Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (3 page)

“In fact,” he said, “you should be aware that I can see wherever I have tentacles—and I can see whether I seem to notice or not. I can’t not see.”

That sounded like a horrible existence—not to be able to close one’s eyes, sink into the private darkness behind one’s own eyelids. “Don’t you sleep?”

“Yes. But not the way you do.”

She shifted suddenly from the subject of his sleeping to her own. “You never told me how long you kept me asleep.”

“About … two hundred and fifty of your years.”

This was more than she could assimilate at once. She said nothing for so long that he broke the silence.

“Something went wrong when you were first Awakened. I heard about it from several people. Someone handled you badly—underestimated you. You are like us in some ways, but you were thought to be like your military people hidden underground. They refused to talk to us too. At first. You were left asleep for about fifty years after that first mistake.”

She crept to the bed, worms or no worms, and leaned against the end of it. “I’d always thought my Awakenings might be years apart, but I didn’t really believe it.”

“You were like your world. You needed time to heal. And we needed time to learn more about your kind.” He paused. “We didn’t know what to think when some of your people killed themselves. Some of us believed it was because they had been left out of the mass suicide—that they simply wanted to finish the dying. Others said it was because we kept them isolated. We began putting two or more together, and many injured or killed one another. Isolation cost fewer lives.”

These last words touched a memory in her. “Jdahya?” she said.

The tentacles down the sides of his face wavered, looked for a moment like dark, muttonchop whiskers.

“At one point a little boy was put in with me. His name was Sharad. What happened to him?”

He said nothing for a moment, then all his tentacles stretched themselves upward. Someone spoke to him from above in the usual way and in a voice much like his own, but this time in a foreign language, choppy and fast.

“My relative will find out,” he told her. “Sharad is almost certainly well, though he may not be a child any longer.”

“You’ve let children grow up and grow old?”

“A few, yes. But they’ve lived among us. We haven’t isolated them.”

“You shouldn’t have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another.”

His tentacles writhed repulsively. “We know. I wouldn’t have cared to endure as much solitude as you have. But we had no skill at grouping humans in ways that suited them.”

“But Sharad and I—”

“He may have had parents, Lilith.”

Someone spoke from above, in English this time. “The boy has parents and a sister. He’s asleep with them, and he’s still very young.” There was a pause. “Lilith, what language did he speak?”

“I don’t know,” Lilith said. “Either he was too young to tell me or he tried and I didn’t understand. I think he must have been East Indian, though—if that means anything to you.”

“Others know. I was only curious.”

“You’re sure he’s all right?”

“He’s well.”

She felt assured at that and immediately questioned the emotion. Why should one more anonymous voice telling her everything was fine reassure her?

“Can I see him?” she asked.

“Jdahya?” the voice said.

Jdahya turned toward her. “You’ll be able to see him when you can walk among us without panic. This is your last isolation room. When you’re ready, I’ll take you outside.”

J
DAHYA WOULD NOT LEAVE
her. As much as she had hated her solitary confinement, she longed to be rid of him. He fell silent for a while and she wondered whether he might be sleeping—to the degree that he did sleep. She lay down herself, wondering whether she could relax enough to sleep with him there. It would be like going to sleep knowing there was a rattlesnake in the room, knowing she could wake up and find it in her bed.

She could not fall asleep facing him. Yet she could not keep her back to him long. Each time she dozed, she would jolt awake and look to see if he had come closer. This exhausted her, but she could not stop doing it. Worse, each time she moved, his tentacles moved, straightening lazily in her direction as though he were sleeping with his eyes open—as he no doubt was.

Painfully tired, head aching, stomach queasy, she climbed down from her bed and lay alongside it on the floor. She could not see him now, no matter how she turned. She could see only the platform beside her and the walls. He was no longer part of her world.

“No, Lilith,” he said as she closed her eyes.

She pretended not to hear him.

“Lie on the bed,” he said, “or on the floor over here. Not over there.”

She lay rigid, silent.

“If you stay where you are, I’ll take the bed.”

That would put him just above her—too close, looming over her, Medusa leering down.

She got up and all but fell across the bed, damning him, and, to her humiliation, crying a little. Eventually she slept. Her body had simply had enough.

She awoke abruptly, twisting around to look at him. He was still on the platform, his position hardly altered. When his head tentacles swept in her direction she got up and ran into the bathroom. He let her hide there for a while, let her wash and be alone and wallow in self-pity and self-contempt. She could not remember ever having been so continually afraid, so out of control of her emotions. Jdahya had done nothing, yet she cowered.

When he called her, she took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom. “This isn’t working,” she said miserably. “Just put me down on Earth with other humans. I can’t do this.”

He ignored her.

After a time she spoke again on a different subject. “I have a scar,” she said, touching her abdomen. “I didn’t have it when I was on Earth. What did your people do to me?”

“You had a growth,” he said. “A cancer. We got rid of it. Otherwise, it would have killed you.”

She went cold. Her mother had died of cancer. Two of her aunts had had it and her grandmother had been operated on three times for it. They were all dead now, killed by someone else’s insanity. But the family “tradition” was apparently continuing.

“What did I lose along with the cancer?” she asked softly.

“Nothing.”

“Not a few feet of intestine? My ovaries? My uterus?”

“Nothing. My relative tended you. You lost nothing you would want to keep.”

“Your relative is the one who … performed surgery on me?”

“Yes. With interest and care. There was a human physician with us, but by then she was old, dying. She only watched and commented on what my relative did.”

“How would he know enough to do anything for me? Human anatomy must be totally different from yours.”

