Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,145

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