Dawn x-1

by Butler, Octavia

  "Dichaan has said he would adjust the walls of their home to you so that you can open them. He and Ahajas can't change you in any way, but they can adjust your new surroundings."

  So at least she wouldn't have to go back to the house pet stage, asking every time she wanted to enter or leave a room or eat a snack. "I'm grateful for that, at least," she said.

  "It's trade," Jdahya said. "Stay close to Nikanj. Do what it has trusted you to do."

  12

  Kahguyaht came to see her a few days later. She had been installed in the usual bare room, this one with one bed and two table platforms, a bathroom, and Nikanj who slept so much and so deeply that it too seemed part of the room rather than a living being.

  Kahguyaht was almost welcome. It relieved her boredom, and, to her surprise, it brought gifts: a block of tough, thin, white paper-more than a ream-and a handful of pens that said Paper Mate, Parker, and Bic. The pens, Kahguyaht said, had been duplicated from prints taken of centuries-gone originals. This was the first time she had seen anything she knew to be a print re-creation. And it was the first time she had realized that the Oankali re-created nonliving things from prints. She could find no difference between the print copies and the remembered originals.

  And Kahguyaht gave her a few brittle, yellowed books- treasures she had not imagined: A spy novel, a Civil War novel, an ethnology textbook, a study of religion, a book about cancer and one about human genetics, a book about an ape being taught sign language and one about the space race of the 1960s.

  Lilith accepted them all without comment.

  Now that it knew she was serious about looking after Nikanj, it was easier to get along with, more likely to answer if she asked it a question, less ready with its own sarcastic rhetorical questions. It returned several times to sit with her as she attended Nikanj and, in fact, became her teacher, using its body and Nikanj's to help her understand more of Oankali biology. Nikanj slept through most of this. Most often it slept so deeply that its head tentacles did not follow movement.

  "It will remember all that happens around it," Kahguyaht said. "It still perceives in all the ways that it would if it were awake. But it cannot respond now. It is not aware now. It is... recording." Kahguyaht lifted one of Nikanj's limp arms to observe the development of the sensory arms. There was nothing to be seen yet but a large, dark, lumpy swelling-a frightening-looking growth.

  "Is that the arm itself," she asked, "or will the arm come out of that?"

  "That is the arm," Kahguyaht said. "While it's growing, don't touch it unless Nikanj asks you to."

  It did not look like anything Lilith would want to touch. She looked at Kahguyaht and decided to take a chance on its new civility. "What about the sensory hand?" she asked. "Nikanj mentioned that there was such a thing."

  Kahguyaht said nothing for several seconds. Finally, in a tone she could not interpret, it said, "Yes. There is such a thing."

  "If I've asked something that I shouldn't, just tell me," she said. Something about that odd tone of voice made her want to move away from it, but she kept still.

  "You haven't," Kahguyaht said, its voice neutral now. "In fact, it's important that you know about the... sensory hand." It extended one of its sensory arms, long and gray and rough-skinned, still reminding her of a blunt, closed elephant's trunk. "All the strength and resistance to harm of this outer covering is to protect the hand and its related organs," it said. "The arm is closed, you see?" It showed her the rounded tip of the arm, capped by a semitransparent material that she knew was smooth and hard.

  "When it's like this, it's merely another limb." Kahguyaht coiled the end of the arm, wormlike, reached out, touched Lilith's head, then held before her eyes a single strand of hair, pulled straight in a twist of the arm. "It is very flexible, very versatile, but only another limb." The arm drew back from Lilith, releasing the hair. The semitransparent material at the end began to change, to move in circular waves away to the sides of the tip and something slender and pale emerged from the center of the tip. As she watched, the slender thing seemed to thicken and divide. There were eight fingers-or rather, eight slender tentacles arranged around a circular palm that looked wet and deeply lined. It was like a starfish-one of the brittle stars with long, slender, snakelike arms.

  "How does it seem to you?" Kahguyaht asked.

