Butler, Octavia - Dawn

"Then put me back to sleep, dammit, and choose someone you think is brighter! I never wanted this job!"

It was silent for several seconds. Finally, it said, "Do you really believe I was disparaging your intelligence?"

She glared at it, refusing to answer.

"I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will."

III

NURSERY

1

The room was slightly larger than a football field. Its ceiling was a vault of soft, yellow light. Lilith had caused two walls to grow at a corner of it so that she had a room, enclosed except for a doorway where the walls would have met. There were times when she brought the walls together, sealing herself away from the empty vastness outside--away from the decisions she must make. The walls and floor of the great room were hers to reshape as she pleased. They would do anything she was able to ask of them except let her out.

She had erected her cubicle enclosing the doorway of a bathroom. There were eleven more bathrooms unused along one long wall. Except for the narrow, open doorways of these facilities, the great room was featureless. Its walls were pale green and its floors pale brown. Lilith bad asked for color and Nikanj bad found someone who could teach it how to induce the ship to produce color. Stores of food and clothing were encapsulated within the walls in various unmarked cabinets within Lilith's room and at both ends of the great room.

The food, she had been told, would be replaced as it was used--replaced by the ship itself which drew on its own substance to make print reconstructions of whatever each cabinet had been taught to produce.

The long wall opposite the bathrooms concealed eighty sleeping human beings-healthy, under fifty, English-speaking, and frighteningly ignorant of what was in store for them.

Lilith was to choose and Awaken no fewer than forty. No wall would open to let her or those she Awakened out until at least forty human beings were ready to meet the Oankali.

The great room was darkening slightly. Evening. Lilith found surprising comfort and relief in having time divided visibly into days and nights again. She had not realized how she had missed the slow change of light, how welcome the darkness would be.

"It's time for you to get used to having planetary night again," Nikanj had told her.

On impulse, she had asked if there were anywhere in the ship where she could look at the stars.

Nikanj had taken her, on the day before it put her into this huge, empty room, down several corridors and ramps, then by way of something very like an elevator. Nikanj said it corresponded closer to a gas bubble moving harmlessly through a living body. Her destination turned out to be a kind of observation bubble through which she could see not only stars, but the disk of the Earth, gleaming like a full moon in the black sky.

"We're still beyond the orbit of your world's satellite," it told her as she searched hungrily for familiar continental outlines. She believed she had found a few of them-part of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Or that was what it looked like, hanging there in the middle of a sky that was both above and beneath her feet. There were more stars out there than she had ever seen, but it was Earth that drew her gaze. Nikanj let her look at it until her own tears blinded her. Then it wrapped a sensory arm around her and led her to the great room.

She had been in the great room alone for three days now, thinking, reading, writing her thoughts. All her books, papers, and pens had been left for her. With them were eighty dossiers-short biographies made up of transcribed conversations, brief histories, Oankali observations and conclusions, and pictures. The human subjects of the dossiers had no living relatives. They were all strangers to one another and to Lilith.

She had read just over half the dossiers, searching not only for likely people to Awaken, but for a few potential allies-people she could Awaken first and perhaps come to trust. She needed to share the burden of what she knew, what she must do. She needed thoughtful people who would hear what she had to say and not do anything violent or stupid. She needed people who could give her ideas, push her mind in directions she might otherwise miss. She needed people who could tell her when they thought she was being a fool-people whose arguments she could respect. On another level, she did not want to Awaken anyone. She was afraid of these people, and afraid for them. There were so many unknowns, in spite of the information in the dossiers. Her job was to weave them into a cohesive unit and prepare them for the Oankali-prepare them to be the Oankali's new trade partners. That was impossible.

How could she Awaken people and tell them they were to be part of the genetic engineering scheme of a species so alien that the humans would not be able to look at it comfortably for a while? How would she Awaken these people, these survivors of war, and tell them that unless they could escape the Oankali, their children would not be human?

Better to tell them little or none of that for a while. Better not to Awaken them at all until she had some idea how to help them, how not to betray them, how to get them to accept their captivity, accept the Oankali, accept anything until they were sent to Earth. Then to run like hell at the first opportunity.

Her mind slipped into the familiar track: There was no escape from the ship. None at all. The Oankali controlled the ship with their own body chemistry. There were no controls that could be memorized or subverted. Even the shuttles that traveled between Earth and the ship were like extensions of Oankali bodies.

No human could do anything aboard the ship except make trouble and be put back into suspended animation-or be killed. Therefore, the only hope was Earth. Once they were on Earth-somewhere in the Amazon basin, she had been told-they would at least have a chance.

That meant they must control themselves, learn all she could teach them, all the Oankali could teach them, then use what they had learned to escape and keep themselves alive.

What if she could make them understand that? And what if it turned out that that was exactly what the Oankali wanted her to do? Of course, they knew it was what she would do. They knew her. Did that mean they were plan. fling their own betrayal: No trip to Earth. No chance to run. Then why had they made her spend a year being taught to live in a tropical forest? Perhaps the Oankali were simply very certain of their ability to keep humans corralled even on Earth.

What could she do? What could she tell the humans but "Learn and run!" What other possibility for escape was there?

None at all. Her only other personal possibility was to refuse to Awaken anyone-hold out until the Oankali gave up on her and went looking for a more cooperative subject. Another Paul Titus, perhaps-someone who had truly given up on humanity and cast his lot with the Oankali. A man like that could make Titus' predictions self-fulfilling. He could undermine what little civilization might be left in the minds of those he Awoke. He could make them a gang. Or a herd.

What would she make them?

She lay on her bed platform, staring at a picture of a man. Five-seven, his statistics said. One hundred and forty pounds, thirty-two years old, missing the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of his left hand. He had lost the fingers in a childhood accident with a lawnmower, and he was self-conscious about the incomplete hand. His name was Victor Dominic-Vidor Domonkos, really. His parents had come to the United States from Hungary just -before he was born. He had been a lawyer. The Oankali suspected he had been a good one. They had found him intelligent, talkative, understandably suspicious of unseen questioners, and very creative at lying to them. He had probed constantly for their identity, but was, like Lilith, one of the few native Englishspeakers who had never expressed the suspicion that they might be extraterrestrials.