Adulthood Rites (20 page)

Or were they?

Who among the Oankali was speaking for the interests of resister Humans? Who had seriously considered that it might not be enough to let Humans choose either union with the Oankali or sterile lives free of the Oankali? Trade-village Humans said it, but they were so flawed, so genetically contradictory that they were often not listened to.

He did not have their flaw. He had been assembled within the body of an ooloi. He was Oankali enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know that resister Humans were being treated with cruelty and condescension.

Yet he had not even been able to make Amma and Shkaht understand. He did not know enough yet. These resisters had to help him learn more.

A
KIN WAS WITH THE
people of Phoenix for over a year. He spent most of this time in the hills, watching the salvaging and taking part when the salvagers would let him. One of the men set him to cleaning small, decorative items—jewelry, figurines, small bottles, jars, eating utensils. He knew he was given the job mainly to keep him from underfoot, but the work pleased him. He tasted everything before he cleaned it and afterward. Often he found Human leavings protected within containers. There were bits of hair, skin, nail. From some of these he salvaged lost Human genetic patterns that ooloi could re-create if they needed the Human genetic diversity. Only an ooloi could tell him what was useful. He memorized everything to give to Nikanj someday.

Once Sabina caught him tasting the inside of a small bottle. She tried to snatch the bottle away. Fortunately, he managed to dodge her hands and withdraw the thin, searching filaments of his tongue before she broke them. She should have gone back to Phoenix when her group left. She had done her share of what she called grubbing in the dirt, but she had stayed. Akin believed she had stayed because of him. He had not forgotten that she had been willing to take part in cutting off Amma’s and Shkaht’s tentacles. But she seemed brighter than Neci, more able, more willing to learn.

“What was this called?” he asked her once there was no chance of her injuring him.

“It was a perfume bottle. You keep it out of your mouth.”

“Where were you going?” he asked.

“What?”

“If you have time, I’ll tell you why I put things in my mouth.”

“All kids put things in their mouths—and sometimes they poison themselves.”

“I
must
put things in my mouth to understand them. And I must try to understand them. Not to try would be like having hands and eyes and yet always being tied and blindfolded. It would make me … not sane.”

“Oh, but—”

“And I’m too old now to poison myself. I could drink the fluid that used to be in this bottle and nothing would happen. It would pass through me quickly, almost unchanged, because it isn’t very dangerous. If it were very dangerous, my body would either change its structure and neutralize it or … contain it in a kind of sealed flesh bottle and expel it. Do you see?”

“I … understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I believe you.”

“It’s important that you understand. Especially you.”

“Why?”

“Because just now, you almost hurt me a lot. You could have injured me more than any poison could. And you could have made me sting you. If I did that, you would die. That’s why.”

She had drawn back from him. Her face had changed slightly. “You always look so normal … sometimes I forget.”

“Don’t forget. But don’t hate me either. I’ve never stung anyone, and I don’t ever want to.”

Some of the wariness left her eyes.

“Help me learn,” he said. “I want to know the Human part of myself better.”

“What can I teach you?”

He smiled. “Tell me why Human kids put things in their mouths. I’ve never known.”

H
E MADE THEM ALL
his teachers. He told only Tate what he meant to do. When she had heard, she looked at him then shook her head sadly. “Go ahead,” she said. “Learn all you can about us. It can’t do any harm. But afterward, I think you’ll find you have a few more things to learn about the Oankali, too.”

He worried about that. No other resister could have made him worry about the Oankali. But Tate had been almost a relative. She would have been an ooloi relative if she had stayed with Kahguyaht and its mates. He felt her to be almost a relative now. He trusted her. Yet he could not give up his own belief that he could someday speak for the resisters.

“Shall I tell them there must be Akjai Humans?” he asked her. “Would you be willing to begin again, isolated somewhere far from here?” Where, he could not imagine, but
somewhere!

“If it were a place where we could live, and if we could have children.” She drew a breath, wet her lips. “We would do anything for that. Anything.”

