Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler Page A

hand on my shoulder as the woman let me go. “Is any of this familiar to you? Do you know these people, this house?”
    I shook my head. “I like the room, but I don’t remember it.” I looked at the three people. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t remember any of you either.”
    All three of them stared at Iosif.
    “She was very badly injured,” he said. “Head injuries. As a result, she’s lost her memory. And she was alone until she found Wright Hamlin here. I’m hoping her memory will return.”
    “Don’t you have your own medical people?” Wright asked. “People who know how to help your kind?”
    “We do,” Iosif said. “But for Ina, that tends to mean someone to fix badly broken bones so that they heal straight or binding serious wounds so that they’ll heal faster.”
    “You don’t want to see what they mean by ‘a serious wound,’” one of the men said. “Intestines spilling out, legs gone, that sort of thing.”
    “I don’t,” Wright agreed. “Shori told me she had been badly burned as well as shot. But she healed on her own. Not a scar.”
    “Except for not knowing herself or her people,” Iosif said. “I would call that a large scar. Unfortunately, it’s not one we know how to fix.”
    “Did I have friends here?” I asked. “People who might know me especially well?”
    “Your four brothers are here,” he said. He looked at the three humans. “Look after Wright for a while,” he said. “Answer fully any questions he asks. He’s with Shori now. He’s her first, but he knows almost nothing.” He took my arm and began to lead me away.
    “Renee?” Wright said to me, and I stopped. It eased something in me to hear him call me by the name he had given me. “You okay?” he asked.
    I nodded. “Yell if you need me. I’ll hear.”
    He nodded. He looked as though my words eased something in him.
    I followed Iosif down a long hallway.
    “These bedrooms belong to me and my human family,” he told me. “They’re the three you just met and five others who aren’t here right now. They’ve all been with me for years. Eight is a good number for me, although at other times in my life I’ve had seven or even ten. I’m wealthy enough to care for all of them if I have to, and they feed me. They’re free to hold jobs away from the community, even live elsewhere part time, and sometimes they do. But at least three of them are always here. They work out a schedule among themselves.”
    We went through a door at the end of the hallway and out onto a broad lawn. I stopped in the middle of the lawn. “Do they mind?” I asked.
    “Mind?”
    “That you need eight. That none of them can be your only one.” I paused. “Because I think Wright is going to mind.”
    “When he understands that you have to have others?”
    “Yes.”
    “He’ll mind. I can see that he’s very possessive of you—and very protective.” He paused, then said, “Let him mind, Shori. Talk to him. Help him. Reassure him. Stop violence. But let him feel what he feels and settle his feelings his own way.”
    “All right.”
    “I suspect this kind of thing needs to be said more to my sons than to you, but you should hear it, at least once: treat your people well, Shori. Let them see that you trust them and let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions. Do that and they will willingly commit their lives to you. Bully them, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, and after a while, you’ll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, and stifling their resentment. Do you understand?”
    “I do, yes. I’ve made him do things but only to keep him safe—mostly to keep him safe from me—especially when Raleigh Curtis shot me.”
    He nodded. “That sort of thing is necessary whether they understand or not. How many do you have other than Wright?”
    “I’ve drunk from five others, but Wright doesn’t know about any of them.” I paused, then