Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (12 page)

She smiled and took the sandwich he offered. She was not hungry at all, but eating with him was companionable and safe. She took a few of his French fries, too.

“Cassava,” he told her. “Tastes like potatoes, though. I’d never heard of cassava before I got it here. Some tropical plant the Oankali are raising.”

“I know. They mean for those of us who go back to Earth to raise it and use it. You can make flour from it and use it like wheat flour.”

He stared at her until she frowned. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

His gaze slid away from her and he stared downward at nothing. “Have you really thought about what it will be like?” he asked softly. “I mean … Stone Age! Digging in the ground with a stick for roots, maybe eating bugs, rats. Rats survived, I hear. Cattle and horses didn’t. Dogs didn’t. But rats did.”

“I know.”

“You said you had a baby.”

“My son. Dead.”

“Yeah. Well, I’ll bet when he was born, you were in a hospital with doctors and nurses all around helping you and giving you shots for the pain. How would you like to do it in a jungle with nothing around but bugs and rats and people who feel sorry for you but can’t do shit to help you?”

“I had natural childbirth,” she said. “It wasn’t any fun, but it went okay.”

“What do you mean? No painkiller?”

“None. No hospital either. Just something called a birthing center—a place for pregnant women who don’t like the idea of being treated as though they were sick.”

He shook his head, smiled crookedly. “I wonder how many women they had to go through before they came up with you. A lot, I’ll bet. You’re probably just what they want in ways I haven’t even thought of.”

His words bit more deeply into her than she let him see. With all the questioning and testing she had gone through, the two and a half years of round-the-clock observation—the Oankali must know her in some ways better than any human being ever had. They knew how she would react to just about everything they put her through. And they knew how to manipulate her, maneuver her into doing whatever they wanted. Of course they knew she had had certain practical experiences they considered important. If she had had an especially difficult time giving birth—if she had had to be taken to the hospital in spite of her wishes, if she had needed a caesarean—they would probably have passed over her to someone else.

“Why are you going back?” Titus asked. “Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?”

“I don’t.”

His eyes widened. “Then why don’t you—”

“We don’t have to forget what we know,” she said. She smiled to herself. “I couldn’t forget if I wanted to. We don’t have to go back to the Stone Age. We’ll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we’ll at least have a chance.”

“They don’t teach for free! They didn’t save us out of kindness! It’s all trade with them. You know what you’ll have to pay down there!”

“What have you paid to stay up here?”

Silence.

He ate several more bites of food. “The price,” he said softly, “is just the same. When they’re finished with us there won’t be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they’ll finish.”

“I don’t believe it has to be like that.”

“Yeah. But then, you haven’t been Awake long.”

“Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it’s still a damn big place.”

He looked at her with such open, undisguised pity that she drew back angrily. “Do you think they don’t know what a big place it is?” he asked.

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t have said anything to you and whoever’s listening. They know how I feel.”

“And they know how to make you change your mind.”

“Not about that. Never about that.”

“Like I said, you haven’t been Awake long.”

What had they done to him, she wondered. Was it just that they had kept him Awake so long—Awake and for the most part without human companions? Awake and aware that everything he had ever known was dead, that nothing he could have on Earth now could measure up to his former life. How had that gone down with a fourteen-year-old?

“If you wanted it,” he said, “they’d let you stay here … with me.”

“What, permanently?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her and came over to her. “You know they expect you to say no,” he said. “They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all over again that they were right about you.” He stood tall and broad, too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was afraid of him. “Surprise them,” he continued softly. “Don’t do what they expect—just for once. Don’t let them play you like a puppet.”

He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.

She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own ranks?

He let her go. “You could be safe here,” he said softly. “Down on Earth … how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if you don’t forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of them will want to be cavemen—drag you around, put you in a harem, beat the shit out of you.” He shook his head. “Tell me I’m wrong. Sit there and tell me I’m wrong.”

She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually—as soon as they realized they could get away with it.

He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn’t bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure.

“Look,” she said when he drew back. “I’m not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali.”

“What difference do they make? It’s not like human beings were watching us.”

“It is to me.”

“Lilith,” he said, shaking his head, “they will
always
be watching.”

“The other thing I’m not interested in doing is giving them a human child to tamper with.”

“You probably already have.”

Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.

“They didn’t have enough of us for what they call a normal trade,” he said. “Most of the ones they have will be Dinso—people who want to go back to Earth. They didn’t have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more.”

“While we slept? Somehow they—”

“Somehow!” he hissed. “
Anyhow!
They took stuff from men and women who didn’t even know each other and put it together and made babies in women who never knew the mother or the father of their kid—and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they grew the baby in another kind of animal. They have animals they can adjust to—to incubate human fetuses, as they say. Or maybe they don’t even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin from one person and make babies out of it—cloning, you know. Or maybe they use one of their prints—and don’t ask me what a print is. But if they’ve got one of you, they can use it to make another you even if you’ve been dead for a hundred years and they haven’t got anything at all left of your body. And that’s just the start. They can make people in ways I don’t even know how to talk about. Only thing they can’t do, it seems, is let us alone. Let us do it our own way.”

