Butler, Octavia - Dawn

Silence. Stubborn silence.

She looked at Nikanj's still-healing sensory arm. "Listen to me," she said. "Let me help you learn about us, or there'll be more injuries, more deaths."

"Will you walk through the forest," Nikanj asked, "or shall we go the shorter way beneath the training room?"

She sighed. She was Cassandra, warning and predicting to people who went deaf whenever she began to warn and predict. "Let's walk through the forest," she said.

It stood still, keenly focused on her.

"What?" she asked.

It looped its injured sensory arm around her neck. "No one has ever done what we did here. No one has ever healed a wound as serious as mine so quickly or so completely."

"There was no reason for you to die or be maimed," she said. "I couldn't help Joseph. I'm glad I could help you- even though I don't have any idea how I did it."

Nikanj focused on Ahajas and Dichaan. "Joseph's body?" it said softly.

"Frozen," Dichaan said. "Waiting to be sent to Earth." Nikanj rubbed the back of her neck with the cool, hard tip of its sensory arm. "I thought I had protected him enough," it said. "It should have been enough."

"Is Curt still with the others?"

"He's asleep."

"Suspended animation?"

"Yes."

"And he'll stay here? He'll never get to Earth?"

"Never."

She nodded. "That isn't enough, but it's better than nothing."

"He has a talent like yours," Ahajas said. "The ooloi will use him to study and explore the talent."

"Talent...?"

"You can't control it," Nikanj said, "but we can. Your body knows how to cause some of its cells to revert to an embryonic stage. It can awaken genes that most humans never use after birth. We have comparable genes that go dormant after metamorphosis. Your body showed mine how to awaken them, how to stimulate growth of cells that would not normally regenerate. The lesson was complex and painful, but very much worth learning."

"You mean. . ." She frowned. "You mean my family problem with cancer, don't you?"

"It isn't a problem anymore," Nikanj said, smoothing its body tentacles. "It's a gift. It has given me my life back."

"Would you have died?"

Silence.

After a while, Ahajas said, "It would have left us. It would have become Toaht or Akjai and left Earth."

"Why?" Lilith asked.

"Without your gift, it could not have regained full use of the sensory arm. It could not have conceived children." Ahajas hesitated. "When we heard what had happened, we thought we had lost it. It had been with us for so little time. We felt. . . Perhaps we felt what you did when your mate died. There seemed to be nothing at all ahead for us until Ooan Nikanj told us that you were helping it, and that it would recover completely."

"Kahguyaht behaved as though nothing unusual were happening," Lilith said.

"It was frightened for me," Nikanj said. "It knows you dislike it. It thought any instructions from it beyond the essential would anger or delay you. It was badly frightened."

Lilith laughed bitterly. "It's a good actor."

Nikanj rustled its tentacles. It took its sensory arm from Lilith's neck and led the group toward the settlement.

Lilith followed automatically, her thoughts shifting from Nikanj to Joseph to Curt. Curt whose body was to be used to teach the ooloi more about cancer. She could not make herself ask whether he would be conscious and aware during these experiments. She hoped he would be.

8

It was nearly dark when they reached the settlement. People were gathered around fires, talking, eating. Nikanj and its mates were welcomed by the Oankali in a kind of gleeful silence-a confusion of sensory arms and tentacles, a relating of experience by direct neural stimulation. They could give each other whole experiences, then discuss the experience in nonverbal conversation. They had a whole language of sensory images and accepted signals that took the place of words.

Lilith watched them enviously. They didn't lie often to humans because their sensory language had left them with no habit of lying-only of withholding information, refusing contact.

Humans, on the other hand, lied easily and often. They could not trust one another. They could not trust one of their own who seemed too close to aliens, who stripped off her clothing and lay down on the ground to help her jailer.

There was silence at the fire where Lilith chose to sit. Allison, Leah and Wray, Gabriel and Tate. Tate gave her a baked yam and, to her surprise, baked fish. She looked at Wray.

Wray shrugged. "I caught it with my hands. Crazy thing to do. It was half as big as I am. But it swam right up to me just begging to be caught. The Oankali claimed I could have been caught myself by some of the things swimming in the river-electric eels, piranha, caiman.. . They brought all the worst things from Earth. Nothing bothered me, though."

"Victor found a couple of turtles," Allison said. "Nobody knew how to cook them so they cut the meat up and roasted it.''

"How was it?" Lilith asked.

"They ate it." Allison smiled. "And while they were cooking it and eating it, the Oankali kept away from them."

Wray grinned broadly. "You don't see any of them around this fire either, do you?"

"I'm not sure," Gabriel answered.

Silence.

Lilith sighed. "Okay, Gabe, what have you got? Questions, accusations or condemnations?"

"Maybe all three."

"Well?"

"You didn't fight. You chose to stand with the Oankali!"

"Against you?"

Angry silence.

"Where were you standing when Curt hacked Joseph to death?"

Tate laid her hand on Lilith's arm. "Curt just went crazy," she said. She spoke very softly. "No one thought he would do anything like that."

"He did it," Lilith said. "And you all watched."

They picked at their food silently for a while, no longer enjoying the fish, sharing it with people from other fires who came offering Brazil nuts, pieces of fruit or baked cassava.

"Why did you take your clothes off?" Wray demanded suddenly. "Why did you lie down on the ground with an ooloi in the middle of the fighting?"

"The fighting was over," Lilith said. "You know that. And the ooloi I lay down with was Nikanj. Curt had all but severed one of its sensory arms. I think you know that, too. I let it use my body to heal itself."

"But why should you want to help it?" Gabriel whispered harshly. "Why didn't you just let it die?" Every Oankali in the area must have heard him.

"What good would that do?" she demanded. "I've known Nikanj since it was a child. Why should I let it die, then be stuck with some stranger? How would that help me or you or anyone here?"

He drew back from her. "You've always got an answer. And it never quite rings true."

She went over in her mind the things she could have said to him about his own tendency not to ring true. Ignoring them all, she asked, "What is it, Gabe? What do you believe I can do or could have done to set you free on Earth one minute sooner?"

He did not answer, but he remained stubbornly angry. He was helpless and in a situation he found intolerable. Someone must be to blame.

Lilith saw Tate reach out to him, take his hand. For a few seconds they clung to the tips of one another's fingers, reminding Lilith of nothing so much as a very squeamish person suddenly given a snake to hold. They managed to let one another go without seeming to recoil in revulsion, but everyone knew what they felt. Everyone had seen. That was something else Lilith had to answer for, no doubt.

"What about that!" Tate demanded bitterly. She shook the hand Gabriel had touched as though to shake it clean of something. "What do we do about that?"

Lilith let her shoulders slump. "I don't know. It was the same for Joseph and me. I never got around to asking Nikanj what it had done to us. I suggest you ask Kahguyaht."