Adulthood Rites

by Octavia E. Butler

  “I want to see Chkahichdahk.”

  “You could wait. See it after you change.”

  “I want to go with Akin.” There was the strong negative again. It had said what it had not wanted to say.

  “Then you will probably be female.”

  Sadness. “I know.”

  “Ti, maybe you want to go with Akin because you’re still trying to heal the old wound. As I said, there are no resisters on Chkahichdahk. No bands of Humans to distract him and use so much of his time.” She shifted her attention to Akin. “And you. Since you must go, how do you feel about having Ti go with you?”

  “I don’t want it to go.” No lie could be told successfully in this intimate form of communication. The only way to avoid unpleasant truths was to avoid communication—to say nothing. But Tiikuchahk already knew he did not want it to go with him. Everyone knew. It repelled him and yet drew him in such an incomprehensible, uncomfortable way that he did not like to be near it at all. And it felt the same things he did. It should have been glad to see him go away.

  Ayre shuddered. She did not break the contact between them, but she wanted to. She could feel the deep attraction-repulsion between them. She tried to overcome the conflicting emotions with her own calm, with feelings of unity that she recalled with her own paired sibling. Akin recognized the feeling. He had noticed it before in others. It did nothing to calm his own confusion of feelings.

  Ayre broke contact with them. “Ti is right. You should go up together,” she said, rustling her head tentacles uncomfortably. “You have to resolve this. It’s disgusting that the people chose to let this happen to you.”

  “We don’t know how to resolve it,” Akin said, “except to wait for metamorphosis.”

  “Find an ooloi. A subadult. That’s something you can’t do here. I haven’t seen a subadult down here for years.”

  “I’ve never seen one,” Tiikuchahk said. “They come down after their second metamorphosis. What can they do before then?”

  “Focus the two of you away from each other without even trying. You’ll see. Even before they grow up, they’re … interesting.”

  Akin stood up. “I don’t want an ooloi. That makes me think about mating. Everything is going too fast.”

  Ayre sighed and shook her head. “What do you think you’ve been doing with those resister women?”

  “That was different. Nothing could happen. I even told them nothing could happen. They wanted to do it anyway—in case I was wrong.”

  “You and Ti find yourselves an ooloi. If it isn’t mature it can’t mate—but it can help you.”

  They left her, found themselves both seeking out then starting toward Nikanj. At that point, Akin deliberately pulled himself out of synchronization with Tiikuchahk. It was a grating synchronization that kept happening by accident and feeling the way the saw mill in Phoenix had once sounded when something went badly wrong with the saw and the mill had to be shut down for days.

  He stopped, and Tiikuchahk went on. It stumbled, and he knew it felt the same tearing away that he did. Things had always been this way for them. He knew it was usually glad when he left the village for weeks or months. Sometimes it would not stay with the family when he was home but went to other families, where it found being alone, being an outsider, more endurable.

  Humans had no idea how completely Oankali and construct society was made up of groups of two or more people. Tate did not know what she had done when she refused to help him get back to Lo and Tiikuchahk. Perhaps that was why in all his travels, he had never returned to Phoenix.

  He went to Lilith, as someone began calling for a story. She was sitting alone, ignoring the call, although people liked her stories. Her memory supplied her with the smallest details of prewar Earth, and she knew how to put everything together in ways that made people laugh or cry or lean forward, listening, fearful of missing the next words.

  She looked up at him, and said nothing when he sat down next to her.

  “I wanted to say goodbye,” he said softly.

  She seemed tired. “I was thinking about Margit growing up, you and Ti going. … But you should go.” She took his hand and held it. “You should know the Oankali part of yourselves, too. But I can hardly stand the thought of losing what may be the last year of your childhood.”

  “I hoped I would reach more of the resisters,” he said.

  She said nothing. She did not talk to him about his trips to the resisters. She cautioned him sometimes, answered questions if he asked. And he could see that she worried about him. But she volunteered nothing—nor did he. Once, when she had left the village on one of her solitary treks, he had followed her, found her sitting on a log waiting for him when he finally caught her. They traveled together for several days, and she told him her story—why her name was an epithet among English-speaking resisters, how they blamed her for what the Oankali had done to them because she was the person the Oankali had chosen to work through. She had had to awaken groups of Humans from suspended animation and help them understand their new situation. Only she could speak Oankali then. Only she could open and close walls and use her Oankali-enhanced strength to protect herself and others. That was enough to make her a collaborator, a traitor in the minds of her own people. It had been safe to blame her, she said. The Oankali were powerful and dangerous, and she was not.

  Now she faced him. “You couldn’t possibly reach all the resisters,” she said. “If you want to help them, you already have the information you need from them. Now you need to learn more about the Oankali. Do you see?”

  He nodded slowly, his skin itching where there were sensory spots but no tentacles to coil tight and express the tension he felt.

  “If there is anything you can do, now is the time to find out what it is and how to do it. Learn all you can.”

  “I will.” He compared her long, brown hand to his own and wondered how there could be so little visible difference. Perhaps the first sign of his metamorphosis would be new fingers growing or old ones losing their flat Human nails. “I hadn’t really thought of the trip being useful.”

