Butler, Octavia - Imago

TomÁs examined my left sensory arm, his touch bringing it to life as nothing else could. “So you’ll give Aaor a little pleasure,” he said. “What good will that do?”

“Aaor wants Human mates. It must have mates of some kind. Until it can get them, will you share what we have with it?”

Jesusa took my right sensory arm and simply held it. “I couldn’t touch Aaor,” she said.

“No need. I’ll touch it. You touch me.”

“Will it be changed back to what it was? Will Nikanj finish changing it before it brings it to us?”

“It will not be a limbless slug when it’s brought to us. But it won’t be what it was when it left us either. Nikanj will make it a land creature again. That will take days. Nikanj won’t even bring it out of the river until it has developed bones again and can support itself. By the time it’s able to come to us, we’ll be ready for it.”

Jesusa let go of my sensory arm. “I don’t know whether I can be ready for it. You didn’t see it, Jodahs. You don’t know how it looked.”

“Hozh showed me. Very bad, I know. But it’s my paired sibling. It’s also the only other being in existence that’s like me. I don’t know what will happen to it if I don’t help it.”

“But Nikanj could—”

“Nikanj is our parent. It will do all it can. It did all it could for me.” I paused, watching her. “Jesusa, do you understand that what happened to Aaor is what was in the process of happening to me when you found me?”

TomÁs moved against me slightly. “You were still in control of yourself,” he said. “You were even able to help us.”

“I never stayed away from home as long as Aaor has. As it was, I don’t think I would have gotten back without you. I would have gone into the water or into the ground for my second metamorphosis. Our changes don’t go well when we’re alone. I don’t know what I would have become.”

“You think Aaor is in its second metamorphosis?” Jesusa asked.

“Probably.”

“No one said so.”

“They would have if you’d asked them. To them it was obvious. Once we get Aaor stabilized, it can finish its change in here. I’ll be up soon.”

“Where will we sleep?” Jesusa asked.

With me! I thought instantly. But I said, “In the main room. We can build a partition if you like.”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll have to go on spending some of our time with Aaor. If we don’t, its change will go wrong again.”

“Oh, god,” Jesusa whispered.

“Have the two of you eaten recently?”

“Yes,” TomÁs said. “We were having dinner with your Human parents when Oni and Hozh found Aaor.”

“Good.” They could share their meal with me and save me the trouble of eating. “Lie down with me.”

They did that willingly enough. Jesusa cringed a little when for the first time I looped a sensory arm around her neck. When she was still, I settled into her with every sensory tentacle on her side of my body. I could not let her move again for a while.

Then with relief that was beyond anything I had ever felt with her, I extended my sensory hand, grasped the back of her neck with it, and sank filaments of it bloodlessly into her flesh.

For the first time, I injected—could not avoid injecting—my own adult ooloi substance into her.

By the neural messages I intercepted, I knew she would have convulsed if she had been able to move at all. She did shout, and for an instant I was distracted by the abrupt adrenaline scent of TomÁs’s alarm.

With my free sensory arm, I touched the skin of his face. “She’s all right,” I made myself say. “Wait.”

Perhaps he believed me. Perhaps the expression on Jesusa’s face reassured him. Whatever the reason, he grew calm and I focused completely on Jesusa. I should have gone into both of them at once, but this first time as an adult, I wanted to savor their individual essences separately.

Adult awareness felt sharper to me, finer and different in some way I had not yet defined. The smell-taste-feel of Jesusa, the rhythm of her heartbeat, the rush of her blood, the texture of her flesh, the easy, right, life-sustaining working of her organs, her cells, the smallest organelles within her cells—all this was a vast, infinitely absorbing complexity. The genetic error that had caused her and her people so much misery was as obvious to me as a single cloud in an otherwise clear sky. I was tempted to begin now to make repairs. Her body cells would be easy to alter, though the alteration would take time. The sex cells, though, the ova, would have to be replaced. Both her parents had the disorder and about three quarters of her own ova were defective. I would have to cause parts of her body to function as they had not since before her birth. Best to save that kind of work until later. Best simply to enjoy Jesusa now—the complex harmonies of her, the built-in danger of her genetically inevitable Human conflict: intelligence versus hierarchical behavior. There was a time when that conflict or contradiction—it was called both—frightened some Oankali so badly that they withdrew from contact with Humans. They became Akjai—people who would eventually leave the vicinity of Earth without mixing with Humans.

To me, the conflict was spice. It had been deadly to the Human species, but it would not be deadly to Jesusa or TomÁs any more than it had been to my parents. My children would not have it at all.

Jesusa, solemn and questioning, beautiful on levels she would probably never understand, would surely be one of the mothers of those children.

I enjoyed her for a few moments more, especially enjoyed her pleasure in me. I could see how my own ooloi substance stimulated the pleasure centers of her brain.

“Monitor them very carefully,” Nikanj had told me. “Give them as much as they can take, and no more. Don’t hurt them, don’t frighten them, don’t overstimulate them. Start them slowly, and in only a little time, they will be more willing to give up eating than to give you up.”

Jesusa had only begun to taste me—me as an adult—and I could see that this was true. She had liked me very much as a subadult. But what she felt now went beyond liking, beyond loving, into the deep biological attachment of adulthood. Literal, physical addiction to another person, Lilith called it. I couldn’t think about it that coldly. For me it meant that soon Jesusa would not want to leave me, would not be able to leave me for more than a few days at a time.

It worked both ways, of course. Soon I would not be able to stand long separation from her. And she could hurt me by deliberately avoiding me. From what I knew of her, she would be willing to do this if she thought she had cause—even though she would inflict as much pain on herself as on me. Lilith had done that to Nikanj many times before the Mars colony was established.

Human males could be dangerous, and Human females frustrating. Yet I felt compelled to have both. So did Aaor, no doubt. If Jesusa and TomÁs ever turned their worst Human characteristics against me, it would probably be on account of Aaor. I had no choice but to try to help it, and Jesusa and TomÁs must help me with it. I did not know whether I could make the experience easy for them.

All the more reason to see that they enjoyed this experience.

Jesusa grew pleasantly weary as I explored her and healed the few bruises and small wounds she had acquired. Her greatest enjoyment would happen when I brought her together with TomÁs and shared the pleasure of each of them with the other, mingling with it my own pleasure in them both. When I could make an ongoing loop of this, we would drown in one another.

But that was for later. Now, without apparent movement, I caressed and lulled Jesusa into deep sleep.

“They will never understand what treasure they are,” Nikanj had said to me once while it sat with me. “They see our differences—even yours, Lelka—and they wonder why we want them.”