Adulthood Rites (3 page)

“Cull means to clear selectively. We only take out the plants with contact poisons.”

“I see.” He paused, trying to understand the new scent he had detected. “There’s someone between us and the river,” he whispered suddenly.

“All right.” They had reached the garden. She bent over a cassava plant and pretended to find it hard to pull up so that she could move casually around to face the river. They could not see the water from where they were. There was plenty of ground between themselves and the river—and plenty of cover.

“I can’t see them,” she said. “Can you?” She had only her eyes to look with, but her senses were sharper than those of other Humans—somewhere between Human and construct.

“It’s a man,” Akin said. “He’s hidden. He’s Human and a stranger.” Akin breathed in the adrenaline bite of the man’s scent. “He’s excited. Maybe afraid.”

“Not afraid,” she said softly. “Not of a woman pulling cassavas and carrying a baby. I hear him now, moving around near the big Brazil nut tree.”

“Yes, I hear!” Akin said excitedly.

“Keep quiet! And hold on. I might have to move fast.”

The man had stopped moving. Suddenly, he stepped into view, and Akin saw that he had something in his hands.

“Shit!” Lilith whispered. “Bow and arrow. He’s a resister.”

“You mean those sticks he’s holding?”

“Yes. They’re weapons.”

“Don’t turn that way. I can’t see him.”

“And he can’t see you. Keep your head down!”

He realized then that he was in danger. Resisters were Humans who had decided to live without the Oankali—and thus without children. Akin had heard that they sometimes stole construct children, the most Human-looking construct children they could find. But that was stupid because they had no idea what the child might be like after metamorphosis. Oankali never let them keep the children anyway.

“Do you speak English?” Lilith called, and Akin, straining to look over her shoulder, saw the man lower his bow and arrow.

“English is the only Human language spoken here,” Lilith said. It comforted Akin that she neither sounded nor smelled frightened. His own fear diminished.

“I heard you talking to someone,” the man said in slightly accented English.

“Hold tight,” Lilith whispered.

Akin grasped the material of the cloth sack in which she carried him. He held on with hands and legs, wishing he were stronger.

“My village isn’t far from here,” she said to the man. “You’ll be welcome there. Food. Shelter. It’s going to rain soon.”

“
Who were you talking to!
” the man demanded, coming nearer.

“My son.” She gestured toward Akin.

“What? The baby?”

“Yes.”

The man came closer, peering at Akin. Akin peered back over Lilith’s shoulder, curiosity overwhelming the last of his fear. The man was shirtless, black-haired, clean-shaven, and stocky. His hair was long and hung down his back. He had cut it off in a straight line across his forehead. Something about him reminded Akin of the picture he had seen of Joseph. This man’s eyes were narrow like Joseph’s, but his skin was almost as brown as Lilith’s.

“The kid looks good,” he said. “What’s wrong with him?”

She stared at him. “Nothing,” she said flatly.

The man frowned. “I don’t mean to offend you. I just … Is he really as healthy as he looks?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t seen a baby since back before the war.”

“I’d guessed that. Will you come back to the village with us? It isn’t far.”

“How is it you were allowed to have a boy?”

“How is it your mother was allowed to have a boy?”

The man took a final step toward Lilith and was abruptly too close. He stood very straight and tried to intimidate her with his stiff, angry posture and his staring eyes. Akin had seen Humans do that to one another before. It never worked with constructs. Akin had never seen it work with Lilith. She did not move.

“I’m Human,” the man said. “You can see that. I was born before the war. There’s nothing Oankali about me. I have two parents, both Human, and no one told them when and whether they could have kids and what the sex of those kids would be.
Now, how is it you were allowed to have a boy?
”

“I asked for one.” Lilith reached out, snatched the man’s bow, and broke it over her knee before the man was fully aware of what had happened. Her move had been almost too swift for him to follow even if he had been expecting it.

“You’re welcome to food and shelter for as long as you like,” she said, “but we don’t allow weapons.”

The man stumbled back from her. “I mistook you for Human,” he said. “My god, you look Human.”

