Adulthood Rites

1

He remembered much of his stay in the womb.

While there, he began to be aware of sounds and tastes. They meant nothing to him, but he remembered them. When they recurred, he noticed.

When something touched him, he knew it to be a new thing—a new experience. The touch was first startling, then comforting. It penetrated his flesh painlessly and calmed him. When it withdrew, he felt bereft, alone for the first time. When it returned, he was pleased—another new sensation. When he had experienced a few of these withdrawals and returns, he learned anticipation.

He did not learn pain until it was time for him to be born.

He could feel and taste changes happening around him—the slow turning of his body, then later the sudden headfirst thrust, the compression first of his head, then gradually along the length of his body. He hurt in a dull, distant way.

Yet he was not afraid. The changes were right. It was time for them. His body was ready. He was propelled along in regular pulses and comforted from time to time by the touch of his familiar companion.

There was light!

Vision was first a blaze of shock and pain. He could not escape the light. It grew brighter and more painful, reached its maximum as the compression ended. No part of his body was free from the sharp, raw brilliance. Later, he would recall it as heat, as burning.

It cooled abruptly.

Something muted the light. He could still see, but seeing was no longer painful. His body was rubbed gently as he lay submerged in something soft and comforting. He did not like the rubbing. It made the light seem to jerk and vanish, then leap back to visibility. But it was the familiar presence that touched him, held him. It stayed with him and helped him endure the rubbing without fear.

He was wrapped in something that touched him everywhere except his face. He did not like the heavy feel of it, but it shut out the light and did not hurt him.

Something touched the side of his face, and he turned, mouth open, to take it. His body knew what to do. He sucked and was rewarded by food and by the taste of flesh as familiar as his own. For a time, he assumed it was his own. It had always been with him.

He could hear voices, could even distinguish individual sounds, though he understood none of them. They captured his attention, his curiosity. He would remember these, too, when he was older and able to understand them. But he liked the soft voices even without knowing what they were.

“He’s beautiful,” one voice said. “He looks completely Human.”

“Some of his features are only cosmetic, Lilith. Even now his senses are more dispersed over his body than yours are. He is

less Human than your daughters.”

“I’d guessed he would be. I know your people still worry about Human-born males.”

“They were an unsolved problem. I believe we’ve solved it now.”

“His senses are all right, though?”

“Of course.”

“That’s all I can expect, I guess.” A sigh. “Shall I thank you for making him look this way—for making him seem Human so I can love him?

for a while.”

“You’ve never thanked me before.”

“

no.”

“And I think you go on loving them even when they change.”

“They can’t help what they are

what they become. You’re sure everything else is all right, too? All the mismatched bits of him fit together as best they can?”

“Nothing in him is mismatched. He’s very healthy. He’ll have a long life and be strong enough to endure what he must endure.”

2

He was Akin.

Things touched him when this sound was made. He was given comfort or food, or he was held and taught. Body to body understanding was given to him. He came to perceive himself as himself—individual, defined, separate from all the touches and smells, all the tastes, sights, and sounds that came to him. He was Akin.

Yet he came to know that he was also part of the people who touched him—that within them, he could find fragments of himself. He was himself, and he was those others.

He learned quickly to distinguish between them by taste and touch. It took longer for him to know them by sight or smell, but taste and touch were almost a single sensation for him. Both had been familiar to him for so long.

He had heard differences in voices since his birth. Now he began to attach identities to those differences. When, within days of his birth, he had learned his own name and could say it aloud, the others taught him their names. These they repeated when they could see that they had his attention. They let him watch their mouths shape the words. He came to understand quickly that each of them could be called by one or both of two groups of sounds.

Nikanj Ooan, Lilith Mother, Ahajas Ty, Dichaan Ishliin, and the one who never came to him even though Nikanj Ooan had taught him that one’s touch and taste and smell. Lilith Mother had shown him a print image of that one, and he had scanned it with all his senses: Joseph Father.

He called for Joseph Father and, instead, Nikanj Ooan came and taught him that Joseph Father was dead. Dead. Ended. Gone away and not coming back. Yet he had been part of Akin, and Akin must know him as he knew all his living parents.

Akin was two months old when he began to put together simple sentences. He could not get enough of being held and taught.

“He’s quicker than most of my girls,” Lilith commented as she held him against her and let him drink. It could have been difficult to learn from her smooth, unhelpful skin except that it was as familiar as his own—and superficially like his own. Nikanj Ooan taught him to use his tongue—his least Human visible organ—to study Lilith when she fed him. Over many feedings, he tasted her flesh as well as her milk. She was a rush of flavors and textures—sweet milk, salty skin smooth in some places, rough in others. He concentrated on one of the smooth places, focused all his attention on probing it, perceiving it deeply, minutely. He perceived the many cells of her skin, living and dead. Her skin taught him what it meant to be dead. Its dead outer layer contrasted sharply with what he could perceive of the living flesh beneath. His tongue was as long and sensitive and malleable as the sensory tentacles of Ahajas and Dichaan. He sent a filament of it into the living tissue of her nipple. He had hurt her the first time he tried this, and the pain had been channeled back to him through his tongue. The pain had been so sharp and startling that he withdrew, screaming and weeping. He refused to be comforted until Nikanj showed him how to probe without causing pain.

“That,” Lilith had commented, “was a lot like being stabbed with a hot, blunt needle.”

“He won’t do it again,” Nikanj had promised.

Akin had not done it again. And he had learned an important lesson: He would share any pain he caused. Best, then, to be careful and not cause pain. He would not know for months how unusual it was for an infant to recognize the pain of another person and recognize himself as the cause of that pain.

Now he perceived, through the tendril of flesh he had extended into Lilith, expanses of living cells. He focused on a few cells, on a single cell, on the parts of that cell, on its nucleus, on chromosomes within the nucleus, on genes along the chromosomes. He investigated the DNA that made up the genes, the nucleotides of the DNA. There was something beyond the nucleotides that he could not perceive—a world of smaller particles that he could not cross into. He did not understand why he could not make this final crossing—if it were the final one. It frustrated him that anything was beyond his perception. He knew of it only through shadowy ungraspable feelings. When he was older he came to think of it as a horizon, always receding when he approached it.

He shifted his attention from the frustration of what he could not perceive to the fascination of what he could. Lilith’s flesh was much more exciting than the flesh of Nikanj, Ahajas, and Dichaan. There was something wrong with hers—something he did not understand. It was both frightening and seductive. It told him Lilith was dangerous, though she was also essential. Nikanj was interesting but not dangerous. Ahajas and Dichaan were so alike he had to struggle to perceive differences between them. In some ways Joseph had been like Lilith. Deadly and compelling. But he had not been as much like Lilith as Ahajas was like Dichaan. In fact, though he had clearly been Human and native to this place, this Earth, like Lilith, he had not been Lilith’s relative. Ahajas and Dichaan were brother and sister, like most Oankali male and female mates. Joseph was unrelated, like Nikanj—but although Nikanj was Oankali, it was also ooloi, not male or female. Ooloi were supposed to be unrelated to their male and female mates so that they could focus their attention on their mates’ genetic differences and construct children without making dangerous mistakes of overfamiliarity and overconfidence.

“Be careful,” he heard Nikanj say. “He’s studying you again.”

“I know,” Lilith answered. “Sometimes I wish he’d just nurse like Human babies.”

Lilith rubbed Akin’s back, and the flickering of light between and around her fingers broke his concentration. He withdrew his flesh from hers, then released her nipple and looked at her. She closed clothing over her breast but went on holding him on her lap. He was always glad when people held him and talked to each other, allowing him to listen. He had already learned more words from them than he had yet had occasion to use. He collected words and gradually assembled them into questions. When his questions were answered, he remembered everything he was told. His picture of the world grew.

“At least he isn’t any stronger or faster in physical development than other babies,” Lilith said. “Except for his teeth.”

“There have been babies born with teeth before,” Nikanj said. “Physically, he’ll look his Human age until his metamorphosis. He’ll have to think his way out of any problems his precocity causes.”

“That won’t do him much good with some Humans. They’ll resent him for not being completely Human and for looking more Human than their kids. They’ll hate him for looking much younger than he sounds. They’ll hate him because they haven’t been allowed to have sons. Your people have made Human-looking male babies a very valuable commodity.”

“We’ll allow more of them now. Everyone feels more secure about mixing them. Before now, too many ooloi could not perceive the necessary mixture. They could have made mistakes and their mistakes could be monsters.”

“Most Humans think that’s what they’ve been doing.”

“Do you still?”

Silence.

“Be content, Lilith. One group of us believed it would be best to dispense with Human-born males altogether. We could construct female children for Human females and male children for Oankali females. We’ve done that until now.”

“And cheated everyone. Ahajas wants daughters, and I want sons. Other people feel the same way.”

“I know. And we control children in ways we should not to make them mature as Oankali-born males and Human-born females. We control inclinations that should be left to individual children. Even the group that suggested we go on this way knows we shouldn’t. But they were afraid. A male who’s Human enough to be born to a Human female could be a danger to us all. We must try though. We’ll learn from Akin.”

Akin felt himself held closer to Lilith. “Why is he such an experiment?” she demanded. “And why should Human-born men be such a problem? I know most prewar men don’t like you. They feel you’re displacing them and forcing them to do something perverted. From their point of view, they’re right. But you could teach the next generation to love you, no matter who their mothers are. All you’d have to do is start early. Indoctrinate them before they’re old enough to develop other opinions.”

“But

” Nikanj hesitated. “But if we had to work that blindly, that clumsily, we couldn’t have trade. We would have to take your children from you soon after they were born. We wouldn’t dare trust you to raise them. You would be kept only for breeding—like nonsentient animals.”

Silence. A sigh. “You say such god-awful things in such a gentle voice. No, hush, I know it’s the only voice you’ve got. Nika, will Akin survive the Human males who will hate him?”

“They won’t hate him.”

“They will! He isn’t Human. Un-Human women are offensive to them, but they don’t usually try to hurt them, and they do sleep with them—like a racist sleeping with racially different women. But Akin

They’ll see him as a threat. Hell, he is a threat. He’s one of their replacements.”

“Lilith, they will not hate him.” Akin felt himself lifted from Lilith’s arms and held close to Nikanj’s body. He gasped at the lovely shock of contact with Nikanj’s sensory tentacles, many of which held him while others burrowed painlessly into his flesh. It was so easy to connect with Nikanj and to learn. “They will see him as beautiful and like themselves,” Nikanj said. “By the time he’s old enough for his body to reveal what he actually is, he’ll be an adult and able to hold his own.”

“Able to fight?”

“Only to save his life. He’ll tend to avoid fighting. He’ll be like Oankali-born males now—a solitary wanderer when he’s not mated.”

“He won’t settle down with anyone?”

“No. Most Human males aren’t particularly monogamous. No construct males will be.”

“But—”

“Families will change, Lilith—are changing. A complete construct family will be a female, an ooloi, and children. Males will come and go as they wish and as they find welcome.”

“But they’ll have no homes.”

“A home like this would be a prison to them. They’ll have what they want, what they need.”

“The ability to be fathers to their kids?”

Nikanj paused. “They might choose to keep contact with their children. They won’t live with them permanently—and no construct, male or female, young or old, will feel that as a deprivation. It will be normal to them, and purposeful, since there will always be many more females and ooloi than males.” It rustled its head and body tentacles. “Trade means change. Bodies change. Ways of living must change. Did you think your children would only look different?”

3

Akin spent some part of the day with each of his parents. Lilith fed him and taught him. The others only taught him, but he went to them all eagerly. Ahajas usually held him after Lilith.

Ahajas was tall and broad. She carried him without seeming to notice his weight. He had never felt weariness in her. And he knew she enjoyed carrying him. He could feel pleasure the moment she sank filaments of her sensory tentacles into him. She was the first person to be able to reach him this way with more than simple emotions. She was the first to give him multisensory images and signaling pressures and to help him understand that she was speaking to him without words. As he grew, he realized that Nikanj and Dichaan also did this. Nikanj had done it even before he was born, but he had not understood. Ahajas had reached him and taught him quickly. Through the images she created for him, he learned about the child growing within her. She gave him images of it and even managed to give it images of him. It had several presences: all its parents except Lilith. And it had him. Sibling.

He knew he would be male when he grew up. He understood male, and female, and ooloi. And he knew that because he would be male, the unborn child who would begin its life seeming much less Human than he did would eventually become female. There was a balance, a naturalness to this that pleased him. He should have a sister to grow up with—a sister but not an ooloi sibling. Why? He wondered whether the child inside Ahajas would become ooloi, but Ahajas and Nikanj both assured him it would not. And they would not tell him how they knew. So this sibling should become a sister. It would take years to develop sexually, but he already thought of it as “she.”

Dichaan usually took him once Ahajas had returned him to Lilith and Lilith had fed him. Dichaan taught him about strangers.

First there were his older siblings, some born to Ahajas and becoming more Human, and some born to Lilith and becoming more Oankali. There were also children of older siblings, and finally, frighteningly, unrelated people. Akin could not understand why some of the unrelated ones were more like Lilith than Joseph had been. And none of them were like Joseph.

Dichaan read Akin’s unspoken confusion.

“The differences you perceive between Humans—between groups of Humans—are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments,” he said, illustrating each concept with quick multiple images. “Joseph and Lilith were born in very different parts of this world—born to long separated peoples. Do you understand?”

“Where are Joseph’s kind?” Akin asked aloud.

“Now there are villages of them to the southwest. They’re called Chinese.”

“I want to see them.”

“You will. You can travel to them when you’re older.” He ignored Akin’s rush of frustration. “And someday I’ll take you to the ship. You’ll be able to see Oankali differences, too.” He gave Akin an image of the ship—a vast sphere made up of huge, still-growing, many-sided plates like the shell of a turtle. In fact, it was the outer shell of a living being. “There,” Dichaan said, “you’ll see Oankali who will never come to Earth or trade with Humans. For now, they tend the ship in ways that require a different physical form.” He gave Akin an image, and Akin thought it resembled a huge caterpillar.

Akin projected silent questioning.

“Speak aloud,” Dichaan told him.

“Is it a child?” Akin asked, thinking of the changes caterpillars underwent.

“No. It’s adult. It’s larger than I am.”

“Can it talk?”

“In images, in tactile, bioelectric, and bioluminescent signals, in pheromones, and in gestures. It can gesture with ten limbs at once. But its throat and mouth parts won’t produce speech. And it is deaf. It must live in places where there is a great deal of noise. My parents’ parents had that shape.”

This seemed terrible to Akin—Oankali forced to live in an ugly form that did not even allow them to hear or speak.

“What they are is as natural to them as what you are is to you,” Dichaan told him. “And they are much closer to the ship than we can be. They’re companions to it, knowing its body better than you know your own. When I was a little older than you are now, I wanted to be one of them. They let me taste a little of their relationship with the ship.”

“Show me.”

“Not yet. It’s a very powerful thing. I’ll show you when you’re a little older.”

Everything was to happen when he was older. He must wait! He must always wait! In frustration, Akin had stopped speaking. He could not help hearing and remembering all that Dichaan told him, but he would not speak to Dichaan again for days.

Yet it was Dichaan who began leaving him in the care of his older sisters, letting him begin to investigate them—while they thoroughly investigated him. His favorite among them was Margit. She was six years old—too small to carry him long, but he was content to ride on her back or sit on her lap for as long as she could handle him comfortably. She did not have sensory tentacles like his Oankali-born sisters, but she had clusters of sensitive nodules that would probably be tentacles when she grew up. She could match some of these to the smooth, invisible sensory patches on his skin, and the two of them could exchange images and emotions as well as words. She could teach him.

“You should be careful,” she said as she took him to shelter in their family house, away from a hard afternoon rain. “Your eyes don’t track a lot of the time. Can you see with them?”

He thought about this. “I can,” he said, “but I don’t always. Sometimes it’s easier to see things from other parts of my body.”

“When you’re older, you’ll be expected to turn your face and body toward people when you talk to them. Even now, you should look at Humans with your eyes. If you don’t, they yell at you or repeat things because they’re not sure they have your attention. Or they start to ignore you because they think you’re ignoring them.”

“No one’s done that to me.”

“They will. Just wait until you get past the stage when they try to talk stupid to you.”

“Baby talk, you mean?”

“Human talk!”

Silence.

“Don’t worry,” she said after a while. “It’s them I’m mad at, not you.”

“Why?”

“They blame me for not looking like them. They can’t help doing it, and I can’t help resenting it. I don’t know which is worse—the ones who cringe if I touch them or the ones who pretend it’s all right while they cringe inside.”

“What does Lilith feel?” Akin asked only because he already knew the answer.

“For her, I might as well look the way you do. I remember when I was about your age, she would wonder how I would find a mate, but Nikanj told her there would be plenty of males like me by the time I grew up. She never said anything after that. She tells me to stick with the constructs. I do, mostly.”

“Humans like me,” he said. “I guess because I look like them.”

“Just remember to look at them with your eyes when they talk to you or you talk to them. And be careful about tasting them. You won’t be able to get away with that for much longer. Besides, your tongue doesn’t look Human.”

“Humans say it shouldn’t be gray, but they don’t realize how different it really is.”

“Don’t let them guess. They can be dangerous, Akin. Don’t show them everything you can do. But

hang around them when you can. Study their behavior. Maybe you can collect things about them that we can’t. It would be wrong if anything that they are is lost.”

“Your legs are going to sleep,” Akin observed. “You’re tired. You should take me to Lilith.”

“In a little while.”

She did not want to give him up, he realized. He did not mind. She was, Humans said, gray and warty—more different than most Human-born children. And she could hear as well as any construct. She caught every whisper whether she wanted to or not, and if she were near Humans, they soon began to talk about her. “If she looks this bad now, what will she look like after metamorphosis?” they would begin. Then they would speculate or pity her or condemn her or laugh at her. Better a few more minutes of peace alone with him.

Her full Human name was Margita Iyapo Domonkos Kaalnikanjlo. Margit. She had all four of his living parents in common with him. Her Human father, though, was Vidor Domonkos, not the dead Joseph. Vidor—some people called him Victor—had moved to a village several miles upriver when he and Lilith tired of one another. He came back two or three times a year to see Margit. He did not like the way she looked, yet he loved her. She had seen that he did, and Akin was certain she had read his emotion correctly. He had never met Vidor himself. He had been too young for contact with strangers during the man’s last visit.

