Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (66 page)

“Now? In the middle of everything?”

“Yes.”

“What if it can’t?”

Lilith swallowed. I could see her throat move. “Then maybe we’ll have to leave Lo for a while—live apart in the forest.”

He went to her, looked at her the way he does sometimes when he wants to touch her, maybe to hold her the way Humans hold each other in the guest area. But Humans who accept Oankali mates give up that kind of touching. They don’t give up wanting to do it, but once they mate Oankali, they find each other’s touch repellent.

Tino shifted his attention to Nikanj. “Why don’t you talk to me? Why do you leave her to tell me what’s going on?”

Nikanj extended a sensory arm toward him.

“No! Goddamnit, talk to me! Speak aloud!”

“… all right,” Nikanj whispered, its body bent in an attitude of deep shame.

Tino glared at it.

“I cannot restore … your same-sex child to you,” it said.

“Why did you do this? How could you do it?”

“I made a mistake. I only realized earlier today what I had allowed to happen. I … I would not have done it deliberately, Chka. Nothing could have made me do it. It happened because after so many years I had begun to relax about our children. Things have always gone well. I was careless.”

My Human father looked at me. It was as though he looked from a long way away. His hands moved, and I knew he wanted to touch me, too. But if he did, it would go wrong the way it had earlier with my mother. They couldn’t touch me anymore. Within families, people could touch their same-sex children, their unsexed children, their same-sex mates, and their ooloi mates.

Now, abruptly, my Human father turned and grasped the sensory arm Nikanj offered. The arm was a tough, muscular organ that existed to contain and protect the essential ooloi sensory and reproductive organs. It probably could not be injured by bare Human hands, but I think Tino tried. He was angry and hurt, and that made him want to hurt others. Of my two Human parents, only he tended to react this way. And now the only being he could turn to for comfort was the one who had caused all his trouble. An Oankali would have opened a wall and gone away for a while. Even Lilith would have done that. Tino tried to give pain. Pain for pain.

Nikanj drew him against its body and held him motionless as it comforted him and spoke silently with him. It held him for so long that my Oankali parents raised platforms and sat on them to wait. Lilith came to share my platform, though she could have raised her own. My scent must have disturbed her, but she sat near me and looked at me.

“Do you feel all right?” she said.

“Yes. I’ll fall asleep soon, I think.”

“You look ready for it. Does my being here bother you?”

“Not yet. But it must bother you.”

“I can stand it.”

She stayed where she was. I could remember being inside her. I could remember when there was nothing in my universe except her. I found myself longing to touch her. I hadn’t felt that before. I had never before been unable to touch her. Now I discovered a little of the Human hunger to touch where I could not.

“Are you afraid?” Lilith asked.

“I was. But now that I know I’m all right, and that you’ll all keep me here, I’m fine.”

She smiled a little. “Nika’s first same-sex child. It’s been so lonely.”

“I know.”

“We all knew,” Dichaan said from his platform. “All the ooloi on Earth must be feeling the desperation Nikanj felt. The people are going to have to change the old agreement before more accidents happen. The next one might be a flawed ooloi.”

A flawed natural genetic engineer—one who could distort or destroy with a touch. Nothing could save it from confinement on the ship. Perhaps it would even have to be physically altered to prevent it from functioning in any way as an ooloi. Perhaps it would be so dangerous that it would have to spend its existence in suspended animation, its body used by others for painless experimentation, its consciousness permanently shut off.

I shuddered and lay down again. At once, both Nikanj and Tino were beside me, reconciled, apparently, by their concern for me. Nikanj touched me with a sensory arm, but did not expose the sensory hand. “Listen, Jodahs.”

I focused on it without opening my eyes.

“You’ll be all right here. I’ll stay with you. I’ll talk to the people from here, and when you’ve reached the end of this first metamorphosis, you’ll remember all that I’ve said to them—and all they’ve said.” It slipped a sensory arm around my neck and the feel of it there comforted me. “We’ll take care of you,” it said.

