Lilith's Brood: Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago

by Octavia E. Butler

  Nikanj spoke in Oankali. “And I want him to live because of you. But I didn’t make the decision to keep humans who kill away from Earth—and I didn’t exempt you. It was a consensus. I can’t exempt him.”

  “Then … strengthen him the way you did me.”

  “He would be more likely to kill then.”

  “And less likely to die. I mean give him more resistance to injury. Help him heal faster if he is injured. Give him a chance!”

  “What are you talking about?” Joseph said to her angrily. “Speak English!”

  She opened her mouth, but Nikanj spoke first. “She’s speaking for you. She wants you protected.”

  He looked at Lilith for confirmation. She nodded. “I’m afraid for you. I wanted you exempted too. It says it can’t do that. So I’ve asked it to …” She stopped, looked from Nikanj to Joseph. “I’ve asked it to strengthen you, give you at least a chance.”

  He frowned at her. “Lilith, I’m not large, but I’m stronger than you think. I can take care of myself.”

  “I didn’t speak in English because I didn’t want to hear you say that. Of course you can’t take care of yourself. No one person could against what might happen out there. I only wanted to give you more of a chance than you have now.”

  “Show him your hand,” Nikanj said.

  She hesitated, fearing that he would begin to see her as alien or too close to aliens—too much changed by them. But now that Nikanj had drawn attention to her hand, she could not conceal it. She raised her no-longer-bruised knuckles and showed them to Joseph.

  He examined her hand minutely, then looked at the other one just to be certain he had not made a mistake. “They did this?” he asked. “Enabled you to heal so quickly?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Made me stronger than I was—and I was strong before—and enabled me to control interior walls and suspended animation plants. That’s all.”

  He faced Nikanj. “How did you do this?”

  Nikanj rustled its tentacles. “For the walls, I altered her body chemistry slightly. For the strength, I gave her more efficient use of what she already has. She should have been stronger. Her ancestors were stronger—her nonhuman ancestors in particular. I helped her fulfill her potential.”

  “How?”

  “How do you move and coordinate the fingers of your hands? I’m an ooloi bred to work with humans. I can help them do anything their bodies are capable of doing. I made biochemical changes that caused her regular exercises to be much more effective than they would have been otherwise. There is also a slight genetic change. I haven’t added or subtracted anything, but I have brought out latent ability. She is as strong and as fast as her nearest animal ancestors were.” Nikanj paused, perhaps noticing the way Joseph was looking at Lilith. “The changes I’ve made are not hereditary,” it said.

  “You said you changed her genes!” Joseph charged.

  “Body cells only. Not reproductive cells.”

  “But if you cloned her …”

  “I will not clone her.”

  There was a long silence. Joseph looked at Nikanj, then stared long at Lilith. She spoke when she thought she had endured his stare long enough.

  “If you want to go out and join the others, I’ll open the wall,” she said.

  “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  “That’s what I fear,” she whispered.

  “Could you have prevented what was done to you?”

  “I didn’t try to prevent it.” She swallowed. “They were going to give me this job no matter what I said. I told them they might as well kill me themselves. Even that didn’t stop them. So when Nikanj and its mates offered me as much as they could offer, I didn’t even have to think about it. I welcomed it.”

  After a time, he nodded.

  “I’ll give you some of what I gave her,” Nikanj said. “I won’t increase your strength, but I will enable you to heal faster, recover from injuries that might otherwise kill you. Do you want me to do this?”

  “You’re giving me a choice?”

  “Yes.”

  “The change is permanent?”

  “Unless you ask to be changed back.”

  “Side effects?”

  “Psychological.”

  Joseph frowned. “What do you mean, psycho … Oh. So that’s why you won’t give me the strength.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you trust … Lilith.”

  “She has been Awake and living with my families for years. We know her. And, of course, we’re always watching.”

  After a time, Joseph took Lilith’s hands. “Do you see?” he asked gently. “Do you understand why they chose you—someone who desperately doesn’t want the responsibility, who doesn’t want to lead, who is a woman?”

  The condescension in his voice first startled, then angered her. “Do I see, Joe? Oh, yes. I’ve had plenty of time to see.”

  He seemed to realize how he had sounded. “You have, yes—not that it helps to know.”

  Nikanj had shifted its attention from one of them to the other. Now it focused on Joseph. “Shall I make the change in you?” it asked.

  Joseph released Lilith’s hands. “What is it? Surgery? Something to do with blood or bone marrow?”

  “You will be made to sleep. When you awake, the change will have been made. There won’t be any pain or illness, no surgery in the usual sense of the word.”

  “How will you do it?”

  “These are my tools.” It extended both sensory arms. “Through them, I’ll study you, then make the necessary adjustments. My body and yours will produce any substances I need.”

  Joseph shuddered visibly. “I … I don’t think I could let you touch me.”

  Lilith looked at him until he turned to face her. “I was shut up for days with one of them before I could touch him,” she said. “There were times … I’d rather take a beating than go through anything like that again.”

