Lauren Olamina's daughter, Larkin, describes the broken and alienated world of 2032, as war racks the North American continent and an ultra-conservative religious crusader becomes president
Chapter One
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Darkness
Gives shape to the light
As light
Shapes the darkness.
Death
Gives shape to life
As life
Shapes death.
The universe
And God
Share this wholeness,
Each
Defining the other.
God
Gives shape to the universe
As the universe
Shapes God.
FROM Memories of Other Worlds
BY TAYLOR FRANKLIN BANKOLE
I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to
refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the
Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030--a decade and a half of chaos.
This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well
before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has
not ended.
I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding
climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to
say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious
problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and
watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I
was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have
watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic
necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched
as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous
environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease
become inevitable for more and more people.
Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World
War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on
around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs--wastes of
life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious
foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate
leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that
they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse
patriotic support for war.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a
major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive
the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then
blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.
What is left of it now, what it has become, I do not know.
Taylor Franklin Bankole was my father. From his writings, he seems
to have been a thoughtful, somewhat formal man who wound up
with my strange, stubborn mother even though she was almost young
enough to be his granddaughter.
My mother seems to have loved him, seems to have been happy with
him. He and my mother met during the Pox when they were both homeless
wanderers. But he was a 57-year-old doctor--a family practice
physician--and she was an 18-year-old girl. The Pox gave them terrible
memories in common. Both had seen their neighborhoods destroyed--his
in San Diego and hers in Robledo, a suburb of Los Angeles. That
seems to have been enough for them. In 2027, they met, liked each
other, and got married. I think, reading between the lines of some of my
fathers writing, that he wanted to take care of this strange young girl
that he had found. He wanted to keep her safe from the chaos of the
time, safe from the gangs, drugs, slavery, and disease. And of course he
was flattered that she wanted him. He was human, and no doubt tired
of being alone. His first wife had been dead for about two years when
they met.
He couldn't keep my mother safe, of course. No one could have done
that. She had chosen her path long before they met. His mistake was in
seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2032
Today is Arrival Day, the fifth anniversary of our establishing a community
called Acorn here in the mountains of Humboldt County.
In perverse celebration of this, I've just had one of my recurring
nightmares. They've become rare in the past few years--old enemies
with familiar nasty habits. I know them. They have such soft, easy
beginnings.... This one was, at first, a visit to the past, a trip home, a
chance to spend time with beloved ghosts.
My old home has come back from the ashes. This doesn't surprise me,
somehow, although I saw it burn years ago. I walked through the rubble
that was left of it. Yet here it is restored and filled with people--all the
people I knew as I was growing up. They sit in our front rooms in rows
of old metal folding chairs, wooden kitchen and dining room chairs, and
plastic stacking chairs, a silent congregation of the scattered and the
dead.
Church service is already going on, and, of course, my father is
preaching. He looks as he always has in his church robes: tall, broad,
stern, straight--a great black wall of a man with a voice you not only
hear, but feel on your skin and in your bones. There's no corner of the
meeting rooms that my father cannot reach with that voice. We've never
had a sound system--never needed one. I hear and feel that voice again.
Yet how many years has it been since my father vanished? Or
rather, how many years since he was killed? He must have been killed.
He wasn't the kind of man who would abandon his family, his community,
and his church. Back when he vanished, dying by violence was
even easier than it is today. Living, on the other hand was almost
impossible.
He left home one day to go to his office at the college. He taught his
classes by computer, and only had to go to the college once a week, but
even once a week was too much exposure to danger. He stayed
overnight at the college as usual. Early mornings were the safest times
for working people to travel. He started for home the next morning, and
was never seen again.
We searched. We even paid for a police search. Nothing did any
good.
This happened many months before our house burned, before our
community was destroyed. I was 17. Now I'm 23 and I'm several hundred
miles from that dead place.
Yet all of a sudden, in my dream, things have come right again. I'm
at home, and my father is preaching. My stepmother is sitting behind
him and a little to one side at her piano. The congregation of our neighbors
sits before him in the large, not-quite-open area formed by our living
room, dining room, and family room. This is a broad L-shaped space
into which even more than the usual 30 or 40 people have crammed
themselves for Sunday service. These people are too quiet to be a
Baptist congregation--or at least, they're too quiet to be the Baptist
congregation I grew up in. They're here, but somehow not here. They're
shadow people. Ghosts.
