Adulthood Rites (28 page)

There was nothing. A neurosensory equivalent of silence. Denial.

He reached through the Akjai once more, struggling against sudden exhaustion. Only the Akjai’s efforts kept him conscious. “Look at the Human-born among you,” he told them. “If your flesh knows you’ve done all you can for Humanity, their flesh should know as mine does that you’ve done almost nothing. Their flesh should know that resister Humans must survive as a separate, self-sufficient species. Their flesh should know that Humanity must live!”

He stopped. He could have gone on, but it was time to stop. If he had not said enough, shown them enough, if he had not guessed accurately about the Human-born, he had failed. He must try again later when he was an adult, or he must find people who would help him in spite of the majority opinion. That would be difficult, perhaps impossible. But it must be tried.

As he realized he was about to be cut off, shielded by the Akjai, he felt confusion among the people. Confusion, dissension.

He had reached some of them, perhaps caused Human-born constructs to start to think, start to examine their Human heritage as they had not before. Toaht constructs could have little reason to pay close attention to their own Humanity. He would go to them if opinion went against him. He would seek them out and teach them about the people they were part of. He would go to them even if opinion did not go against him. Aboard the ship, they were the group most likely to help him.

“Sleep,” the Akjai advised him. “You’re too young for all this. I’ll argue for you now.”

“Why?” he asked. He was almost asleep, but the question was like an itch in his mind. “Why do you care so when my own kin-group doesn’t care?”

“Because you’re right,” the Akjai said. “If I were Human, little construct, I would be a resister myself. All people who know what it is to end should be allowed to continue if they can continue. Sleep.”

The Akjai coiled part of its body around him so that he lay in a broad curve of living flesh. He slept.

T
IIKUCHAHK AND DEHKIAHT WERE
with him when he awoke. The Akjai was there, too, but he realized it had not been with him continually. He had a memory of it going away and coming back with Tiikuchahk and Dehkiaht. As Akin took in his surroundings, he saw the Akjai draw Dehkiaht into an alarming embrace, lifting the ooloi child and clasping it in over a dozen limbs.

“They wanted to learn about one another,” Tiikuchahk said. These were the first words it had spoken to him since he caused it to experience his memories.

He sat up and focused on it questioningly.

“You shouldn’t have been able to grab us and hold us that way,” it said. “Dehkiaht and its parents say no child should be able to do that.”

“I didn’t know I could do it.”

“Dehkiaht’s parents say it’s a teaching thing—the way adults teach subadult ooloi sometimes when the ooloi have to learn something they aren’t really ready for. They’ve never heard of a subadult male.”

“But Dehkiaht says that’s what I am.”

“It is what you are. Human-born construct females could be called subadults too, I guess. But you’re a first. Again.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t like what I did. I’ll try not to do it again.”

“Don’t. Not to me. The Akjai says you learned it here.”

“I must have—without realizing it.” He paused, watching Tiikuchahk. It was sitting next to him in apparent comfort. “Is it all right between us?”

“Seems to be.”

“Will you help me?”

“I don’t know.” It focused narrowly on him. “I don’t know what I am yet. I don’t even know what I want to be.”

“Do you want Dehkiaht?”

“I like it. It helped us, and I feel better when it’s around. If I were like you, I would probably want to keep it.”

“I do.”

“It wants you, too. It says you’re the most interesting person it’s known. I think it will help you.”

“If you become female, you could join us—mate with it.”

“And you?”

He looked away from it. “I can’t imagine how I would feel to have it and not you. What I’ve felt of it was … partly you.”

“I don’t know. No one knows yet what I’ll be. I can’t feel what you feel yet.”

He managed to stop himself from arguing. Tiikuchahk was right. He still occasionally thought of it as female, but its body was neuter. It could not feel as he did. He was amazed at his own feelings, although they were natural. Now that Tiikuchahk was no longer a source of irritation and confusion, he could begin to feel about it the way people tended to feel about their closest siblings. He did not know whether he truly wanted to have it as one of his mates—or whether a wandering male of the kind he was supposed to be could be said to have mates. But the idea of mating with it felt right, now. It, Dehkiaht, and himself. That was the way it should be.

