Butler, Octavia - Dawn

"You probably already have."

Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.

"They didn't have enough of us for what they call a normal trade," he said. "Most of the ones they have will be Dinso-people who want to go back to Earth. They didn't have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more."

"While we slept? Somehow they-?"

"Somehow!" he hissed. "Anyhow! They took stuff from men and women who didn't even know each other and put it together and made babies in women who never knew the mother or the father of their kid-and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they grew the baby in another kind of animal. They have animals they can adjust to-to incubate human fetuses, as they say. Or maybe they don't even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin from one person and make babies out of it- cloning, you know. Or maybe they use one of their prints- and don't ask me what a print is. But if they've got one of you, they can use it to make another you even if you've been dead for a hundred years and they haven't got anything at all left of your body. And that's just the start. They can make people in ways I don't even know how to talk about. Only thing they can't do, it seems, is let us alone. Let us do it our own way."

His hands were almost gentle on her. "At least they haven't until now." He shook her abruptly. "You know how many kids I got? They say, 'Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.' And I've never even seen a woman in all the time I've been here."

He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.

Yet it would do no good to fight him physically. She was tall, had always thought of herself as strong, but he was much bigger-six-four, six-five, and stocky.

"They've had two hundred and fifty years to fool around with us," she said. "Maybe we can't stop them, but we don't have to help them."

"The hell with them." He tried to unfasten her jacket.

"No!" she shouted, deliberately startling him. "Animals get treated like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send them back to their owners. What do they care? They're just animals!"

He tore her jacket off then fumbled with her pants. She threw her weight against him suddenly and managed to shove him away.

He stumbled backward for several steps, caught himself, came at her again.

Screaming at him, she swung her legs over the platform she had been sitting on and came down standing on the opposite side of it. Now it was between them. He strode around it.

She sat on it again and swung her legs over, keeping it between them.

"Don't make yourself their dog!" she pleaded. "Don't do this!"

He kept coming, too far gone to care what she said. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. He cut her off from the bed by coming over it himself. He cornered her against a wall.

"How many times have they made you do this before?" she asked desperately. "Did you have a sister back on Earth? Would you know her now? Maybe they've made you do it with your sister."

He caught her arm, jerked her to him.

"Maybe they've made you do it with your mother!" she shouted.

He froze and she prayed she had hit a nerve.

"Your mother," she repeated. "You haven't seen her since you were fourteen. How would you know if they brought her to you and you-"

He hit her.

Staggered by shock and pain, she collapsed against him and he half pushed and half threw her away as though he had found himself clutching something loathsome.

She fell hard, but was not quite unconscious when he came to stand over her.

"I never got to do it before," he whispered. "Never once with a woman. But who knows who they mixed the stuff with." He paused, stared at her where she had fallen. "They said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!" He kicked her hard. The last sound she heard before she lost consciousness was his ragged, shouted curse.

9

She awoke to voices--Oankali near her, not touching her. Nikanj and one other.

"Go away now," Nikanj was saying. "She is regaining consciousness."

"Perhaps I should stay," the other said softly. Kahguyaht. She had thought once that all Oankali sounded alike with their quiet androgynous voices, but now she couldn't mistake Kahguyaht's deceptively gentle tones. "You may need help with her," it said.

Nikanj said nothing.

After a while Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles and said, "I'll leave. You're growing up faster than I thought. Perhaps she's good for you after all."

She was able to see it step through a wall and leave. Not until it was gone did she become aware of the aching of her own body-her jaw, her side, her bead, and in particular, her left arm. There was no sharp pain, nothing startling. Only dull, throbbing pain, especially noticeable when she moved.

"Be still," Nikanj told her. "Your body is still healing. The pain will be gone soon."

She turned her face away from it, ignoring the pain. There was a long silence. Finally it said, "We didn't know." It stopped, corrected itself. "I didn't know how the male would behave. He has never lost control so completely before. He hasn't lost control at all for several years."

"You cut him off from his own kind," she said through swollen lips. "You kept him away from women for how long? Fifteen years? More? In some ways you kept him fourteen for all those years."

"He was content with his Oankali family until he met you."

"What did he know? You never let him see anybody else!"

"It wasn't necessary. His family took care of him."

She stared at it, feeling more strongly than ever, the difference between them-the unbridgeable alienness of Nikanj. She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate. It could do the same with her, although it could force her to obey whether she understood or not. Or it could turn her over to others who would use force against her.

"His family thought you should have mated with him," it said. "They knew you wouldn't stay with him permanently, but they believed you would share sex with him at least once."

Share sex, she thought sadly. Where had it picked up that expression? She had never said it. She liked it, though. Should she have shared sex with Paul Titus? "And maybe gotten pregnant," she said aloud.

"You would not have gotten pregnant," Nikanj said.

And it had her full attention. "Why not?" she demanded.

"It isn't time for you to have children yet."

"Have you done something to me? Am I sterile?"

"Your people called it birth control. You are slightly changed. It was done while you slept, as it was done to all humans at first. It will be undone eventually."

"When?" she asked bitterly. "When you're ready to breed me?"

"No. When you're ready. Only then."

"Who decides? You?"

"You, Lilith. You."

Its sincerity confused her. She felt that she had learned to read its emotions through posture, sensory tentacle position, tone of voice. . . . It seemed not only to be telling the truth-as usual-but to be telling a truth it considered important. Yet Paul Titus, too, had seemed to be telling the truth. "Does Paul really have over seventy children?" she asked.

"Yes. And he's told you why. The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay." Nikanj hesitated. "They should not have told Paul what they were doing. But that's always a difficult thing to realize-and sometimes we realize it too late."