Bloodchild and Other Stories reading response about human

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4 pages double space 12 front Times New Roman.
come up with a topic about "human" and a research concern that you are exploring throughout your paper and analyze with your original thoughts. You can think of this 4-pages paper as a short practice for thinking deeply rather than broadly. Just dig in your question directly without too much rhetorical narrative. Be specific and logical.

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The paper is depend on the chapter "Bloodchild",

If you have time, you can read chapters "The Evening and the Morning and the Night", "Speech Sounds", and "The Book of Martha".


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Also by Octavia E. Butler Patternmaster Mind of My Mind Survivor Kindred Wild Seed Clay’s Ark Dawn Adulthood Rites Imago Parable of the Sower Parable of the Talents Fledgling © 1996, 2005 by Octavia E. Butler “Bloodchild” © 1984 Davis Publications Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” © 1987 Omni Publications International First published in Omni Magazine. “Near of Kin” © 1979 Octavia E. Butler First published in Chrysalis 4. “Speech Sounds” © 1983 Davis Publications Inc. First published Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. “Crossover” © 1971 Robin Scott Wilson First published in Clarion. “Birth of a Writer” © 1989 Essence Communications, Inc. First published in Essence. “Furor Scribendi” © 1993 Octavia E. Butler First published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume IX. “Amnesty” © 2003 Octavia E. Butler “The Book of Martha” © 2003 Octavia E. Butler and SCIFI.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by Seven Stories Press 140 Watts Street New York, NY 10013 www.sevenstories.com In Canada: Publishers Group Canada, 559 College Street, Toronto, ON M6G 1A9 In the UK: Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd., Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6TZ In Australia: Palgrave Macmillan, 15–19 Claremont Street, South Yarra, VIC 3141 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild and other stories / Octavia E. Butler.– 2nd ed. p. cm. eISBN: 978-1-58322-803-6 1. Science fiction, American. 2. Women–Fiction. 1. Title. PS3552. U827A6 2005 813′.54–dc22 2005018898 College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook/ or send a fax on school letterhead to 212.226.1411. v3.1 -ContentsCover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Preface -Stories- Bloodchild The Evening and the Morning and the Night Near of Kin Speech Sounds Crossover -Two Essays- Positive Obsession Furor Scribendi -New Stories- Amnesty The Book of Martha Preface The truth is, I hate short story writing. Trying to do it has taught me much more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted to know. Yet there is something seductive about writing short stories. It looks so easy. You come up with an idea, then ten, twenty, perhaps thirty pages later, you’ve got a finished story. Well, maybe. My earliest collections of pages weren’t stories at all. They were fragments of longer works—of stalled, unfinished novels. Or they were brief summaries of unwritten novels. Or they were isolated incidents that could not stand alone. All that, and poorly written, too. It didn’t help that my college writing teachers said only polite, lukewarm things about them. They couldn’t help me much with the science fiction and fantasy I kept turning out. In fact, they didn’t have a very high opinion of anything that could be called science fiction. Editors regularly rejected my stories, returning them with the familiar, unsigned, printed rejection slips. This, of course, was the writer’s rite of passage. I knew it, but that didn’t make it easier. And as for short stories, I used to give up writing them the way some people give up smoking cigarettes— over and over again. I couldn’t escape my story ideas, and I couldn’t make them work as short stories. After a long struggle, I made some of them work as novels. Which is what they should have been all along. I am essentially a novelist. The ideas that most interest me tend to be big. Exploring them takes more time and space than a short story can contain. And yet, every now and then one of my short stories really is a short story. The five stories in this collection really are short stories. I’ve never been tempted to turn them into novels. This book, however, has tempted me to add to them—not to make them longer, but to talk about each of them. I’ve included a brief afterword with each story. I like the idea of afterwords rather than individual introductions since afterwords allow me to talk freely about the stories without ruining them for readers. It will be a pleasure to make use of such freedom. Before now, other people have done all the print interpretations of my work: “Butler seems to be saying …” “Obviously, Butler believes …” “Butler makes it clear that she feels …” Actually, I feel that what people bring to my work is at least as important to them as what I put into it. But I’m still glad to be able to talk a little about what I do put into my work, and what it means to me. -Stories- Bloodchild My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T’Gatoi’s sister 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, sipping 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 just 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 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 life-time, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three time 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 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 development. 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 limb bones 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. “Hold the door open, Gan,” T’Gatoi said. “And tell the family to stay back.” “What is it?” I asked. “N’Tlic.” I shrank back against the door. “Here? Alone?” “He was trying to reach a call box, I suppose.” She carried the man past me, unconscious, folded like a coat over some of her limbs. He looked young—my brother’s age perhaps—and he was thinner than he should have been. What T’Gatoi would have called dangerously thin. “Gan, go to the call box,” she said. She put the man on the floor and began stripping off his clothing. I did not move. After a moment, she looked up at me, her sudden stillness a sign of deep impatience. “Send Qui,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Maybe I can help.” She let her limbs begin to move again, lifting the man and pulling his shirt over his head. “You don’t want to see this,” she said. “It will be hard. I can’t help this man the way his Tlic could.” “I know. But send Qui. He won’t want to be of any help here. I’m at least willing to try.” She looked at my brother—older, bigger, stronger, certainly more able to help her here. He was sitting up now, braced against the wall, staring at the man on the floor with undisguised fear and revulsion. Even she could see that he would be useless. “Qui, go!” she said. He didn’t argue. He stood up, swayed briefly, then steadied, frightened sober. “This man’s name is Bram Lomas,” she told him, reading from the man’s armband. I fingered my own armband in sympathy. “He needs T’Khotgif Teh. Do you hear?” “Bram Lomas, T’Khotgif Teh,” my brother said. “I’m going.” He edged around Lomas and ran out the door. Lomas began to regain consciousness. He only moaned at first and clutched spasmodically at a pair of T’Gatoi’s limbs. My younger sister, finally awake from her egg dream, came close to look at him, until my mother pulled her back. T’Gatoi removed the man’s shoes, then his pants, all the while leaving him two of her limbs to grip. Except for the final few, all her limbs were equally dexterous. “I want no argument from you this time, Gan,” she said. I straightened. “What shall I do?” “Go out and slaughter an animal that is at least half your size.” “Slaughter? But I’ve never —” She knocked me across the room. Her tail was an efficient weapon whether she exposed the sting or not. I got up, feeling stupid for having ignored her warning, and went into the kitchen. Maybe I could kill something with a knife or an ax. My mother raised a few Terran animals for the table and several thousand local ones for their fur. T’Gatoi would probably prefer something local. An achti, perhaps. Some of those were the right size, though they had about three times as many teeth as I did and a real love of using them. My mother, Hoa, and Qui could kill them with knives. I had never killed one at all, had never slaughtered any animal. I had spent most of my time with T’Gatoi while my brother and sisters were learning the family business. T’Gatoi had been right. I should have been the one to go to the call box. At least I could do that. I went to the corner cabinet where my mother kept her large house and garden tools. At the back of the cabinet there was a pipe that carried off waste water from the kitchen—except that it didn’t anymore. My father had rerouted the waste water below before I was born. Now the pipe could be turned so that one half slid around the other and a rifle could be stored inside. This wasn’t our only gun, but it was our most easily accessible one. I would have to use it to shoot one of the biggest of the achti. Then T’Gatoi would probably confiscate it. Firearms were illegal in the Preserve. There had been incidents right after the Preserve was established—Terrans shooting Tlic, shooting N’Tlic. This was before the joining of families began, before everyone had a personal stake in keeping the peace. No one had shot a Tlic in my lifetime or my mother’s, but the law still stood—for our protection, we were told. There were stories of whole Terran families wiped out in reprisal back during the assassinations. I went out to the cages and shot the biggest achti I could find. It was a handsome breeding male, and my mother would not be pleased to see me bring it in. But it was the right size, and I was in a hurry. I put the achti’s long, warm body over my shoulder—glad that some of the weight I’d gained was muscle—and took it to the kitchen. There, I put the gun back in its hiding place. If T’Gatoi noticed the achti’s wounds and demanded the gun, I would give it to her. Otherwise, let it stay where my father wanted it. I turned to