Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“It was a dolphin,” Doro murmured.

“But it was more like a land thing than a fish. Inside, it is much like a land animal. The changes I make will not be as great as I thought.”

“Did you have to eat leopard flesh to learn to become a leopard?”

She shook her head. “No, I could see what the leopard was like. I could mold myself into what I saw. I was not a true leopard, though, until I killed one and ate a little of it. At first, I was a woman pretending to be a leopard—clay molded into leopard shape. Now when I change, I am a leopard.”

“And now you will be a dolphin.” He gazed at her. “You cannot know how valuable you are to me. Shall I let you do this?”

That startled her. It had not occurred to her that he would disapprove. “It is a harmless thing,” she said.

“A dangerous thing. What do you know of the sea?”

“Nothing. But tomorrow I will begin to learn. Have Isaac watch me; I will stay near the surface. If he sees that I’m in trouble, he can lift me out of the water and let me change back on deck.”

“Why do you want to do this?”

She cast about for a reason she could put into words, a reason other than the wrenching longing she had felt when she watched the dolphins leaping and diving. It was like the days at home when she had watched eagles fly until she could no longer stand to only watch. She had killed an eagle and eaten and learned and flown as no human was ever meant to fly. She had flown away, escaping her town, her duties, her kinsmen. But after a while, she had flown back to her people. Where else could she go? Afterward, though, when the seasons with them grew long and the duties tiresome, when the kinsmen by themselves became a great tribe, she would escape again. She would fly. There was danger. Men hunted her and once had nearly killed her. She made an exceptionally large, handsome eagle. But fear never kept her out of the sky. Nor would it keep her out of the water.

“I want this,” she told Doro. “I will do it without Isaac if you keep him from helping me.”

Doro shook his head. “Were you this way with your other husbands—telling them what you would do in spite of their wishes?”

“Yes,” she said seriously, and was very much relieved when he laughed aloud. Better to amuse him than to anger him.

The next day she stood by the rail, watching Doro and Isaac argue in English. It was Isaac who did most of the arguing. Doro said only a few words, and then later repeated them exactly. Anyanwu could find only one word in what Isaac said that was repeated. The word was “shark,” and Isaac said it with vehemence. But he stopped when he saw how little attention Doro was paying to him. And Doro turned to face her.

“Isaac fears for you,” he told her.

“Will he help?”

“Yes—though I told him he didn’t have to.”

“I thought you were speaking for me!”

“In this, I am only translating.”

His attitude puzzled her. He was not angry, not even annoyed. He did not even seem to be as concerned for her as Isaac was, and yet he said he valued her. “What is a shark?” she asked.

“A fish,” Doro said. “A large flesh eater, a killer at least as deadly in the sea as your leopards are on land.”

“You did not say there were such things.”

He looked at the water. “It is as dangerous down there as in your forests,” he told her. “You need not go.”

“You didn’t try hard to stop me from going.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I want to see whether you can do it or not.”

He reminded her of one of her sons who, when he was very young had thrown several fowls into the river to see whether they could swim.

“Stay near the dolphins if they let you,” Doro said. “Dolphins know how to deal with sharks.”

Anyanwu tore off her cloth and dived into the sea before her confidence deserted her entirely. There, she transformed herself as quickly as was comfortable. She became the dolphin whose flesh she had eaten.

And she was moving through the water alongside the ship, propelling her long, sleek body forward with easy beats of her tail. She was seeing differently, her eyes now on the sides of her head instead of in front. Her head had extended itself into a hard beak. She was breathing differently—or rather, she was not breathing at all until she felt the need and found herself surfacing in a slow forward roll that exposed her blowhole-nose briefly and allowed her to expel her breath and take new air into her lungs. She observed herself minutely, saw that her dolphin body used the air it breathed much more efficiently than an ordinary human body. The dolphin body knew tricks her own human body had taken time and pain to learn. How to expel and renew a much larger portion of the air in its lungs with each breath. How to leach more of the usable portion of that air from the rest, the waste, and use it to fuel the body. Other things. None of it was new to her, but she thought she would have learned it all much sooner and more easily with the help of a bit of dolphin flesh. Instead, she had had only men who attempted to drown her.

She reveled in the strength and speed of her new body, and in its keen hearing. In her human shape, she kept her hearing abnormally keen—kept all her senses keen. But dolphin hearing was superior to anything she had ever created in herself. As a dolphin, she could close her eyes and perceive an only slightly diminished world around her with her ears. She could make sounds and they would come back to her as echoes bearing with them the story of all that lay before her. She had never imagined such hearing.

Finally, she directed her attention from herself to the other dolphins. She had heard them too, chattering not far from her, keeping alongside the ship as she did. Strangely, their chatter sounded more human now—more like speech, like a foreign speech. She swam toward them slowly, uncertainly. How did they greet strangers? How would they greet one small, ignorant female? If they were speaking among themselves somehow, they would think her mute—or mad.

A dolphin swam to meet her, paralleled her, observing her out of one lively eye. This was a male, she realized, and she watched him with interest. After a moment, he swam closer and rubbed his body against hers. Dolphin skin, she discovered, was pleasantly sensitive. It was not scaly as was the skin of true fish which she had never imitated, but whose bodies she understood. The male brushed her again, chattering in a way she felt was questioning, then swam away. She turned, checking the position of the ship, and saw that by keeping up with the dolphins, she was also keeping up with it. She swam after the male.

There were advantages, she thought, to being a female animal. The males of some species fought each other, mindlessly possessive of territory or females. She could remember being bullied as a female animal, being pursued by persistent males, but only in her true woman-shape could she remember being seriously hurt by males—men. It was only accident that made her a female dolphin; she had eaten the flesh of a female. But it was a fortunate accident.

A very small dolphin, a baby, she assumed, came to make her acquaintance, and she swam slowly, allowing it to investigate her. Eventually, its mother called it away, and she was alone again. Alone, but surrounded by creatures like herself—creatures she was finding it harder to think of as animals. Swimming with them was like being with another people. A friendly people. No slavers with brands and chains here. No Doro with gentle, terrible threats to her children, to her.

As time passed, several dolphins approached to touch her, rub themselves against her, get acquainted. When the male who had touched her first returned, she was startled to realize that she recognized him. His touch was his touch—not quite like that of any of the others as they were not quite like each other.