Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (36 page)

Wray joined his daughters and Tehkorahs and led them out of the house. Tino found himself watching the young women’s hips. He did not realize until they were gone that Nikanj and Lilith had come over to him.

“We’d like you to stay with us,” Lilith said softly. “At least for the night.”

He looked at her lineless face, her cap of dark hair, her breasts, now concealed beneath a simple gray shirt. He had had only a glimpse of them as she had settled herself to nurse Akin.

She took his hand, and he remembered seizing her hand to examine it. She had large, strong, calloused hands, warm and Human. Almost unconsciously, he turned his back to Nikanj. What did it want? Or rather, how did it go about getting what it wanted? What did the ooloi actually do to Humans? What would it want of him? And did he really want Lilith badly enough to find out?

But why had he left Phoenix if not for this?

But so quickly? Now?

“Sit with us,” Lilith said. “Let’s talk for a while.” She drew him toward a wall—toward the place they had sat when he spoke to the people. They sat cross-legged—or the two Humans crossed their legs—their bodies forming a tight triangle. Tino watched the other two Oankali in the room as they herded the children away. Akin and the small gray child who now held him clearly wanted to stay. Tino could see that, though neither child was speaking English. The larger of the two Oankali lifted both children easily and managed to interest them in something else. All three vanished with the others through a doorway that seemed to grow shut behind them—the way doorways had closed so long ago aboard the ship. The room was sealed and empty except for Tino, Lilith, and Nikanj.

Tino made himself look at Nikanj. It had folded its legs under it the way the Oankali did. Many of its head tentacles were trained on him, seeming almost to be straining toward him. He suppressed a shudder—not a response of fear or disgust. Those feelings would not have surprised him. He felt … He did not know what he felt about this ooloi.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” Nikanj admitted. “You’re unusual. I’ve never known a Human to remember before.”

“To remember his conditioning?”

Silence.

“To remember his conditioner,” Tino said nodding. “I don’t think anyone could forget his conditioning. But … I don’t know how I recognized you. I met you so long ago, and … well, I don’t mean to offend you, but I still can’t tell your people apart.”

“You can. You just don’t realize it yet. That’s unusual, too. Some Humans never learn to recognize individuals among us.”

“What did you do to me back then?” he demanded. “I’ve never … never felt anything like that before or since.”

“I told you then. I checked you for disease and injury, strengthened you against infection, got rid of any problems I found, programmed your body to slow its aging processes after a certain point, and did whatever else I could to improve your chances of surviving your reintroduction to Earth. Those are the things all conditioners did. And we all took prints of you—read all that your bodies could tell us about themselves and created a kind of blueprint. I could make a physical copy of you even if you hadn’t survived.”

“A baby?”

“Yes, eventually. But we prefer you to any copy. We need cultural as well as genetic diversity for a good trade.”

“Trade!” Tino said scornfully. “I don’t know what I’d call what you’re doing to us, but it isn’t trade. Trade is when two people agree to an exchange.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t involve coercion.”

“We have something you need. You have something we need.”

“We didn’t need anything before you got here!”

“You were dying.”

Tino said nothing for a moment. He looked away. The war was an insanity he had never understood, and no one in Phoenix had been able to explain it to him. At least, no one had been able to give him a reason why people who had excellent reasons to suppose they would destroy themselves if they did a certain thing chose to do that thing anyway. He thought he understood anger, hatred, humiliation, even the desire to kill a man. He had felt all those things. But to kill everyone … almost to kill the Earth … There were times when he wondered if somehow the Oankali had not caused the war for their own purposes. How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing—or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.

“I don’t know about the war,” Tino admitted. “It’s never made sense to me. But … maybe you should have left us alone. Maybe some of us would have survived.”

“Nothing would have survived except bacteria, a few small land plants and animals, and some sea creatures. Most of the life that you see around you we reseeded from prints, from collected specimens from our own creations, and from altered remnants of things that had undergone benign changes before we found them. The war damaged your ozone layer. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It shielded life on Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Without its protection, above-ground life on Earth would not have been possible. If we had left you on Earth, you would have been blinded. You would have been burned—if you hadn’t already been killed by other expanding effects of the war—and you would have died a terrible death. Most animals did die, and most plants, and some of us. We’re hard to kill, but your people had made their world utterly hostile to life. If we had not helped it, it couldn’t have restored itself so quickly. Once it was restored, we knew we couldn’t carry on a normal trade. We couldn’t let you breed alongside us, coming to us only when you saw the value of what we offered. Stabilizing a trade that way takes too many generations. We needed to free you—the least dangerous of you anyway. But we couldn’t let your numbers grow. We couldn’t let you begin to become what you were.”

“You believe we would have had another war?”

“You would have had many others—against each other, against us. Some of the southern resister groups are already making guns.”

Tino digested that silently. He had known about the guns of the southerners, had assumed they were to be used against the Oankali. He had not believed people from the stars would be stopped by a few crude firearms, and he had said so, making himself unpopular with those of his people who wanted to believe—needed to believe. Several of these had left Phoenix to join the southerners.

“What will you do about the guns?” he asked.

“Nothing, except to those who actually do try to shoot us. Those go back to the ship permanently. They lose Earth. We’ve told them that. So far, none of them have shot us. A few have shot one another, though.”

Lilith looked startled. “You’re letting them do that?”

Nikanj focused a cone of tentacles on her. “Could we stop them, Lilith, really?”

“You used to try!”

“Aboard the ship, here in Lo, and in the other trade villages. Nowhere else. We control the resisters only if we cage them, drug them, and allow them to live in an unreal world of drug-stimulated imaginings. We’ve done that to a few violent Humans. Shall we do it to more?”

Lilith only stared at it, her expression unreadable.

“You won’t do that?” Tino asked.

