Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
“So we’ve been called.”
“There was a politician. He was running for the state senate, I think. He won. He was a Jarret supporter. He was making a speech in Arcata when I was up there, and he was listing devil-worshiping cults. He named Earthseed as one of them. I’d never heard of it, but I remember because he was going on about how the name actually referred to the devil, the seed deep in the earth and growing like a poisonous fungus to spread its evil to more and more people.”
“Oh, Marc…”
“I didn’t make it up. He really said that.”
I drew a deep breath. “We don’t worship the devil. In fact, we don’t worship anyone. And we are Earthseed. Human beings are Earthseed. We have no devils. But we’re so small that I’m surprised your politician had ever heard of us. And I wish he hadn’t. Such lies!”
He shrugged. “It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything. But why would you stop being a Christian? Why would you make up a new religion?”
“I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true. I could never say anything about it at home. I never wanted to hurt Dad. But his way didn’t work for me. I wanted it to. I would have been a lot more comfortable if it had. But it didn’t. Earthseed does.”
“But you made Earthseed up. Or if you didn’t make it up, you read it or heard about it somewhere.”
I had heard this many times before. It seemed to be one of the things that every new potential member said. I even kept a simple teaching tool near at hand to deal with it. I got up and went to a bookshelf where a beautiful piece of rose quartz that Bankole had given me acted as a bookend for the few books I kept here in the house and not in the library section of the school.
“Look at this,” I said, “and tell me something.” I put the rock in his hands. “If I were to analyze this stone and find out exactly what it’s made of, would that mean I made it up?”
“That’s not a good comparison, Lauren. The rock exists. Earthseed didn’t exist until you made it up.”
“All the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn’t make any of them up.”
“You just put them together.”
“Yes.”
“Then you did make Earthseed up the same way you would have made a novel up if you wrote one. You wouldn’t have to find anything brand-new for your characters to do or be in a novel. I don’t think you could if you wanted to.”
“Except that by definition, a novel is fiction. Don’t call Earthseed fiction. You don’t know anything about it except the lies told by an opportunistic politician.” I took down a copy of The First Book of the Living and handed it to him. “Come and talk to me after you’ve read this.”
“You wrote this?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe in it?”
“I believe it. I wouldn’t teach people that things were true if I didn’t believe them.”
“Back in Robledo, I remember you were always writing. Keith used to sneak into your room and read your diary. Or at least he said he did.”
I thought about that for a moment. “I don’t think he ever read my journal,” I said. “I mean, I know I was always chasing him out of my room. I chased you out, too, plenty of times. But I think if Keith had read my journal, he wouldn’t have been able to resist using it against me. Besides, Keith never read anything unless he had to.”
“Yeah.” He paused, gazing down at the table. “It’s weird to think I’m older now than he ever got to be. He still seems older and bigger when I think about him. He was such a goddamn asshole.” He shook his head. “I think I really hated him, you know, the way he was always making trouble for everybody, beating the rest of us up—except you. He was afraid of you because you were so much bigger. And Mama…she loved him more than she loved all of us put together.”
“It wasn’t that bad, Marc.”
He looked up at me, solemn-eyed. “It was, though. She wasn’t your mother, so maybe you didn’t feel it the way I did, but it was that bad and then some.”
“I felt it. Toward the end when she and I needed each other most, I’m not sure she loved me at all. But she was so scared and so desperate… Forgive her, Marc. She was in a hellish place with four children to look out for. If it made her less rational than she should have been…well, forgive her.”
There was a long silence. He stared at the book, open at the first page:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
I couldn’t tell whether he had read the words at first. He seemed to stare the way blind people do, unseeing, blank. Then he whispered, “Oh, god,” and it sounded like a prayer. He shut the book and closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I want to read your book, Lauren,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked at me. “You haven’t asked how I wound up with Cougar.”
“I want to know,” I admitted.
“Simple. My first night walking the freeway, three guys jumped me—big guys. I didn’t have much money and that pissed them off—you know, like I was supposed to be rich so that robbing me would be worth their while. If I wasn’t rich, then I had cheated them, and they had a right to get me for it. Shit.”
He was staring at the table again, and I imagined him as he must have been then, facing three big men. He had always been slight and much too attractive for his own good—a beautiful boy, and now, such a handsome young man. I had seen the girls and women of the community staring at him as we brought him from the truck to the house last night. If he stayed, they would be all over him.
He would be stronger now. He had a look of wiry strength about him. But even now, he wouldn’t be strong enough to hold off three attackers. And he’d had no friends with him, watching his back on the freeway that night.
