Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (22 page)

“What does he think he’s going to do?” she asked Curt. He had taken part in holding her, though, of course Celene had not. He still held one of her arms.

Watching him, she shook the others off. Now that Derrick was gone from sight, they did not try hard to hold her. She knew now that if she had been willing to hurt or kill them, they could not have held her. She was not stronger than all six combined, but she was stronger than any two. And faster than any of them. The knowledge was not as comforting as it should have been.

“What’s he supposed to be doing?” she repeated.

Curt released the arm she had left in his hands. “Finding out what’s really going on,” he said. “There are people refilling those cabinets and we intend to find out who they are. We want to get a look at them before they’re ready to be seen—before they’re ready to convince us they’re Martians.”

She sighed. He had been told that the cabinets refilled automatically. Just one more thing he had decided not to believe. “They’re not Martians,” she said.

He crooked his mouth in something less than a smile. “I knew that. I never believed your fairy tales.”

“They’re from another solar system,” she said. “I don’t know which one. It doesn’t matter. They left it so long ago, they don’t even know whether it still exists.”

He cursed her and turned away.

“What’s going to happen?” another voice asked.

Lilith looked around, saw Celene, and sighed. Wherever Curt was, Celene was trembling nearby. Lilith had matched them as well as Nikanj had matched her with Joseph. “I don’t know,” she said. “The Oankali won’t let him get hurt, but I don’t know whether they’ll put him back in here.”

Joseph strode up to her, obviously concerned. Someone had apparently gone to his room and told him what was going on.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Derrick has gone out to look at the Oankali.” She shrugged at his look of alarm. “I hope they send him back—or bring him back. These people are going to have to see for themselves.”

“That could start a panic!” he whispered.

“I don’t care. They’ll recover. But if they keep doing stupid things like this, they’ll eventually manage to hurt themselves.”

Derrick was not sent back.

Eventually even Peter and Jean did not object when Lilith went to the wall and opened the cabinet to prove that Derrick had not asphyxiated inside. She had to open every cabinet in the general area of the one he had used because most of the others could not locate the individual cabinet on the broad, unmarked expanse of wall. Lilith had at first been surprised at her own ability to locate each one easily and exactly. Once she found them the first time she remembered their distance from floor and ceiling, from right and left walls. Some people, since they could not do this themselves, found the ability suspicious.

Some people found everything about her suspicious.

“What happened to Derrick!” Jean Pelerin demanded.

“He did something stupid,” Lilith told her. “And while he was doing it, you helped hold me so that I couldn’t stop him.”

Jean drew back a little, spoke louder. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar!” The volume increased again. “What did your friends do to him? Kill him?”

“What ever happened to him, you’re partly to blame,” Lilith said. “Handle your own guilt.” She looked around at other equally guilty, equally accusing faces. Jean never made her complaints privately. She needed an audience.

Lilith turned and went to her room. She was about to seal herself in when Tate and Joseph joined her. A moment later, Gabriel followed them in. He sat on the corner of Lilith’s table and faced her.

“You’re losing,” he said flatly.

“You’re losing,” she countered. “If I lose, everyone loses.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“If you have an idea, I’ll listen.”

“Give them a better show. Get your friends to help you impress them.”

“My friends?”

“Look, I don’t care. You say they’re extraterrestrials. Okay. They’re extraterrestrials. What the hell are they going to gain if those assholes out there kill you?”

“I agreed. I was hoping they would send or bring Derrick back. They might still. But their timing is terrible.”

“Joe says you can talk to them.”

She turned to stare at Joseph in betrayal and surprise.

“Your enemies are gathering allies,” he said. “Why should you be alone?”

She looked at Tate and the woman shrugged. “Those people out there are assholes,” she said. “If they had a brain between them they’d shut up and open their eyes and ears until they had some idea what was really going on.”

“That’s all I hoped for,” Lilith said. “I didn’t expect it, but I hoped for it.”

“Those are frightened people looking for someone to save them,” Gabriel said. “They don’t want reason or logic or your hopes or expectations. They want Moses or somebody to come and lead them into lives they can understand.”

