Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

  Bankole took me by the shoulder and turned me to face him. “I’m not boring you, am I?” he asked for the second time.

  I had been trying not to look at him. I looked now, but he had not yet said what he had to say if he wanted to keep me with him. Did he know? I thought he did.

  “I want to go with you,” I said. “But I’m serious about Earthseed. I couldn’t be more serious. You have to understand that.” Why did this sound strange to me? It was the absolute truth, but I felt odd telling it.

  “I know my rival,” he said.

  Maybe that’s why it sounded strange. I was telling him there was someone else—something else. Maybe it would have sounded less strange if the something were another man.

  “You could help me,” I said.

  “Help you what? Do you have any real idea what you want to do?”

  “Begin the first Earthseed Community.”

  He sighed.

  “You could help me,” I repeated. “This world is falling apart. You could help me begin something purposeful and constructive.”

  “Going to fix the world, are you?” he said with quiet amusement.

  I looked at him. For a moment I was too angry to let myself speak. When I could control my voice, I said, “It’s all right if you don’t believe, but don’t laugh. Do you know what it means to have something to believe in? Don’t laugh.”

  After a while he said, “All right.”

  After a longer while, I said, “Fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about.”

  “The stars. I know.” He lay flat on his back, but turned his head to look at me instead of looking up.

  “This world would be a better place if people lived according to Earthseed,” I said. “But then, this world would be better if people lived according to the teachings of almost any religion.”

  “That’s true. Why do you think they’ll live according to the teaching of yours?”

  “A few will. Several thousand? Several hundred thousand? Millions? I don’t know. But when I have a home base, I’ll begin the first community. In fact, I’ve already begun it.”

  “Is that what you need me for?” He didn’t bother to smile or pretend it was a joke. It wasn’t. I moved over closer to him and sat next to him so that I could look down into his face.

  “I need you to understand me,” I said. “I need you to take me the way I am or go off to your land by yourself.”

  “You need me to take you and all your friends off the street so you can start a church.” Again, he was altogether serious.

  “That or nothing,” I said with equal seriousness. He gave me a humorless smile. “So now we know where we stand.”

  I smoothed his beard, and saw that he wanted to move away from my hand, but that he did not move. “Are you all that sure you want God as your rival?” I asked.

  “I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?” He covered my caressing hand with one of his own. “Tell me, do you ever lose your temper and scream and cry?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t picture it. In all honesty, I can’t.”

  And that reminded me of something that I hadn’t told him, had better tell him before he found out and felt cheated or decided that I didn’t trust him—which I still didn’t, quite. But I didn’t want to lose him to stupidity or cowardice. I didn’t want to lose him at all.

  “Still want me with you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I intend to marry you once we’ve settled.”

  He had managed to surprise me. I stared at him with my mouth open.

  “A genuine spur-of-the-moment reaction,” he said. I’ll have to remember it. Will you marry me, by the way?”

  “Listen to me first.”

  “No more. Bring your church. Bring your congregation. I doubt they care any more about the stars than I do, but bring them. I like them, and there’s room for them.”

  If they would come. My next effort would be to convince them. But this effort wasn’t over yet.

  “That isn’t all,” I said. “Let me tell you one more thing. Then, if you still want me, I’ll marry you anytime you say. I want to. You must know I want to.”

  He waited.

  “My mother was taking—abusing—a prescription drug when she got pregnant with me. The drug was Paracetco. As a result, I have hyperempathy syndrome.”

  He took that in with no sign of how he felt about it. He sat up and looked at me—looked at me with great curiosity, as though he hoped to see some sign of my hyperempathy on my face or body. “You feel other people’s pain?” he asked.

  “I share other people’s pain and pleasure,” I said. “There hasn’t been much pleasure to share lately, except with you.”

  “Do you share bleeding?”

  “No more. I did when I was little.”

  “But you… I saw you kill a man.”

  “Yes.” I shook my head, remembering what he had seen. “I had to, or he would have killed me.”

  “I know that. It’s just that… I’m surprised you were able to do it.”

  “I told you, I had to.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve read about the syndrome, of course, although I’ve never seen a case. I remember thinking that it might not be so bad a thing if most people had to endure all the pain they caused. Not doctors or other medical people, of course, but most people.”

  “Bad idea,” I said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Take my word for it. Bad, bad idea. Self-defense shouldn’t have to be an agony or a killing or both. I can be crippled by the pain of a wounded person. I’m a very good shot because I’ve never felt that I could afford just to wound someone. Also…” I stopped, looked past him for a moment and drew a deep breath, then focused on him again. “The worst of it is, if you got hurt, I might not be able to help you. I might be as crippled by your injury—by your pain, I mean—as you are.”

  “I suspect you’d find a way.” He smiled a little.

  “Don’t suspect that, Bankole.” I stopped and hunted for words that would make him understand. “I’m not looking for compliments or even reassurance. I want you to understand: If you broke your leg badly, if you were shot, if anything serious and disabling happened to you, I might be disabled, too. You must know how disabling real pain can be.”

