Adulthood Rites

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

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

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No

what?”

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

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

“In my house they do.”

“Did you tell Mateo who killed Tino?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

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

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

11

Both Damek and Mateo lived.

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

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

And it had been Tate’s idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is the time for bonding,” Akin said, wondering how he could explain such a personal thing to a Human who deliberately avoided all contact with the Oankali. “Bonding happens shortly after birth and shortly after metamorphosis. At other times

bonds are only shadows of what they could be. Sometimes people manage to make them, but usually they don’t. Late bonds are never what they should be. I’ll never know my sister the way I should.”

“Sister?”

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

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

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

“Ahajas let me touch it, let me be one of its presences. She let me recognize it and know it as a sibling still forming. It would be the sibling closest to me—closest to my age. It should be the sibling I grow up with, bond with. We

we won’t be right

” He thought for a moment. “We won’t be complete without each other.” He looked up at her hopefully.

“I remember Ahajas,” she said softly. “She was so big

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

“Kahguyaht ooan Nikanj?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

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

“How would you do that?” she asked.

“Pick me up.”

She stooped and lifted him into her arms.

“Would you sit down and let me do it without making you tired?” he asked. “I know I’m heavy to you.”

“Not that heavy.”

“It won’t hurt or anything,” he said. “People only feel it when the ooloi do it. Then they like it.”

“Yeah. Go ahead and do it.”

He was surprised that she was not afraid of being poisoned. She leaned against a tree and held him while he tasted her neck, studied her.

“Regular little vampire,” he heard her say before he was lost in the taste of her. There were echoes of Kahguyaht in her. Nikanj had shared its memory of its own ooloi parent, had let Akin study that memory so thoroughly that Akin felt he knew Kahguyaht.

Tate herself was fascinating—very unlike Lilith, unlike Joseph. She was somewhat like Leah and Wray, but not truly like anyone he had tasted. There was something truly strange about her, something wrong.

“You’re pretty good,” she said when he drew back and looked into her face. “You found it, didn’t you?”

“I found

something. I don’t know what it is.”

“A nasty little disease that should have killed me years ago. Something I apparently inherited from my mother. Though at the time of the war, we were only beginning to suspect that she had inherited it. Huntington’s disease, it was called. I don’t know what the Oankali did for me, but I never had any symptoms of it.”

“How do you know that’s what it is?”

“Kahguyaht told me.”

That was good enough.

“It was a

wrong gene,” he said. “It drew me and I had to look at it. Kahguyaht didn’t want it ever to start to work. I don’t think it will—but you should be near Kahguyaht so that it could keep watch. It should have replaced that gene.”

“It said it would if we stayed with it. It said it would have to watch me for a while if it did any real tampering. I

couldn’t stay with it.”

“You wanted to.”

“Did I?” She shifted him in her arms, then put him down.

“You still do.”

“Have you had all you wanted to eat out here?”

“Yes.”

“You follow me, then. I’ve got this fruit to carry.” She stooped and lifted the large basket of fruit to her head. When she was satisfied with its placement, she stood up and turned back toward the village.

“Tate?” he called.

“What?” She did not look at him.

“It went back to the ship, you know. It’s still Dinso. It will have to come to Earth sometime. But it did not want to live here with any of the Humans it could have. I never knew why before.”

“Nobody ever mentioned us?”

Us, Akin thought. Tate and Gabe. They had both known Kahguyaht. And Gabe was probably the reason Tate had not gone to Kahguyaht. “Kahguyaht would come back if Nikanj called it,” he said.

“You really didn’t know about us?” she insisted.

“No. But the walls in Lo aren’t like the walls here. You can’t hear through Lo walls. People seal themselves in and no one knows what they’re saying.”

She stopped, put one hand up to balance the basket, then stared down at him. “Good god!” she said.

It occurred to him then that he should not have let her know he could hear through Phoenix walls.

“What is Lo!” she demanded. “Is it just a village, or

”

Akin did not know what to say, did not know what she wanted.

“Do the walls really seal?” she asked.

“Yes, except at the guest house. You’ve never been there?”

“Never. Traders and raiders have told us about it, but never that it was

What is it, for godsake! A baby ship?”

Akin frowned. “It could be someday. There are so many on Earth, though. Maybe Lo will be one of the males inside one of those that become ships.”

“But

but someday it will leave Earth?”

Akin knew the answer to this question, but he realized he must not give it. Yet he liked her and found it difficult to lie to her. He said nothing.

“I thought so,” she said. “So someday the people of Lo—or their descendants—will be in space again, looking for some other people to infect or afflict or whatever you call it.”

“Trade.”

“Oh, yeah. The goddamn gene trade! And you want to know why I can’t go back to Kahguyaht.”

She walked away, leaving him to make his own way back to the village. He made no effort to keep up with her, knowing he could not. The little she had guessed had upset her enough to make her not care that he, valuable being that he was, was left alone in the groves and gardens where he might be stolen. How would she have reacted if he had told her all he knew—that it was not only the descendants of Humans and Oankali who would eventually travel through space in newly mature ships. It was also much of the substance of Earth. And what was left behind would be less than the corpse of a world. It would be small, cold, and as lifeless as the moon. Maturing Chkahichdahk left nothing useful behind. They had to be worlds in themselves for as long as it took the constructs in each one to mature as a species and find another partner species to trade with.

The salvaged Earth would finally die. Yet in another way, it would live on as single-celled animals lived on after dividing. Would that comfort Tate? Akin was afraid to find out.

He was tired, but he had nearly reached the houses when Tate returned for him. She had already put away her basket of fruit. Now she picked him up without a word and carried him back to her home. He fell asleep in her arms before they reached it.

12

No one came for him.

No one would take him home or let him go.

He felt both unwanted and wanted too much. If his parents could not come because of his sibling’s birth, then others should have come. His parents had done this kind of service for other families, other villages who had had their children stolen. People helped each other in searching for and recovering children.

And yet, his presence seemed to delight the people of Phoenix. Even those who were disturbed by the contrast between his tiny body and his apparent maturity grew to like having him around. Some always had a bit of food ready for him. Some asked question after question about his life before he was brought to them. Others liked to hold him or let him sit at their feet and tell him stories of their own prewar lives. He liked this best. He learned not to interrupt them with questions. He could learn afterward what kangaroos, lasers, tigers, acid rain, and Botswana were. And since he remembered every word of their stories, he could easily think back and insert explanations where they should go.

He liked it less when people told him stories that were clearly not true—stories peopled by beings called witches or elves or gods. Mythology, they said; fairy tales.

He told them stories from Oankali history—past partnerships that contributed to what the Oankali were or could become today. He had heard such stories from all three of his Oankali parents. All were absolutely true, yet the Humans believed almost none of them. They liked them anyway. They would gather around close so that they could hear him. Sometimes they let their work go and came to listen. Akin liked the attention, so he accepted their fairy tales and their disbelief in his stories. He also accepted the pairs of short pants that Pilar Leal made for him. He did not like them. They cut off some of his perception, and they were harder than skin to clean once they were soiled. Yet it never occurred to him to ask anyone else to wash them for him. When Tate saw him washing them, she gave him soap and showed him how to use it on them. Then she smiled almost gleefully and went away.

