Dawn x-1

by Butler, Octavia

  Nikanj came to her again, seemed to read her thoughts. "Shall we pick him up on our way back and have him sent to Earth?" it asked. "He can end as part of his homeworld."

  Bury him on Earth? Let his flesh be part of the new beginning there? "Yes," she whispered.

  It touched her experimentally with a sensory arm. She glared at it, wanting desperately to be let alone.

  "No!" it said softly. "No, I let you alone once, the two of you, thinking you could look after one another. I won't let you alone now."

  She drew a deep breath, accepted the familiar loop of sensory arm around her neck. "Don't drug me," she said. "Leave me. . . leave me what I feel for him, at least."

  "1 want to share, not mute or distort."

  "Share? Share my feelings now?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Lilith.. ." It began to walk and she walked beside it automatically. The other ooloi moved silently ahead of them. "Lilith, he was mine too. You brought him tome."

  "You brought him to me."

  "I would not have touched him if you had rejected him."

  "I wish I had. He'd be alive."

  Nikanj said nothing.

  "Let me share what you feel," she said.

  It touched her face in a startlingly human gesture. "Move the sixteenth finger of your left strength hand," it said softly. One more case of Oankali omniscience: We understand your feelings, eat your food, manipulate your genes. But we're too complex for you to understand.

  "Approximate!" she demanded. "Trade! You're always talking about trading. Give me something of yourself!"

  The other ooloi focused back toward them and Nikanj's head and body tentacles drew themselves into lumps of some negative emotion. Embarrassment? Anger? She did not care. Why should it feel comfortable about parasitizing her feelings for Joseph-her feelings for anything? It had helped set up a human experiment. One of the humans had been lost. What did it feel? Guilty for not having been more careful with valuable subjects? Or were they even valuable?

  Nikanj pressed the back of her neck with a sensory hand-warning pressure. It would give her something then. They stopped walking by mutual consent and faced one another.

  It gave her.. . a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or. . . tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling.

  Extinguished.

  A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.

  Broken.

  Gone.

  Dead.

  The forest came back around her slowly and she realized she was still standing with Nikanj, facing it, her back to the waiting ooloi.

  "That's all I can give you," Nikanj said. "That's what I feel. I don't even know whether there are words in any human language to speak of it."

  "Probably not," she whispered. Alter a moment, she let herself hug it. There was some comfort even in cool, gray flesh. Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair-an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.

  She walked more willingly with Nikanj now, and the other ooloi no longer isolated them in front or behind.

  7

  Curt's camp boasted a bigger shelter, not as well made. The roof was a jumble of palm leaves-not thatch, but branches crisscrossed and covering one another. No doubt it leaked. There were walls, but no floor. There was an indoor fire, hot and smoky. That was the way the people looked. Hot, smoky, dirty, angry.

  They gathered outside the shelter with axes, machetes, and clubs, and faced the cluster of ooloi. Lilith found herself standing with aliens, facing hostile, dangerous humans.

  She drew back. "I can't fight them," she said to Nikanj. "Curt, yes, but not the others."

  "We'll have to fight if they attack," Nikanj said. "But you stay out of it. We'll be drugging them heavily-fighting to subdue without killing in spite of their weapons. Dangerous."

  "No closer!" Curt called.

  The Oankali stopped.

  "This is a human place!" Curt continued. "It's off limits to you and your animals." He stared at Lilith, held his ax ready.

  She stared back, afraid of the ax, but wanting him. Wanting to kill him. Wanting to take the ax from him and beat him to death with her own hands. Let him die here and rot in this alien place where he had left Joseph.

  "Do nothing," Nikanj whispered to her. "He has lost all hope of Earth. He's lost Celene. She'll be sent to Earth without him. And he's lost mental and emotional freedom. Leave him to us."

  She could not understand it at first-literally could not comprehend the words it spoke. There was nothing in her world but a dead Joseph and an obscenely alive Curt.

