Dawn x-1

by Butler, Octavia

  "What else shall we give you?" Ahajas had asked her when Lilith saw her last. Ahajas had worried about her, found her too small to be impressive. She had discovered that humans were impressed by size. The fact that Lilith was taller and heavier than most women seemed not enough. She was not taller and heavier than most men. But there was nothing to be done about it.

  "Nothing you could give me would be enough," Lilith had answered.

  Dichaan had heard this and come over to take Lilith's hands. "You want to live," he told her. "You won't squander your life."

  They were squandering her life.

  She picked up the next folder and opened it.

  Joseph Li-Chin Shing. A widower whose wife had died before the war. The Oankali had found him quietly grateful for that. After his own period of stubborn silences he had discovered that he didn't mind talking to them. He seemed to accept the reality that his life was, as he said, "on hold" until he found out what had happened in the world and who was running things now. He constantly probed for answers to these questions. He admitted that he remembered deciding, not long after the war, that it was time for him to die. He believed that he had been captured before he could attempt suicide. Now, he said, he had reason to live-to see who had caged him and why and how he might want to repay them.

  He was forty years old, a small man, once an engineer, a citizen of Canada, born in Hong Kong. The Oankali had considered making him a parent of one of the human groups they meant to establish. But they had been put off by his threat. It was, the Oankali questioner thought, soft, but potentially quite deadly. Yet the Oankali recommended him to her-to any first parent. He was intelligent, they said, and steady. Someone who could be depended on.

  Nothing special about his looks, Lilith thought. He was a small, ordinary man, yet the Oankali had been very interested in him. And the threat he had made was surprisingly conservative-deadly only if Joseph did not like what he found out. He would not like it, Lilith thought. But he would also be bright enough to realize that the time to do something about it would be when they were all on the ground, not while they were caged in the ship.

  Lilith's first impulse was to Awaken Joseph Shing-Awaken him at once and end her solitude. The impulse was so strong that she sat still for several moments, hugging herself, holding herself rigid against it. She had promised herself that she would not Awaken anyone until she had read all the dossiers, until she had had time to think. Following the wrong impulse now could kill her.

  She went through several more dossiers without finding anyone she thought compared with Joseph, though some of the people she found would definitely be Awakened.

  There was a woman named Celene Ivers who had spent much of her short interrogation period crying over the death of her husband and her twin daughters, or crying over her own unexplained captivity and her uncertain future. She had wished herself dead over and over, but had never made any attempt at suicide. The Oankali had found her very pliable, eager to please-or rather, fearful of displeasing. Weak, the Oankali had said. Weak and sorrowing, not stupid, but so easily frightened that she could be induced to behave stupidly.

  Harmless, Lilith thought. One person who would not be a threat, no matter how strongly she suspected Lilith of being her jailer.

  There was Gabriel Rinaldi, an actor, who had confused the Oankali utterly for a while because he played roles for them instead of letting them see him as he was. He was another they had finally stopped feeding on the theory that sooner or later hunger would bring out the true man They were not entirely sure that it had. Gabriel must have been good. He was also very good-looking. He had never tried to harm himself or threatened to harm the Oankali. And for some reason, they had never drugged him. He was, the Oankali said, twenty-seven, thin, physically stronger than be looked, stubborn and not as bright as he liked to think.

  That last, Lilith thought, could be said of most people. Gabriel, like the others who had defeated or come near defeating the Oankali, was potentially valuable. She did wonder whether she would ever be able to trust Gabriel, but his dossier remained with those she meant to Awaken.

  There was Beatrice Dwyer who had been completely unreachable while she was naked, but whom clothing had transformed into a bright, likable person who seemed actually to have made a friend of her interrogator. That interrogator, an experienced ooloi, had attempted to have Beatrice accepted as a first parent. Other interrogators had observed her and disagreed for no stated reason. Maybe it was just the woman's extreme physical modesty. Nevertheless, one ooloi had been completely won over.

  There was Hilary Ballard, poet, artist, playwright, actress, singer, frequent collector of unemployment compensation. She really was bright; she had memorized poetry, plays, songs-her own and those of more established writers. She had something that would help future human children remember who they were. The Oankali thought she was unstable, but not dangerously so. They had had to drug her because she injured herself trying to break free of what she called her cage. She had broken both her arms.

  And that was not dangerously unstable?

  No, probably was not. Lilith herself had panicked at being caged. So had a great many other people. Hilary's panic had simply been more extreme than most. She probably should not be given crucial work to do. The survival of the group should never depend on her-but then it should not depend on any one person. The fact that it did was not the fault of human beings.

  There was Conrad Loehr-called Curt-who had been a cop in New York, and who had survived only because his wife had finally dragged him off to Colombia where her family lived. They had not gone anywhere for years before that. The wife had been killed in one of the riots that began shortly after the last missile exchange. Thousands had been killed even before it began to get cold. Thousands had simply trampled one another or torn one another apart in panic. Curt had been picked up with seven children, none of them his own, whom he had been guarding. His own four children, left back in the States with his relatives, were all dead. Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal-or dead. He had, alone in his isolation room, done his best to tear out his own throat with his fingernails.

