Dawn x-1

by Butler, Octavia

  The infection seemed to heal eventually, though clear fluid continued to leak from the wound. Not until it stopped completely did Nikanj let her go.

  She began to rouse slowly, began to realize that she had not been fully conscious for a long time. It was as though she were Awakening again from suspended animation, this time without pain. Muscles that should have screamed when she moved after lying still for so long made no protest at all.

  She moved slowly, straightening her arms, stretching her legs, arching her back against the ground. But something was missing.

  She looked around, suddenly alarmed, and found Nikanj sitting beside her, focusing on her.

  "You're all right," it said in its normal neutral voice. "You'll feel a little unsteady at first, but you're all right."

  She looked at its left sensory arm. The healing was not yet complete. There was still visible what looked like a bad cut-as though someone had slashed at the arm and managed only a flesh wound.

  "Are you all right?" she asked.

  It moved the arm easily, normally, used it to stroke her face in an acquired human gesture.

  She smiled, sat up, steadied herself for a moment, then stood up and looked around. There were no humans in sight, no Oankali except Nikanj, Ahajas, and Dichaan. Dichaan handed her a jacket and a pair of pants, both clean. Cleaner than she was. She took the clothing, and put it on reluctantly. She was not as dirty as she thought she should have been, but she still wanted to wash.

  "Where are the others?" she asked. "Is everyone all right?"

  "The humans are back at the settlement," Dichaan said. "They'll be sent to Earth soon. They've been shown the walls here. They know they're still aboard the ship."

  "You should have shown them the walls on their first day here."

  "We will do that next time. That was one of the things we had to learn from this group."

  "Better yet, prove to them they're in a ship as soon as they're Awakened," she said. "Illusion doesn't comfort them for long. It just confuses them, helps them make dangerous mistakes. I had begun to wonder myself where we really were."

  Silence. Stubborn silence.

  She looked at Nikanj's still-healing sensory arm. "Listen to me," she said. "Let me help you learn about us, or there'll be more injuries, more deaths."

  "Will you walk through the forest," Nikanj asked, "or shall we go the shorter way beneath the training room?"

  She sighed. She was Cassandra, warning and predicting to people who went deaf whenever she began to warn and predict. "Let's walk through the forest," she said.

  It stood still, keenly focused on her.

  "What?" she asked.

  It looped its injured sensory arm around her neck. "No one has ever done what we did here. No one has ever healed a wound as serious as mine so quickly or so completely."

  "There was no reason for you to die or be maimed," she said. "I couldn't help Joseph. I'm glad I could help you- even though I don't have any idea how I did it."

  Nikanj focused on Ahajas and Dichaan. "Joseph's body?" it said softly.

  "Frozen," Dichaan said. "Waiting to be sent to Earth." Nikanj rubbed the back of her neck with the cool, hard tip of its sensory arm. "I thought I had protected him enough," it said. "It should have been enough."

  "Is Curt still with the others?"

  "He's asleep."

  "Suspended animation?"

  "Yes."

  "And he'll stay here? He'll never get to Earth?"

  "Never."

  She nodded. "That isn't enough, but it's better than nothing."

  "He has a talent like yours," Ahajas said. "The ooloi will use him to study and explore the talent."

  "Talent...?"

  "You can't control it," Nikanj said, "but we can. Your body knows how to cause some of its cells to revert to an embryonic stage. It can awaken genes that most humans never use after birth. We have comparable genes that go dormant after metamorphosis. Your body showed mine how to awaken them, how to stimulate growth of cells that would not normally regenerate. The lesson was complex and painful, but very much worth learning."

  "You mean. . ." She frowned. "You mean my family problem with cancer, don't you?"

  "It isn't a problem anymore," Nikanj said, smoothing its body tentacles. "It's a gift. It has given me my life back."

  "Would you have died?"

  Silence.

  After a while, Ahajas said, "It would have left us. It would have become Toaht or Akjai and left Earth."

  "Why?" Lilith asked.

