Parable of the Talents

American, and the three newest are Russian. They're all as illegal as hell and as common as oranges. We'll hide them in our survival caches scattered through the mountains. The only thing they had that we'll keep with us and use, as we need it, is some of their money. Most of that will go in the caches too. It's all worn and wrinkled and not identifiable. The fact that there's so much of it—more per person than any group of us would carry around—tells us that these people were either rich or involved in some profitable illegal activity, or both.

Well, now they're gone. People vanish in this world. Even rich people out for fun and greater profit vanish. It happens all the time.

 

Chapter 10

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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

We can,

Each of us,

Do the impossible

As Long as we can convince ourselves

That it has been done before.

LIFE AT ACORN involved a lot of hard physical work. It says a great deal about the world of the early 2030s that most of the people who stumbled onto the community chose to join Earthseed and stay. That being the case, it must have taken a lot to get the Peralta family to leave. There may have been more reasons than my mother gives for their leaving, but I haven't been able to find evidence of them. Perhaps the Per­altas actually did disagree with the religious and political feelings of the rest of Acorn. Perhaps also, they were afraid of the way the political situation in the country was going. They had reason to be.

On the other hand, I'm not at all surprised that Uncle Marc left. There really was no place for him at Acorn. He was 'Olamina's little brother' or, as my mother said, a nice boy. He could have married and begun a family in one more little cabin. That would have been intolerable to him. He was a world saver, after all, like my mother. Or not like her, since Earth was the only world that interested him. Like the Peral­tas, he was in religious and political disagreement with Acorn, and, like the Peraltas, he was probably wise to leave when he did.

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I got the impression that my mother didn't pay much at­tention to being pregnant, it wasn't that she resented it There's no indication that she did. She simply ignored it I was due in July. Between running out into the firefight with the thugs who chased Dan and Nina Noyer and actually giv­ing birth to me, she worked hard to increase both Acorn's wholesaling and its retailing businesses. She was so suc­cessful at this that by the time I was born, the community was in the process of negotiating to buy another truck. They did eventually buy it. Most people had been nervous about having only the one truck. Travis and his helpers had kept the old housetruck running well, and hadn't had to spend much money on it since they made repairs them­selves, but one major accident would put the whole com­munity out of business—or at least out of its new businesses.

With two trucks, the beginnings of a fleet, my mother was looking forward to what she saw as a pleasant, reason­ably secure future. She began to think less about Acorn and more about Earthseed—about spreading Earthseed to whole groups of new people. She wrote more than once in her journal that she hoped to use missionaries to make conversions in nearby cities and towns and to build whole new Earthseed communities—clones of Acorn. I think she especially liked this last idea. She even imagined names for the Acorn clones like a girl thinking up names for imaginary children that she hopes to have someday. There was a Hazelnut, a Pine, a Manzanita, a Sunflower, an Almond.... 'They should be small communities,' she said. 'No more than a few hundred people, never more than a thousand. A community whose population grew to more than a thou­sand should split and 'parent' a new community.'

In small communities, she believed, people are more ac­countable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you're doing.

My mother was not a fanciful woman apart from her be­lief in Earthseed. That, I think, was why the people of Acorn trusted her so. She was practical, straightforward, fair, hon­est, and she liked people. She enjoyed working with them. She was a better-than-average community leader. But be­neath it all was always Earthseed and a longing, an obses­sion, that was far stronger than anyone seemed to realize. People who are intelligent, ambitious, and at the same time, in the grip of odd obsessions can be dangerous. When they occur, they inevitably upset things.

In The First Book of the Living, my mother says,

Prodigy