Imago x-3 Read online

  I got up and stepped around the fire to them. “Let me have your machete for a few moments.”

  Jesusa grabbed TomÁs’s arm to stop him, but he simply handed me the machete. I took it and went into the forest. Bamboo was plentiful in the area so I cut that and a few stalks from saplings. I would cover these with palm and wild banana leaves. I also took a stem of bananas. They could be cooked for breakfast. They weren’t ripe enough for Humans to eat raw. And there was a nut tree nearby—not to mention more tubers. All this so close, and yet TomÁs had been very hungry when I touched him.

  “You haven’t cut anything for yourself,” Jesusa said as I handed back the machete. It meant a great deal to her to get the knife back and to get a comfortable pallet to sleep on. She was still wary, but less obviously on edge.

  “I’m used to the ground,” I said. “No insect will bother me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t smell good to them. I would taste even worse.”

  She thought for a moment. “That would protect you against biting insects, but what about those that sting?”

  “Even those. I smell offensive and dangerous. Humans don’t notice my scent in any negative way, but insects always do.”

  “Oh, I would be willing to stink if it would keep them off me,” TomÁs said. “Can you make me immune to them?”

  Jesusa turned to frown at him.

  I smiled to myself. “No, I can’t help you with that.” Not until they let me sleep between them. But insects would bother them less while I healed them. If someday they mated with an adult ooloi, insects would hardly bother them at all. There was time enough for them to learn that. I lay down again beside the dying fire.

  Jesusa and TomÁs lay quietly, first awake, then drifting into sleep. I did not sleep, though I lay still, resting. The scent of the Humans was a mild torment to me because I could not touch them—would not touch them until they had learned to trust me. There was something strange about them—about TomÁs, anyway—something I didn’t yet understand. And my failure to understand was unusual. Normally if I touched someone to correct a flaw, I understood that person’s body completely. I had to get my hands on TomÁs again. And I had to touch Jesusa. But I wanted them to let me do it. Immature as I was, my scent must be working on them. And TomÁs’s healed neck must be working on him. He couldn’t possibly like his growing disabilities—and surely other Humans did not like the way he looked. Humans cared very much how other people looked. Even Jesusa must seem grotesquely ugly to them—though neither TomÁs nor Jesusa acted as though they cared how they looked. Very unusual. Perhaps it was because there were two of them. If they were siblings they had been together most of their lives. Perhaps they sustained one another.

  6

  They awoke just before dawn the next morning. Jesusa awoke first. She shook TomÁs awake, then put a hand over his mouth so that he would not speak. He took her hand from his mouth and sat up. How much could they see? It was still fairly dark.

  Jesusa pointed downriver through the forest.

  TomÁs shook his head, then glanced at me and shook his head again.

  Jesusa pulled at him, both her face and her body language communicating pleading and terror.

  He shook his head again, tried to take her arms. His manner was reassuring, but she evaded him. She stood up, looked down at him. He would not get up.

  She sat down again, touching him, her mouth against his ear. It was more as though she breathed the words. I heard them, but I might not have if I hadn’t been listening for them.

  “For the others!” she whispered. “For all of the others, we must go!”

  He shut his eyes for a moment, as though the soft words hurt him.

  “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

  He got up and followed her into the forest. He did not look at me again. When I couldn’t see them any longer, I got up. I was well rested and ready to track them—to stay out of sight and listen and learn. They were going downriver as I had to do to get home. That was convenient, though the truth was, I would have followed them anywhere. And when I spoke to them again, I would know the things they had not wanted me to know.

  I followed them for most of the day. Whatever was driving them, it kept them from stopping for more than a few minutes to rest. They ate almost nothing until the end of the day when, with metal hooks they had not shown me, they managed to catch a few small fish. The smell of these cooking was disgusting, but the conversation, at least, was interesting.

  “We should go back,” TomÁs said. “We should cross the river to avoid Jodahs, then we should go back.”

  “I know,” Jesusa agreed. “Do you want to?”

  “No.”

  “It will rain soon. Let’s make a shelter.”

  “Once we’re home, we’ll never be free again,” he said. “We’ll be watched all the time, probably shut up for a while.”

  “I know. Cut leaves from that plant and that one. They’re big enough for good roofing.”

  Silence. Sounds of a machete hacking. And sometime later, TomÁs’s voice, “I would rather stay here and be rained on every day and starve every other day.” There was a pause. “I would almost rather cut my own throat than go back.”

  “We will go back,” Jesusa said softly.

  “I know.” TomÁs sighed. “Who else would have us anyway—except Jodah’s people.”

  Jesusa had nothing to say on that subject. They worked for a while in silence, probably erecting their shelter. I didn’t mind being rained on, so I stretched out silently and lay with most of my attention focused on the two Humans. If someone approached me from a different direction, I would notice, but if people or animals were simply moving around nearby, not coming in my direction, I would not be consciously aware of them.

  “We should have let Jodahs teach us about safe, edible plants,” TomÁs said finally. “There’s probably food all around us, but we don’t recognize it. I’m hungry enough to eat that big insect right there.”

