Bankole sighed. "Dead. Some trouble on the road up north around Trinidad. Three men tried to steal her. They got caught. Her owners and the thieves shot it out, and she was in the middle. Nina says her owners just cursed her for getting in the way and getting killed. They left her body lying among the rocks by the sea. Nina said Paula loved the sea when the family saw it for the first time last year. She said she hoped the tide came in and carried her away."
I shook my head. Bankole got up and went to lie on the bed.
"But Dan did it," I said more to myself than to him. "He found his sister, and he brought her home. It was impossible, but he did it!"
"Shit," Bankole said, and turned his face to the wall.
************************************
Now the long day is over.
We've cleaned up the hillside battlefield and thrown ground pepper over parts of it so that any smell of blood that still clings to it wouldn't hold the attention of wild dogs.
We've collected the dead, searched their bodies, then after dark, surrounded them with scrap wood, soaked them in lamp oil, and burned them. We do a thorough job, and the smoke is less noticeable at night—less of a lure to scavengers and to the curious.
I hate doing this—burning the dead. Of course, whether they're our dead or someone else's, it has to be done, but I hate it
We burned Dan separate from his attackers. I set his pyre alight myself. Allie chose the verse and spoke it. We'll have a full service for Dan when Nina is well enough to attend. For now, though, I think Allie made a good choice.
"As wind,
As water,
As fire,
As life,
God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Sculptor and clay.
God
Is Infinite Potential.
God
Is Change."
The other dead—the intruders—were four men and a woman, all in their twenties or early thirties. They were dirty and scratched up, but well-dressed, well-armed, well-heeled. They had plenty of Canadian money in their pockets. Were they slavers? Drug dealers? Thieves? Rich kids slumming? Even Nina wasn't sure. She and Dan had escaped from their original captors and had been on the highway, headed for Acorn when this new group spotted them and came after them.
The intruders weren't carrying identification or even a change of clothing. That means they had homes or a base of some kind nearby. We thought about that and decided to burn their clothing along with their bodies. It's of much better quality than our own—newer, more fashionable, and more expensive. If we wear it, it might be recognized at one of the street markets. And another thing. Two of the intruders were wearing black sweatshirts with white crosses embroidered on them—embroidered, not printed. These weren't the long tunics that Aubrey Dovetree mentioned, but they were interesting imitations. The intruders were thugs of some kind who had decided it was fashionable to look like Jarret's people.
The intruders' guns are, like our own, good-quality, well-cared-for automatic rifles with laser sites. One is German, one's American, and the three newest are Russian. They're all as illegal as hell and as common as oranges. We'll hide them in our survival caches scattered through the mountains. The only thing they had that we'll keep with us and use, as we need it, is some of their money. Most of that will go in the caches too. It's all worn and wrinkled and not identifiable. The fact that there's so much of it—more per person than any group of us would carry around—tells us that these people were either rich or involved in some profitable illegal activity, or both.
Well, now they're gone. People vanish in this world. Even rich people out for fun and greater profit vanish. It happens all the time.
Chapter 10
□ □ □
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
We can,
Each of us,
Do the impossible
As Long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.
LIFE AT ACORN involved a lot of hard physical work. It says a great deal about the world of the early 2030s that most of the people who stumbled onto the community chose to join Earthseed and stay. That being the case, it must have taken a lot to get the Peralta family to leave. There may have been more reasons than my mother gives for their leaving, but I haven't been able to find evidence of them. Perhaps the Peraltas actually did disagree with the religious and political feelings of the rest of Acorn. Perhaps also, they were afraid of the way the political situation in the country was going. They had reason to be.
On the other hand, I'm not at all surprised that Uncle Marc left. There really was no place for him at Acorn. He was "Olamina's little brother" or, as my mother said, a nice boy. He could have married and begun a family in one more little cabin. That would have been intolerable to him. He was a world saver, after all, like my mother. Or not like her, since Earth was the only world that interested him. Like the Peraltas, he was in religious and political disagreement with Acorn, and, like the Peraltas, he was probably wise to leave when he did.
************************************
I got the impression that my mother didn't pay much attention to being pregnant, it wasn't that she resented it There's no indication that she did. She simply ignored it I was due in July. Between running out into the firefight with the thugs who chased Dan and Nina Noyer and actually giving birth to me, she worked hard to increase both Acorn's wholesaling and its retailing businesses. She was so successful at this that by the time I was born, the community was in the process of negotiating to buy another truck. They did eventually buy it. Most people had been nervous about having only the one truck. Travis and his helpers had kept the old housetruck running well, and hadn't had to spend much money on it since they made repairs themselves, but one major accident would put the whole community out of business—or at least out of its new businesses.
With two trucks, the beginnings of a fleet, my mother was looking forward to what she saw as a pleasant, reasonably secure future. She began to think less about Acorn and more about Earthseed—about spreading Earthseed to whole groups of new people. She wrote more than once in her journal that she hoped to use missionaries to make conversions in nearby cities and towns and to build whole new Earthseed communities—clones of Acorn. I think she especially liked this last idea. She even imagined names for the Acorn clones like a girl thinking up names for imaginary children that she hopes to have someday. There was a Hazelnut, a Pine, a Manzanita, a Sunflower, an Almond.... "They should be small communities," she said. "No more than a few hundred people, never more than a thousand. A community whose population grew to more than a thousand should split and 'parent' a new community."