Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy)

by Octavia E. Butler

  Nikanj had told her that if she could not find her way “home” she was to go to the nearest adult and say her name with new Oankali additions: Dhokaaltediinjdahyalilith eka Kahguyaht aj Dinso. The Dho used as prefix indicated an adopted non-Oankali. Kaal was a kinship group name. Then Tediin’s and Jdahya’s names with Jdahya’s last because he had brought her into the family. Eka meant child. A child so young it literally had no sex—as very young Oankali did not. Lilith had accepted this designation hopefully. Surely sexless children were not used in breeding experiments. Then there was Kahguyaht’s name. It was her third “parent,” after all. Finally there was the trade status name. The Dinso group was staying on Earth, changing itself by taking part of humanity’s genetic heritage, spreading its own genes like a disease among unwilling humans … Dinso. It wasn’t a surname. It was a terrible promise, a threat.

  Yet if she said this long name—all of it—people immediately understood not only who she was but where she should be, and they pointed her toward “home.” She was not particularly grateful to them.

  On one of these solitary walks, she heard two Oankali use one of their words for humans—kaizidi—and she slowed down to listen. She assumed the two were talking about her. She often supposed people she walked among were discussing her as though she were an unusual animal. These two confirmed her fears when they fell silent at her approach and continued their conversation silently with mutual touching of head tentacles. She had all but forgotten this incident when, several walks later, she heard another group of people in the same area speaking again of a kaizidi—a male they called Fukumoto.

  Again everyone fell silent at her approach. She had tried to freeze and listen, just hidden by the trunk of one of the great pseudotrees, but the moment she stopped there, conversation went silent among the Oankali. Their hearing, when they chose to focus their attention on it, was acute. Nikanj had complained early on in her stay about the loudness of her heartbeat.

  She walked on, ashamed in spite of herself of having been caught eavesdropping. There was no sense to such a feeling. She was a captive. What courtesy did a captive owe beyond what was necessary for self-preservation?

  And where was Fukumoto?

  She replayed in her mind what she remembered of the fragments she had heard. Fukumoto had something to do with the Tiej kinship group—also a Dinso people. She knew vaguely where their area was, though she had never been there.

  Why had people in Kaal been discussing a human in Tiej? What had Fukumoto done? And how could she reach him?

  She would go to Tiej. She would do her wandering there if she could—if Nikanj did not appear to stop her. It still did that occasionally, letting her know that it could follow her anywhere, approach her anywhere, and seem to appear from nowhere. Maybe it liked to see her jump.

  She began to walk toward Tiej. She might manage to see the man today if he happened to be outside—addicted to wandering as she was. And if she saw him, he might speak English. If he spoke English, his Oankali jailers might not prevent him from speaking to her. If the two of them spoke together, he might prove as ignorant as she was. And if he were not ignorant, if they met and spoke and all went well, the Oankali might decide to punish her. Solitary confinement again? Suspended animation? Or just closer confinement with Nikanj and its family? If they did either of the first two she would simply be relieved of a responsibility she did not want and could not possibly handle. If they did the third, what difference would it really make? What difference balanced against the chance to see and speak with one of her own kind again, finally?

  None at all.

  She never considered going back to Nikanj and asking it or its family to let her meet Fukumoto. They had made it clear to her that she was not to have contact with humans or human artifacts.

  The walk to Tiej was longer than she had expected. She had not yet learned to judge distances aboard the ship. The horizon, when it was not obscured by pseudotrees and hill-like entrances to other levels, seemed startlingly close. But how close, she could not have said.

  At least no one stopped her. Oankali she passed seemed to assume that she belonged wherever she happened to be. Unless Nikanj appeared, she would be able to wander in Tiej for as long as she liked.

  She reached Tiej and began her search. The pseudotrees in Tiej were yellow-brown rather than the gray-brown of Kaal, and their bark looked rougher—more like what she expected of tree bark. Yet people opened them in the way to come and go. She peered through the openings they made when she got the chance. This trip, she felt, would be worthwhile if she could just catch a glimpse of Fukumoto—of any human Awake and aware. Anyone at all.

  She had not realized until she actually began looking how important it was for her to find someone. The Oankali had removed her so completely from her own people—only to tell her they planned to use her as a Judas goat. And they had done it all so softly, without brutality, and with patience and gentleness so corrosive of any resolve on her part.

  She walked and looked until she was too tired to continue. Finally, discouraged and more disappointed than even she thought reasonable, she sat down against a pseudotree and ate the two oranges she had saved from the lunch she had eaten earlier in Kaal.

  Her search, she admitted finally, had been ridiculous. She could have stayed in Kaal, daydreamed about meeting another human, and gotten more satisfaction from it. She could not even be certain how much of Tiej she had covered. There were no signs that she could read. Oankali did not use such things. Their kinship group areas were clearly scent-marked. Each time they opened a wall, they enhanced the local scent markers—or they identified themselves as visitors, members of a different kinship group. Ooloi could change their scent, and did when they left home to mate. Males and females kept the scents they were born with and never lived outside their kinship area. Lilith could not read scent signs. As far as she was concerned Oankali had no odor at all.

