Parable of the Talents (48 page)
1 thought the best we could all do was to look after one an-other and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth. That seemed to me a big enough job for any person or group, and that was one of the good things that Christian America worked hard at.
I went on living in Uncle Marc's upstate New York house.
Once I had my Master's, I began work on my Ph.D. Also, I began creating Dreamask scenarios. Dreamask International hired me on the strength of several scenarios I had done for them on speculation.
Now, thanks to Uncle Marc, I had the Dreamask scenario recorder I had longed for when I was little. Now I had the freedom to create pretty much anything I wanted to. I did my work under the name Asha Vere. I wanted no connection with the Alexanders, yet I felt uncomfortable about trading on my connection with Uncle Marc, and calling myself Duran. At the time, I believed Duran was my mother's family name. My fa-ther's surname, "Bankole," meant nothing to me since Uncle Marc couldn't tell me much about Taylor Franklin Bankole— only that he was a doctor and very old when I was born. Asha Vere was name enough for me. It dated me as a child born during the popularity of a particular early Mask, but that didn't matter. And the Dreamask people kind of liked it.
I worked at home on my Masks and on my Ph.D., and was so casual about the degree that I was 32 before I completed it. I enjoyed the work, enjoyed Marc's company when he came to me to get away from his public and enjoy some feel-ing of family. 1 was happy. I never found anyone I wanted to marry. In fact, I had never seen a marriage that I would have wanted to be part of. There must be good marriages some-where, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn't quite break. I knew that not everyone's marriage was as ster-ile and ugly as Kayce's and Madison's. I knew that intellectu-ally, but emotionally, I couldn't seem to escape Kayce's cold, bitter dissatisfaction and Madison's moist little hands.
Uncle Marc, on the other hand, had said without ever quite saying it that he preferred men sexually, but his church taught that homosexuality was sin, and he chose to live by that doctrine. So he had no one. Or at least, I never knew him to have anyone. That looks bleak on the page, but we each chose our lives. And we had one another. We were a family.
That seemed to be enough.
Meanwhile, my mother was giving her attention to her other child, her older and best beloved child, Earthseed.
Somehow we—or at least
I
—never paid much attention to the growing Earthseed movement. It was out there. In spite of the efforts of Christian America and other denominations, there were always cults out there. Granted, Earthseed was an unusual cult, ft financed scientific exploration and inquiry, and techno-logical creativity. It set up grade schools and eventually col-leges, and offered full scholarships to poor but gifted students. The students who accepted had to agree to spend seven years teaching, practicing medicine, or otherwise using their skills to improve life in the many Earthseed communities. Ultimately, the intent was to help the communities to launch themselves toward the stars and to live on the distant worlds they found circling those stars.
"Do you know anything about these people?" I asked Uncle Marc after reading and hearing a few news items about them. "Are they serious? Interstellar emigration? My god, why don't they just move to Antarctica if they want to rough it?" And he surprised me by making a straight line of his mouth and looking away. I had expected him to laugh.
"They're serious," he said. "They're sad, ridiculous, misled people who believe that the answer to all human problems is to fly off to Alpha Centauri."
I did laugh. "Is a flying saucer coming for them or what?"
He shrugged. "They're pathetic. Forget about them."
I didn't, of course. I left my usual haunts on the nets and began to research them. I wasn't serious. I didn't plan to do anything with what I learned, but I was curious—and I might get an idea for a Mask. I found that Earthseed was a wealthy sect that welcomed everyone and was willing to make use of everyone. It owned land, schools, farms, factories, stores, banks, several whole towns. And it seemed to own a lot of well-known people—lawyers, physicians, journalists, scien-tists, politicians, even members of Congress.
And were they all hoping to fly off to Alpha Centauri?
It wasn't that simple, of course. But to tell the truth, the more I read about Earthseed, the more I despised it. So much needed to be done here on earth—so many diseases, so much hunger, so much poverty, such suffering, and here was a rich organization spending vast sums of money, time, and effort on nonsense. Just nonsense!
Then I found
The Books of the Living
and I accessed images and information concerning Lauren Oya Olamina.
Even after reading about my mother and seeing her I didn't notice anything. I never looked at her image and thought,
"Oh, she looks like me." She did look like me, though—or rather, I looked like her. But I didn't notice. All I saw was a tall, middle-aged, dark-skinned woman with ar-resting eyes and a nice smile. She looked, somehow, like someone I would be inclined to like and trust—which scared me. It made me immediately dislike and distrust her. She was a cult leader, after all. She was supposed to be seductive. But she wasn't going to seduce me.
And all that was only my reaction to her image. No wonder she was so rich, no wonder she could draw followers even into such a ridiculous religion. She was dangerous.
FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, JULY
29, 2035 Portland.
I've gathered a few more people. They aren't people who will travel with me or come together in easily targetable vil-lages.
They're people in stable homes—or people who need homes.
Isis Duarte Norman, for instance, lives in a park between the river and the burned, collapsed remains of an old hotel.
She has a shack there—wood covered with plastic sheeting.
Each evening she can be found there. During the day she works, cleaning other women's houses. This enables her to eat and keep herself and her secondhand clothing clean. She has a hard life, but it's as respectable as she can make it. She's 43.
The man she married when she was 23 dumped her six years ago for a 14-year-old girl—the daughter of one of his servants.
