Imago x-3

Imago x-3 Page 17

by Butler, Octavia

  “Nikanj has talked to us about Aaor,” she said softly.

  I focused narrowly on her. “Nikanj?”

  “It told us what you’ve just told us. It said Aaor probably would dissolve. Die.”

  “Not exactly die.”

  “Yes! Yes, die. It will not be Aaor any longer no matter how many of its cells live. Aaor will be gone!”

  I was startled by her sudden vehemence. I resisted the impulse to calm her chemically because she did not want to be calmed.

  “We know more about dying than you do,” she said bitterly. “And, I tell you, I know death when I see it.”

  I put my strength arm around her, but could not think of anything to say.

  TomÁs spoke finally. “At home, she was made to help with the sick and the dying. She hated it, but people trusted her. They knew she would do what was necessary, no matter how she felt.” He sighed. “Like you, I suppose. There must be something wrong with me—to love only serious, duty-bound people.”

  I smiled and extended my free sensory arm to him.

  He came to sit with us and accepted the arm. No intensity now. Only comfort in being together. We’d had little of that lately.

  “If Aaor had a chance to mate with a pair of Humans,” Jesusa said, “would it survive?”

  She felt frightened and sick to her stomach. She spoke as though the words had been beaten out of her. Both TomÁs and I stared at her.

  “Well, Jodahs? Would it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Almost certainly.”

  She nodded. “What I was thinking is that if you could fix our faces back the way they were, we could go home. I can think of people who might be willing to join us once they know what we’ve found—what we’ve learned.”

  “We’d be locked up and bred!” TomÁs protested.

  “I don’t think any elders or parents would have to see us. You were always good at coming and going without being seen when you thought you might be put to work.”

  “That was nothing. This is serious.” He paused. “With a name like yours, sister, this isn’t a role you should play.”

  She turned her face away from him, rested her head against my shoulder. “I don’t want to do it,” she said. “But why should Aaor die? We know our people will be taken and moved or absorbed or sterilized. It’s too late to prevent that. How can we watch Aaor suffer and know it will probably die and just do nothing? It’s true that our people will think badly of us when they find out that we’ve joined the Oankali. But they will find out eventually, no matter what.”

  “They’ll kill us if they get the chance,” TomÁs said.

  Jesusa shook her head. “Not if we look the way we used to look. Jodahs will have to change us back in every way. Even your neck must be stiff again. That will give us a chance to get out again sooner or later, even if we’re caught.” She thought for a moment. “They can’t know yet what we’ve done, can they, Jodahs?”

  “Not yet,” I admitted. “Nikanj has avoided sending word to the ship or to any of the towns.”

  “Because it hoped we would do just what we’re doing.”

  I nodded. “It would not ask either of you. It only hoped.”

  “And you?”

  “I couldn’t ask either. You had already refused. We understood your refusal.”

  She said nothing for a while. She sat utterly still, staring at the floor. Adrenaline flowed into her system, and she began to shake.

  “Jesusa?” I said.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” she said. “You think you understand. You don’t. You can’t.”

  I held her and stroked her until she stopped shaking. TomÁs touched her hair, reaching across me to do it, and making me want to grab his hand and stop him. Oankali male and female mates had no need to do this. I had to learn to endure it in Human mates.

  “Shall we do it?” she asked him suddenly.

  He drew back from her, looked from one of us to the other, then looked away.

  She looked at me. “Shall we?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth to say yes, she should, of course. Then I closed it. “I don’t want you to destroy yourself,” I said after a while. “I don’t want to trade my sibling’s life for yours.” I felt what she felt. She could not give me multisensory illusions. Humans did not have that kind of control. But I could feel how tightly she held herself, how her stomach hurt her and her muscles ached. I had to keep stopping myself from giving her relief. She didn’t need or want that from me now. Both my mother and Nikanj had warned me that not every pain should be immediately healed. Her body language would tell me when she wanted relief.