take the achti to her, then hesitated. For several seconds, I stood in front of the closed door wondering why I was suddenly afraid. I knew what was going to happen. I hadn’t seen it before but T’Gatoi had shown me diagrams and drawings. She had made sure I knew the truth as soon as I was old enough to understand it. Yet I did not want to go into that room. I wasted a little time choosing a knife from the carved, wooden box in which my mother kept them. T’Gatoi might want one, I told myself, for the tough, heavily furred hide of the achti. “Gan!” T’Gatoi called, her voice harsh with urgency. I swallowed. I had not imagined a single moving of the feet could be so difficult. I realized I was trembling and that shamed me. Shame impelled me through the door. I put the achti down near T’Gatoi and saw that Lomas was unconscious again. She, Lomas, and I were alone in the room—my mother and sisters probably sent out so they would not have to watch. I envied them. But my mother came back into the room as T’Gatoi seized the achti. Ignoring the knife I offered her, she extended claws from several of her limbs and slit the achti from throat to anus. She looked at me, her yellow eyes intent. “Hold this man’s shoulders, Gan.” I stared at Lomas in panic, realizing that I did not want to touch him, let alone hold him. This would not be like shooting an animal. Not as quick, not as merciful, and, I hoped, not as final, but there was nothing I wanted less than to be part of it. My mother came forward. “Gan, you hold his right side,” she said. “I’ll hold his left.” And if he came to, he would throw her off without realizing he had done it. She was a tiny woman. She often wondered aloud how she had produced, as she said, such “huge” children. “Never mind,” I told her, taking the man’s shoulders. “I’ll do it.” She hovered nearby. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t shame you. You don’t have to stay and watch.” She looked at me uncertainly, then touched my face in a rare caress. Finally, she went back to her bedroom. T’Gatoi lowered her head in relief. “Thank you, Gan,” she said with courtesy more Terran than Tlic. “That one … she is always finding new ways for me to make her suffer.” Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds. I had hoped he would stay unconscious. T’Gatoi put her face near his so that he focused on her. “I’ve stung you as much as I dare for now,” she told him. “When this is over, I’ll sting you to sleep and you won’t hurt anymore.” “Please,” the man begged. “Wait …” “There’s no more time, Bram. I’ll sting you as soon as it’s over. When T’Khotgif arrives she’ll give you eggs to help you heal. It will be over soon.” “T’Khotgif!” the man shouted, straining against my hands. “Soon, Bram.” T’Gatoi glanced at me, then placed a claw against his abdomen slightly to the right of the middle, just below the left rib. There was movement on the right side—tiny, seemingly random pulsations moving his brown flesh, creating a concavity here, a convexity there, over and over until I could see the rhythm of it and knew where the next pulse would be. Lomas’s entire body stiffened under T’Gatoi’s claw, though she merely rested it against him as she wound the rear section of her body around his legs. He might break my grip, but he would not break hers. He wept helplessly as she used his pants to tie his hands, then pushed his hands above his head so that I could kneel on the cloth between them and pin them in place. She rolled up his shirt and gave it to him to bite down on. And she opened him. His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore himself away from me. The sound he made … I had never heard such sounds come from anything human. T’Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away blood. His blood vessels contracted, reacting to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed. I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn’t know why I hadn’t already. I couldn’t possibly last until she was finished. She found the first grub. It was fat and deep red with his blood—both inside and out. It had already eaten its own egg case but apparently had not yet begun to eat its host. At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its mother’s. Let alone, it would have gone on excreting the poisons that had both sickened and alerted Lomas. Eventually it would have begun to eat. By the time it ate its way out of Lomas’s flesh, Lomas would be dead or dying—and unable to take revenge on the thing that was killing him. There was always a grace period between the time the host sickened and the time the grubs began to eat him. T’Gatoi picked up the writhing grub carefully and looked at it, somehow ignoring the terrible groans of the man. Abruptly, the man lost consciousness. “Good,” T’Gatoi looked down at him. “I wish you Terrans could do that at will.” She felt nothing. And the thing she held … It was limbless and boneless at this stage, perhaps fifteen centimeters long and two thick, blind and slimy with blood. It was like a large worm. T’Gatoi put it into the belly of the achti, and it began at once to burrow. It would stay there and eat as long as there was anything to eat. Probing through Lomas’s flesh, she found two more, one of them smaller and more vigorous. “A male!” she said happily. He would be dead before I would. He would be through his metamorphosis and screwing everything that would hold still before his sisters even had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort to bite T’Gatoi as she placed him in the achti. Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas’s flesh. I closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something dead, rotting, and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it was far worse than any drawing or diagram. “Ah, there are more,” T’Gatoi said, plucking out two long, thick grubs. You may have to kill another animal, Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans.” I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing my eyes didn’t help. T’Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only blood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts. T’Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood. Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—or not die at all? The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn’t have thought anything about her could seem alien to me. “One more, I think,” she said. “Perhaps two. A good family. In a host animal these days, we would be happy to find one or two alive.” She glanced at me. “Go outside, Gan, and empty your stomach. Go now while the man is unconscious.” I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why I was crying, but I could not stop. I went further from the house to avoid being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms crawling over redder human flesh. There was a car coming toward the house. Since Terrans were forbidden motorized vehicles except for certain farm equipment, I knew this must be Lomas’s Tlic with Qui and perhaps a Terran doctor. I wiped my face on my shirt, struggled for control. “Gan,” Qui called as the car stopped. “What happened?” He crawled out of the low, round, Tlicconvenient car door. Another Terran crawled out the other side and went into the house without speaking to me. The doctor. With his help and a few eggs, Lomas might make it. “T’Khotgif Teh?” I said. The Tlic driver surged out of her car, reared up half her length before me. She was paler and smaller than T’Gatoi—probably born from the body of an animal. Tlic from Terran bodies were always larger as well as more numerous. “Six young,” I told her. “Maybe seven, all alive. At least one male.” “Lomas?” she said harshly. I liked her for the question and the concern in her voice when she asked it. The last coherent thing he had said was her name. “He’s alive,” I said. She surged away to the house without another word. “She’s been sick,” my brother said, watching her go. “When I called, I could hear people telling her she wasn’t well enough to go out even for this.” I said nothing. I had extended courtesy to the Tlic. Now I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hoped he would go in—out of curiosity if nothing else. “Finally found out more than you wanted to know, eh?” I looked at him. “Don’t give me one of her looks,” he said. “You’re not her. You’re just her property.” One of her looks. Had I picked up even an ability to imitate her expressions? “What’d you do, puke?” He sniffed the air. “So now you know what you’re in for.” I walked away from him. He and I had been close when we were kids. He would let me follow him around when I was home, and sometimes T’Gatoi would let me bring him along when she took me into the city. But something had happened when he reached adolescence. I never knew what. He began keeping out of T’Gatoi’s way. Then he began running away—until he realized there was no “away.” Not in the Preserve. Certainly not outside. After that he concentrated on getting his share of every egg that came into the house and on looking out for me in a way that made me all but hate him—a way that clearly said, as long as I was all right, he was safe from the Tlic. “How was it, really?” he demanded, following me. “I killed an achti. The young ate it.” “You didn’t run out of the house and puke because they ate an achti.” “I had … never seen a person cut open before.” That was true, and enough for him to know. I couldn’t talk about the other. Not with him. “Oh,” he said. He glanced at me as though he wanted to say more, but he kept quiet. We walked, not really headed anywhere. Toward the back, toward the cages, toward the fields. “Did he say anything?” Qui asked. “Lomas, I mean.” Who else would he mean? “He said ‘T’Khotgif.’ ” Qui shuddered. “If she had done that to me, she’d be the last person I’d call for.” “You’d call for her. Her sting would ease your pain without killing the grubs in you.” “You think I’d care if they died?” No. Of course he wouldn’t. Would I? “Shit!” