“It isn’t wrong here. It …” He shrugged. “People from outside always have trouble understanding us. Not very many things are forbidden here. Most of us don’t believe in gods and spirits and devils who must be pleased or feared. We have Doro, and he’s enough. He tells us what to do, and if it isn’t what other people do, it doesn’t matter?because we won’t last long if we don’t do it, no matter what outsiders think of us.”
He got up, went to stand beside the fireplace. The low flame seemed to comfort him too. “Doro’s ways aren’t strange to me,” he said. “I’ve lived with them all my life. I’ve shared women with him. My first woman …” He hesitated, glanced at her as though to see how she was receiving such talk, whether she was offended. She was almost indifferent. She had made up her mind. Nothing the boy said would change it.
“My first woman,” he continued, “was one he sent to me. The women here are glad to go to him. They didn’t mind coming to me either when they saw how he favored me.”
“Go to them then,” Anyanwu said quietly.
“I would,” he said matching her tone. “But I don’t want to. I’d rather stay with you?for the rest of my life.”
She wanted to run out of the room. “Leave me alone, Isaac!”
He shook his head slowly. “If I leave this room tonight, you’ll die tonight. Don’t ask me to hurry your death.”
She said nothing.
“Besides, I want you to have the night to think.” He frowned at her. “How can you sacrifice your children?”
“Which children, Isaac? The ones I have had or the ones he will make me have with you and with him?”
He blinked. “Oh.”
“I cannot kill him?or even understand what there is to kill. I have bitten him when he was in another body, and he seemed no more than flesh, no more than a man.”
“You never touched him,” Isaac said. “Lale did once?he reached out in that way of his to change Doro’s thoughts. He almost died. I think he would have died if Doro hadn’t struggled hard not to kill him. Doro wears flesh, but he isn’t flesh himself?nor spirit, he says.”
“I cannot understand that,” she said. “But it does not matter. I cannot save my children from him. I cannot save myself. But I will not give him more people to defile.”
He turned from the fire, went back to his chair and pulled it close to her. “You could save generations unborn if you wished, Anyanwu. You could have a good life for yourself, and you could stop him from killing so many others.”
“How can I stop him?” she said in disgust. “Can one stop a leopard from doing what it was born to do?”
“He’s not a leopard! He’s not any sort of mindless animal!”
She could not help hearing the anger in his voice. She sighed. “He is your father.”
“Oh God,” muttered Isaac. “How can I make you see … I wasn’t resenting an insult to my father, Anyanwu, I was saying that in his own way, he can be a reasonable being. You’re right about his killing; he can’t help doing it. When he needs a new body, he takes one whether he wants to or not. But most of the time, he transfers because he wants to, not because he has to; and there are a few people?four or five?who can influence him enough sometimes to stop him from killing, save a few of his victims. I’m one of them. You could be another.”
“You do not mean stop him,” she said wearily. “You mean”?she hunted through her memory for the right word?“you mean delay him.”
“I mean what I said! There are people he listens to, people he values beyond their worth as breeders or servants. People who can give him … just a little of the companionship he needs. They’re among the few people in the world that he can still love?or at least care for. Although compared to what the rest of us feel when we love or hate or envy or whatever, I don’t think he feels very much. I don’t think he can. I’m afraid the time will come when he won’t feel anything. If it does … there’s no end to the harm he could do. I’m glad I won’t have to live to see it. You, though, you could live to see it?or live to prevent it. You could stay with him, keep him at least as human as he is now. I’ll grow old; I’ll die like all the others, but you won’t?or, you needn’t. You are treasure to him. I don’t think he’s really understood that yet.”
“He knows.”
“He knows, of course, but he doesn’t … doesn’t feel it yet. It’s not yet real to him. Don’t you see? He’s lived for more than thirty-seven hundred years. When Christ, the Son of the God of most white people in these colonies was born, Doro was already impossibly old. Everyone has always been temporary for him?wives, children, friends, even tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but him. And maybe you, Sun Woman, and maybe you. Make him know you’re not like everyone else?make him feel it. Prove it to him, even if for a while, you have to do some things you don’t like. Reach out to him; keep reaching. Make him know he’s not alone any more!”
There was a long period of silence. Only the log in the fireplace slipped, then spat and crackled as new wood began to burn. Anyanwu covered her face, shook her head slowly. “I wish I knew you to be a liar,” she whispered. “I am afraid and angry and desperate, yet you heap burdens on me.”
He said nothing.
“What is forbidden here, Isaac? What is so evil that a man could be taken out and killed?”
“Murder,” Isaac said. “Theft sometimes, some other things. And of course, defying Doro.”
“If a man killed someone and Doro said he must not be punished, what would happen?”
Isaac frowned. “If the man had to be kept alive?maybe for breeding, Doro would probably take him. Or if it was too soon, if he was being saved for a girl still too young, Doro would send him away from the colony. He wouldn’t ask us to tolerate him here.”
“And when the man was no longer needed, he would die?”
“Yes.”
Anyanwu took a deep breath. “Perhaps you try to keep some decency, then. Perhaps he has not made animals