“I was born twenty-six years before the war,” she said. “I’m Human enough. But I have other children in that village. You won’t take weapons among them.”

He looked at the machete hanging from her belt.

“It’s a tool,” she said. “We don’t use them on each other.”

He shook his head. “I don’t care what you say. That was a heavy bow. No Human woman should have been able to take it from me and break it that way.”

She walked away from him, unsheathed her machete, and cut a pineapple. She picked it up carefully, slashed off most of its spiky top, and cut two more.

Akin watched the man while Lilith put her cassavas and pineapples into her basket. She cut a stalk of bananas, and once she was certain they were free of snakes and dangerous insects, she handed them to the man. He took a quick step back from her.

“Carry these,” she said. “They’re all right. I’m glad you happened along. The two of us will be able to carry more.” She cut several dozen ribbons of quat—an Oankali vegetable that Akin loved—and tied it into a bundle with thin lianas. She also cut fat stalks of scigee, which the Oankali had made from some war-mutated Earth plant. Humans said it had the taste and texture of the flesh of an extinct animal—the pig.

Lilith bound the scigee stalks and fastened the bundle behind her just above her hips. She swung Akin to one side and carried her full basket on the other.

“Can you watch him without using your eyes?” she whispered to Akin.

“Yes,” Akin answered.

“Do it.” And she called to the man, “Come. This way.” She walked away down the path to the village, not waiting to see whether the man would follow. It seemed for a while that the man would stay behind. The narrow path curved around a huge tree, and Akin lost sight of him. There was no sound of his following. Then there was a burst of sound—hurrying feet, heavy breathing.

“Wait!” the man called.

Lilith stopped and waited for him to catch up. He was, Akin noticed, still carrying the stalk of bananas. He had thrown it over his left shoulder.

“Watch him!” Lilith whispered to Akin.

The man came close, then stopped and stared at her, frowning.

“What the matter?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I just don’t know what to make of you,” he said.

Akin felt her relax a little. “This is your first visit to a trading village, isn’t it?” she said.

“Trading village? So that’s what you call them.”

“Yes. And I don’t want to know what you call us. But spend some time with us. Maybe you’ll accept our definition of ourselves. You came to find out about us, didn’t you?”

He sighed. “I guess so. I was a kid when the war started. I still remember cars, TV, computers … I do remember. But those things aren’t real to me anymore. My parents … All they want to do is go back to the prewar days. They know as well as I do that that’s impossible, but it’s what they talk about and dream about. I left them to find out what else there might be to do.”

“Both your parents survived?”

“Yeah. They’re still alive. Hell, they don’t look any older than I do now. They could still join a … one of your villages and have more kids. They won’t though.”

“And you?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at Akin. “I haven’t seen enough to decide yet.”

She reached out to touch his arm in a gesture of sympathy.

He grabbed her hand and held it at first as though he thought she would try to pull away. She did not. He held her wrist and examined the hand. After a time he let her go.

“Human,” he whispered. “I always heard you could tell by the hands—that the … the others would have too many fingers or fingers that bend in un-Human ways.”

“Or you could just ask,” she said. “People will tell you; they don’t mind. It’s not the kind of thing anyone bothers to lie about. Hands aren’t as reliable as you think.”

“Can I look at the baby’s?”

“No more than you are now.”

He drew a long breath. “I wouldn’t hurt a kid. Even one that wasn’t quite Human.”

“Akin isn’t quite Human,” she said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Not a thing.”

“I mean … What’s different about him?”

“Internal differences. Rapid mental development. Perceptual differences. At metamorphosis, he’ll begin to look different, though I don’t know how different.”

“Can he talk?”

“All the time. Come on.”

He followed her along the path, and Akin watched him through light-sensitive patches on the skin of his shoulder and arm.

“Baby?” the man said peering at him.

Akin, remembering what Margit had told him, turned his head so that he faced the man. “Akin,” he said. “What’s your name?”

The man let his mouth fall open. “How old are you?” he demanded.

