Wild Seed

  Supper was quiet, almost grim, and everyone seemed to have something to do to keep from lingering at the table. Everyone but Doro. He coaxed Anyanwu to share wine and fruit and nuts and talk with him in the smaller, cooler back parlor. As it turned out, they shared wine and fruit and nuts and silence, but it did not matter. It was enough that she was with him.

  Anyanwu’s child, a tiny, sturdy boy, was born two weeks after Doro’s return, and Doro became almost sick with desperation. He did not know how to deal with his feelings, could not recall ever having had such an intense confusion of feelings before. Sometimes he caught himself observing his own behavior as though from a distance and noticing with even greater confusion that there was nothing outwardly visible in him to show what he was suffering. He spent as much time as he could with Anyanwu, watching her prepare and mix her herbs; instruct several of her people at a time in their cultivation, appearance and use; tend those few who could not wait for this or that herb.

  “What will they do when they have only the herbs?” he asked her.

  “Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”

  She found a woman to nurse her baby and she gave calm instructions to a frightened Leah. She considered Leah the strangest and the brightest of her white daughters and the one most competent to succeed her. Kane did not want this. He felt threatened, even frightened, by the thought of suddenly greater visibility. He would become more noticeable to people of his father’s class—people who might have known his father. Doro thought this too unlikely to worry about. He found himself trying to explain to the man that if Kane played his role as well as Doro had always seen him play it, and if also he clearly possessed all the trappings of a wealthy planter, it would never occur to people to assume that he was anything but a wealthy planter. Doro told the story of Frank’s passing him off as a Christianized African prince, and he and Kane laughed together over it. There had not been much laughter in the house recently, and even this ended abruptly.

  “You have to stop her,” Kane said as though they had been discussing Anyanwu all along. “You have to. You’re the only one who can.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Doro admitted bleakly. Kane would have no idea how unusual such an admission was from him.

  “Talk to her! Does she want something? Give it to her!”

  “I think she wants me not to kill,” Doro said.

  Kane blinked, then shook his head helplessly. Even he understood that it was impossible.

  Leah came into the back parlor where they were talking and stood before Doro, hands on her hips. “I can’t tell what you feel,” she said. “I’ve never been able to somehow. But if you feel anything at all for her, go to her now!”

  “Why?” Doro asked.

  “Because she’s going to do it. She’s just about gotten herself to the brink. I don’t think she plans to wake up tomorrow morning—like Luisa.”

  Doro stood up to go, but Kane stopped him with a question to Leah.

  “Honey, what does she want? What does she really want from him?”

  Leah looked from one man to another, saw that they were both awaiting her answer. “I asked her that myself,” she said. “She just said she was tired. Tired to death.”

  She had seemed weary, Doro thought. But weary of what? Him? She had begged him not to go away again—not that he had planned to. “Tired of what?” he asked.

  Leah held her hands in front of her and looked down at him. She opened and closed the fingers as though to grasp something, but she held only air. She gestured sometimes when receiving or remembering images and impressions no one else could see. In ordinary society, people would certainly have thought her demented.

  “That’s what I can feel,” she said. “If I sit where she’s recently sat or even more if I handle something she’s worn. It’s a reaching and reaching and grasping and then her hands are empty. There’s nothing. She’s so tired.”

  “Maybe it’s just her age,” Kane said. “Maybe it’s finally caught up with her.”

  Leah shook her head. “I don’t think so. She’s not in any pain, hasn’t slowed down at all. She’s just …” Leah made a sound of frustration and distress—almost a sob. “I’m no good at this,” she said. “Things either come to me clear and sharp without my working and worrying at them or they never come clear. Mother used to be able to take something cloudy and make it clear for herself and for me. I’m just not good enough.”

  Doro said nothing, stood still, trying to make sense of the strange grasping, the weariness.

  “Go to her, damn you!” Leah screamed. And then more softly, “Help her. She’s been a healer since she was back in Africa. Now she needs somebody to heal her. Who could do it but you?”

  He left them and went looking for Anyanwu. He had not thought in terms of healing her before. Let the tables be turned, then. Let him do what he could to heal the healer.

  He found her in her bedroom, gowned for bed and hanging her dress up to air. She had begun wearing dresses exclusively when her pregnancy began to show. She smiled warmly as Doro came in, as though she were glad to see him.

  “It’s early,” he said.

  She nodded. “I know, but I’m tired.”

  “Yes. Leah has just been telling me that you were … tired.”

  She faced him for a moment, sighed. “Sometimes I long for only ordinary children.”

  “You were planning … tonight …”

  “I still am.”

  “No!” He stepped to her, caught her by the shoulders as though his holding her could keep life in her.

