Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Talents

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 1 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...." 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.

Ilooked 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. 1 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 1 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 ... 1 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. "1 wanted to believe you were, but I didn't know. 1 got involved in a lawsuit with Christian America back in the for­ties, and 1 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," 1 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. "1 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," 1 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.