animals for the table and several thousand local ones for
their fur. T’Gatoi would probably prefer something
local. An achti, perhaps. Some of those were the right
size, though they had about three times as many teeth as
I did and a real love of using them. My mother, Hoa, and
Qui could kill them with knives. I had never killed one at
all, had never slaughtered any animal. I had spent most
of my time with T’Gatoi while my brother and sisters
were learning the family business. T’Gatoi had been
right. I should have been the one to go to the call box. At
least I could do that.
I went to the comer cabinet where my mother kept her
larger house and garden tools. At the back of the cabinet
there was a pipe that carried off waste water from the
kitchen— except that it didn’t anymore. My father had
rerouted the waste water before I was bom. Now the pipe
could be turned so that one half slid around the other
and a rifle could be stored inside. This wasn’t our only
gun, but it was our most easily accessible one. I would
have to use it to shoot one of the biggest of the achti.
Then T’Gatoi would probably confiscate it. Firearms
were illegal in the Preserve. There had been incidents
right after the Preserve was established— Terrans shooting Tlic, shooting N’Tlic. This was before the joining of families began, before everyone had a personal stake in
182
Octavia Butler
keeping the peace. No one had shot a Tlic in my lifetime
or my mother’s, but the law still stood— for our protection, we were told. There were stories of whole Terran families wiped out in reprisal back during the assassinations.
I went out to the cages and shot the biggest achti I
could find. It was a handsome breeding male and my
mother would not be pleased to see me bring it in. But it
was the right size, and I was in a hurry.
I put the achti’s long, warm body over my shoulder—
glad that some of the weight I’d gained was muscle— and
took it to the kitchen. There, I put the gun back in its
hiding place. If T’Gatoi noticed the achti’s wounds and
demanded the gun, I would give it to her. Otherwise, let
it stay where my father wanted it.
I turned to take the achti to her, then hesitated. For
several seconds, I stood in front of the closed door
wondering why I was suddenly afraid. I knew what was
going to happen. I hadn’t seen it before but T’Gatoi had
shown me diagrams, and drawings. She had made sure I
knew the truth as soon as I was old enough to understand
it.
Yet I did not want to go into that room. I wasted a little
time choosing a knife from the carved, wooden box in
which my mother kept them. T’Gatoi might want one, I
told myself, for the tough, heavily furred hide of the
achti.
“Gan!” T’Gatoi called, her voice harsh with urgency.
I swallowed. I had not imagined a simple moving of
the feet could be so difficult. I realized I was trembling
and that shamed me. Shame impelled me through the
door.
I put the achti down near T’Gatoi and saw that Lomas
was unconscious again. She, Lomas, and I were alone in
the room, my mother and sisters probably sent out so
they would not have to watch. I envied them.
But my mother came back into the room as T’Gatoi
Blood Child
183
seized the achti. Ignoring the knife I offered her, she
extended claws from several of her limbs and slit the
achti from throat to anus. She looked at me, her yellow
eyes intent. “Hold this man’s shoulders, Gan.”
I stared at Lomas in panic, realizing that I did not
want to touch him, let alone hold him. This would not be
like shooting an animal. Not as quick, not as merciful,
and, I hoped, not as final, but there was nothing I wanted
less than to be part of it.
My mother came forward. “Gan, you hold his right
side,” she said. “I’ll hold his left.” And if he came to, he
would throw her off without realizing he had done it.
She was a tiny woman. She often wondered aloud how
she had produced, as she said, such “huge” children.
“Never mind,” I told her, taking the man’s shoulders.
“I’ll do it.”
She hovered nearby.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t shame you. You don’t
have to stay and watch.”
She looked at me uncertainly, then touched my face in
a rare caress. Finally, she went back to her bedroom.
T’Gatoi lowered her head in relief. “Thank you, Gan,”
she said with courtesy more Terran than Tlic. “That
one . . . she is always finding new ways for me to make
her suffer.”
Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds. I had
hoped he would stay unconscious. T’Gatoi put her face
near his so that he focused on her.
“I’ve stung you as much as I dare for now,” she told
him. “When this is over, I’ll sting you to sleep and you
won’t hurt anymore.”