There was an intensity that he had never heard before in her voice. And there was something else. He frowned. “Would you go?”

She had come over to watch him scrub a piece of colorful mosaic—a square of bright bits of glass fitted together to make a red flower against a blue field.

“That’s beautiful,” Tate said softly. “There was a time when I would have thought it was cheap junk. Now, it’s beautiful.”

“Would you go?” Akin asked again.

She turned and walked away.

G
ABE TOOK HIM AWAY
from his tasting and cleaning for a while—took him higher into the hills where the great mountains in the distance could be seen clearly. One of them smoked and steamed into the blue sky and was somehow very beautiful—a pathway deep into the Earth. A breathing place. A kind of joint where great segments of the Earth’s crust came together. Akin could look at the huge volcano and understand a little better how the Earth worked—how it would work until it was broken and divided between departing Dinso groups. Akin chose the edible plants he thought would taste best to Gabe and introduced the man to them. In return, Gabe told him about a place called New York and what it had been like to grow up there. Gabe talked more than he ever had—talked about acting, which Akin did not understand at all at first.

Gabe had been an actor. People gave him money and goods so that he would pretend to be someone else—so that he would take part in acting out a story someone had made up.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you any stories?” he asked Akin.

“Yes,” Akin said. “But they were true.”

“She never told you about the three bears?”

“What’s a bear?”

Gabe looked first angry, then resigned. “I still forget sometimes,” he said. “A bear is just one more large, extinct animal. Forget it.”

That night in a small, half-ruined stone shelter before a campfire, Gabe became another person for Akin. He became an old man. Akin had never seen an old man. Most of the old Humans who had survived the war had been kept aboard the ship. The oldest were dead by now. The Oankali had not been able to extend their lives for more than a few years, but they kept them healthy and free of pain for as long as possible.

Gabe became an old man. His voice became heavier, thicker. His body seemed heavier, too, and painfully weary, bent, yet hard to bend. He was a man whose daughters had betrayed him. He was sane, and then not sane. He was terrifying. He was another person altogether. Akin wanted to get up and run out into the darkness.

Yet he sat still, spellbound. He could not understand much of what Gabe said, though it seemed to be English. Somehow, though, he felt what Gabe seemed to want him to feel. Surprise, anger, betrayal, utter bewilderment, despair, madness. …

The performance ended, and Gabe was Gabe again. He turned his face upward and laughed aloud. “Jesus,” he said. “
Lear
for a three-year-old. Damn. It felt good, anyway. It’s been so long. I didn’t know I remembered all that stuff.”

“Don’t you do that for the people in Phoenix?” Akin asked timidly.

“No. I never have. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I farm now or I work metal. I dig up junk from the past and turn it into stuff people can use today. That’s what I do.”

“I liked the acting. It scared me at first, and I couldn’t understand a lot of it, but … It’s like what we do—constructs and Oankali. It’s like when we touch each other and talk with feelings and pressures. Sometimes you have to remember a feeling you haven’t had for a long time and bring it back so you can transmit it to someone else or use a feeling you have about one thing to help someone understand something else.”

“You do that?”

“Yes. We can’t do it very well with Humans. The ooloi can, but males and females can’t.”

“Yeah.” He sighed and lay down on his back. They had cleared some of the plant growth and rubble from the stone floor of the shelter and could wrap themselves in their blankets and lie on it in comfort.

“What was this place?” Akin asked, looking up at the stars through the roofless building. Only the overhang of the hill provided any shelter at all if it happened to rain that night.

“Don’t know,” Gabe said. “It could have been some peasant’s house. I suspect it goes back further, though. I think it’s an old Indian dwelling. Maybe even Inca or some related people.”

“Who were they?”

“Short brown people. Probably looked something like Tino’s parents. Something like you, maybe. They were here for thousands of years before people who look like me or Tate got here.”

“You and Tate don’t look alike.”