“Will you tell Vidor to let me touch him when he comes to see you again?” Akin asked.

“Father? Why?”

“I want to find you in him.”

She laughed. “He and I have a lot in common. He doesn’t like having anyone explore him, though. Says he doesn’t need anything burrowing through his skin.” She hesitated. “He means that. He only let me do it once. Just talk to him if you meet him, Akin. In some ways he can be just as dangerous as any other Human.”

“Your father?”

‘Akin

All of them! Haven’t you explored any of them? Can’t you feel it?” She gave him a complex image. He understood it only because he had explored a few Humans himself. Humans were a compelling, seductive, deadly contradiction. He felt drawn to them, yet warned against them. To touch a Human deeply—to taste one—was to feel this.

“I know,” he said. “But I don’t understand.”

“Talk to Ooan. It knows and understands. Talk to Mother, too. She knows more than she likes to admit.”

“She’s Human. You don’t think she’s dangerous, too, do you?”

“Not to us.” She stood up with him. “You’re getting heavier. I’ll be glad when you learn to walk.”

“Me, too. How old were you when you walked?”

“Just over a year. You’re almost there.”

“Nine months.”

“Yes. It’s too bad you couldn’t learn walking as easily as you learned talking.” She returned him to Lilith, who fed him and promised to take him into the forest with her.

Lilith gave him bits of solid food now, but he still took great comfort in nursing. It frightened him to realize that someday she would not let him nurse. He did not want to grow that old.

4

Lilith put him on her back in a cloth sack and took him co one of the village gardens. This particular garden was some distance upriver from the village, and Akin enjoyed the long walk through the forest. There were new sounds, smells, and sights on each trip. Lilith would often stop to let him touch or taste new things or to let him view and memorize deadly things. He had discovered that his fingers were sensitive enough to taste which plants were harmful—if his sense of smell did not warn him before he touched.

“That’s a good talent,” Lilith said when he told her. “At least you’re not likely to poison yourself. Be careful how you touch things, though. Some plants do damage on contact.”

“Show me those,” Akin said.

“I will. We clear them out of the area when we see them, but they always find their way back. I’ll take you with me next time we decide to cull them.”

“Does cull mean the same as clear?”

“Cull means to clear selectively. We only take out the plants with contact poisons.”

“I see.” He paused, trying to understand the new scent he had detected. “There’s someone between us and the river,” he whispered suddenly.

“All right.” They had reached the garden. She bent over a cassava plant and pretended to find it hard to pull up so that she could move casually around to face the river. They could not see the water from where they were. There was plenty of ground between themselves and the river—and plenty of cover.

“I can’t see them,” she said. “Can you?” She had only her eyes to look with, but her senses were sharper than those of other Humans—somewhere between Human and construct.

“It’s a man,” Akin said. “He’s hidden. He’s Human and a stranger.” Akin breathed in the adrenaline bite of the man’s scent. “He’s excited. Maybe afraid.”

“Not afraid,” she said softly. “Not of a woman pulling cassavas and carrying a baby. I hear him now, moving around near the big Brazil nut tree.”

“Yes, I hear!” Akin said excitedly.

“Keep quiet! And hold on. I might have to move fast.”

The man had stopped moving. Suddenly, he stepped into view, and Akin saw that he had something in his hands.

“Shit!” Lilith whispered. “Bow and arrow. He’s a resister.”

“You mean those sticks he’s holding?”

“Yes. They’re weapons.”

‘Don’t turn that way. I can’t see him”

“And he can’t see you. Keep your head down!”

He realized then that he was in danger. Resisters were Humans who had decided to live without the Oankali—and thus without children. Akin had heard that they sometimes stole construct children, the most Human-looking construct children they could find. But that was stupid because they had no idea what the child might be like after metamorphosis. Oankali never let them keep the children anyway.

“Do you speak English?” Lilith called, and Akin, straining to look over her shoulder, saw the man lower his bow and arrow.

“English is the only Human language spoken here,” Lilith said. It comforted Akin that she neither sounded nor smelled frightened. His own fear diminished.

“I heard you talking to someone,” the man said in slightly accented English.

“Hold tight,” Lilith whispered.

Akin grasped the material of the cloth sack in which she carried him. He held on with hands and legs, wishing he were stronger.

“My village isn’t far from here,” she said to the man. “You’ll be welcome there. Food. Shelter. It’s going to rain soon.”

“Who were you talking to!” the man demanded, coming nearer.

“My son.” She gestured toward Akin.

“What? The baby?”

“Yes.”

The man came closer, peering at Akin. Akin peered back over Lilith’s shoulder, curiosity overwhelming the last of his fear. The man was shirtless, black-haired, clean-shaven, and stocky. His hair was long and hung down his back. He had cut it off in a straight line across his forehead. Something about him reminded Akin of the picture he had seen of Joseph. This man’s eyes were narrow like Joseph’s, but his skin was almost as brown as Lilith’s.

“The kid looks good,” he said. “What’s wrong with him?”

She stared at him. “Nothing,” she said flatly.

The man frowned. “I don’t mean to offend you. I just

Is he really as healthy as he looks?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t seen a baby since back before the war.”

“I’d guessed that. Will you come back to the village with us? It isn’t far.”

“How is it you were allowed to have a boy?”

“How is it your mother was allowed to have a boy?”

The man took a final step toward Lilith and was abruptly too close. He stood very straight and tried to intimidate her with his stiff, angry posture and his staring eyes. Akin had seen Humans do that to one another before. It never worked with constructs. Akin had never seen it work with Lilith. She did not move.

“I’m Human,” the man said. “You can see that. I was born before the war. There’s nothing Oankali about me. I have two parents, both Human, and no one told them when and whether they could have kids and what the sex of those kids would be. Now, how is it you were allowed to have a boy?”

“I asked for one.” Lilith reached out, snatched the man’s bow, and broke it over her knee before the man was fully aware of what had happened. Her move had been almost too swift for him to follow even if he had been expecting it.

“You’re welcome to food and shelter for as long as you like,” she said, “but we don’t allow weapons.”

The man stumbled back from her. “I mistook you for Human,” he said. “My god, you look Human.”

“I was born twenty-six years before the war,” she said. “I’m Human enough. But I have other children in that village. You won’t take weapons among them.”

He looked at the machete hanging from her belt.

“It’s a tool,” she said. “We don’t use them on each other.”

He shook his head. “I don’t care what you say. That was a heavy bow. No Human woman should have been able to take it from me and break it that way.”

She walked away from him, unsheathed her machete, and cut a pineapple. She picked it up carefully, slashed off most of its spiky top, and cut two more.

Akin watched the man while Lilith put her cassavas and pineapples into her basket. She cut a stalk of bananas, and once she was certain they were free of snakes and dangerous insects, she handed them to the man. He took a quick step back from her.

“Carry these,” she said. “They’re all right. I’m glad you happened along. The two of us will be able to carry more.” She cut several dozen ribbons of quat—an Oankali vegetable that Akin loved—and tied it into a bundle with thin lianas. She also cut fat stalks of scigee, which the Oankali had made from some war-mutated Earth plant. Humans said it had the taste and texture of the flesh of an extinct animal—the pig.

Lilith bound the scigee stalks and fastened the bundle behind her just above her hips. She swung Akin to one side and carried her full basket on the other.

“Can you watch him without using your eyes?” she whispered to Akin.

“Yes,” Akin answered.

“Do it.” And she called to the man, “Come. This way.” She walked away down the path to the village, not waiting to see whether the man would follow. It seemed for a while that the man would stay behind. The narrow path curved around a huge tree, and Akin lost sight of him. There was no sound of his following. Then there was a burst of sound—hurrying feet, heavy breathing.

“Wait!” the man called.

Lilith stopped and waited for him to catch up. He was, Akin noticed, still carrying the stalk of bananas. He had thrown it over his left shoulder.

“Watch him!” Lilith whispered to Akin.

The man came close, then stopped and stared at her, frowning.

“What the matter?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I just don’t know what to make of you,” he said.

Akin felt her relax a little. “This is your first visit to a trading village, isn’t it?” she said.

“Trading village? So that’s what you call them.”

“Yes. And I don’t want to know what you call us. But spend some time with us. Maybe you’ll accept our definition of ourselves. You came to find out about us, didn’t you?”

He sighed. “I guess so. I was a kid when the war started. I still remember cars, TV, computers

I do remember. But those things aren’t real to me anymore. My parents

All they want to do is go back to the prewar days. They know as well as I do that that’s impossible, but it’s what they talk about and dream about. I left them to find out what else there might be to do.”

“Both your parents survived?”

“Yeah. They’re still alive. Hell, they don’t look any older than I do now. They could still join a

one of your villages and have more kids. They won’t though.”

“And you?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at Akin. “I haven’t seen enough to decide yet.”

She reached out to touch his arm in a gesture of sympathy.

He grabbed her hand and held it at first as though he thought she would try to pull away. She did not. He held her wrist and examined the hand. After a time he let her go.

“Human,” he whispered. “I always heard you could tell by the hands—that the

the others would have too many fingers or fingers that bend in un-Human ways.”

“Or you could just ask,” she said. “People will tell you; they don’t mind. It’s not the kind of thing anyone bothers to lie about. Hands aren’t as reliable as you think.”

“Can I look at the baby’s?”

“No more than you are now.”

He drew a long breath. “I wouldn’t hurt a kid. Even one that wasn’t quite Human.”

“Akin isn’t quite Human,” she said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I mean

What’s different about him?”

“Internal differences. Rapid mental development. Perceptual differences. At metamorphosis, he’ll begin to look different, though I don’t know how different.”

“Can he talk?”

“All the time. Come on.”

He followed her along the path, and Akin watched him through light-sensitive patches on the skin of his shoulder and arm.

“Baby?” the man said peering at him.

Akin, remembering what Margit had told him, turned his head so that he faced the man. “Akin,” he said. “What’s your name?”

The man let his mouth fall open. “How old are you?” he demanded.

Akin stared at him silently.

“Don’t you understand me?” the man asked. He had a jagged scar on one of his shoulders, and Akin wondered what had made it.

The man slapped at a mosquito with his free hand and spoke to Lilith. “How old is he?”

“Tell him your name,” she said.

“What?”

She said nothing more.

The man’s smallest toe was missing from his right foot, Akin noticed. And there were other marks on his body—scars, paler than the rest of his skin. He must have hurt himself often and had no ooloi to help him heal. Nikanj would never have left so many scars.

“Okay,” the man said. “I give up. My name is Augustino Leal. Everybody calls me Tino.”

“Shall I call you that?” Akin asked.

“Sure, why not? Now, how the hell old are you?”

“Nine months.”

“Can you walk?”

“No, I can stand up if there’s something for me to hold on to, but I’m not very good at it yet. Why did you stay away from the villages for so long? Don’t you like kids?”

“I

don’t know.”

“They aren’t all like me. Most of them can’t talk until they’re older.”

The man reached out and touched his face. Akin grasped one of the man’s fingers and drew it to his mouth. He tasted it quickly with a snakelike flick of his tongue and a penetration too swift, too slight to notice. He collected a few living cells for later study.

“At least you put things in your mouth the way babies used to,” he said.

“Akin,” Lilith said, cautioning.

Suppressing his frustration, he let the man’s finger go. He would have preferred to investigate further, to understand more of how the genetic information he read had been expressed and to see what nongenetic factors he could discover. He wanted to try to read the man’s emotions and to find the marks the Oankali had left in him when they collected him from postwar Earth, when they repaired him and stored him away in suspended animation.

Perhaps later he would have the chance.

“If the kid is this smart now, what’s he going to be like as an adult?” Tino asked.

“I don’t know,” Lilith told him. “The only adult male constructs we have so far are Oankali-born—born to Oankali mothers. If Akin is like them, he’ll be bright enough, but his interests will be so diverse and, in some cases, so just plain un-Human that he’ll wind up keeping to himself a lot.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But

you didn’t have to have kids.”

“As it happens, I did have to. I had two construct kids by the time they brought me down from the ship. I never had a chance to run off and pine for the good old days!”

The man said nothing. If he stayed long, he would learn that Lilith had these flares of bitterness sometimes. They never seemed to affect her behavior, though often they frightened people. Margit had said, “It’s as though there’s something in her trying to get out. Something terrible.” Whenever the something seemed on the verge of surfacing, Lilith went alone into the forest and stayed away for days. Akin’s oldest sisters said they used to worry that she would leave and not come back.

“They forced you to have kids?” the man asked.

“One of them surprised me,” she said. “It made me pregnant, then told me about it. Said it was giving me what I wanted but would never come out and ask for.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” She shook her head from side to side. “Oh, yes. But if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone.”

5

The rain had begun by the time they reached the village, and Akin enjoyed the first few warm drops that made their way through the forest canopy. Then they were indoors—followed by everyone who had seen Lilith arrive with a stranger.

“They’ll want your life story,” Lilith told him softly. “They want to hear about your village, your travels; anything you know may be news to us. We don’t get that many travelers. And later, when you’ve eaten and talked and whatever, they’ll try to drag you off to their beds. Do what you like. If you’re too tired for any of this now, say so, and we’ll save your party until tomorrow.”

“You didn’t tell me I would have to entertain,” he said, staring at the inpouring of Humans, constructs, and Oankali.

“You don’t have to. Do what you like.”

“But

” He looked around helplessly, cringed away from an Oankali-born unsexed construct child who touched him with one of the sensory tentacles growing from its head.

“Don’t scare him,” Akin told it from Lilith’s back. He spoke in Oankali. “There aren’t any of us where he comes from.”

“Resister?” the child asked.

“Yes. But I don’t think he means any harm. He didn’t try to hurt us.”

“What does the kid want?” Tino asked.

“It’s just curious about you,” Lilith told him. “Do you want to talk to these people while I put together a meal?”

“I guess so. I’m not a good storyteller, though.”

Lilith turned to the still gathering crowd. “All right,” she said loudly. And when they had quieted: “His name is Augustino Leal. He comes from a long way away, and he says he feels like talking.”

People cheered.

“If anyone wants to go home to get something to eat or drink, we’ll wait.”

Several Humans and constructs left, ordering her not to let anything begin without them. An Oankali took Akin from her back. Dichaan. Akin flattened against him happily, sharing what he had learned of the new Human.

“You like him?” Dichaan asked by way of tactile signals shaded with sensory images.

“Yes. He’s a little afraid and dangerous. Mother had to take his weapon. But he’s mostly curious. He’s so curious he feels like one of us.”

Dichaan projected amusement. Maintaining his sensory link with Akin, he watched Lilith give Tino something to drink. The man tasted the drink and smiled. People had gathered around him, sitting on the floor. Most of them were children, and this seemed to put him at ease in one way—he was no longer afraid—and excite him in another. His eyes focused on one child after another, examining the wide variety of them.

“Will he try to steal someone?” Akin asked silently.

“If he did, Eka, it would probably be you.” Dichaan softened the statement with amusement, but there was a seriousness beneath it that Akin did not miss. The man probably meant no harm, was probably not a child thief. But Akin should be careful, should not allow himself to be alone with Tino.

People brought food, shared it among themselves and with Lilith as they accepted what she offered. They fed their own children and each other’s children as usual. A child who could walk could get bits of food anywhere.

Lilith prepared Tino and her younger children dishes of flat cassava bread layered with hot scigee and quat alongside hot, spicy beans. There were slices of pineapple and papaya for dessert. She fed Akin small amounts of quat mixed with cassava. She did not let him nurse until she had settled down with everyone else to talk and listen to Tino.

“They named our village Phoenix before my parents reached it,” Tino told them. “We weren’t original settlers. We came in half-dead from the forest—we’d eaten something bad, some kind of palm fruit. It was edible, all right, but only if you cooked it—and we hadn’t. Anyway, we stumbled in, and the people of Phoenix took care of us. I was the only child they had—the only Human child they’d seen since before the war. The whole village sort of adopted me because

” He stopped, glanced at a cluster of Oankali. “Well, you know. They wanted to find a little girl. They thought maybe the few kids who hadn’t gone through puberty before they were set free might be fertile together when they grew up.” He stared at the nearest Oankali, who happened to be Nikanj. “True or false?” he asked.

“False,” Nikanj said softly. “We told them it was false. They chose not to believe.”

Tino stared at Nikanj—gave it a look that Akin did not understand. The look was not threatening, but Nikanj drew its body tentacles up slightly into the beginnings of a prestrike threat gesture. Humans called it knotting up or getting knotty. They knew it meant getting angry or otherwise upset. Few of them realized it was also a reflexive, potentially lethal gesture. Every sensory tentacle could sting. The ooloi could also sting with their sensory arms. But at least they could sting without killing. Male and female Oankali and constructs could only kill. Akin could kill with his tongue. This was one of the first things Nikanj had taught him not to do. Let alone, he might have discovered his ability by accident and killed Lilith or some other Human. The thought of this had frightened him at first, but he no longer worried about it. He had never seen anyone sting anyone.

Even now, Nikanj’s body language indicated only mild upset. But why should Tino upset it at all? Akin began to watch Nikanj instead of Tino. As Tino spoke, all of Nikanj’s long head tentacles swung around to focus on him. Nikanj was intensely interested in this newcomer. After a moment, it got up and made its way over to Lilith. It took Akin from her arms.

Akin had finished nursing and now flattened obligingly against Nikanj, giving what he knew Nikanj wanted: genetic information about Tino. In trade, he demanded to have explained the feelings Nikanj had expressed with its indrawn sensory tentacles.

In silent, vivid images and signals, Nikanj explained. “That one wanted to stay with us when he was a child. We couldn’t agree to keep him, but we hoped he would come to us when he was older.”

“You knew him then?”

“I handled his conditioning. He spoke only Spanish then. Spanish is one of my Human languages. He was only eight years old and not afraid of me. I didn’t want to let him go. Everyone knew his parents would run when we released them. They would become resisters and perhaps die in the forest. But I couldn’t get a consensus. We aren’t good at raising Human children, so no one wanted to break up the family. And even I didn’t want to force them all to stay with us. We had prints of them. If they died or kept resisting we could fashion genetic copies of them to be born to trader Humans. They wouldn’t be lost to the gene pool. We decided that might have to be enough.”

