Parable of the Talents

After dinner, after the sermon, I managed to make myself go up to one of the servers—a blond woman with a long red scar on her forehead. She was one of the few who laughed and talked with us as she scooped stew into bowls and passed out bread. I asked her to give my note to lay minis­ter Marcos Duran. As it happened, she knew him.

"He's not here anymore," she said. "He was transferred to Portland."

"Oregon?" I asked, and then felt stupid. Of course she meant Portland, Oregon.

"Yeah," the server said. "He left a few days ago. He was offered a chance to do more preaching at our new center in Portland, and he's always wanted that What a nice man. We were sorry to lose him. Did you ever hear him preach?"

"A couple of times," I said. "Are you sure he's gone?"

"Yeah. We had a party for him. He'll be a great minister someday. A great minister. He's so spiritual." She sighed.

Maybe "spiritual" is another word for fantastically good-looking in her circles. Anyway, he was gone. Instead of helping me find Larkin or even seeing me again, he had gone.

I thanked the server and headed out into the evening to­ward the home of the 88-year-old man where I was still stay­ing. I had left my spare clothing and my sleepsack in his garage. For once, I was traveling light My backpack was half-empty. I walked automatically, not thinking about where I was going. I was wondering whether I could reach Marc again, wondering whether it would do me any good to reach him. What would he do if I showed up in Portland? Run for Seattle? Why had he run, anyway? I wouldn't have hurt him—wouldn't have said or done anything that could damage his lay-minister reputation. Did he run because I mentioned Cougar? Maybe it had been a mistake for me to tell him what happened to us, to Acorn. Maybe I should have told him the same thing I had told the police. "Well, I was walking north on U.S. 101, heading for Eureka, and these guys….."

Was it so essential for him to be important in CA that he didn't care what vicious things CA was doing, didn't care even what CA did to the only family he had left?

Then there was a man looming in front of me—a huge man, tall and broad and wearing a CA Center Security uni­form. I stopped just before I would have slammed into him. I jumped back. My impulse was to run like hell. This guy looked scary enough to make anyone run. But the truth was, I was frozen with fear. I couldn't move. I just stared up at him.

He put a huge hand inside his uniform jacket, and I had a flash of it coming out holding a gun—not that this guy needed a gun to kill me. He was a giant.

But his hand came out of his jacket holding an enve­lope—a little white paper envelope like the kind mail used to come in. Back when we lived in Robledo my father some­times brought home paper mail from the college in such envelopes.

"Reverend Duran said to give this to anyone tall and Black and asking for him by name," the giant said. He had a soft, quiet voice that made his appearance less threatening somehow. "Looks like you qualify," he finished.

I had to make myself reach out and take the envelope.

The giant stared at me for a moment, then said, "He told me you were his sister."

I nodded.

"He said you might be dressed as a man."

I didn't answer. I couldn't quite form words yet.

"He said he's sorry. He asked me to tell you that you could get a bed at the Center for as long as you needed one. I'll be around. He's my friend. I'll look out for you."

"No," I said, getting my voice to work at last. "But thank you." I stood straight, never knowing when I had crouched in my fear. I extended a hand, and the giant took it and shook it "Thank you," I repeated, and he was gone, striding back toward the Center.

I didn't stop to think. I tucked Marcus's envelope into my blouse and walked on. You didn't stand opening things on dark streets in this part of town. I kept my ears open now, and paid attention to my surroundings. The giant had caught up with me, passed me, and gotten in front of me and I hadn't heard a thing. That kind of inattention was beyond stupid. It was suicidal.

And yet I had almost relaxed again by the time I was only three blocks from the old man's little house. I was tired, full of food, looking forward to my warm pallet, and eager to see what my brother had written.

Then, through my preoccupations, I began to hear foot­steps. I swung around just in time to startle and confront the two men who were creeping up behind me. My gun was out of reach in my backpack, but my knife was in my pocket. I grabbed it and flipped it open before these guys could re­cover and clean the street with me. They weren't big, but there were two of them. I put my back against someone's redwood fence, and let them decide how much they wanted what they thought I had. In fact I was carrying not only my gun but enough money to make them happy for days, as well as Marcus's note, and I wasn't eager to give up any of it

"Just put the pack down, girl," one said. "Put the pack down and back away from it We'll let you go."

I didn't move. To take my pack off, I would have had to lower my knife and trust these two not to jump me. That I didn't dare do. I didn't answer them. I wasn't interested in talking to them. I hated hearing the one call me "girl." It was what Bankole called me with love. And here was the word in someone else's mouth with contempt.

I don't know whether or not I was being stupid. I know I was scared to death and I was angry. I tried to stoke the anger.

I saw that one of them had a knife too. It was an old steak knife, but it was a knife—made for cutting meat.

The one with the knife lunged at me. An instant later, the other lunged too—one to cut, one to grab.

I dropped to the ground and stabbed upward into the belly of the knife-wielder. As I jerked my knife free, not looking, not wanting to see what I had done, I rammed my body backward against the legs of the other man—or against where his legs should have been. I only hit one of them— enough to trip him, but he seemed to recover without falling. Then he did fall. He toppled like a tree as I scrambled to my feet

They were both down, one curled around his belly wound, groaning, and the other making no sound at all ex­cept his rasping breathing. The steak knife stuck out of him just below the breastbone.

Shit

I fell to my knees, my body a flaming mass of agony, from other people's knife wounds. I twisted away from mem both, crawled away from them on all fours, dripping tears at the terrible, terrible pain. I dragged myself around a comer and sat there on the broken concrete for a long time. I was shaking with the pain, gasping with it until at last, it began to ease. I got up before it was altogether gone. I went to the old man's garage as quickly as I could. The pain was gone by the time I got there, and the anger had long since gone. There was nothing left but the fear. I got my things together as fast as I could, stuffed them into my pack, and headed out of town. Maybe I didn't have to leave. Maybe the tramp who had been living in the old man's garage would never be con­nected with the two dead or soon-to-be dead men on the street nearby. Maybe.

But I would not risk a collar.

So I ran.

So I run. I had to check the tree before I headed for Port­land, and I'm going to stop at Georgetown. Then I'll take an inland route and avoid Eureka. Meanwhile, here are the words my brother left me:

"Lauren, I'm sorry I hit you—really sorry. I hope I didn't hurt you too much. It's just that I couldn't stand to lose everything again. I just couldn't. That keeps happening to me. 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, ab­solutely 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 nation­wide 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 si­lence.' But don't worry. There's plenty of other more suit­able 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 de­cided he had—or at least the server who told me he had be­lieved 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 con­cerned, 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 ef­fort to stop them. He shouldn't want them to make their in­sanity 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 organiza­tion 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.

Chapter 19

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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 al­lowed to use Dreamasks with strict Christian American sce­narios—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 al­lowed no free time—no recess or lunch breaks. We were kept an hour late every day. We were monitored even in the bath­room to make sure we weren't indulging in more wicked­ness—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 pornog­raphy I managed to find, most of the scenarios I was per­mitted 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 Chris­tian 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 be­cause 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 Amer­ica, 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 beau­tiful, powerful "real" parents who would come for me some­day.

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, em­bezzlers, 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 experi­ence, 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 Antarc­tica 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 feel­ings? I wasn't sure. Not like Madison, for sure. Like the fa­thers 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 com­monplace 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 bas­tard 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 ser­vice. 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 be­cause 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.

Kayce said she and Madison were the only parents I had to worry about, and I was an ungrateful little heathen not to ap­preciate what I had.

That was that.

When I was 15, an enemy at school told me my real mother was not only a heathen but a whore and a murderer. I hit her before 1 even thought about it—and I discovered that I didn't know my own strength. I broke her jaw. She was screaming and crying and bleeding, and I was horrified—scared to death. I got kicked out of school, and very nearly collared as a juvenile felon. Only Madison and our minister working to­gether managed to keep my neck out of a collar. This was the beginning of the worst part of my adolescence. I was grateful to Madison. I hadn't thought he would fight for me. i hadn't thought he would fight for anything. He had become even more of a shadow as I had grown. He repaired aging com­puters for poor working people. He had seemed closer to his tools than he did to me, except when he was feeling me up.

Then, on Saturday, after my troubles had been papered over, while Kayce was attending some women's-group thing at Church, Madison explained to me how grateful I should be to him. He had saved me from a collar. He read me an article about collars—how they hurt, how they can "pacify" even the most violent criminal and still leave him able to do use­ful work, how the holder of a collar control unit is "a virtual puppet master" as far as the convict is concerned. And al­though the pain that the collar can deliver is intense, it leaves no mark and does no permanent harm no matter how often it must be used.

Madison gave me some other articles to read. As I took them, he reached out with both sweaty little hands and felt my breasts.

"It wouldn't hurt you to show some gratitude," he said to me when I pulled away. "I saved you from something really brutal. I don't know. You're so ungrateful. Maybe I won't be able to save you next time." He paused. "You know, your mama wanted to let you go on and be collared. She thinks you hurt that girl on purpose." Another pause. "You need to be nice to me, Asha. I'm all you've got."

He kept after me. There were times when I thought I should just sleep with him and be done with it. But I was back in school by then and I could stay away from home most of the time. He was such a godawful whiny man. My only good luck was that he was small, and after a while, I realized he was a little bit afraid of me. That was a shock. I had grown up timid and afraid of almost everyone—resentful, but afraid. I had to be provoked suddenly and severely to make me react with anything other than argument. That's why I was so upset when I broke the girl's jaw. Not only did I not know that I could hurt someone that badly, but I wasn't the kind of person who hurt people at all.

But somehow, Madison didn't know that.

He wouldn't let me alone, but at least he didn't use phys­ical force on me. His moist little hands kept wandering and he kept pleading, and he watched me. His eyes followed me so much, I was afraid Kayce would notice and blame me. He tried to peek at me in the bathroom—1 caught him at it twice. He tried to watch me in my bedroom when I was dressing.

At 15, I couldn't wait to get out of the house and away from both of them for good.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

thursday, june 7, 2035

I'm back at Georgetown. I need to rest a little, check in with Allie, clean up, pick up some of the things I left with her, and gather what information I can. Then I'll head for Ore­gon. I need to get out of the area for a while, and going up where Marc is seems a good choice. He won't want to see me. He needs to be part of Christian America even though he knows that Christian America's hands are far from clean. If he doesn't want me around reminding him what kind of people he's mixed up with, let him help me. Once I've got my child back, he'll never have to see me again—unless he wants to.

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

It's hard to accept even the comforts of Georgetown now. It seems that I can only stand myself when I'm moving, work­ing, searching for Larkin. I've got to get out of here.

Allie says I should stay until next week. She says I look like hell. I suppose I did when I arrived. After all, I was pre­tending to be a vagrant I've cleaned up now and gone back to being an ordinary woman. But even when I was clean, she said I looked older. 'Too much older," she said.

"You've got your Justin back," I told her, and she looked away, looked at Justin, who was playing basketball with some other Georgetown kids. They had nailed an honest-to­goodness basket-without-a-bottom high up on someone's cabin wall. Early Georgetown cabins were made of notched logs, stone, and mud. They're heavy, sturdy things—so heavy that a few have fallen in and killed people during earthquakes. But a nailed-on basket and the blows of a newly stolen bas­ketball did them no harm at all. One of the men who had a job cleaning office buildings in Eureka had brought the ball home the day before, saying he had found it in the street.

"How is Justin?" I asked Allie. She had set up a work area behind the hotel. There she made or repaired furniture, re­paired or sharpened tools, and did reading and writing for peo­ple. She didn't teach reading or writing as I had. She claimed she didn't have the patience for that kind of teaching— although she was willing to show kids how to work with wood, and she fixed their broken toys for free. She contin­ued to do repair work for the various George businesses, but no more cleaning, no more fetching and carrying. Once Do­lores George had seen the quality of her work, Allie was al­lowed to do the things she loved for her living and for Justin's. The repair work she was doing now for other peo­ple was for extra cash to buy clothing or books for Justin.

