Adulthood Rites

by Octavia E. Butler

“I told you, I asked to be taught. My teacher was ooloi. I can’t do everything it could do, but I can help your flesh and your bones heal. I can encourage your organs to repair themselves, even if they wouldn’t normally.”

  “I’ve never heard that males could do that,” Gabe said.

  “An ooloi could do it better. You would enjoy what it did. The safest thing for me to do is make you sleep.”

  “That’s what you’d do if you were an ooloi child, isn’t it?” Tate asked.

  “Yes. But it’s what I’ll always do, even as an adult. Ooloi change and become physically able to do more.”

  “I don’t want more done,” Tate said. “I want to be healed—healed of everything. And that’s all.”

  “I can’t do anything else.”

  Gabe made a short, wordless sound. “You can still sting, can’t you?”

  Akin suppressed an urge to stand up, to face Gabe. His body was almost tiny compared to Gabe’s. Even if he had been larger, physical confrontation would have been pointless. He simply stared at the man.

  After a time, Gabe came closer and bent to face Tate. “You really want to let him do this?”

  She sighed, closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m dying. Of course I’m going to let him do it.”

  And he sighed, stroked her hair lightly. “Yeah.” He turned to glare at Akin. “All right, do whatever it is you do.”

  Akin did not speak or move. He continued to watch Gabe, resenting the man’s attitude, knowing that it did not come only from fear for Tate.

  “Well?” Gabe said, standing straight and looking down. Tall men did this. They meant to intimidate. Some of them wanted to fight. Gabe simply intended to make a point he was in no position to make.

  Akin waited.

  Tate said, “Get out of here, Gabe. Leave us alone for a while.”

  “Leave you with him!”

  “Yes. Now. I’m sick of feeling like shit that’s been stepped in. Go.”

  He went. It was better for him to go because she wanted it than for him to give in to Akin. Akin would have preferred to let him go silently, but he did not dare.

  “Gabe,” he said as the man was going outside.

  Gabe stopped but did not turn.

  “Guard the door. An interruption could kill her.”

  Gabe closed the door behind him without speaking. Immediately, Tate let her breath out in a kind of moan. She looked at the door, then at Akin. “Do I have to do anything?”

  “No. Just put up with having me on that bench with you.”

  This did not seem to disturb her. “You’re small enough,” she said. “Come on.”

  He was no smaller than she was.

  Carefully, he settled himself between her and the wall. “I still have only my tongue to work with,” he said. “That means this will look like I’m biting you on the neck.”

  “You used to do that whenever I’d let you.”

  “I know. Apparently, though, it looks more threatening or more suspicious now.”

  She tried to laugh.

  “You don’t think he’ll come in, do you? It really could kill you if someone tried to pull us apart.”

  “He won’t. He learned a long time ago not to do things like that.”

  “Okay. You won’t sleep as quickly as you would with an ooloi because I can’t sting you unconscious. I have to convince your body to do all the work. Keep still now.”

  He put one arm around her to keep her in position when she lost consciousness, then put his mouth to the side of her neck. From then on, he was aware only of her body—its injured organs and poorly healed fractures … and its activation of her old illness, her Huntington’s disease. Did she know? Had the disease caused her to fall? It could have. Or she could have fallen deliberately in the hope of escaping the disease.

  She had strained and bruised the ligaments in her back. She had dislocated one of the disks of cartilage between the vertebrae of her neck. She had broken her left kneecap badly. Her kidneys were damaged. Both kidneys. How had she managed to do that? How far had she fallen?

  Her left wrist had been broken but had been set and had almost healed. There were also two rib fractures, nearly healed.

  Akin lost himself in the work—the pleasure—of finding injuries and stimulating her body’s own healing ability. He stimulated her body to produce an enzyme that turned off the Huntington’s gene. The gene would eventually become active again. She must have an ooloi take care of the disease permanently before she left Earth. He could not replace the deadly gene or trick her body into using genes she had not used since before her birth. He could not help her create new ova clean of the Huntington’s gene. What he had already done to suppress the gene was as much as he dared to do.

  3

  GABE’S INTERRUPTION OF AKIN’S healing produced the only serious disruption in his memory Akin ever experienced. All he recalled of it later was abrupt agony.

  In spite of his warning to Gabe, in spite of Tate’s reassurance, Gabe came into the room before the healing was complete. Akin learned later that Gabe returned because hours had passed without a sound from Akin or Tate. He was afraid for Tate, afraid something had gone wrong, and suspicious of Akin.

  He found Akin apparently unconscious, his mouth still against Tate’s neck. Akin did not even seem to breathe. Nor did Tate. Her flesh was cool—almost cold—and that frightened Gabe. He believed she was dying, feared she might already be dead. He panicked.

  First he tried to pull Tate free, alerting Akin on some level that something was wrong. But Akin’s attention was too much on Tate. He had only begun to disengage when Gabe hit him.

  Gabe was afraid of Akin’s sting. He would not grasp Akin and try to pull him away from Tate. Instead, he tried to knock Akin away with quick, hard punches.

