Adulthood Rites (34 page)

“I’ve heard some of them,” the female said. “You’ll probably drop them eventually.”

“No. We’ll change them to suit our needs, but we won’t drop them. They give very useful information, especially when people are looking for mates.”

“Jodahs doesn’t sound like any name I’ve heard before,” the male said.

“Oankali name. An Oankali named Jodahs died helping with the emigration. My birth mother said he should be remembered. The Oankali don’t have a tradition of remembering people by naming kids after them, but my birth mother insisted. She does that sometimes—insists on keeping Human customs.”

“You look very Human,” the female said softly.

I smiled. “I’m a child. I just look unfinished.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Good god! When will you be considered an adult?”

“After metamorphosis.” I smiled to myself. Soon. “I have a brother who went through it at twenty-one, and a sister who didn’t reach it until she was thirty-three. People change when their bodies are ready, not at some specific age.”

She was silent for some time. We reached the last of the true houses of Lo—the houses that had been grown from the living substance of the Lo entity. Humans without Oankali mates could not open walls or raise table, bed, or chair platforms in such houses. Left alone in our houses, these Humans were prisoners until some construct, Oankali, or mated Human freed them. Thus, they had been given first a guest house, then a guest area. In that area they had built their dead houses of cut wood and woven thatch. They used fire for light and cooking and occasionally they burned down one of their houses. Houses that did not burn became infested with rodents and insects which ate the Human’s food and bit or stung the Humans themselves. Periodically Oankali went in and drove the non-Human life out. It always came back. It had been feeding on Humans, eating their food, and living in their buildings since long before the Oankali arrived. Still the guest area was reasonably comfortable. Guests ate from trees and plants that were not what they appeared to be. They were extensions of the Lo entity. They had been induced to synthesize fruits and vegetables in shapes, flowers, and textures that Humans recognized. The foods grew from what appeared to be their proper trees and plants. Lo took care of the Humans’ wastes, keeping their area clean, though they tended to be careless about where they threw or dumped things in this temporary place.

“There’s an empty house there,” I said, pointing.

The female stared at my hand rather than at where I pointed. I had, from a Human point of view, too many fingers and toes. Seven per. Since they were part of distinctly Human-looking hands and feet, Humans didn’t usually notice them at once.

I held my hand open, palm up so that she could see it, and her expression flickered from curiosity and surprise through embarrassment back to curiosity.

“Will you change much in metamorphosis?” she asked.

“Probably. The Human-born get more Oankali and the Oankali-born get more Human. I’m first-generation. If you want to see the future, take a look at some of the third- and fourth-generations constructs. They’re a lot more uniform from start to finish.”

“That’s not our future,” the male said.

“Your choice,” I said.

The male walked away toward the empty house. The female hesitated. “What do you think of our emigration?” she asked.

I looked at her, liking her, not wanting to answer. But such questions should be answered. Why, though, were the Human females who insisted on asking them so often small, weak people? The Martian environment they were headed for was harsher than any they had known. We would see that they had the best possible chance to survive. Many would live to bear children on their new world. But they would suffer so. And in the end, it would all be for nothing. Their own genetic conflict had betrayed and destroyed them once. It would do so again.

“You should stay,” I told the female. “You should join us.”

“Why?”

I wanted very much not to look at her, to go away from her. Instead I continued to face her. “I understand that Humans must be free to go,” I said softly. “I’m Human enough for my body to understand that. But I’m Oankali enough to know that you will eventually destroy yourselves again.”

She frowned, marring her smooth forehead. “You mean another war?”

“Perhaps. Or maybe you’ll find some other way to do it. You were working on several ways before your war. “

“You don’t know anything about it. You’re too young.”

“You should stay and mate with constructs or with Oankali,” I said. “The children we construct are free of inherent flaws. What we build will last.”

“You’re just a child, repeating what you’ve been told!”

