Lilith's Brood: Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago

by Octavia E. Butler

  She stopped struggling abruptly and stared at one of the bite wounds she had inflicted on my left arm. In the firelight, even Human eyes could see it. It was healing, and that seemed to fascinate her. She watched until there was no visible sign of injury. Just a little smeared blood and saliva.

  “You’re doing that inside,” she said, “healing your wound.”

  I lay down, dragging her with me. She lay facing me, watching me with fear and distrust.

  “I can heal myself as well as most adults,” I said. “I’m not very good at controlling pain in myself, though.”

  She looked concerned, then deliberately hardened her expression. “What did you do to Tomás?”

  “He’s only asleep.”

  “No! He would have awakened.”

  “I drugged him a little. He didn’t mind. I promised I would heal him.”

  “We don’t want your healing!”

  The worst of the pain from my wound was over. I relaxed in relief and drew a long breath. I let go of her hands and she drew them away, looked at them, then back to me.

  I grinned at her. “You’re not afraid of me now. And you don’t want to hurt me again.”

  I could feel her face grow warmer. She sat up abruptly, very much against her own will. My scent was at work on her. She would probably have difficulty resisting it because she was not consciously aware of it.

  “We truly don’t want your healing,” she repeated. “Though … I’m sorry I shot you.” She sat still, looking down at me. “You look like Tomás, you know? You look the way he should look. You could be our brother—or perhaps our sister.”

  “Neither.”

  “I know. Why did you follow us?”

  “Why did you run from me?”

  She stared at the machete. She would have to get over or around both Tomás and me to get it.

  “No, Jesusa,” I said. “Stay here. Let me talk to you.”

  “You know about us, don’t you?” she demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “I knew you would—once you’d touched us both.”

  “I should have known from your scent alone. I let your disorder and my own inexperience confuse me. But, no, I didn’t learn what I know from touching you just now. I learned it from following you and hearing you and Tomás talk.”

  Her face took on a look of outrage. “You listened? You hid in the bushes and listened to what I said to my brother!”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. We don’t usually do such things, but I needed to know about you. I needed to understand you.”

  “You needed nothing!”

  “You were new to me. New, different, in need of help with your genetic disorder, and alone. You knew I could help you, yet you ran away. When you know us better, you may understand that it was as though you were dragging me by several ropes. The question wasn’t whether I would follow you, but how long I could follow before I joined you again.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I like your people if you’re all compelled to do such things.”

  “It’s been a century since anyone in my family has seen anyone like you. And you … perhaps you won’t have to worry about attracting the attention of others of my people.”

  “What will you do, now that you know about us? What do you want of us?”

  “That we must talk about,” I said, “you, Tomás, and me. But I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Yes?” she said.

  I looked at her for some time, simply enjoying the look and the scent of her. She still might leave me. She no longer wanted to, but she was capable of causing herself pain if she thought it was the right thing to do.

  “Lie here with me,” I said, knowing she would not. Not yet.

  “Why?” she asked, frowning.

  “We’re very tactile. We don’t just enjoy contact, we need it.”

  “Not with me.”

  At least she did not move away from me. My left heart was not yet healed so I did not get up. I took her hand and held it for a while, examined it with body tentacles. This startled her, but did not bring out the phobic terror some Humans are subject to when we touch them that way. Instead, she bent to get a better look at my body tentacles. They were widely scattered now, and the same brown as the rest of my skin. My head tentacles, all hidden in my hair now, were as black as my hair.

  “Can you move them all at will?” she asked.

  “Yes. As easily as you move your fingers. You’ve never seen them before, have you?”

  “I’ve heard of them. All my life, I’ve heard that they were like snakes and the Oankali were covered with them.”

  “Some are. No Oankali has as few of them as I do now. Even I have the potential to develop a great many more.”

  She looked at her own arm and its dozens of small tumors. “Actually I think mine are uglier,” she said.

  I laughed and, with great relief, pulled her down beside me again. She didn’t really mind. She was wary, but not afraid.

  “You have to tell me what will happen,” she said. “I’m afraid for my people. You have to tell me.”

  I put her head on my shoulder so that I could reach her with both head and body tentacles. She let me position her, then lay relaxed and alert against me. I eased her weariness, but did not let her become drowsy. She was younger than I had thought. She had never had a mate in the Human way. Now she never would. I felt as though I could absorb her into myself. And yet she seemed too far away. If I could just bring her closer, touch her with more sensory tentacles, touch her with … with what I did not yet possess.

  “This is wonderful,” she said. “But I don’t know why it should be.” She said nothing for a while. On her own, she discovered that if she touched me now with her hand, she felt the touch as though on her own skin, felt pleasure or discomfort just as she made me feel.

  “Touch me,” she said.

  I touched her thigh, and her body flared with sexual feeling. This surprised and frightened her and she caught my free hand and held it in her own. “You haven’t told me anything,” she said.

  “In a way, I’ve told you everything,” I said, “and all without words.”

