Adulthood Rites

by Octavia E. Butler

  The doctor stumbled back from him with a wordless sound.

  “I told you he could talk, Yori.”

  She shook her head. “I thought you meant … baby talk.”

  “I meant like you and me. Ask him questions. He’ll answer.”

  “What can you tell me about the spots?” she asked.

  “Sensory spots. I can see and taste with most of them.” And he could complete sensory connections with anyone else who had sensory tentacles or spots. But he would not talk to Humans about that.

  “Does it bother you when we touch them?”

  “Yes. I’m used to it, but it still bothers me.”

  Two women came into the room and called Rinaldi away.

  A man and woman came in to look at Akin—just to stand and stare at him and listen as he answered the doctor’s questions. He guessed who they were before they finally spoke to him.

  “Did you really know our son?” the woman asked. She was very small. All the women he had seen so far were almost tiny. They would have looked like children alongside his mother and sisters. Still, they were gentle and knew how to lift him without hurting him. And they were neither afraid of him nor disgusted by him.

  “Was Tino your son?” he asked the woman.

  She nodded, mouth pulled tight. Small lines had gathered between her eyes. “Is it true?” she asked. “Have they killed him?”

  Akin bit his lips, suddenly caught by the woman’s emotion. “I think so. Nothing could save him unless an Oankali found him quickly—and no Oankali heard when I screamed for help.”

  The man stepped close to Akin, wearing an expression Akin had never seen before—yet he understood it. “Which one of them killed him?” the man demanded. His voice was very low, and only Akin and the two women heard. The doctor, slightly behind the man, shook her head. Her eyes were like his Human father Joseph’s had been—more narrow than round. Akin had been waiting for a chance to ask her whether she was Chinese. Now, though, her eyes were big with fear. Akin knew fear when he saw it.

  “One who died,” Akin lied quietly. “His name was Tilden. He had a sickness that made him bleed and hurt and hate everyone. The other men called it an ulcer. One day, he threw up too much blood, and he died. I think the others buried him. One of them took me away so I wouldn’t see.”

  “You know that he’s dead? You’re sure?”

  “Yes. The others were angry and sad and dangerous for a long time after that. I had to be very careful.”

  The man stared at him for a long time, trying to see what any Oankali would have known at a touch, what this man would never know. He had loved Tino, this man. How could Akin, even without the doctor’s warning, send him with his bare hands to face a man who had a gun, who had three friends with guns?

  Tino’s father turned from Akin and went to the other side of the room, where both Rinaldis, the two women who had come in, and the four raiders were talking, shouting, gesturing. They had, Akin realized, begun the business of trading for him. Tino’s father was smaller than most of the men, but when he stalked into their midst, everyone stopped talking. Perhaps it was the look on the man’s face that made Iriarte finger the rifle beside him.

  “Is there one of you called Tilden?” Tino’s father asked. His voice was calm and soft.

  The raiders did not answer for a moment. Then, ironically, it was Damek who said, “He died, mister. That ulcer of his finally got him.”

  “Did you know him?” Iriarte asked.

  “I would like to have met him,” Tino’s father said. And he walked out of the house. Tate Rinaldi looked over at Akin, but no one else seemed to pay attention to him. Attention shifted from Tino’s father back to the subject of the trade. Tino’s mother smoothed back Akin’s hair and looked into his face for a moment.

  “What was my son to you?” she asked.

  “He took the place of my dead Human father.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and tears ran down her face. Finally she kissed his cheek and went away.

  “Akin,” the doctor said softly, “did you tell them the truth?”

  Akin looked at her and decided not to answer. He wished he had not told Tate Rinaldi the truth. She had sent Tino’s parents to him. It would have been better not to meet them at all until the raiders had gone away. He had to remember, had to keep reminding himself how dangerous Human beings were.

  “Never tell them,” Yori whispered. His silence had apparently told her enough. “There has been enough killing. We die and die and no one is born.” She put her hands on either side of his face and looked at him, her expression shifting from pain to hatred to pain to something utterly unreadable. She hugged him suddenly, and he was afraid she would crush him or scratch him with her nails or thrust him away from her and hurt him. There was so much suppressed emotion in her, so much deadly tension in her body.

  She left him. She spoke for a few moments with Rinaldi, then left the house.

  10

  BARGAINING WENT ON INTO the night. People ate and drank and told stories and tried to outtrade one another. Tate gave Akin what she called a decent vegetarian meal, and he did not tell her that it was not decent at all. It did not contain nearly enough protein to satisfy him. He ate it, then slipped out a door at the back of the house and supplemented his meal with peas and seed from her garden. He was eating these things when the shooting began inside.

  The first shot startled him so much that he fell over. As he stood up, there were more shots. He took several steps toward the house, then stopped. If he went in, someone might shoot him or step on him or kick him. When the shooting stopped, he would go in. If Iriarte or Tate called him, he would go in.

  There was the noise of furniture smashing—heavy bodies thrown about, people shouting, cursing. It was as though the people inside intended to destroy both the house and themselves.

  Other people rushed into the house, and the sounds of fighting increased, then died.