I shook my head. “I perceive what I perceive. No one had to tell me how to use my senses any more than they had to tell you how to see or hear. There is a lethal genetic conflict in Humanity, and you know it.”

“All we know is what the Oankali have told us.” The male had come back. He put his arm around the female, drawing her away from me as though I had offered some threat. “They could be lying for their own reasons.”

I shifted my attention to him. “You know they’re not,” I said softly. “Your own history tells you. Your people are intelligent, and that’s good. The Oankali say you’re potentially one of the most intelligent species they’ve found. But you’re also hierarchical—you and your nearest animal relatives and your most distant animal ancestors. Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient. The new was too often put at the service of the old. It will be again. You’re bright enough to learn to live on your new world, but you’re so hierarchical you’ll destroy yourselves trying to dominate it and each other. You might last a long time, but in the end, you’ll destroy yourselves.”

“We could last a thousand years,” the male said. “We did all right on Earth until the war.”

“You could. Your new world will be difficult. It will demand most of your attention, perhaps occupy your hierarchical tendencies safely for a while.”

“We’ll be free—us, our children, their children.”

“Perhaps.”

“We’ll be fully Human and free. That’s enough. We might even get into space again on our own someday. Your people might be dead wrong about us.”

“No.” He couldn’t read the gene combinations as I could. It was as though he were about to walk off a cliff simply because he could not see it—or because he, or rather his descendants, would not hit the rocks below for a long time. And what were we doing, we who knew the truth? Helping him reach the cliff. Ferrying him to it.

“We might outlast your people here on Earth,” he said.

“I hope so,” I told him. His expression said he didn’t believe me, but I meant it. We would not be here—the Earth he knew would not be here—for more than a few centuries. We, Oankali and construct, were space-going people, as curious about other life and as acquisitive of it as Humans were hierarchical. Eventually we would have to begin the long, long search for a new species to combine with to construct new life-forms. Much of Oankali existence was spent in such searches. We would leave this solar system in perhaps three centuries. I would live to see the leave-taking myself. And when we broke and scattered, we would leave behind a lump of stripped rock more like the moon than like his blue Earth. He did not know that. He would never know it. To tell him would be a cruelty.

“Do you ever think of yourself or your kind as Human?” the female asked. “Some of you look so Human.”

“We feel our Humanity. It helps us to understand both you and the Oankali. Oankali alone could never have let you have your Mars colony.”

“I heard they were helping!” the male said. “Your … your parent said they were helping!”

“They help because of what we constructs tell them: that you should be allowed to go even though you’ll eventually destroy yourselves. The Oankali believe … the Oankali
know to the bone
that it’s wrong to help the Human species regenerate unchanged because it
will
destroy itself again. To them it’s like deliberately causing the conception of a child who is so defective that it must die in infancy. “

“They’re wrong. Someday we’ll show them how wrong.”

It was a threat. It was meaningless, but it gave him some slight satisfaction. “The other Humans here will show you where to gather food,” I said. “If you need anything else, ask one of us.” I turned to go.

“So goddamn patronizing,” the male muttered.

I turned back without thinking. “Am I really?”

The male frowned, muttered a curse, and went back into the house. I understood then that he was just angry. It bothered me that I sometimes made them angry. I never intended to.

The female stepped to me, touched my face, examined a little of my hair. Humans who hadn’t mated among us never really learned to touch us. At best, they annoyed us by rubbing their hands over sensory spots, and once their hands found the spots they never liked them.

The female jerked her hand back when her fingers discovered the one below my left ear.

“They’re a little like eyes that can’t close to protect themselves,” I said. “It doesn’t exactly hurt us when you touch them, but we don’t like you to.”

“So what? You have to teach people how to touch you?”

I smiled and took her hand between my own. “Hands are always safe,” I said. I left her standing there, watching me. I could see her through sensory tentacles in my hair. She stood there until the male came out and drew her inside.

