Free Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) by Octavia E. Butler Page A

somewhat strange to Anyanwu. She pronounced some of her words differently or used different words so that Anyanwu had to replay everything in her mind to be certain what had been said. “How did you get here, Udenkwo?” she asked. “Did these whites steal you from your home?” From the corner of her eye, she saw Doro turn to look at her indignantly. But he allowed Udenkwo to answer for herself.
    “Not these,” she said. “Strangers who spoke much as you do. They sold me to others. I was sold four times—finally to these.” She looked around as though dazed, surprised. “No one has beaten me here or tied me.”
    “How were you taken?”
    “I went to the river with friends to get water. We were all taken and our children with us. My son …”
    “Where is he?”
    “They took him from me. When I was sold for the second time, he was not sold with me.” The woman’s strange accent did nothing to mask her pain. She looked from Anyanwu to Doro. “What will be done with me now?”
    This time Doro answered. “You will go to my country. You belong to me now.”
    “I am a freeborn woman! My father and my husband are great men!”
    “That is past.”
    “Let me go back to my people!”
    “My people will be your people. You will obey me as they obey.”
    Udenkwo sat still, but somehow seemed to shrink from him. “Will I be tied again? Will I be beaten?”
    “Not if you obey.”
    “Will I be sold?”
    “No.”
    She hesitated, examining him as though deciding whether or not to believe him. Finally, tentatively, she asked: “Will you buy my son?”
    “I would,” Doro said, “but who knows where he may have been taken—one boy. How old was he?”
    “About five years old.”
    Doro shrugged. “I would not know how to find him.”
    Anyanwu had been looking at Udenkwo uncertainly. Now, as the woman seemed to sink into depression at the news that her son was forever lost to her, Anyanwu asked: “Udenkwo, who is your father and his father?”
    The woman did not answer.
    “Your father,” Anyanwu repeated, “his people.”
    Listlessly, Udenkwo gave the name of her clan, then went on to name several of her male ancestors. Anyanwu listened until the names and their order began to sound familiar—until one of them was the name of her eighth son, then her third husband.
    Anyanwu stopped the recitation with a gesture. “I have known some of your people,” she said. “You are safe here. You will be well treated.” She began to move away. “I will see you again.” She drew Doro with her and when they were beyond the woman’s hearing, she asked: “Could you not look for her son?”
    “No,” Doro said. “I told her the truth. I would not know where to begin—or even whether the boy is still alive.”
    “She is one of my descendants.”
    “As you said, she will be well treated. I can offer no more than that.” Doro glanced at her. “The land must be full of your descendants.”
    Anyanwu looked somber. “You are right. They are so numerous, so well scattered, and so far from me in their generations that they do not know me or each other. Sometimes they marry one another and I hear of it. It is abomination, but I cannot speak of it without focusing the wrong kind of attention on the young ones. They cannot defend themselves as I can.”
    “You are right to keep silent,” Doro said. “Sometimes ways must be different for people as different as ourselves.”
    “We,” she said thoughtfully. “Did you have children of … of a body born to your mother?”
    He shook his head. “I died too young,” he said. “I was thirteen years old.”
    “That is a sad thing, even for you.”
    “Yes.” They were on deck now, and he stared out at the sea. “I have lived for more than thirty-seven hundred years and fathered thousands of children. I have become a woman and borne children. And still, I long to know that my body could have produced. Another being like myself? A companion?”
    “Perhaps not,” said