Adulthood Rites x-2 Page 23

  who might live there now?

  A man with a gun came out onto the porch and looked down. Gabe.

  “You speak English?” he demanded, pointing his rifle at Akin.

  “I always have, Gabe.” He paused, giving the man time to look at him. “I’m Akin.”

  The man stood staring at him, peering first from one angle, then moving slightly to peer from another. Akin had changed after all, had grown up. Gabe looked the same.

  “I worried that you would be in the hills or out at another village,” Akin said. “I never thought to worry that you might not recognize me. I’ve come back to keep a promise I made to Tate.”

  Gabe said nothing.

  Akin sighed and settled to wait. It was not likely that anyone would shoot him as long as he stood still, hands in sight, unthreatening.

  Men gathered around Akin, waiting for some sign from Gabe.

  “Check him,” Gabe said to one of them.

  The man rubbed rough hands over Akin’s body. He was Gilbert Senn. He and his wife Anne had once stood with Neci, feeling that sensory tentacles should be removed. Akin did not speak to him. Instead, he waited, eyes on Gabe. Humans needed the steady, visible gaze of eyes. Males respected it. Females found it sexually interesting.

  “He says he’s that kid we bought almost twenty years ago,” Gabe said to the men. “He says he’s Akin.”

  The men stared at Akin with hostility and suspicion. Akin gave no indication that he saw this.

  “No worms,” one man said. “Shouldn’t he have them by now?”

  No one answered. Akin did not answer because he did not want to be told to be quiet. He wore only a pair of short pants as he had when these people knew him. Insects no longer bit him. He had learned to make his body unpalatable to them. He was a dark, even brown, small, but clearly not weak. And clearly not afraid.

  “Are you an adult?” Gabe asked him.

  “No,” he said softly.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not old enough.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To see you and Tate. You were my parents for a while.”

  The rifle wavered slightly. “Come closer.”

  Akin obeyed.

  “Show me your tongue.”

  Akin smiled, then showed his tongue. It did not look any more Human now than it had when Gabe had first seen it.

  Gabe drew back, then took a deep breath. He let the rifle point toward the ground. “So it is you.”

  Almost shyly, Akin extended a hand. Human beings often shook one another’s hands. Several had refused to shake his.

  Gabe took the hand and shook it, then seized Akin by both shoulders and hugged him. “I don’t believe it,” he kept saying. “I don’t fucking believe it.

  “It’s okay,” he told the other men. “It’s really him!”

  The men watched for a moment longer, then began to drift away. Watching them without turning, Akin got the impression that they were disappointed—that they would have preferred to beat him, perhaps kill him.

  Gabe took Akin into the house, where everything looked the same—cool and dark and clean.

  Tate lay on a long bench against a wall. She turned her head to look at him, and he read pain in her face. Of course, she did not recognize him.

  “She took a fall,” Gabe said. There was deep pain in his voice. “Yori’s been taking care of her. You remember Yori?”

  “I remember,” Akin said. “Yori once said she’d leave Phoenix if the people here made guns.”

  Gabe gave him an odd look. “Guns are necessary. Raids taught everyone that.”

  “Who

  ?” Tate asked. And then, amazingly, “Akin?”

  He went to her, knelt beside her, and took her hand. He did not like the slightly sour smell of her or the lines around her eyes. How much harm had been done to her?

  How much help would she and Gabe tolerate?

  “Akin,” he echoed. “How did you fall? What happened?”

  “You’re the same,” she said, touching his face. “I mean, you’re not grown up yet.”

  “No. But I have kept my promise to you. I’ve found

  I’ve found what may be the answer for your people. But tell me how you got hurt.”

  He had forgotten nothing about her. Her quick mind, her tendency to treat him like a small adult, the feeling she projected of being not quite trustworthy—just unpredictable enough to make him uneasy. Yet he had accepted her, liked her from his first moments with her. It troubled him more than he could express that she seemed so changed now. She had lost weight, and her coloring, like her scent, had gone wrong. She was too pale. Almost gray. Her hair, too, seemed to be graying. It was much less yellow than it had been. And she was far too thin.