  Jesusa said, with amusement in her voice, “That is a very pretty red cockroach, brother. I don’t think I’d eat it.”

  “At least there will be fewer insects when we get home.”

  “They’ll separate us.” Jesusa became grim again. “They’ll make me marry Dario. He has a smooth face. Maybe we’ll have mostly smooth-faced children.” She sighed. “You’ll choose between Virida and Alma.”

  “Alma,” he said wearily. “She wants me. How do you think she will like leading me around? And how will we speak to one another when I’m deaf?”

  “Hush, little brother. Why think about that?”

  “You don’t have to think about it. It won’t happen to you.” He paused, then continued with sad irony. “That leaves you free to worry about bearing child after child after child, watching most of them die, and being told by some smooth-faced elder who looks younger than you do that you’re ready to do it all again—when she’s never done it at all.”

  Silence.

  “Jesusita.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? It’s true. It happened to Mama. It will happen to me.”

  “It may not be so bad. There are more of us now.”

  In a tone that made a lie of every word she said, Jesusa agreed. “Yes, little brother. Perhaps it will be better for our generation.”

  They were quiet for so long, I thought they wouldn’t speak again, but he said, “I’m glad to have seen the lowland forest. For all its insects and other discomforts, it’s a good place stuffed with life, drunk with life.”

  “I think the mountains better,” she said. “The air is not so thick or so wet. Home is always better.”

  “Maybe not if you can’t see it or hear it. I don’t want that life, Jesusa. I don’t think I can stand it. Why should I help give the people more ugly cripples anyway? Will my children thank me? I don’t think they will.”

  Jesusa made no comment.

  “I’ll see that you get back,” he said. “I promise you that.”

  “We’ll both get back,” she said with uncharacteristic harshness. “You know your duty as well
as I know mine.”

  There was no more talk.

  There was no more need for talk. They were fertile! Both of them. That was what I had spotted in TomÁs—spotted, but not recognized. He was fertile, and he was young. He was young! I had never touched a Human like him before—and he had never touched an ooloi. I had thought his rapid aging was part of his genetic disorder, but I could see now that he was aging the way Humans had aged before their war—before the Oankali arrived to rescue the survivors and prolong their lives.

  TomÁs was probably younger than I was. They were both probably younger than I was. I could mate with them!

  Young Humans, born on Earth, fertile among themselves. A colony of them, diseased, deformed, but breeding!

  Life.

  I lay utterly still. I had all I could do to keep myself from getting up, going to them at once. I wanted to bind them to me absolutely, permanently. I wanted to lie between them tonight. Now. Yet if I weren’t careful, they would reject me, escape me. Worse, their hidden people would have to be found. I would have to betray them to my family, and my family would have to tell others. The settlement of fertile Humans would be found and the people in it collected. They would be allowed to choose Mars or union with us or sterility here on Earth. They could not be allowed to continue to reproduce here, then to die when we separated and left an uninhabitable rock behind.

  No Human who did not decide to mate with us was told this last. They were given their choices and not told why.

  What could TomÁs and Jesusa be told? What should they be told to ease the knowledge that their people could not remain as they were? Obviously Jesusa, in particular, cared deeply about these people—was about to sacrifice herself for them. TomÁs cared enough to walk away from certain healing when it was what he desperately wanted. Now, clearly, he was thinking about death, about dying. He did not want to reach his home again.

  How could either of them mate with me, knowing what my people would do to theirs?

  And how should I approach them? If they were potential mates and nothing more, I would go to them now. But once Jesusa understood that I knew their secret, her first question would be, “What will happen to our people?” She would not accept evasion. If I lied to her, she would learn the truth eventually, and I did not think she would forgive me for the lies. Would she forgive me for the truth?

  When she and TomÁs saw that they had given their people away, would they decide to kill me, to die themselves, or to do both?

  7

  The next day, Jesusa and TomÁs crossed the river and began their journey home. I followed. I let them cross, waited until I could no longer see or hear them, then swam across myself. I swam upriver for a while, enjoying the rich, cool water. Finally I went up the bank and sorted their scent from the many.

  I followed it silently, resting when they rested, grazing on whatever happened to be growing nearby. I had not decided what I would do, but there was comfort for me just being within range of their scent.

  Perhaps I should follow them all the way to their home, see its location, and take news of it back to my family. Then other people, Oankali and construct, would do what was necessary. I would not be connected with it. But I also might not be allowed to mate with Jesusa and TomÁs. I might be sent to the ship in spite of everything. Jesusa and TomÁs might choose Mars once others had healed them and explained their choices to them. Or they might mate with others

  .

  The more I followed them, the more I wanted them, and the more unlikely it seemed that I would ever mate with them.

  After four days, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just joined them. If I could not have them as mates permanently, I could enjoy them for a while.

  They had caught no fish that night. They had found wild figs and eaten them, but I doubted that these had satisfied them.