  Nikanj held her until it too had to be acknowledged as part of her world. When it saw that she looked at it, struggled against it instead of simply struggling toward Curt, it repeated its words until she heard them, until they penetrated, until she was still. It never made any attempt to drug her, and it never let her go.

  Off to one side, Kahguyaht was speaking to Tate. Tate stood well back from it, holding a machete and staying close to Gabriel who held an ax. It was Gabriel who had convinced her to abandon Lilith. It had to be. And what had convinced Leah? Practicality? A fear of being abandoned alone, left as much an outcast as Lilith?

  Lilith found Leah and stared at her, wondering. Leah looked away. Then her attention was drawn back to Tate.

  "Go away," Tate was pleading in a voice that did not sound like her. "We don't want you! I don't want you! Let us alone!" She sounded as though she would cry. In fact, tears streamed down her face.

  "I have never lied to you," Kahguyaht told her. "If you manage to use your machete on anyone, you'll lose Earth.

  You'll never see your homeworld again. Even this place will be denied to you." It stepped toward her. "Don't do this Tate. We're giving you the thing you want most: Freedom and a return home."

  "We've got that here," Gabriel said.

  Curt came to join him. "We don't need anything else from you!" he shouted.

  The others behind him agreed loudly.

  "You would starve here," Kahguyaht said. "Even in the short time you've been here, you've had trouble finding food. There isn't enough, and you don't yet know how to use what there is." Kahguyaht raised its voice, spoke to all of them. "You were allowed to leave us when you wished so that you could practice the skills you'd learned and learn more from each other and from Lilith. We had to know how you would behave after leaving us. We knew you might be injured, but we didn't think you would kill one another."

  "We didn't kill a human being," Curt shouted. "We killed one of your animals!"

  "We?" Kahguyaht said mildly. "And who helped you kill him?"

  Curt did not answer.

  "You beat him," Kahguyaht continued, "and when he was unconscious, you killed him with your ax. You did it alone, and in doing it, you've exiled yourself permanently from your Earth." It spoke to the others. "Will you join him? Will you be taken from this training room and placed with Toaht families to live the rest of your lives aboard the ship?"

  The faces of some of the others began to change---doubts beginning or growing.

  Allison's ooloi went to her, became the first to touch the human it had come to retrieve. It spoke very quietly. Lilith could not hear what it said, but after a moment, Allison sighed and offered it her machete.

  It declined the knife with a wave of one sensory arm while settling the other arm around her neck. It drew her back behind the line of Oankali where Lilith stood with Nikanj. Lilith stared at her, wondering how Allison could turn against her. Had it only been fear? Curt could frighten just about anyone if he worked at it. And this was Curt with an ax-an ax he had already used on one man...

  Allison met her gaze, looked away, then faced her again. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "We thought we could avoid bloodshed by going along with them, doing what they said. We thought. . . I'm sorry."

  Lilith turned away, tears blurring her vision a
gain. Somehow, she had been able to put Joseph's death aside for a few minutes. Allison's words brought it back.

  Kahguyaht stretched out a sensory arm to Tate but Gabriel snatched her away.

  "We don't want you here!" he grated. He thrust Tate behind him.

  Curt shouted-a wordless scream of rage, a call to attack. He lunged at Kahguyaht and several of his people joined his attack, lunging at the other ooloi with their weapons.

  Nikanj thrust Lilith toward Allison and plunged into the fighting. Allison's ooloi paused only long enough to say, "Keep her out of this!" in rapid Oankali. Then it, too, joined the fight.

  Things happened almost too quickly to follow. Tate and the few other humans who seemed to want nothing more than to get clear found themselves caught in the middle. Wray and Leah, half supporting one another, stumbled out of the fighting between a pair of ooloi who seemed about to be slashed by three machete-wielding humans. Lilith realized suddenly that Leah was bleeding, and she ran to help get her away from the danger.

  The humans shouted. The ooloi did not make a sound. Lilith saw Gabriel swing at Nikanj, narrowly missing it, saw him raise his ax again for what was clearly intended to be a death blow. Then Kahguyaht drugged him from behind.

