I believe Kayce realized what was happening. In the days before I left, we were enemies, she and I. Neither of us said anything about Madison. We just spent a lot of time hating one another. We didn't talk unless we had to. Any talk that we couldn't avoid might become a screaming fight. Then she'd call me a little whore, an ungrateful little bastard, a heathen witch……During my seventeenth year, I don't think she and I ever had anything like a conversation.
Anyway, I joined the choir. And I discovered that I had a big alto voice that people enjoyed hearing. I even discovered that church wasn't so bad if I didn't have to sit between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Because of my singing, I tried to stay with the church after I moved out of Kayce and Madison's house. I did try. But I couldn't do it.
The rumors began at once: I was having sex with any number of men. I was pregnant. I had had an abortion. I had cursed God and joined my real mother in a heathen cult I was spreading lies about Madison People I had grown up with, people I had thought of as friends, stopped speaking to me. Men who had paid no attention to me while I was at home now began to edge up to me with whispered invitations and unwanted little touches, and then angry denunciations when I wouldn't give them what they now seemed to think they had a right to get from me.
I couldn't take it. A few months after I left home, I left the church. That was all right with my employer. She didn't go to church. She had been raised a Unitarian, but now seemed to have no religious interests. She liked to spend Sundays with her kids. Sunday was my day off. What I did with it was up to me.
But to my amazement, I missed my adoptive parents. I missed the church. I missed the life 1 had grown up with. I missed everything. And I was so lonely. I dragged myself through my days. Sometimes I barely wanted to be alive.
Then I heard that Reverend Marcos Duran was coming to town, that he would be preaching at the First Christian American Church of Seattle. That was the big church, not our little neighborhood thing. The moment I read that Reverend Duran was coming, I knew I would go to see him. I knew what a great preacher he was. I had disks of him preaching to thousands in great CA cathedrals on the Gulf Coast and in Washington, D.C. He had a big church of his own in New York. He was young to be so successful, and I had quite a crush on him. God, he was beautiful. And unlike every other preacher I knew of, he wasn't married. That must have been rough. Every woman would be after him. Other ministers would pressure him to get married, accept adult responsibilities, family responsibilities. Men would look at his handsome face and think he was a homosexual. Was he? I had heard rumors. But then, I knew about rumors.
1 camped out all night outside the big church to make sure that I would be able to get in for services. As soon as I was off duty on Saturday night, I took a blanket roll, some sandwiches, and a bottle of water, and went to get a place outside the church. I wasn't the only one. Even though services would be broadcast free, there were dozens of people camped around the church when I got there. More kept coming. We were mostly women and girls sleeping out that night—not that anyone slept much. There were some men either trying to get close to the women or looking as though they hoped to get close to Reverend Duran. But there was nothing blatant. We sang and talked and laughed. I had a great time. These people were all strangers to me, and I had a great time with them. They liked my voice and got me to sing some solos. Doing that was still hard for me, but I had done it in church, so I just put myself back in church mentally. Then I was into the singing, and the faces of the others told me they were into my songs.
And then a woman came out of the big, handsome house near the church and made straight for me. i stopped singing because it occurred to me suddenly that I was disturbing people. It was late. We were having something very like a party in the street and on the steps of the church. None of us had even thought that we might be keeping people awake. I just stopped singing in the middle of a word and everyone stared at me, then at the woman striding toward me. She was a light-skinned Black woman with red hair and freckles—a plump, middle-aged woman, wearing a long green caftan. She came right up to me as though I were the only one there.
"Would your name be Asha Alexander?" she asked.
I nodded. "Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry if we disturbed you."
She put an envelope in my hand and smiled. "You didn't disturb me, dear, you have a lovely voice. Read the note. I think you'll want to answer it,"
The note said, "If your name is Asha Vere Alexander, I would like to speak with you. I believe I have information concerning your biological parents. Marcos Duran."
I stared at the red-haired woman's face in shock, and she smiled. "If you're interested, come with me," she said, and she turned and walked back toward her house.
I wasn't sure I should.
"What is it?" one of my new friends asked. She was sitting, wrapped in her blankets on the church steps, looking from me to the departing red-haired woman. They were all looking from me to the woman.
"1 don't know," 1 said. "Family stuff." And I ran after the woman.
And he was there, Marcos Duran, in that big house. The house was the home of the minister of the First Church. The red-haired woman was the minister's wife. God, Reverend Duran was even more beautiful in person than he was on the disks. He was an amazing-looking man.
