The Fifth Sacred Thing (47 page)

I
t seemed to Maya that the whole City had come to Council. She recognized many people, some she hadn’t seen in years, since she stopped going to meetings of the Writers’ Guild, but they were surrounded by ranks of strangers crowded into every spare corner of space, practically sitting in the laps of the masked Voices. The crowd provided visual relief from the tension in the room. San Franciscans had always loved costume, Maya reflected. Now fashion had become tribal; one’s garb announced one’s loyalties and identity. The contingent from northside favored high-collared jackets in soft brocades, chrysanthemum-patterned silks, sarongs, or plain denim trousers vaguely reminiscent of the China of the 1970s. The neighbors of Black Dragon House sported ponchos and brightly embroidered cotton shirts. The tecchies wore unadorned jumpsuits in solid colors, the delegations from the Tribal Lands upriver wore their full traditional regalia complete with feather cloaks and basketry hats, while the Fairy men from center city were bedecked with scarves and costume jewelry. Within those broader categories were hundreds of variations: a woman with five dangling earrings in each lobe, a slim man in a rhinestone-studded vest, a tall person of indeterminate sex in a leotard and tutu. Hair was shaved, sculpted, braided, twined, cornrowed, dreadlocked, colored, beaded, and freely hanging loose. Maya herself wore crone’s black. Simple, she thought, and well suited to her age and purported dignity.

In one corner sat groups from the Forest Communities to the east and north, sporting rough work clothes and heavy boots. Around the room sat clusters of representatives from the other cities that hugged the Bay and the habitable spots of the river valleys. Against the far wall sat the representatives of the Wild Boar People, their matted hair caked with dirt. Council had sent them a special invitation for this meeting. People left a moat of empty space around them, and windows were opened in their vicinity.

The crowd settled down after a great deal of jostling, shuffling, and adjusting of feet and arms and legs. Bird sat squashed against Maya’s right side, with Sage crammed between his legs. On her left, Nita perched on Holybear’s lap. When everyone was settled, a man and a woman rose in the center.

“I’m Joseph.”

“I’m Salal. We’re the Crows, the facilitators, for this morning.”

On the signers’ platform a young woman began translating the words of those who preferred not to speak and sign simultaneously. The meeting had begun.

Joseph lit a candle, and Salal formally invited in the spirits of the Four Sacred Things. Maya felt the atmosphere of the room deepen, as the Voices went into trance. A woman in a white headcloth and flowing skirts stood up and called Elegba the Trickster, God of the Crossroads. Sage rose and called Hecate. A very young man stood up and invoked the ancestors. Sister Marie, who was seated not far from them, asked for the blessing of the Virgin. A man Maya recognized from the Seder recited the Shema. The calling went on and on, until finally Sam stood up.

“Look, I don’t want to step on anybody’s religion. But we can call all the spirits in the universe, and in the end we’re still going to have to decide what to do. Maybe we’d better get on with it, before the Stewards’ troops get over San Bruno Hill.”

There was a slight ripple of laughter, as Joseph asked, “Are we ready to begin the discussion?”

“Yes,” the room thundered.

“All right, then.” He peered around the room with his dark, narrow eyes, running his hands over the brush of his clipped black hair. “There’s only one main question on the agenda today, and that is: What the hell are we going to do?”

“Can we hear a report from Defense first?” Salal suggested. “What exactly is the situation?”

The woman who rose to speak looked to be in her eighties. She had clear gray eyes and short-cropped white hair, and Maya recognized her, suddenly, as Greta Jeanne, one of
Las Cuatro
. Beside her, Lily was seated, dressed in a simple black shift. She and Maya exchanged nods of greeting.

“There’s an army of approximately five thousand marching up the old Highway 101,” Greta said. “They’re repairing the road as they go, and we assume that when they reach the good stretch on the peninsula, which should be in about a week, they’ll bring up trucks from the South. Along the same route they’re also laying rail, which the Santa Cruz and peninsula councils have been sabotaging rather systematically. They’re well armed with laser rifles, handguns, and, we assume, other weapons.”

“Five thousand—that’s not so bad,” someone murmured.