People let him watch them make shoes and clothing and paper. Tate persuaded Gabe to take him up to the mills—one where grain was ground and one where wooden furniture, tools, and other things were being made. The man and woman there were making a large canoe when Akin arrived.

“We could build a textile mill,” Gabe told him. “But foot-powered spinning wheels, sewing machines, and looms are enough. We already make more than we need, and people need to do some things at their own pace with their own designs.”

Akin thought about this and decided he understood it. He had often watched people spinning, weaving, sewing, making things they did not need in the hope of being able to trade with villages that had little or no machinery. But there was no urgency. They could stop in the middle of what they were doing and come to listen to his stories. Much of their work was done simply to keep them busy.

“What about metal?” he asked.

Gabe stared down at him. “You want to see the blacksmith’s shop?”

“Yes.”

Gabe picked him up and strode off with him. “I wonder how much you really understand,” he muttered.

“I usually understand,” Akin admitted. “What I don’t understand, I remember. Eventually I understand.”

“Jesus! I wonder what you’ll be like when you grow up.”

“Not as big as you,” Akin said wistfully.

“Really? You know that?”

Akin nodded. “Strong, but not very big.”

“Smart, though.”

“It would be terrible to be small and foolish.”

Gabe laughed. “It happens,” he said. “But probably not to you.”

Akin looked at him and smiled himself. He was still pleased when he could make Gabe laugh. It seemed that the man was beginning to accept him. It was Tate who had suggested that Gabe take him up the hill and show him the mills. She pushed them together when she could, and Akin understood that she wanted them to like each other.

But if they did what would happen when his people finally came for him? Would Gabe fight? Would he kill? Would he die?

Akin watched the blacksmith make a machete blade, heating, pounding, shaping the metal. There was a wooden crate of machete blades in one corner. There were also scythes, sickles, axes, hammers, saws, nails, hooks, chains, coiled wire, picks

And yet there was no clutter. Everything, work tools and products, had their places.

“I work here sometimes,” Gabe said. “And I’ve helped salvage a lot of our raw materials.” He glanced at Akin. “You might get to see the salvage site.”

“In the mountains?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“When things start to get warm around here.”

It took Akin several seconds to realize that he was not talking about the weather. He would be hidden at the salvage site when his people came looking for him.

“We’ve found artifacts of glass, plastic, ceramic, and metal. We’ve found a lot of money. You know what money is?”

“Yes. I’ve never seen any, but people have told me about it.”

Gabe reached into his pocket with his free hand. He brought out a bright, golden disk of metal and let Akin hold it. It was surprisingly heavy for its size. On one side was something that looked like a large letter t and the words, “He is risen. We shall rise.” On the other side there was a picture of a bird flying up from fire. Akin studied the bird, noticing that it was a kind he had never seen pictured before.

“Phoenix money,” Gabe said. “That’s a phoenix rising from its own ashes. A phoenix was a mythical bird. You understand?”

“A lie,” Akin said thoughtlessly.

Gabe took the disk from him, put it back into his pocket and put Akin down.

“Wait!” Akin said. “I’m sorry. I call myths that in my mind. I didn’t mean to say it out loud.”

Gabe looked down at him. “If you’re always going to be small, you ought to learn to be careful with that word,” he said.

“But

I didn’t say you were lying.”

“No. You said my dream, the dream of everyone here, was a lie. You don’t even know what you said.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gabe stared at him, sighed, and picked him up again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I ought to be relieved.”

“At what?”

“That in some ways you really are just a kid.”

13

Weeks later, traders arrived bringing two more stolen children. Both appeared to be young girls. The traders took away not a woman but as many metal tools and as much gold as they could carry, plus books that were more valuable than gold. Two couples in Phoenix worked together with occasional help from others to make paper and ink and print the books most likely to be desired by other villages. Bibles—using the memories of every village they could reach, Phoenix researchers had put together the most complete Bible available. There were also how-to books, medical books, memories of prewar Earth, listings of edible plants, animals, fish, and insects and their dangers and advantages, and propaganda against the Oankali.

“We can’t have kids, so we make all this stuff,” Tate told Akin as they watched the traders bargain for a new canoe to carry all their new merchandise in. “Those guys are now officially rich. For all the good it will do them.”

“Can I see the girls?” Akin asked.

“Why not? Let’s go over.”

She walked slowly and let him follow her over to the Wilton house where the girls were staying. Macy and Kolina Wilton had been quick enough to seize both children for themselves. They were one half of Phoenix’s publishers. They would probably be expected to give up one child to another couple, but for now they were a family of four.

The girls were eating roasted almonds and cassava bread with honey. Kolina Wilton was spooning a salad of mixed fruit into small bowls for them.

“Akin,” she said when she saw him. “Good. These little girls don’t speak English. Maybe you can talk to them.”

They were brown girls with long, thick black hair and dark eyes. They wore what appeared to be men’s shirts, belted with light rope and cut off to fit them. The bigger of the two girls had already managed to free her arms from the makeshift garment. She had a few body tentacles around her neck and shoulders, and confining them was probably blinding, itching torment. Now all her small tentacles focused on Akin, while the rest of her seemed to go on concentrating on the food. The smaller girl had a cluster of tentacles at her throat, where they probably protected a sair breathing orifice. That meant her small, normal-looking nose was probably ornamental. It might also mean the girl could breathe underwater. Oankali-born, then, in spite of her human appearance. That was unusual. If she was Oankali-born, then she was she only by courtesy. She could not know yet what her sex would be. But such children, if they had Human-appearing sex organs at all, tended to look female. The children were perhaps three and four years old.

“You’ll have to go into their gardens and into the forest to find enough protein,” Akin told them in Oankali. “They try, but they never seem to give us enough.”

Both girls climbed down from their chairs, came to touch him and taste him and know him. He became so totally focused on them and on getting to know them that he could not perceive anything else for several minutes.

They were siblings—Human-born and Oankali-born. The smaller one was Oankali-born and the more androgenous-looking of the two. It would probably become male in response to its sibling’s apparent femaleness. Its name, it had signaled, was Shkaht—Kaalshkaht eka Jaitahsokahldahktohj aj Dinso. It was a relative. They were both relatives through Nikanj, whose people were Kaal. Happily, Akin gave Shkaht the Human version of his own name, since the Oankali version did not give enough information about Nikanj. Akin Iyapo Shing Kaalnikanjlo.

Both children knew already that he was Human-born and expected to become male. That made him an object of intense curiosity. He discovered that he enjoyed their attention, and he let them investigate him thoroughly.

“

not like kids at all,” one of the Humans was saying. “They’re all over each other like a bunch of dogs.” Who was speaking? Akin made himself focus on the room again, on the Humans. Three more had come into the room. The speaker was Neci, a woman who had always seen him as a valuable property, but who had never liked him.

“If that’s the worst thing they do, we’ll get along fine with them,” Tate said. “Akin, what are their names?”

“Shkaht and Amma,” Akin told her. “Shkaht is the younger one.”

