Parable of the Talents

  “I wonder what happened to that woman to make her willing to do a thing like that,” I said as we walked this morning.

  “She was out of her mind,” Len said. “That’s all.”

  “That’s rarely all,” I said.

  Then early today, a farm woman drove us off with a rifle and I decided to quit trying for a day or two. A storekeeper told us that Jarret’s Crusaders have been active in the area. They’ve been rounding up vagrants, singling out witches and heathens, and generally scaring the hell out of householders by warning them about the dangers and evils of strangers from the road.

  It was interesting to see how angry the storekeeper was. The Crusaders, he said, are bad for business. They collar his highway customers or frighten them away, and they intimidate his local customers so that he’s lost a lot of his regulars—the ones who live a long way from his store. They’ve learned to shop as close to home as they can with little regard for quality or price.

  “Jarret says he can’t control his own Crusaders,” the man said. “Next time out, I’ll vote for someone who’ll put the bastards in jail where they belong!”

  TWENTY-ONE

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  To survive,

  Let the past

  Teach you—

  Past customs,

  Struggles,

  Leaders and thinkers.

  Let

  These

  Help you.

  Let them inspire you,

  Warn you,

  Give you strength.

  But beware:

  God is Change.

  Past is past.

  What was

  Cannot

  Come again.

  To survive,

  Know the past.

  Let it touch you.

  Then let

  The past Go.

  I DON’T KNOW THAT Uncle Marc would ever have told me the truth about my mother. I don’t believe he intended to. He never wavered from his story that she was dead, and I never suspected that he was lying. I loved him, believed in him, trusted him completely. When he found out how I was living, he invited me to live with him and continue my education. “You’re a bright girl,” he said, “and you’re family—the only family I have. I couldn’t help your mother. Let me help you.”

  I said yes. I didn’t even have to think about it. I quit my job and went to live in one of his houses in New York. He hired a housekeeper and tutors and bought computer courses to see to it that I had the college education that Kayce and Madison wouldn’t have provided for me if they could have. Kayce used to say, “You’re a girl! If you know how to keep a clean, decent house and how to worship God, you know enough!”

  I even went back to church because of Uncle Marc. I went back to the Church of Christian America, physically, at least. I lived at his second home in upstate New York, and I attended church on Sundays because he wanted me to, and because I was so used to doing it. I was comfortable doing it. I sang in the choir again and did regular charity work, helping to care for old people in one of the church nursing homes. Doing those things again was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.

  But the truth was, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love. Fine behavior for good Christian Americans, trying to build a strong, united country.

  Better, I decided after much thought and much reading of history, to live a decent life and behave well toward other people. Better not to worry about the Christian Americans, the Catholics, the Lutherans, or whatever. Each denomination seemed to think that it had the truth and the only truth and its people were going to bliss in heaven while everyone else went to eternal torment in hell.

  But the Church wasn’t only a religion. It was a community—my community. I didn’t want to be free of it. That would have been—had been—impossibly lonely. Everyone needs to be part of something.

  By the time I got my Master’s in history, I found that I couldn’t muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we’ve made right here on earth. That seemed to me a big enough job for any person or group, and that was one of the good things that Christian America worked hard at.

  I went on living in Uncle Marc’s upstate New York house. Once I had my Master’s, I began work on my Ph.D. Also, I began creating Dreamask scenarios. Dreamask International hired me on the strength of several scenarios I had done for them on speculation.

  Now, thanks to Uncle Marc, I had the Dreamask scenario recorder I had longed for when I was little. Now I had the freedom to create pretty much anything I wanted to. I did my work under the name Asha Vere. I wanted no connection with the Alexanders, yet I felt uncomfortable about trading on my connection with Uncle Marc, and calling myself Duran. At the time, I believed Duran was my mother’s family name. My father’s surname, “Bankole,” meant nothing to me since Uncle Marc couldn’t tell me much about Taylor Franklin Bankole—only that he was a doctor and very old when I was born. Asha Vere was name enough for me. It dated me as a child born during the popularity of a particular early Mask, but that didn’t matter. And the Dreamask people kind of liked it.

  I worked at home on my Masks and on my Ph.D., and was so casual about the degree that I was 32 before I completed it. I enjoyed the work, enjoyed Marc’s company when he came to me to get away from his public and enjoy some feeling of family. I was happy. I never found anyone I wanted to marry. In fact, I had never seen a marriage that I would have wanted to be part of. There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn’t quite break. I knew that not everyone’s marriage was as sterile and ugly as Kayce’s and Madison’s. I knew that intellectually, but emotionally, I couldn’t seem to escape Kayce’s cold, bitter dissatisfaction and Madison’s moist little hands.

  Uncle Marc, on the other hand, had said without ever quite saying it that he preferred men sexually, but his church taught that homosexuality was sin, and he chose to live by that doctrine. So he had no one. Or at least, I never knew him to have anyone. That looks bleak on the page, but we each chose our lives. And we had one another. We were a family. That seemed to be enough.

