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

by Octavia E. Butler

  She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually—as soon as they realized they could get away with it.

  He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn’t bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure.

  “Look,” she said when he drew back. “I’m not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali.”

  “What difference do they make? It’s not like human beings were watching us.”

  “It is to me.”

  “Lilith,” he said, shaking his head, “they will always be watching.”

  “The other thing I’m not interested in doing is giving them a human child to tamper with.”

  “You probably already have.”

  Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.

  “They didn’t have enough of us for what they call a normal trade,” he said. “Most of the ones they have will be Dinso—people who want to go back to Earth. They didn’t have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more.”

  “While we slept? Somehow they—”

  “Somehow!” he hissed. “Anyhow! They took stuff from men and women who didn’t even know each other and put it together and made babies in women who never knew the mother or the father of their kid—and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they grew the baby in another kind of animal. They have animals they can adjust to—to incubate human fetuses, as they say. Or maybe they don’t even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin from one person and make babies out of it—cloning, you know. Or maybe they use one of their prints—and don’t ask me what a print is. But if they’ve got one of you, they can use it to make another you even if you’ve been dead for a hundred years and they haven’t got anything at all left of your body. And that’s just the start. They can make people in ways I don’t even know how to talk about. Only thing they can’t do, it seems, is let us alone. Let us do it our own way.”

  His hands were almost gentle on her. “At least they haven’t until now.” He shook her abruptly. “You know how many kids I got? They say, ‘Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.’ And I’ve never even seen a woman in all the time I’ve been here.”

  He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.

  Yet it would do no good to fight him physically. She was tall, had always thought of herself as strong, but he was much bigger—six-four, six-five, and stocky.

  “They’ve had two hundred and fifty years to fool around with us,” she said. “Maybe we can’t stop them, but we don’t have to help them.”

  “The hell with them.” He tried to unfasten her jacket.

  “No!” she shouted, deliberately startling him. “Animals get treated like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send them back to their owners. What do they care? They’re just animals!”

  He tore her jacket off then fumbled with her pants.

  She threw her weight against him suddenly and managed to shove him away.

  He stumbled backward for several steps, caught himself, came at her again.

  Screaming at him, she swung her legs over the platform she had been sitting on and came down standing on the opposite side of it. Now it was between them. He strode around it.

  She sat on it again and swung her legs over, keeping it between them.

  “Don’t make yourself their dog!” she pleaded. “Don’t do this!”

  He kept coming, too far gone to care what she said. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. He cut her off from the bed by coming over it himself. He cornered her against a wall.

  “How many times have they made you do this before?” she asked desperately. “Did you have a sister back on Earth? Would you know her now? Maybe they’ve made you do it with your sister.”

  He caught her arm, jerked her to him.

  “Maybe they’ve made you do it with your mother!” she shouted.

  He froze and she prayed she had hit a nerve.

  “Your mother,” she repeated. “You haven’t seen her since you were fourteen. How would you know if they brought her to you and you—”

  He hit her.

  Staggered by shock and pain, she collapsed against him and he half pushed and half threw her away as though he had found himself clutching something loathsome.

  She fell hard, but was not quite unconscious when he came to stand over her.

  “I never got to do it before,” he whispered. “Never once with a woman. But who knows who they mixed the stuff with.” He paused, stared at her where she had fallen. “They said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!” He kicked her hard. The last sound she heard before she lost consciousness was his ragged, shouted curse.

  9

  SHE AWOKE TO VOICES—Oankali near her, not touching her. Nikanj and one other.

  “Go away now,” Nikanj was saying. “She is regaining consciousness.”

  “Perhaps I should stay,” the other said softly. Kahguyaht. She had thought once that all Oankali sounded alike with their quiet androgynous voices, but now she couldn’t mistake Kahguyaht’s deceptively gentle tones. “You may need help with her,” it said.

  Nikanj said nothing.

  After a while Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles and said, “I’ll leave. You’re growing up faster than I thought. Perhaps she’s good for you after all.”

  She was able to see it step through a wall and leave. Not until it was gone did she become aware of the aching of her own body—her jaw, her side, her head, and in particular, her left arm. There was no sharp pain, nothing startling. Only dull, throbbing pain, especially noticeable when she moved.

  “Be still,” Nikanj told her. “Your body is still healing. The pain will be gone soon.”

  She turned her face away from it, ignoring the pain.

  There was a long silence. Finally it said, “We didn’t know.” It stopped, corrected itself. “I didn’t know how the male would behave. He has never lost control so completely before. He hasn’t lost control at all for several years.”