"I wish you'd stay and teach him," she said to me. "I'm afraid he spends too much time with kids who are already breaking into houses and robbing people. If anything makes me leave Georgetown, it will be that."

I nodded, wondering what sort of things my Larkin was learning. And the unwanted question occurred to me as it sometimes did: Was she still alive to learn anything at all? I turned my back on Allie and stared out into the vast, jum­bled forest of shacks, cabins, tents, and lean-tos that was Georgetown.

"Lauren?" Allie said in a voice too soft to trust

I looked around at her, but she was hand-sanding the leg of a chair, and not looking at me. I waited.

"You know... I had a son before Justin," she said.

"I know." Her father, who had prostituted her and her sis­ter Jill had also murdered her baby in a drunken rage. That was why she and Jill had left home. They had waited until their father drank himself to sleep. Then they set fire to their shack with him in it and ran away. Fire again. What a cleans­ing friend. What a terrible enemy.

"I never even knew who my first son's father was," she said, "but I loved him—my little boy. You can't know how I loved him. He came from me, and he knew me, and he was mine." She sighed and looked up from the chair leg. "For eight whole months, he was mine."

I stared at Georgetown again, knowing where she was going with this, not really wanting to hear it It had a nasty enough sound when I heard it in my own head.

"I wanted to die when Daddy killed my baby. I wished he had killed me too." She paused. "Jill kept me going—kind of like back at Camp Christian, you kept me going." An­other pause, longer this time. "Lauren, you might never find her."

I didn't say anything, didn't move.

"She might be dead."

After a while, I turned to look at her. She was staring at me, looking sad.

“I'm sorry," she said. "But it's true. And even if she's alive, you might never find her."

"You knew about your baby," I said. "You knew he was dead, not suffering somewhere, not being abused by crazy people who think they're Christians. I don't know anything. But Justin is back, and now Jorge's brother Mateo is back."

"I know, and you know that's different. Both boys are old enough to know who they are. And... and they're old enough to survive abuse and neglect."

I thought about that, understood it, turned away from it

"You still have a life," she said.

"I can't give up on her."

"You can't now. But the time might come...."

I didn't say anything. After a while I spotted one of the men I had gotten information from back before I began working in Eureka. I went off to talk to him, see whether he'd heard anything. He hadn't.

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

sunday, june 10, 2035

It seems I'm to have a companion for my trip north. I don't know how I feel about that. Allie sent her to me. She's a woman who should have been rich and secure with her family down in Mendocino County, but, according to her, her family didn't want her. They wanted her brother, but they'd never wanted her. She was born from the body of a hired surrogate back when that was still unusual, and although she looks much like her mother and nothing like the surrogate, her parents never quite accepted her—especially after her brother was born the old-fashioned way from the body of his own mother. At 18, she was kidnapped for ransom, but no ransom was ever paid. She knew her parents had the money, but they never paid. Her brother was the prince, but some­how, she was never the princess. Her captors had kept her for a while for sex. Then, she got the idea to make herself seem sick. She would put her finger down her throat when­ever they weren't looking. Then she'd throw up all over everything. At last, in disgust and fear, her captors aban­doned her down near Clear Lake. When she tried to go home, she discovered that just before the Al-Can War began, her family left the area, moved to Alaska. Now, more than a year after her kidnapping, she was on her way to Alaska to find them. The fact that the war was not yet officially over didn't faze her. She had nothing and no one except her fam­ily, and she was going north. Allie had told her to go with me, at least as far as Portland. "Watch one another's backs," she said when she brought us together. "Maybe you'll both manage to live for a while longer."

Belen Ross, the girl's name was. She pronounced it Bay-LEN, and wanted to be called Len. She looked at me—at my clean but cheap men's clothing, my short hair, my boots.

"You don't need me," she said. She's tall, thin, pale, sharp-nosed, and black-haired. She doesn't look strong, but she looks impressive, somehow. In spite of all that's hap­pened to her, she hasn't broken. She still has a lot of pride.

"Know how to use a gun?" I asked.

She nodded. "I'm a damned good shot."

"Then let's talk."

The two of us went up to Allie's room and sat down to­gether at the pine table Allie had made for herself. It was simple and handsome. I ran a hand over it. "Allie shouldn't be in a place like this," I said. "She's good at what she does. She should have a shop of her own in some town."

"No one belongs in a place like this," Len said. "If chil­dren grow up here, what chance do they have?"

"What chance do you have?" I asked her.

She looked away. "This is only about our traveling to­gether to Portland," she said.

I nodded. "Allie's right We will have a better chance together. Lone travelers make good targets."

"I've traveled alone before," she said.

"I have too. And I know that alone, you have to fight off attacks that might not even happen at all if you aren't alone, and if you and your companion are armed."

She sighed and nodded. "You're right I suppose I don't really mind traveling with you. It won't be for long."

I shook my head. "That's right. You won't have to put up with me for long."

She frowned at me. "Well, what more do you want? We'll get to Portland, and that will be that. We'll never see each other again."

"For now, though, I want to know that you're someone I can trust with my life. I need to know who you are, and you need to know who I am."

"Allie told me you were from a walled community down south."

"In Robledo, yes."

"Wherever. Your community got wiped out, and you came up here to start another community. It got wiped out and you wound up here." That sounded like Allie, giving only the bare bones of my life.

"My husband was killed, my child kidnapped, and my community destroyed," I said. "I'm looking for my child— and for any children of my former community. Only two have been found so far—two of the oldest. My daughter was only a baby."

"Yeah." Len looked away. "Allie said you were looking for your daughter. Too bad. Hope you find her."

Just as I was beginning to get angry with this woman, it occurred to me that she was acting. And as soon as the thought came to me, it was followed by others. Much of what she had shown me so far was false. She had not lied with her words. It was her manner that was a he—filled with threads of wrongness. She was not the bored, indifferent person she wanted to seem to be. She was just trying to keep her distance. Strangers might be dangerous and cruel. Best to keep one's distance.

Problem was, even though this girl had been treated very badly, she wasn't distant. It wasn't natural to her. It made her a little bit uncomfortable all the time—like an itch, and in her body language, she was communicating her discomfort to me. And, I decided, watching her, there was something else wrong.

"Shall we travel together?" I asked. "I usually travel as a man, by the way. I'm big enough and androgynous-looking enough to get away with it"

"Fine with me."

I looked at her, waiting.

She shrugged. "So we travel together. All right."

I went on looking at her.

She shifted in her hard chair. "What's the matter? What is it?"

I reached out and took her hand before she could flinch away. "I'm a sharer," I said. "And so are you."

She snatched her hand away and glared at me. "For god-sake! We're only traveling together. Maybe not even that Keep your accusations to yourself!"

"That's the kind of secret that gets companion travelers killed. If you're still alive, it's obvious that you can handle sudden, unexpected pain. But believe me, two sharers trav­eling together need to know how to help one another."

She got up and ran out of the room.

I looked after her, wondering whether she would come back. I didn't care whether or not she did, but the strength of her reaction surprised me. Back at Acorn, people were always surprised to be recognized as sharers when they came to us. But once they were recognized, and no one hurt them, they were all right. I never identified another sharer without identifying myself. And most of the ones I did identify realized that sharers do need to learn to manage without crippling one another. Male sharers were touchy—resenting their extra vulnerability more than females seemed to, but none of them, male or female, had just turned and run away.

Well, Belen Ross had been rich, if not loved. She had been protected from the world even better than I had been down in Robledo. She had learned that the people within the walls of her father's compound were of one kind, and those outside were of another. She had learned that she had to pro­tect herself from that other kind. One must never let them see weakness. Perhaps that was it. If so, she wouldn't come back. She would get her things and leave the area as soon as she could. She would not stay where someone knew her dangerous secret.

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

All this happened on Friday. I didn't see Len again until yesterday—Saturday. I met with a few of the men who had provided me with useful information before—in particular with those who had been to Portland. I bought them drinks and listened to what they had to say, then I left them and bought maps of northern California and Oregon. I bought dried fruit, beans, cornmeal, almonds, sunflower seeds, supplies for my first aid kit, and ammunition for my rifle and my handgun. I bought these things from the Georges even though their prices are higher than those of most stores in Eureka. I wouldn't be going to Eureka again soon. I would go inland for a while toward Interstate 5. I might even travel along I-5 if it seemed wise once I'd gotten there and had a look at it. In some parts of California, I-5 has become frightening and dangerous—or at least it was back in '27 when I walked it for a few miles. In any case, I-5 would take me right into Portland. If I circled back to the coast and walked up U.S. 101, I'd have a longer walk. And U.S. 101 looked lonelier. There were fewer towns, smaller towns.

"Big towns are good," a man from Salem, Oregon, had told me. "You can be anonymous. Small towns can be mean and suspicious when strangers show up. If they just had a robbery or something, they might pull you in, put a collar on you, or lock you up or even shoot you. Big cities are bad news. They chew you up and spit you out in pieces. You're nobody, and if you die in the gutter, nobody cares but the sanitation department. Maybe not even them."

"You gotta think about there's still a war on," a man from Bakersfield, California, had said. "It could flare back up anytime, no matter how much they talk peace. Nobody knows what more war's going to mean to people walking on the highway. More guns, I guess. More crazy guys, more guys who don't know how to do anything but kill people."

He was probably right. He had, as he put it, "been bummin' around for more than 20 years," and he was still around. That alone made his opinion worth something. He told me he had had no trouble going back and forth to Port­land, even last year during the war, and that was good news. There were fewer people on the road than there had been back in the 2020s, but more than just before the war. I re­member when I hoped that fewer travelers were a sign that things were getting better. I suppose things are getting bet­ter for some people.

Len came to me just as I finished my purchases at George's. Without a word, she helped me carry my stuff back to Allie's room, where, in continuing silence, she watched while I packed it. She couldn't really help with that.

"Your pack ready?" I asked her.

She shook her head.

"Go get it ready."

She caught my arm and waited until she had my full at­tention. "First tell me how you knew," she said. "I've never had anyone spot me like that."

I drew a long breath. "You're what, 19?"

"Yes."

"And you've never spotted anyone?"

She shook her head again. "I had just about decided that there weren't any others. I thought the ones who let them­selves be discovered were collared or killed. I've been terri­fied that someone would notice. And then you did. I almost left without you."

"I thought you might, but there didn't seem to be anything I could say to you that wouldn't upset you even more."

"And you really are You really... have it too?"

“I'm a sharer, yes." I stared past her for a moment. "One of the best days of my life was when I realized that my daughter probably wasn't. You can't be 100 percent sure with babies, but I don't believe that she was. And I had a friend who had four sharer kids. He said he didn't think she was either." And where were Gray Mora's children now? What was happening to the lost little boys? Could there be anyone more vulnerable than little male sharers at the mercy of both men and other boys?

"Four sharer children?" Len demanded. "Four?"

I nodded.

"I think... I think my life would have been so different if my brother had been a sharer, too, instead of his normal, perfect self," Len said. "It was as though I had leprosy and he didn't You know what I mean? There was an idea once that people who had leprosy were unclean and God didn't much like them."

I nodded. "Who was the Paracetco addict in your family?"

"They both were—both of my parents."

"Oh, my. And you were the evidence of their misbehav­ior, the constant reminder. I suppose they couldn't forgive you for that"

She thought about that for a while. "You're right. People do blame you for the things they do to you. The men who kidnapped me blamed me because they had gone to so much trouble to get me, then there was no ransom. I don't remem­ber how many times they hit me for that—as though it were all my fault."

"These days, projecting blame is almost an art form."

"You still haven't told me how you knew."

"Your body language. Everything about you. If you have a chance to meet others, you'll begin to recognize them. It just takes practice."

"Some people think sharing is a power—like some kind of extrasensory perception."

I shrugged. "You and I know it isn't."

She began to look a little happier. "When do we leave?"

"Monday morning just before dawn. Don't say anything about it to anyone."

