Adulthood Rites

by Octavia E. Butler

  “You don’t know what we’ll need!”

  This surprised him. How could she think he did not know? She might wish he did not know, but of course he did. “I’ve known since I touched my sibling,” he said. “I couldn’t have said it then, but I knew we were two-thirds of a reproductive unit. I know what that means. I don’t know how it feels. I don’t know how threes of adults feel when they come together to mate. But I know there must be three, and one of those three must be an ooloi. My body knows that.”

  She believed him. Her face said she believed him.

  “Let’s get back,” she said.

  “Will you help me get home?”

  “No.”

  “But why?”

  Silence.

  “Why!” He pulled futilely at her locked arms.

  “Because …” She waited until he remembered to turn his face up to meet her gaze. “Because these are my people. Lilith has made her choice, and I’ve made mine. That’s something you’ll probably never understand. You and the girls are hope to these people, and hope is something they haven’t had for more years than I want to think about.”

  “But it’s not real. We can’t do what they want.”

  “Do yourself a favor. Don’t tell them.”

  Now he did not have to remind himself to stare at her.

  “Your people will come for you, Akin. I know that, and so do you. I like you, but I’m not good at self-delusion. Let my people hope while they can. Keep quiet.” She drew a deep breath. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  “You’ve taken my sibling from me,” he said. “You’ve kept me from having what Amma and Shkaht have, and that’s something you don’t understand or even care about. My mother might die because you keep me here. You know her, but you don’t care. And if you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?”

  She looked downward, then gazed into the running water. Her expression reminded him of Tino’s mother’s expression when she asked if her son were dead. “No reason,” she said finally. “If I were you, I’d hate our guts.” She unbarred her arms and picked him up, put him on her lap. “We’re all you’ve got, though, kid. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.”

  She stood up with him, holding him tighter than necessary, and turned to see Gabe coming toward them.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. Akin thought later that he looked a little frightened. He looked uncertain, then relieved, yet slightly frightened—as though something bad still might happen.

  “He had some things to tell me,” Tate said. “And we have work to do.”

  “What work?” He took Akin from her as they walked back toward camp, and there was somehow more to the gesture than simply relieving her of a burden. Akin had seen this odd tension in Gabe before, but he did not understand it.

  “We have to see to it that our little girls aren’t forced to kill anyone,” Tate said.

  16

  THE SALVAGE SITE THAT was their destination was a buried town. “Smashed and covered by the Oankali,” Gabe told Akin. “They didn’t want us living here and remembering what we used to be.”

  Akin looked at the vast pit the salvage crew had dug over the years, excavating the town. It had not been wantonly smashed as Gabe believed. It had been harvested. One of the shuttles had partially consumed it. The small ship-entities fed whenever they could. There was no faster way to destroy a town than to land a shuttle on it and let the shuttle eat its fill. Shuttles could digest almost anything, including the soil itself. What the people of Phoenix were digging through were leavings. Apparently these were enough to satisfy their needs.

  “We don’t even know what this place used to be called,” Gabe said bitterly.

  Piles of metal, stone, and other materials lay scattered about. Salvagers were tying some things together with jute rope so that they could be carried. They all stopped their work, though, when they saw the party of newcomers. They gathered around first, shouting and greeting people by name, then falling silent as they noticed the three children.

  Men and women, covered with sweat and dirt, clustered around to touch Akin and make baby-talk noises at him. He did not surprise them by speaking to them, although both girls were trying out their new English on their audience.

  Gabe knelt down, slipped out of his pack, then lifted Akin free. “Don’t goo-goo at him,” he said to a dusty woman salvager who was already reaching for him. “He can talk as well as you can—and understand everything you say.”

  “He’s beautiful!” the woman said. “Is he ours? Is he—”

  “We got him in trade. He’s more Human-looking than the girls, but that probably doesn’t mean anything. He’s construct. He’s not a bad kid, though.”

  Akin looked up at him, recognizing the compliment—the first he had ever received from Gabe, but Gabe had turned away to speak to someone else.

  The salvager picked Akin up and held him so that she could see his face. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you a damn big hole in the ground. Why don’t you talk like your friends? You shy?”

  “I don’t think so,” Akin answered.

  The woman looked startled, then grinned. “Okay. Let’s go take a look at something that probably used to be a truck.”

  The salvagers had hacked away thick, wild vegetation to dig their hole and to plant their crops along two sides of it, but the wild vegetation was growing back. People with hoes, shovels, and machetes had been clearing it away. Now they were talking with newly arrived Humans or getting acquainted with Amma and Shkaht. Three Humans trailed after the woman who carried Akin, talking to each other about him and occasionally talking to him.

  “No tentacles,” one of them said, stroking his face. “So Human. So beautiful …”

  Akin did not believe he was beautiful. These people liked him simply because he looked like them. He was comfortable with them, though. He talked to them easily and ate the bits of food they kept giving him and accepted their caresses, though he did not enjoy them any more than he ever had. Humans needed to touch people, but they could not do so in ways that were pleasurable or useful. Only when he felt lonely or frightened was he glad of their hands, their protection.