“Tino recognized you?”

“Yes, but in a very Human way, I think. I don’t believe he understands why I caught his attention. He doesn’t have complete access to memory.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“It’s a Human thing. Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them—usually—but lose the experience itself. We can retrieve it for them—enable them to recall everything—but for many of them, that would only create confusion. They would remember so much that their memories would distract them from the present.”

Akin received an impression of a dazed Human whose mind so overflowed with the past that every new experience triggered the reliving of several old ones, and those triggered others.

“Will I get that way?” he asked fearfully.

“Of course not. No construct is that way. We were careful.”

“Lilith isn’t that way, and she remembers everything.”

“Natural ability, plus some changes I made. She was chosen very carefully.”

“How did Tino find you again? Did you bring him here before you let him go? Did he remember?”

“This place didn’t exist when we let his family and a few others go. He was probably following the river. Did he have a canoe?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“If you follow the river and keep your eyes open, you’ll find villages.”

“He found Mother and me.”

“He’s Human—and he’s a resister. He wouldn’t want to just walk into a village. He would want to have a look at it first. And he was lucky enough to meet some harmless villagers—people who might introduce him into the village safely or who could let him know why he should avoid the village.”

“Mother isn’t harmless.”

“No, but she finds it convenient to seem harmless.”

“What kind of village would he avoid?”

“Other resister villages, probably. Resister villages—especially widely separated ones—are dangerous in different ways. Some of them are dangerous to one another. A few become dangerous to us, and we have to break them up. Human diversity is fascinating and seductive, but we can’t let it destroy them—or us.”

“Will you keep Tino here?”

“Do you like him?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Your mother doesn’t yet, but she might change her mind. Perhaps he’ll want to stay.”

Akin, curious about adult relationships, used all his senses to perceive what went on between his parents and Tino.

First there was Tino’s story to be finished.

“I don’t know what to tell you about our village,” he was saying. “It’s full of old people who look young—just like here, I guess. Except here you have kids. We worked hard, getting things as much like they used to be as possible. That’s what kept everyone going. The idea that we could use our long lives to bring back civilization—get things ready for when they found a girl for me or discovered some way to get kids of their own. They believed it would happen. I believed. Hell, I believed more than anyone.

“We did salvaging and quarrying in the mountains. I was never allowed to go. They were afraid something would happen to me. But I helped build the houses. Real houses, not huts. We even had glass for the windows. We made glass and traded it with other resister villages. One of them came in with us when they saw how well we were doing. That almost doubled our numbers. They had a guy about three years younger than me, but no young women.

“We made a town. We even had a couple of mills for power. That made building easier. We built like crazy. If you were really busy, you didn’t have to think that maybe you were doing it all for nothing. Maybe all we were going to do was sit in our handsome houses and pray in our nice church and watch everybody not getting old.

“Then in one week, two guys and a woman hung themselves. Four others just disappeared. It would hit us like that—like a disease that one person caught and spread. We never had one suicide or one murder or one disappearance. Somebody else always caught the disease. I guess I finally caught it. Where do people go when they disappear? Someplace like this?” He looked around, sighed, then frowned. His tone changed abruptly. “You people have all the advantages. The Oankali can get you anything. Why do you live this way?”

“We’re comfortable,” Akin’s oldest sister Ayre said. “This isn’t a terrible way to live.”

“It’s primitive! You live like savages! I mean

” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just that

I don’t know any polite way to ask this: Why don’t you at least build real houses and get rid of these shacks! You should see what we have! And

Hell, you have spaceships. How can you live this way’.”

Lilith spoke softly to him. “How many of those real houses of yours were empty when you left, Tino?”

He faced her angrily. “My people never had a chance! They didn’t make the war. They didn’t make the Oankali. And they didn’t make themselves sterile! But you can be damn sure that everything they did make was good and it worked and they put their hearts into it. Hey, I thought, ‘If we made a town, the

traders

must have made a city!’ And what do I find? A village of huts with primitive gardens. This place is hardly even a clearing!” His voice had risen again. He looked around with disapproval. “You’ve got kids to plan for and provide for, and you’re going to let them slide right back to being cavemen!”

A Human woman named Leah spoke up. “Our kids will be okay,” she said. “But I wish we could get more of your people to come here. They’re as close to immortal as a Human being has ever been, and all they can think of to do is build useless houses and kill one another.”

“It’s time we offered the resisters a way back to us,” Ahajas said. “I think we’ve been too comfortable here.”

Several Oankali made silent gestures of agreement.

“Leave them alone,” Tino said. “You’ve done enough to them! I’m not going to tell you where they are!”

Nikanj, still holding Akin, got up and moved through the seated people until it could sit with no one between itself and Tino. “None of the resister villages are hidden from us,” it said softly. “We wouldn’t have asked you where Phoenix was. And we don’t mean to focus on Phoenix. It’s time for us to approach all the resister villages and invite them to join us. It’s only to remind them that they don’t have to live sterile, pointless lives. We won’t force them to come to us, but we will let them know they’re still welcome. We let them go originally because we didn’t want to hold prisoners.”

Tino laughed bitterly. “So everyone here is here of their own freewill, huh?”

“Everyone here is free to leave.”

Tino gave Nikanj another of his unreadable looks and turned deliberately so that he faced Lilith. “How many men are there here?” he asked.

Lilith looked around, found Wray Ordway who kept the small guest house stocked with food and other supplies. This was where newly arrived men lived until they paired off with one of the village women. It was the only house in the village that had been built of cut trees and palm thatch. Tino might sleep there tonight. Wray kept the guest house because he had chosen not to wander. He had paired with Leah and apparently never tired of her. The two of them with their three Oankali mates had nine Human-born daughters and eleven Oankali-born children.

“How many men have we got now, Wray?” Lilith asked.

“Five,” he said. “None in the guest house, though. Tino can have it all to himself if he wants.”

“Five men.” Tino shook his head. “No wonder you haven’t built anything.”

“We build ourselves,” Wray said. “We’re building a new way of life here. You don’t know anything about us. Why don’t you ask questions instead of shooting off your mouth!”

“What is there to ask? Except for your garden—which barely looks like a garden—you don’t grow anything. Except for your shacks, you haven’t built anything! And as for building yourselves, the Oankali are doing that. You’re their clay, that’s all!”

“They change us and we change them,” Lilith said. “The whole next generation is made up of genetically engineered people, Tino—constructs, whether they’re born to Oankali or to Human mothers.” She sighed. “I don’t like what they’re doing, and I’ve never made any secret of it. But they’re in this with us. When the ships leave, they’re stuck here. And with their own biology driving them, they can’t not blend with us. But some of what makes us Human will survive, just as some of what makes them Oankali will survive.” She paused, looked around the large room. “Look at the children here, Tino. Look at the construct adults. You can’t tell who was born to whom. But you can see some Human features on every one of them. And as for the way we live

well, we’re not as primitive as you think—and not as advanced as we could be. It was all a matter of how much like the ship we wanted our homes to be. The Oankali made us learn to live here without them so that if we did resist, we could survive. So that people like your parents would have a choice.”

“Some choice,” Tino muttered.

“Better than being a prisoner or a slave,” she said. “They should have been ready for the forest. I’m surprised they ate the palm fruit that made them sick.”

“We were city people, and we were hungry. My father didn’t believe something could be poison raw but okay to eat cooked.”

Lilith shook her head. “I was a city person, too, but there were some things I was willing not to learn from experience.” She returned to her original subject. “Anyway, once we had learned to live in the forest on our own, the Oankali told us we didn’t have to. They meant to live in homes as comfortable as the ones they had on the ship, and we were free to do the same. We accepted their offer. Believe me, weaving thatch and tying logs together with lianas doesn’t hold any more fascination for me than it does for you—and I’ve done my share of it.”

“This place has a thatched roof,” Tino argued. “In fact, it looks freshly thatched.”

“Because the leaves are green? Hell, they’re green because they’re alive. We didn’t build this house, Tino, we grew it. Nikanj provided the seed; we cleared the land; everyone who was going to live here trained the walls and made them aware of us.”

Tino frowned. “What do you mean, ‘aware’ of you? I thought you were telling me it was a plant.”

“It’s an Oankali construct. Actually, it’s a kind of larval version of the ship. A neotenic larva. It can reproduce without growing up. It can also get a lot bigger without maturing sexually. This one will have to do that for a while. We don’t need more than one.”

“But you’ve got more than one. You’ve got—”

“Only one in this village. And a lot of that one is underground. What you see of it appears to be houses, grasses, shrubs, nearby trees, and, to some extent, riverbank. It allows some erosion, traps some newly arrived silt. Its inclination, though, is to become a closed system. A ship. We can’t let it do that here. We still have a lot of growing to do ourselves.”

Tino shook his head. He looked around at the large room, at the people watching, eating, feeding children, some small children stretched out asleep with their heads on adults’ laps.

“Look up, Tino.”

Tino jumped at the sound of Nikanj’s soft voice so close to him. He seemed about to move away, shrink away. He had probably not been this close to an Oankali since he was a child. Somehow, he managed to keep still.

“Look up,” Nikanj repeated.

Tino looked up into the soft yellow glow of the ceiling.

“Didn’t you even wonder where the light was coming from?” Nikanj asked. “Is that the ceiling of a primitive dwelling?”

“It wasn’t like that when I came in,” Tino said.

“No. It wasn’t as much needed when you came in. There was plenty of light from outside. Look at the smooth walls. Look at the floor. Feel the floor. I don’t think a floor of dead wood would be as comfortable. You’ll have a chance to make comparisons if you choose to stay in the guest house. It really is the rough wood and thatch building you thought this was. It has to be. Strangers wouldn’t be able to control the walls of the true houses here.”

Wray Ordway said mildly, “Nika, if that man sleeps in the guest house tonight, I’ll lose all faith in you.”

Nikanj’s body went helplessly smooth, and everyone laughed. The glass-smooth flattening of head and body tentacles normally indicated humor or pleasure, Akin knew, but what Nikanj was feeling now was neither of those emotions. It was more like a huge, consuming hunger, barely under control. If Nikanj had been Human, it would have been trembling. After a moment it managed to return its appearance to normal. It focused a cone of head tentacles on Lilith, appealing to her. She had not laughed, though she was smiling.

“You people are not nice,” she said, keeping her smile. “You should be ashamed. Go home now, all of you. Have interesting dreams.”

6

Tino watched in confusion as people began to leave. Some of them were still laughing—at a joke Tino was not sure he understood, not sure he wanted to understand. Some stopped to talk to the woman who had brought him into the village. Lilith her name was. Lilith. Unusual name loaded with bad connotations. She should have changed it. Almost anything would have been better.

Three Oankali and several children clustered around her, talking to the departing guests. Much of the conversation was in some other language—almost certainly Oankali, since Lilith had said the villagers had no other Human languages in common.

The group, family and guests, was a menagerie, Tino thought. Human; nearly Human with a few visible sensory tentacles; half-Human, gray with strangely jointed limbs and some sensory tentacles; Oankali with Human features contrasting jarringly with their alienness; Oankali who might possibly be part Human; and Oankali like the ooloi who had spoken to him, who obviously had no Humanity at all.

Lilith amid the menagerie. He had liked her looks when he spotted her in the garden. She was an amazon of a woman, tall and strong, but with no look of hardness to her. Fine, dark skin. Breasts high in spite of all the children—breasts full of milk. He had never before seen a woman nursing a child. He had almost had to turn his back on her to stop himself from staring as Lilith fed Akin. The woman was not beautiful. Her broad, smooth face was usually set in an expression of solemnity, even sadness. It made her look—and Tino winced at the thought—it made her look saintly. A mother. Very much a mother. And something else.

And she had no man, apparently. She had said Akin’s father was long dead. Was she looking for someone? Was that what all the laughter was about? After all, if he stayed with Lilith, he would also be staying with her Oankali family, with the ooloi whose reaction had provoked so much laughter. Especially with that ooloi. And what would that mean?

He was looking at it when the man Lilith had called Wray came up to him.

“I’m Wray Ordway,” he said. “I live here permanently. Come around when you can. Anyone here can head you toward my house.” He was a small, blond man with nearly colorless eyes that caught Tino’s attention. Could anyone really see out of such eyes? “Do you know Nikanj?” the man asked.

“Who?” Tino asked, though he thought he knew.

“The ooloi who spoke to you. The one you’re watching.”

Tino stared at him with the beginnings of dislike.

“I think it recognized you,” Wray said. “It’s an interesting creature. Lilith thinks very highly of it.”

“Is it her mate?” Of course it was.

“It’s one of her mates. She hasn’t had a man stay with her for a long time, though.”

Was this Nikanj the mate who had forced pregnancy on her? It was an ugly creature with too many head tentacles and not enough of anything that could be called a face. Yet there was something compelling about it. Perhaps he had seen it before. Perhaps it was the last ooloi he had seen before he and his parents had been set down on Earth and let go. That ooloi

?

A very Human-looking young woman brushed past Tino on her way out. Tino’s attention was drawn to her, and he stared as she walked away. He saw her join another very similar young woman, and the two both turned to look at him, smile at him. They were completely alike, pretty, but so startling in their similarity that he was distracted from their beauty. He found himself searching his memory for a word he had had no occasion to use since childhood.

“Twins?” he asked Wray.

“Those two? No.” Wray smiled. “They were born within a day of one another, though. One of them should have been a boy.”

Tino stared at the well-shaped young women. “Neither of them is in any way like a boy.”

“Do you like them?”

Tino glanced at him and smiled.

“They’re my daughters.”

Tino froze, then shifted his gaze from the girls uneasily. “Both?” he asked after a moment.

“Human mother, Oankali mother. Believe me, they weren’t identical when they were born. I think they are now because

Tehkorahs wanted to make a point—that the nine children Leah and I have produced are true siblings of the children of our Oankali mates.”

“Nine children?” Tino whispered. “Nine?” He had lived since childhood among people who would almost have given their lives to produce one child.

“Nine,” Wray confirmed. “And listen.” He stopped, waited until Tino’s eyes focused on him. “Listen, I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. Those girls wear more clothing than most constructs because they have concealable differences. Neither of them is as Human as she looks. Let them alone if you can’t accept that.”

Tino looked into the pale, blind-seeming eyes. “What if I can accept it?”

Wray looked at the two girls, his expression gentling. “That’s between you and them.” The girls were exchanging words with Nikanj. Another ooloi came up to them, and as the exchange continued, it put one strength arm around each girl.

“That’s Tehkorahs,” Wray said, “my ooloi mate. That’s Tehkorahs being protective, I think. And Nikanj

being impatient if anyone can believe that.”

Tino watched the two ooloi and the two girls with interest. They did not seem to be arguing. In fact, they had ceased to speak at all—or ceased to speak aloud. Tino suspected they were still communicating somehow. There had always been a rumor that Oankali could read minds. He had never believed it, but clearly something was happening.

“One thing,” Wray said softly. “Listen.”

Tino faced him questioningly.

“You can do as you please here. As long as you don’t hurt anyone, you can stay or go as you like; you can choose your own friends, your own lovers. No one has the right to demand anything from you that you don’t want to give.” He turned and walked away before Tino could ask what this really meant when it came to the Oankali.

Wray joined his daughters and Tehkorahs and led them out of the house. Tino found himself watching the young women’s hips. He did not realize until they were gone that Nikanj and Lilith had come over to him.

“We’d like you to stay with us,” Lilith said softly. “At least for the night.”

He looked at her lineless face, her cap of dark hair, her breasts, now concealed beneath a simple gray shirt. He had had only a glimpse of them as she had settled herself to nurse Akin.

She took his hand, and he remembered seizing her hand to examine it. She had large, strong, calloused hands, warm and Human. Almost unconsciously, he turned his back to Nikanj. What did it want? Or rather, how did it go about getting what it wanted? What did the ooloi actually do to Humans? What would it want of him? And did he really want Lilith badly enough to find out?

But why had he left Phoenix if not for this?

But so quickly? Now?

“Sit with us,” Lilith said. “Let’s talk for a while.” She drew him toward a wall—toward the place they had sat when he spoke to the people. They sat cross-legged—or the two Humans crossed their legs—their bodies forming a tight triangle. Tino watched the other two Oankali in the room as they herded the children away. Akin and the small gray child who now held him clearly wanted to stay. Tino could see that, though neither child was speaking English. The larger of the two Oankali lifted both children easily and managed to interest them in something else. All three vanished with the others through a doorway that seemed to grow shut behind them— the way doorways had closed so long ago aboard the ship. The room was sealed and empty except for Tino, Lilith, and Nikanj.

Tino made himself look at Nikanj. It had folded its legs under it the way the Oankali did. Many of its head tentacles were trained on him, seeming almost to be straining toward him. He suppressed a shudder—not a response of fear or disgust. Those feelings would not have surprised him. He felt

He did not know what he felt about this ooloi.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” Nikanj admitted. “You’re unusual. I’ve never known a Human to remember before.”

“To remember his conditioning?”

Silence.

“To remember his conditioner,” Tino said nodding. “I don’t think anyone could forget his conditioning. But

I don’t know how I recognized you. I met you so long ago, and

well, I don’t mean to offend you, but I still can’t tell your people apart.”

“You can. You just don’t realize it yet. That’s unusual, too. Some Humans never learn to recognize individuals among us.”

“What did you do to me back then?” he demanded. “I’ve never

never felt anything like that before or since.”

“I told you then. I checked you for disease and injury, strengthened you against infection, got rid of any problems I found, programmed your body to slow its aging processes after a certain point, and did whatever else I could to improve your chances of surviving your reintroduction to Earth. Those are the things all conditioners did. And we all took prints of you—read all that your bodies could tell us about themselves and created a kind of blueprint. I could make a physical copy of you even if you hadn’t survived.”

“A baby?”

“Yes, eventually. But we prefer you to any copy. We need cultural as well as genetic diversity for a good trade.”

“Trade!” Tino said scornfully. “I don’t know what I’d call what you’re doing to us, but it isn’t trade. Trade is when two people agree to an exchange.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t involve coercion.”