Only my own family feels real to me. They're as dead as most of the
others, and yet they're alive! My brothers are here and they look the way
they did when I was about 14. Keith, the oldest of them, the worst, and
the first to die, is only 11. This means Marcus, my favorite brother and
always the best-looking person in the family, is 10. Ben and Greg,
almost as alike as twins, are eight and seven. We're all sitting in the
front row, over near my stepmother so she can keep an eye on us. I'm
sitting between Keith and Marcus to keep them from killing each other
during the service.
When neither of my parents is looking, Keith reaches across me
and punches Marcus hard on the thigh. Marcus, younger, smaller, but
always stubborn, always tough, punches back. I grab each boy's fist and
squeeze. I'm bigger and stronger than both of them, and I've always had
strong hands. The boys squirm in pain and try to pull away. After a
moment, I let them go. Lesson learned. They let each other alone for at
least a minute or two.
In my dream, their pain doesn't hurt me the way it always did when
we were growing up. Back then, since I was the oldest, I was held
responsible for their behavior. I had to control them even though I
couldn't escape their pain. My father and stepmother cut me as little
slack as possible when it came to my hyperempathy syndrome. They
refused to let me be handicapped. I was the oldest kid, and that was
that. I had my responsibilities.
Nevertheless, I used to feel every damned bruise, cut, and burn that
my brothers managed to collect. Each time I saw them hurt, I shared
their pain as though I had been injured myself. Even pains they pretended
to feel, I did feel. Hyperempathy syndrome is a delusional disorder,
after all. There's no telepathy, no magic, no deep spiritual awareness.
There's just the neurochemically-induced delusion that I feel the
pain and pleasure that I see others experiencing. Pleasure is rare, pain
is plentiful, and, delusional or not, it hurts like hell.
So why do I miss it now?
What a crazy thing to miss. Not feeling it should be like having a
toothache vanish away. I should be surprised and happy. Instead, I'm
afraid. A part of me is gone. Not being able to feel my brothers' pain is
like not being able to hear them when they shout, and I'm afraid.
The dream begins to become a nightmare.
Without warning, my brother Keith vanishes. He's just gone. He
was the first to go--to die--years ago. Now he's vanished again. In his
place beside me, there is a tall, beautiful woman, black-brown-skinned
and slender with long, crow-black hair, gleaming. She's wearing a soft,
silky green dress that flows and twists around her body. wrapping her in
some intricate pattern of folds and gathers from neck to feet. She is a
stranger.
She is my mother.
She is the woman in the one picture my father gave me of my biological
mother. Keith stole it from my bedroom when he was nine and I
was twelve. He wrapped it in an old piece of a plastic tablecloth and
buried it in our garden between a row of squashes and a mixed row of
corn and beans. Later, he claimed it wasn't his fault that the picture was
ruined by water and by being walked on. He only hid it as a joke. How
was he supposed to know anything would happen to it? That was Keith.
I beat the hell out of him. I hurt myself too, of course, but it was worth
it. That was one beating he never told our parents about.
But the picture was still ruined. All I had left was the memory of it.
And here was that memory, sitting next to me.
My mother is tall, taller than I am, taller than most people. She's not
pretty. She's beautiful. I don't look like her. I look like my father, which
he used to say was a pity. I don't mind. But she is a stunning woman.
I stare at her, but she does not turn to look at me. That, at least, is
true to life. She never saw me. As I was born, she died. Before that, for
two years, she took the popular "smart drug" of her time. It was a new
prescription medicine called Paracetco, and it was doing wonders for
people who had Alzheimer's disease. It stopped the deterioration of
their intellectual function and enabled them to make excellent use of
whatever memory and thinking ability they had left. It also boosted the
performance of ordinary, healthy young people. They read faster,
retained more, made more rapid, accurate connections, calculations,
and conclusions. As a result, Paracetco became as popular as coffee
among students, and, if they meant to compete in any of the highly paid
professions, it was as necessary as a knowledge of computers.
My mother's drug taking may have helped to kill her. I don't know
for sure. My father didn't know either. But I do know that her drug left
its unmistakable mark on me--my hyperempathy syndrome. Thanks to
the addictive nature of Paracetco--a few thousand people died trying to
break the habit--there were once tens of millions of us.
Hyperempaths, we're called, or hyperempathists, or sharers. Those
are some of the polite names. And in spite of our vulnerability and our
high mortality rate, there are still quite a few of us.
