Adulthood Rites (23 page)

“I will be.” He put his hand in among her head tentacles and felt them grasp and penetrate. “I’m still years away from changing.”

“Your body can change faster than you think. The stress of having to adjust to a new environment could make things go more quickly. You should see everyone now.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. You don’t want to leave so you don’t want to say goodbye. You didn’t even go to your resister friends.”

She didn’t smell them on him. He had been particularly embarrassed to realize that she and others knew by scent when he had been with a woman. He washed, of course, but still they knew.

“You should have gone to them. You might change a great deal during your metamorphosis. Humans don’t accept that easily.”

“Lilith?”

“You know better. In spite of the things she says, I’ve never seen her reject one of her children. But would you want to leave without seeing her?”

Silence.

“Come on, Eka.” She released his hand and stood up.

He followed her back to the village, feeling resentful and manipulated.

A
N OUTDOOR FEAST WAS
arranged for him. The people stopped their activities and came together in the center of the village for him and for Tiikuchahk. Tiikuchahk seemed to enjoy the party, but Akin simply endured it. Margit, who was known to be on the verge of her metamorphosis, came to sit beside him. She was still his favorite sibling, although she spent more time with her own paired sibling. She held out a gray hand to him, and he almost took it between his own before he noticed what she was showing him. She had always had too many fingers for a Human-born child—seven on each hand. But the hand she held out to him now had only five long, slender, gray fingers.

He stared at her, then carefully took the offered hand and examined it. There was no wound, no scars.

“How … ?” he asked.

“I woke up this morning, and they were gone. Nothing left but the nail and some shriveled, dead skin.”

“Did your hand hurt?”

“It felt fine. It still does. I’m sleepy, but that’s all so far.” She hesitated. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”

He hugged her and was barely able to stop himself from crying. “I won’t even know you when I come back. You’ll be someone else, probably mated and pregnant.”

“I may be mated and pregnant, but you’ll know me. I’ll see to that!”

He only looked at her. Everyone changed, but, irrationally, he did not want her to change.

“What is it?” Tiikuchahk asked.

Akin did not understand why he did it, but after looking to see that it was all right with Margit, he took her hand and showed it to Tiikuchahk.

Tiikuchahk, who looked a great deal more Human than Margit did in spite of being Oankali-born, began to cry. It kissed her hand and let it go sadly. “Things are going to change too much while we’re gone,” it said, silent tears sliding down its gray face. “We’ll be strangers when we come back.” Its few small sensory tentacles tightened into lumps against its body, making it look the way Akin felt.

Now others wanted to know what was wrong, and Lilith came to them, looking as though she already knew.

“Margit?” she said softly.

Margit held up her hands and smiled. “I thought so,” Lilith said. “Now this is your party, too. Come on.” She led Margit away to show others.

Akin and Tiikuchahk got up together without speaking. They did sometimes act in unison in the way of paired siblings, but the phenomenon always startled them and somehow never gave the comfort it seemed to give to sibling pairs who had bonded properly in infancy. Now, though, they moved together toward Ayre, their oldest sister. She was a construct adult—the oldest construct adult in Lo—and she had been watching them, training several head tentacles on them as she sat talking to one of Leah’s Oankali-born sons. She had been born in Chkahichdahk. She had passed her metamorphosis on Earth, mated, and borne several children. The things that they still faced, she had already survived.

“Sit with me,” Ayre said as they came up to her. “Sit here.” She positioned them on either side of her. She immediately tangled her long head tentacles with Tiikuchahk’s. Akin had come to find having only one true sensory tentacle, and that one in his mouth, very inconvenient. Resisters liked it because they did not have to look at it, but it inhibited communication with Oankali and constructs. He had quickly grown too large to be held in someone’s arms.

But Ayre, being Ayre, simply took him under one arm and pulled him against her so that it was easy for him to link with her as she used her body tentacles to link with him.