“We have something you need. You have something we need.”

“We didn’t need anything before you got here!”

“You were dying.”

Tino said nothing for a moment. He looked away. The war was an insanity he had never understood, and no one in Phoenix had been able to explain it to him. At least, no one had been able to give him a reason why people who had excellent reasons to suppose they would destroy themselves if they did a certain thing chose to do that thing anyway. He thought he understood anger, hatred, humiliation, even the desire to kill a man. He had felt all those things. But to kill everyone

almost to kill the Earth

There were times when he wondered if somehow the Oankali had not caused the war for their own purposes. How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing—or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.

“I don’t know about the war,” Tino admitted. “It’s never made sense to me. But

maybe you should have left us alone. Maybe some of us would have survived.”

“Nothing would have survived except bacteria, a few small land plants and animals, and some sea creatures. Most of the life that you see around you we reseeded from prints, from collected specimens from our own creations, and from altered remnants of things that had undergone benign changes before we found them. The war damaged your ozone layer. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It shielded life on Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Without its protection, above-ground life on Earth would not have been possible. If we had left you on Earth, you would have been blinded. You would have been burned—if you hadn’t already been killed by other expanding effects of the war—and you would have died a terrible death. Most animals did die, and most plants, and some of us. We’re hard to kill, but your people had made their world utterly hostile to life. If we had not helped it, it couldn’t have restored itself so quickly. Once it was restored, we knew we couldn’t carry on a normal trade. We couldn’t let you breed alongside us, coming to us only when you saw the value of what we offered. Stabilizing a trade that way takes too many generations. We needed to free you—the least dangerous of you anyway. But we couldn’t let your numbers grow. We couldn’t let you begin to become what you were.”

“You believe we would have had another war?”

“You would have had many others—against each other, against us. Some of the southern resister groups are already making guns.”

Tino digested that silently. He had known about the guns of the southerners, had assumed they were to be used against the Oankali. He had not believed people from the stars would be stopped by a few crude firearms, and he had said so, making himself unpopular with those of his people who wanted to believe—needed to believe. Several of these had left Phoenix to join the southerners.

“What will you do about the guns?” he asked.

“Nothing, except to those who actually do try to shoot us. Those go back to the ship permanently. They lose Earth. We’ve told them that. So far, none of them have shot us. A few have shot one another, though.”

Lilith looked startled. “You’re letting them do that?”

Nikanj focused a cone of tentacles on her. “Could we stop them, Lilith, really?”

“You used to try!”

“Aboard the ship, here in Lo, and in the other trade villages. Nowhere else. We control the resisters only if we cage them, drug them, and allow them to live in an unreal world of drug-stimulated imaginings. We’ve done that to a few violent Humans. Shall we do it to more?”

Lilith only stared at it, her expression unreadable.

“You won’t do that?” Tino asked.

“We won’t. We have prints of all of you. We would be sorry to lose you, but at least we would save something. We will be inviting your people to join us again. If any are injured or crippled or even sick in spite of our efforts, we’ll offer them our help. They’re free to accept our help yet stay in their villages. Or they can come to us.” It aimed a sharp cone of head tentacles at Tino. “You’ve known since I sent you back to your parents years ago that you could choose to come to us.”

Tino shook his head, spoke softly. “I seem to remember that I didn’t want to go back to my parents. I asked to stay with you. To this day, I don’t know why.”

“I wanted to keep you. If you’d been a little older

But we’ve been told and shown that we aren’t good at raising fully Human children.” It shifted its attention for a moment to Lilith, but she looked away. “You had to be left with your parents to grow up. I thought I wouldn’t see you again.”

Tino caught himself staring at the ooloi’s long, gray sensory arms. Both arms seemed relaxed against the ooloi’s sides, their ends coiled, spiraling upward so that they did not touch the floor.

“They always look a little like elephants’ trunks to me,” Lilith said.

Tino glanced at her and saw that she was smiling—a sad smile that became her somehow. For a moment, she was beautiful. He did not know what he wanted from the ooloi—if he wanted anything. But he knew what he wanted from the woman. He wished the ooloi were not there. And as soon as the thought occurred to him, he rejected it. Lilith and Nikanj were a pair somehow. Without Nikanj, she would not have been as desirable. He did not understand this, but he accepted it.

They would have to show him what was to happen. He would not ask. They had made it clear they wanted something from him. Let them ask.

“I was thinking,” Tino said, referring to the sensory arms, “that I don’t know what they are.”

Nikanj’s body tentacles seemed to tremble, then solidify into discolored lumps. They sank into themselves the way the soft bodies of slugs seemed to when they drew themselves up to rest.

Tino drew back a little in revulsion. God, the Oankali were ugly creatures. How had Human beings come to tolerate them so easily, to touch them and allow them to

Lilith took the ooloi’s right sensory arm between her hands and held it even when Nikanj seemed to try to pull away. She stared at it, and Tino knew there must be some communication. Did the Oankali share mind-reading abilities with their pet Humans? Or was it mind reading? Lilith spoke aloud.

“Slow,” she whispered. “Give him a moment. Give me a moment. Don’t defeat your own purpose by hurrying.”

For a moment, Nikanj’s lumps looked worse—like some grotesque disease. Then the lumps resolved themselves again into slender gray body tentacles no more grotesque than usual. Nikanj drew its sensory arm from Lilith’s hands, then stood up and went to a far corner of the room. There it sat down and seemed almost to turn itself off. Like something carved from gray marble, it became utterly still. Even its head and body tentacles ceased to move.

“What was all that?” Tino demanded.

Lilith smiled broadly. “For the first time in my life, I had to tell it to be patient. If it were Human, I would say it was infatuated with you.”

“You’re joking!”

“I am,” she said. “This is worse than infatuation. I’m glad you feel something for it, too, even though you don’t yet know what.”

“Why has it gone to sit in that corner?”

“Because it can’t quite bring itself to leave the room, though it knows it should—to let the two of us be Human for a little while. Anyway, I don’t think you really want it to leave.”

“Can it read minds? Can you?”

She did not laugh. At least she did not laugh. “I’ve never met anyone, Oankali or Human, who could read minds. It can stimulate sensations and send your thoughts off in all sorts of directions, but it can’t read those thoughts. It can only share the new sensations they produce. In effect, it can give you the most realistic and the most pleasurable dreams you’ve ever experienced. Nothing you’ve known before can match it—except perhaps your conditioning. And that should tell you why you’re here, why you were bound to seek out a trade village sooner or later. Nikanj touched you when you were too young to have any defenses. And what it gave you, you won’t ever quite forget—or quite remember, unless you feel it again. You want it again. Don’t you.”

It was not a question. Tino swallowed and did not bother with an answer. “I remember drugs,” he said, staring at nothing. “I never took any. I was too young before the war. I remember other people taking them and maybe going crazy for a little while or maybe just being high. I remember that they got addicted, that they got hurt sometimes or killed

”

“This isn’t just a drug.”

“What then?”

“Direct stimulation of the brain and nervous system.” She held up her hand to stop him from speaking. “There’s no pain. They hate pain more than we do, because they’re more sensitive to it. If they hurt us, they hurt themselves. And there are no harmful side effects. Just the opposite. They automatically fix any problems they find. They get real pleasure from healing or regenerating, and they share that pleasure with us. They weren’t as good at repairs before they found us. Regeneration was limited to wound healing. Now they can grow you a new leg if you lose one. They can even regenerate brain and nervous tissue. They learned that from us, believe it or not. We had the ability, and they knew how to use it. They learned by studying our cancers, of all things. It was cancer that made Humanity such a valuable trade partner.”

Tino shook his head, not believing. “I saw cancer kill both my grandfathers. It’s nothing but a filthy disease.”

Lilith touched his shoulder, let her hand slide down his arm in a caress. “So that’s it. That’s why Nikanj is so attracted to you. Cancer killed three close relatives of mine, including my mother. I’m told it would have killed me if the Oankali hadn’t done some work on me. It’s a filthy disease to us, but to the Oankali, it’s the tool they’ve been looking for for generations.”

“What will it do to me that has to do with cancer?”

“Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can’t do with an ugly one? Nothing. It’s just a matter of preference. Nikanj and every other Oankali already have all the information they need to use what they’ve learned from us. Even the constructs can use it once they’re mature. But people like you and me are still attractive to them.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m told our children will understand them, but we won’t.”

“Our children will be them.”

“You accept that?”

It took him a moment to realize what he had said. “No! I don’t know. Yes, but—” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

She moved closer to him, rested warm, calloused hands on his forearms. He could smell her. Crushed plants—the way a fresh-cut lawn used to smell. Food, pepper and sweet. Woman. He reached out to her, touched the large breasts. He could not help himself. He had wanted to touch them since he had first seen them. She lay down on her side, drawing him down facing her. It occurred to him a moment later that Nikanj was behind him. That she had deliberately positioned him so that Nikanj would be behind him.

He sat up abruptly, turned to look at the ooloi. It had not moved. It gave no sign that it was even alive.

“Lie here with me for a while,” she said.

“But—”

“We’ll go to Nikanj in a little while. Won’t we.”

“I don’t know.” He lay down again, now glad to keep his back to it. “I still don’t understand what it does. I mean, so it gives me good dreams. How? And what else will it do? Will it use me to make you pregnant?”

“Not now. Akin is too young. It

might collect some sperm from you. You won’t be aware of it. When they have the chance, they stimulate a woman to ovulate several eggs. They collect the eggs, store them, collect sperm, store it. They can keep sperm and eggs viable and separate in their bodies for decades. Akin is the child of a man who died nearly thirty years ago.”

“I heard there was a time limit—that they could only keep sperm and eggs alive for a few months.”

“Progress. Before I left the ship, someone came up with a new method of preservation. Nikanj was one of the first to learn it.”

Tino looked at her closely, searched her smooth, broad face. “So you’re what? In your fifties?”

“Fifty-five.”

He sighed, shook his head against the arm he had rested it on. “You look younger than I do. I’ve at least got a few gray hairs. I remember I used to worry that I really was the Human the Oankali had failed with, fertile and aging normally, and that all I’d really get out of it was old.”

“Nikanj wouldn’t have failed with you.”

She was so close to him that he couldn’t help touching her, moving his fingers over the fine skin. He drew back, though, when she mentioned the ooloi’s name.

“Can’t it go?” he whispered. “Just for a while.”

“It chooses not to,” she said in a normal voice. “And don’t bother whispering. It can hear your heartbeat from where it’s sitting. It can hear your subvocalizations—the things you

say to yourself in words but not quite out loud. That may be why you thought it could read minds. And it obviously will not go away.”

“Can we?”

“No.” She hesitated. “It isn’t Human, Tino. This isn’t like having another man or woman in the room.”

“It’s worse.”

She smiled wearily, leaned over him, and kissed him. Then she sat up. “I understand,” she said. “I felt the way you do once. Maybe it’s just as well.” She hugged herself and looked at him almost angrily. Frustration? How long had it been for her? Well, the damned ooloi could not always be there. Why wouldn’t it go away, wait its turn? Failing that, why was he so shy of it? Its presence did bother him more than another Human’s would have. Much more.

“We’ll join Nikanj, Tino, once I’ve told you one more thing,” she said. “That is, we’ll join it if you decide you still want anything to do with me.”

“With you? But it wasn’t you I was having trouble with. I mean—”

“I know. This is something else—something I’d rather never mention to you. But if I don’t, someone else will.” She drew a deep breath. “Didn’t you wonder about me? About my name?”

“I thought you should have changed it. It isn’t a very popular name.”

“I know. And changing it wouldn’t do much good. Too many people know me. I’m not just someone stuck with an unpopular name, Tino. I’m the one who made it unpopular. I’m Lilith Iyapo.”

He frowned, began to shake his head, then stopped. “You’re not the one who

who

”

“I awakened the first three groups of Humans to be sent back to Earth. I told them what their situation was, what their options were, and they decided I was responsible for it all. I helped teach them to live in the forest, and they decided it was my fault they had to give up civilized life. Sort of like blaming me for the goddamn war! Anyway, they decided I had betrayed them to the Oankali, and the nicest thing some of them called me was Judas. Is that the way you were taught to think of me?”

“I

Yes.”

She shook her head. “The Oankali either seduced them or terrified them, or both. I, on the other hand, was nobody. It was easy for them to blame me. And it was safe.

“So now and then when we get ex-resisters traveling through Lo and they hear my name, they assume I have horns. Some of the younger ones have been taught to blame me for everything—as though I were a second Satan or Satan’s wife or some such idiocy. Now and then one of them will try to kill me. That’s one of the reasons I’m so touchy about weapons here.”

He stared at her for a while. He had watched her closely as she spoke, trying to see guilt in her, trying to see the devil in her. In Phoenix, people had said things like that—that she was possessed of the devil, that she had sold first herself, then Humanity, that she was the first to go willingly to an Oankali bed to become their whore and to seduce other Humans

“What do your people say about me?” she asked.

He hesitated, glanced at Nikanj. “That you sold us.”

“For what currency?”

There had always been some debate about that. “For the right to stay on the ship and for

powers. They saw you were born Human, but the Oankali made you like a construct.”

She made a sound that she may have intended as a laugh. “I begged to go to Earth with the first group I awakened. I was supposed to have gone. But when the time came, Nika wouldn’t let me. It said the people would kill me once they got me away from the Oankali. They probably would have. And they would have felt virtuous and avenged.”

“But

you are different. You’re very strong, fast

”

“Yes. That wasn’t the Oankali way of paying me off. It was their way of giving me some protection. If they hadn’t changed me a little, someone in the first group would have killed me while I was still awakening people. I’m somewhere between Human and construct in ability. I’m stronger and faster than most Humans, but not as strong or as fast as most constructs. I heal faster than you could, and I’d recover from wounds that would kill you. And of course I can control walls and raise platforms here in Lo. All Humans who settle here are given that ability. That’s all. Nikanj changed me to save my life, and it succeeded. Instead of killing me, the first group I awakened killed Akin’s father, the man I had paired with

might still be with. One of them killed him. The others watched, then went on following that one.”

There was a long silence. Finally Tino said, “Maybe they were afraid.”

“Is that what you were told?”

“No. I didn’t know about that part at all. I even heard

that

perhaps you didn’t like men at all.”

She threw back her head in startling, terrible laughter. “Oh, god. Which of my first group is in Phoenix?”

“A guy named Rinaldi.”

“Gabe? Gabe and Tate. Are they still together?”

“Yes. I didn’t realize

Tate never said anything about being with him then. I thought they had gotten together here on Earth.”

“I awoke them both. They were my best friends for a while. Their ooloi was Kahguyaht—ooan Nikanj.”

“What Nikanj?”

“Nikanj’s ooloi parent. It stayed aboard the ship with its mates and raised another trio of children. Nikanj told it Gabe and Tate wouldn’t be leaving the resisters any time soon. It was finally willing to acknowledge Nikanj’s talent, and it couldn’t bring itself to accept other Humans.”

Tino looked at Nikanj. After a while, he got up and went over to it, sat down opposite it. “What is your talent?” he asked.

Nikanj did not speak or acknowledge his presence.

“Talk to me!” he demanded. “I know you hear.”

The ooloi seemed to come to life slowly. “I hear.”

“What is your talent!”

It leaned toward him and took his hands in its strength hands, keeping its sensory arms coiled. Oddly, the gesture reminded him of Lilith, was much like what Lilith tended to do. He did not mind, somehow, that now hard, cool gray hands held his.

“I have a talent for Humans,” it said in its soft voice. “I was bred to work with you, taught to work with you, and given one of you as a companion during one of my most formative periods.” It focused for a moment on Lilith. “I know your bodies, and sometimes I can anticipate your thinking. I knew that Gabe Rinaldi couldn’t accept a union with us when Kahguyaht wanted him. Tate could have, but she would not leave Gabe for an ooloi—no matter how badly she wanted to. And Kahguyaht would not simply keep her with it when the others were sent to Earth. That surprised me. It always said there was no point in paying attention to what Humans said. It knew Tate would eventually have accepted it, but it listened to her and let her go. And it wasn’t raised as I was in contact with Humans. I think your people affect us more than we realize.”

“I think,” Lilith said quietly, “that you may be better at understanding us than you are at understanding your own people.”

It focused on her, its body tentacles smoothed to invisibility against its flesh. That meant it was pleased, Tino remembered. Pleased or even happy. “Ahajas says that,” it told her. “I don’t think it’s true, but it may be.”

Tino turned toward Lilith but spoke to Nikanj. “Did you make her pregnant against her will?”

“Against one part of her will, yes,” Nikanj admitted. “She had wanted a child with Joseph, but he was dead. She was

more alone than you could imagine. She thought I didn’t understand.”

“It’s your fault she was alone!”

“It was a shared fault.” Nikanj’s head and body tentacles hung limp. “We believed we had to use her as we did. Otherwise we would have had to drug newly awakened Humans much more than was good for them because we would have had to teach them everything ourselves. We did that later because we saw

that we were damaging Lilith and the others we tried to use.

“In the first children, I gave Lilith what she wanted but could not ask for. I let her blame me instead of herself. For a while, I became for her a little of what she was for the Humans she had taught and guided. Betrayer. Destroyer of treasured things. Tyrant. She needed to hate me for a while so that she could stop hating herself. And she needed the children I mixed for her.”

Tino stared at the ooloi, needing to look at it to remind himself that he was hearing an utterly un-Human creature. Finally, he looked at Lilith.

She looked back, smiling a bitter, humorless smile. “I told you it was talented,” she said.

“How much of that is true?” he asked.

“How should I know!” She swallowed. “All of it might be. Nikanj usually tells the truth. On the other hand, reasons and justifications can sound just as good when they’re made up as an afterthought. Have your fun, then come up with a wonderful-sounding reason why it was the right thing for you to do.”

Tino pulled away from the ooloi and went to Lilith. “Do you hate it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I have to leave it to hate it. Sometimes I go away for a while—explore, visit other villages, and hate it. But after a while, I start to miss my children. And, heaven help me, I start to miss it. I stay away until staying away hurts more than the thought of coming

home.”

He thought she should be crying. His mother would never have contained that much passion without tears—would never have tried. He took her by the arms, found her stiff and resistant. Her eyes rejected any comfort before he could offer it.

