Butler, Octavia - Dawn

That was better, she supposed, than their having a foul odor and forcing her to endure it. But it left her bereft of signposts.

She sighed and decided to go back to Kaal-if she could find her way back. She looked around, confirmed her suspicions that she was already disoriented, lost. She would have to ask someone to aim her toward Kaal.

She got up, moved away from the pseudotree she had been leaning against, and scratched a shallow hole in the soil-it actually was soil, Nikanj had told her. She buried her orange peelings, knowing they would be gone within a day, broken down by tendrils of the ship's own living matter.

Or that was what was supposed to happen.

As she shook out her extra jacket and brushed herself off, the ground around the buried peelings began to darken. The color change recaptured her attention and she watched as the soil slowly became mud and turned the same orange that the peelings had been. This was an effect she had never seen before.

The soil began to smell, to stink in a way she found hard to connect with oranges. It was probably the smell that drew the Oankali. She looked up and found two of them standing near her, their head tentacles swept toward her in a point.

One of them spoke to her, and she tried hard to understand the words-did understand some of them, but not fast enough or completely enough to catch the sense of what was being said.

The orange spot on the ground began to bubble and grow. Lilith stepped away from it. "What's happening?" she asked. "Do either of you speak English?"

The larger of the two Oankali-Lilith thought this one was female--spoke in a language neither Oankali nor English. This confused her at first. Then she realized the language sounded like Japanese.

"Fukumoto-san?" she asked hopefully.

There was another burst of what must have been Japanese, and she shook her head. "I don't understand," she said in Oankali. Those words she had learned quickly through repetition. The only Japanese words that came quickly to mind were stock phrases from a trip she had made years before to Japan: Konichiwa, arigato gozaimaso, sayonara.

Other Oankali had gathered to watch the bubbling ground. The orange mass had grown to be about three feet across and almost perfectly circular. It had touched one of the fleshy, tentacled pseudoplants and the pseudoplant darkened and lashed about as though in agony. Seeing its violent twisting Lilith forgot that it was not an individual organism. She focused on the fact that it was alive and she had probably caused it pain. She had not merely caused an interesting effect, she had caused harm.

She made herself speak in slow, careful Oankali. "I can't change this," she said, wanting to say that she couldn't repair the damage. "Will you help?"

An ooloi stepped up, touched the orange mud with one of its sensory arms, held the arm still in the mud for several seconds. The bubbling slowed, then stopped. By the time the ooloi withdrew, the bright orange coloring was also beginning to fade to normal.

The ooloi said something to a big female and she answered, gesturing toward Lilith with her head tentacles.

Lilith frowned suspiciously at the ooloi. "Kahguyaht?" she asked, feeling foolish. But the pattern of this ooloi's head tentacles was the same as Kahguyaht's.

The ooloi pointed its head tentacles toward her. "How have you managed," it asked her, "to remain so promising and yet so ignorant?"

Kahguyaht.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

Silence. It shifted its attention to the healing ground, seemed to examine it once more, then said something loudly to the gathered people. Most of them went smooth and began to disperse. She suspected it had made a joke at her expense.

"So you finally found something to poison," it said to her.

She shook her head. "I just buried a few orange peelings. Nikanj told me to bury my leavings."

"Bury anything you like in Kaal. When you leave Kaal, and you want to throw something away, give it to an ooloi. And don't leave Kaal again until you're able to speak to people. Why are you here?"

Now she refused to answer.

"Fukumoto-san died recently," it said. "No doubt that's why you heard talk of him. You did hear people talking about him, didn't you?"

After a moment she nodded.

"He was one hundred and twenty years old. He spoke no English."

"He was human," she whispered.

"He lived here awake for almost sixty years. I don't think he saw another human more than twice."

She stepped closer to Kahguyaht, studying it. "And it doesn't occur to you that that was a cruelty?"

"He adjusted very well."

"But still-"

"Can you find your way home, Lilith?"

"We're an adaptable species," she said, refusing to be stopped, "but it's wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it."

"Learn our language. When you have, one of us will introduce you to someone who, like Fukumoto, has chosen to live and die among us instead of returning to Earth."

"You mean Fukumoto chose-"

"You know almost nothing," it said. "Come on. I'll take you home-and speak to Nikanj about you."

That made her speak up quickly. "Nikanj didn't know where I was going. It might be tracking me right now."

"No, it isn't. I was. Come on."

5

Kahguyaht took her beneath a hill onto a lower level. There it ordered her onto a small, slow-moving flat vehicle. The transport never moved faster than she could have run, but it got them home surprisingly quickly, no doubt taking a more direct route than she had.

Kahguyaht would not speak to her during the trip. She got the impression it was angry, but she didn't really care. She only hoped it wasn't too angry with Nikanj. She had accepted the possibility that she might be punished somehow for her Tiej trip, but she had not intended to make trouble for Nikanj.

Once they were home, Kahguyaht took Nikanj into the mom she and Nikanj shared, leaving her in what she had come to think of as the dining room. Jdahya and Tediin were there, eating Oankali food this time, the products of plants that would have been deadly to her.

She sat down silently and after a while, Jdahya brought her nuts, fruit, and some Oankali food that had a vaguely meaty taste and texture, though it was actually a plant product.

"Just how much trouble am I in?" she asked as he handed her her dishes.

He smoothed his tentacles. "Not so much, Lilith."

She frowned. "I got the impression Kahguyaht was angry."

Now the smooth tentacles became irregular, raised knots. "That was not exactly anger. It is concerned about Nikanj."

"Because I went to Tiej?"

"No." His lumps became larger, uglier. "Because this is a hard time for it-and for you. Nikanj has left you for it to stumble over."

''What?''

Tediin said something in rapid, incomprehensible Oankali, and Jdahya answered her. The two of them spoke together for a few minutes. Then Tediin spoke in English to Lilith.

"Kahguyaht must teach... same-sex child. You see?"

"And I'm part of the lesson," Lilith answered bitterly.

"Nikanj or Kahguyaht," Tediin said softly.

Lilith frowned, looked to Jdahya for an explanation.

"She means if you and Nikanj weren't supposed to be teaching each other, you would be learning from Kahguyaht."

Lilith shuddered. "Good god," she whispered. And seconds later. "Why couldn't it be you?"

"Ooloi generally handle the teaching of new species."

"Why? If I have to be taught, I'd rather you did it."

His head tentacles smoothed.

"You like him or Kahguyaht?" Tediin asked. Her unpracticed English, acquired just from hearing others speak was much better than Lilith's Oankali.

"No offense," Lilith said, "but I prefer Jdahya."

"Good," Tediin said, her own head smooth, though Lilith did not understand why. "You like him or Nikanj?"