My mother weeps and draws the blinds against the alien landscape, her triumph turned to bitterness.
Sad music emanates noncommittally from the holovision.
Above my aching heart, a hard seed is setting in the ovary of my breast flower.
My dancing dress has died and hangs limp and brown on the chairback.
A green tendril sneaks under the door sill, avoiding my mother's field of vision as she sobs in front of the dresser mirror. Hour by hour, it inches across the floor. I watch it silently. As dawn approaches, it reaches my bed and tugs at my hand. My mother is snoring in her chair. I put on my old spacesuit liners and go out after it.
I am not in the well-trimmed streets through which we flew on rainbow birdwings amid showers of petals and cascades of multicoloured blossoms opening in sequence. I am not worshipped by adoring throngs but stalked by skulking tigers and shambling apes, their mean human faces poking through the transplanted fur. Most of the buildings have gone wild and are sprouting shapeless spare rooms in which these beasts have made their untidy nests. A bird the size of a light aircraft takes off, its massive wings clattering, a shredded biotechnical garment dangling from its beak. Ugly ambulant plants sidle up and press their tumid calyces against me, dusting my liners with pollen.
Before I have gone half a block, my mother catches up. "You cannot go out here! Have you any idea how dangerous it is? These people are animals!" Outside Snakey's All-Night Bio Parlour, a pride of mangy lions are tearing at a headless torso, their tacky manes clotted with blood. Ignoring my mother's disgust, I follow the vine to its conclusion.
We find Beanshoot in a tangle of service roots at the base of the BI tower. Only his head is visible above the blanketing undergrowth. He is lying in a bower of flowers, protected by a cage of thorns, his face as contented as when he suckled a bottle of milk on the Chief Technician's knee.
"What does he mean by this?" my mother yells; "doesn't he know we have been out of our minds with worry?"
Beanshoot turns his head and looks at us comfortably (insolently, I imagine my mother thinking), then turns back to the blossoms which congregate around his head.
"Has he no thought for others? Going off with a plant on his wedding night't These vegetables don't give a damn about him. All he is to them is fertiliser—manure!"
She runs bellowing into the BI building to fetch the President, who arrives in an armoured suit and respirator, leading an armoured team, mincing in trepidation around the poisoned spurting spears that the plant has thrown up in self-defence. My mother is screaming even louder because now I am inside the deadly cage.
* * *
As soon as she had gone, he turned to me. The vine still in my hands contracted, the barricade of thorns parted, and I crawled inside the green shelter, pushing aside the clustering blossoms and pressing my head to his. Don't worry, I said. I stroked his cheek. It was cold and dewy. His skin looked greenish in the early light. His mouth moved without words. I have just kissed his clammy, pollen-crusted lips and am searching for his honeyed tongue when the President and his team move in, brandishing machetes, flamethrowers and her-bicidal aerosols.
Our thorns go into action.
All the plants in the square join in: flailing venomous tendrils, whiplashing vines, pods bursting like bombs. A stench of sap and roasting vegetables and unsmelt defensive pheno-mones that whip the unprotected into a screaming panic. ("Get out, Jeni, get out!" my mother shrieks, but by now I am bound to the ground by a web of tendrils.)
The BI team move on, imperturbable in armour, hacking, burning and spraying, while my mother howls in desperation and I twist in the grip that binds me eye-to-eye with Beanshoot's terrified face.
My hair and liners are on fire. Weedkiller sears my lungs. My blood splatters our faces. A rain of toxic sap slops from the blades of the slashing machetes.
At last the resistance dies down and I lie, gently unbound, in a blackened, blighted thicket; staring into Beanshoot's foggy eyes as the team scrabble to unearth him. They clear the fallen petals from around his head and neck and then stagger back in shock as the unmistakable red/green sandwich of the Bionic Interface comes into view, followed by the wheezing sponge of a failing Green Heart.
From there down, he is all roots.
I faint.
I wake in a rectangular chamber filled with diffuse golden light.
I have no heart. I am not breathing. Pain scrapes my eviscerated thorax. My raw skin still burns.