  They passed near a broad trench, its sides covered with grass. At its center flowed a clear stream. No doubt there were wet seasons when the entire riverbed was filled, perhaps to overflowing. The wet and dry seasons here would be more pronounced than in the forest around Lo. There, it rained often no matter what the season was supposed to be. Akin knew about such things because he had heard adults talk about them. It was not strange to see this shrunken river. But when he looked up as he was carried toward the far end of the pit, he saw for the first time between the green hills to the distant, snow-covered peaks of the mountains.

  “Wait!” Akin shouted as the salvager—Sabina, her name was—would have carried him on toward the house on the far side of the hole. “Wait, let me look.”

  She seemed pleased to do this. “Those are volcanic,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “A broken place in the Earth where hot liquid rock comes up,” Akin said.

  “Good,” she said. “Those mountains were pushed up and built by volcanic activity. One of them went off last year. Not close enough to us to matter, but it was exciting. It still steams now and then, even though it’s covered with snow. Do you like it?”

  “Dangerous,” he said. “Did the ground shake?”

  “Yes. Not much here, but it must have been pretty bad there. I don’t think there are any people living near there.”

  “Good. I like to look at it, though. I’d like to go there some day to understand it.”

  “Safer to look from here.” She took him on to the short row of houses where salvagers apparently lived. There was a flattened rectangular metal frame—Sabina’s “truck” apparently. It looked useless. Akin had no idea what Humans had once done with it, but now it could only be cut up into metal scrap and eventually forged into other things. It was h
uge and would probably yield a great deal of metal. Akin wondered how the feeding shuttle had missed it.

  “I’d like to know how the Oankali smashed it flat this way,” another woman said. “It’s as though a big foot stepped on it.”

  Akin said nothing. He had learned that people did not really want him to give them information unless they asked him directly—or unless they were so desperate they didn’t care where their information came from. And information about the Oankali tended to frighten or anger them no matter how they received it.

  Sabina put him down, and he looked more closely at the metal. He would have tasted it if he had been alone. Instead, he followed the salvagers into one of the houses. It was a solidly built house, but it was plain, unpainted, roofed with sheets of metal. The guest house at Lo was a more interesting building.

  But inside there was a museum.

  There were stacks of dishes, bits of jewelry, glass, metal. There were boxes with glass windows. Behind the windows was only a blank, solid grayness. There were massive metal boxes with large, numbered wheels on their doors. There were metal shelves, tables, drawers, bottles. There were crosses like the one on Gabe’s coin—crosses of metal, each with a metal man hanging from them. Christ on the cross, Akin remembered. There were also pictures of Christ rapping with his knuckles on a wooden door and others of him pulling open his clothing to reveal a red shape that contained a torch. There was a picture of Christ sitting at a table with a lot of other men. Some of the pictures seemed to move as Akin viewed them from different angles.

  Tate, who had reached the house before him, took one of the moving pictures—a small one of Christ standing on a hill and talking to people—and handed it to Akin. He moved it slightly in his hand, watching the apparent movement of Christ, whose mouth opened and closed and whose arm moved up and down. The picture, though scratched, was hard and flat—made of a material Akin did not understand. He tasted it—then threw it hard away from him, disgusted, nauseated.

  “Hey!” one of the salvagers yelled. “Those things are valuable!” The man retrieved the picture, glared at Akin, then glared at Tate. “What the hell would you give a thing like that to a baby for anyway?”

  But both Tate and Sabina had stepped quickly to see what was wrong with Akin.

  Akin went to the door and spat outside several times, spat away pure pain as his body fought to deal with what he had carelessly taken in. By the time he was able to talk and tell what was wrong, he had everyone’s attention. He did not want it, but he had it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did the picture break?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Tate said with unmistakable concern.

  “Nothing now. I got rid of it. If I were older, I could have handled it better—made it harmless.”

  “The picture—the plastic—was harmful to you?”

  “The stuff it was made of. Plastic?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s so sealed and covered with dirt that I didn’t feel the poison before I tasted it. Tell the girls not to taste it.”

  “We won’t,” Amma and Shkaht said in unison, and Akin jumped. He did not know when they had come in.

  “I’ll show you later,” he said in Oankali.

  They nodded.

  “It was … more poison packed tight together in one place than I’ve ever known. Did Humans make it that way on purpose?”

  “It just worked out that way,” Gabe said. “Hell, maybe that’s why the stuff is still here. Maybe it’s so poisonous—or so useless—that not even the microbes would eat it. Non-biodegradable, I think the prewar word was.”

  Akin looked at him sharply. The shuttle had not eaten the plastic. And the shuttle could eat anything. Perhaps the plastic, like the truck, had simply been overlooked. Or perhaps the shuttle had found it useless as Gabe had said.

  “Plastics used to kill people back before the war,” a woman said. “They were used in furniture, clothing, containers, appliances, just about everything. Sometimes the poisons leached into food or water and caused cancer, and sometimes there was a fire and plastics burned and gassed people to death. My prewar husband was a fireman. He used to tell me.”

