Unexpected Stories

by Octavia E. Butler

  He took it wordlessly and cut his huntress and judge free of their bonds.

  The two got up stiffly, rubbing arms and legs. They said nothing, apparently waiting for Diut to tell them what had happened. He told them briefly and as he spoke, Tahneh watched their reactions with special interest. Jeh and Cheah were to play an important part in her plans. It would be dangerous if they were actively hostile to the idea of a tie between the two tribes. But there was no sign of hostility in their manner.

  “And you have already given your word in this, Tehkohn Hao?” asked Jeh when Diut was finished.

  “So,” Diut answered.

  Jeh seemed to think about it. “There’s room,” he said. “There’s food and water.” He glanced at Tahneh. “And there are plenty of contentious fighters jealous of the places that they’ve already made for themselves.”

  “One fighter may challenge another,” said Tahneh.

  But apparently she had missed something in the young judge’s seemingly innocent words—something Diut caught. Diut spoke up quickly.

  “That’s so. But the three of us, Jeh, will hold no grudge for what has happened to us here.” He looked from Jeh to Cheah, and Tahneh saw by the looks that they gave back that he had guessed right. The two had been roughly handled, unfairly subdued by several Rohkohn, then humiliatingly displayed. Apparently they felt that they had debts to pay. Diut spoke again firmly.

  “It should be clear to both of you that I’m buying our lives with this promise of sanctuary for the Rohkohn. And the Rohkohn Hao is buying assured survival for her people.”

  The two flashed white assent—less grudgingly than Tahneh would have expected. The huntress spoke for the first time.

  “Is there a part for us in this, Tehkohn Hao—something you want us to do?”

  “There is something,” said Tahneh before Diut could answer. She had decided that her plan would work. These two could play the role she had intended for them. “You and Jeh will prepare the way for my people. You will return to your mountains at once and let the Tehkohn know that we’re coming, that they should prepare to meet us in peace.”

  “We are to return home without the Tehkohn Hao?” Cheah asked doubtfully.

  “The Tehkohn Hao will stay and guide us to our new home,” answered Tahneh.

  Tahneh glanced at Diut and saw that a small amount of yellow had crept into his coloring. Like his huntress and judge, Diut was just learning this part of her plan, just coming to understand that it was his own presence as a hostage among the Rohkohn that would ensure Rohkohn safe passage. Tahneh was worried about her people’s first contact with the Tehkohn. She believed Diut meant his promise, but like Ehreh she worried about the immediate reaction of his people. They had been without a ruling Hao for too long. They might not be as quick to obey as they should be.

  Now, Tahneh thought, Diut could either pretend to have been aware of her plan all along and confirm her orders to Jeh and Cheah, or he could contradict her, argue with her in front of them, and inevitably lose the argument. For the moment, Tahneh was in the stronger position, and she meant to use that position to ensure the safety of her people. He spoke to her softly.

  “It seems, cousin, that you and your chief judge share similar doubts.”

  She turned her head to look at him, but said nothing. The yellow, she noticed, was gone from his coloring.

  “In the end, you and your people take the greater risk,” he said.

  “So.”

  “In the face of that, I’ll accept the most immediate risk.” He spoke to Jeh and Cheah. “You’ll go as the Rohkohn Hao has said. I’ll follow later with the Rohkohn.”

  The two flashed white.

  Tahneh suppressed an impulse to let her own body whiten with pleasure. He had handled himself well with Ehreh, and well again now. In his youth, he carried his uncertainty closer to the surface than she carried hers. But already he was learning.

  Tahneh went to the door again and when she opened it this time, she saw that her chiefs had already cleared away the crowd. In its place waited only the judges who had brought her Jeh and Cheah. She called in two of these and spoke to them.

  “The Tehkohn huntress and judge will spend today and tomorrow with us as guests, free of any restraint. Tomorrow night, they will be given whatever provisions they ask for and allowed to return to the mountains.”

  Tahneh waited until her judges flashed white, then she looked back at Jeh and Cheah. “Go with them now, back to your apartment. They’ll see that you’re not bothered.”

  Jeh and Cheah left silently. When they were gone, Tahneh sat down wearily on one of the weavers’ mats. “Well, little cousin, it begins.”

  To her surprise, Diut whitened with apparent amusement. “It sounded more like it was almost over.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “Do you know how little time it will take Ehreh to call a meeting of the council of judges, and how long it will take the council to argue our tie over and over pointlessly until they finally decide to do as I’ve ordered? And I must be present. The game must be played correctly. Then there will be the preparations, the actual moving … We’re not a nomadic people, Diut. It will be difficult.”

  Diut sat down beside her. “I’ll do what I can to help,” he said, “if, from now on, you’ll give me some forewarning of your plans before you act on them.”

  She looked at him, then sighed. “I’ve been a ruling Hao for a long time, cousin. Habit is strong.”

  “I’ve just become a ruling Hao,” he countered. “But I am the Tehkohn Hao, and I do intend to rule.”

