Parable of the Sower (25 page)

“So you hit something,” he said as I sat gasping again from the small exertion.

I nodded. “Killed a dog. I’ll be okay soon.”

“You need a keeper,” he said.

“Dogs were after the baby!”

“You’ve adopted those damned people.”

I smiled in spite of myself, liking him, thinking that I’d pretty much adopted him and Zahra, too. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

He sighed. “Get in your bag and go to sleep, will you. I’ll take the next watch.”

“Some people just came and carried off the dog you killed,” Zahra said. “We should have got it.”

“I’m not ready to eat a dog yet,” Harry told her. “Go to sleep.”

The names of the members of the mixed family are Travis Charles Douglas, Gloria Natividad Douglas, and six-month-old Dominic Douglas, also called Domingo. They gave in and joined us tonight after we made camp. We’ve detoured away from the highway to make camp on another beach, and they’ve followed. Once we were settled, they came over to us, uncertain and suspicious, offering us small pieces of their treasure: milk chocolate full of almonds. Real milk chocolate, not carob candy. It was the best thing I’d tasted since long before leaving Robledo.

“It was you last night?” Natividad asked Harry. The first thing she had told us was to call her Natividad.

“It was Lauren,” Harry said, gesturing toward me.

She looked at me. “Thank you.”

“Is your baby all right?” I asked.

“He had scratches and sand in his eyes and mouth from being dragged.” She stroked the sleeping baby’s black hair. “I put salve on the scratches and washed his eyes. He’s all right now. He’s so good. He only cried a little bit.”

“Hardly ever cries,” Travis said with quiet pride. Travis has an unusual deep-black complexion—skin so smooth that I can’t believe he has ever in his life had a pimple. Looking at him makes me want to touch him and see how all that perfect skin feels. He’s young, good looking, and intense—a stocky, muscular man, tall, but a little shorter and a little heavier than Harry. Natividad is stocky, too—a pale brown woman with a round, pretty face, long black hair bound up in a coil atop her head. She’s short, but it isn’t surprising somehow that she can carry a pack and a baby and keep up a steady pace all day. I like her, feel inclined to trust her. I’ll have to be careful about that. But I don’t believe she would steal from us. Travis has not accepted us yet, but she has. We’ve helped her baby. We’re her friends.

“We’re going to Seattle,” she told us. “Travis has an aunt there. She says we can stay with her until we find work. We want to find work that pays money.”

“Don’t we all,” Zahra agreed. She sat on Harry’s sleepsack with him, his arm around her. Tonight could be tiresome for me.

Travis and Natividad sat on their three sacks, spread out to give their baby room to crawl when he woke up. Natividad had harnessed him to her wrist with a length of clothesline.

I felt alone between the two couples. I let them talk about their hopes and rumors of northern edens. I took out my notebook and began to write up the day’s events, still savoring the last of the chocolate.

The baby awoke hungry and crying. Natividad opened her loose shirt, gave him a breast, and moved over near me to see what I was doing.

“You can read and write,” she said with surprise. “I thought you might be drawing. What are you writing?”

“She’s always writing,” Harry said. “Ask to read her poetry. Some of it isn’t bad.”

I winced. My name is androgynous, in pronunciation at least—Lauren sounds like the more masculine Loren. But pronouns are more specific, and still a problem for Harry.

“She?” Travis asked right on cue. “Her?”

“Damn it, Harry,” I said. “We forgot to buy that tape for your mouth.”

He shook his head, then gave me an embarrassed smile. “I’ve known you all my life. It isn’t easy to remember to switch all your pronouns. I think it’s all right this time, though.”

“I told you so!” Natividad said to her husband. Then she looked embarrassed. “I told him you didn’t look like a man,” she said to me. “You’re tall and strong, but… I don’t know. You don’t have a man’s face.”

I had, almost, a man’s chest and hips, so maybe I should be glad to hear that I didn’t have a man’s face—though it wasn’t going to help me on the road. “We believed two men and a woman would be more likely to survive than two women and a man,” I said. “Out here, the trick is to avoid confrontation by looking strong.”