Akin stared at him silently.

“Don’t you understand me?” the man asked. He had a jagged scar on one of his shoulders, and Akin wondered what had made it.

The man slapped at a mosquito with his free hand and spoke to Lilith. “How old is he?”

“Tell him your name,” she said.

“What?”

She said nothing more.

The man’s smallest toe was missing from his right foot, Akin noticed. And there were other marks on his body—scars, paler than the rest of his skin. He must have hurt himself often and had no ooloi to help him heal. Nikanj would never have left so many scars.

“Okay,” the man said. “I give up. My name is Augustino Leal. Everybody calls me Tino.”

“Shall I call you that?” Akin asked.

“Sure, why not? Now, how the hell old are you?”

“Nine months.”

“Can you walk?”

“No, I can stand up if there’s something for me to hold on to, but I’m not very good at it yet. Why did you stay away from the villages for so long? Don’t you like kids?”

“I … don’t know.”

“They aren’t all like me. Most of them can’t talk until they’re older.”

The man reached out and touched his face. Akin grasped one of the man’s fingers and drew it to his mouth. He tasted it quickly with a snakelike flick of his tongue and a penetration too swift, too slight to notice. He collected a few living cells for later study.

“At least you put things in your mouth the way babies used to,” he said.

“Akin,” Lilith said, cautioning.

Suppressing his frustration, he let the man’s finger go. He would have preferred to investigate further, to understand more of how the genetic information he read had been expressed and to see what nongenetic factors he could discover. He wanted to try to read the man’s emotions and to find the marks the Oankali had left in him when they collected him from postwar Earth, when they repaired him and stored him away in suspended animation.

Perhaps later he would have the chance.

“If the kid is this smart now, what’s he going to be like as an adult?” Tino asked.

“I don’t know,” Lilith told him. “The only adult male constructs we have so far are Oankali-born—born to Oankali mothers. If Akin is like them, he’ll be bright enough, but his interests will be so diverse and, in some cases, so just plain un-Human that he’ll wind up keeping to himself a lot.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But … you didn’t have to have kids.”

“As it happens, I did have to. I had two construct kids by the time they brought me down from the ship. I never had a chance to run off and pine for the good old days!”

The man said nothing. If he stayed long, he would learn that Lilith had these flares of bitterness sometimes. They never seemed to affect her behavior, though often they frightened people. Margit had said, “It’s as though there’s something in her trying to get out. Something terrible.” Whenever the something seemed on the verge of surfacing, Lilith went alone into the forest and stayed away for days. Akin’s oldest sisters said they used to worry that she would leave and not come back.

“They forced you to have kids?” the man asked.

“One of them surprised me,” she said. “It made me pregnant, then told me about it. Said it was giving me what I wanted but would never come out and ask for.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” She shook her head from side to side. “Oh, yes. But if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone.”

T
HE RAIN HAD BEGUN
by the time they reached the village, and Akin enjoyed the first few warm drops that made their way through the forest canopy. Then they were indoors—followed by everyone who had seen Lilith arrive with a stranger.

“They’ll want your life story,” Lilith told him softly. “They want to hear about your village, your travels; anything you know may be news to us. We don’t get that many travelers. And later, when you’ve eaten and talked and whatever, they’ll try to drag you off to their beds. Do what you like. If you’re too tired for any of this now, say so, and we’ll save your party until tomorrow.”

“You didn’t tell me I would have to entertain,” he said, staring at the inpouring of Humans, constructs, and Oankali.

“You don’t have to. Do what you like.”

“But …” He looked around helplessly, cringed away from an Oankali-born unsexed construct child who touched him with one of the sensory tentacles growing from its head.

“Don’t scare him,” Akin told it from Lilith’s back. He spoke in Oankali. “There aren’t any of us where he comes from.”

“Resister?” the child asked.

“Yes. But I don’t think he means any harm. He didn’t try to hurt us.”

“What does the kid want?” Tino asked.

“It’s just curious about you,” Lilith told him. “Do you want to talk to these people while I put together a meal?”