“Van Weerden can’t do that,” Lilith said.

“Of course he can’t. But right now they think he can, and they’re following. Next, he’ll tell them the only way to get out of here is to knock you around until you tell all your secrets. He’ll say you know the way out. And by the time it’s clear that you don’t, you’ll be dead.”

Would she? He had no idea how long it would take to torture her to death. Her and Joseph. She looked at him bleakly.

“Victor Dominic,” Joseph said. “And Leah and that guy she’s picked up and Beatrice Dwyer and—”

“Potential allies?” Lilith asked.

“Yes, and we’d better hurry. I saw Beatrice with one of the guys from the other side this morning.”

“Loyalties can change according to who people are sleeping with,” Lilith said.

“So what!” demanded Gabriel. “So you don’t trust anybody? So you wind up in pieces on the floor?”

Lilith shook her head. “I know it has to be done. So stupid, isn’t it. It’s like ‘Let’s play Americans against the Russians. Again.’ ”

“Talk to your friends,” Gabriel said. “Maybe that’s not the show they had in mind. Maybe they’ll help you rewrite the script.”

She stared at him, frowning. “Do you really talk like that?”

“Whatever works,” he said.

T
HE OANKALI DID NOT
choose to play the part of Lilith’s friends. When she sealed herself into her room and spoke to them, they neither appeared nor answered her calls. And they continued to hold Derrick. Lilith thought he had probably been made to sleep again.

None of this surprised her. She would organize the humans into a coherent unit or she would serve as a scapegoat for whoever else organized them. Nikanj and its mates would save her life if they could—if it seemed her life was in immediate danger. But beyond that, she was on her own.

But she did have
powers.
Or that was the way people thought of the things she could do with the walls and the suspended animation plants. Peter Van Weerden had nothing. Some people believed he had caused Derrick’s disappearance, perhaps his death. Fortunately Peter was not eloquent enough, not charismatic enough to shift blame for this to Lilith—though he tried.

What he did manage to do was portray Derrick as a hero, a martyr who had acted for the group, who had at least
tried
to do something. What the hell was Lilith doing, he would demand. What was her group doing? Sitting on their hands, talking and talking, waiting for their captors to tell them what to do next.

People who favored action sided with Peter. People like Leah and Wray, Tate and Gabriel who were biding their time, waiting for more information or a real chance to escape sided with Lilith.

There were also people like Beatrice Dwyer who were afraid of any kind of action, but who had lost hope of ever controlling their own destinies. These sided with Lilith in the hope of peace and continued life. They wanted, Lilith thought, only to be let alone. That was all many people had wanted before the war. It was the one thing they could not have, then or now.

Nevertheless, Lilith recruited these, too, and when she Awakened ten more people, she used only her recruits to help them. Peter’s people were reduced to heckling and jeering. The new people saw them first as troublemakers.

Perhaps that was why Peter decided to impress his followers by helping one of them get a woman.

The woman, Allison Zeigler, had not yet found a man she liked, but she had chosen Lilith’s side over Peter’s. She screamed Lilith’s name when Peter and the new man, Gregory Sebastes, stopped arguing with her and decided to drag her off to Gregory’s room.

Lilith, alone in her own room, frowned, not certain what she had heard. Another fight?

Wearily, she put down the stack of dossiers that she had been going through in search of a few more allies. She went out and saw the trouble at once.

Two men holding a struggling woman between them. The trio was prevented from reaching any of the bedrooms by Lilith’s people who stood blocking the way. And Lilith’s people were prevented from reaching the trio by several of Peter’s people.

A standoff—potentially deadly.

“What the hell is she saving herself for?” Jean was demanding. “It’s her duty to get together with someone. There aren’t that many of us left.”

“It’s my duty to find out where I am and how to get free,” Allison shouted. “Maybe you want to give whoever’s holding us prisoner a human baby to fool around with, but I don’t!”

“We pair off!” Curt bellowed, drowning her out. “One man, one woman. Nobody has the right to hold you. It just causes trouble.”