“We won’t. We have prints of all of you. We would be sorry to lose you, but at least we would save something. We will be inviting your people to join us again. If any are injured or crippled or even sick in spite of our efforts, we’ll offer them our help. They’re free to accept our help yet stay in their villages. Or they can come to us.” It aimed a sharp cone of head tentacles at Tino. “You’ve known since I sent you back to your parents years ago that you could choose to come to us.”

Tino shook his head, spoke softly. “I seem to remember that I didn’t want to go back to my parents. I asked to stay with you. To this day, I don’t know why.”

“I wanted to keep you. If you’d been a little older … But we’ve been told and shown that we aren’t good at raising fully Human children.” It shifted its attention for a moment to Lilith, but she looked away. “You had to be left with your parents to grow up. I thought I wouldn’t see you again.”

Tino caught himself staring at the ooloi’s long, gray sensory arms. Both arms seemed relaxed against the ooloi’s sides, their ends coiled, spiraling upward so that they did not touch the floor.

“They always look a little like elephants’ trunks to me,” Lilith said.

Tino glanced at her and saw that she was smiling—a sad smile that became her somehow. For a moment, she was beautiful. He did not know what he wanted from the ooloi—if he wanted anything. But he knew what he wanted from the woman. He wished the ooloi were not there. And as soon as the thought occurred to him, he rejected it. Lilith and Nikanj were a pair somehow. Without Nikanj, she would not have been as desirable. He did not understand this, but he accepted it.

They would have to show him what was to happen. He would not ask. They had made it clear they wanted something from him. Let
them
ask.

“I was thinking,” Tino said, referring to the sensory arms, “that I don’t know what they are.”

Nikanj’s body tentacles seemed to tremble, then solidify into discolored lumps. They sank into themselves the way the soft bodies of slugs seemed to when they drew themselves up to rest.

Tino drew back a little in revulsion. God, the Oankali were ugly creatures. How had Human beings come to tolerate them so easily, to touch them and allow them to …

Lilith took the ooloi’s right sensory arm between her hands and held it even when Nikanj seemed to try to pull away. She stared at it, and Tino knew there must be some communication. Did the Oankali share mind-reading abilities with their pet Humans? Or was it mind reading? Lilith spoke aloud.

“Slow,” she whispered. “Give him a moment. Give me a moment. Don’t defeat your own purpose by hurrying.”

For a moment, Nikanj’s lumps looked worse—like some grotesque disease. Then the lumps resolved themselves again into slender gray body tentacles no more grotesque than usual. Nikanj drew its sensory arm from Lilith’s hands, then stood up and went to a far corner of the room. There it sat down and seemed almost to turn itself off. Like something carved from gray marble, it became utterly still. Even its head and body tentacles ceased to move.

“What was all that?” Tino demanded.

Lilith smiled broadly. “For the first time in my life, I had to tell it to be patient. If it were Human, I would say it was infatuated with you.”

“You’re joking!”

“I am,” she said. “This is worse than infatuation. I’m glad you feel something for it, too, even though you don’t yet know what.”

“Why has it gone to sit in that corner?”

“Because it can’t quite bring itself to leave the room, though it knows it should—to let the two of us be Human for a little while. Anyway, I don’t think you really want it to leave.”

“Can it read minds? Can you?”

She did not laugh. At least she did not laugh. “I’ve never met anyone, Oankali or Human, who could read minds. It can stimulate sensations and send your thoughts off in all sorts of directions, but it can’t read those thoughts. It can only share the new sensations they produce. In effect, it can give you the most realistic and the most pleasurable dreams you’ve ever experienced. Nothing you’ve known before can match it—except perhaps your conditioning. And that should tell you why you’re here, why you were bound to seek out a trade village sooner or later. Nikanj touched you when you were too young to have any defenses. And what it gave you, you won’t ever quite forget—or quite remember, unless you feel it again. You want it again. Don’t you.”

It was not a question. Tino swallowed and did not bother with an answer. “I remember drugs,” he said, staring at nothing. “I never took any. I was too young before the war. I remember other people taking them and maybe going crazy for a little while or maybe just being high. I remember that they got addicted, that they got hurt sometimes or killed …”

“This isn’t just a drug.”

“What then?”

“Direct stimulation of the brain and nervous system.” She held up her hand to stop him from speaking. “There’s no pain. They hate pain more than we do, because they’re more sensitive to it. If they hurt us, they hurt themselves. And there are no harmful side effects. Just the opposite. They automatically fix any problems they find. They get real pleasure from healing or regenerating, and they share that pleasure with us. They weren’t as good at repairs before they found us. Regeneration was limited to wound healing. Now they can grow you a new leg if you lose one. They can even regenerate brain and nervous tissue. They learned that from us, believe it or not. We had the ability, and they knew how to use it. They learned by studying our cancers, of all things. It was cancer that made Humanity such a valuable trade partner.”

Tino shook his head, not believing. “I saw cancer kill both my grandfathers. It’s nothing but a filthy disease.”

Lilith touched his shoulder, let her hand slide down his arm in a caress. “So that’s it. That’s why Nikanj is so attracted to you. Cancer killed three close relatives of mine, including my mother. I’m told it would have killed me if the Oankali hadn’t done some work on me. It’s a filthy disease to us, but to the Oankali, it’s the tool they’ve been looking for for generations.”

“What will it do to me that has to do with cancer?”

“Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can’t do with an ugly one? Nothing. It’s just a matter of preference. Nikanj and every other Oankali already have all the information they need to use what they’ve learned from us. Even the constructs can use it once they’re mature. But people like you and me are still attractive to them.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m told our children will understand them, but we won’t.”

“Our children will be them.”

“You accept that?”

It took him a moment to realize what he had said. “No! I don’t know. Yes, but—” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”