Parable of the Talents (50 page)

Anyway, some of these dissatisfied people are finding what they want and need in Earthseed. They're the ones who come to me and ask, "What can I do? I believe. Now how can I help?"

So I've begun to reach people. I've reached so many peo-ple from Eureka to Seattle to Syracuse that I believe that even if I were killed tomorrow, some of these people would find ways to go on learning and teaching, pursuing the Des-tiny. Earthseed will go on. It will grow. It will force us to be-come the strong, purposeful, adaptable people that we must become if we're to grow enough to fulfill the Destiny.

I know things will go wrong now and then. Religions are no more perfect than any other human institutions. But Earthseed will fulfill its essential purpose.
It will force us to

become more than we might ever become without it.
And when it's successful, it will offer us a kind of species life in-surance. I wish I could live to see that success. I wish I could be one of those who go out to take root among the stars. I can only hope that my Larkin will go—or perhaps some of her children, or even Marc's children.

Whatever happens, as long as I'm alive, I won't stop working, preaching, aiming people toward the Destiny. I've always known that sharing Earthseed was my only true purpose.

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Earthseed is adulthood.

It's trying our wings,

Leaving our mother,

Becoming men and women.

We've been children,

Fighting for the full breasts,

The protective embrace,

The soft lap.

Children do this.

But Earthseed is adulthood.

Adulthood is both sweet and

sad.

It terrifies.

It empowers.

We are men and women now.

We are Earthseed.

And the Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

UNCLE MARC WAS, in the end, my only family.

I never saw Kayce and Madison again. I sent them money when they were older and in need, and 1 hired people to look after them, but 1 never went back to them. They did their duty toward me and I did mine toward them.

My mother, when I finally met her, was still a drifter. She was immensely rich—or, at least, Earthseed was immensely rich. But she had no home of her own—not even a rented apartment. She drifted between the homes of her many friends and supporters, and between the many Earthseed Communities that she established or encouraged in the United States, Canada, Alaska, Mexico, and Brazil. And she went on teaching, preaching, fund-raising, and spreading her political influence. I met her when she visited a New York Earthseed community in the Adirondacks—a place called Red Spruce.

In fact, she went to Red Spruce to rest. She had been traveling and speaking steadily for several months, and she needed a place where she could be quiet and think. I know this because it was what people kept telling me when I tried to reach her. The community protected her privacy so well that for a while, I was afraid I might never get to see her. I'd read that she usually traveled with only an acolyte or two and, sometimes, a bodyguard, but now it seemed that everyone in the community had decided to guard her.

By then, I was 34, and I wanted very much to meet her.

My friends and Uncle Marc's housekeeper had told me how much I looked like this charismatic, dangerous, heathen cult leader. 1 had paid no attention until, in researching Lauren Olamina's life, I discovered that she had had a child, a daughter, and that that daughter had been abducted from an early Earthseed community called Acorn.

The community, according to Olamina's official biogra-phy, had been destroyed by Jarret's Crusaders back in the 30s. Its men and women had been enslaved for over a year by the Crusaders, and all the prepubescent children had been abducted. Most had never been seen again.

The Church of Christian America had denied this and sued Olamina and Earthseed back in the 2040s when Olam-ina's charge first came to their attention. The church was still powerful, even though Jarret was dead by then. The ru-mors were that Jarret, after his single term as President, drank himself to death. A coalition of angry business peo-ple, protestors against the Al-Can War, and champions of the First Amendment worked hard to defeat him for re-election in 2036. They won by exposing some of the earli-est Christian American witch-burnings. It seems that be-tween 2015 and 2019, Jarret himself took part in singling people out and burning them alive. The Pox, then a grow-ing malignancy, had been both the excuse and the cover for this. Jarret and his friends had burned accused prostitutes, drug dealers, and junkies. Also, in their enthusiasm, they burned some innocent people—people who had nothing to do with the sex trade or drugs. When that happened, Jar-ret's people covered their

"mistakes" with denials, threats, more terror, and occasional payoffs to the bereaved fami-lies. Uncle Marc researched this himself several years ago, and he says it's true—true and sad and wrong, and in the end, irrelevant. He says Jarret's teachings were right even if the man himself did wrong.