  "On Earth, we had animals that looked like that," she replied. "They lived in the seas. We called them starfish."

  Kahguyaht smoothed its tentacles. "I've seen them. There is a similarity." It turned the hand so that she could see it from different angles. The palm, she realized, was covered with tiny projections very like the tube feet of a starfish. They were almost transparent. And the lines she had seen on the palm were actually orifices-openings to a dark interior.

  There was a faint odor to the hand-oddly flowery. Lilith did not like it and drew back from it after a moment of looking.

  Kahguyaht retracted the hand so quickly that it seemed to vanish. It lowered the sensory arm. "Humans and Oankali tend to bond to one ooloi," it told her. "The bond is chemical and not strong in you now because of Nikanj's immaturity. That's why my scent makes you uncomfortable."

  "Nikanj didn't mention anything like that," she said suspiciously.

  "It healed your injuries. It improved your memory. It couldn't do those things without leaving its mark. It should have told you."

  "Yes. It should have. What is this mark? What will it do to me?"

  "No harm. You'll want to avoid deep contact-contact that involves penetration of the flesh-with other ooloi, you understand? Perhaps for a while after Nikanj matures, you'll want to avoid all contact with most people. Follow your feelings. People will understand."

  "But... how long will it last?"

  "It's different with humans. Some linger in the avoidance stage much longer than we would. The longest I've known it to last is forty days."

  "And during that time, Ahajas and Dichaan-"

  "You won't avoid them, Lilith. They're part of the household. You'll be comfortable with them."

  "What happens if I don't avoid people, if I ignore my feelings?"

  "If you managed to do that, you'd make yourself sick, at least. You might manage to kill yourself."

  "...that bad."

  "Your body will tell you what to do. Don't worry." It shifted its attention to Nikanj. "Nikanj will be most vulnerable when the sensory hands begin to grow. It will need a special food then. I'll show you."

  "All right."

  "You'll actually have to put the food into its mouth."

  "I've already done that with the few things it's wanted to eat."

  "Good." Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles. "I didn't want to accept you, Lilith. Not for Nikanj or for the work you'll do. I believed that because of the way human genetics were expressed in culture, a human male should be chosen to parent the first group. I think now that I was wrong."

  "Parent?"

  "That's the way we think of it. To teach, to give comfort, to feed and clothe, to guide them through and interpret what will be, for them, a new and frightening world. To parent."

  "You're going to set me up as their mother?"

  "Define the relationship in any way that's comfortable to you. We have always called it parenting." It turned toward a wall as though to open it, then stopped, faced Lilith again. "It's a good thing that you'll be doing. You'll be in a position to help your own people in much the same way you're helping Nikanj now."

  "They won't trust me or my help. They'll probably kill me."

  "They won't."

  "You don't understand us as well as you think you do."

  "And you don't understand us at all. You never will, really, though you'll be given much more information about us."

  "Then put me back to sleep, dammit, and choose someone you think is brighter! I never wanted this job!"

  It was silent for several seconds. Finally, it said, "Do you really believe I was disparaging your intelligence?"

  She
glared at it, refusing to answer.

  "I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will."

  III

  NURSERY

  1

  The room was slightly larger than a football field. Its ceiling was a vault of soft, yellow light. Lilith had caused two walls to grow at a corner of it so that she had a room, enclosed except for a doorway where the walls would have met. There were times when she brought the walls together, sealing herself away from the empty vastness outside--away from the decisions she must make. The walls and floor of the great room were hers to reshape as she pleased. They would do anything she was able to ask of them except let her out.

  She had erected her cubicle enclosing the doorway of a bathroom. There were eleven more bathrooms unused along one long wall. Except for the narrow, open doorways of these facilities, the great room was featureless. Its walls were pale green and its floors pale brown. Lilith bad asked for color and Nikanj bad found someone who could teach it how to induce the ship to produce color. Stores of food and clothing were encapsulated within the walls in various unmarked cabinets within Lilith's room and at both ends of the great room.

