Parable of the Talents

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