Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) (37 page)
Read Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) Online
Authors: Octavia E. Butler
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.
The Patternist Series
Octavia Butler
For Octavia, M., Harlan and Sid.
Prologue
Doro
Doro’s widow in the southern California city of Forsyth had become a prostitute. Doro had left her alone for eighteen months. Too long. For the sake of the daughter she had borne him, he should have visited her more often. Now it was almost too late.
Doro watched her without letting her know that he was in town. He saw the men come and go from her new, wrong-side-of-the-tracks apartment. He saw that most of her time away from home was spent in the local bars.
Sometime during his eighteen-month absence, she had moved from the house he had bought her—an expensive house in a good neighborhood. And though he had made arrangements with a Forsyth bank for her to receive a liberal monthly allowance, she still needed the men. And the liquor. He was not surprised.
By the time he knocked at her door, the main thing he wanted to do was see whether his daughter was all right. When the woman opened the door, he pushed past her into the apartment without speaking.
She was half drunk and slurred her words a little as she called after him. “Hey, wait a minute. Who the hell do you think you—”
“Shut up, Rina.”
She hadn’t recognized him, of course. He was wearing a body that she had never seen before. But like all his people, she knew him the instant he spoke. She stared at him, round-eyed, silent.
There was a man sitting on her couch drinking directly from a bottle of Santa Fe Port. Doro glanced at him, then spoke to Rina. “Get rid of him.”
The man started to protest immediately. Doro ignored him and went on to the bedroom, following his tracking sense to Mary, his daughter. The child was asleep, her breathing softly even. Doro turned on a light and looked at her more closely. She was three years old now, small and thin, not especially healthy-looking. Her nose was running.
Doro touched her forehead lightly but felt no trace of fever. The bedroom contained only a bed and a three-legged chest of drawers. There was a pile of dirty clothes in one corner on the floor. The rest of the floor was bare wood—no carpeting.
Doro took in all this without surprise, without changing his neutral expression. He uncovered the child, saw that she was sleeping nude, saw the bruises and welts on her back and legs. He shook his head and sighed, covered the little girl up carefully, and went back out to the living room. There the man and Rina were cursing at each other. Doro waited in silence until he was sure that Rina was honestly, in fact desperately, trying to get rid of her “guest” but that the man was refusing to budge. Then Doro walked over to the man.
The man was short and slight, not much more than a boy, really. Rina might have been able to throw him out physically, but she had not. Now it was too late. She stumbled back away from him, silent, abruptly terrified as Doro approached.
The man rose unsteadily to face Doro. Doro saw that he had put his bottle down and taken out a large pocket knife. Unlike Rina, he did not slur his words at all when he spoke. “Now, listen, you—Hold it! I said hold it!”
He broke off abruptly, slashing at Doro as Doro advanced on him. Doro made no effort to avoid the knife. It sliced easily through the flesh of his abdomen but he never felt the pain. He abandoned his body the instant the knife touched him.
Surprise and anger were the first emotions Doro tasted in the man’s mind. Surprise, anger, then fear. There was always fear. Then yielding. Not all Doro’s victims gave in so quickly, but this one was half anesthetized with wine. This one saw Doro as only Doro’s victims ever saw him. Then, stunned, he gave up his life almost without a struggle. Doro consumed him, an easy if not especially satisfying meal.
Rina had gasped and begun to raise her hand to her mouth as the man slashed at Doro. When Doro finished his kill, Rina’s hand was just touching her lips.
Doro stood uncomfortably disoriented, mildly sick to his stomach, the hand of his newly acquired body still clutching its bloody knife. On the floor lay the body that Doro had been wearing when he came in. It had been strong, healthy, in excellent physical condition. The one he had now was nothing beside it. He glanced at Rina in annoyance. Rina shrank back against the wall.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Do you think you’re safer over there?”
“Don’t hurt me,” she said. “Please.”
“Why would you beat a three-year-old like that, Rina?”
“I didn’t do it! I swear. It was a guy who brought me home a couple of nights ago. Mary woke up screaming from a nightmare or something, and he—”
“Hell,” said Doro in disgust. “Is that supposed to be an excuse?”
Rina began to cry silently, tears streaming down her face. “You don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t understand what it’s like for me having that kid here.” She was no longer slurring her words, in spite of her tears. Her fear had sobered her. She wiped her eyes. “I really didn’t hit her. You know I wouldn’t dare lie to you.” She stared at Doro for a moment, then shook her head. “I’ve wanted to hit her though—so many times. I can hardly even stand to go near her sober anymore. …” She looked at the body cooling on the floor and began to tremble.
