Adulthood Rites

by Octavia E. Butler

  He nodded. “Talk to them, Akin. Find out when they were taken and where their village is—if they know. Can they remember things the way you can?”

  “All constructs remember.”

  “Good. They’re going to stay with us, so start teaching them English.”

  “They’re siblings. Very close. They need to stay together.”

  “Do they? We’ll see.”

  Akin did not like that. He would have to warn Amma and Shkaht to get sick if they were separated. Crying would not work. The Humans had to be frightened, had to think they might lose one or two of their new children. They had now what they had probably never had before: children they thought might eventually be fertile together. From what he had heard about resisters, he had no doubt that some of them really believed they could soon breed new, Human-trained, Human-looking children.

  “Let’s go outside,” he told them. “Are you still hungry?”

  “Yes.” They spoke in unison.

  “Come on. I’ll show you where the best things grow.”

  14

  THE NEXT DAY, ALL three children were arranged in backpacks and carried toward the mountains. They were not allowed to walk. Gabe carried Akin atop a bundle of supplies, and Tate walked behind, carrying even more supplies. Amma rode on Macy Wilton’s back and surreptitiously tasted him with one of her small body tentacles. She had a normal Human tongue, but each of her tentacles would serve her as well as Akin’s long, gray Oankali tongue. Shkaht’s throat tentacles gave her a more sensitive sense of smell and taste than Akin, and she could use her hands for tasting. Also, she had slender, dark tentacles on her head, mixed with her hair. She could see with these. She could not see with her eyes. She had learned, though, to seem to look at people with her eyes—to turn and face them and to move her slender head tentacles as she moved her head so that Humans were not disturbed by her hair seeming to crawl about. She would have to be very careful because Humans, for some reason, liked to cut people’s hair. They cut their own, and they had cut Akin’s. Even back in Lo, men in particular either cut their own hair or got others to cut it. Akin did not want to think about what it might feel like to have sensory tentacles cut off. Nothing could hurt worse. Nothing would be more likely to cause an Oankali or a construct to sting reflexively, fatally.

  The Humans walked all day, stopping for rest and food only once at noon. They did not talk about where they were going or why, but they walked quickly, as though they feared pursuit.

  They were a party of twenty, armed, in spite of Tate’s efforts, with the four guns of Akin’s captors. Damek was still alive, but he could not walk. He was being cared for back at Phoenix. Akin suspected that he had no idea what was going on—that his gun was gone, that Akin was gone. What he did not know, he could not resent or tell.

  That night the Humans erected tents and made beds of blankets and branches or bamboo—whatever they could find. Some stretched hammocks between trees and slept outside the tents since they saw no sign of rain. Akin asked to sleep outside with someone and a woman named Abira simply reached out of her hammock and lifted him in. She seemed glad to have him in spite of the heat and humidity. She was a short, very strong woman who carried a pack as heavy as those of men half again her size, yet she handled him with gentleness.

  “I had three little boys before the war,” she said in her strangely accented English. She had come from Israel. She gave his head a quick rub—her favorite caress—and went to sleep, leaving him to find his own most comfortable position.

  Amma and Shkaht slept together on their own bed of blanket-covered bamboo. Humans valued them, fed them, sheltered them, but they did not like the girls’ tentacles—would not deliberately allow themselves to be touched by the small sensory organs. Amma had only managed to taste Macy Wilton because she was riding on his back and her tentacles were able to burrow through the clothing he had put between himself and her.

  No Human wanted to sleep with them. Even now Neci Roybal and her husband Stancio were whispering about the possibility of removing the tentacles while the girls were young.

  Alarmed, Akin listened carefully.

  “They’ll learn to do without the ugly little things if we take them off while they’re so young,” Neci was saying.

  “We have no proper anesthetics,” the man protested. “It would be cruel.” He was his wife’s opposite, quiet, steady, kind. People tolerated Neci for his sake. Akin avoided him in order to avoid Neci. But Neci had a way of saying a thing and saying a thing over and over until other people began to say it—and believe it.

  “They won’t feel much now,” she said. “They’re so young … And those little worm things are so small. Now is the best time to do it.”

  Stancio said nothing.

  “They’ll learn to use their Human senses,” Neci whispered. “They’ll see the world as we do and be more like us.”

  “Do you want to cut them?” Stancio asked. “Little girls. Almost babies.”

  “Don’t talk foolishness. It can be done. They’ll heal. They’ll forget they ever had tentacles.”

  “Maybe they’d grow back.”

  “Cut them off again!”

  There was a long silence.

  “How many times, Neci,” the man said finally. “How many times would you torture children? Would you torture them if they had come from your body? Will you torture them now because they did not?”

  Nothing more was said. Akin thought Neci cried a little. She made small, wordless sounds. Stancio made only regular breathing sounds. After a time, Akin realized he had fallen asleep.

