Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

  But the next day—today—Harry was gone.

  He left George’s early this morning, buying a ride in a truck headed for Santa Barbara. I didn’t know about it until I saw Dolores this morning. She handed me the note that he had left with her for me.

  “I have to go, Lauren,” it said. “Keep the phone with you and stay put. I’ll come back. If I don’t find the kids down south, I’ll help you continue the search up here. Don’t worry, and take care of yourself.”

  All his life, he’s been a funny, gentle, bright person with an undercurrent of seriousness. We’ve known one another all our lives, and felt comfortable enough together to be brother and sister. He and Zahra were my best friends. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve saved one another’s lives.

  And now it’s over. Truly over. Zahra is dead. Harry is gone. Everyone is gone. Allie meant to live in Georgetown with Justin. She had the one thing she cared about: her son. And Nina Noyer just wanted to get married and settle down with people who could take care of her and protect her. I don’t blame her, but I find I don’t like her much. Her little sisters might be wearing collars now or living with people who abused and terrorized them in God’s name. Or they might be in some huge warehouse of a children’s home, lost in the crowd, but separated from one another if Justin was right—lost to everyone who had ever loved them.

  It isn’t that Nina doesn’t care. She just doesn’t think she can do anything to help them. “I’m not Dan,” she’s told me more than once. “Maybe it means I’m weak, but I can’t help it. I can’t do what he did. I can’t! It’s not fair to expect me to. He was a boy—almost a man! I just want to get married and be happy!”

  She’s 16. Her brother was only 15 when he rescued her and brought her to us. But as she says, she’s not him.

  SEVENTEEN

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  All prayers are to Self

  And, in one way or another,

  All prayers are answered.

  Pray,

  But beware.

  Your desires,

  Whether or not you achieve them

  Will determine who you become.

  I WONDER WHAT MY life would have been like if my mother had found me. I don’t doubt that she would have stolen me from the Alexanders—or died trying. But then what? How long would it have been before she put me aside for Earthseed, her other kid? Earthseed was never long out of her thoughts. If it didn’t comfort her during her captivity—and I suspect it did—at least it sustained her. It enabled her to survive without giving up or truly giving in to her captors. I couldn’t have helped her. I was her weakness. Earthseed was her strength. No wonder it was her favorite.

  FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2035

  I’m on my own.

  I’ve left Georgetown, left my students old and young, left my room furnished with junk. I left some of my money and one of my guns with Allie so that I’ll have something to fall back on if I’m robbed. I’ve come first to the message cache—two days’ walk—to see whether anything has been left. I’m there now. I’ll sleep there in the shelter of a living coast redwood tree that time and rot have hollowed out enough to hold a human or three. I’ve found unsigned messages from Travis and Natividad and from Michael and Noriko. Both identified themselves by referring to incidents that any member of the community would remember and understand but that would mean nothing to strangers. I did the same in the message I left.

  Neither couple had found their kids. Both had left numbers. They had bought new phones—the cheap, talk-and-listen, debit phones like Harry’s and mine. I left three numbers—mine, Harry’s, and one where Allie could be reached. Then I wrote a message to those who might come later.

  “Justin is with us again! He’s all right. There is hope. God is Change!”

  God is Change. I wrote the words, then settled back to think about that. I find that I haven’t thought much about Earthseed in the past few months. I believe its teachings helped me, helped all of us to survive Camp Christian. God is Change. I’ve lost none of my belief. All that I said to Bankole so long ago—two years ago—is still true.

  So much has been destroyed, but it is still true. Earthseed is true. The Destiny is as significant a human purpose as it ever was. Only Acorn is gone. Acorn was precious, but it wasn’t essential.

  I sit here now, trying to think, to plan. I must find my daughter, and I must teach Earthseed, make Earthseed real to as many people as I can reach, and send them out to teach others.

  The truth is, when I taught reading, I used a few simple Earthseed verses. This is what I did in Acorn, and I did it automatically in Georgetown. Strange to say, no one objected. People sometimes looked puzzled, sometimes disagreed or agreed with enthusiasm, but no one complained. Some people even seemed to think that what I read was from the Bible. I couldn’t bring myself to let them go on thinking that.

  “No,” I told them. “It’s from something else called Earthseed: The Books of the Living.” And I showed them one of the few surviving copies—retrieved from one of the caches. Since I’ve been calling myself Cory Duran, no one connected me with the strangely named author, Lauren Oya Olamina.

  Lines like the familiar,

  “All that you touch,

  You Change…”

  And

  “To get along with God

  Consider the consequences of your behavior.”

  And

  “Belief

  Initiates and guides action

  Or it does nothing.”

  And

  “Kindness eases Change.”

  People seemed to like brief fragments of verses or complete rhythmic verses because rhythmic verses are easy to memorize. And memorizing verses made it easier to spot individual words and learn to recognize them in their written forms. In that way, I guess I never stopped teaching Earthseed. But without the Destiny, without a more complete understanding of the belief system, what I taught was no more than a few scattered verses and aphorisms. Nothing unifies them.

