Butler, Octavia - Dawn

Jean, still lightly drugged, frightened, and alone, retreated from the people clustering around the room. She stood apart and watched as the body was carried out. Lilith noticed her, approached her, knowing she couldn't help, but hoping at least to give comfort.

"No!" Jean said, backing toward a wall. "Get away!"

Lilith sighed. Jean was going through a prolonged period of ooloi-induced reclusiveness. All of the humans who had been kept heavily drugged were this way-unable to tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them. Neither Lilith nor Joseph had experienced this extreme reaction. Lilith had hardly noticed any reaction at all beyond an increased aversion to Kahguyaht back when Nikanj matured and bound her to it. More recently, Joseph had reacted by simply staying close to Lilith and Nikanj for a couple of days. Then his reaction passed. Jean's was far from passing. What would happen to her now?

Lilith looked around for Nikanj. She spotted it in a cluster of ooloi, went to it and laid a hand on its shoulder.

It focused on her without turning or breaking the various sensory tentacle and sensory arm contacts it had with the others. She spoke to the point of a thin cone of head tentacles.

"Can't you help Jean?"

"Help is coming for her."

"Look at her! She's going to break before it gets here." The cone focused on Jean. She had wedged herself into a corner. Now she stood crying silently and looking around in confusion. She was a tall, strongly built woman. Now, though, she looked like a large child.

Nikanj detached itself from the other ooloi, apparently ending whatever communication was going on. The other ooloi relaxed away from one another. They went to their various human charges who stood waiting for them in widely separated ones and twos. The moment the news of the death had gone around, every human except Lilith and Jean had been drugged heavily. Nikanj had refused to drug Lilith. It trusted her to control her own behavior and the other ooloi trusted it. As for Jean, there was no one present who could drug her without harming her.

Nikanj closed to within about ten feet of Jean. It stopped there and waited until she saw it.

She trembled, but did not try to cringe further into her corner.

"I won't come closer," Nikanj said softly. "Others will come to help you. You aren't alone."

"But. . . But I am alone," she whispered. "They're dead. I saw them."

"One is dead," Nikanj corrected, keeping its voice low. She hid her face in her hands and shook her head from side to side.

"Peter is dead," Nikanj told her, "but Tehjaht is only... injured. And you have siblings coming to help."

"What?''

"They'll help you."

She sat down on the floor, head down, voice muffled when she spoke. "I've never had any brothers or sisters. Not even before the war."

"Tehjaht has mates. They'll take care of you."

"No. They'll blame me . . . because Tehjaht is hurt."

"They'll help you." Very softly. "They'll help both you and Tehjaht. They will help."

She frowned, looking more childlike than ever as she tried to understand. Then her face changed. Curt, heavily drugged, edged along the wall toward her. He kept himself comfortably far from Nikanj, but moved a little too close to Jean. She cringed back from him.

Curt shook his head, took a step backward. "Jeanie?" he called, his heavy voice sounding too loud, sounding drunk.

Jean jumped, but said nothing.

Curt faced Nikanj. "She's one of ours! We should be the ones to take care of her!"

"It isn't possible," Nikanj said.

"It should be possible! It should be! Why isn't it?"

"Her bonding with her ooloi is too strong, too heavily reinforced--as yours is with your ooloi. Later when the bond is more relaxed, you'll be able to go near her again. Later. Not now."

"Goddammit, she needs us now!"

"No."

Curt's ooloi came up to him, took him by the arm. Curt would have pulled away, but suddenly his strength seemed to leave him. He stumbled, fell to his knees. Nearby, Lilith looked away. Curt was as unlikely to forgive any humbling as Peter had been. And he would not always be drugged. He would remember.

Curt's ooloi helped Curt to his feet and led him away to the room he now shared with it and with Celene. As he left, the wall opened at the far end of the room and a male and female Oankali came in.

Nikanj gestured to the pair and they came toward it. They held on to one another, walking as though wounded, as though holding one another up. They were two when they should have been three, missing an essential part.

The male and female made their way to Nikanj, and past it to Jean. Frightened, Jean stiffened. Then she frowned as though something had been said, and she had not quite heard.

Lilith watched sadly, knowing that the first signals Jean received were olfactory. The male and female smelled good, smelled like family, all brought together by the same ooloi, When they took her hands, they felt right. There was a real chemical affinity.

Jean seemed still to be afraid of the two strangers, but she was also relieved. They were what Nikanj had said they would be. People who could help. Family.

She let them lead her into the room where Tehjaht sat frozen. No words had been spoken. Strangers of a different species had been accepted as family. A human friend and ally had been rejected.

Lilith stood staring after Jean, hardly aware of Joseph's coming to stand beside her. He was drugged, but the drug had only made him reckless.

"Peter was right," he said angrily.

She frowned. "Peter? Right to try to kill? Right to die?"

"He died human! And he almost managed to take one of them with him!"

She looked at him. "So what? What's changed? On Earth we can change things. Not here."

"Will we want to by then? What will we be, I wonder? Not human. Not anymore."

IV

THE TRAINING FLOOR

1

The training room was brown and green and blue. Brown, muddy ground was visible through thin, scattered leaf litter. Brown, muddy water flowed past the land, glittering in the light of what seemed to be the sun. The water was too laden with sediment to appear blue, though above it, the ceiling- the sky-was a deep, intense blue. There was no smoke, no smog, only a few clouds-remains of a recent rain.

Across the wide river, there was the illusion of a line of trees on the opposite bank. A line of green. Away from the river, the predominant color was green. Above was the very real green canopy-trees of all sizes, many burdened with a profusion of other life: bromeliads, orchids, ferns, mosses, lichens, lianas, parasitic vines, plus a generous complement of insect life and a few frogs, lizards, and snakes.

One of the first things Lilith had learned during her own earlier training period was not to lean against the trees.

There were few flowers, and those mainly bromiliads and orchids, high in the trees. On the ground, a colorful stationary object was likely to be a leaf or some kind of fungus. Green was everywhere. The undergrowth was thin enough to walk through without difficulty except near the river where in some places a machete was essential-and not yet permitted.

"Tools will come later," Nikanj told Lilith. "Let the humans get used to being here now. Let them explore and see for themselves that they are in a forest on an island. Let them begin to feel what it's like to live here." It hesitated. "Let them settle more firmly into their places with their ooloi. They can tolerate one another now. Let them learn that it isn't shameful to be together with one another and with us."

It had gone with Lilith to the riverbank at a place where a great piece of earth had been undercut and had fallen into the river, taking several trees and much undergrowth with it. There was no trouble here in reaching the water, though there was a sharp drop of about ten feet. At the edge of the drop was one of the giants of the island-a huge tree with buttresses that swept well over Lilith's head and, like walls, separated the surrounding land into individual rooms. In spite of the great variety of life that the tree supported, Lilith stood between a pair of buttresses, two-thirds enclosed by the tree. She felt enveloped in a solidly Earthly thing. A thing that would soon be undercut as its neighbors had been, that would soon fall into the river and die.