Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
And yet, somehow, I’m glad our installations have been sold and not just abandoned. Selling them was bad, but it was the lesser evil. Most people wouldn’t have minded seeing them abandoned. They say we have no business wasting time or money in space when there are so many people suffering here on Earth, here in America. I wonder, though, where the money received in exchange for the installations has gone. I haven’t noticed any new government education or jobs programs. There’s been no government help for the homeless, the sick, the hungry. Squatter settlements are as big and as nasty as ever. As a country, we’ve given up our birthright for even less than bread and pottage. We’ve given it up for nothing—although I’m sure some people somewhere are richer now.
Consider, though: a brand-new form of life has been discovered on Mars, and it got less time on the news disk than the runaway Texas boy. We’re becoming more and more isolated as a people. We’re sliding into undirected negative change, and what’s worse, we’re getting used to it. All too often, we shape ourselves and our futures in such stupid ways.
More news. Scientists in Australia have managed to bring a human infant to term in an artificial womb. The child was conceived in a petri dish. Nine months later, it was taken, alive and healthy, from the last in a series of complex, computer-controlled containers. The child is the normal son of parents who could not have conceived or borne a child without a great deal of medical help.
Reporters are already calling the womb containers “eggs,” and there’s some foolish popular argument over whether a “hatched” person is as human as a “normally born” person. There are ministers and priests arguing that this tampering with human reproduction is wrong, of course. I doubt that they’ll have much to worry about for a while. The whole process is still experimental and would be available only to the very rich if it were being marketed to anyone—which it isn’t, yet. I wonder whether it will catch on at all in this world where so many poor women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers, carrying to term the child of wealthier people even when the wealthy people are able to have a child in the normal way. If you’re rich, you can have a surrogate for not much more than the price of feeding and housing her for nine months. If she’s smart and you’re generous, you might also wind up agreeing to feed, house, and help educate her children. And you might give her husband a job. Channa Ryan’s mother did this kind of work. According to Channa, her mother bore 13 surrogate children, none of them genetically related to her. Her marriage didn’t survive, but her two genetic daughters were given a chance to learn to read and write, cook, garden, and sew. That isn’t enough to know in this world, of course, but it’s more than most poor people learn.
It will be a long while—years, decades perhaps—before human surrogates are replaced by computerized eggs. Consider, though: eggs combined with cloning technology (another toy of the rich) would give men the ability to have a child without the genetic or the gestational help of a woman. Such men would still need a woman’s ovum, stripped of its genetic contents, but that would be all. If the idea caught on, they might be willing to use the ovum of some animal species.
And, of course, women will be free to do without men completely, since women can provide their own ova. I wonder what this will mean for humanity in the future. Radical change or just one more option among the many?
I can see artificial wombs being useful when we travel into extrasolar space—useful for gestating our first animals once they’re transported as frozen embryos and useful for gestating children if the nonreproductive work of women settlers is needed to keep the colony going. In that way, perhaps the eggs may be good for us—for Earthseed—in the long run. But what they’ll do to human societies in the meantime, I wonder.
I’ve saved the worst news item for last. The election was on Tuesday, November 2. Jarret won. When Bankole heard the news, he said, “May God have mercy on our souls.” I find that I’m more worried about our bodies. Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as “witches,” and torch the churches and homes of people they don’t like.
We all voted—all of us who were old enough—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once.
Here are some of the things that Jarret said back when he was shouting from his own Church of Christian America pulpit. I have copies of several of his sermons on disk.
“There was a time, Christian Americans, when our country ruled the world,” he said. “America was God’s country and we were God’s people and God took care of his own. Now look at us. Who are we? What are we? What foul, seething, corrupt heathen concoction have we become?
“Are we Christian? Are we? Can our country be just a little bit Christian and a little bit Buddhist, maybe? How about a little bit Christian and a little bit Hindu? Or maybe a country can be a little bit Christian and a little bit Jewish? How about a little bit Christian and a little bit Moslem? Or perhaps we can be a little bit Christian and a little bit pagan cultist?”
And then he thundered, “We are God’s people, or we are filth! We are God’s people, or we are nothing! We are God’s people! God’s people!
“Oh my God, my God, why have we forsaken thee?
“Why have we allowed ourselves to be seduced and betrayed by these allies of Satan, these heathen purveyors of false and unchristian doctrines? These people…these pagans are not only wrong. They’re dangerous. They’re as destructive as bullets, as contagious as plagues, as poisonous as snakes to the society they infest. They kill us, Christian American brothers and sisters. They kill us! They rouse the righteous anger of God against us for our misguided generosity to them. They are the natural destroyers of our country. They are lovers of Satan, seducers of our children, rapists of our women, drug sellers, usurers, thieves, and murderers!
“And in the face of all that, what are we to them? Shall we live with them? Shall we let them continue to drag our country down into hell? Think! What do we do to weeds, to viruses, to parasitic worms, to cancers? What must we do to protect ourselves and our children? What can we do to regain our stolen nation?”