  Derick Wolski had been working in Australia. He was single, twenty-three, had no strong idea what he wanted to do with his life, had done nothing so far except go to school and work at temporary or part-time jobs. He'd fried hamburgers, driven a delivery truck, done construction work, sold household products door to door-badly--bagged groceries, helped clean office buildings, and on his own, done some nature photography. He'd quit everything except the photography. He liked the outdoors, liked animals. His father thought that sort of thing was nonsense, and he had been afraid his father might be right. Yet, he had been photographing Australian wildlife when the war began.

  Tate Marah had just quit another job. She had some genetic problem that the Oankali had controlled, but not cured. But her real problem seemed to be that she did things so well that she quickly became bored. Or she did them so badly that she abandoned them before anyone noticed her incompetence. People had to see her as a formidable presence, bright, dominant, well off.

  Her family had had money-had owned a very successful real estate business. Part of her problem, the Oankali believed, was that she did not have to do anything. She had great energy, but needed some external pressure, some challenge to force her to focus it.

  How about the preservation of the human species?

  She had attempted suicide twice before the war. After the war, she fought to live. She had been alone, vacationing in Rio de Janeiro when war came. It had not been a good time to be a North American, she felt, hut she had survived and managed to help others. She had that in common with Curt Loehr. Under Oankali interrogation, she had engaged in verbal fencing and game playing that eventually exasperated the ooloi questioner. But in the end, the ooloi had admired her. It thought she was more like an ooloi than like a female. She was good at
manipulating people-could do it in ways they did not seem to mind. That had bored her too in the past. But boredom had not driven her to do harm to anyone except herself. There had been times when she withdrew from people to protect them from the possible consequences of her own frustration. She had withdrawn from several men this way, occasionally pairing them off with female friends. Couples she brought together tended to marry.

  Lilith put Tate Marah's dossier down slowly, left it by itself on the bed. The only other one that was by itself was Joseph Shing's. Tate's dossier fell open, once again displaying the woman's small, pale, deceptively childlike face. The face was smiling slightly, not as though posing for a picture, but as though sizing up the photographer. In fact, Tate had not known the picture was being made. And the pictures were not photographs. They were paintings, impressions of the inner person as well as the outer physical reality. Each contained print memories of their subjects. Oankali interrogators had painted these pictures with sensory tentacles or sensory arms, using deliberately produced bodily fluids. Lilith knew this, but the pictures looked like, even felt like photos. They had been done on some kind of plastic, not on paper. The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were-or who the Oankali thought they were.

  Tate Marah, they thought, was bright, somewhat flexible, and not dangerous except perhaps to the ego.

  Lilith left the dossiers, left her private cubicle, and began building another near it.

  The walls that would not open to let her out responded to her touch now by growing inward along a line of her sweat or saliva drawn along the floor. Thus the old walls extruded new ones, and the new ones would open or close, advance or retreat as she directed. Nikanj had made very sure she knew how to direct them. And when it finished instructing her, its mates, Dichaan and Ahajas, told her to seal herself in if her people attacked her. They had both spent time interrogating isolated humans and they seemed more worried about her than Nikanj did. They would get her out, they promised. They would not leave her to die for someone else's miscalculation.

  Which was fine if she could spot the trouble and seal herself in time.

  Better to choose the right people, bring them along slowly, and Awaken new ones only when she was sure of the ones already Awake.

  She drew two walls to within about eighteen inches of each other. That left a narrow doorway-one that would preserve as much privacy as possible without a door. She also turned one wall inward, forming a tiny entrance hall that concealed the room itself from casual glances. There would be nothing among the people she Awoke to borrow or steal, and anyone who thought now was a good time to play Peeping Tom would have to be disciplined by the group. Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

  Within the new room, Lilith raised a bed platform, a table platform, and three chair platforms around the table. The table and chairs would be at least a small change from what they were all used to in the Oankali isolation rooms. A more human arrangement.

  Creating the room took some time. Afterward Lilith gathered all but eleven of the dossiers and sealed them inside her own table platform. Some of these eleven would be her core group, first Awake, and first to show her just how much of a chance she had to survive and do what was necessary.

  Tate Marah first. Another woman. No sexual tension.

  Lilith took the picture, went to the long, featureless stretch of wall opposite the rest rooms and stood for a moment, staring at the face.

  Once people were Awake, she would have no choice but to live with them. She could not put them to sleep again. And in some ways, Tate Marah would probably be hard to live with.

  Lilith rubbed her hand across the surface of the picture, then placed the picture flat against the wall. She began at one end of the wall and walked slowly toward the other, far away, keeping the face of the picture against the wall. She closed her eyes as she moved, remembering that it had been easier when she practiced this with Nikanj if she ignored her other senses as much as possible. All her attention should be focused on the hand that held the picture flat against the wall. Male and female Oankali did this with head tentacles.