  She thrust him away with strength he had not felt in her since before Isaac’s death. He was thrown back against the wall and would have fallen if there had not been a wall to stop him.

  “Don’t say no to me anymore,” she said softly. “I don’t want to hear you telling me what to do anymore.”

  He doused a reflexive flare of anger, stared at her as he rubbed the shoulder that had struck the wall. “What is it?” he whispered. “Tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I’ve tried.” She climbed onto the bed.

  “Then try again!”

  She did not get under her blanket, but sat on top of it, watching him. She said nothing, only watched. Finally he drew a deep, shuddering breath and sat down in the chair nearest her bed. He was shaking. His strong, perfectly good new body was shaking as though he had all but worn it out. He had to stop her. He had to.

  He looked at her and thought he saw compassion in her eyes—as though in a moment, she could come to him, hold him not only as a lover, but as one of her children to be comforted. He would have permitted her to do this. He would have welcomed it.

  She did not move.

  “I’ve told you,” she said softly, “that even when I hated you, I believed in what you were trying to do. I believed that we should have people more like ourselves, that we should not be alone. You had much less trouble with me than you could have because I believed that. I learned to turn my head and ignore the things you did to people. But, Doro, I could not ignore everything. You kill your best servants, people who obey you even when it means suffering for them. Killing gives you too much pleasure. Far too much.”

  “I would have to do it whether it gave me pleasure or not,” he said. “You know what I am.”

  “You are less than you were.”

  “I …”

  “The human part of you is dying, Doro. It is almost dead. Isaac saw that happening, and he told me. That is part of what he said to me on the night he persuaded me to marry him. He said someday you would not feel anything at all that was human, and he said he was glad he would not live to see that day. He said I must live so that I could save the human part of you. But he was wrong. I cannot save it. It’s already dead.”

  “No.” He closed his eyes, tried to still his trembling. Finally, he gave up, looked over at her. If he could only make her see. “It isn’t dead, Anyanwu. I might have thought it was myself
before I found you the second time, but it isn’t. It will die, though, if you leave me.” He wanted to touch her, but in his present state, he dared not risk being thrown across the room again. She must touch him. “I think my son was right,” he said. “Parts of me can die little by little. What will I be when there is nothing left but hunger and feeding?”

  “Someone will find a way to rid the world of you,” she said tonelessly.

  “How? The best people, the ones with the greatest potential power belong to me. I’ve been collecting them, protecting them, breeding them for nearly four millennia while ordinary people poisoned, tortured, hanged, or burned any that I missed.”

  “You are not infallible,” she said. “For three centuries, you missed me.” She sighed, shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I cannot say what will happen, but like Isaac, I’m glad I won’t live to see it.”

  He stood up, furious with her, not knowing whether to curse or to plead. His legs were weak under him and he felt himself on the verge of obscene weeping. Why didn’t she help him? She helped everyone else! He longed to get away from her—or kill her. Why should she be allowed to waste all her strength and power in suicide while he stood before her, his face wet with perspiration, his body trembling like a palsied old man.

  But he could not leave or kill. It was impossible. “Anyanwu, you must not leave me!” He had control of his voice, at least. He did not have that half-in-and-half-out-of-his-body sound that frightened most people and that would have made Anyanwu think he was trying to frighten her.

  Anyanwu pulled back the blanket and sheet and lay down. He knew suddenly that she would die now. Right in front of him, she would lie there and shut herself off.

  “Anyanwu!” He was on the bed with her, pulling her up again. “Please,” he said, not hearing himself any longer. “Please, Anyanwu. Listen.” She was still alive. “Listen to me. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to be able to lie down beside you and die when you die. You can’t know how I’ve longed …” He swallowed. “Sun Woman, please don’t leave me.” His voice caught and broke. He wept. He choked out great sobs that shook his already shaking body almost beyond bearing. He wept as though for all the past times when no tears would come, when there was no relief. He could not stop. He did not know when she pulled off his boots and pulled the blanket up over him, when she bathed his face in cool water. He did know the comfort of her arms, the warmth of her body next to him. He slept, finally, exhausted, his head on her breast, and at sunrise when he awoke, that breast was still warm, still rising and falling gently with her breathing.

  Epilogue

  THERE HAD TO BE changes.

  Anyanwu could not have all she wanted, and Doro could no longer have all that he had once considered his by right. She stopped him from destroying his breeders after they had served him. She could not stop him from killing altogether, but she could extract a promise from him that there be no more Susans, no more Thomases. If anyone had earned the right to be safe from him, to have his protection, it was these people.