  "Without your gift, it could not have regained full use of the sensory arm. It could not have conceived children." Ahajas hesitated. "When we heard what had happened, we thought we had lost it. It had been with us for so little time. We felt. . . Perhaps we felt what you did when your mate died. There seemed to be nothing at all ahead for us until Ooan Nikanj told us that you were helping it, and that it would recover completely."

  "Kahguyaht behaved as though nothing unusual were happening," Lilith said.

  "It was frightened for me," Nikanj said. "It knows you dislike it. It thought any instructions from it beyond the essential would anger or delay you. It was badly frightened."

  Lilith laughed bitterly. "It's a good actor."

  Nikanj rustled its tentacles. It took its sensory arm from Lilith's neck and led the group toward the settlement.

  Lilith followed automatically, her thoughts shifting from Nikanj to Joseph to Curt. Curt whose body was to be used to teach the ooloi more about cancer. She could not make herself ask whether he would be conscious and aware during these experiments. She hoped he would be.

  8

  It was nearly dark when they reached the settlement. People were gathered around fires, talking, eating. Nikanj and its mates were welcomed by the Oankali in a kind of gleeful silence-a confusion of sensory arms and tentacles, a relating of experience by direct neural stimulation. They could give each other whole experiences, then discuss the experience in nonverbal conversation. They had a whole language of sensory images and accepted signals that took the place of words.

  Lilith watched them enviously. They didn't lie often to humans because their sensory language had left them with no habit of lying-only of withholding information, refusing contact.

  Humans, on the other hand, lied easily and often. They could not trust one another. They could not trust one of their own who seemed too close to aliens, who stripped off her clothing and lay down on the ground to help her jailer.

  There was silence at the fire where Lilith chose to sit. Allison, Leah and Wray, Gabriel and Tate. Tate gave her a baked yam and, to her surprise, baked fish. She looked at Wray.

  Wray shrugged. "I caught it with my hands. Crazy thing to do. It was half as big as I am. But it swam right up to me just begging to be caught. The Oankali claimed I could have been caught myself by some of the things swimming in the river-electric eels, piranha, caiman.. . They brought all the worst things from Earth. Nothing bothered me, though."

  "Victor found a couple of turtles," Allison said. "Nobody knew how to cook them so they cut the meat up and roasted it.''

  "How was it?" Lilith asked.

  "They ate it." Allison smiled. "And while they were cooking it and eating it, the Oankali kept away from them."

  Wray grinned broadly. "You don't see any of them around this fire either, do you?"

  "I'm not sure," Gabriel answered.

  Silence.

  Lilith sighed. "Okay, Gabe, what have you got? Questions, accusations or condemnations?"

  "Maybe all three."

  "Well?"

  "You didn't fight. You chose to stand with the Oankali!"

  "Against you?"

  Angry silence.

  "Where were you standing when Curt hacked Joseph to death?"

  Tate laid her hand on Lilith's arm. "Curt just went crazy," she said. She spoke very softly. "No one thought he would do anything like that."

  "He did it," Lilith said. "And you all watched."

 
They picked at their food silently for a while, no longer enjoying the fish, sharing it with people from other fires who came offering Brazil nuts, pieces of fruit or baked cassava.

  "Why did you take your clothes off?" Wray demanded suddenly. "Why did you lie down on the ground with an ooloi in the middle of the fighting?"

  "The fighting was over," Lilith said. "You know that. And the ooloi I lay down with was Nikanj. Curt had all but severed one of its sensory arms. I think you know that, too. I let it use my body to heal itself."

  "But why should you want to help it?" Gabriel whispered harshly. "Why didn't you just let it die?" Every Oankali in the area must have heard him.

  "What good would that do?" she demanded. "I've known Nikanj since it was a child. Why should I let it die, then be stuck with some stranger? How would that help me or you or anyone here?"

  He drew back from her. "You've always got an answer. And it never quite rings true."

  She went over in her mind the things she could have said to him about his own tendency not to ring true. Ignoring them all, she asked, "What is it, Gabe? What do you believe I can do or could have done to set you free on Earth one minute sooner?"

