Parable of the Talents

Multiple award winner Octavia E. Butler's astonishing novels have made her a powerful, acclaimed voice in women's fiction, African-American literature, and modern science fiction. PARABLE OF THE TALENTS is her mesmerizing vision of a near-future world filled with irrational hatred...and divine hope.

E A R T H S E E D

Lauren Olamina's love is divided among her young daughter, her community, and the revelation that led Lauren to found a new faith that teaches "God Is Change."

But in the wake of environmental and economic chaos, the U.S. government turns a blind eye to violent bigots who consider the mere existence of a black female leader a threat. And soon Lauren must either sacrifice her child and her followers— or forsake the religion that can transform human destiny.

************************************

TO MY AUNTS

IRMA HARRIS AND

HAZEL RUTH WALKER,

AND IN MEMORY OF MY

MOTHER

OCTAVIA MARGARET

BUTLER

************************************

PROLOGUE

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

By Lauren Oya Olamina

Here we are—

Energy,

Mass,

Life,

Shaping life, Mind,

Shaping Mind, God,

Shaping God.

Consider—

We are born

Not with purpose,

But with potential.

THEY'LL MAKE A GOD of her.

I think that would please her, if she could know about it. In spite of all her protests and denials, she's always needed devoted, obedient followers—disciples—who would listen to her and believe everything she told them. And she needed large events to manipulate. All gods seem to need these things.

Her legal name was Lauren Oya Olamina Bankole. To those who loved her or hated her, she was simply "Olamina."

She was my biological mother.

She is dead.

I have wanted to love her and to believe that what hap-pened between her and me wasn't her fault. I've wanted that. But instead, I've hated her, feared her, needed her. I've never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was—so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me. I still don't understand.

And now that she's dead, I'm not even sure I ever will. But I must try because I need to understand myself, and she is part of me. I wish that she weren't, but she is. In order for me to understand who I am, I must begin to understand who she was. That is my reason for writing and assembling this book.

It has always been my way to sort through my feelings by writing. She and I had that in common. And along with the need to write, she also developed a need to draw. If she had been born in a saner time, she might have become a writer as I have or an artist.

I've gathered a few of her drawings, although she gave most of these away during her lifetime. And I have copies of all that was saved of her writings. Even some of her early, paper notebooks have been copied to disk or crystal and saved. She had a habit, during her youth, of hiding caches of food, money, and weaponry in out-of-the-way places or with trusted people, and being able to go straight back to these years later. These saved her life several times, and also they saved her words, her journals and notes and my father's writ-ings. She managed to badger him into writing a little. He wrote well, although he didn't like doing it. I'm glad she bad-gered him. I'm glad to have known him at least through his writing. I wonder why I'm not glad to have known her through hers.

"God is Change," my mother believed. That was what she said in the first of her verses in
Earthseed: The First Book of

the living.

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

The words are harmless, I suppose, and metaphorically true. At least she began with some species of truth. And now she's touched me one last time with her memories, her life, and her damned Earthseed.

************************************

2032

? ? ?

From

EARTHSEED:

THE BOOKS OF

THE LIVING

We give our dead

To the orchards

And the groves.

We give our dead

To life.

Chapter 1

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Darkness

Gives shape to the light

As light

Shapes the darkness.

Death

Gives shape to life

As life

Shapes death.

The universe

And God

Share this wholeness,

Each

Defining the other.

God

Gives shape to the universe

As the universe

Shapes God.

FROM
Memories of Other Worlds

BY TAYLOR FRANKLIN BANKOLE

I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and iner-tia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox.

These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because in-adequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.

What is left of it now, what it has become, I do not know.

************************************

Taylor Franklin Bankole was my father. From his writings, he seems to have been a thoughtful, somewhat formal man who wound up with my strange, stubborn mother even though she was almost young enough to be his granddaughter.

My mother seems to have loved him, seems to have been happy with him. He and my mother met during the Pox when they were both homeless wanderers. But he was a 57-year-old doctor—a family practice physician—and she was an 18-year-old girl. The Pox gave them terrible memories in common. Both had seen their neighborhoods

destroyed—his in San Diego and hers in Robledo, a suburb of Los Angeles. That seems to have been enough for them. In 2027, they met, liked each other, and got married. I think, reading between the lines of some of my father's writing, that he wanted to take care of this strange young girl that he had found. He wanted to keep her safe from the chaos of the time, safe from the gangs, drugs, slavery, and disease. And of course he was flattered that she wanted him. He was human, and no doubt tired of being alone. His first wife had been dead for about two years when they met.

He couldn't keep my mother safe of course. No one could have done that. She had chosen her path long before they met. His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER
26, 2032

Today is Arrival Day, the fifth anniversary of our establish-ing a community called Acorn here in the mountains of Humboldt County.

In perverse celebration of this, I've just had one of my re-curring nightmares. They've become rare in the past few years—old enemies with familiar nasty habits. I know them.

They have such soft, easy beginnings

This one was, at first,

a visit to the past, a trip home, a chance to spend time with beloved ghosts.

************************************

My old home has come back from the ashes. This doesn't surprise me, somehow, although I saw it burn years ago. I walked through the rubble that was left of it. Yet here it is restored and filled with people—all the people I knew as I was growing up. They sit in our front rooms in rows of old metal folding chairs, wooden kitchen and dining room chairs, and plastic stacking chairs, a silent congregation of the scattered and the dead.

Church service is already going on, and, of course, my fa-ther is preaching. He looks as he always has in his church robes: tall, broad, stern, straight—a great black wall of a man with a voice you not only hear, but feel on your skin and in your bones. There's no corner of the meeting rooms that my father cannot reach with that voice. We've never had a- sound system—never needed one. I hear and feel that voice again.

Yet how many years has it been since my father vanished?

Or rather, how many years since he was killed? He must have been killed. He wasn't the kind of man who would abandon his family, his community, and his church. Back when he vanished, dying by violence was even easier than it is today.

Living, on the other hand, was almost impossible.

He left home one day to go to his office at the college. He taught his classes by computer, and only had to go to the col-lege once a week, but even once a week was too much ex-posure to danger. He stayed overnight at the college as usual. Early mornings were the safest times for working people to travel. He started for home the next morning and was never seen again.

We searched. We even paid for a police search. Nothing did any good.

This happened many months before our house burned, be-fore our community was destroyed. I was 17. Now I'm 23

and I'm several hundred miles from that dead place.

Yet all of a sudden, in my dream, things have come right again. I'm at home, and my father is preaching. My step-mother is sitting behind him and a little to one side at her piano. The congregation of our neighbors sits before him in the large, not-quite-open area formed by our living room, dining room, and family room. This is a broad L-shaped space into which even more than the usual 30 or 40 people have crammed themselves for Sunday service. These people are too quiet to be a Baptist congregation—or at least, they're too quiet to be the Baptist congregation I grew up in. They're here, but somehow not here. They're shadow peo-ple. Ghosts.

Only my own family feels real to me. They're as dead as most of the others, and yet they're alive! My brothers are here and they look the way they did when I was about 14.

Keith, the oldest of them, the worst and the first to die, is only 11. This means Marcus, my favorite brother and al-ways the best-looking person in the family, is 10. Ben and Greg, almost as alike as twins, are eight and seven. We're all sitting in the front row, over near my stepmother so she can keep an eye on us. I'm sitting between Keith and Marcus to keep them from killing each other during the service.

When neither of my parents is looking, Keith reaches across me and punches Marcus hard on the thigh. Marcus, younger, smaller, but always stubborn, always tough, punches back. I grab each boy's fist and squeeze. I'm bigger and stronger than both of them and I've always had strong hands.