Dawn x-1

by Butler, Octavia

  Tate dove into the food, eating until she was satisfied, not wasting time talking. She had not, Lilith thought, asked one very important question. Of course there was a great deal she had not asked, but one thing in particular made Lilith wonder.

  "What's your name, by the' way?" Tate asked, finally resting from her eating. She sipped coconut milk tentatively, then drank it all.

  "Lilith Iyapo."

  "Lilith. Lil?"

  "Lilith. I've never had a nickname. Never wanted one. Is there anything apart from your name that you'd like to be called?"

  "No. Tate will do. Tate Marah. They told you my name, didn't they?"

  "Yes."

  "I thought so. All those damn questions. They kept me Awake and in solitary for. . . it must have been two or three months. Did they tell you that? Or were you watching?"

  "I was either asleep or in solitary myself, but yes, I knew about your confinement. It was three months in all. Mine was just over two years."

  "It took them that long to make a trustee of you, did it?"

  Lilith frowned, took a few nuts and ate them. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.

  For an instant, Tate looked uncomfortable, uncertain. The expression appeared and vanished so quickly that Lilith could have missed it through just a moment's inattention.

  "Well, why should they keep you awake and alone for so long?" Tate demanded.

  "I wouldn't talk to them at first. Then later when I began to talk, apparently a number of them were interested in me. They weren't trying to make a trustee of me at that point. They were trying to decide whether I was fit to be one. If I had had a vote, I'd still be asleep."

  "Why wouldn't you talk to them? Were you military?"

  "God, no. I just didn't like the idea of being locked up, questioned, and ordered around by I-didn't-know-who. And Tate, it's time you knew who-even though you've been careful not to ask."

  She drew a deep breath, rested her forehead on her hand and stared down at the table. "I asked them. They wouldn't tell me. After a while I got scared and stopped asking."

  "Yeah. I did that too."

  "Are they... Russians?"

  "They're not human."

  Tate did not move, did not say anything for so long that Lilith continued.

  "They call themselves Oankali, and they look like sea creatures, though they are bipedal. They. . . are you taking any of this in?"

  ''I'm listening.''

  Lilith hesitated. "Are you believing?"

  Tate looked up at her, seemed to smile a little. "How can I?"

  Lilith nodded. "Yeah. But you'll have to sooner or later, of course, and I'm supposed to do what I can to prepare you. The Oankali are ugly. Grotesque. But we can get used to them, and they won't hurt us. Remember that. Maybe it will help when the time comes."

  3

  For three days, Tate slept a great deal, ate a great deal, and asked questions that Lilith answered completely honestly. Tate also talked about her life before the war. Lilith saw that it seemed to relax her, ease that shell of emotional control she usually wore. That made it worthwhile. It meant Lilith felt obligated to talk a little about herself-her past before the war-something she would not normally have been inclined to do. She had learned to keep her sanity by accepting things as she found them, adapting herself to new circumstances by putting aside the old ones whose memories might overwhelm her. She had tried to talk to Nikanj about humans in general, only occasionally bringing in personal anecdotes. Her father, her brothers, her sister, her husband and son. . . . She chose now to talk about her return to college.

  "Anthropology," Tate said disparagingly. "Why did you want to snoop through other people's cultures? Couldn't you find what you wanted in your own?"

  Lilith smiled and noticed that Tate frowned as though this were the beginning of a wrong answer. "I started out wanting to do exactly that," Lilith said. "Snoop. Seek. It seemed to me that my culture-ours-was running headlong over a cliff. And, of course, as it turned out, it was. I thought there must be saner ways of life."

  "Find any?"

  "Didn't have much of a chance. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway. It was the cultures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that counted."

  "I wonder."

  "What?"

  "Human beings are more alike than different-damn sure more alike than we like to admit. I wonder if the same thing wouldn't have happened eventually, no matter which two cultures gained the ability to wipe one another out along with the rest of the world"

  Lilith gave a bitter laugh. "You might like it here. The Oankali think a lot like you do."

