Wild Seed

by Octavia E. Butler

Genres: Science Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi; Science Fiction Fantasy; Authors of color

Synopsis

DDoro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. He fears no one—until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. She can heal with a bite and
transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. She uses her powers to cure her neighbors and birth entire tribes, surrounding herself with kindred who both fear and respect her. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu—until she meets Doro. The moment Doro meets Anyanwu, he covets her, and from the villages of seventeenth-century Nigeria to nineteenth-century United States, their courtship becomes a power struggle that echoes through generations, irrevocably changing what it means to be human.

Release date: July 24, 2012

Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Print pages: 320

Sample

Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mud-walled place surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized even before he reached it that its people were gone. Slavers had been to it before him. With their guns and their greed, they had undone in a few hours the work of a thousand years. Those villagers they had not herded away, they had slaughtered. Doro found human bones, hair, bits of desiccated flesh missed by scavengers. He stood over a very small skeleton—the bones of a child—and wondered where the survivors had been taken. Which country or New World colony? How far would he have to travel to find the remnants of what had been a healthy, vigorous people?

Finally, he stumbled away from the ruins bitterly angry, not knowing or caring where he went. It was a matter of pride with him that he protected his own. Not the individuals, perhaps, but the groups. They gave him their loyalty, their obedience, and he protected them.

He had failed.

He wandered southwest toward the forest, leaving as he had arrived—alone, unarmed, without supplies, accepting the savanna and later the forest as easily as he accepted any terrain. He was killed several times—by disease, by animals, by hostile people. This was a harsh land. Yet he continued to move southwest, unthinkingly veering away from the section of the coast where his ship awaited him. After a while, he realized it was no longer his anger at the loss of his seed village that drove him. It was something new—an impulse, a feeling, a kind of mental undertow pulling at him. He could have resisted it easily, but he did not. He felt there was something for him farther on, a little farther, just ahead. He trusted such feelings.

He had not been this far west for several hundred years, thus he could be certain that whatever, whoever he found would be new to him—new and potentially valuable. He moved on eagerly.

The feeling became sharper and finer, resolving itself into a kind of signal he would normally have expected to receive only from people he knew—people like his lost villagers whom he should be tracking now before they were forced to mix their seed with foreigners and breed away all the special qualities he valued in them. But he continued on southwest, closing slowly on his quarry.

Anyanwu’s ears and eyes were far sharper than those of other people. She had increased their sensitivity deliberately after the first time men came stalking her, their machetes ready, their intentions clear. She had had to kill seven times on that terrible day—seven frightened men who could have been spared—and she had nearly died herself, all because she let people come upon her unnoticed. Never again.

Now, for instance, she was very much aware of the lone intruder who prowled the bush near her. He kept himself hidden, moved toward her like smoke, but she heard him, followed him with her ears.

Giving no outward sign, she went on tending her garden. As long as she knew where the intruder was, she had no fear of him. Perhaps he would lose his courage and go away. Meanwhile, there were weeds among her coco yams and her herbs. The herbs were not the traditional ones grown or gathered by her people. Only she grew them as medicines for healing, used them when people brought their sick to her. Often she needed no medicines, but she kept that to herself. She served her people by giving them relief from pain and sickness. Also, she enriched them by allowing them to spread word of her abilities to neighboring people. She was an oracle. A woman through whom a god spoke. Strangers paid heavily for her services. They paid her people, then they paid her. That was as it should have been. Her people could see that they benefited from her presence, and that they had reason to fear her abilities. Thus was she protected from them—and they from her—most of the time. But now and then one of them overcame his fear and found reason to try to end her long life.

The intruder was moving close, still not allowing her to see him. No person of honest intentions would approach so stealthily. Who was he then? A thief? A murderer? Someone who blamed her for the death of a kinsman or some other misfortune? During her various youths, she had been blamed several times for causing misfortune. She had been fed poison in the test for witchcraft. Each time, she had taken the test willingly, knowing that she had bewitched no one—and knowing that no ordinary man with his scanty knowledge of poisons could harm her. She knew more about poisons, had ingested more poisons in her long life than any of her people could imagine. Each time she passed the test, her accusers had been ridiculed and fined for their false charges. In each of her lives as she grew older, people ceased to accuse her—though not all ceased to believe she was a witch. Some sought to take matters into their own hands and kill her regardless of the tests.

