Parable of the Talents

  SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2035

  We’re taking the day off. We’re in Redding—a little west of Redding in a park, really. Redding is a sizable city. We’ve made camp, for once in a place where people are supposed to camp, and we’re eating heavy, tasty food bought in town. We’ve also had a chance to bathe and do our laundry. It always puts me in a better mood not to stink and not to have to endure the body odor of my companion. Somehow, no matter how awful I smell, I can still smell other people.

  We’ve had a hot stew of potatoes, vegetables, and jerked beef with a topping of lovely Cheddar cheese. It turns out that Len can’t cook. She says her mother could but never did. Never had to. Servants did the cooking, the cleaning, repairing things. Teachers were hired for Len and her brother—mostly to guide their use of the computer courses and to be sure they did the work they were supposed to do. Their father, their computer connections, and their older servants provided them with most of what they knew about the world. Ordinary living skills like cooking and sewing were never on the agenda.

  “What did your mother do?” I asked.

  Len shrugged. “Nothing, really. She lived in her virtual room—her own private fantasy universe. That room could take her anywhere, so why should she ever come out? She was getting fat and losing her physical and mental health, but her v-room was all she cared about.”

  I frowned. “I’ve heard of that kind of thing—people being hooked on Dreamasks or on virtual-world fantasies. I don’t know anything about it, though.”

  “What is there to know? Dreamasks are nothing—cheap kid’s toys. Really limited. In that room she could go anywhere, be anyone, be with anyone. It was like a womb with an imagination. She could visit fourteenth-century China, present-day Argentina, Greenland in any imagined distant future, or one of the distant worlds circling Alpha Centauri. You name it, she could create some version of it. Or she could visit her friends, real and imaginary. Her real friends were other wealthy, idle people—mostly women and children. They were as addicted to their v-rooms as she was to hers. If her real friends didn’t indulge her as much as she wanted them to, she just created more obliging versions of them. By the time I was abducted, I didn’t know whether she really had contact with any flesh-and-blood people anymore. She couldn’t stand real people with real egos of their own.”

  I thought about this. It was worse than anything I had heard about this particular addiction. “What about food?” I asked. “What about bathing or just going to the bathroom?”

  “She used to come out for meals. She had her own bathroom. All by itself, it was big as my bedroom. Then she began to have all her meals sent in. After that, there were whole months when I didn’t see her. Even when I took her meals in myself, I had to just leave them. She was in the v-bubble inside the room, and I couldn’t even see her. If I went into the bubble—you could just walk into it—she would scream at me. I wasn’t part of her perfect fantasy life. My brother, on the other hand, was. He got to visit her once or twice a week and share in her fantasies. Nice, isn’t it.”

  I sighed. “Didn’t your father mind any of this? Didn’t he try to help her—or you?”

  “He was busy making money and screwing the maids and their children—some of whom were also his children. He wasn’t cut off from the outside, but he had his own fantasy life.” She hesitated. “Do I seem normal to you?”

  I couldn’t help seeing where she was going with that. “We’re survivors, Len. You are. I am. Most of Georgetown is. All of Acorn was. We’ve been slammed around in all kinds of ways. We’re all wounded. We’re healing as best we can. And, no, we’re not normal. Normal people wouldn’t have survived what we’ve survived. If we were normal we’d be dead.”

  That made her cry. I just held her. No doubt she had been repressing far too much in recent years. When had anyone last held her and let her cry? I held her. After a while, she lay down, and I thought she was falling asleep. Then she spoke.

  “If God is Change, then…then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?”

  “We care for one another,” I said. “We care for ourselves and one another.” And I quoted,

  “Kindness eases Change.

  Love quiets fear.”

  At that, she surprised me. She said, “Yes, I liked that one.” And she finished the quote:

  “And a sweet and powerful

  Positive obsession

  Blunts pain,

  Diverts rage,

  And engages each of us

  In the greatest,

  The most intense

  Of our chosen struggles.”

  “But I have no obsession, positive or otherwise. I have nothing.”

  “Alaska?” I said.

  “I don’t know what else to do, where else to go.”

  “If you get there, what will you do? Go back to being your parents’ housekeeper?”

  She glanced at me. “I don’t know whether they would let me. I might never make it over the borders anyway, especially with the war. Border guards will probably shoot me.” She said this with no fear, no passion, no feeling at all. She was telling me that she was committing a kind of suicide. She wasn’t out to kill herself, but she was going to arrange for others to kill her—because she didn’t know what else to do. Because no one loved her or needed her for anything at all. From her parents to her abductors, people were willing to use her and discard her, but she mattered to no one. Not even to herself. Yet she had kept herself alive through hell. Did she struggle for life only out of habit, or because some part of her still hoped that there was something worth living for?

  She can’t be allowed to go off to be shot by thugs, border guards, or soldiers. I can’t let her do that. And, I think, she wants to be stopped. She won’t ask to be, and she will fight for her own self-destructive way. People are like that. But I must think about what she can do instead of dying—what she should be doing. I must think about what she can do for Earthseed, and what it can do for her.