  Tate turned away, suddenly disturbed. She wandered over to look at the new third and fourth rooms Lilith had grown on either side of the second restroom. One of them was back to back with her own room, and in part, an extension of one of her walls. She had watched the walls growing- watched first with disbelief, then anger, refusing to believe she was not being tricked somehow. Then she began to keep her distance from Lilith, to watch Lilith suspiciously, to be jumpy and silent.

  That had not lasted long. Tate was adaptable if nothing else. "I don't understand," she had said softly, though by then, Lilith had explained why she could control the walls, how she could find and Awaken specific individuals.

  Now, Tate wandered back and said again, "I don't understand. None of this makes sense!"

  "I had an easier time believing," Lilith said. "An Oankali sealed himself in my isolation room and refused to leave until I got used to him. You can't look at them and doubt that they're alien."

  "Maybe you can't."

  "I won't argue with you about it. I've been Awake a lot longer than you have. I've lived among the Oankali and I accept them as what they are."

  "What they say they are."

  Lilith shrugged. "I want to start Awakening more people. Two new ones today. Will you help me?"

  "Who are you Awakening?"

  "Leah Bede and Celene Iver."

  "Two more women? Why don't you wake up a man?"

  "I will eventually."

  "You're still thinking about your Paul Titus, aren't you?"

  "He wasn't mine." She wished she had not told Tate about him.

  "Awaken a man next, Lilith. Awaken the guy who was found protecting the kids."

  Lilith turned to look at her. "On the theory that if you fall off a horse, you should immediately get back on?"

  "Yes."

  "Tate, once he's Awake, he stays Awake. He's six-three, he weighs two-twenty, he's been a cop for seven years, and he's used to ordering people around. He can't save us or protect us here, but he can damn sure screw us up. All he has to do to hurt us is refuse to believe we're on a ship. After that, everything he does will be wrong and potentially deadly."

  "So what? You're going to wait until you can Awaken him to a kind of harem?"

  "No. Once we've got Leah and Celene awake and reasonably stable, I'm going to Awaken Curt Loehr and Joseph Shing."

  "Why wait?"

  "I'm going to get Celene out first. You take care of her while I get Leah out. I think Celene might be someone for Curt to take care of."

  She went to her room, brought back pictures of both women, and was about to begin hunting for Celene when Tate caught her arm.

  "We're being watched, aren't we?" she asked.

  "Yes. I don't know that we're watched every minute, but now, when we're both Awake, yes, I'm sure they're watching."

  "If there's trouble, will they help?"

  "If they decide it's bad enough. I think there were some who would have let Titus rape me. I don't think they would have let him kill me. They might have been too slow to prevent it, though."

  "Wonderful," Tate muttered bitterly. "We're on our own."

  "Exactly."

  Tate shook her head. "I don't know whether I should be shedding the constraints of civilization and getting ready to fight for my life or keeping and enhancing them for the sake of our future."

  "We'll do what's necessary," Lili
th said. "Sooner or later, that will probably mean fighting for our lives."

  "I hope you're wrong," Tate said. "What have we learned if all we can do now is go on fighting among ourselves?" She paused. "You didn't have kids, did you Lilith?"

  Lilith began to walk slowly along the wall, eyes closed, Celene's picture flat between the wall and her hand. Tate walked along beside her, distracting her.

  "Wait until I call you," Lilith told her. "Searching like this takes all my attention."

  "It's really hard for you to talk about your life before, isn't it?" Tate said, with sympathy Lilith did not begin to trust.

  "Pointless," Lilith said. "Not hard. I lived in those memories for my two years of solitary. By the time the Oankali showed up in my room, I was ready to move into the present and stay there. My life before was a lot of groping around, looking for I-didn't-know-what. And, as for kids, I had a son. He was killed in an auto accident before the war." Lilith took a deep breath. "Let me alone now. I'll call you when I've found Celene."