  “Make it useful!”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “Do you really believe I can help?”

  “Do you?”

  “I have ideas.”

  “Save them. You’ve been right to keep quiet about them so far.”

  It was good to hear her confirming what he had believed. “Will you come to the ship with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Now.”

  She looked out at the party, at the village. People had clustered at the guest house where someone was telling a story, and another group had gotten out flutes, drums, guitars, and a small harp. Their music would soon either drive the storytellers into one of the houses or, more likely, bring them into the singing and dancing.

  Oankali did not like music. They began to withdraw into the houses—to save their hearing, they said. Most constructs enjoyed music as much as Humans did. Several Oankali-born construct males had become wandering musicians, more than welcome at any trade village.

  “I’m not in a mood for singing or dancing or stories,” he said. “Walk with me. I’ll sleep at the ship tonight. I’ve said my goodbyes.”

  She stood up, towering over him in a way that made him feel oddly secure. No one spoke to them or joined them as they left the village.

  4

  CHKAHICHDAHK. DICHAAN WENT UP with Akin and Tiikuchahk. The shuttle could simply have been sent home. It had eaten its fill and been introduced to several people who had reached adulthood recently. It was content and needed no guiding. But Dichaan went with them anyway. Akin was glad of this. He needed his same-sex parent more than he would have admitted.

  Tiikuchahk seemed to need Dichaan, too. It stayed close to him in the soft light of the shuttle. The shuttle had made them a plain gray sphere within itself and left them to decide whether they wanted to raise platforms or bulkheads. The air would be kept fresh, the shuttle efficiently supplying them wi
th the oxygen it produced and taking away the carbon dioxide they exhaled for its own use. It could also use any waste they produced, and it could feed them anything they could describe, just as Lo could. Even a child with only one functional sensory tentacle could describe foods he had eaten and ask for duplicate foods. The shuttle would synthesize them as Lo would have.

  But only Dichaan could truly link with the shuttle and, through its senses, share its experience of flying through space. He could not share what he experienced until he had detached himself from the shuttle. Then he held Akin immobile as though holding an infant and showed him open space.

  Akin seemed to drift, utterly naked, spinning on his own axis, leaving the wet, rocky, sweet-tasting little planet that he had always enjoyed and going back to the life source that was wife, mother, sister, haven. He had news for her of one of their children—of Lo.

  But he was in empty space—surrounded by blackness, feeding from the impossibly bright light of the sun, falling away from the great blue curve of the Earth, aware over all the body of the great number of distant stars. They were gentle touches, and the sun was a great, confining hand, gentle but inescapable. No shuttle could travel this close to a star, then escape its gravitational embrace. Only Chkahichdahk could do that, powered by its own internal sun—its digestion utterly efficient, wasting nothing.

  Everything was sharp, starkly clear, intense beyond enduring. Everything pounded the senses. Impressions came as blows. He was attacked, beaten, tormented …

  And it ended.

  Akin could not have ended it. He lay now, weak with shock, no longer annoyed at Dichaan’s holding him, needing the support.

  “That was only a second,” Dichaan was saying. “Less than a second. And I cushioned it for you.”

  Gradually, Akin became able to move and think again. “Why is it like that?” he demanded.

  “Why does the shuttle feel what it feels? Why do we experience its feelings so intensely? Eka, why do you feel what you feel? How would a coati or an agouti receive your feelings?”

  “But—”

  “It feels as it feels. Its feelings would hurt you, perhaps injure or kill you if you took them directly. Your reactions would confuse it and throw it off course.”

  “And when I’m an adult, I’ll be able to perceive through it as you do?”

  “Oh, yes. We never trade away our abilities to work with the ships. They’re more than partners to us.”

  “But … what do we do for them, really? They allow us to travel through space, but they could travel without us.”

  “We build them. They are us, too, you know.” He stroked a smooth, gray wall, then linked into it with several head tentacles. He was asking for food, Akin realized. Delivery would take a while, since the shuttle stored nothing. Foods were stored when Humans were brought along because some shuttles were not as practiced as they might be in assembling foods that tasted satisfying to Humans. They had never poisoned anyone or left anyone malnourished. But sometimes Humans found the food they produced so odd-tasting that the Humans chose to fast.

  “They began as we began,” Dichaan continued. He touched Akin with a few long-stretched head tentacles, and Akin moved closer again to receive an impression of Oankali in one of their earliest forms, limited to their home world and the life that had originated there. From their own genes and those of many other animals, they fashioned the ancestors of the ships. Their intelligence, when it was needed, was still Oankali. There were no ooloi ships, so their seed was always mixed in Oankali ooloi.

  “And there are no construct ooloi,” Akin said softly.

  “There will be.”

  “When?”

  “Eka … when we feel more secure about you.”

  Silenced, Akin stared at him. “Me alone?”

  “You and the others like you. By now, every trade village has one. If you had done your wandering to trade villages, you’d know that.”

  Tiikuchahk spoke for the first time. “Why should it be so hard to get construct males from Human females? And why are Human-born males so important?”

