Parable of the Talents

  Anyway, the Church of Christian America sued Olamina for her “false” accusations. She countersued. Then suddenly, without explanation, CA dropped its suit and settled with her, paying her an unreported, but reputedly vast sum of money. I was still a kid growing up with the Alexanders when all this happened, and I heard nothing about it. Years later, when I began to research Earthseed and Olamina, I didn’t know what to think of it.

  I phoned Uncle Marc and asked him, point-blank, whether there was any possibility that this woman could be my mother.

  On my phone’s tiny monitor, Uncle Marc’s face froze, then seemed to sag. He suddenly looked much older than his 54 years. He said, “I’ll talk to you about this when I come home.” And he broke the connection. He wouldn’t take my calls after that. He had never refused my calls before. Never.

  Not knowing what else to do, where else to turn, I checked the nets to see where Lauren Olamina might be speaking or organizing. To my surprise, I learned that she was “resting” at Red Spruce, less than a hundred kilometers from where I was.

  And all of a sudden, I had to see her.

  I didn’t try to phone her, didn’t try to reach her with Uncle Marc’s well-known name or my own name as a creator of several popular Masks. I just showed up at Red Spruce, rented a room at their guest house, and began trying to find her. Earthseed doesn’t bother with a lot of formality. Anyone can visit its communities and rent a room at a guest house. Visitors came to see relatives who were members, came to attend Gatherings or other ceremonies, even came to join Earthseed and arrange to begin their probationary first year.

  I told the manager of the guest house that I thought I might be a relative of Olamina’s and asked him if he could tell me how I might make an appointment to speak with her. I asked him because I had heard people call him “Shaper” and I recognized that from my reading as a title of respect akin to “reverend” or “minister.” If he was the community’s minister, he might be able to introduce me to Olamina himself.

  Perhaps he could have, but he refused. Shaper Olamina was very tired, and not to be bothered, he told me. If I wanted to meet her, I should attend one of her Gatherings or phone her headquarters in Eureka, California, and arrange an appointment.

  I had to hang around the community for three days before I could find anyone willing to take my message to her. I didn’t see her. No one would even tell me where she was staying within the community. They protected her from me courteously, firmly. Then, all of a sudden, the wall around her gave way. I met one of her acolytes and he took my message to her.

  My messenger was a thin, brown-haired young man who said his name was Edison Balter. I met him in the guest-house dining room one morning as we each sat alone, eating bagels and drinking apple cider. I pounced on him as someone I hadn’t pestered yet. I had no idea at that time what the Balter name meant to my mother or that this man was an adopted son of one of her best friends. I was only relieved that someone was listening to me, not closing one more door in my face.

  “I’m her aide this trip,” he told me. “She says I’m just about ready to go out on my own, and the idea scares the hell out of me. What name shall I give her?”

  “Asha Vere.”

  “Oh? Are you the Asha Vere who does Dreamasks?”

  I nodded.

  “Nice work. I’ll tell her. You want to put her in one of your Masks? You know you do look a lot like her. Like a softer version of her.” And he was gone. He talked fast and moved very fast, but somehow without seeming to hurry. He didn’t look anything like Olamina himself, but there was a similarity. I found that I liked him at once—just as I’d at first found myself liking her. Another likable cultist. I got the feeling that Red Spruce, a clean, pretty mountain community, was nothing but a nest of seductively colorful snakes—a poisonous place.

  Then Edison Balter came back and told me he would take me to her. She was somewhere in her fifties—58, I remembered from my reading. She was born way back in 2009, before the Pox. My god. She was old. But she didn’t look old, even though her black hair was streaked with gray. She looked big and strong and, in spite of her pleasant, welcoming expression, just a little frightening. She was a little taller than me, and maybe a little more angular. She looked…not hard, but as though she could be hard with just the smallest change of expression. She looked like someone I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of. And, yes, even I could see it. She looked like me.

  She and I just stood looking at one another for a long, long time. After a while, she came up to me, took my left hand, and turned it to look at the two little moles I have just below the knuckles. My impulse was to pull away, but I managed not to.

  She stared at the moles for a while, then said, “Do you have another mark—a kind of jagged dark patch just here?” She touched a place covered by my blouse on my left shoulder near my neck.

  This time, I did step away from her touch. I didn’t mean to, but I just don’t like to be touched. Not even by a stranger who might be my mother. I said, “I have a birthmark like that, yes.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, and went on looking at me. After a moment, she said, “Sit down. Sit here with me. You are my child, my daughter. I know you are.”

  I sat in a chair instead of sharing the couch with her. She was open and welcoming, and somehow, that made me want all the more to draw back.

  “Have you only just found out?” she asked.

  I nodded, tried to speak, and found myself stumbling and stammering. “I came here because I thought…maybe…because I looked up information about you, and I was curious. I mean, I read about Earthseed, and people said I looked like you, and…well, I knew I was adopted, so I wondered.”