  Tate moved away, settled against the opposite wall near one of the rest rooms. Lilith closed her eyes and began inching along again. She let herself lose track of time and distance, felt as though she were almost flowing along the wall. The illusion was familiar-as physically pleasing and emotionally satisfying as a drug-a needed drug at this moment.

  "If you have to do something, it might as well feel good," Nikanj had told her. It had become very interested in her physical pleasures and pains once its sensory aims were fully grown. Happily, it had paid more attention to pleasure than to pain. It had studied her as she might have studied a book-and it had done a certain amount of rewriting.

  The bulge in the wall felt large and distinct when her fingers found it. But when she opened her eyes and looked, she could not see any irregularity.

  "There's nothing there!" Tate said over her right shoulder. Lilith jumped, dropped the picture, refused to turn and glare at Tate as she bent to pick it up. "Get away from me!" she said quietly.

  Grudgingly, Tate moved back several steps. Lilith could have found the spot again without any particular concentration, without having Tate move away, but Tate had to learn to accept Lilith's authority in anything to do with controlling the walls or dealing with the Oankali and their ship. What the hell did she think she was doing, coming back, creeping along behind Lilith? What was she looking for? Some trick?

  Lilith rubbed one hand on the face of the picture and placed it against the wall. She found the bulge at once, though it was still to slight to be seen. It had ceased to grow with the removal of the picture, but had not yet vanished. Now Lilith rubbed it gently with the picture, encouraging it to grow. When she could see the protrusion, she stepped away and waited, gesturing for Tate to come.

  Standing together, they watched the wall disgorge the long, translucent green plant. Tate made a sound of disgust and stepped back as the smell drifted to her.

  "You want to look at it before I open it?" Lilith asked. Tate came closer and stared at the plant. "Why is it moving?"

  "So that every part of it is exposed to the light for a while. If you could mark it, you would see that it's very slowly turning over. The movement is suppose to be good for the people inside, too. it exercises their muscles and changes their position."

  "It doesn't really look like a slug," Tate said. "Not when someone's in it." She went to it, stroked it with several fingers, then looked at her fingers.

  "Be careful," Lilith told her. "Celene isn't very big. The plant probably wouldn't mind taking someone else in."

  "Would you be able to get me out?"

  "Yes." She smiled. "The first Oankali to show these to me didn't warn me. I put my hand on the plant and almost panicked when I realized the plant was holding me and growing around my hand."

  Tate tried this, and the plant obligingly began to swallow her hand. She tugged at her band, then looked at Lilith, obviously afraid. "Make it let go!"

  Lilith touched the plant around her captive hand and the plant released her. "Now," Lilith said, moving to one end of the plant. She drew her hands along the length of the plant. It opened in its usual slow way, and she lifted Celene out and put her on the floor where Tate could look after her. "Get some clothes on her before she wakes up if you can," she told Tate.

  But by the time Celene was fully awake, Lilith had Leah Bede out of the wall and out of her plant. She dressed Leah quickly. Not until both women were fully awake and looking around did Lilith push the two plants back through the wall. When that was done, she turned, meaning to sit down with Leah and Celene and answer their questions.

  Instead, she was suddenly staggered by Leah's weight as the woman leaped onto her back and began strangling her. Lilith began to fall. Time seemed to slow down for her.

  If she fell on Leah, the woman would probably injure her back or her head. The injury might be only superficial, but could be serious. It would be wrong to let a potentially useful person be lost for one act of stupidity.

  Lilith managed to fall on her side so that only Leah's arm and shoulder struck the floor. Lilith reached up and took Leah's hands from her throat. It was not difficult. Lilith was even able to go on taking care not to cause injury. She also took care not to let Leah see how easy it was for Lilith to defeat her. She gasped as she tore Leah's hands from her throat, though she was nowhere near desperate for air yet. And she allowed Leah's hands to move in her own as Leah struggled.

  "Will you stop it!" she shouted. "I'm a prisoner here just like you. I can't let you out. I can't get out myself. Do you understand?"

