Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,128
be cruel. Cory was Marc’s mother, after all, not mine. I didn’t want to remind him of the pain of losing her or hint that she might be alive. And if I had written Lauren O., I thought Marc might decide not to come. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, after all. Perhaps it’s also cruel to hint to him that one of our two youngest brothers might still be alive. Perhaps he’ll know or guess that I wrote the note. But I had to use a name that would get his attention. I must see him. If he won’t do anything else, surely he’ll help me find Larkin. He can’t know what happened to us. I don’t believe he would have joined CA if he knew it was made up of thieves, kidnappers, slavers, and murderers. He wanted to lead, to be important, to be respected, but he had been a slave prostitute himself. No matter how angry he was at me, he wouldn’t wish me captivity and a collar. At least, I don’t believe he would.
The truth is, I don’t know what to believe.
An old man is letting me sleep in his garage tonight. I chopped weeds and cleared trash for him today. Now I’m content. I’ve spread some flat boards over the concrete and covered the boards with rags. In my sleepsack on top of these, I’m pretty comfortable. There’s even a filthy old flush toilet and a sink with running water out here—a real luxury. I had a wash. Now I want to sleep, but all I can do, all I can think of is Marc in that place, Marc with those people. Maybe he was even there at the time of my first visit. We might have seen each other and not known. What would he have done, I wonder, if he had recognized me?
EIGHTEEN
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Beware:
All too often,
We say
What we hear others say.
We think
What we’re told that we think.
We see
What we’re permitted to see.
Worse!
We see what we’re told that we see.
Repetition and pride are the keys to this.
To hear and to see
Even an obvious lie
Again
And again and again
May be to say it,
Almost by reflex
Then to defend it
Because we’ve said it
And at last to embrace it
Because we’ve defended it
And because we cannot admit
That we’ve embraced and defended
An obvious lie.
Thus, without thought,
Without intent,
We make
Mere echoes
Of ourselves—
And we say
What we hear others say.
FROM Warrior by Marcos Duran
I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED IN the power of God, distant and profound. But more immediately, I believe in the power of religion itself as a great mover of masses. I wonder if that’s odd in the son of a Baptist minister. I think my father honestly believed that faith in God was enough. He lived as though he believed it. But it didn’t save him.
I began preaching when I was only a boy. I prayed for the sick and saw some of them healed under my hands. I was given tithings of money and food by people who had not enough to eat themselves. People who were old enough to be my parents came to me for advice, reassurance, and comfort. I was able to help them. I knew the Bible. I had my own version of my father’s quiet, caring, confident manner. I was only in my teens, but I found people interesting. I liked them and I understood how to reach them. I’ve always been a good mimic, and I’d had more education than most of the people I dealt with. Some Sundays in my Robledo slum church, I had as many as 200 people listening as I preached, taught, prayed, and passed the plate.
But when the city authorities decided that we were no more than trash to be swept out of our homes, my prayers had no power to stop them. The city authorities were stronger and richer.
They had more and better guns. They had the power, the knowledge, and the discipline to bury us.
The governments, city, county, state, and federal plus the big rich companies were the sources of money, information, weapons—real physical power. But in post-Pox America, successful churches were only sources of influence. They offered people safe emotional catharsis, a sense of community, and ways to organize their desires, hopes, and fears into systems of ethics. Those things were important and necessary, but they weren’t power. If this country was ever to be restored to greatness, it wasn’t the little dollar-a-dozen preachers who would do it.