Parable of the Talents

the truck and the area around it. A housetruck, armed, armored, and locked up tight shouldn't—couldn't let the sound of a child's crying escape. And the sound had seemed normal, not amplified or modified by truck speakers.

Therefore, one of the truck's doors must be open. Wide open.

I couldn't see much through the weeds and grasses, and I didn't dare to raise my head above them. All I could make out were the sunlit shapes of the chimney, the truck beside it, the weeds in the fields behind both chimney and truck, the distant trees, and....

Movement?

Movement far away in the weeds of the field, but coming closer.

Natividad pulled me down. 'What is the matter with you?' she whispered in Spanish. For Jorge's sake, it was best to stay with Spanish while we were in trouble. 'There are crazy people in that truck! Do you want to die?'

'Someone else is coming,' I said. 'More than one person, coming through the fields.'

'I don't care! Stay down!'

Natividad is one of my best friends, but sometimes hav­ing her along is like having your mother with you.

'Maybe the crying is intended to lure us out,' Michael said. 'People have used children as lures before.' He's a suspicious man, Michael is. He questions everything. He and his family have been with us for two years now, and I think it took him six months to accept us and to decide that we had no evil intentions toward his wife or his twin girls. This, even though we took them in and helped them when we found his wife alone, giving birth to the twins in a ruin of a shack where they had been squatting. The place was near a stream, so they had water, and they had a couple of scavenged pots. But they were armed only with an ancient, empty .22 target pistol and a knife. They were all but starving, eating pine nuts, wild plants, and an occasional small animal that Michael trapped or killed with a rock. In fact, he was away looking for food when his wife Noriko went into labor.

Michael agreed to join us because he was terrified that in spite of his odd jobs, begging, stealing, and scavenging, his wife and babies might starve. We never asked more of them than that they do their share of the work to keep the com­munity going and that they respect Earthseed by not preach­ing other belief systems. But to Michael, this sounded like altruism, and Michael didn't believe in altruism. He kept ex­pecting to catch us selling people into slavery or prostituting them. He didn't begin to relax until he realized that we were, in fact, practicing what we preached. Earthseed was and is the key to us. We had a way of life that he thought was sen­sible and a goal, a Destiny that he thought was crazy, but we weren't up to anything that would harm his family. And his family was the key to him. Once he accepted us, he and Noriko and the girls settled in and made Acorn very much their home. They're good people. Even Michael's suspi­ciousness can be a good thing. Most of the time, it helps us keep alert

'I don't think the crying was intended to lure us out,' I said. 'But something is wrong here. That's obvious. The people in that truck should either make sure we're dead or they should leave.'

'And we shouldn't hear them,' Jorge said. 'No matter how loud that kid yells, we shouldn't hear a thing.'

Natividad spoke up. 'Their guns shouldn't have missed us,' she said. 'In a truck like that, the guns should be run by a computer. Automatic targeting. The only way you can miss is if you insist on doing things yourself. You might forget to put your guns on the computer or you might leave the com­puter off if you just wanted to scare people. But if you're se­rious, you shouldn't keep missing.' Her father had taught her more about guns than most of the rest of our community knew.

'I don't think they missed us on purpose,' I said. 'It didn't feel like that.'

'I agree,' Michael said. 'So what's wrong over there?'

'Shit!' Jorge whispered. 'What's wrong is the bastards are going to kill us if we move!'

The guns went off again. I pressed myself against the ground and lay there, frozen, eyes shut. The idiots in the truck meant to kill us whether we moved or not, and their chances for success were excellent.

Then I realized that this time, they weren't shooting at us.

Someone screamed. Over the steady clatter of one of the truck's guns, I heard someone scream in agony. I didn't move. When someone was in pain, the only way I could avoid sharing the suffering was not to look.

Jorge, who should have known better, raised his head and looked.