Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (28 page)

She remembered now what Nikanj had said about Joseph having enemies. Curt had never liked him. Nothing had happened between the two of them in the great room or at the settlement. But what if something had happened now?

She must go back to the settlement and get help from the Oankali. She must get nonhumans to help her against her own people in a place that might or might not be on Earth.

Why couldn’t they have left her Joseph? They had taken her machete, her ax, her baskets—everything except her hammock and her extra clothing. They could at least have left Joseph to see that she was all right. He would have stayed to do that if they had let him.

She walked back to the shelter, collected her clothing and hammock, drank water from a small, clear stream that fed into the river, and started back toward the settlement.

If only Nikanj were still there. Perhaps it could spy on the human camp without the humans’ knowing, without fighting. Then if Joseph were there, he could be freed … if he wanted to be. Would he want it? Or would he choose to stay with the others who were trying to do the thing she had always wanted them all to do?
Learn and run.
Learn to live in this country, then lose themselves in it, go beyond the reach of the Oankali. Learn to touch one another as human beings again.

If they were on Earth as they believed, they might have a chance. If they were aboard a ship, nothing they did would matter.

If they were aboard a ship, Joseph would definitely be restored to her. But if they were on Earth …

She walked quickly, taking advantage of the path cleared the day before.

There was a sound behind her, and she turned quickly. Several ooloi emerged from the water and waded onto the bank to thrash their way through the thick bank undergrowth.

She turned and went back to them, recognizing Nikanj and Kahguyaht among them.

“Do you know where they’ve gone?” she asked Nikanj.

“We know,” it said. It settled a sensory arm around her neck.

She put her hand to the arm, securing it where it was, welcoming it in spite of herself. “Is Joe all right?”

It did not answer, and that frightened her. It released her and led her through the trees, moving quickly. The other ooloi followed, all of them silent, all clearly knowing where they were going and probably knowing what they would find there.

Lilith no longer wanted to know.

She kept their fast pace easily, staying close to Nikanj. She almost slammed into it when it stopped without warning near a fallen tree.

The tree had been a giant. Even on its side, it was high and hard to climb, rotten and covered with fungi. Nikanj leaped onto it and off the other side with an agility Lilith could not match.

“Wait,” it said as she began to climb the trunk. “Stay there.” Then it focused on Kahguyaht. “Go on,” it urged. “There could be more trouble while you wait here with me.”

Neither Kahguyaht nor any of the other ooloi moved. Lilith noticed Curt’s ooloi among them, and Allison’s and—

“Come over now, Lilith.”

She climbed over the trunk, jumped down on the other side. And there was Joseph.

He had been attacked with an ax.

She stared, speechless, then rushed to him. He had been hit more than once—blows to the head and neck. His head had been all but severed from his body. He was already cold.

The hatred that someone must have felt for him … “Curt?” she demanded of Nikanj. “Was it Curt?”

“It was us,” Nikanj said very softly.

After a time, she managed to turn from the grisly corpse and face Nikanj. “What?”

“Us,” Nikanj repeated. “We wanted to keep him safe, you and I. He was slightly injured and unconscious when they took him away. He had fought for you. But his injuries healed. Curt saw the flesh healing. He believed Joe wasn’t human.”

“
Why didn’t you help him!
” she screamed. She had begun to cry. She turned again to see the terrible wounds and did not understand how she could even look at Joseph’s body so mutilated, dead. She had had no last words from him, no memory of fighting alongside him, no chance to protect him. Her last memory was of him flinching away from her too-human touch.

“I’m more different than he was,” she whispered. “Why didn’t Curt kill me?”

“I don’t believe he meant to kill anyone,” Nikanj said. “He was angry and afraid and in pain. Joseph had injured him when he hit you. Then he saw Joseph healing, saw the flesh mending itself before his eyes. He screamed. I’ve never heard a human scream that way. Then he … used his ax.”

“Why didn’t you help?” she demanded. “If you could see and hear everything, why—”

“We don’t have an entrance near enough to this place.”

She made a sound of anger and despair.