  That was better, she supposed, than their having a foul odor and forcing her to endure it. But it left her bereft of signposts.

  She sighed and decided to go back to Kaal—if she could find her way back. She looked around, confirmed her suspicions that she was already disoriented, lost. She would have to ask someone to aim her toward Kaal.

  She got up, moved away from the pseudotree she had been leaning against, and scratched a shallow hole in the soil—it actually was soil, Nikanj had told her. She buried her orange peelings, knowing they would be gone within a day, broken down by tendrils of the ship’s own living matter.

  Or that was what was supposed to happen.

  As she shook out her extra jacket and brushed herself off, the ground around the buried peelings began to darken. The color change recaptured her attention and she watched as the soil slowly became mud and turned the same orange that the peelings had been. This was an effect she had never seen before.

  The soil began to smell, to stink in a way she found hard to connect with oranges. It was probably the smell that drew the Oankali. She looked up and found two of them standing near her, their head tentacles swept toward her in a point.

  One of them spoke to her, and she tried hard to understand the words—did understand some of them, but not fast enough or completely enough to catch the sense of what was being said.

  The orange spot on the ground began to bubble and grow. Lilith stepped away from it. “What’s happening?” she asked. “Do either of you speak English?”

  The larger of the two Oankali—Lilith thought this one was female—spoke in a language neither Oankali nor English. They confused her at first. Then she realized the language sounded like Japanese.

  “Fukumoto-san?” she asked hopefully.

  There was another burst of what must have been Japanese, and she shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said in Oankali. Those words she had learned quickly through repetition. The only Japanese words that came quickly to mind were stock phrases from a trip she had made years before to Japan: Konichiwa, arigato gozaimaso, sayona
ra. …

  Other Oankali had gathered to watch the bubbling ground. The orange mass had grown to be about three feet across and almost perfectly circular. It had touched one of the fleshy, tentacled pseudoplants and the pseudoplant darkened and lashed about as though in agony. Seeing its violent twisting Lilith forgot that it was not an individual organism. She focused on the fact that it was alive and she had probably caused it pain. She had not merely caused an interesting effect, she had caused harm.

  She made herself speak in slow, careful Oankali. “I can’t change this,” she said, wanting to say that she couldn’t repair the damage. “Will you help?”

  An ooloi stepped up, touched the orange mud with one of its sensory arms, held the arm still in the mud for several seconds. The bubbling slowed, then stopped. By the time the ooloi withdrew, the bright orange coloring was also beginning to fade to normal.

  The ooloi said something to a big female and she answered, gesturing toward Lilith with her head tentacles.

  Lilith frowned suspiciously at the ooloi. “Kahguyaht?” she asked, feeling foolish. But the pattern of this ooloi’s head tentacles was the same as Kahguyaht’s.

  The ooloi pointed its head tentacles toward her. “How have you managed,” it asked her, “to remain so promising and yet so ignorant?”

  Kahguyaht.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Silence. It shifted its attention to the healing ground, seemed to examine it once more, then said something loudly to the gathered people. Most of them went smooth and began to disperse. She suspected it had made a joke at her expense.

  “So you finally found something to poison,” it said to her.

  She shook her head. “I just buried a few orange peelings. Nikanj told me to bury my leavings.”

  “Bury anything you like in Kaal. When you leave Kaal, and you want to throw something away, give it to an ooloi. And don’t leave Kaal again until you’re able to speak to people. Why are you here?”

  Now she refused to answer.

  “Fukumoto-san died recently.” it said. “No doubt that’s why you heard talk of him. You did hear people talking about him, didn’t you?”

  After a moment she nodded.

  “He was one hundred and twenty years old. He spoke no English.”

  “He was human,” she whispered.

  “He lived here awake for almost sixty years. I don’t think he saw another human more than twice.”

  She stepped closer to Kahguyaht, studying it. “And it doesn’t occur to you that that was a cruelty?”

  “He adjusted very well.”

  “But still—”

  “Can you find your way home, Lilith?”

  “We’re an adaptable species,” she said, refusing to be stopped, “but it’s wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it.”

  “Learn our language. When you have, one of us will introduce you to someone who, like Fukumoto, has chosen to live and die among us instead of returning to Earth.”

  “You mean Fukumoto chose—”

  “You know almost nothing,” it said. “Come on. I’ll take you home—and speak to Nikanj about you.”

  That made her speak up quickly. “Nikanj didn’t know where I was going. It might be tracking me right now.”

  “No, it isn’t. I was. Come on.”

  5

  KAHGUYAHT TOOK HER BENEATH a hill onto a lower level. There it ordered her onto a small, slow-moving flat vehicle. The transport never moved faster than she could have run, but it got them home surprisingly quickly, no doubt taking a more direct route than she had.

  Kahguyaht would not speak to her during the trip. She got the impression it was angry, but she didn’t really care. She only hoped it wasn’t too angry with Nikanj. She had accepted the possibility that she might be punished somehow for her Tiej trip, but she had not intended to make trouble for Nikanj.

  Once they were home, Kahguyaht took Nikanj into the room she and Nikanj shared, leaving her in what she had come to think of as the dining room. Jdahya and Tediin were there, eating Oankali food this time, the products of plants that would have been deadly to her.