"I've been watching you and your friends and listening to your singing," he said. "I thought I recognized you. Your adoptive parents are Kayce and Madison Alexander." It wasn't a question. He was looking at me as though he knew me, as though he were honestly glad to see me.
I nodded.
He smiled—a sad kind of smile. "Well, I think we may be related. We can do a gene check later if you like, but I believe your mother was my half-sister. She and your father are dead now." He paused, gave me an odd, uncertain look. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that. They were good people. I thought you should know about them if you wanted to."
"You're sure they're dead?" I asked.
He nodded and said again, "I'm sorry."
I thought about this, and didn't know what to feel. My parents were dead. Well, I had thought they might be, in spite of my fantasies. But... but all of a sudden, I had an uncle. All of a sudden one of the best-known men in the country was my uncle.
"Would you like to hear about your parents?" he asked.
"Yes!" I said. "Yes, please. I want to hear everything."
So he began to tell me. As I recall it now, he talked about my mother as a girl with four younger brothers to ride herd on, about Robledo being wiped out, about Acorn. Not until he began to talk about Acorn did he begin to lie. Acorn, he said, was a small mountain community—a real community, not a squatter settlement. But he said nothing about Earth-seed, Acorn's religion. Acorn was destroyed like Robledo, he continued. My parents met there, married there, and were killed there. I was found crying in the ruins of the community.
He hadn't found out about all this until a couple of years later, and by then, I had a home and new parents—good Christian Americans, he believed. He had kept track of me, always meaning to speak to me when I was older, let me know my history, let me know that I still had a living member of my biological family.
"You look like her," he said to me. "You look so much like her, I can't believe it. And your voice is like hers. When I heard you singing out there, I had to get up and go look."
He looked at me with something like amazement, then turned and wiped away a tear.
I wanted to touch him, comfort him. That was odd, because I didn't like touching people. I had been too much alone in my life. Kayce didn't like to touch people—or at least she didn't like to touch me. She always said it was too hot or she was too busy or something. She acted as though hugging or kissing me would somehow have been nasty. And of course, being touched by Madison's moist little hands was nasty. But this man, my uncle ... my uncle!... made me want to reach out to him. I believed everything he told me. It never occurred to me not to. I was awed, flattered, con�
�fused, almost in tears.
I begged him to tell me more about my parents. I knew nothing, and I was hungry for any information he could give me. He spent a lot of time with me, answering my questions and putting me at my ease. The pastor and his red-haired wife put me up for what was left of the night. And all of a sudden, I had family.
************************************
My mother had blundered through the first few years of her life, knowing early what she wanted to do, but not knowing how to do it, improvising as she went along. She recruited the people of Acorn because she came to believe that she could accomplish her purpose by creating Earthseed communities where children would grow up learning the "truths'' of Earthseed and go on to shape the human future according to those "truths." This was her first attempt, as she put it, to plant seeds. But she had the bad luck to begin her work at almost the same time that Andrew Steele Jarret began his, and he was, at least in the short term, much the stronger. Her only good luck was that he was so much stronger than she was that he never noticed her. His fanatical Crusaders, very much one of the fingers of his hand, utterly destroyed her first effort, but there's no record at all of her ever having come to Jarret's attention. She was just an ant that he happened to step on.
If she had been anything more than that, she would not have survived.
It is interesting, however, to see that after Acorn, she seemed to lose her direction until she found Belen Ross. She had written about wanting to find me, then begin her Earthseed work again—but begin it how? By establishing another Acorn? One even more hidden away and low-key?
Surely, a new Acorn would be just as vulnerable as the first one. One gesture of authority could erase it completely. What then? She needed a different idea, and, in fact, she had one. She knew that she had to teach teachers. Gathering families had not worked. She had to gather single people, or at least independent people—people who would learn from her, then scatter to preach and teach as, in effect, her disciples. Instead, she was still, reflexively, looking for me. I'm not sure there was much left of that search but reflex by the time Belen Ross came into the picture. I've wondered whether Allison Gilchrist—Allie—guessed this and brought her together with Len just to shake her up.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
tuesday, june 19, 2035
There are three of us now, in a way. We've had an interesting time becoming three, and I'm not altogether comfortable with the way I brought it about. It isn't exactly what I expected to do, but I've found it interesting. We're on the road again, just north of a shiny, new company town called Hobartville. We bought supplies outside of the walls of Hobartville at the inevitable squatter settlement. Then we circled around the town and moved on. It's good to be moving again. We've been three days in one place.
