Lilith's Brood: Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago

by Octavia E. Butler

  “What?” he said.

  “We did things to them—inoculations, surgery, isolation—all for their own good. We wanted them healthy and protected—sometimes so we could eat them later. “

  His tentacles did not flatten to his body, but she got the impression he was laughing at her. “Doesn’t it frighten you to say things like that to me?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “It scares me to have people doing things to me that I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve been given health. The ooloi have seen to it that you’ll have a chance to live on your Earth—not just to die on it.”

  He would not say any more on the subject. She looked around at the huge trees, some with great branching multiple trunks and foliage like long, green hair. Some of the hair seemed to move, though there was no wind. She sighed. The trees, too, then—tentacled like the people. Long, slender, green tentacles.

  “Jdahya?”

  His own tentacles swept toward her in a way she still found disconcerting, though it was only his way of giving her his attention or signaling her that she had it.

  “I’m willing to learn what you have to teach me,” she said, “but I don’t think I’m the right teacher for others. There were so many humans who already knew how to live in the wilderness—so many who could probably teach you a little more. Those are the ones you ought to be talking to.”

  “We have talked to them. They will have to be especially careful because some of the things they ‘know’ aren’t true anymore. There are new plants—mutations of old ones and additions we’ve made. Some things that used to be edible are lethal now. Some things are deadly only if they aren’t prepared properly. Some of the animal life isn’t as harmless as it apparently once was. Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed.”

  She nodded, wondering why she could absorb his words so easily. Perhaps because she had known even before her capture that the world she had known was dead. She had already absorbed that loss to the degree that she could.

  “There must be ruins,” she said softly.

  “There were. We’ve destroyed many of them.”

  She seized his arm without thinking. “You destroyed them? There were things left and you destroyed them?”

  “You’ll begin again. We’ll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were.”

  “And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?”

  “No. Only different.” She realized suddenly that she was facing him, grasping his arm in a grip that should have been painful to him. It was painful to her. She let go of him and his arm swung to his side in the oddly dead way in which his limbs seemed to move when he was not using them for a specific purpose.

  “You were wrong,” she said. She could not sustain her anger. She could not look at his tentacled, alien face and sustain anger—but she had to say the words. “You destroyed what wasn’t yours,” she said. “You completed an insane act.”

  “You are still alive,” he said.

  She walked beside him, silently ungrateful. Knee-high tufts of thick, fleshy leaves or tentacles grew from the soil. He stepped carefully to avoid them—which made her want to kick them. Only the fact that her feet were bare stopped her. Then she saw, to her disgust, that the leaves twisted or contracted out of the way if she stepped near one—like plants made up of snake-sized night crawlers. They seemed to be rooted to the ground. Did that make them plants?

  “What are those things?” she asked, gesturing toward one with a foot.

  “Part of the ship. They can be induced to produce a liquid we and our animals enjoy. It wouldn’t be good for you.”

  “Are they plant or animal?”

  “They aren’t separate from the ship.”

  “Well, is the ship plant or animal?”

  “Both, and more.”

  Whatever that meant. “Is it intelligent?”

  “It can be. That part of it is dormant now. But even so, the ship can be chemically induced to perform more functions than you would have the patience to listen to. It does a great deal on its own without monitoring. And it …” He fell silent for a moment, his tentacles smooth against his body. Then he continued, “The human doctor used to say it loved us. There is an affinity, but it’s biological—a strong, symbiotic relationship. We serve the ship’s needs and it serves ours. It would die without us and we would be planetbound without it. For us, that would eventually mean death.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “We grew it.”

  “You … or your ancestors?”

  “My ancestors grew this one. I’m helping to grow another.”

  “Now? Why?”

  “We’ll divide here. We’re like mature asexual animals in that way, but we divide into three: Dinso to stay on Earth until it is ready to leave generations from now; Toaht to leave in this ship; and Akjai to leave in the new ship.”

  Lilith looked at him. “Some of you will go to Earth with us?”

  “I will, and my family and others. All Dinso.”

  “Why?”

  “This is how we grow—how we’ve always grown. We’ll take the knowledge of shipgrowing with us so that our descendants will be able to leave when the time comes. We couldn’t survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.”

  “Will you take … seeds or something?”

  “We’ll take the necessary materials.”

  “And those who leave—Toaht and Akjai—you’ll never see them again?”

