Wild Seed

by Octavia E. Butler

  “You’ll get over your anger,” he said. “Life will be rich and good for you here. You’ll be surprised to see how easily you blend with these people.”

  “I will not marry your son, Doro! No matter what threats you make, no matter what promises, I will not marry your son!”

  He sighed, tied his cloth around him, and started for the door. “Stay here,” he told her. “Put something on and wait.”

  “For what!” she demanded bitterly.

  “For Isaac,” he answered.

  And when she turned to face him, mouth open to curse both him and his son, he stepped close to her and struck her across the face with all his strength.

  There was an instant before the blow landed when she could have caught his arm and broken the bones within it like dry sticks. There was an instant before the blow landed when she could have torn out his throat.

  But she absorbed the blow, moved with it, made no sound. It had been a long time since she had wanted so powerfully to kill a man.

  “I see you know how to be quiet,” he said. “I see you’re not as willing to die as you thought. Good. My son asked for a chance to talk to you if you refused to obey. Wait here.”

  “What can he say to me that you have not said?” she demanded harshly.

  Doro paused at the door to give her a look of contempt. His blow had had less power to hurt her than that look.

  When the door closed behind him, she went to the bed and sat down to stare, unseeing, into the fire. By the time Isaac knocked on the door, her face was wet with tears she did not remember shedding.

  She made him wait until she had wrapped a cloth around herself and dried her face. Then with leaden, hopeless weariness, she opened the door and let the boy in.

  He looked as depleted as she felt. The yellow hair hung limp into his eyes and the eyes themselves were red. His sun-browned skin looked as pale as Anyanwu had ever seen it. He seemed not only tired, but sick.

  He stood gazing at her, saying nothing, making her want to go to him as though to Okoye, and try to give him comfort. Instead, she sat down in one of the room’s chairs so that he could not sit close to her.

  Obligingly, he sat opposite her in the other chair. “Did he threaten you?” he asked softly.

  “Of course. That is all he knows how to do.”

  “And promise you a good life if you obey?”

  “… yes.”

  “He’ll keep his word, you know. Either way.”

  “I have seen how he keeps his word.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, Isaac whispered, “Don’t make him do it, Anyanwu. Don’t throw away your life!”

  “Do you think I want to die?” she said. “My life has been good, and very long. It could be even longer and better. The world is a much wider place than I thought; there is so much for me to see and know. But I will not be his dog! Let him commit his abominations with other people!”

  “With your children?”

  “Do you threaten me too, Isaac?”

  “No!” he cried. “You know better, Anyanwu.”

  She turned her face away from him. If only he would go away. She did not want to say things to hurt him. He spoke softly:

  “When he told me I would marry you, I was surprised and a little afraid. You’ve been married many times, and I not even once. I know Okoye is your grandson—one of your younger grandsons—and he’s at least my age. I didn’t see how I could measure up against all your experience. But I wanted to try! You don’t know how I wanted to try.”

  “Will you be bred, Isaac? Does it mean nothing to you?”

  “Don’t you know I wanted you long before he decided we should marry?”

  “I knew.” She glanced at him. “But wrong is wrong!”

  “It isn’t wrong here. It …” He shrugged. “People from outside always have trouble understanding us. Not very many things are forbidden here. Most of us don’t believe in gods and spirits and devils who must be pleased or feared. We have Doro, and he’s enough. He tells us what to do, and if it isn’t what other people do, it doesn’t matter—because we won’t last long if we don’t do it, no matter what outsiders think of us.”

  He got up, went to stand beside the fireplace. The low flame seemed to comfort him too. “Doro’s ways aren’t strange to me,” he said. “I’ve lived with them all my life. I’ve shared women with him. My first woman …” He hesitated, glanced at her as though to see how she was receiving such talk, whether she was offended. She was almost indifferent. She had made up her mind. Nothing the boy said would change it.

  “My first woman,” he continued, “was one he sent to me. The women here are glad to go to him. They didn’t mind coming to me either when they saw how he favored me.”

  “Go to them then,” Anyanwu said quietly.

