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Автор Октавия Батлер
Wild Seed
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
1980
Book I
Covenant
1690
CHAPTER 1
Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mud-walled place surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized even before he reached it that its people were gone. Slavers had been to it before him. With their guns and their greed, they had undone in a few hours the work of a thousand years. Those villagers they had not herded away, they had slaughtered. Doro found human bones, hair, bits of desiccated flesh missed by scavengers. He stood over a very small skeletonthe bones of a childand wondered where the survivors had been taken. Which country or New World colony? How far would he have to travel to find the remnants of what had been a healthy, vigorous people?
Finally, he stumbled away from the ruins bitterly angry, not knowing or caring where he went. It was a matter of pride with him that he protected his own. Not the individuals, perhaps, but the groups. They gave him their loyalty, their obedience, and he protected them.
He had failed.
He wandered southwest toward the forest, leaving as he had arrivedalone, unarmed, without supplies, accepting the savanna and later the forest as easily as he accepted any terrain. He was killed several timesby disease, by animals, by hostile people. This was a harsh land.
Yet he continued to move southwest, unthinkingly veering away from the section of the coast where his ship awaited him. After a while, he realized it was no longer his anger at the loss of his seed village that drove him. It was something newan impulse, a feeling, a kind of mental undertow pulling at him. He could have resisted it easily, but he did not. He felt there was something for him farther on, a little farther, just ahead. He trusted such feelings.He had not been this far west for several hundred years, thus he could be certain that whatever, whoever he found would be new to himnew and potentially valuable. He moved on eagerly.
The feeling became sharper and finer, resolving itself into a kind of signal he would normally have expected to receive only from people he knewpeople like his lost villagers whom he should be tracking now before they were forced to mix their seed with foreigners and breed away all the special qualities he valued in them. But he continued on southwest, closing slowly on his quarry.
Anyanwu’s ears and eyes were far sharper than those of other people. She had increased their sensitivity deliberately after the first time men came stalking her, their machetes ready, their intentions clear. She had had to kill seven times on that terrible dayseven frightened men who could have been sparedand she had nearly died herself, all because she let people come upon her unnoticed. Never again.
Now, for instance, she was very much aware of the lone intruder who prowled the bush near her. He kept himself hidden, moved toward her like smoke, but she heard him, followed him with her ears.
