Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,17
up age-wise. He’s always being mistaken for my father. When he corrects people, they wink at him or frown or grin. Here in Acorn, if people don’t understand us, at least they accept us.
“I’m content here,” I said. “The land is yours. The community is ours. With our work, and with Earthseed to guide us, we’re building something good here. It will grow and spread. We’ll see that it does. But for now, nothing in any of those towns is ours.”
“It can be,” he said. “You don’t realize how valuable a physician is to an isolated community.”
“Oh, don’t I? I know how valuable you are to us.”
He turned his head toward me. “More valuable than a truck?”
“Idiot,” I said. “You want to hear praise? Fine. Consider yourself praised. You know how many of our lives you’ve saved—including mine.”
He seemed to think about that for a moment. “This is a healthy young group of people,” he said. “Except for the Dovetree woman, even your most recent adoptees are healthy people who’ve been injured, not sick people. We have no old people.” He grinned. “Except me. No chronic problems except for Katrina Dovetree’s heart. Not even a problem pregnancy or a child with worms. Almost any town in the area needs a doctor more than Acorn does.”
“They need any doctor. We need you. Besides, they have what they need.”
“As I’ve said, they won’t always.”
“I don’t care.” I moved against him. “You belong here. Don’t even think about going away.”
“Thinking is all I can do about it right now. I’m thinking about a safe place for us, a safe place for you when I’m dead.”
I winced.
“I’m an old man, girl. I don’t kid myself about that.”
“Bankole—”
“I have to think about it. I want you to think about it too. Do that for me. Just think about it.”
THREE
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
God is Change,
And in the end,
God prevails.
But meanwhile…
Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear.
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
FROM Memories of Other Worlds
I CANNOT KNOW WHAT the end will be of all of Olamina’s dreaming, striving, and certainty. I cannot recall ever feeling as certain of anything as she seems to be of Earthseed, a belief system that she herself created—or, as she says, a network of truths that she has simply recognized. I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are irrational states of mind.
Olamina believes in a god that does not in the least love her. In fact, her god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity. It is not consciously aware of her—or of anything. It is not conscious at all. “God is Change,” she says and means it. Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics. “God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails.”
Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even the Earthseed Destiny seems to have little to do with religion.
“We are Earthseed,” Olamina says. “We are the children of God, as all fractions of the universe are the children of God. But more immediately we are the children of our particular Earth.” And within those words lies the origin of the Destiny. That portion of humanity that is conscious, that knows it is Earthseed, and that accepts its Destiny is simply trying to leave the womb, the Earth, to be born as all young beings must do eventually.
Earthseed is Olamina’s contribution to what she feels should be a species-wide effort to evade, or at least to lengthen the specialize-grow-die evolutionary cycle that humanity faces, that every species faces.
“We can be a long-term success and the parents, ourselves, of a vast array of new peoples, new species,” she says, “or we can be just one more abortion. We can, we must, scatter the Earth’s living essence—human, plant, and animal—to extrasolar worlds: ‘The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.’ ”
Grand words.
She hopes and dreams and writes and believes, and perhaps the world will let her live for a while, tolerating her as a harmless eccentric. I hope that it will.