  “I would,” he said, matching her tone. “But I don’t want to. I’d rather stay with you—for the rest of my life.”

  She wanted to run out of the room. “Leave me alone, Isaac!”

  He shook his head slowly. “If I leave this room tonight, you’ll die tonight. Don’t ask me to hurry your death.”

  She said nothing.

  “Besides, I want you to have the night to think.” He frowned at her. “How can you sacrifice your children?”

  “Which children, Isaac? The ones I have had or the ones he will make me have with you and with him?”

  He blinked. “Oh.”

  “I cannot kill him—or even understand what there is to kill. I have bitten him when he was in another body, and he seemed no more than flesh, no more than a man.”

  “You never touched him,” Isaac said. “Lale did once—he reached out in that way of his to change Doro’s thoughts. He almost died. I think he would have died if Doro hadn’t struggled hard not to kill him. Doro wears flesh, but he isn’t flesh himself—nor spirit, he says.”

  “I cannot understand that,” she said. “But it does not matter. I cannot save my children from him. I cannot save myself. But I will not give him more people to defile.”

  He turned from the fire, went back to his chair and pulled it close to her. “You could save generations unborn if you wished, Anyanwu. You could have a good life for yourself, and you could stop him from killing so many others.”

  “How can I stop him?” she said in disgust. “Can one stop a leopard from doing what it was born to do?”

  “He’s not a leopard! He’s not any sort of mindless animal!”

  She could not help hearing the anger in his voice. She sighed. “He is your father.”

  “Oh God,” muttered Isaac. “How can I make you see … I wasn’t resenting an insult to my father, Anyanwu, I was saying that in his own way, he can be a reasonable being. You’re right about his killing, he can’t help doing it. When he needs a new body, he takes one whether he wants to or not. But most of the time, he transfers because he wants to, not because he has to; and there are a few people—four or five—who can influence him enough sometimes to stop him from killing, save a few of his victims. I’m one of them. You could be another.”

  “You do not mean stop him,” she said wearily. “You mean”—she hunted through her memory for the right word—“you mean delay him.”

  “I mean what I said! There are people he listens to, people he values beyond their worth as breeders or servants. People who can give him … just a little of the companionship he needs. They’re among the few people in the world that he can still love—or at least care for. Although compared to what the rest of us feel when we love or hate or envy or whatever, I don’t think he feels very much. I don’t think he can. I’m afraid the time will come when he won’t feel anything. If it does—there’s no end to the harm he could do. I’m glad I won’t have to live to see it. You, though, you could live to see it—or live to prevent it. You could stay with him, keep him at least as human as he is now. I’ll grow old; I’ll die like all the others, but you won’t—or, you needn’t. You are treasure to him. I don’t think he’s reall
y understood that yet.”

  “He knows.”

  “He knows, of course, but he doesn’t … doesn’t feel it yet. It’s not yet real to him. Don’t you see? He’s lived for more than thirty-seven hundred years. When Christ, the Son of God of most white people in these colonies, was born, Doro was already impossibly old. Everyone has always been temporary for him—wives, children, friends, even tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but him. And maybe you, Sun Woman, and maybe you. Make him know you’re not like everyone else—make him feel it. Prove it to him, even if for a while, you have to do some things you don’t like. Reach out to him; keep reaching. Make him know he’s not alone anymore!”

  There was a long period of silence. Only the log in the fireplace slipped, then spat and crackled as new wood began to burn. Anyanwu covered her face, shook her head slowly. “I wish I knew you to be a liar,” she whispered. “I am afraid and angry and desperate, yet you heap burdens on me.”

  He said nothing.

  “What is forbidden here, Isaac? What is so evil that a man could be taken out and killed?”

  “Murder,” Isaac said. “Theft sometimes, some other things. And of course, defying Doro.”

  “If a man killed someone and Doro said he must not be punished, what would happen?”

  Isaac frowned. “If the man had to be kept alive—maybe for breeding, Doro would probably take him. Or if it was too soon, if he was being saved for a girl still too young, Doro would send him away from the colony. He wouldn’t ask us to tolerate him here.”