“No. But we’re both descended from Europeans. Indians were descended from Asians. The Incas are the ones everyone thinks of for this part of the world, but there were a lot of different groups. To tell the truth, I don’t think we’re far enough into the mountains to be seeing Inca ruins. This is a damn old place, though.” He pulled his mouth into a smile. “Old and Human.”

They walked for many days, exploring, finding other ruined dwellings, describing a great circle back to the salvage camp. Akin never asked why Gabe took him on the long trip. Gabe never volunteered an explanation. He seemed pleased that Akin insisted on walking most of the time and usually managed to keep up. He willingly tried eating plants Akin recommended and liked some of them well enough to take them back as small plants, seeds, stalks, or tubers. Akin guided him in this, too.

“What can I take back that will grow?” Gabe would say. He could not know how much this pleased Akin. What he and Gabe were doing was what the Oankali always did—collect life, travel and collect and integrate new life into their ships, their already vast collection of living things, and themselves.

He studied each plant very carefully, telling Gabe exactly what he must do to keep the plant alive. Automatically, he kept within himself a memory of genetic patterns or a few dormant cells from each sample. From these, an ooloi could recreate copies of the living organism. Ooloi liked cells from or memories of several individuals within a species. For the Humans, Akin saw that Gabe took seed when there was seed. Seed could be carried in a leaf or a bit of cloth tied with a twist of grass. And it would grow. Akin would see to that. Even without an ooloi to help, he could taste a plant and read its needs. With its needs met, it would thrive.

“This is about the happiest I’ve ever seen you,” Gabe remarked as they neared the salvage camp.

Akin grinned at him but said nothing. Gabe would not want to know that Akin was collecting information for Nikanj. It was enough for him to know that he had pleased Akin very much.

Gabe did not smile back, but only because he made an obvious effort not to.

When they reached camp a few days later, Gabe met Tate with none of the odd anxiety he often showed when she had been out of his sight for a while.

T
EN DAYS AFTER AKIN
and Gabe returned, a new salvage team arrived to take their turn at the dig. While both teams were still on the site, the Oankali arrived.

They were not seen. There was no outcry among the Humans. Akin was busy scrubbing a small, ornate crystal vase when he noticed the Oankali scent.

He put the vase down carefully in a wooden box lined with cloth—a box used for especially delicate, especially beautiful finds. Akin had never broken one of these. There was no reason to break one now.

What should he do? If Humans spotted the Oankali, there might be fighting. Humans could so easily provoke the lethal sting reflex of the Oankali. What to do?

He spotted Tate and called to her. She was digging very carefully around something large and apparently delicate. She was digging with what looked like a long, thin knife and a brush made of twigs. She ignored him.

He went to her quickly, glad there was no one near her to hear.

“I have to go,” he whispered. “They’re here.”

She almost stabbed herself with the knife. “Where!”

“That way.” He looked east but did not point.

“Of course.”

“Walk me out there. People will notice if I get too far from camp alone.”

“Me? No!”

“If you don’t, someone might get killed.”

“If I do, I might get killed!”

“Tate.”

She looked at him.

“You know they won’t hurt you. You know. Help me. Your people are the ones I’m trying to save.”

She gave him a look so hostile that he stumbled back from her. Abruptly she grabbed him, picked him up, and began walking east.

“Put me down,” he said. “Let me walk.”

“Shut up!” she said. “Just tell me when I’m getting close to them.”

He realized belatedly that she was terrified. She could not have been afraid of being killed. She knew the Oankali too well for that. What then?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You were the only one I dared to ask. It will be all right.”

She took a breath and put him down, held his hand. “It won’t be all right,” she said. “But that’s not your fault.”

They went over a rise, out of sight of the camp. There, several Oankali and two Humans waited. One of the Humans was Lilith. The other … looked like Tino.

“Oh, Jesus God!” Tate whispered as she caught sight of the Oankali. She froze. Akin thought she might turn and run, but somehow she managed not to move. Akin wanted to go to his family, but he too kept very still. He did not want to leave Tate standing alone and terrified.