“He’s been here among us for a long time. He’s only a little older than you are, but he was Awakened young and kept Awake. A Toaht family wanted him and he was willing to stay with them.”
Willing? What kind of choice had they given him? Probably the same kind they had given her, and he had been years younger. Only a boy, perhaps. What was he now? What had they created from their human raw material? “Take me to him,” she said.
For the second time, Lilith rode one of the flat transports through the crowded corridors. This transport moved no faster than the first one she had ridden. Nikanj did not steer it except occasionally to touch one side or the other with head tentacles to make it turn. They rode for perhaps a half hour before she and Nikanj dismounted. Nikanj touched the transport with several head tentacles to send it away.
“Won’t we need it to go back?” she asked.
“We’ll get another,” Nikanj said. “Maybe you’ll want to stay here awhile.”
She looked at it sharply. What was this? Step two of the captive breeding program? She glanced around at the retreating transport. Maybe she had been too quick to agree to see this man. If he were thoroughly enough divorced from his humanity to want to stay here, who knew what else he might be willing to do.
“It’s an animal,” Nikanj said.
“What?”
“The thing we rode. It’s an animal. A tilio. Did you know?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. How does it move?”
“On a thin film of a very slippery substance.”
“Slime?”
Nikanj hesitated. “I know that word. It’s … inadequate, but it will serve. I’ve seen Earth animals who use slime to move. They are inefficient compared to the tilio, but I can see similarities. We shaped the tilio from larger, more efficient creatures.”
“It doesn’t leave a slime trail.”
“No. The tilio has an organ at its rear that collects most of what it spreads. The ship takes in the rest.”
“Nikanj, do you ever build machinery? Tamper with metal and plastic instead of living things?”
“We do that when we have to. We … don’t like it. There’s no trade.”
She sighed. “Where is the man? What’s his name, by the way?”
“Paul Titus.”
Well, that didn’t tell her anything. Nikanj took her to a nearby wall and stroked it with three long head tentacles. The wall changed from off-white to dull red, but it did not open.
“What’s wrong?” Lilith asked.
“Nothing. Someone will open it soon. It’s better not to go in if you don’t know the quarters well. Better to let the people who live there know you are waiting to go in.”
“So what you did is like knocking,” she said, and was about to demonstrate knocking for it when the wall began to open. There was a man on the other side, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts.
She stared at him. A human being—tall, stocky, as dark as she was, clean shaved. He looked wrong to her at first—alien and strange, yet familiar, compelling. He was beautiful. Even if he had been bent and old, he would have been beautiful.
She glanced at Nikanj, saw that it had become statue-still. It apparently had no intention of moving or speaking soon.
“Paul Titus?” she asked.
The man opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed, nodded. “Yes,” he said finally.
The sound of his voice—deep, definitely human, definitely male—fed a hunger in her. “I’m Lilith Iyapo,” she said. “Did you know we were coming or is this a surprise to you?”
“Come in,” he said, touching the wall opening. “I knew. And you don’t know how welcome you are.” He glanced at Nikanj. “Kaalnikanj oo Jdahyatediinkahguyaht aj Dinso, come in. Thank you for bringing her.”
Nikanj made a complex gesture of greeting with its head tentacles and stepped into the room—the usual bare room. Nikanj went to a platform in a corner and folded itself into a sitting position on it. Lilith chose a platform that allowed her to sit almost with her back to Nikanj. She wanted to forget it was there, observing, since it clearly did not intend to do anything but observe. She wanted to give all her attention to the man. He was a miracle—a human being, an adult who spoke English and looked more than a little like one of her dead brothers.
His accent was as American as her own and her mind overflowed with questions. Where had he lived before the war? How had he survived? Who was he beyond a name? Had he seen any other humans? Had he—
“Have you really decided to stay here?” she demanded abruptly. It was not the first question she had intended to ask.
The man sat cross-legged in the middle of a platform large enough to be a serving table or a bed.
“I was fourteen when they woke me up,” he said. “Everyone I knew was dead. The Oankali said they’d send me back to Earth eventually if I wanted to go. But once I had been here for a while, I knew this was where I wanted to be. There’s nothing that I care about left on Earth.”
“Everyone lost relatives and friends,” she said. “As far as I know, I’m the only member of my family still alive.”
“I saw my father, my brother—their bodies. I don’t know what happened to my mother. I was dying myself when the Oankali found me. They tell me I was. I don’t remember, but I believe them.”
“I don’t remember their finding me either.” She twisted around. “Nikanj, did your people do something to us to keep us from remembering?”
Nikanj seemed to rouse itself slowly. “They had to,” it said. “Humans who were allowed to remember their rescue became uncontrollable. Some died in spite of our care.”
