Seed to Harvest

by Octavia E. Butler

  He hadn’t.

  I had nowhere else to go. There was something especially galling about suffering a defeat now, just minutes after I had won my biggest victory. But what could I do?

  I shifted my attention back to Clay. There was a glimmer of something just as I shifted—like the glimmer of a fine spider web that catches the light just for a second and then seems to vanish again. I froze. I shifted back to the pattern, bringing it into focus very slowly. At first there was nothing. Then, just before I would have had a strong, clear focus on the pattern strands of my six actives, there was that glimmer again. I managed to keep it, this time, by not trying to sharpen my focus on it. Like looking at something out of the corner of your eye.

  It was a pattern strand. A slender, fragile-seeming thread, like a shadow of one of the comparatively substantial strands of my actives. But it was a pattern strand. Somehow, Clay had become a member of the pattern. How?

  I could think of only one answer. The pattern was made up of actives. Just actives, no latents until now. No latents period. Clay was on his way to transition.

  The moment the thought hit me, I knew it was right. After a ten-year delay, Clay was going to make it. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t sure. After all, I had never seen anyone who was about to go into transition before. But I couldn’t even make myself doubt. Clay was going to come through. He would belong to me, like the others. I knew it.

  I brought my attention back to Seth and Clay, who stood waiting.

  “That took long enough,” said Seth. “What did you find out?”

  “That your brother’s not a latent any more,” I said. “That he’s headed toward transition.”

  There was a moment of complete silence. Then came quick, bitter disappointment radiating from both men. They didn’t believe me.

  Seth spoke quietly. “Mary, Doro himself gave up on Clay years ago, said he wouldn’t ever reach transition.”

  “I know it. But there was no pattern back then.”

  “But Doro explained that—”

  “Damnit, Seth, I’m explaining that Doro was wrong. He might know a hell of a lot, but he can’t foretell the future. And he can’t use my pattern to see what I can see!”

  Karl came up as I was talking. When I finished, he asked, “What are you shouting about now?”

  I told him and he just shrugged.

  “Doro wants to see us both in the library,” he said. “Now.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Seth. “She can’t leave now.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to tell us how you know … how after all these years this could happen.” So they were beginning to believe me.

  “I’ll have to talk to you after I see what Doro wants,” I said. “It probably won’t take long.”

  I followed Karl away from them, hoping I could get back to them soon. I wanted to learn more about what was happening to Clay myself. I was excited about it. But now, Doro and the Dana brothers aside, there was something else I had to do.

  “Karl.”

  We had almost reached the library door. He stopped, looked at me.

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “You didn’t need it.”

  “Yes I did. I might not have been able to stop myself from killing if they had pushed me harder.”

  Karl nodded disinterestedly, turned to go into the library.

  “Wait a minute.”

  He gave me a look of annoyance.

  “I have a feeling that, even though you sided with me, you’re the only one in the house that I haven’t really won over.”

  “You didn’t win anyone over,” he said. “You bludgeoned the others into submission. I had already submitted.”

  “The hell with that,” I said. I lowered my gaze a little, stared at his chest instead of his face. He was wearing a blue shirt open at the neck so that a little of his mat of brown chest hair showed. “I did what I had to do,” I said. “What I was evidently born to do. I’m not fighting it any more, for the same reason Jesse and Rachel probably won’t fight me any more. It doesn’t do any good.”

  “Don’t you think I understand that?”

  “If you understand it, why are you still holding it against me?”

  “Because Jesse was right about one thing. It doesn’t really matter whether what you’re doing to us is your fault or not. You’re doing it. I’m not fighting you, but you shouldn’t expect me to thank you, either.”

  “I don’t.”

  He looked a little wary. “Just what do you want from me?”

  “You know damn well what I want.”

  “Do I?” He stared at me for a long moment. “I suppose I do. Doro must be leaving.” He turned and walked away.

  I let him go this time. I felt like throwing something at him, but I let him go. The son of a bitch had Jan and Vivian both, and he had the nerve to talk about Doro and me. Or, rather, he had the nerve to use Doro to try to hurt me. If he couldn’t get away from me, he’d hurt me. He shouldn’t have been able to hurt me. But he was.

  In the library, Doro was sitting at the reading table leafing through a book, and probably reading it. He read fast. Karl and I sat opposite him with an empty chair between us.

  “I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” said Doro.

  I felt rather than saw Karl’s glance at me. I ignored him. Doro went on.

  “Mary, it looks as though you’ve established yourself fairly well. I don’t think anyone will bother you again.”

  “No.”

  “You’re just going to leave?” said Karl. “Don’t you have any plans for us now that Mary has become what you seemed to want her to become?”

  “Mary’s plan sounded all right to me,” said Doro. “It might be harder for the group of you to organize your lives, held together as you are. But I’d rather give you a chance to try it. Let you find out whether you can build something of your own.”

  “Or at least of Mary’s own,” said Karl bitterly.

  Doro looked from one of us to the other.