  When there had been several moments of silence, Akin went up the steps and into the house, moving slowly but not quietly. He made small noises deliberately, hoping he would be heard and seen and known not to be dangerous.

  He saw first broken dishes. The clean, neat room where Tate had given him pineapple and talked to him was now littered with broken dishes and broken furniture. He had to move very carefully to avoid cutting his feet. His body healed faster than the bodies of Humans, but he found injuring himself just as painful as they seemed to.

  Blood.

  He could smell it strongly enough to be frightened. Someone must be dead with so much blood spilled.

  In the living room, there were people lying on the floor and others tending them. In one corner, Iriarte lay untended.

  Akin ran toward the man. Someone caught him before he could reach Iriarte and picked him up in spite of his struggles and cries.

  Rinaldi.

  Akin yelled, twisted, and bit the man’s thumb.

  Rinaldi dropped him, shouting that he had been poisoned—which he had not—and Akin scrambled to Iriarte.

  But Iriarte was dead.

  Someone had struck him several times across the body with what must have been a machete. He had gaping, horrible wounds, some spilling entrails onto the floor.

  Akin screamed in shock and frustration and grief. When he came to know a man, the man died. His Human father was dead without Akin ever knowing him except through Nikanj. Tino was dead. Now Iriarte was dead. His years had been cut off unfinished. His Human children had died in the war, and his construct children, created from material the ooloi had collected long ago, would never know him, never taste him and find themselves in him.

  Why?

  Akin looked around the room. Yori and a few others were doing what they could for the injured, but most of the people in the room were just staring at Akin or at Gabriel Rinaldi.

  “He’s not poisoned!” Akin said with disgust. “You’re the ones who kill people, not me!”

  “He’s all right?” Tate s
aid. She was standing with her husband, looking frightened.

  “Yes.” He looked at her for a moment, then looked again at Iriarte. He looked around, saw that Galt also appeared to be dead, hacked about the head and shoulders. Yori was working over Damek. What irony if Damek lived while Iriarte died for the murder Damek had committed.

  Tino’s murder must be the reason for all this.

  On the floor near Damek lay Tino’s father, wounded in his left thigh, his left arm, and his right shoulder. His wife was weeping over him, but he was not dead. A man was using something other than water to clean away blood from the shoulder wound. Another man was holding Tino’s father down.

  There were other wounded and dead around the room. Akin found Kaliq dead behind a long cushion-covered wooden bench. He had only one wound, bloody but small. It was a chest wound, probably involving his heart.

  Akin sat beside him while others in the house helped the injured and carried out the dead. No one came for Kaliq while he sat there. Behind him, someone began to scream. Akin looked back and saw that it was Damek. Akin tried not to feel the anguish that came to him reflexively when he saw a Human suffering. One part of his mind screamed for an ooloi to save this irreplaceable Human, this man whom some ooloi somewhere had made prints of, but whom no Oankali or construct truly knew.

  Another part of his mind hoped Damek would die. Let him suffer. Let him scream. Tino had not even had time to scream.

  Tino’s father did not scream. He grunted. Bits of metal were cut from his flesh while he held a piece of folded cloth between his teeth and grunted.

  Akin came out of his corner to look at one of the bits of metal—a gray pellet covered with the blood of Tino’s father.

  Tate came over to him and picked him up. To his own surprise, he held on to her. He put his head on her shoulder and did not want to be put down.

  “Don’t you bite me,” she said. “If you want to get down, you tell me. Bite me and I’ll bounce you off a wall.”

  He sighed, feeling alone even in her arms. She was not the haven he had needed. “Put me down,” he said.

  She held him away from her and looked at him. “Really?”

  Surprised, he looked back. “I thought you didn’t want to hold me.”

  “If I didn’t want to hold you, I wouldn’t have picked you up. I just want us to understand each other. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  And she held him to her again and answered his questions, told him about bullets and how they were fired from guns, how Tino’s father Mateo had come with his friends to take revenge on the raiders in spite of their guns. There were no guns in Phoenix before the raiders arrived.

  “We voted not to have them,” she said. “We have enough things to hurt each other with. Now … well, we’ve got our first four. I’ll bury the damned things if I get the chance.”

  She had taken him in among the broken dishes and sat him on the counter. He watched while she lit a lamp. The lamp reminded him suddenly, painfully, of the guest house back in Lo.

  “You want anything else to eat?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No … what?”

  “Shame on Lilith. ‘No, thank you,’ little one. Or ‘Yes, please.’ Understand?”

  “I didn’t know resisters said those things.”

  “In my house they do.”

  “Did you tell Mateo who killed Tino?”

  “God, no. I was afraid you told him. I forgot to tell you to keep that to yourself.”

  “I told him the man who killed Tino was dead. One of the raiders really did die. He was sick. I thought if Mateo believed it was that one, he wouldn’t hurt anyone else.”

  She nodded. “That should have worked. You’re brighter than I thought. And Mateo is crazier than I thought.” She sighed. “Hell, I don’t know. I never had any kids. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had one and someone killed him.”