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve seen what they do. You think this thing with Lomas was bad? It was nothing.” I didn’t argue. He didn’t know what he was talking about. “I saw them eat a man,” he said. I turned to face him. “You’re lying!” “I saw them eat a man.” He paused. “It was when I was little. I had been to the Hartmund house and I was on my way home. Halfway here, I saw a man and a Tlic and the man was N’Tlic. The ground was hilly. I was able to hide from them and watch. The Tlic wouldn’t open the man because she had nothing to feed the grubs. The man couldn’t go any further and there were no houses around. He was in so much pain, he told her to kill him. He begged her to kill him. Finally, she did. She cut his throat. One swipe of one claw. I saw the grubs eat their way out, then burrow in again, still eating.” His words made me see Lomas’s flesh again, parasitized, crawling. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I whispered. He looked startled as though he’d forgotten I was listening. “I don’t know.” “You started to run away not long after that, didn’t you?” “Yeah. Stupid. Running inside the Preserve. Running in a cage.” I shook my head, said what I should have said to him long ago. “She wouldn’t take you, Qui. You don’t have to worry.” “She would … if anything happened to you.” “No. She’d take Xuan Hoa. Hoa … wants it.” She wouldn’t if she had stayed to watch Lomas. “They don’t take women,” he said with contempt. “They do sometimes.” I glanced at him. “Actually, they prefer women. You should be around them when they talk among themselves. They say women have more body fat to protect the grubs. But they usually take men to leave the women free to bear their own young.” “To provide the next generation of host animals,” he said, switching from contempt to bitterness. “It’s more than that!” I countered. Was it? “If it were going to happen to me, I’d want to believe it was more, too.” “It is more!” I felt like a kid. Stupid argument. “Did you think so while T’Gatoi was picking worms out of that guy’s guts?” “It’s not supposed to happen that way.” “Sure it is. You weren’t supposed to see it, that’s all. And his Tlic was supposed to do it. She could sting him unconscious and the operation wouldn’t have been as painful. But she’d still open him, pick out the grubs, and if she missed even one, it would poison him and eat him from the inside out.” There was actually a time when my mother told me to show respect for Qui because he was my older brother. I walked away, hating him. In his way, he was gloating. He was safe and I wasn’t. I could have hit him, but I didn’t think I would be able to stand it when he refused to hit back, when he looked at me with contempt and pity. He wouldn’t let me get away. Longer legged, he swung ahead of me and made me feel as though I were following him. “I’m sorry,” he said. I strode on, sick and furious. “Look, it probably won’t be that bad with you. T’Gatoi likes you. She’ll be careful.” I turned back toward the house, almost running from him. “Has she done it to you yet?” he asked, keeping up easily. “I mean, you’re about the right age for implantation. Has she—” I hit him. I didn’t know I was going to do it, but I think I meant to kill him. If he hadn’t been bigger and stronger, I think I would have. He tried to hold me off, but in the end, had to defend himself. He only hit me a couple of times. That was plenty. I don’t remember going down, but when I came to, he was gone. It was worth the pain to be rid of him. I got up and walked slowly toward the house. The back was dark. No one was in the kitchen. My mother and sisters were sleeping in their bedrooms—or pretending to. Once I was in the kitchen, I could hear voices—Tlic and Terran from the next room. I couldn’t make out what they were saying—didn’t want to make it out. I sat down at my mother’s table, waiting for quiet. The table was smooth and worn, heavy and well crafted. My father had made it for her just before he died. I remembered hanging around underfoot when he built it. He didn’t mind. Now I sat leaning on it, missing him. I could have talked to him. He had done it three times in his long life. Three clutches of eggs, three times being opened up and sewed up. How had he done it? How did anyone do it? I got up, took the rifle from its hiding place, and sat down again with it. It needed cleaning, oiling. All I did was load it. “Gan?” She made a lot of little clicking sounds when she walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as it touched down. Waves of little clicks. She came to the table, raised the front half of her body above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and looked at me. “That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have seen it. It need not be that way.” “I know.” “T’Khotgif—Ch’Khotgif now—she will die of her disease. She will not live to raise her children. But her sister will provide for them, and for Bram Lomas.” Sterile sister. One fertile female in every lot. One to keep the family going. That sister owed Lomas more than she could ever repay. “He’ll live then?” “Yes.” “I wonder if he would do it again.” “No one would ask him to do that again.” I looked into the yellow eyes, wondering how much I saw and understood there, and how much I only imagined. “No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.” She moved her head slightly. “What’s the matter with your face?” “Nothing. Nothing important.” Human eyes probably wouldn’t have noticed the swelling in the darkness. The only light was from one of the moons, shining through a window across the room. “Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?” “Yes.” “And do you mean to use it to shoot me?” I stared at her, outlined in the moonlight—coiled, graceful body. “What does Terran blood taste like to you?” She said nothing. “What are you?” I whispered. “What are we to you?” She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. “You know me as no other does,” she said softly. “You must decide.” “That’s what happened to my face,” I told her. “What?” “Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well.” I moved the gun slightly, brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. “At least it was a decision I made.” “As this will be.” “Ask me, Gatoi.” “For my children’s lives?” She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time. “I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even yours.” It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.” “You use us.” “We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You know you aren’t animals to us.” I stared at her, saying nothing. “The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their home-world, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.” At the word “worms,” I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it. “I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?” I didn’t answer. “Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?” “Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud.… Not terrified. T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much. “I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.” This was going too fast. My sister Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me. “Wait! Gatoi!” She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned to face me. “These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!” “But she’s … my sister.” “I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!” “But—” “It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.” Human lives. Human young who should someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins. I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine? “Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated. She stared at me, utterly still. I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.” I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it. “No,” I told her. “It’s the law,” she said. “Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.” She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her. “Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.” It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about the other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter. “I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?” Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known? “I hear.” “Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused. “I must do it to someone tonight.” I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?” She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry. Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs. “Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?” She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making the choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.” “Would you have gone to Hoa?” “Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?” “It wasn’t … hate.” “I know what it was.” “I was afraid.” Silence. “I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now. “But you came to me … to save Hoa.” “Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so. She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.” “I had, but …” “Lomas.” “Yes.” “I had never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?” “Yes.” “Terrans should be protected from seeing.” I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.” She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.” Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment. “You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.” The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them. “I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age. “You could have,” she insisted. “Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving. “Would you have destroyed yourself?” I moved carefully, uncomfortable. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.” “What?” I did not answer. “You will live now.” “Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes. “I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.” Afterword It amazes me that some people have seen “Bloodchild” as a story of slavery. It isn’t. It’s a number of other things, though. On one level, it’s a love story between two very different beings. On another, it’s a coming-of-age story in which a boy must absorb disturbing information and use it to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life. On a third level, “Bloodchild” is my pregnant man story. I’ve always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions. Could I write a story in which a man chose to become pregnant not through some sort of misplaced competitiveness to prove that a man could do anything a woman could do, not because he was forced to, not even out of curiosity? I wanted to see whether I could write a dramatic story of a man becoming pregnant as an act of love— choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of surrounding difficulties. Also, “Bloodchild” was my effort to ease an old fear of mine. I was going to travel to the Peruvian Amazon to do research for my Xenogenesis books (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago), and I worried about my possible reactions to some of the insect life of the area. In particular, I worried about the botfly—an insect with, what seemed to me then, horrormovie habits. There was no shortage of botflies in the part of Peru that I intended to visit. The botfly lays its eggs in wounds left by the bites of other insects. I found the idea of a maggot living and growing under my skin, eating my flesh as it grew, to be so intolerable, so terrifying that I didn’t know how I could stand it if it happened to me. To make matters worse, all that I heard and read advised botfly victims not to try to get rid of their maggot passengers until they got back home to the United States and were able to go to a doctor—or until the fly finished the larval part of its growth cycle, crawled out of its host, and flew away. The problem was to do what would seem to be the normal thing, to squeeze out the maggot and throw it away, was to invite infection. The maggot becomes literally attached to its host and leaves part of itself behind, broken off, if it’s squeezed or cut out. Of course, the part left behind dies and rots, causing infection. Lovely. When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it. I sort out my problems by writing about them. In a high school classroom on November 22, 1963, I remember grabbing a notebook and beginning to write my response to news of John Kennedy’s assassination. Whether I write journal pages, an essay, a short story, or weave my problems into a novel, I find the writing helps me get through the trouble and get on with my life. Writing “Bloodchild” didn’t make me like botflies, but for a while, it made them seem more interesting than horrifying. There’s one more thing I tried to do in “Bloodchild.” I tried to write a story about paying the rent— a story about an isolated colony of human beings on an inhabited, extrasolar world. At best, they would be a lifetime away from reinforcements. It wouldn’t be the British Empire in space, and it wouldn’t be Star Trek. Sooner or later, the humans would have to make some kind of accommodation with their um … their hosts. Chances are this would be an unusual accommodation. Who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a livable space on a world not our own? The Evening and the Morning and the Night When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by getting careless with my diet, my parents took me to a Duryea-Gode disease ward. They wanted me to see, they said, where I was headed if I wasn’t careful. In fact, it was where I was headed no matter what. It was only a matter of when: now or later. My parents were putting in their vote for later. I won’t describe the ward. It’s enough to say that when they brought me home, I cut my wrists. I did a thorough job of it, old Roman style in a bathtub of warm water. Almost made it. My father dislocated his shoulder breaking down the bathroom door. He and I never forgave each other for that day. The disease got him almost three years later—just before I went off to college. It was sudden. It doesn’t happen that way often. Most people notice themselves beginning to drift—or their relatives notice—and they make arrangements with their chosen institution. People who are noticed and who resist going in can be locked up for a week’s observation. I don’t doubt that that observation period breaks up a few families. Sending someone away for what turns out to be a false alarm.… Well, it isn’t the sort of thing the victim is likely to forgive or forget. On the other hand, not sending someone away in time—missing the signs or having a person go off suddenly without signs—is inevitably dangerous for the victim. I’ve never heard of it going as badly, though, as it did in my family. People normally injure only themselves when their time comes—unless someone is stupid enough to try to handle them without the necessary drugs or restraints. My father had killed my mother, then killed himself. I wasn’t home when it happened. I had stayed at school later than usual, rehearsing graduation exercises. By the time I got home, there were cops everywhere. There was an ambulance, and two attendants were wheeling someone out on a stretcher —someone covered. More than covered. Almost … bagged. The cops wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t find out until later exactly what had happened. I wish I’d never found out. Dad had killed Mom, then skinned her completely. At least that’s how I hope it happened. I mean I hope he killed her first. He broke some of her ribs, damaged her heart. Digging. Then he began tearing at himself, through skin and bone, digging. He had managed to reach his own heart before he died. It was an especially bad example of the kind of thing that makes people afraid of us. It gets some of us into trouble for picking at a pimple or even for daydreaming. It has inspired restrictive laws, created problems with jobs, housing, schools.… The Duryea-Gode Disease Foundation has spent millions telling the world that people like my father don’t exist. A long time later, when I had gotten myself together as best I could, I went to college—to the University of Southern California—on a Dilg scholarship. Dilg is the retreat you try to send your outof-control DGD relatives to. It’s run by controlled DGDs like me, like my parents while they lived. God knows how any controlled DGD stands it. Anyway, the place has a waiting list miles long. My parents put me on it after my suicide attempt, but chances were, I’d be dead by the time my name came up. I can’t say why I went to college—except that I had been going to school all my life and didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t go with any particular hope. Hell, I knew what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time. Whatever I did was just marking time. If people were willing to pay me to go to school and mark time, why not do it? The weird part was, I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do. Sometimes I thought about trying suicide again. How was it I’d had the courage when I was fifteen but didn’t have it now? Two DGD parents—both religious, both as opposed to abortion as they were to suicide. So they had trusted God and the promises of modern medicine and had a child. But how could I look at what had happened to them and trust anything? I majored in biology. Non-DGDs say something about our disease makes us good at the sciences— genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry.… That something was terror. Terror and a kind of driving hopelessness. Some of us went bad and became destructive before we had to—yes, we did produce more than our share of criminals. And some of us went good—spectacularly—and made scientific and medical history. These last kept the doors at least partly open for the rest of us. They made discoveries in genetics, found cures for a couple of rare diseases, made advances against other diseases that weren’t so rare—including, ironically, some forms of cancer. But they’d found nothing to help themselves. There had been nothing since the latest improvements in the diet, and those came just before I was born. They, like the original diet, gave more DGDs the courage to have children. They were supposed to do for DGDs what insulin had done for diabetics—give us a normal or nearly normal life span. Maybe they had worked for someone somewhere. They hadn’t worked for anyone I knew. Biology school was a pain in the usual ways. I didn’t eat in public anymore, didn’t like the way people stared at my biscuits—cleverly dubbed “dog biscuits” in every school I’d ever attended. You’d think university students would be more creative. I didn’t like the way people edged away from me when they caught sight of my emblem. I’d begun wearing it on a chain around my neck and putting it down inside my blouse, but people managed to notice it anyway. People who don’t eat in public, who drink nothing more interesting than water, who smoke nothing at all—people like that are suspicious. Or rather, they make others suspicious. Sooner or later, one of those others, tinding my fingers and wrists bare, would fake an interest in my chain. That would be that. I couldn’t hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened to me, medical people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications they might use on a normal person. It isn’t just ordinary food we have to avoid, but about a quarter of a Physicians’ Desk Reference of widely used drugs. Every now and then there are news stories about people who stopped carrying their emblems—probably trying to pass as normal. Then they have an accident. By the time anyone realizes there is anything wrong, it’s too late. So I wore my emblem. And one way or another, people got a look at it or got the word from someone who had. “She is!” Yeah. At the beginning of my third year, four other DGDs and I decided to rent a house together. We’d all had enough of being lepers twenty-four hours a day. There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had only been done thirty or forty times before. There was a special-education major who hoped the handicapped would accept her more readily than the able-bodied, a premed who planned to go into research, and a chemistry major who didn’t really know what she wanted to do. Two men and three women. All we had in common was our disease, plus a weird combination of stubborn intensity about whatever we happened to be doing and hopeless cynicism about everything else. Healthy people say no one can concentrate like a DGD. Healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid generalizations and short attention spans. We did our work, came up for air now and then, ate our biscuits, and attended classes. Our only problem was house-cleaning. We worked out a schedule of who would clean what when, who would deal with the yard, whatever. We all agreed on it; then, except for me, everyone seemed to forget about it. I found myself going around reminding people to vacuum, clean the