  He did not command her any longer. She was no longer one of his breeders, nor even one of his people in the old proprietary way. He could ask her cooperation, her help, but he could no longer coerce her into giving it. There would be no more threats to her children.

  He would not interfere with her children at all. There was disagreement here. She wanted him to promise that he would not interfere with any of her descendants, but he would not. “Do you have any idea how many descendants you have and how widely scattered they are?” he asked her. And, of course, she did not, though she thought by now they would no doubt make a fine nation. “I won’t make you any promises I can’t keep,” he said. “And I won’t wait to ask some stranger who interests me who his many-times-great-grandmother was.”

  Thus, uncomfortably, she settled for protecting her children and any grandchildren or even strangers who became members of her household. These were hers to protect, hers to teach, hers to move if she wished. When it became clear within a few years that there would be a war between the Northern and Southern states, she chose to move her people to California. The move displeased him. He thought she was leaving not only to get away from the coming war, but to make it more difficult for him to break his word regarding her children. Crossing the continent, sailing around the Horn, or crossing the Isthmus of Panama to reach her would not be quick or simple matters even for him.

  He accused her of not trusting him, and she admitted it freely. “You are still the leopard,” she said. “And we are still prey. Why should we tempt you?” Then she eased it all by kissing him and saying “You will see me when you want to badly enough. You know that. When has distance ever really stopped you?”

  It never had. He would see her. He stopped her cross-country plans by putting her and her people on one of his own clippers and returning to her one of the best of her descendants by Isaac to keep her safe from storms.

  In California, she finally took a European name: Emma. She had heard that it meant grandmother or ancestress, and this amused her. She became Emma Anyanwu. “It will give people something to call me that they can pronounce,” she told him on his first visit.

  He laughed. He did not care what she called herself as long as she went on living. And she would do that. No matter where she went, she would live. She would not leave him.

  A Biography of Octavia E. Butler

  Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a bestselling and award-winning author, considered one of the best science fiction writers of her generation. She received both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and in 1995 became the first author of science fiction to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also awarded the prestigious PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

  Butler’s father died when she was very young; her mother raised her in Pasadena, California. Shy, tall, and dyslexic, Butler immersed herself in reading whatever books she could find. She began writing at twelve, when a B movie called Devil Girl from Mars inspired her to try writing a better science-fiction story.

  She took writing classes throughout college, attending the Clarion Writers Workshop and, in 1969, the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters’ Guild of America, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. There she met renowned science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who adopted Butler as his protégé.

  In 1974 she began writing Patternmaster (1976), set in a future world where a network of all-powerful telepaths dominate humanity. Praised both for its imaginative vision and for Butler’s powerful prose, the novel spawned four prequels, beginning with Mind of My Mind (1977) and finishing with Clay’s Ark (1984).

  Although the Patternist series established Butler among the science fiction elite, Kindred (1979) brought her mainstream success. In that novel, a young black woman travels back in time to the antebellum South, where she is called on to protect the life of a white, slaveholding ancestor. Kindred’s protagonist stood out in a genre that, at the time, was widely dominated by white men.

  In 1985, Butler won Nebula and Hugo awards for the novella Bloodchild, which was reprinted in 1995 as Bloodchild and Other Stories. Dawn (1987) began the Xenogenesis trilogy, about a race of aliens who visit earth to save humanity from itself. Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) continue the story, following the life of the first child born with a mixture of alien and human DNA.

  Fledgling (2005), which combines vampire and science fiction narratives, was Butler’s final novel. “She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels,” mystery author Walter Mosley said. “She was writing very difficult, brilliant work.” Her books have been translated into several languages, and continue to appear widely in school and college literature curricula.

  Butler died at home in Washington in 2006.

  Butler, age three, sits with her mother for a photo in Los Angeles in 1951.

  Butler at age thirteen. She began writing the year before when a science fiction film—the cult favorite Devil Girl from Mars—inspired her to create so
mething of her own.

  Butler’s 1965 senior class photo from John Muir High School in Pasadena, California.

  Butler reading a book in 1975, the year before she published Patternmaster.

  Butler on a book tour for Parable of the Sower in New York City in 1993.

  Butler addresses the audience at Marygrove College, Detroit, during the Contemporary American Author Lecture Series in 1994.

  Butler won both Nebula and Hugo awards for her contributions to the science fiction genre. (Photo courtesy of Anna Fedor.)

  Butler with authors Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez (standing), Samuel R. Delany, and Steven Barnes (sitting) at Clark Atlanta University’s conference for African American science fiction writers—the first of its kind—in 1997.

  When Butler passed away in 2006, the New York Times eulogized her as a world-renowned author whose science fiction explored “far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human.”

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