  “You are a Tehkohn Hao. Now there are two of us.”

  He flashed white. “Two Hao, Tahneh. I won’t be like your council of judges, merely deciding to do as you say.”

  She stroked his shoulder, smoothing the fur down his arm. He amused her, but she felt a seriousness too. She spoke quietly. “I don’t owe you this warning, cousin, but I’ll give it to you anyway. Unless you’re careful, you’ll become exactly like my council of judges. You dislike responsibility. I’m accustomed to it. Think how easy it would be for you to become lax, satisfied, willing to enjoy the prestige of your coloring while doing nothing to earn it.”

  “That won’t happen, Tahneh.”

  “But,” she whitened slightly, “I’ve given you back your life. That’s enough. What you do with it is up to you.”

  As much warningly as affectionately, she reached over and caressed his throat.

  Childfinder

  Standardization of psionic ability through large segments of the population must have given different peoples wonderful opportunities to understand each other. Such abilities could bridge age-old divisions of race, religion, nationality, etc. as could nothing else. Psi could have put the human race on the road to utopia.

  Away from the organization. As far away as I could get. 855 South Madison. An unfurnished three-room house for $60 a month. Rain through the roof in the winter, insects through the walls in the summer. Most of the electrical outlets not working. Most of the faucets working all the time whether they were turned off or not. Tenant pays utilities. My house. And there were seven more just like it. All set in a straggly row and called a court.

  Not that I minded the place really. I’d lived in worse. And I killed every damn rat and roach on the premises before I moved in. Besides, there was this kid next door. Young, educable, with the beginnings of a talent she was presently using for shoplifting. A pre-telepath.

  Saturday.

  She came over at 10 a.m., banging on the door as though she intended to come through it whether I opened it or not. Considering her background and the condition of the door, she might have.

  I let her in. Ten years old, dirty, filthy even at this hour of the morning. Which meant she had probably gone to bed that way. Her mother worked at night and her older sister knew better than to try to make her do anything she didn’t want to do. Like bathe. Most of her hair was pulled back in a linty pony tail. The kind that advertised the fa
ct that she had just started “combing” it herself.

  “Come on in. What do you want?” I knew what she wanted. I’d been waiting for her all morning. But it made her suspicious when I was too nice or too understanding.

  “Here’s your book.” She wasn’t comfortable handing it to me.

  “What happened to the cover?”

  “Larry played with it and tore it off.”

  “Valerie, what’d you let a two-year-old play with a book for?”

  “Mama said share it with him.”

  I took the book from her, keeping my expression just short of disgust. People don’t like you breaking up their things. She knew it and she didn’t expect me to be happy. Actually I didn’t care. There was only one thing I cared about.

  “Did you read it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you like about it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.” Beginning of battle. You drag words out of her, one by painful one. You prove to her that she can do a lot more thinking than she’s used to … if she wants to. Then you make her want to. And all the time you push her, guide her thinking just a little. Partly to get her used to mental communication—like letting a baby hear speech so it can learn to talk. And partly to shock her into thinking along new and not always pleasant lines. That last is ugly. Not something I like to do to kids. The adults I do it to usually can’t be reached any other way. Most of the time they’re not salvageable anyway. All the kids like Valerie have is ten years or so of failure conditioning. Not quite enough to be fatal.

  Valerie said, “I liked the parts where Harriet helped those slaves to get away.”

  “She could have been killed every time she helped them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you think she kept doing it?”

  Again the bored shrug. “I don’t know. Wanted them to get free, I guess.”

  Off-the-top-of-her-head stuff. She had liked the book all right, at least while she was reading it. It was a juvenile biography of Harriet Tubman, well written, fast moving, and exciting. There were a lot of reasons for Valerie to get more than a couple of evenings of entertainment out of it. Reasons beyond the ones usually given for making a black kid read that kind of book. Right now, though, her mind had wandered outside, where the rest of the court kids were screaming and chasing each other up and down the driveway.

  I hit her with a scene from the book. Herself in Harriet’s place. Seven or eight people following her north. Night. North star. White people nearby. Danger. Close call. Fear. One of her followers wanting to turn back, and another, and another. Fear like a barrier you could reach out and touch. Gun in her hand, telling them they would go on with her or be shot

  Push.

  Reading it and living it are two different things. Valerie got the whole scene in a few seconds like a really vivid dream. Not the kind of dream someone her age ought to be having, but she was going to have to grow up pretty fast.

  She shook herself and muttered something like, “Long-haired motherfucker!” It was one of the kinder names that people in our court called each other from time to time. But at that moment Valerie was applying it to the rest of Harriet’s would-be deserters.

  She looked at me, frowning. “They always got halfway up north and then somebody would get scared and want to go back. How come they were so scared to just go ahead and be free?”

  Breakthrough. The kids outside were forgotten for the moment. She had asked a question she wanted the answer to.

  I worked with Valerie until her brother—an older one, not Larry—banged on the door and yelled, “Valerie, Mama say come do these dishes.”