  The food, she had been told, would be replaced as it was used--replaced by the ship itself which drew on its own substance to make print reconstructions of whatever each cabinet had been taught to produce.

  The long wall opposite the bathrooms concealed eighty sleeping human beings-healthy, under fifty, English-speaking, and frighteningly ignorant of what was in store for them.

  Lilith was to choose and Awaken no fewer than forty. No wall would open to let her or those she Awakened out until at least forty human beings were ready to meet the Oankali.

  The great room was darkening slightly. Evening. Lilith found surprising comfort and relief in having time divided visibly into days and nights again. She had not realized how she had missed the slow change of light, how welcome the darkness would be.

  "It's time for you to get used to having planetary night again," Nikanj had told her.

  On impulse, she had asked if there were anywhere in the ship where she could look at the stars.

  Nikanj had taken her, on the day before it put her into this huge, empty room, down several corridors and ramps, then by way of something very like an elevator. Nikanj said it corresponded closer to a gas bubble moving harmlessly through a living body. Her destination turned out to be a kind of observation bubble through which she could see not only stars, but the disk of the Earth, gleaming like a full moon in the black sky.

  "We're still beyond the orbit of your world's satellite," it told her as she searched hungrily for familiar continental outlines. She believed she had found a few of them-part of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Or that was what it looked like, hanging there in the middle of a sky that was both above and beneath her feet. There were more stars out there than she had ever seen, but it was Earth that drew her gaze. Nikanj let her look at it until her own tears blinded her. Then it wrapped a sensory arm around her and led her to the great room.

  She had been in the great room alone for three days now, thinking, reading, writing her thoughts. All her books, papers, and pens had been left for her. With them were eighty dossiers-short biographies made up of transcribed conversations, brief histories, Oankali observations and conclusions, and pictures. The human subjects of the dossiers had no living relatives. They were all strangers to one another and to Lilith.

  She had read just over half the dossiers, searching not only for likely people to Awaken, but for a few potential allies-people she could Awaken first and perhaps come to trust. She needed to share the burden of what she knew, what she must do. She needed thoughtful people who would hear what she had to say and not do anything violent or stupid. She needed people who could give her ideas, push her mind in directions she might otherwise miss. She needed people who could tell her when they thought she was being a fool-people whose arguments she could respect. On another level, she did not want to Awaken anyone. She was afraid of these people, and afraid for them. There were so many unknowns, in spite of the information in the dossiers. Her job was to weave them into a cohesive unit and prepare them for the Oankali-prepare them to be the Oankali's new trade partners. That was impossible.

  How could she Awaken people and tell them they were to be part of the genetic engineering scheme of a species so alien that the humans would not be able to look at it comfortably for a while? How would she Awaken these people, these survivors of war, and tell them that unless they could escape the Oankali, their children would not be human?

  Better to tell them little or none of that for a while. Better not to Awaken them at all until she had some idea how to help them, how not to betray them, how to get them to accept their captivity, accept the Oankali, accept anything until they were sent to Earth. Then to run like hell at the first opportunity.

  Her mind slipped into the familiar track: There was no escape from the ship. None at all. The Oankali controlled the ship with their own body chemistry. There were no controls that could be memorized or subverted. Even the shuttles that traveled between Earth and the ship were like extensions of Oankali bodies.

  No human could do anything aboard the ship except make trouble and be put back into suspended animation-or be killed. Therefore, the only hope was Earth. Once they were on Earth-somewhere in the Amazon basin, she had been told-they would at least have a chance.

  That meant they must control themselves, learn all she could teach them, all the Oankali could teach them, then use what they had learned to escape and keep themselves alive.

  What if she could make them understand that? And what if it turned out that that was exactly what the Oankali wanted her to do? Of course, they knew it was what she would do. They knew her. Did that mean they were plan. fling their own betrayal: No trip to Earth. No chance to run. Then why had they made her spend a year being taught to live in a tropical forest? Perhaps the Oankali were simply very certain of their ability to keep humans corralled even on Earth.