bathroom, mow the lawn. … I figured they’d all hate me in no time, but I wasn’t going to be their maid, and I wasn’t going to live in filth. Nobody complained. Nobody even seemed annoyed. They just came up out of their academic daze, cleaned, mopped, mowed, and went back to it. I got into the habit of running around in the evening reminding people. It didn’t bother me if it didn’t bother them. “How’d you get to be housemother?” a visiting DGD asked. I shrugged. “Who cares? The house works.” It did. It worked so well that this new guy wanted to move in. He was a friend of one of the others, and another premed. Not bad looking. “So do I get in or don’t I?” he asked. “As far as I’m concerned, you do,” I said. I did what his friend should have done—introduced him around, then, after he left, talked to the others to make sure nobody had any real objections. He seemed to fit right in. He forgot to clean the toilet or mow the lawn, just like the others. His name was Alan Chi. I thought Chi was a Chinese name, and I wondered. But he told me his father was Nigerian and that in Ibo the word meant a kind of guardian angel or personal God. He said his own personal God hadn’t been looking out for him very well to let him be born to two DGD parents. Him too. I don’t think it was much more than that similarity that drew us together at first. Sure, I liked the way he looked, but I was used to liking someone’s looks and having him run like hell when he found out what I was. It took me a while to get used to the fact that Alan wasn’t going anywhere. I told him about my visit to the DGD ward when I was fifteen—and my suicide attempt afterward. I had never told anyone else. I was surprised at how relieved it made me feel to tell him. And somehow his reaction didn’t surprise me. “Why didn’t you try again?” he asked. We were alone in the living room. “At first, because of my parents,” I said. “My father in particular. I couldn’t do that to him again.” “And after him?” “Fear. Inertia.” He nodded. “When I do it, there’ll be no half measures. No being rescued, no waking up in a hospital later.” “You mean to do it?” “The day I realize I’ve started to drift. Thank God we get some warning.” “Not necessarily.” “Yes, we do. I’ve done a lot of reading. Even talked to a couple of doctors. Don’t believe the rumors non-DGDs invent.” I looked away, stared into the scarred, empty fireplace. I told him exactly how my father had died —something else I’d never voluntarily told anyone. He sighed. “Jesus!” We looked at each other. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “I don’t know.” He extended a dark, square hand, and I took it and moved closer to him. He was a dark, square man —my height, half again my weight, and none of it fat. He was so bitter sometimes, he scared me. “My mother started to drift when I was three,” he said. “My father only lasted a few months longer. I heard he died a couple of years after he went into the hospital. If the two of them had had any sense, they would have had me aborted the minute my mother realized she was pregnant. But she wanted a kid no matter what. And she was Catholic.” He shook his head. “Hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us.” “They?” I said. “You want kids?” “No, but—” “More like us to wind up chewing their fingers off in some DGD ward.” “I don’t want kids, but I don’t want someone else telling me I can’t have any.” He stared at me until I began to feel stupid and defensive. I moved away from him. “Do you want someone else telling you what to do with your body?” I asked. “No need,” he said. “I had that taken care of as soon as I was old enough.” This left me staring. I’d thought about sterilization. What DGD hasn’t? But I didn’t know anyone else our age who had actually gone through with it. That would be like killing part of yourself—even though it wasn’t a part you intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead. “The damned disease could be wiped out in one generation,” he said, “but people are still animals when it comes to breeding. Still following mindless urges, like dogs and cats.” My impulse was to get up and go away, leave him to wallow in his bitterness and depression alone. But I stayed. He seemed to want to live even less than I did. I wondered how he’d made it this far. “Are you looking forward to doing research?” I probed. “Do you believe you’ll be able to—” “No.” I blinked. The word was as cold and dead a sound as I’d ever heard. “I don’t believe in anything,” he said. I took him to bed. He was the only other double DGD I had ever met, and if nobody did anything for him, he wouldn’t last much longer. I couldn’t just let him slip away. For a while, maybe we could be each other’s reasons for staying alive. He was a good student—for the same reason I was. And he seemed to shed some of his bitterness as time passed. Being around him helped me understand why, against all sanity, two DGDs would lock in on each other and start talking about marriage. Who else would have us? We probably wouldn’t last very long, anyway. These days, most DGDs make it to forty, at least. But then, most of them don’t have two DGD parents. As bright as Alan was, he might not get into medical school because of his double inheritance. No one would tell him his bad genes were keeping him out, of course, but we both knew what his chances were. Better to train doctors who were likely to live long enough to put their training to use. Alan’s mother had been sent to Dilg. He hadn’t seen her or been able to get any information about her from his grandparents while he was at home. By the time he left for college, he’d stopped asking questions. Maybe it was hearing about my parents that made him start again. I was with him when he called Dilg. Until that moment, he hadn’t even known whether his mother was still alive. Surprisingly, she was. “Dilg must be good,” I said when he hung up. “People don’t usually … I mean …” “Yeah, I know,” he said. “People don’t usually live long once they’re out of control. Dilg is different.” We had gone to my room, where he turned a chair backward and sat down. “Dilg is what the others ought to be, if you can believe the literature.” “Dilg is a giant DGD ward,” I said. “It’s richer—probably better at sucking in the donations—and it’s run by people who can expect to become patients eventually. Apart from that, what’s different?” “I’ve read about it,” he said. “So should you. They’ve got some new treatment. They don’t just shut people away to die the way the others do.” “What else is there to do with them? With us.” “I don’t know. It sounded like they have some kind of … sheltered workshop. They’ve got patients doing things.” “A new drug to control the self-destructiveness?” “I don’t think so. We would have heard about that.” “What else could it be?” “I’m going up to find out. Will you come with me?” “You’re going up to see your mother.” He took a ragged breath. “Yeah. Will you come with me?” I went to one of my windows and stared out at the weeds. We let them thrive in the backyard. In the front we mowed them, along with the few patches of grass. “I told you my DGD-ward experience.” “You’re not fifteen now. And Dilg isn’t some zoo of a ward.” “It’s got to be, no matter what they tell the public. And I’m not sure I can stand it.” He got up, came to stand next to me. “Will you try?” I didn’t say anything. I focused on our reflections in the window glass—the two of us together. It looked right, felt right. He put his arm around me, and I leaned back against him. Our being together had been as good for me as it seemed to have been for him. It had given me something to go on besides inertia and fear. I knew I would go with him. It felt like the right thing to do. “I can’t say how I’ll act when we get there,” I said. “I can’t say how I’ll act, either,” he admitted. “Especially … when I see her.” He made the appointment for the next Saturday afternoon. You make appointments to go to Dilg unless you’re a government inspector of some kind. That is the custom, and Dilg gets away with it. We left L.A. in the rain early Saturday morning. Rain followed us off and on up the coast as far as Santa Barbara. Dilg was hidden away in the hills not far from San Jose. We could have reached it faster by driving up I-5, but neither of us were in the mood for all that bleakness. As it was, we arrived at one P.M. to be met by two armed gate guards. One of these phoned the main building and verified our appointment. Then the other took the wheel from Alan. “Sorry,” he said. “But no one is permitted inside without an escort. We’ll meet your guide at the garage.” None of this surprised me. Dilg is a place where not only the patients but much of the staff has DGD. A maximum security prison wouldn’t have been as potentially dangerous. On the other hand, I’d never heard of anyone getting chewed up here. Hospitals and rest homes had accidents. Dilg didn’t. It was beautiful—an old estate. One that didn’t make sense in these days of high taxes. It had been owned by the Dilg family. Oil, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. Ironically, they had even owned part of the late, unlamented Hedeon Laboratories. They’d had a briefly profitable interest in Hedeonco: the magic bullet, the cure for a large percentage of the world’s cancer and a number of serious viral diseases—and the cause of Duryea-Gode disease. If one of your parents was treated with Hedeonco and you were conceived after the treatments, you had DGD. If you had kids, you passed it on to them. Not everyone was equally affected. They didn’t all commit suicide or murder, but they all mutilated themselves to some degree if they could. And they all drifted—went off into a world of their own and stopped responding to their surroundings. Anyway, the only Dilg son of his generation had had his life saved by Hedeonco. Then he had watched four of his children die before Doctors Kenneth Duryea and Jan Gode came up with a decent understanding of the problem and a partial solution: the diet. They gave Richard Dilg a way of keeping his next two children alive. He gave the big, cumbersome estate over to the care of DGD patients. So the main building was an elaborate old mansion. There were other, newer buildings, more like guest houses than institutional buildings. And there were wooded hills all around. Nice country. Green. The ocean wasn’t far away. There was an old garage and a small parking