“What shall I do?” he asked. “What do you want me to do?”

She hugged him suddenly, holding him hard against her. “Will you stay?” she said into his ear.

“Shall I?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” She was not Lilith Iyapo. She was a quiet, expressive, broad face. She was dark, smooth skin and warm, work-calloused hands. She was breasts full of milk. He wondered how he had resisted her earlier.

And what about Nikanj? He did not look at it, but he imagined he felt its attention on him.

“If you decide to leave,” Lilith said, “I’ll help you.”

He could not imagine wanting to leave her.

Something cool and rough and hard attached itself to his upper arm. He froze, not having to look to know it was one of the ooloi’s sensory arms.

It stood close to him, one sensory arm on him and one on Lilith. They were like elephants’ trunks, those arms. He felt Lilith release him, felt Nikanj drawing him to the floor. He let himself be pulled down only because Lilith lay down with them. He let Nikanj position his body alongside its own. Then he saw Lilith sit up on Nikanj’s opposite side and watch the two of them solemnly.

He did not understand why she watched, why she did not take part. Before he could ask, the ooloi slipped its sensory arm around him and pressed the back of his neck in a way that made him shudder, then go limp.

He was not unconscious. He knew when the ooloi drew closer to him, seemed to grasp him in some way he did not understand.

He was not afraid.

The splash of icy-sweet pleasure, when it reached him, won him completely. This was the half-remembered feeling he had come back for. This was the way it began.

Before the long-awaited rush of sensation swallowed him completely, he saw Lilith lie down alongside the ooloi, saw the second sensory arm loop around her neck. He tried to reach out to her across the body of the ooloi, to touch her, touch the warm Human flesh. It seemed to him that he reached and reached, yet she remained too far away to touch.

He thought he shouted as the sensation deepened, as it took him. It seemed that she was with him suddenly, her body against his own. He thought he said her name and repeated it, but he could not hear the sound of his own voice.

7

Akin took his first few steps toward Tino’s outstretched hands. He learned to take food from Tino’s plate, and he rode on Tino’s back whenever the man would carry him. He did not forget Dichaan’s warning not to be alone with Tino, but he did not take it seriously. He came to trust Tino very quickly. Eventually everyone came to trust Tino.

Thus, as it happened, Akin was alone with Tino when a party of raiders came looking for children to steal.

Tino had gone out to cut wood for the guest house. He was not yet able to perceive the borders of Lo. He had gotten into the habit of taking Akin along to spot for him after breaking an ax he had borrowed from Wray Ordway on a tree that was not a tree. The Lo entity shaped itself according to the desires of its occupants and the patterns of the surrounding vegetation. Yet it was the larval form of a space-going entity. Its hide and its organs were better protected than any living thing native to Earth. No ax or machete could mark it. Until it was older, no native vegetation would grow within its boundaries. That was why Lilith and a few other people had gardens far from the village. Lo would have provided good food from its own substance—the Oankali could stimulate food production and separate the food from Lo. But most Humans in the village did not want to be dependent on the Oankali. Thus, Lo had a broad fringe of Human-planted gardens, some in use and some fallow. Akin had had, at times, to keep Tino from tramping right into them, then realizing too late that he had slashed his way through food plants and destroyed someone’s work. It was as though he could not see at all.

Akin could not help knowing when he passed the borders of Lo. Even the smell of the air was different. The vegetation that touched him made him cringe at first because it was abruptly not-home. Then, for exactly the same reason, it drew him, called to him with its strangeness. He deliberately let Tino walk farther than was necessary until something he had not tasted before chanced to brush across his face.

“Here,” he said, tearing leaves from the sapling that had touched him. “Don’t cut that tree, but you can cut any of the others.”

Tino put him down and grinned at him. “May I?” he said.

“I like this one,” Akin said. “When it’s older, I think we’ll be able to eat from it.”

“Eat what?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one like this before. But even if it doesn’t bear fruit, the leaves are good to eat. My body likes them.”

Tino rolled his eyes toward the forest canopy and shook his head. “Everything goes into your mouth,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t poisoned yourself ten times.”

Akin ignored this and began investigating the bark on the sapling and looking to see what insects or fungi might be eating it and what might be eating them. Tino had been told why Akin put things in his mouth. He did not understand, but he never tried to keep things out of Akin’s mouth the way other visitors did. He could accept without understanding. Once he had seen that a strange thing did no harm, he no longer feared it. He said Akin’s tongue looked like a big gray slug, but somehow this did not seem to bother him. He allowed himself to be probed and studied when he carried Akin about. Lilith worried that he was concealing disgust or resentment, but he could not have concealed such strong emotions even from Akin. He certainly could not have concealed them from Nikanj.

“He’s more adaptable than most Humans,” Nikanj had told Akin. “So is Lilith.”

“He calls me ‘son’,” Akin said.

“I’ve heard.”

“He won’t go away, will he?”

“He won’t go. He’s not a wanderer. He was looking for a home where he could have a family, and he’s found one.”

Now Tino began to chop down a small tree. Akin watched for a moment, wondering why the man enjoyed such activity. He did enjoy it. He had volunteered to do it. He did not like gardening. He did not like adding to Lo’s library—writing down his prewar memories for later generations. Everyone was asked to do that if they stayed even for a short while in Lo. Constructs wrote about their lives as well, and Oankali, who would not write anything, though they were capable of writing, told their stories to Human writers. Tino showed no interest in any of this. He chopped wood, he worked with Humans who had established a fish farm and with constructs who raised altered bees, wasps, earthworms, beetles, ants, and other small animals that produced new foods. He built canoes and traveled with Ahajas when she visited other villages. She traveled by boat for his sake, though most Oankali swam. She had been surprised to see how easily he accepted her, had recognized his fascination with her pregnancy. Both Ahajas and Akin tried to tell him what it was like to touch the growing child and feel its response, it’s recognition, it’s intense curiosity. The two had talked Nikanj into trying to simulate the sensation for him. Nikanj had resisted the idea only because Tino was not one of the child’s parents. But when Tino asked, the ooloi’s resistance vanished. It gave Tino the sensation—and held him longer than was necessary. That was good, Akin thought. Tino needed to be touched more. It had been painfully hard for him when he discovered that his entry into the family meant he could not touch Lilith. This was something Akin did not understand. Human beings liked to touch one another—needed to. But once they mated through an ooloi, they could not mate with each other in the Human way—could not even stroke and handle one another in the Human way. Akin did not understand why they needed this, but he knew they did, knew it frustrated and embittered them that they could not. Tino had spent days screaming at or not speaking at all to Nikanj, screaming at or not speaking to Lilith, sitting alone and staring at nothing. Once he left the village for three days, and Dichaan followed him and led him back when he was ready to return. He could have gone away until the effects of his mating with Nikanj had passed from his body. He could have found another village and a sterile Human-only mating. He had had several of those, though. Akin had heard him speak of them during those first few bad days. They were not what he wanted. But neither was this. Now he was like Lilith. Very much attached to the family and content with it most of the time, yet poisonously resentful and bitter sometimes. But only Akin and the rest of the younger children of the house worried that he might leave permanently. The adults seemed certain he would stay.

Now he cut the tree he had felled into pieces and cut lianas to bundle the wood. Then he came to collect Akin. He stopped abruptly and whispered. “My god!”

Akin was tasting a large caterpillar. He had allowed it to crawl onto his forearm. It was, in fact, almost as large as his forearm. It was bright red and spotted with what appeared to be tufts of long, stiff black fur. The tufts, Akin knew, were deadly. The animal did not have to sting. It had only to be touched on one of the tufts. The poison was strong enough to kill a large Human. Apparently Tino knew this. His hand moved toward the caterpillar, then stopped.

Akin split his attention, watching Tino to see that he made no further moves and tasting the caterpillar gently, delicately, with his skin and with a flick of his tongue to its pale, slightly exposed underside. Its underside was safe. It did not poison what it crawled on.

It ate other insects. It even ate small frogs and toads. Some ooloi had given it the characteristics of another crawling creature—a small, multilegged, wormlike peripatus. Now both caterpillar and peripatus could project a kind of glue to snare prey and hold it until it could be consumed.

The caterpillar itself was not good to eat. It was too poisonous. The ooloi who had assembled it had not intended that it be food for anything while it was alive, though it might be killed by ants or wasps if it chose to hunt in one of the trees protected by these. It was safe, though, in the tree it had chosen. Its kind would give the tree a better chance to mature and produce food.

Akin held his arm against the trunk of the sapling and carefully maneuvered the caterpillar into crawling back to it. The moment it had left his arm, Tino snatched him up, shouting at him.

“Never do anything so crazy again! Never! That thing could kill you! It could kill me!”

Someone grabbed him from behind.

Someone else grabbed Akin from his arms.

Now, far too late, Akin saw, heard, and smelled the intruders. Strangers. Human males with no scent of the Oankali about them. Resisters. Raiders. Child thieves!

Akin screamed and twisted in the arms of his captor. But physically, he was still little more than a baby. He had let his attention be absorbed by Tino and the caterpillar, and now he was caught. The man who held him was large and strong. He held Akin without seeming to notice Akin’s struggles.

Meanwhile, four men had surrounded Tino. There was blood on Tino’s face where someone had hit him, cut him. One of the four had a piece of gleaming silver metal around one of his fingers. That must have been what had cut Tino.

“Hold it!” one of Tino’s captors said. “This guy used to be Phoenix.” He frowned at Tino. “Aren’t you the Leal kid?”

“I’m Augustino Leal,” Tino said, holding his body very straight. “I was Phoenix. I was Phoenix before you ever heard of it!” His voice did not tremble, but Akin could see that his body was trembling slightly. He looked toward his ax, which now lay on the ground several feet from him. He had leaned it against a tree when he came to get Akin. His machete, though, had still been at his belt. Now it was gone. Akin could not see where it had gone.

The raiders all had long wood-and-metal sticks, which they now pointed at Tino. The man holding Tino also had such a stick, strapped across his back. These were weapons, Akin realized. Clubs—or perhaps guns? And these men knew Tino. One of them knew Tino. And Tino did not like that one. Tino was afraid. Akin had never seen him more afraid.

The man who held Akin had put his neck within easy reach of Akin’s tongue. Akin could sting him, kill him. But then what would happen? There were four other men.

Akin did nothing. He watched Tino, hoping the man would know what was best.

“There were no guns in Phoenix when I left,” Tino was saying. So the sticks were guns.

“No, and you didn’t want there to be any, did you?” the same man asked. He made a point of jabbing Tino with his gun.

Tino began to be a little less afraid and more angry. “If you think you can use those to kill the Oankali, you’re as stupid as I thought you were.”

The man swung his gun up so that its end almost touched Tino’s nose.

“Is it Humans you mean to kill?” Tino asked very softly. “Are there so many Humans left? Are our numbers increasing so fast?”

“You’ve joined the traitors!” the man said.

“To have a family,” Tino said softly. “To have children.” He looked at Akin. “To have at least part of myself continue.”

The man holding Akin spoke up. “This kid is as human as any I’ve seen since the war. I can’t find anything wrong with him.”

“No tentacles?” one of the four asked.

“Not a one.”

“What’s he got between his legs?”

“Same thing you’ve got. Little smaller, maybe.”

There was a moment of silence, and Akin saw that three of the men were amused and one was not.

Akin was afraid to speak, afraid to show the raiders his un-Human characteristics: his tongue, his ability to speak, his intelligence. Would these things make them let him alone or make them kill him? In spite of his months with Tino, he did not know. He kept quiet and began trying to hear or smell any Lo villager who might be passing nearby.

“So we take the kid,” one of the men said. “What do we do with him?” He gestured sharply toward Tino.

Before anyone could answer, Tino said, “No! You can’t take him. He still nurses. If you take him, he’ll starve!”

The men looked at one another uncertainly. The man holding Akin suddenly turned Akin toward him and squeezed the sides of Akin’s face with his fingers. He was trying to get Akin’s mouth open. Why?

It did not matter why. He would get Akin’s mouth open, then be startled. He was Human and a stranger and dangerous. Who knew what irrational reaction he might have. He must be given something familiar to go with the unfamiliar. Akin began to twist in the man’s arm and to whimper. He had not cried so far. That had been a mistake. Humans always marveled at how little construct babies cried. Clearly a Human baby would have cried more.

Akin opened his mouth and wailed.

“Shit!” muttered the man holding him. He looked around quickly as though fearing someone might be attracted by the noise. Akin, who had not thought of this, cried louder. Oankali had hearing more sensitive than most Humans realized.

“Shut up!” the man shouted, shaking him. “Good god, it’s got the ugliest goddamn gray tongue you ever saw! Shut up, you!”

“He’s just a baby,” Tino said. “You can’t get a baby to shut up by scaring him. Give him to me.” He had begun to step toward Akin, holding his arms out to take him.

Akin reached toward him, thinking that the resisters would be less likely to hurt the two of them together. Perhaps he could shield Tino to some degree. In Tino’s arms he would be quiet and cooperative. They would see that Tino was useful.

The man who had first recognized Tino now stepped behind him and smashed the wooden end of his gun into the back of Tino’s head.

Tino dropped to the ground without a cry, and his attacker hit him again, driving the wood of the gun down into Tino’s head like a man killing a poisonous snake.

Akin screamed in terror and anguish. He knew Human anatomy well enough to know that if Tino were not dead, he would die soon unless an Oankali helped him.

And there was no Oankali nearby.

The resisters left Tino where he lay and strode away into the forest, carrying Akin who still screamed and struggled.

1

Dichaan slipped from the deepest part of the broad lake, shifted from breathing in water to breathing in air, and began to wade to shore.

Humans called this an oxbow lake—one that had originally been part of the river. Dichaan had kept the Lo entity from engulfing it so far because the entity would have killed the plant life in it and that would have eventually killed the animal life. Even with help, Lo could not have been taught to provide what the animals needed in a form they would accept before they died of hunger. The only useful thing the entity could have provided at once was oxygen.

But now the entity was changing, moving into its next growth stage. Now it could learn to incorporate Earth vegetation, sustain it, and benefit from it. On its own, it would learn slowly, killing a great deal, culling native vegetation for that vegetation’s ability to adapt to the changes it made.

But the entity in symbiotic relationship with its Oankali inhabitants could change faster, adapting itself and accepting adapted plant life that Dichaan and others had prepared.

Dichaan stepped on shore through a natural corridor between great profusions of long, thick, upright prop roots that would slowly be submerged when the rainy season began and the water rose.

Dichaan had made his way out of the mud, his body still savoring the taste of the lake—rich in plant and animal life—when he heard a cry.

He stood utterly still, listening, his head and body tentacles slowly swinging around to focus on the direction of the sound. Then he knew where it was and who it was, and he began to run. He had been underwater all morning. What had been happening in the air?

Leaping over fallen trees, dodging around dangling lianas, undergrowth, and living trees, he ran. He spread his body tentacles against his skin. This way the sensitive parts of the tentacles could be protected from the thin underbrush that lashed him as he ran through it. He could not avoid it all and still move quickly.

He splashed through a small stream, then scrambled up a steep bank.

He came to a bundle of small logs and saw where a tree had been cut. The scent of Akin and of strange Human males was there. Tino’s scent was there—very strong.

And now Tino cried out weakly, making only a shadow of the sound Dichaan had heard at the lake. It hardly seemed a Human sound at all, yet to Dichaan, it was unmistakably Tino. His head tentacles swept around, seeking the man, finding him. He ran to him where he lay, concealed by the broad, wedge-shaped buttresses of a tree.

His hair was stuck together in solid masses of blood, dirt, and dead leaves. His body twitched, and he made small sounds.

Dichaan folded to the ground, first probed Tino’s wounds with several head tentacles, then lay down beside him and penetrated his body wherever possible with filaments from head and body tentacles.

The man was dying—would die in a moment unless Dichaan could keep him alive. It had been good having a Human male in the family. It had been a balance found after painful years of imbalance, and no one had felt the imbalance more than Dichaan. He had been born to work with a Human male parallel—to help raise children with the aid of such a person, and yet he had had to limp along without this essential other. How were children to learn to understand the Human male side of themselves—a side they all possessed whatever their eventual sex?

Now, here was Tino, childless and unused to children, but quickly at ease with them, quickly accepted by them.

Now, here was Tino, nearly dead at the hands of his own kind.

Dichaan linked with his nervous system and kept his heart beating. The man was a beautiful, terrible physical contradiction, as all Humans were. He was a walking seduction, and he would never understand why. He would not be lost. He could not be another Joseph.

There was some brain damage. Dichaan could perceive it, but he could not heal it. Nikanj would have to do that. But Dichaan could keep the damage from growing worse. He stopped the blood loss, which was not as bad as it looked, and made certain the living brain cells had intact blood vessels to nourish them. He found damage to the skull and perceived that the damaged bone was exerting abnormal pressure on the brain. This, he did not tamper with. Nikanj would handle it. Nikanj could do it faster and more certainly than a male or female could.

Dichaan waited until Tino was as stable as he could be, then left him for a moment. He went to the edge of Lo to one of the larger buttresses of a pseudotree and struck it several times in the code of pressures he would have used to supplement exchanged sensory impressions. The pressures would normally be used very rapidly, soundlessly, against another person’s flesh. It would take a moment for this drumming to be perceived as communication. But it would be noticed. Even if no Oankali or construct heard it, the Lo entity would pick up the familiar groups of vibrations. It would alert the community the next time someone opened a wall or raised a platform.

Dichaan pounded out the message twice, then went back to Tino and lay down to monitor him and wait.

Now there was time to think about what he had been too late to prevent.

Akin was gone—had been gone for some time. His abductors had been Human males—resisters. They had run toward the river. No doubt they had already headed up-or downriver toward their village—or perhaps they had crossed the river and traveled over land. Either way, their scent trail would probably vanish along the river. He had included in his message instructions to search for them, but he was not hopeful. All resister villages had to be searched. Akin would be found. Phoenix in particular would be checked, since it had once been Tino’s home. But would men from Phoenix have hated Tino so much? He did not seem to be the kind of man people could know and still hate. The people of Phoenix who had watched him grow up as the village’s only child must have felt as parents toward him. They would have been more likely to abduct him along with Akin.