  “So you had adoptive parents. Were they good to you? What’s your life been like? What do you…ˮ She stopped, drew a deep breath, covered her face with both hands for a moment, shook her head, then gave a short laugh. “I want to know everything! I can’t believe that it’s you. I…” Tears began to stream down her broad, dark face. She leaned toward me, and I knew she wanted to hug me. She hugged people. She touched people. She hadn’t been raised by Kayce and Madison Alexander.

  I looked away from her and shifted around trying to get comfortable in my chair, in my skin, in my newfound identity. “Can we do a gene print?” I asked.

  “Yes. Today. Now.” She took a phone from her pocket and called someone. No more than a minute later, a woman dressed all in blue came in carrying a small plastic case. She drew a small amount of blood from each of us, and checked it in a portable diagnostic from her case. The unit wasn’t much bigger than Olamina’s phone. In less than a minute, though, it spit out two gene prints. They were rough and incomplete, but even I could see both their many differences and their many unmistakably identical points.

  “You’re close relatives,” the woman said. “Anyone would guess that just from looking at you, but this confirms it.”

  “We’re mother and daughter,” Olamina said.

  “Yes,” the woman in blue agreed. She was my mother’s age or older—a Puerto Rican woman by her accent. She had not a strand of gray in her black hair, but her face was lined and old. “I had heard, Shaper, that you had a daughter who was lost. And now you’ve found her.”

  “She’s found me,” my mother said.

  “God is Change,” the woman said, and gathered her equipment. She hugged my mother before she left us. She looked at me, but didn’t hug me. “Welcome,” she said to me in soft Spanish, and then again, “God is Change.” And she was gone.

  “Shape God,” my mother whispered in a response that sounded both reflexive and religious.

  Then we talked.

  “I had parents.” I said. “Kayce and Madison Alexander. I… We didn’t get along. I haven’t seen them since I turned 18. They said, ‘If you leave without getting married, don’t come back!’ So I didn’t. Then I found Uncle Marc, and I finally—”

  She stood up, staring down at me, staring with such a closed look frozen on
her face. It shut me out, that look, and I wondered whether this was what she was really like—cold, distant, unfeeling. Did she only pretend to be warm and open to deceive her public?

  “When?” she demanded, and her tone was as cold as her expression. “When did you find Marc? When did you learn that he was your uncle? How did you find out? Tell me!”

  I stared at her. She stared back for a moment, then began to pace. She walked to a window, faced it for several seconds, staring out at the mountains. Then she came back to look down at me with what I could only think of as quieter eyes.

  “Please tell me about your life,” she said. “You probably know something about mine because so much has been written. But I know nothing about yours. Please tell me.”

  Irrationally, I didn’t want to. I wanted to get away from her. She was one of those people who sucked you in, made you like her before you could even get to know her, and only then let you see what she might really be like. She had millions of people convinced that they were going to fly off to the stars. How much money had she taken from them while they waited for the ship to Alpha Centauri? My god, I didn’t want to like her. I wanted the ugly persona I had glimpsed to be what she really was. I wanted to despise her.

  Instead, I told her the story of my life.

  Then we had dinner together, just her and me. A woman who might have been a servant, a bodyguard, or the lady of the house brought in a tray for us.

  Then my mother told me the story of my birth, my father, my abduction. Hearing about it from her wasn’t like reading an impersonal account. I listened and cried. I couldn’t help it.

  “What did Marc tell you?” she asked.

  I hesitated, not sure what to say. In the end, I told the truth just because I couldn’t think of a decent lie. “He said you were dead—that both my mother and my father were dead.”

  She groaned.

  “He…he took care of me,” I said. “He saw to it that I got to go to college, and that I had a good place to live. He and I…well, we’re a family. We didn’t have anyone before we found one another.”

  She just looked at me.

  “I don’t know why he told me you were dead. Maybe he was just…lonely. I don’t know. We got along, he and I, right from the first. I still live in one of his houses. I can afford a place of my own now, but it’s like I said. We’re a family.” I paused, then said something I had never admitted before. “You know, I never felt that anyone loved me before I met him. And I guess I never loved anyone until he loved me. He made it…safe to love him back.”

  “Your father and I both loved you,” she said. “We had tried for two years to have a baby. We worried about his age. We worried about the way the world was—all the chaos. But we wanted you so much. And when you were born, we loved you more than you can imagine. When you were taken, and your father was killed… I felt for a while as though I’d died myself. I tried so hard for so long to find you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I shrugged uncomfortably. She hadn’t found me. And Uncle Marc had. I wondered just how hard she’d really looked.

  “I didn’t even know whether you were still alive,” she said. “I wanted to believe you were, but I didn’t know. I got involved in a lawsuit with Christian America back in the forties, and I tried to force them to tell me what had happened to you. They claimed that any record there may have been of you was lost in a fire at the Pelican Bay Children’s Home years before.”