Until three days ago, we had been walking and making no lingering contacts on the road—which is an odd way for me to behave. Back in '27 when I was walking from Los Angeles to Humboldt County, I gathered people, gathered a small community. I thought then that Earthseed would be born through small, cooperating communities. Once Acorn was established, I invited others to join us. This time, I haven't felt that I could invite anyone other than Len to join me.
This time, after all, I was only going to Portland to look for my daughter and to get my brother to help me find her whether he wanted to or not.
And was that any more realistic a goal than Len's intention to walk to Alaska to rejoin her family? It was, perhaps less suicidal, but... no more sensible.
It is my uneasiness, my fear that perhaps this is true, that has kept me from reaching out to people. I've fed a few ragged parent-child groups because it's hard for me to see hungry children and do nothing at all. Yet I couldn't do much. What's a meal, after all? With Acorn, I had done more. With Earthseed, I had hoped to do much more. So much more.... I still have hopes. Even during the 17 months of Camp Christian, I never forgot Earthseed, although there were times when I thought I might not survive to teach it or use it to shape our future.
But all I've been able to do on this trip is to feed a mother and child here, a father and child there, then send them on their ways. They don't always want to go.
"How do you know they won't lie in wait and rob us later?" Len asked as we tramped along I-5 after leaving a father and his two small, ragged boys eating what I suspected was their first good meal in some time.
"I don't know," I said. "It's unlikely, but it could hap-pen.
"Then why take the chance?"
I looked at her. She met my eyes for a second, then looked away. "I know," she said in a voice I could hardly hear. "But what good is a meal? I mean, they'll be hungry again soon."
"Yes," I said. "Jarret would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children's bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls."
"My father voted for him," she said.
"I'm not surprised."
"My father said he would bring order and stability, get the country back on its feet again. I remember that He got my mother to vote for him too, not that she cared. She would have voted for the man in the moon if he had told her to, just so he would let her alone. I was still living at home during the '32 election. I had never been outside our walls. I thought my father must know what he was talking about, so I was for Jarret, too. I was too young to vote, though, so it didn't matter. All the adult servants voted for him. My father stood by the only phone in the house that servants were allowed to use. He watched as their finger and retinal prints were scanned in. Then he watched them vote."
"I wonder whether it was your abduction that made your father give up on Jarret."
"Give up on him?"
"On him and on the United States. He's left the country, after all."
After a moment, she nodded. "Yes. Although I'm still having trouble thinking of Alaska as a foreign country. I guess that should be easy now, since the war. But it doesn't matter. None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids are the future if they don't starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?"
"That's what Earthseed was about," I said. "I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been."
"It is," Len said.
"It is," I repeated. "There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They'll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it's only to begin a new one, a different one.
"Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It's about learning to live
in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. It's ..." I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. "It's about a lot more than that," I said. "But those are the bones."
"Makes a strange sermon."
"I know."
"You need to do what Jarret does."
"What!" I demanded, not wanting to do anything Jarret did.
"Focus on what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it. Tell folksy stories that illustrate your points and promise the moon and stars—literally in your case. Why should people want to go to the stars, anyway? It will cost a lot of money, and time. It will force us to create whole new technologies. And I doubt that anyone who's alive when the effort starts will live to see the end of it. Some scientists might like it. It will give them the chance to work on their pet projects. And some people might think it's a great adventure, but no one's going to want to pay for it."
Now I smiled. "Exactly. I've been saying things like that for years. Some people might want to do it for the sake of their children—to give them the chance to begin again and do things right this time. But that idea alone won't do it. It won't bring in enough people, money, or persistence. Fulfilling the Destiny is a long-term, expensive, uncertain project—or rather it's hundreds of projects. Maybe thousands. And with no guarantees of anything. Politicians, on the other hand, are short-term thinkers, opportunists, sometimes with consciences, but opportunists nevertheless. Business people are hungry for profit, short- and long-term. The truth is, preparing for interstellar travel and then sending out ships filled with colonists is bound to be a job so long, thankless, expensive, and difficult that I suspect that only a religion could do it. A lot of people will find ways to make money from it. That might get things started. But it will take something as essentially human and as essentially irrational as religion to keep them focused and keep it going—for generations if it takes generations. I suspect it will. You see, I have thought about this."
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