The intruder finally moved onto the narrow path to approach her openly—now that he had had enough of spying on her. She looked up as though becoming aware of him for the first time.

He was a stranger, a fine man taller than most and broader at the shoulders. His skin was as dark as her own, and his face was broad and handsome, the mouth slightly smiling. He was young—not yet thirty, she thought. Surely too young to be any threat to her. Yet something about him worried her. His sudden openness after so much stealth, perhaps. Who was he? What did he want?

When he was near enough, he spoke to her, and his words made her frown in confusion. They were foreign words, completely incomprehensible to her, but there was a strange familiarity to them—as though she should have understood. She stood up, concealing uncharacteristic nervousness. “Who are you?” she asked.

He lifted his head slightly as she spoke, seemed to listen.

“How can we speak?” she asked. “You must be from very far away if your speech is so different.”

“Very far,” he said in her own language. His words were clear to her now, though he had an accent that reminded her of the way people spoke long ago when she was truly young. She did not like it. Everything about him made her uneasy.

“So you can speak,” she said.

“I am remembering. It has been a long time since I spoke your language.” He came closer, peering at her. Finally, he smiled and shook his head. “You are something more than an old woman,” he said. “Perhaps you are not an old woman at all.”

She drew back in confusion. How could he know anything of what she was? How could he even guess with nothing more than her appearance and a few words as evidence? “I am old,” she said, masking her fear with anger. “I could be your mother’s mother!” She could have been an ancestor of his mother’s mother. But she kept that to herself. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“I could be your mother’s father,” he said.

She took another step backward, somehow controlling her growing fear. This man was not what he seemed to be. His words should have come to her as mocking nonsense, but instead, they seemed to reveal as much and as little as her own.

“Be still,” he told her. “I mean you no harm.”

“Who are you?” she repeated.

“Doro.”

“Doro?” She said the strange word twice more. “Is that a name?”

“It is my name. Among my people, it means the east—the direction from which the sun comes.”

She put one hand to her face. “This is a trick,” she said. “Someone is laughing.”

“You know better. When were you last frightened by a trick?”

Not for more years than she could remember; he was right. But the names… The coincidence was like a sign. “Do you know who I am?” she asked. “Did you come here knowing, or…?”

“I came here because of you. I knew nothing about you except that you were unusual and you were here. Awareness of you has pulled me a great distance out of my way.”

“Awareness?”

“I had a feeling.… People as different as you attract me somehow, call me, even over great distances.”

“I did not call you.”

“You exist and you are different. That was enough to attract me. Now tell me who you are.”

“You must be the only man in this country who has not heard of me. I am Anyanwu.”

He repeated her name and glanced upward, understanding. Sun, her name meant. Anyanwu: the sun. He nodded. “Our peoples missed each other by many years and a great distance, Anyanwu, and yet somehow they named us well.”

“As though we were intended to meet. Doro, who are your people?”

“They were called Kush in my time. Their land is far to the east of here. I was born to them, but they have not been my people for many years. I have not seen them for perhaps twelve times as long as you have been alive. When I was thirteen years old, I was separated from them. Now my people are those who give me their loyalty.”

“And now you think you know my age,” she said. “That is something my own people do not know.”

“No doubt you have moved from town to town to help them forget.” He looked around, saw a fallen tree nearby. He went to sit on it. Anyanwu followed almost against her will. As much as this man confused and frightened her, he also intrigued her. It had been so long since something had happened to her that had not happened before—many times before. He spoke again.

“I do nothing to conceal my age,” he said, “yet some of my people have found it more comfortable to forget—since they can neither kill me nor become what I am.”

She went closer to him and peered down at him. He was clearly proclaiming himself like her—long-lived and powerful. In all her years, she had not known even one other person like herself. She had long ago given up, accepted her solitude. But now…

“Go on talking,” she said. “You have much to tell me.”

He had been watching her, looking at her eyes with a curiosity that most people tried to hide from her. People said her eyes were like babies’ eyes—the whites too white, the browns too deep and clear. No adult, and certainly no old woman should have such eyes, they said. And they avoided her gaze. Doro’s eyes were very ordinary, but he could stare at her as children stared. He had no fear, and probably no shame.