  He did not answer, but he remained stubbornly angry. He was helpless and in a situation he found intolerable. Someone must be to blame.

  Lilith saw Tate reach out to him, take his hand. For a few seconds they clung to the tips of one another's fingers, reminding Lilith of nothing so much as a very squeamish person suddenly given a snake to hold. They managed to let one another go without seeming to recoil in revulsion, but everyone knew what they felt. Everyone had seen. That was something else Lilith had to answer for, no doubt.

  "What about that!" Tate demanded bitterly. She shook the hand Gabriel had touched as though to shake it clean of something. "What do we do about that?"

  Lilith let her shoulders slump. "I don't know. It was the same for Joseph and me. I never got around to asking Nikanj what it had done to us. I suggest you ask Kahguyaht."

  Gabriel shook his head. "I don't want to see him. . . it, let alone ask it anything."

  "Really?" asked Allison. Her voice was so full of honest questioning that Gabriel only glared at her.

  "No," Lilith said. "Not really. He wishes he hated Kahguyaht. He tries to hate it. But in the fighting, it was Nikanj he tried to kill. And here, now, it's me he blames and distrusts. Hell, the Oankali set me up to be the focus of blame and distrust, but I don't hate Nikanj. Maybe I can't. We're all a little bit co-opted, at least as far as our individual ooloi are concerned."

  Gabriel stood up. He loomed over Lilith, glaring down. The camp had gone quiet, everyone watching him.

  "I don't give a shit what you feel!" he said. "You're talking about your feelings, not mine. Strip and screw your Nikanj right here for everyone to see, why don't you. We know you're their whore! Everybody here knows!"

  She looked at him, abruptly tired, fed up. "And what are you when you spend your nights with Kahguyaht?"

  She believed for a moment that he would attack her. And, for a moment, she wanted him to.

  Instead, he turned and stalked away toward the shelters. Tate glared at Lilith for a moment, then went after him.

  Kahguyaht left the Oankali fire and came over to Lilith. "You could have avoided that," it said softly.

  She did not look up at it. "I'm tired," she said. "I resign."

  "What?''

  "I quit! No more scapegoating for you; no more being seen as a Judas goat by my own people. I don't deserve any of this."

  It stood over her for a moment longer, then went after Gabriel and Tate. Lilith looked after it, shook her head, and laughed bitterly. She thought of Joseph, seemed to feel him beside her, hear him telling her to be careful, asking her what was the point in turning both peoples against her.

  There was no point. She was just tired. And Joseph was not there.

  9

  People avoided Lilith. She suspected they saw her either as a traitor or as a ticking bomb.

  She was content to be let alone. Ahajas and Dichaan asked her if she wanted to go home with them when they left, but she declined the offer. She wanted to stay in an Earthlike setting until she went to Earth. She wanted to stay with human beings even though for a time, she did not love them.

  She chopped wood for the fire, gathered wild fruits for meals or casual eating, even caught fish by trying a method she remembered reading about. She spent hours binding together strong grass stems and slivers of split cane, fashioning them into a long, loose cone that small fish could swim into, but not out of. She fished the small streams that flowed into the river and eventually provided most of the fish the group ate. She experimented with smoking it and had surprisingly good results. No one refused the fish because she had caught it. On the other hand, no one asked how she made her fish traps-so she did not tell them. She did no more teaching unless people came to her and asked questions. This was more punishing to her than to the Oankali since she had discovered that she liked teaching. But she found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.

  Eventually people did begin to come to her. A few people. Allison, Wray and Leah, Victor. . . . She shared her knowledge of fish traps with Wray finally. Tate avoided her-perhaps to please Gabriel, perhaps because she had adopted Gabriel's way of thinking. Tate had been a friend. Lilith missed her, but somehow could not manage any bitterness against her. There was no other close friend to take Tate's place. Even the people who came to her with questions did not trust her. There was only Nikanj.