“ Please,” the man begged. “W ait. . .”
“There’s no more time, Bram. I’ll sting you as soon as
it’s over. When T’Khotgif arrives she’ll give you eggs to
help you heal. It will be over soon.”
“T’Khotgif!” the man shouted, straining against my
hands.
184
Octavia Butler
“Soon, Bram.” T’Gatoi glanced at me, then placed a
claw against his abdomen slightly to the right of the
middle, just below the last rib. There was movement on
the right side—tiny, seemingly random pulsations moving his brown flesh, creating a concavity here, a convexity there, over and over until I could see the rhythm of it and knew where the next pulse would be.
Lomas’s entire body stiffened under T’Gatoi’s claw,
though she merely rested it against him as she wound the
rear section of her body around his legs. He might break
my grip, but he would not break hers. He wept helplessly
as she used his pants to tie his hands, then pushed his
hands above his head so that I could kneel on the cloth
between them and pin them in place. She rolled up his
shirt and gave it to him to bite down on.
And she opened him.
His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore
himself away from me. The sounds he made . . . I had
never heard such sounds come from anything human.
T’Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened
and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away
blood. His blood vessels contracted, reacting to the
chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed.
I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping
her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn’t
know why I hadn’t already. I couldn’t possibly last until
she was finished.
She found the first grub. It was fat and deep red with
his blood— both inside and out. It had already eaten its
own egg case, but apparently had
not yet begun to eat
its host. At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its
mother’s. Let alone, it would have gone on excreting the
poisons that had both sickened and alerted Lomas.
Eventually it would have begun to eat. By the time it ate
its way out of Lomas’s flesh, Lomas would be dead or
dying— and unable to take a revenge on the thing that
was killing him. There was always a grace period be
Blood Child
185
tween the time the host sickened and the time the grubs
began to eat him.
T’Gatoi picked up the writhing grub carefully, and
looked at it, somehow ignoring the terrible groans of the
man.
Abruptly, the man lost consciousness.
“Good.” T’Gatoi looked down at him. “ I wish you
Terrans could do that at will.” She felt nothing. And the
thing she held . . .
It was limbless and boneless at this stage, perhaps
fifteen centimeters long and two thick, blind and slimy
with blood. It was like a large worm. T’Gatoi put it into
the belly of the achti, and it began at once to burrow. It
would stay there and eat as long as there was anything to
eat.
Probing through Lomas’s flesh, she found two more,
one of them smaller and more vigorous. “A male!” she
said happily. He would be dead before I would. He
would be through his metamorphosis and screwing
everything that would hold still before his sisters even
had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort
to bite T’Gatoi as she placed him in the achti.
Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas’s flesh. I
closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something
dead, rotting, and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it
was far worse than any drawing or diagram.
“Ah, there are more,” T’Gatoi said, plucking out two
long, thick grubs. “You may have to kill another animal,
Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans.”
I had been told all my life that this was a good and
necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together— a kind of
birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was
painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it.
Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing
my eyes didn’t help.
T’Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The
186
Octavia Butler
remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by
their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the
way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They
took only blood until they were ready to emerge. Then
they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate
their hosts.
T’Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood.
Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—
or not die at all?
The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn’t
have thought anything about her could seem alien to me.
“One more, I think,” she said. “Perhaps two. A good
family. In a host animal these days, we would be happy
to find one or two alive.” She glanced at me. “Go
outside, Gan, and empty your stomach. Go now while
the man is unconscious.”
I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just
beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing
left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming
down my face. I did not know why I was crying but I
could not stop. I went farther from the house to avoid
being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms
crawling over redder human flesh.
There was a car coming toward the house. Since
Terrans were forbidden motorized vehicles except for
certain farm equipment, I knew this must be Lomas’s
Tlic with Qui and perhaps a Terran doctor. I wiped my
face on my shirt, struggled for control.
“Gan,” Qui called as the car stopped. “What happened?” He crawled out of the low, round, Tlic-convenient car door. Another Terran crawled out the
other side and went into the house without speaking to
me. The doctor. With his help and a few eggs, Lomas
might make it.