  “I won’t die,” she whispered. “I’m not that fragile. Or maybe

  not that lucky. If I can save your sibling, I will. But I think it would be easier for me to break several of my bones.”

  Now she and I both looked at TomÁs.

  He shook his head. “I hate that place,” he said softly. “Full of pain and sickness and duty and false hope. I meant to die rather than see it again. You both know that.”

  I nodded. Jesusa made no move at all. She watched him.

  “Yet I love those people,” he said. “I don’t want to do this to them. Isn’t there any other way?”

  “None that anyone’s thought of,” I said. “If you can do this, you’ll save Aaor. If you can’t, we’ll get it to the ship and

  hope for the best.”

  “We’ve already betrayed our people,” Jesusa said softly. “We did that with you, Jodahs. All we’re doing now is arguing about whether to bring two more of our people out early or let them all wait until the Oankali arrive.”

  “Is that all?” TomÁs said with bitter irony.

  “Will you go with me?” she asked.

  He sighed. “Didn’t I promise you I’d get you back there?” He ran a hand through his own hair. After a moment he got up, and went outside.

  4

  There were complications.

  We couldn’t leave until Aaor’s metamorphosis ended. Jesusa and TomÁs thought I would give them back their disfigurement and they would go back to the mountains alone. They couldn’t have done that, even if I had been willing to let them try. They couldn’t leave me now.

  I never told them they couldn’t leave. They found out as Lilith had. When they had had all they could take of Aaor for a while, when they realized I could not be talked out of going with them to their mountain home, they went away on their own. They went together into the forest and stayed for several days. It was a foretaste for me of what I would suffer when they died.

  I panicked when I realized they were gone. TomÁs was supposed to spend the night with Aaor and me. The moment I thought about him, though, I realized he wasn’t in camp. Neither was Jesusa. Their scent was beginning to fade.

  Why? Where had they gone? Which way had they gone? I focused all my concentration on picking up their scent trail, finding out where their scent was strongest and freshest. Once I discovered the path they had taken into the forest, I would follow them.

  Ahajas stopped me.

  She was large and quiet and immensely comfortable to be near. Oankali females tended to be that way. I knew that sometimes after a session with Aaor, Nikanj went to her and literally seemed to grow into her body. She was so much larger, it looked like a child against her.

  Now she blocked my path.

  “Let them come back to you,” she said quietly.

  I stared at her with my eyes while my sensory tentacles all focused to the path Jesusa and TomÁs had taken.

  “I saw them leave,” she said. “They took packs and machetes. They’ll be all right, and in a few days, they’ll be back.”

  “Resisters could capture them!” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “But it isn’t likely. They were on their own for a long time before they met you.”

  “But they—”

  “They are as able as any Humans to take care of themselves. Lelka, you should have told them how they were bound to you.”

  “I was afraid to. I was afraid they’d do this.”

  “They probably would have. But now when they begin to need you and feel
desperate and afraid, they won’t know why.”

  “That’s why I want to go after them.”

  “Speak to Lilith first. She used to do this, you know. Nikanj had to learn very young that she would stretch the cord until it almost strangled her. And if Nikanj went after her, she would curse it and hate it.”

  I knew that about Lilith. I went to her and stood near her for a while. She was drawing with black ink or dye on bark cloth. In Lo, other Humans had treasured her drawings— scenes of Earth before the war, of animals long extinct, of distant places, cities, the sea

  . She did paintings, too, sometimes with dyes from plants. She had done little of that during our exile. Now she was returning to it, stripping bark from the limb of a nearby fig tree, preparing it and making her dye and her brushes and sharp sticks. She had told me once that it was something she did to calm herself. Something she did to make herself feel Human.

  She patted the ground next to her, and I went over and cleared a space and sat down.

