Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,144
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.
“I 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.”