Butler, Octavia - Fledgling

Finally, I looked up at him and found him leaning back bonelessly in the chair. “God,” he said. “I hit the jackpot.”

“How have you managed to stay unattached?” I asked. “Didn’t anyone here want you?”

He smiled. “Everyone wanted me. Everyone except Preston and Hayden. They said I was too young to join with them. The others ... they left me alone when I asked them to, but before that, they were all after me. And I didn’t want to join with a man. There’s too much sexual feeling involved when you guys feed. I wanted that from a woman. Preston said he would check with nearby female families after I finished college, and he’s taken me to see a couple of them, but I wasn’t interested. You are the only Ina I’ve

ever been attracted to.” “After seeing me only once?”

“Yeah. I didn’t even see you when you were here before ... before your parents died. I had gone to San Francisco to spend time with some friends from college.” He shook his head. “I liked your looks when I saw the pictures the Gordons had of you and your sisters. When I saw you last night, I didn’t have a chance.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. “I’m only beginning to form my family,” I said. “You would probably have an easier life with anyone here or any of the female families you’ve seen. You know my memory only goes back a few weeks.”

“I heard.”

“And when I leave the Gordons, I’ll be alone.”

He nodded. “Then let me help you make a new family.”

I looked at him and saw that his expression had changed, had become more serious. Good. “I want you to be part of my new family,” I said. “More than that, I need you. But you and my first will have to accept each other. You will accept him. There will be peace between you. No fighting. No endangering the rest of us with destructive competitions.”

“All right. I doubt that your first and I will ever be anything like friends, but I know how it is. I suppose you told him the same thing.”

“Of course.” I paused. “He helped me, Joel. When I had no one else, when I had no idea who or what I

was, he helped me.”

“I wish I had had the chance to do such a thing.” He reached up and touched my face. “Like I said, let me help you make a new family.”

A little later that morning, I put on my hooded jacket, sunglasses, and gloves and walked around to each of the houses of the community. I spotted the guards from outside, then went into the houses to do what I could to help them be less easily spotted. Being easily spotted by the kind of attackers my symbionts and I had faced would mean easily shot.

The Gordon symbionts greeted me by touching me—my shoulders, arms, hands. I found that I was comfortable with that, although I had not expected it. It was as though they had to touch me to believe that I could be Ina and yet be awake.

“You aren’t drowsy at all?” a woman named Linda Higuera asked. She was a nervous, muscular brown woman, at least six feet tall and leaning on a rifle. We were on the third floor of William’s house, and she was one of his symbionts. From what I had seen, William preferred big, powerful-looking symbionts, male and female. Wise of him.

“I’m not drowsy,” I said. “As long as I don’t get too much sun, I’m fine.”

She shook her head. “I wish William could do that. I would feel safer if he could at least wake up if we need him.”

I shrugged. “Your turn to keep him safe.”

She thought about that, then nodded. “You’re right. Damn. He’s so strong, I’ve just gotten used to depending on him. Guess it ought to work both ways.” She stopped and thought for a moment. “Do you have a phone?”

“There are phones in the guest house.” “I mean a cell phone.”

“No, I don’t.” I wasn’t entirely sure what a cell phone was.

“You should have one so we can talk to each other if something happens. The house phones are too easy to disable.”

That made sense. “Is there one I can borrow?”

She sent me down to wake up a huge man named Martin, a man so brown he was almost black. Martin not only supplied me with a charged cell phone, but saved several numbers on it and made me repeat the names that went with them and whose house each person was in. Then he showed me how to make a call, and I made a practice call to the guard at Daniel’s house. Finally, he dug out a charger and showed me how to use that.

“Here’s your number,” he said, making it flash across the phone’s small screen, “just in case you have to give it to somebody.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he grinned.

“No problem. How’s Linda doing up there?” “Doing well,” I said. “Alert and thoughtful.”

“And how about my son?” he asked in a different tone. “How’s he?” I looked at him, startled. “You’re Joel’s father?”

“Yep. Martin Harrison. Joel move into the guest house yet?” “He has, yes. I like him.”

“Good. You’re what he wants. If you take care of him, he’ll take care of you.”

I nodded and left him feeling much better about the safety of the Gordon community. With or without me, these people would not be caught by surprise and murdered, and now I could communicate with them in

a quiet, effective way.

I walked around the community once more, stopping now and then to listen to the activity around me. There were symbionts eating meals, making love, discussing children who were away at boarding schools, discussing the vineyards and the winery, pruning nearby trees, washing dishes, ordering audiobooks by phone, typing on computers ... There were little children playing games and singing songs in a room at Hayden’s house. It seemed that here some symbionts still carried on most of their activities during the day while others had switched to a nocturnal schedule to spend more time with their Ina.

As I wandered back toward the guest house, I found myself paying attention to a conversation that

Wright and Brook were having there.

“They take over our lives,” Brook said. “They don’t even think about it, they just do it as though it were their right. And we let them because they give us so much satisfaction and . . . just pure pleasure.”

Wright grunted. “We let them because we have no choice. By the time we realize what’s happened to us, it’s too late.”

There was a long pause. “It’s not usually that way,” Brook said. “Iosif told me what would happen if I accepted him, that I would become addicted and need him. That I would have to obey. That if he died, I might die. Not that I could imagine him dying. That seemed so impossible . . . But he told me all that. Then he asked me to come to him anyway, to accept him and stay with him because I could live for maybe two hundred years and be healthy and look and feel young, and because he wanted me and

needed me. I wasn’t hooked when he asked. He’d only bitten me a couple of times. I could have walked away—or run like hell. He told me later that he thought I might run. He said people did run sometimes

out of superstitious fear or out of the puritanical belief that anything that feels that good must have a huge downside somewhere along the line. Then he had to find them and talk them into believing he was a

dream or an ordinary boyfriend.”

Wright said, “By the time Shori asked me—or rather, by the time she offered to let me go—I was very thoroughly hooked, psychologically if not physically.”

“That was probably because of her memory loss.”

Wright made an “mmmm” sound of agreement. “I suppose. She’s shown herself to be a weirdly ethical little thing most of the time. It still bothers me, though, and now there’s this new guy she told me about ...”