Earthseed

of all troublemakers. Anoki doesn’t like them, but he’s going along for now—he feels he has to look out for Willem.”
    “What about the others?”
    Bonnie waved a hand. “Look—for most of them, things are a lot easier around here than they were. They’re fed, and if they’re good, they don’t have to work too hard. Now the Earthpeople are trying to organize us, saying they’re going to teach us.”
    “How many are there?”
    “About twenty-five or thirty. I haven’t met them all, because a few of them keep to themselves. But it doesn’t matter—they’ve got control.”
    Zoheret put her hands behind her head. “What are they going to do when we get to the new world?”
    “Keep telling us what to do, I guess.”
    “It isn’t fair.”
    “It doesn’t matter what’s fair.”
    Zoheret stared at the ceiling. “If Ho and Manuel don’t get back to the island, I don’t know what’s going to happen to the others.”
    “Is that where they are?”
    “It’s where they are now.”
    “Well, they aren’t going to get back.”
    Zoheret threw an arm over her eyes. She should have lied to Ho when she first went back to the island, told him only that the settlement had refused to bargain and had thrown her out. She could have made him believe that, and then she and the other captives would have had no value to him and he might have let them go just to get them off his hands. She should not have trusted him. She thought of everything too late. Then she remembered that Ho had made a mistake in trusting Manuel.
    Was this what they were supposed to learn, not to trust? Zoheret, having failed to learn how to lie well, how to cheat, how to use others, how to deceive, was ill equipped for survival. She wondered if it was too late to learn.

16
    Ho and Manuel had been taken away after breakfast. Brendan was still sleeping in one of the bedrooms; Bonnie had told Zoheret that he slept a lot now, as if he could not bear to stay awake.
    Zoheret wandered to the door and opened it. Petra was outside; she gestured at the door and told the girl to close it. Zoheret retreated to a corner, stared silently at Bonnie for a while, then went into the empty bedroom.
    She tossed uneasily as she dozed until voices in the front room awoke her completely. Recognizing one of the voices, she sat up.
    When Zoheret entered the front room, Lillka, seated on the floor with Bonnie, looked up, but did not smile. “Are you all right?”
    “What are you doing here?” Zoheret said coldly.
    “I came to see you. I asked Petra if I could. I’ve got something to tell you.”
    “You don’t have to bother. Your new friends won’t like it if you spend time with troublemakers.”
    “Stop it,” Lillka said. “If you’d been here when they came, you would have done the same thing I did. I thought it was best this way. We needed their help. We still do.”
    “You don’t have to explain,” Zoheret said wearily, seating herself. “You were afraid. That’s the real reason.” She had made her own errors; it was not fair to hold Lillka to account.
    “I’ve been talking to them,” Lillka said, “asking questions. I wanted to find out more about Earth, about the Project. Petra and her friend Ah Lam talked to me until the others told them not to say so much. I wanted to know why they were here.”
    Bonnie said, “They told us that.”
    “Not the real reason. Would you go through being suspended, taking that chance, and being put on Ship, leaving everything you know behind and not knowing what might happen, unless you had a really strong reason?”
    Bonnie shrugged. “Probably not.”
    “Well, they had one. And I don’t mean all that stuff about needing to look after us, although that was part of it. They hated Earth. That’s the reason. They hated everything that was happening in the solar system. I thought it was because they were afraid of dying in a war, but it wasn’t. Do you know what the Project was?”
    “We all know that.”
    Lillka shook her head and turned toward Zoheret. “No, you don’t. It wasn’t this wonderful, great thing everybody was working for. It was just a tiny little group that hated the way things were going and that wanted to preserve its own ways. I found that out from Ah Lam. Earth is nothing—it’s just a ball of dirt some people cling to because they’re afraid. Almost everyone else lives in places like Ship, only bigger and more complicated—they laugh at Earth. They’re not even really