Later, it stripped my clothing from me as I floated atop sleep, a piece of straw floating on a still pond. I could not slip beneath the surface yet.

Something was put into my mouth. It had the flavor and texture of chunks of pineapple, but I knew from tiny differences in its scent that it was a Lo creation. It was almost pure protein—exactly what my body needed. When I had eaten several pieces, I was able to slip beneath the surface into sleep.

M
ETAMORPHOSIS IS SLEEP. DAYS,
weeks, months of sleep broken by a few hours now and then of waking, eating, talking. Males and females slept even more, but they had just the one metamorphosis. Ooloi go through this twice.

There were times when I was aware enough to watch my body develop. A sair was growing at my throat so that I would eventually be able to breathe as easily in water as in air. My nose was not absorbed into my face, but it became little more than an ornament.

I didn’t lose my hair, but I grew many more head and body tentacles. I would not develop sensory arms until my second metamorphosis, but my sensitivity had already been increased, and I would soon be able to give and receive more complex multisensory illusions, and handle them much faster.

And something was growing between my hearts.

Because I was Human-born, my internal arrangement was basically Human. Ooloi are careful not to construct children who provoke uncontrollable immune reactions in their birth mothers. Even two hearts seem radical to some Humans. Sometimes they shoot us where they think a heart should be—where their own hearts are—then run away in panic because that kind of thing doesn’t stop us. I don’t think many Humans have seen what the Oankali look like inside—or what we constructs look like. Two hearts are just double the Human allotment. But the organ now growing between my hearts was not Human at all.

Every construct had some version of it. Males and females used it to store and keep viable the cells of unfamiliar living things that they sought out and brought home to their ooloi mate or parent. In ooloi, the organ was larger and more complex. Within it, ooloi manipulated molecules of DNA more deftly than Human women manipulated the bits of thread they used to sew their cloth. I had been constructed inside such an organ, assembled from the genetic contributions of my two mothers and my two fathers. The construction itself and a single Oankali organelle was the only ooloi contribution to my existence. The organelle had divided within each of my cells as the cells divided. It had become an essential part of my body. We were what we were because of that organelle. It made us collectors and traders of life, always learning, always changing in every way but one—that one organelle. Ooloi said we
were
that organelle—that the original Oankali had evolved through that organelle’s invasion, acquisition, duplication, and symbiosis. Sometimes on worlds that had no intelligent, carbon-based life to trade with, Oankali deliberately left behind large numbers of the organelle. Abandoned, it would seek a home in the most unlikely indigenous life-forms and trigger changes—evolution in spurts. Hundreds of millions of years later, perhaps some Oankali people would wander by and find interesting trade partners waiting for them. The organelle made or found compatibility with life-forms so completely dissimilar that they were unable even to perceive one another as alive.

Once I had been all enclosed within Nikanj in a mature version of the organ I was growing between my hearts. That, I did not remember. I came to consciousness within my Human mother’s uterus.

Yashi, the ooloi called their organ of genetic manipulation. Sometimes they talked about it as though it were another person. “I’m going out to taste the river and the forest. Yashi is hungry and twisting for something new.”

Did it really twist? I probably wouldn’t find out until my second metamorphosis when my sensory arms grew. Until then, yashi would enlarge and develop to become only a little more useful than that of a male or a female.

Other Oankali organs began to develop now as genes, dormant since my conception, became active and stimulated the growth of new, highly specialized tissues. Adult ooloi were more different than most Humans realized. Beyond their insertion of the Oankali organelle, they made no genetic contribution to their children. They left their birth families and mated with strangers so that they would not be confronted with too much familiarity. Humans said familiarity bred contempt. Among the ooloi, it bred mistakes. Male and female siblings could mate safely as long as their ooloi came from a totally different kin group.

So, for an ooloi, a same-sex child was as close as it would ever come to seeing itself in its children.

For that reason among others, Nikanj shielded me.