“The three of us aren’t going to help you look strong,” Travis said. He sounded bitter. Did he resent the baby and Natividad?

“You are our natural allies,” I said. “You sneered at that last time I said it, but it’s true. The baby won’t weaken us much, I hope, and he’ll have a better chance of surviving with five adults around him.”

“I can take care of my wife and my son,” Travis said with more pride than sense. I decided not to hear him.

“I think you and Natividad will strengthen us,” I said. “Two more pairs of eyes, two more pairs of hands. Do you have knives?”

“Yes.” He patted his pants pocket. “I wish we had guns like you.”

I wished we had guns—plural—too. But I didn’t say so. “You and Natividad look strong and healthy,” I said. “Predators will look at a group like the five of us and move on to easier prey.”

Travis grunted, still noncommittal. Well, I had helped him twice, and now I was a woman. It might take him a while to forgive me for that, no matter how grateful he was.

“I want to hear some of your poetry,” Natividad said. “The man we worked for, his wife used to write poetry. She would read it to me sometimes when she was feeling lonely. I liked it. Read me something of yours before it gets too dark.”

Odd to think of a rich woman reading to her maid—which was who Natividad had been. Maybe I had the wrong idea of rich women. But then, everyone gets lonely. I put my journal down and picked up my book of Earthseed verses. I chose soft, non-preachy verses, good for road-weary minds and bodies.

❏ ❏ ❏

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

S
UNDAY
, A
UGUST
8, 2027

“Y
OU BELIEVE IN ALL
this Earthseed stuff, don’t you?” Travis asked me.

It was our day off, our day of rest. We had left the highway to find a beach where we could camp for the day and night and be comfortable. The Santa Barbara beach we had found included a partly burned park where there were trees and tables. It wasn’t crowded, and we could have a little daytime privacy. The water was only a short walk away. The two couples took turns disappearing while I watched their packs and the baby. Interesting that the Douglases were already comfortable trusting me with all that was precious to them. We didn’t trust them to watch alone last night or the night before, though we did make them watch. We had no walls to put our backs against last night so it was useful to have two watchers at a time. Natividad watched with me and Travis watched with Harry. Finally, Zahra watched alone.

I organized that, feeling that it was the schedule that would be most comfortable to both couples. Neither would be required to trust the other too much.

Now, amid the outdoor tables, firepits, pines, palms, and sycamores, trust seems not to be a problem. If you turn your back to the burned portion which is barren and ugly, this is a beautiful place, and it’s far enough from the highway not to be found by the ever-flowing river of people moving north. I found it because I had maps—in particular, a street map of much of Santa Barbara County. My grandparents’ maps helped us explore away from the highway even though many street signs were fallen or gone. There were enough left for us to find beaches when we were near them.

There were locals at this beach—people who had left real homes to spend an August day at the beach. I eavesdropped on a few fragments of conversation and found out that much.

Then I tired talking to some of them. To my surprise, most were willing to talk. Yes, the park was beautiful except where some painted fools had set fires. The rumors were that they did it to fight for the poor, to expose or destroy the goods hoarded by the rich. But a park by the sea wasn’t goods. It was open to everyone. Why burn it? No one knew why.

No one knew where the fad of painting yourself and getting high on drugs and fire had come from, either. Most people suspected it had begun in Los Angeles where, according to them, most stupid or wicked things began. Local prejudice. I didn’t tell any of them I was from the LA. area. I just smiled and asked about the local job situation. Some people said they knew where I could work to earn a meal or a “safe” place to sleep, but no one knew where I could earn money. That didn’t mean there weren’t any such jobs, but if there were, they would be hard to find and harder to qualify for. That’s going to be a problem wherever we go. And yet we know a lot, the three of us, the five of us. We know how to do a great many things. There must be a way to put it all together and make us something other than domestic servants working for room and board. We make an interesting unit.

