Parable of the Talents

'You just let people come here and stay? What if they rob you, cheat you, kill you? What if they're crazy?'

'Give me some credit, Marc.'

His face changed in an odd way. 'You. You personally.' He paused. 'I thought at first this was Bankole's place, that he'd taken you in.'

'I told you, this is his land.'

'But it's your place.'

'It's our place. I've shaped it, but it doesn't belong to me. I've invited people to come here and build lives for themselves, to join us.' I hesitated, wondering how much he still believed in religion as our father had taught it to us. When he was little, he always seemed to take Dad's reli­gion as real, as obvious, as a given. But what did he be­lieve now that he had suffered the destruction of two homes and the loss of two families, then endured prostitu­tion and slavery? He still had not talked about that last part of his story. Had his religion given him hope, or had it withered and fallen away when his God did not rescue him? Back in Robledo, he had run a simple outdoor church, had been serious about it. But where was he now? I made myself continue. 'And I've given them a belief sys­tem to help them deal with the world as it is and the world as it can be—as people like them can make it.'

'You mean you're their preacher?' he asked.

I nodded. 'We don't call it that, but yes.'

He looked surprised, then gave a short bark of laughter. 'Religion is in our genes,' he said. 'It must be. Either that or Dad did a hell of a job on us.'

'We call our system Earthseed,' I said. 'My actual tide is 'Shaper.''

He stared at me for several seconds, saying nothing. He still looked surprised, and now confused. 'Earthseed?' he said at last. 'My god, I've heard of you guys. You're that cult!'

'So we've been called.'

'There was a politician. He was running for the state sen­ate, I think. He won. He was a Jarret supporter. He was mak­ing a speech in Arcata when I was up there, and he was listing devil-worshiping cults. He named Earthseed as one of them. I'd never heard of it, but I remember because he was going on about how the name actually referred to the devil, the seed deep in the earth and growing like a poison­ous fungus to spread its evil to more and more people.'

'Oh, Marc....'

'I didn't make it up. He really said that.'

I drew a deep breath. 'We don't worship the devil. In fact, we don't worship anyone. And we are Earthseed. Human be­ings are Earthseed. We have no devils. But we're so small that I'm surprised your politician had ever heard of us. And I wish he hadn't Such lies!'

He shrugged. 'It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything. But why would you stop being a Chris­tian? Why would you make up a new religion?'

'I didn't make it up. It was something I had been think­ing about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn't the whole truth. It isn't the only truth. It's just one collection of thoughts that are true. I could never say any­thing about it at home. I never wanted to hurt Dad. But his way didn't work for me. I wanted it to. I would have been a lot more comfortable if it had. But it didn't. Earthseed does.'

'But you made Earthseed up. Or if you didn't make it up, you read it or heard about it somewhere.'

I had heard this many times before. It seemed to be one of the things that every new potential member said. I even kept a simple teaching tool near at hand to deal with it. I got up and went to a bookshelf where a beautiful piece of rose quartz that Bankole had given me acted as a bookend for the few books I kept here in the house and not in the library sec­tion of the school.

'Look at this,' I said, 'and tell me something.' 1 put the rock in his hands. 'If I were to analyze this stone and find out exactly what it's made of, would that mean I made it up?'

'That's not a good comparison, Lauren. The rock exists. Earthseed didn't exist until you made it up.'

'All the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn't make any of them up.'

'You just put them together.'

'Yes.'

'Then you did make Earthseed up the same way you