“T’Khotgif Teh?” I said.
The Tlic driver surged out of her car, reared up half
her length before me. She was paler and smaller than
T’Gatoi— probably bom from the body of an animal.
Blood Child
187
Tlic from Terran bodies were always larger as well as
more numerous.
“Six young,” I told her. “Maybe seven, all alive. At
least one male.”
“Lomas?” she said harshly. I liked her for the question
and the concern in her voice when she asked it. The last
coherent thing he had said was her name.
“He’s alive,” I said.
She surged away to the house without another word.
“She’s been sick,” my brother said, watching her go.
“When I called, I could hear people telling her she wasn’t
well enough to go out even for this.”
I said nothing. I had extended courtesy to the Tlic.
Now I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hoped he would go
in— out of curiosity if nothing else.
“Finally found out more than you wanted to know,
eh?”
I looked at him.
“Don’t give me one of her looks,” he said. “You’re not
her. You’re just her property.”
One of her looks. Had I picked up even an ability to
imitate her expressions?
“What’d you do, puke?” He sniffed the air. “So now
you know what you’re in for.”
I walked away from him. He and I had been close when
We were kids. He would let me follow him around when I
was home and sometimes T’Gatoi would let me bring
him along when she took me into the city. But something
had happened when he reached adolescence. I never
knew what. He began keeping out of T’Gatoi’s way.
Then he began running away— until he realized there
was no “away.” Not in the Preserve. Certainly not
outside. After that he concentrated on getting his share
of every egg that came into the house, and on looking out
for me in a way that made me all but hate him— a way
that clearly said, as long as I was all right, he was safe
from the Tlic.
“How was it, really?” he demanded, following me.
188
Octavia Butler
“ I killed an achti. The young ate it.”
“You didn’t run out of the house and puke because
they ate an achti.”
“I had . . . never seen a person cut open before.” That
was true, and enough for him to know. I couldn’t talk
about the other. Not with him.
“Oh,” he said. He glanced at me as though he wanted
to say more, but he kept quiet.
We walked, not really headed anywhere. Toward the
back, toward the cages, toward the fields.
“Did he say anything?” Qui asked
. “Lomas, I mean.”
Who else would he mean? “He said ‘T’Khotgif.’ ”
Qui shuddered. “ If she had done that to me, she’d be
the last person I’d call for.”
“You’d call for her. Her sting would ease your pain
without killing the grubs in you.”
“You think I’d care if they died?”
No. Of course he wouldn’t. Would I?
“Shit!” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve seen what they
do. You think this thing with Lomas was bad? It was
nothing.”
I didn’t argue. He didn’t know what he was talking
about.
“I saw them eat a man,” he said.
1 turned to face him. “You’re lying!”
*7 saw them eat a man. ” He paused. “It was when I
was little. I had been to the Hartmund house and I was
on my way home. Halfway here, I saw a man and a Tlic
and the man was N’Tlic. The ground was hilly. I was able
to hide from them and watch. The Tlic wouldn’t open
the man because she had nothing to feed the grubs. The
man couldn’t go any farther and there were no houses
around. He was in so much pain he told her to kill him.
He begged her to kill him. Finally, she did. She cut his
throat. One swipe of one claw. I saw the grubs eat their
way out, then burrow in again, still eating.”
His words made me see Lomas’s flesh again, parasi
Blood Child
189
tized, crawling. “Why didn't you tell me that?” I whispered.
He looked startled, as though he’d forgotten I was
listening. “I don’t know.”
“You started to run away not long after that, didn’t
you?”
“Yeah. Stupid. Running inside the Preserve. Running
in a cage.”
I shook my head, said what I should have said to him
long ago. “She wouldn’t take you, Qui. You don’t have to
worry.”
“She would . . . if anything happened to you.”
“No. She’d take Xuan Hoa. Hoa . . . wants it.” She
wouldn’t if she had stayed to watch Lomas.
“They don’t take women,” he said with contempt.
“They do sometimes.” I glanced at him. “Actually,
they prefer women. You should be around them when
they talk among themselves. They say women have more
body fat to protect the grubs. But they usually take men
to leave the women free to bear their own young.”
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 23
