Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,118

and looked down, waiting until I could keep my voice steady. “No, Jus. He’s not here.”

The Justin I had known back before Camp Christian would have accepted these words at face value. He might have asked where Bankole was, but he wouldn’t have said what this much older, wounded, wiser child said.

“Shaper?”

I hadn’t heard that title for a while. In fact, I hadn’t heard my name for a while. In Georgetown, I called myself Cory Duran. It was my stepmother’s maiden name, and I used it in the hope of attracting my brother’s attention if he happened to be around. The false name is accepted here because even though I’d been to Georgetown several times before the destruction of Acorn, among the permanent residents, only Dolores George and her husband knew my name. And the Georges don’t gossip.

As for the title, in Acorn, all the children called me “Shaper.” It was the title that seemed right for one teaching Earthseed. Travis, too, was called Shaper. So was Natividad.

“Shaper?”

“Yes, Jus.”

“Is the Doctor dead?”

“Yes. He’s dead.”

“Oh.” He had begun to cry. He had not been crying over his own injuries, but he cried for my Bankole. I took his hand and we walked up the hill to George’s.

Like the rest of us, Allie has been working for Dolores George. I never worried about my own ability to earn my way. I worried about Harry’s depression, but not about his resourcefulness. He would have little trouble. Nina Noyer didn’t give me time to worry about her. She arrived at Georgetown and almost immediately fell in love with one of the younger George sons. In spite of her two lost sisters, in spite of Dolores George’s disapproval, Nina and the boy are so intense, so wrapped up in one another that Dolores knows she could only alienate her son by objecting. She hopes the sudden passion will burn itself out. I’m not so sure.

But I worried about Allie. She is healing. She talks now as much as she ever did—which is to say, not a lot. She can think and reason. But not all of her memory has come back. For that reason, I told Dolores some of her story and hoped aloud that some permanent job could be found for her. Dolores first gave her small jobs to do, cleaning floors, repairing steps, painting railings… When she saw that Allie worked well and made no trouble, she said Allie could stay as long as she wanted to. No salary, just room and board.

I stopped at a tree stump about halfway up the hill and sat down and took both of Justin’s hands between mine. His face looked bad, and it was hard to look at him, but I made myself do it. “Jus, they hurt your mother.”

He began to look afraid. “Hurt her how?”

“They put a collar on her. They put collars on all of us. They hurt her with the collar. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen—”

“I have. I saw collar gangs working on the highway and in Eureka, fixing potholes, pulling weeds, stuff like that. I saw how a collar can hurt you and make you fall down and twitch and scream.”

I nodded. “Collars can do more than that. Someone got really mad at your mother and used the collar to hurt her badly. She’s almost okay now, but she’s still having some trouble with her memory.”

“Amnesia?”

“Yes. Most of what she’s lost is what happened in the weeks and months just before she was hurt. That was a bad time for us all, and it may be a mercy that she’s lost it. But don’t be surprised if you ask her about something and she doesn’t remember. She can’t help it.”

He thought about that for a while, then asked in almost a whisper, “Will she remember me?”

“Absolutely. We’ve been in contact with all sorts of people trying to find out where you and the others were.” Then I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask a few questions for myself. “Justin, were you with any of the other kids? Were you with Larkin?”

He shook his head. “They took us all to Arcata to the church there. Then they made us all separate. They said we were going to have new Christian American families. They said…they said you were all dead. I believed them at first, and I didn’t know what to do. But then I saw how they would lie whenever they felt like it. They would say things about