  “And when the man was no longer needed, he would die?”

  “Yes.”

  Anyanwu took a deep breath. “Perhaps you try to keep some decency then. Perhaps he has not made animals of you yet.”

  “Submit to him now, Anyanwu, and later, you can keep him from ever making animals of us.”

  Submit to him. The words brought a vile taste to her mouth, but she looked at Isaac’s haggard face, and his obvious misery and his fear for her calmed her somehow. She spoke softly. “When I hear you speak of him, I think you love him more than he loves you.”

  “What does that matter?”

  “It does not matter. You are a man to whom it need not matter. I thought he could be a good husband. On the ship, I worried that I could not be the wife he needed. I wanted to please him. Now I can only think that he will never let me go.”

  “Never?” Isaac repeated with gentle irony. “That’s a long time, even for you and him.”

  She turned away. Another time she might have been amused to hear Isaac counseling patience. He was not a patient young man. But now, for her sake, he was desperate.

  “You’ll get freedom, Anyanwu,” he said, “but first you’ll have to reach him. He’s like a tortoise encased in a shell that gets thicker every year. It will take a long time for you to reach the man inside, but you have a long time, and there is a man inside who must be reached. He was born as we were. He’s warped because he can’t die, but he’s still a man.” Isaac paused for breath. “Take the time, Anyanwu. Break the shell; go in. He might turn out to be what you need, just as I think you’re what he needs.”

  She shook her head. She knew now how the slaves had felt as they lay chained on the bench, the slaver’s hot iron burning into their flesh. In her pride, she had denied that she was a slave. She could no longer deny it. Doro’s mark had been on her from the day they met. She could break free of him only by dying and sacrificing her children and leaving him loose upon the world to become even more of an animal. So much of what Isaac said seemed to be right. Or was it her cowardice, her fear of Doro’s terrible way of killing that made his words seem so reasonable? How could she know? Whatever she did would result in evil.

  Isaac got up, came to her, took her hands, and drew her to her feet. “I don’t know what kind of husband I could be to … to someone like you,” he said. “But if wanting to please you counts for anything …”

  Wearily, hopelessly, she allowed him to draw her closer. Had she been an ordinary woman, he could have crushed the breath from her. After a moment, she said, “If Doro had done this differently, Isaac, if he had told me when we met that he wanted a wife for his son and not for himself, I would not have shamed you by refusing you.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” he whispered. “Just as long as you’re not going to make him kill you …”

  “If I had the courage of your mother, I would kill myself.”

  He stared at her in alarm.

  “No, I will live,” she said reassuringly. “I have not the courage to die. I had never thought before that I was a coward, but I am. Living has become too precious a habit.”

  “You’re no more a coward than the rest of us,” he said.

  “The rest of you, at least, are not doing evil in your own eyes.”

  “Anyanwu …”

  “No.” She rested her head against him. “I have decided. I will not tell any more brave lies, even to myself.” She looked up at his young face, his boy face. “We will marry. You are a good man, Isaac. I am the wrong wife for you, but perhaps, somehow, in this place, among these people, it will not matter.”

  He lifted her with the strength of his arms alone and carried her to the great soft bed, there to make the children who would prolong her slavery

  BOOK TWO

  Lot’s Children

  1741

  Chapter Seven

  DORO HAD COME TO Wheatley to see to the welfare of one of his daughters. He had a feeling something was wrong with her, and as usual, he allowed such feelings to guide him.

  As he rode into town from the landing, he could hear a loud dispute in progress—something about one man’s cow ruining another’s garden.

