Unexpected Stories

Unexpected Stories

Octavia E. Butler

Contents

Foreword

A Necessary Being

Childfinder

Afterword

A Biography of Octavia E. Butler

Foreword

In a poem I once heard, a lonely young man walking past a desolate alley sees someone, a street denizen, a woman moving in the shadows. She looks familiar and he realizes that this is his mother—dead now for many years.

Reading posthumously published work of an author you loved is like this—shocking, strange, and very sad. And if that work was early on in the author’s career, it’s like seeing your mother as a woman younger and more hopeful than you, than I.

Discovering these lost stories of Octavia Butler is a kind of poetry and revivification: poetry and revivification, the hallmarks of our lost sister. Reading these tales is like looking at a photograph of a child whom you only knew as an adult. In her eyes you can see the woman that you came to know much later—a face, not yet fully formed, that contains the promise of something that is now a part of you: the welcomed surprise of recognition in innocent eyes.

In these stories we find two women faced with war or with peace. Carrying on their backs society’s future or its end. Both women come to us deeply embedded into histories, beliefs, and landscapes that share ghostly traits of our own, stretched and blasted and made strange. We are asked: Imagine a society striated by colors, imbued with a belief about power that isolates and cripples the one who is paradoxically the most important being. Or a teacher, a leader, on the run from the government that now hunts the telepaths it once cultivated as part of a utopian propaganda.

Long before Octavia Butler changed the face of science and speculative fiction, the landscape of the potentials of literature, she was imagining these worlds. She was asking her readers to enter with her into these untried territories with the challenges, the tragedies, the imperatives of being alive and of becoming more. The stories are disturbing. The characters stay on after the reading is finished. Once entered, the premises that made each story its own reality become familiar and this new society no longer seems strange or distant. We find, instead, that our worldview is transformed by an imagination that sees no border between thought and what is
real
.

Unexpected Stories
reveals the themes that would become Butler’s lexicon: the complicating mysteries we assign to power, race, and gender. Octavia Butler wrote these two stories, “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder,” early on in her journey from reader to writer, from fiction to unassailable reality. She is working out in these two very different stories the purpose she would refine with every book, every series, every word she subsequently wrote.

Walter Mosley

A Necessary Being

The Rohkohn Hao, Tahneh, was sharing her evening meal with her chief judge and discussing the current drought when she first learned of the foreigners who had entered her territory. There were three of them, not traveling north or south over the long strip of coastal desert as she would have expected, but coming from the east through the foothills. Apparently, they were following the narrow dwindling river that had in better times kept Tahneh’s people well supplied with water. The hunter who brought the message described the foreigners as a huntress, a judge, and, startlingly, a young Hao. Tahneh looked sharply at the hunter when he said it.

“You’re certain that it was a Hao and not just a high judge?”

“So the message said, Rohkohn Hao.” And the man quoted. “‘The foreign Hao is male and very young. Perhaps even too young to have been acknowledged by his people. His coloring is unmistakably pure blue and he is much taller and larger than the judge who is with him.’”

Tahneh heard this silently, her face turned away from the hunter. She felt just the beginnings of dread as she began to believe the report. A stupid child-Hao out almost alone on land that belonged to her people! What could his own people have been thinking of to let him wander around so unguarded?

“How far is he from here?” she asked the hunter.

“Two days, perhaps two and a half, Rohkohn Hao. He’s traveling slowly. He had just emerged from the mountains when a group of our hunters saw him and sent word back to us. Since he is coming toward us, our fighters could reach him from here in only a day.”

“Is there any possibility that he saw our hunters—saw them signaling us perhaps?” Tahneh had trouble keeping the hope out of her voice. Even a young Hao would have the sense to take his friends and run if he realized that there were other Kohn in the area. He would not know whether Tahneh’s Rohkohn were hostile or friendly and he would not be foolish enough to wait and find out. If only he had seen her hunters’ light signals.

“He could not have seen them, Rohkohn Hao,” the hunter assured her. “Our hunters made certain that both he and his friends were asleep when they sent their message.” The hunter seemed proud that members of his caste had acted so carefully, so correctly. He added, “Our hunters also ask that we hold our answer until we receive another signal from them—so that we don’t accidently alert the Hao and his party.”

Thorough hunters, Tahneh thought bitterly. A tribute to her insistence on training and discipline. Her body whitened and became slightly luminescent. This was a sign of the approval that she should have felt, but did not feel, a sign to the hunter that he and his fellow hunters had done well.

“Is there anything more?” she asked.

“No, Rohkohn Hao.”

Tahneh let the light go out of her coloring, let her normal blue return and the hunter, understanding that he had been dismissed, turned and left her apartment.

She sat still, ignoring the silent chief judge who sat beside her and staring into the fire of her large fireplace. This particular judge was a friend as well as the top official of her government. She had had liaisons with him before his marriage and after the death of his wife; he was a good companion. But she wished beyond expressing that she had not invited him to eat with her this particular night. In another moment he would speak and say the things she did not want to hear.