“That’s only the advance guard. Their main purpose seems to be to protect the road-building operations. There’s more on the way.”

“How many more?” Salal asked.

Bird stood. All eyes in the room turned to look at him. He felt almost
ashamed, as if by bringing news of the invasion he were somehow responsible for it. “From what I saw last summer,” he said, “there could easily be at least ten times that many.”

“How the hell do they feed all those people?” someone murmured.

“They feed on people like us,” Bird said. “They’ll eat up our gardens, our fields, and our optimism pretty quick.” He sat down.

“And what do we have in the way of defensive resources?” Joseph asked.

Lily stood up and carefully enumerated the numbers of available weapons in the City’s defenses. The discussion left Maya somewhat lost, but she could see Bird’s face looking more and more grim. Holybear wore a glum mask, and even Manzanita wasn’t smiling.

“Why didn’t we start weapons production three months ago?” a young woman asked.

“We have no factories to make guns and bombs and laser rifles,” said a large man whom Maya had seen before, speaking for the Technicians’ Guild. “We have no consensus to build them. And if we had, it would have been at the expense of something else, food production or communications or transport. Especially if you remember that we were recovering from another epidemic, and it’s been hard enough to keep basic services going.”

“That’s exactly what they wanted. We could have tightened our belts,” said a young man who was, in Maya’s opinion, already far too thin.

“Maybe,” the big man said. “But if we start choosing guns over food and water, we become what we’re fighting against.”

“But if we lose to the Stewards, we won’t have the luxury of choosing food or water or anything else.”

“That’s the dilemma patriarchy has posed for the last five thousand years,” Greta said.

“I don’t find that grounds for optimism,” Sam said. “In all those five thousand years, has the peaceful side ever won out?”

Why is it so hard to believe in war? Bird thought. I’ve been to the Southlands, I’ve faced their power, and yet I still can’t grasp that they’ll succeed in imposing it here. He wanted to ask Maya if every war she’d lived through had seemed unreal.

“Isn’t that our collective challenge, then?” Lily said. “If we don’t have guns, we have vision and imagination.”

“A vision ain’t much protection against a laser rifle,” a voice called from the back of the crowd.

The talk went on interminably, as strategy after strategy was proposed, examined, and eventually abandoned as unpromising, if not hopeless.

“Don’t give up,” Lily addressed the room as discussion lagged. “We are simply challenged now to extend our imaginations beyond solutions that have been tried before.”

“Well, we seem to have exhausted all practical, rational, and reasonable approaches to this situation,” Salal said. “What it comes down to is, nobody can see a way out. Am I wrong? So either we need a miracle, an evacuation plan, or a proposal for how to go down with dignity.”

She doesn’t believe it either, Bird noted. Not really. Otherwise how could she sound so cheerful, tossing her flame-red hair and smiling as she talks of despair?

The Speaker stirred and made her careful way to the west, bending her ear to Salmon.

“Friend Salmon says, ‘You have placed spawn in Los Lobos Creek, and we will return. Don’t give up. Listen to the storyteller.’ ”

The masked figure inclined its head toward Maya. She found herself staring into its eyes.

She had hoped to avoid speaking today, had prayed that Defense had some secret plan that would absolve her from sharing her vision. And it’s partly embarrassment, she admitted to herself, that for over half a century I’ve been spokeswoman for the Goddess, and here at the crucial moment I turn up with a visitation from an Old Testament prophet. Am I merely getting senile? More than that, the implications of her vision scared her. It seemed to call for qualities of courage and vision she was not sure that anyone possessed.

Reluctantly, she stood up. “I’m a storyteller,” she said, “and I had a vision. I don’t much like it, and I’m not sure what good it might do us. But for what it’s worth, here it is.” She told them about her visit with the prophet Elijah, and they listened respectfully. She finished with the words Elijah had spoken to her: “What happens to the enemy who is invited to share the feast? Does the enemy not transform? Tell your enemies this: There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us.”

Silence intensified throughout the room.

“So what you’re proposing is?” Joseph asked.

“Nonviolent resistance.”

“Something like that seems indicated,” Salal said. “Given that success in violent resistance seems beyond our means.”