  “I fell,” she said. Her eyes were the same. They examined his face, his body. She took one of his hands and looked at it. “My god,” she whispered.

  “We were exploring,” Gabe said. “She lost her footing, fell down a hill. I carried her back to Salvage.” He paused. “The old camp’s a town itself now. People live there permanently. But they don’t have their own doctor. Some of them helped me bring her down to Yori. That was

  That was bad. But she’s getting better now.” She was not. He knew she was not.

  She had closed her eyes. She knew it as well as he did. She was dying.

  Akin touched her face so that she would open her eyes. Humans seemed almost not to be there when they closed their eyes. They could close off all visual awareness and shut themselves too completely within their own flesh. “When did it happen?” he asked.

  “God. Two, almost three months ago.”

  She had suffered that long. Gabe had not found an ooloi to help her. Any ooloi would have done it at no cost to the Humans. Even some males and females could help. He believed he could. It was clear that she would die if nothing was done.

  What was the etiquette of asking to save someone’s life in an unacceptable way? If Akin asked in the wrong way, Tate would die.

  Best not to ask at all. Not yet. Perhaps not at all. “I came back to tell you I’d kept my promise to you,” he said. “I don’t know if you and the others can accept what I have to offer, but it would mean restored fertility and

  a place of your own.”

  Now her eyes were wide and intent on him. “What place?” she whispered. Gabe had come to stand near them and stare down.

  “Where!” he demanded.

  “It can’t be here,” Akin said. “You would have to build whole new towns in a new environment, learn new ways to, live. It would be hard. But I’ve found people—other constructs—to help me make it possible.”

  “Akin, where?” she whispered.

  “Mars,” he said simply. They stared at him, wordless. He did not know what they might know about Mars, so he began to reassure them. “We can enable the planet to support Human life. We’ll start as soon as I’m mature. The work has been given to me. No one else felt the need to do it as strongly as I did.”

  “Mars?” Gabe said. “Leave Earth to the Oankali? All of Earth?”

  “Yes.” Akin turned his face toward Gabe again. The man must understand as quickly as possible that Akin was serious. He needed to have reason to trust Akin with Tate. And Tate needed a reason to continue to live. It had occurred to Akin that she might be weary of her long, pointless life. That, he realized, was something that would not occur to the Oankali. They would not understand even if they were told. Some would accept without understanding. Most would not.

  Akin turned his face to Tate again. “They left me with you for so long so that you could teach me whether what they had done with you was right. They couldn’t judge. They were so

  disturbed by your genetic structure that they couldn’t do, couldn’t even consider doing what I will do.”

  “Mars?” she said. “Mars?”

  “I can give it to you. Others will help me. But

  you and Gabe have to help me convince resisters.”

  She looked up at Gabe. “Mars,” she whispered, and managed to shake her head.

  “I’ve studied it,” Akin told th
em. “With protection, you could live there now, but you would have to live underground or inside some structure. There’s too much ultraviolet light, an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, and no liquid water. And it’s cold. It will always be colder than it is here, but we can make it warmer than it is now.”

  “How?” Gabe asked.

  “With modified plants and, later, modified animals. The Oankali have used them all before to make lifeless planets livable.”

  “Oankali plants?” Gabe demanded. “Not Earth plants?”

  Akin sighed. “If something the Oankali have modified belongs to them, then you and all your people belong to them now.”

  Silence.

  “The modified plants and animals work much faster than anything that could be found on Earth naturally. We need them to prepare the way for you relatively quickly. The Oankali won’t allow your fertility to be restored here on Earth. You’re older now than most Humans used to get. You can still live a long time, but I want you to leave as soon as possible so that you can still raise children there the way my mother has here and teach them what they are.”

  Tate’s eyes had closed again. She put one hand over them, and Akin restrained an impulse to move it away. Was she crying?

