Adulthood Rites x-2 Read online

  “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.”

  21

  He 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.

  22

  Gabe 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 camp-fire, 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 p
lants 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.

  23

  Ten 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.

  Lilith came over to him. She moved so quickly that he had no time to react before she was there, bending, lifting him, hugging him so hard it hurt.

  She had not made a sound. She let Akin taste her neck and feel the utter security of flesh as familiar as his own.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” he whispered finally.

  “I’ve been looking for you for so long,” she said, her voice hardly sounding like her voice at all. She kissed his face and stroked his hair and finally held him away from her. “Three years old,” she said. “So big. I kept worrying that you wouldn’t remember me—but I knew you would. I knew you would.”

  He laughed at the impossible notion of his forgetting her and looked to see whether she was crying. She was not. She was examining him—his hands and arms, his legs

  A shout made them both look up. Tate and the other Human stood facing one another. The sound had been Tate shouting Tino’s name.

  Tino was smiling at her uncertainly. He did not speak until she took him by the arms and said, “Tino, don’t you recognize me? Tino?”

  Akin looked at Tino’s expression, and he knew he did not recognize her. He was alive, but something was the matter with him.

  “I’m sorry,” Tino said. “I’ve had a head injury. I remember a lot of my past, but

  some things are still coming back to me.”

  Tate looked at Lilith. Lilith looked back with no sign of friendliness. “They tried to kill him when they took Akin,” she said. “They clubbed him down, fractured his skull so badly he nearly did die.”

  “Akin said he was dead.”

  “He had good reason to think so.” She paused. “Was it worth his life for you to have my son?”

  “She didn’t do it,” Akin said quickly. “She was my friend. The men who took me tried to sell me in a lot of places before

  before Phoenix wanted to buy me.”

  “Most of the men who took him are dead,” Tate said. “The survivor is paralyzed. There was a fight.” She glanced at Tino. “Believe me, you and Tino are avenged.”

  The Oankali began communicating silently among themselves as they heard this. Akin could see his Oankali parents among them, and he wanted to go to them, but he also wanted to go to Tino, wanted to make the man remember him, wanted to make him sound like Tino again.

  “Tate

  ?” Tino said staring at her. “Is it

  ? Are you

  ?”

  “It’s me,” she said quickly. “Tate Rinaldi. You did half of your growing up in my house. Tate and Gabe. Remember?”

  “Kind of.” He thought for a moment. “You helped me. I was going to leave Phoenix and you said

  you told me how to get to Lo.”

  Lilith looked surprised. “You did?” she asked Tate.

  “I thought he would be safe in Lo.”

  “He should have been.” Lilith drew a deep breath. “That was our first raid in years. We’d gotten careless.”

  Ahajas, Dichaan, and Nikanj detached themselves from the other Oankali and came over to the Human group. Akin could not wait any longer. He reached toward Dichaan, and Dichaan took him and held him for several minutes of relief and reacquaintance and joy. He did not know what the Humans said while he and Dichaan were locked together by as many of Dichaan’s sensory tentacles as could reach him and by Akin’s own tongue. Akin learned how Dichaan had found Tino and struggled to keep him alive and got home only to discover that Ahajas’s child was soon to be born. The family could not search. But others had searched. At first.

  “Was I left among them for so long so that I could study them?” Akin asked silently.

  Dichaan rustled his free tentacles in discomfort. “There was a consensus,” he said. “Everyone came to believe it was the right thing to do except us. We’ve never been alone that way before. Others were surprised that we didn’t accept the general will, but they were
wrong. They were wrong to even want to risk you!”

  “My sibling?”

  Silence. Sadness. “It remembers you as something there then not there. Nakanj kept you in its thoughts for a while, and the rest of us searched. As soon as we could leave it, we began searching. No one would help us until now.”

  “Why now?” Akin asked.

  “The people believed you had learned enough. They knew they had deprived you of your sibling.”

  “It’s

  too late for bonding.” He knew it was.

  “Yes.”

  “There was a pair of construct siblings here.”

  “We know. They’re all right.”

  “I saw what they had, how it was for them.” He paused for a moment remembering, longing. “I’ll never have that.” Without realizing it, he had begun to cry.

  “Eka, you’ll have something very like it when you mate. Until then, you have us.” Dichaan did not have to be told how little this was. It would be long years before Akin was old enough to mate. And bonding with parents was not the same as bonding with a close sibling. Nothing he had touched was as sweet as that bonding.

  Dichaan gave him to Nikanj, and Nikanj coaxed from him all the information he had discovered about plant and animal life, about the salvage pit. This could be given with great speed to an ooloi. It was the work of ooloi to absorb and assimilate information others had gathered. They compared familiar forms of life with what had been or should be. They detected changes and found new forms of life that could be understood, assembled, and used as they were needed. Males and females went to the ooloi with caches of biological information. The ooloi took the information and gave in exchange intense pleasure. The taking and the giving were one act.

  Akin had experienced mild versions of this exchange with Nikanj all his life, but this experience taught him he had known nothing about what an ooloi could take and give until now. Locked to Nikanj, he forgot for a time the pain of being denied bonding with his sibling.

  When he was able to think again, he understood why people treasured the ooloi. Males and females did not collect information only to please the ooloi or get pleasure from them. They collected it because the collecting felt necessary to them and pleased them.