“How does it work?” a young woman from the Forest Communities asked.

“Like the king of Denmark,” Maya said. The faces around her looked puzzled. “Don’t they teach you history? In World War Two, when the Nazis took over most of Europe, they issued a proclamation that all Jews had to wear a yellow star on their clothing. It was the first step toward rounding them up and sending them to the ovens. And most countries collaborated. But in Denmark, the day after the law was proclaimed, the king rode out wearing a yellow star, and so did everybody else. Their Jews survived.”

“But how would it work here?” someone else asked.

Maya answered. “Suppose that nobody in the city obeys the invaders, or helps them, or gives them information? Suppose all we say to the soldiers when they come, is: There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us’?”

“Complete noncooperation?” Greta asked.

“I’m not a Gandhian,” Maya said. “I’ve worked in nonviolent movements all my life, but I’ve never believed in the spiritual benefits of self-immolation. To be honest, I don’t know if this will work. In part it depends on the enemy we’re facing, and how ruthless they’re willing to be.”

Bird stood again. He had been arguing this with Maya all week, and he was still unsure whether he would come around to agreeing with her. “They are ruthless.” He spoke slowly, signing his own words as he went, as if deliberately to display his broken hands. “I’ve been up against some of them, and frankly I can’t envision them transforming, even under the influence of our sweet characters. But there is this. Of those first five thousand, at least forty-five hundred are going to be black, brown, yellow, red, or some combination, mixed with just plain poor. And they’re in the army because they come out of a world you can’t even imagine—I can hardly imagine it myself, even though I was locked up in it for ten years—where the color of your skin determines everything about you; where if you don’t have money, not only don’t you eat, you don’t drink. These guys, they may never have seen free-running water. They’re going to come marching in here, and it’s going to look like paradise on earth to them.

“So it just might work. Some of them might welcome an invitation to come over. But not all. If we do this, some of us are going to die. Some of us are going to be hurt, imprisoned, beaten, tortured.”

“And if we fight?” Lily asked.

“We would be fighting—just in a different way,” Nita said.

“If we fight them with guns?” Lily went on. She spoke from her seat, quietly, yet her voice carried across the room and rang with authority. “Aren’t some of us going to die, be imprisoned, tortured, then? Aren’t we just forgoing the satisfaction of taking a few of them along with us?”

“Don’t knock that satisfaction,” Bird said. “It’s real.”

“Real it may be,” Lily said, “but it is an indulgence we cannot afford. Because what is on trial here is not just us. We stand on the ridgeline of the future, the great divide determining whether or not what we have built can survive.”

“It will survive if we have the guts to defend it,” said Cress of the Water Council, rising and pushing back the red bandanna that bound his dark hair. He glared defiantly at Lily, taking in Bird also with a hostile glance and looking, Maya thought, like an old poster of Che Guevara that had hung in the grease-spattered kitchen she’d shared with Rio in the sixties.

Mierda
, Bird thought, not Cress. Lily was right, we should have talked to him privately first. But Bird had resisted the idea. He remembered Cress from a decade back, when his name had been Carlos and he had shown such talent on the guitar that the Musicians’ Guild had offered him membership. He’d declined and joined the Water Council.

“Why?” Bird had asked, meeting him in the market a few days later. “You’re good,
hombre.”

“Because music is a luxury. Water is a necessity.”

“Music is more than a luxury. We all know what happens to a society that doesn’t value music and art and dance.”

“We all know what happens to a society that doesn’t protect its own survival!” Carlos/Cress had turned to stare coldly into Bird’s eyes. “Or maybe you don’t. I do. I was born in Fresno. I know what it’s like when the temperature climbs up above a hundred and ten degrees, day after day, and the crops bake and die, and there’s less and less every week to eat. My folks didn’t want to leave, like most did, so they hung on until the quake of ’27. By then we’d pumped so much water out of the aquifers that the land fell in on the empty water table when the tremblor hit. Every standing structure fell. My baby sister and I were buried under our house, pinned by the roof beams. I can still hear her voice, calling for water, getting weaker and weaker until she died.”

Bird had opened his mouth to say something, but Carlos went on without giving him a chance to speak.