  Joseph moved closer to her, his manner protective. It was easier for him to give comfort than to ask for it. Now he managed to do both at once.

  “How long are you going to stay here now?” he demanded of Nikanj.

  “Not much longer. I’ll come back. You’ll probably feel less afraid when you see me again.” It paused. “Eventually you must touch me. You must show at least that much control before I change you.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want you to change me. I don’t really understand what it is you do with those … those tentacles.”

  “Sensory arms, we call them in English. They’re more than arms—much more—but the term is convenient.” It focused its attention on Lilith and spoke in Oankali. “Do you think it would help if he saw a demonstration?”

  “I’m afraid he would be repelled,” she said.

  “He’s an unusual male. I think he might surprise you.”

  “No.”

  “You should trust me. I know a great deal about him.”

  “No! Leave him to me.”

  It stood up, unfolding itself dramatically. When she saw that it was about to leave, she almost relaxed. Then in a single swift sweep of motion, it stepped to her and looped a sensory arm around her neck forming an oddly comfortable noose. She was not afraid. She had been through this often enough to be used to it. Her first thoughts were concern for Joseph and anger at Nikanj.

  Joseph had not moved. She stood between the two of them.

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “It wanted you to see. This is all the contact it would need.”

  Joseph stared at the coil of sensory arm, looked from the arm to Nikanj and back to the arm again where it rested against Lilith’s flesh. After a moment, he raised his hand toward it. He stopped. His hand twitched, drew back, then slowly reached out again. With only a moment’s hesitation, he touched the cool, hard flesh of the sensory arm. His fingers rested on its hornlike tip and that tip twisted to grasp his wrist.

  Now Lilith was no longer their
intermediary. Joseph stood rigid and silent, sweating, but not trembling, his hand upright, fingers clawlike, a noose of sensory tentacles settled in a painless, unbreakable grip around the wrist.

  With a sound that could have been the beginning of a scream, Joseph collapsed.

  Lilith stepped to him quickly, but Nikanj caught him. He was unconscious. She said nothing until she had helped Nikanj put him on the bed. Then she caught it by the shoulders and turned it to face her.

  “Why couldn’t you let him alone!” she demanded. “I’m supposed to be in charge of them. Why didn’t you just leave him to me?”

  “Do you know,” it said, “that no undrugged human has ever done that before? Some have touched us by accident this soon after meeting us, but no one has done it deliberately. I told you he was unusual.”

  “Why couldn’t you let him alone!”

  It unfastened Joseph’s jacket and began to remove it. “Because there are already two human males speaking against him, trying to turn others against him. One has decided he’s something called a faggot and the other dislikes the shape of his eyes. Actually, both are angry about the way he’s allied himself with you. They would prefer to have you without allies. Your mate needs any extra protection I can give him now.”

  She listened, appalled. Joseph had talked about the danger to her. Had he known how immediate his own danger was?

  Nikanj threw the jacket aside and lay down beside Joseph. It wrapped one sensory tentacle around Joseph’s neck and the other around his waist, drawing Joseph’s body close against its own.

  “Did you drug him, or did he faint?” she asked—then wondered why she cared.

  “I drugged him as soon as I grasped his arm. He had reached his breaking point, though. He might have fainted on his own. This way, he can be angry with me for drugging him, not for making him look weak in front of you.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  “What is a faggot?” it asked.

  She told it.

  “But they know he’s not that. They know he’s mated with you.”

  “Yes. Well, there’s been some doubt about me, too, I hear.”

  “None of them really believe it.”

  “Yet.”

  “Serve them by leading them, Lilith. Help us send as many of them home as we can.”

  She stared at it for a long time, feeling frightened and empty. It sounded so sincere—not that that mattered. How could she become the leader of people who saw her as their jailer? On some level, a leader had to be trusted. Yet every act she performed that proved the truth of what she said also made her loyalties, and even her humanity suspect.

  She sat down on the floor, cross-legged and at first stared at nothing. Eventually, her eyes were drawn to Nikanj holding Joseph on the bed. The pair did not move, though once she heard Joseph sigh. Was he no longer completely unconscious, then? Was he already learning the lesson all adult ooloi eventually taught? So much in only one day.

  “Lilith?”

  She jumped. Both Joseph and Nikanj had spoken her name, though clearly, only Nikanj was enough awake to know what it was saying. Joseph, drugged and under the influence of multiple neural links, would shadow everything Nikanj said or did unless Nikanj split its attention enough to stop him. Nikanj did not bother.

  “I have adjusted him, even strengthened him a little, though he’ll have to exercise to be able to use that to his best advantage. He will be more difficult to injure, faster to heal, and able to survive and recover from injuries that would have killed him before.” Joseph, unknowing, spoke every word exactly in unison with Nikanj.

  “Stop that!” Lilith said sharply.

  Nikanj altered its connection without missing a beat. “Lie here with us,” it said, speaking alone. “Why should you be down there by yourself?”

