Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,165
are bad for business, bad for the U.S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.
And I’m finding more and more people who have the leisure now to worry about the nasty, downward slide that the country’s been on. In the 2020s, when these people were sick, starving, or trying to keep warm, they had no time or energy to look beyond their own desperate situations. Now, though, as they’re more able to meet their own immediate needs, they begin to look around, feel dissatisfied with the slow pace of change, and with Jarret, who with his war and his Crusaders, has slowed it even more. I suppose it would have been different if we’d won the war.
Anyway, some of these dissatisfied people are finding what they want and need in Earthseed. They’re the ones who come to me and ask, “What can I do? I believe. Now how can I help?”
So I’ve begun to reach people. I’ve reached so many people from Eureka to Seattle to Syracuse that I believe that even if I were killed tomorrow, some of these people would find ways to go on learning and teaching, pursuing the Destiny. Earthseed will go on. It will grow. It will force us to become the strong, purposeful, adaptable people that we must become if we’re to grow enough to fulfill the Destiny.
I know things will go wrong now and then. Religions are no more perfect than any other human institutions. But Earthseed will fulfill its essential purpose. It will force us to become more than we might ever become without it. And when it’s successful, it will offer us a kind of species life insurance. I wish I could live to see that success. I wish I could be one of those who go out to take root among the stars. I can only hope that my Larkin will go—or perhaps some of her children, or even Marc’s children.
Whatever happens, as long as I’m alive, I won’t stop working, preaching, aiming people toward the Destiny. I’ve always known that sharing Earthseed was my only true purpose.
EPILOGUE
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Earthseed is adulthood.
It’s trying our wings,
Leaving our mother,
Becoming men and women.
We’ve been children,
Fighting for the full breasts,
The protective embrace,
The soft lap.
Children do this.
But Earthseed is adulthood.
Adulthood is both sweet and sad.
It terrifies.
It empowers.
We are men and women now.
We are Earthseed.
And the Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
UNCLE MARC WAS, IN the end, my only family.
I never saw Kayce and Madison again. I sent them money when they were older and in need, and I hired people to look after them, but I never went back to them. They did their duty toward me and I did mine toward them.
My mother, when I finally met her, was still a drifter. She was immensely rich—or, at least, Earthseed was immensely rich. But she had no home of her own—not even a rented apartment. She drifted between the homes of her many friends and supporters, and between the many Earthseed Communities that she established or encouraged in the United States, Canada, Alaska, Mexico, and Brazil. And she went on teaching, preaching, fund-raising, and spreading her political influence. I met her when she visited a New York Earthseed community in the Adirondacks—a place called Red Spruce.
In fact, she went to Red Spruce to rest. She had been traveling and speaking steadily for several months, and she needed a place where she could be quiet and think. I know this because it was what people kept telling me when I tried to reach her. The community protected her privacy so well that for a while, I was afraid I might never get to see her. I’d read that she usually traveled with only an acolyte or two and, sometimes, a bodyguard, but now it seemed that everyone in the community had decided to guard her.
By then, I was 34, and I wanted very much to meet her. My friends and Uncle Marc’s housekeeper had told me how much I looked like this charismatic, dangerous, heathen cult leader. I had paid no attention until, in researching Lauren Olamina’s life, I discovered that she had had a child, a daughter, and that that daughter had been abducted from an early Earthseed community called Acorn.