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feet. From this it may be concluded that she eventually
found that quiet domestic happiness which her cheerful,
blithesome character required, and which Nathanael,
with his tempest-tossed soul, could never have been able
to give her.
Octavia Butler (b. 1947)
B loodchild
Octavia Butler is one of a small number of distinguished
black writers writing science fiction today, and of them, the
only woman. H er most famous novels are Wild Seed
(1980) and Kindred (1979). Butler's stories are characterized by literal or metaphorical issues of class or race, by strong moral consciousness, and careful attention to detail.
Science fiction, her chosen genre, is particularly rich in
possibilities for constructing imagined societies that reflect
metaphorically upon our own, and Butler has taken full
advantage of them in her works. Sometimes the possibilities are horrifying, and she often uses horrific effects in her work, with grim realism. H er most significant story to date
is “ Bloodchild.” which won the 1985 Hugo Award, and the
Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
An initiation story of considerable power, it plays with great
virtuosity upon her usual themes and adds an extraordinary
emotional warmth to a dark and horrifying depiction of
brutal sexual and social enslavement. It is also a departure
for her, in that she characteristically uses women as central
characters. Perhaps the most important influence on Butler
are the darkly ironic works of Harlan Ellison, her mentor.
My last night of childhood began with a visit home.
T’Gatoi’s sisters had given us two sterile eggs.
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T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She
insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter.
There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good.
Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat,
watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her.
Most of the time she watched me.
I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping
from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother
denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair
would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs
prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had
never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as
long as he should have. And toward the end of his life,
when he should have been slowing down, he had married
my mother and fathered four children.
But my mother seemed content to age before she had
to. I saw her turn away as several of T’Gatoi’s limbs
secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat, and took
advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little
and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how
to behave with T’Gatoi— how to be respectful and
always obedient because T’Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It
was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had
chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her
most formal and severe when she was lying.
I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was
lying about. It was an honor to have T’Gatoi in the
family, but it was hardly a novelty. T’Gatoi and my
mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and
T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house
she considered her second home. She simply came in,
climbed onto one of her special couches and called me
over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal
with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.
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“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with
six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally.
Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly,
became a series of caresses.
“He’s still too thin,” my mother said sharply.
T’Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her
body off the couch as though she were sitting up. She
looked at my mother and my mother, her face lined and
old-looking, turned away.
“Lien, I would like you to have what’s left of Gan’s
egg.
“The eggs are for the children,” my mother said.
“They are for the family. Please take it.”
Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and
put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in
the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them
out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of
the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.
“It’s good,” she whispered. “Sometimes I forget how
good it is.”
“You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. “Why are you
in such a hurry to be old?”
My mother said nothing.
“I like being able to come here,” T’Gatoi said. “This
place is a refuge because of you, yet you won’t take care
of yourself.”
T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people
wanted more of us made available. Only she and her
political faction stood between us and the hordes who
did not understand why there was a Preserve— why any
Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way
made available to them. Or they did understand, but in
their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out
to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for
their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status
symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the
joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants
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of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to
suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had
seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people
looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only
she stood between us and that desperation that could so
easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.
Now T’Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away
from her onto the floor. “Go on, Gan,” she said. “Sit
down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober.
You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me.”
My mother hesitated for no reason that I could see.
One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched
alongside T’Gatoi, talking about things I could not
understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing
as she sat me on one of T’Gatoi’s segments. She ate her
share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped,
and why.
She lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left
row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her
loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfo
rtable
to lie that way but, except for my older sister, no one
else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel
caged.
T’Gatoi meant to cage my mother. Once she had, she
moved her tail slightly, then spoke. “Not enough egg,
Lien. You should have taken it when it was passed to you.
You need it badly now.”
T’Gatoi’s tail moved once more, its whip motion so
swift I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for
it. Her sting drew only a single drop of blood from my
mother’s bare leg.
My mother cried out— probably in surprise. Being
stung doesn’t hurt. Then she sighed and I could see her
body relax. She moved languidly into a more comfortable position within the cage of T’Gatoi’s limbs. “Why did you do that?” she asked, sounding half asleep.
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111
“I could not watch you sitting and suffering any
longer.”
My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small
shrug. “Tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering— if
you must. But for now, just for now, lie here and warm
me and let me ease your way a little.”
“He’s still mine, you know,” my mother said suddenly. “Nothing can buy him from me.” Sober, she would not have permitted herself to refer to such things.
“Nothing,” T’Gatoi agreed, humoring her.
“Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life?
My son?”
“Not for anything,” T’Gatoi said, stroking my mother’s shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.
I would like to have touched my mother, shared that
moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched
her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile
and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she
would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want
to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just to be
still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride
and pain.
“Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes,” T’Gatoi said. “In a
little while I’ll sting her again and she can sleep.”
My older sister obeyed, swaying drunkenly as she
stood up. When she had finished, she sat down beside me
and took my hand. We had always been a unit, she and I.
My mother put the back of her head against T’Gatoi’s
underside and tried from that impossible angle to look
up into the broad, round face. “You’re going to sting me
again?”
“Yes, Lien.”