  Leah stopped struggling. Now she glared up at Lilith.

  "Get off me." Her voice was naturally deep and throaty. Now it was almost a growl.

  "I intend to," Lilith said. "But don't jump me again. I'm not your enemy."

  Leah made a wordless sound.

  "Save your strength," Lilith said. "We've got a lot of rebuilding to do."

  "Rebuilding?" Leah growled.

  "The war," Lilith said. "Remember?"

  "I wish I could forget." The growl had softened.

  "You kill me here and you'll prove you haven't had enough war yet. You'll prove you're not fit to take part in the rebuilding."

  Leah said nothing. After a moment, Lilith released her.

  Both women stood up warily.

  "Who decides whether or not I'm fit?" Leak asked. "You?"

  "Our jailers."

  Unexpectedly, Celene whispered, "Who are they?" Her face was already streaked with tears. She and Tate had come up silently to join the discussion-or watch the fight.

  Lilith glanced at Tate, and Tate shook her head. "And you were afraid Awakening a man would cause violence," she said.

  "I still am," Lilith told her. She looked at Celene, then Leah. "Let's get something to eat. I'll answer any questions I can."

  She took them to the room that would be Celene's and watched their eyes widen when they saw, not the expected bowls of god-knew-what, but recognizable food.

  It was easier to talk to them when they'd eaten their fill, when they were relatively relaxed and comfortable. They refused to believe they were on a ship beyond the moon's orbit. Leah laughed aloud when she heard that they were being held by extraterrestrials.

  "Either you're a liar or you're crazy," she said.

  "It's true," Lilith said softly.

  "It's crap."

  "The Oankali modified me," Lilith told her, "so that I can control the walls and the suspended animation plants. I can't do it as well as they can, but I can Awaken people, feed them, clothe them, and give them a certain amount of privacy. You shouldn't get so wrapped up in doubting me that you ignore the things you see me do. And remember two things in particular that I've told you. We are on a ship. Act as though you believe that even if you don't. There is no place to run on a ship. Even if you could get out of this room, there would be nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free. On the other hand, if we endure our time here, we'll get our world back. We
'll be put down on Earth as the first of the returning human colonists."

  "Just do as we're told and wait, huh?" Leah said.

  "Unless you like it here well enough to stay."

  "I don't believe a word you say."

  "Believe what you want! I'm telling you how to act if you ever want to feel the ground under your feet again!"

  Celene began to cry quietly and Lilith frowned at her. "What's the matter with you?"

  Celene shook her head. "I don't know what to believe. I don't even know why I'm still alive."

  Tate sighed and shook her head in disgust.

  "You are alive," Lilith said coldly. "We have no medical supplies here. If you want to commit suicide, you might succeed. If you want to hang around and help get things started back on Earth... well, that seems a lot more worth succeeding at."

  "Did you have any children?" Celene asked, clearly expecting the answer to be no.

  "Yes." Lilith made herself reach out, take the woman's hand, though already she disliked her. "All the people I have to Awaken are here without their families. We're all alone. We've got each other, and nobody else. We'll become a community-friends, neighbors, husbands, wives- or we won't."

  "When will there be men?" Celene demanded.

  "In a day or two. I'll Awaken two men next."

  "Why not now?"

  "No. I'll get rooms ready for them, get food and clothing out for them-the way I have for you and Leah."

  "You mean you build the rooms?"

  "It's more accurate to say I grow them. You'll see."

  "You grow the food, too?" Leah asked, one eyebrow raised.

  "Food and clothing is stored along the walls at each end of the big room. They're replaced as we use them. I can open the storage cabinets, but I can't open the wall behind them. Only the Oankali can do that."

  There was silence for a moment. Lilith began gathering her own fruit peelings and seeds. "Any garbage goes into one of the toilets," she said. "You don't have to worry about stopping them up. They're more than they appear to be. They'll digest anything that isn't alive."