  Doro approached the disputants slowly, watching them. They stood before Isaac, who sat on a bench in front of the house he and Anyanwu had built over fifty years before. Isaac, slender and youthful-looking in spite of his age and his thick gray hair, had no official authority to settle disputes. He had been a farmer, then a merchant—never a magistrate. But even when he was younger, people brought their disagreements to him. He was one of Doro’s favorite sons. That made him powerful and influential. Also, he was known for his honesty and fairness. People liked him as they could not quite like Doro. They could worship Doro as a god, they could give him their love, their fear, their respect, but most found him too intimidating to like. One of the reasons Doro came back to a son like Isaac, old and past most of his usefulness, was that Isaac was a friend as well as a son. Isaac was one of the few people who could enjoy Doro’s company without fear or falseness. And Isaac was an old man, soon to die. They all died so quickly …

  Doro reached the house and sat slouched for a moment on his black mare—a handsome animal who had come with his latest less-than-handsome body. The two men arguing over the cow had calmed down by now Isaac had a way of calming unreasonable people. Another man could say and do exactly what Isaac said and did and be knocked down for his trouble. But people listened to Isaac.

  “Pelham,” Isaac was saying to the older of the two men—a gaunt, large-boned farmer whom Doro remembered as poor breeding stock. “Pelham, if you need help repairing that fence, I’ll send one of my sons over.”

  “My boy can handle it,” Pelham answered. “Anything to do with wood, he can handle.”

  Pelham’s son, Doro recalled, had just about enough sense not to wet himself. He was a huge, powerful man with the mind of a child—a timid, gentle child, fortunately. Doro was glad to hear that he could handle something.

  Isaac looked up, noticed for the first time the small sharp-featured stranger Doro was just then, and did what he had always done. With none of the talents of his brother Lale to warn him, Isaac inevitably recognized Doro. “Well,” he said, “it’s about time you got back to us.” Then he turned toward the house and called, “Peter, come out here.”

  He stood up spryly and took the reins of Doro’s horse, handing them to his son Peter as the boy came out of the house.r />
  “Someday, I’m going to get you to tell me how you always know me,” Doro said. “It can’t be anything you see.”

  Isaac laughed. “I’d tell you if I understood it myself. You’re you, that’s all.”

  Now that Doro had spoken, Pelham and the other man recognized him and spoke together in a confused babble of welcome.

  Doro held up his hand. “I’m here to see my children,” he said.

  The welcomes subsided. The two men shook his hand, wished him a good evening, and hurried off to spread the news of his return. In his few words, he had told him that his visit was unofficial. He had not come to take a new body, and thus would not hold court to settle serious grievances or offer needed financial or other aid in the way that had become customary in Wheatley and some of his other settlements. This visit, he was only a man come to see his children—of whom there were forty-two here, ranging from infants to Isaac. It was rare for him to come to town for no other purpose than to see them, but when he did, other people left him alone. If anyone was in desperate need, they approached one of his children.

  “Come on in,” Isaac said. “Have some beer, some food.” He did not have an old man’s voice, high and cracking. His voice had become deeper and fuller—it contributed to his authority. But all Doro could hear in it now was honest pleasure.

  “No food yet,” Doro said. “Where’s Anyanwu?”

  “Helping with the Sloane baby. Mrs. Sloane let it get sick and almost die before she asked for help. Anyanwu says it has pneumonia.” Isaac poured two tankards of beer.

  “Is it going to be all right?”

  “Anyanwu says so—although she was ready to strangle the Sloanes. Even they’ve been here long enough to know better than to let a child suffer that way with her only a few doors away.” Isaac paused. “They’re afraid of her blackness and her power. They think she’s a witch, and the mold-medicine she made some poison.”

  Doro frowned, took a swallow of beer. The Sloanes were his newest wild seed—a couple who had found each other before Doro found them. They were dangerous, unstable, painfully sensitive people who heard the thoughts of others in intermittent bursts. When one received a burst of pain, anger, fear, any intense emotion, it was immediately transmitted to the other, and both suffered. None of this was deliberate or controlled. It simply happened. Helplessly, the Sloanes did a great deal of fighting and drinking and crying and praying for it to stop happening, but it would not. Not ever. That was why Doro had brought them to Wheatley. They were amazingly good breeding stock to be wild seed. He suspected that in one way or another, they were each descended from his people. Certainly, they were enough like his people to make excellent prey. And as soon as they had produced a few more children, Doro intended to take them both. It would be almost a kindness.