  Meanwhile, my mother was giving her attention to her other child, her older and best beloved child, Earthseed.

  Somehow we—or at least I—never paid much attention to the growing Earthseed movement. It was out there. In spite of the efforts of Christian America and other denominations, there were always cults out there. Granted, Earthseed was an unusual cult. It financed scientific exploration and inquiry, and technological creativity. It set up grade schools and eventually colleges, and offered full scholarships to poor but gifted students. The students who accepted had to agree to spend seven years teaching, practicing medicine, or otherwise using their skills to improve life in the many Earthseed communities. Ultimately, the intent was to help the communities to launch themselves toward the stars and to live on the distant worlds they found circling those stars.

  “Do you know anything about these people?” I asked Uncle Marc after reading and hearing a few news items about them.

  “Are they serious? Interstellar emigration? My god, why don’t they just move to Antarctica if they want to rough it?” And he surprised me by making a straight line of his mouth and looking away. I had expected him to laugh.

  “They’re serious,” he said. “They’re sad, ridiculous, misled people who believe that the answer to all human problems is to fly off to Alpha Centauri.”

  I did laugh. “Is a flying saucer coming for them or what?”

  He shrugged. “They’re pathetic. Forget about them.”

  I didn’t, of course. I left my usual haunts o
n the nets and began to research them. I wasn’t serious. I didn’t plan to do anything with what I learned, but I was curious—and I might get an idea for a Mask. I found that Earthseed was a wealthy sect that welcomed everyone and was willing to make use of everyone. It owned land, schools, farms, factories, stores, banks, several whole towns. And it seemed to own a lot of well-known people—lawyers, physicians, journalists, scientists, politicians, even members of Congress.

  And were they all hoping to fly off to Alpha Centauri?

  It wasn’t that simple, of course. But to tell the truth, the more I read about Earthseed, the more I despised it. So much needed to be done here on earth—so many diseases, so much hunger, so much poverty, such suffering, and here was a rich organization spending vast sums of money, time, and effort on nonsense. Just nonsense!

  Then I found The Books of the Living and I accessed images and information concerning Lauren Oya Olamina.

  Even after reading about my mother and seeing her I didn’t notice anything. I never looked at her image and thought, “Oh, she looks like me.” She did look like me, though—or rather, I looked like her. But I didn’t notice. All I saw was a tall, middle-aged, dark-skinned woman with arresting eyes and a nice smile. She looked, somehow, like someone I would be inclined to like and trust—which scared me. It made me immediately dislike and distrust her. She was a cult leader, after all. She was supposed to be seductive. But she wasn’t going to seduce me.

  And all that was only my reaction to her image. No wonder she was so rich, no wonder she could draw followers even into such a ridiculous religion. She was dangerous.

  FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2035

  Portland.

  I’ve gathered a few more people. They aren’t people who will travel with me or come together in easily targetable villages. They’re people in stable homes—or people who need homes.

  Isis Duarte Norman, for instance, lives in a park between the river and the burned, collapsed remains of an old hotel. She has a shack there—wood covered with plastic sheeting. Each evening she can be found there. During the day she works, cleaning other women’s houses. This enables her to eat and keep herself and her secondhand clothing clean. She has a hard life, but it’s as respectable as she can make it. She’s 43. The man she married when she was 23 dumped her six years ago for a 14-year-old girl—the daughter of one of his servants.

  “She was so beautiful,” Isis said. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her. I couldn’t protect her from him any more than I could protect myself, but I never thought that he would keep her and throw me out,”

  He did. And for six years, she’s been homeless and all but hopeless. She said she had thought of killing herself. Only fear had stopped her—the fear of not quite dying, of maiming herself and dying a slow, lingering death of pain and starvation. That could happen. Portland is a vast, crowded city. It isn’t Los Angeles or the Bay Area, but it is huge. People ignore one another in self-defense. I find this both useful and frightening. When I met Isis, it was because I went to the door of a home where she was working. Otherwise, she would never have dared to talk to me. As it was, she was designated to assemble a meal and bring it to me when I had finished cleaning up the backyard.

  She was wary when she brought the food. Then she looked at the backyard and told me I had done a good job. We talked for a while. I walked her to her shack—which made her nervous. I was a man again. I find it inconvenient and dangerous to be on the street as a homeless woman. Other people manage it well. I don’t, somehow.

  I left Isis without seeing the inside of her shack. Best not to push people. Best, as Len says, to seduce them. I’ve seen Isis several times since then. I’ve talked with her, read verses to her, captured her interest. She has two half-grown children who live with their father’s mother, so she cares, in spite of herself, about what the future will bring. I intend to find a real home for her by getting her a live-in job looking after children. That might take time, but I intend to do it.