I reach out to my mother. No matter what she's done, I want to know
her. But she won't look at me. She won't even turn her head. And somehow,
I can't quite reach her, can't touch her. I try to get up from my
chair, but I can't move. My body won't obey me. I can only sit and listen
as my father preaches.
Now I begin to know what he is saying. He has been an indistinct
background rumble until now, but now I hear him reading from the
twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, quoting the words of Christ:
"`For the kingdom of Heaven is as a man traveling into a far country
who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And
unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to
every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his
journey.'"
My father loved parables--stories that taught, stories that presented
ideas and morals in ways that made pictures in people's minds. He
used the ones he found in the Bible, the ones he plucked from history,
or from folk tales, and, of course he used those he saw in his life and
the lives of people he knew. He wove stories into his Sunday sermons,
his Bible classes, and his computer-delivered history lectures. Because
he believed stories were so important as teaching tools, I learned to pay
more attention to them than I might have otherwise. I could quote the
parable that he was reading now, the parable of the talents. I could
quote several Biblical parables from memory. Maybe that's why I can
hear and understand so much now. There is preaching between the bits
of the parable, but I can't quite understand it. I hear its rhythms rising
and falling, repeating and varying, shouting and whispering. I hear
them as I've always heard them, but I can't catch the words--except for
the words of the parable.
"`Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with
the same and made them another five talents. And likewise he that had
received two, he also gained another two. But he that had received one
went out and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.'"
My father was a great believer in education, hard work, and personal
responsibility. "Those are our talents," he would say as my brothers'
eyes glazed over and even I tried not to sigh. "God has given them
to us, and he'll judge us according to how we use them."
The parable continues. To each of the two servants who had traded
well and made profit for their lord, the lord said, "`Well done, thou
good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I
will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy
lord.'"
But to the servant who had done nothing with his silver talent
except bury it in the ground to keep it safe, the lord said harsher words.
"`Thou wicked and slothful servant....'" he began. And he ordered his
men to, "`Take therefore the talent from him and give it unto him which
hath ten talents. For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall
have in abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even
that which he hath.'"
When my father has said these words, my mother vanishes. I
haven't even been able to see her whole face, and now she's gone.
I don't understand this. It scares me. I can see now that other people
are vanishing too. Most have already gone. Beloved ghosts....
My father is gone. My stepmother calls out to him in Spanish the way
she did sometimes when she was excited, "No! How can we live now?
They'll break in. They'll kill us all! We must build the wall higher!"
And she's gone. My brothers are gone. I'm alone--as I was alone
that night five years ago. The house is ashes and rubble around me. It
doesn't burn or crumble or even fade to ashes, but somehow, in an
instant, it is a ruin, open to the night sky. I see stars, a quarter moon,
and a streak of light, moving, rising into the sky like some life force
escaping. By the light of all three of these, I see shadows, large, moving,
threatening. I fear these shadows, but I see no way to escape them.
The wall is still there, surrounding our neighborhood, looming over me
much higher than it ever truly did. So much higher.... It was supposed
to keep danger out. It failed years ago. Now it fails again. Danger is
walled in with me. I want to run, to escape, to hide, but now my own
hands, my feet begin to fade away. I hear thunder. I see the streak of
light rise higher in the sky, grow brighter.
Then I scream. I fall. Too much of my body is gone, vanished away.
I can't stay upright, can't catch myself as I fall and fall and fall....
I awoke here in my cabin at Acorn, tangled in my blankets, half on and
half off my bed. Had I screamed aloud? I didn't know. I never seem to
have these nightmares when Bankole is with me, so he can't tell me how
much noise I make. It's just as well. His practice already costs him
enough sleep, and this night must be worse than most for him.
It's three in the morning now, but last night, just after dark, some
group, some gang, perhaps, attacked the Dovetree place just north of us.
There were, yesterday at this time, 22 people living at Dovetree--the
old man, his wife, and his two youngest daughters; his five married sons,
their wives and their kids. All of these people are gone except for the
two youngest wives and the three little children they were able to grab
as they ran. Two of the kids are hurt, and one of the women has had a
heart attack, of all things. Bankole has treated her before. He says she
was born with a heart defect that should have been taken care of when
she was a baby. But she's only twenty, and around the time she was
born, her family, like most people, had little or no money. They worked
hard themselves and put the strongest of their kids to work at ages eight
or ten. Their daughter's heart problem was always either going to kill
her or let her live. It wasn't going to be fixed.