Nasty. Very nasty. Jarret was the junior senator from Texas when he preached the sermon that contained those lines. He never answered the questions he asked. He left that to his listeners. And yet he says he’s against the witch burnings.
His speeches during the campaign have been somewhat less inflammatory than his sermons. He’s had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?
Well, now he’s conquered. In January of next year, he’ll be sworn in, and he’ll rule. Then, I suppose we’ll see just how much of his own propaganda he believes.
Another, happier, more local event happened here at Acorn yesterday. Lucio Figueroa, Zahra Balter, and Jeff King came in with a huge load of books for our library. Some look almost new. Others are old and worn, but they’ve all been protected from the weather, from water, and from fire. There are textbooks, up to graduate level in several subjects, specialized dictionaries, a set of encyclopedias—2001 edition—books of history, how-to books, and dozens of novels. Jeff King ran across the books being all but given away at a street market in Arcata.
“Someone was clearing out a room so that relatives could move into it,” he told me. “The owner of the books had died. He was considered the family eccentric, and no one else in the household shared his enthusiasm for reading big, bulky books made of paper. I didn’t think you’d mind my buying them for the school.”
“Mind?” I said. ??
“Lucio said he wasn’t sure we should spend the money, but Zahra said you were crazy for more books. I figured she’d know.”
I grinned. “She knows. I thought everyone knew.”
There were fifteen boxes of books. We took them into the school, and today we recovered as best we could from the stuff on the Worldisk by looking through the books and shelving them. We read bits of this and that to one another. People got excited and interested, and everyone carried away a book or two to read. After hearing the news, we all needed to read something that wasn’t depressing.
I wound up with a couple of books on drawing. I haven’t tried to draw anything since I was seven or eight. Now, all of a sudden, I find myself interested in learning to draw, learning to draw well—if I can. I want to learn something new and unrelated to any of our troubles.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2032
I’m pregnant!
No surrogates, no computerized eggs, no drugs. Bankole and I did it the good old-fashioned way—at last!
It’s crazy that it should happen now, just when America has elected a wild man to lead it. Bankole and I began trying as soon as we could see that we were going to survive here at Acorn. Bankole’s first wife couldn’t have children. As a young woman back in the 1990s, she was in a serious car accident and wound up with a hysterectomy, among other things. Bankole claimed he never minded. He said the world was going to hell just as fast as it could, and it would be an act of cruelty to bring a child into it. They talked about adopting, but never did.
Now he’s going to be a father, and in spite of all his talk, he’s almost jumping up and down—that is, whenever he isn’t being scared to death. He’s talking about moving into an established town again. He hadn’t said anything about that since right after we got the truck, but now the subject is back, and he’s serious. He wants to protect me. I realize that. I suppose I should be glad he feels that way, but I wish he would show his protective feelings in another way.
“You’re a kid yourself,” he said to me. “You don’t have the sense to be afraid.”
I can’t seem to get angry with him for saying things like that. He says them, then he thinks for a moment, and if he doesn’t watch himself, he begins to grin like a boy. Then he remembers his fears and looks panicked. Poor man.
SIX
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
God is Change
And hidden within Change
Is surprise, delight,
Confusion, pain,
Discovery, loss,
Opportunity, and growth.
As always,
God exists
To shape
And to be shaped.
IT’S A GOOD THING, I suppose, that my mother’s God was Change. Her life had a way of changing in abrupt, important ways. I don’t suppose she was really any more prepared for sudden changes than anyone else, but her beliefs helped her cope with them, even take advantage of them when they came.
I enjoyed reading about the way she and my father reacted to my conception. Such mismatched people, yet such a normal reaction. She couldn’t know that she was in for other major changes even before she could get used to being pregnant.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2032
Spokesmen for Christian America have announced that the Church will be opening homeless shelters and children’s homes—orphanages—in several states, including California, Oregon, and Washington. This is just a beginning, they say. They hope in time to “extend a helping hand to the people of every state in the union, including Alaska.” I heard this on a newsdisk that Mike Kardos bought at a Garberville street market yesterday. Time to begin to clean up the Christian America image, I suppose. I just hope the California shelters and orphanages will be put where they’re most needed—down around San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I don’t want them up here. Christian America is made up of scary people, and I find it impossible to believe that they intend only to do good and to help others.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2032
Today I found my brother Marcus.
This is impossible, I know, but I found him. He’s sick, fearful, confused, and angry—but he’s alive!
I found him in Eureka, California, although five years ago, down in Robledo, he died.
I don’t know what to say about this. I don’t know how to deal with it. Writing about it helps. Somehow, writing always helps.
Before dawn this morning, five of us drove into Eureka. Bankole needed medical supplies and we had a couple of deliveries of winter vegetables and fruit to make to small, independent stores who have already begun to buy our produce. After that, we had a special errand.
Bankole hadn’t wanted me to come. He worries about me more than ever now, and he’s always after me to move to an established town. We could have a nice little house and he could be town doctor. We could live nice empty little antique lives, and I could forget I’ve spent the past five years struggling to establish Acorn as the beginning of Earthseed. Now that we’ve got the truck, traveling is a lot less dangerous than it used to be, but my Bankole is more worried than ever.