Not surprising. She tried to imagine what she had done when in the middle of the shock of realizing that her home, her family, her friends, her world were all destroyed. She was confronted with a collecting party of Oankali. She must have believed she had lost her mind. Or perhaps she did lose it for a while. It was a miracle that she had not killed herself trying to escape them.
“Have you eaten?” the man asked.
“Yes,” she said, suddenly shy.
There was a long silence. “What were you before?” he asked. “I mean, did you work?”
“I had gone back to school,” she said. “I was majoring in anthropology.” She laughed bitterly. “I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork—but how the hell do I get out of the field?”
“Anthropology?” he said, frowning. “Oh yeah, I remember reading some stuff by Margaret Mead before the war. So you wanted to study what? People in tribes?”
“Different people anyway. People who didn’t do things the way we did them.”
“Where were you from?” he asked.
“Los Angeles.”
“Oh, yeah. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, movie stars. … I always wanted to go there.”
One trip would have shattered his illusions. “And you were from … ?”
“Denver.”
“Where were you when the war started?”
“Grand Canyon—shooting the rapids. That was the first time we’d ever really done anything, gone anywhere really good. We froze afterward. And my father used to say nuclear winter was nothing but politics.”
“I was in the Andes in Peru,” she said, “hiking toward Machu Picchu. I hadn’t been anywhere either, really. At least not since my husband—”
“You were married?”
“Yes. But he and my son … were killed—before the war, I mean. I had gone on a study tour of Peru. Part of going back to college. A friend talked me into taking that trip. She went too … and died.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “I was sort of looking forward to going to college myself. But I had just gotten through the tenth grade when everything blew up.”
“The Oankali must have taken a lot of people out of the southern hemisphere,” she said, thinking. “I mean we froze too, but I heard the southern freeze was spotty. A lot of people must have survived.”
He drifted into his own thoughts. “It’
s funny,” he said. “You started out years older than me, but I’ve been Awake for so long … I guess I’m older than you are now.”
“I wonder how many people they were able to get out of the northern hemisphere—other than the soldiers and politicians whose shelters hadn’t been bombed open.” She turned to ask Nikanj and saw that it was gone.
“He left a couple of minutes ago,” the man said. “They can move really quietly and fast when they want to.”
“But—”
“Hey, don’t worry. He’ll come back. And if he doesn’t, I can open the walls or get food for you if you want anything.”
“You can?”
“Sure. They changed my body chemistry a little when I decided to stay. Now the walls open for me just like they do for them.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure she liked being left with the man this way—especially if he was telling the truth. If he could open walls and she could not, she was his prisoner.
“They’re probably watching us,” she said. And she spoke in Oankali, imitating Nikanj’s voice: “Now let’s see what they’ll do if they think they’re alone.”
The man laughed. “They probably are. Not that it matters.”
“It matters to me. I’d rather have watchers where I can keep an eye on them, too.”
The laughter again. “Maybe he thought we might be kind of inhibited if he stayed around.”
She deliberately ignored the implications of this. “Nikanj isn’t male,” she said. “It’s ooloi.”
“Yeah, I know. But doesn’t yours seem male to you?”
She thought about that. “No. I guess I’ve taken their word for what they are.”
“When they woke me up, I thought the ooloi acted like men and women while the males and females acted like eunuchs. I never really lost the habit of thinking of ooloi as male or female.”
That, Lilith thought, was a foolish way for someone who had decided to spend his life among the Oankali to think—a kind of deliberate, persistent ignorance.
“You wait until yours is mature,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean. They change when they’ve grown those two extra things.” He lifted an eyebrow. “You know what those things are?”
“Yes,” she said. He probably knew more, but she realized that she did not want to encourage him to talk about sex; not even Oankali sex.
“Then you know they’re not arms, no matter what they tell us to call them. When those things grow in, ooloi let everyone know who’s in charge. The Oankali need a little women’s and men’s lib up here.”
She wet her lips. “It wants me to help it through its metamorphosis.”
“Help it. What did you tell it?”
“I said I would. It didn’t sound like much.”
He laughed. “It isn’t hard. Puts them in debt to you, though. Not a bad idea to have someone powerful in debt to you. It proves you can be trusted, too. They’ll be grateful and you’ll be a lot freer. Maybe they’ll fix things so you can open your own walls.”
“Is that what happened with you?”
He moved restlessly. “Sort of.” He got up from his platform, touched all ten fingers to the wall behind him, and waited as the wall opened. Behind the wall was a food storage cabinet of the kind she had often seen at home. Home? Well, what else was it? She lived there.
He took out sandwiches, something that looked like a small pie—that was a pie—and something that looked like French fries.
