Parable of the Talents

learned was that all our collars were linked together some­how in a kind of collar network. All could be controlled by the units that our captors wore as belts, but the belts themselves were powered or coordinated or somehow controlled from a larger master unit that Diamond Scott believed was kept in one of the two maggots that are always here. Things Di's rapist had said while she was with him waiting to be raped again made her certain that this was true.

A master control unit protected by the guns, locks, and armor of a maggot was beyond our reach, for now. We had to learn more about it. It occurred to me, though, that the reason the belt unit of Emery's rapist had not saved its owner's life was simple: he had taken it off. What man wore his belt to bed? Both of the men Emery had killed had taken their belts off. Why not? Emery was a slender little woman. A man of ordinary size wouldn't doubt his ability to control her with or without the collar.

Once she had killed, Emery would have tried to use the belt units to free herself, either to escape, to try to free us, or to take further revenge. She would have tried. I'm sure of that. And she would have failed either because she had the wrong fingerprints or because she lacked some other neces­sary key. It was important to know that, but there was more: she had tried the units, no doubt caused herself pain, but she had failed to set off any alarms. Perhaps there were no alarms. That could be very important someday.

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We were all lashed for what Emery did. The men were made to watch.

We were marched out of the school and lashed as we were made to kneel and pray, to scream out our sins, to beg for forgiveness, and quote Bible verses on command. I kept thinking they would make a mistake and kill some of us. This was an orgy of abuse and humiliation. It went on and on for hours with our 'teachers' taking turns, trading off, screaming their hate at us, and calling it love. I had no voice at all left by the time it was over. I was sore all over. An ac­tual beating couldn't have left me feeling any worse. And if anyone had been paying attention to me in particular, they would have seen that I was a sharer. I lost control. I couldn't have concealed anything.

I remember wishing I could die. I remember wondering if in the end they would force us all to go the way Emery did, each of us taking a few of them with us.

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New people have been brought to live among us—men and women from squatter camps and from nearby towns. Most of them seem to be just plain poor people. Some were like the Dovetrees. They produced and sold drugs or homemade beer, wine, or whiskey. And our neighbors the Sullivan and the Gama families have been rounded up and brought here. Some of their children used to attend our school, but none were captured with us. I haven't seen any of them since our capture. Why have they been taken captive and brought here now? No one seems to know.

The new women were stuffed in with us or put into the empty third room of the school—the room that was once our clinic. The men were housed in the big room with our men.

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I need to write about Bankole.

I meant to do that when I began. I need to but I don't want to. It just plain hurts too much.

The Crusaders are making us enlarge our prison and en­large our cabins, which are now their homes. And we work in the fields as before. We're feeding livestock and cleaning their pens. We're turning compost, we're planting herbs, we're harvesting winter fruits, vegetables and herbs, clear­ing brush from the hills. We're expected to feed ourselves and our captors. They eat better than we do, of course. After all, we owe them more than we can ever pay, you see, be­cause they're teaching us to forsake our sinful ways. They keep talking about teaching us the meaning of hard work. They tell us that we're no longer squatters, parasites, and thieves. I've earned myself more than one lashing by saying that my husband and I own this land, that we've always paid our taxes on it, and that we've never stolen from anyone.

They've burned our books and our papers.

They've burned all that they could find of our past It's all ungodly trash, they say. They made us do most of the fetch­ing and carrying, the stacking and piling of so much that we loved. They watched us, their hands on their belts. All the books on paper and on disk. All the collections that our younger kids had assembled of minerals, seeds, leaves, pic­tures ... All the reports, models, sculptures and paintings that our older kids have done. All the music that Travis and Gray wrote. All the plays that Emery wrote. All the bite of my journal that they could find All the legal papers, includ­ing marriage licenses, tax receipts, and Bankole's deed to the land. All these things, our teachers threw lamp oil on and burned, then raked and stirred and burned again.

In fact they've only burned copies of the legal papers. I'm not sure that matters, but it's true. Since we got our first truck, we've kept the originals in a safe-deposit box in Eureka—Bankole's idea. And we keep other copies in our var­ious caches, along with a few books, other records, and the usual weapons, food, money, and clothing. I had been scan­ning Bankole's writing and my journal notebooks and hid­ing disk copies of them in the caches too. I don't know why I did this. In the case of my journals, it's