  “You cut him off from his own kind,” she said through swollen lips. “You kept him away from women for how long? Fifteen years? More? In some ways you kept him fourteen for all those years.”

  “He was content with his Oankali family until he met you.”

  “What did he know? You never let him see anybody else!”

  “It wasn’t necessary. His family took care of him.”

  She stared at it, feeling more strongly than ever, the difference between them—the unbridgeable alienness of Nikanj. She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate. It could do the same with her, although it could force her to obey whether she understood or not. Or it could turn her over to others who would use force against her.

  “His family thought you should have mated with him,” it said. “They knew you wouldn’t stay with him permanently, but they believed you would share sex with him at least once.”

  Share sex, she thought sadly. Where had it picked up that expression? She had never said it. She liked it, though. Should she have shared sex with Paul Titus? “And maybe gotten pregnant,” she said aloud.

  “You would not have gotten pregnant,” Nikanj said.

  And it had her full attention. “Why not?” she demanded.

  “It isn’t time for you to have children yet.”

  “Have you done something to me? Am I sterile?”

  “Your people
called it birth control. You are slightly changed. It was done while you slept, as it was done to all humans at first. It will be undone eventually.”

  “When?” she asked bitterly. “When you’re ready to breed me?”

  “No. When you’re ready. Only then.”

  “Who decides? You?”

  “You, Lilith. You.”

  Its sincerity confused her. She felt that she had learned to read its emotions through posture, sensory tentacle position, tone of voice. … It seemed not only to be telling the truth—as usual—but to be telling a truth it considered important. Yet Paul Titus, too, had seemed to be telling the truth. “Does Paul really have over seventy children?” she asked.

  “Yes. And he’s told you why. The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay.” Nikanj hesitated. “They should not have told Paul what they were doing. But that’s always a difficult thing to realize—and sometimes we realize it too late.”

  “He had a right to know!”

  “Knowing frightened him and made him miserable. You discovered one of his fears—that perhaps one of his female relatives had survived and been impregnated with his sperm. He’s been told that this did not happen. Sometimes he believes; sometimes he doesn’t.”

  “He still had a right to know. I would want to know.”

  Silence.

  “Has it been done to me, Nikanj?”

  “No.”

  “And … will it be?”

  It hesitated, then spoke softly. “The Toaht have a print of you—of every human we brought aboard. They need the genetic diversity. We’re keeping prints of the humans they take away, too. Millenia after your death, your body might be reborn aboard the ship. It won’t be you. It will develop an identity of its own.”

  “A clone,” she said tonelessly. Her left arm throbbed, and she rubbed it without actually focusing on the pain.

  “No,” Nikanj said. “What we’ve preserved of you isn’t living tissue. It’s memory. A gene map, your people might call it—though they couldn’t have made one like those we remember and use. It’s more like what they would call a mental blueprint. A plan for the assembly of one specific human being: You. A tool for reconstruction.”

  It let her digest this, said nothing more to her for several minutes. So few humans could do that—just let someone have a few minutes to think.

  “Will you destroy my print if I ask you to?” she asked.

  “It’s a memory, Lilith, a complete memory carried by several people. How would I destroy such a thing?”

  A literal memory, then, not some kind of mechanical recording or written record. Of course.

  After a while, Nikanj said, “Your print may never be used. And if it is, the reconstruction will be as much at home aboard the ship as you were on Earth. She’ll grow up here and the people she grows up among will be her people. You know they won’t harm her.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know any such thing. I suspect they’ll do what they think is best for her. Heaven help her.”

  It sat beside her and touched her aching left arm with several head tentacles. “Did you really need to know that?” it asked. “Should I have told you?”

  It had never asked such a question before. Her arm hurt more than ever for a moment, then felt warm and pain-free. She managed not to jerk away, though Nikanj had not paralyzed her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “You were having pain in that arm. There’s no need for you to suffer.”

  “I hurt all over.”

  “I know. I’ll take care of it. I just wanted to talk to you before you slept again.”

  She lay still for a moment, glad that the arm was no longer throbbing. She had barely been aware of this individual pain before Nikanj stopped it. Now she realized it had been among the worst of the many. The hand, the wrist, the lower arm.

  “You had a bone broken in your wrist,” Nikanj told her. “It will be completely healed by the time you awaken again.” And it repeated its question. “Did you really need to know, Lilith?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It concerned me. I needed to know.”

  It said nothing for a while and she did not disturb its thoughts. “I will remember that,” it said softly, finally.

  And she felt as though she had communicated something important. Finally.

  “How did you know my arm was bothering me?”

  “I could see you rubbing it. I knew it was broken and that I had done very little to it. Can you move your fingers?”