  I must find at least a few people who are willing to learn more, and who will be willing to teach what they’ve learned. I must build…not a physical community this time. I guess I understand at last how easy it is to destroy such a community. I need to create something wide-reaching and harder to kill. That’s why I must teach teachers. I must create not only a dedicated little group of followers, not only a collection of communities as I once imagined, but a movement. I must create a new fashion in faith—a fashion that can evolve into a new religion, a new guiding force, that can help humanity to put its great energy, competitiveness, and creativity to work doing the truly vast job of fulfilling the Destiny.

  But first, somehow, I must find my child.

  I am alone, and I know that’s stupid. To travel alone is to make yourself more vulnerable than you need to be. I wish I could have talked Harry into working with me. He’s endangering himself and wasting his time down in southern California and around the Bay Area. I don’t believe there’s any chance at all that our kids have been shipped down there. They’re here. And his kids and mine are so young that they’ve surely been adopted. My Larkin could grow up believing that she is the daughter of one her kidnappers. His kids were four and two when they were taken, so I suspect the same could happen to them—if we let it.

  Tomorrow, I’ll start walking toward Eureka. I’m armed. I’ve got the old .45 semiautomatic that made the trip up from Robledo with me. I had tucked it into one of the caches, thinking I wouldn’t need it again. Also, I’ve done all that seemed reasonable to make myself look both poor and male. I’m big and plain. That’s good camouflage, at least. It’s not real protection, but it’s the best I can do. If someone shoots me, I’ve got no backup, so chances are, I’m dead. But I’m not the only solitary walker out there, and maybe the robbers and the crazies will go for the smaller ones who look like less trouble. And there are fewer robbers
and crazies. Or there were. At Georgetown and on my way here, I saw more and more men in military uniforms—or parts of uniforms. They helped fight Jarret’s stupid Al-Can war. Now a lot of them are having a hard time earning a living—and they’re often very well armed.

  There are more slavers now that Jarret’s Crusaders have joined Cougar and his friends in the game of collaring people and grabbing their kids. I’m hoping to be invisible to them. I want to keep quiet, do my work, and to look just crazy enough to encourage people to let me alone. As a man, though, I must be very careful how I follow up the few leads I have on small Black children who have appeared all of a sudden in families where no one was pregnant. I don’t want to be mistaken for a lurking child molester or a kidnapper.

  I hope to work for meals in Eureka and Arcata—a little yard work, some painting, some minor carpentry, wood that needs chopping… If I stay away from the wealthier neighborhoods, I should be all right. Wealthy people wouldn’t need to hire me anyway. They would keep a few servants—people working for room and board. I would be working for what was left of the middle class. I would be just one more day laborer working for his next meal.

  Down south and in the Bay Area, a laborer’s life would be harder. People are too distrustful of one another, too walled off from one another if they can afford walls. But up here, men are hired, and then at least decently fed. They might even be allowed to sleep in a shed, a garage, or a barn. And they might—often do—get a look at the kids of the family. They might—often do—hear talk that later proves useful. For most laborers, useful means they might be steered toward other jobs or away from trouble or let in on where people keep their valuables. For me, useful might mean rumors of adoptions, fosterings, and children’s homes.

  I’ll wander around the Eureka-Arcata complex and the surrounding towns for as long as I can. Allie has promised to go on collecting information for me, and she says I can crash in her rooms at Georgetown when I need a rest in a real bed. Also, if I’m picked up and collared, Dolores will vouch for me—for a fee, of course. She knows what I’m doing. She doesn’t think I’ve got a chance in hell of succeeding, but she’s got kids and grandkids, so she knows I have to do this.

  “I’d do the same thing myself,” she said when I talked to her. “I’d do all I could. Goddamn these so-called religious people. Thieves and murderers—that’s all they are. They should wear the collar. They should roast in hell!”

  There are times when I wish I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2035

  I’ve spent my first week doing other people’s scutwork. Odd how familiar all the jobs are—helping to plant vegetable or flower gardens, chopping weeds, pruning bushes and small trees, cleaning up a winter’s accumulation of trash, repairing fences, and so on. These are all things I did at Acorn where everyone did everything. People seem pleased and a little surprised that I do good work. I’ve even earned some money by suggesting extra jobs that I was willing to take care of for a fee. People warn their kids away from me most of the time, but I do get to see the kids, from babies in their mothers’ arms to toddlers to older kids and neighbor kids. I haven’t seen any familiar faces yet, but, of course, I’ve just begun. I’ve gone to as many Black or mixed-race families as I could. I don’t know what kind of people I should be checking, but it seemed best to begin with these people. If they seem at all friendly, I ask them if they have friends who might hire me. That’s gotten me a couple of jobs so far.

  My problem has turned out to be having a place to sleep. A guy offered to let me sleep in his garage that first night if I’d give him a blow job.

  I wasn’t sure whether he thought I was a man or had spotted that I was a woman, and I didn’t care. I bedded down that night in a shabby park where a few redwood trees survive. There, among a small flock of other homeless people, I slept safely and awoke early to avoid the police. People in Georgetown have warned me that collaring vagrants is what cops do when they need some arrests to justify their paychecks. It’s also what some of the meaner ones do when they’ve had no amusement for a while.