  Had they said that? I supposed they might have. They would have said almost anything to avoid giving up evidence of their abductions—and giving a Christian American child back to a heathen cult leader. But still, “Uncle Marc says he found me when I was two or three years old,” I said. “But he saw that I had good Christian American parents, and he thought it would be best for me to stay with them, undisturbed.” I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not sure why I did.

  She got up and began to walk again—quick, angry pacing, prowling the room. “I never thought he would do that to me,” she said. “I never thought he hated me enough to do a thing like that. I never thought he could hate anyone that much. I saved him from slavery! I saved his worthless life, goddamnit!”

  “He doesn’t hate you,” I said. “I’m sure he doesn’t. I’ve never known him to hate anyone. He thought he was doing right.”

  “Don’t defend him,” she whispered. “I know you love him, but don’t defend him to me. I loved him myself, and see what he’s done to me—and to you.”

  “You’re a cult leader,” I said. “He’s Christian American. He believed—”

  “I don’t care! I’ve spoken with him hundreds of times since he found you, and he said nothing. Nothing!”

  “He doesn’t have any children.” I said. “I don’t think he ever will. But I was like a daughter to him. He was like a father to me.”

  She stopped her pacing and stood staring down at me with an almost frightening intensity. She stared at me as though she hated me.

  I stood up, looked around for my jacket, found it, and put it on.

  “No!” she said. “No, don’t go.” All the stiffness and rage went out of her. “Please don’t go. Not yet.”

  But I needed to go. She is an overwhelming person, and I needed to get away from her.

  “All right,” she said when I headed for the door. “But you can always come to me. Come back tomorrow. Come back whenever you want to. We have so much time to make up for. My door is open to you, Larkin, always.”

  I stopped and looked back at her, realizing that she had called me by the name that she had given to her baby daughter so long ago. “Asha,” I said, looking back at her. “My name is Asha Vere.”

  She looked confused. Then her face seemed to sag the way Uncle Marc’s had when I phoned him to ask about her. She looked so hurt and sad that I couldn’t stop myself from feeling sorry for her. “Asha,” she whispered. “My door is open to you, Asha. Always.”

  The next day Uncle Marc arrived, filled with fear and despair.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to me as soon as he saw me. “I was so happy when I found you after you left your parents. I was so glad to be able to help you with your education. I guess… I had been alone so long that I just couldn’t stand to share you with anyone.”

  My mother would not see him. He came to me almost in tears because he had tried to see her and she had refused. He tried several more times, and over and over again, she sent people out to tell him to go away.

  I went back home with him. I was angry with him, but even angrier with her, somehow. I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone no matter what he had done, and she was hurting him. I didn’t know whether I would ever see her again. I didn’t know whether I should. I didn’t even know whether I wanted to.

  My mother lived to be 81.

  She kept her word. She never stopped teaching. For Earthseed, she used herself up several times over speaking, training, guiding, writing, establishing schools that boarded orphans as well as students who had parents and homes. She found sources of money and directed them into areas of study that brought the fulfillment of the Earthseed Destiny closer. She sent promising young students to universities that helped them to fulfill their own potential.

  All that she did, she did for Earthseed. I did see her again occasionally, but Earthseed was her first “child,” and in some ways her only “child.”

  She was planning a lecture tour when her heart stopped just after her eighty-first birthday. She saw the first shuttles leave for the first starship assembled partly on the Moon and partly in orbit. I was not on any of the shuttles, of course. Neither was Uncle Marc, and neither of us has children.

  But Justin Gilchrist was on that ship. He shouldn’t have been at his age, of course, but he was. And the son of Jessica Faircloth has gone, ironically. He’s a biologist. The Mora girls, their children, and the whole surviving Douglas family have gone. They, in particular, were her family. All Earthseed was her family. We never really were, Uncle Marc and I.
She never really needed us, so we didn’t let ourselves need her. Here is the last journal entry of hers that seems to apply to her long, narrow story.

  FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  THURSDAY, JULY 20, 2090

  I know what I’ve done.

  I have not given them heaven, but I’ve helped them to give themselves the heavens. I can’t give them individual immortality, but I’ve helped them to give our species its only chance at immortality. I’ve helped them to the next stage of growth. They’re young adults now, leaving the nest. It will be rough on them out there. It’s always rough on the young when they leave the protection of the mother. It will take a toll—perhaps a heavy one. I don’t like to think about that, but I know it’s true. Out there, though, among the stars on the living worlds we already know about and on other worlds that we haven’t yet dreamed of, some will survive and change and thrive and some will suffer and die.

  Earthseed was always true. I’ve made it real, given it substance. Not that I ever had a choice in the matter. If you want a thing—truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.

  The shuttles are fat, squat, ugly, ancient-looking space trucks. They look as though they could be a hundred years old. They’re very different from the early ones under the skin, of course. The skin itself is substantially different. But except for being larger, today’s space shuttles don’t look that different from those a hundred years ago. I’ve seen pictures of the old ones.