Now it had nearly killed her. Bankole was sleeping--or more likely
staying awake--in the clinic room of the school tonight, keeping an
eye on her and the two injured kids. Thanks to my hyperempathy syndrome,
he can't have his clinic here at the house. I pick up enough of
other people's pain as things are, and he worries about it. He keeps
wanting to give me some stuff that prevents my sharing by keeping me
sleepy, slow, and stupid. No, thanks!
So I awoke alone, soaked with sweat, and unable to get back to
sleep. It's been years since I've had such a strong reaction to a dream.
As I recall, the last time was five years ago right after we settled here,
and it was this same damned dream. I suppose it's come back to me
because of the attack on Dovetree.
That attack shouldn't have happened. Things have been quieting
down over the past few years. There's still crime, of course--robberies,
break-ins, abductions for ransom or for the slave trade. Worse, the poor
still get arrested and indentured for indebtedness, vagrancy, loitering,
and other "crimes." But this thing of raging into a community and
killing and burning all that you don't steal seems to have gone out of
fashion. I haven't heard of anything like this Dovetree raid for at least
three years.
Granted, the Dovetrees did supply the area with home-distilled
whiskey and homegrown marijuana, but they've been doing that since
long before we arrived. In fact, they were the best-armed farm family in
the area because their business was not only illegal, but lucrative.
People have tried to rob them before, but only the quick, quiet burglar-types
have had any success. Until now.
I questioned Aubrey, the healthy Dovetree wife, while Bankole was
working on her son. He had already told her that the little boy would be
all right, and I felt that we had to find out what she knew, no matter how
upset she was. Hell, the Dovetree houses are only an hour's walk from
here down the old logging road. Whoever hit Dovetree, we could be next
on their list.
Aubrey told me the attackers wore strange clothing. She and I
talked in the main room of the school, a single, smoky oil lamp between
us on one of the tables. We sat facing one another across the table,
Aubrey glancing every now and then, at the clinic room, where Bankole
had cleaned and eased her child's scrapes, burns, and bruises. She said
the attackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics--black
dresses, she called them--which hung to their thighs. Under these, they
wore ordinary pants--either jeans or the kind of camouflage pants that
she had seen soldiers wear.
"They were like soldiers," she said. "They sneaked in, so quiet. We
never saw them until they started shooting at us. Then, bang! All at
once. They hit all our houses. It was like an explosion--maybe twenty
or thirty or more guns going off all at just the same time."
And that wasn't the way gangs operated. Gangsters would have
fired raggedly, not in unison. Then they would have tried to make individual
names for themselves, tried to grab the best-looking women or
steal the best stuff before their friends could get it.
"They didn't steal or burn anything until they had beaten us, shot
us." Aubrey said. "Then they took our fuel and went straight to our
fields and burned our crops. After that, they raided the houses and
barns. They all wore big white crosses on their chests--crosses like in
church. But they killed us. They even shot the kids. Everybody they
found, they killed them. I hid with my baby or they would have shot him
and me." Again, she stared toward the clinic room.
That killing of children ... that was a hell of a thing. Most thugs--except
for the worst psychotics--would keep the kids alive for rape and
then for sale. And as for the crosses, well, gangsters might wear crosses
on chains around their necks, but that wasn't the sort of thing most
of their victims would get close enough to notice. And gangsters were
unlikely to run around in matching tunics all sporting white crosses on
their chests. This was something new.
Or something old.
I didn't think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back
to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him
something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won't be able
to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn't
help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses,
had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate,
Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing
his people might do--a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did
the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses--as well as burn them? The Nazis wore
the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don't think they wore it on
their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the
Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another
group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret's people could
be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, "simpler"
time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit
him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take
us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same
God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety
in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and
stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this
country. But these days when more than half the people in the country
can't read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.
Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and
burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch,
in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in
some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness, or even a
Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a "cultist," or a well-to-do
eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that's
worth stealing. And "cultist" is a great catchall term for anyone who fits
into no other large category, and yet doesn't quite match Jarret's version
of Christianity. Jarret's people have been known to beat or drive out
Unitarians, for goodness' sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does
so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want
to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction
of "heathen houses of devil-worship," he has a simple answer:
"Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your
sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America
great again." He's had notable success with this carrot-and-stick
approach. Join us and thrive, or whatever happens to you as a result of
your own sinful stubbornness is your problem. His opponent Vice
President Edward Jay Smith calls him a demagogue, a rabble-rouser,
and a hypocrite. Smith is right, of course, but Smith is such a tired, gray
shadow of a man. Jarret, on the other hand, is a big, handsome, black-haired
man with deep, clear blue eyes that seduce people and hold
them. He has a voice that's a whole-body experience, the way my
father's was. In fact, I'm sorry to say, Jarret was once a Baptist minister
like my father. But he left the Baptists behind years ago to begin his
own "Christian America" denomination. He no longer preaches regular
CA sermons at CA churches or on the nets, but he's still recognized as
head of the church.
It seems inevitable that people who can't read are going to lean
more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on
what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated
are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than
they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give
Jarret an even greater advantage.
Jarret's people see alcohol and drugs as Satan's tools. Some of his
more fanatical followers might very well be the tunic-and-cross gang
who destroyed Dovetree.
And we are Earthseed. We're "that cult," "those strange people in
the hills," "those crazy fools who pray to some kind of god of change."
We are also, according to some rumors I've heard, "those devil-worshiping
hill heathens who take in children. And what do you suppose
they do with them?" Never mind that the trade in abducted or orphaned
children or children sold by desperate parents goes on all over the
country, and everyone knows it. No matter. The hint that some cult is
taking in children for "questionable purposes" is enough to make some
people irrational.
That's the kind of rumor that could hurt us even with people who
aren't Jarret supporters. I've only heard it a couple of times, but it's still
scary.
At this point, I just hope that the people who hit Dovetree were
some new gang, disciplined and frightening, but only after profit. I
hope....
But I don't believe it. I do suspect that Jarret's people had something
to do with this. And I think I'd better say so today at Gathering.
With Dovetree fresh in everyone's mind, people will be ready to cooperate,
have more drills and scatter more caches of money, food,
weapons, records, and valuables. We can fight a gang. We've done that
before when we were much less prepared than we are now. But we can't
fight Jarret. In particular, we can't fight President Jarret. President
Jarret, if the country is mad enough to elect him, could destroy us without
even knowing we exist.
We are now 59 people--64 with the Dovetree women and children,
if they stay. With numbers like that, we barely do exist. All the more
reason, I suppose, for my dream.
My "talent," going back to the parable of the talents, is Earthseed.
And although I haven't buried it in the ground, I have buried it here in
these coastal mountains, where it can grow at about the same speed as our
redwood trees. But what else could I have done? If I had somehow been
as good at rabble-rousing as Jarret is, then Earthseed might be a big
enough movement by now to be a real target. And would that be better?
I'm jumping to all kinds of unwarranted conclusions. At least I
hope they're unwarranted. Between my horror at what's happened down
at Dovetree and my hopes and fears for my own people, I'm upset and
at loose ends and, perhaps, just imagining things.
Copyright © 1998 Octavia E. Butler.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-888363-81-9
Lauren Olamina, a black teenager, grew up in a 21st-century America that was tearing itself apart. Global warming, massive unemployment, gang warfare and corporate greed combined to break down society in general and her impoverished southern California neighborhood in particular. A victim of hyperempathy syndrome, a disorder that compels its victims to believe they feel others' pain, Lauren found herself homeless and alone in a violent world. Escaping from the urban jungle of Los Angeles, Lauren founded Acorn, a hard-working, prosperous rural community based on the teachings of Earthseed, a religion she herself created and centered on the ideas that God is Change and that humanity's destiny is to go to the stars. Butler's extraordinary Parable of the Sower (1996) detailed the aforementioned events. In this equally powerful sequel, Acorn is destroyed by the rising forces of Christian fundamentalism, led by the newly elected U.S. president, the Reverend Andrew Steele Jarret. A handsome man and persuasive orator, seemingly modeled in part on Pat Robertson, Jarret converts millions to his sect, Christian America, while his thugs imprison, rape and murder those they label "heathens," all the while kidnapping their children in order to raise them in Christian households. The narrative is both impassioned and bitter as Butler weaves a tale of a frighteningly believable near-future dystopia. Lauren, at once loving wife and mother, prophet and fanatic, victim and leader, gains stature as one of the most intense and well-developed protagonists in recent SF. Though not for the faint-hearted, this work stands out as a testament to the author's enormous talent, and to the human spirit.. Author tour. (Nov.) FYI: In 1995, Butler received a MacArthur Foundation ("genius") Award. Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly Reviews