  Oankali did it with their sensory arms. Both did it from memory, without pictures impregnated with prints. Once they read someone's print or examined someone and took a print, they remembered it, could duplicate it. Lilith would never be able to read prints or duplicate them. That required Oankali organs of perception. Her children would have them, Kahguyaht had said.

  She stopped now and then to rub one sweaty hand over the picture, renewing her own chemical signature.

  More than halfway down the hail, she began to feel a response, a slight bulging of the surface against the picture, against her hand.

  She stopped at once, not certain at first that she had felt anything at all. Then the bulge was unmistakable. She pressed against it lightly, maintaining the contact until the wall began to open beneath the picture. Then she drew back to let the wall disgorge its long, green plant. She went to a space at one end of the great room, opened a wall, and took out a jacket and a pair of pants. These people would probably welcome clothing as eagerly as she had.

  The plant lay, writhing slowly, still surrounded by the foul odor that had followed it through the wall. She could not see well enough through its thick, fleshy body to know which end concealed Tate Marah's head, but that did not matter. She drew her hands along the length of the plant as though unzipping it, and it began to come apart.

  There was no possibility this time of the plant trying to swallow her. She would be no more palatable to it now than Nikanj would.

  Slowly, the face and body of Tate Marah became visible. Small breasts. Figure like that of a girl who had barely reached puberty. Pale, translucent skin and hair. Child's face. Yet Tate was twenty-seven.

  She would not awaken until she was lifted completely clear of the suspended animation plant. Her body was wet and slippery, but not heavy. Sighing, Lilith lifted her clear.

  2

  "Get away from me!" Tate said the moment she opened her eyes. "Who are you? What are you doing?"

  "Trying to get you dressed," Lilith said. "You can do it yourself now-if you're strong enough."

  Tate was beginning to tremble, beginning to react to being awakened from suspended animation. it was surprising that she had been able to speak her few coherent words before succumbing to the reaction.

  Tate made a tight, shuddering fetal knot of her body and lay moaning. She gasped several times, gulping air as she might have gulped water.

  "Shit!" she whispered minutes later when the reaction began to wane. "Oh shit. It wasn't a dream, I see."

  "Finish dressing," Lilith told her. "You knew it wasn't a dream."

  Tate looked up at Lilith, then down at her own half naked body. Lilith had managed to get pants on her, but had only gotten one of her arms into the jacket. She had managed to work that arm free as she suffered through the reaction. She picked up the jacket, put it on, and in a moment, had discovered how to close it. Then she turned to watch silently as Lilith closed the plant, opened the wall nearest to it, and pushed the plant through. In seconds the only sign left of it was a rapidly drying spot on the floor.

  "And in spite of all that," Lilith said, facing Tate, "I'm a prisoner just as you are."

  "More like a trustee," Tate said quietly.

  "More like. I have to Awaken at least thirty-nine more people before any of us are allowed out of this room. I chose to start with you."

  "Why?" She was incredibly self-possessed--or seemed to be. She had only been Awakened twice before-average among people not chosen to parent
a group-but she behaved almost as though nothing unusual were happening. That was a relief to Lilith, a vindication of her choice of Tate.

  "Why did I begin with you?" Lilith said. "You seemed least likely to try to kill me, least likely to fall apart, and most likely to be able to help with the others as they Awaken."

  Tate seemed to think about that. She fiddled with her jacket, re-examining the way the front panels adhered to one another, the way they pulled apart. She felt the material itself, frowning.

  "Where the hell are we?" she asked.

  "Some distance beyond the orbit of the moon."

  Silence. Then finally, "What was that big green slug-thing you pushed into the wall?"

  "A... a plant. Our captors-our rescuers-use them for keeping people in suspended animation. You were in the one you saw. I took you out of it."

  "Suspended animation?"

  "For over two hundred and fifty years. The Earth is just about ready to have us back now."

  "We're going back!"

  "Yes."

  Tate looked around at the vast, empty room. "Back to what?"

  "Tropical forest. Somewhere in the Amazon basin. There are no more Cities."

  "No. I didn't think there would be." She drew a deep breath. "When are we fed?"

  "I put some food in your room before I Awoke you. Come on."

  Tate followed. "I'm hungry enough to eat even that plaster of Paris garbage they served me when I was Awake before."

  "No more plaster. Fruit, nuts, a kind of stew, bread, something like cheese, coconut milk..."

  "Meat? A steak?"

  "You can't have everything."

  Tate was too good to be true. Lilith worried for a moment that at some point she would break-begin to cry or be sick or scream or beat her head against the wall-lose that seemingly easy control. But whatever happened to her Lilith would try to help. Just these few minutes of apparent normality were worth a great deal of trouble. She was actually speaking with and being understood by another human being-after so long.