Fledgling

by Octavia E. Butler

“And don’t bite anyone.”

Jill Renner sym Wayne.

And how did families who thought like the Silks get along with other Ina? Joan Braithwaite had said that there were many who loved Milo. They must have loved him in spite of his arrogance. Or perhaps they loved him for what he had been when he was younger. He was far from lovable now.

Dulce Ramos,

Gerald and Eric Cooper.

Haha

“As soon as she was gone, though, two men left.

“A tall fellow and a short one,” Gerald explained. “And they didn’t look alike at all except for the hair.

Jack Roan sym Katharine Dahlman.

Jack Roan had gone—had left Punta Nublada.

Zane Carter,

Hiram Majors sym Preston,

he and my sister both went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh at the same time.

Saw her in some play—she was a drama major—and then ran into her the next day and invited her to have coffee with him.”

Jack Roan was—I guess—so eager to go after Theodora that he told a really stupid lie.”

Layla Cory,

Haha

You stand there hugging yourself as though you were trying to hold yourself together. They did this to you, Shori. They want you this way!”

“It’s as though they’re playing a game.

You must seem more Ina that they.” “I don’t know how to do that.”

“She told him to give his place to one of his sons or she would, before the Council, question his mental stability.”

Haha

tripped and almost fell on the steps that lead up into the offices.

This was what Preston had meant. Theodora had been murdered so that I would begin to stumble in all sorts of ways.

Nice metaphor or parable

“When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.

Good advice in any circumstance

it’s a good thing they have some protection against us.

We need our symbionts more than most of them know. We need not only their blood, but physical contact with them and emotional reassurance from them.

We either weave ourselves a family of symbionts, or we die.

“You want your sons to mate with this person. You want them to get black, human children from her. Here in the United States, even most humans will look down on them. When I came to this country, such people were kept as property, as slaves.

“Over the centuries, I’ve seen too much racial prejudice among humans. It isn’t a weed we need growing among us.”

I did not like Joan Braithwaite. But I thought I might eventually love her.

Haha

I lay there and got lost in Theodora’s scent and in grief.

you’re willing to ask me questions.” Instead of just ordering him around, yes. That would be important to a symbiont, to anyone.

I got the impression he was happy, that he liked being their symbiont. That’s usually a good sign.”

They killed so many just to get to me.”

“Theodora wasn’t even a person to Katharine.

Preston

“Russell Silk,

They destroy one another by the millions, and it makes no difference to their numbers.

They breed and breed and breed, while we live long and breed slowly.

Their lives are brief and, without us, riddled with disease and violence....

Preston, is there a legal, nonlethal way of questioning someone’s behavior?

Brilliant

you could ask for a Council of the Goddess.”

“The rule of seven would apply,”

“Zoë Fotopoulos?”

Haha

“Joan Braithwaite?”

“Alexander Svoboda?”

“Peter Marcu?”

“Ana Morariu?”

Nothing wrong, she seemed to think, with letting your friends get away with mass murder.

Haha