I said yes. i didn't even have to think about it. I quit my job and went to live in one of his houses in New York. He hired a housekeeper and tutors and bought computer courses to see to it that 1 had the college education that Kayce and Madison wouldn't have provided for me if they could have. Kayce used to say, "You're a girl! If you know how to keep a clean, decent house and how to worship God, you know enough!"
I even went back to church because of Uncle Marc. I went back to the Church of Christian America, physically, at least. I lived at his second home in upstate New York, and I attended church on Sundays because he wanted me to, and because I was so used to doing it. I was comfortable doing it. I sang in the choir again and did regular charity work, helping to care for old people in one of the church nursing homes. Doing those things again was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.
But the truth was, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love. Fine behavior for good Christian Americans, trying to build a strong, united country.
Better, I decided after much thought and much reading of history, to live a decent life and behave well toward other people. Better not to worry about the Christian Americans, the Catholics, the Lutherans, or whatever. Each denomination seemed to think that it had the truth and the only truth and its people were going to bliss in heaven while everyone else went to eternal torment in hell.
But the Church wasn't only a religion. It was a community—my community. I didn't want to be free of it. That would have been—had been—impossibly lonely. Everyone needs to be part of something.
By the time I got my Master's in history, I found that 1 couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. 1 thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth. That seemed to me a big enough job for any person or group, and that was one of the good things that Christian America worked hard at.
I went on living in Uncle Marc's upstate New York house. Once I had my Master's, I began work on my Ph.D. Also, I began creating Dreamask scenarios. Dreamask International hired me on the strength of several scenarios I had done for them on speculation.
Now, thanks to Uncle Marc, I had the Dreamask scenario recorder I had longed for when I was little. Now I had the freedom to create pretty much anything I wanted to. I did my work under the name Asha Vere. I wanted no connection with the Alexanders, yet I felt uncomfortable about trading on my connection with Uncle Marc, and calling myself Duran. At the time, I believed Duran was my mother's family name. My father's surname, "Bankole," meant nothing to me since Uncle Marc couldn't tell me much about Taylor Franklin Bankole— only that he was a doctor and very old when I was born. Asha Vere was name enough for me. It dated me as a child born during the popularity of a particular early Mask, but that didn't matter. And the Dreamask people kind of liked it.
I worked at home on my Masks and on my Ph.D., and was so casual about the degree that i was 32 before I completed it. I enjoyed the work, enjoyed Marc's company when he came to me to get away from his public and enjoy some feeling of family. 1 was happy. I never found anyone I wanted to marry. In fact, I had never seen a marriage that I would have wanted to be part of. There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn't quite break. I knew that not everyone's marriage was as sterile and ugly as Kayce's and Madison's. I knew that intellectually, but emotionally, I couldn't seem to escape Kayce's cold, bitter dissatisfaction and Madison's moist little hands.
Uncle Marc, on the other hand, had said without ever quite saying it that he preferred men sexually, but his church taught that homosexuality was sin, and he chose to live by that doctrine. So he had no one. Or at least, I never knew him to have anyone. That looks bleak on the page, but we each chose our lives. And we had one another. We were a family. That seemed to be enough.
Meanwhile, my mother was giving her attention to her other child, her older and best beloved child, Earthseed.
Somehow we—or at least I—never paid much attention to the growing Earthseed movement. It was out there. In spite of the efforts of Christian America and other denominations, there were always cults out there. Granted, Earthseed was an unusual cult, ft financed scientific exploration and inquiry, and technological creativity. It set up grade schools and eventually colleges, and offered full scholarships to poor but gifted students. The students who accepted had to agree to spend seven years teaching, practicing medicine, or otherwise using their skills to improve life in the many Earthseed communities. Ultimately, the intent was to help the communities to launch themselves toward the stars and to live on the distant worlds they found circling those stars.
"Do you know anything about these people?" I asked Uncle Marc after reading and hearing a few news items about them. "Are they serious? Interstellar emigration? My god, why don't they just move to Antarctica if they want to rough it?" And he surprised me by making a straight line of his mouth and looking away. I had expected him to laugh.
"They're serious," he said. "They're sad, ridiculous, misled people who believe that the answer to all human problems is to fly off to Alpha Centauri."
I did laugh. "Is a flying saucer coming for them or what?"
He shrugged. "They're pathetic. Forget about them."
I didn't, of course. I left my usual haunts on the nets and began to research them. I wasn't serious. I didn't plan to do anything with what I learned, but I was curious—and I might get an idea for a Mask. I found that Earthseed was a wealthy sect that welcomed everyone and was willing to make use of everyone. It owned land, schools, farms, factories, stores, banks, several whole towns. And it seemed to own a lot of well-known people—lawyers, physicians, journalists, scientists, politicians, even members of Congress.
And were they all hoping to fly off to Alpha Centauri?
It wasn't that simple, of course. But to tell the truth, the more I read about Earthseed, the more I despised it. So much needed to be done here on earth—so many diseases, so much hunger, so much poverty, such suffering, and here was a rich organization spending vast sums of money, time, and effort on nonsense. Just nonsense!
Then I found The Books of the Living and I accessed images and information concerning Lauren Oya Olamina.
Even after reading about my mother and seeing her I didn't notice anything. I never looked at her image and thought, "Oh, she looks like me." She did look like me, though—or rather, I looked like her. But I didn't notice. All I saw was a tall, middle-aged, dark-skinned woman with arresting eyes and a nice smile. She looked, somehow, like someone I would be inclined to like and trust—which scared me. It made me immediately dislike and distrust her. She was a cult leader, after all. She was supposed to be seductive. But she wasn't going to seduce me.
And all that was only my reaction to her image. No wonder she was so rich, no wonder she could draw followers even into such a ridiculous religion. She was dangerous.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina