The demands of the lowlanders and the people of the ship were surprisingly easy for me to absorb and understand. I could handle the intensity and the complexity. What I wasn’t sure I could handle was the result. The whole business was like Lilith’s rounded black cloud of hair. Every strand seemed to go its own different way, bending, twisting, spiraling, angling. Yet together they formed a symmetrical, recognizable shape, and all were attached to the same head.
Oankali and construct opinion also took on a recognizable shape from apparent chaos. The head that they were attached to was the generally accepted belief that Aaor and I were potentially dangerous and should either go to the ship or stay where we were. The lowland towns were apologetic, but they still felt unsure and afraid of us. We represented the premature adulthood of a new species. We represented true independence—reproductive independence—for that species, and this frightened both Oankali and constructs. We were, as one signaler remarked, frighteningly competent ooloi. We must be watched and understood before any more of us were made—and before we could be permitted to settle in a lowland town.
Continued exile, then. The mountains. We would not go to Chkahichdahk. The people knew that. We let them know it again, Aaor and I together.
“There will be two more of you,” someone signaled from far away. I separated out the signal in my memory and realized that it had come from far to the east and south on the other side of the continent. There, an ooloi in a Mandarin-speaking Jah village was reporting its shameful error, its children going wrong. Both were in metamorphosis now. Both would be ooloi.
“Bring them here as soon as they can travel,” I signaled. “They’ll need mates quickly. It would be best if they had chosen mates already.”
“This is first metamorphosis,” the signaler protested.
“And they are construct! Bring them here or they’ll die. Put them on a shuttle as soon as you can. For now, let them know that there are mates for them here.”
After a time, the signaler agreed.
This produced confusion among the people. One mistake simply focused attention on the ooloi responsible. Two mistakes unconnected, but happening so close together in time after a century of perfection, might indicate something other than ooloi incompetence.
There was much communication about this, but no conclusion. Finally Aaor interrupted.
“This will probably happen again,” it said. “An ooloi subadult who doesn’t want to go to the ship should be sent here. The Humans who want to stay here should be left here and let alone. They want mates and I think there are Oankali and constructs who are willing to come here to mate with them.”
“I believe we will be staying,” Kahguyaht signaled. “We’ve found resisters who might mate with us.” It paused. “I don’t believe they would even consider us if they hadn’t spent these last months living near Jodahs and Aaor.”
“Your ooan children,” someone signaled.
Kahguyaht signaled very slowly. “Where is the flaw in what I’ve said?”
No response. I doubted that anyone really believed Kahguyaht was expressing misplaced family pride. It was simply telling the truth.
“Aaor and I want Oankali mates,” I signaled. “We want to start children. I think once we’ve done that and once you’ve examined our children, you’ll know that we’re not dangerous.”
“You are dangerous,” several people signaled. “There’s no safe way to begin a new species.”
“Then help us. Send us mates and young construct ooloi. Watch us all you like, but don’t hinder us.”
“Have you planted a town?” someone on Chkahichdahk asked.
I signaled negative. “We didn’t know we would be staying here … permanently.”
“Plant a town,” several people signaled. “How can you think of having children with no town to hold them?”
I hesitated, focused on Kahguyaht. It spoke aloud within the shuttle. “Plant a town, Lelka. In less than a hundred years, my mates and I will be dead. You should plant the town that you and your mates and children will leave this world in.”
“If I plant a town,” I signaled the people, “will Aaor and I be permitted Oankali mates? Will Oankali and construct mates come to the Humans here?”
There was a long period of discussion. Some people were more concerned about us than others. Some, clearly, would have nothing to do with us until we had been stable for several more years, and clearly done no harm. They were in the minority. The majority decided that as long as we stayed where we were, anyone who wanted to join us could do so.
“Plant a town,” they told us. “Prepare a place. People will come.”
A few of them signaled such eagerness that I knew they would be with us as soon as they could get a shuttle. Humans who wanted mates were rare enough and desirable enough to make people dare to face any danger they thought Aaor and I might present. And Aaor and I were interesting enough in our newness to seduce Oankali who needed ooloi mates. People seeking mates were more vulnerable to seduction than they would be at any other time in their lives. They would come.
16
SOMETIME LATER, WHEN THE visiting families and the mountain Humans had begun to get together and curiously examine one another, I prepared to plant the new town.
I sorted through the vast genetic memory that Nikanj had given me. There was a single cell within that great store—a cell that could be “awakened” from its stasis within yashi and stimulated to divide and grow into a kind of seed. This seed could become a town or a shuttle or a great ship like Chkahichdahk. In fact, my seed would begin as a town and eventually leave Earth as a great ship. It would never be a shuttle, though it would be parent to shuttles.