Akin.

They would not hurt him—not intentionally. Not at first. He still nursed, but he did it more for comfort than for nutrition. He had an Oankali ability to digest whatever he was given and make the most of it. If they fed him what they ate, he would satisfy his body’s needs.

Did they know how intelligent he was? Did they know he could talk? If not, how would they react when they found out? Humans reacted badly to surprise. He would be careful, of course, but what did he know of angry, frightened, frustrated Humans? He had never been near even one person who might hate him, who might even hurt him when they discovered that he was not as Human as he looked.

2

Upriver.

The Humans had a long, smooth, narrow canoe, light and easy to row. Two pairs of men took turns at the oars, and the boat cut quickly through the water. The current was not strong. Working in relay as they were, the men never slowed to rest.

Akin had screamed as loudly as he could as long as there had been any chance of his being heard. But no one had come. He was quiet now, exhausted and miserable. The man who had caught him still held him, had once dangled him by his feet and threatened to dunk him in the river if he did not be quiet. Only the intervention of the other men had stopped him from doing this. Akin was terrified of him. The man honestly did not seem to understand why murder and abduction should disturb Akin or stop him from following orders.

Akin stared at the man’s broad, bearded, red face, breathed his sour breath. His was a bitter, angry face whose owner might hurt him for acting like a baby, yet might kill him for acting like anything else. The man held him as disgustedly as he had once seen another man hold a snake. Was he as alien as a snake to these people?

The bitter man looked down, caught Akin staring. “What the hell are you looking at?” he demanded.

Akin ceased to watch the man with his eyes, but kept him in view with other light-sensitive parts of his body. The man stank of sweat and of something else. Something was wrong with his body—some illness. He needed an ooloi. And he would never go near one.

Akin lay very still in his arms and, somehow, eventually, fell asleep.

He awoke to find himself lying between two pairs of feet on a piece of soggy cloth at the bottom of the boat. Water sloshing on him had awakened him.

He sat up cautiously, knowing before he moved that the current was stronger here and that it was raining. Raining hard. The man who had been holding Akin began to bail water from the boat with a large gourd. If the rain continued or got worse, surely they would stop.

Akin looked around at the land and saw that the banks were high and badly eroded—cliffs with vegetation spilling over the edges. He had never seen such things. He was farther from home than he had ever been, and still traveling. Where would they take him?

into the hills?

into the mountains?

The men gave up their effort and rowed for the bank. The water was gray-brown and rough, and the rain was coming down harder. They did not quite make it to shore before the canoe sank. The men cursed and jumped out to pull the boat onto a broad mud flat, while Akin stayed where he was, all but swimming. They dumped the boat, tipping both him and the water over one side, laughing when he slid along the mud.

One of them grabbed him by a leg and tried to hand him to the man who had captured him.

His captor would not take him. “You babysit for a while,” the man said. “Let him piss on you.”

Akin was barely able to stop himself from speaking out in indignation. He had not urinated on anyone for months—not since his family had been able to make him understand that he should not, that he should warn them when he needed to urinate or move his bowels. He would not have urinated even on these men.

“No thanks,” said the man holding Akin by the foot. “I just rowed the damn boat god knows how many miles while you sat there and watched the scenery. Now you can watch the kid.” He put Akin down on the mud flat and turned to help carry the boat to a place where they might be able to make their way up the bank. The mud flat was exactly that—a sliver of soft, wet, bare silt collected only just above the water. It was neither safe nor comfortable in the downpour. And night was coming. Time to find a place to camp.

Akin’s babysitter stared at Akin with cold dislike. He rubbed his stomach, and, for a moment, pain seemed to replace his general displeasure. Perhaps his stomach hurt him. How stupid to be sick and know where there was healing and decide to stay sick.

Abruptly, the man grabbed Akin, lifted him by one arm, thrust him under one of the man’s own long, thick arms, and followed the others up the steep, muddy trail.

Akin shut his eyes during the climb. His captor was not surefooted. He kept falling but somehow never fell on Akin or dropped him. He did, however, hold him so tightly that Akin could hardly breathe, so tightly the man’s fingers hurt and bruised him. He whimpered and sometimes cried out, but most of the time he tried to keep quiet. He feared this man as he had never before feared anyone. This man who had been eager to dunk him in water that might contain predators, who had gripped him and shaken him and threatened to punch him because he was crying, this man who was apparently willing to endure pain rather than go to someone who would heal him and ask nothing of him—this man might kill him before anyone could act to stop him.

At the top of the bluff, Akin’s captor threw him down. “You can walk,” the man muttered.

Akin sat still where he had landed, wondering whether Human babies had been thrown about this way—and if so, how they had survived? Then he followed the men as quickly as he could. If he were mature, he would run away. He would go back to the river and let it take him home. If he were mature he could breathe underwater and fend off predators with a simple chemical repellant—the equivalent of a bad smell.

But then, if he were mature, the resisters would not want him. They wanted a helpless infant—and they had very nearly gotten one. He could think, but his body was so small and weak that he could not act. He would not starve in the forest, but he might be poisoned by something that bit or stung him unexpectedly. Near the river, he might be eaten by an anaconda or a caiman.

Also, he had never been alone in the forest before.

As the men drew away from him, he grew more and more frightened. He fell several times but refused to cry again. Finally, exhausted, he stopped. If the men meant to leave him, he could not prevent them. Did they carry off construct children to abandon in the forest?

He urinated on the ground, then found a bush with edible, nutritious leaves. He was too small to reach the best possible food sources—sources the men could have reached but probably could not recognize. Tino had known a great deal, but he did not know much about the forest plants. He ate only obvious things—bananas, figs, nuts, palm fruit—wild versions of things his people grew in Phoenix. If a thing did not look or taste familiar to him, he would not eat it. Akin would eat anything that would not poison him and that would help to keep him alive. He was eating an especially nutritious gray fungus when he heard one of the men coming back for him.

He swallowed quickly, muddied one hand deliberately, and wiped it over his face. If he were simply dirty, the men would pay no attention. But if only his mouth were dirty, they might decide to try to make him throw up.

The man spotted him, cursed him, snatched him up, and carried him under one arm to where the others were building a shelter.

They had found a relatively dry place, well protected by the forest canopy, and they had swept it clean of leaf litter. They had stretched latex-sealed cloth from a pair of small trees to the ground. This cloth had apparently been in the boat, out of Akin’s sight. Now they were cutting small branches and sapling trees for flooring. At least they did not plan to sleep in the mud.

They built no fire. They ate dry food—nuts, seeds, and dry fruit mixed together, and they drank something that was not water. They gave Akin a little of the drink and were amused to see that once he had tasted it, he would not take it again.

“It didn’t seem to bother him, though,” one of them said. “And that stuff is strong. Give him some food. Maybe he can handle it. He’s got teeth, right?”

“Yeah.”

He had been born with teeth. They gave him some of their food, and he ate slowly, one small fragment at a time.

“So that Phoenix we killed was lying,” Akin’s captor said. “I thought he might be.”

“I wonder if it was really his kid.”

“Probably. It looks like him.”

“Jesus. I wonder what he had to do to get it. I mean, he didn’t just fuck a woman.”

“You know what he did. If you didn’t know, you would have died of old age or disease by now.”

Silence.

“So what do you think we can get for the kid?” a new voice asked.

“Whatever we want. A boy, almost perfect? Whatever they’ve got. He’s so valuable I wonder if we shouldn’t keep him.”

“Metal tools, glass, good cloth, a woman or two

And this kid might not even live to grow up. Or he might grow up and grow tentacles all over. So what if he looks good now. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Akin’s captor put in. “Our chances, any man’s chances of seeing that kid grow up are rat shit. The worms are going to find him sooner or later, dead or alive. And the village they find him in is fucked.”

Someone else agreed. “The only way is to get rid of him fast and get out of the area. Let someone else worry about how to hold him and how not to wind up dead or worse.”

Akin went out of the shelter, found a place to relieve himself and another place—a clearing where one of the larger trees had recently fallen—where the rain fell heavily enough for him to wash himself and to catch enough water to satisfy his thirst.

The men did not stop him, but one of them watched him. When he reentered the shelter, wet and glistening, carrying broad, flat wild banana leaves to sleep on, the men all stared at him.

“Whatever it is,” one of them said, “it isn’t as Human as we thought. Who knows what it can do? I’ll be glad to get rid of it.”

“It’s just what we knew it was,” Akin’s captor said. “A mongrel baby. I’ll bet it can do a lot more that we haven’t seen.”

“I’ll bet if we walked off and left it here it would survive and get home,” the man who had killed Tino said. “And I’ll bet if we poisoned it, it wouldn’t die.”

An argument broke out over this as the men passed around their alcoholic drink and listened to the rain, which stopped then began again.

Akin grew more afraid of them, but even his fear could not keep him awake after a while. He had been relieved to know that they would trade him away to some other people—to Phoenix, perhaps. He could find Tino’s parents. Perhaps they would imagine that he looked like Tino, too. Perhaps they would let him live with them. He wanted to be among people who did not grab him painfully by a leg or an arm and carry him as though he had no more feeling than a piece of dead wood. He wanted to be among people who spoke to him and cared for him instead of people who either ignored him or drew away from him as though he were a poisonous insect or laughed at him. These men not only frightened him, they made him agonizingly lonely.

Sometime after dark, Akin awoke to find someone holding him and someone else trying to put something in his mouth.

He knew at once that the men had all had too much of their alcoholic drink. They stank of it. And their speech was thicker, harder to understand.

They had begun a small fire somehow, and in the light of it Akin could see two of them sprawled on the floor, asleep. The other three were busy with him, trying to feed him some beans they had mashed up.

He knew without his tongue touching the mashed beans that they were deadly. They were not to be eaten at all. Mashed as they were, they might incapacitate him before he could get rid of them. Then they would surely kill him.

He struggled and cried out as best he could without opening his mouth. His only hope, he thought, was to awaken the sleeping men and let them see how their trade goods were being destroyed.

But the sleeping men slept on. The men who were trying to feed him the beans only laughed. One of them held his nose and pried his mouth open.

In desperation, Akin vomited over the intruding hand.

The man jumped back cursing. He fell over one of the sleeping men and was thrown off into the fire.

There was a terrifying confusion of shouting and cursing and the shelter stank of vomit and sweat and drink. Men struggled with one another, not knowing what they were doing. Akin escaped outside just before they brought the shelter down.

Frightened, confused, lonely almost to sickness, Akin fled into the forest. Better to try to get home. Better to chance hungry animals and poisonous insects than to stay with these men who might do anything, any irrational thing. Better to be completely alone than lonely among dangerous creatures that he did not understand.

But it was aloneness that really frightened him. The caimans and the anacondas could probably be avoided. Most stinging or biting insects were not deadly.

But to be alone in the forest

He longed for Lilith, for her to hold him and give him her sweet milk.

3

The men realized quickly that he was gone.

Perhaps the pain of the fire and the wild blows, the collapse of the shelter, and the sudden wash of rain brought them to their senses. They scattered to search for him.

Akin was a small, frightened animal, unable to move quickly or coordinate his movements well. He could hear and occasionally see them, but he could not get away from them quickly enough. Nor could he be as quiet as he wished. Fortunately, the rain hid his clumsiness.

He moved inland—deeper into the forest, into the darkness where he could see and the Humans could not. They glowed with body heat that they could not see. Akin glowed with it as well and used it and the heat-light from the vegetables to guide him. For the first time in his life, he was glad Humans did not have this ability.

They found him without it.

He fled as quickly as he could. The rain ceased, and there were only insect and frog noises to conceal his mistakes. Apparently these were not enough. One of the men heard him. He saw the man jerk around to look. He froze, hoping he would not be seen, half-covered as he was by the leaves of several small plants.

“Here he is!” the man shouted. “I’ve found him!”

Akin scrambled away past a large tree, hoping the man would trip in the dangling lianas or run into a buttress. But beyond the tree was another man blundering toward the sound of the shout. He almost certainly did not see Akin. He did not seem even to see the tree. He tripped over Akin, fell against the tree, then twisted around, both arms extended, and swept them before him almost in swimming motions. Akin was not quick enough to escape the groping hands.

He was caught, felt roughly all over, then lifted and carried.

“I’ve got him,” the man yelled. “He’s all right. Just wet and cold.”

Akin was not cold. His normal body temperature was slightly lower than the man’s though, so his skin would always feel cool to Humans.

Akin rested against the man wearily. There was no escape. Not even at night when his ability to see gave him an advantage. He could not run away from grown men who were determined to keep him.

What could he do then? How could he save himself from their unpredictable violence? How could he live at least until they sold him?

He put his head against the man’s shoulder and closed his eyes. Perhaps he could not save himself. Perhaps there was nothing for him to do but wait until they killed him.

The man who was carrying him rubbed his back with a free hand. “Poor kid. Shaking like hell. I hope those fools haven’t made you sick. What do we know about taking care of a sick kid—or for that matter, a well one.”

He was only muttering to himself, but he was at least not blaming Akin for what had happened. And he had not picked Akin up by an arm or a leg. That was a pleasant change. Akin wished he dared ask the man not to stroke him. Being stroked across the back was very much like being rubbed across eyes that could not protect themselves by closing.

Yet the man meant to be kind.

Akin looked at the man curiously. He had the shortest, brightest hair and beard of the group. Both were copper-colored and striking. He had not been the one to hit Tino. He had been asleep when his friends had tried to poison Akin. In the boat, he had been behind Akin, rowing, resting, or bailing. He had paid little attention to Akin beyond momentary curiosity. Now, though, he held Akin comfortably, supporting his body, and letting him hold on instead of clutching him and squeezing out his breath. He had stopped the rubbing now, and Akin was comfortable. He would stay close to this man if the man would let him. Perhaps with this man’s help, he would survive to be sold.

4

Akin slept the rest of the night with the red-haired man. He simply waited until the man adjusted his sleeping mat under the newly built shelter and lay down. Then Akin crawled onto the mat and lay beside him. The man raised his head, frowned at Akin, then said, “Okay, kid, as long as you’re housebroken.”

The next morning while the red-haired man shared his sparse breakfast with Akin, his original captor vomited blood and collapsed.

Frightened, Akin watched him from behind the red-haired man. This should not be happening. It should not be happening! Akin hugged himself, trembling, panting. The man was in pain, bleeding, sick, and all his friends could do was help him lie flat and turn his head to one side so that he did not reswallow the blood.

Why didn’t they find an ooloi? How could they just let their friend bleed? He might bleed too much and die. Akin had heard of Humans doing that. They could not stop themselves from hemorrhaging without help. Akin could do this within his own body, but he did not know how to teach the skill to a Human. Perhaps it could not be taught. And he could not do it for anyone else the way the ooloi could.

One of the men went down to the river and got water. Another sat with the sick man and wiped away the blood—though the man continued to bleed.

“Jesus,” the red-haired man said, “he’s never been that bad before.” He looked down at Akin, frowned, then picked Akin up and walked away toward the river. They met the man who had gone for water coming back with a gourdful.

“Is he all right?” the man asked, stopping so quickly he spilled some of his water.

“He’s still throwing up blood. I thought I’d get the kid away.”

The other man hurried on, spilling more of his water.

The red-haired man sat on a fallen tree and put Akin down beside him.

“Shit!” he muttered to himself. He put one foot on the tree trunk, turning away from Akin.

Akin sat, torn, wanting to speak, yet not daring to, almost sick himself about the bleeding man. It was wrong to allow such suffering, utterly wrong to throw away a life so unfinished, unbalanced, unshared.

The red-haired man picked him up and held him, peering into his face worriedly. “You’re not getting sick, too, are you?” he asked. “Please, God, no.”

“No,” Akin whispered.

The man looked at him sharply. “So you can talk. Tilden said you ought to know a few words. Being what you are, you probably know more than a few, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Akin did not realize until later that the man had not expected an answer. Human beings talked to trees and rivers and boats and insects the way they talked to babies. They talked to be talking, but they believed they were talking to uncomprehending things. It upset and frightened them when something that should have been mute answered

intelligently. All this, Akin realized later. Now he could only think of the man vomiting blood and perhaps dying so incomplete. And the red-haired man had been kind. Perhaps he would listen.

“He’ll die,” Akin whispered, feeling as though he were using shameful profanity.

The red-haired man put him down, stared at him with disbelief.

“An ooloi would stop the bleeding and the pain,” Akin said. “It wouldn’t keep him or make him do anything. It would just heal him.”

The man shook his head, let his mouth sag open. “What the hell are you?” There was no longer kindness or friendliness in his voice. Akin realized he had made a mistake. How to recoup? Silence? No, silence would be seen as stubbornness now, perhaps punished as stubbornness.

“Why should your friend die?” he asked with all the passionate conviction he felt.

“He’s sixty-five,” the man said, drawing away from Akin. “At least he’s been awake for sixty-five years in all. That’s a decent length of time for a Human being.”

“But he’s sick, in pain.”

“It’s just an ulcer. He had one before the war. The worms fixed it, but after a few years it came back.”

“It could be fixed again.”

“I think he’d cut his own throat before he’d let one of those things touch him again. I know I would.”

Akin looked at the man, tried to understand his new expression of revulsion and hatred. Did he feel these things toward Akin as well as toward the Oankali? He was looking at Akin.

“What the hell are you?” he said.

Akin did not know what to say. The man knew what he was.

“How old are you really?”

“Seventeen months.”

“Crap! Jesus, what are the worms doing to us? What kind of mother did you have?”

“I was born to a Human woman.” That was what he really wanted to know. He did not want to hear that Akin had two female parents just as he had two male parents. He knew this, though he probably did not understand it. Tino had been intensely curious about it, had asked Akin questions he was too embarrassed to ask his new mates. This man was curious, too, but it was like the kind of curiosity that made some Humans turn over rotting logs—so they could enjoy being disgusted by what lived there.

“Was that Phoenix your father?”

Akin began to cry in spite of himself. He had thought of Tino many times, but he had not had to speak of him. It hurt to speak of him. “How could you hate him so much and still want me? He was Human like you, and I’m not, but one of you killed him.”

“He was a traitor to his own kind. He chose to be a traitor.”

