Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) (72 page)

“They don’t frighten me. My response to them frightens me. I feel … as though I’m not in control of myself anymore. I feel drugged—as though they could make me do anything.”

“You won’t be their prisoner. And you won’t be dealing with unmated ooloi. The ooloi who changes you won’t want anything from you.”

“I would rather have you do it—or someone like you.”

“I’m a construct ooloi. The first one. There is no one else like me.”

She looked at me for a little longer, then pulled me closer to her and drew a long, weary breath. “You’re beautiful, you know? You shouldn’t be, but you are. You remind me of a man I knew once.” She sighed again. “Damn.”

B
ACK TO LO.

We gave the drugged prisoners to the people of Lo. A house would be grown for them from the substance of Lo and they would not be let out of it until a shuttle came for them. Then they would be transferred to the ship. They understood what was to happen to them, and even drugged, they asked to be spared, to be released. The one who had called Lilith and Tino animals began to cry. Nikanj drugged him a little more and he seemed to forget why he had been upset. That would be his life now. Once he was aboard the ship, one ooloi would drug him regularly. He would come to look forward to it—and he would not care what else was done with him.

I took Marina to the guest area before Nikanj was free to check her. I didn’t want to watch it examine her. I got the impression that it was perfectly willing not to touch her. There must have been too much of my scent on her to make her seem still alone and unrelated.

She kissed me before I left her. I think it was an experiment for her. For me it was an enjoyment. It let me touch her a little more, sink filaments of sensory tentacles into her along the lengths of our bodies. She liked that. She shouldn’t have. I was supposed to be too young to give pleasure. She liked it anyway.

“I’ll send someone to change you genetically,” I said after a time. “Don’t be afraid. Let your children have the same chance you have.”

“All right.”

I held her a little longer, then left her. I asked Tehkorahs to check her and make the necessary adjustment.

It stood with Wray Ordway, its male Human mate, and Wray smiled and gave me a look of understanding and amusement. He was one of the few people in Lo to speak for me when the exile decision was being made. “A child is a child,” he said through Tehkorahs. “The more you treat it like a freak, the more it will behave like one.” I think people like him eased things for me. They made Earth exile feel less objectionable to the truly frightened people who wanted me safely shut away on the ship.

“You know I’ll take care of the female,” Tehkorahs said. “She seemed to like you very much.”

I felt my head and body tentacles flatten to my skin in remembered pleasure. “Very much.”

Wray laughed. “I told you it would be sexually precocious—just like the construct males and females.”

Tehkorahs looped a sensory tentacle around his neck. “I’m not surprised. Every gene trade brings change. Jodahs, let me check you. The female won’t want to see me for a while. You’ve left too much of yourself with her.”

I stepped close to it and it released Wray and examined me quickly, thoroughly. I felt its surprise before it let me go. “You’re much more in control now,” it said. “I can’t find anything wrong with you. And if your memories of the female are accurate—”

“Of course they are!”

“Then I probably won’t find anything wrong with her either. Except for the genetic problem.”

“She’ll cooperate when you’re ready to correct that.”

“Good. You look like her, you know.”

“What?”

“Your body has been striving to please her. You’re more brown now—less gray. Your face is changed subtly.”

“You look like a male version of her,” Wray said. “She probably thought you were very handsome.”

“She said so,” I admitted amid Wray’s laughter. “I didn’t know I was changing.”

“All ooloi change a little when they mate,” Tehkorahs said. “Our scents change. We fit ourselves into our mates’ kin group. You may fit in better than most of us—just as your descendants will fit more easily when they find a new species for the gene trade.”

If I ever had descendants.

The next day, the family gathered new supplies and left Lo for the second time. I had had one more night to sleep in the family house. I slept with Aaor the way I always used to before my metamorphosis. I think I made it as lonely as I felt myself now that Marina was gone. And that night I gave Aaor, Lo, and myself large, foul-smelling sores.