  “He’s still holding the pattern against me,” I said. “But he might be right, anyway. I might have something we can start working on together.” I told him about Clay Dana. He sat there listening, and looking more and more as though he didn’t believe me.

  “Clay lost any chance he had for becoming an active over ten years ago,” he said.

  “Ten years ago he didn’t have the pattern to help him along.”

  “I find it hard to believe the pattern is helping him now. How could it? What did you do?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But it must be the pattern. What other new thing has there been in his life in the past two weeks? He was a latent before he came here. And if I can push one latent toward transition, why can’t I push others?”

  “Oh, my God,” muttered Karl. I ignored him.

  “Look,” I said, “we actives were all latents once. We moved up. Why can’t others?”

  “The others weren’t bred for it. Clay was, and I can see now that you were right about him. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “You can see?”

  “Of course. How could I have raised generations of actives if I wasn’t able to judge my people’s potential?”

  “Oh, yeah.” The ones who tasted good, yes. “Doro, I want to try bringing other latents to transition.”

  “How?”

  “By doing to them the only thing I’d ever done to Clay before today. By reading them. Just reading them.”

  Doro shook his head. “Go ahead. It won’t work.”

  Yes, it would. I felt sure that it would. And I could try it without even leaving the room. I thought of two of my cousins, a brother and sister—Jamie and Christine Hanson. We used to get into trouble together when we were little. As we grew older and started to receive mental interference, we got more antisocial. We abandoned each other and started to get into trouble separately. Doro didn’t pay any attention to Jamie and Christine, and their parents had given up on them years ago. No transition was supposed to come alo
ng and put them back in control of their lives, so, let alone, they’d probably wind up in prison or in the morgue before they were a lot older. But I wasn’t going to let them alone.

  I reached out to the old neighborhood, got a bird’s-eye view of it all at once. Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue. Emma’s house. I could have focused in tight and read Rina or Emma. Instead, I followed Forsyth Avenue south past Piedras Altas, where heaven knew how many of my relatives lived, and on to Cooper Street, where I had even more family. On Cooper I recognized the Hanson house and focused in on it.

  Christine was inside screaming at her mother. I noticed that she had shaved her head—probably more to get on her mother’s nerves than for any other reason. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were fighting about. I read her the way you skim pages of a phone book looking for a number. Only, I wasn’t looking for anything. I noticed that she’d been pregnant three times—one miscarriage and two abortions. And she was only nineteen. And she’d been with some idiot friends when they decided to rob a liquor store. Some other things. I didn’t care. I just read her. Then I went after Jamie.

  I found him sitting on an old sofa in the garage, fooling around with a guitar. I read him and learned, among other things, that he had just gotten out of jail a few days before. He had been driving drunk, smashed into a parked car, backed up, drove away. But somebody got his license number. Ninety days.

  Now that he was out, he couldn’t take the running battle that was usually going on inside the house. So he was living in the garage until some money came his way and he could get his own place.

  I shifted my attention to the pattern. I knew what to look for now. My experience with Clay had taught me. Slender threads, fragile, tentative, soon to grow into the real thing. I found them stretching between me and both Hansons. Both of them. They were mine.

  I snapped back to the library, excited, elated. “I did it!”

  I’m not quite sure what expression I was wearing, but Doro frowned and drew back from me a little.

  “I did it! I got two more! You’re going to have your damn empire sooner than you thought.”

  “Which two?” He spoke very quietly.

  “Hanson. Christine and Jamie. They live over on Cooper Street. You used to see them around Emma’s house sometimes when I was little.”

  “I remember.” He stared down at the table for several seconds, still frowning. I assumed he was doing his own checking.

  Karl reached over and touched my arm. “Show me,” he said.

  Not tell him, show him. Just like that. And just minutes after our little conversation in the hall. If he had caught me in any other mood I would have told him to go to hell. But I felt good. I opened to him.

  He looked at the way I had brought the Hansons in, and he looked at my memories on Clay. That was all.

  “You want to build an empire, all right,” he said when he was finished. “But Doro isn’t the one you want to build it for.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked.

  And Doro answered. “No, it doesn’t. All that matters is that you obey me.” There was something frightening, something too intense about the way he was looking at me.

  It was my turn to draw back a little. “I’ve always obeyed you.”

  “More or less. It could get harder now, though. Sometimes it’s harder for a leader to obey. And sometimes it’s harder to be lenient with a disobedient leader.”

  “I understand.”

  “No you don’t. Not yet. But I think you’re capable of understanding. That’s why I’m willing to let you go ahead with what you’re planning.”

  “It isn’t exactly a plan yet,” I said. “I haven’t had time to think. … I just want to start bringing in latents, letting the pattern push them through transition—you were satisfied that the Hansons were on their way, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. The houses in this neighborhood have room for a lot more people. All our neighbors can be persuaded to take in house guests.”

  “All of them?” said Karl sarcastically. “How many latents are you planning to enslave?”

  “None,” I said. “But I mean to have as many of them brought through transition as I can.”

