Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,29

shaping fictional worlds. Jorge and a few others are hams and love acting in plays. Travis and Gray provide any needed music. The rest of us enjoy watching. We all feed one another’s hungers.

Dan Noyer came over to me as I helped myself to fried rabbit, baked potato, a mix of steamed vegetables with a spicy sauce, and a little goat cheese. There were also pine nut cookies, acorn bread, and sweet potato pie. On Gathering Day, the rule is, we eat only what we’ve raised and prepared. There was a time when that was something of a hardship. It reminded us that we were not growing or raising as much as we should. Now it’s a pleasure. We’re doing well.

“Can I sit with you?” Dan asked.

I said, “Sure,” then had to fend off several other people who wanted me to eat with them. Dan’s expression made me think it was time for him and me to have some version of the talk that I always seem to wind up having with newcomers. I thought of it as the “What the hell is this Earthseed stuff, and do I have to join?” talk.

Right on cue, Dan said, “The Balters say my sisters and I can stay here. They say we don’t have to join your cult if we don’t want to.”

“You don’t have to join Earthseed,” I said. “You and your sisters are welcome to stay. If you decide to join us someday, we’ll be glad to welcome you.”

“What do we have to do—just to stay, I mean?”

I smiled. “Finish healing first. When you’re well enough, work with us. Everyone works here, kids and adults. You’ll help in the fields, help with the animals, help maintain the school and its grounds, help do some building. Building homes is a communal effort here. There are other jobs—building furniture, making tools, trading at street markets, scavenging. You’ll be free to choose something you like. And you’ll go to school. Have you gone to school before?”

“My folks taught us.”

I nodded. These days, most educated poor or middle-class people taught their own children or did what people in my old neighborhood had done—formed unofficial schools in someone’s home. Only very small towns still had anything like old-fashioned public schools. “You might find,” I said, “that you know some things well enough to teach them to younger kids. One of the first duties of Earthseed is to learn and then to teach.”

“And this? This Gathering?”

“Yes, you’ll come to Gathering every week.”

“Will I get a vote?”

“No vote, but you’ll get a share of the profit from the sale of the crop, and from the other businesses if things work out. That’s after you’ve been here for a year. You won’t have a decision-making role unless you decide to join. If you do join, you’ll get a larger share of the profit and a vote.”

“It isn’t really religious—your service, I mean. You guys don’t believe in God or anything.”

I turned to look at him. “Dan, of course we do.”

He just stared at me in silent, obvious disbelief.

“We don’t believe the way your parents did, perhaps, but we do believe.”

“That God is Change?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means that Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.”

“But…what can you do with a God like that? I mean…it isn’t even a person. It doesn’t love you or protect you. It doesn’t know anything. What’s the point?”

“The point is, it’s the truth,” I said. “It’s a hard truth. Too hard for some people to take, but that doesn’t make it any less true.” I put my food down, got up, and went to one of our bookcases. There, I took down one of our several copies of Earthseed: The First Book of the Living. I self-published this first volume two years ago. Bankole had looked over my text when it was finished, and said I should and publish for my own protection. At the time, that seemed unnecessary—a ridiculous thing to do in a world gone mad. Later, I came to believe he was right—for the future and for a reason in the present that Bankole had not mentioned.

“Things will get back to normal someday,” he had said to me. “You should do this in the same way that we go on paying their taxes.”

Things won’t get back to what he calls normal. We’ll settle into some new norm