Over the next few days, I found the cell, awakened it, nourished it, and encouraged it to divide. When it had divided several times, I stopped it, separated one cell from the mass, and returned that cell to stasis. This was work that only an adult ooloi could do, and I found that I enjoyed it immensely.
I took the remaining mass—the seed—still within my body to the place that the Humans and the visiting families had agreed was good for people and towns. Several of the visitors and Humans traveled with me by shuttle, since the chosen place was well upriver from the mountain village. There were scattered stone ruins at the new place where the canyon broadened into a large valley. Plenty of land, plenty of water, easy access to many needed minerals. Less easy access to others, according to what the shuttle’s senses told us when it had landed and tasted the new place. But whether or not the town had to develop a longer and more complex root system than most towns, everything it needed was within its reach. Including us. Here the town could grow and always have the companionship of some of us. It would need that companionship as much as we did during our metamorphoses. Yet we were planting it too far from the mountain people’s crops for it to be tempted to reach them and eat them before it was big enough to feed the people itself. While it was young, it would be particularly voracious. And it would need the space the valley afforded it to grow and mature before it had to deal with mountains.
“This could be a good place to live,” one of the elders commented as she left the shuttle and looked around. She was the woman whose leg Aaor had regenerated. She had decided with most of her people to stay on Earth.
“There’s room here for many people,” Jesusa said, looking at me. She wanted a child even more than I did. It was hard for her to wait for Oankali mates. At least now we knew there were potential mates coming.
I chose a spot near the river. There I prepared the seed to go into the ground. I gave it a thick, nutritious coating, then brought it out of my body through my right sensory hand. I planted it deep in the rich soil of the riverbank. Seconds after I had expelled it, I felt it begin the tiny positioning movements of independent life.
A Biography of Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a bestselling and award-winning author, considered one of the best science fiction writers of her generation.
She received both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and in 1995 became the first author of science fiction to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also awarded the prestigious PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
Butler’s father died when she was very young; her mother raised her in Pasadena, California. Shy, tall, and dyslexic, Butler immersed herself in reading whatever books she could find. She began writing at twelve, when a B movie called Devil Girl from Mars inspired her to try writing a better science-fiction story.
She took writing classes throughout college, attending the Clarion Writers Workshop and, in 1969, the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters’ Guild of America, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. There she met renowned science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who adopted Butler as his protégé.
In 1974 she began writing Patternmaster (1976), set in a future world where a network of all-powerful telepaths dominate humanity. Praised both for its imaginative vision and for Butler’s powerful prose, the novel spawned four prequels, beginning with Mind of My Mind (1977) and finishing with Clay’s Ark (1984).
Although the Patternist series established Butler among the science fiction elite, Kindred (1979) brought her mainstream success. In that novel, a young black woman travels back in time to the antebellum South, where she is called on to protect the life of a white, slaveholding ancestor. Kindred’s protagonist stood out in a genre that, at the time, was widely dominated by white men.
In 1985, Butler won Nebula and Hugo awards for the novella Bloodchild, which was reprinted in 1995 as Bloodchild and Other Stories. Dawn (1987) began the Xenogenesis trilogy, about a race of aliens who visit earth to save humanity from itself. Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) continue the story, following the life of the first child born with a mixture of alien and human DNA.
Fledgling (2005), which combines vampire and science fiction narratives, was Butler’s final novel. “She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels,” mystery author Walter Mosley said. “She was writing very difficult, brilliant work.” Her books have been translated into several languages, and continue to appear widely in school and college literature curricula.
Butler died at home in Washington in 2006.
Butler, age three, sits with her mother for a photo in Los Angeles in 1951.
Butler at age thirteen. She began writing the year before when a science fiction film—the cult favorite Devil Girl from Mars—inspired her to create something of her own.
Butler’s 1965 senior class photo from John Muir High School in Pasadena, California.
Butler reading a book in 1975, the year before she published Patternmaster.
Butler on a book tour for Parable of the Sower in New York City in 1993.
Butler addresses the audience at Marygrove College, Detroit, during the Contemporary American Author Lecture Series in 1994.
Butler won both Nebula and Hugo awards for her contributions to the science fiction genre. (Photo courtesy of Anna Fedor.)
Butler with authors Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez (standing), Samuel R. Delany, and Steven Barnes (sitting) at Clark Atlanta University’s conference for African American science fiction writers—the first of its kind—in 1997.
When Butler passed away in 2006, the New York Times eulogized her as a world-renowned author whose science fiction explored “far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dawn copyright © 1987 by Octavia E. Butler
Adulthood Rites copyright © 1988 by Octavia E. Butler
Imago copyright © 1989 by Octavia E. Butler
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
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Lilith's Brood: Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago Page 73
