Hope of Earth

by Piers Anthony

  Jack stepped across and knocked the hand away. The four of them shoved forward, brushing by the kids, entering the street leading into the project.

  “Oh, gimpy’s tough!” one cried mockingly. “I’m scared!” Then he drew a knife.

  All around them knives appeared.

  It could be worse, Bry realized. Guns were increasingly common on the street. The main advantage of knives was their silence, but it was getting so that juvenile thugs no longer cared about noise.

  “Run for it!” Lin cried.

  They tried, but immediately two gang kids went after Lin, catching her by the arms. The others closed on the other three, their knives held forward menacingly. “You ain’t going nowhere, you turds,” the leader said. “You wanna get cut?”

  They had to stop. Even if the other three made it to the project, Lin was caught and would pay the price. Bry noted that the inexperience of this gang was showing; many of the pejorative terms used were childish rather than savage. There was about as much bluster as action. That made it worse; if amateurs were getting this bad, what were the hardened professional gangs up to?

  “That’s better,” the leader said, enjoying his power over them. “Okay, black bitch, you first: take it off.”

  Bry realized that there was a protocol: humiliate the black woman first, while the others watched. To send the message: stay out of white territory. They might not be able to justify raping a pretty white girl, but a black one was fair game.

  “No!” Lin cried.

  “Make her scream,” the leader said without turning.

  One of the kids holding Lin twisted her arm. She screamed.

  Wildflower flinched. She knew what rape was like. She didn’t want Lin to suffer it. She started to take off her clothes.

  “Hey, hey!” the boys said, smiling. They had seen that Wildflower had a nice figure; now they were eager to confirm its details, feeling very naughty. They were nevertheless working themselves up, and some of them would indeed try to complete the rape.

  Bry looked desperately around, but there were no police near, and no one else was coming to their rescue. That was par for the course, at night. Now it was happening in broad daylight. What could they do? Even without the knives, the four of them would have been no match for the gang. Jack had a bad foot, Bry was holding the bag, and the two girls couldn’t fight.

  Wildflower pulled off her red blouse, standing in skirt and bra. At age eighteen, she was a fine figure of a woman. “Yeah, yeah!” the kids agreed, ogling. They were young enough not to have had much actual sexual experience. They would have seen pornographic videos galore, but reality was much more compelling.

  Wildflower waved the blouse over her head, like a flag. “More, more!” the boys cried gleefully.

  There was the whistle of a bullet, followed by the sound of a shot from the project. The boys wheeled to look—and another bullet struck the road almost at their feet.

  “Another time, bitch!” the leader cried as the gang members fled.

  “You signaled Jes!” Lin exclaimed, catching on.

  Wildflower nodded as she pulled her blouse back on. Then the four of them resumed their walk to the project.

  Flo met them at the door. She was grim. “If I hadn’t heard you scream—”

  “And if Jes wasn’t a dead shot with that rifle,” Lin said, relieved.

  “You did nothing to provoke them?”

  “We were just walking. But they didn’t like Wildflower’s color.”

  Jes appeared, carrying her baby. She had fired from the upstairs window. The sound of the shots must have awakened the baby. But she had done what she had to do.

  That night, when the men were home, they had a family meeting. “We can’t have this,” Ned declared, furious because of the threat to his wife.

  “We can’t afford better housing,” Flo reminded him. “Anyway, the trouble is spreading to the ‘good’ neighborhoods now. The city isn’t safe. Soon no city will be safe.”

  “And no town,” Dirk added. “Violence isn’t just for ghettoes any more.”

  “Where else can we go?” Snow asked. She was foreign-born, like Wildflower, and was having trouble finding work.

  “I saw something,” Bry said, remembering. “An ad. Maybe it’s for us.” He dashed to find the newspaper, searching out the section. “Here.” He gave it to Flo.

  “‘Planned community looking for skilled personnel in the following occupations,’” she read. Her eyes skimmed across the listing. “‘CAD—Computer Aided Design.’” She looked up. “That’s you, Ned.” She returned to the list. “‘Heavy construction.’ That’s you, Sam. ‘Project organizer.’ That’s you, Ittai. ‘Large-scale cook.’”

  “That’s you!” several others cried, laughing.

  “What’s the small print?” Ned asked.

  “There isn’t any,” Flo said. “There’s only a blind box.”

  “A what?” Sam asked.

  Flo smiled, briefly. “Sam, your age is showing. It’s a newspaper box, protecting the anonymity of the advertising party. There’s no way to find out who is behind it except by answering.”

  Snow was interested. “But suppose you are looking for another job, and the ad is by your present employer? You could get fired, because—”

  “Then you list a ‘destroy’ address: if your response is headed for the named company, destroy it instead of delivering it. You can list any number of such addresses, to avoid past and present employers, estranged spouses, aggressive creditors, government agencies—”

  “Hey, neat!” Lin cried. “Let’s list that juvenile street gang.” But no one laughed.

  “So this is an essentially anonymous ad,” Ned said. “With no indication of rates of pay, location, working conditions, duration, or benefits.”

  “So maybe we’d better ask,” Flo said. “We don’t have to sign up for anything we don’t like. But we could certainly use some of these jobs, especially if they are together.”