“What kind of name is Shkaht?” Gabe said. He had come in with Neci and Pilar.

“An Oankali name,” Akin said.

“Why? Why give her an Oankali name?”

“Three of her parents are Oankali. So are three of mine.” He would not tell them Shkaht was Oankali-born. He would not let Shkaht tell them. What if they found out and decided they only wanted the Human-born sibling? Would they trade Shkaht away later or return her to the raiders? Best to let them go on believing that both Amma and Shkaht were Human-born and truly female. He must think of them that way himself so that his thoughts did not become words and betray him. He had already warned both children that they must not tell this particular truth. They did not understand yet, but they had agreed.

“What languages do they speak?” Tate asked.

“They want to know what languages you speak,” Akin said in Oankali.

“We speak French and Twi,” Amma said. “Our Human father and his brothers come from France. They were traveling in our mother’s country when the war came. Many people in her country spoke English, but in her home village people spoke mostly Twi.”

“Where was her village?”

“In Ghana. Our mother comes from Ghana.”

Akin relayed this to Tate.

“Africa again,” she said. “It probably didn’t get hit at all. I wonder whether the Oankali have started settlements there. I thought people in Ghana all spoke English.”

“Ask them what trade village they’re from,” Gabe said.

“From Kaal,” Akin said without asking. Then he turned to the children. “Is there more than one Kaal village?”

“There are three,” Shkaht said. “We’re from Kaal-Osei.”

“Kaal-Osei,” Akin relayed.

Gabe shook his head. “Kaal

” He looked at Tate, but she shook her head.

“If they don’t speak English there,” she said, “nobody we know would be there.”

He nodded. “Talk to them, Akin. Find out when they were taken and where their village is—if they know. Can they remember things the way you can?”

“All constructs remember.”

“Good. They’re going to stay with us, so start teaching them English.”

“They’re siblings. Very close. They need to stay together.”

“Do they? We’ll see.”

Akin did not like that. He would have to warn Amma and Shkaht to get sick if they were separated. Crying would not work. The Humans had to be frightened, had to think they might lose one or two of their new children. They had now what they had probably never had before: children they thought might eventually be fertile together. From what he had heard about resisters, he had no doubt that some of them really believed they could soon breed new, Human-trained, Human-looking children.

“Let’s go outside,” he told them. “Are you still hungry?”

“Yes.” They spoke in unison.

“Come on. I’ll show you where the best things grow.”

14

The next day, all three children were arranged in backpacks and carried toward the mountains. They were not allowed to walk. Gabe carried Akin atop a bundle of supplies, and Tate walked behind, carrying even more supplies. Amma rode on Macy Wilton’s back and surreptitiously tasted him with one of her small body tentacles. She had a normal Human tongue, but each of her tentacles would serve her as well as Akin’s long, gray Oankali tongue. Shkaht’s throat tentacles gave her a more sensitive sense of smell and taste than Akin, and she could use her hands for tasting. Also, she had slender, dark tentacles on her head, mixed with her hair. She could see with these. She could not see with her eyes. She had learned, though, to seem to look at people with her eyes—to turn and face them and to move her slender head tentacles as she moved her head so that Humans were not disturbed by her hair seeming to crawl about. She would have to be very careful because Humans, for some reason, liked to cut people’s hair. They cut their own, and they had cut Akin’s. Even back in Lo, men in particular either cut their own hair or got others to cut it. Akin did not want to think about what it might feel like to have sensory tentacles cut off. Nothing could hurt worse. Nothing would be more likely to cause an Oankali or a construct to sting reflexively, fatally.

The Humans walked all day, stopping for rest and food only once at noon. They did not talk about where they were going or why, but they walked quickly, as though they feared pursuit.

They were a party of twenty, armed, in spite of Tate’s efforts, with the four guns of Akin’s captors. Damek was still alive, but he could not walk. He was being cared for back at Phoenix. Akin suspected that he had no idea what was going on—that his gun was gone, that Akin was gone. What he did not know, he could not resent or tell.

That night the Humans erected tents and made beds of blankets and branches or bamboo—whatever they could find. Some stretched hammocks between trees and slept outside the tents since they saw no sign of rain. Akin asked to sleep outside with someone and a woman named Abira simply reached out of her hammock and lifted him in. She seemed glad to have him in spite of the heat and humidity. She was a short, very strong woman who carried a pack as heavy as those of men half again her size, yet she handled him with gentleness.

“I had three little boys before the war,” she said in her strangely accented English. She had come from Israel. She gave his head a quick rub—her favorite caress—and went to sleep, leaving him to find his own most comfortable position.

Amma and Shkaht slept together on their own bed of blanket-covered bamboo. Humans valued them, fed them, sheltered them, but they did not like the girls’ tentacles—would not deliberately allow themselves to be touched by the small sensory organs. Amma had only managed to taste Macy Wilton because she was riding on his back and her tentacles were able to burrow through the clothing he had put between himself and her.

No Human wanted to sleep with them. Even now Neci Roybal and her husband Stancio were whispering about the possibility of removing the tentacles while the girls were young.

Alarmed, Akin listened carefully.

“They’ll learn to do without the ugly little things if we take them off while they’re so young,” Neci was saying.

“We have no proper anesthetics,” the man protested. “It would be cruel.” He was his wife’s opposite, quiet, steady, kind. People tolerated Neci for his sake. Akin avoided him in order to avoid Neci. But Neci had a way of saying a thing and saying a thing over and over until other people began to say it—and believe it.

“They won’t feel much now,” she said. “They’re so young

And those little worm things are so small. Now is the best time to do it.”

Stancio said nothing.

“They’ll learn to use their Human senses,” Neci whispered. “They’ll see the world as we do and be more like us.”

“Do you want to cut them?” Stancio asked. “Little girls. Almost babies.”

“Don’t talk foolishness. It can be done. They’ll heal. They’ll forget they ever had tentacles.”

“Maybe they’d grow back.”

“Cut them off again!”

There was a long silence.

“How many times, Neci,” the man said finally. “How many times would you torture children? Would you torture them if they had come from your body? Will you torture them now because they did not?”

Nothing more was said. Akin thought Neci cried a little. She made small, wordless sounds. Stancio made only regular breathing sounds. After a time, Akin realized he had fallen asleep.

15

They spent days walking through forest, climbing forested hills. But it was cooler now, and Akin and the girls had to fight off attempts to clothe them more warmly. There was still plenty to eat, and their bodies adjusted quickly and easily to the temperature change. Akin went on wearing the short pants Pilar Leal had made for him. There had been no time for clothing to be made for the girls, so they wore lengths of cloth wrapped around their waists and tied at the top. This was the only clothing they did not deliberately shed and lose.

Akin had begun sleeping with them on the second night of the journey. They needed to learn more English and learn it quickly. Neci was doing as Akin had expected—saying over and over to different people in quiet, intense conversation that the girls’ tentacles should be removed now, while they were young, so that they would look more Human, so that they would learn to depend on their Human senses and perceive the world in a Human way. People laughed at her behind her back, but now and then, Akin heard them talking about the tentacles—how ugly they were, how much better the girls would look without them

“Will they cut us?” Amma asked him when he told them. All her tentacles had flattened invisibly to her flesh.