He startled her by taking her hand and pulling her down beside him on the tree trunk. She could have broken his grip easily, but she did not. “I’ve come a long way today,” he told her. “This body needs rest if it is to continue to serve me.”

She thought about that. This body needs rest. What a strange way he had of speaking.

“I came to this territory last about three hundred years ago,” he said. “I was looking for a group of my people who had strayed, but they were killed before I found them. Your people were not here then, and you had not been born. I know that because your difference did not call me. I think you are the fruit of my people’s passing by yours, though.”

“Do you mean that your people may be my kinsmen?”

“Yes.” He was examining her face very carefully, perhaps seeking some resemblance. He would not find it. The face she was wearing was not her true face.

“Your people have crossed the Niger”—he hesitated, frowning, then gave the river its proper name—“the Orumili. When I saw them last, they lived on the other side in Benin.”

“We crossed long ago,” she said. “Children born in that time have grown old and died. We were Ado and Idu, subject to Benin before the crossing. Then we fought with Benin and crossed the river to Onitsha to become free people, our own masters.”

“What happened to the Oze people who were here before you?”

“Some ran away. Others became our slaves.”

“So you were driven from Benin, then you drove others from here—or enslaved them.”

Anyanwu looked away, spoke woodenly. “It is better to be a master than to be a slave.” Her husband at the time of the migration had said that. He had seen himself becoming a great man—master of a large household with many wives, children, and slaves. Anyanwu, on the other hand, had been a slave twice in her life and had escaped only by changing her identity completely and finding a husband in a different town. She knew some people were masters and some were slaves. That was the way it had always been. But her own experience had taught her to hate slavery. She had even found it difficult to be a good wife in her most recent years because of the way a woman must bow her head and be subject to her husband. It was better to be as she was—a priestess who spoke with the voice of a god and was feared and obeyed. But what was that? She had become a kind of master herself. “Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave,” she said softly.

“Yes,” he agreed.

She deliberately turned her attention to the new things he had given her to think about. Her age, for instance. He was right. She was about three hundred years old—something none of her people would have believed. And he had said something else—something that brought alive one of her oldest memories. There had been whispers when she was a girl that her father could not beget children, that she was the daughter not only of another man, but of a visiting stranger. She had asked her mother about this, and for the first and only time in her life, her mother had struck her. From then on, she had accepted the story as true. But she had never been able to learn anything about the stranger. She would not have cared—her mother’s husband claimed her as his daughter and he was a good man—but she had always wondered whether the stranger’s people were more like her.

“Are they all dead?” she asked Doro. “These… kinsmen of mine?”

“Yes.”

“Then they were not like me.”

“They might have been after many more generations. You are not only their child. Your Onitsha kinsmen must have been unusual in their own right.”

Anyanwu nodded slowly. She could think of several unusual things about her mother. The woman had stature and influence in spite of the gossip about her. Her husband was a member of a highly respected clan, well known for its magical abilities, but in his household, it was Anyanwu’s mother who made magic. She had highly accurate prophetic dreams. She made medicine to cure disease and to protect the people from evil. At market, no woman was a better trader. She seemed to know just how to bargain—as though she could read the thoughts in the other women’s minds. She became very wealthy.

It was said that Anyanwu’s clan, the clan of her mother’s husband, had members who could change their shapes, take animal forms at will, but Anyanwu had seen no such strangeness in them. It was her mother in whom she found strangeness, closeness, empathy that went beyond what could be expected between mother and daughter. She and her mother had shared a unity of spirit that actually did involve some exchange of thoughts and feelings, though they were careful not to flaunt this before others. If Anyanwu felt pain, her mother, busy trading at some distant market, knew of the pain and came home. Anyanwu had no more than ghosts of that early closeness with her own children and with three of her husbands. And she had sought for years through her clan, her mother’s clan, and others for even a ghost of her greatest difference, the shape changing. She had collected many frightening stories, but had met no other person who, like herself, could demonstrate this ability. Not until now, perhaps. She looked at Doro. What was it she felt about him—what strangeness? She had shared no thoughts with him, but something about him reminded her of her mother. Another ghost.