"She was so beautiful," Isis said. "I knew he wouldn't be able to keep his hands off her. I couldn't protect her from him any more than I could protect myself, but I never thought that he would keep her and throw me out."
He did. And for six years, she's been homeless and all but hopeless. She said she had thought of killing herself. Only fear had stopped her—the fear of not quite dying, of maim-ing herself and dying a slow, lingering death of pain and starvation. That could happen. Portland is a vast, crowded city. It isn't Los Angeles or the Bay Area, but it is huge. Peo-ple ignore one another in self-defense.
I find this both use-ful and frightening. When I met Isis, it was because I went to the door of a home where she was working.
Otherwise, she would never have dared to talk to me. As it was, she was designated to assemble a meal and bring it to me when I had finished cleaning up the backyard.
She was wary when she brought the food. Then she looked at the backyard and told me I had done a good job. We talked for a while. I walked her to her shack—which made her nervous. I was a man again. I find it inconvenient and dangerous to be on the street as a homeless woman. Other people manage it well. I don't, somehow.
I left Isis without seeing the inside of her shack. Best not to push people. Best, as Len says, to seduce them. I've seen Isis several times since then. I've talked with her, read verses to her, captured her interest. She has two half-grown children who live with their father's mother, so she cares, in spite of herself, about what the future will bring. I intend to find a real home for her by getting her a live-in job looking after children. That might take time, but I intend to do it.
************************************
Then Joel and Irma invited us in to eat with them at their table. I had done a quick sketch of Irma to catch her atten-tion, and added a verse that was intended to reach her through environmental interests that I had heard her express:
There is nothing alien
About nature.
Nature
Is all that exists.
It's the earth
And all that's on it.
It's the universe
And all that's in it.
It's God,
Never at rest.
It's you,
Me,
Us,
Them,
Struggling upstream
Or drifting down.
Also, perhaps because her mother had died the year before, Irma also seemed touched by this fragment of funeral oration.
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
We were an unexpected novelty, and the Elfords were cu-rious about us. They let us wash up in their back bathroom and change into cleaner clothing from our packs. Then they sat us down, fed us a huge meal, and began to ask us ques-tions. Where were we going? Did we have homes?
Fami-lies? No? Well, how long had we been homeless? What did we do for shelter in rough weather? Weren't we afraid
"out there"?
I answered for both of us at first, since Len did not seem inclined to talk, and I answered as often with Earthseed verses as with ordinary conversation. It didn't take long for Irma to ask, "What is it you're quoting from?" And then,
"May I see it? I've never heard of it." And, "Is this Bud-dhist?
No, I see that it isn't. I very nearly became a Buddhist when I was younger." She's 37. "Very simple little verses. Very direct But some of them are lovely."
"I want to be understood," I said. "I want to make it easy for people to understand. It doesn't always work, but I was serious about the effort"
Irma was all I could have hoped for. "You wrote these?
You? Really? Then tell me please, on page 47 . . . "
They're quiet, childless, middle-aged people who choose to live in a modest, middle-class neighborhood even though they could afford their own walled enclave. They're inter-ested in the world around them and worried about the direc-tion the country has taken. I could see their wealth in the beautiful, expensive little things they've scattered around their home—antique silver and crystal, old leather-bound paper books, paintings, and, for a touch of the modern, a cover-the-earth phone net system that includes, according to Len, the latest in Virtual rooms. They can have all the sights and other sensations of visiting anyplace on earth or any programmed-in imaginary place, all without leaving home.
And yet they were interested in talking to us.
We had to be careful, though. The Elfords may be bored and hungry for both novelty and purpose, but they're not fools. I had to be more open with them than I have been with people like Isis. I told them much of my own story, and I told them what I'm trying to do. They thought I was brave, naive, ridiculous, and. . . interesting. Out of pity and cu-riosity they let us sleep in the comfortable little guest house at the back of their property.
The next day, when we had painted the fence, they found more small jobs for us to do, and now and then, they talked to us. And they let us talk to them. They never lost interest.
"What will you ask them to do?" Len said to me that night as we settled in again in the guest house. "You have them, you know, even if they don't realize it yet"
I nodded. "They're hungry for something to do," I said,
"starved for some kind of real purpose. I think they'll have some suggestions themselves. They'll feel better if they make the first suggestions. They'll feel in control. Later, I want them to take Allie in. This guest house would be per-fect for her and Justin. When they see what she can do with a few sticks of wood and simple tools, they'll be glad to have her.
And I think I'll introduce Allie to Isis. I have the feeling they'll hit it off."
"The Elfords have all but seduced themselves for you,"
Len said.
I nodded. "Think about all the other people we've met who've given us nothing but trouble. I'm glad to meet eager, enthusiastic people now and then."
And of course, I've found my brother again. I find that I've not wanted to talk about that.
Marc has been preaching at one of the big Portland shel-ters, helping out with shelter maintenance, and attending a Christian American seminary. He wants to be an ordained minister. He was not happy to see me. I kept showing up to hear him and leaving notes that I wanted a meeting. It took him two weeks to give in.
"I suppose if I moved to Michigan, you'd turn up there," he said by way of greeting.
We were meeting in his apartment building—which was more like a big dormitory. Because he wasn't permitted to have guests in his apartment, we met in the large dining room just off the lobby. It was a clean, dim, plain room crowded with mismatched wooden tables and chairs and nothing else.