"Why did you write this?"
"Because it's true," I answered, and from then until the time she lay down to sleep, we talked about Earthseed and what it meant, what it could mean and how anyone could ever accept it even if they happened to hear about it. She doesn't sneer, but she doesn't understand yet either. I find that I look forward to teaching her.
sunday, june 17, 2035
We're taking the day off. We're in Redding—a little west of Redding in a park, really. Redding is a sizable city. We've made camp, for once in a place where people are supposed to camp, and we're eating heavy, tasty food bought in town. We've also had a chance to bathe and do our laundry. It always puts me in a better mood not to stink and not to have to endure the body odor of my companion. Somehow, no matter how awful I smell, I can still smell other people.
We've had a hot stew of potatoes, vegetables, and jerked beef with a topping of lovely Cheddar cheese. It turns out that Len can't cook. She says her mother could but never did. Never had to. Servants did the cooking, the cleaning, repairing things. Teachers were hired for Len and her brother—mostly to guide their use of the computer courses and to be sure they did the work they were supposed to do. Their father, their computer connections, and their older servants provided them with most of what they knew about the world. Ordinary living skills like cooking and sewing were never on the agenda.
"What did your mother do?" I asked.
Len shrugged. "Nothing, really. She lived in her virtual room—her own private fantasy universe. That room could take her anywhere, so why should she ever come out? She was getting fat and losing her physical and mental health, but her v-room was all she cared about"
I frowned. "I've heard of that kind of thing—people being hooked on Dreamasks or on virtual-world fantasies. I don't know anything about it, though."
"What is there to know? Dreamasks are nothing—cheap kid's toys. Really limited. In that room she could go anywhere, be anyone, be with anyone. It was like a womb with an imagination. She could visit fourteenth-century China, present-day Argentina, Greenland in any imagined distant future, or one of the distant worlds circling Alpha Centauri. You name it, she could create some version of it. Or she could visit her friends, real and imaginary. Her real friends were other wealthy, idle people—mostly women and children. They were as addicted to their v-rooms as she was to hers. If her real friends didn't indulge her as much as she wanted them to, she just created more obliging versions of them. By the time I was abducted, I didn't know whether she really had contact with any flesh-and-blood people anymore. She couldn't stand real people with real egos of their own."
I thought about this. It was worse than anything I had heard about this particular addiction. "What about food?" I asked. "What about bathing or just going to the bathroom?"
"She used to come out for meals. She had her own bathroom. All by itself, it was big as my bedroom. Then she began to have all her meals sent in. After that, there were whole months when I didn't see her. Even when I took her meals in myself, I had to just leave them. She was in the v-bubble inside the room, and I couldn't even see her. If I went into the bubble—you could just walk into it—she would scream at me. I wasn't part of her perfect fantasy life. My brother, on the other hand, was. He got to visit her once or twice a week and share in her fantasies. Nice, isn't it"
I sighed. "Didn't your father mind any of this? Didn't he try to help her—or you?"
"He was busy making money and screwing the maids and their children—some of whom were also his children. He wasn't cut off from the outside, but he had his own fantasy life." She hesitated. "Do I seem normal to you?"
I couldn't help seeing where she was going with that "We're survivors, Len. You are. I am. Most of Georgetown is. All of Acorn was. We've been slammed around in all kinds of ways. We're all wounded. We're healing as best we can. And, no, we're not normal. Normal people wouldn't have survived what we've survived. If we were normal we'd be dead."
That made her cry. I just held her. No doubt she had been repressing far too much in recent years. When had anyone last held her and let her cry? I held her. After a while, she lay down, and I thought she was falling asleep. Then she spoke.
"If God is Change, then... then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?"
"We care for one another," I said. "We care for ourselves and one another." And I quoted,
"Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear."
At that, she surprised me. She said, "Yes, I liked that one." And she finished the quote:
"And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles."
"But I have no obsession, positive or otherwise. I have nothing."
"Alaska?" I said.
"I don't know what else to do, where else to go."
“If you get there, what will you do? Go back to being your parents' housekeeper?"
She glanced at me. "I don't know whether they would let me. I might never make it over the borders anyway, especially with the war. Border guards will probably shoot me." She said this with no fear, no passion, no feeling at all. She was telling me that she was committing a kind of suicide. She wasn't out to kill herself, but she was going to arrange for others to kill her—because she didn't know what else to do. Because no one loved her or needed her for anything at all. From her parents to her abductors, people were willing to use her and discard her, but she mattered to no one. Not even to herself. Yet she had kept herself alive through hell. Did she struggle for life only out of habit, or because some part of her still hoped that there was something worth living for?