Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

He told them stories from Oankali history—past partnerships that contributed to what the Oankali were or could become today. He had heard such stories from all three of his Oankali parents. All were absolutely true, yet the Humans believed almost none of them. They liked them anyway. They would gather around close so that they could hear him. Sometimes they let their work go and came to listen. Akin liked the attention, so he accepted their fairy tales and their disbelief in his stories. He also accepted the pairs of short pants that Pilar Leal made for him. He did not like them. They cut off some of his perception, and they were harder than skin to clean once they were soiled. Yet it never occurred to him to ask anyone else to wash them for him. When Tate saw him washing them, she gave him soap and showed him how to use it on them. Then she smiled almost gleefully and went away.

People let him watch them make shoes and clothing and paper. Tate persuaded Gabe to take him up to the mills—one where grain was ground and one where wooden furniture, tools, and other things were being made. The man and woman there were making a large canoe when Akin arrived.

“We could build a textile mill,” Gabe told him. “But foot-powered spinning wheels, sewing machines, and looms are enough. We already make more than we need, and people need to do some things at their own pace with their own designs.”

Akin thought about this and decided he understood it. He had often watched people spinning, weaving, sewing, making things they did not need in the hope of being able to trade with villages that had little or no machinery. But there was no urgency. They could stop in the middle of what they were doing and come to listen to his stories. Much of their work was done simply to keep them busy.

“What about metal?” he asked.

Gabe stared down at him. “You want to see the blacksmith’s shop?”

“Yes.”

Gabe picked him up and strode off with him. “I wonder how much you really understand,” he muttered.

“I usually understand,” Akin admitted. “What I don’t understand, I remember. Eventually I understand.”

“Jesus! I wonder what you’ll be like when you grow up.”

“Not as big as you,” Akin said wistfully.

“Really? You know that?”

Akin nodded. “Strong, but not very big.”

“Smart, though.”

“It would be terrible to be small and foolish.”

Gabe laughed. “It happens,” he said. “But probably not to you.”

Akin looked at him and smiled himself. He was still pleased when he could make Gabe laugh. It seemed that the man was beginning to accept him. It was Tate who had suggested that Gabe take him up the hill and show him the mills. She pushed them together when she could, and Akin understood that she wanted them to like each other.

But if they did what would happen when his people finally came for him? Would Gabe fight? Would he kill? Would he die?

Akin watched the blacksmith make a machete blade, heating, pounding, shaping the metal. There was a wooden crate of machete blades in one corner. There were also scythes, sickles, axes, hammers, saws, nails, hooks, chains, coiled wire, picks

And yet there was no clutter. Everything, work tools and products, had their places.

“I work here sometimes,” Gabe said. “And I’ve helped salvage a lot of our raw materials.” He glanced at Akin. “You might get to see the salvage site.”

“In the mountains?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“When things start to get warm around here.”

It took Akin several seconds to realize that he was not talking about the weather. He would be hidden at the salvage site when his people came looking for him.

“We’ve found artifacts of glass, plastic, ceramic, and metal. We’ve found a lot of money. You know what money is?”

“Yes. I’ve never seen any, but people have told me about it.”

Gabe reached into his pocket with his free hand. He brought out a bright, golden disk of metal and let Akin hold it. It was surprisingly heavy for its size. On one side was something that looked like a large letter t and the words, “He is risen. We shall rise.” On the other side there was a picture of a bird flying up from fire. Akin studied the bird, noticing that it was a kind he had never seen pictured before.

“Phoenix money,” Gabe said. “That’s a phoenix rising from its own ashes. A phoenix was a mythical bird. You understand?”

“A lie,” Akin said thoughtlessly.

Gabe took the disk from him, put it back into his pocket and put Akin down.

“Wait!” Akin said. “I’m sorry. I call myths that in my mind. I didn’t mean to say it out loud.”

Gabe looked down at him. “If you’re always going to be small, you ought to learn to be careful with that word,” he said.

“But

I didn’t say you were lying.”

“No. You said my dream, the dream of everyone here, was a lie. You don’t even know what you said.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gabe stared at him, sighed, and picked him up again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I ought to be relieved.”

“At what?”

“That in some ways you really are just a kid.”

13

Weeks later, traders arrived bringing two more stolen children. Both appeared to be young girls. The traders took away not a woman but as many metal tools and as much gold as they could carry, plus books that were more valuable than gold. Two couples in Phoenix worked together with occasional help from others to make paper and ink and print the books most likely to be desired by other villages. Bibles—using the memories of every village they could reach, Phoenix researchers had put together the most complete Bible available. There were also how-to books, medical books, memories of prewar Earth, listings of edible plants, animals, fish, and insects and their dangers and advantages, and propaganda against the Oankali.

“We can’t have kids, so we make all this stuff,” Tate told Akin as they watched the traders bargain for a new canoe to carry all their new merchandise in. “Those guys are now officially rich. For all the good it will do them.”

“Can I see the girls?” Akin asked.

“Why not? Let’s go over.”

She walked slowly and let him follow her over to the Wilton house where the girls were staying. Macy and Kolina Wilton had been quick enough to seize both children for themselves. They were one half of Phoenix’s publishers. They would probably be expected to give up one child to another couple, but for now they were a family of four.

The girls were eating roasted almonds and cassava bread with honey. Kolina Wilton was spooning a salad of mixed fruit into small bowls for them.

“Akin,” she said when she saw him. “Good. These little girls don’t speak English. Maybe you can talk to them.”

They were brown girls with long, thick black hair and dark eyes. They wore what appeared to be men’s shirts, belted with light rope and cut off to fit them. The bigger of the two girls had already managed to free her arms from the makeshift garment. She had a few body tentacles around her neck and shoulders, and confining them was probably blinding, itching torment. Now all her small tentacles focused on Akin, while the rest of her seemed to go on concentrating on the food. The smaller girl had a cluster of tentacles at her throat, where they probably protected a sair breathing orifice. That meant her small, normal-looking nose was probably ornamental. It might also mean the girl could breathe underwater. Oankali-born, then, in spite of her human appearance. That was unusual. If she was Oankali-born, then she was she only by courtesy. She could not know yet what her sex would be. But such children, if they had Human-appearing sex organs at all, tended to look female. The children were perhaps three and four years old.

“You’ll have to go into their gardens and into the forest to find enough protein,” Akin told them in Oankali. “They try, but they never seem to give us enough.”