“My relative is not male—or female. The name for its sex is ooloi. It understood your body because it is ooloi. On your world there were vast numbers of dead and dying humans to study. Our ooloi came to understand what could be normal or abnormal, possible or impossible for the human body. The ooloi who went to the planet taught those who stayed here. My relative has studied your people for much of its life.”

“How do ooloi study?” She imagined dying humans caged and every groan and contortion closely observed. She imagined dissections of living subjects as well as dead ones. She imagined treatable diseases being allowed to run their grisly courses in order for ooloi to learn.

“They observe. They have special organs for their kind of observation. My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.”

“I wouldn’t call it a talent. A curse, maybe. But how could your relative know about that from just … observing.”

“Maybe
perceiving
would be a better word,” he said. “There’s much more involved than sight. It knows everything that can be learned about you from your genes. And by now, it knows your medical history and a great deal about the way you think. It has taken part in testing you.”

“Has it? I may not be able to forgive it for that. But listen, I don’t understand how it could cut out a cancer without … well, without doing damage to whichever organ it was growing on.”

“My relative didn’t cut out your cancer. It wouldn’t have cut you at all, but it wanted to examine the cancer directly with all its senses. It had never personally examined one before. When it had finished, it induced your body to reabsorb the cancer.”

“It … induced my body to reabsorb … cancer?”

“Yes. My relative gave your body a kind of chemical command.”

“Is that how you cure cancer among yourselves?”

“We don’t get them.”

Lilith sighed. “I wish we didn’t. They’ve created enough hell in my family.”

“They won’t be harming you anymore. My relative says they’re beautiful, but simple to prevent.”

“Beautiful?”

“It perceives things differently sometimes. Here’s food, Lilith. Are you hungry?”

She stepped toward him, reaching out to take the bowl, then realized what she was doing. She froze, but managed not to scramble backward. After a few seconds, she inched toward him. She could not do it quickly—snatch and run. She could hardly do it at all. She forced herself forward slowly, slowly.

Teeth clenched, she managed to take the bowl. Her hand shook so badly that she spilled half the stew. She withdrew to the bed. After a while she was able to eat what was left, then finish the bowl. It was not enough. She was still hungry, but she did not complain. She was not up to taking another bowl from his hand. Daisy hand. Palm in the center, many fingers all the way around. The fingers had bones in them, at least; they weren’t tentacles. And there were only two hands, two feet. He could have been so much uglier than he was, so much less … human. Why couldn’t she just accept him? All he seemed to be asking was that she not panic at the sight of him or others like him. Why couldn’t she do that?

She tried to imagine herself surrounded by beings like him and was almost overwhelmed by panic. As though she had suddenly developed a phobia—something she had never before experienced. But what she felt was like what she had heard others describe. A true xenophobia—and apparently she was not alone in it.

She sighed, realized she was still tired as well as still hungry. She rubbed a hand over her face. If this were what a phobia was like, it was something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. She looked at Jdahya. “What do your people call themselves?” she asked. “Tell me about them.”

“We are Oankali.”

“Oankali. Sounds like a word in some Earth language.”

“It may be, but with different meaning.”

“What does it mean in your language?”

“Several things. Traders for one.”

“You are traders?”

“Yes.”

“What do you trade?”

“Ourselves.”

“You mean … each other? Slaves?”

“No. We’ve never done that.”

“What, then?”

“Ourselves.”

“I don’t understand.”

He said nothing, seemed to wrap silence around himself and settle into it. She knew he would not answer.

She sighed. “You seem too human sometimes. If I weren’t looking at you, I’d assume you were a man.”

“You have assumed that. My family gave me to the human doctor so that I could learn to do this work. She came to us too old to bear children of her own, but she could teach.”

“I thought you said she was dying.”

“She did die eventually. She was a hundred and thirteen years old and had been awake among us off and on for fifty years. She was like a fourth parent to my siblings and me. It was hard to watch her age and die. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.”

“I’ve heard humans say that.” She frowned. “Couldn’t your ooloi have helped her live longer—if she wanted to live longer than a hundred and thirteen years, that is.”

“They did help her. They gave her forty years she would not have had, and when they could no longer help her heal, they took away her pain. If she had been younger when we found her, we could have given her much more time.”

Lilith followed that thought to its obvious conclusion. “I’m twenty-six,” she said.

“Older,” he told her. “You’ve aged whenever we’ve kept you awake. About two years altogether.”

She had no sense of being two years older, of being, suddenly, twenty-eight because he said she was. Two years of solitary confinement. What could they possibly give her in return for that? She stared at him.

His tentacles seemed to solidify into a second skin—dark patches on his face and neck, a dark, smooth-looking mass on his head. “Barring accident,” he said, “you’ll live much longer than a hundred and thirteen years. And for most of your life, you’ll be biologically quite young. Your children will live longer still.”

He looked remarkably human now. Was it only the tentacles that gave him that sea-slug appearance? His coloring hadn’t changed. The fact that he had no eyes, nose, or ears still disturbed her, but not as much.

“Jdahya, stay that way,” she told him. “Let me come close and look at you … if I can.”

The tentacles moved like weirdly rippling skin, then resolidified. “Come,” he said.

She was able to approach him hesitantly. Even viewed from only a couple of feet away, the tentacles looked like a smooth second skin. “Do you mind if …” She stopped and began again. “I mean … may I touch you?”

“Yes.”

It was easier to do than she had expected. His skin was cool and almost too smooth to be real flesh—smooth the way her fingernails were and perhaps as tough as a fingernail.

“Is it hard for you to stay like this?” she asked.

“Not hard. Unnatural. A muffling of the senses.”

“Why did you do it—before I asked you to, I mean.”

“It’s an expression of pleasure or amusement.”

“You were pleased a minute ago?”

“With you. You wanted your time back—the time we’ve taken from you. You didn’t want to die.”