  “It does say ‘planned community,’” Dirk said. “That suggests something out of the city, with a lot of setting up to do. I rather like the notion, if it’s valid.”

  “There certainly isn’t much to hold us in this city,” Ned said, with a glance at Wildflower.

  “There isn’t much in this culture to hold us,” Ittai said grimly. “Companies are downsizing, jobs are scarce, and the average wage earner is making substantially less in real terms than he made twenty years ago, with no sign of improvement in the future. The welfare roles are increasing, while benefits are being cut. Things are worsening on every front. People are getting mired in debt they can’t escape.”

  “Company store,” Ned said. “The pay is such, and the prices such, that most folk can only sink lower. That’s the beauty of it, by company logic: the subtle creation of a virtual slave class, while the owners reap record profits.”

  “St. Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go,” Lin sing-songed, echoing an old song she had picked up in the schoolyard. “I owe my soul to the company store.”

  Ittai nodded. “We do seem to be in a company store society. But I suspect it’s not as simple as a conspiracy by the haves to further deprive the have-nots. The resources of the world are being depleted, and there simply is not enough to go around. So everyone is scrambling for what remains, and an increasing number are losing out.”

  “Musical chairs,” Bry said. “There’s always one chair too few, so someone loses.”

  “A nice enough analogy,” Ittai agreed. “I believe that when the livelihood of families is strained, with both parents having to work outside the home, or single-parent families with that parent working or forced onto welfare, the children are inevitably neglected. They turn to their peer groups, and we get street gangs. The next stage will be what we already see in third world countries: mass starvation, food riots, class warfare, and revolution that accomplishes little other than intensification of the misery.”

  “We have to get out of this game,” Lin sai
d. The others nodded soberly.

  “So maybe this planned community has the same idea,” Flo said. “Get out of the city, get self-sufficient, get independent of the company store, have enough chairs.”

  “It works for me,” Lin said.

  “So let’s answer this ad,” Flo said, looking around. No one objected.

  Two weeks later they were on their way to Dreams, a planned community in southern Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border. They drove in both their vans, a convoy of two, watching out for each other in case one broke down. It was the family way. Counting the baby, the full family now numbered fifteen, because Jack had elected to come along. It wasn’t just that he was engaged to Lin and wanted to be with her; he felt at home with a family that accepted him without reservation. His family was wealthy, and Jack was prepared to be generous with money, if asked. But he was never asked. So he lived as they did, fitting in, and liked it.

  Jack and Lin and Bry rode together in the rear seat, Lin in the middle, her left hand holding Jack’s right hand, their fingers interleaved so that hers fell outside his on both sides, and her left foot touched his clubbed right foot. Bry was privately jealous of their intimacy. It wasn’t that Jack had come between Bry and his sister, for he had not; it was that Bry lacked an equivalent girlfriend. Someone beautiful but in some way tainted or marked. He knew that a psychiatrist would consider his taste to be warped, but Bry understood his own dream. Marked people could be like pearls among swine, real bargains for those who looked.

  In three hours they were in the Appalachians, looking for the turnoff to Amaranth, a town so small that it wasn’t on their roadmap. It was supposed to be about ten miles north of the Potomac River’s northernmost loop, where it almost pinched off the western tip of Maryland. Then they explored the back roads until at last they found the entrance to Dreams. The scenery was phenomenal; this was true mountain country, largely forested, and barely touched by the works of man.

  An elder man came out to meet them as they climbed out and looked around. “Greetings. You would be the visiting family?”

  “We are,” Flo said.

  “I am Marc, with a c. I am one of the elders of the community. We have a house for you, but regret that it is as yet unfinished.”

  “I’m sure we’ll make do,” Flo said. “Where do we check in?”

  “There is no checking in as such. You will introduce yourselves at the evening meal, and any community members you meet will introduce themselves to you, until you know them. I will conduct you to the various working sites. I think you will know soon enough whether these are compatible, and we shall come to know you too.”

  “So we’ll know whether we really want to join Dreams,” Flo agreed. “But we’d like to learn more of the community philosophy and outlook.”

  “There are informal community meetings every evening, where discussion and group activities occur.”

  “Well, that’s fine. But I understand that this is a religious community. We aren’t sure that we—”

  “The project is founded and funded by volunteers associated with the Religious Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, in conjunction with the American Friends Service Committee, or AFSC, a globally charitable organization. So we do have weekly Meetings. But attendance is not mandatory, and we don’t require that others join. But I must advise you that pacifism is a tenet of our religion, and those who profess or practice violence will not be welcome here. This is something you will have to judge as you work with us. We are short-handed because others have found this aspect unsuitable. We do not require that you adopt pacifism as a philosophy, just that you practice no violence of word or action on these, our premises. Similarly, no flesh of animals is served here; you will have to seek that elsewhere.”

  “Understood,” Flo said for all of them. “We will behave appropriately while here. So you don’t have a problem with, for example, non-Christians. Ned and Wildflower are Moslem.”

  “As long as they do not proselytize. We encourage discussion of religion in all its forms, and they are welcome to clarify their belief for us, but we frown on efforts to convert. We will not try to convert you.”

