Wild Seed Read Free Page A

imagine such a thing.
    "You see? Your children should not be wasted anyway. They may be good—" He spoke a word in another language. She heard it clearly, but it meant nothing to her. The word was seed.
    "What is seed?" she asked.
    "People too valuable to be casually killed," he said. Then more softly, "You must show me what you are."
    "How can my sons be of value to you?"
    He gave her a long silent look, then spoke with that same softness. "I may have to go to them, Anyanwu. They may be more tractable than their mother."
    She could not recall ever having been threatened so gently—or so effectively. Her sons . . . "Come," she whispered. "It is too open for me to show you here."

    With concealed excitement, Doro followed the small, wizened woman to her tiny compound. The compound wall—made of red clay and over six feet high—would give them the privacy Anyanwu wanted.
    "My sons would do you no good," she told him as they walked. "They are good men, but they know very little."
    "They are not like you—any of them?"
    "None."
    "And your daughters?"
    "Nor them. I watched them carefully until they went away to their husbands' towns. They are like my mother. They exert great influence on their husbands and on other women, but nothing beyond that. They live their lives and they die."
    "They die . . .?"
    She opened the wooden door and led him through the wall, then barred the door after him.
    "They die," she said sadly. "Like their fathers."
    "Perhaps if your sons and daughters married each other . . ."
    "Abomination!" she said with alarm. "We are not animals here, Doro!"
    He shrugged. He had spent most of his life ignoring such protests and causing the protestors to change their minds. People's morals rarely survived confrontations with him. For now, though, gentleness. This woman was valuable. If she were only half as old as he thought, she would be the oldest person he had ever met—and she was still spry. She was descended from people whose abnormally long lives, resistance to disease, and budding special abilities made them very important to him. People who, like so many others, had fallen victim to slavers or tribal enemies. There had been so few of them. Nothing must happen to this one survivor, this fortunate little hybrid. Above all, she must be protected from Doro himself. He must not kill her out of anger or by accident—and accidents could happen so easily in this country. He must take her away with him to one of his more secure seed towns. Perhaps in her strangeness, she could still bear young, and perhaps with the powerful mates he could get her, this time her children would be worthy of her. If not, there were always her existing children.
    "Will you watch, Doro?" she asked. "This is what you demanded to see."
    He focused his attention on her, and she began to rub her hands. The hands were bird claws, long-fingered, withered, and bony. As he watched, they began to fill out, to grow smooth and young-looking. Her arms and shoulders began to fill out and her sagging breasts drew themselves up round and high. Her hips grew round beneath her cloth, causing him to want to strip the cloth from her. Lastly, she touched her face and molded away her wrinkles. An old scar beneath one eye vanished. The flesh became smooth and firm, and the woman startlingly beautiful.
    Finally, she stood before him looking not yet twenty. She cleared her throat and spoke to him in a soft, young woman's voice. "Is this enough?"
    For a moment he could only stare at her. "Is this truly you, Anyanwu?"
    "As I am. As I would always be if I did not age or change myself for others. This shape flows back to me very easily. Others are harder to take."
    "Others!"
    "Did you think I could take only one?" She began molding her malleable body into another shape. "I took animal shapes to frighten my people when they wanted to kill me," she said. "I became a leopard and spat at them. They believe in such things, but they do not like to see them proved. Then