Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler Page B

glad to say her terrible wound had healed by the time she came to us. We don't even know whether May is her real name. But she can say, "May," and she's let us know we're to call her that. It's al-ways been clear that she loves kids and gets along well with them. Now, with the little Noyer girls, it seems that she has a family. She's been sharing a cabin with Allie Gilchrist and Allie's adopted son Justin for the better part of a year. Now I suppose we'll have to either expand Allie's cabin or begin work on a new one. In fact, we need to begin work on two or three new ones. The Scolari family will be getting the next one. They've been cooped up with the Figueroas long enough. Then the Dovetrees, then the Noyers and May.
    Dan Noyer is staying with Harry and Zahra Balter and their kids now that he's well enough to get around on his own a little. It seemed best to get him out of the clinic as soon as possible once his mother died. May is already sharing her one room with the two little girls, so Bankole looked for space for Dan elsewhere. The Balters volunteered. Also, May's a sharer, and Dan still has bouts of pain. He doesn't complain, but May would notice. I do when I'm around him. There's no hyperempathy in the Balter family, so they can care for injured people without suffering themselves.
    It's been a busy few weeks. We've done several salvage runs with the truck and gathered things we've never been able to gather in quantity before: lumber, stone, bricks, mor-tar, cement, plumbing fixtures, furniture, and pipe from dis-tant abandoned ruins and from the Dovetree place. We'll need it all. We're 67 people now with the Noyer children. We're growing too fast.
    And yet in another way, we're only creeping along. We're not only Acorn, we're Earthseed, and we're still only a sin-gle tiny hill community squeezed into too few cabins, and sharing an almost nineteenth-century existence. The truck will improve our comfort, but. . . it's not enough. I mean, it may be enough for Acorn, but it's not enough for Earthseed.
    Not that I claim to know what would be enough. The thing that I want to build is so damned new and so vast! I not only don't know how to build it, but I'm not even sure what it will look like when I have built it. I'm just feeling my way, using whatever I can do, whatever I can learn to take one more step forward.

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Here, for our infant Earthseed archives, is what I've learned so far about what happened to the Noyers. I've talked to Kassia and Mercy several times. And over the past three days, Dan has told me what he could remember. He seemed to need to talk, in spite of his pain, and with me around to complain to Bankole for him and see that he has his medi-cine when he needs it, he's had less pain. On his own, he seems willing to just lie there and hurt Well, there's nothing wrong with being stoic when you have to be, but there's enough unavoidable suffering in the world. Why endure it when you don't have to?
    The Noyers had driven up from Phoenix, Arizona, where food and water are even more expensive man they are in the Los Angeles area. They sold their houses—they owned two—some vacant land, their furniture, Krista Noyer's jew-elry, sold everything they could to get the money to buy and equip an armed and armored housetruck big enough to sleep seven people. The truck was intended to take the fam-ily to Alaska and serve as their home there until the parents could get work and rent or buy something better.
    Alaska is a more popular destination than ever these days.
    When I left southern California, Alaska was a popular dream— almost heaven. People struggled toward it, hoping for a still-civilized place of jobs, peace, room to raise their chil-dren in safety, and a return to the mythical golden-age world of the mid-twentieth century. They expected to find no gangs, no slavery, no free poor squatter settlements growing like cancers on the land, no chaos. There was to be plenty of