“ I’ll sleep until tomorrow noon.”
“Good. You need it. When did you sleep last?”
My mother made a wordless sound of annoyance. “I
should have stepped on you when you were small
enough,” she muttered.
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It was an old joke between them. They had grown up
together, sort of, though T’Gatoi had not, in my mother’s lifetime, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three times my mother’s present age,
yet would still be young when my mother died of age. But
T’Gatoi and my mother had met as T’Gatoi was coming
into a period of rapid development— a kind of Tlic
adolescence. My mother was only a child, but for a while
they developed at the same rate and had no better friends
than each other.
T’Gatoi had even introduced my mother to the man
who became my father. My parents, pleased with each
other in spite of their very different ages, married as
T’Gatoi was going into her family’s business— politics.
She and my mother saw each other less. But sometime
before my older sister was bom, my mother promised
T’Gatoi one of her children. She would have to give one
of us to someone, and she preferred T’Gatoi to some
stranger.
Years passed. T’Gatoi traveled and increased her
influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came
back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as
her just reward for her hard work. My older sister took
an instant liking to her and wanted to be chosen, but my
mother was just coming to term with me and T’Gatoi
liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and
taking part in all the phases of development. I’m told I
was first caged within T’Gatoi’s many limbs only three
minutes after my birth. A few days later, I was given my
first taste of egg. I tell Terrans that when they ask
whether I was ever afraid of her. And I tell it to Tlic when
T’Gatoi suggests a young Terran child for them and they,
anxious and ignorant, demand an adolescent. Even my
brother who had somehow grown up to fear and distrust
the Tlic could probably have gone smoothly into one of
their families if he had been adopted early enough.
Sometimes, I think for his sake he should have been. I
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looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room,
his eyes open, but glazed as he dreamed his egg dream.
No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always
demanded his share of egg.
“Lien, can you stand up?” T’Gatoi asked suddenly.
“Stand?” my mother said. “I thought I was going to
sleep.”
“Later. Something sounds wrong outside.” The cage
was abruptly gone.
“What?”
“Up, Lien!”
My mother recognized her tone and got up just in time
to avoid being dumped on the floor. T’Gatoi whipped
her three meters of body off her couch, toward the door,
and out at full speed. She had bones— ribs, a long spine,
a skull, four sets of limbbones per segment. But when she
moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled
falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless,
but aquatic— something swimming through the air as
though it were water. I loved watching her move.
I left my sister and started to follow her out the door,
though I wasn’t very steady on my own feet. It would
have been better to sit and dream, better yet to find a girl
and share a waking dream with her. Back when the Tlic
saw us as not much more than convenient big warmblooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. That way they
could be sure of getting another generation of us no
matter how we tried to hold out. We were lucky that
didn’t go on long. A few generations of it and we would
have been little more than convenient big animals.
“Hold the door open, Gan,” T’Gatoi said. “And tell
the family to stay back.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“N’Tlic.”
I shrank back against the door. “Here? Alone?”
“He was trying to reach a call box, I suppose.” She
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carried the man past me, unconscious, folded like a coat
over some of her limbs. He looked young— my brother’s
age perhaps— and he was thinner than he should have
&nb
sp; been. What T’Gatoi would have called dangerously thin.
“Gan, go to the call box,” she said. She put the man on
the floor and began stripping off his clothing.
I did not move.
After a moment, she looked up at me, her sudden
stillness a sign of deep impatience.
“Send Qui,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Maybe I can
help.”
She let her limbs begin to move again, lifting the man
and pulling his shirt over his head. “You don’t want to
see this,” she said. “It will be hard. I can’t help this man
the way his Tlic could.”
“I know. But send Qui. He won’t want to be of any
help here. I’m at least willing to try.”
She looked at my brother— older, bigger, stronger,
certainly more able to help her here. He was sitting up
now, braced against the wall, staring at the man on the
floor with undisguised fear and revulsion. Even she
could see that he would be useless.
“Qui, go!” she said.
He didn’t argue. He stood up, swayed briefly, then
steadied, frightened sober.
“This man’s name is Bram Lomas,” she told him,
reading from the man’s arm band. I fingered my own
arm band in sympathy. “He needs T’Khotgif Teh. Do
you hear?”
“Bram Lomas, T’Khotgif Teh,” my brother said. “I’m
going.” He edged around Lomas and ran out the door.
Lomas began to regain consciousness. He only
moaned at first and clutched spasmodically at a pair of
T’Gatoi’s limbs. My younger sister, finally awake from
her egg dream, came close to look at him, until my
mother pulled her back.
T’Gatoi removed the man’s shoes, then his pants, all
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the while leaving him two of her limbs to grip. Except for
the final few, all her limbs were equally dexterous. “I
want no argument from you this time, Gan,” she said.
I straightened. “What shall I do?”
“Go out and slaughter an animal that is at least half
your size.”
“Slaughter? But I’ve never— ”
She knocked me across the room. Her tail was an
efficient weapon whether she exposed the sting or not.
I got up, feeling stupid for having ignored her warning,
and went into the kitchen. Maybe I could kill something
with a knife or an ax. My mother raised a few Terran
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