Butler, Octavia - Dawn

"Is that what happened with you?"

He moved restlessly. "Sort of." He got up from his platform, touched all ten fingers to the wall behind him, and waited as the wall opened. Behind the wall was a food storage cabinet of the kind she had often seen at home. Home? Well, what else was it? She lived there.

He took out sandwiches, something that looked like a small pie-that was a pie-and something that looked like French fries.

Lilith stared at the food in surprise. She had been content with the foods the Oankali had given her-good variety and flavor once she began staying with Nikanj's family. She had missed meat occasionally, but once the Oankali made it clear they would neither kill animals for her nor allow her to kill them while she lived with them, she had not minded much. She had never been a particular eater, had never thought of asking the Oankali to make the food they prepared look more like what she was used to.

"Sometimes," he said, "I want a hamburger so bad I dream about them. You know the kind with cheese and bacon and dill pickles and-"

"What's in your sandwich?" she asked.

"Fake meat. Mostly soybean, I guess. And quat." Quatasayasha, the cheeselike Oankali vegetable. "I eat a lot of quat myself," she said.

"Then have some. You don't really want to sit there and watch me eat, do you?"

She smiled and took the sandwich be offered. She was not hungry at all, but eating with him was companionable and safe. She took a few of his French fries, too.

"Cassava," he told her. "Tastes like potatoes, though. I'd never heard of cassava before I got it here. Some tropical plant the Oankali are raising."

"I know. They mean for those of us who go back to Earth to raise it and use it. You can make flour from it and use it like wheat flour."

He stared at her until she frowned. "What's the matter?" she asked.

His gaze slid away from her and he stared downward at nothing. "Have you really thought about what it will be like?" he asked softly. "I mean. . . Stone Age! Digging in the ground with a stick for roots, maybe eating bugs, rats. Rats survived, I hear. Cattle and horses didn't. Dogs didn't. But rats did."

"I know."

"You said you bad a baby."

"My son. Dead."

"Yeah. Well, I'll bet when he was born, you were in a hospital with doctors and nurses all around helping you and giving you shots for the pain. How would you like to do it in a jungle with nothing around but bugs and rats and people who feel sorry for you but can't do shit to help you?"

"I had natural childbirth," she said. "It wasn't any fun, but it went okay."

"What do you mean? No painkiller?"

"None. No hospital either. Just something called a birthing center-a place for pregnant women who don't like the idea of being treated as though they were sick."

He shook his head, smiled crookedly. "I wonder bow many women they had to go through before they came up with you. A lot, I'll bet. You're probably just what they want in ways I haven't even thought of."

His words bit more deeply into her than she let him see. With all the questioning and testing she had gone through, the two and a half years of round-the-clock observation- the Oankali must know her in some ways better than any human being ever had. They knew how she would react to just about everything they put her through. And they knew how to manipulate her, maneuver her into doing whatever they wanted. Of course they knew she had had certain practical experiences they considered important. If she had had an especially difficult time giving birth-if she had had to be taken to the hospital in spite of her wishes, if she had needed a caesarean-they would probably have passed over her to someone else.

"Why are you going back?" Titus asked. "Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?"

"I don't."

His eyes widened. "Then why don't you-"

"We don't have to forget what we know," she said. She smiled to herself. "I couldn't forget if I wanted to. We don't have to go back to the Stone Age. We'll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we'll at least have a chance."

"They don't teach for free! They didn't save us out of kindness! It's all trade with them. You know what you'll have to pay down there!"

"What have you paid to stay up here?"

Silence.

He ate several more bites of food. "The price," he said softly, "is just the same. When they're finished with us there won't be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they'll finish."

"I don't believe it has to be like that."

"Yeah. But then, you haven't been Awake long."

"Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it's still a damn big place."

He looked at her with such open, undisguised pity that she drew back angrily. "Do you think they don't know what a big place it is?" he asked.

"If I thought that, I wouldn't have said anything to you and whoever's listening. They know how I feel."

"And they know how to make you change your mind."

"Not about that. Never about that."

"Like I said, you haven't been Awake long."

What bad they done to him, she wondered. Was it just that they had kept him Awake so long-Awake and for the most part without human companions? Awake and aware that everything he had ever known was dead, that nothing he could have on Earth now could measure up to his former life. How had that gone down with a fourteen-year-old?

"If you wanted it," he said, "they'd let you stay here with me."

"What, permanently?"

"Yeah."

"No."

He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her and came over to her. "You know they expect you to say no," he said. "They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all over again that they were right about you." He stood tall and broad, too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was afraid of him. "Surprise them," he continued softly. "Don't do what they expect-just for once. Don't let them play you like a puppet."

He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.

She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own ranks?

He let her go. "You could be safe here," he said softly. "Down on Earth... how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if you don't forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of them will want to be cavemen-drag you around, put you in a harem, beat the shit out of you." He shook his head. "Tell me I'm wrong. Sit there and tell me I'm wrong."

She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually-as soon as they realized they could get away with it.

He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn't bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure.

"Look," she said when he drew back, "I'm not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali."

"What difference do they make? It's not like human beings were watching us."

"It is to me."

"Lilith," he said, shaking his head, "they will always be watching."

"The other thing I'm not interested in doing is giving them a human child to tamper with."