Parable of the Talents

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, con­fused, 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