“And there was no sign that Curt meant to kill. He blames you for almost everything, yet he didn’t kill you. What happened here was … totally unplanned.”

She had stopped listening. Nikanj’s words were incomprehensible to her. Joseph was dead—hacked to death by Curt. It was all some kind of mistake. Insanity!

She sat on the ground beside the corpse, first trying to understand, then doing nothing at all; not thinking, no longer crying. She sat. Insects crawled over her and Nikanj brushed them off. She did not notice.

After a time, Nikanj lifted her to her feet, managing her weight easily. She meant to push it away, make it let her alone. It had not helped Joseph. She did not need anything from it now. Yet she only twisted in its grasp.

It let her pull free and she stumbled back to Joseph. Curt had walked away and left him as though he were a dead animal. He should be buried.

Nikanj came to her again, seemed to read her thoughts. “Shall we pick him up on our way back and have him sent to Earth?” it asked. “He can end as part of his homeworld.”

Bury him on Earth? Let his flesh be part of the new beginning there? “Yes,” she whispered.

It touched her experimentally with a sensory arm. She glared at it, wanting desperately to be let alone.

“No!” it said softly. “No, I let you alone once, the two of you, thinking you could look after one another. I won’t let you alone now.”

She drew a deep breath, accepted the familiar loop of sensory arm around her neck. “Don’t drug me,” she said. “Leave me … leave me what I feel for him, at least.”

“I want to share, not mute or distort.”

“Share? Share my feelings now?”

“Yes.”

“
Why?
”

“Lilith …” It began to walk and she walked beside it automatically. The other ooloi moved silently ahead of them. “Lilith, he was mine too. You brought him to me.”

“You brought him to me.”

“I would not have touched him if you had rejected him.”

“I wish I had. He’d be alive.”

Nikanj said nothing.

“Let me share what you feel,” she said.

It touched her face in a startlingly human gesture. “Move the sixteenth finger of your left strength hand,” it said softly. One more case of Oankali omniscience:
We understand your feelings, eat your food, manipulate your genes. But we’re too complex for you to understand.

“Approximate!” she demanded. “Trade! You’re always talking about trading. Give me something of yourself!”

The other ooloi focused back toward them and Nikanj’s head and body tentacles drew themselves into lumps of some negative emotion. Embarrassment? Anger? She did not care. Why should it feel comfortable about parasitizing her feelings for Joseph—her feelings for anything? It had helped set up a human experiment. One of the humans had been lost. What did it feel? Guilty for not having been more careful with valuable subjects? Or were they even valuable?

Nikanj pressed the back of her neck with a sensory hand—warning pressure. It would give her something then. They stopped walking by mutual consent and faced one another.

It gave her … a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or … tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling.

Extinguished.

A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.

Broken.

Gone.

Dead.

The forest came back around her slowly and she realized she was still standing with Nikanj, facing it, her back to the waiting ooloi.

“That’s all I can give you,” Nikanj said. “That’s what I feel. I don’t even know whether there are words in any human language to speak of it.”

“Probably not,” she whispered. After a moment, she let herself hug it. There was some comfort even in cool, gray flesh. Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair—an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.

She walked more willingly with Nikanj now, and the other ooloi no longer isolated them in front or behind.

C
URT’S CAMP BOASTED A
bigger shelter, not as well made. The roof was a jumble of palm leaves—not thatch, but branches crisscrossed and covering one another. No doubt it leaked. There were walls, but no floor. There was an indoor fire, hot and smoky. That was the way the people looked. Hot, smoky, dirty, angry.

They gathered outside the shelter with axes, machetes, and clubs, and faced the cluster of ooloi. Lilith found herself standing with aliens, facing hostile, dangerous humans.

She drew back. “I can’t fight them,” she said to Nikanj. “Curt, yes, but not the others.”

“We’ll have to fight if they attack,” Nikanj said. “But you stay out of it. We’ll be drugging them heavily—fighting to subdue without killing in spite of their weapons. Dangerous.”

“No closer!” Curt called.

The Oankali stopped.

“This is a human place!” Curt continued. “It’s off limits to you and your animals.” He stared at Lilith, held his ax ready.

