Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
“Do you think anyone expects you to know everything?”
I smiled. “Of course they do. They don’t believe I know it all, and they wouldn’t like me much if I did, but somehow, they do expect it. Logic isn’t involved in feelings like that.”
“No, it isn’t. I suspect that logic isn’t involved in trying to found a new religion and then having doubts about it either.”
“My doubts are personal,” I said. “You know that. I doubt myself, not Earthseed. I worry that I might not be able to make Earthseed anything more than another little cult.” I shook my head. “It could happen. Earthseed is true—is a collection of truths, but there’s no law that says it has to succeed. We can always screw it up. I can always screw it up. There’s so much to be done.”
Bankole went on holding my hands, and I let myself go on talking, thinking aloud. “I wonder sometimes whether I’ll make it. I might grow old and die without seeing Earthseed grow the way that it should, without leaving the Earth myself or seeing others leave, maybe without even focusing serious attention on the Destiny. There are so many little cults—like earthworms twisting and feeding, forming and splitting, and going nowhere.”
“I’ll die without seeing the results of most of your efforts,” Bankole said.
I jumped, looked at him, then said, “What?”
“I think you heard me, girl.”
I never know what to say when he starts talking that way. It scares me because, of course, it’s true.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you really think you can spend your life—your life, girl!—struggling and risking yourself, maybe risking our child for a…a cause whose fulfillment you…probably won’t live to see? Should you do such a thing?” I could feel him holding himself back, trying so hard to discourage me without offending me.
He let my hands go, then moved his chair around closer to me. He put his arm around me. “It’s a good dream, girl, but that’s all it is. You know that as well as I do. You’re an intelligent person. You know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
I leaned against him. “It’s more than a good dream, babe. It’s right. It’s true! And it’s so big and so difficult, so long-term, and as far as money is concerned, it’s potentially so profitless, that it’ll take all the strong religious faith we human beings can muster to make it happen. It’s not like anything humanity has ever done before. And if I can’t have it, if I can’t help to make it happen…” To my amazement, I felt myself on the verge of tears. “If I can’t give it the push it needs, if I can’t live to see it succeed…” I paused, swallowed. “If I can’t live to see it succeed, then, maybe Larkin can!” I found the words all but impossible to say. It was not a new idea to me that I might not live to see the Destiny fulfilled. But it felt new. Now Larkin was part of it, and it felt new and real. It felt true. It made me frantic inside, my thoughts leaping around. I felt as though I didn’t know what to do. All of a sudden, I wanted to go stand beside Larkin’s crib and look at her, hold her. I didn’t move. I leaned against Bankole, unsettled, trembling.
After a while, Bankole said, “Welcome to adulthood, girl.”
I did cry then. I sat there with tears running down my face. I couldn’t stop. I made no noise, but of course, Bankole saw, and he held me. At first I was horrified and disgusted with myself. I don’t do that. I don’t cry on people. I’ve never been that kind of person. I tried to pull away from Bankole, but he held me. He’s a big man.
I’m tall and strong myself, but he just folded his arms around me so that I couldn’t get away from him without hurting him. After a moment, I decided I was where I wanted to be. If I had to cry on someone’s shoulders, well, his were big and broad.
After a time, I stopped, all cried out, exhausted, ready to get up and go to bed. I wiped my face on a napkin, and looked at him. “I wonder if that was some kind of postpartum something-or-other?”
“It might have been,” he said, smiling.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I meant everything I said.”
He nodded. “I guess I know that.”
“Then let’s go to bed.”
“Not yet. Listen to me, Olamina.”
I sat still and listened.
“If we stay here, if I agree that you and Larkin and I are going to stay here, this place is not going to be just one more squatter’s shanty.”
“It was never that!”
He held up his hand. “My daughter will not grow up grubbing for a living through the ruins of other people’s homes and trash heaps. This place will be a town—a twenty-first-century town. It will be a decent place to raise a child—a place with some hope of survival and success. Whatever other grand things we do or fail to do, we will do that much!”
“It’s an Acorn,” I said, stroking his face, his beard. “It will grow.”
He almost smiled. Then he was solemn again. “If I accept this, I’m in it for good! If you change your mind after a few hard times…”
“Do I tend to do that, babe? Am I like that?”
He stared hard at me, silent, weighing.
“I helped you build this house,” I said, referring to the literal meaning of his name, help me build a house. “I helped you build this house. Now there’s so much more work to do.”
ELEVEN
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.
I’M NOT CERTAIN HOW to write about the next episode in my parents’ lives and in my life. I’m glad to have no memory of it. I was only two months old when it happened.
