Butler, Octavia - Dawn

She drew a deep breath, rested her forehead on her hand and stared down at the table. "I asked them. They wouldn't tell me. After a while I got scared and stopped asking."

"Yeah. I did that too."

"Are they... Russians?"

"They're not human."

Tate did not move, did not say anything for so long that Lilith continued.

"They call themselves Oankali, and they look like sea creatures, though they are bipedal. They. . . are you taking any of this in?"

''I'm listening.''

Lilith hesitated. "Are you believing?"

Tate looked up at her, seemed to smile a little. "How can I?"

Lilith nodded. "Yeah. But you'll have to sooner or later, of course, and I'm supposed to do what I can to prepare you. The Oankali are ugly. Grotesque. But we can get used to them, and they won't hurt us. Remember that. Maybe it will help when the time comes."

3

For three days, Tate slept a great deal, ate a great deal, and asked questions that Lilith answered completely honestly. Tate also talked about her life before the war. Lilith saw that it seemed to relax her, ease that shell of emotional control she usually wore. That made it worthwhile. It meant Lilith felt obligated to talk a little about herself-her past before the war-something she would not normally have been inclined to do. She had learned to keep her sanity by accepting things as she found them, adapting herself to new circumstances by putting aside the old ones whose memories might overwhelm her. She had tried to talk to Nikanj about humans in general, only occasionally bringing in personal anecdotes. Her father, her brothers, her sister, her husband and son. . . . She chose now to talk about her return to college.

"Anthropology," Tate said disparagingly. "Why did you want to snoop through other people's cultures? Couldn't you find what you wanted in your own?"

Lilith smiled and noticed that Tate frowned as though this were the beginning of a wrong answer. "I started out wanting to do exactly that," Lilith said. "Snoop. Seek. It seemed to me that my culture-ours-was running headlong over a cliff. And, of course, as it turned out, it was. I thought there must be saner ways of life."

"Find any?"

"Didn't have much of a chance. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway. It was the cultures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that counted."

"I wonder."

"What?"

"Human beings are more alike than different-damn sure more alike than we like to admit. I wonder if the same thing wouldn't have happened eventually, no matter which two cultures gained the ability to wipe one another out along with the rest of the world"

Lilith gave a bitter laugh. "You might like it here. The Oankali think a lot like you do."

Tate turned away, suddenly disturbed. She wandered over to look at the new third and fourth rooms Lilith had grown on either side of the second restroom. One of them was back to back with her own room, and in part, an extension of one of her walls. She had watched the walls growing- watched first with disbelief, then anger, refusing to believe she was not being tricked somehow. Then she began to keep her distance from Lilith, to watch Lilith suspiciously, to be jumpy and silent.

That had not lasted long. Tate was adaptable if nothing else. "I don't understand," she had said softly, though by then, Lilith had explained why she could control the walls, how she could find and Awaken specific individuals.

Now, Tate wandered back and said again, "I don't understand. None of this makes sense!"

"I had an easier time believing," Lilith said. "An Oankali sealed himself in my isolation room and refused to leave until I got used to him. You can't look at them and doubt that they're alien."

"Maybe you can't."

"I won't argue with you about it. I've been Awake a lot longer than you have. I've lived among the Oankali and I accept them as what they are."

"What they say they are."

Lilith shrugged. "I want to start Awakening more people. Two new ones today. Will you help me?"

"Who are you Awakening?"

"Leah Bede and Celene Iver."

"Two more women? Why don't you wake up a man?"

"I will eventually."

"You're still thinking about your Paul Titus, aren't you?"

"He wasn't mine." She wished she had not told Tate about him.

"Awaken a man next, Lilith. Awaken the guy who was found protecting the kids."

Lilith turned to look at her. "On the theory that if you fall off a horse, you should immediately get back on?"

"Yes."

"Tate, once he's Awake, he stays Awake. He's six-three, he weighs two-twenty, he's been a cop for seven years, and he's used to ordering people around. He can't save us or protect us here, but he can damn sure screw us up. All he has to do to hurt us is refuse to believe we're on a ship. After that, everything he does will be wrong and potentially deadly."

"So what? You're going to wait until you can Awaken him to a kind of harem?"

"No. Once we've got Leah and Celene awake and reasonably stable, I'm going to Awaken Curt Loehr and Joseph Shing."

"Why wait?"

"I'm going to get Celene out first. You take care of her while I get Leah out. I think Celene might be someone for Curt to take care of."

She went to her room, brought back pictures of both women, and was about to begin hunting for Celene when Tate caught her arm.

"We're being watched, aren't we?" she asked.

"Yes. I don't know that we're watched every minute, but now, when we're both Awake, yes, I'm sure they're watching."

"If there's trouble, will they help?"

"If they decide it's bad enough. I think there were some who would have let Titus rape me. I don't think they would have let him kill me. They might have been too slow to prevent it, though."

"Wonderful," Tate muttered bitterly. "We're on our own."

"Exactly."

Tate shook her head. "I don't know whether I should be shedding the constraints of civilization and getting ready to fight for my life or keeping and enhancing them for the sake of our future."

"We'll do what's necessary," Lilith said. "Sooner or later, that will probably mean fighting for our lives."

"I hope you're wrong," Tate said. "What have we learned if all we can do now is go on fighting among ourselves?" She paused. "You didn't have kids, did you Lilith?"

Lilith began to walk slowly along the wall, eyes closed, Celene's picture flat between the wall and her hand. Tate walked along beside her, distracting her.

"Wait until I call you," Lilith told her. "Searching like this takes all my attention."

"It's really hard for you to talk about your life before, isn't it?" Tate said, with sympathy Lilith did not begin to trust.

"Pointless," Lilith said. "Not hard. I lived in those memories for my two years of solitary. By the time the Oankali showed up in my room, I was ready to move into the present and stay there. My life before was a lot of groping around, looking for I-didn't-know-what. And, as for kids, I had a son. He was killed in an auto accident before the war." Lilith took a deep breath. "Let me alone now. I'll call you when I've found Celene."

Tate moved away, settled against the opposite wall near one of the rest rooms. Lilith closed her eyes and began inching along again. She let herself lose track of time and distance, felt as though she were almost flowing along the wall. The illusion was familiar-as physically pleasing and emotionally satisfying as a drug-a needed drug at this moment.

"If you have to do something, it might as well feel good," Nikanj had told her. It had become very interested in her physical pleasures and pains once its sensory aims were fully grown. Happily, it had paid more attention to pleasure than to pain. It had studied her as she might have studied a book-and it had done a certain amount of rewriting.

The bulge in the wall felt large and distinct when her fingers found it. But when she opened her eyes and looked, she could not see any irregularity.