"Of course not!"

"Are you all right for supplies?"

In a different tone, she repeated, "Of course not. But I'll be all right. I can take care of myself."

"We'll be traveling together for almost a month," I said. "The idea is that we should take care of ourselves and of one another. What do you need?"

We sat together quiet for a while, and she wrestled in si­lence with her pride and her temper.

"It's sometimes best to avoid towns," I said. "Some towns fear and hate travelers. If they don't arrest them or beat them, they chase them away. Sometimes at the end of the day, there are no towns within reach. And fasting and hiking don't go well together. Now let's go get you some supplies. I assume you stole the things you have now."

"Thank you," she said, "for assuming that."

I laughed and heard bitterness in my own laughter. "We do what we have to do to live. But don't steal while you're with me." I let my voice harden a little. "And don't steal from me."

"You'll take my word that I won't?"

"Will you give me your word?"

She looked down her long, thin nose at me. "You enjoy telling people what to do, don't you?"

I shrugged. "I like living, and I like being free. And you and I need to be able to trust one another." I watched her now, needing to see all that there was to be seen.

"I know," she said. "It's just that... I've always had things. I used to give clothing, shoes, food, things like that to the families of our servants at Christmas. About five years ago, my mother stopped seeing anyone except mem­bers of the family, and my father got into the habit of leav­ing the house servants to me. Now I'm poorer than our servants were. And, yes, everything I have, I've stolen. I was so idealistic when I was at home. I wouldn't steal any­thing. Now I feel moral because I'm a thief instead of a prostitute."

"While we're together, you won't be either."

"... all right."

And I let myself relax a little. She seemed to mean it. "Let's go get what you need, then. Come on."

wednesday, june 13, 2035

We're on our way and we've had no trouble. Len asked me whether I had anything to read when we stopped last night, and I handed her one of my two remaining copies of The First Book of the Living. We're not rushing and the days are long, so we don't have to push on until it's too dark to read.

We've traveled south to a state highway that will take us inland to I-5. Len gave no trouble about this. She did ask, "Why not walk right up the coast?"

"I want to avoid Eureka," I told her. “I was mugged last time I was there."

She made a grim face, then nodded. "God, I hope we can avoid that kind of thing."

"The best way to avoid it is to be ready for it," I said. "Ac­cept the reality that it might happen, and keep your eyes and ears open."

“I know."

She's a good traveler. She complains, but she's willing to keep her share of the watches. One of the scary things about being alone is having no one to watch while you sleep. You have to sleep on your belongings, using them as a pillow or at least keeping them in your sleepsack with you, or some­one will make off with them. The violent thieves are the ones who present the most obvious and immediate danger, but sneak thieves can hurt you. For one thing, they can force you to join them. If they steal your money or if you don't have enough money to replace the essentials they've stolen, then you have to steal to survive. My experience with col­lars has made me a very reluctant thief—not that I was ever an eager one.

Anyway, Len is a good traveling companion. And she's an avid reader with an active mind. She says one of the things she misses most about home is computer access to the libraries of the world. She's well read. She rushed through Earthseed: The First Book of the Living in one evening. Problem is, it wasn't intended to be rushed through.

1 know you wrote this book," she said when she'd fin­ished it—a couple of hours ago. "Allie told me you wrote a book about something called Earthseed. Is this your real name? Lauren Oya Olamina?"

I nodded. It didn't matter that she knew. We've bedded down off the road, between of a pair of hills where we can have some privacy. We're still in country that I know—hills, scattered ranches, small communities, stands of young trees, open ground. Nice country. We walked through it many times from Acorn. It's less populated than it should be be­cause during the worst years of the 2020s, a lot of people were burned out, robbed, abducted, or just killed. The small communities were vulnerable and the gangs swept over them like locusts. Many of the survivors looked for less crime-ridden places to live—places Like Canada, Alaska, and Russia. That's why so much was abandoned to the likes of us when we hunted building materials, useful plants, and old tools. Now, though, the land's familiarity doesn't com­fort me. Then Len asks me a familiar question, and that is comforting, somehow.

"Why did you write this?"

"Because it's true," I answered, and from then until the time she lay down to sleep, we talked about Earthseed and what it meant, what it could mean and how anyone could ever accept it even if they happened to hear about it. She doesn't sneer, but she doesn't understand yet either. I find that I look forward to teaching her.

sunday, june 17, 2035

We're taking the day off. We're in Redding—a little west of Redding in a park, really. Redding is a sizable city. We've made camp, for once in a place where people are supposed to camp, and we're eating heavy, tasty food bought in town. We've also had a chance to bathe and do our laundry. It always puts me in a better mood not to stink and not to have to endure the body odor of my companion. Somehow, no matter how awful I smell, I can still smell other people.

We've had a hot stew of potatoes, vegetables, and jerked beef with a topping of lovely Cheddar cheese. It turns out that Len can't cook. She says her mother could but never did. Never had to. Servants did the cooking, the cleaning, repairing things. Teachers were hired for Len and her brother—mostly to guide their use of the computer courses and to be sure they did the work they were supposed to do. Their father, their computer connections, and their older ser­vants provided them with most of what they knew about the world. Ordinary living skills like cooking and sewing were never on the agenda.

"What did your mother do?" I asked.

Len shrugged. "Nothing, really. She lived in her virtual room—her own private fantasy universe. That room could take her anywhere, so why should she ever come out? She was getting fat and losing her physical and mental health, but her v-room was all she cared about"

I frowned. "I've heard of that kind of thing—people being hooked on Dreamasks or on virtual-world fantasies. I don't know anything about it, though."

"What is there to know? Dreamasks are nothing—cheap kid's toys. Really limited. In that room she could go any­where, be anyone, be with anyone. It was like a womb with an imagination. She could visit fourteenth-century China, present-day Argentina, Greenland in any imagined distant future, or one of the distant worlds circling Alpha Centauri. You name it, she could create some version of it. Or she could visit her friends, real and imaginary. Her real friends were other wealthy, idle people—mostly women and children. They were as addicted to their v-rooms as she was to hers. If her real friends didn't indulge her as much as she wanted them to, she just created more obliging ver­sions of them. By the time I was abducted, I didn't know whether she really had contact with any flesh-and-blood people anymore. She couldn't stand real people with real egos of their own."

I thought about this. It was worse than anything I had heard about this particular addiction. "What about food?" I asked. "What about bathing or just going to the bathroom?"

"She used to come out for meals. She had her own bath­room. All by itself, it was big as my bedroom. Then she began to have all her meals sent in. After that, there were whole months when I didn't see her. Even when I took her meals in myself, I had to just leave them. She was in the v-bubble inside the room, and I couldn't even see her. If I went into the bubble—you could just walk into it—she would scream at me. I wasn't part of her perfect fantasy life. My brother, on the other hand, was. He got to visit her once or twice a week and share in her fantasies. Nice, isn't it"

I sighed. "Didn't your father mind any of this? Didn't he try to help her—or you?"

"He was busy making money and screwing the maids and their children—some of whom were also his children. He wasn't cut off from the outside, but he had his own fantasy life." She hesitated. "Do I seem normal to you?"

I couldn't help seeing where she was going with that "We're survivors, Len. You are. I am. Most of Georgetown is. All of Acorn was. We've been slammed around in all kinds of ways. We're all wounded. We're healing as best we can. And, no, we're not normal. Normal people wouldn't have survived what we've survived. If we were normal we'd be dead."

That made her cry. I just held her. No doubt she had been repressing far too much in recent years. When had anyone last held her and let her cry? I held her. After a while, she lay down, and I thought she was falling asleep. Then she spoke.

"If God is Change, then... then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?"

"We care for one another," I said. "We care for ourselves and one another." And I quoted,

"Kindness eases Change.

Love quiets fear."

At that, she surprised me. She said, "Yes, I liked that one." And she finished the quote:

"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."

"But I have no obsession, positive or otherwise. I have nothing."

"Alaska?" I said.

"I don't know what else to do, where else to go."

“If you get there, what will you do? Go back to being your parents' housekeeper?"

She glanced at me. "I don't know whether they would let me. I might never make it over the borders anyway, espe­cially with the war. Border guards will probably shoot me." She said this with no fear, no passion, no feeling at all. She was telling me that she was committing a kind of suicide. She wasn't out to kill herself, but she was going to arrange for others to kill her—because she didn't know what else to do. Because no one loved her or needed her for anything at all. From her parents to her abductors, people were willing to use her and discard her, but she mattered to no one. Not even to herself. Yet she had kept herself alive through hell. Did she struggle for life only out of habit, or because some part of her still hoped that there was something worth living for?

She can't be allowed to go off to be shot by thugs, border guards, or soldiers. I can't let her do that. And, I think, she wants to be stopped. She won't ask to be, and she will fight for her own self-destructive way. People are like that. But I must think about what she can do instead of dying—what she should be doing. I must think about what she can do for Earthseed, and what it can do for her.

Chapter 20

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Are you Earthseed?

Do you believe?

Belief will not save you.

Only actions

Guided and shaped

By belief and knowledge

Will save you.

Belief

Initiates and guides action—

Or it does nothing.

WHEN I WAS 19,1 met my Uncle Marc.

He was, by then, the Reverend Marcos Duran, a slight, still-beautiful middle-aged man who had become in English and in Spanish the best-known minister of the Church of Christian America. There was even some talk of his running for president, although he seemed uncomfortable about this. By then, though, the Church was just one more Protestant denomination. Andrew Steele Jarret had been dead for years, and the Church had gone from being an institution that everyone knew about and either loved or feared to being a smaller, somewhat defensive organization with much to answer for and few answers.

I had left home. Even though a girl who left home unmar­ried was seen by church members as almost a prostitute, I left as soon as I was 18.

"If you go," Kayce said, "don't come back. This is a decent, God-fearing house. You will not bring your trash and your sin back here!"

I had gotten a job caring for children in a household where the father had died. I had deliberately looked for a job that did not put me at the mercy of another man—a man who might be like Madison, or worse than Madison. The pay was room, board, and a tiny salary. I believed I had clothing and books enough to get me through a few years of working there, helping to raise another woman's children while she worked in public relations for a big agribusiness company. I had met the kids—two girls and a boy—and I liked them. I believed that I could do this work and save my salary so that when 1 left, 1 would have enough money to begin a small business—a small cafe, perhaps—of my own. I had no grand hopes. I only wanted to get away from the Alexanders who had become more and more intolerable.

There was no love in the Alexander house. There was only the habit of being together, and, 1 suppose, the fear of even greater loneliness. And there was the Church—the habit of Church with its Bible class, men's and women's missionary groups, charity work, and choir practice. I had joined the young people's choir to get away from Madison. As it hap­pened, the choir provided relief in three ways. First, I dis­covered that I really liked to sing. I was so shy at first that I could hardly open my mouth, but once I got into the songs, lost myself in them, I loved it. Second, choir practice was one more excuse that I could use to get out of the house. Third, singing in the choir was a way to avoid having to sit next to Madison in church, it was a way to avoid his nasty, moist little hands. He used to feel me up in church. He really did that. We would sit down with Kayce between us, then he would get up to go to the men's room and come back and sit next to me with his coat or his jacket on his lap to hide his touching me.

I believe Kayce realized what was happening. In the days before I left, we were enemies, she and I. Neither of us said anything about Madison. We just spent a lot of time hating one another. We didn't talk unless we had to. Any talk that we couldn't avoid might become a screaming fight. Then she'd call me a little whore, an ungrateful little bastard, a heathen witch……During my seventeenth year, I don't think she and I ever had anything like a conversation.

Anyway, I joined the choir. And I discovered that I had a big alto voice that people enjoyed hearing. I even discovered that church wasn't so bad if I didn't have to sit between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Because of my singing, I tried to stay with the church after I moved out of Kayce and Madison's house. I did try. But I couldn't do it.

