Parable of the Talents (6 page)

"It's a shame that so many of your unnecessary risks pay off so well," he said to me as we lay in bed last night. "You're a fool, you know. It's as though you think you can't be killed.

My god, girl, you're old enough to know better."

"I wanted the housetruck," I said. "And I realized we might be able to get it. And we might be able to help a child. We kept hearing one of them crying."

He turned his head to look at me for several seconds, his mouth set. "You've seen children led down the road in con-vict collars or chains," he said. "You've seen them displayed as enticements before houses of prostitution. Are you going to tell me you did this because you heard one crying?"

"I do what I can," I said. "When I can do more, I will. You know that."

He just looked at me. If I didn't love him, I might not like him much at times like these. I took his hand and kissed it, and held it. "I do what I can." I repeated, "And I wanted the housetruck."

"Enough to risk not only yourself, but your whole team—four people?"

"The risk in running away empty-handed was at least as great as the risk of going for the truck."

He made a sound of disgust and withdrew his hand. "So now you've got a battered old housetruck," he muttered.

I nodded. "So now we have it. We need it. You know we do. It's a beginning."

"It's not worth anyone's life!"

"It didn't cost any of our lives!" I sat up and looked down at him. I needed to have him see me as well as he could in the dim light from the window. I wanted to have him know that I meant what I was saying. "If I had to die," I said, "if I had to get shot by strangers, shouldn't it be while I was try-ing to help the community, and not just while I was trying to run away?"

He raised his hands and gave me an ironic round of ap-plause. "I knew you would say something like that, Well, I never thought you were stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid. That being the case, I have a proposition for you."

He sat up and I moved close to him and pulled the blan-kets up around us. I leaned against him and sat, waiting.

Whatever he had to say, I felt that I'd gotten my point across.

If he wanted to call my thinking obsessive, I didn't care.

“I’ve been looking at some of the towns in the area," he said. "Saylorville, Halstead, Coy—towns that are a few miles off the highway. None of them need a doctor now, but one probably will someday soon. How would you feel about living in one of those towns?"

I sat still, surprised. He meant it. Saylorville? Halstead?

Coy? These are communities so small that I'm not sure they qualify as towns. Each has no more than a few families and businesses huddled together between the highway—U.S.

101—and the sea. We trade at their street markets, but they're closed societies, these towns. They tolerate "for-eign"

visitors, but they don't like us. They've been burned too many times by strangers passing through—people who turned out to be thieves or worse. They trust only their own and long-established neighboring farmers. Did Bankole think that they would welcome us? Except for a larger town called Prata, the nearest towns are almost all White. Prata is White and Latino with a sprinkling of Asians. We're you name it: Black, White, Latino, Asian, and any mixture at all—the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a city. The kids we've adopted and the ones who have been born to us think of all the mixing and matching as normal. Imagine that.

Bankole and I both Black, have managed to mix things up agewise. He's always being mistaken for my father. When he corrects people, they wink at him or frown or grin. Here in Acorn, if people don't understand us, at least they accept us.

"I'm content here," I said. "The land is yours. The com-munity is ours. With our work, and with Earthseed to guide us, we're building something good here. It will grow and spread. We'll see that it does. But for now, nothing in any of those towns is ours."

"It can be," he said. "You don't realize how valuable a physician is to an isolated community."

"Oh, don't I? I know how valuable you are to us."

He turned his head toward me. "More valuable than a truck?"

"Idiot," I said. "You want to hear praise? Fine. Consider yourself praised. You know how many of our lives you've saved—including mine."

He seemed to think about that for a moment. "This is a healthy young group of people," he said. "Except for the Dovetree woman, even your most recent adoptees are healthy people who've been injured, not sick people. We have no old people." He grinned. "Except me. No chronic problems except for Katrina Dovetree's heart. Not even a problem pregnancy or a child with worms. Almost any town in the area needs a doctor more than Acorn does."

"They need any doctor. We need you. Besides, they have what they need."

"As I've said, they won't always."

"I don't care." I moved against him. "You belong here.

Don't even think about going away."

“Thinking is all I can do about it right now. I'm thinking about a safe place for us, a safe place for you when I'm dead."

I winced.

"I'm an old man, girl. I don't kid myself about that."

"Bankole—"

"I have to think about it. I want you to think about it too.

Do that for me. Just think about it."

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

God is Change,

And in the end,

God prevails.

But meanwhile . . .

Kindness eases Change.

Love quiets fear.

And a sweet and powerful

Positive obsession

Blunts pain,

Diverts rage,

And engages each of us

In the greatest,

The most intense

Of our chosen struggles

FROM Memories of Other Worlds

I cannot know what the end will be of all of Olamina's dreaming, striving, and certainty. I cannot recall ever feeling as certain of anything as she seems to be of Earthseed, a be-lief system that she herself created—or, as she says, a net-work of truths that she has simply recognized. I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are ir-rational states of mind.

Olamina believes in a god that does not in the least love her. In fact, her god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity. It is not consciously aware of her—

or of anything. It is not conscious at all. "God is Change," she says and means it. Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics.

"God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails."

Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even the Earthseed Destiny seems to have little to do with religion.

"We are Earthseed," Olamina says. "We are the children of God, as all fractions of the universe are the children of God.

But more immediately we are the children of our par-ticular Earth." And within those words lies the origin of the Destiny.

That portion of humanity that is conscious, that knows it is Earthseed, and that accepts its Destiny is simply trying to leave the womb, the Earth, to be born as all young beings must do eventually.