lot. Waiting in the lot was a tall, old woman. Our guard pulled up near her, let us out, then parked the car in the half-empty garage. “Hello,” the woman said, extending her hand. “I’m Beatrice Alcantara.” The hand was cool and dry and startlingly strong. I thought the woman was DGD, but her age threw me. She appeared to be about sixty, and I had never seen a DGD that old. I wasn’t sure why I thought she was DGD. If she was, she must have been an experimental model—one of the first to survive. “Is it Doctor or Ms.?” Alan asked. “It’s Beatrice,” she said. “I am a doctor, but we don’t use titles much here.” I glanced at Alan, was surprised to see him smiling at her. He tended to go a long time between smiles. I looked at Beatrice and couldn’t see anything to smile about. As we introduced ourselves, I realized I didn’t like her. I couldn’t see any reason for that either, but my feelings were my feelings. I didn’t like her. “I assume neither of you have been here before,” she said, smiling down at us. She was at least six feet tall, and straight. We shook our heads. “Let’s go in the front way, then. I want to prepare you for what we do here. I don’t want you to believe you’ve come to a hospital.” I frowned at her, wondering what else there was to believe. Dilg was called a retreat, but what difference did names make? The house close up looked like one of the old-style public buildings—massive, baroque front with a single domed tower reaching three stories above the three-story house. Wings of the house stretched for some distance to the right and left of the tower, then cornered and stretched back twice as far. The front doors were huge—one set of wrought iron and one of heavy wood. Neither appeared to be locked. Beatrice pulled open the iron door, pushed the wooden one, and gestured us in. Inside, the house was an art museum—huge, high ceilinged, tile floored. There were marble columns and niches in which sculptures stood or paintings hung. There were other sculptures displayed around the rooms. At one end of the rooms there was a broad staircase leading up to a gallery that went around the rooms. There more art was displayed. “All this was made here,” Beatrice said. “Some of it is even sold from here. Most goes to galleries in the Bay Area or down around L.A. Our only problem is turning out too much of it.” “You mean the patients do this?” I asked. The old woman nodded. “This and much more. Our people work instead of tearing at themselves or staring into space. One of them invented the p.v. locks that protect this place. Though I almost wish he hadn’t. It’s gotten us more government attention than we like.” “What kind of locks?” I asked. “Sorry. Palmprint-voiceprint. The first and the best. We have the patent.” She looked at Alan. “Would you like to see what your mother does?” “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re telling us out-of-control DGDs create art and invent things?” “And that lock,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. I didn’t even see a lock.” “The lock is new,” she said. “There have been a few news stories about it. It’s not the kind of thing most people would buy for their homes. Too expensive. So it’s of limited interest. People tend to look at what’s done at Dilg in the way they look at the efforts of idiots savants. Interesting, incomprehensible, but not really important. Those likely to be interested in the lock and able to afford it know about it.” She took a deep breath, faced Alan again. “Oh, yes, DGDs create things. At least they do here.” “Out-of-control DGDs.” “Yes.” “I expected to find them weaving baskets or something—at best. I know what DGD wards are like.” “So do I,” she said. “I know what they’re like in hospitals, and I know what it’s like here.” She waved a hand toward an abstract painting that looked like a photo I had once seen of the Orion Nebula. Darkness broken by a great cloud of light and color. “Here we can help them channel their energies. They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don’t destroy.” “Why?” Alan demanded. “It can’t be some drug. We would have heard.” “It’s not a drug.” “Then what is it? Why haven’t other hospitals—?” “Alan,” she said. “Wait.” He stood frowning at her. “Do you want to see your mother?” “Of course I want to see her!” “Good. Come with me. Things will sort themselves out.” She led us to a corridor past offices where people talked to one another, waved to Beatrice, worked with computers.… They could have been anywhere. I wondered how many of them were controlled DGDs. I also wondered what kind of game the old woman was playing with her secrets. We passed through rooms so beautiful and perfectly kept it was obvious they were rarely used. Then at a broad, heavy door, she stopped us. “Look at anything you like as we go on,” she said. “But don’t touch anything or anyone. And remember that some of the people you’ll see injured themselves before they came to us. They still bear the scars of those injuries. Some of those scars may be difficult to look at, but you’ll be in no danger. Keep that in mind. No one here will harm you.” She pushed the door open and gestured us in. Scars didn’t bother me much. Disability didn’t bother me. It was the act of self-mutilation that scared me. It was someone attacking her own arm as though it were a wild animal. It was someone who had torn at himself and been restrained or drugged off and on for so long that he barely had a recognizable human feature left, but he was still trying with what he did have to dig into his own flesh. Those are a couple of the things I saw at the DGD ward when I was fifteen. Even then I could have stood it better if I hadn’t felt I was looking into a kind of temporal mirror. I wasn’t aware of walking through that doorway. I wouldn’t have thought I could do it. The old woman said something, though, and I found myself on the other side of the door with the door closing behind me. I turned to stare at her. She put her hand on my arm. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “That door looks like a wall to a great many people.” I backed away from her, out of her reach, repelled by her touch. Shaking hands had been enough, for God’s sake. Something in her seemed to come to attention as she watched me. It made her even straighter. Deliberately, but for no apparent reason, she stepped toward Alan, touched him the way people do sometimes when they brush past—a kind of tactile “Excuse me.” In that wide, empty corridor, it was totally unnecessary. For some reason, she wanted to touch him and wanted me to see. What did she think she was doing? Flirting at her age? I glared at her, found myself suppressing an irrational urge to shove her away from him. The violence of the urge amazed me. Beatrice smiled and turned away. “This way,” she said. Alan put his arm around me and tried to lead me after her. “Wait a minute,” I said, not moving. Beatrice glanced around. “What just happened?” I asked. I was ready for her to lie—to say nothing happened, pretend not to know what I was talking about. “Are you planning to study medicine?” she asked. “What? What does that have to do—?” “Study medicine. You may be able to do a great deal of good.” She strode away, taking long steps so that we had to hurry to keep up. She led us through a room in which some people worked at computer terminals and others with pencils and paper. It would have been an ordinary scene except that some people had half their faces ruined or had only one hand or leg or had other obvious scars. But they were all in control now. They were working. They were intent but not intent on selfdestruction. Not one was digging into or tearing away flesh. When we had passed through this room and into a small, ornate sitting room, Alan grasped Beatrice’s arm. “What is it?” he demanded. “What do you do for them?” She patted his hand, setting my teeth on edge. “I will tell you,” she said. “I want you to know. But I want you to see your mother first.” To my surprise, he nodded, let it go at that. “Sit a moment,” she said to us. We sat in comfortable, matching upholstered chairs—Alan looking reasonably relaxed. What was it about the old lady that relaxed him but put me on edge? Maybe she reminded him of his grandmother or something. She didn’t remind me of anyone. And what was that nonsense about studying medicine? “I wanted you to pass through at least one workroom before we talked about your mother—and about the two of you.” She turned to face me. “You’ve had a bad experience at a hospital or a rest home?” I looked away from her, not wanting to think about it. Hadn’t the people in that mock office been enough of a reminder? Horror film office. Nightmare office. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to go into detail. Just outline it for me.” I obeyed slowly, against my will, all the while wondering why I was doing it. She nodded, unsurprised. “Harsh, loving people, your parents. Are they alive?” “No.” “Were they both DGD?” “Yes, but … yes.” “Of course, aside from the obvious ugliness of your hospital experience and its implications for the future, what impressed you about the people in the ward?” I didn’t know what to answer. What did she want? Why did she want anything from me? She should have been concerned with Alan and his mother. “Did you see people unrestrained?” “Yes,” I whispered. “One woman. I don’t know how it happened that she was free. She ran up to us and slammed into my father without moving him. He was a big man. She bounced off, fell, and … began tearing at herself. She bit her own arm and … swallowed the flesh she’d bitten away. She tore at the wound she’d made with the nails of her other hand. She … I screamed at her to stop.” I hugged myself, remembering the young woman, bloody, cannibalizing herself as she lay at our feet, digging into her own flesh. Digging. “They try so hard, fight so hard to get out.” “Out of what?” Alan demanded. I looked at him, hardly seeing him. “Lynn,” he said gently. “Out of what?” I shook my head. “Their restraints, their disease, the ward, their bodies …” He glanced at Beatrice, then spoke to me again. “Did the girl talk?” “No. She screamed.” He turned away from me uncomfortably. “Is this important?” he asked Beatrice. “Very,” she said. “Well … can we talk about it after I see my mother?” “Then and now.” She spoke to me. “Did the girl stop what she was doing when you told her to?” “The nurses had her a