Butler, Octavia - Adulthood Rites

Dichaan gave him to Nikanj, and Nikanj coaxed from him all the information he had discovered about plant and animal life, about the salvage pit. This could be given with great speed to an ooloi. It was the work of ooloi to absorb and assimilate information others had gathered. They compared familiar forms of life with what had been or should be. They detected changes and found new forms of life that could be understood, assembled, and used as they were needed. Males and females went to the ooloi with caches of biological information. The ooloi took the information and gave in exchange intense pleasure. The taking and the giving were one act.

Akin had experienced mild versions of this exchange with Nikanj all his life, but this experience taught him he had known nothing about what an ooloi could take and give until now. Locked to Nikanj, he forgot for a time the pain of being denied bonding with his sibling.

When he was able to think again, he understood why people treasured the ooloi. Males and females did not collect information only to please the ooloi or get pleasure from them. They collected it because the collecting felt necessary to them and pleased them.

But, still, they did know that at some point an ooloi must take the information and coordinate it so that the people could use it. At some point, an ooloi must give them the sensation that only an ooloi could give. Even Humans were vulnerable to this enticement. They could not deliberately gather the kind of specific biological information the ooloi wanted, but they could share with an ooloi all that they had recently eaten, breathed, or absorbed through their skins. They could share any changes in their bodies since their last contact with the ooloi. They did not understand what they gave the ooloi. But they knew what the ooloi gave them. Akin understood exactly what he was giving to Nikanj. And for the first time, he began to understand what an ooloi could give him. It did not take the place of an ongoing closeness like Amma’s and Shkaht’s. Nothing could do that. But this was better than anything he had ever known. It was an easing of pain for now and a foreshadowing of healing for the distant, adult future.

Sometime later, Akin became aware again of the three Humans. They were sitting on the ground talking to one another. On the hill behind them, the hill that concealed them from the salvage camp, Gabe stood. Apparently, none of the Humans had seen him yet. All the Oankali must be aware of him. He was watching Tate, no doubt focusing on her yellow hair.

“Don’t say anything,” Nikanj told him silently. “Let them talk.”

“He’s her mate,” Akin whispered aloud. “He’s afraid she’ll come with us and leave him.”

“Yes.”

“Let me go and get him.”

“No, Eka.”

“He’s a friend. He took me all around the hills. It was because of him that I had so much information to give you.”

“He’s a resister. I won’t give him the chance to use you as a hostage. You don’t realize how valuable you are.”

“He wouldn’t do it.”

“What if he simply picked you up and stepped over the hill and called his friends. There are guns in that camp, aren’t there?”

Silence. Gabe might do such a thing if he thought he was losing both Akin and Tate. He might. Just as Tino’s father had gathered his friends and killed so many even though he believed nothing he could do would bring Tino back or even properly avenge him.

“Come with us!” Lilith was saying. “You like kids? Have some of your own. Teach them everything you know about what Earth used to be.”

“That’s not what you used to say,” Tate said softly.

Lilith nodded. “I used to think you resisters would find an answer. I hoped you would. But, Jesus, your only answer has been to steal kids from us. The same kids you’re too good to have yourselves. What’s the point?”

“We thought

we thought they would be able to have children without an ooloi.”

Lilith took a deep breath. “No one does it without the ooloi. They’ve seen to that.”

“I can’t come back to them.”

“It’s not bad,” Tino said. “It’s not what I thought.”

“I know what it is! I know exactly what it is. So does Gabe. And I don’t think anything I could say would make him go through that again.”

“Call him,” Lilith said. “He’s there on the hill.”

Tate looked up, saw Gabe. She stood up. “I have to go.”

“Tate!” Lilith said urgently.

Tate looked back at her.

“Bring him to us. Let’s talk. What harm can it do?”

But Tate would not. Akin could see that she would not. “Tate,” he called to her.

She looked at him, then looked away quickly.

“I’ll do what I said I would,” he told her. “I don’t forget things.”

She came over to him, and kissed him. The fact that Nikanj was still holding him seemed not to bother her.

“If you ask,” Nikanj said, “my parents will come from the ship. They haven’t found other Human mates.”

She looked at Nikanj but did not speak to it. She walked away up the hill and over it, not stopping even to speak to Gabe. He followed her, and both disappeared over the hill.

1

The boy wanders too much,” Dichaan said as he sat sharing a meal with Tino. “It’s too early for the wandering phase of his life to begin.” Dichaan ate with his fingers from a large salad of fruits and vegetables that he had prepared himself. Only he knew best what he felt like eating and exactly what his current nutritional needs were.

Tino ate a corn and bean dish and had beside him a sliced melon with sweet orange flesh and dishes of fried plantains and roasted nuts. He was, Dichaan thought, paying more attention to his food than to what Dichaan was saying.

“Tino, listen to me!”

“I hear.” The man swallowed and licked his lips. “He’s twenty, ‘Chaan. If he weren’t showing some independence by now, I would be the one who was worried.”

“No.” Dichaan rustled his tentacles. “His Human appearance is deceiving you. His twenty years are like

like twelve Human years. Less in some ways. He isn’t fertile now. He won’t be until his metamorphosis is complete.”

“Four or five more years?”

“Perhaps. Where does he go, Tino?”

“I won’t tell you. He’s asked me not to.”

Dichaan focused sharply on him. “I haven’t wanted to follow him.”

“Don’t follow him. He isn’t doing any harm.”

“I’m his only same-sex parent. I should understand him better. I don’t because his Human inheritance makes him do things that I don’t expect.”

“What would a twenty-year-old Oankali be doing?”

“Developing an affinity for one of the sexes. Beginning to know what it would become.”

“He knows that. He doesn’t know how he’ll look, but he knows he’ll become male.”

“Yes.”

“Well, a twenty-year-old Human male in a place like this would be exploring and hunting and chasing girls and showing off. He’d be trying to see to it that everyone knew he was a man and not a kid anymore. That’s what I was doing.”

“Akin is still a kid, as you say.”

“He doesn’t look like one, in spite of his small size. And he probably doesn’t feel like one. And whether he’s fertile or not, he’s damned interested in girls. And they don’t seem to mind.”

“Nikanj said he would go through a phase of quasi-Human sexuality.”

Tino laughed. “This must be it, then.”

“Later he’ll want an ooloi.”

“Yeah. I can understand that, too.”

Dichaan hesitated. He had come to the question he most wanted to ask, and he knew Tino would not appreciate his asking. “Does he go to the resisters, Tino? Are they the reason for his wandering?”

Tino looked startled, then angry. “If you knew, why did you ask?”

“I didn’t know. I guessed. He must stop!”