After a moment the chief judge’s normal blue-green coloring soared to brilliant white luminescence with his joy. “At last, Tahneh, at last!” The words came out in a harsh whisper. “We must send more fighters—judges—to capture him before those hunters frighten him away!”

Tahneh watched him silently, knowing that his elation would soon be shared by the rest of her people. Another Hao at last. A young one to be the successor that her body had
been unable to produce, a child who could probably be captured without the danger and loss of life that would be involved in capturing an experienced adult.

“With his youth,” the chief judge said, “it might even be possible to persuade him to accept the Rohkohn as his people without the usual … coercion.”

“Perhaps,” said Tahneh. She knew that this was a vain hope, that there was no possibility of “persuading” a Hao to betray his people other than by the brutal traditional methods. But she knew too that the words had been meant as a kindness. This judge, more than any other, understood how deeply she hated the traditional ways.

She longed to see the young Hao. She had not seen one of her own kind since the death of her father twenty years before. She had felt her loneliness agonizingly right after his death, but she had been very young herself then—just acknowledged by her people. Her loneliness had passed, or she thought it had. She was surprised at the new loneliness, the desperate need she felt now—need that she knew was in conflict with her fear for the boy, with her hope that he had already fled.

But no matter what she hoped, she had to assume that he had not escaped. For the sake of her people, she had to plan his capture.

She spoke to her chief judge. “We will obey the conventions in this, Ehreh. The Hao and his party are to be brought here unharmed, untouched if possible. They are to be treated as potential friends, not as prisoners. They’re to be convinced that we’re only being cautious with them. If we can make them understand that, then they’ll be careful not to do anything that might make us turn hostile.”

“We can’t be too gentle with them,” Ehreh said. “We can’t take the chance of their escaping.”

“Take a large enough force with you to prevent their escape. Take as many fighters, both judges and hunters, as you think you’ll need. But remember, the point is to give them no reason to risk trying to escape.”

Ehreh stared at her. “You want me to go after them, Tahneh?”

“Would you rather I send someone else—someone with less knowledge of the Hao, someone who’ll lose this boy?”

He considered this, then gave the slight flash of white that indicated agreement. “For that matter,” he said slowly, “you should go yourself.”

“You won’t need me if you do as I’ve ordered!” The words came out more sharply than she had intended and she knew that Ehreh would notice.

He looked at her silently for several seconds. “You’ve been alone for a long time, Tahneh. You should welcome this chance to capture another Hao.”

“The people need him, not me,” she said shortly. “They’ll have him.”

“They will if I can catch him without your help.”

“A moment ago you didn’t even think you were needed to make the capture.”

“A moment ago I hadn’t thought at all. I’m thinking now, though. A Hao … We’ll need you, Tahneh. If he decides to leave his friends, escape alone, we may lose him no matter how many fighters I have.”

“He won’t do that if you don’t give him reason. We Hao don’t particularly like abandoning our friends even when it’s necessary.”

Ehreh laid a hand on her shoulder and she felt the pressure of it heavily. “‘We,’ Tahneh? Already, ‘we’? You must have been more lonely than I thought.”

She said nothing.

“By refusing to go after this boy, you are giving him a chance to escape.”

“I’m giving you a chance to prove that you deserve your high position!” The words stung him as she had intended them to. She saw yellow flicker in his coloring and was pleased. It was better to have him angry and defensive than to have him beginning to doubt that she was acting in the best interests of the people.

“I am not Hao,” he said quietly. “I cannot perform Hao duties.”

“Nor will you define Hao duties.”

His yellow flickering stopped, and to her surprise his coloring faded toward gray. Gray was for the most private and deeply felt grief. “This is an ordeal that both you and the boy must bear, Tahneh.” Ehreh spoke very softly. “We are close, you and I, and I can see the pain that you think your harsh words hide. I understand your sentiment, but the people can’t afford it.”

Tahneh let some of her own gray come through bleakly. “All right, Ehreh, we’ll stop snarling at each other. It’s meaningless anyway; I’ve already made my decision. Gather your judges and hunters and go capture the young Hao.”

“You
must
come with us!”

Her blue returned at that—returned harshly metallic, a cold threatening color. She said nothing to Ehreh. She only looked at him. He understood that he had gone too far. He rose silently and left her.

When he was gone, she sat still for a long moment, then bent over slowly, very
slowly, until her head touched her knees. She rocked back and forth, still moving with agonizing slowness, and her body became a deep gray. Once she spoke the name of her father loudly, sharply as though she were asking a question. But the dead were dead; death was an end. She neither expected nor received guidance. But she did call to mind the memory of her father, sitting on his mat, lying on his pallet, sitting in the litter that the people had used to carry him. She had never seen him standing. He had been old when she was born, and his legs had been useless for two-thirds of his life. The Rohkohn had had to follow the tradition when they captured him. He had refused to renounce his former people—the people from whom the Rohkohn had stolen him—as a Hao was duty bound to refuse, and the Rohkohn had had to cripple him to prevent his ever returning to them. They had burned him with hot irons behind his knees until his lower legs were permanently useless. He had been bitterly vengeful at first, and his agony until his burns healed had helped him make the lives of those who had chosen to serve him hard.