The rumors began at once: I was having sex with any num­ber of men. I was pregnant. I had had an abortion. I had cursed God and joined my real mother in a heathen cult I was spreading lies about Madison People I had grown up with, people I had thought of as friends, stopped speak­ing to me. Men who had paid no attention to me while I was at home now began to edge up to me with whispered invi­tations and unwanted little touches, and then angry denun­ciations when I wouldn't give them what they now seemed to think they had a right to get from me.

I couldn't take it. A few months after I left home, I left the church. That was all right with my employer. She didn't go to church. She had been raised a Unitarian, but now seemed to have no religious interests. She liked to spend Sundays with her kids. Sunday was my day off. What I did with it was up to me.

But to my amazement, I missed my adoptive parents. I missed the church. I missed the life 1 had grown up with. I missed everything. And I was so lonely. I dragged myself through my days. Sometimes I barely wanted to be alive.

Then I heard that Reverend Marcos Duran was coming to town, that he would be preaching at the First Christian American Church of Seattle. That was the big church, not our little neighborhood thing. The moment I read that Reverend Duran was coming, I knew I would go to see him. I knew what a great preacher he was. I had disks of him preaching to thousands in great CA cathedrals on the Gulf Coast and in Washington, D.C. He had a big church of his own in New York. He was young to be so successful, and I had quite a crush on him. God, he was beautiful. And unlike every other preacher I knew of, he wasn't married. That must have been rough. Every woman would be after him. Other ministers would pressure him to get married, accept adult responsi­bilities, family responsibilities. Men would look at his hand­some face and think he was a homosexual. Was he? I had heard rumors. But then, I knew about rumors.

1 camped out all night outside the big church to make sure that I would be able to get in for services. As soon as I was off duty on Saturday night, I took a blanket roll, some sand­wiches, and a bottle of water, and went to get a place out­side the church. I wasn't the only one. Even though services would be broadcast free, there were dozens of people camped around the church when I got there. More kept com­ing. We were mostly women and girls sleeping out that night—not that anyone slept much. There were some men either trying to get close to the women or looking as though they hoped to get close to Reverend Duran. But there was nothing blatant. We sang and talked and laughed. I had a great time. These people were all strangers to me, and I had a great time with them. They liked my voice and got me to sing some solos. Doing that was still hard for me, but I had done it in church, so I just put myself back in church men­tally. Then I was into the singing, and the faces of the others told me they were into my songs.

And then a woman came out of the big, handsome house near the church and made straight for me. i stopped singing because it occurred to me suddenly that I was disturbing people. It was late. We were having something very like a party in the street and on the steps of the church. None of us had even thought that we might be keeping people awake. I just stopped singing in the middle of a word and everyone stared at me, then at the woman striding toward me. She was a light-skinned Black woman with red hair and freckles—a plump, middle-aged woman, wearing a long green caftan. She came right up to me as though I were the only one there.

"Would your name be Asha Alexander?" she asked.

I nodded. "Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry if we disturbed you."

She put an envelope in my hand and smiled. "You didn't disturb me, dear, you have a lovely voice. Read the note. I think you'll want to answer it,"

The note said, "If your name is Asha Vere Alexander, I would like to speak with you. I believe I have information concerning your biological parents. Marcos Duran."

I stared at the red-haired woman's face in shock, and she smiled. "If you're interested, come with me," she said, and she turned and walked back toward her house.

I wasn't sure I should.

"What is it?" one of my new friends asked. She was sit­ting, wrapped in her blankets on the church steps, looking from me to the departing red-haired woman. They were all looking from me to the woman.

"1 don't know," 1 said. "Family stuff." And I ran after the woman.

And he was there, Marcos Duran, in that big house. The house was the home of the minister of the First Church. The red-haired woman was the minister's wife. God, Reverend Duran was even more beautiful in person than he was on the disks. He was an amazing-looking man.

"I've been watching you and your friends and listening to your singing," he said. "I thought I recognized you. Your adoptive parents are Kayce and Madison Alexander." It wasn't a question. He was looking at me as though he knew me, as though he were honestly glad to see me.

I nodded.

He smiled—a sad kind of smile. "Well, I think we may be related. We can do a gene check later if you like, but I be­lieve your mother was my half-sister. She and your father are dead now." He paused, gave me an odd, uncertain look. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that. They were good people. I thought you should know about them if you wanted to."

"You're sure they're dead?" I asked.

He nodded and said again, "I'm sorry."

I thought about this, and didn't know what to feel. My parents were dead. Well, I had thought they might be, in spite of my fantasies. But... but all of a sudden, I had an uncle. All of a sudden one of the best-known men in the country was my uncle.

"Would you like to hear about your parents?" he asked.

"Yes!" I said. "Yes, please. I want to hear everything."

So he began to tell me. As I recall it now, he talked about my mother as a girl with four younger brothers to ride herd on, about Robledo being wiped out, about Acorn. Not until he began to talk about Acorn did he begin to lie. Acorn, he said, was a small mountain community—a real community, not a squatter settlement. But he said nothing about Earth-seed, Acorn's religion. Acorn was destroyed like Robledo, he continued. My parents met there, married there, and were killed there. I was found crying in the ruins of the commu­nity.

He hadn't found out about all this until a couple of years later, and by then, I had a home and new parents—good Christian Americans, he believed. He had kept track of me, always meaning to speak to me when I was older, let me know my history, let me know that I still had a living mem­ber of my biological family.

"You look like her," he said to me. "You look so much like her, I can't believe it. And your voice is like hers. When I heard you singing out there, I had to get up and go look."

He looked at me with something like amazement, then turned and wiped away a tear.

I wanted to touch him, comfort him. That was odd, be­cause I didn't like touching people. I had been too much alone in my life. Kayce didn't like to touch people—or at least she didn't like to touch me. She always said it was too hot or she was too busy or something. She acted as though hugging or kissing me would somehow have been nasty. And of course, being touched by Madison's moist little hands was nasty. But this man, my uncle ... my uncle!... made me want to reach out to him. I believed everything he told me. It never occurred to me not to. I was awed, flattered, con­fused, almost in tears.

I begged him to tell me more about my parents. I knew nothing, and I was hungry for any information he could give me. He spent a lot of time with me, answering my questions and putting me at my ease. The pastor and his red-haired wife put me up for what was left of the night. And all of a sudden, I had family.

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

My mother had blundered through the first few years of her life, knowing early what she wanted to do, but not knowing how to do it, improvising as she went along. She recruited the people of Acorn because she came to believe that she could accomplish her purpose by creating Earthseed com­munities where children would grow up learning the "truths'' of Earthseed and go on to shape the human future according to those "truths." This was her first attempt, as she put it, to plant seeds. But she had the bad luck to begin her work at almost the same time that Andrew Steele Jarret began his, and he was, at least in the short term, much the stronger. Her only good luck was that he was so much stronger than she was that he never noticed her. His fanati­cal Crusaders, very much one of the fingers of his hand, ut­terly destroyed her first effort, but there's no record at all of her ever having come to Jarret's attention. She was just an ant that he happened to step on.

If she had been anything more than that, she would not have survived.

It is interesting, however, to see that after Acorn, she seemed to lose her direction until she found Belen Ross. She had written about wanting to find me, then begin her Earthseed work again—but begin it how? By establishing another Acorn? One even more hidden away and low-key?

Surely, a new Acorn would be just as vulnerable as the first one. One gesture of authority could erase it completely. What then? She needed a different idea, and, in fact, she had one. She knew that she had to teach teachers. Gathering families had not worked. She had to gather single people, or at least independent people—people who would learn from her, then scatter to preach and teach as, in effect, her disci­ples. Instead, she was still, reflexively, looking for me. I'm not sure there was much left of that search but reflex by the time Belen Ross came into the picture. I've wondered whether Allison Gilchrist—Allie—guessed this and brought her together with Len just to shake her up.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

tuesday, june 19, 2035

There are three of us now, in a way. We've had an interest­ing time becoming three, and I'm not altogether comfort­able with the way I brought it about. It isn't exactly what I expected to do, but I've found it interesting. We're on the road again, just north of a shiny, new company town called Hobartville. We bought supplies outside of the walls of Hobartville at the inevitable squatter settlement. Then we cir­cled around the town and moved on. It's good to be moving again. We've been three days in one place.

Until three days ago, we had been walking and making no lingering contacts on the road—which is an odd way for me to behave. Back in '27 when I was walking from Los Ange­les to Humboldt County, I gathered people, gathered a small community. I thought then that Earthseed would be born through small, cooperating communities. Once Acorn was established, I invited others to join us. This time, I haven't felt that I could invite anyone other than Len to join me.

This time, after all, I was only going to Portland to look for my daughter and to get my brother to help me find her whether he wanted to or not.

And was that any more realistic a goal than Len's inten­tion to walk to Alaska to rejoin her family? It was, perhaps less suicidal, but... no more sensible.

It is my uneasiness, my fear that perhaps this is true, that has kept me from reaching out to people. I've fed a few ragged parent-child groups because it's hard for me to see hungry children and do nothing at all. Yet I couldn't do much. What's a meal, after all? With Acorn, I had done more. With Earthseed, I had hoped to do much more. So much more.... I still have hopes. Even during the 17 months of Camp Christian, I never forgot Earthseed, al­though there were times when I thought I might not survive to teach it or use it to shape our future.

But all I've been able to do on this trip is to feed a mother and child here, a father and child there, then send them on their ways. They don't always want to go.

"How do you know they won't lie in wait and rob us later?" Len asked as we tramped along I-5 after leaving a father and his two small, ragged boys eating what I sus­pected was their first good meal in some time.

"I don't know," I said. "It's unlikely, but it could hap-pen.

"Then why take the chance?"

I looked at her. She met my eyes for a second, then looked away. "I know," she said in a voice I could hardly hear. "But what good is a meal? I mean, they'll be hungry again soon."

"Yes," I said. "Jarret would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children's bodies and minds as he pre­tends to care about their souls."

"My father voted for him," she said.

"I'm not surprised."

"My father said he would bring order and stability, get the country back on its feet again. I remember that He got my mother to vote for him too, not that she cared. She would have voted for the man in the moon if he had told her to, just so he would let her alone. I was still living at home during the '32 election. I had never been outside our walls. I thought my father must know what he was talking about, so I was for Jarret, too. I was too young to vote, though, so it didn't matter. All the adult servants voted for him. My fa­ther stood by the only phone in the house that servants were allowed to use. He watched as their finger and retinal prints were scanned in. Then he watched them vote."

"I wonder whether it was your abduction that made your father give up on Jarret."

"Give up on him?"

"On him and on the United States. He's left the country, after all."

After a moment, she nodded. "Yes. Although I'm still having trouble thinking of Alaska as a foreign country. I guess that should be easy now, since the war. But it doesn't matter. None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids are the future if they don't starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?"

"That's what Earthseed was about," I said. "I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or an­other. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been."

"It is," Len said.

"It is," I repeated. "There seem to be solid biological rea­sons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cy­cles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other an­imal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and what­ever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They'll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it's only to begin a new one, a different one.

"Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It's about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essen­tials that they are. It's ..." I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. "It's about a lot more than that," I said. "But those are the bones."

"Makes a strange sermon."

"I know."

"You need to do what Jarret does."

"What!" I demanded, not wanting to do anything Jarret did.

"Focus on what people want and tell them how your sys­tem will help them get it. Tell folksy stories that illustrate your points and promise the moon and stars—literally in your case. Why should people want to go to the stars, any­way? It will cost a lot of money, and time. It will force us to create whole new technologies. And I doubt that anyone who's alive when the effort starts will live to see the end of it. Some scientists might like it. It will give them the chance to work on their pet projects. And some people might think it's a great adventure, but no one's going to want to pay for it."

