Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,159

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. It 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