Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

Another part of his mind hoped Damek would die. Let him suffer. Let him scream. Tino had not even had time to scream.

Tino’s father did not scream. He grunted. Bits of metal were cut from his flesh while he held a piece of folded cloth between his teeth and grunted.

Akin came out of his corner to look at one of the bits of metal—a gray pellet covered with the blood of Tino’s father.

Tate came over to him and picked him up. To his own surprise, he held on to her. He put his head on her shoulder and did not want to be put down.

“Don’t you bite me,” she said. “If you want to get down, you tell me. Bite me and I’ll bounce you off a wall.”

He sighed, feeling alone even in her arms. She was not the haven he had needed. “Put me down,” he said.

She held him away from her and looked at him. “Really?”

Surprised, he looked back. “I thought you didn’t want to hold me.”

“If I didn’t want to hold you, I wouldn’t have picked you up. I just want us to understand each other. Okay?”

“Yes.”

And she held him to her again and answered his questions, told him about bullets and how they were fired from guns, how Tino’s father Mateo had come with his friends to take revenge on the raiders in spite of their guns. There were no guns in Phoenix before the raiders arrived.

“We voted not to have them,” she said. “We have enough things to hurt each other with. Now

well, we’ve got our first four. I’ll bury the damned things if I get the chance.”

She had taken him in among the broken dishes and sat him on the counter. He watched while she lit a lamp. The lamp reminded him suddenly, painfully, of the guest house back in Lo.

“You want anything else to eat?” she asked.

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No

what?”

“Shame on Lilith. ‘No, thank you,’ little one. Or ‘Yes, please.’ Understand?”

“I didn’t know resisters said those things.”

“In my house they do.”

“Did you tell Mateo who killed Tino?”

“God, no. I was afraid you told him. I forgot to tell you to keep that to yourself.”

“I told him the man who killed Tino was dead. One of the raiders really did die. He was sick. I thought if Mateo believed it was that one, he wouldn’t hurt anyone else.”

She nodded. “That should have worked. You’re brighter than I thought. And Mateo is crazier than I thought.” She sighed. “Hell, I don’t know. I never had any kids. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had one and someone killed him.”

“You shouldn’t have told Tino’s parents anything at all until the raiders were gone,” Akin said quietly.

She looked at him, then looked away. “I know. All I said was that you had known Tino and that he had been killed. Of course they wanted to know more, but I told them to wait until we had settled you in—that you were just a baby, after all.” She looked at him again, frowning, shaking her head. “I wonder what the hell you really are.”

“A baby,” he said. “A Human-Oankali construct. I wish I were something more because the Oankali part of me scares people, but it doesn’t help me when they try to hurt me.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

Akin looked at her, then looked toward the room in which Iriarte lay dead.

Tate made herself very busy cleaning up the broken dishes and glass.

11

Both Damek and Mateo lived.

Akin avoided both of them and stayed with the Rinaldis. Tino’s mother Pilar wanted him, seemed to believe she had a right to him since her son was dead. But Akin did not want to be near Mateo, and Tate knew it. Tate wanted him herself. She also felt guilty about the shooting, about her misjudgment. Akin trusted her to fight for him. He did not want to chance making an enemy of Pilar.

Other women fed him and held him when they could. He tried to speak to them or at least be heard speaking before they could get their hands on him. This made some of them back away from him. It kept them all from talking baby talk to him—most of the time. It also kept them from making fools of themselves and later resenting him for it. It forced them to either accept him for what he was or reject him.

And it had been Tate’s idea.

She reminded him of his mother, though the two were physical opposites. Pink skin and brown, blond hair and black, short stature and tall, small-boned and large. But they were alike in the way they accepted things, adapted to strangeness, thought quickly, and turned situations to their advantage. And they were both, at times, dangerously angry and upset for no apparent reason. Akin knew that Lilith sometimes hated herself for working with the Oankali, for having children who were not fully Human. She loved her children, yet she felt guilt for having them.

Tate had no children. She had not cooperated with the Oankali. What did she feel guilt for? What drove her sometimes when she stalked away into the forest and stayed for hours?

“Don’t worry about it,” Gabe told him when he asked. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Akin suspected that he himself did not understand. He watched her sometimes in a way that made Akin think he was trying hard to understand her—and failing.

Gabe had accepted Akin because Tate wanted him to. He did not particularly like Akin. “The mouth,” he called Akin. And he said when he thought Akin could not hear: “Who the hell needs a baby that sounds like a midget?”

Akin did not know what a midget was. He thought it must be a kind of insect until one of the village women told him it was a Human with a glandular disorder that caused him to remain tiny even as an adult. After he had asked the question, several people in the village never called him anything except midget.

He had no worse trouble than that in Phoenix. Even the people who did not like him were not cruel. Damek and Mateo recuperated out of his sight. And he had begun at once to try to convince Tate to help him escape and go home.

He had to do something. No one seemed to be coming for him. His new sibling must be born by now and bonding with other people. It would not know it had a brother, Akin. It would be a stranger when he finally saw it. He tried to tell Tate what this would mean, how completely wrong it would be.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tate told him. They had gone out to pick pummelos—Tate to pick the fruit and Akin to graze, but Akin stayed close to her. “The kid’s just a newborn now,” Tate continued. “Even construct kids can’t be born talking and knowing people. You’ll have time to get acquainted with it.”

“This is the time for bonding,” Akin said, wondering how he could explain such a personal thing to a Human who deliberately avoided all contact with the Oankali. “Bonding happens shortly after birth and shortly after metamorphosis. At other times

bonds are only shadows of what they could be. Sometimes people manage to make them, but usually they don’t. Late bonds are never what they should be. I’ll never know my sister the way I should.”

“Sister?”

Akin looked away, not wanting to cry but not able to stop a few silent tears. “Maybe it won’t be a sister. It should be, though. It would be if I were there.” He looked up at her suddenly and thought he read sympathy in her face.

“Take me home!” he whispered urgently. “I’m not really finished with my own bonding. My body was waiting for this new sibling.”

She frowned at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Ahajas let me touch it, let me be one of its presences. She let me recognize it and know it as a sibling still forming. It would be the sibling closest to me—closest to my age. It should be the sibling I grow up with, bond with. We

we won’t be right

” He thought for a moment. “We won’t be complete without each other.” He looked up at her hopefully.