Now I smiled. "Exactly. I've been saying things like that for years. Some people might want to do it for the sake of their children—to give them the chance to begin again and do things right this time. But that idea alone won't do it. It won't bring in enough people, money, or persistence. Ful­filling the Destiny is a long-term, expensive, uncertain project—or rather it's hundreds of projects. Maybe thou­sands. And with no guarantees of anything. Politicians, on the other hand, are short-term thinkers, opportunists, some­times with consciences, but opportunists nevertheless. Business people are hungry for profit, short- and long-term. The truth is, preparing for interstellar travel and then send­ing out ships filled with colonists is bound to be a job so long, thankless, expensive, and difficult that I suspect that only a religion could do it. A lot of people will find ways to make money from it. That might get things started. But it will take something as essentially human and as essentially irrational as religion to keep them focused and keep it going—for generations if it takes generations. I suspect it will. You see, I have thought about this."

Len thought about it herself for a while, then said, "If that's what you believe, why don't you tell people to go to the stars because that's what God wants them to do—and don't start explaining to me that your God doesn't want anything. I understand that. But most people won't under­stand it."

"The people of Acorn did."

"And where are they?"

That hurt like a punch in the face. "No one knows better than I do how miserably I failed my people," I said.

Len looked away, embarrassed. "I didn't mean it that way," she said. "I'm sorry. I just mean that what you're say­ing just isn't something people are going to understand and get enthusiastic about—at least not quickly. Did people join Acorn for Earthseed or in the hope of feeding their kids?"

I sighed and nodded. "They did it to feed their kids and to live in a community that didn't look down on them for being poor or enslave them when they were vulnerable. It took some of the adults years to accept Earthseed. The kids got into it right away, though. I thought the kids would be the missionary teachers."

"Maybe they would have been, if they'd had the chance. But that way didn't work. What are you going to do now?"

"With Jarret's Crusaders still running loose? I don't know." This wasn't entirely true. I did have some ideas, but I wanted to hear what Len had to say. She had been inter­esting and thoughtful so far.

"You're good at talking to people," she said. "They like you. Hell, they trust you. Why can't you just preach to them like any other minister? Preach the way Jarret does. Have you ever heard any of his speeches? Most of them are ser­mons. Newspeople have a hard time opposing anything he wants because he's always on God's side. Guess whose side that puts them on?"

"And you think I should do that?"

"Of course you should do that if you believe what you say."

"I'm not a demagogue."

"That's too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be."

We walked in silence for a while, then I said, "What about you?"

"What do you mean? You know where I'm going."

"Stay with me. Go somewhere else."

"You're going to Oregon to see your brother and find your child."

"Yes. And I'm also going to make Earthseed what it should be—the way we humans finally manage to grow up."

"You intend to try again?"

"I don't really have any choice. Earthseed isn't just what I believe. It's who I am. It's why I exist."

"You say in your book that we don't have purpose, but potential."

I smiled. She had a photographic memory or nearly so. But she wasn't above using it unfairly to win an argument.

I quoted,

"We are born

Not with purpose,

But with potential."

"We choose our purpose," I said. "I chose mine before I was old enough to know any better—or it chose me. Pur­pose is essential. Without it, we drift."

"Purpose," she said, and with an air of showing off, she quoted:

"Purpose

Unifies us:

It focuses our dreams,

Guides our plans,

Strengthens our efforts.

Purpose

Defines us,

Shapes us,

And offers us

Greatness."

She sighed. "Sounds wonderful. But then a lot of things sound wonderful. What are you going to do?"

"I'm no Jarret," I said, "but you're probably right about the need to simplify and focus my message. You can help me do that."

"Why should I?"

"Because it will keep you alive."

She looked away again. After a long silence, she said with great bitterness, "What makes you think I want to be kept alive?"

"I know you do. But if you stick with me, you'll have to prove it."

"What?"

"As a matter of fact, if you stick with me, you'll have all you can do to stay alive. Ideas like those in Earthseed aren't going to be popular for a while. Jarret wouldn't like them if he knew about them."

"If you have any sense, you won't draw attention to yourself. Not now."

"I don't intend to draw huge crowds or get on the nets. Not until Jarret has worn out his welcome, anyway. I do in­tend to reach out to people again."

"How?"

And I knew. I had been wondering as we spoke, scram­bling for ideas. Len's comments had helped focus me. So had my own recent experience. "I'll reach people in their homes," I said. "There's nothing new about door-to-door missionaries in small cities like Eureka, for instance. In L.A. you couldn't do it. We may not be able to do it in Port­land either. Portland's gotten so big. But on the way there, and in the larger towns around Portland, it might work. Small cities and big towns. People in very large cities and the very small towns can be—will be—suspicious and vicious."

"Free towns only, I assume," Len said.

"Of course. If I managed to get into a company town, I might be collared for vagrancy. That can be a life sentence. They just keep charging you more to live than they pay you for your labor, and you never get out of debt."

"So I've heard. You want to just knock on people's doors and ask to tell them about Earthseed? I hear the Jehovah's Witnesses do that. Or they did it. I'm not sure they still do."

"It's gotten more dangerous." I said. "But other people did it too. The Mormons and some other lesser-known groups."

"Christian groups."

"I know." I thought for a moment. "Did you know I was 18 when I began collecting people and establishing Acorn? Eighteen. A year younger than you are now."

"I know. Allie told me."

"People followed me, though," I continued. "And they didn't only do it because they were convinced that I could help them get what they wanted. They followed me because I seemed to be going somewhere. They had no purpose be­yond survival. Get a job. Eat. Get a room somewhere. Exist. But I wanted more than that for myself and for my people, and I meant to have it. They wanted more too, but they didn't think they could have it. They weren't even sure what 'it' was."

"Weren't you wonderful?" Len murmured.

"Don't be an idiot," I said. "Those people were willing to follow an 18-year-old girl because she seemed to be going somewhere, seemed to know where she was going. People elected Jarret because he seemed to know where he was going too. Even rich people like your dad are desperate for someone who seems to know where they're going."

"Dad wanted someone who would protect his invest­ments and keep the poor people in their places."

"And when he realized that Jarret either couldn't or wouldn't do either, he left the country. Other people will turn their backs on Jarret, too, in different ways. But they'll still want to follow people who seem to know where they're going."

"You?"

I sighed. "Perhaps. More likely, though, it will be people I've taught. I don't really have the skills that will be needed. Also, I don't know how long it will take to make Earthseed a way of life and the Destiny a goal that much of humanity struggles to achieve. I'm afraid that alone might take my lifetime and yours. It won't be quick. But we'll be the ones who plant the first seeds, you and I."

Len pushed her black hair away from her face. "I don't believe in Earthseed. I don't believe in any of this. It's just a lot of simplistic nonsense. You'll get killed knocking on the doors of strangers, and that will be the end of it."

"That could happen."

"I want no part of it."

"Yes, you do. If you live, you'll accomplish more that's good and important than anyone you've ever known. If you die, you'll die trying to accomplish it."

"I said I want no part of it. It's ridiculous. It's impos­sible."

"And you have more important things to do?"

Silence.

We didn't talk anymore until we came to a road leading off into the hills. I turned to follow it, ignoring Len's ques­tions. Where was I going? I didn't know at all. Perhaps I would just have a look at what lay up the road, then turn back to the highway. Perhaps not.

Hidden away in the hills, there was a large, two-story wooden farmhouse set back off the road. It was much in need of paint. It had once been white. Now it was gray. Alongside it, a woman was weeding her large vegetable garden. Without telling Len what I meant to do, I walked off the road, went to her, and asked if we could do her weeding for a meal.

"We'll do a good job," I said. "We'll satisfy you, or no food."

She stared at us both with fear and suspicion. She seemed to be alone, but might not be. We were clearly armed, but offering no threat. I smiled. "Just a few sandwiches would be awfully welcome," I said. "We'll work hard for them." I was dressed in loose clothing as a man. My hair was cut short. Len tells me I don't make a bad-looking man. We were both reasonably clean.

The woman smiled in spite of herself—a tentative little smile. "Do you think you can tell the weeds from the veg­etables?" she asked.

I laughed and said, "Yes, ma'am." In my sleep, I thought. But Len was another matter. She had never done any gar­dening at all. Her father hired people to work in their gar­dens and orchards. She had thin, soft, uncallused hands and no knowledge of plants. I told her to watch me for a while. I pointed out the carrots, the various green vegetables, the herbs, then set her weeding the herbs on hands and knees. She'd have more control over what she pulled that way. I depended on her memory and her good sense. If she was angry with me, she would let me know about it later. Rag­ing at people in public wasn't her style. In fact, we had plenty of food in our packs, and we weren't yet low on money. But I wanted to begin at once to reach out to peo­ple. Why not stop for a day on our way to Portland and leave a few words behind in this old gray house? It was good practice, if nothing else.

We worked hard and got the garden cleaned up. Len mut­tered and complained, but I didn't get the impression that she was really suffering. In fact, she seemed interested in what she was doing and content to be doing it, although she complained about bugs and worms, about the way the weeds smelled, about the way the damp earth smelled, about getting dirty. . . .

I realized that while Len had talked about experiences with her family and with the servants and experiences with her kidnappers and with living on her own, scavenging and stealing, she's never talked about working. She must have done some small jobs for food, but working seems still to be a novelty for her. I'll have to see that she gets more experience so that even if she decides to go off on her own, she'll be better able to take care of herself.

Later in the day, when we had finished the weeding, the woman—who told us her name was Nia Cortez—gave us a plate of three kinds of sandwiches. There was egg, toasted cheese, and ham. And there was a bowl of strawberries, a bowl of oranges, and a pitcher of lemonade sweetened with honey. Nia sat with us on her side porch, and I got the im­pression that she was lonely, shy, and still more than a little afraid of us. What a solitary place the old house was, dropped amid grassy hills.

"This is beautiful country," I said. "I sketch a little. These rolling hills, blond grasses, and green trees make me want to sit drawing all day."

"You can draw?" Nia asked me with a little smile.

And I took my sketchpad from my pack and began to draw not the rolling hills but Nia's own plump, pleasant face. She was in her late forties or early fifties and had dark brown hair streaked with gray. Drawn back into a long, thick horsetail, it hung almost to her waist. Her plumpness had helped her avoid wrinkles, and her smooth skin was tanned a good even brown—a nice, uncomplicated face. Her eyes were as clear as a baby's, and the same dark brown as most of her hair. Drawing someone gives me an excellent excuse to study them and let myself feel what it seems to me that they feel. That's what sharing is, after all, and it comes to me whether I want it or not. I might as well use it. In a rough and not altogether dependable way, draw­ing a person helps me become that person and, to be hon­est, it helps me manipulate that person. Everything teaches.

She was lonely, Nia was. And she was taking an uncom­fortable interest in me-as-a-man. To curb that interest, I turned to Len, who was watching everything with sharp, in­telligent interest. "Wrap up a couple of sandwiches for me, would you?" I asked her. "I'd like to finish this while the light is right."

Len gave me a sidelong glance and used paper napkins to wrap two sandwiches. Nia, on the other hand, looked at Len almost as though she had forgotten her. Then, in a moment of confusion, she looked down at her hands—tools of work, those hands. She seemed more contained, more restrained when she looked at me again.

I didn't hurry with the drawing. I could have finished it much more quickly. But working on it, adding detail, gave me a chance to talk about Earthseed without seeming to proselytize. I quoted verses as though quoting any poetry to her until one verse caught her interest. That she could not conceal from me. To her credit, it was this verse:

"To shape God

With wisdom and forethought

To benefit your world,

Your people,

Your life.

Consider consequences.

Minimize harm.

Ask questions.

Seek answers.

Learn.

Teach."

She had once been a teacher in a public school in San Francisco. The school had closed 15 years after she began teaching. That was during the early twenties when so many public school systems around the country gave up the ghost and closed their doors. Even the pretense of having an edu­cated populace was ending. Politicians shook their heads and said sadly that universal education was a failed experi­ment Some companies began to educate the children of their workers at least well enough to enable them to become their next generation of workers. Company towns began then to come back into fashion. They offered security, em­ployment, and education. That was all very well, but the company that educated you owned you until you paid off the debt you owed them. You were an indentured person, and if they couldn't use you themselves, they could trade you off to another division of the company—or another company. You, like your education, became a commodity to be bought or sold.