  “Why?” Doro asked. “I mean aside from the fact that you’ve suddenly discovered you enjoy power.”

  “You should talk.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  I thought about it. I needed a few hours of solitude to think and nose around other people’s heads and decide what I was doing myself. “They’re latents,” I said. “And if Rina and the Hanson family and just about all the rest of my relatives are any indication, latents live like dogs. They spend most of their lives sharing other people’s pain and slowly going crazy. Why should they have to go through that if I can give them a better way?”

  “Are you so sure it is better?” asked Karl.

  “You’re damn right I am. How many latents do you imagine burn the hands off their kids like your mother did—or worse? And you know Doro doesn’t pay attention to those kids. How could he? God knows how many thousands of them there are. So they get shitted on, and if they live to grow up, they shit on their own kids.”

  “And you’re going to save them all.” Karl radiated sarcasm.

  I turned to look at him.

  “You’re not exactly vicious, Mary,” he said. “But you’re not altruistic, either. Why pretend to be?”

  “Wait a minute, Karl,” said Doro. And then to me, “Mary, as angry as he’s just made you, I think he’s right. I think there’s a reason for what you want to do that you haven’t faced yet. Think about it.”

  I had been just about to explode at Karl. Somehow, though, when Doro said the same thing in different words, it didn’t bother me as much. Well, why did I want to see as many latents as possible brought through transition? So I could be an empress? I wouldn’t even say that out loud. It sounded too stupid. But, whatever I called myself, I was definitely going to wind up with a lot of people taking orders from me, and that really didn’t sound like such a bad thing. And as for altruism, whether it was my real motive or not, every latent we brought into the pattern would benefit from being there. He would regain control of his life and be able to use his energy for something besides fighting to stay sane. But, honestly, as bad as it sounds, I had known that latents were suffering for most of my life. I grew up watching one of them suffer. Rina. Of course I couldn’t have done anything about it until now, but I hadn’t really wanted to do anything. I hadn’t cared. Not even during the time, just before my transition, when I found out just how much latents suffered. After all, I knew I wasn’t going to be one much longer.

  Altruism, ambition—what else was there?

  Need?

  Did I need those latents, somehow? Was that why I was so enthusiastic, so happy that I was going to get them? I knew I wanted them in the pattern. They belonged to me and I wanted them. The only way to find out for sure whether or not I needed them was to leave them alone and see how I fared without them. I didn’t want to do that.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to say,” I told him. “You’re right. I want to bring latents through for my own satisfaction. I admit that. I want them here around me. But as for why. …” I shook my head.

  “You don’t have to kill,” said Doro quietly. “But you do have to feed. And six people aren’t enough.”

  Karl looked startled. “Wait a minute, are you saying she’s going to have to keep doing what she did to Jesse and Rachel? That she’ll have to choose one or two of us regularly and—”

  “I don’t know,” said Doro. “It’s possible, of course. And if it turns out to be true, I would think you’d want her to fill the neighborhood with other actives. But, on the other hand, she didn’t take Rachel and Jesse because she wanted them. She took them in self-defense.” He looked at me. “You haven’t been an active long enough for this to mean much, but in the two weeks since your transition, have you felt any need, any inclination to take a
nyone?”

  “No,” I said. “Never. The idea disgusted me until I did it. Then I felt … well, you probably know.”

  “He might know,” said Karl. “But I don’t.”

  I opened and projected the sensation.

  He jumped, whispered, “Jesus Christ.” From him it sounded more like praying than cursing. “If that’s what you felt, I’m surprised you didn’t go ahead and take the rest of us.”

  “It’s possible that she was only saving the rest of you for another time,” said Doro. “But I don’t think so. Somehow, her ability reminds me more of Rachel’s. Rachel could have left her congregations unconscious or dead, but she never did. Never felt inclined to. It was easy for her to be careful, easy for her not to really take anyone. But, to a lesser degree, she took everyone. She gained what she needed, and her congregations lost nothing more than they could afford. Nothing that they couldn’t easily replace. Nothing that they even noticed was gone.”

  Karl sat frowning at Doro for several seconds after Doro had finished. Then he turned to look at me. “Open to me again.”

  I sighed and did it. He would be easier to live with if he knew whether Doro was right or wrong—or at least knew he couldn’t find out. I watched him, not really caring what he found. I stopped him just as he was about to break contact.

  You and I are going to have to talk later.

  About what?

  About making some kind of truce before you manage to goad me into hitting back at you.

  He changed the subject. Do you realize you’re exactly the kind of parasite he’s described? Except, of course, you prey on actives instead of ordinary people.

  I can see what you’ve found. I do seem to be taking a tiny amount of strength from you and from the others. But it’s so small it’s not bothering any of you.

  That’s not the point.

  The point is, you don’t want me taking anything. Do you have to be told that I don’t know how to stop it any more than I know how it got started ?

  I know. The thought carried overtones of weary frustration. He broke contact, spoke to Doro. “You’re right about her. She’s like Rachel.”