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

by Octavia E. Butler

  Kahguyaht ignored the question. But of course she had been in one of the plants—had spent most of the last two and a half centuries within what was basically a carnivorous plant. And the thing had taken good care of her, kept her young and well.

  “How did you make them stop eating people?” she asked.

  “We altered them genetically—changed some of their requirements, enabled them to respond to certain chemical stimuli from us.”

  She looked at the ooloi. “It’s one thing to do that to a plant. It’s another to do it to intelligent, self-aware beings.”

  “We do what we do, Lilith.”

  “You could kill us. You could make mules of our children—sterile monsters.”

  “No,” it said. “There was no life at all on your Earth when our ancestors left our original homeworld, and in all that time we’ve never done such a thing.”

  “You wouldn’t tell me if you had,” she said bitterly.

  It took her back through the crowded corridors to what she had come to think of as Jdahya’s apartment. There it turned her over to the child, Nikanj.

  “It will answer your questions and take you through the walls when necessary,” Kahguyaht said. “It is half again your age and very knowledgeable about things other than humans. You will teach it about your people and it will teach you about the Oankali.”

  Half again her age, three-quarters her size, and still growing. She wished it were not an ooloi child. She wished it were not a child at all. How could Kahguyaht first accuse her of wanting to poison children, then leave her in the care of its own child?

  At least Nikanj did not look like an ooloi yet.

  “You do speak English, don’t you?” she asked when Kahguyaht had opened a wall and left the room. The room was the one they had eaten in, empty now except for Lilith and the child. The leftover food and the dishes had been removed and she had not seen Jdahya or Tediin since her return.

  “Yes,” the child said. “But … not much. You teach.”

  Lilith sighed. Neither the child nor Tediin had said a word to her beyond greeting, though both had occasionally spoken in fast, choppy Oankali to Jdahya or Kahguyaht. She had wondered why. Now she knew.

  “I’ll teach what I can,” she said.

  “I teach. You teach.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Outside?”

  “You want me to go outside with you?”

  It seemed to think for a moment. “Yes,” it said finally.

  “Why?”

  The child opened its mouth, then closed it again, head tentacles writhing. Confusion? Vocabulary problem?

  “It’s all right,” Lilith said. “We can go outside if you like.”

  Its tentacles smoothed flat against its body briefly, then it took her hand and would have opened the wall and led her out but she stopped it.

  “Can you show me how to make it open?” she asked.

  The child hesitated, then took one of her hands and brushed it over the forest of its long head tentacles, leaving the hand slightly wet. Then it touched her fingers to the wall, and the wall began to open.

  More programmed reaction to chemical stimuli. No special areas to press, no special series of pressures. Just a chemical the Oankali manufactured within their bodies. She would go on being a prisoner, forced to stay wherever they chose to leave her. She would not be permitted even the illusion of freedom.

  The child stopped her once they were outside. It struggled through a few more words. “Others,” it said, then hesitated. “Others see you? Others not see human … never.”

  Lilith frowned, certain she was being asked a question. The child’s rising inflection seemed to indicate questioning if she could depend on such clues from an Oankali. “Are you asking me whether you can show me off to your friends?” she asked.

  The child turned its face to her. “Show you … off?”

  “It means … to put me on display—take me out to be seen.”

  “Ah. Yes. I show you off?”

  “All right,” she said smiling.

  “I talk … more human soon. You say … if I speak bad.”

  “Badly,” she corrected.

  “If I speak badly?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence. “Also, goodly?” it asked.

  “No, not goodly. Well.”

  “Well.” The child seemed to taste the word. “I speak well soon,” it said.

  3

  NIKANJ’S FRIENDS POKED AND prodded her exposed flesh and tried to persuade her through Nikanj to take off her clothing. None of them spoke English. None seemed in the least childlike, though Nikanj said all were children. She got the feeling some would have enjoyed dissecting her. They spoke aloud very little, but there was much touching of tentacles to flesh or tentacles to other tentacles. When they saw that she would not strip, no more questions were addressed to her. She was first amused, then annoyed, then angered by their attitude. She was nothing more than an unusual animal to them. Nikanj’s new pet.

  Abruptly she turned away from them. She had had enough of being shown off. She moved away from a pair of children who were reaching to investigate her hair, and spoke Nikanj’s name sharply.

  Nikanj disentangled its long head tentacles from those of another child and came back to her. If it had not responded to its name, she would not have known it. She was going to have to learn to tell people apart. Memorize the various head-tentacle patterns, perhaps.

  “I want to go back,” she said.

  “Why?” it asked.

  She sighed, decided to tell as much of the truth as she thought it could understand. Best to find out now just how far the truth would get her. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t want to be shown off anymore to people I can’t even talk to.”

  It touched her arm tentatively. “You … anger?”

  “I’m angry, yes. I need to be by myself for a while.”

  It thought about that. “We go back,” it said finally.

  Some of the children were apparently unhappy about her leaving. They clustered around her and spoke aloud to Nikanj, but Nikanj said a few words and they let her pass.