  15

  THEY SPENT DAYS WALKING through forest, climbing forested hills. But it was cooler now, and Akin and the girls had to fight off attempts to clothe them more warmly. There was still plenty to eat, and their bodies adjusted quickly and easily to the temperature change. Akin went on wearing the short pants Pilar Leal had made for him. There had been no time for clothing to be made for the girls, so they wore lengths of cloth wrapped around their waists and tied at the top. This was the only clothing they did not deliberately shed and lose.

  Akin had begun sleeping with them on the second night of the journey. They needed to learn more English and learn it quickly. Neci was doing as Akin had expected—saying over and over to different people in quiet, intense conversation that the girls’ tentacles should be removed now, while they were young, so that they would look more Human, so that they would learn to depend on their Human senses and perceive the world in a Human way. People laughed at her behind her back, but now and then, Akin heard them talking about the tentacles—how ugly they were, how much better the girls would look without them …

  “Will they cut us?” Amma asked him when he told them. All her tentacles had flattened invisibly to her flesh.

  “They might try,” Akin said. “We have to stop them from trying.”

  “How?”

  Shkaht touched him with one of her small, sensitive hands. “Which Humans do you trust?” she asked. She was the younger of the two, but she had managed to learn more.

  “The woman I live with. Tate. Not her husband. Just her. I’m going to tell her the truth.”

  “Can she really do anything?”

  “She can. She might not. She does … strange things sometimes. She … The worst thing she might do now is nothing.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “What’s wrong with them all? Haven’t you noticed?”

  “… yes. But I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either, really. But it’s the way they have to live. They want kids, so they buy us. But we still aren’t their kids. They want to have kids. Sometimes they hate us because they can’t. And sometimes they hate us because we’re part of the Oankali and the Oankali are the ones who won’t let them have kids.”

  “They could have dozens of kids if they stop living by themselves and join us.”

  “They want kids the way they used to have them before the war. Without the Oankali.�
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  “Why?”

  “It’s their way.” He lay in a jumble with them so that sensory spot found sensory spot, so that the girls were able to use their sensory tentacles and he was able to use his tongue. They were almost unaware that the conversation had ceased to be vocal. Akin had already learned that Humans considered them to be asleep half-atop one another when they lay this way.

  “There won’t be any more of them,” he said, trying to project the sensations of aloneness and fear he believed the Humans felt. “Their kind is all they’ve ever known or been, and now there won’t be any more. They try to make us like them, but we won’t ever be really like them, and they know it.”

  The girls shuddered, broke contact briefly, minutely. When they touched him again they seemed to communicate as one person.

  “We are them! And we are the Oankali. You know. If they could perceive, they would know!”

  “If they could perceive, they would be us. They can’t and they aren’t. We’re the best of what they are and the best of what the Oankali are. But because of us, they won’t exist anymore.”

  “Oankali Dinso and Toaht won’t exist anymore.”

  “No. But Akjai will go away unchanged. If the Human-Oankali construct doesn’t work here or with the Toaht, Akjai will continue.”

  “Only if they find some other people to blend with.” This came distinctly from Amma.

  “Humans had come to their own end,” Shkaht said. “They were flawed and overspecialized. If they hadn’t had their war, they would have found another way to kill themselves.”

  “Perhaps,” Akin admitted. “I was taught that, too. And I can see the conflict in their genes—the new intelligence put at the service of ancient hierarchical tendencies. But … they didn’t have to destroy themselves. They certainly don’t have to do it again.”

  “How could they not?” Amma demanded. All that she had learned, all that the bodies of her own Human parents had shown her told her he was talking nonsense. She had not been among resister Humans long enough to begin to see them as a truly separate people.

  Yet she must understand. She would be female. Someday, she would tell her children what Humans were. And she did not know. He was only beginning to learn himself.

  He said with intensity, with utter certainty, “There should be a Human Akjai! There should be Humans who don’t change or die—Humans to go on if the Dinso and Toaht unions fail.”

  Amma was moving uncomfortably against him, first touching, then breaking contact as though it hurt her to know what he was saying, but her curiosity would not let her stay away. Shkaht was still, fastened to him by slender head tentacles, trying to absorb what he was saying.

  “You’re here for this,” she said aloud softly. Her voice startled him, though he did not move. She had spoken in Oankali, and her communication, like his, had the feel of intensity and truth.

  Amma linked more deeply into both of them, giving them her frustration. She did not understand.

  “He is being left here,” Shkaht explained silently. She deliberately soothed her sibling with her own calm certainly. “They want him to know the Humans,” she said. “They would not have sent him to them, but since he’s here and not being hurt, they want him to learn so that later he can teach.”

  “What about us?”

  “I don’t know. They couldn’t come for us without taking him. And they probably didn’t know where we would be sold—or even whether we would be sold. I think we’ll be left here until they decide to come for him—unless we’re in danger.”

  “We’re in danger now,” Amma whispered aloud.

  “No. Akin will talk to Tate. If Tate can’t help us, we’ll disappear some night soon.”

  “Run away?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Humans would catch us!”

  “No. We’d travel at night, hide during the day, take to the nearest river when it’s safe.”