moment later. It didn’t matter.” “It mattered. Did she stop?” “Yes.” “According to the literature, they rarely respond to anyone,” Alan said. “True.” Beatrice gave him a sad smile. “Your mother will probably respond to you, though.” “Is she? …” He glanced back at the nightmare office. “Is she as controlled as those people?” “Yes, though she hasn’t always been. Your mother works with clay now. She loves shapes and textures and—” “She’s blind,” Alan said, voicing the suspicion as though it were fact. Beatrice’s words had sent my thoughts in the same direction. Beatrice hesitated. “Yes,” she said finally. “And for … the usual reason. I had intended to prepare you slowly.” “I’ve done a lot of reading.” I hadn’t done much reading, but I knew what the usual reason was. The woman had gouged, ripped, or otherwise destroyed her eyes. She would be badly scarred. I got up, went over to sit on the arm of Alan’s chair. I rested my hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and held it there. “Can we see her now?” he asked. Beatrice got up. “This way,” she said. We passed through more workrooms. People painted; assembled machinery; sculpted in wood, stone; even composed and played music. Almost no one noticed us. The patients were true to their disease in that respect. They weren’t ignoring us. They clearly didn’t know we existed. Only the few controlled-DGD guards gave themselves away by waving or speaking to Beatrice. I watched a woman work quickly, knowledgeably, with a power saw. She obviously understood the perimeters of her body, was not so dissociated as to perceive herself as trapped in something she needed to dig her way out of. What had Dilg done for these people that other hospitals did not do? And how could Dilg withhold its treatment from the others? “Over there we make our own diet foods,” Beatrice said, pointing through a window toward one of the guest houses. “We permit more variety and make fewer mistakes than the commercial preparers. No ordinary person can concentrate on work the way our people can.” I turned to face her. “What are you saying? That the bigots are right? That we have some special gift?” “Yes,” she said. “It’s hardly a bad characteristic, is it?” “It’s what people say whenever one of us does well at something. It’s their way of denying us credit for our work.” “Yes. But people occasionally come to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons.” I shrugged, not interested in arguing with her about it. “Alan?” she said. He looked at her. “Your mother is in the next room.” He swallowed, nodded. We both followed her into the room. Naomi Chi was a small woman, hair still dark, fingers long and thin, graceful as they shaped the clay. Her face was a ruin. Not only her eyes but most of her nose and one ear were gone. What was left was badly scarred. “Her parents were poor,” Beatrice said. “I don’t know how much they told you, Alan, but they went through all the money they had, trying to keep her at a decent place. Her mother felt so guilty, you know. She was the one who had cancer and took the drug.… Eventually, they had to put Naomi in one of those state-approved, custodial-care places. You know the kind. For a while, it was all the government would pay for. Places like that … well, sometimes if patients were really troublesome—especially the ones who kept breaking free—they’d put them in a bare room and let them finish themselves. The only things those places took good care of were the maggots, the cockroaches, and the rats.” I shuddered. “I’ve heard there are still places like that.” “There are,” Beatrice said, “kept open by greed and indifference.” She looked at Alan. “Your mother survived for three months in one of those places. I took her from it myself. Later I was instrumental in having that particular place closed.” “You took her?” I asked. “Dilg didn’t exist then, but I was working with a group of controlled DGDs in L.A. Naomi’s parents heard about us and asked us to take her. A lot of people didn’t trust us then. Only a few of us were medically trained. All of us were young, idealistic, and ignorant. We began in an old frame house with a leaky roof. Naomi’s parents were grabbing at straws. So were we. And by pure luck, we grabbed a good one. We were able to prove ourselves to the Dilg family and take over these quarters.” “Prove what?” I asked. She turned to look at Alan and his mother. Alan was staring at Naomi’s ruined face, at the ropy, discolored scar tissue. Naomi was shaping the image of an old woman and two children. The gaunt, lined face of the old woman was remarkably vivid—detailed in a way that seemed impossible for a blind sculptress. Naomi seemed unaware of us. Her total attention remained on her work. Alan forgot about what Beatrice had told us and reached out to touch the scarred face. Beatrice let it happen. Naomi did not seem to notice. “If I get her attention for you,” Beatrice said, “we’ll be breaking her routine. We’ll have to stay with her until she gets back into it without hurting herself. About half an hour.” “You can get her attention?” he asked. “Yes.” “Can she? …” Alan swallowed. “I’ve never heard of anything like this. Can she talk?” “Yes. She may not choose to, though. And if she does, she’ll do it very slowly.” “Do it. Get her attention.” “She’ll want to touch you.” “That’s all right. Do it.” Beatrice took Naomi’s hands and held them still, away from the wet clay. For several seconds Naomi tugged at her captive hands, as though unable to understand why they did not move as she wished. Beatrice stepped closer and spoke quietly. “Stop, Naomi.” And Naomi was still, blind face turned toward Beatrice in an attitude of attentive waiting. Totally focused waiting. “Company, Naomi.” After a few seconds, Naomi made a wordless sound. Beatrice gestured Alan to her side, gave Naomi one of his hands. It didn’t bother me this time when she touched him. I was too interested in what was happening. Naomi examined Alan’s hand minutely, then followed the arm up to the shoulder, the neck, the face. Holding his face between her hands, she made a sound. It may have been a word, but I couldn’t understand it. All I could think of was the danger of those hands. I thought of my father’s hands. “His name is Alan Chi, Naomi. He’s your son.” Several seconds passed. “Son?” she said. This time the word was quite distinct, though her lips had split in many places and had healed badly “Son?” she repeated anxiously. “Here?” “He’s all right, Naomi. He’s come to visit.” “Mother?” he said. She reexamined his face. He had been three when she started to drift. It didn’t seem possible that she could find anything in his face that she would remember. I wondered whether she remembered she had a son. “Alan?” she said. She found his tears and paused at them. She touched her own face where there should have been an eye, then she reached back toward his eyes. An instant before I would have grabbed her hand, Beatrice did it. “No!” Beatrice said firmly. The hand fell limply to Naomi’s side. Her face turned toward Beatrice like an antique weather vane swinging around. Beatrice stroked her hair, and Naomi said something I almost understood. Beatrice looked at Alan, who was frowning and wiping away tears. “Hug your son,” Beatrice said softly. Naomi turned, groping, and Alan seized her in a tight, long hug. Her arms went around him slowly. She spoke words blurred by her ruined mouth but just understandable. “Parents?” she said. “Did my parents … care for you?” Alan looked at her, clearly not understanding. “She wants to know whether her parents took care of you,” I said. He glanced at me doubtfully, then looked at Beatrice. “Yes,” Beatrice said. “She just wants to know that they cared for you.” “They did,” he said. “They kept their promise to you, Mother.” Several seconds passed. Naomi made sounds that even Alan took to be weeping, and he tried to comfort her. “Who else is here?” she said finally. This time Alan looked at me. I repeated what she had said. “Her name is Lynn Mortimer,” he said. “I’m …” He paused awkwardly. “She and I are going to be married.” After a time, she moved back from him and said my name. My first impulse was to go to her. I wasn’t afraid or repelled by her now, but for no reason I could explain, I looked at Beatrice. “Go,” she said. “But you and I will have to talk later.” I went to Naomi, took her hand. “Bea?” she said. “I’m Lynn,” I said softly. She drew a quick breath. “No,” she said. “No, you’re …” “I’m Lynn. Do you want Bea? She’s here.” She said nothing. She put her hand to my face, explored it slowly. I let her do it, confident that I could stop her if she turned violent. But first one hand, then both, went over me very gently. “You’ll marry my son?” she said finally. “Yes.” “Good. You’ll keep him safe.” As much as possible, we’ll keep each other safe. “Yes,” I said. “Good. No one will close him away from himself. No one will tie him or cage him.” Her hand wandered to her own face again, nails biting in slightly. “No,” I said softly, catching the hand. “I want you to be safe, too.” The mouth moved. I think it smiled. “Son?” she said. He understood her, took her hand. “Clay,” she said. Lynn and Alan in clay. “Bea?” Of course,” Beatrice said. “Do you have an impression?” “No!” It was the fastest that Naomi had answered anything. Then, almost childlike, she whispered. “Yes.” Beatrice laughed. “Touch them again if you like, Naomi. They don’t mind.” We didn’t. Alan closed his eyes, trusting her gentleness in a way I could not. I had no trouble accepting her touch, even so near my eyes, but I did not delude myself about her. Her gentleness could turn in an instant. Naomi’s fingers twitched near Alan’s eyes, and I spoke up at once, out of fear for him. “Just touch him, Naomi. Only touch.” She froze, made an interrogative sound. “She’s all right,” Alan said. “I know,” I said, not believing it. He would be all right, though, as long as someone watched her very carefully, nipped any dangerous impulses in the bud. “Son!” she said, happily possessive. When she let him go, she demanded clay, wouldn’t touch her old-woman sculpture again. Beatrice got new clay for her, leaving us to soothe her and ease her impatience. Alan began to recognize signs of impending destructive behavior. Twice he caught her hands and said no. She struggled against him until I spoke to her. As Beatrice returned, it happened again, and Beatrice said, “No, Naomi.” Obediently