Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

Surely the raiders would not hurt Akin. Surely

But they did not belong to any resister village. That much had already been learned. They were nomads—traveling traders when they had trade goods, raiders when they had nothing. Would they try to keep Akin and raise him to be one of them, use his Oankali senses against the Oankali? Others had tried that before them, but they had never tried it with a child so young. They had never tried it with a Human-born male child, since there had been none before Akin. That worried Dichaan most. He was Akin’s only living same-sex parent, and he felt uncertain, apprehensive, and painfully responsible. Where in the vast rain forest was the child? He probably could not escape and return home as so many others had before him. He simply did not have the speed or the strength. He must know that by now, and he must know he had to cooperate with the men, make them value him. If he were still alive, he must know.

The child would emerge from Ahajas’s left side. She lay down on her right side. Dichaan and Lilith moved to maintain contact while Nikanj stroked the area of slowly rippling flesh. In tiny circular waves, the flesh withdrew itself from a central point, which grew slowly to show a darker gray—a temporary orifice within which the child’s head tentacles could be seen moving slowly. These tentacles had released the substance that began the birth process. They were responsible now for the way Ahajas’s flesh rippled aside.

Nikanj exposed one of its sensory hands, reached into the orifice, and lightly touched the child’s head tentacles.

Instantly, the head tentacles grasped the sensory arm—the familiar thing amid so much strangeness. Ahajas, feeling the sudden movement and understanding it, rolled carefully onto her back. The child knew now that it was coming into an accepting, welcoming place. Without that small contact, its body would have prepared it to live in a harsher place—an environment less safe because it contained no ooloi parent. In truly dangerous environments, ooloi were likely to be killed trying to handle hostile new forms of life. That was why children who had no ooloi parents to welcome them at birth tended to become ooloi themselves when they matured. Their bodies assumed the worst. But in order for them to mature in the assumed hostile environment, they had to become unusually hardy and resilient early. This child, though, would not have to undergo such changes. Nikanj was with it. And someday it would probably be female to balance Akin—if Akin returned in time to influence it.

Nikanj caught the child as it slipped easily through its birth orifice. It was gray with a full complement of head tentacles, but only a few small body tentacles. It had a startlingly Human face—eyes, ears, nose, mouth—and it had a functioning sair orifice at its throat surrounded by pale, well-developed tentacles. The tentacles quivered slightly as the child breathed. That meant the small Human nose was probably only cosmetic.

It had a full set of teeth, as many construct newborns did, and unlike Human-born constructs, it would be using them at once. It would be given small portions of what everyone else ate. And once it had shown to Nikanj’s satisfaction that it was not likely to poison itself, it would have the freedom to eat whatever it found edible—to graze, as the Humans said.

Akin might be doing that now to keep himself alive—grazing or browsing on whatever he could find. The resisters might or might not feed him. If they simply let him feed himself in the forest, it would be enough. Humans, though, were always frightened when they saw a young child putting something strange in its mouth. If the raiders were conscientious, normal Humans, they might kill him.

6

The river branched and branched, and the men never seemed in doubt about which branch to take. The journey seemed endless. Five days. Ten days. Twelve days

.

Akin said nothing as they traveled. He had made one mistake. He was afraid to make another. The red-haired man, whose name was Galt, never told anyone about his talking. It was as though the man did not quite believe he had heard Akin speak. He kept away from Akin as much as he could, never spoke to him, hardly spoke of him. The three others swung Akin around by his arms and legs or shoved him with their feet or carried him when necessary.

It took Akin days to realize that the men were not, in their own minds, treating him cruelly. There were no more drunken attempts to poison him, and no one hit him. They did hit each other occasionally. Twice, a pair of them rolled in the mud, punching and clutching at one another. Even when they did not fight, they cursed each other and cursed him.

They did not wash themselves often enough, and sometimes they stank. They talked at night about their dead comrade Tilden and about other men they had traveled with and raided with. Most of these, it seemed, were also dead. So many men, uselessly dead.

When the current grew too strong against them, they hid the boat and began to walk. The land was rising now. It was still rain forest, but it was climbing slowly into the hills. There, they hoped to trade Akin to a rich resister village called Hillmann where the people spoke German and Spanish. Tilden had been the group’s German speaker. His mother, someone said, had been German. The men believed it was necessary to speak German because the majority of the people in the village were German, and they were likely to have the best trade goods. Yet only one other man, Damek, the man who had hit Tino, spoke any German at all. And he spoke only a little. Two people spoke Spanish—Iriarte and Kaliq. Iriarte had lived in a place called Chile before the war. The other, Kaliq, had spent years in Argentina. It was decided that bargaining would be done in Spanish. Many of the Germans spoke their neighbors’ language. The traders would pretend not to know German, and Damek would listen to what he was not supposed to hear. Villagers who thought they could not be understood might talk too much among themselves.

Akin looked forward to seeing and hearing different kinds of Humans. He had heard and learned some Spanish from Tino. He had liked the sound of it when Tino had gotten Nikanj to speak it to him. He had never heard German at all. He wished that someone other than Damek spoke it. He avoided Damek as best he could, remembering Tino. But the thought of meeting an entirely new people was almost enticing enough to ease his grief and his disappointment at not being taken to Phoenix, where he believed he would have been welcomed by Tino’s parents. He would not have pretended to them to be Tino’s son, but if the color of his skin and the shape of his eyes reminded them of Tino, he would not have been sorry. Perhaps the Germans would not want him.

The four resisters and Akin approached Hillmann through fields of bananas, papaya trees, pineapple plants, and corn. The fields looked well kept and fruitful. They looked more impressive to Akin than Lilith’s gardens because they were so much larger and so many more trees had been cut down. There was a great deal of cassava and rows of something that had not yet come up. Hillmann must have lost a great deal of top soil to the rain in all those long, neat rows. How long could they farm this way before the land was ruined and they had to move? How much land had they already ruined?

The village was two neat rows of thatched-roof wooden houses on stilts. Within the village, several large trees had been preserved. Akin liked the way the place looked. There was a calming symmetry to it.

But there were no people in it.

Akin could see no one. Worse, he could hear no one. Humans were noisy even when they tried not to be. These Humans, though, should be talking and working and going about their lives. Instead, there was absolutely no sound of them. They were not hiding. They were simply gone.