Parable of the Talents

But the Church wasn't only a religion. It was a commu­nity—my community. I didn't want to be free of it. That would have been—had been—impossibly lonely. Everyone needs to be part of something.

By the time I got my Master's in history, I found that 1 couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. 1 thought the best we could all do was to look after one an­other and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth. That seemed to me a big enough job for any person or group, and that was one of the good things that Christian America worked hard at.

I went on living in Uncle Marc's upstate New York house. Once I had my Master's, I began work on my Ph.D. Also, I began creating Dreamask scenarios. Dreamask International hired me on the strength of several scenarios I had done for them on speculation.

Now, thanks to Uncle Marc, I had the Dreamask scenario recorder I had longed for when I was little. Now I had the freedom to create pretty much anything I wanted to. I did my work under the name Asha Vere. I wanted no connection with the Alexanders, yet I felt uncomfortable about trading on my connection with Uncle Marc, and calling myself Duran. At the time, I believed Duran was my mother's family name. My fa­ther's surname, 'Bankole,' meant nothing to me since Uncle Marc couldn't tell me much about Taylor Franklin Bankole— only that he was a doctor and very old when I was born. Asha Vere was name enough for me. It dated me as a child born during the popularity of a particular early Mask, but that didn't matter. And the Dreamask people kind of liked it.

I worked at home on my Masks and on my Ph.D., and was so casual about the degree that i was 32 before I completed it. I enjoyed the work, enjoyed Marc's company when he came to me to get away from his public and enjoy some feel­ing of family. 1 was happy. I never found anyone I wanted to marry. In fact, I had never seen a marriage that I would have wanted to be part of. There must be good marriages some­where, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn't quite break. I knew that not everyone's marriage was as ster­ile and ugly as Kayce's and Madison's. I knew that intellectu­ally, but emotionally, I couldn't seem to escape Kayce's cold, bitter dissatisfaction and Madison's moist little hands.

Uncle Marc, on the other hand, had said without ever quite saying it that he preferred men sexually, but his church taught that homosexuality was sin, and he chose to live by that doctrine. So he had no one. Or at least, I never knew him to have anyone. That looks bleak on the page, but we each chose our lives. And we had one another. We were a family. That seemed to be enough.

Meanwhile, my mother was giving her attention to her other child, her older and best beloved child, Earthseed.

Somehow we—or at least I—never paid much attention to the growing Earthseed movement. It was out there. In spite of the efforts of Christian America and other denominations, there were always cults out there. Granted, Earthseed was an unusual cult, ft financed scientific exploration and inquiry, and techno­logical creativity. It set up grade schools and eventually col­leges, and offered full scholarships to poor but gifted students. The students who accepted had to agree to spend seven years teaching, practicing medicine, or otherwise using their skills to improve life in the many Earthseed communities. Ultimately, the intent was to help the communities to launch themselves toward the stars and to live on the distant worlds they found circling those stars.

'Do you know anything about these people?' I asked Uncle Marc after reading and hearing a few news items about them. 'Are they serious? Interstellar emigration? My god, why don't they just move to Antarctica if they want to rough it?' And he surprised me by making a straight line of his mouth and looking away. I had expected him to laugh.

'They're serious,' he said. 'They're sad, ridiculous, misled people who believe that the answer to all human problems is to fly off to Alpha Centauri.'

I did laugh. 'Is a flying saucer coming for them or what?'

He shrugged. 'They're pathetic. Forget about them.'

I didn't, of course. I left my usual haunts on the nets and began to research them. I wasn't serious. I didn't plan to do anything with what I learned, but I was curious—and I might get an idea for a Mask. I found that Earthseed was a wealthy sect that welcomed everyone and was willing to make use of everyone. It owned land, schools, farms, factories, stores, banks, several whole towns. And it seemed to own a lot of well-known people—lawyers, physicians, journalists, scien­tists, politicians, even members of Congress.

And were they all hoping to fly off to Alpha Centauri?

It wasn't that simple, of course. But to tell the truth, the more I read about Earthseed, the more I despised it. So much needed to be done here on earth—so many diseases, so much hunger, so much poverty, such suffering, and here was a rich organization spending vast sums of money, time, and effort on nonsense. Just nonsense!

Then I found The Books of