Naomi let her hands fall to her sides. “What is it?” Alan demanded later when we had left Naomi safely, totally focused on her new work—clay sculptures of us. “Does she only listen to women or something?” Beatrice took us back to the sitting room, sat us both down, but did not sit down herself. She went to a window and stared out. “Naomi only obeys certain women,” she said. “And she’s sometimes slow to obey. She’s worse than most—probably because of the damage she managed to do to herself before I got her.” Beatrice faced us, stood biting her lip and frowning. “I haven’t had to give this particular speech for a while,” she said. “Most DGDs have the sense not to marry each other and produce children. I hope you two aren’t planning to have any—in spite of our need.” She took a deep breath. “It’s a pheromone. A scent. And it’s sex-linked. Men who inherit the disease from their fathers have no trace of the scent. They also tend to have an easier time with the disease. But they’re useless to use as staff here. Men who inherit from their mothers have as much of the scent as men get. They can be useful here because the DGDs can at least be made to notice them. The same for women who inherit from their mothers but not their fathers. It’s only when two irresponsible DGDs get together and produce girl children like me or Lynn that you get someone who can really do some good in a place like this.” She looked at me. “We are very rare commodities, you and I. When you finish school you’ll have a very well-paying job waiting for you.” “Here?” I asked. “For training, perhaps. Beyond that, I don’t know. You’ll probably help start a retreat in some other part of the country. Others are badly needed.” She smiled humorlessly. “People like us don’t get along well together. You must realize that I don’t like you any more than you like me.” I swallowed, saw her through a kind of haze for a moment. Hated her mindlessly—just for a moment. “Sit back,” she said. “Relax your body. It helps.” I obeyed, not really wanting to obey her but unable to think of anything else to do. Unable to think at all. “We seem,” she said, “to be very territorial. Dilg is a haven for me when I’m the only one of my kind here. When I’m not, it’s a prison.” “All it looks like to me is an unbelievable amount of work,” Alan said. She nodded. “Almost too much.” She smiled to herself. “I was one of the first double DGDs to be born. When I was old enough to understand, I thought I didn’t have much time. First I tried to kill myself. Failing that, I tried to cram all the living I could into the small amount of time I assumed I had. When I got into this project, I worked as hard as I could to get it into shape before I started to drift. By now I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I weren’t working.” “Why haven’t you … drifted?” I asked. “I don’t know. There aren’t enough of our kind to know what’s normal for us.” “Drifting is normal for every DGD sooner or later.” “Later, then.” “Why hasn’t the scent been synthesized?” Alan asked. “Why are there still concentration-camp rest homes and hospital wards?” “There have been people trying to synthesize it since I proved what I could do with it. No one has succeeded so far. All we’ve been able to do is keep our eyes open for people like Lynn.” She looked at me. “Dilg scholarship, right?” “Yeah. Offered out of the blue.” “My people do a good job keeping track. You would have been contacted just before you graduated or if you dropped out.” “Is it possible,” Alan said, staring at me, “that she’s already doing it? Already using the scent to … influence people?” “You?” Beatrice asked. “All of us. A group of DGDs. We all live together. We’re all controlled, of course, but …” Beatrice smiled. “It’s probably the quietest house full of kids that anyone’s ever seen.” I looked at Alan, and he looked away. “I’m not doing anything to them,” I said. “I remind them of work they’ve already promised to do. That’s all.” “You put them at ease,” Beatrice said. “You’re there. You … well, you leave your scent around the house. You speak to them individually. Without knowing why, they no doubt find that very comforting. Don’t you, Alan?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I must have. From my first visit to the house, I knew I wanted to move in. And when I first saw Lynn, I …” He shook his head. “Funny, I thought all that was my idea.” “Will you work with us, Alan?” “Me? You want Lynn.” “I want you both. You have no idea how many people take one look at one workroom here and turn and run. You may be the kind of young people who ought to eventually take charge of a place like Dilg.” “Whether we want to or not, eh?” he said. Frightened, I tried to take his hand, but he moved it away. “Alan, this works,” I said. “It’s only a stopgap, I know. Genetic engineering will probably give us the final answers, but for God’s sake, this is something we can do now!” “It’s something you can do. Play queen bee in a retreat full of workers. I’ve never had any ambition to be a drone.” “A physician isn’t likely to be a drone,” Beatrice said. “Would you marry one of your patients?” he demanded. “That’s what Lynn would be doing if she married me—whether I become a doctor or not.” She looked away from him, stared across the room. “My husband is here,” she said softly. “He’s been a patient here for almost a decade. What better place for him … when his time came?” “Shit!” Alan muttered. He glanced at me. “Let’s get out of here!” He got up and strode across the room to the door, pulled at it, then realized it was locked. He turned to face Beatrice, his body language demanding she let him out. She went to him, took him by the shoulder, and turned him to face the door. “Try it once more,” she said quietly. “You can’t break it. Try.” Surprisingly, some of the hostility seemed to go out of him. “This is one of those p.v. locks?” he asked. “Yes.” I set my teeth and looked away. Let her work. She knew how to use this thing she and I both had. And for the moment, she was on my side. I heard him make some effort with the door. The door didn’t even rattle. Beatrice took his hand from it, and with her own hand flat against what appeared to be a large brass knob, she pushed the door open. “The man who created that lock is nobody in particular,” she said. “He doesn’t have an unusually high I.Q., didn’t even finish college. But sometime in his life he read a science-fiction story in which palmprint locks were a given. He went that story one better by creating one that responded to voice or palm. It took him years, but we were able to give him those years. The people of Dilg are problem solvers, Alan. Think of the problems you could solve!” He looked as though he were beginning to think, beginning to understand. “I don’t see how biological research can be done that way,” he said. “Not with everyone acting on his own, not even aware of other researchers and their work.” “It is being done,” she said, “and not in isolation. Our retreat in Colorado specializes in it and has —just barely—enough trained, controlled DGDs to see that no one really works in isolation. Our patients can still read and write—those who haven’t damaged themselves too badly. They can take each other’s work into account if reports are made available to them. And they can read material that comes in from the outside. They’re working, Alan. The disease hasn’t stopped them, won’t stop them.” He stared at her, seemed to be caught by her intensity—or her scent. He spoke as though his words were a strain, as though they hurt his threat. “I won’t be a puppet. I won’t be controlled … by a goddamn smell!” “Alan—” “I won’t be what my mother is. I’d rather be dead!” “There’s no reason for you to become what your mother is.” He drew back in obvious disbelief. “Your mother is brain damaged—thanks to the three months she spent in that custodial-care toilet. She had no speech at all when I met her. She’s improved more than you can imagine. None of that has to happen to you. Work with us, and we’ll see that none of it happens to you.” He hesitated, seemed less sure of himself. Even that much flexibility in him was surprising. “I’ll be under your control or Lynn’s,” he said. She shook her head. “Not even your mother is under my control. She’s aware of me. She’s able to take direction from me. She trusts me the way any blind person would trust her guide.” “There’s more to it than that.” “Not here. Not at any of our retreats.” “I don’t believe you.” “Then you don’t understand how much individuality our people retain. They know they need help, but they have minds of their own. If you want to see the abuse of power you’re worried about, go to a DGD ward.” “You’re better than that, I admit. Hell is probably better than that. But …” “But you don’t trust us.” He shrugged. “You do, you know.” She smiled. “You don’t want to, but you do. That’s what worries you, and it leaves you with work to do. Look into what I’ve said. See for yourself. We offer DGDs a ch...
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Running Head: BLOODCHILD

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Bloodchild
Student’s Name
Institution Affiliations

BLOODCHILD

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In Bloodchild, Butler (1996) explores the unusual bond between the Tlic race of insectlike life forms and a colony of humans that have escaped Earth. Having settled into the Tlic
planet, human beings risk annihilation through the infestation of the Tlic. Thus, upon realizing
the fertility of humans as hosts, Tlic establishes a Preserve to safeguard the sustainability of
human beings but in turn, requires them to commit one member in each family for implantation.
The story is narrated through the voice of Gan, a young boy that is chosen to be a host of
implantation for T’Gatoi’s eggs before his birth. In one instance, Gan witnesses the performance
of an emergency cesarean section on a pregnant make N’Tlic named Lomas who is being eaten
by the hatched larvae after being abandoned by his Tlic. Gan considers suicide over implantation
but eventually agrees to the arrangement on condition that his family retains an illegal gun
(Butler, 1996). Ultimately, the story depicts the fictional imposition of female experiences on
male human beings through implantation.
The narrator of the story, Gan, is given the respo...


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