  It was cold, but I’ve got warm, lightweight clothing and a comfortable, shabby old sleepsack that I’d used on the trip up from Robledo. I woke up aching a little from the uneven ground, but otherwise all right. I needed a bath, but compared to the amount of crud I used to accumulate back in Camp Christian, I was almost presentable. I had already decided that I’d wash when I could, sleep sheltered when I could. I can’t afford to let myself worry about things like that.

  On Tuesday, I was allowed to sleep in a toolshed, which was a good thing, because it rained hard.

  On Wednesday I was back in the park, although the woman I worked for told me that I should go to the shelter at the Christian America Center on Fourth Street.

  Hell of a thought. I’ve known for weeks that the place existed, and I’ve kept well clear of it. Laborers at Georgetown say they avoid the place. People have been known to vanish from there. I’m afraid I’ll have to go there someday, though. I need to hear more about what the CA people do with orphans. Problem is, I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand it. I hate those bastards so much. There are moments when I’d kill them all if I could. I hate them.

  And I’m terrified of them. What if someone recognizes me? That’s unlikely, but what if? I can’t go to the CA Center yet. I’ll make myself do it soon, but not yet. I’d rather blow my own brains out than wear a collar again.

  On Thursday, I was in the park, but on Friday and Saturday, I slept in the garage of an old woman who wanted her fence re- paired and painted and her windowsills sanded and painted. Her neighbor kept coming over “to chat.” I understood that the neighbor was just making sure that I wasn’t murdering her friend, and I didn’t mind. It turned out well in the end. The neighbor wound up hiring me herself to chop weeds, prepare the soil, and put in her vegetable and flower gardens. That was good because she was my reason for going to her part of town. She was a blond woman with a blond husband, and yet I had heard through my contacts at Georgetown that she had two beautiful dark-haired, dark-skinned toddlers.

  The woman turned out to be not well off at all, and yet she paid me a few dollars in addition to a couple of good meals for the work I did. I liked her, and I was glad when I saw that the two children she had adopted were strangers. I write now in her garage, where there is an electric light and a cot. It’s cold, of course, but I’m wrapped up and warm enough except for my hands. I need to write now more than ever because I have no one to talk to, but writing is cold work on nights like this.

  SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2035

  I’ve been to the Christian America Center. I’ve finally made myself go there. It was like making myself step into a big nest of rattlesnakes, but I’ve done it. I couldn’t sleep there. Even without Day Turner’s experience to guide me, I couldn’t have slept in the rattler’s nest. But I’ve eaten there three times now, trying to hear what there might be to hear. I remember Day Turner telling me that he had been offered a bed, meals, and a few dollars if he helped paint and repair a couple of houses that were to be part of a CA home for orphaned children. He had not known the addresses of the houses. Nor had he known Eureka well enough to give me an idea where these houses might be, and that was a shame. Our children might not still be there—if they were ever there. But I might be able to learn something from the place. There might be records that I could steal or rumors, memories, stories that I could hear about. And if several of our children had been sent there, then perhaps I could find one or two of them still there.

  That last thought scared me a little. If I did find a couple of our kids, I couldn’t leave them in CA hands. One way or another, I would have to free them and try to reunite them with their families. That would draw such attention to me that I would have to leave the area, and, I suspect, leave my Larkin. This is assuming that I would be able to leave, that I didn’t wind up wearing another collar.

  The food at the CA
Center was edible—a couple of slices of bread and a rich stew of potatoes and vegetables flavored with beef, although I never found meat of any kind in it. People around me complained about the lack of meat, but I didn’t mind. Over the past several months, I’ve learned to eat whatever was put in front of me, and be glad of it. If I could keep it down, and there was enough of it to fill my stomach, I considered myself lucky. But it amazed me that I could keep anything down while sitting so close to my enemies at the CA Center.

  My first visit was the worst. My memory of it isn’t as clear as it ought to be. I know I went there. I sat and I ate with several dozen other homeless men. I managed not to go crazy when someone began to preach at us. I know I did all that, and I know that afterward, I needed the long, long walk to the park to get my head back into working order. Walking, like writing, helps.

  I did it all in blind terror. How I looked to others I don’t know. I think I must have seemed too mentally sick even to talk to. No one tried to make conversation with me, although some of the men talked to one another. I got in line and after that I moved automatically, did what others did. Once I sat down with my food, I found myself crouching over it, protecting it, gulping it like a hawk who’s caught a pigeon. I used to see people doing that at Camp Christian. You got so damned hungry there sometimes, it made you a little crazy. This time, though, it wasn’t the food that I cared about. I wasn’t that hungry. And if I’d wanted to, I could have changed my clothing, gone in to a decent restaurant, and bought a real meal. It’s just that somehow, if I focused on the food and filled my mind with it as well as my body, I could keep myself still and not get up and run, screaming, out of that place.

  I have never, in freedom, been so afraid. People edged away from me. I mean crazies, junkies, whores, and thieves edged away from me. I didn’t think about it at the time. I didn’t think about anything. I’m surprised that I manage to remember any of it now. I moved through it in a cloud of blank terror and an absolute readiness to kill.