After a while, he spoke again, still staring at the table. “They didn’t just beat the hell out of me and rape me and let me go,” he said. “They kept me so they could do it over and over again. And when they got tired of me, they sold me to a pimp. Not Cougar. He came later. The first one called himself Zorro. All these guys seem to have stupid names. Anyway, Zorro was the first to put a collar around my neck. After that people didn’t have to bother beating me up—unless they felt like it. Some people get turned on by beating the shit out of a guy who can’t fight back. And… You know the worst thing about a collar, Lauren? They can torture you with it every day. Every goddamn day. And you never have any marks to mess you up and drive down your price, and you never die of it! Or most people don’t die of it. Some are lucky. They have heart attacks or strokes and they die. But the rest of us live no matter what. And if we try to find some other way to die, to kill ourselves, they can stop us. The guy with the control unit can play you the way Mama used to play her piano. You get so you’ll do anything—anything!—just to get him to let you alone for a few minutes. You walk past a corpse on the road—some poor old guy who couldn’t walk any farther or a woman someone had raped and killed. You walk past the corpse, and you wish like hell it was you.”
He sighed and shook his head. “That’s it, really. I had one more owner between Zorro and Cougar, but he was walking shit too. You can’t own people and torture them for fun and profit without being shit. A pimp would sell his mother and his daughter if the price were right. And if I ever get the chance, I swear to god, Lauren, I’ll stake all three of them out and I’ll burn them—like Jarret’s people do with their so-called witches.” After a moment, he added, “I saw that done once—a burning. Sargent—my second owner—did it to a woman who tried to kill him in his sleep. She was a beautiful woman. Sargent a
“These are the rules: Once you’ve got a collar on, you can’t run. Get a certain distance from the control unit and the collar chokes you. I mean it gives you so much pain that you can’t keep going. You pass out if you try. We called that getting choked. Touch the control unit and the collar chokes you. It won’t work for you anyway. It’s got a fingerprint lock. And if the fingers trying to use it are wrong or are dead, it chokes you and stays on choke until someone with the right living fingers turns it off. Or until you die. When someone threatens a pimp, sometimes he’ll make his oldest, least popular whores fight for him, shield him. The truth is, while they’re wearing the collars, all his whores will fight for him, no matter how much they hate him. They’ll fight hard. They might not even care whether or not they get killed.
“And, of course, if you try to cut, burn, or otherwise damage the collar, it chokes you.
“The girl, she tried to take revenge for her family. She never knew why the other whore Sargent had with him that night stopped her. The other whore begged her not to do it. He tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen. Then Sargent woke up. The next day, he gathered all his whores together, and he staked the girl out naked and made us all gather wood and stack it around her and on top of her with just her head showing. Then he made us watch while he…while he burned her.”
It occurred to me that Marcus was the “other whore” who saved Sargent’s life. Maybe he was. I would not ask. Perhaps on some level, the “other whore” was him even if it wasn’t, really. A collar, my brother was saying, makes you turn traitor against your kind, against your freedom, against yourself. This was what had been done to him. And what had it made of him? Who and what was he now? No one could go through what he has gone through and not change somehow. No wonder the first of the Earthseed verses had reached him.
I took him to see Zahra and Harry, and they both hugged him, amazed. Zahra, in particular, who had seen him shot and thrown into the fire, kept staring at him and touching him. He stared back at them the way I’ve seen half-starved people stare at food that they couldn’t beg, buy, or steal.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2032
“Call me Marcos,” my brother said to me as I showed him our school-library-Gathering Hall. He was about to attend his first Gathering, but I had brought him to the school early so that he could see more of what we had built. He seemed impressed with the building and with our collection of salvaged, purchased, and bartered books, but I had gotten the impression that there was something else on his mind. Now here it was.
“I’ve been Marcos Duran for more than five years now,” he said. “I don’t really know how to be Marcus Olamina anymore.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. After a while, I said, “Do you…? Is it that you don’t want people to think of me as your sister?”
He looked horrified. “No, Lauren. It’s not like that.” He paused, thought for a moment. “It’s more like Marcus Olamina was my childhood name. I’m not that kid anymore. I’ll never be him again.”
I nodded. “Okay.” And then, “Thanks to Bankole, just about everyone here calls me Olamina, so maybe it’s just as well. Less confusing.”
“Your husband calls you by your maiden name?”
