Butler, Octavia - Imago

“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.