My mother hovers over my bed. "Dead!" she whimpers occasionally. The President paces the room, moving in and out of the field of vision of my unfocused, immobile eyes; his angry strides quaking the floor. "It has gone much too far!" he mutters, throwing up some shade to let a white rectangle into the golden haze of the room. "Look at them all out there! They have taken over the world! How did we let it happen?"
"Dead," my mother sniffs again, "poor boy!" So it is not I who am dead! Something out of my sight is circulating and ventilating my blood. A new heart and lungs developing among the blood clots in my chest cavity.
"Kidnapped, raped and killed by a fucking autonomous vegetable!" the President bursts out, agonised.
"Poor boy," my mother says. "Nobody should die in this day and age. Nole Whard Junior was so innocent." She has heard on the holovision that the plant entrapped him on the dancefloor—trussing him with its tendrils, gassing him with its perfume, hauling him down the side of the building with its vines. How terrible it was to see her son-in-law in its rapacious clutches!
She sobs. ''Just for a moment, while I watched the rescue, I imagined—of course my mind was mostly on my poor daughter—but I thought I saw—for a second I thought that the silly boy had deliberately interfaced himself with the plant. Then I heard on the holo that the dying vegetable, its roots having already reduced his body to gnawed bones, had cut his throat with one last spiteful slash of its thorns, rather than surrender him. Oh my God. Jeni cannot hear me, can she?"
"No," says the President. "Your daughter will be unconscious for a long time yet. The shock. She has been very badly burned. But you must not worry. We are growing her a new skin. New breasts as well. Your daughter will be lovelier than ever."
"The estate…" My continuing good looks assured, my mother is turning her mind to Nole Whard's billions.
"That will go to his son, of course."
"His son?"
My mother's spasm of alarm rocks my bed.
"Well, naturally, we had him cloned as soon as we could get a sample to the lab. Nole Whard III will be a lively blastocyst by now."
Tears fall onto my bandages. A quavering wail escapes my mother's throat. "My daughter]"
"No safer place for a clone than a female uterus," says the
President benignly. I feel my mother relax. Joy eases her heart. Her daughter, virgin mother to the prophet of the steel and concrete renaissance, new skin glowing with radiant maternity, new breasts swollen with celestial milk.
My mother's vanity squirms in my womb, sickening me. I try to protest. I have no breath. A drug paralyses me.
Smiling, on the arm of the President, my mother leaves the room.
* * *
BLOODCHILD
Octavia E. Butler
Here is a powerful and moving story about humans living as chattel to an alien race on a far planet. The relationship between the races is fascinating… and as we gradually learn more about it, it becomes more than a bit horrifying.
Octavia E. Butler's novels include Wild Seed and Clay's Ark.
* * *
My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T'Gatoi's sisters had given us two sterile eggs. T'Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn't matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn't take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.
I lay against T'Gatoi's long, velvet underside, sippin
g from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. ,My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.
But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of T'Gatoi's limbs secured me closer. T'Gatoi liked our body heat, and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T'Gatoi— how to be respectful and always obedient because T'Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.
I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was lying about. It was an honor to have T'Gatoi in the family, but it was hardly a novelty. T'Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother's life, and T'Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.
"You're better," she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. "You're gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous." The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses.
"He's still too thin," my mother said sharply.
T'Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her body off the couch as though she were sitting up. She looked at my mother and my mother, her face lined and old-looking, turned away.
"Lien, I would like you to have what's left of Gan's egg."
"The eggs are for the children," my mother said.
"They are for the family. Please take it."
Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.
"It's good," she whispered. "Sometimes I forget how good it is."
"You should take more," T'Gatoi said. "Why are you in such a hurry to be old?"
My mother said nothing.
"I like being able to come here," T'Gatoi said. "This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won't take care of yourself.''
T'Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve—why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, "Take care of her." And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.
Now T'Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor. "Go on, Gan," she said. "Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me."
My mother hesitated for no reason that I could see. One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched alongside T'Gatoi, talking about things I could not understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing as she sat me on one of T'Gatoi's segments. She ate her share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped, and why.