I felt as though it stood between me and the people so that they could not get past it to take me away.

I absorbed all that happened in the room with me, and all that came through the platform to me from Lo.

“
How can we trust you?
” the people demanded of Nikanj. Their messages reached us through Lo, and reached Lo either directly from our neighbors or by way of radio signals from other towns relayed to Lo by the ship. And we heard from people who lived on the ship. A few messages came from nearby towns that could make direct underground contact with Lo. The messages were all essentially the same. “
How can we possibly trust you? No one else has made such a dangerous mistake
.”

Through Lo, Nikanj invited the people to examine it and its findings as though it were some newly discovered species. It invited them to know all that it knew about me. It endured all the tests people could think of and agree on. But it kept them from touching me.

In spite of its mistakes, it was my same-sex parent. Since it said I must not be disturbed in metamorphosis, and since they were not yet convinced that it had lost all competence, they would not disturb me. Humans thought this sort of thing was a matter of authority—who had authority over the child. Constructs and Oankali knew it was a matter of physiology. Nikanj’s body “understood” what mine was going through— what it needed and did not need. Nikanj let me know that I was all right and reassured me that I wasn’t alone. In the way of Oankali and construct same-sex parents, it went through metamorphosis with me. It knew exactly what would disturb me and what was safe. Its body knew, and no one would argue with that knowledge. Even Human same-sex parents seemed to reach an empathy with their children that the people respected. Without that empathy, some developing males and females had had a strange time of it. One of my brothers was completely cut off from the family and from Oankali and construct companionship during his metamorphosis. He reacted to his unrelated, all-Human companions by losing all visible traces of his own Human heritage. He survived all right. The Humans had taken care of him as best they could. But after metamorphosis he had had to accept people treating him as though he were an entirely different person. He was Human-born, but our Human parents didn’t recognize him at all when he came home.

“I don’t want to push you toward the Human or the Oankali extreme,” Nikanj said once when the people gave it a few hours of peace. It talked to me often, knowing that whether I was conscious or not, I would hear and remember. Its presence and its voice comforted me. “I want you to develop as you should in every way. The more normal your changes are, the sooner the people will accept you as normal.”

It had not yet convinced the people to accept anything about me. Not even that I should be allowed to stay on Earth and live in Lo through my subadult stage and second metamorphosis. The consensus now was that I should be brought up to the ship as soon as I had completed this first metamorphosis. Subadults were still seen as children, but they could work as ooloi in ways that did not involve reproduction. Subadults could not only heal or cause disease, but they could cause genetic changes—mutations—in plants and animals. They could do anything that could be done without mates. They could be unintentionally deadly, changing insects and microorganisms in unexpected ways.

“I don’t want to hurt anything,” I said toward the end of my months-long change when I could speak again. “Don’t let me do any harm.”

“No harm, Oeka,” Nikanj said softly. It had lain down beside me as it often did so that while I slept, it could be with me, yet sink its head and body tentacles into the platform—the flesh of Lo—and communicate with the people. “There is no flaw in you,” it continued. “You should be aware of everything you do. You can make mistakes, but you can also perceive them. And you can correct them. I’ll help you.”

Its words gave a security nothing else could have. I had begun to feel like one of the dormant volcanoes high in the mountains beyond the forest—like a thing that might explode anytime, destroying whatever happened to be nearby.

“There is something that you must be aware of, though,” Nikanj said.

“Yes?”

“You will be complete in ways that male and female constructs have not been. Eventually you and others like you will awaken dormant abilities in males and females. But you, as an ooloi, can have no dormant abilities.”

“What will it mean … to be complete?”

“You’ll be able to change yourself. What we can do from one generation to the next—changing our form, reverting to earlier forms or combinations of forms—you’ll be able to do within yourself. Superficially, you may even be able to create new forms, new shells for camouflage. That’s what we intended.”

“If I can change my shape …” I focused narrowly on Nikanj. “Could I become male?”