Adulthood Rites

by Octavia E. Butler

  “Can he talk?”

  “All the time. Come on.”

  He followed her along the path, and Akin watched him through light-sensitive patches on the skin of his shoulder and arm.

  “Baby?” the man said peering at him.

  Akin, remembering what Margit had told him, turned his head so that he faced the man. “Akin,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  The man let his mouth fall open. “How old are you?” he demanded.

  Akin stared at him silently.

  “Don’t you understand me?” the man asked. He had a jagged scar on one of his shoulders, and Akin wondered what had made it.

  The man slapped at a mosquito with his free hand and spoke to Lilith. “How old is he?”

  “Tell him your name,” she said.

  “What?”

  She said nothing more.

  The man’s smallest toe was missing from his right foot, Akin noticed. And there were other marks on his body—scars, paler than the rest of his skin. He must have hurt himself often and had no ooloi to help him heal. Nikanj would never have left so many scars.

  “Okay,” the man said. “I give up. My name is Augustino Leal. Everybody calls me Tino.”

  “Shall I call you that?” Akin asked.

  “Sure, why not? Now, how the hell old are you?”

  “Nine months.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “No, I can stand up if there’s something for me to hold on to, but I’m not very good at it yet. Why did you stay away from the villages for so long? Don’t you like kids?”

  “I … don’t know.”

  “They aren’t all like me. Most of them can’t talk until they’re older.”

  The man reached out and touched his face. Akin grasped one of the man’s fingers and drew it to his mouth. He tasted it quickly with a snakelike flick of his tongue and a penetration too swift, too slight to notice. He collected a few living cells for later study.

  “At least you put things in your mouth the way babies used to,” he said.

  “Akin,” Lilith said, cautioning.

  Suppressing his frustration, he let the man’s finger go. He would have preferred to investigate further, to understand more of how the genetic information he read had been expressed and to see what nongenetic factors he could discover. He wanted to try to read the man’s emotions and to find the marks the Oankali had left in him when they collected him from postwar Earth, when they repaired him and stored him away in suspended animation.

  Perhaps later he would have the chance.

  “If the kid is this smart now, what’s he going to be like as an adult?” Tino asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lilith told him. “The only adult male constructs we have so far are Oankali-born—born to Oankali mothers. If Akin is like them, he’ll be bright enough, but his interests will be so diverse and, in some cases, so just plain un-Human that he’ll wind up keeping to himself a lot.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “But … you didn’t have to have kids.”

  “As it happens, I did have to. I had two construct kids by the time they brought me down from the ship. I never had a chance to run off and pine for the good old days!”

  The man said nothing. If he stayed long, he would learn that Lilith had these flares of bitterness sometimes. They never seemed to affect her behavior, though often they frightened people. Margit had said, “It’s as though there’s something in her trying to get out. Something terrible.” Whenever the something seemed on the verge of surfacing, Lilith went alone into the forest and stayed away for days. Akin’s oldest sisters said they used to worry that she would leave and not come back.

  “They forced you to have kids?” the man asked.

  “One of them surprised me,” she said. “It made me pregnant, then told me about it. Said it was giving me what I wanted but would never come out and ask for.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes.” She shook her head from side to side. “Oh, yes. But if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone.”

  5

  THE RAIN HAD BEGUN by the time they reached the village, and Akin enjoyed the first few warm drops that made their way through the forest canopy. Then they were indoors—followed by everyone who had seen Lilith arrive with a stranger.

  “They’ll want your life story,” Lilith told him softly. “They want to hear about your village, your travels; anything you know may be news to us. We don’t get that many travelers. And later, when you’ve eaten and talked and whatever, they’ll try to drag you off to their beds. Do what you like. If you’re too tired for any of this now, say so, and we’ll save your party until tomorrow.”

  “You didn’t tell me I would have to entertain,” he said, staring at the inpouring of Humans, constructs, and Oankali.

  “You don’t have to. Do what you like.”

  “But …” He looked around helplessly, cringed away from an Oankali-born unsexed construct child who touched him with one of the sensory tentacles growing from its head.

  “Don’t scare him,” Akin told it from Lilith’s back. He spoke in Oankali. “There aren’t any of us where he comes from.”

  “Resister?” the child asked.

  “Yes. But I don’t think he means any harm. He didn’t try to hurt us.”

  “What does the kid want?” Tino asked.

  “It’s just curious about you,” Lilith told him. “Do you want to talk to these people while I put together a meal?”

  “I guess so. I’m not a good storyteller, though.”

  Lilith turned to the still gathering crowd. “All right,” she said loudly. And when they had quieted: “His name is Augustino Leal. He comes from a long way away, and he says he feels like talking.”

  People cheered.

  “If anyone wants to go home to get something to eat or drink, we’ll wait.”

  Several Humans and constructs left, ordering her not to let anything begin without them. An Oankali took Akin from her back. Dichaan. Akin flattened against him happily, sharing what he had learned of the new Human.

  “You like him?” Dichaan asked by way of tactile signals shaded with sensory images.

  “Yes. He’s a little afraid and dangerous. Mother had to take his weapon. But he’s mostly curious. He’s so curious he feels like one of us.”

  Dichaan projected amusement. Maintaining his sensory link with Akin, he watched Lilith give Tino something to drink. The man tasted the drink and smiled. People had gathered around him, sitting on the floor. Most of them were children, and this seemed to put him at ease in one way—he was no longer afraid—and excite him in another. His eyes focused on one child after another, examining the wide variety of them.

  “Will he try to steal someone?” Akin asked silently.

  “If he did, Eka, it would probably be you.” Dichaan softened the statement with amusement, but there was a seriousness beneath it that Akin did not miss. The man probably meant no harm, was probably not a child thief. But Akin should be careful, should not allow himself to be alone with Tino.

  People brought food, shared it among themselves and with Lilith as they accepted what she offered. They fed their own children and each other’s children as usual. A child who could walk could get bits of food anywhere.

  Lilith prepared Tino and her younger children dishes of flat cassava bread layered with hot scigee and quat alongside hot, spicy beans. There were slices of pineapple and papaya for dessert. She fed Akin small amounts of quat mixed with cassava. She did not let him nurse until she had settled down with everyone else to talk and listen to Tino.

  “They named our village Phoenix before my parents reached it,” Tino told them. “We weren’t original settlers. We came in half-dead from the forest—we’d eaten something bad, some kind of palm fruit. It was edible, all right, but only if you cooked it—and we hadn’t. Anyway, we stumbled in, and the people of Phoenix to
ok care of us. I was the only child they had—the only Human child they’d seen since before the war. The whole village sort of adopted me because …” He stopped, glanced at a cluster of Oankali. “Well, you know. They wanted to find a little girl. They thought maybe the few kids who hadn’t gone through puberty before they were set free might be fertile together when they grew up.” He stared at the nearest Oankali, who happened to be Nikanj. “True or false?” he asked.

  “False,” Nikanj said softly. “We told them it was false. They chose not to believe.”

  Tino stared at Nikanj—gave it a look that Akin did not understand. The look was not threatening, but Nikanj drew its body tentacles up slightly into the beginnings of a prestrike threat gesture. Humans called it knotting up or getting knotty. They knew it meant getting angry or otherwise upset. Few of them realized it was also a reflexive, potentially lethal gesture. Every sensory tentacle could sting. The ooloi could also sting with their sensory arms. But at least they could sting without killing. Male and female Oankali and constructs could only kill. Akin could kill with his tongue. This was one of the first things Nikanj had taught him not to do. Let alone, he might have discovered his ability by accident and killed Lilith or some other Human. The thought of this had frightened him at first, but he no longer worried about it. He had never seen anyone sting anyone.

  Even now, Nikanj’s body language indicated only mild upset. But why should Tino upset it at all? Akin began to watch Nikanj instead of Tino. As Tino spoke, all of Nikanj’s long head tentacles swung around to focus on him. Nikanj was intensely interested in this newcomer. After a moment, it got up and made its way over to Lilith. It took Akin from her arms.

  Akin had finished nursing and now flattened obligingly against Nikanj, giving what he knew Nikanj wanted: genetic information about Tino. In trade, he demanded to have explained the feelings Nikanj had expressed with its indrawn sensory tentacles.

  In silent, vivid images and signals, Nikanj explained. “That one wanted to stay with us when he was a child. We couldn’t agree to keep him, but we hoped he would come to us when he was older.”

  “You knew him then?”

  “I handled his conditioning. He spoke only Spanish then. Spanish is one of my Human languages. He was only eight years old and not afraid of me. I didn’t want to let him go. Everyone knew his parents would run when we released them. They would become resisters and perhaps die in the forest. But I couldn’t get a consensus. We aren’t good at raising Human children, so no one wanted to break up the family. And even I didn’t want to force them all to stay with us. We had prints of them. If they died or kept resisting we could fashion genetic copies of them to be born to trader Humans. They wouldn’t be lost to the gene pool. We decided that might have to be enough.”

  “Tino recognized you?”

  “Yes, but in a very Human way, I think. I don’t believe he understands why I caught his attention. He doesn’t have complete access to memory.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “It’s a Human thing. Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them—usually—but lose the experience itself. We can retrieve it for them—enable them to recall everything—but for many of them, that would only create confusion. They would remember so much that their memories would distract them from the present.”

  Akin received an impression of a dazed Human whose mind so overflowed with the past that every new experience triggered the reliving of several old ones, and those triggered others.

  “Will I get that way?” he asked fearfully.

  “Of course not. No construct is that way. We were careful.”

  “Lilith isn’t that way, and she remembers everything.”

  “Natural ability, plus some changes I made. She was chosen very carefully.”

  “How did Tino find you again? Did you bring him here before you let him go? Did he remember?”