  “Fair enough,” Ned said.

  “However, those of you who elect to remain with us will be expected to convert to the extent of becoming familiar with our essential philosophy, and supporting it. We would ask, for example, that the young lady refrain from wearing a weapon while in the community.”

  Jes nodded. “What about during this trial period?”

  “Thee is free to do as thee wishes, as thee is uncommitted.”

  All of them were startled. “Thee?” Jes asked.

  Marc smiled. “I apologize for not clarifying this earlier. We who are committed tend to use the plain talk, which derives from the manner the Quakers—that is, the Religious Society of Friends—spoke in an earlier age. It fell gradually out of favor in recent times, but we regard Dreams as a new beginning, and so the use of plain talk seems appropriate. This affectation is not required of thee.”

  “But you weren’t doing it before.”

  “Second person singular is ‘thee.’ Second person plural is ‘you.’ I was addressing the group of you before, not thee personally.”

  “Oh.” Jes was evidently intrigued, as were the rest of them.

  They trouped to the house, which turned out to be of the modern log cabin type, a sturdy and large two story structure with a number of rooms, but unfinished inside. “There has been so much to do, that this lacked priority,” Marc explained. “We hope that in winter, when outdoor work—gardening, and so on—is not feasible, we will be able to catch up on interior work.”

  “It will do,” Flo said. “Those of us with skills for you will see to those now; the others can unload the cars and set up the house.” She looked around. “Snow and I will head for your kitchen. Ned and Bry will go to your computer designing facility. Ittai will go to your organizing section. And Sam will help with your brute work.”

  Soon Ned and Bry were in the Dreams computer room, adjacent to the machine shop. A man looked up from the computer. “These are Ned and Bry, our visitors,” Marc said. Then he left.

  The man stood and came over to shake hands. “Bill. Does thee know CAD?”

  “Yes,” Ned said. “But not necessarily your particular program.”

  “It varies. How is thee on the Stirling engine?”

  “Archaic external combustion engine,” Ned said. “Intriguing, but it lost out to the internal combustion engine because of the problem with bearings and low mechanical efficiency.”

  “Suppose it could be hermetically sealed, with no external piston?”

  “That would solve one problem, but generate several others. Such as how to make it perform work.”

  “Let me introduce thee to the Solar Stirling engine, which we propose to use for generating electricity.”

  “Solar! For electricity! That would do it. But the technology—”

  “Can be tricky in detail. Right this way.”

  In the shop was a squat device somewhat like a bomb. Bry tried to look interested, but engines weren’t his specialty, and this one seemed comprehensible only to Bill and Ned. It didn’t even seem to have any moving parts.

  Bill glanced at him. “This must be pretty dull for thee, Bry. Why don’t thee go on out back and ask my daughter Faience to show thee around? It may be hours before we’re back on the computer.”

  “Okay,” Bry agreed gratefully. He went out in the indicated direction.

  There was a girl of about fourteen working on basket weaving. There were mounds of fibrous material around. She looked up as Bry approached. “Hello. I’m Faience.”

  “I’m Bry. My family just arrived for a trial visit. Your father said you might show me around.”

  “Glad to, unless you’d rather learn basket weaving.”

  “No, computer games are more my style.”

  “Mine too. But we have to wait for off hours. Thou shalt not waste prime compu
ter time, and all that.” She put aside her materials and stood up. She was a plain girl with freckles, but seemed pleasant. “Right,” she said as if reading his mind. “I’m not much to look at, but I’ve got personality. Or something.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “You didn’t have to. Come on. I’ll show you the pump. You know what a hydraulic ram is?”

  “Either an animal or a machine, I think.”

  She laughed. “Right! Do you like to run?”

  “For about a hundred yards.”

  “Then follow me.” She set off across the field at a run, her shortish hair fluffing out. She was lean, and ran well; it was a job to catch up with her, and then he was out of breath.

  She slowed somewhat. “Sorry, didn’t mean to tease you. I just love it out here so well I can’t help myself.”

  “I just wanted to stay behind to watch your jeans,” he panted.

  She laughed again. “That’s a lie I can live with.” She slowed to a walk.

  “But I wasn’t—”

  She turned to face him. “Don’t lie for real. That would ruin our friendship, and it has hardly begun. No one considers me romantic; I’m too young and too plain. But I do make a good friend.”

  “Okay. I’m new here, and I don’t know if we’ll stay more than a month. I could use a friend for that month.”

  “Done! Do you like movies?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can get a ride into Hagerstown tomorrow and see one. I like company when I leave Dreams.”

  “But don’t we have to work? I understood that in a planned community, everybody has his job.”

  “That’s true. But tomorrow’s Saturday. We work during the week, we attend Meeting on Sunday and relax in quiet, cultural, or educational ways. Oh, it’s not bad, and I do like the folk singing, but Saturday’s my chance to be a regular irresponsible teen. Do you have any sisters?”

  “Three. The elder two are married, but Lin’s my age and she still likes movies. Maybe she and Jack will join us. Jack’s her boyfriend; they’re pretty serious.”