  “We’ve lost almost everything already,” Gabe said. “Now we lose our world and everything on it.”

  “Not everything. You’ll be able to take whatever you want. And plant life from Earth will be added as the new environment becomes able to support it.” He hesitated. “The plants that grow here

  Not many of them will grow there outdoors. But a lot of the mountain plants will eventually grow there.”

  Gabe shook his head. “All that in our lifetimes?”

  “If you keep yourselves safe, you’ll live about twice as long as you already have. You’ll live to see plants from Earth growing unprotected on Mars.”

  Tate took her hand away from her face and looked at him. “Akin, I probably won’t live another month,” she said. “Before now, I didn’t want to. But now

  Can you get help for me?”

  “No!” Gabe protested. “You don’t need help. You’ll be okay!”

  “I’ll be dead!” She managed to glare at him. “Do you believe Akin?” she asked.

  He looked from her to Akin, stared at Akin as he answered. “I don’t know.”

  “What, you think he’s lying?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just a kid. Kids lie.”

  “Yes. And men lie. But don’t you think you can lie to me after all these years. If there’s something to live for, I want to live! Are you saying I should die?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then let me get the only help available. Yori had given up on me.”

  Gabe looked as though he still wanted to protest, but he only looked at her. After a time, he spoke to Akin. “Get someone to help her,” he said. Akin could recall hearing him curse in that same tone of voice. Only Humans could do that: say, “Get someone to help her,” with their mouths, and “Damn her to hell!” with their voices and bodies.

  “I can help her,” Akin said.

  And both Humans were suddenly looking at him with a suspicion he didn’t understand at all.

  “I asked for training,” he said. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “If you aren’t ooloi,” Gabe said, “how can you heal anyone?”

  “I told you, I asked to be taught. My teacher was ooloi. I can’t do everything it could do, but I can help your flesh and your bones heal. I can encourage your organs to repair themselves, even if they wouldn’t normally.”

  “I’ve never heard that males could do that,” Gabe said.

  “An ooloi could do it better. You would enjoy what it did. The safest thing for me to do is make you sleep.”

  “That’s what you’d do if you were an ooloi child, isn’t it?” Tate asked.

  “Yes. But it’s what I’ll always do, even as an adult. Ooloi change and become physically able to do more.”

  “I don’t want more done,” Tate said. “I want to be healed—healed of everything. And that’s all.”

  “I can’t do anything else.”

  Gabe made a short, wordless sound. “You can still sting, can’t you?”

  Akin suppressed an urge to stand up, to face Gabe. His body was almost tiny compared to Gabe’s. Even if he had been larger, physical confrontation would have been pointless. He simply stared at the man.

  After a time, Gabe came closer and bent to face Tate. “You really want to let him do this?”

  She sighed, closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m dying. Of course I’m going to let him do it.”

  And he sighed, stroked her hair lightly. “Yeah.” He turned to glare at Akin. “All right, do whatever it is you do.”

  Akin did not speak or move. He continued to watch Gabe, resenting the man’s attitude, knowing that it did not come only from fear for Tate.

  “Well?” Gabe said, standing straight and looking down. Tall men did this. They meant to intimidate. Some of them wanted to fight. Gabe simply intended to make a point he was in no position to make.

  Akin waited.

  Tate said, “Get out of here, Gabe. Leave us alone for a while.”

  “Leave you with him!”

  “Yes. Now. I’m sick of feeling like shit that’s been stepped in. Go.”

  He went. It was better for him to go because she wanted it than for him to give in to Akin. Akin would have preferred to let him go silently, but he did not dare.

  “Gabe,” he said as the man was going outside.

  Gabe stopped but did not turn.

  “Guard the door. An interruption could kill her.”

  Gabe closed the door behind him without speaking. Immediately, Tate let her breath out in a kind of moan. She looked at the door, then at Akin. “Do I have to do anything?”

  “No. Just put up with having me on that bench with you.”

  This did not seem to disturb her. “You’re small enough,” she said. “Come on.”