“He doesn’t like my first name, so he ignores it. That’s fair. I didn’t like his first name either. It’s Taylor, by the way, and I ignore it.”
My brother shrugged. “Your business, I guess. Just call me Marcos.”
I shrugged too. “All right,” I said.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2032
Bankole is home. He says the doctor in Halstead is dead, and the people there—the mayor and town council—have asked him to move there and become their doctor full time.
He wants to. For my sake and the baby’s as well as his own, he wants to more than anything. It’s a chance that may not come his way again, he says. He’s an old man, he says. He’s got to think of the future, and I’ve got to think of the baby, he says. I’ve got to be realistic, for god’s sake, and stop dreaming, he says.
I’m not conveying the full flavor of this. It’s the same old stuff. He’s said most of it before, and I’m damned tired of it. But it’s worse now. It’s scarier. Bankole means it more than he ever has before because he has an offer now—a real offer. And he means it because there is this small new life between us, growing inside me. I’ve had no morning sickness, none of the swellings and discomforts and moodiness that Zahra has when she’s pregnant. And yet, I don’t doubt for a moment that my daughter is within me. Bankole’s checked, and he says she’s a girl. In gentler moments, we bicker about her name—Beryl like his mother or, from my point of view, almost anything that isn’t Beryl. Such an old-fashioned name.
But sometimes all of the ease and the joy and the love that I feel because of our child growing and developing within me seems lost on Bankole. All he seems to see is what he calls my immaturity, my irrational, unrealistic faith in Earthseed, my selfishness, my shortsightedness.
2033
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life.
Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live.
EIGHT
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.
I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE why I’ve spent so much time looking at my mother’s life before I was born. Perhaps it’s because this seems the most human, normal time of her life. I wanted to know who she was when she was a young wife and soon-to-be mother, when she was a friend, a sister, and, incidentally, the local minister.
Should she have left Acorn and gone to live in Halstead as my father asked? Of course she should have! And if she had, would she, my father, and I have managed to have normal, comfortable lives through Jarret’s upheavals? I believe we would have. My father called her immature, unrealistic, selfish, and shortsighted. Shortsighted, of all things! If there are sins in Earthseed, shortsightedness, lack of forethought, is the worst of them. And yet shortsighted is exactly what she was. She sacrificed us for an idea. And if she didn’t know what she was doing, she should have known—she who paid so much attention to the news, to the times and the trends. As an adolescent, she saw her father’s error when he could not see it—his dependence on walls and guns, religious faith, and a hope that the good old days would return. Yet what more than that did she have? If her good days were to be in the future on some extra-solar world, that only made them more pathetically unreal.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 2033
People keep pet dogs in Halstead, as they do in most local cities and towns.
I know that, but I grew up down south, where poor people and dogs didn’t run together. They ate one another. Dogs ran in packs, and they were one of the things we were glad our walls kept out. Some of the very rich used vicious dogs to guard their property. They were the only ones who could afford to buy meat, then feed it to a dog. The rest of us, if we got meat, were glad to eat it ourselves.
Even now, it startles me every time I see people and dogs together and peaceful. But the people of local towns and family farms, while not rich, have food enough to share with dogs—even dogs who do no work and
It’s interesting to see that dogs don’t like me any more than I like them. We keep out of one another’s way. Bankole, on the other hand, likes dogs. He scratches their ears and talks to them. They like him. When he was a boy down south, he kept two or three big ones as pets. Hard to believe that people did that in San Diego or Los Angeles, even thirty or forty years ago.
To please Bankole, I went with him into cold, windy Halstead for a couple of days. I told him it would do no good, but he wanted me to go anyway. I’ve pleased him so little recently that I agreed to go. He’s in love with the place. It’s just what he wants: long established, yet modern, familiar, and isolated. There are comfortable big houses—three and four bedrooms. And, thanks to the wind turbines in the hills, along the ridges, there’s plenty of electricity most of the time. And there’s modern plumbing. We have a little of that now, but it’s been a long struggle. Halstead, except for its crumbling coastline, is about as well protected as any town could be. Its population is about 250. That includes the nearest farm families.
Bankole and I have been promised the home of a family who is emigrating—going to homestead in Siberia. Two young-adult sons and the husband of the family have already gone to prepare a place for the women, the younger children, and the grandparents. For this family named Cannon, Bankole’s protected, promised land of Halstead is just one more piece of the worn-out, unlivable “old country” that they want to leave behind. They’re nice people, but they can’t wait to get out of the United States. They say it just doesn’t work anymore. The election of Jarret was, for them, the last straw.