His hands were almost gentle on her. “At least they haven’t until now.” He shook her abruptly. “You know how many kids I got? They say, ‘Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.’ And I’ve never even seen a woman in all the time I’ve been here.”

He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.

Yet it would do no good to fight him physically. She was tall, had always thought of herself as strong, but he was much bigger—six-four, six-five, and stocky.

“They’ve had two hundred and fifty years to fool around with us,” she said. “Maybe we can’t stop them, but we don’t have to help them.”

“The hell with them.” He tried to unfasten her jacket.

“
No!
” she shouted, deliberately startling him. “Animals get treated like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send them back to their owners. What do they care? They’re just animals!”

He tore her jacket off then fumbled with her pants.

She threw her weight against him suddenly and managed to shove him away.

He stumbled backward for several steps, caught himself, came at her again.

Screaming at him, she swung her legs over the platform she had been sitting on and came down standing on the opposite side of it. Now it was between them. He strode around it.

She sat on it again and swung her legs over, keeping it between them.

“Don’t make yourself their dog!” she pleaded. “Don’t do this!”

He kept coming, too far gone to care what she said. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. He cut her off from the bed by coming over it himself. He cornered her against a wall.

“How many times have they made you do this before?” she asked desperately. “Did you have a sister back on Earth? Would you know her now? Maybe they’ve made you do it with your sister.”

He caught her arm, jerked her to him.

“Maybe they’ve made you do it with your mother!” she shouted.

He froze and she prayed she had hit a nerve.

“Your mother,” she repeated. “You haven’t seen her since you were fourteen. How would you know if they brought her to you and you—”

He hit her.

Staggered by shock and pain, she collapsed against him and he half pushed and half threw her away as though he had found himself clutching something loathsome.

She fell hard, but was not quite unconscious when he came to stand over her.

“I never got to do it before,” he whispered. “Never once with a woman. But who knows who they mixed the stuff with.” He paused, stared at her where she had fallen. “They said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!” He kicked her hard. The last sound she heard before she lost consciousness was his ragged, shouted curse.

S
HE AWOKE TO VOICES
—Oankali near her, not touching her. Nikanj and one other.

“Go away now,” Nikanj was saying. “She is regaining consciousness.”

“Perhaps I should stay,” the other said softly. Kahguyaht. She had thought once that all Oankali sounded alike with their quiet androgynous voices, but now she couldn’t mistake Kahguyaht’s deceptively gentle tones. “You may need help with her,” it said.

Nikanj said nothing.

After a while Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles and said, “I’ll leave. You’re growing up faster than I thought. Perhaps she’s good for you after all.”

She was able to see it step through a wall and leave. Not until it was gone did she become aware of the aching of her own body—her jaw, her side, her head, and in particular, her left arm. There was no sharp pain, nothing startling. Only dull, throbbing pain, especially noticeable when she moved.

“Be still,” Nikanj told her. “Your body is still healing. The pain will be gone soon.”

She turned her face away from it, ignoring the pain.

There was a long silence. Finally it said, “We didn’t know.” It stopped, corrected itself. “I didn’t know how the male would behave. He has never lost control so completely before. He hasn’t lost control at all for several years.”

“You cut him off from his own kind,” she said through swollen lips. “You kept him away from women for how long? Fifteen years? More? In some ways you kept him fourteen for all those years.”

“He was content with his Oankali family until he met you.”

“What did he know? You never let him see anybody else!”

“It wasn’t necessary. His family took care of him.”

She stared at it, feeling more strongly than ever, the difference between them—the unbridgeable alienness of Nikanj. She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate. It could do the same with her, although it could force her to obey whether she understood or not. Or it could turn her over to others who would use force against her.

“His family thought you should have mated with him,” it said. “They knew you wouldn’t stay with him permanently, but they believed you would share sex with him at least once.”

Share sex, she thought sadly. Where had it picked up that expression? She had never said it. She liked it, though. Should she have shared sex with Paul Titus? “And maybe gotten pregnant,” she said aloud.

“You would not have gotten pregnant,” Nikanj said.

And it had her full attention. “Why not?” she demanded.

“It isn’t time for you to have children yet.”

“Have you done something to me? Am I sterile?”

“Your people called it birth control. You are slightly changed. It was done while you slept, as it was done to all humans at first. It will be undone eventually.”

“When?” she asked bitterly. “When you’re ready to breed me?”

“No. When you’re ready. Only then.”

“Who decides? You?”

“You, Lilith. You.”

Its sincerity confused her. She felt that she had learned to read its emotions through posture, sensory tentacle position, tone of voice. … It seemed not only to be telling the truth—as usual—but to be telling a truth it considered important. Yet Paul Titus, too, had seemed to be telling the truth. “Does Paul really have over seventy children?” she asked.

“Yes. And he’s told you why. The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay.” Nikanj hesitated. “They should not have told Paul what they were doing. But that’s always a difficult thing to realize—and sometimes we realize it too late.”