There were still a few public school systems in the coun­try, limping along, doing what they could, but these had more in common with city jails than with even the most mediocre private, religious, or company schools. It was the business of responsible parents to see to the education of their children, somehow. Those who did not were bad par­ents. It was to be hoped that social, legal, and religious pressures would sooner or later force even bad parents to do their duty toward their offspring.

"So," Nia said, "poor, semiliterate, and illiterate people became financially responsible for their children's elemen­tary education. If they were alcoholics or addicts or prosti­tutes or if they had all they could do just to feed their kids and maybe keep some sort of roof over their heads, that was just too bad! And no one thought about what kind of soci­ety we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wast­ing their tax money, educating other people's children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn't hurt them!"

Len sighed. "That sounds like the way my dad thinks. I'm his punishment, I guess—not that he cares!"

Nia gave her a look of chilly interest. "What? Your fa­ther?"

Len explained, and I watched as, almost against her will, Nia thawed. "I see." She sighed. "I suppose I could have wound up homeless myself, but my aunt and uncle owned this house and surrounding farmland outright. This is mother's family home. I came to live here and care for them when my job ended. They were old and not doing well any­more. Even then they were renting the farmland to neigh­boring farmers. They left the house, the land, and the rest of their possessions to me when they died. I keep a garden, some chickens, goats, rabbits. I rent the land. I survive."

I tried to ignore a sharp stab of envy and nostalgia.

Len said, "I like your garden." She stared out at the long, neat rows of vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

"Do you?" Nia asked. "I heard you complaining out there."

Len blushed, then looked at her hands. "I've never done that kind of thing before. I liked it, but it was hard work."

I smiled. "She's game, if nothing else. I've been doing work like that all my life."

"You were a gardener?" Nia asked.

"No, it was just a matter of eating or not eating. I've done a number of things, including teach—although I'm not aca­demically qualified to teach. But I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.''

As she smiled her delight at hearing such agreement with her own thoughts, I handed her the drawing. On the lower right side of it I had written the first verse of Earthseed, "All that you touch, /You Change "On the other I had written the "To shape God" verse that she liked.

She read the verses and looked at the picture for a long, long time. It was a detailed drawing, not just a sketch, and I felt almost pleased with it. Then she looked at me and said in a voice almost too soft to hear, "Thank you."

She asked us to stay the night, offered to let us sleep in her barn, proving that she hadn't altogether lost her fear of us. We stayed, and the next day I did a few odd repair jobs around the house for her. I could have stolen her blind if I'd wanted to, but what I had decided that I wanted from her, I couldn't steal. She had to give it.

I told her that evening that I was a woman. First, though, I told her about Larkin. We were in her kitchen. She was cooking. She'd told me to sit down and talk to her. I'd worked hard, she said. I'd earned a rest.

I never took my eyes off her as I told her. It was impor­tant that she not feel foolish, frightened, or angry when she understood. A little confusion and mild embarrassment was inevitable, but that should be all.

She looked as though she might cry when she heard about my Larkin. That was all right. Len was in the living room, delighting in reading real books made of paper. She would not see any tears Nia shed—in case Nia was sensi­tive about that kind of thing. You could never be altogether sure what another person might feel as a humiliation or an invasion of privacy.

"What happened to ... to the child's mother?" Nia asked.

I didn't answer until she turned to look at me. "It's dan­gerous on the road," I said. "You know that People vanish out there. I walked from the Los Angeles area to Humboldt County in '27, so I know it. Know it too well."

"She vanished on the road? She was killed?"

"She vanished on the road to avoid being killed." I paused. "She's me, Nia."

Silence. Confusion. "But. . ."

"You've trusted us. Now I'm trusting you. I'm a man on the road. I have to be. Two women out there would be everyone's target." There. I was not correcting her, not smiling at the joke I'd played on her. I was making myself vulnerable to her, and asking her to understand and keep my secret. Just right, I hoped. It felt right.

She blinked and then stared at me. She left her pots and came over to take a good look. "I can hardly believe you," she whispered.

And I smiled. "You can, though. I wanted you to know." I drew a deep breath. "Not that it's safe for a man out there either. The people who took my child also killed my husband and wiped out my community—all in the name of God, of course."

She sat down at the table with me. "Crusaders. I've heard of them, of course—that they rescue homeless orphans and... burn witches, for heaven's sake. But I've never heard that they ... just killed people and... stole their children." But it seemed that what the Crusaders had done could not quite get her mind off what I had done. "But you ...," she said. "I can't get over it. I still feel... I still feel as though you were a man. I mean ..."

"It's all right."

She sighed, put her head back and looked at me with a sad smile. "No, it isn't."

No, it wasn't. But I went to her and hugged her and held her. Like Len, she needed to be hugged and held, needed to cry in someone's arms. She'd been alone far too long. To my own surprise, I realized that under other circumstances, I might have taken her to bed. I had gone through 17 months at Camp Christian without wanting to be with any­one. I missed Bankole—missed him so much sometimes that it was an almost physical pain. And I had never been tempted to want to make love with a woman. Now, I found myself almost wanting to. And she almost wanted me to. But that wasn't the relationship that I needed between us.

I mean to see her again, this kind, lonely woman in her large, empty, shabby house. I need people like her. Until I met her, I had not realized how much I needed such people. Len had been right about what I should be doing, although she had known no more than I about how it must be done. I still don't know enough. But there's no manual for this kind of thing. I suppose that I'll be learning what to do and how to do it until the day I die.

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

The three of us talked about Earthseed again over dinner. Most often we talked of it from the point of view of educa­tion. By the time we parted for the night, I could speak of it as Earthseed without worrying that Nia would feel harassed or proselytized. We stayed one more day and I told her more about Acorn, and about the children of Acorn. I held her once more when she cried. I kissed her lonely mouth, then put her away from me.

I did two more sketches, each accompanied by verses, and I let her offer to look after any of the children of Acorn that I could find until their parents could be contacted. I never suggested it, but I did all I could to open ways for her to suggest it. She was afraid of the children of the road, light-fingered and often violent. But she was not, in theory at least, afraid of the children of Acorn. They were con­nected with me, and after three days, she had no fear at all of me. That was very compelling, somehow, that complete acceptance and trust. It was hard for me to leave her.

By the time we did leave, she was as much with me as Len was. The verses and the sketches and memories will keep her with me for a while. I'll have to visit her again soon—say within the year—to hold on to her, and I intend to do that. I hope I'll soon be bringing her a child or two to protect and teach—one of Acorn's or not. She needs purpose as much as I need to give it to her.

"That was fascinating," Len said to me this morning as we got under way again, "I enjoyed watching you work."

I glanced at her. "Thank you for working with me."

She smiled, then stopped smiling. "You seduce people. My God, you're always at it, aren't you?"

"People fascinate me," I said. "I care about mem. If I didn't, Earthseed wouldn't mean anything at all to me."

"Are you really going to bring that poor woman children to look after?"

"I hope to."

"She can barely look after herself. That house looks as though the next storm will knock it over."

"Yes. I'll have to see what I can do about that, too."

"Do you have that kind of money?"

"No, of course not. But someone does. I don't know how I'm going to do it, Len, but the world is full of needy peo­ple. They don't all need the same things, but they all need purpose. Even some of the ones with plenty of money need purpose."

"What about Larkin?"

"I'll find her. If she's alive, I'll find her. I've sworn that."

We walked in silence for a while. There were a few other walkers in clusters, passing us or walking far ahead or behind us. The broad highway was broken and old and stretched long in front of us, but it wasn't threatening, somehow. Not now.

After a while, Len caught my arm and I turned to look at her. It was good to be walking with someone. Good to have another pair of eyes, another pair of hands. Good to hear another voice say my name, another brain questioning, de­manding, even sneering.

"What do you want of me?" she asked. "What is it that you want me to do? You have to tell me that."

"Help me reach people," I said. "Go on working with me, and helping me. There's so much to be done."

thursday, june 21, 2035

As my father used to quote from his old King James Bible, "Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." He liked to be accurate about his quotes.

I'm bruised and wounded about the pride, but not de­stroyed, at least.

I decided yesterday that things had worked out so well with Nia that I could go on recruiting people as we walked toward Portland. Walking through a roadside town that seemed big enough for people not to be alarmed at the sight of a stranger, I stopped to ask a woman who was sweeping her front porch whether we could do some yard work for a meal. With no warning, she opened her front door, called her two big dogs, and told them to get us. We barely got out of her yard in time to avoid being bitten. Interesting that neither of us drew a gun or uttered a sound. It turns out that Len's fear of dogs is as strong as mine. Last night, she showed me some scars given her by a dog that her former owners had allowed to get too close.

Anyway, the woman with the two dogs cursed us, called us "thieves, killers, heathens, and witches." She promised to call the cops on us.

"All that just because you asked for work," Len said. "Thank heavens you didn't try to tell her about Earthseed!" She was cleaning a long, deep scratch on her arm. It came from a nail that stuck out from the woman's wooden gate. I had spotted the dogs in time to shove her back through the gate, dive through myself, then slam the gate by grabbing a bottom slat and yanking. I only just let go in time to avoid a lot of long, sharp teeth, and damned if the dog didn't bite one of the wooden slats of the fence in frustration at not being able to get at me. I had skinned hands and a bruised hip. Len had her long scratch, which hurt and bled enough to scare me. Later, I treated us both to tetanus skin tabs. They cost more than they should, but neither of us is up-to-date on our immunizations anymore. Best not to take un­necessary chances.

"I wonder what happened to that woman to make her willing to do a thing like that," I said as we walked this morning.

"She was out of her mind," Len said. "That's all."

"That's rarely all," I said.

Then early today, a farm woman drove us off with a rifle and I decided to quit trying for a day or two. A storekeeper told us that Jarret's Crusaders have been active in the area. They've been rounding up vagrants, singling out witches and heathens, and generally scaring the hell out of house­holders by warning them about the dangers and evils of strangers from the road.

It was interesting to see how angry the storekeeper was. The Crusaders, he said, are bad for business. They collar his highway customers or frighten them away, and they intim­idate his local customers so that he's lost a lot of his regu­lars—the ones who live a long way from his store. They've learned to shop as close to home as they can with little re­gard for quality or price.

"Jarret says he can't control his own Crusaders," the man said. "Next time out, I'll vote for someone who'll put the bastards in jail where they belong!"

Chapter 21

_{□ □ □}

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

To survive,

Let the past

Teach you—

Past customs,

Struggles,

Leaders and thinkers.

Let

These

Help you.

Let them inspire you,

Warn you,

Give you strength.

But beware:

God is Change.

Past is past.

What was

Cannot

Come again.

To survive,

Know the past.

Let it touch you.

Then let

The past

Go.

I DON'T KNOW that Uncle Marc would ever have told me the truth about my mother. I don't believe he intended to. He never wavered from his story that she was dead, and I never suspected that he was lying. I loved him, believed in him, trusted him completely. When he found out how 1 was living, he invited me to live with him and continue my education. "You're a bright girl," he said, "and you're family—the only family I have, I couldn't help your mother. Let me help you."

I said yes. i didn't even have to think about it. I quit my job and went to live in one of his houses in New York. He hired a housekeeper and tutors and bought computer courses to see to it that 1 had the college education that Kayce and Madison wouldn't have provided for me if they could have. Kayce used to say, "You're a girl! If you know how to keep a clean, decent house and how to worship God, you know enough!"

I even went back to church because of Uncle Marc. I went back to the Church of Christian America, physically, at least. I lived at his second home in upstate New York, and I at­tended church on Sundays because he wanted me to, and because I was so used to doing it. I was comfortable doing it. I sang in the choir again and did regular charity work, helping to care for old people in one of the church nursing homes. Doing those things again was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.

But the truth was, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love. Fine behavior for good Christian Americans, trying to build a strong, united country.