Earthseed is Olamina's contribution to what she feels should be a species-wide effort to evade, or at least to lengthen the specialize-grow-die evolutionary cycle that humanity faces, that every species faces.

"We can be a long-term success and the parents, our-selves, of a vast array of new peoples, new species," she says, "or we can be just one more abortion. We can, we must, scatter the Earth's living essence—human, plant, and animal—to extrasolar worlds: 'The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.'"

Grand words.

She hopes and dreams and writes and believes, and per-haps the world will let her live for a while, tolerating her as a harmless eccentric. I hope that it will. I fear that it may not.

************************************

When my mother was a child, protected and imprisoned by the walls of her neighborhood, she dreamed of the stars.

Literally, at night she dreamed of them. And she dreamed of flying. I've seen her flying dreams mentioned in her earliest writings. Awake or asleep, she dreamed of these things. As far as I'm concerned, that's what she was doing when she created her Earthseed Destiny and her Earthseed verses: dreaming. We all need dreams—our fantasies—to sustain us through hard times. There's no harm in that as long as we don't begin to mistake our fantasies for reality as she did. It seems that she doubted herself from time to time, but she never doubted the dream, never doubted Earthseed. Like my father, I can't feel that secure about any religion. That's odd, considering the way i was raised, but it's true.

I've seen religious passion in other people, though—love for a compassionate God, fear of an angry God, fulsome praise and desperate pleading for a God that rewards and punishes. All that makes me wonder how a belief system like Earthseed—very demanding but offering so little comfort from such an utterly indifferent God—should inspire any loy-alty at all.

In Earthseed, there is no promised afterlife. Earthseed's heaven is literal, physical—other worlds circling other stars.

It promises its people immortality only through their chil-dren, their work, and their memories. For the human species, immortality is something to be won by sowing Earthseed on other worlds. Its promise is not of mansions to live in, milk and honey to drink, or eternal oblivion in some vast whole of nirvana, its promise is of hard work and brand-new possibili-ties, problems, challenges, and changes.

Apparently, that can be surprisingly seductive to some people. My mother was a surprisingly seductive person.

There is an Earthseed verse that goes like this:

God is Change.

God is Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

God is Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay—

God is Change.

Beware:

God exists to shape

And to be shaped.

This is a terrifying God, implacable, faceless, yet malleable and wildly dynamic. I suppose it will soon be wearing my mother's face. Her second name was "Oya." I wonder what-ever possessed my Baptist minister grandfather to give her such a name. What did he see in her? "Oya" is the name of a Nigerian Orisha—goddess—of the Yoruba people. In fact, the original Oya was the goddess of the Niger River, a dynamic, dangerous entity. She was also goddess of the wind, fire, and death, more bringers of great change.

FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2032

Krista Noyer died today.

That was her name: Krista Koslow Noyer. She never re-gained consciousness. From the time we found her beaten, raped, and shot, lying naked in her family's housetruck, she's been in a deep coma. We've kept her and her wounded son in the clinic together. The five Dovetrees have moved in with Jeff King and his children, but it seemed best to keep Krista Noyer and her son at the clinic.

Zahra Baker and Allie Gilchrist helped to clean them up, then assisted Bankole when he removed five bullets from their bodies—two from the mother and three from the son.

Zahra and Allie have been working with Bankole longer than Mike and Natividad have. They're not doctors, of course, but they know a lot Bankole says he thinks they could function well as nurse practitioners now.

He, all four of his helpers, and others who gave volunteer nursing care did their best for the Noyers. After Krista Noyer's surgery, Zahra, Natividad, Allie, Noriko Kardos, Channa Ryan, and Teresa Lin took turns sitting with her, tending her needs. Bankole says he wanted women around her in case she came to. He thought the sight of male strangers would panic her.

I suspect that he was right. Poor woman.

At least her son was with her when she died. He lay on the bed next to hers, sometimes reaching out to touch her. They were only separated by one of our homemade privacy screens when personal things had to be done for one of them. There was no screen between them when Krista died.

The boy's name is Danton Noyer, Junior. He wants to be called Dan. We burned the body of Danton Noyer, Senior, as soon as we got it back to Acorn. Now we'll have to burn his wife. We'll hold services for both of them when Dan is well enough to attend.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER
17, 2032

We had a double funeral today for Danton Noyer, Senior and his wife Krista.

Under Bankole's care, Dan Noyer is recovering. His legs and shoulder are healing, and he can walk a little. Bankole says he can thank the maggots for that. Not only did the dis-gusting little things keep his wounds clean by eating the dead tissue, but they did no harm. This particular kind have no appetite for healthy, living tissue. They eat the stuff that would putrefy and cause gangrene, then, unless they're re-moved, they metamorphose and fly away.

The little girls, Kassia and Mercy, had, at first, to be kept inside so that they would not run away. They had nowhere to go, but they were so frightened and confused that they kept trying to escape. When they were allowed to visit their brother they had to be kept from hurting him. They ran to him and would have piled onto his bed for reassurance and comfort if May and Allie had not stopped them. May seems best able to reach them. They seem to be adopting both women—and vice versa—but they seem to have a special liking for May.

She's something of a mystery, our May. I'm teaching her to write so that someday she'll be able to tell us her story. She looks as though she might be a Latina, but she doesn't understand Spanish. She does understand English, but doesn't speak it well enough to be understood most of the time. That's because sometime before she joined us, someone cut out her tongue.