  “I won’t. At some time in the distant future, a group of my descendants might meet a group of theirs. I hope that will happen. Both will have divided many times. They’ll have acquired much to give one another.”

  “They probably won’t even know one another. They’ll remember this division as mythology if they remember it at all.”

  “No, they’ll recognize one another. Memory of a division is passed on biologically. I remember every one that has taken place in my family since we left the homeworld.”

  “Do you remember your homeworld itself? I mean, could you get back to it if you wanted to?”

  “Go back?” His tentacles smoothed again. “No, Lilith, that’s the one direction that’s closed to us. This is our homeworld now.” He gestured around them from what seemed to be a glowing ivory sky to what seemed to be brown soil.

  There were many more of the huge trees around them now, and she could see people going in and out of the trunks—naked, gray Oankali, tentacled all over, some with two arms, some, alarmingly, with four, but none with anything she recognized as sexual organs. Perhaps some of the tentacles and extra arms served a sexual function.

  She examined every cluster of Oankali for humans, but saw none. At least none of the Oankali came near her or seemed to pay any attention to her. Some of them, she noticed with a shudder, had tentacles covering every inch of their heads all around. Others had tentacles in odd, irregular patches. None had quite Jdahya’s humanlike arrangement—tentacles placed to resemble eyes, ears, hair. Had Jdahya’s work with humans been suggested by the chance arrangement of his head tentacles or had he been altered surgically or in some other way to make him seem more human?

  “This is the way I have always looked,” he said when she asked, and he would not say any more on the subject.

  Minutes later they passed near a tree and she reached out to touch its smooth, slightly giving bark—like the walls of her isolation room, but darker-colored. “These trees are all buildings, aren’t they?” she asked.

  “These structures are not trees,” he told her. “They’re part of the ship. They support its shape, provide necessities for us—food, oxygen, waste disposal, transport conduits, storage and living space, work areas, many things.”

  They passed very near a pair of Oankali who stood so close together their head tentacles writhed and tangled together. She co
uld see their bodies in clear detail. Like the others she had seen, these were naked. Jdahya had probably worn clothing only as a courtesy to her. For that she was grateful.

  The growing number of people they passed near began to disturb her, and she caught herself drawing closer to Jdahya as though for protection. Surprised and embarrassed, she made herself move away from him. He apparently noticed.

  “Lilith?” he said very quietly.

  “What?”

  Silence.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “It’s just … so many people, and so strange to me.”

  “Normally, we don’t wear anything.”

  “I’d guessed that.”

  “You’ll be free to wear clothing or not as you like.”

  “I’ll wear it!” She hesitated. “Are there any other humans Awake where you’re taking me?”

  “None.”

  She hugged herself tightly, arms across her chest. More isolation.

  To her surprise, he extended his hand. To her greater surprise, she took it and was grateful.

  “Why can’t you go back to your homeworld?” she asked. “It … still exists, doesn’t it?”

  He seemed to think for a moment. “We left it so long ago … I doubt that it does still exist.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “It was a womb. The time had come for us to be born.”

  She smiled sadly. “There were humans who thought that way—right up to the moment the missiles were fired. People who believed space was our destiny. I believed it myself.”

  “I know—though from what the ooloi have told me, your people could not have fulfilled that destiny. Their own bodies handicapped them.”

  “Their … our bodies? What do you mean? We’ve been into space. There’s nothing about our bodies that prevented—”

  “Your bodies are fatally flawed. The ooloi perceived this at once. At first it was very hard for them to touch you. Then you became an obsession with them. Now it’s hard for them to let you alone.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you.”

  She shook her head. “If you’re saying we were genetically programmed to do what we did, blow ourselves up—”

  “No. Your people’s situation was more like your own with the cancer my relative cured. The cancer was small. The human doctor said you would probably have recovered and been well even if humans had discovered it and removed it at that stage. You might have lived the rest of your life free of it, though she said she would have wanted you checked regularly.”

  “With my family history, she wouldn’t have had to tell me that last.”

  “Yes. But what if you hadn’t recognized the significance of your family history? What if we or the humans hadn’t discovered the cancer?”

  “It was malignant, I assume.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I suppose it would eventually have killed me.”

  “Yes, it would have. And your people were in a similar position. If they had been able to perceive and solve their problem, they might have been able to avoid destruction. Of course, they too would have to remember to reexamine themselves periodically.”

  “But what was the problem? You said we had two incompatible characteristics. What were they?”

  Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to come from his mouth or throat. “You are intelligent,” he said. “That’s the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we’ve found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics.”

  “What’s the second characteristic?”

  “You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It’s a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all …” The rattling sounded again. “That was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing.”

  “I don’t think most of us thought of it as a genetic problem. I didn’t. I’m not sure I do now.” Her feet had begun to hurt from walking so long on the uneven ground. She wanted to end both the walk and the conversation. The conversation made her uncomfortable. Jdahya sounded … almost plausible.

  “Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

  “I just don’t believe it’s that simple. Just a bad gene or two.”

  “It isn’t simple, and it isn’t a gene or two. It’s many—the result of a tangled combination of factors that only begins with genes.” He stopped, let his head tentacles drift toward a rough circle of huge trees. The tentacles seemed to point. “My family lives there,” he said.

  She stood still, now truly frightened.

  “No one will touch you without your consent,” he said. “And I’ll stay with you for as long as you like.”

  She was comforted by his words and ashamed of needing comfort. How had she become so dependent on him? She shook her head. The answer was obvious. He wanted her dependent. That was the reason for her continued isolation from her own kind. She was to be dependent on an Oankali—dependent and trusting. To hell with that!

  “Tell me what you want of me,” she demanded abruptly, “and what you want of my people.”

  His tentacles swung to examine her. “I’ve told you a great deal.”

  “Tell me the price, Jdahya. What do you want? What will your people take from us in return for having saved us?”

  All his tentacles seemed to hang limp, giving him an almost comical droop. Lilith found no humor in it. “You’ll live,” he said. “Your people will live. You’ll have your world again. We already have much of what we want of you. Your cancer in particular.”

  “What?”

  “The ooloi are intensely interested in it. It suggests abilities we have never been able to trade for successfully before.”

  “Abilities? From cancer?”

  “Yes. The ooloi see great potential in it. So the trade has already been useful.”

  “You’re welcome to it. But before when I asked, you said you trade … yourselves.”

  “Yes. We trade the essence of ourselves. Our genetic material for yours.”

  Lilith frowned, then shook her head. “How? I mean, you couldn’t be talking about interbreeding.”

  “Of course not.” His tentacles smoothed. “We do what you would call genetic engineering. We know you had begun to do it yourselves a little, but it’s foreign to you. We do it naturally. We must do it. It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species instead of specializing ourselves into extinction or stagnation.”

  “We all do it naturally to some degree,” she said warily. “Sexual reproduction—”

  “The ooloi do it for us. They have special organs for it. They can do it for you too—make sure of a good, viable gene mix.

  It is part of our reproduction, but it’s much more deliberate than what any mated pair of humans have managed so far.

  “We’re not hierarchical, you see. We never were. But we are powerfully acquisitive. We acquire new life—seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it. We carry the drive to do this in a minuscule cell within a cell—a tiny organelle within every cell of our bodies. Do you understand me?”

  “I understa
nd your words. Your meaning, though … it’s as alien to me as you are.”

  “That’s the way we perceived your hierarchical drives at first.” He paused. “One of the meanings of Oankali is gene trader. Another is that organelle—the essence of ourselves, the origin of ourselves. Because of that organelle, the ooloi can perceive DNA and manipulate it precisely.”

  “And they do this … inside their bodies?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now they’re doing something with cancer cells inside their bodies?”

  “Experimenting, yes.”

  “That sounds … a long way from safe.”

  “They’re like children now, talking and talking about possibilities.”

  “What possibilities?”

  “Regeneration of lost limbs. Controlled malleability. Future Oankali may be much less frightening to potential trade partners if they’re able to reshape themselves and look more like the partners before the trade. Even increased longevity, though compared to what you’re used to, we’re very long-lived now.”

  “All that from cancer.”

  “Perhaps. We listen to the ooloi when they stop talking so much. That’s when we find out what our next generations will be like.”

  “You leave all that to them? They decide?”

  “They show us the tested possibilities. We all decide.”

  He tried to lead her into his family’s woods, but she held back. “There’s something I need to understand now,” she said. “You call it a trade. You’ve taken something you value from us and you’re giving us back our world. Is that it? Do you have all you want from us?”

  “You know it isn’t,” he said softly. “You’ve guessed that much.”

  She waited, staring at him.

  “Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you. Your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to regenerate limbs and reshape our bodies, we’ll share those abilities with you. That’s part of the trade. We’re overdue for it.”

  “It is crossbreeding, then, no matter what you call it.”