Doro went to her. She stiffened with terror as he touched her. Then, after a moment, when she realized that he was doing nothing more than putting his arm around her, she let him lead her back to the couch.
She sat with him, beginning to relax, the tension going out of her body. When he spoke to her, his tone was gentle, without threat.
“I’ll take Mary if you want me to, Rina. I’ll find a home for her.”
She said nothing for a long while. He did not hurry her. She looked at him, then closed her eyes, shook her head. Finally she put her head on his shoulder and spoke softly. “I’m sick,” she said. “Tell me I’ll be well if you take her.”
“You’ll be as well as you were before Mary was born.”
“Then?” She shuddered against him. “No. I was sick then too. Sick and alone. If you take Mary away, you won’t come back to me, will you?”
“No. I won’t.”
“You said, ‘I want you to have a baby,’ and I said, ‘I hate kids, especially babies,’ and you said, That doesn’t matter.’ And it didn’t.”
“Shall I take her, Rina?”
“No. Are you going to get rid of that corpse for me?” She nudged his former body with one foot.
“I’ll have someone take care of it.”
“I can’t do anything,” she said. “My hands shake and sometimes I hear voices. I sweat and my head hurts and I want to cry or I want to scream. Nothing helps but taking a drink—or maybe finding a guy.”
“You won’t drink so much from now on.”
There was another long silence. “You always want so damn much. Shall I give up men, too?”
“If I come back and find Mary black and blue again, I’ll take her. If anything worse happens to her, I’ll kill you.”
She looked at him without fear. “You mean I can keep my men if I keep them away from Mary. All right.”
Dora sighed, started to speak, then shrugged.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “Something is wrong with me. I can’t help it.”
“I know.”
“You made me what I am. I ought to hate your guts for what you made me.”
“You don’t hate me. And you don’t have to defend yourself to me. I don’t condemn you.” He caressed her, wondering idly how she could want life badly enough to fight as hard as she had to fight to keep it. In producing her daughter, she had performed the function she had been born to perform. Doro had demanded that much of her as he had demanded it of others, her ancestors long before her. There had been a time when he disposed of people like her as soon as they had produced the number of offspring he desired. They were inevitably poor parents and their children grew up more comfortably with adoptive parents. Now, though, if such people wanted to live after having served him, he let them. He treated them kindly, as servants who had been faithful. Their gratitude often made them his best servants in spite of their seeming weakness. And the weakness didn’t bother him. Rina was right. It was his fault—a result of his breeding program. Rina, in fact, was a minor favorite with him when she was sober.
“I’ll be careful,” she said. “No one will hurt Mary again. Will you stay with me for a while?”
“Only for a few days. Long enough to help you move out of here.”
She looked alarmed. “I don’t want to move. I can’t stand it out there where I was, by myself.”
“I’m not going to send you back to our old house. I’m just going to take you a few blocks over to Dell Street where one of your relatives lives. She has a duplex and you’re going to live in one side of it.”
“I don’t have any relatives left alive around here.”
He smiled. “Rina, this part of Forsyth is full of your relatives. Actually, that’s why you came back to it. You don’t know them, and you wouldn’t like most of them if you met them, but you need to be close to them.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say, so you won’t be by yourself.”
She shrugged, neither understanding nor really caring. “If people around here are my relatives, are they your people too?”
“Of course.”
“And … this woman I’m going to live next door to—what is she to me?”
“Your grandmother several times removed.”
Rina’s terror returned full force. “You mean she’s like you? Immortal?”
“No. Not like me. She doesn’t kill—at least not the way I do. She’s still wearing the same body she was born into. And she won’t hurt you. But she might be able to help with Mary.”
“All for Mary. She must be important, poor kid.”
“She’s very important.”
Rina was suddenly the concerned mother, frowning at him worriedly. “She won’t just be like me? Sick? Crazy?”
“She’ll be like you at first, but she’ll grow out of it. It isn’t really a disease, you know.”
“It is to me. But I’ll keep her, and move, like you said, to this grandmother’s house. What’s the woman’s name?”
“Emma. She started to call herself Emma about one hundred fifty years ago as a joke. It means grandmother or ancestress.”
“It means she’s somebody you can trust to watch me and see that I don’t hurt Mary.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t. I’ll learn to be her mother at least … a little more. I can do that much—raise a child who’ll be important to you.”