W
E DIDN’T STOP AT THE
island we had intended to live on. It was too close to Pascual. Living there would have made us targets for more Human fear and frustration. We followed the river west, then south, traveling when we wanted to, resting when we were tired—drifting, really. I was restless, and drifting suited me. The others simply seemed not content with any likely campsite we found. I suspected that they wouldn’t be content again until they returned to Lo to stay.

We edged around Human habitations very carefully. Humans who saw us either stared from a distance or followed us until we left their territory. None approached us.

Twelve days from Lo, we were still drifting. The river was long with many tributaries, many curves and twists. It was good to walk along the shaded forest floor, following the sound and smell of it, and thinking about nothing at all. My fingers and toes became webbed on the third day, and I didn’t bother to correct them. I was wet at least as often as I was dry. My hair fell out and I developed a few more sensory tentacles. I stopped wearing clothing, and my coloring changed to gray-green.

“What are you doing?” my Human mother asked. “Letting your body do whatever it wants to?” Her voice and posture expressed stiff disapproval.

“As long as I don’t develop an illness,” I said.

She frowned. “I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. Deformity is as bad as illness.”

I walked away from her. I had never done that before.

Fifteen days out of Lo, someone shot at us with arrows.

Only Lilith was hit. Nikanj caught the archer, drugged him unconscious, destroyed all his weapons, and changed the color of his hair. It had been deep brown. It would be colorless from now on. It would look all white. Finally Nikanj encouraged his face to fall into the permanent creases that this male’s behavior and genetic heritage had dictated for his old age. He would look much older. He would not be weaker or in any way infirm, but appearances were important to Humans. When this male awoke—sometime the next day—his eyes and his fingers would tell him he had paid a terrible price for attacking us. More important, his people would see. They would misunderstand what they saw, and it would frighten them into letting us alone.

Lilith had no special trouble with the arrow. It damaged one of her kidneys and gave her a great deal of pain, but her life was in no danger. Her improved body would have healed quickly even without Nikanj’s help, since the arrow was not poisoned. But Nikanj did not leave her to heal herself. It lay beside her and healed her completely before it returned to whiten the drugged archer’s hair and wrinkle his face. Mates took care of one another.

I watched them, wondering who I would take care of. Who would take care of me?

Twenty-one days out, the bed of our river turned south and we turned with it. Dichaan veered off the trail, and left us for some time, and came back with a male Human who had broken his leg. The leg was grotesque—swollen, discolored, and blistered. The smell of it made Nikanj and me look at one another.

We camped and made a pallet for the injured Human. Nikanj spoke to me before it went to him.

“Get rid of your webbing,” it said. “Try to look less like a frog or you’ll scare him.”

“Are you going to let me heal him?”

“Yes. And it will take a while for you to do it right. Your first regeneration. … Go eat something while I ease his pain.”

“Let me do that,” I said. But it had already turned away and gone back to the male. The male’s leg was worse than worthless. It was poisoning his body. Portions of it were already dead. Yet the thought of taking it disturbed me.

Ahajas and Aaor brought me food before I could look around for it, and Aaor sat with me while I ate.

“Why are you afraid?” it said.

“Not exactly afraid, but … To take the leg …”

“Yes. It will give you a chance to grow something other than webbing and sensory tentacles.”

“I don’t want to do it. He’s old like Marina. You don’t know how I hated letting her go.”

“Don’t I?”

I focused on it. “I didn’t think you did. You didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t want me to. You should eat.”

When I didn’t eat, it moved closer to me and leaned against me, linking comfortably into my nervous system. It had not done that for a while. It wasn’t afraid of me anymore. It had not exactly abandoned me. It had allowed me to isolate myself—since I seemed to want to. It let me know this in simple neurosensory impressions.

“I was lonely,” I protested aloud.

“I know. But not for me.” It spoke with confidence and contentment that confused me.

“You’re changing,” I said.

“Not yet. But soon, I think.”

“Metamorphosis? We’ll lose each other when you change.”

“I know. Share the Human with me. It will give the two of us more time together.”