  She discovered she was trembling and took deep breaths to relax herself. How was a pet supposed to feel? How did zoo animals feel?

  If the child would just take her somewhere and leave her for a while. If it would give her a little more of what she had thought she would never want again: Solitude.

  Nikanj touched her forehead with a few head tentacles, as though sampling her sweat. She jerked her head away, not wanting to be sampled anymore by anyone.

  Nikanj opened a wall into the family apartment and led her into a room that was a twin of the isolation room she thought she had left behind. “Rest here,” it told her. “Sleep.”

  There was even a bathroom, and on the familiar table platform, there was a clean set of clothing. And replacing Jdahya was Nikanj. She could not get rid of it. It had been told to stay with her, and it meant to stay. Its tentacles settled into ugly irregular lumps when she shouted at it, but it stayed.

  Defeated, she hid for a while in the bathroom. She rinsed her old clothing, though no foreign matter stuck to it—not dirt, not sweat, not grease or water. It never stayed wet for more than a few minutes. Some Oankali synthetic.

  Then she wanted to sleep again. She was used to sleeping whenever she felt tired, and not used to walking long distances or meeting new people. Surprising how quickly the Oankali had become people to her. But then, who else was there?

  She crawled into the bed and turned her back to Nikanj, who had taken Jdahya’s place on the table platform. Who else would there be for her if the Oankali had their way—and no doubt they were used to having their way. Modifying carnivorous plants … What had they modified to get their ship? And what useful tools would they modify human beings into? Did they know yet, or were they planning more experiments? Did they care? How would they make their changes? Or had they made them already—done a little extra
tampering with her while they took care of her tumor? Had she ever had a tumor? Her family history led her to believe she had. They probably had not lied about that. Maybe they had not lied about anything. Why should they bother to lie? They owned the Earth and all that was left of the human species.

  How was it that she had not been able to take what Jdahya offered?

  She slept, finally. The light never changed, but she was used to that. She awoke once to find that Nikanj had come onto the bed with her and lay down. Her first impulse was to push the child away in revulsion or get up herself. Her second, which she followed, wearily indifferent, was to go back to sleep.

  4

  IT BECAME IRRATIONALLY IMPORTANT to her to do two things: First, to talk to another human being. Any human would do, but she hoped for one who had been Awake longer than she had, one who knew more than she had managed to learn.

  Second, she wanted to catch an Oankali in a lie. Any Oankali. Any lie.

  But she saw no sign of other humans. And the closest she came to catching the Oankali lying was to catch them in half-truths—though they were honest even about this. They freely admitted that they would tell her only part of what she wanted to know. Beyond this, the Oankali seemed to tell the truth as they perceived it, always. This left her with an almost intolerable sense of hopelessness and helplessness—as though catching them in lies would make them vulnerable. As though it would make the thing they intended to do less real, easier to deny.

  Only Nikanj gave her any pleasure, any forgetfulness. The ooloi child seemed to have been given to her as much as she had been given to it. It rarely left her, seemed to like her—though what “liking” a human might mean to an Oankali, she did not know. She had not even figured out Oankali emotional ties to one another. But Jdahya had cared enough for her to offer to do something he believed was utterly wrong. What might Nikanj do for her eventually?

  In a very real sense, she was an experimental animal. Not a pet. What could Nikanj do for an experimental animal? Protest tearfully (?) when she was sacrificed at the end of the experiment?

  But, no, it was not that kind of experiment. She was intended to live and reproduce, not to die. Experimental animal, parent to domestic animals? Or … nearly extinct animal, part of a captive breeding program? Human biologists had done that before the war—used a few captive members of an endangered animal species to breed more for the wild population. Was that what she was headed for? Forced artificial insemination. Surrogate motherhood? Fertility drugs and forced “donations” of eggs? Implantation of unrelated fertilized eggs. Removal of children from mothers at birth … Humans had done these things to captive breeders—all for a higher good, of course.

  This was what she needed to talk to another human about. Only a human could reassure her—or at least understand her fear. But there was only Nikanj. She spent all her time teaching it and learning what she could from it. It kept her as busy as she would permit. It needed less sleep than she did, and when she was not asleep, it expected her to be learning or teaching. It wanted not only language, but culture, biology, history, her own life story. … Whatever she knew, it expected to learn.

  This was a little like having Sharad with her again. But Nikanj was much more demanding—more like an adult in its persistence. No doubt she and Sharad had been given their time together so that the Oankali could see how she behaved with a foreign child of her own species—a child she had to share quarters with and teach.

  Like Sharad, Nikanj had an eidetic memory. Perhaps all Oankali did. Anything Nikanj saw or heard once, it remembered, whether it understood or not. And it was bright and surprisingly quick to understand. She became ashamed of her own plodding slowness and haphazard memory.

  She had always found it easier to learn when she could write things down. In all her time with the Oankali, though, she had never seen any of them read or write anything.