“Are you my kinsman?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But your kinsmen had given me their loyalty. That is no small thing.”

“Is that why you came when… when my difference attracted you?”

He shook his head. “I came to see what you were.”

She frowned, suddenly cautious. “I am myself. You see me.”

“As you see me. Do you imagine you see everything?”

She did not answer.

“A lie offends me, Anyanwu, and what I see of you is a lie. Show me what you really are.”

“You see what you will see!”

“Are you afraid to show me?”

“… No.” It was not fear. What was it? A lifetime of concealment, of commanding herself never to play with her abilities before others, never to show them off as mere tricks, never to let her people or any people know the full extent of her power unless she were fighting for her life. Should she break her tradition now simply because this stranger asked her to? He had done much talking, but what had he actually shown her about himself? Nothing.

“Can my concealment be a lie if yours is not?” she asked.

“Mine is,” he admitted.

“Then show me what you are. Give me the trust you ask me to give you.”

“You have my trust, Anyanwu, but knowing what I am would only frighten you.”

“Am I a child then?” she asked angrily. “Are you my mother who must shield me from adult truths?”

He refused to be insulted. “Most of my people are grateful to me for shielding them from my particular truth,” he said.

“So you say. I have seen nothing.”

He stood up, and she stood to face him, her small withered body fully in the shadow of his. She was little more than half his size, but it was no new thing for her to face larger people and either bend them to her will with words or beat them into submission physically. In fact, she could have made herself as large as any man, but she chose to let her smallness go on deceiving people. Most often, it put strangers at their ease because she seemed harmless. Also, it caused would-be attackers to underestimate her.

Doro stared down at her. “Sometimes only a burn will teach a child to respect fire,” he said. “Come with me to one of the villages of your town, Anyanwu. There I will show you what you think you want to see.”

“What will you do?” she asked warily.

“I will let you choose someone—an enemy or only some useless person that your people would be better without. Then I will kill him.”

“Kill!”

“I kill, Anyanwu. That is how I keep my youth, my strength. I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is kill a man and wear his body like a cloth.” He breathed deeply. “This is not the body I was born into. It’s not the tenth I’ve worn, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth. Your gift seems to be a gentle one. Mine is not.”

“You are a spirit,” she cried in alarm.

“I told you you were a child,” he said. “See how you frighten yourself?”

He was like an ogbanje, an evil child spirit born to one woman again and again, only to die and give the mother pain. A woman tormented by an ogbanje could give birth many times and still have no living child. But Doro was an adult. He did not enter and re-enter his mother’s womb. He did not want the bodies of children. He preferred to steal the bodies of men.

“You are a spirit!” she insisted, her voice shrill with fear. All the while part of her mind wondered why she was believing him so easily. She knew many tricks herself, many frightening lies. Why should she react now like the most ignorant stranger brought before her believing that a god spoke through her? Yet she did believe, and she was afraid. This man was far more unusual than she was. This man was not a man.

When he touched her arm lightly, unexpectedly, she screamed.

He made a sound of disgust. “Woman, if you bring your people here with your noise, I will have no choice but to kill some of them.”

She stood still, believing this also. “Did you kill anyone as you came here?” she whispered.

“No. I went to great trouble to avoid killing for your sake. I thought you might have kinsmen here.”

“Generations of kinsmen. Sons and their sons and even their sons.”

“I would not want to kill one of your sons.”

“Why?” She was relieved but curious. “What are they to you?”

“How would you receive me if I came to you clothed in the flesh of one of your sons?”

She drew back, not knowing how to imagine such a thing.

“You see? Your children should not be wasted anyway. They may be good—” He spoke a word in another language. She heard it clearly, but it meant nothing to her. The word was seed.

“What is seed?” she asked.

“People too valuable to be casually killed,” he said. Then more softly, “You must show me what you are.”

“How can my sons be of value to you?”

He gave her a long silent look, then spoke with that same softness. “I may have to go to them, Anyanwu. They may be more tractable than their mother.”

She could not recall ever having been threatened so gently—or so effectively. Her sons…“Come,” she whispered. “It is too open for me to show you here.”

With concealed excitement, Doro followed the small, wizened woman to her tiny compound. The compound wall—made of red clay and over six feet high—would give them the privacy Anyanwu wanted.