“We don’t know what will happen to us,” both he and Tiikuchahk said in silent unison. It was a cry of fear from both of them and, for Akin, also a cry of frustration. Time was being stolen from him. He knew the people and languages of a Chinese resister village, an Igbo village, three Spanish-speaking villages made up of people from many countries, a Hindu village, and two villages of Swahili-speaking people from different countries. So many resisters. Yet there were so many more. He had been driven out of, of all things, a village of English-speaking people because he was browner than the villagers were. He did not understand this, and he had not dared to ask anyone in Lo. But still, there were resisters he had never seen, resisters whose ideas he had not heard, resisters who believed their only hope was to steal construct children or to die as a species. There were stories now of a village whose people had gathered in their village square and drunk poison. No one Akin had talked to knew the name of this village, but everyone had heard about it.

Would there be any Humans left to save when he was finally old enough to have his opinions respected?

And would he still look Human enough to persuade them?

Or was all that foolishness? Would he truly be able to help them at all, no matter what happened? The Oankali would not stop him from doing anything they did not consider harmful. But if there were no consensus, they would not help him. And he could not help the Humans alone.

He could not, for instance, give them a ship entity. As long as they remained Human enough to satisfy their beliefs, they could not communicate with a ship. Some of them insisted on believing the ships were not alive—that they were metal things that anyone could learn to control. They had not understood at all when Akin tried to explain that ships controlled themselves. You either joined with them, shared their experiences, and let them share yours, or there was no trade. And without trade, the ships ignored your existence.

“You know you must help each other,” Ayre said.

Akin and Tiikuchahk drew back reflexively.

“You can’t be what you should have been, but you can help each other.” Akin could not miss the certainty Ayre felt. “You’re both alone. You’ll both be strangers. And you’re like one pea cut in half. Let yourselves depend on each other a little.”

Neither Akin nor Tiikuchahk responded.

“Is a pea cut in half one wounded thing or two?” she asked softly.

“We can’t heal each other,” Tiikuchahk said.

“Metamorphosis will heal you, and it may be closer than you think.”

And they were afraid again. Afraid of changing, afraid of returning to a changed, unrecognizable home. Afraid of going to a place even less their own than the one they were leaving. Ayre sought to divert them. “Ti, why do you want to go to Chkahichdahk?” she asked.

Tiikuchahk did not want to answer the question. Both Akin and Ayre received only a strong negative feeling from it.

“There are no resisters there,” Ayre said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

Tiikuchahk said nothing.

“Has Ahajas said you would be female?” Ayre asked.

“Not yet.”

“Do you want to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think you might want to be male?”

“Maybe.”

“If you want to be male, you should stay here. Let Akin go. Spend your time with Dichaan and Tino and with your sisters. Male parents, female siblings. Your body will know how to respond.”

“I want to see Chkahichdahk.”

“You could wait. See it after you change.”

“I want to go with Akin.” There was the strong negative again. It had said what it had not wanted to say.

“Then you will probably be female.”

Sadness. “I know.”

“Ti, maybe you want to go with Akin because you’re still trying to heal the old wound. As I said, there are no resisters on Chkahichdahk. No bands of Humans to distract him and use so much of his time.” She shifted her attention to Akin. “And you. Since you must go, how do you feel about having Ti go with you?”

“I don’t want it to go.” No lie could be told successfully in this intimate form of communication. The only way to avoid unpleasant truths was to avoid communication—to say nothing. But Tiikuchahk already knew he did not want it to go with him. Everyone knew. It repelled him and yet drew him in such an incomprehensible, uncomfortable way that he did not like to be near it at all. And it felt the same things he did. It should have been glad to see him go away.

Ayre shuddered. She did not break the contact between them, but she wanted to. She could feel the deep attraction-repulsion between them. She tried to overcome the conflicting emotions with her own calm, with feelings of unity that she recalled with her own paired sibling. Akin recognized the feeling. He had noticed it before in others. It did nothing to calm his own confusion of feelings.

