Parable of the Talents

her from me courteously, firmly. Then, all of a sudden, the wall around her gave way. I met one of her acolytes and he took my mes­sage to her.

My messenger was a thin, brown-haired young man who said his name was Edison Balter. I met him in the guest­house dining room one morning as we each sat alone, eat­ing bagels and drinking apple cider. I pounced on him as someone I hadn't pestered yet. I had no idea at that time what the Balter name meant to my mother or that this man was an adopted son of one of her best friends. I was only relieved that someone was listening to me, not closing one more door in my face.

'I'm her aide this trip,' he told me. 'She says I'm just about ready to go out on my own, and the idea scares the hell out of me. What name shall I give her?'

'Asha Vere.'

'Oh? Are you the Asha Vere who does Dreamasks?'

I nodded.

'Nice work. I'll tell her. You want to put her in one of your Masks? You know you do look a lot like her. Like a softer version of her.' And he was gone. He talked fast and moved very fast, but somehow without seeming to hurry. He didn't look anything like Olamina himself, but there was a similarity. I found that I liked him at once—just as I'd at first found myself liking her. Another likable cultist. I got the feeling that Red Spruce, a clean, pretty mountain com­munity, was nothing but a nest of seductively colorful snakes—a poisonous place.

Then Edison Balter came back and told me he would take me to her. She was somewhere in her fifties—58, I remem­bered from my reading. She was born way back in 2009, be­fore the Pox. My god. She was old. But she didn't look old, even though her black hair was streaked with gray. She looked big and strong and, in spite of her pleasant, welcom­ing expression, just a little frightening. She was a little taller than me, and maybe a little more angular. She looked... not hard, but as though she could be hard with just the smallest change of expression. She looked like someone I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. And, yes, even 1 could see it. She looked like me.

She and I just stood looking at one another for a long, long time. After a while, she came up to me, took my left hand, and turned it to look at the two little moles I have just below the knuckles. My impulse was to pull away, but I managed not to.

She stared at the moles for a while, then said, 'Do you have another mark—a kind of jagged dark patch just here?' She touched a place covered by my blouse on my left shoul­der near my neck.

This time, I did step away from her touch. I didn't mean to, but I just don't like to be touched. Not even by a stranger who might be my mother. I said, 'I have a birth­mark like that, yes.'

'Yes,' she whispered, and went on looking at me. After a moment, she said, 'Sit down. Sit here with me. You are my child, my daughter. I know you are.'

I sat in a chair instead of sharing the couch with her. She was open and welcoming, and somehow, that made me want all the more to draw back.

'Have you only just found out?' she asked.

I nodded, tried to speak, and found myself stumbling and stammering. 'I came here because 1 thought... maybe ... because I looked up information about you, and I was curi­ous. I mean, I read about Earthseed, and people said I looked like you, and ... well, I knew I was adopted, so I wondered.'

'So you had adoptive parents. Were they good to you? What's your life been like? What do you....' She stopped, drew a deep breath, covered her face with both hands for a moment, shook her head, then gave a short laugh. 'I want to know everything! I can't believe that it's you. I....' Tears began to stream down her broad, dark face. She leaned to­ward me, and I knew she wanted to hug me. She hugged people. She touched people. She hadn't been raised by Kayce and Madison Alexander.

I looked away from her and shifted around trying to get comfortable in my chair, in my skin, in my newfound iden­tity. 'Can we do a gene print?' I asked.

'Yes. Today. Now.' She took a phone from her pocket and called someone. No more than a minute later, a woman dressed all in blue came in carrying a small plastic case. She drew a small amount of blood from each of us, and checked it in a portable diagnostic from her case. The unit wasn't much bigger than Olamina's phone. In less than a minute, though, it spit out two gene prints. They were rough and incomplete, but even I could see both their many differ­ences and their many unmistakably identical points.

'You're close relatives,' the woman said. 'Anyone would guess that just from looking at you, but this confirms it.'

'We're mother and daughter,' Olamina said.

'Yes,' the woman in blue agreed. She was my