Butler, Octavia - Dawn

There was Hilary Ballard, poet, artist, playwright, actress, singer, frequent collector of unemployment compensation. She really was bright; she had memorized poetry, plays, songs-her own and those of more established writers. She had something that would help future human children remember who they were. The Oankali thought she was unstable, but not dangerously so. They had had to drug her because she injured herself trying to break free of what she called her cage. She had broken both her arms.

And that was not dangerously unstable?

No, probably was not. Lilith herself had panicked at being caged. So had a great many other people. Hilary's panic had simply been more extreme than most. She probably should not be given crucial work to do. The survival of the group should never depend on her-but then it should not depend on any one person. The fact that it did was not the fault of human beings.

There was Conrad Loehr-called Curt-who had been a cop in New York, and who had survived only because his wife had finally dragged him off to Colombia where her family lived. They had not gone anywhere for years before that. The wife had been killed in one of the riots that began shortly after the last missile exchange. Thousands had been killed even before it began to get cold. Thousands had simply trampled one another or torn one another apart in panic. Curt had been picked up with seven children, none of them his own, whom he had been guarding. His own four children, left back in the States with his relatives, were all dead. Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal-or dead. He had, alone in his isolation room, done his best to tear out his own throat with his fingernails.

Derick Wolski had been working in Australia. He was single, twenty-three, had no strong idea what he wanted to do with his life, had done nothing so far except go to school and work at temporary or part-time jobs. He'd fried hamburgers, driven a delivery truck, done construction work, sold household products door to door-badly--bagged groceries, helped clean office buildings, and on his own, done some nature photography. He'd quit everything except the photography. He liked the outdoors, liked animals. His father thought that sort of thing was nonsense, and he had been afraid his father might be right. Yet, he had been photographing Australian wildlife when the war began.

Tate Marah had just quit another job. She had some genetic problem that the Oankali had controlled, but not cured. But her real problem seemed to be that she did things so well that she quickly became bored. Or she did them so badly that she abandoned them before anyone noticed her incompetence. People had to see her as a formidable presence, bright, dominant, well off.

Her family had had money-had owned a very successful real estate business. Part of her problem, the Oankali believed, was that she did not have to do anything. She had great energy, but needed some external pressure, some challenge to force her to focus it.

How about the preservation of the human species?

She had attempted suicide twice before the war. After the war, she fought to live. She had been alone, vacationing in Rio de Janeiro when war came. It had not been a good time to be a North American, she felt, hut she had survived and managed to help others. She had that in common with Curt Loehr. Under Oankali interrogation, she had engaged in verbal fencing and game playing that eventually exasperated the ooloi questioner. But in the end, the ooloi had admired her. It thought she was more like an ooloi than like a female. She was good at manipulating people-could do it in ways they did not seem to mind. That had bored her too in the past. But boredom had not driven her to do harm to anyone except herself. There had been times when she withdrew from people to protect them from the possible consequences of her own frustration. She had withdrawn from several men this way, occasionally pairing them off with female friends. Couples she brought together tended to marry.

Lilith put Tate Marah's dossier down slowly, left it by itself on the bed. The only other one that was by itself was Joseph Shing's. Tate's dossier fell open, once again displaying the woman's small, pale, deceptively childlike face. The face was smiling slightly, not as though posing for a picture, but as though sizing up the photographer. In fact, Tate had not known the picture was being made. And the pictures were not photographs. They were paintings, impressions of the inner person as well as the outer physical reality. Each contained print memories of their subjects. Oankali interrogators had painted these pictures with sensory tentacles or sensory arms, using deliberately produced bodily fluids. Lilith knew this, but the pictures looked like, even felt like photos. They had been done on some kind of plastic, not on paper. The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were-or who the Oankali thought they were.

Tate Marah, they thought, was bright, somewhat flexible, and not dangerous except perhaps to the ego.

Lilith left the dossiers, left her private cubicle, and began building another near it.

The walls that would not open to let her out responded to her touch now by growing inward along a line of her sweat or saliva drawn along the floor. Thus the old walls extruded new ones, and the new ones would open or close, advance or retreat as she directed. Nikanj had made very sure she knew how to direct them. And when it finished instructing her, its mates, Dichaan and Ahajas, told her to seal herself in if her people attacked her. They had both spent time interrogating isolated humans and they seemed more worried about her than Nikanj did. They would get her out, they promised. They would not leave her to die for someone else's miscalculation.

Which was fine if she could spot the trouble and seal herself in time.

Better to choose the right people, bring them along slowly, and Awaken new ones only when she was sure of the ones already Awake.

She drew two walls to within about eighteen inches of each other. That left a narrow doorway-one that would preserve as much privacy as possible without a door. She also turned one wall inward, forming a tiny entrance hall that concealed the room itself from casual glances. There would be nothing among the people she Awoke to borrow or steal, and anyone who thought now was a good time to play Peeping Tom would have to be disciplined by the group. Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

Within the new room, Lilith raised a bed platform, a table platform, and three chair platforms around the table. The table and chairs would be at least a small change from what they were all used to in the Oankali isolation rooms. A more human arrangement.

Creating the room took some time. Afterward Lilith gathered all but eleven of the dossiers and sealed them inside her own table platform. Some of these eleven would be her core group, first Awake, and first to show her just how much of a chance she had to survive and do what was necessary.

Tate Marah first. Another woman. No sexual tension.

Lilith took the picture, went to the long, featureless stretch of wall opposite the rest rooms and stood for a moment, staring at the face.

Once people were Awake, she would have no choice but to live with them. She could not put them to sleep again. And in some ways, Tate Marah would probably be hard to live with.