I
WENT BACK TO NIKANJ
and sat near it while it took care of family matters, while it met with people from the Oankali homeship, Chkahichdahk, which circled the Earth out beyond the orbit of the moon, while it exchanged information with other ooloi or took biological information from my siblings. We all brought Nikanj bits of fur, flesh, pollen, leaves, seeds, spores, or other living or dead cells from plants or animals that we had questions about or that were new to us.

No one paid any attention to me. There was an odd comfort in that. I could examine them all with my newly sharpened senses, see what I had never seen before, smell what I had never noticed. I suppose I seemed to doze a little. For a time, Aaor, my closest sibling—my Oankali-born sister—came to sit beside me. She was the child of my Oankali mother, and not yet truly female, but I had always thought of her as a sister. She looked so female—or she had looked female before I began to change. Now she … Now
it
looked the way it always should have. It looked eka in the true meaning of the word—a child too young to have developed sex. That was what we both were—for now. Aaor smelled eka. It could literally go either way, become male or female. I had always known this, of course, about both of us. But now, suddenly, I could no longer even think of Aaor as she. It probably would be female someday, just as I would probably soon become the male I appeared to be. The Human-born rarely change their apparent sex. In my family, only one Human-born had changed from apparent female to actual male. Several Oankali-born had changed, but most knew long before their metamorphosis that they felt more drawn to become the opposite of what they seemed.

Aaor moved close and examined me with a few of its head and body tentacles. “I think you’re close to metamorphosis,” it said. It has not spoken aloud. Children learned early that it was ill mannered to speak aloud among themselves if others nearby were having ongoing vocal conversations. We spoke through touch signals, signs, and multisensory illusions transmitted through head or body tentacles—direct neural stimulation.

“I am,” I answered silently. “But I feel … different.”

“Show me.”

I tried to re-create my increased sensory awareness for it, but it drew away.

After a time, it touched me again lightly. In tactile signals only, it said, “I don’t like it. Something’s wrong. You should show Dichaan.”

I did not want to show Dichaan. That was odd. I hadn’t minded showing Aaor. I felt no aversion to showing Nikanj—except that it would probably send me to my fathers.

“What about me disturbs you?” I asked Aaor.

“I don’t know,” it answered. “But I don’t like it. I’ve never felt it before. Something is wrong.” It was afraid, and that was odd. New things normally drew its attention. This new thing repelled it.

“It isn’t anything that will hurt you,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

It got up and went away. It didn’t say anything. It just left. That was out of character. Aaor and I had always been close. It was only three months younger than I was, and we’d been together since it was born. It had never walked away from me before. You only walk away from people you could no longer communicate with.

I went over to Nikanj. It was alone now. One of our neighbors had just left it. It focused a cone of its long head tentacles on me, finally noticing that there was something different about me.

“Metamorphosis, Eka?”

“I think so.”

“Let me check. Your scent is … strange.”

The tone of its voice was strange. I had been around when siblings of mine went into metamorphosis. Nikanj had never sounded quite that way.

It wrapped the tip of one sensory arm around my arm and extended its sensory hand. Sensory hands were ooloi appendages. Nikanj did not normally use them to check for metamorphosis. It could have used its head or body tentacles just like anyone else, but it was disturbed enough to want to be more precise, more certain.

I tried to feel the filaments of the sensory hand as they slipped through my flesh. I had never been able to before, but I felt them clearly now. There was no pain, of course. No communication. But I felt as though I had found what I had been looking for. The deep touch of the sensory hand was air after a long, blundering swim underwater. Without thinking I caught its second sensory arm between my hands.

Something went wrong then. Nikanj didn’t sting me. It wouldn’t do that. But something happened. I startled it. No, I shocked it profoundly—and it transmitted to me the full impact of that shock. Its multisensory illusions felt more real than things that actually happened, and this was worse than an illusion. This was a sudden, swift cycling of its own intense surprise and fear. From me to it to me. Closed loop.