Ayre broke contact with them. “Ti is right. You should go up together,” she said, rustling her head tentacles uncomfortably. “You have to resolve this. It’s disgusting that the people chose to let this happen to you.”

“We don’t know how to resolve it,” Akin said, “except to wait for metamorphosis.”

“Find an ooloi. A subadult. That’s something you can’t do here. I haven’t seen a subadult down here for years.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Tiikuchahk said. “They come down after their second metamorphosis. What can they do before then?”

“Focus the two of you away from each other without even trying. You’ll see. Even before they grow up, they’re … interesting.”

Akin stood up. “I don’t want an ooloi. That makes me think about mating. Everything is going too fast.”

Ayre sighed and shook her head. “What do you think you’ve been doing with those resister women?”

“That was different. Nothing could happen. I even told them nothing could happen. They wanted to do it anyway—in case I was wrong.”

“You and Ti find yourselves an ooloi. If it isn’t mature it can’t mate—but it can help you.”

They left her, found themselves both seeking out then starting toward Nikanj. At that point, Akin deliberately pulled himself out of synchronization with Tiikuchahk. It was a grating synchronization that kept happening by accident and feeling the way the saw mill in Phoenix had once sounded when something went badly wrong with the saw and the mill had to be shut down for days.

He stopped, and Tiikuchahk went on. It stumbled, and he knew it felt the same tearing away that he did. Things had always been this way for them. He knew it was usually glad when he left the village for weeks or months. Sometimes it would not stay with the family when he was home but went to other families, where it found being alone, being an outsider, more endurable.

Humans had no idea how completely Oankali and construct society was made up of groups of two or more people. Tate did not know what she had done when she refused to help him get back to Lo and Tiikuchahk. Perhaps that was why in all his travels, he had never returned to Phoenix.

He went to Lilith, as someone began calling for a story. She was sitting alone, ignoring the call, although people liked her stories. Her memory supplied her with the smallest details of prewar Earth, and she knew how to put everything together in ways that made people laugh or cry or lean forward, listening, fearful of missing the next words.

She looked up at him, and said nothing when he sat down next to her.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” he said softly.

She seemed tired. “I was thinking about Margit growing up, you and Ti going. … But you should go.” She took his hand and held it. “You should know the Oankali part of yourselves, too. But I can hardly stand the thought of losing what may be the last year of your childhood.”

“I hoped I would reach more of the resisters,” he said.

She said nothing. She did not talk to him about his trips to the resisters. She cautioned him sometimes, answered questions if he asked. And he could see that she worried about him. But she volunteered nothing—nor did he. Once, when she had left the village on one of her solitary treks, he had followed her, found her sitting on a log waiting for him when he finally caught her. They traveled together for several days, and she told him her story—why her name was an epithet among English-speaking resisters, how they blamed her for what the Oankali had done to them because she was the person the Oankali had chosen to work through. She had had to awaken groups of Humans from suspended animation and help them understand their new situation. Only she could speak Oankali then. Only she could open and close walls and use her Oankali-enhanced strength to protect herself and others. That was enough to make her a collaborator, a traitor in the minds of her own people. It had been safe to blame her, she said. The Oankali were powerful and dangerous, and she was not.

Now she faced him. “You couldn’t possibly reach all the resisters,” she said. “If you want to help them, you already have the information you need from them. Now you need to learn more about the Oankali. Do you see?”

He nodded slowly, his skin itching where there were sensory spots but no tentacles to coil tight and express the tension he felt.

“If there is anything you can do, now is the time to find out what it is and how to do it. Learn all you can.”

“I will.” He compared her long, brown hand to his own and wondered how there could be so little visible difference. Perhaps the first sign of his metamorphosis would be new fingers growing or old ones losing their flat Human nails. “I hadn’t really thought of the trip being useful.”