“All right.”

Then I had to go to the Human. I had to heal him alone. After that, Aaor and I could share him.

People remembered their ooloi siblings. I had heard Ahajas and Dichaan talk about theirs. But they had not seen it for decades. An ooloi belonged to the kin group of its mates. Its siblings were lost to it.

The Human male had lost consciousness by the time I lay down beside him. The moment I touched him, I knew he must have broken his leg in a fall—probably from a tree. He had puncture wounds and deep bruises on the left side of his body. The left leg was, as I had expected, a total loss, foul and poisonous. I separated it from the rest of his body above the damaged tissue. First I stopped the circulation of bodily fluids and poisons to and from the leg. Then I encouraged the growth of a skin barrier at the hip. Finally I helped his body let go of the rotting limb.

When the leg fell away, I withdrew enough of my attention from the male to ask the family to get rid of it. I didn’t want the male to see it.

Then I settled down to healing the many smaller injuries and neutralizing the poisons that had already begun to destroy the health of his body. I spent much of the evening healing him. Finally I focused again on his leg and began to reprogram certain cells. Genes that had not been active since well before the male was born had to be awakened and set to work telling the body how to grow a leg. A leg, not a cancer. The regeneration would take many days and would have to be monitored. We would camp here and keep the man with us until regeneration was complete.

It had been dark for some time when I detached myself from the male. My Human parents and my siblings were asleep nearby. Ahajas and Dichaan sat near one another guarding the camp and conversing aloud so softly that even I could not hear all they said. A Human intruder would have heard nothing at all. Oankali and construct hearing was so acute that some resisters imagined we could read their thoughts. I wished we could have so that I would have some idea how the male I had healed would react to me. I would have to spend as much time with him as new mates often spent together. That would be hard if he hated or feared me.

“Do you like him, Oeka?” Nikanj asked softly.

I had known it was behind me, sitting, waiting to check my work. Now it came up beside me and settled a sensory arm around my neck. I still enjoyed its touch, but I held stiff against it because I thought it would next touch the male.

“Thorny, possessive ooloi child,” it said, pulling me against it in spite of my stiffness. “I must examine him this once. But if what you tell me and show me matches what I find in him, I won’t touch him again until it’s time for him to go—unless something goes wrong.”

“Nothing will go wrong!”

“Good. Show me everything.”

I obeyed, stumbling now and then because I understood the working of the male’s body better than I understood the vocabulary, silent or vocal, for discussing it. But with neurosensory illusions, I could show it exactly what I meant.

“There are no words for some things,” Nikanj told me as it finished. “You and your children will create them if you need them. We’ve never needed them.”

“Did I do all right with him?”

“Go away. I’ll find out for sure.”

I went to sit with Ahajas and Dichaan and they gave me some of the wild figs and nuts they had been eating. The food did not take my mind off Nikanj touching the Human, but I ate anyway, and listened while Ahajas told me how hard it had been for Nikanj when its ooan Kahguyaht had had to examine Lilith.

“Kahguyaht said ooloi possessiveness during subadulthood is a bridge that helps ooloi understand Humans,” she said. “It’s as though Human emotions were permanently locked in ooloi subadulthood. Humans are possessive of mates, potential mates, and property because these can be taken from them.”

“They can be taken from anyone,” I said. “Living things can die. Nonliving things can be destroyed.”

“But Human mates can walk away from one another,” Dichaan said. “They never lose the ability to do that. They can leave one another permanently and find new mates. Humans can take the mates of other Humans. There’s no physical bond.

No security. And because Humans are hierarchical, they tend to compete for mates and property.”

“But that’s built into them genetically,” I said. “It isn’t built into me.”

“No,” Ahajas said. “But, Oeka, you won’t be able to bond with a mate—Human, construct, or Oankali—until you’re adult. You can feel needs and attachments. I know you feel more at this stage than an Oankali would. But until you’re mature, you can’t form a true bond. Other ooloi can seduce potential mates away from you. So other ooloi are suspect.”