  “They’re gone,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. She was drawing an outdoor family meal with all of us gathered and eating from gourd dishes and Lo bowls. All. My parents, my siblings—even Aaor as it had looked before it went into the forest—and Jesusa and TomÁs. Everyone was completely recognizable, though it seemed to me they shouldn’t have been. They were made up only of a few black lines.

  “Your mates will never trust me or Tino again,” she said. “That will be our reward for keeping quiet about what was happening to them.”

  “Shall I go after them?”

  “Not now. In a few days. Go when your own feelings tell you they’re suffering, maybe turning back. Meet them somewhere between here and wherever they’ve gone. Can you track them well enough to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it, then. And don’t expect them to behave as though they’re glad to see you for any reasons except the obvious biological need.”

  “I know.”

  “They won’t love or even like you for quite a while.”

  “Or trust me,” I said miserably.

  “That won’t last. It’s us they’ll distrust and resent.”

  I moved around to face her. “They’ll know you kept silent for me.”

  She smiled a bitter smile. “Pheromones, Lelka. Your scent won’t let them hate you for long. They can hate us, though. I’m sorry for that. I like them. You’re very lucky to have them.”

  I did as she said. And when I brought home my silent, resentful mates, they did as she had said they would. Tino and TomÁs seemed to find some common ground by the time Aaor had completed its metamorphosis, but Jesusa held an unyielding grudge. She hardly spoke to my mother from then on. And when it was time for us to go, and she learned that Aaor had to go with us, she almost stopped speaking to me. That was another battle. Aaor did have to go. If we left it behind with only Nikanj to help it, it would not survive. I suspected it was surviving now only because of our combined efforts and its new hope of Human mates to bond with. I suspected, too, that Jesusa understood this. She never threatened to change her mind, to refuse us and leave Aaor to its fate. She was gentler with Aaor than she was with me. Contact with it through me was still torment for her, but its illness reached something in her that perhaps nothing else could. I, on the other hand, was both her comfort and torment. She stopped touching me. She accepted my touch, even enjoyed it as much as she ever had. But she stopped reaching out to me.

  “You did wrong,” TomÁs told me when he had been watching us for a while. “If she wasn’t so good at punishing you, I’d have to think of a way to do it myself.”

  “But you don’t mind,” I said. He had felt only relief when I met them in the forest and brought them home. Jesusa had been full of resentment and anger.

  “She minds,” he said. “She feels trapped and betrayed. I mind that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I was more afraid of losing you than you can imagine.”

  “I can see Aaor,” he said. “I don’t have to imagine.”

  “No. It was the two of you I wanted. Not just to avoid pain.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then smiled. “She’ll forgive you eventually, you know. And she’ll be very suspicious of why she’s done it. And she’ll be right. Won’t she?”

  I looped a sensory arm around his neck and did not bother to answer.

  The rainy season was just ending when the four of us prepared to leave camp. Aaor was strong again—able to walk all day and live on whatever it ran across. And if we slept with it every two or three nights, it could hold its shape. Yet with us all around, it was hideously lonely, empty, almost blank. It could follow and care for itself—just barely. I had to touch it sometimes to rouse it. It was as though it were lost within itself, and only surfaced when we were in contact. It rarely spoke.

  When we were ready to go, Nikanj stood between my Oankali parents to give me final advice and to say goodbye.

  “Don’t come back to this place,” it said. “In a few months, we’ll return to Lo. We’ll give you plenty of time, but we need to go home. Once we get there, everyone will have to know about your mates and their village. Lo will signal the ship and the Humans will be picked up. If the four of you succeed, you’ll be six by then, and perhaps you’ll be back at Lo yourselves.” It focused on me for a time without speaking, and I could not help thinking that if we weren’t careful, we might not live to get back to Lo. I might never see my parents again. Nikanj must have been thinking the same thing.

  “Lelka, I have memories to give you,” it said. “Let me pass them to you now. I think it’s time.”

  Genetics memories. Viable copies of cells that Nikanj had received from its own ooloi parent or that it had collected itself or accepted from its mates and children. It had duplicated everything it possessed and now it would pass the whole inheritance on to me. It was time. I was a mated adult.