  “Yes. I know a little about you, too. No, don’t tell me again that you aren’t fishing for compliments. I know. Let’s go back to camp. I’ve got some pain medications in my bag. I’ll teach you how and when to use them on me or whoever needs them. If you can just hold on and be yourself long enough to use them, you can do whatever else may be necessary.”

  “…okay. So…do you still want to marry me?” It surprised me how much I didn’t want to ask the question. I knew he still wanted me. Yet there I was, asking him, almost begging him to say it. I needed to hear it.

  He laughed. Big, full laughter that sounded so real, I couldn’t take offense. “I’ll have to remember this,” he said. “Do you imagine for one minute, girl, that I would let you get away?”

  23

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  Your teachers

  Are all around you.

  All that you perceive,

  All that you experience,

  All that is given to you

  or taken from you,

  All that you love or hate,

  need or fear

  Will teach you—

  If you will learn.

  God is your first

  and your last teacher.

  God is your harshest teacher:

  subtle,

  demanding.

  Learn or die.

  EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2027

  WE HAD ANOTHER BATTLE to try to sleep through before dawn this morning. It began to the south of us out on or near the highway, and worked its way first toward, then away from us.

  We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running… Same old stuff—tiresome, da
ngerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.

  I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over being angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can’t stop them by staying awake. If that wasn’t altogether true, I didn’t care. I slept.

  And somehow, during or after the battle, in spite of the watch, two people slipped into our camp and bedded down among us. They slept, too.

  We awoke early as usual so that we could start walking while the heat wasn’t too terrible. We’ve learned to wake up without prompting at the first light of dawn. Today, four of us sat up in our bags at almost the same time. I was crawling out of my bag to go off and urinate when I spotted the extra people—two gray lumps in the dawn light, one large and one small, lying against each other, asleep on the bare ground. Thin arms and legs extended like sticks from rags and mounds of clothing.

  I glanced around at the others and saw that they were staring where I was staring—all of them except Jill, who was supposed to be on watch. We began trusting her to stand night watch last week with a partner. This was only her second solitary watch. And where was she looking? Away into the trees. She and I would have to talk.

  Harry and Travis were already reacting to the figures on the ground. In silence, each man was peeling out of his bag in his underwear, and standing up. More fully clothed, I matched them, move for move, and the three of us closed in around the two intruders.

  The larger of the two awoke all at once, jumped up, darted two or three steps toward Harry, then stopped. It was a woman. We could see her better now. She was brown-skinned with a lot of long, straight, unkempt black hair. Her coloring was as dark as mine, but she was all planes and angles—a wiry, hawk-faced woman who could have used a few decent meals and a good scrubbing. She looked like a lot of people we’ve seen on the road.

  The second intruder awoke, saw Travis standing nearby in his underwear, and screamed. That got everyone’s attention. It was the high, piercing shriek of a child—a little girl who looked about seven. She was a tiny, pinched image of the woman—her mother, or her sister perhaps.

  The woman ran back to the child and tried to scoop her up. But the child had folded herself into a tight fetal knot and the woman, trying to lift her, could not get a grip. She stumbled, fell over, and in an instant she too had rolled herself into a tight ball. By then everyone had come to see.

  “Harry,” I said, and waited until he looked at me. “Would you and Zahra keep watch—make sure nothing else surprises us.”

  He nodded. He and Zahra detached from the cluster, separated, and took up positions on opposite sides of the camp, Harry nearest to the approach from the highway and Zahra on the approach from the nearest lesser road. We had buried ourselves as well as we could in a deserted area that Bankole said must once have been a park, but we didn’t kid ourselves that we were alone. We’d followed I-5 to a small city outside Sacramento, away from the worst of the sprawl, but there were still plenty of poor people around—local paupers and refugees like us.

  Where had this pair of ragged, terrified, filthy people come from?

  “We won’t hurt you,” I said to them as they lay, still rolled up on the ground. “Get up. Come on, get up. You’ve come into our camp unasked. You can at least talk to us.”

  We didn’t touch them. Bankole seemed to want to, but he stopped when I grasped his arm. They were already scared to death. A strange man, reaching out to them, might make them hysterical.

  Trembling, the woman unrolled herself and gazed up at us. Now I realized she looked Asian except for her coloring. She put her head down and whispered something to the child. After a moment, the two of them stood up.

  “We didn’t know this was your place,” she whispered. “We’ll go away. Let us go away.”

  I sighed and looked at the terrified face of the little girl. “You can go,” I said. “Or if you like, you can eat with us.”

  They both wanted to run away. They were like deer, frozen in terror, about to bolt. But I’d said the magic word. Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have said it, but I said today to these two starved-looking people: “eat.”

  “Food?” the woman whispered.

  “Yes. We’ll share a little food with you.”