Water is very expensive here—worse than in Los Angeles or Ventura Counties. We all went to a water station this morning. Still no freeway watersellers for us.

On the road yesterday, we saw three dead men—a group together, young, unmarked, but covered with the blood they had vomited, their bodies bloated and beginning to stink. We passed them, looked at them, took nothing from their bodies. Their packs—if they’d had any—were already gone. Their clothes, we did not want. And their canteens—all three still had canteens—their canteens, no one wanted.

We all resupplied yesterday at a local Hanning Joss. We were relieved and surprised to see it—a good dependable place where we could buy all we needed from solid food for the baby to soap to salves for skin chafed by salt water, sun, and walking. Natividad bought new liners for her baby carrier and washed and dried a plastic bag of filthy old ones. Zahra went with her into the separate laundry area of the store to wash and dry some of our filthy clothing. We wore our sea-washed clothing, salty, but not quite stinking. Paying to wash clothes was a luxury we could not often afford, yet none of us found it easy to be filthy. We weren’t used to it. We were all hoping for cheaper water in the north. I even bought a second clip for the gun—plus solvent, oil, and brushes to clean the gun. It had bothered me, not being able to clean it before. If the gun failed us when we needed it, we could be killed. The new clip was a comfort, too. It gave us a chance to reload fast and keep shooting.

Now we lounged in the shade of pines and sycamores, enjoyed the sea breeze, rested, and talked. I wrote, fleshing out my journal notes for the week. I was just finishing that when Travis sat down next to me and asked his question:

“You believe in all this Earthseed stuff, don’t you?”

“Every word,” I answered.

“But…you made it up.”

I reached down, picked up a small stone, and put it on the table between us. “If I could analyze this and tell you all that it was made of, would that mean I’d made up its contents?”

He didn’t do more than glance at the rock. He kept his eyes on me. “So what did you analyze to get Earthseed?”

“Other people,” I said, “myself, everything I could read, hear, see, all the history I could learn. My father is—was—a minister and a teacher. My stepmother ran a neighborhood school. I had a chance to see a lot.”

“What did your father think of your idea of God?”

“He never knew.”

“You never had the guts to tell him.”

I shrugged. “He’s the one person in the world I worked hard not to hurt.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. My parents, too.” He shook his head. “People don’t live long these days.”

There was a period of silence. After a while, he said, “How did you get your ideas about God?”

“I was looking for God,” I said. “I wasn’t looking for mythology or mysticism or magic. I didn’t know whether there was a god to find, but I wanted to know. God would have to be a power that could not be defied by anyone or anything.”

“Change.”

“Change, yes,”

“But it’s not a god. It’s not a person or an intelligence or even a thing. It’s just… I don’t know. An idea.”

I smiled. Was that such a terrible criticism? “It’s a truth,” I said. “Change is ongoing. Everything changes in some way—size, position, composition, frequency, velocity, thinking, whatever. Every living thing, every bit of matter, all the energy in the universe changes in some way. I don’t claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way.”

Harry, coming in dripping from the sea, heard this last. “Sort of like saying God is the second law of thermodynamics,” he said, grinning. He and I had already had this conversation.

“That’s an aspect of God,” I said to Travis. “Do you know about the second law?”

He nodded. “Entropy, the idea that the natural flow of heat is from something hot to something cold—not the other way—so that the universe itself is cooling down, running down, dissipating its energy.”

I let my surprise show.

“My mother wrote for newspapers and magazines at first,” he said. “She taught me at home. Then my father died and she couldn’t earn enough for us to keep the house. And she couldn’t find any other work that paid money. She had to take a job as a live-in cook, but she went on teaching me.”

“She taught you about entropy?” Harry asked.

“She taught me to read and write,” Travis said. “Then she taught me to teach myself. The man she worked for had a library—a whole big room full of books.”

“He let you read them?” I asked.

“He didn’t let me near them.” Travis gave me a humorless smile. “I read them anyway. My mother would sneak them to me.”