  “This place didn’t exist when we let his family and a few others go. He was probably following the river. Did he have a canoe?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “If you follow the river and keep your eyes open, you’ll find villages.”

  “He found Mother and me.”

  “He’s Human—and he’s a resister. He wouldn’t want to just walk into a village. He would want to have a look at it first. And he was lucky enough to meet some harmless villagers—people who might introduce him into the village safely or who could let him know why he should avoid the village.”

  “Mother isn’t harmless.”

  “No, but she finds it convenient to seem harmless.”

  “What kind of village would he avoid?”

  “Other resister villages, probably. Resister villages—especially widely separated ones—are dangerous in different ways. Some of them are dangerous to one another. A few become dangerous to us, and we have to break them up. Human diversity is fascinating and seductive, but we can’t let it destroy them—or us.”

  “Will you keep Tino here?”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Your mother doesn’t yet, but she might change her mind. Perhaps he’ll want to stay.”

  Akin, curious about adult relationships, used all his senses to perceive what went on between his parents and Tino.

  First there was Tino’s story to be finished.

  “I don’t know what to tell you about our village,” he was saying. “It’s full of old people who look young—just like here, I guess. Except here you have kids. We worked hard, getting things as much like they used to be as possible. That’s what kept everyone going. The idea that we could use our long lives to bring back civilization—get things ready for when they found a girl for me or discovered some way to get kids of their own. They believed it would happen. I believed. Hell, I believed more than anyone.

  “We did salvaging and quarrying in the mountains. I was never allowed to go. They were afraid something would happen to me. But I helped build the houses. Real houses, not huts. We even had glass for the windows. We made glass and traded it with other resister villages. One of them came in with us when they saw how well we were doing. That almost doubled our numbers. They had a guy about three years younger than me, but no young women.

  “We made a town. We even had a couple of mills for power. That made building easier. We built like crazy. If you were really busy, you didn’t have to think that maybe you were doing it all for nothing. Maybe all we were going to do was sit in our handsome houses and pray in our nice church and watch everybody not getting old.

  “Then in one week, two guys and a woman hung themselves. Four others just disappeared. It would hit us like that—like a disease that one person caught and spread. We never had one suicide or one murder or one disappearance. Somebody else always caught the disease. I guess I finally caught it. Where do people go when they disappear? Someplace like this?” He looked around, sighed, then frowned. His tone changed abruptly. “You people have all the advantages. The Oankali can get you anything. Why do you live this way?”

  “We’re comfortable,” Akin’s oldest sister Ayre said. “This isn’t a terrible way to live.”

  “It’s primitive! You live like savages! I mean …” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just that … I don’t know any polite way to ask this: Why don’t you at least build real houses and get rid of these shacks! You should see what we have! And … Hell, you have spaceships. How can you live this way!”

  Lilith spoke softly to him. “How many of those real houses of yours were empty when you left, Tino?”

  He faced her angrily. “My people never had a chance! They didn’t make the war. They didn’t make the Oankali. And they didn’t make themselves sterile! But you can be damn sure that everything they did make was good and it worked and they put their hearts into it. Hey, I t
hought, ‘If we made a town, the … traders … must have made a city!’ And what do I find? A village of huts with primitive gardens. This place is hardly even a clearing!” His voice had risen again. He looked around with disapproval. “You’ve got kids to plan for and provide for, and you’re going to let them slide right back to being cavemen!”

  A Human woman named Leah spoke up. “Our kids will be okay,” she said. “But I wish we could get more of your people to come here. They’re as close to immortal as a Human being has ever been, and all they can think of to do is build useless houses and kill one another.”

  “It’s time we offered the resisters a way back to us,” Ahajas said. “I think we’ve been too comfortable here.”

  Several Oankali made silent gestures of agreement.

  “Leave them alone,” Tino said. “You’ve done enough to them! I’m not going to tell you where they are!”

  Nikanj, still holding Akin, got up and moved through the seated people until it could sit with no one between itself and Tino. “None of the resister villages are hidden from us,” it said softly. “We wouldn’t have asked you where Phoenix was. And we don’t mean to focus on Phoenix. It’s time for us to approach all the resister villages and invite them to join us. It’s only to remind them that they don’t have to live sterile, pointless lives. We won’t force them to come to us, but we will let them know they’re still welcome. We let them go originally because we didn’t want to hold prisoners.”

  Tino laughed bitterly. “So everyone here is here of their own free will, huh?”

  “Everyone here is free to leave.”

  Tino gave Nikanj another of his unreadable looks and turned deliberately so that he faced Lilith. “How many men are there here?” he asked.

  Lilith looked around, found Wray Ordway who kept the small guest house stocked with food and other supplies. This was where newly arrived men lived until they paired off with one of the village women. It was the only house in the village that had been built of cut trees and palm thatch. Tino might sleep there tonight. Wray kept the guest house because he had chosen not to wander. He had paired with Leah and apparently never tired of her. The two of them with their three Oankali mates had nine Human-born daughters and eleven Oankali-born children.