Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler Page A

people to enslave and keep alive. None like them have gone through my hands without being tested."
    "Speak the words I taught you."
    Daly spoke them—words in the seed people's own language asking them whether they were followers of Doro, whether they were "Doro's seed"—and Doro released Daly's wrist. The slaver had said the words perfectly and none of Doro's seed villagers had failed to respond. They were, as Daly had said, difficult people—bad-tempered, more suspicious than most of strangers, more willing than most to murder each other or attack their far-flung neighbors, more willing to satisfy their customs and their meat-hunger with human flesh. Doro had isolated them on their sparsely populated savanna for just that reason. Had they been any closer to the larger, stronger tribes around them, they would have been wiped out as a nuisance.
    They were also a highly intuitive people who involuntarily saw into each other's thoughts and fought with each other over evil intentions rather than evil deeds. This without ever realizing that they were doing anything unusual. Doro had been their god since he had assembled them generations before and commanded them to marry only each other and the strangers he brought to them. They had obeyed him, throwing away clearly defective children born of their inbreeding, and strengthening the gifts that made them so valuable to him. If those same gifts made them abnormally quick to anger, vicious, and savagely intolerant of people unlike themselves, it did not matter. Doro had been very pleased with them, and they had long ago accepted the idea that pleasing him was the most important thing they could do.
    "Your people are surely dead if they have been taken," Daly said. "The few that you brought here with you years ago made enemies wherever they went."
    Doro had brought five of the villagers out to cross-breed them with certain others he had collected. They had insulted everyone with their arrogance and hostility, but they had also bred as Doro commanded them and gotten fine children—children with even greater, more controllable sensitivity.
    "Some of them are alive," Doro said. "I can feel their lives drawing me when I think of them. I'm going to have to track as many of them as I can before someone does kill them though."
    "I'm sorry," Daly said. "I wish they had been brought to me. As bad as they are, I would have held them for you."
    Doro nodded, sighed. "Yes, I know you would have."
    And the last of the slaver's tension melted away. He knew Doro did not blame him for the seed people's demise, knew he would not be punished. "What is the little Igbo you have brought aboard?" he asked curiously. There was room for curiosity now.
    "Wild seed," Doro said. "Carrier of a bloodline I believed was lost—and, I think, of another that I did not know existed. I have some exploring to do in her homeland once she is safely away."
    "She! But . . . that black is a man."
    "Sometimes. But she was born a woman. She is a woman most of the time."
    Daly shook his head, unbelieving. "The monstrosities you collect! I suppose now you will breed creatures who don't know whether to piss standing or squatting."
    "They will know—if I can breed them. They will know, but it won't matter."
    "Such things should be burned. They are against God!"
    Doro laughed and said nothing. He knew as well as Daly how the slaver longed to be one of Doro's monstrosities. Daly was still alive because of that desire. Ten years before, he had confronted what he considered to be just another black savage leading five other less black but equally savage-looking men. All six men appeared to be young, healthy—fine potential slaves. Daly had sent his own black employees to capture them. He had lost thirteen men that day. He had seen them swept down as grain before a scythe. Then, terrified, confronted by Doro in the body of the last man killed, he had drawn his own sword. The move cost him his right hand. He never understood why it