Butler, Octavia - Dawn

"He had a right to know!"

"Knowing frightened him and made him miserable. You discovered one of his fears-that perhaps one of his female relatives had survived and been impregnated with his sperm. He's been told that this did not happen. Sometimes he believes; sometimes he doesn't."

"He still had a right to know. I would want to know."

Silence.

"Has it been done to me, Nikanj?"

"No."

"And . . . will it be?"

It hesitated, then spoke softly. "The Toaht have a print of you-of every human we brought aboard. They need the genetic diversity. We're keeping prints of the humans they take away, too. Millenia after your death, your body might be reborn aboard the ship. It won't be you. it will develop an identity of its own."

"A clone," she said tonelessly. Her left arm throbbed, and she rubbed it without actually focusing on the pain.

"No," Nikanj said. "What we've preserved of you isn't living tissue. It's memory. A gene map, your people might call it-though they couldn't have made one like those we remember and use. It's more like what they would call a mental blueprint. A plan for the assembly of one specific human being: You. A tool for reconstruction."

It let her digest this, said nothing more to her for several minutes. So few humans could do that-just let someone have a few minutes to think.

"Will you destroy my print if I ask you to?" she asked.

"It's a memory, Lilith, a complete memory carried by several people. How would I destroy such a thing?"

A literal memory, then, not some kind of mechanical recording or written record. Of course.

After a while, Nikanj said, "Your print may never be used. And if it is, the reconstruction will be as much at home aboard the ship as you were on Earth. She'll grow up here and the people she grows up among will be her people. You know they won't harm her."

She sighed. "I don't know any such thing. I suspect they'll do what they think is best for her. Heaven help her."

It sat beside her and touched her aching left arm with several head tentacles. "Did you really need to know that?" it asked. "Should I have told you?"

It had never asked such a question before. Her arm hurt more than ever for a moment, then felt warm and pain-free. She managed not to jerk away, though Nikanj had not paralyzed her.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"You were having pain in that arm. There's no need for you to suffer."

"I hurt all over."

"I know. I'll take care of it. I just wanted to talk to you before you slept again."

She lay still for a moment, glad that the arm was no longer throbbing. She had barely been aware of this individual pain before Nikanj stopped it. Now she realized it had been among the worst of the many. The hand, the wrist, the lower arm.

"You had a bone broken in your wrist," Nikanj told her. "It will be completely healed by the time you awaken again." And it repeated its question. "Did you really need to know, Lilith?"

"Yes," she said. "It concerned me. I needed to know."

It said nothing for a while and she did not disturb its thoughts. "I will remember that," it said softly, finally.

And she felt as though she had communicated something important. Finally.

"How did you know my arm was bothering me?"

"I could see you rubbing it. I knew it was broken and that I had done very little to it. Can you move your fingers?"

She obeyed, amazed to see the fingers move easily, painlessly.

"Good. I'll have to make you sleep again now."

"Nikanj, what happened to Paul?"

It shifted the focus of some of its head tentacles from her arm to her face. "He's asleep."

She frowned. "Why? I didn't hurt him. I couldn't have."

"He was. . . enraged. Out of control. He attacked members of his family. They say he would have killed them if he could have. When they restrained him, he wept and spoke incoherently. He refused to speak Oankali at all. In English, he cursed his family, you, everyone. He had to be put to sleep-perhaps for a year or more. The long sleeps are healing to nonphysical wounds."

"A year... ?"

"He'll be all right. He won't age. And his family will be waiting for him when he Awakes. He is very attached to them-and they to him. Toaht family bonds are. . . beautiful, and very strong."

She rested her right arm across her forehead. "His family," she said bitterly. "You keep saying that. His family is dead! Like mine. Like Fukumoto's. Like just about everyone's. That's half our problem. We haven't got any real family bonds."

"He has."

"He has nothing! He has no one to teach him to be a man, and he damn sure can't be an Oankali, so don't talk to me about his family!"

"Yet they are his family," Nikanj insisted softly. "They have accepted him and he has accepted them. He has no other family, but he has them."

She made a sound of disgust and turned her face away. What did Nikanj tell others about her? Did it talk about her family? According to her new name, she had been adopted, after all. She shook her head, confused and disturbed.

"He beat you, Lilith," Nikanj said. "He broke your bones. If you had gone untreated, you might have died of what he did."

"He did what you and his so-called family set him up to do!"

It rustled its tentacles. "That's truer than I would like. It's hard for me to influence people now. They think I'm too young to understand. I did warn them, though, that you wouldn't mate with him. Since I'm not yet mature, they didn't believe me. His family and my parents overruled me. That won't happen again."

It touched the back of her neck, pricking the skin with several sensory tentacles. She realized what it was doing as she felt herself beginning to lose consciousness.

"Put me back, too," she demanded while she could still talk. "Let me sleep again. Put me where they've put him. I'm no more what your people think than he was. Put me back. Find someone else!"

10

But the ease of her awakening, when it came, told her that her sleep had been ordinary and relatively brief, returning her all too quickly to what passed for reality. At least she was not in pain.

She sat up, found Nikanj lying stone-still next to her. As usual, some of its head tentacles followed her movements lazily as she got up and went to the bathroom.

Trying not to think, she bathed, worked to scrub off an odd, sour smell that her body had acquired-some residual effect of Nikanj's healing, she supposed. But the smell would not wash away. Eventually she gave up. She dressed and went back out to Nikanj. It was sitting up on the bed, waiting for her.

"You won't notice the smell in a few days," it said. "It isn't as strong as you think."

She shrugged, not caring.

"You can open walls now."

Startled, she stared at it, then went to a wall and touched it with the fingertips of one hand. The wall reddened as Paul Titus' wall had under Nikanj's touch.

"Use all your fingers," it told her.

She obeyed, touching the fingers of both hands to the wall. The wall indented, then began to open.

"If you're hungry," Nikanj said, "you can get food for yourself now. Within these quarters, everything will open for you."

"And beyond these quarters?" she asked.

"These walls will let you out and back in again. I've changed them a little too. But no other walls will open for you."

So she could walk the corridors or walk among the trees, but she couldn't get into anything Nikanj didn't want her in. Still, that was more freedom than she had had before it put her to sleep.

"Why did you do this?" she asked, staring at it.

"To give you what I could. Not another long sleep or solitude. Only this. You know the layout of the quarters now, and you know Kaal. And the people nearby know you.,'

So she could be trusted out alone again, she thought bitterly. And within the quarters, she could be depended on not to do the local equivalent of spilling the drain-cleaner or starting a fire. She could even be trusted not to annoy the neighbors. Now she could keep herself occupied until someone decided it was time to send her off to the work she did not want and could not do-the work that would probably get her killed. How many more Paul Tituses could she survive, after all?