Butler, Octavia - Imago

I never told them they couldn’t leave. They found out as Lilith had. When they had had all they could take of Aaor for a while, when they realized I could not be talked out of going with them to their mountain home, they went away on their own. They went together into the forest and stayed for several days. It was a foretaste for me of what I would suffer when they died.

I panicked when I realized they were gone. TomÁs was supposed to spend the night with Aaor and me. The moment I thought about him, though, I realized he wasn’t in camp. Neither was Jesusa. Their scent was beginning to fade.

Why? Where had they gone? Which way had they gone? I focused all my concentration on picking up their scent trail, finding out where their scent was strongest and freshest. Once I discovered the path they had taken into the forest, I would follow them.

Ahajas stopped me.

She was large and quiet and immensely comfortable to be near. Oankali females tended to be that way. I knew that sometimes after a session with Aaor, Nikanj went to her and literally seemed to grow into her body. She was so much larger, it looked like a child against her.

Now she blocked my path.

“Let them come back to you,” she said quietly.

I stared at her with my eyes while my sensory tentacles all focused to the path Jesusa and TomÁs had taken.

“I saw them leave,” she said. “They took packs and machetes. They’ll be all right, and in a few days, they’ll be back.”

“Resisters could capture them!” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “But it isn’t likely. They were on their own for a long time before they met you.”

“But they—”

“They are as able as any Humans to take care of themselves. Lelka, you should have told them how they were bound to you.”

“I was afraid to. I was afraid they’d do this.”

“They probably would have. But now when they begin to need you and feel desperate and afraid, they won’t know why.”

“That’s why I want to go after them.”

“Speak to Lilith first. She used to do this, you know. Nikanj had to learn very young that she would stretch the cord until it almost strangled her. And if Nikanj went after her, she would curse it and hate it.”

I knew that about Lilith. I went to her and stood near her for a while. She was drawing with black ink or dye on bark cloth. In Lo, other Humans had treasured her drawings— scenes of Earth before the war, of animals long extinct, of distant places, cities, the sea

. She did paintings, too, sometimes with dyes from plants. She had done little of that during our exile. Now she was returning to it, stripping bark from the limb of a nearby fig tree, preparing it and making her dye and her brushes and sharp sticks. She had told me once that it was something she did to calm herself. Something she did to make herself feel Human.

She patted the ground next to her, and I went over and cleared a space and sat down.

“They’re gone,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She was drawing an outdoor family meal with all of us gathered and eating from gourd dishes and Lo bowls. All. My parents, my siblings—even Aaor as it had looked before it went into the forest—and Jesusa and TomÁs. Everyone was completely recognizable, though it seemed to me they shouldn’t have been. They were made up only of a few black lines.

“Your mates will never trust me or Tino again,” she said. “That will be our reward for keeping quiet about what was happening to them.”

“Shall I go after them?”

“Not now. In a few days. Go when your own feelings tell you they’re suffering, maybe turning back. Meet them somewhere between here and wherever they’ve gone. Can you track them well enough to do that?”

“Yes.”

“Do it, then. And don’t expect them to behave as though they’re glad to see you for any reasons except the obvious biological need.”

“I know.”

“They won’t love or even like you for quite a while.”

“Or trust me,” I said miserably.

“That won’t last. It’s us they’ll distrust and resent.”

I moved around to face her. “They’ll know you kept silent for me.”

She smiled a bitter smile. “Pheromones, Lelka. Your scent won’t let them hate you for long. They can hate us, though. I’m sorry for that. I like them. You’re very lucky to have them.”

I did as she said. And when I brought home my silent, resentful mates, they did as she had said they would. Tino and TomÁs seemed to find some common ground by the time Aaor had completed its metamorphosis, but Jesusa held an unyielding grudge. She hardly spoke to my mother from then on. And when it was time for us to go, and she learned that Aaor had to go with us, she almost stopped speaking to me. That was another battle. Aaor did have to go. If we left it behind with only Nikanj to help it, it would not survive. I suspected it was surviving now only because of our combined efforts and its new hope of Human mates to bond with. I suspected, too, that Jesusa understood this. She never threatened to change her mind, to refuse us and leave Aaor to its fate. She was gentler with Aaor than she was with me. Contact with it through me was still torment for her, but its illness reached something in her that perhaps nothing else could. I, on the other hand, was both her comfort and torment. She stopped touching me. She accepted my touch, even enjoyed it as much as she ever had. But she stopped reaching out to me.

“You did wrong,” TomÁs told me when he had been watching us for a while. “If she wasn’t so good at punishing you, I’d have to think of a way to do it myself.”

“But you don’t mind,” I said. He had felt only relief when I met them in the forest and brought them home. Jesusa had been full of resentment and anger.

“She minds,” he said. “She feels trapped and betrayed. I mind that.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I was more afraid of losing you than you can imagine.”

“I can see Aaor,” he said. “I don’t have to imagine.”

“No. It was the two of you I wanted. Not just to avoid pain.”

He looked at me for a moment, then smiled. “She’ll forgive you eventually, you know. And she’ll be very suspicious of why she’s done it. And she’ll be right. Won’t she?”

I looped a sensory arm around his neck and did not bother to answer.

The rainy season was just ending when the four of us prepared to leave camp. Aaor was strong again—able to walk all day and live on whatever it ran across. And if we slept with it every two or three nights, it could hold its shape. Yet with us all around, it was hideously lonely, empty, almost blank. It could follow and care for itself—just barely. I had to touch it sometimes to rouse it. It was as though it were lost within itself, and only surfaced when we were in contact. It rarely spoke.

When we were ready to go, Nikanj stood between my Oankali parents to give me final advice and to say goodbye.

“Don’t come back to this place,” it said. “In a few months, we’ll return to Lo. We’ll give you plenty of time, but we need to go home. Once we get there, everyone will have to know about your mates and their village. Lo will signal the ship and the Humans will be picked up. If the four of you succeed, you’ll be six by then, and perhaps you’ll be back at Lo yourselves.” It focused on me for a time without speaking, and I could not help thinking that if we weren’t careful, we might not live to get back to Lo. I might never see my parents again. Nikanj must have been thinking the same thing.

“Lelka, I have memories to give you,” it said. “Let me pass them to you now. I think it’s time.”

Genetics memories. Viable copies of cells that Nikanj had received from its own ooloi parent or that it had collected itself or accepted from its mates and children. It had duplicated everything it possessed and now it would pass the whole inheritance on to me. It was time. I was a mated adult.