'Simple. My first night walking the freeway, three guys jumped me—big guys. I didn't have much money and that pissed them off—you know, like I was supposed to be rich so that robbing me would be worth their while. If I wasn't rich, then I had cheated them, and they had a right to get me for it. Shit.'
He was staring at the table again, and I imagined him as he must have been then, facing three big men. He had always been slight and much too attractive for his own good—a beautiful boy, and now, such a handsome young man. I had seen the girls and women of the community staring at him as we brought him from the truck to the house last night If he stayed, they would be all over him.
He would be stronger now. He had a look of wiry strength about him. But even now, he wouldn't be strong enough to hold off three attackers. And he'd had no friends with him, watching his back on the freeway that night
After a while, he spoke again, still staring at the table. 'They didn't just beat the hell out of me and rape me and let me go,' he said. 'They kept me so they could do it over and over again. And when they got tired of me, they sold me to a pimp. Not Cougar. He came later. The first one called himself Zorro. All these guys seem to have stupid names. Anyway, Zorro was the first to put a collar around my neck. After that people didn't have to bother beating me up—unless they felt like it. Some people get turned on by beating the shit out of a guy who can't fight back. And You know the worst thing about a collar, Lauren? They can torture you win it every day. Every goddamn day. And you never have any marks to mess you up and drive down your price, and you never die of it! Or most people don't die of it Some are lucky. They have heart attacks or strokes and they die. But the rest of us live no matter what And if we try to find some other way to die, to kill ourselves, they can stop us. The guy with the control unit can play you the way Mama used to play her piano. You get so you'll do anything—anything!—just to get him to let you alone for a few minutes. You walk past a corpse on the road— some poor old guy who couldn't walk any farther or a woman someone had raped and killed. You walk past the corpse, and you wish like hell it was you.'
He sighed and shook his head. 'That's it, really. I had one more owner between Zorro and Cougar, but he was walking shit too. You can't own people and torture them for fun and profit without being shit A pimp would sell his mother and his daughter if the price were right And if I ever get the chance, I swear to god, Lauren, I'll stake all three of them out and I'll burn them—like Jarret's people do with their so-called witches.' After a moment, he added, 'I saw that done once— a burning. Sargent—my second owner—did it to a woman who tried to kill him in his sleep. She was a beautiful woman. Sargent and his friends wiped out her family to get her, but then he slept with her before she had learned the rules.
'These are the rules: Once you've got a collar on, you can't run. Get a certain distance from the control unit and the collar chokes you. I mean it gives you so much pain that you can't keep going. You pass out if you try. We called that getting choked. Touch the control unit and the collar chokes you. It won't work for you anyway. It's got a fingerprint lock. And if the fingers trying to use it are wrong or are dead, it chokes you and stays on choke until someone with the right living fingers turns it off. Or until you die. When someone threatens a pimp, sometimes he'll make his oldest, least popular whores fight for him, shield him. The truth is, while they're wearing the collars, all his whores will fight for him, no matter how much they hate him. They'll fight hard. They might not even care whether or not they get killed.
'And, of course, if you try to cut, burn, or otherwise damage the collar, it chokes you.
'The girl, she tried to take revenge for her family. She never knew why the other whore Sargent had with him that night stopped her. The other whore begged her not to do it He tried to explain, but she wouldn't listen. Then Sargent woke up. The next day, he gathered all his whores together, and he staked the girl out naked and made us all gather wood and stack it around her and on top of her with just her head showing. Then he made us watch while he... while he burned her.'
It occurred to me that Marcus was the 'other whore' who saved Sargent's life. Maybe he was. I would not ask. Perhaps on some level, the 'other whore' was him even if it wasn't, really. A collar, my brother was saying, makes you turn traitor against your kind, against your freedom, against yourself. This was what had been done to him. And what had it made of him? Who and what was he now? No one could go through what he has gone through and not change somehow. No wonder the first of the Earthseed verses had reached him.
I took him to see Zahra and Harry, and they both hugged him, amazed. Zahra, in particular, who had seen him shot and thrown into the fire, kept staring at him and touching him. He stared back at them the way I've seen half-starved people stare at food that they couldn't beg, buy, or steal.
sunday, december 19, 2032
'Call me Marcos,' my brother said to me as I showed him our school-library-Gathering Hall. He was about to attend his first Gathering, but I had brought him to the school early so that he could see more of what we had built He seemed impressed with the building and with our collection of salvaged, purchased, and bartered books, but I had gotten the impression that there was something else on his mind. Now here it was.
'I've been Marcos Duran for more than five years now,' he said. 'I don't really know how to be Marcus Olamina anymore.'
I didn't know what to make of that. After a while, I
