Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

President Donner has sold the last of our Mars installations to a Euro-Japanese company, in fulfillment of one of his earliest campaign promises. The idea is that all nonmilitary space travel, manned and unmanned, should be privatized. “If it’s worth doing at all,” Donner said, “it should be done for profit, and not as a burden on the taxpayers.” As though profit could be counted only as immediate financial gain. I was born in 2009, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve heard people complaining about the space program as a waste of money, and even as one of the reasons for the country’s deterioration. Ridiculous! There is so much to be learned from space itself and from the nearby worlds! And now we’ve found living extraterrestrials, and we’re going to quit. I suppose that if the Martian “slime molds” can be used for something—mining, perhaps, or chemistry—then they’ll be protected, cultivated, bred to be even more useful. But if they prove to be of no particular use, they’ll be left to survive or not as best they can with whatever impediments the company sees fit to put in their paths. If they’re unlucky enough to be bad for business in some way—say they develop a taste for some of the company’s building materials—they’ll be lucky to survive at all. I doubt that Terrestrial environmental laws will protect them. Those laws don’t even really protect plant and animal species here on Earth. And who would enforce such laws on Mars? And yet, somehow, I’m glad our installation...