Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

The raiders all had long wood-and-metal sticks, which they now pointed at Tino. The man holding Tino also had such a stick, strapped across his back. These were weapons, Akin realized. Clubs—or perhaps guns? And these men knew Tino. One of them knew Tino. And Tino did not like that one. Tino was afraid. Akin had never seen him more afraid.

The man who held Akin had put his neck within easy reach of Akin’s tongue. Akin could sting him, kill him. But then what would happen? There were four other men.

Akin did nothing. He watched Tino, hoping the man would know what was best.

“There were no guns in Phoenix when I left,” Tino was saying. So the sticks were guns.

“No, and you didn’t want there to be any, did you?” the same man asked. He made a point of jabbing Tino with his gun.

Tino began to be a little less afraid and more angry. “If you think you can use those to kill the Oankali, you’re as stupid as I thought you were.”

The man swung his gun up so that its end almost touched Tino’s nose.

“Is it Humans you mean to kill?” Tino asked very softly. “Are there so many Humans left? Are our numbers increasing so fast?”

“You’ve joined the traitors!” the man said.

“To have a family,” Tino said softly. “To have children.” He looked at Akin. “To have at least part of myself continue.”

The man holding Akin spoke up. “This kid is as human as any I’ve seen since the war. I can’t find anything wrong with him.”

“No tentacles?” one of the four asked.

“Not a one.”

“What’s he got between his legs?”

“Same thing you’ve got. Little smaller, maybe.”

There was a moment of silence, and Akin saw that three of the men were amused and one was not.

Akin was afraid to speak, afraid to show the raiders his un-Human characteristics: his tongue, his ability to speak, his intelligence. Would these things make them let him alone or make them kill him? In spite of his months with Tino, he did not know. He kept quiet and began trying to hear or smell any Lo villager who might be passing nearby.

“So we take the kid,” one of the men said. “What do we do with him?” He gestured sharply toward Tino.

Before anyone could answer, Tino said, “No! You can’t take him. He still nurses. If you take him, he’ll starve!”

The men looked at one another uncertainly. The man holding Akin suddenly turned Akin toward him and squeezed the sides of Akin’s face with his fingers. He was trying to get Akin’s mouth open. Why?

It did not matter why. He would get Akin’s mouth open, then be startled. He was Human and a stranger and dangerous. Who knew what irrational reaction he might have. He must be given something familiar to go with the unfamiliar. Akin began to twist in the man’s arm and to whimper. He had not cried so far. That had been a mistake. Humans always marveled at how little construct babies cried. Clearly a Human baby would have cried more.

Akin opened his mouth and wailed.

“Shit!” muttered the man holding him. He looked around quickly as though fearing someone might be attracted by the noise. Akin, who had not thought of this, cried louder. Oankali had hearing more sensitive than most Humans realized.

“Shut up!” the man shouted, shaking him. “Good god, it’s got the ugliest goddamn gray tongue you ever saw! Shut up, you!”

“He’s just a baby,” Tino said. “You can’t get a baby to shut up by scaring him. Give him to me.” He had begun to step toward Akin, holding his arms out to take him.

Akin reached toward him, thinking that the resisters would be less likely to hurt the two of them together. Perhaps he could shield Tino to some degree. In Tino’s arms he would be quiet and cooperative. They would see that Tino was useful.

The man who had first recognized Tino now stepped behind him and smashed the wooden end of his gun into the back of Tino’s head.

Tino dropped to the ground without a cry, and his attacker hit him again, driving the wood of the gun down into Tino’s head like a man killing a poisonous snake.

Akin screamed in terror and anguish. He knew Human anatomy well enough to know that if Tino were not dead, he would die soon unless an Oankali helped him.

And there was no Oankali nearby.

The resisters left Tino where he lay and strode away into the forest, carrying Akin who still screamed and struggled.

1

Dichaan slipped from the deepest part of the broad lake, shifted from breathing in water to breathing in air, and began to wade to shore.

Humans called this an oxbow lake—one that had originally been part of the river. Dichaan had kept the Lo entity from engulfing it so far because the entity would have killed the plant life in it and that would have eventually killed the animal life. Even with help, Lo could not have been taught to provide what the animals needed in a form they would accept before they died of hunger. The only useful thing the entity could have provided at once was oxygen.

But now the entity was changing, moving into its next growth stage. Now it could learn to incorporate Earth vegetation, sustain it, and benefit from it. On its own, it would learn slowly, killing a great deal, culling native vegetation for that vegetation’s ability to adapt to the changes it made.

But the entity in symbiotic relationship with its Oankali inhabitants could change faster, adapting itself and accepting adapted plant life that Dichaan and others had prepared.

Dichaan stepped on shore through a natural corridor between great profusions of long, thick, upright prop roots that would slowly be submerged when the rainy season began and the water rose.

Dichaan had made his way out of the mud, his body still savoring the taste of the lake—rich in plant and animal life—when he heard a cry.

He stood utterly still, listening, his head and body tentacles slowly swinging around to focus on the direction of the sound. Then he knew where it was and who it was, and he began to run. He had been underwater all morning. What had been happening in the air?

Leaping over fallen trees, dodging around dangling lianas, undergrowth, and living trees, he ran. He spread his body tentacles against his skin. This way the sensitive parts of the tentacles could be protected from the thin underbrush that lashed him as he ran through it. He could not avoid it all and still move quickly.

He splashed through a small stream, then scrambled up a steep bank.

He came to a bundle of small logs and saw where a tree had been cut. The scent of Akin and of strange Human males was there. Tino’s scent was there—very strong.

And now Tino cried out weakly, making only a shadow of the sound Dichaan had heard at the lake. It hardly seemed a Human sound at all, yet to Dichaan, it was unmistakably Tino. His head tentacles swept around, seeking the man, finding him. He ran to him where he lay, concealed by the broad, wedge-shaped buttresses of a tree.

His hair was stuck together in solid masses of blood, dirt, and dead leaves. His body twitched, and he made small sounds.

Dichaan folded to the ground, first probed Tino’s wounds with several head tentacles, then lay down beside him and penetrated his body wherever possible with filaments from head and body tentacles.

The man was dying—would die in a moment unless Dichaan could keep him alive. It had been good having a Human male in the family. It had been a balance found after painful years of imbalance, and no one had felt the imbalance more than Dichaan. He had been born to work with a Human male parallel—to help raise children with the aid of such a person, and yet he had had to limp along without this essential other. How were children to learn to understand the Human male side of themselves—a side they all possessed whatever their eventual sex?