“They might try,” Akin said. “We have to stop them from trying.”

“How?”

Shkaht touched him with one of her small, sensitive hands. “Which Humans do you trust?” she asked. She was the younger of the two, but she had managed to learn more.

“The woman I live with. Tate. Not her husband. Just her. I’m going to tell her the truth.”

“Can she really do anything?”

“She can. She might not. She does

strange things sometimes. She

The worst thing she might do now is nothing.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“What’s wrong with them all? Haven’t you noticed?”

“

yes. But I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either, really. But it’s the way they have to live. They want kids, so they buy us. But we still aren’t their kids. They want to have kids. Sometimes they hate us because they can’t. And sometimes they hate us because we’re part of the Oankali and the Oankali are the ones who won’t let them have kids.”

“They could have dozens of kids if they stop living by themselves and join us.”

“They want kids the way they used to have them before the war. Without the Oankali.”

“Why?”

“It’s their way.” He lay in a jumble with them so that sensory spot found sensory spot, so that the girls were able to use their sensory tentacles and he was able to use his tongue. They were almost unaware that the conversation had ceased to be vocal. Akin had already learned that Humans considered them to be asleep half-atop one another when they lay this way.

“There won’t be any more of them,” he said, trying to project the sensations of aloneness and fear he believed the Humans felt. “Their kind is all they’ve ever known or been, and now there won’t be any more. They try to make us like them, but we won’t ever be really like them, and they know it.”

The girls shuddered, broke contact briefly, minutely. When they touched him again they seemed to communicate as one person.

“We are them! And we are the Oankali. You know. If they could perceive, they would know!”

“If they could perceive, they would be us. They can’t and they aren’t. We’re the best of what they are and the best of what the Oankali are. But because of us, they won’t exist anymore.”

“Oankali Dinso and Toaht won’t exist anymore.”

“No. But Akjai will go away unchanged. If the Human-Oankali construct doesn’t work here or with the Toaht, Akjai will continue.”

“Only if they find some other people to blend with.” This came distinctly from Amma.

“Humans had come to their own end,” Shkaht said. “They were flawed and overspecialized. If they hadn’t had their war, they would have found another way to kill themselves.”

“Perhaps,” Akin admitted. “I was taught that, too. And I can see the conflict in their genes—the new intelligence put at the service of ancient hierarchical tendencies. But

they didn’t have to destroy themselves. They certainly don’t have to do it again.”

“How could they not?” Amma demanded. All that she had learned, all that the bodies of her own Human parents had shown her told her he was talking nonsense. She had not been among resister Humans long enough to begin to see them as a truly separate people. Yet she must understand. She would be female. Someday, she would tell her children what Humans were. And she did not know. He was only beginning to learn himself.

He said with intensity, with utter certainty, “There should be a Human Akjai! There should be Humans who don’t change or die—Humans to go on if the Dinso and Toaht unions fail.”

Amma was moving uncomfortably against him, first touching, then breaking contact as though it hurt her to know what he was saying, but her curiosity would not let her stay away. Shkaht was still, fastened to him by slender head tentacles, trying to absorb what he was saying.

“You’re here for this,” she said aloud softly. Her voice startled him, though he did not move. She had spoken in Oankali, and her communication, like his, had the feel of intensity and truth.

Amma linked more deeply into both of them, giving them her frustration. She did not understand.

“He is being left here,” Shkaht explained silently. She deliberately soothed her sibling with her own calm certainly. “They want him to know the Humans,” she said. “They would not have sent him to them, but since he’s here and not being hurt, they want him to learn so that later he can teach.”

“What about us?”

“I don’t know. They couldn’t come for us without taking him. And they probably didn’t know where we would be sold—or even whether we would be sold. I think we’ll be left here until they decide to come for him—unless we’re in danger.”

“We’re in danger now,” Amma whispered aloud.

“No. Akin will talk to Tate. If Tate can’t help us, we’ll disappear some night soon.”

“Run away?”

“Yes.”

“The Humans would catch us!”

“No. We’d travel at night, hide during the day, take to the nearest river when it’s safe.”

“Can you breathe underwater?” Akin asked Amma.

“Not yet,” she answered, “but I’m a good swimmer. I always went in whenever Shkaht did. If I get into trouble, Shkaht helps—links with me and breathes for me.”

As Akin’s sibling would have been able to help him. He withdrew from them, reminded by their unity of his own solitude. He could talk to them, communicate with them nonvocally, but he could never have the special closeness with them that they had with each other. Soon he would be too old for it—if he wasn’t already. And what was happening to his sibling?

“I don’t believe they’re leaving me with the Humans deliberately,” he said. “My parents wouldn’t do that. My Human mother would come alone if no one would come with her.”

Both girls were back in contact with him at once. “No!” Shkaht was saying. “When resisters find women alone, they keep them. We saw it happen at a village where our captors tried to trade us.”

“What did you see?”

“Some men came to the village. They lived there, but they had been traveling. They had a woman with them, her arms tied with rope and a rope tied around her neck. They said they had found her and she was theirs. She screamed at them, but no one knew her language. They kept her.”

“No one could do that to my mother,” Akin said. “She wouldn’t let them. She travels alone whenever she wants to.”

“But how would she find you alone? Maybe every resister village she went to would try to tie her up and keep her. Maybe if they couldn’t they would hurt her or kill her with guns.”

Maybe they would. They seemed to do such things so easily. Maybe they already had.

Some communication he did not catch passed between Amma and Shkaht. “You have three Oankali parents,” Shkaht whispered aloud. “They know more about resisters than we do. They wouldn’t let her go alone, would they? If they couldn’t stop her, they would go with her, wouldn’t they?”

“

yes,” Akin answered, feeling no certainty at all. Amma and Shkaht did not know Lilith, did not know how she became so frightening sometimes that everyone stayed away from her. Then she vanished for a while. Who knew what might happen to her while she roamed the forests alone?

The girls had placed him between them. He did not realize until it was too late that they were calming him with their own deliberate calm, soothing him, putting themselves and him to sleep.

Akin awoke the next day still miserable, still frightened for his mother and lonely for his sibling. Yet he went to Tate and asked her to carry him for a while so that he could talk to her.

She picked him up at once and took him to the small, fast-running stream where the camp had gotten its water.

“Wash,” she said, “and talk to me here. I don’t want people watching the two of us whispering together.”

He washed and told her about Neci’s efforts to have Amma’s and Shkaht’s tentacles removed. “They would grow back,” he said. “And until they did, Shkaht wouldn’t be able to see at all or breathe properly. She would be very sick. She might die. Amma probably wouldn’t die, but she would be crippled. She wouldn’t be able to use any of her senses to their full advantage. She wouldn’t be able to recognize smells and tastes that should be familiar to her—as though she could touch them, but not grasp them—until her tentacles grew back. They would always grow back. And it would hurt her to have them cut off—maybe the way it would hurt you to have your eyes cut out.”

Tate sat on a fallen log, ignoring its fungi and its insects. “Neci has a way of convincing people,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I came to you.”