  He was no smaller than she was.

  Carefully, he settled himself between her and the wall. “I still have only my tongue to work with,” he said. “That means this will look like I’m biting you on the neck.”

  “You used to do that whenever I’d let you.”

  “I know. Apparently, though, it looks more threatening or more suspicious now.”

  She tried to laugh.

  “You don’t think he’ll come in, do you? It really could kill you if someone tried to pull us apart.”

  “He won’t. He learned a long time ago not to do things like that.”

  “Okay. You won’t sleep as quickly as you would with an ooloi because I can’t sting you unconscious. I have to convince your body to do all the work. Keep still now.”

  He put one arm around her to keep her in position when she lost consciousness, then put his mouth to the side of her neck. From then on, he was aware only of her body—its injured organs and poorly healed fractures

  and its activation of her old illness, her Huntington’s disease. Did she know? Had the disease caused her to fall? It could have. Or she could have fallen deliberately in the hope of escaping the disease.

  She had strained and bruised the ligaments in her back. She had dislocated one of the disks of cartilage between the vertebrae of her neck. She had broken her left kneecap badly. Her kidneys were damaged. Both kidneys. How had she managed to do that? How far had she fallen?

  Her left wrist had been broken but had been set and had almost healed. There were also two rib fractures, nearly healed.

  Akin lost himself in the work—the pleasure—of finding injuries and stimulating her body’s own healing ability. He stimulated her body to produce an enzyme that turned off the Huntington’s gene. The gene would eventually become active again. She must have an ooloi take care of the disease permanently before she left Earth. He could not replace the deadly gene or trick her body into using genes she had not used since before her birth. He could not help her create new ova clean of the Huntington’s gene. What he had already done to suppress the gene was as much as he dared to do.

  3
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br />   Gabe’s interruption of Akin’s healing produced the only serious disruption in his memory Akin ever experienced. All he recalled of it later was abrupt agony.

  In spite of his warning to Gabe, in spite of Tate’s reassurance, Gabe came into the room before the healing was complete. Akin learned later that Gabe returned because hours had passed without a sound from Akin or Tate. He was afraid for Tate, afraid something had gone wrong, and suspicious of Akin.

  He found Akin apparently unconscious, his mouth still against Tate’s neck. Akin did not even seem to breathe. Nor did Tate. Her flesh was cool—almost cold—and that frightened Gabe. He believed she was dying, feared she might already be dead. He panicked.

  First he tried to pull Tate free, alerting Akin on some level that something was wrong. But Akin’s attention was too much on Tate. He had only begun to disengage when Gabe hit him.

  Gabe was afraid of Akin’s sting. He would not grasp Akin and try to pull him away from Tate. Instead, he tried to knock Akin away with quick, hard punches.

  The first blow all but tore Akin loose. It hurt him more than he had ever been hurt, and he could not help passing some of his pain on to Tate.

  Yet he managed not to poison her. He did not know when she began to scream. He continued automatically to hold her. That and the fact that he was stronger than the larger Gabe enabled him to withdraw from Tate’s nervous system and then from her body without being badly injured—and without killing. Later he was amazed that he had done this. His teacher had warned him that males did not have the control to do such things. Oankali males and females avoided healing not only because they were not needed as healers but because they were more likely than ooloi to kill by accident. They could be driven to kill unintentionally by interruptions and even by their subjects if things went wrong. Even Gabe should have been in danger. Akin should have struck at him blindly, reflexively.

  Yet he did not.

  His body coiled into a painfully tight fetal knot and lay vulnerable and more completely unconscious than it had ever been.

  4

  When Akin became able to perceive the world around him again he discovered that he could not move or speak. He lay frozen, aware that sometimes there were Humans around him. They looked at him, sat with him sometimes, but did not touch him. For some time he did not know who they were—or where he was. Later, he compared this period with his earliest infancy. It was a time he remembered but took no part in. But even as an infant, he had been fed and washed and held. Now no hand touched him.