“Do you know what the people have decided?” he asked.

Tiikuchahk shook its head Humanly. “No.”

After a time, Dehkiaht and the Akjai separated, and Dehkiaht climbed to the Akjai’s long, broad back.

“Come join us,” Dehkiaht called.

Akin got up and started toward it. Behind him, though, Tiikuchahk did not move.

Akin stopped, turned to face it. “Are you afraid?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You know the Akjai won’t hurt you.”

“It will hurt me if it thinks hurting me is necessary.”

That was true. The Akjai had hurt Akin in order to teach him—and had taught Akin much more than he realized.

“Come anyway,” Akin said. He wanted to touch Tiikuchahk now, draw it to him, comfort it. He had never before wanted to do such a thing. And in spite of the impulse, he found he was not willing to touch it now. It would not want him to. Dehkiaht would not want him to.

He went back to it and sat next to it. “I’ll wait for you,” he said.

It focused on him, head tentacles knotting miserably. “Join them,” it said.

He said nothing. He sat with it, comfortably patient, wondering whether it feared the joining because it might find itself making decisions it did not feel ready to make.

Dehkiaht simply lay down on the Akjai’s back, and the Akjai squatted, resting on its belly, waiting. Humans said no one knew how to wait better than the Oankali. Humans, perhaps remembering their earlier short life spans, tended to hurry without reason.

He did not know how much time had passed when Tiikuchahk stood up and he roused and stood up beside it. He focused on it, and when it moved, he followed it to the Akjai and Dehkiaht.

The Akjai drew its body into the familiar curve and welcomed Tiikuchahk and Akin to sit or lie against it. The Akjai gave each a sensory arm and gave Dehkiaht one too when it slid down one of the plates to settle beside them.

Now Akin learned for the first time what the people had decided. He felt now what he had not been able to feel before. That the people saw him as something they had helped to make.

He was intended to decide the fate of the resisters. He was intended to make the decision the Dinso and the Toaht could not make. He was intended to see what must be done and convince others.

He had been abandoned to the resisters when they took him so that he could learn them as no adult could, as no Oankali-born construct could, as no construct who did not look quite Human could. Everyone knew the resisters’ bodies, but no one knew their thinking as Akin did. No one except other Humans. And they had not been allowed to convince Oankali to do the profoundly immoral, antilife thing that Akin had decided must be done. The people had suspected what he would decide—had feared it. They would not have accepted it if he had not been able to stir confusion and some agreement among constructs, both Oankali-born and Human-born.

They had deliberately rested the fate of the resisters—the fate of the Human species—on him.

Why? Why not on one of the Human-born females? Some of them were adults before he was born.

The Akjai supplied him with the answer before he was aware of having asked the question. “You’re more Oankali than you think, Akin—and far more Oankali than you look. Yet you’re very Human. You skirt as close to the Contradiction as anyone has dared to go. You’re as much of them as you can be and as much of us as your ooan dared make you. That leaves you with your own contradiction. It also made you the most likely person to choose for the resisters—quick death or long, slow death.”

“Or life,” Akin protested.

“No.”

“A chance for life.”

“Only for a while.”

“You’re certain of that … and yet you spoke for me?”

“I’m Akjai. How can I deny another people the security of an Akjai group? Even though for this people it’s a cruelty. Understand that, Akin; it
is
a cruelty. You and those who help you will give them the tools to create a civilization that will destroy itself as certainly as the pull of gravity will keep their new world in orbit around its sun.”

Akin felt absolutely no sign of doubt or uncertainty in the Akjai. It meant what it was saying. It believed it knew factually that Humanity was doomed. Now or later.

“It’s your life work to decide for them,” the Akjai continued, “and then to act on your decision. The people will allow you to do what you believe is right. But you’re not to do it in ignorance.”

