Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,168

in a portable diagnostic from her case. The unit wasn’t much bigger than Olamina’s phone. In less than a minute, though, it spit out two gene prints. They were rough and incomplete, but even I could see both their many differences and their many unmistakably identical points.

“You’re close relatives,” the woman said. “Anyone would guess that just from looking at you, but this confirms it.”

“We’re mother and daughter,” Olamina said.

“Yes,” the woman in blue agreed. She was my mother’s age or older—a Puerto Rican woman by her accent. She had not a strand of gray in her black hair, but her face was lined and old. “I had heard, Shaper, that you had a daughter who was lost. And now you’ve found her.”

“She’s found me,” my mother said.

“God is Change,” the woman said, and gathered her equipment. She hugged my mother before she left us. She looked at me, but didn’t hug me. “Welcome,” she said to me in soft Spanish, and then again, “God is Change.” And she was gone.

“Shape God,” my mother whispered in a response that sounded both reflexive and religious.

Then we talked.

“I had parents.” I said. “Kayce and Madison Alexander. I… We didn’t get along. I haven’t seen them since I turned 18. They said, ‘If you leave without getting married, don’t come back!’ So I didn’t. Then I found Uncle Marc, and I finally—”

She stood up, staring down at me, staring with such a closed look frozen on her face. It shut me out, that look, and I wondered whether this was what she was really like—cold, distant, unfeeling. Did she only pretend to be warm and open to deceive her public?

“When?” she demanded, and her tone was as cold as her expression. “When did you find Marc? When did you learn that he was your uncle? How did you find out? Tell me!”

I stared at her. She stared back for a moment, then began to pace. She walked to a window, faced it for several seconds, staring out at the mountains. Then she came back to look down at me with what I could only think of as quieter eyes.

“Please tell me about your life,” she said. “You probably know something about mine because so much has been written. But I know nothing about yours. Please tell me.”

Irrationally, I didn’t want to. I wanted to get away from her. She was one of those people who sucked you in, made you like her before you could even get to know her, and only then let you see what she might really be like. She had millions of people convinced that they were going to fly off to the stars. How much money had she taken from them while they waited for the ship to Alpha Centauri? My god, I didn’t want to like her. I wanted the ugly persona I had glimpsed to be what she really was. I wanted to despise her.

Instead, I told her the story of my life.

Then we had dinner together, just her and me. A woman who might have been a servant, a bodyguard, or the lady of the house brought in a tray for us.

Then my mother told me the story of my birth, my father, my abduction. Hearing about it from her wasn’t like reading an impersonal account. I listened and cried. I couldn’t help it.

“What did Marc tell you?” she asked.

I hesitated, not sure what to say. In the end, I told the truth just because I couldn’t think of a decent lie. “He said you were dead—that both my mother and my father were dead.”

She groaned.

“He…he took care of me,” I said. “He saw to it that I got to go to college, and that I had a good place to live. He and I…well, we’re a family. We didn’t have anyone before we found one another.”

She just looked at me.

“I don’t know why he told me you were dead. Maybe he was just…lonely. I don’t know. We got along, he and I, right from the first. I still live in one of his houses. I can afford a place of my own now, but it’s like I said. We’re a family.” I paused, then said something I had never admitted before. “You know, I never felt that anyone loved me before I met him. And I guess I never loved anyone until he loved me. He made it…safe to love him back.”

“Your father and I both loved you,” she said. “We had tried for