Parable of the Talents (41 page)

Mom and Dad, the Durans, and even Acorn, where I thought maybe I could stay. And I couldn't see how anyone connected with Christian America could do what you say has been done. I could barely stand to hear you say it. I knew it was just wrong. It had to be.

"And I was right. The people who do the kind of thing you described are a splinter group. Jarret has disclaimed all connection with them. They call themselves Jarret's Crusaders, but they he. They're extremists who believe that reeducating heathen adults and placing their young children in Christian American homes is the only way to restore order and greatness. If Acorn was attacked, these are the likely attackers. I've talked to my friends in CA, and they say it isn't safe to probe too deeply into what the Crusaders are doing.

The Crusaders are a kind of secret society, ab-solutely dedicated, and ruthless. They're courageous people.

Misguided, but courageous. I've been told they really do find good homes for the children they rescue. That's what they call it—rescuing the children. They take them into their own homes if necessary and raise them as their children or they find others to raise them. Problem is, they're a nation-wide group. They send the kids out of their home areas— often out of their home states. They're serious about raising these kids as good Christian Americans. They believe it would be a sin against God and a crime against America to let them be reunited with their heathen parents.

"I've heard all this second- or third-hand from at least half a dozen people. I don't know how much of it is true. I don't know where Larkin is, and don't have any idea how to find out. I'm sorry about that, sorry about Bankole, sorry about everything.

"You probably won't like this, Lauren, but I think that if you really want to find your daughter, you should join us—join Christian America. Your cult has failed. Your god of change couldn't save you. Why not come back to where you belong? If Mom and Dad were alive, they would join. They would want you to be part of a good Christian organization that's trying to put the country back together again. I know you're smart and strong and too stubborn for your own good.

If you can also be patient and join us in our work, you'll have the only chance possible of getting information about your daughter.

"I have to warn you, though, the movement won't let you preach. They agree with Saint Paul in that: 'Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man but to be in si-lence.' But don't worry. There's plenty of other more suit-able work for women to do to serve the movement

"Some of our people have relatives or friends who are Crusaders. Join us, work hard, keep your eyes and ears open, and maybe you'll learn things that will help you find your daughter—and help you into a good, decent life as a Christian American woman.

"I don't know what else to tell you. I'm enclosing a few hundred in hard currency. I wish I could give you more. I wish I could help you more. I do wish you well, whatever you decide to do, and again, I'm sorry. Marc."

And that was that. There wasn't a word about his going to Portland—no explanation, no good-bye. No address. Had he, in fact, gone to Portland? I thought about that and de-cided he had—or at least the server who told me he had be-lieved what she was saying.

But why did my brother not mention where he was going—or even
that
he was going—in his letter? Did he think I wouldn't find out? Or was he just signaling me in a cold, deliberate way that he wanted no further contact with me.

Was he saying, in effect, "You're my sister and I have a duty to help you. So here's some advice and some money. Too bad about your troubles, but I can't do any more. I've got to get on with my life."

Well, the money I could use. As far as the advice was con-cerned, my first impulse was to curse it, and to curse my brother for giving it. Then, for a moment, I wondered whether I could join the enemy and find my child. Perhaps I could.

Then I remembered the man I had seen at the Center—the one whom I had last seen acting as one of our "teachers" at Acorn, and raping Adela Ortiz. Perhaps he was the father of the child she would soon be having. Marc might be able to convince himself that the Crusaders are outcast extremists, but I know better. Whether CA chooses to admit it or not, they and the Crusaders have members in common. How many? What are the real connections? What does Jarret really think about the Crusaders? Does he control them? If he doesn't like what they're doing, he should make some ef-fort to stop them. He shouldn't want them to make their in-sanity part of his political image.

On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side—a side of yourself or your organiza-tion that's dangerous and unpredictable—willing to do any damned thing.

Is that what's going on? I don't know and my brother doesn't want to know.

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

All religions are ultimately

cargo cults.

Adherents perform required

rituals, follow specific

rules, and expect to be

supernaturally gifted with

desired rewards—long life,

honor, wisdom, children,

good health, wealth, victory

over opponents,

immortality after death, any

desired rewards.

Earthseed offers its own

rewards—room for small

groups of people to begin

new lives and new ways of

life with new opportunities,

new wealth, new concepts

of wealth, new challenges

to grow and to learn and to

decide what to become.

Earthseed is the dawning

adulthood of the human

species. It offers the only

true immortality. It enables

the seeds of the Earth to

become the seeds of new

life, new communities on

new earths. The Destiny of

Earthseed is to take root

among the stars, and there,

again, to grow, to learn, and

to fly.

I BEGAN CREATING secret Dreamask scenarios when I was 12. By then, I was very much the timid, careful daughter of Kayce and Madison Alexander. I knew that even though I was al-lowed to use Dreamasks with strict Christian American sce-narios—like the old "Asha Vere" stories—no one would be likely to approve my creating new, uncensored scenarios. I knew this because back when I was nine, I began making up plain, linear installment stories to amuse myself and my few friends at Christian America School. It was fun.

My friends liked it until we all got into trouble. Then some teacher eavesdropped, realized what I was doing, and punished me for lying. My friends were punished for not reporting my lies. We had to memorize whole chapters of Exodus, Psalms, Proverbs, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Until we had memorized and been tested on every single assigned chapter, we were al-lowed no free time—no recess or lunch breaks. We were kept an hour late every day. We were monitored even in the bath-room to make sure we weren't indulging in more wicked-ness—like stealing a minute or two

"from God."

It didn't matter that I had said from the beginning that my stories were only made up. I never tried to convince anyone that they were true. And it didn't matter that the Dreamask scenarios we were all allowed to experience were equally imaginary. It was as though my teachers believed that all the possible stories had already been created, and it was a sin to make more—or at least it was a sin for me to make more.

