Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler Page B

understand her own.
    After Lale's death, she avoided the boy as best she could in the confined space of the ship, thinking that he might not be as indifferent to the death of a brother as Doro was to the death of a son. But Isaac came to her.
    He joined her at the rail one day as she stood watching the leaping fish. He watched them himself for a moment, then laughed. She glanced up at him questioningly, and he pointed out to sea. When she looked there again, she saw one of the great fish hanging high above the water, struggling in midair.
    It was as though the creature had been caught in some invisible net. But there was no net. There was nothing.
    She looked at Isaac in amazement. "You?" she asked in her uncertain English. "You do this?"
    Isaac only smiled. The fish, struggling wildly, drifted closer to the ship. Several crewmen noticed it and began shouting at Isaac. Anyanwu could not understand most of what they said, but she knew they wanted the fish. Isaac made a gesture of presenting it to Anyanwu, though it still hung over the water. She looked around at the eager crewmen, then grinned. She beckoned for the fish to be brought aboard.
    Isaac dropped it at her feet.
    Everyone ate well that night. Anyanwu ate better than anyone, because for her, the flesh of the fish told her all she needed to know about the creature's physical structure—all she needed to know to take its shape and live as it did. Just a small amount of raw flesh told her more than she had words to say. Within each bite, the creature told her its story clearly thousands of times. That night in their cabin, Doro caught her experimentally turning one of her arms into a flipper.
    "What are you doing!" he demanded, with what sounded like revulsion.
    She laughed like a child and stood up to meet him, her arm flowing easily back to its human shape. "Tomorrow," she said, "you will tell Isaac how to help me, and I will swim with the fish! I will be a fish! I can do it now! I have wanted to for so long."
    "How do you know you can?" Curiosity quickly drove any negative feelings from him, as usual. She told him of the messages she had read within the flesh of the fish. "Messages as clear and fine as those in your books," she told him. Privately she thought her flesh-messages even more specific than the books he had introduced her to, read to her from. But the books were the only example she could think of that he might understand. "It seems that you could misunderstand your books," she said. "Other men made them. Other men can lie or make mistakes. But the flesh can only tell me what it is. It has no other story."
    "But how do you read it?" he asked. Read. If he used that English word, he too saw the similarity.
    "My body reads it—reads everything. Did you know that fish breathes air as we do? I thought it would breathe water like the ones we caught and dried at home."
    "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