  Nikanj never tried to make her change her behavior. She had the feeling it would not object to anything she did unless she began hurting people. She lay with it and its mates at night and it pleasured her as it had before she met Joseph. She did not want this at first, but she came to appreciate it.

  Then she realized she was able to touch a man again and find pleasure in it.

  "Are you so eager to match me with someone else?" she asked Nikanj. That day she had handed Victor an armload of cassava cuttings for planting and she had been surprised, briefly pleased at the feel of his hand, as warm as her own.

  "You're free to find another mate," Nikanj told her. "We'll be Awakening other humans soon. I wanted you to be free to choose whether or not to mate."

  "You said we would be put down on Earth soon."

  "You stopped teaching here. People are learning more slowly. But I think they'll be ready soon." Before she could question it further, other ooloi called it away to swim with them. That probably meant it was leaving the training room for a while. Ooloi liked to use the underwater exits whenever they could. Whenever they were not guiding humans.

  Lilith looked around the camp, saw nothing that she wanted to do that day. She wrapped smoked fish and baked cassava banana leaf and put it into one of her baskets with a few bananas. She would wander. Later, she would probably come back with something useful.

  It was late when she headed back, her basket filled with bean pods that provided an almost candy-sweet pulp and palm fruit that she had been able to cut from a small tree with her machete. The bean pods-inga, they were called-would be a treat for everyone. Lilith did not like this particular kind of palm fruit as much, but others did.

  She walked quickly, not wanting to be caught in the forest after dark. She thought she could probably find her way home in the dark, but she did not want to have to. The Oankali had made this jungle too real. Only they were invulnerable to the things whose bite or sting or sharp spines were deadly.

  It was almost too dark to see under the canopy when she arrived back at the settlement.

  Yet at the settlement, there was only one fire. This was a time for cooking and talking and working on baskets, nets, and other small things that could be done mindlessly while people enjoyed one another's company. But there was only one fire-and only one person near it.

  As she reached the fire, the person stood up, and she saw that it was Nikanj. There was no sign of anyone
else.

  Lilith dropped her basket and ran the last few steps into camp. "Where are they?" she demanded. "Why didn't someone come to find me?"

  "Your friend Tate says she's sorry for the way she behaved," Nikanj told her. "She wanted to talk to you, says she would have done it within the next few days. As it happened, she didn't have a few more days here."

  "Where is she?"

  "Kahguyaht has enhanced her memory as I have yours. It thinks that will help her survive on Earth and help the other humans."

  "But. . ." She stepped closer to it, shaking her head. "But what about me? I did all you asked. I didn't hurt anyone. Why am I still here!"

  "To save your life." It took her hand. "I was called away today to hear the threats that had been made against you. I had already heard most of them. Lilith, you would have wound up like Joseph."

  She shook her head. No one had threatened her directly. Most people were afraid of her.

  "You would have died," Nikanj repeated. "Because they can't kill us, they would have killed you."

  She cursed it, refusing to believe, yet on another level, believing, knowing. She blamed it and hated it and wept.

  "You could have waited!" she said finally. "You could have called me back before they left."

  "I'm sorry," it said.

  "Why didn't you call me? Why?"

  It knotted its head and body tentacles in distress. "You could have reacted very badly. With your strength, you could have injured or killed someone. You could have earned a place alongside Curt." It relaxed the knots and let its tentacles hang limp. "Joseph is gone. I didn't want to risk losing you too."

  And she could not go on hating it. Its words reminded her too much of her own thoughts when she lay down to help it in spite of what other humans might think of her. She went to one of the cut logs that served as benches around the fire and sat down.

  "How long do I have to stay here?" she whispered. "Do they ever let the Judas goat go?"

  It sat beside her awkwardly, wanting to fold itself onto the log, but not finding enough room to balance there.

  "Your people will escape us as soon as they reach Earth," it told her. "You know that. You encouraged them to do it-and of course, we expected it. We'll tell them to take what they want of their equipment and go. Otherwise they might run away with less than they need to live. And we'll tell them they're welcome to come back to us. All of them. Any of them. Whenever they like."