“Gabe said something to me about a little surgery on the girls. Are you sure it was Neci’s idea?”

“I heard her talking about it on the first night after we left Phoenix.”

“God.” Tate sighed. “And she won’t quit. She never quits. If the girls were older, I’d like to give her a knife and tell her to go try it.” She stared at Akin. “And since neither of those two is an ooloi, I assume that would be fatal to her. Wouldn’t it, Akin?”

“

yes.”

“What if the girls were unconscious?”

“It wouldn’t matter. Even if they

Even if they were dead and hadn’t been dead very long, their tentacles would still sting anyone who tried to cut them or pull them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that instead of telling me how badly the girls would be hurt?”

“I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.”

“No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.”

“You’re going to tell them?”

“In a way. I’m going to tell them a story. Gabe and I once saw what happened to a man who injured an Oankali’s body tentacles. That was back on the ship. There are other people in Phoenix who remember, but none of them are with us here. Your mother was with us then, Akin, though I don’t intend to mention her.”

Akin looked away from her, stared across the stream bed, and wondered if his mother were still alive.

“Hey,” Tate said. “What’s the matter?”

“You should have taken me home,” he said bitterly. “You say you know my mother. You should have taken me back to her.”

Silence.

“Shkaht says men in resister villages tie up women when they catch them, and they keep them. My mother probably knows that, but she would look for me anyway. She wouldn’t let them keep her, but they might shoot her or cut her.”

More silence.

“You should have taken me home.” He was crying openly now.

“I know,” she whispered. “And I’m sorry. But I can’t take you home. You mean too much to my people.” She had crossed her arms in front of her, the fingers of each hand curved around an elbow. She had made a bar against him like the wooden bars she used to secure her doors. He went to her and put his hands on her arms.

“They won’t let you keep me much longer,” he said. “And even if they did

Even if I grew up in Phoenix and Amma and Shkaht grew up there, you would still need an ooloi. And there are no construct ooloi.”

“You don’t know what we’ll need!”

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

She believed him. Her face said she believed him.

“Let’s get back,” she said.

“Will you help me get home?”

“No.”

“But why?”

Silence.

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

“Because

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think so,” Akin answered.

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

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

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

”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But inside there was a museum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The stuff it was made of. Plastic?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

They nodded.

“It was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then

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

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

“Was it plastic?” Akin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You just poisoned yourself!”

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

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

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

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

“I’d rather go out and eat leaves.”

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

17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had already shown Akin some of her work. She seemed to like him.

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

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

“The boy loves her,” Yori said.

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

“You?” Gil asked.

“Why not me! I had two children before the war. I know how to bring them up.”

“We also had two,” Anne said. “Two little girls.” She gave a low laugh. “Shkaht and Amma look nothing like them, but I would give anything to make one of those girls my daughter.”

“With or without tentacles?” Sabina said.

“If Yori would do it, I would want them removed.”

“I don’t know whether I’d do it,” Yori said. “I don’t believe Tate was lying about what she saw.”

“But what she saw was between a Human and an adult Oankali,” Anne said. “These are children. Almost babies. And they’re almost Human.”

“They look almost Human,” Sabina put in. “We don’t know what they really are.”

“Children,” Anne said. “They’re children.”

Silence.

“It should be done,” Neci said. “Everyone knows it should be done. We don’t know how to do it yet, but, Yori, you should be finding out how. You should study them. You came along to guard their health. Doesn’t that mean you should spend time with them, get to know more about them?”

“That won’t help,” Yori said. “I already know they’re venomous. Perhaps I could protect myself, and perhaps I couldn’t. But

this is cosmetic surgery, Neci. Unnecessary. And I’m no surgeon anyway. Why should we risk the girls’ health and my life just because they have what amounts to ugly birthmarks? Tate says the tentacles grow back, anyway.” She drew a deep breath. “No, I won’t do it. I wasn’t sure before, but I am now. I won’t do it.”

Silence. Sounds of moving about, someone walking—Yori’s short, light steps. Sound of a door being opened.

“Good night,” Yori said.

No one wished her a good night.

“It’s not that complicated,” Neci said moments later. “Especially not with Amma. She has so few tentacles—eight or ten—and they’re so small. Anyone could do it—with gloves for protection.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Anne said. “I couldn’t use a knife on anyone.”

“I could,” Gil said. “But

if only they weren’t such little girls.”

“Is there any liquor here?” Neci asked. “Even that foul cassava stuff the wanderers drink would do.”

“We make the corn whiskey here, too,” Gil said. “There’s always plenty. Too much.”

“So we give it to the girls and then do it.”

“I don’t know,” Sabina said. “They’re so young. And if they get sick

”

“Yori will care for them if they get sick. She’ll care for them, even if she doesn’t like what we’ve done. And it will be done, as it should be.”

“But—”

“It must be done! We must raise Human children, not aliens who don’t even understand how we see things.”

Silence.

“Tomorrow, Gil? Can it be done tomorrow?”

“I

don’t know

.”

“We can collect the kids when they’re out eating plants. No one will notice for a while that they’re gone. Sabina, you’ll get the liquor, won’t you?”

“I—”

“Are there very sharp knives here? It should be done quickly and cleanly. And we’ll need clean cloths for bandages, gloves for all of us, just in case, and that antiseptic Yori has. I’ll get that. There probably won’t be any infection, but we won’t take chances.” She stopped abruptly, then spoke one word harshly.

“Tomorrow!”

Silence.

Akin got up, managed to struggle out of the hammock. Abira awoke, but only mumbled something and went back to sleep. Akin headed toward the next room where Amma and Shkaht shared a hammock. They met him coming out. All three linked instantly and spoke without sound.

“We have to go,” Shkaht said sadly.

“You don’t,” Akin argued. “They’re only a few, and not that strong. We have Tate and Gabe, Yori, Abira, Macy and Kolina. They would help us!”

“They would help us tomorrow. Neci would wait and recruit and try again later.”

“Tate could talk to the salvagers the way she talked to the camp on the way up here. People believe her when she talks.”

“Neci didn’t.”

“Yes she did. She just wants to have everything her way—even if her way is wrong. And she’s not very smart. She’s seen me taste metal and flesh and wood, but she thinks gloves will protect her hands from being tasted or stung when she cuts you.”

“Plastic gloves?”

Surprised, Akin thought for a moment. “They might have gloves made of some kind of plastic. I haven’t seen plastic that soft, but it could exist. But once you understand the plastic it can’t hurt you.”

“Neci probably doesn’t realize that. You said she wasn’t smart. That makes her more dangerous. Maybe if other people stop her from cutting us tomorrow, she’ll get angrier. She’ll want to hurt us just to prove she can.”

After a time, Akin agreed. “She would.”

“We have to go.”

“I want to go with you!”

Silence.

Frightened, Akin linked more deeply with them. “Don’t leave me here alone!”

More silence. Very gently, they held him between them and put him to sleep. He understood what they were doing and resisted them angrily at first, but they were right. They had a chance without him. They were stronger, larger, and could travel faster and farther without rest. Communication between them was quicker and more precise. They could act almost as though they shared a single nervous system. Only paired siblings and adult mates came to know each other that well. Akin would hamper them, probably get them recaptured. He knew this, and they could feel his contradictory feelings. They knew he knew. Thus, there was no need to argue. He must simply accept the reality.

