worry that someone will break ranks and report Allie and Mary, but so far, no one has reported anyone for anything, although our “teachers” keep inviting us to report one another’s sins. There has been trouble now and then. Squatter-camp women have gotten into fights over food or possessions, and the rest of us stopped things before they got too loud—before a “teacher” arrived and demanded to know what was going on and who was responsible.

And there is one young squatter-camp woman, Crystal Blair, who seems to be a natural bully. She hits or shoves people, takes their food or their small possessions. She amuses herself by telling lies to cause fights. (“Do you know what she said about you? I heard her! She said…”) She snatches things from people, sometimes making no secret of what she’s doing. She doesn’t want the pitiful possessions. Sometimes she makes a show of breaking them. She wants the other women to know that she can do what she damned well pleases, and they can’t stop her. She has power, and they don’t.

We’ve taught her to let Earthseed women and our possessions alone. We stood together, and let her know we’re willing to make her life even more of a misery to her than it already is. We discovered by accident that all we had to do was hold her down and tug on her collar. The collar punishes her, and it punishes me and the other sharers among us if we were stupid enough to watch her suffering, but it leaves no marks. If we use her clothing to tie and gag her, then with just an occasional tug on her collar we can give her a hellish night. After we put her through one such night, she let us alone. She tormented other women. Tormenting people was her particular comfort.

We worry about her. She’s crazier than most of us, and she’s trouble, but she hates our “teachers” more than we do. She won’t go to them for help. In time, though, one of her victims might. We watch her. We try to keep her from going too far.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2033

More new people have been brought here—ragged, scrawny people, all strangers. Every day this week, a maggot has arrived to unload new people in groups of three, four, or five. We’ve finished building a long, shedlike extension onto the school with lumber that the “teachers” trucked in. This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house 30 people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head. The new people are each given what we have: a blanket, a plastic bowl, a Bible, and a shelf where they must sleep and store their things. We still sleep on the floor in our rooms, but everything else is the same.

Like us, the new people are using buckets as toilets. Some of us are being made to dig a cesspit. I took some lashes for pointing out that it was being put in a bad place. It could contaminate the underground water that feeds our wells. That could make us all sick, including our “teachers.”

But our “teachers” know everything. They don’t need advice from a woman, and a heathen woman at that. It was entirely their own decision a few days later to relocate the cesspit downhill and far away from the wells.

Someone has put up a sign at the logging-road gate: “Camp Christian Reeducation Facility.” The Crusaders have surrounded the place with a Lazor-wire fence, so there’s no safe entry or exit except at the gate. Lazor wire is made up of strands of wire so thin that they’re hard to see. They slice into the flesh of the wild animals who blunder into them.

I’ve asked some of the strangers what’s happening outside. Do people know what a reeducation camp really is? Are there other camps? Is there resistance? What’s Jarret doing? What’s going on?

Most of the new people won’t talk to me. They’re weary, frightened, beaten people. Those who are willing to talk know only that they