Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

“What will you do about the guns?” he asked.

“Nothing, except to those who actually do try to shoot us. Those go back to the ship permanently. They lose Earth. We’ve told them that. So far, none of them have shot us. A few have shot one another, though.”

Lilith looked startled. “You’re letting them do that?”

Nikanj focused a cone of tentacles on her. “Could we stop them, Lilith, really?”

“You used to try!”

“Aboard the ship, here in Lo, and in the other trade villages. Nowhere else. We control the resisters only if we cage them, drug them, and allow them to live in an unreal world of drug-stimulated imaginings. We’ve done that to a few violent Humans. Shall we do it to more?”

Lilith only stared at it, her expression unreadable.

“You won’t do that?” Tino asked.

“We won’t. We have prints of all of you. We would be sorry to lose you, but at least we would save something. We will be inviting your people to join us again. If any are injured or crippled or even sick in spite of our efforts, we’ll offer them our help. They’re free to accept our help yet stay in their villages. Or they can come to us.” It aimed a sharp cone of head tentacles at Tino. “You’ve known since I sent you back to your parents years ago that you could choose to come to us.”

Tino shook his head, spoke softly. “I seem to remember that I didn’t want to go back to my parents. I asked to stay with you. To this day, I don’t know why.”

“I wanted to keep you. If you’d been a little older

But we’ve been told and shown that we aren’t good at raising fully Human children.” It shifted its attention for a moment to Lilith, but she looked away. “You had to be left with your parents to grow up. I thought I wouldn’t see you again.”

Tino caught himself staring at the ooloi’s long, gray sensory arms. Both arms seemed relaxed against the ooloi’s sides, their ends coiled, spiraling upward so that they did not touch the floor.

“They always look a little like elephants’ trunks to me,” Lilith said.

Tino glanced at her and saw that she was smiling—a sad smile that became her somehow. For a moment, she was beautiful. He did not know what he wanted from the ooloi—if he wanted anything. But he knew what he wanted from the woman. He wished the ooloi were not there. And as soon as the thought occurred to him, he rejected it. Lilith and Nikanj were a pair somehow. Without Nikanj, she would not have been as desirable. He did not understand this, but he accepted it.

They would have to show him what was to happen. He would not ask. They had made it clear they wanted something from him. Let them ask.

“I was thinking,” Tino said, referring to the sensory arms, “that I don’t know what they are.”

Nikanj’s body tentacles seemed to tremble, then solidify into discolored lumps. They sank into themselves the way the soft bodies of slugs seemed to when they drew themselves up to rest.

Tino drew back a little in revulsion. God, the Oankali were ugly creatures. How had Human beings come to tolerate them so easily, to touch them and allow them to

Lilith took the ooloi’s right sensory arm between her hands and held it even when Nikanj seemed to try to pull away. She stared at it, and Tino knew there must be some communication. Did the Oankali share mind-reading abilities with their pet Humans? Or was it mind reading? Lilith spoke aloud.

“Slow,” she whispered. “Give him a moment. Give me a moment. Don’t defeat your own purpose by hurrying.”

For a moment, Nikanj’s lumps looked worse—like some grotesque disease. Then the lumps resolved themselves again into slender gray body tentacles no more grotesque than usual. Nikanj drew its sensory arm from Lilith’s hands, then stood up and went to a far corner of the room. There it sat down and seemed almost to turn itself off. Like something carved from gray marble, it became utterly still. Even its head and body tentacles ceased to move.

“What was all that?” Tino demanded.

Lilith smiled broadly. “For the first time in my life, I had to tell it to be patient. If it were Human, I would say it was infatuated with you.”

“You’re joking!”

“I am,” she said. “This is worse than infatuation. I’m glad you feel something for it, too, even though you don’t yet know what.”

“Why has it gone to sit in that corner?”

“Because it can’t quite bring itself to leave the room, though it knows it should—to let the two of us be Human for a little while. Anyway, I don’t think you really want it to leave.”

“Can it read minds? Can you?”

She did not laugh. At least she did not laugh. “I’ve never met anyone, Oankali or Human, who could read minds. It can stimulate sensations and send your thoughts off in all sorts of directions, but it can’t read those thoughts. It can only share the new sensations they produce. In effect, it can give you the most realistic and the most pleasurable dreams you’ve ever experienced. Nothing you’ve known before can match it—except perhaps your conditioning. And that should tell you why you’re here, why you were bound to seek out a trade village sooner or later. Nikanj touched you when you were too young to have any defenses. And what it gave you, you won’t ever quite forget—or quite remember, unless you feel it again. You want it again. Don’t you.”

It was not a question. Tino swallowed and did not bother with an answer. “I remember drugs,” he said, staring at nothing. “I never took any. I was too young before the war. I remember other people taking them and maybe going crazy for a little while or maybe just being high. I remember that they got addicted, that they got hurt sometimes or killed

”

“This isn’t just a drug.”

“What then?”

“Direct stimulation of the brain and nervous system.” She held up her hand to stop him from speaking. “There’s no pain. They hate pain more than we do, because they’re more sensitive to it. If they hurt us, they hurt themselves. And there are no harmful side effects. Just the opposite. They automatically fix any problems they find. They get real pleasure from healing or regenerating, and they share that pleasure with us. They weren’t as good at repairs before they found us. Regeneration was limited to wound healing. Now they can grow you a new leg if you lose one. They can even regenerate brain and nervous tissue. They learned that from us, believe it or not. We had the ability, and they knew how to use it. They learned by studying our cancers, of all things. It was cancer that made Humanity such a valuable trade partner.”

Tino shook his head, not believing. “I saw cancer kill both my grandfathers. It’s nothing but a filthy disease.”

Lilith touched his shoulder, let her hand slide down his arm in a caress. “So that’s it. That’s why Nikanj is so attracted to you. Cancer killed three close relatives of mine, including my mother. I’m told it would have killed me if the Oankali hadn’t done some work on me. It’s a filthy disease to us, but to the Oankali, it’s the tool they’ve been looking for for generations.”

“What will it do to me that has to do with cancer?”

“Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can’t do with an ugly one? Nothing. It’s just a matter of preference. Nikanj and every other Oankali already have all the information they need to use what they’ve learned from us. Even the constructs can use it once they’re mature. But people like you and me are still attractive to them.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m told our children will understand them, but we won’t.”

“Our children will be them.”

“You accept that?”

It took him a moment to realize what he had said. “No! I don’t know. Yes, but—” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”