He accepted it finally and allowed them to send him into a deep sleep.

18

He slept naked on the floor until Tate found him the next morning. She awoke him by lifting him and was startled when he grabbed her around the neck and would not let go. He did not cry or speak. He tasted her but did not study her. Later he realized he had actually tried to become her, to join with her as he might with his closest sibling. It was not possible. He was reaching for a union the Humans had denied him. It seemed to him that what he needed was just beyond his grasp, just beyond that final crossing he could not make, as with his mother. As with everyone. He could know so much and no more, feel so much and no more, join so close and no closer.

Desperately, he took what he could get. She could not comfort him or even know how deeply he perceived her. But she could, simply by permitting the attachment, divert his attention from himself, from his own misery.

Aside from her original jerk of surprise, Tate did not try to detach him. He did not know what she did. All his senses were focused on the worlds within the cells of her body. He did not know how long he was frozen to her, not thinking, not knowing or caring what she did as long as she did not disturb him.

When he finally drew away from her, he found that she was sitting on a mat on the floor, leaning against a wall. She had gone on holding him on her arm and resting her arm on her knees. Now as he straightened and reoriented himself, she took his chin between her fingers and turned his face toward hers.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

He said nothing for a moment, looked around the room.

“Everyone’s at breakfast,” she said. “I’ve had my regularly scheduled lecture about how I spoil you and a little extra to boot. Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”

She put him down beside her and stared down at him, waiting. Clearly she did not know the girls were gone. Perhaps no one had noticed yet, thanks to the morning grazing habits of all three children. He could not tell. Amma and Shkaht should have as much of a start as possible.

“It’s too late for me to bond with my sibling,” he said truthfully. “I was thinking about that last night. I was feeling

Lonely wouldn’t really be the right word. This was more like

something died.” Every word was true. His answer was simply incomplete. Amma and Shkaht had started his feelings—their union, their leaving

“Where are the girls?” Tate asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Have they gone, Akin?”

He looked away. Why was she always so hard to hide things from? Why did he hesitate so to lie to her?

“Good god,” she said, and started to get up.

“Wait!” Akin said. “They were going to cut them this morning. Neci and her friends were going to grab them while they were eating and hide them and cut off their sensory tentacles.”

“The hell they were!”

“They were! We heard them last night! Yori wouldn’t help them, but they were going to do it anyway. They were going to give them corn whiskey and—”

“Moonshine?”

“What?”

“They were going to make the girls drunk?”

“They couldn’t.”

Tate frowned. “Were they going to give them the moonshine—the whiskey?”

“Yes. But it wouldn’t make them drunk. I’ve seen drunk Humans. I don’t think anything we could drink would make us like that. Our bodies would reject the drink.”

“What would it have done to them?”

“Make them vomit or urinate a lot. It isn’t strong or deadly. Probably they would just pass it through almost unchanged. They would urinate a lot.”

“That stuff’s damn strong.”

“I mean

I mean it’s not a deadly poison. Humans can drink it without dying. We can drink it without vomiting it up wrapped in part of our flesh to keep it from injuring us.”

“So it wouldn’t hurt them—just in case Neci caught them.”

“It wouldn’t hurt them. They wouldn’t like it, though. And Neci hasn’t caught them.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve heard her. She’s been asking people where the girls are. No one’s seen them. She’s getting worried.”

Tate stared at nothing, believing, absorbing. “We wouldn’t have let her do it. All you had to do was tell me.”

“You would have stopped her this time,” he agreed. “She would have kept trying. People believe her after a while. They do what she wants them to.”

She shook her head. “Not this time. Too many of us were against her on this. Little girls, for godsake! Akin, we could waste days searching for them, but you could track them faster with your Oankali hearing and sight.”

“No.”

“Yes. Oh, yes! How far do you think those girls will get before something happens to them? They’re not much bigger than you are. They’ll die out there!”

“I wouldn’t. Why should they?”

Silence. She frowned down at him. “You mean you could get home from here?”

“I could if no Humans stopped me.”

“And you think no Humans will stop the girls?”

“I think

I think they’re afraid. I think they’re frightened enough to sting.”

“Oh, god.”

“What if someone were going to cut your eyes out, and you had a gun?”

“I thought the new species was supposed to be above that kind of thing.”

“They’re afraid. They only want to go home. They don’t want to be cut.”

“No.” She sighed. “Get dressed. Let’s go to breakfast. The riot should be starting any time now.”

“I don’t think they’ll find the girls.”

“If what you say is true, I hope they don’t. Akin?”

He waited, knowing what she would ask.

“Why didn’t they take you with them?”

“I’m too small.” He walked away from her, found his pants in the next room, and put them on. “I couldn’t work with them the way they could work with each other. I would have gotten them caught.”

“You wanted to go?”

Silence. If she did not know he had wanted to go, wanted desperately to go, she was stupid. And she was not stupid.

“I wonder why the hell your people don’t come for you,” she said. “They must know better than I do what they’re putting you through.”

“What they’re putting me through?” he asked, amazed.

She sighed. “We, then. Whatever good that admission does you. Oankali drove us to become what we are. If they hadn’t tampered with us, we’d have children of our own. We could live in our own ways, and they could live in theirs.”

“Some of you would attack them,” Akin said softly. “I think some Humans would have to attack them.”

“Why?”

“Why did Humans attack one another?”

Suddenly there was shouting outside.

“Okay,” Tate said. “They’ve realized the girls are gone. They’ll be here in a moment.”

Almost before she had finished speaking, Macy Wilton and Neci Roybal were at the door, looking around the room.

“Have you seen the girls?” Macy demanded.

Tate shook her head. “No, we haven’t been out.”

“Did you see them at all this morning?”

“No.”

“Akin?”

“No.” If Tate thought it was best to lie, then he would lie—although neither of them had begun lying yet.

“I heard you were sick, Akin,” Neci said.

“I’m all right now.”

“What made you sick?”

He stared at her with quiet dislike, wondering what it might be safe to say.

Tate spoke up with uncharacteristic softness. “He had a dream that upset him. A dream about his mother.”

Neci raised an eyebrow skeptically. “I didn’t know they dreamed.”

Tate shook her head, smiled slightly. “Neci, why not? He’s at least as Human as you are.”

The woman drew back. “You should be out helping to search for the girls!” she said. “Who knows what’s happened to them!”

“Maybe someone decided to follow your advice, grab them, and cut off their sensory tentacles.”

“What!” demanded Macy. He had gone into the room where he and the girls and his wife had slept. Now he came out, staring at Tate.

“She has an obscene sense of humor,” Neci said.

Tate made a wordless sound. “These days, I have no sense of humor at all where you’re concerned.” She looked at Macy. “She was still pushing to have the girls’ tentacles amputated. She’s been talking to the salvagers about it,” Now she looked directly at Neci. “Deny it.”

“Why should I? They would be better off without them—more Human!”

“Just as much better off as you would be without your eyes! Let’s go look for them, Macy. I hope to god they never heard the things Neci’s been saying.”