  Gabriel made a small gasp of sound-as though there were not enough strength in him to force out a scream. He collapsed.

  Tate screamed, grabbed him, and tried to drag him clear of the fighting. She had dropped her machete, was clearly no threat.

  Curt had not dropped his ax. It gave him a long, deadly reach. He swung it like a hatchet, controlling it easily in spite of its weight, and no ooloi risked being hit by it.

  Elsewhere a man did manage to swing his ax through part of an ooloi's chest, leaving a gaping wound. When the ooloi fell, the man closed in for the kill, aided by a woman with a machete.

  A second ooloi stung them both from behind. As they fell, the injured ooloi got up. In spite of the cut it had taken, it walked over to where Lilith's group waited. It sat down heavily on the ground.

  Lilith looked at Allison, Wray, and Leah. They stared at the ooloi, but made no move toward it. Lilith went to it, noticing that it focused on her sharply in spite of its wound. She suspected the wound would not have stopped it from stinging her to unconsciousness or death if it felt threatened.

  "Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked. Its wound was just about where its heart would have been if it had been human. It was oozing thick clear fluid and blood so bright red that it seemed false. Movie blood. Poster-paint blood. Such a terrible wound should have been awash in bodily fluids, but the ooloi seemed to be losing very little.

  "I'll heal," it said in its disconcertingly calm voice. "This isn't serious." It paused. "I never believed they would try to kill us. I never knew how hard it would be not to kill them."

  "You should have known," Lilith said. "You've had plenty of time to study us. What did you think would happen when you told us you were going to extinguish us as a species by tampering genetically with our children?"

  The ooloi focused on her again. "If you had used a weapon, you could probably have killed at least one of us. These others couldn't, but you could."

  "I don't want to kill you. I want to get away from you. You know that."

  "I know you think that."

  It turned its attention from her and began doing something to its wound with its sensory arms.

  "Lilith!" Allison called.

  Lilith looked back at her, then looked where she was pointing.

  Nikanj was down, writhing on the ground as no ooloi had so far. Kahguyaht abruptly stopped fencing with Curt, lunged under his ax, hit him, and drugged him. Curt was the last human to go down. Tate was still conscious, still holding Gabriel, who was unconscious from Kahguyaht's sting. Some distance away, Victor was conscious, weaponless, making his way to the injured ooloi near Lilith-Victor's ooloi, she realized.

  Lilith did not care how the two would meet. They could both take care of themselves. She ran toward Nikanj, avoiding the sensory arms of another ooloi who might have stung her.

  Kahguyaht was already kneeling beside Nikanj, speaking to it low-voiced. It fell silent as she knelt on Nikanj's opposite side. She saw Nikanj's wound at once. Its left sensory arm had been hacked almost off. The arm seemed to be hanging by little more than a length of tough gray skin. Clear fluid and blood spurted from the wound.

  "My god!" Lilith said. "Can it. . . can it heal?"

  "Perhaps," Kahguyaht answered in its insanely calm voice. She hated their voices. "But you must help it."

  "Yes, of course I'll help. What shall I do?"

  "Lie beside it. Hold it and hold the sensory arm in place so that it can reattach-if it will."

  "Reattach?"

  "Get your clothing off. It may be too weak to burrow through clothing."

  Lilith stripped, refusing to think of how she would look to the humans still conscious. They would be certain now that she was a traitor. Stripping naked on the battlefield to lie down with the enemy. Even the few who had accepted her might turn on her now. But she had just lost Joseph. She could not lose Nikanj too. She could not simply watch it die.

  She lay down beside it and it strained toward her silently. She looked up for more instructions from Kahguyaht, but Kahguyaht had gone away to examine Gabriel. Nothing important going on for it here. Only its child, horribly wounded.

