Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,33

feel. This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person’s whole life. I’ve heard that some collared people kill themselves, not because they can’t stand the pain, but because they can’t stand the degree of slavishness to which they find themselves descending.

The Texas boy’s father spent a lot of money. He hired private cops—the kind who’ll do anything if you pay them enough—and they sliced through the squatter camp as though it were a ripe melon until they found the boy. And with that, bingo! Slavery was discovered in Texas in 2032. Innocent people—not criminals or indigents—were being held against their wills and used for immoral purposes! How about that! What I’d like to see is a state of the union where slavery isn’t being practiced.

Here’s another news item. On the planet Mars, living, multicellular organisms have been discovered…sort of. They’re very small and very strange inside, although outside they look like tiny slugs…some of the time. They live at least four meters down in certain polar rock formations, and they’re not exactly animals. They’re a little like Terrestrial slime molds. And, like slime molds, they go through independent single-celled stages during which they eat their way through the rocks, multiplying by dividing, resembling little antifreeze-filled amoeba. When they’ve exhausted the food supply in their immediate neighborhoods, they unite into sluglike multicellular masses to travel to new sites where the minerals they ingest are available. They don’t reproduce in their slug form as Terrestrial slime molds do. They seem to need the slug form only to produce enough of their corrosive antifreeze solution to enable them to migrate through rock to a fresh supply of food. They make soil in two ways. They eat minerals, pass these through their bodies, and shed a dust so fine and so slippery that, like graphite, it can work as a kind of lubricant. And they ooze through the rocks in their slug form, their corrosive slime dissolving trails, cracks, and making more dust.

These creatures are living Martians! So far, though, all the specimens captured and examined at Leal Station died soon after being taken from their cold, rocky home. For that reason and others, they are both a great discovery and a great sadness. They are the last discoveries that will be made by scientists working for the U.S. Government.

President Donner has sold the last of our Mars installations to a Euro-Japanese company, in fulfillment of one of his earliest campaign promises. The idea is that all nonmilitary space travel, manned and unmanned, should be privatized. “If it’s worth doing at all,” Donner said, “it should be done for profit, and not as a burden on the taxpayers.” As though profit could be counted only as immediate financial gain. I was born in 2009, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve heard people complaining about the space program as a waste of money, and even as one of the reasons for the country’s deterioration.

Ridiculous! There is so much to be learned from space itself and from the nearby worlds! And now we’ve found living extraterrestrials, and we’re going to quit. I suppose that if the Martian “slime molds” can be used for something—mining, perhaps, or chemistry—then they’ll be protected, cultivated, bred to be even more useful. But if they prove to be of no particular use, they’ll be left to survive or not as best they can with whatever impediments the company sees fit to put in their paths. If they’re unlucky enough to be bad for business in some way—say they develop a taste for some of the company’s building materials—they’ll be lucky to survive at all. I doubt that Terrestrial environmental laws will protect them. Those laws don’t even really protect plant and animal species here on Earth. And who would enforce such laws on Mars?

And yet, somehow, I’m glad our installations have been sold and not just abandoned. Selling them was bad, but it was the lesser evil. Most people wouldn’t have minded seeing them abandoned. They say we have no business wasting time or money in space when there are so many people suffering here on Earth, here in America. I wonder, though, where the money received in exchange for the installations has gone. I haven’t noticed any new government education or jobs programs. There’s been no government help for the homeless, the sick, the hungry.