It did not matter. Isaac was here, and he had to be taken away before he noticed the other dolphin so temptingly near. She swam back toward the ship, allowing him to keep his hold on her fin. She did not mind towing him.
“I’ll go up first,” he said when they reached the ship. “Then I’ll lift you.”
He rose straight out of the water and drifted onto the ship. He could fly without wings as easily as he could direct the ship out of a storm. She wondered whether he could be sick and need a woman after this too. Then something touched her, gripped her firmly but not painfully, lifted her out of the water. It was not, as she had thought, like being lifted by a net or by the arms of men. There was no special feeling of pressure on any part of her body. It was like being held and supported by the air itselfsoftness that seemed to envelope her entire body, firmness that all her strength could not free her from.
But she did not use her strength, did not struggle. She had seen the futility of the dolphin’s struggles the day before, and she had felt the speed of the great ship as it plunged through the storm, propelled by Isaac’s power. No strength of her muscles could resist such power. Besides, she trusted the boy. He handled her more carefully than he had the other dolphin, gestured crewmen back out of his way before he set her down gently on deck. Then the crewmen, Doro, and Isaac watched, fascinated, as she began to grow legs. She had had to absorb her legs almost completely, leaving only the useless detached hip bones natural to her dolphin bodyas though the dolphin itself were slowly developing legsor losing them. Now, she began with this large change. And her flippers began to look more like arms. Her neck, her entire body, grew slender again and her tiny excellent dolphin ears enlarged to become less efficient human ears. Her nose migrated back to her face and she absorbed her beak, her tail, and her fin. There were internal changes that those watching could not be aware of. And her gray skin changed color and texture. That change caused her to begin thinking about what she might have to do to herself if someday she decided to vanish into this land of white people that she was approaching. She would have to do some experimenting later. It was always useful to be able to camouflage oneself to hide or to learn the things people either would not or could not deliberately teach her about themselves. This when she could speak English well, of course. She would have to work harder at the language.
When the transformation was complete, she stood up, and Doro handed her her cloth. Before the staring men, she wrapped it around her waist and tied it. It had been centuries since she had gone naked in the way of unmarried young girls. She felt ashamed now to be seen by so many men, but she understood that again, Doro wanted his people to see her power. If he could not breed stupidity out of them, he would frighten it out.
She looked around at them, allowing no hint of her shame to reach her expression. Why should they know what she felt? She read awe in their expressions, and two who were near her actually stepped back when she looked at them. Then Doro hugged her wet body to him and she was able to relax. Isaac laughed aloud, breaking the tension, and said something to Doro. Doro smiled.
In her language, he said: “What children you will give me!” She was caught by the intensity she could sense behind his words. It reminded her that his was more than an ordinary man’s desire for children. She could not help thinking of her own children, strong and healthy, but as short-lived and powerless as the children of any other woman. Could she give Doro what he wantedwhat she herself had wanted for so longchildren who would not die?
“What children you will give me, husband,” she whispered, but the words were more questioning than his had been.
And strangely, Doro also seemed to become uncertain. She looked at him and caught a troubled expression on his face. He was staring out at the dolphins who were leaping again, some of them just ahead of the ship. He shook his head slowly.
“What is it?” she asked.
He looked away from the dolphins, and for a moment, his expression was so intense, so feral that she wondered if he hated the animals, or envied her because she could join them.
“What is it?” she repeated.
He seemed to force himself to smile. “Nothing,” he said. He pulled her head to his shoulder reassuringly, and stroked her glossy, newly grown skullcap of hair. Unreassured, she accepted the caress and wondered why he was lying.
CHAPTER 6
Anyanwu had too much power.
In spite of Doro’s fascination with her, his first inclination was to kill her. He was not in the habit of keeping alive people he could not control absolutely. But if he killed her and took over her body, he would get only one or two children from her before he had to take a new body. Her longevity would not help him keep her body alive. He did not acquire the use of his victims’ special abilities with his transmigrations. He inhabited bodies. He consumed lives. That was all. Had he killed Lale, he would not have acquired the man’s thought-transfer ability. He would only have been able to pass on that ability to children of Lale’s body. And if he killed Anyanwu, he would not acquire her malleability, longevity, or healing. He would have only his own special ability lodged within her small, durable body until he began to hungerhunger in a way Anyanwu and Isaac could never understand. He would hunger, and he would have to feed. Another life. A new body. Anyanwu would last him no longer than any other good kill.
Therefore, Anyanwu must live and bear her valuable young. But she had too much power. In her dolphin form, and before that, in her leopard form, Doro had discovered that his mind could not find her. Even when he could see her, his mind, his tracking sense, told him she was not there. It was as though she had died, as though he confronted a true animala creature beyond his reach. And if he could not reach her, he could not kill her and take her body while she was in animal form. In her human shape, she was as vulnerable to him as anyone else, but as an animal, she was beyond him as animals had always been beyond him. He longed now for one of the animal sensitives his controlled breeding occasionally produced. These were people whose abilities extended to touching animal minds, receiving sensation and emotion from them, people who suffered every time someone wrung a chicken’s neck or gelded a horse or slaughtered a pig. They led short, unenviable lives. Sometimes Doro killed them before they could waste their valuable bodies in suicide. But now, he could have used a living one. Without one, his control of Anyanwu was dangerously limited.
And if Anyanwu ever discovered that limitation, she might run away from him whenever she chose. She might go the moment he demanded more of her than she was willing to give. Or she might go if she discovered that he meant to have both her and the children she had left behind in Africa. She believed her cooperation had bought their freedombelieved he would give up such potentially valuable people. If she found out the truth, she would surely run, and he would lose her. He had never before lost anyone in that way. He lost people to disease, accident, war, causes beyond his control. People were stolen from him or killed as had been his people of the savanna. This was bad enough. It was waste, and he intended to end much of it by bringing his people to less widely scattered communities in the Americas. But no individual had ever succeeded in escaping him. Individuals who ran from him were caught and most often killed. His own people knew better than to run from him.
But Anyanwu, wild seed that she was, did not know. Yet.
He would have to teach her, instruct her quickly and begin using her at once. He wanted as many children as he could get from her before it became necessary to kill her. Wild seed always had to be destroyed eventually. It could never conform as children born among his people conformed. But like no other wild seed, Anyanwu would learn to fear him and bend herself to his will. He would use her for breeding and healing. He would use her children, present and future, to create more acceptable long-lived types. The troublesome shape-changing ability could probably be bred out of her line if it appeared. The fact that it had not appeared so far told him he might be able to extinguish it entirely. But then, none of her special abilities had appeared among her children. They had inherited nothing more than potentialgood blood that might produce special abilities after a few generations of inbreeding. Perhaps he would fail with them. Perhaps he would discover that Anyanwu could not be duplicated, or that there could be no longevity without shape-changing. Perhaps. But any finding, positive or negative, was generations away.