“He never hurt other Humans. He wasn’t even trying to hurt anyone when you killed him. He was just afraid for me.”

Silence.

“How can what he did be wrong if I’m valuable?”

The man looked at him with deep disgust. “You may not be valuable.”

Akin wiped his face and stared his own dislike back at this man who defended the killing of Tino, who had never harmed him. “I will be valuable to you,” he said. “All I have to do is be quiet. Then you can be rid of me. And I can be rid of you.”

The man got up and walked away.

Akin stayed where he was. The men would not leave him. They would come this way when they went down to the river. He was frightened and miserable and shaking with anger. He had never felt such a mix of intense emotions. And where had his last words come from? They made him think of Lilith when she was angry. Her anger had always frightened him, yet here it was inside him. What he had said was true enough, but he was not Lilith, tall and strong. It might have been better for him not to speak his feelings.

Yet there had been some fear in the red-haired man’s expression before he went away.

“Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand this, you will. You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.” And she had put her hand on his hair. “When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.”

Akin had not understood, but she had said, “It’s all right. Just remember.” And of course, he had remembered every word. It was one of the few times she had encouraged him to express Oankali characteristics. But now

How could he embrace Humans who, in their difference, not only rejected him but made him wish he were strong enough to hurt them?

He climbed down from his log and found fungi and fallen fruit to eat. There were also fallen nuts, but he ignored them because he could not crack them. He could hear the men talking occasionally, though he could not hear what they said. He was afraid to try to run away again. When they caught him this time, they might beat him. If Red-Hair told them how well he could talk and understand, they might want to hurt him.

When he had eaten his fill he watched several ants, each the size of a man’s forefinger. These were not deadly, but adult Humans found their sting agonizing and debilitating. Akin was gathering his courage to taste one, to explore the basic structure of it, when the men arrived, snatched him up, and stumbled and slipped down the path to the river. Three men carried the boat. One man carried Akin. There was no sign of the fifth man.

Akin was placed alone on the fifth seat in the center of the boat. No one spoke to him or paid any particular attention to him as they threw their gear into the boat, pushed the boat into deeper water, and jumped in.

The men rowed without speaking. Tears streamed down the face of one. Tears for a man who seemed to hate everyone, and who had apparently died because he would not ask an ooloi for help.

What had they done with his body? Had they buried it? They had left Akin alone for a long time—long enough, perhaps, even to escape if he had dared. They were getting a very late start in spite of their knowledge that they were being pursued. They had had time to bury a body.

Now they were dangerous. They were like smoldering wood that might either flare into flames or gradually cool and become less deadly. Akin made no sound, hardly moved. He must not trigger a flaring.

5

Dichaan helped Ahajas to a sitting position, then placed himself behind her so that she could rest against him if she wished. She never had before. But she needed him near her, needed contact with him during this one act—the birth of her child. She needed all her mates near her, touching her, needed to be able to link into them and feel the parts of her child that had come from them. She could survive without this contact, but that would not be good for her or for the child. Solitary births produced children with tendencies to become ooloi. It was too soon for construct ooloi. Such a child would have been sent to the ship to grow up among Lo relatives there.

Lilith had accepted this. She had shared all Ahajas’s births as Ahajas had shared all of hers. She knelt now beside Dichaan, slightly behind Ahajas. She waited with false patience for the child to find its way out of Ahajas’s body. First Tino had had to be transported to the ship for healing. He would probably not die. He would heal physically and emotionally during a short period in suspended animation. He might, however, lose some of his memory.

Then, when he was gone and Lilith was ready to join those already looking for Akin, Ahajas’s child decided to be born. That was the way with children, Human or Oankali. When their bodies were ready, they insisted on being born. Eleven months for the Human-born instead of their original nine. Fifteen months for the Oankali-born instead of the original eighteen. Humans were so quick about everything. Quick and potentially deadly. Construct births on both sides had to be more carefully conventional than Human or Oankali births. Missing parents had to be simulated by the ooloi. The world had to be introduced very slowly after the child had gotten to know its parents. Lilith could not simply assist at the birth, then leave. Nikanj had all it could do simulating Joseph and being itself for the child. More would be uncertain—unsafe for the construct child.

Nikanj sat searching with its sensory arms for the place from which the child would eventually emerge. Lilith’s Human way of giving birth was simpler. He child emerged from an existing orifice—the same one each time. Its birth hurt Lilith, but Nikanj always took away her pain. Ahajas had no birth orifice. Her child had to make its own way out of her body.

This did not hurt Ahajas, but it weakened her momentarily, made her want to sit down, made her focus her whole attention on following the child’s progress, helping it if it seemed in distress. It was the duty of her mates to protect her from interference and reassure her that they were with her—all part of her child that was part of her. All interconnected, all united—a network of family into which each child should fall. This should be the best possible time for a family. But with Tino badly injured and Akin abducted, it was a time of confused feelings. The moments of union and anticipation were squeezed between moments of fear for Akin and worry that the Tino they got back might not know them or want them.

Surely the raiders would not hurt Akin. Surely

But they did not belong to any resister village. That much had already been learned. They were nomads—traveling traders when they had trade goods, raiders when they had nothing. Would they try to keep Akin and raise him to be one of them, use his Oankali senses against the Oankali? Others had tried that before them, but they had never tried it with a child so young. They had never tried it with a Human-born male child, since there had been none before Akin. That worried Dichaan most. He was Akin’s only living same-sex parent, and he felt uncertain, apprehensive, and painfully responsible. Where in the vast rain forest was the child? He probably could not escape and return home as so many others had before him. He simply did not have the speed or the strength. He must know that by now, and he must know he had to cooperate with the men, make them value him. If he were still alive, he must know.

The child would emerge from Ahajas’s left side. She lay down on her right side. Dichaan and Lilith moved to maintain contact while Nikanj stroked the area of slowly rippling flesh. In tiny circular waves, the flesh withdrew itself from a central point, which grew slowly to show a darker gray—a temporary orifice within which the child’s head tentacles could be seen moving slowly. These tentacles had released the substance that began the birth process. They were responsible now for the way Ahajas’s flesh rippled aside.

Nikanj exposed one of its sensory hands, reached into the orifice, and lightly touched the child’s head tentacles.

Instantly, the head tentacles grasped the sensory arm—the familiar thing amid so much strangeness. Ahajas, feeling the sudden movement and understanding it, rolled carefully onto her back. The child knew now that it was coming into an accepting, welcoming place. Without that small contact, its body would have prepared it to live in a harsher place—an environment less safe because it contained no ooloi parent. In truly dangerous environments, ooloi were likely to be killed trying to handle hostile new forms of life. That was why children who had no ooloi parents to welcome them at birth tended to become ooloi themselves when they matured. Their bodies assumed the worst. But in order for them to mature in the assumed hostile environment, they had to become unusually hardy and resilient early. This child, though, would not have to undergo such changes. Nikanj was with it. And someday it would probably be female to balance Akin—if Akin returned in time to influence it.

Nikanj caught the child as it slipped easily through its birth orifice. It was gray with a full complement of head tentacles, but only a few small body tentacles. It had a startlingly Human face—eyes, ears, nose, mouth—and it had a functioning sair orifice at its throat surrounded by pale, well-developed tentacles. The tentacles quivered slightly as the child breathed. That meant the small Human nose was probably only cosmetic.

It had a full set of teeth, as many construct newborns did, and unlike Human-born constructs, it would be using them at once. It would be given small portions of what everyone else ate. And once it had shown to Nikanj’s satisfaction that it was not likely to poison itself, it would have the freedom to eat whatever it found edible—to graze, as the Humans said.

Akin might be doing that now to keep himself alive—grazing or browsing on whatever he could find. The resisters might or might not feed him. If they simply let him feed himself in the forest, it would be enough. Humans, though, were always frightened when they saw a young child putting something strange in its mouth. If the raiders were conscientious, normal Humans, they might kill him.

6

The river branched and branched, and the men never seemed in doubt about which branch to take. The journey seemed endless. Five days. Ten days. Twelve days

.

Akin said nothing as they traveled. He had made one mistake. He was afraid to make another. The red-haired man, whose name was Galt, never told anyone about his talking. It was as though the man did not quite believe he had heard Akin speak. He kept away from Akin as much as he could, never spoke to him, hardly spoke of him. The three others swung Akin around by his arms and legs or shoved him with their feet or carried him when necessary.

It took Akin days to realize that the men were not, in their own minds, treating him cruelly. There were no more drunken attempts to poison him, and no one hit him. They did hit each other occasionally. Twice, a pair of them rolled in the mud, punching and clutching at one another. Even when they did not fight, they cursed each other and cursed him.

They did not wash themselves often enough, and sometimes they stank. They talked at night about their dead comrade Tilden and about other men they had traveled with and raided with. Most of these, it seemed, were also dead. So many men, uselessly dead.

When the current grew too strong against them, they hid the boat and began to walk. The land was rising now. It was still rain forest, but it was climbing slowly into the hills. There, they hoped to trade Akin to a rich resister village called Hillmann where the people spoke German and Spanish. Tilden had been the group’s German speaker. His mother, someone said, had been German. The men believed it was necessary to speak German because the majority of the people in the village were German, and they were likely to have the best trade goods. Yet only one other man, Damek, the man who had hit Tino, spoke any German at all. And he spoke only a little. Two people spoke Spanish—Iriarte and Kaliq. Iriarte had lived in a place called Chile before the war. The other, Kaliq, had spent years in Argentina. It was decided that bargaining would be done in Spanish. Many of the Germans spoke their neighbors’ language. The traders would pretend not to know German, and Damek would listen to what he was not supposed to hear. Villagers who thought they could not be understood might talk too much among themselves.

Akin looked forward to seeing and hearing different kinds of Humans. He had heard and learned some Spanish from Tino. He had liked the sound of it when Tino had gotten Nikanj to speak it to him. He had never heard German at all. He wished that someone other than Damek spoke it. He avoided Damek as best he could, remembering Tino. But the thought of meeting an entirely new people was almost enticing enough to ease his grief and his disappointment at not being taken to Phoenix, where he believed he would have been welcomed by Tino’s parents. He would not have pretended to them to be Tino’s son, but if the color of his skin and the shape of his eyes reminded them of Tino, he would not have been sorry. Perhaps the Germans would not want him.

The four resisters and Akin approached Hillmann through fields of bananas, papaya trees, pineapple plants, and corn. The fields looked well kept and fruitful. They looked more impressive to Akin than Lilith’s gardens because they were so much larger and so many more trees had been cut down. There was a great deal of cassava and rows of something that had not yet come up. Hillmann must have lost a great deal of top soil to the rain in all those long, neat rows. How long could they farm this way before the land was ruined and they had to move? How much land had they already ruined?

The village was two neat rows of thatched-roof wooden houses on stilts. Within the village, several large trees had been preserved. Akin liked the way the place looked. There was a calming symmetry to it.

But there were no people in it.

Akin could see no one. Worse, he could hear no one. Humans were noisy even when they tried not to be. These Humans, though, should be talking and working and going about their lives. Instead, there was absolutely no sound of them. They were not hiding. They were simply gone.

Akin stared at the village from the arms of Iriarte and wondered how long it would take the men to realize that something was wrong.

Iriarte seemed to notice first. He stopped, stood staring straight ahead. He glanced at Akin whose face was so close to his own, saw that Akin had turned in his arms and was also staring with his eyes.

“What is it?” he asked as though expecting Akin to answer. Akin almost did—almost forgot himself and spoke aloud. “Something is crazy here,” Iriarte said to the others.

Immediately Kaliq took the opposite position. “It’s a nice place. Still looks rich. There’s nothing wrong.”

“No one is here,” Iriarte said.

“Why? Because they don’t rush out to meet us? They’re around somewhere, watching.”

“No. Even the kid noticed something.”

“Yes,” Galt agreed. “He did. I was watching him. His kind are supposed to see and hear better than we are.” He gave Akin a look of suspicion. “What we walk into, you walk into with us, kid.”

“For godsake,” Damek said, “he’s a baby. He doesn’t know anything. Let’s go.”

He had gone out several steps ahead before the others began to follow. He drew even farther ahead, showing his scorn for their caution, but he drew neither bullets nor arrows. There was no one to shoot him. Akin rested his chin on Iriarte’s shoulder and savored the strange pale scents—all pale now. Humans had been gone from this place for several days. There was food spoiling in some of the houses. The scent of that grew stronger as they neared the village. Many men, a few women, spoiling food, and agoutis—the small rodents that some resisters ate.

And Oankali.

Many Oankali had been here several days ago. Did it have anything to do with Akin’s abduction? No. How could it? The Oankali would not empty a village on his account. If someone in the village had harmed him, they would certainly find that person, but they would not bother anyone else. And this emptying may have occurred before he was abducted.

“There’s nobody here,” Damek said. He had stopped, finally, in the middle of the village, surrounded by empty houses.

“I told you that a long time ago,” Iriarte muttered. “I think it’s okay for us, though. The kid was nervous before, but he’s relaxed now.”

“Put him down,” Galt said. “Let’s see what he does.”

“If he’s not nervous, maybe we ought to be.” Kaliq looked around warily, peered through the open doorway of a house. “Oankali did this. They must have.”

“Put the kid down,” Galt repeated. He had ignored Akin for most of Akin’s captivity, but seemed to forget or deny Akin’s precocity. Now he seemed to want something.

Iriarte put Akin down, though Akin would have been content to stay in the man’s arms. But Galt seemed to expect something. Best to give him something and keep him quiet. Akin turned slowly, drawing breaths over his tongue. Something unusual but not likely to stimulate fear or anger.

Blood in one direction. Old human blood, dry on dead wood. No. It would do no good to show them that.

An agouti nearby. Most of these had gone—apparently either carried away by the villagers or released into the forest. This one was still in the village, eating the seedpods that had fallen from one of the few remaining trees. Best not to make the men notice it. They might shoot it. They craved meat. Within the last few days, they had caught, cooked, and eaten several fish, but they talked a great deal about real meat—steaks and chops and roasts and burgers

A faint smell of the kind of vegetable dye Humans at Lo used to write with. Writing. Books. Perhaps the people of Hillmann had left some record of the reason for their leaving.

Without speaking, the men followed Akin to the house that smelled strongest of the dye, the ink, Lilith called it. She used it so often that the smell of it made Akin see her in his mind and almost cry with wanting her.

“Just like a bloodhound,” Damek said. “He doesn’t waste a step.”

“He eats mushrooms and flowers and leaves,” Kaliq said inconsequentially. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t poisoned himself.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? What’s he found?” Iriarte picked up a large book that Akin had been trying to reach. The paper, Akin could see, was heavy and smooth. The cover was of polished, dark-stained wood.

“Shit,” Iriarte muttered. “It’s in German.” He passed the book to Damek.

Damek rested the book on the little table and turned pages slowly. “Ananas

bohnen

bananen

mangos

. This is just stuff about crops. I can’t read most of it, but it’s

records. Crop yields, farming methods

” He turned several more pages to the end of the book. “Here’s some Spanish, I think.”

Iriarte came back to look. “Yeah. It says

shit. Ah, shit!”

Kaliq pushed forward to look. “I don’t believe this,” he said after a moment. “Someone was forced to write this!”

“Damek,” Iriarte said, gesturing. “Look at this German shit up here. The Spanish says they gave it up. The Oankali invited them again to join the trade villages, and they voted to do it. To have Oankali mates and kids. They say, ‘Part of what we are will continue. Part of what we are will go to the stars someday. That seems better than sitting here, rotting alive or dying and leaving nothing. How can it be a sin for the people to continue?’” Iriarte looked at Damek. “Does it say anything like that in German?”

Damek studied the book for so long that Akin sat down on the floor to wait. Finally Damek faced the others, frowning. “It says just about that,” he told them. “But there are two writers. One says ‘We’re joining the Oankali. Our blood will continue.’ But the other one says the Oankali should be killed—that to join with them is against God. I’m not sure, but I think one group went to join the Oankali and another went to kill the Oankali. God knows what happened.”

“They just walked away,” Galt said. “Left their homes, their crops

” He began looking through the house to see what else had been left. Trade goods.

The other men scattered through the village to carry on their own searches. Akin looked around to be certain he was unobserved, then went out to watch the agouti. He had not seen one close up before. Lilith claimed they looked like a cross between deer and rats. Nikanj said they were larger now than they had been before the war, and they were more inclined now to seek out insects. They had lived mainly on fruits and seeds before, though even then they took insects as well. This agouti was clearly more interested in the insect larvae that infested the seedpods than in the pods themselves. Its forelegs ended in tiny hands, and it sat back on its haunches and used the hands to pluck out the white larvae. Akin watched it, fascinated. It looked at him, tensed for a moment, then selected another seedpod. Akin was smaller than it was. Apparently it did not see him as a threat. He stooped near it and watched it. He inched closer, wanting to touch it, see how the furred body felt.

To his amazement, the animal let him touch it, let him stroke the short fur. He was surprised to find that the fur did not feel like hair. It was smooth and slightly stiff in one direction and rough in the other. The animal moved away when he rubbed its fur against the grain. It sniffed his hand and stared at him for a moment. It clutched a large, half-eaten larva in its hands.

An instant later the agouti flew sideways in a roar of Human-made thunder. It landed on its side some distance from Akin, and it made small, useless running motions with its feet. It could not get up.

Akin saw at once that it was Galt who had shot the animal. The man looked at Akin and smiled. Akin understood then that the man had shot the inoffensive animal not because he was hungry for its meat, but because he wanted to hurt and frighten Akin.

Akin went to the agouti, saw that it was still alive, still struggling to run. Its hind feet did not work, but its forefeet made small running steps through the air. There was a gaping hole in its side.

Akin bent to its neck and tasted it, then, for the first time, deliberately injected his poison. A few seconds later, the agouti stopped struggling and died.

Galt stepped up and nudged the animal with his foot.

“It was beginning to feel terrible pain,” Akin said. “I helped it die.” He swayed slightly, even though he was seated on the ground. He had tasted the agouti’s life and its pain, but all he could give it was death. If he had not gone near it, Galt might never have noticed it. It might have lived.

He hugged himself, trembling, feeling sick.

Galt nudged him with a foot, and he fell over. He picked himself up and stared at the man, wanting desperately to be away from him.

