Parable of the Talents

I had just finished a pen-and-ink sketch of a woman and her two youngest kids, sitting outside their wood-and-plastic shack. I was headed back up to my room at the hotel. The streets in Georgetown are all dirt tracks or trash-filled ditches—open sewers—where you might step in anything. The Georges were sensible enough to build their collection of businesses upslope from the worst of the mess, but I can only do my work by going down to where most of the peo­ple are. I haven't bought much since I've been here, but I have invested in a pair of well-made, water-resistant boots.

I was thinking, as I walked, about the woman whom I had just drawn with her three-month-old and her 18-month-old. The mother isn't 30 yet, but she looks fifty. She has nine kids, sparse, graying hair, and almost no teeth. I felt as though I had gone back in time. Farther back, I mean. We were nineteenth-century in Acorn. What is this, I wondered? Eighteenth? And yet, perversely, I found myself filled with envy.  Sometimes I look at these poor, sad women and I'm almost sick with envy. At least they have their children. If they have nothing else, they have their children. I look at the children and I draw them, and I can hardly stand it.

As I tramped up the hill toward my room at George's, I saw a little boy squatting by the side of the path, his head in his hands. He was just another scrawny little kid in rags. I thought he might be having a nosebleed, and that made me want to hurry past him. My sharing makes me a coward sometimes. But it also makes me resist being a coward.

I stopped. 'Are you all right, honey?' I asked.

He jumped at the sound of my voice, then stared up at me. He was not bleeding, but his Lips were cut and swollen and he had an old slash in his cheek and a big black-and-blue swelling on the left side of his forehead. I froze the way I had learned to freeze when confronted with unexpected pain, and the kid mumbled something that I didn't understand because his mouth was so swollen. Then he just launched himself at me.

I thought at first that it was some kind of attack. I thought he might have a knife or an old-style razor or even a skin patch of some poison or a drug. There's nothing new about thieving or murderous children. In a big squatter settlement like Georgetown, there were quite a few of them, although they tended to go after the small, the weak, or the sick. And they tended to travel in packs. Then somehow, before the boy touched me, I knew him. I recognized his wounded, dis­torted face in spite of the pain he was giving me.

Justin! Justin beaten and cut, but alive. I held him, ignor­ing the people around us who stared or muttered. Justin is small and wiry. I suspect he still has quite a bit of growing to do. He's White, red-haired, and freckled. In short, he doesn't look like someone who should be hugging me. But in Georgetown although people might stare, they don't interfere. They mind their own business. They don't need any­one else's trouble.

I held him away from me and looked him over. He was filthy and bloody, and he didn't look as though he had had much to eat recently. The cuts on his face and mouth and his bruised head weren't his only injuries. He moved as though he hurt elsewhere.

'Is Mama here, too?' he asked.

'She's here,' I said.

'Where?'

'I'm taking you to her.' We had begun to walk together up toward the George complex.

'Is the Doctor there too?'

I stopped, staring up toward the complex, and looked down, waiting until I could keep my voice steady. 'No, Jus. He's not here.'

The Justin I had known back before Camp Christian would have accepted these words at face value. He might have asked where Bankole was, but he wouldn't have said what this much older, wounded, wiser child said.

'Shaper?'

I hadn't heard that title for a while. In fact, I hadn't heard my name for a while. In Georgetown, I called myself Cory Duran. It was my stepmother's maiden name, and I used it in the hope of attracting my brother's attention if he hap­pened to be around. The false name is accepted here because even though I'd been to Georgetown several times before the destruction of Acorn, among the permanent residents, only Dolores George and her husband knew my name. And the Georges don't gossip.

As for the title, in Acorn, all the children called me 'Shaper.' It was the title that seemed right for one teaching Earthseed. Travis, too, was called Shaper. So was Natividad.

'Shaper?'

'Yes, Jus.'