“Trouble for who!” someone demanded.

“Who the shit are you to tell us our rights!” called someone else.

“What is she to you!” Gregory used his free hand to knock someone away from Allison. “Get your own damn woman!”

At that moment, Allison hit him. He cursed and hit her. She screamed, twisted her body violently. Blood streamed from her nose.

Lilith reached the crowd. “Stop,” she called. “Let her go!” But her voice was lost in the many.

“
Goddammit, stop!
” She shouted in a voice that surprised even her.

People near her froze, staring at her, but the group around Allison was too involved to notice her until she reached it.

This was too familiar, too much like what Paul Titus had said and done.

She stepped up to the knot of people surrounding Allison, too furious to worry about their blocking her. Two of them caught her arms. She threw them aside without ever seeing their faces. For once she did not care what happened to them. Cavemen.
Fools!

She grabbed Peter’s free arm as he tried to hit her. She held the arm, squeezed it, twisted it.

Peter screamed and fell to his knees, his grip on Allison released, forgotten. For a moment, Lilith stared at him. He was garbage. Human garbage. How had she made the mistake of Awakening him? And what could she do with him now?

She threw him aside, not caring that he hit a nearby wall.

The other man, Gregory Sebastes, held his ground. Curt stood beside him, challenging Lilith. They had seen what she had done to Peter, but they did not seem to believe it. They let her walk up to them.

She hit Curt hard in the stomach, doubling him, toppling him.

Gregory let go of Allison and lunged at Lilith.

She hit him, catching him in midair, snapping his head back, collapsing him to the floor unconscious.

Abruptly, all was still except for Curt’s gasping and Peter’s groaning—“My arm! Oh, god, my arm!”

Lilith looked at each of Peter’s people, daring them to attack, almost wanting them to attack. But now five of them were injured, and Lilith was untouched. Even her own people stood back from her.

“There’ll be no rape here,” she said evenly. She raised her voice. “Nobody here is property. Nobody here has the right to the use of anybody else’s body. There’ll be no back-to-the-Stone-Age, caveman bullshit!” She let her voice drop to normal. “We stay human. We treat each other like people, and we get through this like people. Anyone who wants to be something less will have his chance in the forest. There’ll be plenty of room for him to run away and play at being an ape.”

She turned and walked back toward her room. Her body trembled with residual anger and frustration. She did not want the others to see her tremble. She had never come closer to losing control, killing people.

Joseph spoke her name softly. She swung around, ready to fight, then made herself relax as she recognized his voice. She stood looking at him, longing to go to him, but restraining herself. What did he think of what she had done?

“I know those guys don’t deserve it,” he said, “but some of them need help. Peter’s arm is broken. The others … Can you get the Oankali to help them?”

Alarmed, she looked back at the carnage she had created. She drew a deep breath, managed to still her trembling. Then she spoke quietly in Oankali.

“Whoever is on watch, come in and check these people. Some of them may be badly hurt.”

“Not so badly,” a disembodied voice answered in Oankali. “The ones on the floor will heal without help. I’m in contact with them through the floor.”

“What about the one with the broken arm?”

“We’ll take care of him. Shall we keep him?”

“I’d love to have you keep him. But no, leave him with us. You’re already suspected of being murderers.”

“Derrick is asleep again.”

“I thought so. What shall we do with Peter?”

“Nothing. Let him think for a while about his behavior.”

“Ahajas?”

“Yes?”

Lilith drew another deep breath. “I’m surprised to realize how good it is to hear your voice.”

There was no answer. Nothing more to be said.

“What did he say?” Joseph wanted to know.

“She. She said no one was seriously hurt. She said the Oankali would take care of Peter after he’s had time to think about his behavior.”

“What do we do with him until then?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought they wouldn’t talk to you,” Gabriel said, his voice filled with unconcealed suspicion. He and Tate and a few others had come over to her. They stood back cautiously.

“They talk when they want to,” she said. “This is an emergency so they decided to talk.”