  She sat down silently and after a while, Jdahya brought her nuts, fruit, and some Oankali food that had a vaguely meaty taste and texture, though it was actually a plant product.

  “Just how much trouble am I in?” she asked as he handed her her dishes.

  He smoothed his tentacles. “Not so much, Lilith.”

  She frowned. “I got the impression Kahguyaht was angry.”

  Now the smooth tentacles became irregular, raised knots. “That was not exactly anger. It is concerned about Nikanj.”

  “Because I went to Tiej?”

  “No.” His lumps became larger, uglier. “Because this is a hard time for it—and for you. Nikanj has left you for it to stumble over.”

  “What?”

  Tediin said something in rapid, incomprehensible Oankali, and Jdahya answered her. The two of them spoke together for a few minutes. Then Tediin spoke in English to Lilith.

  “Kahguyaht must teach … same-sex child. You see?”

  “And I’m part of the lesson,” Lilith answered bitterly.

  “Nikanj or Kahguyaht,” Tediin said softly.

  Lilith frowned, looked to Jdahya for an explanation.

  “She means if you and Nikanj weren’t supposed to be teaching each other, you would be learning from Kahguyaht.”

  Lilith shuddered. “Good god,” she whispered. And seconds later, “Why couldn’t it be you?”

  “Ooloi generally handle the teaching of new species.”

  “Why? If I have to be taught, I’d rather you did it.”

  His head tentacles smoothed.

  “You like him or Kahguyaht?” Tediin asked. Her unpracticed English, acquired just from hearing others speak was much better than Lilith’s Oankali.

  “No offense,” Lilith said, “but I prefer Jdahya.”

  “Good,” Tediin said, her own head smooth, though Lilith did not understand why. “You like him or Nikanj?”

  Lilith opened her mouth, then hesitated. Jdahya had left her completely to Nikanj for so long—deliberately, no doubt. And Nikanj … Nikanj was appealing—probably because it was a child. It was no more responsible for the thing that was to happen to the remnants of humanity than she was. It was simply doing—or trying to do—what the adults around it said should be done. Fellow victim?

  No, not a victim. Just a child, appealing in spite of itself. And she liked it in spite of herself.

  “You see?” Tediin asked, smooth all over now.

  “I see.” She took a deep breath. “I see that everyone including Nikanj wants me to prefer Nikanj. Well you win. I do.” She turned to Jdahya. “You people are manipulative as hell, aren’t you?”

  Jdahya concentrated on eating.

  “Was I that much of a burden?” she asked him.

  He did not answer.

  “Will you help me to be less of a burden in one way, at least?”

  He aimed some of his tentacles at her. “What do you want?”

  “Writing materials. Paper. Pencils or pens—whatever you’ve got.”

  “No.”

  There was no give behind the refusal. He was part of the family conspiracy to keep her ignorant—while trying as hard as they could to educate her. Insane.

  She spread both hands before her, shaking her head. “Why?”

  “Ask Nikanj.”

  “I have! It won’t tell me.”

  “Perhaps it will now. Have you finished eating?”

  “I’ve had enough—in more ways than one.”

  “Come on. I’ll open the wall for you.”

  She unfolded herself from her platform and followed him to the wall.

  “Nikanj can help you remember without writing,” he told her as he touched the wall with several head tentacles.

  “How?”

  “Ask it.”

  She stepped through the hole as soon as it
was large enough, and found herself intruding on the two ooloi who refused to notice her beyond the automatic sweep of some of their head tentacles. They were talking—arguing—in very fast Oankali. She was, no doubt, the reason for their dispute.

  She looked back, hoping to step back through the wall and leave them. Let one of them tell her later what had been decided. She didn’t imagine it would be anything she would be eager to hear. But the wall had sealed itself—abnormally quickly.

  Nikanj seemed to be holding its own, at least. At one point, it beckoned to her with a sharp movement of head tentacles. She moved to stand beside it, willing to offer whatever moral support she could against Kahguyaht.

  Kahguyaht stopped whatever it had been saying and faced her. “You haven’t understood us at all, have you?” it asked in English.

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Do you understand me now?” it asked in slow Oankali.

  “Yes.”

  Kahguyaht turned its attention back to Nikanj and spoke rapidly. Straining to understand, Lilith thought it said something close to, “Well, at least we know she’s capable of learning.”

  “I’m capable of learning even faster with paper and pencil,” she said. “But with or without them, I’m capable of telling you what I think of you in any one of three human languages!”

  Kahguyaht said nothing for several seconds. Finally it turned, opened a wall, and left the room.

  When the wall had closed, Nikanj lay down on the bed and crossed its arms over its chest, hugging itself.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “What are the other two languages?” it asked softly.

  She managed a smile. “Spanish and German. I used to speak a little German. I still know a few obscenities.”

  “You are … not fluent?”

  “I am in Spanish.”

  “But why not in German?”

  “Because it’s been years since I’ve studied it or spoken it—years before the war, I mean. We humans … if we don’t use a language, we forget it.”

  “No. You don’t.”