  Nikanj penetrated her body with every head and body tentacle that could reach her, and for once it felt the way she had always imagined it should. It hurt! It was like abruptly being used as a pincushion. She gasped, but managed not to pull away. The pain was endurable, was probably nothing to what Nikanj was feeling-however it experienced pain.

  She reached twice for the nearly severed sensory arm before she could make herself touch it. It was covered with slimy bodily fluids and white, blue-gray, and red-gray tissues hung from it.

  She grasped it as best she could and pressed it to the stump it had been hacked from.

  But surely more was necessary than this. Surely the heavy, complex, muscular organ could not reattach itself with no aid but the pressure of a human hand.

  "Breathe deeply," Nikanj said, hoarsely. "Keep breathing deeply. Use both hands to hold my arm."

  "You're plugged into my left arm," she gasped.

  Nikanj made a harsh, ugly sound. "I have no control. I'll have to let you go completely, then begin again. If I can."

  Several seconds later, tens of dozens of "needles" were withdrawn from Lilith's body. She rearranged Nikanj as gently as she could so that its head was on her shoulder and she could reach the nearly severed limb with both hands. She could support it and hold it where it belonged. She could rest one of her own arms on the ground and the other across Nikanj's body. This was a position she could hold for a while as long as no one disturbed her.

  "All right," she said, bracing for the pincushion effect again.

  Nikanj did nothing.

  "Nikanj!" she whispered, frightened.

  It stirred, then penetrated her flesh so abruptly in so many places-and so painfully-that she cried out. But she managed not to move beyond an initial reflexive jerk.

  "Breathe deeply," it said. "I... I'll try not to hurt you anymore."

  "It's not that bad. I just don't see how this can help you."

  "Your body can help me. Keep breathing deeply."

  It said nothing more, made no sound of its own pain. She lay with it, eyes closed most of the time, and let the time pass, let herself lose track of it. From time to time, hands touched her. The first time she felt them, she looked to see what they were doing and realized that they were Oankali hands, brushing insects from her body.

  Much later when she had lost track of time she was surprised to open her eyes to darkness; she felt someone lift her head and slip something under it.

  Someone had covered her body with cloth. Spare clothing? And someone had wedged cloth under the parts of her body that seemed to need easing.

  S
he heard talking, listened for human voices, and could not distinguish any. Parts of her body went numb, then underwent their own painful reawakening with no effort on her part. Her arms ached, then were eased, though she never changed position. Someone put water to her lips and she drank between gasps.

  She could hear her own breathing. No one had to remind her to breathe deeply. Her body demanded it. She had begun breathing through her mouth. Whoever was looking after her noticed this and gave her water more often. Small amounts to wet her mouth. The water made her wonder what would happen if she had to go to the bathroom, but the problem never occurred.

  Bits of food were put into her mouth. She did not know what it was, could not taste it, but it seemed to strengthen her.

  At some point she recognized Ahajas, Nikanj's female mate as the owner of the hands that gave her food and water. She was confused at first and wondered whether she had been moved out of the forest and back to the quarters the family shared. But when it was light, she could still see the forest canopy-real trees burdened with epiphytes and lianas. A rounded termite nest the size of a basketball hung from a branch just above her. Nothing like that existed in the orderly, self-manicured Oankali living areas.

  She drifted away again. Later she realized she was not always conscious. Yet she never felt as though she had slept. And she never let go of Nikanj. She could not let go of it. It had frozen her hands, her muscles into position as a kind of living cast to hold it while it healed.

  At times her heart beat fast, thundering in her ears as though she had been running hard.

  Dichaan took over the task of giving her food and water and protecting her from insects. He kept flattening his head and body tentacles when he looked at Nikanj's wound. Lilith managed to look at it to see what was pleasing him.

  There first seemed nothing to be pleased about. The wound oozed fluids that turned black and stank. Lilith was afraid that some kind of infection had set in, but she could do nothing. At least none of the local insects seemed attracted to it-and none of the local microorganisms, probably. More likely Nikanj had brought whatever caused its infection into the training room with it.