Anyway, the Church of Christian America sued Olamina for her "false" accusations. She countersued. Then sud-denly, without explanation, CA dropped its suit and settled with her, paying her an unreported, but reputedly vast sum of money. I was still a kid growing up with the Alexanders when all this happened, and I heard nothing about it. Years later, when I began to research Earthseed and Olamina, I didn't know what to think of it.

I phoned Uncle Marc and asked him, point-blank, whether there was any possibility that this woman could be my mother.

On my phone's tiny monitor, Uncle Marc's face froze, then seemed to sag. He suddenly looked much older than his 54

years. He said, "I'll talk to you about this when I come home." And he broke the connection. He wouldn't take my calls after that. He had never refused my calls be-fore. Never.

Not knowing what else to do, where else to turn, 1 checked the nets to see where Lauren Olamina might be speaking or organizing. To my surprise, I learned that she was "resting" at Red Spruce, less than a hundred kilometers from where I was.

And all of a sudden, I had to see her.

I didn't try to phone her, didn't try to reach her with Uncle Marc's well-known name or my own name as a cre-ator of several popular Masks. I just showed up at Red Spruce, rented a room at their guest house, and began try-ing to find her. Earthseed doesn't bother with a lot of for-mality. Anyone can visit its communities and rent a room at a guest house.

Visitors came to see relatives who were members, came to attend Gatherings or other ceremonies, even came to join Earthseed and arrange to begin their pro-bationary first year.

I told the manager of the guest house that I thought I might be a relative of Olamina's and asked him if he could tell me how I might make an appointment to speak with her. I asked him because I had heard people call him "Shaper" and I recognized that from my reading as a title of respect akin to

"reverend" or "minister." If he was the com-munity's minister, he might be able to introduce me to Olamina himself.

Perhaps he could have, but he refused. Shaper Olamina was very tired, and not to be bothered, he told me. If I wanted to meet her, I should attend one of her Gatherings or phone her headquarters in Eureka, California, and arrange an appointment.

I had to hang around the community for three days be-fore I could find anyone willing to take my message to her. 1

didn't see her. No one would even tell me where she was staying within the community. They protected her from me courteously, firmly. Then, all of a sudden, the wall around her gave way. I met one of her acolytes and he took my mes-sage to her.

My messenger was a thin, brown-haired young man who said his name was Edison Balter. I met him in the guest-house dining room one morning as we each sat alone, eat-ing bagels and drinking apple cider. I pounced on him as someone I hadn't pestered yet. I had no idea at that time what the Balter name meant to my mother or that this man was an adopted son of one of her best friends. I was only relieved that someone was listening to me, not closing one more door in my face.

"I'm her aide this trip," he told me. "She says I'm just about ready to go out on my own, and the idea scares the hell out of me. What name shall I give her?"

"Asha Vere."

"Oh? Are you the Asha Vere who does Dreamasks?"

I nodded.

"Nice work. I'll tell her. You want to put her in one of your Masks? You know you do look a lot like her. Like a softer version of her." And he was gone. He talked fast and moved very fast, but somehow without seeming to hurry. He didn't look anything like Olamina himself, but there was a similarity.

I found that I liked him at once—just as I'd at first found myself liking her. Another likable cultist. I got the feeling that Red Spruce, a clean, pretty mountain com-munity, was nothing but a nest of seductively colorful snakes—a poisonous place.

Then Edison Balter came back and told me he would take me to her. She was somewhere in her fifties—58, I remem-bered from my reading. She was born way back in 2009, be-fore the Pox. My god. She was old. But she didn't look old, even though her black hair was streaked with gray.

She looked big and strong and, in spite of her pleasant, welcom-ing expression, just a little frightening. She was a little taller than me, and maybe a little more angular. She looked... not hard, but as though she could be hard with just the smallest change of expression. She looked like someone I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. And, yes, even 1

could see it. She looked like me.