  “Can you breathe underwater?” Akin asked Amma.

  “Not yet,” she answered, “but I’m a good swimmer. I always went in whenever Shkaht did. If I get into trouble, Shkaht helps—links with me and breathes for me.”

  As Akin’s sibling would have been able to help him. He withdrew from them, reminded by their unity of his own solitude. He could talk to them, communicate with them nonvocally, but he could never have the special closeness with them that they had with each other. Soon he would be too old for it—if he wasn’t already. And what was happening to his sibling?

  “I don’t believe they’re leaving me with the Humans deliberately,” he said. “My parents wouldn’t do that. My Human mother would come alone if no one would come with her.”

  Both girls were back in contact with him at once. “No!” Shkaht was saying. “When resisters find women alone, they keep them. We saw it happen at a village where our captors tried to trade us.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Some men came to the village. They lived there, but they had been traveling. They had a woman with them, her arms tied with rope and a rope tied around her neck. They said they had found her and she was theirs. She screamed at them, but no one knew her language. They kept her.”

  “No one could do that to my mother,” Akin said. “She wouldn’t let them. She travels alone whenever she wants to.”

  “But how would she find you alone? Maybe every resister village she went to would try to tie her up and keep her. Maybe if they couldn’t they would hurt her or kill her with guns.”

  Maybe they would. They seemed to do such things so easily. Maybe they already had.

  Some communication he did not catch passed between Amma and Shkaht. “You have three Oankali parents,” Shkaht whispered aloud. “They know more about resisters than we do. They wouldn’t let her go alone, would they? If they couldn’t stop her, they would go with her, wouldn’t they?”

  “… yes,” Akin answered, feeling no certainty at all. Amma and Shkaht did not know Lilith, did not know how she became so frightening sometimes that everyone stayed away from her. Then she vanished for a while. Who knew what might happen to her while she roamed the forests alone?

  The girls had placed him between them. He did not realize until it was too late that they were calming him with their own deliberate calm, soothing him, putting themselves and him to sleep.

  Akin awoke the next day still miserable, still frightened for his mother and lonely for his sibling. Yet he went to Tate and asked her to carry him for a while so that he could talk to her.

  She picked him up at once and took him to the small, fast-running stream where the camp had gotten its water.

  “Wash,” she said, “and talk to me here. I don’t want people watching the two of us whispering together.”

  He washed and told her about Neci’s efforts to have Amma’s and Shkaht’s tentacles removed. “They would grow back,” he said. “And until they did, Shkaht wouldn’t be able to see at all or breathe properly. She would be very sick. She might die. Amma probably wouldn’t die, but she would be crippled. She wouldn’t be able to use any of her senses to their full advantage. She wouldn’t be able to recognize smells and tastes that should be familiar to her—as though she could touch them, but not grasp them—until her tentacles grew back. They would always grow back. And it would hurt her to have them cut off—maybe the way it would hurt you to have your eyes cut out.”

  Tate sat on a fallen log, ignoring its fungi and its insects. “Neci has a way of convincing people,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I came to you.”

  “Gabe said something to me about a little surgery on the girls. Are you sure it was Neci’s idea?”

  “I heard her talking about it on the first night after we left Phoenix.”

  “God.” Tate sighed. “And she won’t quit. She never quits. If the girls were older, I’d like to give her a knife and tell her to go try it.” She stared at Akin. “And since neither of those two is an ooloi, I assume that would be fatal to her. Wouldn’t
it, Akin?”

  “… yes.”

  “What if the girls were unconscious?”

  “It wouldn’t matter. Even if they … Even if they were dead and hadn’t been dead very long, their tentacles would still sting anyone who tried to cut them or pull them.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that instead of telling me how badly the girls would be hurt?”

  “I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.”

  “No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.”

  “You’re going to tell them?”

  “In a way. I’m going to tell them a story. Gabe and I once saw what happened to a man who injured an Oankali’s body tentacles. That was back on the ship. There are other people in Phoenix who remember, but none of them are with us here. Your mother was with us then, Akin, though I don’t intend to mention her.”

  Akin looked away from her, stared across the stream bed, and wondered if his mother were still alive.

  “Hey,” Tate said. “What’s the matter?”

  “You should have taken me home,” he said bitterly. “You say you know my mother. You should have taken me back to her.”

  Silence.

  “Shkaht says men in resister villages tie up women when they catch them, and they keep them. My mother probably knows that, but she would look for me anyway. She wouldn’t let them keep her, but they might shoot her or cut her.”

  More silence.

  “You should have taken me home.” He was crying openly now.

  “I know,” she whispered. “And I’m sorry. But I can’t take you home. You mean too much to my people.” She had crossed her arms in front of her, the fingers of each hand curved around an elbow. She had made a bar against him like the wooden bars she used to secure her doors. He went to her and put his hands on her arms.

  “They won’t let you keep me much longer,” he said. “And even if they did … Even if I grew up in Phoenix and Amma and Shkaht grew up there, you would still need an ooloi. And there are no construct ooloi.”