  She let go of my hand and touched me again, let the sensation we shared guide her so that her fingertips slid around the bases of some of my sensory tentacles. She stopped an instant before I would have stopped her. The sensation was too intense.

  She took my hand and put it on her breasts, and I remembered what it had been like to have breasts for João, and to drink from Lilith’s breasts. Jesusa’s breasts, covered by rough cloth that scratched against the top of my hand, were small and wonderfully sensitive. How had she become accustomed to the rough cloth? Probably she had never worn anything else.

  She moaned and shared with me the pleasure of her body until I took my hand away and reluctantly detached from her.

  “No!” she said.

  “I know. We’ll sleep together tonight. I have to talk to you, though, and I wanted you to experience a little of that first. I wanted you to live in my skin for a while.”

  She sat up and glanced at Tomás, who slept on. “Is that what you do?” she asked. She meant was that all I did.

  “For now. When I’m an adult, I’ll be able to do more. And also … even now, if I spend much time with you, I’ll heal you. I can’t help it.”

  “I can’t go home if you heal me.”

  “Jesusa … that doesn’t really matter.”

  “My people matter. They matter very much to me.”

  “Your people are tormenting themselves unnecessarily. They don’t even know about the Mars colony, do they?”

  “The what?”

  “I thought not. And with their background in high-altitude living, they may be better suited to it than most Humans. The Mars colony is exactly what it sounds like: a colony of Humans living and reproducing on the planet Mars. We transport them and we’ve given them the tools to make Mars livable.”

  “Why?”

  “There are no Oankali
living on Mars. It’s a Human world.”

  “This should be a Human world!”

  “It isn’t anymore. It won’t ever be again.”

  Silence.

  “That’s a hard thing to think about, but it’s true. Humans who are sent to Mars are healed completely of any disease or defect. They’ll pass only good health on to their children.”

  “What else had been done to them?”

  “Nothing. Not even what I’ve already done with you. Their healing won’t be done by some hungry ooloi child. It will be done by people who are adult and mated and not especially interested in them. That’s good if they want to go to Mars. That’s safe.”

  “And I think what we did is not safe.”

  “Not safe at all.”

  “Then you must tell me what you want of me—and of Tomás?”

  I turned my face away from her for a moment. I could still lose her. I stood a good chance of losing her. “You know what I want of you. Your people must have warned you. I want to mate with you. With both of you. I want you to stay with me.”

  “To … to marry? But you’re … we’re strangers.”

  “Are we? Not really. Not after what we’ve shared. I don’t think one of your priests would make us a marriage ceremony, but Oankali and constructs don’t have much of a ceremony. For us, mating is biological … neurochemical.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Our bodies please one another and depend on one another. We keep one another well and make children together. We—”

  “Have children with my brother!”

  “Jesusa …” I shook my head. “Your flesh is so like his that I could transplant some of it to his body, and with only a small adjustment, it would live and grow on him as well as it does on you. Your people have been breeding brother to sister and parent to child for generations.”

  “Not anymore! We don’t have to do that anymore!”

  “Because there are more of you now—all closely related. Isn’t that so?”

  She said nothing.

  “And unfortunately there was a mutation. Or perhaps one of your founding parents had a serious genetic defect that was controlled, but not corrected. That wouldn’t have mattered if they’d had an ooloi to clear the way for them, but they didn’t.” I touched her face. “You have one now, so why should you be separated from Tomás?”

  She drew back from me. “We’ve never touched one another that way!”

  “I know.”

  “People had to do what they did in the past. Like the children of Adam and Eve. There wasn’t anyone else.”

  “On Mars there are already a great many others. Why should your people want to stay here and breed dead children or disabled children? They should go to Mars or come to us. We would welcome them.”

  She shook her head slowly. “They told us you were of the devil.”

  Now it was my turn to keep quiet. She didn’t believe in devils. In spite of her name, she probably didn’t believe strongly in gods. She believed in her people and in what her senses told her.

  “Your people won’t be hurt,” I assured her. “People who spend as much time as we do living inside one another’s skins are very slow to kill. And if we injure people, we heal them.”

  “You should let them alone.”

  “No. We shouldn’t.”

  “They own themselves. They don’t belong to you.”

  “They can’t survive as they are. Their gene pool is too small. It’s only a matter of time before some disease or defect wipes them out.” I stopped for a moment, thinking. “I’m Human enough to understand what they’re trying to do. One of my brothers began the Mars colony because he understood the need of Humans to live as themselves, not to blend completely with the Oankali.”

  “You have brothers?” She was frowning at me as though it had never occurred to her that she and I had anything in common.

  “I have brothers and sisters. I even have one ooloi sibling.” Had it completed its first metamorphosis yet? Was the family simply waiting for me to return so that Aaor and I could begin our extraterrestrial exile? Let them wait.