  She thought there could be nothing more seductive than an ooloi speaking in that particular tone, making that particular suggestion. She realized she had stood up without meaning to and taken a step toward the bed. She stopped, stared at the two of them. Joseph’s breathing now became a gentle snore and he seemed to sleep comfortably against Nikanj as she had awakened to find him sleeping comfortably against her many times. She did not pretend outwardly or to herself that she would resist Nikanj’s invitation—or that she wanted to resist it. Nikanj could give her an intimacy with Joseph that was beyond ordinary human experience. And what it gave, it also experienced. This was what had captured Paul Titus, she thought. This, not sorrow over his losses or fear of a primitive Earth.

  She clenched her fists, holding back. “This won’t help me,” she said. “It will just make it harder for me when you’re not around.”

  Nikanj freed one sensory arm from Joseph’s waist and extended it toward her.

  She stayed where she was for a moment longer, proving to herself that she was still in control of her behavior. Then she tore off her jacket and seized the ugly, ugly elephant’s trunk of an organ, letting it coil around her as she climbed onto the bed. She sandwiched Nikanj’s body between her own and Joseph’s, placing it for the first time in the ooloi position between two humans. For an instant, this frightened her. This was the way she might someday be made pregnant with an other-than-human child. Not now while Nikanj wanted other work from her, but someday. Once it plugged into her central nervous system it could control her and do whatever it wanted.

  She felt it tremble against her, and knew it was in.

  7

  SHE DID NOT LOSE consciousness. Nikanj did not want to cheat itself of sensation. Even Joseph was conscious, though utterly controlled, unafraid because Nikanj kept him tranquil. Lilith was not controlled. She could lift a free hand across Nikanj to take Joseph’s cool, seemingly lifeless hand.

  “No,” Nikanj said softly into her ear—or perhaps it stimulated the auditory nerve directly. It could do that—stimulate her senses individually or in any combination to make perfect hallucinations. “Only through me,” its voice insisted.

  Lilith’s hand tingled. She released Joseph’s hand and immediately received Joseph as a blanket of warmth and security, a compelling, steadying presence.

  She never knew whether she was receiving Nikanj’s approximation of Joseph, a true transmission of what Joseph was feeling, some combination of truth and approximation, or just a pleasant fiction.

  What was Joseph feeling from her?

  It seemed to her that she had always been with him. She had no sensation of shifting gears, no “time alone” to contrast with the present “time together.” He had always been there, part of her, essential.

  Nikanj focused on the intensity of their attraction, their union. It left Lilith no other sensation. It seemed, itself, to vanish. She sensed only Joseph, felt that he was aware only of her.

  Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them tireless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.

  Noon, evening, dusk, darkness.

  Her throat hurt. Her first solitary sensation was pain—as though she had been shouting, screaming. She swallowed painfully and raised her hand to her throat, but Nikanj’s sensory arm was there ahead of her and brushed her hand away. It laid its exposed sensory hand across her throat. She felt it anchor itself, sensory fingers stretching, clasping. She did not feel the tendrils of its substance penetrate her flesh, but in a moment the pain in her throat was gone.

  “All that and you only screamed once,” it told her.

  “How’d you let me do even that?” she asked.

  “You surprised me. I’ve never made you scream before.”

  She let it withdraw from her throat, then moved languidly to stroke it. “How much of that experience was Joseph’s and mine?” she asked. “How much did you make up?”

  “I’ve never made up an experience for you,” it said. “I won�
�t have to for him either. You both have memories filled with experiences.”

  “That was a new one.”

  “A combination. You had your own experiences and his. He had his and yours. You both had me to keep it going much longer than it would have otherwise. The whole was … overwhelming.”

  She looked around. “Joseph?”

  “Asleep. Very deeply asleep. I didn’t induce it. He’s tired. He’s all right, though.”

  “He … felt everything I felt?”

  “On a sensory level. Intellectually, he made his interpretations and you made yours.”

  “I wouldn’t call them intellectual.”

  “You understand me.”

  “Yes.” She moved her hand over its chest, taking a perverse pleasure in feeling its tentacles squirm, then flatten under her hand.

  “Why do you do that?” it asked.

  “Does it bother you?” she asked stilling her hand.

  “No.”

  “Let me do it, then. I didn’t used to be able to.”

  “I have to go. You should wash, then feed your people. Seal your mate in. Be certain you’re the first to talk to him when he wakes.”

  She watched it climb over her, joints bending all wrong, and lower itself to the floor. She caught its hand before it could head for a wall. Its head tentacles pointed at her loosely in unspoken question.

  “Do you like him?” she asked.

  The point focused briefly on Joseph. “Ahajas and Dichaan are mystified,” it said. “They thought you would choose one of the big dark ones because they’re like you. I said you would choose this one—because he’s like you.”

  “What?”

  “During his testing, his responses were closer to yours than anyone else I’m aware of. He doesn’t look like you but he’s like you.”

  “He might …” She forced herself to voice the thought. “He might not want anything more to do with me when he realizes what I helped you do with him.”

  “He’ll be angry—and frightened and eager for the next time and determined to see that there won’t be a next time. I’ve told you, I know this one.”