Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Talents

After a while, Len caught my arm and I turned to look at her. It was good to be walking with someone. Good to have another pair of eyes, another pair of hands. Good to hear another voice say my name, another brain questioning, de­manding, even sneering.

"What do you want of me?" she asked. "What is it that you want me to do? You have to tell me that."

"Help me reach people," I said. "Go on working with me, and helping me. There's so much to be done."

thursday, june21, 2035

As my father used to quote from his old King James Bible, "Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." He liked to be accurate about his quotes.

I'm bruised and wounded about the pride, but not de­stroyed, at least.

I decided yesterday that things had worked out so well with Nia that I could go on recruiting people as we walked toward Portland. Walking through a roadside town that seemed big enough for people not to be alarmed at the sight of a stranger, I stopped to ask a woman who was sweeping her front porch whether we could do some yard work for a meal. With no warning, she opened her front door, called her two big dogs, and told them to get us. We barely got out of her yard in time to avoid being bitten. Interesting that neither of us drew a gun or uttered a sound. It turns out that Len's fear of dogs is as strong as mine. Last night, she showed me some scars given her by a dog that her former owners had allowed to get too close.

Anyway, the woman with the two dogs cursed us, called us "thieves, killers, heathens, and witches." She promised to call the cops on us.

"All that just because you asked for work," Len said. "Thank heavens you didn't try to tell her about Earthseed!" She was cleaning a long, deep scratch on her arm. It came from a nail that stuck out from the woman's wooden gate. I had spotted the dogs in time to shove her back through the gate, dive through myself, then slam the gate by grabbing a bottom slat and yanking. I only just let go in time to avoid a lot of long, sharp teeth, and damned if the dog didn't bite one of the wooden slats of the fence in frustration at not being able to get at me. I had skinned hands and a bruised hip. Len had her long scratch, which hurt and bled enough to scare me. Later, I treated us both to tetanus skin tabs. They cost more than they should, but neither of us is up-to-date on our immunizations anymore. Best not to take un­necessary chances.

"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!"

Chapter 21

□ □ □

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 1 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 1 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 1 couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. 1 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 iwas 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. 1 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.