  What could she do? What could she tell the humans but "Learn and run!" What other possibility for escape was there?

  None at all. Her only other personal possibility was to refuse to Awaken anyone-hold out until the Oankali gave up on her and went looking for a more cooperative subject. Another Paul Titus, perhaps-someone who had truly given up on humanity and cast his lot with the Oankali. A man like that could make Titus' predictions self-fulfilling. He could undermine what little civilization might be left in the minds of those he Awoke. He could make them a gang. Or a herd.

  What would she make them?

  She lay on her bed platform, staring at a picture of a man. Five-seven, his statistics said. One hundred and forty pounds, thirty-two years old, missing the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of his left hand. He had lost the fingers in a childhood accident with a lawnmower, and he was self-conscious about the incomplete hand. His name was Victor Dominic-Vidor Domonkos, really. His parents had come to the United States from Hungary just -before he was born. He had been a lawyer. The Oankali suspected he had been a good one. They had found him intelligent, talkative, understandably suspicious of unseen questioners, and very creative at lying to them. He had probed constantly for their identity, but was, like Lilith, one of the few native Englishspeakers who had never expressed the suspicion that they might be extraterrestrials.

  He had been married three times already, but had fathered no children due to a biological problem the Oankali believed they had corrected. Not fathering children had bothered him intensely, and he had blamed his wives, all the while refusing to see a doctor himself.

  Apart from this, the Oankali had found him reasonable and formidable. He had never broken down in his unexplained solitary confinement, had never wept or attempted suicide. He had, however, promised to kill his captors if he ever got the chance. He had said this only once, calmly, more as though he were making a casual remark than as though he were seriously threatening murder.

  Yet his Oa
nkali interrogator had been disturbed by the words, and bad put Victor Dominic back to sleep at once.

  Lilith liked the man. He had brains and, except for the foolishness with his wives, self-control--exactly what she needed. But she also feared him.

  What if he decided she was one of his captors? She was bigger, and now certainly stronger than he was, but that did not have to matter. He would have too many chances to attack when she was off guard.

  Better to Awaken him later when she had allies. She put his dossier to one side on the smaller of two piles-people she definitely wanted, but did not dare to Awaken first. She sighed and picked up a new dossier.

  Leah Bede. Quiet, religious, slow-slow-moving, not slow-witted, though the Oankali had not been particularly impressed by her intelligence. It was her patience and self-sufficiency that had impressed them. They had not been able to make her obey. She had outwaited them in stolid silence. Outwaited Oankali! She had starved herself almost to death when they stopped feeding her to coerce her cooperation. Finally, they had drugged her, gotten the information they wanted, and, after a period of letting her regain weight and strength, they had put her back to sleep.

  Why, Lilith wondered. Why hadn't the Oankali not simply drugged her as soon as they realized she was stubborn? Why had they not drugged Lilith herself? Perhaps because they wanted to see how far human beings had to be pushed before they broke. Perhaps they even wanted to see how each individual broke. Or perhaps the Oankali version of stubbornness was so extreme from a human point of view that very few humans tried their patience. Lilith had not. Leah had.

  The photo of Leah was of a pale, lean, tired-looking woman, though an ooloi had noted that she had a physiological tendency to be heavy.

  Lilith hesitated, then put Leah's folder atop Victor's. Leah, too, sounded like a good potential ally, but not a good one to Awaken first. She sounded as though she could be an intensely loyal friend-unless she got the idea Lilith was one of her captors.

  Anyone Lilith Awakened might get that idea-almost certainly would get it the moment Lilith opened a wall or caused new walls to grow, thus proving she had abilities they did not. The Oankali had given her information, increased physical strength, enhanced memory, and an ability to control the walls and the suspended animation plants. These were her tools. And every one of them would make her seem less human.