  “They must be given more Human characteristics than Oankali-born construct males,” Dichaan answered. “Otherwise, they could not survive inside their Human mothers. And since they must be so Human and still male, and eventually fertile, they must come dangerously close to fully Human males in some ways. They bear more of the Human Contradiction than any other people.”

  The Human Contradiction again. The Contradiction, it was more often called among Oankali. Intelligence and hierarchical behavior. It was fascinating, seductive, and lethal. It had brought Humans to their final war.

  “I don’t feel any of that in me,” Akin said.

  “You’re not mature yet,” Dichaan said. “Nikanj believes you are exactly what it intended you to be. But the people must see the full expression of its work before they are ready to shift their attention to construct ooloi and maturity for the new species.”

  “Then it will be an Oankali species,” Akin said softly. “It will grow and divide as Oankali always have, and it will call itself Oankali.”

  “It will be Oankali. Look within the cells of your own body. You are Oankali.”

  “And the Humans will be extinct, just as they believe.”

  “Look within your cells for them, too. Your cells in particular.”

  “But we will be Oankali. They will only be … something we consumed.”

  Dichaan lay back, relaxing his body and welcoming Tiikuchahk, who immediately lay beside him, some of its head tentacles writhing into his.

  “You and Nikanj,” he said to Akin. “Nikanj tells the Humans we are symbionts, and you believe we are predators. What have you consumed, Eka?”

  “I’m what Nikanj made me.”

  “What has it consumed?”

  Akin stared at the two of them, wondering what communion they shared that he took no part in. But he did not want another painful, dissonant blending with Tiikuchahk. Not yet. That would happen soon enough by accident. He sat watching them, trying to see them both as a resister might. They slowly became alien to him, became ugly, became almost frightening.

  He shook his head suddenly, rejecting the illusion. He had created it before, but never so deliberately or so perfectly.

  “They are consumed,” he said quietly. “And it was wrong and unnecessary.”

  “They live, Eka. In you.”

  “Let them live in themselves!”

  Silence.

  “What are we that we can do this to whole peoples? Not predators? Not symbionts? What then?”

  “A people, growing, changing. You’re an important part of that change. You’re a danger we might not survive.”

  “I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

  “Do you think the Humans deliberately destroyed their civilization?”

  “What do you think I will destroy?”

  “Nothing. Not you personally, but human-born males in general. Yet we must have you. You’re part of the trade. No trade has ever been without danger.”

  “Do you mean,” Akin said, frowning, “that this new branch of the Oankali that we’re intended to become could wind up fighting a war and destroying itself?”

  “We don’t think so. The ooloi have been very careful, checking themselves, checking each other. But if they’re wrong, if they’ve made mistakes and missed them, Dinso will eventually be destroyed. Toaht will probably be destroyed. Only Akjai will survive. It doesn’t have to be war that destroys us. War was only the quickest of the many destructions that faced Humanity before it met us.”

  “It should have another chance.”

  “It has. With us.” Dichaan turned his attention to Tiikuchahk. “I haven’t let you taste the ship’s perceptions. Shall I?”

  Tiikuchahk hesitated, opening its mouth so that they would know it meant to speak aloud. “I don’t know,” it said finally. “Shall I taste it, Akin?”

  Akin was surprised to be asked. This was the first time Tiikuchahk
had spoken directly to him since they had entered the ship. Now he examined his own feelings, searching for an answer. Dichaan had upset him, and he resented being pulled to another subject so abruptly. Yet Tiikuchahk had not asked a frivolous question. He should answer.

  “Yes,” he said. “Do it. It hurts, and you won’t like it, but there’s something more in it than pain, something you won’t feel until afterward. I think maybe … maybe it’s a shadow of the way it will be for us when we’re adult and able to perceive directly. It’s worth what it costs, worth reaching for.”

  5

  AKIN AND TIIKUCHAHK WERE asleep when the shuttle reached Chkahichdahk. Dichaan awoke them with a touch and led them out into a pseudocorridor that was exactly the same color as the inside of the shuttle. The pseudocorridor was low and narrow—just large enough for the three of them to walk through, single file. It closed behind them. Akin, following last, could see the walls sphinctering together just a few steps behind him. The movement fascinated him. No structure in Lo was massive enough to move this way, creating a temporary corridor to guide them through a thick layer of living tissue. And the flesh must be opening ahead of them. He tried to look past Tiikuchahk and Dichaan and see the movement. He caught sight of it now and then. That was the trouble with being small. He was not weak, but nearly everyone he knew was taller and broader than he was—and always would be. During metamorphosis, Tiikuchahk, if it became female, would almost double its size. But he would be male, and metamorphosis made little difference in the size of males.

  He would be small and solitary, Nikanj had said shortly after his birth. He would not want to stay in one place and be a father to his children. He would not want anything to do with other males.

  He could not imagine such a life. It was not Human or Oankali. How could he be able to help the resisters if he were so solitary?

  Nikanj knew a great deal, but it did not know everything. Its children were always healthy and intelligent. But they did not always do what it wanted or expected them to. It had better luck sometimes predicting what Humans would do under a given set of circumstances. Surely it did not know as much as it thought it did about what Akin would do as an adult.