  “You shouldn’t have told Tino’s parents anything at all until the raiders were gone,” Akin said quietly.

  She looked at him, then looked away. “I know. All I said was that you had known Tino and that he had been killed. Of course they wanted to know more, but I told them to wait until we had settled you in—that you were just a baby, after all.” She looked at him again, frowning, shaking her head. “I wonder what the hell you really are.”

  “A baby,” he said. “A Human-Oankali construct. I wish I were something more because the Oankali part of me scares people, but it doesn’t help me when they try to hurt me.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Akin looked at her, then looked toward the room in which Iriarte lay dead.

  Tate made herself very busy cleaning up the broken dishes and glass.

  11

  BOTH DAMEK AND MATEO lived.

  Akin avoided both of them and stayed with the Rinaldis. Tino’s mother Pilar wanted him, seemed to believe she had a right to him since her son was dead. But Akin did not want to be near Mateo, and Tate knew it. Tate wanted him herself. She also felt guilty about the shooting, about her misjudgment. Akin trusted her to fight for him. He did not want to chance making an enemy of Pilar.

  Other women fed him and held him when they could. He tried to speak to them or at least be heard speaking before they could get their hands on him. This made some of them back away from him. It kept them all from talking baby talk to him—most of the time. It also kept them from making fools of themselves and later resenting him for it. It forced them to either accept him for what he was or reject him.

  And it had been Tate’s idea.

  She reminded him of his mother, though the two were physical opposites. Pink skin and brown, blond hair and black, short stature and tall, small-boned and large. But they were alike in the way they accepted things, adapted to strangeness, thought quickly, and turned situations to their advantage. And they were both, at times, dangerously angry and upset for no apparent reason. Akin knew that Lilith sometimes hated herself for working with the Oankali, for having children who were not fully Human. She loved her children, yet she felt guilt for having them.

  Tate had no children. She had not cooperated with the Oankali. What did she feel guilt for? What drove her sometimes when she stalked away into the forest and stayed for hours?

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gabe told him when he asked. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Akin suspected that he himself did not understand. He watched her sometimes in a way that made Akin think he was trying hard to understand her—and failing.

  Gabe had accepted Akin because Tate wanted him to. He did not particularly like Akin. “The mouth,” he called Akin. And he said when he thought Akin could not hear: “Who the hell needs a baby that sounds like a midget?”

  Akin did not know what a midget was. He thought it must be a kind of insect until one of the village women told him it was a Human with a glandular disorder that caused him to remain tiny even as an adult. After he had asked the question, several people in the village never called him anything except midget.

  He had no worse trouble than that in Phoenix. Even the people who did not like him were not cruel. Damek and Mateo recuperated out of his sight. And he had begun at once to try to convince Tate to help him escape and go home.

  He had to do something. No one seemed to be coming for him. His new sibling must be born by now and bonding with other people. It would not know it had a brother, Akin. It would be a stranger when he finally saw it. He tried to tell Tate what this would mean, how completely wrong it would be.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tate told him. They had gone out to pick pummelos—Tate to pick the fruit and Akin to graze, but Akin stayed close to her. “The kid’s just a newborn now,” Tate continued. “Even construct kids can’t be born talking and knowing people. You’ll have time to get acquainted with it.”

  “This is the time for bonding,” Akin said, wondering how he could explain such a personal thing to a Human who delibera
tely avoided all contact with the Oankali. “Bonding happens shortly after birth and shortly after metamorphosis. At other times … bonds are only shadows of what they could be. Sometimes people manage to make them, but usually they don’t. Late bonds are never what they should be. I’ll never know my sister the way I should.”

  “Sister?”

  Akin looked away, not wanting to cry but not able to stop a few silent tears. “Maybe it won’t be a sister. It should be, though. It would be if I were there.” He looked up at her suddenly and thought he read sympathy in her face.

  “Take me home!” he whispered urgently. “I’m not really finished with my own bonding. My body was waiting for this new sibling.”

  She frowned at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “Ahajas let me touch it, let me be one of its presences. She let me recognize it and know it as a sibling still forming. It would be the sibling closest to me—closest to my age. It should be the sibling I grow up with, bond with. We … we won’t be right …” He thought for a moment. “We won’t be complete without each other.” He looked up at her hopefully.

  “I remember Ahajas,” she said softly. “She was so big … I thought she was male. Then Kahguyaht, our ooloi, told me Oankali females are like that. ‘Plenty of room inside for children,’ it said. ‘And plenty of strength to protect the children, born and unborn.’ Gabe asked what males did if females did all that. ‘They seek out new life,’ it said. ‘Males are seekers and collectors of life. What ooloi and females can do, males must do.’ Gabe thought that meant ooloi and females could do without males. Kahguyaht said no, it meant the Oankali as a people would eventually die without males. I don’t think Gabe ever believed that.” She sighed. She had been thinking aloud, not really talking to Akin. She jumped when Akin spoke to her.

  “Kahguyaht ooan Nikanj?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He stared at her for several seconds. “Let me taste you,” he said finally. She could consent or refuse. She would not be frightened or disgusted or dangerous.