Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

Tino looked at Nikanj. After a while, he got up and went over to it, sat down opposite it. “What is your talent?” he asked.

Nikanj did not speak or acknowledge his presence.

“Talk to me!” he demanded. “I know you hear.”

The ooloi seemed to come to life slowly. “I hear.”

“What is your talent!”

It leaned toward him and took his hands in its strength hands, keeping its sensory arms coiled. Oddly, the gesture reminded him of Lilith, was much like what Lilith tended to do. He did not mind, somehow, that now hard, cool gray hands held his.

“I have a talent for Humans,” it said in its soft voice. “I was bred to work with you, taught to work with you, and given one of you as a companion during one of my most formative periods.” It focused for a moment on Lilith. “I know your bodies, and sometimes I can anticipate your thinking. I knew that Gabe Rinaldi couldn’t accept a union with us when Kahguyaht wanted him. Tate could have, but she would not leave Gabe for an ooloi—no matter how badly she wanted to. And Kahguyaht would not simply keep her with it when the others were sent to Earth. That surprised me. It always said there was no point in paying attention to what Humans said. It knew Tate would eventually have accepted it, but it listened to her and let her go. And it wasn’t raised as I was in contact with Humans. I think your people affect us more than we realize.”

“I think,” Lilith said quietly, “that you may be better at understanding us than you are at understanding your own people.”

It focused on her, its body tentacles smoothed to invisibility against its flesh. That meant it was pleased, Tino remembered. Pleased or even happy. “Ahajas says that,” it told her. “I don’t think it’s true, but it may be.”

Tino turned toward Lilith but spoke to Nikanj. “Did you make her pregnant against her will?”

“Against one part of her will, yes,” Nikanj admitted. “She had wanted a child with Joseph, but he was dead. She was

more alone than you could imagine. She thought I didn’t understand.”

“It’s your fault she was alone!”

“It was a shared fault.” Nikanj’s head and body tentacles hung limp. “We believed we had to use her as we did. Otherwise we would have had to drug newly awakened Humans much more than was good for them because we would have had to teach them everything ourselves. We did that later because we saw

that we were damaging Lilith and the others we tried to use.

“In the first children, I gave Lilith what she wanted but could not ask for. I let her blame me instead of herself. For a while, I became for her a little of what she was for the Humans she had taught and guided. Betrayer. Destroyer of treasured things. Tyrant. She needed to hate me for a while so that she could stop hating herself. And she needed the children I mixed for her.”

Tino stared at the ooloi, needing to look at it to remind himself that he was hearing an utterly un-Human creature. Finally, he looked at Lilith.

She looked back, smiling a bitter, humorless smile. “I told you it was talented,” she said.

“How much of that is true?” he asked.

“How should I know!” She swallowed. “All of it might be. Nikanj usually tells the truth. On the other hand, reasons and justifications can sound just as good when they’re made up as an afterthought. Have your fun, then come up with a wonderful-sounding reason why it was the right thing for you to do.”

Tino pulled away from the ooloi and went to Lilith. “Do you hate it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I have to leave it to hate it. Sometimes I go away for a while—explore, visit other villages, and hate it. But after a while, I start to miss my children. And, heaven help me, I start to miss it. I stay away until staying away hurts more than the thought of coming

home.”

He thought she should be crying. His mother would never have contained that much passion without tears—would never have tried. He took her by the arms, found her stiff and resistant. Her eyes rejected any comfort before he could offer it.

“What shall I do?” he asked. “What do you want me to do?”

She hugged him suddenly, holding him hard against her. “Will you stay?” she said into his ear.

“Shall I?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” She was not Lilith Iyapo. She was a quiet, expressive, broad face. She was dark, smooth skin and warm, work-calloused hands. She was breasts full of milk. He wondered how he had resisted her earlier.

And what about Nikanj? He did not look at it, but he imagined he felt its attention on him.

“If you decide to leave,” Lilith said, “I’ll help you.”

He could not imagine wanting to leave her.

Something cool and rough and hard attached itself to his upper arm. He froze, not having to look to know it was one of the ooloi’s sensory arms.

It stood close to him, one sensory arm on him and one on Lilith. They were like elephants’ trunks, those arms. He felt Lilith release him, felt Nikanj drawing him to the floor. He let himself be pulled down only because Lilith lay down with them. He let Nikanj position his body alongside its own. Then he saw Lilith sit up on Nikanj’s opposite side and watch the two of them solemnly.

He did not understand why she watched, why she did not take part. Before he could ask, the ooloi slipped its sensory arm around him and pressed the back of his neck in a way that made him shudder, then go limp.

He was not unconscious. He knew when the ooloi drew closer to him, seemed to grasp him in some way he did not understand.

He was not afraid.

The splash of icy-sweet pleasure, when it reached him, won him completely. This was the half-remembered feeling he had come back for. This was the way it began.

Before the long-awaited rush of sensation swallowed him completely, he saw Lilith lie down alongside the ooloi, saw the second sensory arm loop around her neck. He tried to reach out to her across the body of the ooloi, to touch her, touch the warm Human flesh. It seemed to him that he reached and reached, yet she remained too far away to touch.

He thought he shouted as the sensation deepened, as it took him. It seemed that she was with him suddenly, her body against his own. He thought he said her name and repeated it, but he could not hear the sound of his own voice.

7

Akin took his first few steps toward Tino’s outstretched hands. He learned to take food from Tino’s plate, and he rode on Tino’s back whenever the man would carry him. He did not forget Dichaan’s warning not to be alone with Tino, but he did not take it seriously. He came to trust Tino very quickly. Eventually everyone came to trust Tino.

Thus, as it happened, Akin was alone with Tino when a party of raiders came looking for children to steal.

Tino had gone out to cut wood for the guest house. He was not yet able to perceive the borders of Lo. He had gotten into the habit of taking Akin along to spot for him after breaking an ax he had borrowed from Wray Ordway on a tree that was not a tree. The Lo entity shaped itself according to the desires of its occupants and the patterns of the surrounding vegetation. Yet it was the larval form of a space-going entity. Its hide and its organs were better protected than any living thing native to Earth. No ax or machete could mark it. Until it was older, no native vegetation would grow within its boundaries. That was why Lilith and a few other people had gardens far from the village. Lo would have provided good food from its own substance—the Oankali could stimulate food production and separate the food from Lo. But most Humans in the village did not want to be dependent on the Oankali. Thus, Lo had a broad fringe of Human-planted gardens, some in use and some fallow. Akin had had, at times, to keep Tino from tramping right into them, then realizing too late that he had slashed his way through food plants and destroyed someone’s work. It was as though he could not see at all.