Amazed, Akin followed her out. She had put the blame for the girls’ flight exactly where it belonged without involving him at all. She left him with a salvager who had injured his knee and joined the search as though she had every expectation of finding the girls quickly.

19

Amma and Shkaht were not found. They were simply gone—perhaps found by other resisters, perhaps safe in some trade village. Most of the resisters seemed to think they were dead—eaten by caimans or anacondas, bitten by poisonous snakes or insects. The idea that such young children could find their way to safety seemed completely impossible to them.

And most of the resisters blamed Neci. Tate seemed to find that satisfying. Akin did not care. If Neci left him alone, he was content with her. And she did leave him alone—but only after planting the idea that he must be watched more carefully. She was not the only one who believed this, but she was the only one to suggest that he be kept out of the pit, kept away from the river, be harnessed and tied outside the cabins when everyone was too busy to watch him.

He would not have stood for that. He would have stung the rope or chain that they tied him with until it rotted or corroded through, and he would have run away—up the mountain, not down. They might not find him higher up. He would probably not make it back to Lo. He was too far from it now, and there were so many resister villages between it and him that he would probably be picked up once he headed down from the hills. But he would not stay with people who tied him.

He was not tied. He was watched more closely than before, but it seemed the resisters had as great an aversion to tying or confining people as he did.

Neci finally left with a group of salvagers going home—men and women carrying wealth on their backs. They took two of the guns with them. There had been a general agreement among new salvagers and old that Phoenix would begin to manufacture guns. Tate was against it. Yori was so strongly against it that she threatened to move to another resister village. Nevertheless, guns would be made.

“We’ve got to protect ourselves,” Gabe said. “Too many of the raiders have guns now, and Phoenix is too rich. Sooner or later, they’ll realize it’s easier to steal from us than carry on honest trade.”

Tate slept several nights alone or with Akin once the decision was made. Sometimes she hardly slept at all, and Akin wished he could comfort her the way Amma and Shkaht had comforted him. Sleep could be a great gift. But he could have given it only with the help of a close Oankali-born sibling.

“Would raiders begin raiding you the way they raid us?” he asked her one night as they lay together in a hammock.

“Probably.”

“Why haven’t they already?”

“They have occasionally—trying to steal metal or women. But Phoenix is a strong town—plenty of people willing to fight if they have to. There are smaller, weaker settlements that are easier pickings.”

“Are guns really a bad idea, then?”

In the dark she tried to stare at him. She couldn’t have seen him—although he saw her clearly. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I like a lot of the people in Phoenix. And I remember what raiders did to Tino. They didn’t have to. They just did it. Later, though, while I was with them, they didn’t really seem

I don’t know. Most of the time, they were like the men in Phoenix.”

“They probably came from someplace like Phoenix—some village or town. They got sick of one pointless, endless existence and chose another.”

“Pointless because resisters can’t have children?”

“That’s it. It means a lot more than I could ever explain to you. We don’t get old. We don’t have kids, and nothing we do means shit.”

“What would it mean

if you had a kid like me?”

“We have got a kid like you. You.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Go to sleep, Akin.”

“Why are you afraid of guns?”

“They make killing too easy. Too impersonal. You know what that means?”

“Yes. I’ll ask if you say something I don’t understand.”

“So we’ll kill more of each other than we already do. We’ll learn to make better and better guns. Someday, we’ll take on the Oankali, and that will be the end of us.”

“It would. What do you want to happen instead?”

Silence.

“Do you know?”

“Not extinction,” she whispered. “Not extinction in any form. As long as we’re alive, we have some chance.”

Akin frowned, trying to understand. “If you had kids in the old way, your prewar way, with Gabe, would that mean you and Gabe were becoming extinct?”

“It would mean we weren’t. Our kids would be Human like us.”

“I’m Human like you—and Oankali like Ahajas and Dichaan.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I’m trying to.”

“Are you?” She touched his face. “Why?”

“I need to. It’s part of me, too. It concerns me, too.”

“Not really.”

Abruptly he was angry. He hated her soft condescension. “Then why am I here! Why are you here! You and Gabe would be down in Phoenix if it didn’t concern me. I would be back in Lo. Oankali and Human have done what Human male and female used to do. And they made me and Amma and Shkaht, and they’re no more extinct than you would be if you had kids with Gabe!”

She turned slightly—turned her back to him as much as she could in a hammock. “Go to sleep, Akin.”

But he did not sleep. It was his turn to lie awake thinking. He understood more than she thought. He recalled his argument with Amma and Shkaht that Humans should be permitted their own Akjai division—their own hedge against disaster and true extinction. Why should it be so difficult? There were, according to Lilith, bodies of land surrounded by vast amounts of water. Humans could be isolated and their ability to reproduce in their own way restored to them. But then what would happen when the constructs scattered to the stars, leaving the Earth a stripped ruin. Tate’s hopes were in vain.

Or were they?

Who among the Oankali was speaking for the interests of resister Humans? Who had seriously considered that it might not be enough to let Humans choose either union with the Oankali or sterile lives free of the Oankali? Trade-village Humans said it, but they were so flawed, so genetically contradictory that they were often not listened to.

He did not have their flaw. He had been assembled within the body of an ooloi. He was Oankali enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know that resister Humans were being treated with cruelty and condescension.

Yet he had not even been able to make Amma and Shkaht understand. He did not know enough yet. These resisters had to help him learn more.

20

Akin was with the people of Phoenix for over a year. He spent most of this time in the hills, watching the salvaging and taking part when the salvagers would let him. One of the men set him to cleaning small, decorative items—jewelry, figurines, small bottles, jars, eating utensils. He knew he was given the job mainly to keep him from underfoot, but the work pleased him. He tasted everything before he cleaned it and afterward. Often he found Human leavings protected within containers. There were bits of hair, skin, nail. From some of these he salvaged lost Human genetic patterns that ooloi could recreate if they needed the Human genetic diversity. Only an ooloi could tell him what was useful. He memorized everything to give to Nikanj someday.

Once Sabina caught him tasting the inside of a small bottle. She tried to snatch the bottle away. Fortunately, he managed to dodge her hands and withdraw the thin, searching filaments of his tongue before she broke them. She should have gone back to Phoenix when her group left. She had done her share of what she called grubbing in the dirt, but she had stayed. Akin believed she had stayed because of him. He had not forgotten that she had been willing to take part in cutting off Amma’s and Shkaht’s tentacles. But she seemed brighter than Neci, more able, more willing to learn.

“What was this called?” he asked her once there was no chance of her injuring him.

“It was a perfume bottle. You keep it out of your mouth.”

“Where were you going?” he asked.

“What?”

“If you have time, I’ll tell you why I put things in my mouth.”

“All kids put things in their mouths—and sometimes they poison themselves.”

“I must put things in my mouth to understand them. And I must try to understand them. Not to try would be like having hands and eyes and yet always being tied and blindfolded. It would make me

not sane.”