  The first blow all but tore Akin loose. It hurt him more than he had ever been hurt, and he could not help passing some of his pain on to Tate.

  Yet he managed not to poison her. He did not know when she began to scream. He continued automatically to hold her. That and the fact that he was stronger than the larger Gabe enabled him to withdraw from Tate’s nervous system and then from her body without being badly injured—and without killing. Later he was amazed that he had done this. His teacher had warned him that males did not have the control to do such things. Oankali males and females avoided healing not only because they were not needed as healers but because they were more likely than ooloi to kill by accident. They could be driven to kill unintentionally by interruptions and even by their subjects if things went wrong. Even Gabe should have been in danger. Akin should have struck at him blindly, reflexively.

  Yet he did not.

  His body coiled into a painfully tight fetal knot and lay vulnerable and more completely unconscious than it had ever been.

  4

  WHEN AKIN BECAME ABLE to perceive the world around him again he discovered that he could not move or speak. He lay frozen, aware that sometimes there were Humans around him. They looked at him, sat with him sometimes, but did not touch him. For some time he did not know who they were—or where he was. Later, he compared this period with his earliest infancy. It was a time he remembered but took no part in. But even as an infant, he had been fed and washed and held. Now no hand touched him.

  He slowly became aware that two people did talk to him. Two females, both Human, one small and yellow-haired and pale. One slightly larger, dark-haired, and sun-browned.

  He was glad when they were with him.

  He dreaded their coming.

  They aroused him. Their scents reached deep into him and drew him to them. Yet he could not move. He lay, being drawn and drawn and utterly still. It was torment, but he preferred it to solitude.

  The females talked to him. After a while, he came to know that they were Tate and Yori. And he remembered all that he knew of Tate and Yori.

  Tate sat close to him and said his name. She told him how well she felt and how her crops were growing and what different people
in the settlement were doing. She did her sewing and her writing while sitting with Akin. She kept a journal.

  Yori kept one, too. Yori’s became a study of him. She told him so. He was in metamorphosis, she said. She had never seen metamorphosis before, but she had heard it described. Already there were small, new sensory tentacles on his back, on his head, on his legs. His skin was gray now, and he was losing his hair. She said he must find a way to tell them if he wished to be touched. She said Tate was all right, and Akin must find a way to communicate. She said anything he asked would be done for him. She would see to it. She said he must not worry about being alone because she would see that someone was always with him.

  This comforted him more than she could know. People in metamorphosis had little tolerance for solitude.

  Gabe sat with him. Gabe and the two women had lifted the bench he lay on and carried it and him into a small sunlit room.

  Sometimes Gabe tempted him with food or water. He could not know that the scent of the women tempted Akin more strongly than anything Gabe could place near him. He would have wanted food before he fell asleep if he had gone into metamorphosis normally. He would have eaten, then slept. He had heard that ooloi did not sleep straight through much of their second metamorphosis. Lilith had told him that Nikanj slept most of the time, but woke up now and then to eat and talk. Eventually it would fall into another deep sleep. Males and females slept through most of their one metamorphosis. They did not eat, drink, urinate, or defecate. The women stirred Akin, focused his attention, but the smells of food and water did not interest him. He noticed them because they were intermittent. They were environmental changes that he could not fail to notice.

  Gabe brought him plants, and he realized after a while that the plants were some of those that he had enjoyed eating when he was younger, upon which Gabe had seen him grazing. The man remembered. That pleased him and eased the sudden shock when, one day, Gabe touched him.

  There was no warning. As Gabe had decided to come into the room and separate Akin and Tate, he now decided to do one of the things Yori had told him and Tate not to do.

  He simply placed his hand on Akin’s back and shook Akin.

  After a moment, Akin shuddered. His small, new sensory tentacles moved for the first time, elongating reflexively toward the touching hand.

  Gabe jerked his hand away. He would not have been hurt, but he did not know that, and Akin could not tell him. Gabe did not touch him again.

  Pilar and Mateo Leal took their turns sitting with Akin. Tino’s parents. Mateo had killed people Akin had cared for very much. For a time, his presence made Akin intensely uncomfortable. Then, because he had no choice, Akin adjusted.

  Kolina Wilton sat with him sometimes but never spoke to him. One day, to his surprise, Macy Wilton sat with him. So the man was not always lying drunk in the street.

  Macy came back several times. He carved things of wood while he sat with Akin, and the smells of his woods were an announcement of his coming. He began to talk to Akin—to speculate about what had happened to Amma and Shkaht, to speculate about children he might someday father, to speculate about Mars.

  This told Akin for the first time that Gabe and Tate had spread the story, the hope that he had brought.

  Mars.

  “Not everyone wants to go,” Macy said. “I think they’re crazy if they stay here. I’d give anything to see homo sap have another chance. Lina and I will go. And don’t you worry about those others!”

  At once, Akin began to worry. There was no way to hurry metamorphosis. Bringing it on so traumatically had nearly killed him. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Wait and know that when Humans disagreed, they sometimes fought, and when they fought, all too often they killed one another.