It’s all very strange, very bad, very confused. If only my mother had agreed to go with my father to live peacefully, normally in Halstead, it wouldn’t have happened. Or at least, it wouldn’t have happened to us.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2033
They didn’t shoot their way in. It seems that they don’t intend to kill us. Yet. Since Dovetree, they have changed. Their leader has come to power. They have acquired…if not legitimacy, at least a shadow of sophistication. Roaring in, shooting everyone, and burning everything is perhaps too crude for them now. Or maybe it’s just not as much fun.
I write, not knowing how long I will be able to write. I write because they have not yet robbed us of everything. Our freedom is gone, our two trucks, our land, our business, our homes are gone, stolen from us. But somehow, I still have paper, pens, and pencils. None of our captors values these things, so no one has yet taken them from me. I must keep them hidden or they will be taken. All possessions will be taken. They will strip us. They’ve made that all too clear. They will break us down, reshape us, teach us what it means to love their country and fear their God.
Our several secret caches of food, weapons, money, clothing, and records have not been found. At least, I don’t believe they have been. No one has heard that they have.
We’re shut up in two of the rooms of the school. Our books are still here on their shelves. The various projects of our students are still here. Our several phones and our five new teaching computers are gone. They have hard-currency value. Also, they were a means of communicating with the outside. We are not permitted to do that. That would inhibit our reeducation.
I must make a record of all this. I don’t want to, but I must. And I
We will do that. We will survive. I don’t yet know how. How is always a problem. But, in fact, we will survive.
Here is what happened.
Late Tuesday afternoon last week, I was sketching two of the Faircloth kids and talking with them about the project they wanted to work on for school. They had, in their required study of history, just discovered World War II, and they wanted to build models of the battleships, submarines, and airplanes of the time. They wanted to report on the big battles and find out more about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were fascinated by all of the loud, explosive events of the War, but they had no idea what a huge subject they had chosen or, beyond the barest outline, why the War had been fought. I had decided to sketch them while the three of us talked about it and narrowed things down.
The Faircloth family had always been poor, had lived in a squatter settlement before they came to us. Alan Faircloth had small, badly creased, paper photos of the boys as babies, but nothing recent. He had pleased me more than I would have been willing to admit by asking me to draw the two of them. I had become vain about my drawing. It was finally somewhere near good. Even Harry, Zahra, and Allie had said so, and they were the ones who had the most fun with my earlier efforts.
The boys and I were outside behind the school, enjoying a warm, easy day. Larkin lay next to me, asleep in her crib in spite of the noise the boys made. She was already used to noise. The boys were 11 and 12, small for their age, always loud, and unlikely to be still for more than two or three minutes at a time. First they peeked at Larkin, then they lost interest and shouted first at each other, then at me about weapons and battles, dive-bombers and aircraft carriers, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, London, Stalingrad, Tokyo, on and on. Interesting that a thing as terrible and as massive as a worldwide war could seem so wonderful and exciting to a pair of preadolescent boys whose grandparents weren’t born in time for it—although they did have paternal grandparents who were born and raised in London.
I sketched the boys quickly while listening to their enthusiasm and making suggestions. I was just finishing the sketches when the maggots arrived.
A maggot, nicknamed in its ugly shape, is something less than a tank, and something more than a truck. It’s a big, armed and armored, all-terrain, all-wheel-drive vehicle. Private cops and military people use them, and people with plenty of money drive them as private cars. Maggots can go almost anywhere, over, around, or through almost anything. The people of Halstead have one. They’ve used it now and then to collect Bankole. Several small local towns have one or two for their cops or for search and rescue in the hills. But the things are serious fuel eaters—expensive to run.
That Friday, seven maggots came crawling out of the hills and through our thorn fence toward us. There had been no warning from the watchers. Nothing at all. That was my first thought when I saw them coming: Where were Lucio Figueroa and Noriko Kardos? Why hadn’t they warned us? Were they all right?
Seven maggots! That was three or four times as much firepower as we could muster if we brought out every one of our guns. Only our truck guns would have even a ghost of a chance of stopping a maggot, anyway.
Seven of the damned things!
“Go home!” I said to the two boys. “Tell your father and sisters to get the hell out. No drill. The real thing! Get out, fast and quiet! Run!”
Both boys ran.
I took my phone from my pocket and tapped out the emergency bug-out signal. We’ve had bug-out exercises. Bankole called them that, and the name spread. I thought of them as “melt into the mountains” exercises. Now we faced the real thing. It had to be real. No one came visiting in seven armed and armored maggots.
