I reached for his hand.
He flinched away, then looked up from the plate and stared at me through his tears.
I took his hand again, and looked back at him. "We have friends in some of the nearby towns," I said. "We've already left word with them. We're offering a reward for the girls or for information that leads us to them. If we can, we'll snatch them. If we have to, we'll buy them." I sighed. “I can't promise anything, Dan, but we'll do what we can. And we need you to help us. Travel with us to street markets, stores, and shops in nearby communities. Help us to look for them."
He went on staring at me as though I might be lying, as though he could find the truth in my face, if only he stared hard enough at it. "Why? Why would you do that?"
I hesitated, then drew a deep breath and told him. "We've all lost people," I said. "Everyone here has lost members of their families to fire, to murder, to raids.... I had a father, a stepmother, and four younger brothers. All dead. All. When we can save life ... we do. We couldn't stand it any other way."
And still, he stared at me. But now he was shaking. He made me think of a crystal thing, vibrating to sound, about to shatter. I pulled him to me, held him, this big child, taller than me. I felt his tears, wet on my shoulder, then felt his arms go around me, hugging back, still shaking, silent, desperate, hanging on.
Chapter 5
□ □ □
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Beware:
At war
Or at peace.
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease.
THE SELECTIONS I'VE OFFERED from my mother's journal make it clear that in spite of her near nineteenth-century existence she paid attention to the wider world. Politics and war mattered very much. Science and technology mattered. Fashions in crime and drug use and in racial, ethnic, religious, and class tolerance mattered. She did see these as fashions, by the way—as behaviors that went in and out of favor for reasons that ran the gamut from the practical to the emotional to the biological. Human competitiveness and territoriality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression. We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to took down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for direction and help.
My mother was always noticing and mentioning things like that. Sometimes she managed to work her observations into Earthseed verses. In November of 2032 she had bigger reasons than usual to pay attention to the world outside.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
sunday, november 7, 2032
News.
Tucked away at Acorn as we are, we have to make a special effort to get news from outside—real news, I mean, not rumors, and not the "news bullets" that purport to tell us all who we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights. Bullets are cheap and full of big dramatic pictures. Some bullets are true virtuals that allow people to experience—safely—hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and mass murder. Hell of a kick.
Well-made news disks, on the other hand, or good satellite news services cost more. Gray and Emery Mora and one or two others say news bullets are enough. They say detailed news doesn't matter. Since we can't change the stupid, greedy, vicious things that powerful people do, they think we should try to ignore them. No matter how many times we're forced to admit we can't really hide, some of us still find ways to try.
Well, we can't hide. So it's best to pay attention to what goes on. The more we know, the better able we'll be to survive. So we subscribe to a good phone news service and now and then we buy detailed world-news disks. The whole business makes me long for free broadcast radio like the kind we had when I was a kid, but that's almost nonexistent in this area. We listen to what little is left when we go into one of the larger towns. We can hear more now because the truck's radio picks up more than our little pocket radios can.
So here are some of the most significant news items of the past week. We listened to some of them on a new Worldisk today after Gathering.
Alaska is still claiming to be an independent nation, and it seems to have gotten into an even closer more formal alliance with Canada and Russia—northerners sticking together I suppose. Bankole shrugged when he heard that and shook his head. "Why not?" he said. "They've got all the money."
Thanks to climate change, they do have most of it. The climate is still changing, warming. It's supposed to settle at a new stable state someday. Until then, we'll go on getting a lot of violent erratic weather around the world. Sea level is still rising and chewing away at low-lying coastal areas like the sand dunes that used to protect Humboldt Bay and Arcata Bay just north of us. Half the crops in the Midwest and South are still withering from the heat, drowning in floods, or being torn to pieces by winds, so food prices are still high. The warming has made tropical diseases like malaria and dengue normal parts of life in the warm, wet Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic coast states. But people are beginning to adapt. There's less cholera, for instance, and less hepatitis. There are fewer of all the diseases that result from bad sanitation, spoiled food, or malnutrition. People boil the water they drink in cities where there's a problem and in squatter settlements with their open sewers—ditches. There are more gardens, and old-fashioned skills in food preservation are being revived. People barter for goods and services where cash is rare. They use hand tools and draft animals where there is no money for fuel or no power equipment left. Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one.
There are plenty of wars going on around the world now. Kenya and Tanzania are fighting. I haven't yet heard why. Bolivia and Peru are having another border dispute. Pakistan and Afghanistan have joined forces in a religious war against India. One part of Spain is fighting against another. Greece and Turkey are on the edge of war, and Egypt and Libya are slaughtering one another. China, like Spain, is tearing at itself. War is very popular these days.
I suppose we should be grateful that there hasn't been another "nuclear exchange." The one three years ago between Iran and Iraq scared the hell out of everyone. After it happened, there must have been peace all over the world for maybe three months. People who had hated one another for generations found ways to talk peace. But insult by insult, expediency by expediency, cease-fire violation by cease-fire violation, most of the peace talks broke down. It's always been much easier to make war than to make peace.
Back in this country, in Dallas, Texas, some fool of a rich boy went adventuring among the free poor of a big squatter settlement. He wound up wearing the latest in electronic convict control devices—also known as slave collars, dog collars, and choke chains. And with the collar to encourage him, he learned to make himself useful to a local pimp. I've heard that the new collars are damned sophisticated. The old ones—worn more often as belts—could only cause pain. They delivered shocks and sometimes damaged or killed people. The new collars don't kill, and they can be worn for months or years at a time and used often to deliver punishment. They're programmed to resist being removed or destroyed by delivering jolts of pain severe enough to cause unconsciousness. I've heard that some collars can also give cheap, delicious rewards of pleasure for good behavior by encouraging changes in brain chemistry—stimulating the wearer to produce endorphins. I don't know whether that's true, but if it is, the whole business sounds a little like being a sharer—except that instead of sharing what other people feel, the wearer feels whatever the person holding the control unit wants him to feel. This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person's whole life. I've heard that some collared people kill themselves, not because they can't stand the pain, but because they can't stand the degree of slavishness to which they find themselves descending.