Butler, Octavia - Dawn

She made herself step up to the opening, and then, teeth clenched, step through.

Outside, she stood beside him and drew a long, shuddering breath. She turned her head, looked at the room, then turned away quickly, resisting an impulse to flee back to it. He took her band and led her away.

When she looked back a second time, the hole was closing and she could see that what she had come out of was actually a huge tree. Her room could not have taken more than a tiny fraction of its interior. The tree had grown from what appeared to be ordinary, pale-brown, sandy soil. Its lower limbs were heavily laden with fruit. The rest of it looked almost ordinary except for its size. The trunk was bigger around than some office buildings she remembered. And it seemed to touch the ivory sky. How tall was it? How much of it served as a building?

"Was everything inside that room alive?" she asked.

"Everything except some of the visible plumbing fixtures," Jdahya said. "Even the food you ate was produced from the fruit of one of the branches growing outside. It was designed to meet your nutritional needs."

"And to taste like cotton and paste," she muttered. "I hope I won't have to eat any more of that stuff."

"You won't. But it's kept you very healthy. Your diet in particular encouraged your body not to grow cancers while your genetic inclination to grow them was corrected."

"It has been corrected, then?"

"Yes. Correcting genes have been inserted into your cells, and your cells have accepted and replicated them. Now you won't grow cancers by accident."

That, she thought, was an odd qualification, but she let it pass for the moment. "When will you send me back to Earth?" she asked.

"You couldn't survive there now-especially not alone."

"You haven't sent any of us back yet?"

"Your group will be the first."

"Oh." This had not occurred to her-that she and others like her would be guinea pigs trying to survive on an Earth that must have greatly changed. "How is it there now?"

"Wild. Forests, mountains, deserts, plains, great oceans. It's a rich world, clean of dangerous radiation in most places. The greatest diversity of animal life is in the seas, but there are a number of small animals thriving on land: insects, worms, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals. There's no doubt your people can live there."

"When?"

"That will not be hurried. You have a very long life ahead of you, Lilith. And you have work to do here."

"You said something about that once before. What work?"

"You'll live with my family for a while-live as one of us as much as possible. We'll teach you your work."

"But what work?"

"You'll Awaken a small group of humans, all English-speaking, and help them learn to deal with us. You'll teach them the survival skills we teach you. Your people will all be from what you would call civilized societies. Now they'll have to learn to live in forests, build their own shelters, and raise their own food all without machines or outside help."

"Will you forbid us machines?" she asked uncertainly.

"Of course not. But we won't give them to you either. We'll give you hand tools, simple equipment, and food until you begin to make the things you need and grow your own crops. We've already armed you against the deadlier microorganisms. Beyond that, you'll have to fend for yourselves- avoiding poisonous plants and animals and creating what you need."

"How can you teach us to survive on our own world? How can you know enough about it or about us?"

"How can we not? We've helped your world restore itself. We've studied your bodies, your thinking, your literature, your historical records, your many cultures. . . . We know more of what you're capable of than you do."

Or they thought they did. If they really had had two hundred and fifty years to study, maybe they were right. "You've inoculated us against diseases?" she asked to be sure she had understood.

"No."

"But you said-"

"We've strengthened your immune system, increased your resistance to disease in general."

"How? Something else done to our genes?"

He said nothing. She let the silence lengthen until she was certain he would not answer. This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good. "We used to treat animals that way," she muttered bitterly.

"What?" he said.

"We did things to them-inoculations, surgery, isolation- all for their own good. We wanted them healthy and protected-sometimes so we could eat them later."

His tentacles did not flatten to his body, but she got the impression he was laughing at her. "Doesn't it frighten you to say things like that to me?" he asked.

"No," she said. "It scares me to have people doing things to me that I don't understand."

"You've been given health. The ooloi have seen to it that you'll have a chance to live on your Earth-not just to die on it."

He would not say any more on the subject. She looked around at the huge trees, some with great branching multiple trunks and foliage like long, green hair. Some of the hair seemed to move, though there was no wind. She sighed. The trees, too, then-tentacled like the people. Long, slender, green tentacles.

"Jdahya?"

His own tentacles swept toward her in a way she still found disconcerting, though it was only his way of giving her his attention or signaling her that she had it.

"I'm willing to learn what you have to teach me," she said, "but I don't think I'm the right teacher for others. There were so many humans who already knew how to live in the wilderness-so many who could probably teach you a little more. Those are the ones you ought to be talking to."

"We have talked to them. They will have to be especially careful because some of the things they 'know' aren't true anymore. There are new plants-mutations of old ones and additions we've made. Some things that used to be edible are lethal now. Some things are deadly only if they aren't prepared properly. Some of the animal life isn't as harmless as it apparently once was. Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed."

She nodded, wondering why she could absorb his words so easily. Perhaps because she had known even before her capture that the world she had known was dead. She had already absorbed that loss to the degree that she could.

"There must be ruins," she said softly.

"There were. We've destroyed many of them."

She seized his arm without thinking. "You destroyed them? There were things left and you destroyed them?"

"You'll begin again. We'll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were."

"And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?"

"No. Only different." She realized suddenly that she was facing him, grasping his arm in a grip that should have been painful to him. It was painful to her. She let go of him and his arm swung to his side in the oddly dead way in which his limbs seemed to move when he was not using them for a specific purpose.

"You were wrong," she said. She could not sustain her anger. She could not look at his tentacled, alien face and sustain anger-but she had to say the words. "You destroyed what wasn't yours," she said. "You completed an insane act."

"You are still alive," be said.

She walked beside him, silently ungrateful. Knee-high tufts of thick, fleshy leaves or tentacles grew from the soil. He stepped carefully to avoid them-which made her want to kick them. Only the fact that her feet were bare stopped her. Then she saw, to her disgust, that the leaves twisted or contracted out of the way if she stepped near one-like plants made up of snake-sized night crawlers. They seemed to be rooted to the ground. Did that make them plants?