'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?
She can't be allowed to go off to be shot by thugs, border guards, or soldiers. I can't let her do that. And, I think, she wants to be stopped. She won't ask to be, and she will fight for her own self-destructive way. People are like that. But I must think about what she can do instead of dying—what she should be doing. I must think about what she can do for Earthseed, and what it can do for her.
Chapter 20
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.
WHEN I WAS 19,1 met my Uncle Marc.
He was, by then, the Reverend Marcos Duran, a slight, still-beautiful middle-aged man who had become in English and in Spanish the best-known minister of the Church of Christian America. There was even some talk of his running for president, although he seemed uncomfortable about this. By then, though, the Church was just one more Protestant denomination. Andrew Steele Jarret had been dead for years, and the Church had gone from being an institution that everyone knew about and either loved or feared to being a smaller, somewhat defensive organization with much to answer for and few answers.
I had left home. Even though a girl who left home unmarried was seen by church members as almost a prostitute, I left as soon as I was 18.
'If you go,' Kayce said, 'don't come back. This is a decent, God-fearing house. You will not bring your trash and your sin back here!'
I had gotten a job caring for children in a household where the father had died. I had deliberately looked for a job that did not put me at the mercy of another man—a man who might be like Madison, or worse than Madison. The pay was room, board, and a tiny salary. I believed I had clothing and books enough to get me through a few years of working there, helping to raise another woman's children while she worked in public relations for a big agribusiness company. I had met the kids—two girls and a boy—and I liked them. I believed that I could do this work and save my salary so that when 1 left, 1 would have enough money to begin a small business—a small cafe, perhaps—of my own. I had no grand hopes. I only wanted to get away from the Alexanders who had become more and more intolerable.
There was no love in the Alexander house. There was only the habit of being together, and, 1 suppose, the fear of even greater loneliness. And there was the Church—the habit of Church with its Bible class, men's and women's missionary groups, charity work, and choir practice. I had joined the