Better, I decided after much thought and much reading of history, to live a decent life and behave well toward other people. Better not to worry about the Christian Americans, the Catholics, the Lutherans, or whatever. Each denomination seemed to think that it had the truth and the only truth and its people were going to bliss in heaven while everyone else went to eternal torment in hell.

But the Church wasn't only a religion. It was a commu­nity—my community. I didn't want to be free of it. That would have been—had been—impossibly lonely. Everyone needs to be part of something.

By the time I got my Master's in history, I found that 1 couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. 1 thought the best we could all do was to look after one an­other 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 fa­ther'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 feel­ing 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 some­where, 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 ster­ile and ugly as Kayce's and Madison's. I knew that intellectu­ally, 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 techno­logical creativity. It set up grade schools and eventually col­leges, 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, scien­tists, 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 ar­resting 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 vil­lages. 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 maim­ing 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. Peo­ple ignore one another in self-defense. I find this both use­ful 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.

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

On the other hand, I've met and gathered in Joel and Irma Elford, who hired me when I first came to Portland to paint a garage and a fence and do some yard work. Len and I worked together, first cutting weeds, harvesting row crops, raking, cleaning the yard at the back of the property where a wilderness had begun to grow. Then, when the dust settled, we painted the garage. We would have to get to the fence the next day. We were to get hard currency for this job, and that put us in a good mood. Len is a likable person to work with. She learns fast, complains endlessly, and does an excellent job, however long it takes. Most of the time, she enjoys her­self. The complaining was just one of her quirks.

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 atten­tion, 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 cu­rious 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 ques­tions. Where were we going? Did we have homes? Fami­lies? 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 Bud­dhist? 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 inter­ested in the world around them and worried about the direc­tion 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 cu­riosity 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 per­fect 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 shel­ters, 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. Its walls were a dim gray-green and the floor was gray tile worn through to the wood in spots. We were alone there, drinking what I was told would be hot cinnamon-apple tea. When I bought a cup from the machine, I found that it tasted like tepid, slightly sweet water. The lights in the room were few, weak, and far apart, and the place worked hard at being as dreary and cheerless as could be managed.

"Service to God is what's important," my brother said, and I realized that I had been looking around and making my unspoken criticism obvious.

"I'm sorry," I said. "If you want to be here, then you should be here. I wish, though ... I wish you could spare a little concern for your niece."

"Don't be so condescending! And I've told you what you should do to find her!"

Join CA. I shuddered. "I can't. I just can't. If Cougar were here, could you enlist with him again—just as a job, you know? Could you become one of his helpers?"

"It's not the same!"

"It's the same to me. What Cougar did to you, CA's Cru­saders did to me. The only difference is they did it to me longer. And don't tell me the Crusaders are just renegades. They're not. They're as much part of CA as the shelters are. I spotted one of the men who raped and lashed us at Acorn. He was working as an armed guard at the Eureka shelter."

Marc stood up. He all but pushed his chair over in his ea­gerness to get away from me. "I've finally got a chance to have what I want," he said. "You're not going to wreck it for me!"

"This isn't about you," I said, still seated. "I wish you had a child, Marc. If you did, you might be able to understand what it's like not to know where she is, whether she's being well treated, or even ... even whether she's still alive. If I could only know!"

He stood over me for a very long time, looking down at me as though he hated me. "I don't believe you feel any­thing," he said.

I stared back at him amazed. "Marc, my daughter—"

"You think you're supposed to care, so you pretend to. Maybe you even want to, but you don't."

I think I preferred it when he hit me. I couldn't react ex­cept to sit staring at him. Tears spilled from my eyes, but I didn't realize it at the time. I just sat frozen, staring.

After a while, my brother turned and walked away, tears glistening on his own face.

By then, I wanted to hate him. I couldn't quite, but I wanted to.

"Brothers!" Len muttered when I told her what had hap­pened. She had waited for me at the Elford guesthouse. She listened to what I told her and, I suppose, heard it according to her own experience.

"He needs to make everything my fault," I said. "He still can't let himself admit what Christian America did to me. He couldn't stay with them if they did such things, so he's decided that they're innocent, and somehow everything is my fault."

"Why are you making excuses for him?" Len demanded.

"I'm not. I think that's really what he's feeling. He had tears on his face when he walked away from me. He didn't want me to see that, but I saw it. He has to drive me away or he can't have his dreams. Christian America is teaching him to be the only thing I think he's ever wanted to be—a min­ister. Like our father."

She sighed and shook her head. "So what are you going to do?"

"I... don't know. Maybe the Elfords can suggest some­thing.''

"Them, yes.... Irma asked me while you were gone whether you would be willing to speak to a group of her friends. She wants to have a party and, I suppose, show you off."

"You're kidding!"

“I said I thought you would do it."

I got up and went to look out the window at a pear tree, dark against the night sky. "You know, if I could only find my daughter, I would think my life was going along beauti­fully."

sunday, september 16, 2035

I've managed to get Marc to meet with me again at last.

He may be the only relative I have left on earth. I don't want him as an enemy.

"Just tell me you'll help my Larkin if you ever find her," I said.

"How could I do less?" he asked, still with a certain cold­ness.

"I wish you well, Marc. I always have. You're my brother, and I love you. Even with all that's happened, I can't help loving you."

He sighed. We were sitting in his building's vast, drab din­ing room again. This time there were other people scattered around, eating late lunches or early dinners. Most were men, young and old, individuals and small groups. Some stared at me with what seemed to be disapproval. "You can't know what Christian America has meant to me," he said. His voice had softened. He looked less distant.

"Of course I can," I told him. "I'm here because I do understand. You'll be a Christian American minister, and I'll be your heathen sister. I can stand that. What I find hard to stand is being your enemy. I never meant for that to happen."

After a while, he said, "We aren't enemies. You're my sis­ter, and I love you too."

We shook hands. I don't think I've ever shaken hands with my brother before, but I got the feeling that it was as much contact as he was willing to endure, at least for now.

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

Allie and Justin have come to Portland to live. I phoned Allie and told her to use some of the money I left with her to buy a ride up with the Georges. The Elfords have agreed to let the two of them live in their guest house. Len and I have been given rooms above the garage at the home of another sup­porter—a friend of the Elfords.

That's how I've come to think of these people—as sup­porters. We speak to groups in their houses. We lead discus­sions and teach the truths of Earthseed. I say "we" because Len has begun to take a more active part. She will teach on her own someday, and perhaps train someone to help her. As I write those words, I miss her as though she had already gone off on her own, as though I already had some new young skeptic to train.

Through the Elfords and their friends and the friends of their friends, we've received invitations to speak all over town in people's homes and in small halls. I've found that in each group there is one person, perhaps two, who are serious, who hear in Earthseed something that they can accept, something they want, something they need. These are the ones who will make our first schools possible.

In Acorn, it was no accident that the church and the school were the same. They weren't just the same building. They were the same institution. If the Earthseed Destiny is to have any meaning beyond a distant mythical paradise, Earthseed must be not only a belief system but a way of life. Children should be raised in it. Adults should be reminded of it often, refocused on it, and urged toward it. Both should understand how their current behavior is or isn't contribut­ing to fulfillment of the Destiny. By the time we're able to send Earthseed children to college, they should be dedicated not only to a course of study but to the fulfillment of the Destiny. If they are, then any course of study they choose can become a tool for the fulfillment.

sunday, september 30, 2035

I've found a potential home for Travis and Natividad. I've called them several times, and gotten no answer. I worried about them until last night when I reached them. They've been living in a squatter camp a few miles from Sacramento. They went there on a rumor that some of Acorn's children had been seen there. The rumor was false, but their money had run low. They'd had to stop and take jobs doing agricultural work. This was rough because the work paid little more than room and board in horrible little shacks.

They'll come here with the Mora girls and the new Mora baby. I can't restore their children to them, but I can see to it that they have work that sustains them and a decent place to Live. They'll live in the big house that is to be our first school. The house belongs to one of my supporters—one who said those magic words: "What can I do? What do you need?"

What don't we need!

The house is a big empty shell that the Douglas and Mora families will have to work hard on. It needs paint, repairs, landscaping, fencing, everything. But it has living room for a big family upstairs and teaching and working room down­stairs. It will be a new beginning in so many ways. And the people who own it have relatives in both city and state gov­ernment. They're the kind of people Jarret's Crusaders have learned to let alone.

Also, next month, Len and I are invited to teach at several homes in the Seattle area.

tuesday, november 13, 2035

I've finally talked Harry into coming north. He's run across the Figueroas and joined with them for the trip. He hasn't found Tabia or Russ, I'm sorry to say, but he has picked up three orphans. He found them on the road just north of San Luis Obispo. Their mother was hit by a truck. He saw it hap­pen and went straight to the kids. There are more and more vehicles on the road during the day now. Walking is becom­ing more dangerous.

As horrible as the hit and run was, I get the feeling it's given Harry what he needs—children to protect, children who need him, children who run to him and hold his hands when they're scared. He and Zahra always said they wanted a big family. He's such a good daddy. I have a teaching job for him in Seattle. I believe he'll thrive in it if he can let him­self.

Jorge Cho and his family are coming. I've found work for Jorge and Di in Portland.

Now I have to look around for places for the Figueroas.

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

I believe that I've finally done it. I believe that my life has finally educated me enough to enable me to make a real start at planting Earthseed. It may be too soon to say this, but it feels true. I believe it is true.

I've allowed the Elfords to make The First Book of the Living available free on the nets. I never expected to make money from the book. My only fear has been that someone would take it and change it, make it an instrument of some other theology or use it for some new brand of demagoguery. Joel Elford says the best way to avoid that is to make it available on every possible net and with my name on it. And, of course, the copyright is my legal fallback if someone does begin to misuse it seriously.

"I don't think you realize what you have," Joel told me.

I looked at him in surprise and realized that he believed what he was saying.

"And you don't realize how many other people will want it," he continued. "I've aimed the book particularly at the nets that are intended to interest American universities and the smaller free cities where so many of those universities are lo­cated. It will go out worldwide, but it will draw more attention to itself in those places."

He was smiling, so I asked, "What are you expecting to happen?"

"You're going to start hearing from people," he said. "You'll soon have more attention than you'll know what to do with." He sobered. "And what you actually do with it is important. Be careful." Irma trusted me more than Joel did. Joel was still watching me—watching with a great deal of interest. He says it's like watching a birth.

sunday, december 30, 2035

I've been traveling.

That's nothing new for me, but this is different. This time, thanks to the book, I've been invited by university groups and others, and paid to travel, paid to speak—which is a Little Like paying ice to be cold.

And I've been flying. Flying! I've walked over most of the West Coast, and now I've flown over the interior of the country and over much of the East Coast. I've flown to Newark, Delaware; Clarion, Pennsylvania; and up to Syra­cuse, New York. Next, I go to Toledo, Ohio; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; and Iowa City, Iowa.

"Not a bad first tour," Joel told me before I left. "I thought you'd arouse interest. People are ready for something new and hopeful."

I was scared to death, worried about flying and worried about speaking to so many strangers. What if I attracted the wrong kind of attention? How would Len handle the experi­ence? And I worried about Len, who seemed to be even more afraid than I was, especially about flying. I had spent more money than I should have, buying us both decent clothing.

Then Joel and Irma were taking us to the airport in their huge car. One way in which they do indulge themselves is to keep a late-model armed and armored car—a civilian mag­got, really. The thing cost as much as a nice house in a good neighborhood, and it's scary-looking enough to intimidate anyone stupid enough to spend their time hijacking vehicles.

"We've never had to use the guns," Irma told me when she showed them to me. "I don't like them. They frighten me. But being without them would frighten me more."

So now Len and I are lecturing and conducting Earthseed Workshops. We're being paid in hard currency, fed well, and allowed to live in good, safe hotels. And we're being wel­comed, listened to, even taken seriously by people who are hungry for something to believe in, some difficult but worthwhile goal to involve themselves in and work toward.