She stared back, afraid of the ax, but wanting him. Wanting to kill him. Wanting to take the ax from him and beat him to death with her own hands. Let him die here and rot in this alien place where he had left Joseph.

“Do nothing,” Nikanj whispered to her. “He has lost all hope of Earth. He’s lost Celene. She’ll be sent to Earth without him. And he’s lost mental and emotional freedom. Leave him to us.”

She could not understand it at first—literally could not comprehend the words it spoke. There was nothing in her world but a dead Joseph and an obscenely alive Curt.

Nikanj held her until it too had to be acknowledged as part of her world. When it saw that she looked at it, struggled against it instead of simply struggling toward Curt, it repeated its words until she heard them, until they penetrated, until she was still. It never made any attempt to drug her, and it never let her go.

Off to one side, Kahguyaht was speaking to Tate. Tate stood well back from it, holding a machete and staying close to Gabriel who held an ax. It was Gabriel who had convinced her to abandon Lilith. It had to be. And what had convinced Leah? Practicality? A fear of being abandoned alone, left as much an outcast as Lilith?

Lilith found Leah and stared at her, wondering. Lilith looked away. Then her attention was drawn back to Tate.

“Go away,” Tate was pleading in a voice that did not sound like her. “We don’t want you! I don’t want you! Let us alone!” She sounded as though she would cry. In fact, tears streamed down her face.

“I have never lied to you,” Kahguyaht told her. “If you manage to use your machete on anyone, you’ll lose Earth. You’ll never see your homeworld again. Even this place will be denied to you.” It stepped toward her. “Don’t do this Tate. We’re giving you the thing you want most: Freedom and a return home.”

“We’ve got that here,” Gabriel said.

Curt came to join him. “We don’t need anything else from you!” he shouted.

The others behind him agreed loudly.

“You would starve here,” Kahguyaht said. “Even in the short time you’ve been here, you’ve had trouble finding food. There isn’t enough, and you don’t yet know how to use what there is.” Kahguyaht raised its voice, spoke to all of them. “You were allowed to leave us when you wished so that you could practice the skills you’d learned and learn more from each other and from Lilith. We had to know how you would behave after leaving us. We knew you might be injured, but we didn’t think you would kill one another.”

“We didn’t kill a human being,” Curt shouted. “We killed one of your animals!”

“We?” Kahguyaht said mildly. “And who helped you kill him?”

Curt did not answer.

“You beat him,” Kahguyaht continued, “and when he was unconscious, you killed him with your ax. You did it alone, and in doing it, you’ve exiled yourself permanently from your Earth.” It spoke to the others. “Will you join him? Will you be taken from this training room and placed with Toaht families to live the rest of your lives aboard the ship?”

The faces of some of the others began to change—doubts beginning or growing.

Allison’s ooloi went to her, became the first to touch the human it had come to retrieve. It spoke very quietly. Lilith could not hear what it said, but after a moment, Allison sighed and offered it her machete.

It declined the knife with a wave of one sensory arm while settling the other arm around her neck. It drew her back behind the line of Oankali where Lilith stood with Nikanj. Lilith stared at her, wondering how Allison could turn against her. Had it only been fear? Curt could frighten just about anyone if he worked at it. And this was Curt with an ax—an ax he had already used on one man …

Allison met her gaze, looked away, then faced her again. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “We thought we could avoid bloodshed by going along with them, doing what they said. We thought … I’m sorry.”

Lilith turned away, tears blurring her vision again. Somehow, she had been able to put Joseph’s death aside for a few minutes. Allison’s words brought it back.

Kahguyaht stretched out a sensory arm to Tate but Gabriel snatched her away.

“We don’t want you here!” he grated. He thrust Tate behind him.

Curt shouted—a wordless scream of rage, a call to attack. He lunged at Kahguyaht and several of his people joined his attack, lunging at the other ooloi with their weapons.

Nikanj thrust Lilith toward Allison and plunged into the fighting. Allison’s ooloi paused only long enough to say, “Keep her out of this!” in rapid Oankali. Then it, too, joined the fight.