Lilith stared at the food in surprise. She had been content with the foods the Oankali had given her—good variety and flavor once she began staying with Nikanj’s family. She had missed meat occasionally, but once the Oankali made it clear they would neither kill animals for her nor allow her to kill them while she lived with them, she had not minded much. She had never been a particular eater, had never thought of asking the Oankali to make the food they prepared look more like what she was used to.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I want a hamburger so bad I dream about them. You know the kind with cheese and bacon and dill pickles and—”
“What’s in your sandwich?” she asked.
“Fake meat. Mostly soybean, I guess. And quat.”
Quatasayasha, the cheeselike Oankali vegetable. “I eat a lot of quat myself,” she said.
“Then have some. You don’t really want to sit there and watch me eat, do you?”
She smiled and took the sandwich he offered. She was not hungry at all, but eating with him was companionable and safe. She took a few of his French fries, too.
“Cassava,” he told her. “Tastes like potatoes, though. I’d never heard of cassava before I got it here. Some tropical plant the Oankali are raising.”
“I know. They mean for those of us who go back to Earth to raise it and use it. You can make flour from it and use it like wheat flour.”
He stared at her until she frowned. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
His gaze slid away from her and he stared downward at nothing. “Have you really thought about what it will be like?” he asked softly. “I mean … Stone Age! Digging in the ground with a stick for roots, maybe eating bugs, rats. Rats survived, I hear. Cattle and horses didn’t. Dogs didn’t. But rats did.”
“I know.”
“You said you had a baby.”
“My son. Dead.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ll bet when he was born, you were in a hospital with doctors and nurses all around helping you and giving you shots for the pain. How would you like to do it in a jungle with nothing around but bugs and rats and people who feel sorry for you but can’t do shit to help you?”
“I had natural childbirth,” she said. “It wasn’t any fun, but it went okay.”
“What do you mean? No painkiller?”
“None. No hospital either. Just something called a birthing center—a place for pregnant women who don’t like the idea of being treated as though they were sick.”
He shook his head, smiled crookedly. “I wonder how many women they had to go through before they came up with you. A lot, I’ll bet. You’re probably just what they want in ways I haven’t even thought of.”
His words bit more deeply into her than she let him see. With all the questioning and testing she had gone through, the two and a half years of round-the-clock observation—the Oankali must know her in some ways better than any human being ever had. They knew how she would react to just about everything they put her through. And they knew how to manipulate her, maneuver her into doing whatever they wanted. Of course they knew she had had certain practical experiences they considered important. If she had had an especially difficult time giving birth—if she had had to be taken to the hospital in spite of her wishes, if she had needed a caesarean—they would probably have passed over her to someone else.
“Why are you going back?” Titus asked. “Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?”
“I don’t.”
His eyes widened. “Then why don’t you—”
“We don’t have to forget what we know,” she said. She smiled to herself. “I couldn’t forget if I wanted to. We don’t have to go back to the Stone Age. We’ll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we’ll at least have a chance.”
“They don’t teach for free! They didn’t save us out of kindness! It’s all trade with them. You know what you’ll have to pay down there!”
“What have you paid to stay up here?”
Silence.
He ate several more bites of food. “The price,” he said softly, “is just the same. When they’re finished with us there won’t be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they’ll finish.”
“I don’t believe it has to be like that.”
“Yeah. But then, you haven’t been Awake long.”
“Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it’s still a damn big place.”
He looked at her with such open, undi
sguised pity that she drew back angrily. “Do you think they don’t know what a big place it is?” he asked.
“If I thought that, I wouldn’t have said anything to you and whoever’s listening. They know how I feel.”
“And they know how to make you change your mind.”
“Not about that. Never about that.”
“Like I said, you haven’t been Awake long.”
What had they done to him, she wondered. Was it just that they had kept him Awake so long—Awake and for the most part without human companions? Awake and aware that everything he had ever known was dead, that nothing he could have on Earth now could measure up to his former life. How had that gone down with a fourteen-year-old?
“If you wanted it,” he said, “they’d let you stay here … with me.”
“What, permanently?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her and came over to her. “You know they expect you to say no,” he said. “They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all over again that they were right about you.” He stood tall and broad, too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was afraid of him. “Surprise them,” he continued softly. “Don’t do what they expect—just for once. Don’t let them play you like a puppet.”
He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.
She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own ranks?
He let her go. “You could be safe here,” he said softly. “Down on Earth … how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if you don’t forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of them will want to be cavemen—drag you around, put you in a harem, beat the shit out of you.” He shook his head. “Tell me I’m wrong. Sit there and tell me I’m wrong.”
She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually—as soon as they realized they could get away with it.
Lilith's Brood: Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago Page 9