We've also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret's kind of re­ligion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U.S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the pop­ulation. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they've just made others very angry.

And I'm finding more and more people who have the leisure now to worry about the nasty, downward slide that the country's been on. In the 2020s, when these people were sick, starving, or trying to keep warm, they had no time or energy to look beyond their own desperate situations. Now, though, as they're more able to meet their own immediate needs, they begin to look around, feel dissatisfied with the slow pace of change, and with Jarret, who with his war and his Crusaders, has slowed it even more. I suppose it would have been different if we'd won the war.

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 peo­ple 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 Des­tiny. Earthseed will go on. It will grow. It will force us to be­come 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 in­surance. 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.

EPILOGUE

□ □ □

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 biogra­phy, 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 Olam­ina's charge first came to their attention. The church was still powerful, even though Jarret was dead by then. The ru­mors were that Jarret, after his single term as President, drank himself to death. A coalition of angry business peo­ple, protestors against the Al-Can War, and champions of the First Amendment worked hard to defeat him for re­election in 2036. They won by exposing some of the earli­est Christian American witch-burnings. It seems that be­tween 2015 and 2019, Jarret himself took part in singling people out and burning them alive. The Pox, then a grow­ing 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, Jar­ret's people covered their "mistakes" with denials, threats, more terror, and occasional payoffs to the bereaved fami­lies. 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 sud­denly, 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 be­fore. 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 cre­ator of several popular Masks. I just showed up at Red Spruce, rented a room at their guest house, and began try­ing to find her. Earthseed doesn't bother with a lot of for­mality. 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 pro­bationary 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 com­munity'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 be­fore 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 mes­sage to her.

My messenger was a thin, brown-haired young man who said his name was Edison Balter. I met him in the guest­house dining room one morning as we each sat alone, eat­ing 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 com­munity, 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 remem­bered from my reading. She was born way back in 2009, be­fore 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, welcom­ing 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 shoul­der 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 birth­mark 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 curi­ous. 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 you...." 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 to­ward 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 iden­tity. "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 differ­ences 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 sec­onds, 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.

Instead, I told her the story of my life.

Then we had dinner together, just her and me. A woman who might have been a servant, a bodyguard, or the lady of the house brought in a tray for us.

Then my mother told me the story of my birth, my father, my abduction. Hearing about it from her wasn't like read­ing an impersonal account. I listened and cried. I couldn't help it.

"What did Marc tell you?" she asked.

I hesitated, not sure what to say. In the end, I told the truth just because I couldn't think of a decent lie. "He said you were dead—that both my mother and my father were dead."

She groaned.

"He ... he took care of me," I said. "He saw to it that I got to go to college, and that I had a good place to live. He and I... well, we're a family. We didn't have anyone before we found one another."

She just looked at me.

"I don't know why he told me you were dead. Maybe he was just... lonely. I don't know. We got along, he and I, right from the first. I still live in one of his houses. I can af­ford a place of my own now, but it's like I said. We're a fam­ily." I paused, then said something 1 had never admitted before. "You know, I never felt that anyone loved me before I met him. And I guess I never loved anyone until he loved me. He made it... safe to love him back."

"Your father and I both loved you," she said. "We had tried for two years to have a baby. We worried about his age. We worried about the way the world was—all the chaos. But we wanted you so much. And when you were born, we loved you more than you can imagine. When you were taken, and your father was killed ... 1 felt for a while as though I'd died myself. I tried so hard for so long to find you."

I didn't know what to say to that. I shrugged uncomfort­ably. She hadn't found me. And Uncle Marc had. I wondered just how hard she'd really looked.

"I didn't even know whether you were still alive," she said. "1 wanted to believe you were, but I didn't know. 1 got involved in a lawsuit with Christian America back in the for­ties, and 1 tried to force them to tell me what had happened to you. They claimed that any record there may have been of you was lost in a fire at the Pelican Bay Children's Home years before."

Had they said that? I supposed they might have. They would have said almost anything to avoid giving up evi­dence of their abductions—and giving a Christian American child back to a heathen cult leader. But still, "Uncle Marc says he found me when I was two or three years old," 1 said. "But he saw that I had good Christian American parents, and he thought it would be best for me to stay with them, undisturbed." I shouldn't have said that. I'm not sure why I did.

She got up and began to walk again—quick, angry pac­ing, prowling the room. "I never thought he would do that to me," she said. "I never thought he hated me enough to do a thing like that. I never thought he could hate anyone that much. I saved him from slavery! I saved his worthless life, goddamnit!"

"He doesn't hate you," I said. "I'm sure he doesn't. I've never known him to hate anyone. He thought he was doing right."

"Don't defend him," she whispered. "1 know you love him, but don't defend him to me. I loved him myself, and see what he's done to me—and to you."

"You're a cult leader," 1 said. "He's Christian American. He believed—"

"I don't care! I've spoken with him hundreds of times since he found you, and he said nothing. Nothing!"

"He doesn't have any children." I said. "I don't think he ever will. But I was like a daughter to him. He was like a fa­ther to me."

She stopped her pacing and stood staring down at me with an almost frightening intensity. She stared at me as though she hated me.

I stood up, looked around for my jacket, found it, and put it on.

"No!" she said. "No, don't go." All the stiffness and rage went out of her. "Please don't go. Not yet."

But I needed to go. She is an overwhelming person, and I needed to get away from her.

"All right," she said when I headed for the door. "But you can always come to me. Come back tomorrow. Come back whenever you want to. We have so much time to make up for. My door is open to you, Larkin, always."

I stopped and looked back at her, realizing that she had called me by the name that she had given to her baby daughter so long ago. "Asha," I said, looking back at her. "My name is Asha Vere."

She looked confused. Then her face seemed to sag the way Uncle Marc's had when I phoned him to ask about her. She looked so hurt and sad that I couldn't stop myself from feeling sorry for her. "Asha," she whispered. "My door is open to you, Asha. Always."

The next day Uncle Marc arrived, filled with fear and despair.

"I'm sorry," he said to me as soon as he saw me. "I was so happy when I found you after you left your parents. I Was so glad to be able to help you with your education. I guess ... I had been alone so long that I just couldn't stand to share you with anyone."

My mother would not see him. He came to me almost in tears because he had tried to see her and she had refused. He tried several more times, and over and over again, she sent people out to tell him to go away.

I went back home with him. I was angry with him, but even angrier with her, somehow. I loved him more than I'd ever loved anyone no matter what he had done, and she was hurting him. I didn't know whether I would ever see her again. I didn't know whether I should. I didn't even know whether I wanted to.

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

My mother lived to be 81.

She kept her word. She never stopped teaching. For Earthseed, she used herself up several times over speaking, training, guiding, writing, establishing schools that boarded orphans as well as students who had parents and homes. She found sources of money and directed them into areas of study that brought the fulfillment of the Earthseed Destiny closer. She sent promising young students to uni­versities that helped them to fulfill their own potential.

All that she did, she did for Earthseed. I did see her again occasionally, but Earthseed was her first "child," and in some ways her only "child."

She was planning a lecture tour when her heart stopped just after her eighty-first birthday. She saw the first shuttles leave for the first starship assembled partly on the Moon and partly in orbit. I was not on any of the shuttles, of course. Neither was Uncle Marc, and neither of us has children.

But Justin Gilchrist was on that ship. He shouldn't have been at his age, of course, but he was. And the son of Jes­sica Faircloth has gone, ironically. He's a biologist. The Mora girls, their children, and the whole surviving Douglas family have gone. They, in particular, were her family. All Earthseed was her family. We never really were, Uncle Marc and I. She never really needed us, so we didn't let ourselves need her. Here is the last journal entry of hers that seems to apply to her long, narrow story.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

thursday, july 20, 2090

I know what I've done.

I have not given them heaven, but I've helped them to give themselves the heavens. I can't give them individual immortality, but I've helped them to give our species its only chance at immortality. I've helped them to the next stage of growth. They're young adults now, leaving the nest. It will be rough on them out there. It's always rough on the young when they leave the protection of the mother. It will take a toll—perhaps a heavy one. I don't like to think about that, but I know it's true. Out there, though, among the stars on the living worlds we already know about and on other worlds that we haven't yet dreamed of, some will survive and change and thrive and some will suffer and die.

Earthseed was always true. I've made it real, given it substance. Not that I ever had a choice in the matter. If you want a thing—truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.

The shuttles are fat, squat, ugly, ancient-looking space trucks. They look as though they could be a hundred years old. They're very different from the early ones under the skin, of course. The skin itself is substantially different. But except for being larger, today's space shuttles don't look that different from those a hundred years ago. I've seen pictures of the old ones.

Today's shuttles have been loaded with cargoes of peo­ple, already deeply asleep in DiaPause—the suspended-animation process that seems to be the best of the bunch. Traveling with the people are frozen human and animal embryos, plant seeds, tools, equipment, memories, dreams, and hopes. As big and as spaceworthy as they are, the shut­tles should sag to the Earth under such a load. The memo­ries alone should overload them. The libraries of the Earth go with them. All this is to be off-loaded on the Earth's first starship, the Christopher Columbus.

I object to the name. This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It's not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch. But one can't win every battle. One must know which battles to fight. The name is nothing.

I couldn't have watched this first Departure on a screen or in a virtual room or in some personalized version be­neath a Dreamask. I would have traveled across the world on foot to see this Departure if I'd had to. This is my life flying away on these ugly big trucks. This is my immortal­ity. I have a right to see it, hear the thunder of it, smell it.

I will go with the first ship to leave after my death. If I thought I could survive as something other than a burden, I would go on this one, alive. No matter. Let them some­day use my ashes to fertilize their crops. Let them do that. It's arranged. I'll go, and they'll give me to their orchards and their groves.

Now, with my friends and the children of my friends, I watch. Lacy Figueroa, Myra Cho, Edison Balter and his daughter, Jan, and Harry Balter, bent, gray, and smiling. It took Harry so long to learn to smile again after the loss of Zahra and the children. He's a man who should smile. He stands with one arm around his granddaughter and the other around me. He's my age. Eighty-one. Impossible. Eighty-one! God is Change.

My Larkin would not come. I begged her, but she re­fused. She's caring for Marc. He's just getting over an­other heart transplant. How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him.

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

Now, I watch as, one by one, the ships lift their cargoes from the Earth. I feel alone with my thoughts until I reach out to hug each of my friends and look into their loved faces, this one solemn, that one joyous, all of them wet with tears. Except for Harry, they'll all go soon in these same shuttles. Perhaps Harry's ashes and mine will keep company someday. The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars, after all, and not to be filled with preservative poisons, boxed up at great expense, as is the revived fashion now, and buried uselessly in some ceme­tery.

I know what I've done.

For the kingdom of heaven is as a man traveling into a far country, who called his own servants, and de­livered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.

Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same and made them other five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. But he that had received one went and digged in the earth and hid his lord's money.

After a long time the lord of these servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. And so he that had received five talents came and brought the other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliverest unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five tal­ents more.

His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliverest unto me two talents: be­hold, I have gained two other talents beside them.

His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gather­ing where thou has not strawed: And I was aftaid and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast what is thine.

His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where 1 sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

Take therefore the talent from him and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

the bible

authorized king james version

st. matthew 25:14-30

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ABOUT octavia e. butler

octavia e. butler writes: "I am a 53-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

I've had 11 novels published so far: Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, Parable of the Sower,

and Parable of the Talents, as well as a collection of my shorter work, entitled Bloodchild. I've also had short stories published in anthologies and magazines. One, "Speech Sounds," won a Hugo Award as best short story of 1984. Another, “Bloodchild," won both the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette. My most recent novel, Parable of the Talents, won the 1999 Nebula for Best

Novel."

—Octavia E. Butler

Of special Note: In 1995, Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. The program, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArtbur Foundation, rewards cre­ative people who push the boundaries of their fields. In 2000, she received the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award.