  She obeyed, amazed to see the fingers move easily, painlessly.

  “Good. I’ll have to make you sleep again now.”

  “Nikanj, what happened to Paul?”

  It shifted the focus of some of its head tentacles from her arm to her face. “He’s asleep.”

  She frowned. “Why? I didn’t hurt him. I couldn’t have.”

  “He was … enraged. Out of control. He attacked members of his family. They say he would have killed them if he could have. When they restrained him, he wept and spoke incoherently. He refused to speak Oankali at all. In English, he cursed his family, you, everyone. He had to be put to sleep—perhaps for a year or more. The long sleeps are healing to nonphysical wounds.”

  “A year … ?”

  “He’ll be all right. He won’t age. And his family will be waiting for him when he Awakes. He is very attached to them—and they to him. Toaht family bonds are … beautiful, and very strong.”

  She rested her right arm across her forehead. “His family,” she said bitterly. “You keep saying that. His family is dead! Like mine. Like Fukumoto’s. Like just about everyone’s. That’s half our problem. We haven’t got any real family bonds.”

  “He has.”

  “He has nothing! He has no one to teach him to be a man, and he damn sure can’t be an Oankali, so don’t talk to me about his family!”

  “Yet they are his family,” Nikanj insisted softly. “They have accepted him and he has accepted them. He has no other family, but he has them.”

  She made a sound of disgust and turned her face away. What did Nikanj tell others about her? Did it talk about her family? According to her new name, she had been adopted, after all. She shook her head, confused and disturbed.

  “He beat you, Lilith,” Nikanj said. “He broke your bones. If you had gone untreated, you might have died of what he did.”

  “He did what you and his so-called family set him up to do!”

  It rustled its tentacles. “That’s truer than I would like. It’s hard for me to influence people now. They think I’m too young to understand. I did warn them, though, that you wouldn’t mate with him. Since I’m not yet mature, they didn’t believe me. His family and my parents overruled me. That won’t happen again.”

  It touched the back of her neck, pricking the skin with several sensory tentacles. She realized what it was doing as she felt herself beginning to lose consciousness.

  “Put me back, too,” she demanded while she could still talk.

  “Let me sleep again. Put me where they’ve put him. I’m no more what your people think than he was. Put me back. Find someone else!”

  10

  BUT THE EASE OF her awakening, when it came, told her that her sleep had been ordinary and relatively brief, returning her all too quickly to what passed for reality. At least she was not in pain.

  She sat up, found Nikanj lying stone-still next to her. As usual, some of its head tentacles followed her movements lazily as she got up and went to the bathroom.

  Trying not to think, she bathed, worked to scrub off an odd, sour smell that her body had acquired—some residual effect of Nikanj’s healing, she supposed. But the smell would not wash away. Eventually she gave up. She dressed and went back out to Nikanj. It was sitting up on the bed, waiting for her.

  “You won’t notice the
smell in a few days,” it said. “It isn’t as strong as you think.”

  She shrugged, not caring.

  “You can open walls now.”

  Startled, she stared at it, then went to a wall and touched it with the fingertips of one hand. The wall reddened as Paul Titus’ wall had under Nikanj’s touch.

  “Use all your fingers,” it told her.

  She obeyed, touching the fingers of both hands to the wall. The wall indented, then began to open.

  “If you’re hungry,” Nikanj said, “you can get food for yourself now. Within these quarters, everything will open for you.”

  “And beyond these quarters?” she asked.

  “The walls will let you out and back in again. I’ve changed them a little too. But no other walls will open for you.”

  So she could walk the corridors or walk among the trees, but she couldn’t get into anything Nikanj didn’t want her in. Still, that was more freedom than she had had before it put her to sleep.

  “Why did you do this?” she asked, staring at it.

  “To give you what I could. Not another long sleep or solitude. Only this. You know the layout of the quarters now, and you know Kaal. And the people nearby know you.”

  So she could be trusted out alone again, she thought bitterly. And within the quarters, she could be depended on not to do the local equivalent of spilling the drain-cleaner or starting a fire. She could even be trusted not to annoy the neighbors. Now she could keep herself occupied until someone decided it was time to send her off to the work she did not want and could not do—the work that would probably get her killed. How many more Paul Tituses could she survive, after all?

  Nikanj lay down again and seemed to tremble. It was trembling. Its body tentacles exaggerated the movement and made its whole body seem to vibrate. She neither knew nor cared what was wrong with it. She left it where it was and went out to get food.

  In one compartment in the seemingly empty little living-room-dining-room-kitchen, she found fresh fruit: oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and melons of different kinds. In other compartments she found nuts, bread, and honey.