  TWENTY

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  Are you Earthseed?

  Do you believe?

  Belief will not save you.

  Only actions

  Guided and shaped

  By belief and knowledge

  Will save you.

  Belief

  Initiates and guides action—

  Or it does nothing.

  WHEN I WAS 19, I met my Uncle Marc.

  He was, by then, the Reverend Marcos Duran, a slight, still-beautiful middle-aged man who had become in English and in Spanish the best-known minister of the Church of Christian America. There was even some talk of his running for president, although he seemed uncomfortable about this. By then, though, the Church was just one more Protestant denomination. Andrew Steele Jarret had been dead for years, and the Church had gone from being an institution that everyone knew about and either loved or feared to being a smaller, somewhat defensive organization with much to answer for and few answers.

  I had left home. Even though a girl who left home unmarried was seen by church members as almost a prostitute, I left as soon as I was 18.

  “If you go,” Kayce said, “don’t come back. This is a decent, God-fearing house. You will not bring your trash and your sin back here!”

  I had gotten a job caring for children in a household where the father had died. I had deliberately looked for a job that did not put me at the mercy of another man—a man who might be like Madison, or worse than Madison. The pay was room, board, and a tiny salary. I believed I had clothing and books enough to get me through a few years of working there, helping to raise another woman’s children while she worked in public relations for a big agribusiness company. I had met the kids—two girls and a boy—and I liked them. I believed that I could do this work and save my salary so that when I left, I would have enough money to begin a small business—a small café, perhaps—of my own. I had no grand hopes. I only wanted to get away from the Alexanders who ha
d become more and more intolerable.

  There was no love in the Alexander house. There was only the habit of being together, and, I suppose, the fear of even greater loneliness. And there was the Church—the habit of Church with its Bible class, men’s and women’s missionary groups, charity work, and choir practice. I had joined the young people’s choir to get away from Madison. As it happened, the choir provided relief in three ways. First, I discovered that I really liked to sing. I was so shy at first that I could hardly open my mouth, but once I got into the songs, lost myself in them, I loved it. Second, choir practice was one more excuse that I could use to get out of the house. Third, singing in the choir was a way to avoid having to sit next to Madison in church. It was a way to avoid his nasty, moist little hands. He used to feel me up in church. He really did that. We would sit down with Kayce between us, then he would get up to go to the men’s room and come back and sit next to me with his coat or his jacket on his lap to hide his touching me.

  I believe Kayce realized what was happening. In the days before I left, we were enemies, she and I. Neither of us said anything about Madison. We just spent a lot of time hating one another. We didn’t talk unless we had to. Any talk that we couldn’t avoid might become a screaming fight. Then she’d call me a little whore, an ungrateful little bastard, a heathen witch… During my seventeenth year, I don’t think she and I ever had anything like a conversation.

  Anyway, I joined the choir. And I discovered that I had a big alto voice that people enjoyed hearing. I even discovered that church wasn’t so bad if I didn’t have to sit between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  Because of my singing, I tried to stay with the church after I moved out of Kayce and Madison’s house. I did try. But I couldn’t do it.

  The rumors began at once: I was having sex with any number of men. I was pregnant. I had had an abortion. I had cursed God and joined my real mother in a heathen cult. I was spreading lies about Madison… People I had grown up with, people I had thought of as friends, stopped speaking to me. Men who had paid no attention to me while I was at home now began to edge up to me with whispered invitations and unwanted little touches, and then angry denunciations when I wouldn’t give them what they now seemed to think they had a right to get from me.

  I couldn’t take it. A few months after I left home, I left the church. That was all right with my employer. She didn’t go to church. She had been raised a Unitarian, but now seemed to have no religious interests. She liked to spend Sundays with her kids. Sunday was my day off. What I did with it was up to me.

  But to my amazement, I missed my adoptive parents. I missed the church. I missed the life I had grown up with. I missed everything. And I was so lonely. I dragged myself through my days. Sometimes I barely wanted to be alive.

  Then I heard that Reverend Marcos Duran was coming to town, that he would be preaching at the First Christian American Church of Seattle. That was the big church, not our little neighborhood thing. The moment I read that Reverend Duran was coming, I knew I would go to see him. I knew what a great preacher he was. I had disks of him preaching to thousands in great CA cathedrals on the Gulf Coast and in Washington, D.C. He had a big church of his own in New York. He was young to be so successful, and I had quite a crush on him. God, he was beautiful. And unlike every other preacher I knew of, he wasn’t married. That must have been rough. Every woman would be after him. Other ministers would pressure him to get married, accept adult responsibilities, family responsibilities. Men would look at his handsome face and think he was a homosexual. Was he? I had heard rumors. But then, I knew about rumors.