And, to tell the truth, there are still things to worry about. We’ve all been looking over our shoulders since Dovetree. But we’ve got to live. We’ve got work to do.
“So Acorn is safe now?” I said to Bankole. “I’ll be safe if I stay there?”
“Safer than you are traveling all over the county,” he muttered, but he knew me well enough to let it go. At least he would be along to keep an eye on me.
Dan Noyer would also be along because our special errand concerned him. On our way home we were going to meet with a man who had contacted us through friends in Georgetown, claiming that he had one of Dan’s younger sisters, and that he would sell her to us. The man was a pimp, of course—“a livestock man, specializing in lamb and chicken” as one of the euphemisms went. That is, a man who puts slave collars on little children and rents their bodies to other grown men. I hate the idea of having anything to do with a slug like that, but he was exactly the kind of walking filth who would have Nina and Paula Noyer.
I had asked Travis and Natividad Douglas to come along with us, to ride shotgun, and in Travis’s case, to fix the truck if anything went wrong with it. I’ve trusted them both more than once with my life. I trust their judgment and their ability to fight. I felt a need to have people like that behind me when I was dealing with a slaver.
We made our deliveries to the two independent markets early, as we had promised—produce from our fields and from what was left of Dovetree’s huge kitchen garden and small grove of fruit trees. The Dovetree truck and farm tractor had both been stolen during the raid that destroyed Dovetree. The houses and outbuildings had been torched along with the stills and fields. But a number of fruit trees and garden crops survived. Since the five surviving Dovetrees have decided to stay with us—to join us as members of Earthseed once their required probationary year has ended—we’ve felt free to take what we could from the property. The two Dovetree women have relatives elsewhere in the mountains, but they don’t much like them, and they don’t want to be squeezed into crowded houses with them. They do get along with us, and they know that while they’re crowded now, they will have their own cabin by the time they’re Welcomed as members.
Of course, they could go back and live on their own land. But two women and three children wouldn’t survive on their own. They wouldn’t survive alone even in a place as hidden and protected as Acorn. Trying to live right off the highway at Dovetree, they would be enslaved or killed in no time. Any home or farm that can be seen from the highway is bound to be tempting to the desperate and the opportunistic, and now the fanatical. Dovetree as it was survived because the family was large, well armed, and had a reputation for toughness. That worked until a small, determined army came along. The attackers really were Jarret loyalists, by the way. They came fro
Bankole bought his supplies next. They’re the most expensive things we buy, but they’re also the most necessary. We are, as Bankole says, a healthy, young community, but the world around us isn’t healthy. Thanks to malnutrition, climate change, poverty, and ignorance, a lot of old diseases are back, and some of them are contagious. There was an outbreak of whooping cough in the Bay Area last winter, and it came up the highway as far north as Ukiah down in Mendocino County. Why it stopped there, I don’t know. And there was rabies last summer. Several people in squatter camps were bitten by rabid dogs or rats. They died of it, and a couple of teenagers were shot because they pretended to have rabies just to scare people. Whatever money it costs to keep us healthy, it’s worth it.
When our business in Eureka was finished, we went to meet the slaver at the place he and I had agreed on, just south and east of Eureka in Georgetown. The squatter settlement called Georgetown extends well back from the highway in coastal hills. The place is a human-made desert, dusty when the weather is dry, muddy when it rains, almost treeless, plantless, filled with the poorest of the poor and their open sewers, their malnutrition, their drugs, crime, and disease. Bankole says it was once a beautiful area of farms, trees, and hills. That must have been a long time ago. The settlement is called Georgetown because the most permanent-looking thing in it is a cluster of shabby-looking redwood buildings. They’re on a flattened hilltop and can be seen from just about everywhere in the settlement. There’s a store, a café, a games hall, bar, a hotel, a fuel station, and a repair shop where tools, guns, and vehicles of all kinds might be restored to usefulness. The whole complex is called George’s, and is run by a huge family surnamed George. At the café, George’s has a lot of rentable cubbyhole mailboxes where packages and paper messages can be left, and there’s a big bank of pay phones where, for a serious fee, you can access almost any network, service, group, or individual. This service in particular has made the place a combination message center, meeting place, and Old West saloon. It’s natural to arrange to meet people there to transact business of all kinds. Elroy George and his sons, his sons-in-law, his brothers, and his brothers’ sons see to it that people behave themselves. The Georges are a formidable tribe. They stick together, and people respect them. Their prices are high, but they’re honest. You get what you pay for with the Georges. Sad to say some of the things that get paid for in the café or elsewhere at the complex are slaves and drugs. The Georges aren’t slavers, but they’ve been known to handle drugs. I wish that weren’t so, but it is. I just hope they don’t go the way of the Dovetrees. They’re stronger and more entrenched, and better connected politically than the Dovetrees, but who knows? Now that Jarret has been elected, who knows?