The Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler

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.
- Earthseed: The Books of the Living

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2027

We've had over a week of weary, frightening, nerve wracking walking. We've reached and passed through the city of Sacramento without real trouble. We've been able to buy enough food and water, been able to find plenty of empty places in the hills where we could make camp. Yet none of us have had any feelings of comfort or well-being along the stretch of Interstate-5 that we've just traveled. I-5 is much less traveled than U.S. 101, in spite of the earthquake chaos. There were times when the only people we could see were each other. Those times never lasted long, but they did happen.
On the other hand, there were more trucks on I-5. We had to be careful because trucks traveled during the day as well as at night. Also, there were more human bones on I-5. It was nothing to run across skulls, lower jaws, or bones of the pelvis and torso. Arm and leg bones were rarer, but now and then, we spotted them too.
[...] But we say other things. On Tuesday we camped in a little hollow back in the hills to the west of the road, and a big black and white dog came wandering down toward our camp with the fresh-looking, bloody hand and forearm of a child in its mouth.
The dog spotted us, froze, turned, and ran back the way it had come. But we all got a good look before it went, and we all saw the same thing. That night, we posted a double watch. Two watchers, two guns, no unnecessary conversation, no sex.
The next day we decided not to take another rest day until we had pasted through Sacramento. There was no guarantee that anything would be better on the other side of Sacramento, but we wanted to get away from this grim land.
That night, looking for a place to camp, we stumbled across four ragged, filthy kids huddled around a campfire. The picture of them is still clear in my mind. Kids the age of my brothers - twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, three boys and a girl. The girl was pregnant, and so huge it was obvious she would be giving birth any day. We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were, roasting a severed human leg, maneuvering it where it lay in the middle of their fire atop the burning wood by twisting its foot. As we watched, the girl pulled a sliver of charred flesh from the thigh and stuffed it into her mouth.
They never saw us. I was in the lead, and I stopped the others before they all rounded the bend. Harry and Zahra, who were just behind me, saw all that I saw. We turned the others back and away, not telling them why until we were far from those kids and their cannibal feast.
No one attacked us. No one bother us at all. The country we walked through was even beautiful in some places - green trees and rolling hills; golden dried grasses and tiny communities, farms, many overgrown and abandoned, and abandoned houses. Nice country, and compared to Souther California, rich country. More water, more food, more room...
So why were the people eating one another?
There were several burned out buildings. It was obvious that there had been trouble here too, but much less than on the coast. Yet we couldn't wait to get back to the coast.
Sacramento was all right to resupply in a hurry though. Water and food were cheap there compared to what you could buy along hte roadside, of course. Cities were alyways a relief as far as prices were. But cities were also dangerous. More gangs, more cops, more suspicious, nervous people with guns. You tiptoe through cities. You keep up a steady pace, keep your eyes open, and try to look both too intimidating to bother and invisible. Neat trick. Bankole says cities have been like that for a long time.

Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you -
If you will learn.
God is your first
and your last teacher,
God is your harshest teacher;
subtle,
demanding.
Learn or die.
- Earthseed: The Books of the Living

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2027

We had another battle to try to sleep through before dawn this morning. It began to the south of us out on or near the highway, and worked its way first toward, then away from us.
We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running. . . Same old stuff - tiresome, dangerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing, and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.
I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over geing angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can't stop them by staying awake. If that wasn't altogether true, I didn't care. I slept.
[...] The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Her's their story, put together from the fragmnts they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tankaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis. Tori is ni ne years old, noot seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life. She's tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole's shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only 23. At 13, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else's gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from ictimization and starvtation in the streets.
Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three children over the next three years -- a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers' shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing -- new or used -- for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages -- surprise! -- were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.
Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be "disciplined" if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or escaped.
Emery's husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive other-the-counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing. But then, there's nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.
Emory and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without bother their parents. Yet they were taken. Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to "quiet her down." She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.
She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with heir thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn't something they could escape by remaining slaves.
A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you're in individual gang territories you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.
"One group was coming close to us," Emery said. "They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn't let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn't see you. You know how to hide."
That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that's possible. Most of the time it isn't. Tonight it isn't. And tonight we watch two at a time.

-- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, NY 1993.