Parable of the Talents

gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.

Earthseed offers its own rewards—room for small groups of people to begin new lives and new ways of life with new opportunities, new wealth, new concepts of wealth, new challenges to grow and to learn and to decide what to become.

Earthseed is the dawning adulthood of the human species. It offers the only true immortality. It enables the seeds of the Earth to become the seeds of new life, new communities on new earths. The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars, and there, again, to grow, to learn, and to fly.

I BEGAN CREATING secret Dreamask scenarios when I was 12. By then, I was very much the timid, careful daughter of Kayce and Madison Alexander. I knew that even though I was al­lowed to use Dreamasks with strict Christian American sce­narios—like the old 'Asha Vere' stories—no one would be likely to approve my creating new, uncensored scenarios. I knew this because back when I was nine, I began making up plain, linear installment stories to amuse myself and my few friends at Christian America School. It was fun. My friends liked it until we all got into trouble. Then some teacher eavesdropped, realized what I was doing, and punished me for lying. My friends were punished for not reporting my lies. We had to memorize whole chapters of Exodus, Psalms, Proverbs, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Until we had memorized and been tested on every single assigned chapter, we were al­lowed no free time—no recess or lunch breaks. We were kept an hour late every day. We were monitored even in the bath­room to make sure we weren't indulging in more wicked­ness—like stealing a minute or two 'from God.'

It didn't matter that I had said from the beginning that my stories were only made up. I never tried to convince anyone that they were true. And it didn't matter that the Dreamask scenarios we were all allowed to experience were equally imaginary. It was as though my teachers believed that all the possible stories had already been created, and it was a sin to make more—or at least it was a sin for me to make more.

But by the time I reached puberty, except for the pornog­raphy I managed to find, most of the scenarios I was per­mitted were tired, dull, boring things. Characters were always being shown the error of their ways, suffering for their sins, and then returning to God. Boys fought for Chris­tian America. They went to war against heathens, or went out as missionaries in dangerous, wicked, foreign jungles and deserts. Girls, on the other hand, were always cooking, cleaning, sewing, crying, praying, taking care of babies or old people, and going to church. Asha Vere was unusual be­cause she did interesting things. She saved people. She made them return to God. She was one of the few. In fact as a Black and a woman, she was the only one.

A very old woman—she was in her nineties and lived in one of the nursing homes that Christian America had set up for elderly members—once told me that Asha Vere was my generation's Nancy Drew. It was years before I found out who Nancy Drew was.

Anyway, I wrote scenarios—had to write them down with a stylus in my notebook since even outside of Christian Amer­ica, no one was going to trust a kid to work with a scenario recorder. At least our notebooks had a lot of memory and I could code them to erase the scenarios if someone else tried to get into them. Or I thought I could.

I wrote about having different parents—parents who cared about me and didn't wish always that I were another person, the sainted Kamaria. I didn't know at this time that I was adopted. All I had was the usual child's suspicion that I might be, and that somewhere, somehow, I might have beau­tiful, powerful 'real' parents who would come for me some­day.

I wrote about having four brothers and three sisters. The idea of eight children appealed to me. I didn't think you could be lonely in such a big family. My brothers and sisters and I had huge parties on holidays and birthdays and we were always having adventures, and I had a handsome boyfriend who was crazy about me, and the girls at school were all jealous.

Instead of living in shabby, patched-together old Seattle with its missile-strike scars, we lived in a big corporate town. We were important and had plenty of money. We spent our time speeding around in fast cars or making flashy scientific discoveries in laboratories or catching gangs of spies, em­bezzlers, and saboteurs. Since this was a Mask, I could live the adventures as any of my brothers or sisters or as either of our parents. That meant I could 'experience' being a boy or an adult. But since it wasn't like a real Dreamask experi­ence, I had no sensation guidance beyond research and my imagination. I watched other people, tried to make myself feel what it might be like to drive a car or fire a gun or be an older brother who worked in the South Pacific as a deep-sea miner or an older sister who was an architect in Antarc­tica or a father who was CEO of a major corporation or a mother who was a molecular biologist. The father was a big, godlike man who was rich and smart and ... not there most of the time. I had the hardest time being him. Research didn't help much. He was more of a shell than the others. What should a father be like inside, in his thoughts and feel­ings? I wasn't sure. Not like Madison, for sure. Like the fa­thers of my occasional friends? 1 saw my friends' fathers now and then, but I didn't know them. Like the minister, maybe—stern and sure of himself and usually surrounded by a lot of deferential men and smiling women, some of whom were rumored to sleep with him even though they had husbands and he had a wife. But how did he feel? What did he believe? What did he want? What scared him?

I read a lot. I watched people and 1 eavesdropped. I got a lot of the ideas from kids whose parents let them have non-religious Masks and books—bad books, we called them. In short, I tried to do what my