I grabbed my Larkin as fast as I could and ran for the hills. I tried to keep the school building between the two of us and the nearest maggots. They were crawling toward us in what could have been a military formation. They could run us down, shoot us, do whatever they chose to do. The only thing we might be able to do that they couldn’t do was vanish into the mountains. But could we even do that? If we kept still, the maggots’ sensory equipment would spot us. And if we ran, the rocks and trees and thorn bushes wouldn’t give us much protection from the maggots’ guns. But what could we do but run? As long as no one came out of the maggots, we had nothing to shoot at.
Where was Bankole? I didn’t know. Well, we had rendezvous points. We would find each other. The idea was not to waste time running around looking for relatives. Except for babies and very young children, everyone knew from the drills that a command to get out meant exactly, that. “Get out now!”
And we were to go in all directions. We were not to follow one another or group together and provide our enemies with big, easy targets. As much as possible, we were to put trees and geographical features between ourselves and the enemy.
But what were we to do when the enemy was everywhere?
Then, in the same instant, all seven of the maggots began firing. It took me a moment to realize that they were not firing bullets, that, perhaps, we were not about to be killed. They were firing gas canisters. I kept running, hoping that others were doing the same. No matter what the gas was, it was not intended to do us good.
I headed through the young oak grove that was our cemetery toward the fold of a hill that I hoped would both shelter me and give me an easier path up over the first hill.
Then just ahead of me, a canister landed. Before it hit the ground, it began to spew out gas.
And my legs wouldn’t hold me. I was running. Then I felt myself begin to fall. It was all I could do to manage not to fall on my baby, instead to have her fall on me. I heard her begin to cry—a thin, un-Larkinlike whimpering. I don’t believe I cried out. I know I never lost consciousness. It was a terrible gas. I still don’t know the name of it. It took away most of my ability to move, but left me wide awake, able to hear and see, able to know that my people were being collected like driftwood, being carried or dragged away by uniformed men.
Someone came to me, bent, and took Larkin from me. I couldn’t move my head to see what he did with her. I couldn’t struggle or protest or plead. I couldn’t even scream.
Someone came for me and took me by the feet and dragged me over the ground, down the hill to the school. I was wearing denims and a light cotton shirt, and I could feel my back scraping over rocks and weeds. I could feel pressure—bumping and thudding. It didn’t hurt as it was happening, but I knew it would hurt. All the adults and older kids had been carried or dragged to the school. I could see several of them sprawled on the floor wherever their captors had dropped them. What I could not see were the babies and young children.
I could not see my Larkin.
At one point, I heard shooting outside. It came from the south side of the school, not far away. It sounded like the guns of our older truck. Perhaps one of us had reached the truck and tried to use it as Bankole, Harry, and I had back when Dan and Nina Noyer came home. That was hopeless. Our old housetruck wouldn’t have been a match for even one maggot. Then I heard a huge explosion. After that there was silence.
What had happened? Were the children involved? Not knowing was an agonizing torment. Utter helplessness was even worse. I could breathe. I could twitch a hand or a foot. I could blink. Nothing more.
After a while, I could whimper a little.
Sometime later, a man wearing the uniform of the day—black pants and a belted, black tunic with a white cross on its front, came to do something to us, to each of us. I couldn’t see what he was doing until he got to me, unbuttoned three buttons of my shirt, raised my head, and fastened the slave collar around my neck.
It was that simple. They took Acorn. Its name is Camp Christian now. We captives were not able to do more than twitch, blink, or moan for over an hour. That was plenty of time to collar almost all of us.
No one collared Gray Mora. He had been a slave earlier in his life. He had
But this time, there was no escape. And yet Gray would not be a slave again.
I found out later that he managed to get to the housetruck, lock himself in, and fire on some of the maggots. That scratched them more than a little. Then, as the maggots began to fire on him and blow the housetruck’s armor to hell, he charged one of them. He rammed it. There was an explosion. There shouldn’t have been.
The housetruck was as safe as it could be. Making it explode had to take a conscious effort—unless it was the maggot that exploded. I don’t know for sure. But knowing Gray, I suspect he did something to cause the explosion. I believe he chose to die.
He is dead.
I can’t believe that any of this is true. Į mean…there ought to be a different way to write about these things—a way that at least begins to express the insanity and the terrible, terrible pain of it all. Acorn has always been full of ugly stories. There wasn’t an adult among us who didn’t have one. But we’d come together, lived together, helped one another, survived, thrived, we’d done that! We’d done all that! We’d made a good home for ourselves, were making an honest living. Now people with crosses have come and put slave collars on us.