  I found nuts and fruit for them, and root stalks that could be roasted and eaten. I wrapped all this in a crude basket I had woven of thin lianas and lined with large leaves. I could only do this by biting through the lianas in a way that would have disturbed the resisters, so I was glad they could not see me. A resister had said to me years before that we constructs and Oankali were supposed to be superior beings, but we insisted on acting like animals. Oddly both ideas seemed to disturb him.

  I took my basket of food and went quietly into Jesusa and TomÁs’s camp. It was dark and they had built a small shelter and made a fire. Their fire still burned, but they had lain down on their pallets. Jesusa’s even breathing said she was asleep, but TomÁs lay awake. His eyes were open, but he did not see me until I was beside him.

  Then before he could get up, before he could shout, I was down beside him, one hand over his mouth, the other grasping his hand and forcing it to maintain its hold on the machete, but to be still.

  “Jodahs,” I whispered, and he stopped struggling and stared at me.

  “It can’t be you!” he whispered when I let him speak. He remembered a scaly Jodahs, like a humanoid reptile. But I could not stay within range of their scent for four days and go on looking that way. Now I was brown-skinned and black-haired and I thought it was likely that I looked the way TomÁs would when I healed him. He was the one I had touched and studied.

  He let me take the machete from his hand and put it aside. I already had several body tentacles linked into his nervous system. I put him to sleep so that I could take care of Jesusa before she awoke.

  From the moment I said my name, he was never afraid. “Will you heal me?” he whispered in his last moments of consciousness.

  “I will,” I said. “Completely.”

  He closed his eye, trusting himself to me in a way that made it hard for me to withdraw from him and turn to attend to Jesusa.

  When I did turn, it was almost too late. She was awake, her eyes full of confusion and terror. She drew back as I turned, and she almost pulled the trigger on the rifle she was holding.

  “I’m Jodahs,” I told her.

  She shot me.

  The bullet went through one of my hearts and I had all I could do to stop myself from lunging at her reflexively and stinging her to death. I grabbed the gun from her and threw it against a nearby tree. It broke into two pieces, the wooden stock splintering and separating from the metal, and the metal bending.

  I grasped her wrists so she couldn’t run. I couldn’t trust myself to put her to sleep until I had my own problem under control.

  She struggled and shouted for TomÁs to wake up and help her. She managed to bite me twice, managed to kick me between the legs, then stopped her struggling for a moment to absorb the reality that I had only smooth skin between my legs, and that her kick did not bother me at all.

  She twisted frantically and tried to gouge my eyes. I held on. I had to hold her. She couldn’t see in the dark. She might run into the surrounding forest and hurt herself—or run toward the river and fall down the high, steep bluff there. Or perhaps she meant to try to shoot me again with what was left of the gun or use the machete on me. I could not let her hurt herself or hurt me again and perhaps make me kill her. Nothing would be more irrational than that.

  She stopped struggling abruptly and stared at one of the bite wounds she had inflicted on my left arm. In the firelight, even Human eyes could see it. It was healing, and that seemed to fascinate her. She watched until there was no visible sign of injury. Just a little smeared blood and saliva.

  “You’re doing that inside,” she said, “healing your wound.”

  I lay down, dragging her with me. She lay facing me, watching me with fear and distrust.

  “I can heal myself as well as most adults,” I said. “I’m not very good at controlling pain in myself, though.”

  She looked concerned, then deliberately hardened her expression. “What did you do to TomÁs?”

  “He’s only asleep.”

  “No! He would have awakened.”

  “I drugged him a little. He didn’t mind. I promised I would heal him.”

  “We don’t want your healing!”

  Th
e worst of the pain from my wound was over. I relaxed in relief and drew a long breath. I let go of her hands and she drew them away, looked at them, then back to me.

  I grinned at her. “You’re not afraid of me now. And you don’t want to hurt me again.”

  I could feel her face grow warmer. She sat up abruptly, very much against her own will. My scent was at work on her. She would probably have difficulty resisting it because she was not consciously aware of it.

  “We truly don’t want your healing,” she repeated. “Though

  I’m sorry I shot you.” She sat still, looking down at me. “You look like TomÁs, you know? You look the way he should look. You could be our brother—or perhaps our sister.”

  “Neither.”

  “I know. Why did you follow us?”

  “Why did you run from me?”

  She stared at the machete. She would have to get over or around both TomÁs and me to get it.

  “No, Jesusa,” I said. “Stay here. Let me talk to you.”

  “You know about us, don’t you?” she demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “I knew you would—once you’d touched us both.”

  “I should have known from your scent alone. I let your disorder and my own inexperience confuse me. But, no, I didn’t learn what I know from touching you just now. I learned it from following you and hearing you and TomÁs talk.”

  Her face took on a look of outrage. “You listened? You hid in the bushes and listened to what I said to my brother!”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. We don’t usually do such things, but I needed to know about you. I needed to understand you.”

  “You needed nothing!”

  “You were new to me. New, different, in need of help with your genetic disorder, and alone. You knew I could help you, yet you ran away. When you know us better, you may understand that it was as though you were dragging me by several ropes. The question wasn’t whether I would follow you, but how long I could follow before I joined you again.”