  I focused on Jesusa. I couldn’t lie to her, yet I couldn’t tell her everything. I was desperate to keep her and Tomás with me. The people would almost certainly not allow me to find Human mates on the ship, but they would not take away mates I had found on my own. And perhaps they would not exile me at all if they saw that with these two Humans, I was stable—not changing others, not changing myself except in a deliberate, controlled way. And Aaor could get mates from among Jesusa’s people. It would want them. I had no doubt of that.

  So what to do?

  “My people will fight,” Jesusa said.

  “They’ll be gassed and taken,” I said. “My people like to get that kind of thing over quickly so that they don’t have to hurt anyone.”

  She looked at me with anger—almost with hatred. “I won’t tell you where my people are. I would drown myself before I would tell you.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “Why? How will you find out?”

  “I won’t. My people will. Once they know that your people exist, they’ll find them.”

  She did not look toward the broken gun. She probably could not have seen it in the darkness now, but her body wanted to turn and look. Her hands wanted the gun. Her muscles twitched. If she killed me, no one would find out what I knew. No one would look for her hidden people.

  I made up my mind abruptly. She had to know everything or she might die defending her people. She probably could not kill me, but she could force me to act reflexively and kill her.

  “Jesusa,” I said, “come over here.”

  She stared at me with hostility.

  “Come. I’m going to tell you something my own Human mother didn’t learn until she had given birth to two construct children. Your people are not usually told this at all. I … I should not tell it to you, but I think I have to. Come.”

  Her muscles wanted to move her toward me. My scent and her memory of comfort and pleasure drew her, but she moved deliberately away. “Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me. Don’t touch me again.”

  I said nothing for a while. It would be easier for her to believe what I said if we were in contact. Humans did not usually understand why being linked into our nervous systems enabled them to feel the truth of what we said, but they did feel it. Now she would not. All her body language told me she would not be persuaded.

  Should she still be told?

  Se had to be.

  I spoke to her very softly. “You and your brother mean life to me.” I paused. “And in a different way, I mean life to your people. They’ll die if they stay where they are. They’ll all die.”

  “Some of us die. Some live.” She shook her head. “I don’t care what you say. Nothing will kill us if your people let us alone. We’re strong enough to stand anything else.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Jesusa! Listen.” When she had settled into an angry silence, I told her what would happen to the Earth, what would be left of it when we were gone. “Nothing will be able to live on what we leave,” I said. “If your people stay where they are and keep breeding, they’ll be destroyed. Every one of them. There’s life for them on Mars, and there’s life here with us. But if they insist on staying where they are … they won’t be allowed to keep having children. That way, by the time we break away from Earth, your people will have died of age.”

  She shook her head slowly as I spoke. “I don’t believe you. Even your people can’t destroy all the Earth.”

  “Not all of it, no. It’s like … when you eat a piece of fruit that has an inedible core or inedible seeds. There will be a rocky core of the Earth left—a great mass of material, useful for mining, but not for living on. We’ll be scattering in a great many ships. Each one will have to be self-sustaining in interstellar space perhaps for thousands of years.”

  “Self-sustaining in …
?”

  “Just think of it as being beyond any possible help or dependable resupply.”

  “In space … between the stars. That’s what you mean. No sun. Almost nothing.”

  “Yes.”

  “The elders who raised us when our mother died … they knew about such things. One used to write about them before the war to help others understand.”

  I said nothing. Let her think for a while.

  She sat silent, frowning, sometimes shaking her head. After a while, she rubbed her face with both hands and moved to sit next to Tomás.

  “Shall I wake him?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  I went into the forest and brought back a few sticks of dry wood. The rain began just as I returned. Jesusa sat where I had left her, rocking back and forth a little. I hung the basket of food that I had brought on the stump of a branch that had been left on one of the support saplings. Jesusa was hungry, but she did not want to eat now. I could satisfy the needs of her body without getting her to eat. Linked with her, I could transfer nourishment to her.

  I fed the fire, then went to sit with her, Tomás lying between us.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she said softly. “My brother was going to die, you know.” She stroked his black hair.

  “Someone is always going to die.” She paused. “He was going to kill himself as soon as he got me within sight of home. I don’t know whether I could have stopped him this time.”

  “He tried before?” I asked.

  She nodded. “That was the reason for this trip. To keep him alive a little longer.” She looked at me solemn-faced. “We didn’t need you to tell us he was becoming disabled. We’ve watched it happen to too many of our people. And … they just go on having children until they die or it becomes physically impossible.” She touched his misshapen face. “Last year, he broke his leg and had to lie on his back with his leg splinted and attached to weights for weeks. He told the elders he didn’t remember what happened. I told them he fell. They would have locked him up otherwise. We both knew he’d jumped. He meant to die. That long fall down to the river should have killed him. Thank god it didn’t. I promised him we would make this trip before they married us off. I said when his leg was strong, we would slip away. He had wanted to do that for years. Only I knew. It was wrong, of course. Fertile young people risking themselves in the lowland forests, risking the welfare of everyone. … I did it for him. I didn’t even want to come here.” Tears streamed down her face, but she made no sound of crying, no move to wipe her face.