Akin shook his head. He could feel the attention of Tiikuchahk and Dehkiaht on him. He thought for some time, trying to digest the indigestible certainty of the Akjai. He had trusted it, and it had not failed him. It did not lie. It could be mistaken, but only if all Oankali were mistaken. Its certainty was an Oankali certainty. A certainty of the flesh. They had read Human genes and reviewed Human behavior. They knew what they knew.

Yet …

“I can’t not do it,” he said. “I keep trying to decide not to do it, and I can’t.”

“I’ll help you do it,” Dehkiaht said at once.

“Find a female mate that you can be especially close to,” the Akjai told it. “Akin will not stay with you. You know that.”

“I know.”

Now the Akjai turned its attention to Tiikuchahk. “You are not as much a child as you want to be.”

“I don’t know what I’ll be,” it said.

“What do you feel about the resisters?”

“They took Akin. They hurt him, and they hurt me. I don’t want to care about them.”

“But you do care.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re part Human. You shouldn’t carry such feelings for such a large group of Humans.”

Silence.

“I’ve found teachers for Akin and Dehkiaht. They’ll teach you, too. You’ll learn to prepare a lifeless world for life.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I … don’t know.”

“Then do this. The knowledge won’t harm you if you decide not to use it. You need to do this. You’ve taken refuge too long in doing nothing at all.”

And that was that. Somehow, Tiikuchahk could not bring itself to go on arguing with the Akjai. Akin was reminded that in spite of the way the Akjai looked, it was an ooloi. With scent and touch and neural stimulation, ooloi manipulated people. He focused warily on Dehkiaht, wondering whether he would know when it began to move him with things other than words. The idea disturbed him, and for the first time, he looked forward to wandering.

F
OR A TIME, EARTH
seemed wild and strange to Akin—a profusion of life almost frightening in its complexity. On Chkahichdahk, there was only a potential profusion stored in people’s memories and in seed, cell, and gene-print banks. Earth was still a huge biological bank itself, balancing its own ecology with little Oankali help.

Akin could do nothing on the fourth planet—Mars, the Humans called it—until after his metamorphosis. His training too had gone as far as it could until his metamorphosis. His teachers had sent him home. Tiikuchahk, now at peace with him and with itself, seemed glad to come home. And Dehkiaht had simply attached itself to Akin. When Dichaan came for Akin and Tiikuchahk, even he did not suggest leaving Dehkiaht behind.

Once they reached Earth, however, Akin had to get away from Dehkiaht, away from everyone for a while. He wanted to see some of his resister friends before his metamorphosis—before he changed beyond recognition. He had to let them know what had happened, what he had to offer them. Also, he needed respected Human allies. He first thought of people he had visited during his wanderings—men and women who knew him as a small, nearly Human man. But he did not want to see them. Not yet. He felt drawn toward another place—a place where the people would hardly know him. He had not been there since his third year. He would go to Phoenix—to Gabe and Tate Rinaldi, where his obsession with the resisters had begun.

He settled Dehkiaht with his parents and noticed that Tiikuchahk seemed to be spending more and more time with Dichaan. He watched this sadly, knowing that he was losing his closest sibling for the second time, the final time. If it chose later to help with the changing of Mars, it would not do so as a mate or a potential mate. It was becoming male.

He went to see Margit, who was brown now and mated and pregnant and content.

He asked his parents to find a female mate for Dehkiaht.

Then he left for Phoenix. He especially wanted to see Tate again while he still looked Human. He wanted to tell her he had kept his promise.

P
HOENIX WAS STILL MORE
a town than a village, but it was a shabbier town. Akin could not help comparing Phoenix as he remembered it to Phoenix now.

There was trash in the street. Dead weeds, food waste, scrap wood, cloth, and paper. Some of the houses were obviously vacant. A couple of them had been partially torn down. Others seemed ready to fall down.

Akin walked into town openly as he had always walked into resister settlements. He had been shot doing this only once. That once had been nothing more than a painful nuisance. A Human would have died. Akin had simply run away and healed himself. Lilith had warned him that he must not let resisters see how his body healed—that the sight of wounds healing before their eyes could frighten them. And Humans were most dangerous, most unpredictable when they were afraid.