Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

“This is about the happiest I’ve ever seen you,” Gabe remarked as they neared the salvage camp.

Akin grinned at him but said nothing. Gabe would not want to know that Akin was collecting information for Nikanj. It was enough for him to know that he had pleased Akin very much.

Gabe did not smile back, but only because he made an obvious effort not to.

When they reached camp a few days later, Gabe met Tate with none of the odd anxiety he often showed when she had been out of his sight for a while.

23

Ten days after Akin and Gabe returned, a new salvage team arrived to take their turn at the dig. While both teams were still on the site, the Oankali arrived.

They were not seen. There was no outcry among the Humans. Akin was busy scrubbing a small, ornate crystal vase when he noticed the Oankali scent.

He put the vase down carefully in a wooden box lined with cloth—a box used for especially delicate, especially beautiful finds. Akin had never broken one of these. There was no reason to break one now.

What should he do? If Humans spotted the Oankali, there might be fighting. Humans could so easily provoke the lethal sting reflex of the Oankali. What to do?

He spotted Tate and called to her. She was digging very carefully around something large and apparently delicate. She was digging with what looked like a long, thin knife and a brush made of twigs. She ignored him.

He went to her quickly, glad there was no one near her to hear.

“I have to go,” he whispered. “They’re here.”

She almost stabbed herself with the knife. “Where!”

“That way.” He looked east but did not point.

“Of course.”

“Walk me out there. People will notice if I get too far from camp alone.”

“Me? No!”

“If you don’t, someone might get killed.”

“If I do, I might get killed!”

“Tate.”

She looked at him.

“You know they won’t hurt you. You know. Help me. Your people are the ones I’m trying to save.”

She gave him a look so hostile that he stumbled back from her. Abruptly she grabbed him, picked him up, and began walking east.

“Put me down,” he said. “Let me walk.”

“Shut up!” she said. “Just tell me when I’m getting close to them.”

He realized belatedly that she was terrified. She could not have been afraid of being killed. She knew the Oankali too well for that. What then?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You were the only one I dared to ask. It will be all right.”

She took a breath and put him down, held his hand. “It won’t be all right,” she said. “But that’s not your fault.”

They went over a rise, out of sight of the camp. There, several Oankali and two Humans waited. One of the Humans was Lilith. The other

looked like Tino.

“Oh, Jesus God!” Tate whispered as she caught sight of the Oankali. She froze. Akin thought she might turn and run, but somehow she managed not to move. Akin wanted to go to his family, but he too kept very still. He did not want to leave Tate standing alone and terrified.

Lilith came over to him. She moved so quickly that he had no time to react before she was there, bending, lifting him, hugging him so hard it hurt.

She had not made a sound. She let Akin taste her neck and feel the utter security of flesh as familiar as his own.

“I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” he whispered finally.

“I’ve been looking for you for so long,” she said, her voice hardly sounding like her voice at all. She kissed his face and stroked his hair and finally held him away from her. “Three years old,” she said. “So big. I kept worrying that you wouldn’t remember me—but I knew you would. I knew you would.”

He laughed at the impossible notion of his forgetting her and looked to see whether she was crying. She was not. She was examining him—his hands and arms, his legs

A shout made them both look up. Tate and the other Human stood facing one another. The sound had been Tate shouting Tino’s name.

Tino was smiling at her uncertainly. He did not speak until she took him by the arms and said, “Tino, don’t you recognize me? Tino?”

Akin looked at Tino’s expression, and he knew he did not recognize her. He was alive, but something was the matter with him.

“I’m sorry,” Tino said. “I’ve had a head injury. I remember a lot of my past, but

some things are still coming back to me.”

Tate looked at Lilith. Lilith looked back with no sign of friendliness. “They tried to kill him when they took Akin,” she said. “They clubbed him down, fractured his skull so badly he nearly did die.”

“Akin said he was dead.”

“He had good reason to think so.” She paused. “Was it worth his life for you to have my son?”

“She didn’t do it,” Akin said quickly. “She was my friend. The men who took me tried to sell me in a lot of places before

before Phoenix wanted to buy me.”

“Most of the men who took him are dead,” Tate said. “The survivor is paralyzed. There was a fight.” She glanced at Tino. “Believe me, you and Tino are avenged.”

The Oankali began communicating silently among themselves as they heard this. Akin could see his Oankali parents among them, and he wanted to go to them, but he also wanted to go to Tino, wanted to make the man remember him, wanted to make him sound like Tino again.

“Tate

?” Tino said staring at her. “Is it

? Are you

?”

“It’s me,” she said quickly. “Tate Rinaldi. You did half of your growing up in my house. Tate and Gabe. Remember?”

“Kind of.” He thought for a moment. “You helped me. I was going to leave Phoenix and you said

you told me how to get to Lo.”

Lilith looked surprised. “You did?” she asked Tate.

“I thought he would be safe in Lo.”

“He should have been.” Lilith drew a deep breath. “That was our first raid in years. We’d gotten careless.”

Ahajas, Dichaan, and Nikanj detached themselves from the other Oankali and came over to the Human group. Akin could not wait any longer. He reached toward Dichaan, and Dichaan took him and held him for several minutes of relief and reacquaintance and joy. He did not know what the Humans said while he and Dichaan were locked together by as many of Dichaan’s sensory tentacles as could reach him and by Akin’s own tongue. Akin learned how Dichaan had found Tino and struggled to keep him alive and got home only to discover that Ahajas’s child was soon to be born. The family could not search. But others had searched. At first.

“Was I left among them for so long so that I could study them?” Akin asked silently.

Dichaan rustled his free tentacles in discomfort. “There was a consensus,” he said. “Everyone came to believe it was the right thing to do except us. We’ve never been alone that way before. Others were surprised that we didn’t accept the general will, but they were wrong. They were wrong to even want to risk you!”

“My sibling?”

Silence. Sadness. “It remembers you as something there then not there. Nakanj kept you in its thoughts for a while, and the rest of us searched. As soon as we could leave it, we began searching. No one would help us until now.”

“Why now?” Akin asked.

“The people believed you had learned enough. They knew they had deprived you of your sibling.”

“It’s

too late for bonding.” He knew it was.

“Yes.”

“There was a pair of construct siblings here.”

“We know. They’re all right.”

“I saw what they had, how it was for them.” He paused for a moment remembering, longing. “I’ll never have that.” Without realizing it, he had begun to cry.

“Eka, you’ll have something very like it when you mate. Until then, you have us.” Dichaan did not have to be told how little this was. It would be long years before Akin was old enough to mate. And bonding with parents was not the same as bonding with a close sibling. Nothing he had touched was as sweet as that bonding.