  “I don’t remember that,” someone said.

  “I remember it,” someone else contradicted. “I remember a house fire in my neighborhood where everybody died trying to get out because of poison gas from burning plastics.”

  “My god,” Sabina said, “should we be trading this stuff?”

  “We can trade it,” Tate said. “The only place that has enough of it to be a real danger is right here. Other people need things like this—pictures and statues from another time, something to remind them what we were. What we are.”

  “Why did people use it so much if it killed them?” Akin asked.

  “Most of them didn’t know how dangerous it was,” Gabe said. “And some of the ones who did know were making too damn much money selling the stuff to worry about fire and contamination that might or might not happen.” He made a wordless sound—almost a laugh, although Akin could detect no humor in it. “That’s what Humans are, too, don’t forget. People who poison each other, then disclaim all responsibility. In a way, that’s how the war happened.”

  “Then …” Akin hesitated. “Then why don’t you paint new pictures and make statues from wood or metal?”

  “It wouldn’t be the same for them,” Shkaht said in Oankali. “They really do need the old things. Our Human father got one of the little crosses from a traveling resister. He always wore it on a cord around his neck.”

  “Was it plastic?” Akin asked.

  “Metal. But prewar. Very old. Maybe it even came from here.”

  “Independent resisters take our stuff to your villages?” Tate asked when Akin translated.

  “Some of them trade with us,” Akin said. “Some stay for a while and have children. And some only come to steal children.”

  Silence. The Humans went back to their trade goods, broke into groups, and began exchanging news.

  Tate showed Akin the house where he was to sleep—a house filled with mats and hammocks, cluttered with small objects the salvagers had dug up, and distinguished by a large, cast-iron woodstove. It made the one in Tate’s kitchen seem child-sized.

  “Stay away from that,” Tate said. “Even when it’s cold. Make a habit of staying away from it, you hear?”

  “All right. I wouldn’t touch anything hot by accident, though. And I’m finally too old to poison, so—”

  “You just poisoned yourself!”

  “No. I was careless, and it hurt, but I wouldn’t have gotten very sick or died. It was like when you hit your toe and stumbled on the trail. It didn’t mean you don’t know how to walk. You were just careless.”

  “Yeah. That may or may not be a good analogy. You stay away from the stove anyway. You want something to eat or has everyone already stuffed you with food?”

  “I’ll have to get rid of some of what I’ve already eaten so that I can eat some more protein.”

  “Want to eat with us or would you rather go out and eat leaves?”

  “I’d rather go out and eat leaves.”

  She frowned at him for a second, then began to laugh. “Go,” she said. “And be careful.”

  17

  NECI ROYBAL WANTED ONE of the girls. And she had not given up the idea of having both girls’ tentacles removed. She had begun again to campaign for that among the salvagers. The tentacles looked more like slugs than worms most of the time, she said. It was criminal to allow little girls to be afflicted with such things. Girl children who might someday be the mothers of a new Human race ought to look Human—ought to see Human features when they looked in the mirror …

  “They’re not Oankali,” Akin heard her tell Abira one night. “What happened to the man Tate and Gabe knew—that might only happen with Oankali.”

  “Neci,” Abira told her, “if you go near those kids with a knife, and they don’t finish you, I will.”

>   Others were more receptive. A pair of salvagers named Senn converted quickly to Neci’s point of view. Akin spent much of his third night at the salvage camp lying in Abira’s hammock, listening as in the next house Neci and Gilbert and Anne Senn strove to convert Yori Shinizu and Sabina Dobrowski. Yori, the doctor, was obviously the person they hoped would remove the girls’ tentacles.

  “It’s not just the way the tentacles look,” Gil said in his soft voice. Everyone called him Gil. He had a soft, ooloilike voice. “Yes, they are ugly, but it’s what they represent that’s important. They’re alien. Un-Human. How can little girls grow up to be Human women when their own sense organs betray them?”

  “What about the boy?” Yori asked. “He has the same alien senses, but they’re located in his tongue. We couldn’t remove that.”

  “No,” Anne said, soft-voiced like her husband. She looked and sounded enough like him to be his sister, but Humans did not marry their siblings, and these two had been married before the war. They had come from a place called Switzerland and had been visiting a place called Kenya when the war happened. They had gone to look at huge, fabulous animals, now extinct. In her spare time, Anne painted pictures of the animals on cloth or paper or wood. Giraffes, she called them, lions, elephants, cheetahs … She had already shown Akin some of her work. She seemed to like him.

  “No,” she repeated. “But the boy must be taught as any child should be taught. It’s wrong to let him always put things into his mouth. It’s wrong to let him eat grass and leaves like a cow. It’s wrong to let him lick people. Tate says he calls it tasting them. It’s disgusting.”

  “She lets him give in to any alien impulse,” Neci said. “She had no children before. I heard there was some sickness in her family so that she didn’t dare have children. She doesn’t know how to care for them.”

  “The boy loves her,” Yori said.

  “Because she spoils him,” Neci said. “But he’s young. He can learn to love other people.”

  “You?” Gil asked.