She and I just stood looking at one another for a long, long time. After a while, she came up to me, took my left hand, and turned it to look at the two little moles I have just below the knuckles. My impulse was to pull away, but I managed not to.

She stared at the moles for a while, then said, "Do you have another mark—a kind of jagged dark patch just here?"

She touched a place covered by my blouse on my left shoul-der near my neck.

This time, I did step away from her touch. I didn't mean to, but I just don't like to be touched. Not even by a stranger who might be my mother. I said, "I have a birth-mark like that, yes."

"Yes," she whispered, and went on looking at me. After a moment, she said, "Sit down. Sit here with me. You are my child, my daughter. I know you are."

I sat in a chair instead of sharing the couch with her. She was open and welcoming, and somehow, that made me want all the more to draw back.

"Have you only just found out?" she asked.

I nodded, tried to speak, and found myself stumbling and stammering. "I came here because 1 thought. . . maybe . . .

because I looked up information about you, and I was curi-ous. I mean, I read about Earthseed, and people said I looked like you, and . . . well, I knew I was adopted, so I wondered."

"So you had adoptive parents. Were they good to you?

What's your life been like? What do y o u . . . . " She stopped, drew a deep breath, covered her face with both hands for a moment, shook her head, then gave a short laugh. "I want to know everything! I can't believe that it's you. I . . . . " Tears began to stream down her broad, dark face. She leaned to-ward me, and I knew she wanted to hug me. She hugged people. She touched people. She hadn't been raised by Kayce and Madison Alexander.

I looked away from her and shifted around trying to get comfortable in my chair, in my skin, in my newfound iden-tity. "Can we do a gene print?" I asked.

"Yes. Today. Now." She took a phone from her pocket and called someone. No more than a minute later, a woman dressed all in blue came in carrying a small plastic case. She drew a small amount of blood from each of us, and checked it in a portable diagnostic from her case. The unit wasn't much bigger than Olamina's phone. In less than a minute, though, it spit out two gene prints. They were rough and incomplete, but even I could see both their many differ-ences and their many unmistakably identical points.

"You're close relatives," the woman said. "Anyone would guess that just from looking at you, but this confirms it."

"We're mother and daughter," Olamina said.

"Yes," the woman in blue agreed. She was my mother's age or older—a Puerto Rican woman by her accent. She had not a strand of gray in her black hair, but her face was lined and old. "I had heard, Shaper, that you had a daughter who was lost. And now you've found her."

"She's found me," my mother said.

"God is Change," the woman said, and gathered her equipment. She hugged my mother before she left us. She looked at me, but didn't hug me. "Welcome," she said to me in soft Spanish, and then again, "God is Change." And she was gone.

"Shape God," my mother whispered in a response that sounded both reflexive and religious.

Then we talked.

"I had parents." I said. "Kayce and Madison Alexander.

I………We didn't get along. I haven't seen them since I turned 18. They said, 'If you leave without getting married, don't come back!' So I didn't. Then I found Uncle Marc, and I finally—"

She stood up, staring down at me, staring with such a closed look frozen on her face. It shut me out, that look, and I wondered whether this was what she was really like— cold, distant, unfeeling. Did she only pretend to be warm and open to deceive her public?

"When?" she demanded, and her tone was as cold as her expression. "When did you find Marc? When did you learn that he was your uncle? How did you find out? Tell me!"

I stared at her. She stared back for a moment, then began to pace. She walked to a window, faced it for several sec-onds, staring out at the mountains. Then she came back to look down at me with what I could only think of as quieter eyes.

"Please tell me about your life," she said. "You probably know something about mine because so much has been written. But I know nothing about yours. Please tell me."

Irrationally, I didn't want to. I wanted to get away from her. She was one of those people who sucked you in, made you like her before you could even get to know her, and only then let you see what she might really be like. She had millions of people convinced that they were going to fly off to the stars. How much money had she taken from them while they waited for the ship to Alpha Centauri? My god, I didn't want to like her. I wanted the ugly persona I had glimpsed to be what she really was. 1 wanted to despise her.