Free Kindred by Octavia Butler Page B

you?”
    “What?” He started up angrily, forgetting his leg, then fell back. “I am not trash!” he whispered. “You damn black …”
    “Hush, Rufe.” I put my hand on his shoulder to quiet him. Apparently I’d hit the nerve I’d aimed at. “I didn’t say you were trash. I said how’d you like to be called trash. I see you don’t like it. I don’t like being called nigger either.”
    He lay silent, frowning at me as though I were speaking a foreign language. Maybe I was.
    “Where we come from,” I said, “it’s vulgar and insulting for whites to call blacks niggers. Also, where we come from, whites and blacks can marry.”
    “But it’s against the law.”
    “It is here. But it isn’t where we come from.”
    “Where do you come from?”
    I looked at Kevin.
    “You asked for it,” he said.
    “You want to try telling him?”
    He shook his head. “No point.”
    “Not for you, maybe. But for me …” I thought for a moment trying to find the right words. “This boy and I are liable to have a long association whether we like it or not. I want him to know.”
    “Good luck.”
    “Where do you come from?” repeated Rufus. “You sure don’t talk like anybody I ever heard.”
    I frowned, thought, and finally shook my head. “Rufe, I want to tell you, but you probably won’t understand. We don’t understand ourselves, really.”
    “I already don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t know how I can see you when you’re not here, or how you get here, or anything. My leg hurts so much I can’t even think about it.”
    “Let’s wait then. When you feel better …”
    “When I feel better, maybe you’ll be gone. Dana, tell me!”
    “All right, I’ll try. Have you ever heard of a place called California?”
    “Yeah. Mama’s cousin went there on a ship.”
    Luck. “Well, that’s where we’re from. California. But … it’s not the California your cousin went to. We’re from a California that doesn’t exist yet, Rufus. California of nineteen seventy-six.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I mean we come from a different time as well as a different place. I told you it was hard to understand.”
    “But what’s nineteen seventy-six?”
    “That’s the year. That’s what year it is for us when we’re at home.”
    “But it’s eighteen nineteen. It’s eighteen nineteen everywhere. You’re talking crazy.”
    “No doubt. This is a crazy thing that’s happened to us. But I’m telling you the truth. We come from a future time and place. I don’t know how we get here. We don’t want to come. We don’t belong here. But when you’re in trouble, somehow you reach me, call me, and I come—although as you can see now, I can’t always help you.” I could have told him about our blood relationship. Maybe I would if I saw him again when he was older. For now, though, I had confused him enough.
    “This is crazy stuff,” he repeated. He looked at Kevin. “You tell me. Are you from California?”
    Kevin nodded. “Yes.”
    “Then are you Spanish? California is Spanish.”
    “It is now, but it will be part of the United States eventually, just like Maryland or Pennsylvania.”
    “When?”
    “It will become a state in eighteen fifty.”
    “But it’s only eighteen nineteen. How could you know …?” He broke off, looked from Kevin to me in confusion. “This isn’t real,” he said. “You’re making it all up.”
    “It’s real,” said Kevin quietly.
    “But how could it be?”
    “We don’t know. But it is.”
    He thought for a while looking from one to the other of us. “I don’t believe you,” he said.
    Kevin made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t blame you.”
    I shrugged. “All right, Rufe. I wanted you to know the truth, but I can’t blame you for not being able to accept it either.”
    “Nineteen seventy-six,” said the boy slowly. He shook his head and closed his eyes. I wondered why I had bothered to try to convince him. After all, how accepting would