Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

“What’s going on?” he asked. Akin thought later that he looked a little frightened. He looked uncertain, then relieved, yet slightly frightened—as though something bad still might happen.

“He had some things to tell me,” Tate said. “And we have work to do.”

“What work?” He took Akin from her as they walked back toward camp, and there was somehow more to the gesture than simply relieving her of a burden. Akin had seen this odd tension in Gabe before, but he did not understand it.

“We have to see to it that our little girls aren’t forced to kill anyone,” Tate said.

16

The salvage site that was their destination was a buried town. “Smashed and covered by the Oankali,” Gabe told Akin. “They didn’t want us living here and remembering what we used to be.”

Akin looked at the vast pit the salvage crew had dug over the years, excavating the town. It had not been wantonly smashed as Gabe believed. It had been harvested. One of the shuttles had partially consumed it. The small ship-entities fed whenever they could. There was no faster way to destroy a town than to land a shuttle on it and let the shuttle eat its fill. Shuttles could digest almost anything, including the soil itself. What the people of Phoenix were digging through were leavings. Apparently these were enough to satisfy their needs.

“We don’t even know what this place used to be called,” Gabe said bitterly.

Piles of metal, stone, and other materials lay scattered about. Salvagers were tying some things together with jute rope so that they could be carried. They all stopped their work, though, when they saw the party of newcomers. They gathered around first, shouting and greeting people by name, then falling silent as they noticed the three children.

Men and women, covered with sweat and dirt, clustered around to touch Akin and make baby-talk noises at him. He did not surprise them by speaking to them, although both girls were trying out their new English on their audience.

Gabe knelt down, slipped out of his pack, then lifted Akin free. “Don’t goo-goo at him,” he said to a dusty woman salvager who was already reaching for him. “He can talk as well as you can—and understand everything you say.”

“He’s beautiful!” the woman said. “Is he ours? Is he—”

“We got him in trade. He’s more Human-looking than the girls, but that probably doesn’t mean anything. He’s construct. He’s not a bad kid, though.”

Akin looked up at him, recognizing the compliment—the first he had ever received from Gabe, but Gabe had turned away to speak to someone else.

The salvager picked Akin up and held him so that she could see his face. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you a damn big hole in the ground. Why don’t you talk like your friends? You shy?”

“I don’t think so,” Akin answered.

The woman looked startled, then grinned. “Okay. Let’s go take a look at something that probably used to be a truck.”

The salvagers had hacked away thick, wild vegetation to dig their hole and to plant their crops along two sides of it, but the wild vegetation was growing back. People with hoes, shovels, and machetes had been clearing it away. Now they were talking with newly arrived Humans or getting acquainted with Amma and Shkaht. Three Humans trailed after the woman who carried Akin, talking to each other about him and occasionally talking to him.

“No tentacles,” one of them said, stroking his face. “So Human. So beautiful

”

Akin did not believe he was beautiful. These people liked him simply because he looked like them. He was comfortable with them, though. He talked to them easily and ate the bits of food they kept giving him and accepted their caresses, though he did not enjoy them any more than he ever had. Humans needed to touch people, but they could not do so in ways that were pleasurable or useful. Only when he felt lonely or frightened was he glad of their hands, their protection.

They passed near a broad trench, its sides covered with grass. At its center flowed a clear stream. No doubt there were wet seasons when the entire riverbed was filled, perhaps to overflowing. The wet and dry seasons here would be more pronounced than in the forest around Lo. There, it rained often no matter what the season was supposed to be. Akin knew about such things because he had heard adults talk about them. It was not strange to see this shrunken river. But when he looked up as he was carried toward the far end of the pit, he saw for the first time between the green hills to the distant, snow-covered peaks of the mountains.

“Wait!” Akin shouted as the salvager—Sabina, her name was—would have carried him on toward the house on the far side of the hole. “Wait, let me look.”

She seemed pleased to do this. “Those are volcanic,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

“A broken place in the Earth where hot liquid rock comes up,” Akin said.

“Good,” she said. “Those mountains were pushed up and built by volcanic activity. One of them went off last year. Not close enough to us to matter, but it was exciting. It still steams now and then, even though it’s covered with snow. Do you like it?”

“Dangerous,” he said. “Did the ground shake?”

“Yes. Not much here, but it must have been pretty bad there. I don’t think there are any people living near there.”

“Good. I like to look at it, though. I’d like to go there some day to understand it.”

“Safer to look from here.” She took him on to the short row of houses where salvagers apparently lived. There was a flattened rectangular metal frame—Sabina’s “truck” apparently. It looked useless. Akin had no idea what Humans had once done with it, but now it could only be cut up into metal scrap and eventually forged into other things. It was huge and would probably yield a great deal of metal. Akin wondered how the feeding shuttle had missed it.

“I’d like to know how the Oankali smashed it flat this way,” another woman said. “It’s as though a big foot stepped on it.”

Akin said nothing. He had learned that people did not really want him to give them information unless they asked him directly—or unless they were so desperate they didn’t care where their information came from. And information about the Oankali tended to frighten or anger them no matter how they received it.

Sabina put him down, and he looked more closely at the metal. He would have tasted it if he had been alone. Instead, he followed the salvagers into one of the houses. It was a solidly built house, but it was plain, unpainted, roofed with sheets of metal. The guest house at Lo was a more interesting building.

But inside there was a museum.

There were stacks of dishes, bits of jewelry, glass, metal. There were boxes with glass windows. Behind the windows was only a blank, solid grayness. There were massive metal boxes with large, numbered wheels on their doors. There were metal shelves, tables, drawers, bottles. There were crosses like the one on Gabe’s coin—crosses of metal, each with a metal man hanging from them. Christ on the cross, Akin remembered. There were also pictures of Christ rapping with his knuckles on a wooden door and others of him pulling open his clothing to reveal a red shape that contained a torch. There was a picture of Christ sitting at a table with a lot of other men. Some of the pictures seemed to move as Akin viewed them from different angles.

Tate, who had reached the house before him, took one of the moving pictures—a small one of Christ standing on a hill and talking to people—and handed it to Akin. He moved it slightly in his hand, watching the apparent movement of Christ, whose mouth opened and closed and whose arm moved up and down. The picture, though scratched, was hard and flat—made of a material Akin did not understand. He tasted it—then threw it hard away from him, disgusted, nauseated.