  On the other hand, I’ve met and gathered in Joel and Irma Elford, who hired me when I first came to Portland to paint a garage and a fence and do some yard work. Len and I worked together, first cutting weeds, harvesting row crops, raking, cleaning the yard at the back of the property where a wilderness had begun to grow. Then, when the dust settled, we painted the garage. We would have to get to the fence the next day. We were to get hard currency for this job, and that put us in a good mood. Len is a likable person to work with. She learns fast, complains endlessly, and does an excellent job, however long it takes. Most of the time, she enjoys herself. The complaining was just one of her quirks.

  Then Joel and Irma invited us in to eat with them at their table. I had done a quick sketch of Irma to catch her attention, and added a verse that was intended to reach her through environmental interests that I had heard her express:

  There is nothing alien

  About nature.

  Nature

  Is all that exists.

  It’s the earth

  And all that’s on it.

  It’s the universe

  And all that’s in it.

  It’s God,

  Never at rest.

  It’s you,

  Me,

  Us,

  Them,

  Struggling upstream

  Or drifting down.

  Also, perhaps because her mother had died the year before, Irma also seemed touched by this fragment of funeral oration.

  We give our dead

  To the orchards

  And the groves.

  We give our dead

  To life.

  We were an unexpected novelty, and the Elfords were curious about us. They let us wash up in their back bathroom and change into cleaner clothing from our packs. Then they sat us down, fed us a huge meal, and began to ask us questions. Where were we going? Did we have homes? Families? No? Well, how long had we been homeless? What did we do for shelter in rough weather? Weren’t we afraid “out there”?

  I answered for both of us at first, since Len did not seem inclined to talk, and I answered as often with Earthseed verses as with ordinary conversation. It didn’t take long for Irma to ask, “What is it you’re quoting from?” And then, “May I see it? I’ve never heard of it.” And, “Is this Buddhist? No, I see that it isn’t. I very nearly became a Buddhist when I was younger.” She’s 37. “Very simple little verses. Very direct. But some of them are lovely.”

  “I want to be understood,” I said. “I want to make it easy for people to understand. It doesn’t always work, but I was serious about the effort.”

  Irma was all I could have hoped for. “You wrote these? You? Really? Then tell me please, on page 47…”

  They’re quiet, childless, middle-aged people who choose to live in a modest, middle-class neighborhood even though they could afford their own walled enclave. They’re interested in the world around them and worried about the direction the country has taken. I could see their wealth in the beautiful, expensive little things they’ve scattered around their home—antique silver and crystal, old leather-bound paper books, paintings, and, for a touch of the modern, a cover-the-earth phone net system that includes, according to Len, the latest in Virtual rooms. They can have all the sights and other sensations of visiting anyplace on earth or any programmed-in imaginary place, all without leaving home. And yet they were interested in talking to us.

  We had to be careful, though. The Elfords may be bored and hungry for both novelty and purpose, but they’re not fools. I had to be more open with them than I have been with people like Isis. I told them much of my own story, and I told them what I’m trying to do. They thought I was brave, naive, ridiculous, and…interesting. Out of pity and curiosity they let us sleep in the comfortable little guest house at the back of their property.

  The next day, when we had painted the fence, they found more small jobs for us to do, and now and then, they talked to us.
And they let us talk to them. They never lost interest.

  “What will you ask them to do?” Len said to me that night as we settled in again in the guest house. “You have them, you know, even if they don’t realize it yet.”

  I nodded. “They’re hungry for something to do,” I said, “starved for some kind of real purpose. I think they’ll have some suggestions themselves. They’ll feel better if they make the first suggestions. They’ll feel in control. Later, I want them to take Allie in. This guest house would be perfect for her and Justin. When they see what she can do with a few sticks of wood and simple tools, they’ll be glad to have her. And I think I’ll introduce Allie to Isis. I have the feeling they’ll hit it off.”

  “The Elfords have all but seduced themselves for you,” Len said.

  I nodded. “Think about all the other people we’ve met who’ve given us nothing but trouble. I’m glad to meet eager, enthusiastic people now and then.”

  And of course, I’ve found my brother again. I find that I’ve not wanted to talk about that.

  Marc has been preaching at one of the big Portland shelters, helping out with shelter maintenance, and attending a Christian American seminary. He wants to be an ordained minister. He was not happy to see me. I kept showing up to hear him and leaving notes that I wanted a meeting. It took him two weeks to give in.

  “I suppose if I moved to Michigan, you’d turn up there,” he said by way of greeting.

  We were meeting in his apartment building—which was more like a big dormitory. Because he wasn’t permitted to have guests in his apartment, we met in the large dining room just off the lobby. It was a clean, dim, plain room crowded with mismatched wooden tables and chairs and nothing else. Its walls were a dim gray-green and the floor was gray tile worn through to the wood in spots. We were alone there, drinking what I was told would be hot cinnamon-apple tea. When I bought a cup from the machine, I found that it tasted like tepid, slightly sweet water. The lights in the room were few, weak, and far apart, and the place worked hard at being as dreary and cheerless as could be managed.