  She left, taking another book with her, a step closer to being ready. I became aware of somebody else as Valerie left.

  A woman coming down the driveway to my house. She spoke to Valerie in the kind of first-grade language that the ten-year-old had come to know and dislike years ago.

  “My, that’s a big book you have there. Are you going to read all that?”

  Valerie muttered something that might have been either “yes” or “no,” leaped the distance between her porch and mine and disappeared into her house. She had left my door open, and the woman walked in like she owned the place. Organization woman. White, of course. White people came to the court to turn off the utilities, evict tenants, sell overpriced junk and take care of other equally savory kinds of business. This would be one of those other kinds. For once, I was glad of Valerie’s youth and ignorance. She didn’t know anything the organization could lift out of her thoughts and use against me.

  I said, “Eve, if you don’t know how to talk to kids why don’t you just pass by without saying anything?”

  “I was only trying to be pleasant to her because she’s one of yours.” She sat down uninvited and smoothed first her dress, then her hair. Her hair was long and when she was nervous she liked to fool with it. Now she was starting to twist a piece of it around her fingers.

  “Did she think you were pleasant?”

  Eve changed the subject. “We’ve missed you. We want you to come to a meeting today … if you have time.”

  “I don’t.” A lot of things I wouldn’t like could happen to me at one of their meetings.

  “Barbara, come. Really, if you don’t there’s going to be trouble.”

  “There’ll be trouble no matter what. But I didn’t know it was so close. Thanks for the warning.” So they were finally getting worried enough about what I was doing to think about forcing me back to the fold.

  She looked around at my so-called house and listened to the kids screaming outside. “What is it you’re so willing to fight for? What do you have here that you couldn’t have more of with us?”

  “Valeries.”

  “I’ve told you before, Barbara, bring the children. We want them too.”

  “Do you? Are you sure? These are the same kids you wouldn’t even consider before I left. You took one look into them and you couldn’t get out fast enough.”

  “All right, we were wrong. You’re the childfinder and we should have listened. Come back now and we will listen.”

  “I don’t need you any more.” The way they hadn’t needed me before I started finding pre-psi kids. I know a lot about them, about the way they feel. The kind of things normal people can only guess about each other.

  Silence for a moment. As silent as my court gets, anyway.

  “So the others are right. You’re forming an opposing organization.”

  “We won’t oppose you unless we have to.”

  “A segregated black-only group … Don’t you see, you’re setting yourself up for the same troubles that plague the normals.”

  “No. Until you get another childfinder, I don’t think they’ll be quite the same. More like reversed.” I almost said, “How does it feel to be on the downside for a change.” Almost. And to one of the new people—the next step for mankind.

  Honest to God, that’s the way they talked when I was with them. They had everything they needed then. Somebody to pull them all together—all the ones who had managed to mature on their own. The ones who had been solitary misfits, human trash, until they got together. I was one of them. I know just how low they were before someone with the talent to reach out and call them together matured. That led to the organization and the organization led me to find out that I hadn’t been as mature as I thought. Led me to discover that I was the other thing they needed. Somebody who could recognize normal-appearing kids who had psi potential before they got too old and the potential in them died from lack of use. Originally the organization was a group of exceptions. Most pre-psi kids don’t mature without help. That’s why the organization had stayed the same size since the day I left it.

  Eve was saying, “Sooner or later we’re bound to get another childfinder.”

  That was true. Except that I was likely to see their childfinder before they did. I’d seen two white potential ones
so far. I hate to hurt kids. I mean it. My specialty is helping them. But I crippled those two for good. The best they can hope for now—if they knew enough to hope—is to be normal with traces of psionic ability.

  “Barbara.” There was a change in Eve’s voice that made me look at her. “I didn’t want to say this, but … well, you can’t watch all the kids you’ve collected all the time. Especially since you’re still out looking for new ones. We would hate to do anything, but …”

  They wouldn’t hate it. And they wouldn’t be careful. Where I’d cripple kids painlessly, they would kill them. After all that build-up about the organization wanting them.

  “Don’t come after my kids, Eve.”

  “Do you think I’d want to? Do you think it was my idea? You’re the one who won’t listen to reason. …”

  “Don’t come after my kids! You’ll lose a lot more than you bargain for if you do. You’d be surprised how fast some of them are growing up, and they know a lot more about you than you know about them.”

  She got mad then and tried one of her organization tricks. Swiping at me. Trying to grab what I knew out of my thoughts before I could realize what she was doing and stop her. But who’s likely to know more about that kind of thing? Someone who spends months teaching it to kids, or someone who’s had to be polite most of the time and pretend it doesn’t exist? She didn’t get a thing. Not even the satisfaction of taking me by surprise. So she left. Just like that. She got up and walked out.

  I didn’t reach after her until she was outside in the driveway. I meant to catch her just as she started to give way to her anger and let her guard down a little. I meant to show her how that little trick worked!

  I never got to do it.

  There were three organization men waiting in her car. She stood in the driveway and called them to her. Then she started back toward my house with them surrounding her. Her protection.