Butler, Octavia - Imago

“The people had already begun to make homes for themselves in the place they had chosen when they realized the Mother would have a child. No one had thought it was possible. People had tried to accept their sterility. They said it was better to have no children than

than to have un-Human children.” TomÁs looked down at his hands. When he raised his head, he found himself looking directly at Tino.

“My people said the same thing before I left them,” Tino said. “They believed it. But it’s a lie.”

TomÁs looked at Lilith, his gaze questioning.

“You know it’s a lie,” Lilith said quietly.

TomÁs looked at me, then continued his story. “The people worried that the Mother’s child might not be Human. No one had seen her attackers. No one knew who or what they had been.”

Nikanj spoke up. “They could not have believed we would send them away sterile, then change our minds and impregnate one of them while killing another.” Even with its soft mature-ooloi’s voice, it managed to sound outraged.

TomÁs was already able to look at it, speak to it. It had been careful not to notice when he studied it as he ate. Now he said, “They said you could do almost anything. Some of them said your powers came from the devil. Some said you were devils. Some were disgusted with that kind of talk. To them, you were only the enemy. They didn’t believe you had raped the Mother. They believed the Mother could be their tool to defeat you. They took her in and cared for her and fed her even when they didn’t have enough to eat themselves. When her son was born, they helped her care for him and they showed him to everyone so that the people could see that he was perfect and Human. They called him Adan. The mother’s name was MarÍa de la Luz. When Adan was weaned, they cared for him. They encouraged his mother to work in the gardens and help with the building and be away from her son. That way, when the time came, when Adan was thirteen years old, they were able to put mother and son together. By then, both had been taught their duty. And by then, everyone had realized that the Mother was not only fertile but mortal—as they seemed not to be. By the time her first daughter was born, the Mother looked older than some of those who had helped her raise her son.

“The Mother bore three daughters eventually. She died with the birth of her second son. That son was

seriously deformed. He had a hole in his back. People say you could see the spine. And he had other things wrong with him. He died and was buried with the Mother in a place

that is sacred to us. The people built a shrine there. Some have seen the Mother when they went there to think or to pray. They’ve seen her spirit.” TomÁs stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?”

“We believe in life,” Ahajas said.

“Life after death?”

Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.”

“But I mean—”

“If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”

“

it would?”

“Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.”

“Nothing more?”

Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”

He did not ask what “Lelka” meant, though he couldn’t have known. It meant mated child—something parents called their adult children and mates of their children. I would have to ask her not to call him that. Not yet.

“When I was little,” TomÁs said, “I planted a tree at the Mother’s shrine.” He smiled, apparently remembering. “Some people wanted to pull it up. It grew so well, though, that no one touched it. People said the Mother must like having it there.” He stopped and looked at Ahajas.

She nodded Humanly and watched him with interest and approval.

“The Mother had twenty-three grandchildren,” he continued. “Fifteen survived. Among these were several who were deformed or who grew deformed. They were fertile, and not all of their children had the deformities. The deformed ones could not be spared. Sometimes smooth children with only a few dark spots on their skin had deformed young. One of our elders said this was a disorder that had been known before the war. He had known a woman who had it and who looked much the way I did before Jodahs healed me.”

Everyone turned at once and focused on me.

“Ask me when his story is finished,” I said. “I don’t know a name for the disease anyway. I can only describe it.”

“Describe it,” Lilith said.

I looked at her and understood that she was asking me for more than a description of the disorder. Her face was set and grim, as it had been since Jesusa promised to stay with me through metamorphosis. She wanted to know what reason there might be apart from her love for me for not telling the Humans how bound to me they were becoming. She wanted to know why she should betray her own kind with silence.

“It was a genetic disorder,” I said. “It affected their skin, their bones, their muscles, and their nervous systems. It made tumors—large ones on TomÁs’s face and upper body. His optic nerve was affected. The bones of his neck and one arm were affected. His hearing was affected. Jesusa was covered head to foot in small very visible tumors. They didn’t impair her ability to move or to use her senses.”

“I was very lucky,” Jesusa said quietly. “I looked ugly, but people didn’t care, because I could have children. I didn’t suffer the way TomÁs did.”

TomÁs looked at her. The look said more than even a shout of protest could have. “You suffered,” he said. “And if not for Jodahs, you would have made yourself go back and suffer more. For the rest of your life.”

She stared at the floor, then into the fire. There was no shyness in the gesture. She simply did not agree with him. The corners of her mouth turned slightly downward. As her brother began speaking again, I took her hand. She jumped, looked at me as though I were a stranger. Then she took my hand between her own and held it. I didn’t think she had noticed that across the room from us Tino was holding one of Nikanj’s sensory arms in exactly the same way.

“Sometimes,” TomÁs was saying, “people have only brown spots and no tumors. Sometimes they have both. And sometimes their minds are affected. Sometimes there are other troubles and they die. Children die.” He let his voice vanish away.

“No more!” Lilith said. “That misery will soon be over for them.”

TomÁs turned to face her. “You must know they won’t thank me or Jesusa for that. They’ll hate us as traitors.”

“I know.”

“Was it that way for you?”

Lilith looked downward for a moment, moving only her eyes. “Has Jodahs told you about the Mars colony?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t exist as an alternative for me.”

“My people may not see it as an alternative either.”

“If they’re wise, they will.” She looked at Nikanj. “Their disorder does sound like something that was around before the war, if it matters. In the United States, people called it neurofibromatosis. I don’t know the Spanish name for it. It could have occurred as a mutation in one or more of the Mother’s children if no one had it until the third generation. I remember reading about a couple of especially horrible prewar cases. Sometimes the tumors became malignant. That would be a special attraction to Jodahs, I think. Ooloi can see great unused potential in that kind of thing.”