  5

  AKIN’S METAMORPHOSIS DRAGGED ON. He was silent and motionless for months as his body reshaped itself inside and out. He heard and automatically remembered argument after argument over his mission, his right to be in Phoenix, the Human right to Earth. There was no resolution. There was cursing, shouting, threats, fighting, but no resolution. Then, on the day his silence ended, there was a raid. There was shooting. One man was killed. One woman was carried off.

  Akin heard the noise but did not know what was happening. Pilar Leal was with him. She stayed with him until the shooting was over. Then she left him for a few moments to see that her husband was all right. When she returned, he was trying desperately to speak.

  Pilar gave a short, startled scream, and he knew he must be doing something that she could see. He could see her, hear her, smell her, but he was somehow distant from himself. He had no image of himself and was not sure whether he was causing any part of his body to move. Pilar’s reaction said he was.

  He managed to make a sound and knew that he had made it. It was nothing more than a hoarse croak, but he had done it deliberately.

  Pilar crept toward him, stared at him, “Estâ despierto?” she demanded. Was he awake?

  “Sí,” he said, and gasped and coughed. He had no strength. He could hear himself, but he still felt distanced from his body. He tried to straighten it and could not.

  “Do you have pain?” she asked.

  “No. Weak. Weak.”

  “What can I do? What can I get for you?”

  He could not answer for several seconds. “Shooting,” he said finally. “Why?”

  “Raiders. Dirty bastards! They took Rudra. They killed her husband. We killed two of them.”

  Akin wanted to slip back into the refuge of unconsciousness. They were not killing each other over the Mars decision, but they were killing each other. There always seemed to be reason for Humans to kill each other. He would give them a new world—a hard world that would demand cooperation and intelligence. Without either, it would surely kill them. Could even Mars distract them long enough for them to breed their way out of their Contradiction?

  He felt stronger and tried to speak to Pilar again. He discovered she was gone. Yori was with him now. He had slept. Yes, he had a stored memory of Yori coming in, Pilar reporting that he had spoken, Pilar going out. Yori speaking to him, then understanding that he was asleep.

  “Yori?”

  She jumped, and he realized she had fallen asleep herself. “So you are awake,” she said.

  He took a deep breath. “It isn’t over. I can’t move much yet.”

  “Should you try?”

  He attempted a smile. “I am trying.” And a moment later, “Did they get Rudra back?” He had not known the woman, though he remembered seeing her during his stay in Phoenix. She was a tiny brown woman with straight black hair that would have swept the ground if she had not bound it up. She and her husband were Asians from a place called South Africa.

  “Men went after her. I don’t think they’re back yet.”

  “Are there many raids?”

  “Too many. More all the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, because we’re flawed. Your people said so.”

  He had not heard her speak so bitterly before.

  “There were not so many raids before.”

  “People had hope here when you were a baby. We were more formidable. And … our men had not begun raiding then.”

  “Phoenix men raiding?”

  “Humanity extinguishing itself in boredom, hopelessness, bitterness … I’m surprised we’ve lasted this long.”

  “Will you go to Mars, Yori?”

  She looked at him for several seconds. “It’s true?”

  “Yes. I have to prepare the way. After that, Humanity will have a place of its own.”

  “What will we do with it, I wonder?”

  “Work hard to keep it from killing you. You’ll be able to live there when I’ve prepared it, but your lives will be hard. If you’re careless or can’t work together, you’ll die.”

  “We can have children?”

  “I can’t arrange that. You’ll have to let an ooloi do it.”

  “But it will be don
e!”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed. “Then I’m going.” She watched him for a moment. “When?”

  “Years from now. Some of you will go early, though. Some of you must see and understand what I do so that you’ll understand from the beginning how your new world works.”

  She sat watching him silently.

  “And I need help with other resisters,” he said. He strained for a moment, trying to lift a hand, trying to unknot his body. It was as though he had forgotten how to move. Yet this did not concern him. He knew he was simply trying to rush things that could not be rushed. He could talk. That had to be enough.

  “I probably look a lot less Human than I did,” he continued. “I won’t be able to approach people who used to know me. I don’t like being shot or having to threaten people. I need Humans to talk to other Humans and gather them in.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  “You need mostly Oankali for that. Or adult constructs.”

  “But—”

  “You need people who won’t be shot on sight. Sane people only shoot Oankali by accident. You need people who won’t be taken prisoner and everything they say ignored. That’s the way Human beings are now. Shoot the men. Steal the women. If you have nothing better to do, go raid your neighbors.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  He sighed. “Will you help me, Yori?”

  “What shall I do?”

  “Advise me. I’ll need Human advisors.”

  “From what I’ve heard, your mother should be one of them.”

  He tried to read her still face. “I didn’t realize you knew who she was.”

  “People tell me things.”

  “I’ve chosen a good advisor, then.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I can leave Phoenix except with the group that goes to Mars. I’ve trained others, but I’m the only formally trained doctor. That’s a joke, really. I was a psychiatrist. But at least I have formal training.”

  “What’s a psychiatrist?”

  “A doctor who specializes in the treatment of mental illness.” She gave a bitter laugh. “The Oankali say people like me dealt with far more physical disorders than we were capable of recognizing.”