  I camped out all night outside the big church to make sure that I would be able to get in for services. As soon as I was off duty on Saturday night, I took a blanket roll, some sandwiches, and a bottle of water, and went to get a place outside the church. I wasn’t the only one. Even though services would be broadcast free, there were dozens of people camped around the church when I got there. More kept coming. We were mostly women and girls sleeping out that night—not that anyone slept much. There were some men either trying to get close to the women or looking as though they hoped to get close to Reverend Duran. But there was nothing blatant. We sang and talked and laughed. I had a great time. These people were all strangers to me, and I had a great time with them. They liked my voice and got me to sing some solos. Doing that was still hard for me, but I had done it in church, so I just put myself back in church mentally. Then I was into the singing, and the faces of the others told me they were into my songs.

  And then a woman came out of the big, handsome house near the church and made straight for me. I stopped singing because it occurred to me suddenly that I was disturbing people. It was late. We were having something very like a party in the street and on the steps of the church. None of us had even thought that we might be keeping people awake. I just stopped singing in the middle of a word and everyone stared at me, then at the woman striding toward me. She was a light-skinned Black woman with red hair and freckles—a plump, middle-aged woman, wearing a long green caftan. She came right up to me as though I were the only one there.

  “Would your name be Asha Alexander?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry if we disturbed you.”

  She put an envelope in my hand and smiled. “You didn’t disturb me, dear, you have a lovely voice. Read the note. I think you’ll want to answer it.”

  The note said, “If your name is Asha Vere Alexander, I would like to speak with you. I believe I have information concerning your biological parents. Marcos Duran.”

  I stared at the red-haired woman’s face in shock, and she smiled. “If you’re interested, come with me,” she said, and she turned and walked back toward her house.

  I wasn’t sure I should.

  “What is it?” one of my new friends asked. She was sitting, wrapped in her blankets on the church steps, looking from me to the departing red-haired woman. They were all looking from me to the woman.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Family stuff.” And I ran after the woman.

  And he was there, Marcos Duran, in that big house. The house was the home of the minister of the First Church. The red-haired woman was the minister’s wife. God, Reverend Duran was even more beautiful in person than he was on the disks. He was an amazing-looking man.

  “I’ve been watching you and your friends and listening to your singing,” he said. “I thought I recognized you. Your adoptive parents are Kayce and Madison Alexander.” It wasn’t a question. He was looking at me as though he knew me, as though he were honestly glad to see me.

  I nodded.

  He smiled—a sad kind of smile. “Well, I think we may be related. We can do a gene check later if you like, but I believe your mother was my half-sister. She and your father are dead now.” He paused, gave me an odd, uncertain look. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that. They were good people. I thought you should know about them if you wanted to.”

  “You’re sure they’re dead?” I asked.

  He nodded and said again, “I’m sorry.”

  I thought about this, and didn’t know what to feel. My parents were dead. Well, I had thought they might be, in spite of my fantasies. But…but all of a sudden, I had an uncle. All of a sudden one of the best-known men in the country was my uncle.

  “Would you like to hear about your parents?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I said. “Yes, please. I want to hear everything.”

  So he began to tell me. As I recall it now, he talked about my mother as a girl with four younger brothers to ride herd on, about Robledo being wiped out, about Acorn. Not until he began to talk about Acorn did he begin to lie. Acorn, he said, was a small mountain community—a real community, not a squatter settlement. But he said nothing about Earthseed, Acorn’s religion. Acorn was destroyed like Robledo, he continued. My parents met there, married there, and were killed there. I was found crying in the ruins of the community.

  He hadn’t found out a
bout all this until a couple of years later, and by then, I had a home and new parents—good Christian Americans, he believed. He had kept track of me, always meaning to speak to me when I was older, let me know my history, let me know that I still had a living member of my biological family.

  “You look like her,” he said to me. “You look so much like her, I can’t believe it. And your voice is like hers. When I heard you singing out there, I had to get up and go look.”

  He looked at me with something like amazement, then turned and wiped away a tear.

  I wanted to touch him, comfort him. That was odd, because I didn’t like touching people. I had been too much alone in my life. Kayce didn’t like to touch people—or at least she didn’t like to touch me. She always said it was too hot or she was too busy or something. She acted as though hugging or kissing me would somehow have been nasty. And of course, being touched by Madison’s moist little hands was nasty. But this man, my uncle…my uncle!…made me want to reach out to him. I believed everything he told me. It never occurred to me not to. I was awed, flattered, confused, almost in tears.

  I begged him to tell me more about my parents. I knew nothing, and I was hungry for any information he could give me. He spent a lot of time with me, answering my questions and putting me at my ease. The pastor and his red-haired wife put me up for what was left of the night. And all of a sudden, I had family.

  My mother had blundered through the first few years of her life, knowing early what she wanted to do, but not knowing how to do it, improvising as she went along. She recruited the people of Acorn because she came to believe that she could accomplish her purpose by creating Earthseed communities where children would grow up learning the “truths” of Earthseed and go on to shape the human future according to those “truths.” This was her first attempt, as she put it, to plant seeds.