“How come you only talk to me?” Galt asked.

“First because I wanted to help Tilden,” Akin whispered quickly. The others were coming. “Now because I have to

have to help you. You shouldn’t eat the agouti. The poison I gave it would kill you.”

Akin managed to dodge the vicious kick Galt aimed at his head. Iriarte picked Akin up and held him protectively.

“You fool, you’ll kill him!” Iriarte shouted.

“Good riddance,” Galt yelled back. “Shit, there’s plenty of trade goods here. We don’t need that mongrel bastard!”

Kaliq had come up to stand beside Iriarte. “What have you found here that we could trade for a woman?” he demanded.

Silence.

“That boy is to us what gold used to be,” Kaliq spoke softly now.

“In fact,” Iriarte said, “he’s more valuable to us than you are.”

“He can talk!” Galt shouted.

Kaliq took a step closer to him. “Man, I don’t care if he can fly! There are people who’ll pay anything for him. He looks okay, that’s what’s important.”

Iriarte looked at Akin. “Well, he always knew he could understand us better than any normal kid his age. What did he say?”

Galt drew his mouth into a thin smile. “After I shot the agouti, he bit it on the neck, and it died. He told me not to eat it because he had poisoned it.”

“Yeah?” Iriarte held Akin away from him and stared. “Say something, kid.”

Akin was afraid the man would drop him if he spoke. He was also afraid he would lose Iriarte as a protector—as he had lost Galt. He tried to look as frightened as he felt, but he said nothing.

“Give him to me,” Galt said. “I’ll make him talk.”

“He’ll talk when he gets ready,” Iriarte said. “Hell, I had seven kids before the war. They’d talk all the time until you wanted them to.”

“Listen, I’m not talking about baby talk!”

“I know. I believe you. Why does it bother you so?”

“He can talk as well as you can!”

“So? It’s better than being covered with tentacles or gray skin. It’s better than being without eyes or ears or a nose. Kaliq is right. It’s looks that are important. But you know as well as I do that he isn’t Human, and it’s got to come out somehow.”

“He claims to be poison,” Galt said.

“He may be. The Oankali are.”

“So you go on holding him next to your neck. You do that.”

To Akin’s surprise, Iriarte did just that. Later, when he was alone with Akin, he said, “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.” He ran a hand across Akin’s hair. “I think I’d rather you didn’t, really. You look so much like one of my kids, it hurts.”

Akin accepted this silently.

“Don’t kill anything else,” he said. “Even if it’s suffering, let it alone. Don’t scare these guys. They get crazy.”

7

At Siwatu village, the people looked much like Lilith. They spoke English, Swahili, and a scattering of other languages. They examined Akin and wished very much to buy him, but they would not send one of the village women away with foreign men. The women took Akin and fed him and bathed him as though he could do nothing for himself. Several of them believed that their breasts could be made to produce milk if they kept Akin with them.

The men were so fascinated with him that his captors became frightened. They took him and stole out of the village one moonless night. Akin did not want to go. He liked being with the women who knew how to lift him without hurting him and who gave him interesting food. He liked the way they smelled and the softness of their bosoms and their voices, high and empty of threat.

But Iriarte carried him away, and he believed that if he cried out, the man might be killed. Certainly some people would be killed. Perhaps it would only be Galt who kicked at him whenever he was nearby and Damek who had clubbed Tino down. But more likely, it would be all four of his abductors and several village men. He might die himself. He had seen that men could go mad when they were fighting. They could do things that afterward amazed and shamed them.

Akin let himself be carried to the raiders’ canoes. They had two now—the one they had begun with and a light, new one found in Hillmann. Akin was put into the new one between two balanced mounds of trade goods. Behind one mound Iriarte rowed. In front of the other, Kaliq rowed. Akin was glad, at least, not to have to worry about Galt’s feet or his oar. And he continued to avoid Damek when he could, though the man showed him friendliness. Damek acted as though Akin had not seen him club Tino down.

8

There were Oankali in Vladlengrad. Galt saw them through the rain at yet another branching of the river. They were far away, and Akin himself did not see them at first—gray beings, slipping from gray water into the shadow of the trees on the bank, and all this through heavy rain.

The man ignored their weariness to row hard into the left fork of the river, leaving the right fork to Vladlengrad and the Oankali.

The men rowed until they were completely exhausted. Finally, reluctantly, they dragged themselves and their boats onto a low bank. They concealed their boats, ate smoked fish and dried fruit from Siwatu, and drank a mild wine. Kaliq held Akin and gave him some of the wine. Akin discovered that he liked it, but he drank only a little. His body did not like the disorientation it caused and would have expelled a larger amount. When he had eaten the food Kaliq had given him, he went out to graze. While he was out, he gathered several large nuts in a wide leaf and took them back to Kaliq.

“I’ve seen these,” Kaliq said, examining one. “I think they’re one of the new postwar species. I wondered whether they were good to eat.”

“I wouldn’t eat them,” Galt said. “Anything that wasn’t here before the war. I don’t need.”

Kaliq took two of the nuts in one hand and squeezed. Akin could hear the shells cracking. When he opened his hand, several small round nuts rolled around amid the shell fragments. Kaliq offered them to Akin, and Akin took most of them gratefully. He ate them with such obvious enjoyment that Kaliq laughed and ate one of them himself. He chewed slowly, tentatively.

“It tastes like

I don’t know.” He ate the rest. “It’s very good. Better than anything I’ve had for a long time.” He settled to breaking and eating the rest while Akin brought another leafful to Iriarte. There were not many good nuts on the ground. Most were insect-infested. He checked each one with his tongue to make sure they were all right. When Damek went out and gathered nuts of his own, almost every one was infested with insect larvae. This made him stare at Akin with suspicion and doubt. Akin watched him without facing him, watched him without eyes until he shrugged and threw the last of his nuts away in disgust. He looked at Akin once more and spat on the ground.

9

Phoenix.

The four resisters had been avoiding it, they said, because they knew it was Tino’s home village. The Oankali would check it first, perhaps stay there the longest. But Phoenix was also the richest resister village they knew of. It sent people into the hills to salvage metal from prewar sites and had people who knew how to shape the metal. It had more women than any other village because it traded metal for them. It grew cotton and made soft, comfortable clothing. It raised and tapped not only rubber trees, but trees that produced a form of oil that could be burned in their lamps without refinement. And it had fine, large houses, a church, a store, vast farms

It was, the raiders said, more like a prewar town—and less like a group of people who have given up, whose only hope was to kill a few Oankali before they died.

“I almost settled there once,” Damek said when they had hidden the canoes and begun their single-file walk toward the hills and Phoenix. Phoenix was many days south of Hillmann on a different branch of the river, but it, too, was located closer to the mountains than most trader and resister villages. “I swear,” Damek continued, “they’ve got everything there but kids.”

Iriarte, who was carrying Akin, sighed quietly. “They’ll buy you, niŃo,” he said. “And if you don’t frighten them, they’ll treat you well.”

Akin moved in the man’s arms to show that he was listening. Iriarte had developed a habit of talking to him. He seemed to accept movement as sufficient response.

“Talk to them,” Iriarte whispered. “I’m going to tell them you can talk and understand like a much older kid, and you do it. It’s no good pretending to be something you aren’t and then scaring them with what you really are. You understand?”

Akin moved again.

“Tell me, niŃo. Speak to me. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

“I understand,” Akin whispered into his ear.

He held Akin away from him for a moment and stared at him. Finally he smiled, but it was a strange smile. He shook his head and held Akin against him again. “You still look like one of my kids,” he said. “I don’t want to give you up.”

Akin tasted him. He made the gesture very quick, deliberately placing his mouth against the man’s neck in the way that Humans called kissing. Iriarte would feel a kiss and nothing more. That was good. He thought a Human who felt as he did might have expressed the feeling with a kiss. His own need was to understand Iriarte better and keep that understanding. He wished he dared to study the man in the leisurely, thorough way he had studied Tino. What he had now was an impression of Iriarte. He could have given an ooloi the few cells he had taken from Iriarte, and the ooloi could have used the information to build a new Iriarte. But it was one thing to know what the man was made of and another to know how the parts worked together—how each bit was expressed in function, behavior, and appearance.

“You’d better watch that kid,” Galt called from several steps behind. “A kiss from him could be the same as a kiss from a bushmaster.”

“That man had three children before the war,” Iriarte whispered. “He liked you. You shouldn’t have frightened him.”

Akin knew this. He sighed. How could he avoid scaring people? He had never seen a Human baby. How could he behave as one? Would it be easier to avoid scaring villagers who knew he could talk? It should be. After all, Tino had not been afraid. Curious, suspicious, startled when an un-Human-looking child touched him, but not frightened. Not dangerous.

And the people of Phoenix were his people.

Phoenix was larger and more beautiful than Hillmann. The houses were large and colored white or blue or gray. They had the glass windows Tino had boasted of—windows that glittered with reflected light. There were broad fields and storage buildings and an ornate structure that must have been the church. Tino had described it to Akin and tried to make Akin understand what it was for. Akin still did not understand, but he could repeat Tino’s explanation if he had to. He could even say his prayers. Tino had taught him, thinking it scandalous that he had not known them before.

Human men worked in the fields, planting something. Human men came out of their houses to look at the visitors. There was a faint scent of Oankali in the village. It was many days old—searchers who had come and searched and waited and finally left. None of the searchers had been members of his family.

Where were his parents looking?

And in this village, where were the Human women?

Inside. He could smell them in their houses—could smell their excitement.

“Don’t say a word until I tell you to,” Iriarte whispered.

Akin moved to show that he had heard, then twisted in Iriarte’s arms to face the large, well-built, low-stilted house they were walking toward and the tall, lean man who awaited them in the shade of its roof in what seemed to be a partially enclosed room. The walls were only as high as the man’s waist, and the roof was held up by regularly spaced, rounded posts. The half-room reminded Akin of a drawing he had seen by a Human Lo woman, Cora: great buildings whose overhanging roofs were supported by huge, ornately decorated, round posts.

“So that’s the kid,” the tall man said. He smiled. He had a short, well-tended black beard and short hair, very black. He wore a white shirt and short pants, displaying startlingly hairy arms and legs.

A small blond woman came from the house to stand beside him. “My god,” she said, “that’s a beautiful child. Isn’t there anything wrong with him?”

Iriarte walked up several steps and put Akin into the woman’s arms. “He is beautiful,” Iriarte told her quietly. “But he has a tongue you’ll have to get used to—in more than one way. And he is very, very intelligent.”

“And he is for sale,” the tall man said, his eyes on Iriarte. “Come in, gentlemen. My name is Gabriel Rinaldi. This is my wife Tate.”

The house was cool and dark and sweet-smelling inside. It smelled of herbs and flowers. The blond woman took Akin into another room with her and gave him a chunk of pineapple to eat while she poured some drinks for the guests.

“I hope you won’t wet the floor,” she said, glancing at him.

“I won’t,” he said impulsively. Something made him want to talk to this woman. He had wanted to speak to the women of Siwatu, but he had been afraid. He was never alone with one of them. He had feared their group reaction to his un-Human aspect.

The woman looked at him, eyes momentarily wide. Then she smiled with only the left side of her mouth. “So that’s what the raider meant about that tongue of yours.” She lifted him and put him on a counter so that she could talk to him without bending or stooping. “What’s your name?”

“Akin.” No one else had asked his name during his captivity. Not even Iriarte.

“Ah-keen,” she pronounced. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen months.” Akin thought for a moment. “No, eighteen now.”

“Very, very intelligent,” Tate said, echoing Iriarte. “Shall we buy you, Akin?”

“Yes, but

”

“But?”

“They want a woman.”

Tate laughed. “Of course they do. We might even find them one. Men aren’t the only ones who get itchy feet. But, Jesus, four men! She’d better have another itchy part or two.”

“What?”

“Nothing, little one. Why do you want us to buy you?”

Akin hesitated, said finally, “Iriarte likes me and so does Kaliq. But Galt hates me because I look more Human than I am. And Damek killed Tino.” He looked at her blond hair, knowing she was no relative of Tino’s. But perhaps she had known him, liked him. It would be hard to know him and not like him. “Tino used to live here,” he said. “His whole name is Augustino Leal. Did you know him?”

“Oh, yes.” She had become very still, totally focused on Akin. If she had been Oankali, all her head tentacles would have been elongated toward him in a cone of living flesh. “His parents are here,” she said. “He

couldn’t have been your father. You look like him, though.”

“My Human father is dead. Tino took his place. Damek called him a traitor and killed him.”

She closed her eyes, turned her face away from Akin. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

“He was alive when they took me away, but the bones of his head had been broken with the wooden part of Damek’s gun. There was no one around to help him. He must have died.”

She took Akin down from the counter and hugged him. “Did you like him, Akin?”

“Yes.”

“We loved him here. He was the son most of us never had. I knew he was going, though. What was there for him in a place like this? I gave him a packet of food to take with him and aimed him toward Lo. Did he reach it?”

“Yes.”

She smiled again with only half her mouth. “So you’re from Lo. Who’s your mother?”

“Lilith Iyapo.” Akin did not think she would have liked hearing Lilith’s long Oankali name.

“Son of a bitch!” Tate whispered. “Listen, Akin, don’t say that name to anyone else. It may not matter anymore, but don’t say it.”

“Why?”

“Because there are people here who don’t like your mother. There are people here who might hurt you because they can’t get at her. Do you understand?”

Akin looked into her sun-browned face. She had very blue eyes—not like Wray Ordway’s pale eyes, but a deep, intense color. “I don’t understand,” he said, “but I believe you.”

“Good. If you do that, we’ll buy you. I’ll see to it.”

“At Siwatu, the raiders took me away because they were afraid the men were going to try to steal me.”

“Don’t you worry. Once I drop this tray and you in the living room, I’ll see to it that they don’t go anywhere until our business with them is done.”

She carried the tray of drinks and let Akin walk back to her husband and the resisters. Then she left them.

Akin climbed onto Iriarte’s lap, knowing he was about to lose the man, missing him already.

“We’ll have to have our doctor look at him,” Gabriel Rinaldi was saying. He paused. “Let me see your tongue, kid.”

Obligingly, Akin opened his mouth. He did not stick his tongue out to its full extent, but he did nothing to conceal it.

The man got up and looked for a moment, then shook his head. “Ugly. And he’s probably venomous. The constructs usually are.”

“I saw him bite an agouti and kill it,” Galt put in.

“But he’s never made any effort to bite any of us,” Iriarte said with obvious irritation. “He’s done what he’s been told to do. He’s taken care of his own toilet needs. And he knows better than we do what’s edible and what isn’t. Don’t worry about his picking up things and eating them. He’s been doing that since we took him—seeds, nuts, flowers, leaves, fungi

and he’s never been sick. He won’t eat fish or meat. I wouldn’t force him to if I were you. The Oankali don’t eat it. Maybe it would make him sick.”

“What I want to know,” Rinaldi said, “is just how un-Human he is

mentally. Come here, kid.”

Akin did not want to go. Showing his tongue was one thing. Deliberately putting himself in hands that might be unfriendly was another. He looked up at Iriarte, hoping the man would not let him go. Instead Iriarte put him down and gave him a shove toward Rinaldi. Reluctantly, he edged toward the man.

Rinaldi got up impatiently and lifted Akin into his arms. He sat down, turned Akin about on his lap looking at him, then held Akin facing him. “Okay, they say you can talk. So talk.”

Again Akin turned to look at Iriarte. He did not want to begin talking in a room full of men when talking had already made one of those men hate him.

Iriarte nodded. “Talk, niŃo. Do as he says.”

“Tell us your name,” Rinaldi said.

Akin caught himself smiling. Twice now, he had been asked his name. These people seemed to care who he was, not just what he was. “Akin,” he said softly.

“Ah-keen?” Rinaldi frowned down at him. “Is that a Human name?”

“Yes.”

“What language?”

“Yoruba.”

“Yor—

what? What country?”

“Nigeria.”

“Why should you have a Nigerian name? Is one of your parents Nigerian?”

“It means hero. If you put an s on it, it means brave boy. I’m the first boy born to a Human woman on Earth since the war.”

“That’s what the worms hunting for you said,” Rinaldi agreed. He was frowning again. “Can you read?”

“Yes.”

“How can you have had time to learn to read?”

Akin hesitated. “I don’t forget things,” he said softly.

The raiders looked startled. “Ever?” Damek demanded. “Anything?”

Rinaldi only nodded. “That’s the way the Oankali are,” he said. “They can bring out the ability in Humans when they want to—and when the Humans agree to be useful to them. I thought that was the boy’s secret.”

Akin, who had considering lying, was glad he had not. He had always found it easy to tell the truth and difficult to make himself lie. He could lie very convincingly, though, if lying would keep him alive and spare him pain among these men. It was easier, though, to divert questions—as he had diverted the question about his parents.

“Do you want to stay here, Akin?” Rinaldi asked.

“If you buy me, I’ll stay,” Akin said.

“Shall we buy you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Akin glanced at Iriarte. “They want to sell me. If I have to be sold, I’d like to stay here.”

“Why?”

“You aren’t afraid of me, and you don’t hate me. I don’t hate you, either.”

Rinaldi laughed. Akin was pleased. He had hoped to make the man laugh. He had learned back in Lo that if he made Humans laugh, they were more comfortable with him—though, of course, in Lo, he had never been exposed to people who might injure him simply because he was not Human.

Rinaldi asked his age, the number of languages he spoke, and the purpose of his long, gray tongue. Akin withheld information only about the tongue.

“I smell and taste with it,” he said. “I can smell with my nose, too, but my tongue tells me more.” All true, but Akin had decided not to tell anyone what else his tongue could do. The idea of his tasting their cells, their genes, might disturb them too much.

A woman called a doctor came in, took Akin from Rinaldi, and began to examine, poke, and probe his body. She did not talk to him, though Rinaldi had told her he could talk.

“He’s got some oddly textured spots on his back, arms, and abdomen,” she said. “I suspect they’re where he’ll grow tentacles in a few years.”

“Are they?” Rinaldi asked him.

“I don’t know,” Akin said. “People never know what they’ll be like after metamorphosis.”

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 said. 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.”