But by the time I reached puberty, except for the pornog-raphy I managed to find, most of the scenarios I was per-mitted were tired, dull, boring things. Characters were always being shown the error of their ways, suffering for their sins, and then returning to God. Boys fought for Chris-tian America. They went to war against heathens, or went out as missionaries in dangerous, wicked, foreign jungles and deserts. Girls, on the other hand, were always cooking, cleaning, sewing, crying, praying, taking care of babies or old people, and going to church. Asha Vere was unusual be-cause she did interesting things. She saved people. She
made
them return to God. She was one of the few. In fact as a Black and a woman, she was the only one.

A very old woman—she was in her nineties and lived in one of the nursing homes that Christian America had set up for elderly members—once told me that Asha Vere was my generation's Nancy Drew. It was years before I found out who Nancy Drew was.

Anyway, I wrote scenarios—had to write them down with a stylus in my notebook since even outside of Christian Amer-ica, no one was going to trust a kid to work with a scenario recorder. At least our notebooks had a lot of memory and I could code them to erase the scenarios if someone else tried to get into them. Or I thought I could.

I wrote about having different parents—parents who cared about me and didn't wish always that I were another person, the sainted Kamaria. I didn't know at this time that I was adopted. All I had was the usual child's suspicion that I might be, and that somewhere, somehow, I might have beau-tiful, powerful "real" parents who would come for me some-day.

I wrote about having four brothers and three sisters. The idea of eight children appealed to me. I didn't think you could be lonely in such a big family. My brothers and sisters and I had huge parties on holidays and birthdays and we were always having adventures, and I had a handsome boyfriend who was crazy about me, and the girls at school were all jealous.

Instead of living in shabby, patched-together old Seattle with its missile-strike scars, we lived in a big corporate town.

We were important and had plenty of money. We spent our time speeding around in fast cars or making flashy scientific discoveries in laboratories or catching gangs of spies, em-bezzlers, and saboteurs. Since this was a Mask, I could live the adventures as any of my brothers or sisters or as either of our parents. That meant I could "experience" being a boy or an adult. But since it wasn't like a real Dreamask experi-ence, I had no sensation guidance beyond research and my imagination. I watched other people, tried to make myself feel what it might be like to drive a car or fire a gun or be an older brother who worked in the South Pacific as a deep-sea miner or an older sister who was an architect in Antarc-tica or a father who was CEO of a major corporation or a mother who was a molecular biologist. The father was a big, godlike man who was rich and smart and . . . not there most of the time. I had the hardest time being him. Research didn't help much. He was more of a shell than the others.

What should a father be like inside, in his thoughts and feel-ings? I wasn't sure. Not like Madison, for sure. Like the fa-thers of my occasional friends? 1 saw my friends' fathers now and then, but I didn't know them. Like the minister, maybe—stern and sure of himself and usually surrounded by a lot of deferential men and smiling women, some of whom were rumored to sleep with him even though they had husbands and he had a wife. But how did he feel? What did he believe? What did he want? What scared him?

I read a lot. I watched people and 1 eavesdropped. I got a lot of the ideas from kids whose parents let them have non-religious Masks and books—bad books, we called them.

In short, I tried to do what my biological mother hated, but couldn't help doing. I tried to feel what other people felt and know them—really know them.

It was all nonsense, of course. Harmless nonsense. But when I was caught at it, it was suddenly all but criminal.

There was a theft in my Christian American History class.

Someone stole a small personal phone that the teacher had left on her desk. We were all searched and our belongings collected and thoroughly examined. Someone examined my notebook too thoroughly, in spite of my self-destruct codes, and found my scenario.

I had to attend special religion classes for delinquents and get counseling. I had to confess my sins before our local church. 1 had to memorize a dozen or so more chapters of the Bible. While I was working off my punishment, I began to hear whispers that I was, indeed, adopted, and that I was the daughter not of rich, important, beautiful people but of the worst heathen devils—murderers, thieves, and perverters of God's word. The kids started it. There were plenty of kids around who were known to be adopted, so it was com-monplace to ridicule them and make up lies about how evil their real parents were. And if you weren't adopted, and someone got mad at you, they might call you a heathen bas-tard whether you were or not.

So first the kids started in on me, then the adults, some of whom knew that I was adopted, began to talk. "Well, after all, think about what kind of woman her real mother must be.

That's got to leave a mark on her." Or, "You wait. That girl is no good. My grandmother used to say the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree!" Or, "Well, what can you expect? 'Vere' means truth, doesn't it? And the truth is, there's bad blood in her if there ever was bad blood!"

I remember turning around in church to confront the nasty old woman who had stage-whispered this last bit of stupidity to her equally ancient friend. The two were sitting directly behind Kayce, Madison, and me during Sunday evening ser-vice. I looked at her, and she just stared back at me as though I were an animal who had somehow invaded the church.

"'God is love,'" I quoted to her in as sweet a voice as I could manage. And then, '"Love is the fulfilling of the law.'" I tried to make sure that my words carried as well as her ugly stage whisper had carried. Bad blood, for heaven's sake.

Kayce had told me people said things like that because they were ignorant, but that I had to respect even the ignorant be-cause they were older.

On that particular night, Kayce nudged me with a sharp elbow the moment I spoke, and I saw the ignorant old woman's mouth turn down in a grimace of dislike and disapproval.

I had just turned 13 when that happened. I remember after church, Kayce and I had a huge fight because she said I was rude to an older person, and I said I didn't care. 1 said I wanted to know whether 1 realty was adopted and if so, who were my real parents.