  The woman looked at the little girl. I was certain now that they were mother and daughter. “We can’t pay,” she said. “We don’t have anything.”

  I could see that. “Just take what we give you and nothing more than we give you,” I said. “That will be pay enough.”

  “We won’t steal. We aren’t thieves.”

  Of course they were thieves. How else could they live. Some stealing and scavenging, maybe some whoring… They weren’t very good at it or they’d look better. But for the little kid’s sake, I wanted to help them at least with a meal.

  “Wait, then,” I said. “We’ll put a meal together.”

  They sat where they were and watched us with hungry, hungry eyes. There was more hunger in those eyes than we could fill with all our food. I thought I had probably made a mistake. These people were so desperate, they were dangerous. It didn’t matter at all that they looked harmless. They were still alive and strong enough to run. They were not harmless.

  It was Justin who eased some of the tension in those bottomless, hungry eyes. Stark naked, he toddled over to the woman and the girl and looked them over. The little girl only stared back, but after a moment, the woman began to smile. She said something to Justin, and he smiled. Then he ran back to Allie who held on to him long enough to dress him. But he had done his work. The woman was seeing us with different eyes. She watched Natividad nursing Dominic, then watched Bankole combing his beard. This seemed funny to her and to the child, and they both giggled.

  “You’re a hit,” I told Bankole.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny about a man combing his beard,” he muttered, and put way his comb.

  I dug sweet pears out of my pack, and took one each to the woman and the girl. I had just bought them two days before, and I had only three left. Other people got the idea and began sharing what they could spare. Shelled walnuts, apples, a pomegranate, Valencia oranges, figs…little things.

  “Save what you can,” Natividad told the woman as she gave her almonds wrapped in a piece of red cloth. “Wrap things in here and tie the ends together.”

  We all shared corn bread made with a little honey and the hard-boiled eggs we bought and cooked yesterday. We baked the corn bread in the coals of last night’s fire so that we could get away early this morning. The woman and the girl ate as though the plain, cold food were the best they had ever tasted, as though they couldn’t believe someone had given it to them. They crouched over it as though they were afraid we might snatch it back.

  “We’ve got to go,” I said at last. “The sun’s getting hotter.”

  The woman looked at me, her strange, sharp face hungry again, but now not hungry for food.

  “Let us go with you,” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “We’ll work. We’ll get wood, make fire, clean dishes, anything. Take us with you.”

  Bankole looked at me. “I assume you saw that coming.”

  I nodded. The woman was looking from one of us to the other.

  “Anything,” she whispered—or whimpered. Her eyes were dry and starved, but tears streamed from the little girl’s eyes.

  “Give us a moment to decide,” I said. I meant, Go away so my friends can yell at me in private, but the woman didn’t seem to understand. She didn’t move.

  “Wait over there,” I said, pointing toward the trees nearest to the road. “Let us talk. Then we’ll tell you.”

  She didn’t want to do it. She hesitated, then stood up, pulled her even more reluctant daughter up, and trudged off to the trees I had indicated.

  “Oh God,” Zahra muttered. “We’re going to take them,
aren’t we?”

  “That’s what we have to decide,” I said.

  “What, we feed her, and then we get to tell her to go away and finish starving?” Zahra made a noise of disgust.

  “If she isn’t a thief,” Bankole said. “And if she doesn’t have any other dangerous habits, we may be able to carry them. That little kid…”

  “Yes,” I said. “Bankole, is there room for them at your place?”

  “His place?” three others asked. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them about it. And I hadn’t had the nerve.

  “He has a lot of land up north and over by the coast,” I said. “There’s a family house that we can’t live in because his sister and her family are there. But there’s room and trees and water. He says…” I swallowed, looked at Bankole who was smiling a little. “He says we can start Earthseed there—build what we can.”

  “Are there jobs?” Harry asked Bankole.

  “My brother-in-law manages with year-round gardens and temporary jobs. He’s raising three kids that way.”

  “But the jobs do pay money?”

  “Yes, they pay. Not well, but they pay. We’d better hold off talking about this for a while. We’re torturing that young woman over there.”

  “She’ll steal,” Natividad said. “She says she won’t, but she will. You can look at her and tell.”

  “She’s been beaten,” Jill said. “The way they rolled up when we first spotted them. They’re used to being beaten, kicked, knocked around.”

  “Yeah.” Allie looked haunted. “You try to keep from getting hit in the head, try to protect your eyes and…your front. She thought we would beat her. She and the kid both.”

  Interesting that Allie and Jill should understand so well. What a terrible father they had. And what had happened to their mother? They had never talked about her. It was amazing that they had escaped alive and sane enough to function.

  “Should we let her stay?” I asked them.

  Both girls nodded. “I think she’ll be a pain in the ass for a while, though,” Allie said. “Like Natividad says, she’ll steal. She won’t be able to stop herself. We’ll have to watch her real good. That little kid will steal, too. Steal and run like hell.”