Parable of the Talents

Earthseed has survived.

We will do that We will survive. I don't yet know how. How is always a problem. But, in fact, we will survive.

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Here is what happened.

Late Tuesday afternoon last week, I was sketching two of the Faircloth kids and talking with them about the project they wanted to work on for school. They had, in their re­quired study of history, just discovered World War II, and they wanted to build models of the battleships, submarines, and airplanes of the time. They wanted to report on the big battles and find out more about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were fascinated by all of the loud, explosive events of the War, but they had no idea what a huge subject they had chosen or, beyond the barest outline, why the War had been fought. I had decided to sketch them while the three of us talked about it and narrowed things down.

The Faircloth family had always been poor, had lived in a squatter settlement before they came to us. Alan Faircloth had small, badly creased, paper photos of the boys as babies, but nothing recent. He had pleased me more than I would have been willing to admit by asking me to draw the two of them. I had become vain about my drawing. It was finally somewhere near good. Even Harry, Zahra, and Allie had said so, and they were the ones who had the most fun with my earlier efforts.

The boys and I were outside behind the school, enjoying a warm, easy day. Larkin lay next to me, asleep in her crib in spite of the noise the boys made. She was already used to noise. The boys were 11 and 12, small for their age, always loud, and unlikely to be still for more than two or three min­utes at a time. First they peeked at Larkin, then they lost in­terest and shouted first at each other, then at me about weapons and battles, dive-bombers and aircraft carriers, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, London, Stalingrad, Tokyo, on and on. Interesting that a thing as terrible and as massive as a worldwide war could seem so wonderful and exciting to a pair of preadolescent boys whose grandparents weren't born in time for it—although they did have paternal grandparents who were born and raised in London.

I sketched the boys quickly while listening to their enthu­siasm and making suggestions. I was just finishing the sketches when the maggots arrived.

A maggot, nicknamed in its ugly shape, is something less than a tank, and something more than a truck. It's a big, armed and armored, all-terrain, all-wheel-drive vehicle. Private cops and military people use them, and people with plenty of money drive them as private cars. Maggots can go almost anywhere, over, around, or through almost anything. The people of Halstead have one. They've used it now and then to collect Bankole. Several small local towns have one or two for their cops or for search and rescue in the hills. But the things are serious fuel eaters—expensive to run.

That Friday, seven maggots came crawling out of the hills and through our thorn fence toward us. There had been no warning from the watchers. Nothing at all. That was my first thought when I saw them coming: Where were Lucio Figueroa and Noriko Kardos? Why hadn't they warned us? Were they all right?

Seven maggots! That was three or four times as much firepower as we could muster if we brought out every one of our guns. Only our truck guns would have even a ghost of a chance of stopping a maggot, anyway.

Seven of the damned things!

'Go home!' I said to the two boys. 'Tell your father and sisters to get the hell out No drill. The real thing! Get out, fast and quiet! Run!'

Both boys ran.

I took my phone from my pocket and tapped out the emer­gency bug-out signal. We've had bug-out exercises. Bankole called them that, and the name spread. I thought of them as 'melt into the mountains' exercises. Now we faced the real thing. It had to be real. No one came visiting in seven armed and armored maggots.

I grabbed my Larkin as fast as I could and ran for the hills. I tried to keep the school building between the two of us and the nearest maggots. They were crawling toward us in what could have been a military formation. They could run us down, shoot us, do whatever they chose to do. The only thing we might be able to do that they couldn't do was vanish into the mountains. But could we even do that? If we kept still, the maggots' sensory equipment would spot us. And if we ran, the rocks and trees and thorn bushes wouldn't give us much protection from the maggots' guns. But what could we do but run? As long as no one came out of the maggots, we had nothing to shoot at.

Where was Bankole? I didn't know. Well, we had ren­dezvous points. We would find each other. The idea was not to waste time running around looking for relatives. Except for babies and very young children, everyone knew from the drills that a command to get out meant exactly that. 'Get out now!'

And we were to go in all directions. We were not to fol­low one another or group together and provide our enemies with big, easy targets. As much as possible, we were to put trees and geographical features