"Would your name be Asha Alexander?" she asked.
I nodded. "Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry if we disturbed you."
She put an envelope in my hand and smiled. "You didn't disturb me, dear, you have a lovely voice. Read the note. I think you'll want to answer it,"
The note said, "If your name is Asha Vere Alexander, I would like to speak with you. I believe I have information concerning your biological parents. Marcos Duran."
I stared at the red-haired woman's face in shock, and she smiled. "If you're interested, come with me," she said, and she turned and walked back toward her house.
I wasn't sure I should.
"What is it?" one of my new friends asked. She was sitting, wrapped in her blankets on the church steps, looking from me to the departing red-haired woman. They were all looking from me to the woman.
"1 don't know," 1 said. "Family stuff." And I ran after the woman.
And he was there, Marcos Duran, in that big house. The house was the home of the minister of the First Church. The red-haired woman was the minister's wife. God, Reverend Duran was even more beautiful in person than he was on the disks. He was an amazing-looking man.
"I've been watching you and your friends and listening to your singing," he said. "I thought I recognized you. Your adoptive parents are Kayce and Madison Alexander." It wasn't a question. He was looking at me as though he knew me, as though he were honestly glad to see me.
I nodded.
He smiled—a sad kind of smile. "Well, I think we may be related. We can do a gene check later if you like, but I believe your mother was my half-sister. She and your father are dead now." He paused, gave me an odd, uncertain look. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that. They were good people. I thought you should know about them if you wanted to."
"You're sure they're dead?" I asked.
He nodded and said again, "I'm sorry."
I thought about this, and didn't know what to feel. My parents were dead. Well, I had thought they might be, in spite of my fantasies. But... but all of a sudden, I had an uncle. All of a sudden one of the best-known men in the country was my uncle.
"Would you like to hear about your parents?" he asked.
"Yes!" I said. "Yes, please. I want to hear everything."
So he began to tell me. As I recall it now, he talked about my mother as a girl with four younger brothers to ride herd on, about Robledo being wiped out, about Acorn. Not until he began to talk about Acorn did he begin to lie. Acorn, he said, was a small mountain community—a real community, not a squatter settlement. But he said nothing about Earth-seed, Acorn's religion. Acorn was destroyed like Robledo, he continued. My parents met there, married there, and were killed there. I was found crying in the ruins of the community.
He hadn't found out about all this until a couple of years later, and by then, I had a home and new parents—good Christian Americans, he believed. He had kept track of me, always meaning to speak to me when I was older, let me know my history, let me know that I still had a living member of my biological family.
"You look like her," he said to me. "You look so much like her, I can't believe it. And your voice is like hers. When I heard you singing out there, I had to get up and go look."
He looked at me with something like amazement, then turned and wiped away a tear.
I wanted to touch him, comfort him. That was odd, because I didn't like touching people. I had been too much alone in my life. Kayce didn't like to touch people—or at least she didn't like to touch me. She always said it was too hot or she was too busy or something. She acted as though hugging or kissing me would somehow have been nasty. And of course, being touched by Madison's moist little hands was nasty. But this man, my uncle ... my uncle!... made me want to reach out to him. I believed everything he told me. It never occurred to me not to. I was awed, flattered, confused, almost in tears.
I begged him to tell me more about my parents. I knew nothing, and I was hungry for any information he could give me. He spent a lot of time with me, answering my questions and putting me at my ease. The pastor and his red-haired wife put me up for what was left of the night. And all of a sudden, I had family.
************************************
My mother had blundered through the first few years of her life, knowing early what she wanted to do, but not knowing how to do it, improvising as she went along. She recruited the people of Acorn because she came to believe that she could accomplish her purpose by creating Earthseed communities where children would grow up learning the "truths'' of Earthseed and go on to shape the human future according to those "truths." This was her first attempt, as she put it, to plant seeds. But she had the bad luck to begin her work at almost the same time that Andrew Steele Jarret began his, and he was, at least in the short term, much the stronger. Her only good luck was that he was so much stronger than she was that he never noticed her. His fanatical Crusaders, very much one of the fingers of his hand, utterly destroyed her first effort, but there's no record at all of her ever having come to Jarret's attention. She was just an ant that he happened to step on.
If she had been anything more than that, she would not have survived.
It is interesting, however, to see that after Acorn, she seemed to lose her direction until she found Belen Ross. She had written about wanting to find me, then begin her Earthseed work again—but begin it how? By establishing another Acorn? One even more hidden away and low-key?
Surely, a new Acorn would be just as vulnerable as the first one. One gesture of authority could erase it completely. What then? She needed a different idea, and, in fact, she had one. She knew that she had to teach teachers. Gathering families had not worked. She had to gather single people, or at least independent people—people who would learn from her, then scatter to preach and teach as, in effect, her disciples. Instead, she was still, reflexively, looking for me. I'm not sure there was much left of that search but reflex by the time Belen Ross came into the picture. I've wondered whether Allison Gilchrist—Allie—guessed this and brought her together with Len just to shake her up.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
tuesday, june 19, 2035
There are three of us now, in a way. We've had an interesting time becoming three, and I'm not altogether comfortable with the way I brought it about. It isn't exactly what I expected to do, but I've found it interesting. We're on the road again, just north of a shiny, new company town called Hobartville. We bought supplies outside of the walls of Hobartville at the inevitable squatter settlement. Then we circled around the town and moved on. It's good to be moving again. We've been three days in one place.
Until three days ago, we had been walking and making no lingering contacts on the road—which is an odd way for me to behave. Back in '27 when I was walking from Los Angeles to Humboldt County, I gathered people, gathered a small community. I thought then that Earthseed would be born through small, cooperating communities. Once Acorn was established, I invited others to join us. This time, I haven't felt that I could invite anyone other than Len to join me.
This time, after all, I was only going to Portland to look for my daughter and to get my brother to help me find her whether he wanted to or not.
And was that any more realistic a goal than Len's intention to walk to Alaska to rejoin her family? It was, perhaps less suicidal, but... no more sensible.