“My sons would do you no good,” she told him as they walked. “They are good men, but they know very little.”

“They are not like you—any of them?”

“None.”

“And your daughters?”

“Nor them. I watched them carefully until they went away to their husbands’ towns. They are like my mother. They exert great influence on their husbands and on other women, but nothing beyond that. They live their lives and they die.”

“They die…?”

She opened the wooden door and led him through the wall, then barred the door after him.

“They die,” she said sadly. “Like their fathers.”

“Perhaps if your sons and daughters married each other…”

“Abomination!” she said with alarm. “We are not animals here, Doro!”

He shrugged. He had spent most of his life ignoring such protests and causing the protestors to change their minds. People’s morals rarely survived confrontations with him. For now, though, gentleness. This woman was valuable. If she were only half as old as he thought, she would be the oldest person he had ever met—and she was still spry. She was descended from people whose abnormally long lives, resistance to disease, and budding special abilities made them very important to him. People who, like so many others, had fallen victim to slavers or tribal enemies. There had been so few of them. Nothing must happen to this one survivor, this fortunate little hybrid. Above all, she must be protected from Doro himself. He must not kill her out of anger or by accident—and accidents could happen so easily in this country. He must take her away with him to one of his more secure seed towns. Perhaps in her strangeness, she could still bear young, and perhaps with the powerful mates he could get her, this time her children would be worthy of her. If not, there were always her existing children.

“Will you watch, Doro?” she asked. “This is what you demanded to see.”

He focused his attention on her, and she began to rub her hands. The hands were bird claws, long-fingered, withered, and bony. As he watched, they began to fill out, to grow smooth and young-looking. Her arms and shoulders began to fill out and her sagging breasts drew themselves up round and high. Her hips grew round beneath her cloth, causing him to want to strip the cloth from her. Lastly, she touched her face and molded away her wrinkles. An old scar beneath one eye vanished. The flesh became smooth and firm, and the woman startlingly beautiful.

Finally, she stood before him looking not yet twenty. She cleared her throat and spoke to him in a soft, young woman’s voice. “Is this enough?”

For a moment he could only stare at her. “Is this truly you, Anyanwu?”

“As I am. As I would always be if I did not age or change myself for others. This shape flows back to me very easily. Others are harder to take.”

“Others!”

“Did you think I could take only one?” She began molding her malleable body into another shape. “I took animal shapes to frighten my people when they wanted to kill me,” she said. “I became a leopard and spat at them. They believe in such things, but they do not like to see them proved. Then I became a sacred python, and no one dared to harm me. The python shape brought me luck. We were needing rain then to save the yam crop, and while I was a python, the rains came. The people decided my magic was good and it took them a long time to want to kill me again.” She was becoming a small, well-muscled man as she spoke.

Now Doro did try to strip away her cloth, moving slowly so that she would understand. He felt her strength for a moment when she caught his hand and, with no special effort, almost broke it. Then, as he controlled his surprise, prevented himself from reacting to the pain, she untied her cloth herself and took it off. For several seconds, he was more impressed with that casual grip than with her body, but he could not help noticing that she had become thoroughly male.

“Could you father a child?” he asked.

“In time. Not now.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. But only girl children.”

He shook his head, laughing. The woman was far beyond anything he had imagined. “I’m surprised your people have let you live,” he said.

“Do you think I would let them kill me?” she asked.

He laughed again. “What will you do then, Anyanwu? Stay here with them, convincing each new generation that you are best let alone—or will you come with me?”

She tied her cloth around her again, then stared at him, her large too-clear eyes looking deceptively gentle in her young man’s face. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “For me to go with you?”

“Yes.”

“That is your true reason for coming here then.”

He thought he heard fear in her voice, and his throbbing hand convinced him that she must not be unduly frightened. She was too powerful. She might force him to kill her. He spoke honestly.

“I let myself be drawn here because people who had pledged loyalty to me had been taken away in slavery,” he said. “I went to their village to get them, take them to a safer home, and I found… only what the slavers had left. I went away, not caring where my feet took me. When they brought me here, I was surprised, and for the first time in many days, I was pleased.”

“It seems your people are often taken from you.”

“It does not seem so, it is so. That. . .