  Yet as Nikanj stepped away from Ahajas and Dichaan and reached for me with all four arms, I didn’t feel like an adult. I was afraid of this final step, this final touch. It was as though Nikanj were saying, “Here’s your birthright, my final gift/duty/pleasure to you.” Final.

  But Nikanj said nothing at all. When it touched me, I pulled back, resisting. It simply waited until I was calmer. Then it spoke. “You must have this before you go, Lelka.” It paused. “And you must pass it on to Aaor as soon as Aaor is mated and stable. Who knows when the two of you will see me again?”

  I made myself step into its embrace and at once I felt myself held and penetrated, held absolutely still, but not paralyzed. Nikanj had a gentler touch than I had yet managed. And it still gave pleasure. Even to me. Even now.

  Then the world around me seemed to flare brilliant white. I could no longer see beyond myself. All my senses turned inward as Nikanj used both sensory hands to inject a rush of individual cells, each one a plan by which a whole living entity could be constructed. The cells went straight into my newly mature yashi. The organ seemed to gulp and suckle the way I had once at my mother’s breast.

  There was immense newness. Life in more varieties than I could possibly have imagined—unique units of life, most never seen on Earth. Generations of memory to be examined, memorized, and either preserved alive in stasis or allowed to live their natural span and die. Those that I could re-create from my own genetic material, I did not have to maintain alive.

  The flood of information was incomprehensible to me at first. I received it and stored it with only a few bits of it catching my attention. There would be plenty of time for me to examine the rest. I wouldn’t lose any of it, and once I understood it, I wouldn’t forget it.

  When the flood ended and Nikanj was sure I could stand alone, it let me go.

  “Now,” it said, “except for the lack of Oankali or construct mates, you’re an adult.”

  I felt confused, stuffed with information, overwhelmed with new sensation, stupefied, unable to do much more than hold myself up. I heard what Nikanj said, but the meanings of the words did not reach me for what seemed to be a long time. I felt it touch me once more
with a sensory arm, then draw me to it and walk me over to TomÁs, who was making a pack of the Lo cloth hammock and the other things my parents had given me.

  TomÁs got up at once and took me from Nikanj. He was, I recalled later, careful not to touch Nikanj, but no longer concerned about its nearness. Mated adults behaved that way—at ease with one another because they understood where they belonged and what they should and should not do.

  “What did you do to it?” TomÁs asked.

  “Passed it information it might need on this dangerous trip with you. It’s a little like a drunk Human right now, but it will be all right in a few moments.”

  Tom Ás looked at me doubtfully. “Are you sure? We were about to leave.”

  “It will be fine.”

  I recalled all this later, the way I recalled things I perceived while I was asleep. TomÁs sat me down next to him, finished putting his pack together and rolling it. Then he took one of my sensory arms between his hands and said, “If you don’t wake up, we’ll leave you here and you can come running after us when you’re sober.”

  He was amused, but he wasn’t joking. He would leave without Aaor and me and let us catch up as best we could. Jesusa would certainly go along with him.

  I groped for him, smelling for him rather than seeing him, hardly able to focus on him at all. He gave me his hand readily enough, and I locked on to it, focused so narrowly on it that I began to see and hear him normally through the incredible confusion of information Nikanj had given me. That information was a weight demanding my attention. It would not begin to “lighten” until I began to understand it. To understand it all could take years, but I must at least begin now.

  “It’s not really like being drunk,” I said when I could speak. “It’s more like having billions of strangers screaming from inside you for your individual attention. Incomprehensible

  overwhelming

  no word is big enough. Let me stay close to you for a while.”

  “Nikanj said it just gave you information,” he protested.

  “Yes. And if I began now and continued for the rest of our lives, I could only explain a small fraction of it aloud to you. Ooan should have waited until we came back.”

 

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