  “Do you keep any records outside your own memories?” she asked Nikanj when she had worked with it long enough to become frustrated and angry. “Do you ever read or write?”

  “You have not taught me those words,” it said.

  “Communication by symbolic marks …” She looked around for something she could mark, but they were in their bedroom and there was nothing that would retain a mark long enough for her to write words—even if she had had something to write with. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  It opened a wall and led her out. Outside, beneath the branches of the pseudotree that contained their living quarters, she knelt on the ground and began to write with her finger in what seemed to be loose, sandy soil. She wrote her name, then experimented with different possible spellings of Nikanj’s name. Necange didn’t look right—nor did Nekahnge. Nickahnge was closer. She listened in her mind to Nikanj saying its name, then wrote Nikanj. That felt right, and she liked the way it looked.

  “That’s about what your name would look like written down,” she said. “I can write the words you teach me and study them until I know them. That way I wouldn’t have to ask you things over and over. But I need something to write with—and on. Thin sheets of paper would be best.” She was not sure it knew what paper was, but it did not ask. “If you don’t have paper, I could use thin sheets of plastic or even cloth if you can make something that will mark them. Some ink or dye—something that will make a clear mark. Do you understand?”

  “You can do what you’re doing with your fingers,” it told her.

  “That’s not enough. I need to be able to keep my writing … to study it. I need—”

  “No.”

  She stopped in midsentence, blinked at it. “This isn’t anything dangerous,” she said. “Some of your people must have seen our books, tapes, disks, films—our records of history, medicine, language, science, all kinds of things. I just want to make my own records of your language.”

  “I know about the … records your people kept. I didn’t know what they were called in English, but I’ve seen them. We’ve saved many of them and learned to use them to know humans better. I don’t understand them, but others do.”

  “May I see them?”

  “No. None of your people are permitted to see them.”

  “Why?”

  It did not answer.

  “Nikanj?”

  Silence.

  “Then … at least let me make my own records to help me learn your language. We humans need to do such things to help us remember.”

  “No.”

  She frowned. “But … what do you mean, ‘no’? We do.”

  “I cannot give you such things. Not to write or to read.”

  “Why!”

  “It is not allowed. The people have decided that it should not be allowed.”

  “That doesn’t answer anything. What was their reason?”

  Silence again. It let its sensory tentacles droop. This made it look smaller—like a furry animal that had gotten wet.

  “It can’t be that you don’t have—or can’t make—writing materials,” she said.

  “We can make anything your people could,” it said. “Though we would not want to make most of their things.”

  “This is such a simple thing …” She shook her head. “Have you been told not to tell me why?”

  It refused to answer. Did that mean not telling her was its own idea, its own childish exercise of power? Why shouldn’t the Oankali do such things as readily as humans did?

  After a time, it said, “Come back in. I’ll teach you more of our history.” It knew she liked stories of the long, multispecies Oankali history, and the stories helped her Oankali vocabulary. But she was in no mood to be cooperative now. She sat down on the ground and leaned back against the pseudotree. After a moment, Nikanj sat down opposite her and began to speak.

  “Six divisions ago, on a white-sun water world, we lived in great shallow oceans,” it said. “We were many-bodied and spoke with body lights and color patterns among ourself and among ourselves. …”

 
She let it go on, not questioning when she did not understand, not wanting to care. The idea of Oankali blending with a species of intelligent, schooling, fishlike creatures was fascinating, but she was too angry to give it her full attention. Writing materials. Such small things, and yet they were denied to her. Such small things!

  When Nikanj went into the apartment to get food for them both, she got up and walked away. She wandered, freer than she ever had before through the parklike area outside the living quarters—the pseudotrees. Oankali saw her, but seemed to pay no more than momentary attention to her. She had become absorbed in looking around when abruptly Nikanj was beside her.

  “You must stay with me,” it said in a tone that reminded her of a human mother speaking to her five-year-old. That, she thought, was about right for her rank in its family.

  After that incident she slipped away whenever she could. Either she would be stopped, punished, and/or confined, or she would not be.

  She was not. Nikanj seemed to get used to her wandering. Abruptly, it ceased to show up at her elbow minutes after she had escaped it. It seemed willing to give her an occasional hour or two out of its sight. She began to take food with her, saving easily portable items from her meals—a highly seasoned rice dish wrapped in an edible, high-protein envelope, nuts, fruit or quatasayasha, a sharp, cheeselike Oankali food that Kahguyaht had said was safe. Nikanj had acknowledged its acceptance of her wandering by advising her to bury any uneaten food she did not want. “Feed it to the ship,” was the way it put the suggestion.

  She would fashion her extra jacket into a bag and put her lunch into it, then wander alone, eating and thinking. There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.

  Other Oankali tried to talk with her sometimes, but she could not understand enough of their language to hold a conversation. Sometimes even when they spoke slowly, she would not recognize words she should have known and did know moments after the encounter had ended. Most of the time she wound up resorting to gestures—which did not work very well—and feeling impenetrably stupid. The only certain communication she managed was in enlisting help from strangers when she was lost.