She lay down now against T'Gatoi, and the whole left row of T'Gatoi's limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way but, except for my older sister, no one else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel caged.
T'Gatoi meant to cage my mother. Once she had, she moved her tail slightly, then spoke. "Not enough egg, Lien. You should have taken it when it was passed to you. You need it badly now."
T'Gatoi's tail moved once more, its whip motion so swift I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been watching for it. Her sting drew only a single drop of blood from my mother's bare leg.
My mother cried out—probably in surprise. Being stung doesn't hurt. Then she sighed and I could see her body relax. She moved languidly into a more comfortable position within the cage of T'Gatoi's limbs. "Why did you do that?" she asked, sounding half asleep.
"I could not watch you sitting and suffering any longer."
My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small shrug. "Tomorrow," she said.
"Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering—-if you must. But for now, just for now, lie here and warm me and let me ease your way a little."
"He's still mine, you know," my mother said suddenly.
"Nothing can buy him from me." Sober, she would not have permitted herself to refer to such things.
"Nothing," T'Gatoi agreed, humoring her.
"Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?"
"Not for anything," T'Gatoi said, stroking my mother's shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.
I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just to be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.
"Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes," T'Gatoi said. "In a little while I'll sting her again and she can sleep."
My older sister obeyed, swaying drunkenly as she stood up. When she had finished, she sat down beside me and took my hand. We had always been a unit, she and I.
My mother put the back of her head against T'Gatoi's underside and tried from that impossible angle to look up into the broad, round face. "You're going to sting me again?"
"Yes, Lien."
"I'll sleep until tomorrow noon."
"Good. You need it. When did you sleep last?"
My mother made a wordless sound of annoyance. "I should have stepped on you when you were small enough," she muttered.
It was an old joke between them. They had grown up together, sort of, though T'Gatoi had not, in my mother's lifetime, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three times my mother's present age, yet would still be young when my mother died of age. But T'Gatoi and my mother had met as T'Gatoi was coming into a period of rapid development—a kind of Tlic adolescence. My mother was only a child, but for a while they developed at the same rate and had no better friends than each other.
T'Gatoi had even introduced my mother to the man who became my father. My parents, pleased with each other in spite of their very different ages, married as T'Gatoi was going into her family's business—politics. She and my mother saw each other less. But sometime before my older sister was born, my mother promised T'Gatoi one of her children. She would have to give one of us to someone, and she preferred T'Gatoi to some stranger.
Years passed. T'Gatoi traveled and increased her influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as her just reward for her hard work. My older sister took an instant liking to her and wanted to be chosen, but my mother was just coming to term with me and T'Gatoi liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and taking part in all the phases of d
evelopment. I'm told I was first caged within T'Gatoi's many limbs only three minutes after my birth. A few days later, I was given my first taste of egg. I tell Terrans that when they ask whether I was ever afraid of her. And I tell it to Tlic when T'Gatoi suggests a young Terran child for them and they, anxious and ignorant, demand an adolescent. Even my brother who had somehow grown up to fear and distrust the Tlic could probably have gone smoothly into one of their families if he had been adopted early enough. Sometimes, I think for his sake he should have been. I looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room, his eyes open, but glazed as he dreamed his egg dream. No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always demanded his share of egg.
"Lien, can you stand up?" T'Gatoi asked suddenly.
"Stand?" my mother said. "I thought I was going to sleep."
"Later. Something sounds wrong outside." The cage was abruptly gone.
"What?"
"Up, Lien!"
My mother recognized her tone and got up just in time to avoid being dumped on the floor. T'Gatoi whipped her three meters of body off her couch, toward the door, and out at full speed. She had bones—ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limbbones per segment. But when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic—something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved watching her move.
I left my sister and started to follow her out the door, though I wasn't very steady on my own feet. It would have been better to sit and dream, better yet to find a girl and share a waking dream with her. Back when the Tlic saw us as not much more than convenient big warm-blooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. That way they could be sure of getting another generation of us no matter how we tried to hold out. We were lucky that didn't go on long. A few generations of it and we would have been little more than convenient big animals.
Best Science Fiction of the Year 14 Page 29