“Oh, but—”

“And I’m too old now to poison myself. I could drink the fluid that used to be in this bottle and nothing would happen. It would pass through me quickly, almost unchanged, because it isn’t very dangerous. If it were very dangerous, my body would either change its structure and neutralize it or

contain it in a kind of sealed flesh bottle and expel it. Do you see?”

“I

understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I believe you.”

“It’s important that you understand. Especially you.”

“Why?”

“Because just now, you almost hurt me a lot. You could have injured me more than any poison could. And you could have made me sting you. If I did that, you would die. That’s why.”

She had drawn back from him. Her face had changed slightly. “You always look so normal

sometimes I forget.”

“Don’t forget. But don’t hate me either. I’ve never stung anyone, and I don’t ever want to.”

Some of the wariness left her eyes.

“Help me learn,” he said. “I want to know the Human part of myself better.”

“What can I teach you?”

He smiled. “Tell me why Human kids put things in their mouths. I’ve never known.”

21

He made them all his teachers. He told only Tate what he meant to do. When she had heard, she looked at him then shook her head sadly. “Go ahead,” she said. “Learn all you can about us. It can’t do any harm. But afterward, I think you’ll find you have a few more things to learn about the Oankali, too.”

He worried about that. No other resister could have made him worry about the Oankali. But Tate had been almost a relative. She would have been an ooloi relative if she had stayed with Kahguyaht and its mates. He felt her to be almost a relative now. He trusted her. Yet he could not give up his own belief that he could someday speak for the resisters.

“Shall I tell them there must be Akjai Humans?” he asked her. “Would you be willing to begin again, isolated somewhere far from here?” Where, he could not imagine, but somewhere!

“If it were a place where we could live, and if we could have children.” She drew a breath, wet her lips. “We would do anything for that. Anything.”

There was an intensity that he had never heard before in her voice. And there was something else. He frowned. “Would you go?”

She had come over to watch him scrub a piece of colorful mosaic—a square of bright bits of glass fitted together to make a red flower against a blue field.

“That’s beautiful,” Tate said softly. “There was a time when I would have thought it was cheap junk. Now, it’s beautiful.”

“Would you go?” Akin asked again.

She turned and walked away.

22

Gabe took him away from his tasting and cleaning for a while—took him higher into the hills where the great mountains in the distance could be seen clearly. One of them smoked and steamed into the blue sky and was somehow very beautiful—a pathway deep into the Earth. A breathing place. A kind of joint where great segments of the Earth’s crust came together. Akin could look at the huge volcano and understand a little better how the Earth worked—how it would work until it was broken and divided between departing Dinso groups.

Akin chose the edible plants he thought would taste best to Gabe and introduced the man to them. In return, Gabe told him about a place called New York and what it had been like to grow up there. Gabe talked more than he ever had—talked about acting, which Akin did not understand at all at first.

Gabe had been an actor. People gave him money and goods so that he would pretend to be someone else—so that he would take part in acting out a story someone had made up.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you any stories?” he asked Akin.

“Yes,” Akin said. “But they were true.”

“She never told you about the three bears?”

“What’s a bear?”

Gabe looked first angry, then resigned. “I still forget sometimes,” he said. “A bear is just one more large, extinct animal. Forget it.”

That night in a small, half-ruined stone shelter before a camp-fire, Gabe became another person for Akin. He became an old man. Akin had never seen an old man. Most of the old Humans who had survived the war had been kept aboard the ship. The oldest were dead by now. The Oankali had not been able to extend their lives for more than a few years, but they kept them healthy and free of pain for as long as possible.

Gabe became an old man. His voice became heavier, thicker. His body seemed heavier, too, and painfully weary, bent, yet hard to bend. He was a man whose daughters had betrayed him. He was sane, and then not sane. He was terrifying. He was another person altogether. Akin wanted to get up and run out into the darkness.

Yet he sat still, spellbound. He could not understand much of what Gabe said, though it seemed to be English. Somehow, though, he felt what Gabe seemed to want him to feel. Surprise, anger, betrayal, utter bewilderment, despair, madness

.

The performance ended, and Gabe was Gabe again. He turned his face upward and laughed aloud. “Jesus,” he said. “Lear for a three-year-old. Damn. It felt good, anyway. It’s been so long. I didn’t know I remembered all that stuff.”

“Don’t you do that for the people in Phoenix?” Akin asked timidly.

“No. I never have. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I farm now or I work metal. I dig up junk from the past and turn it into stuff people can use today. That’s what I do.”

“I liked the acting. It scared me at first, and I couldn’t understand a lot of it, but

It’s like what we do—constructs and Oankali. It’s like when we touch each other and talk with feelings and pressures. Sometimes you have to remember a feeling you haven’t had for a long time and bring it back so you can transmit it to someone else or use a feeling you have about one thing to help someone understand something else.”

“You do that?”

“Yes. We can’t do it very well with Humans. The ooloi can, but males and females can’t.”

“Yeah.” He sighed and lay down on his back. They had cleared some of the plant growth and rubble from the stone floor of the shelter and could wrap themselves in their blankets and lie on it in comfort.

“What was this place?” Akin asked, looking up at the stars through the roofless building. Only the overhang of the hill provided any shelter at all if it happened to rain that night.

“Don’t know,” Gabe said. “It could have been some peasant’s house. I suspect it goes back further, though. I think it’s an old Indian dwelling. Maybe even Inca or some related people.”

“Who were they?”

“Short brown people. Probably looked something like Tino’s parents. Something like you, maybe. They were here for thousands of years before people who look like me or Tate got here.”

“You and Tate don’t look alike.”

“No. But we’re both descended from Europeans. Indians were descended from Asians. The Incas are the ones everyone thinks of for this part of the world, but there were a lot of different groups. To tell the truth, I don’t think we’re far enough into the mountains to be seeing Inca ruins. This is a damn old place, though.” He pulled his mouth into a smile. “Old and Human.”

They walked for many days, exploring, finding other ruined dwellings, describing a great circle back to the salvage camp. Akin never asked why Gabe took him on the long trip. Gabe never volunteered an explanation. He seemed pleased that Akin insisted on walking most of the time and usually managed to keep up. He willingly tried eating plants Akin recommended and liked some of them well enough to take them back as small plants, seeds, stalks, or tubers. Akin guided him in this, too.

“What can I take back that will grow?” Gabe would say. He could not know how much this pleased Akin. What he and Gabe were doing was what the Oankali always did—collect life, travel and collect and integrate new life into their ships, their already vast collection of living things, and themselves.

He studied each plant very carefully, telling Gabe exactly what he must do to keep the plant alive. Automatically, he kept within himself a memory of genetic patterns or a few dormant cells from each sample. From these, an ooloi could recreate copies of the living organism. Ooloi liked cells from or memories of several individuals within a species. For the Humans, Akin saw that Gabe took seed when there was seed. Seed could be carried in a leaf or a bit of cloth tied with a twist of grass. And it would grow. Akin would see to that. Even without an ooloi to help, he could taste a plant and read its needs. With its needs met, it would thrive.

“This is about the happiest I’ve ever seen you,” Gabe remarked as they neared the salvage camp.

Akin grinned at him but said nothing. Gabe would not want to know that Akin was collecting information for Nikanj. It was enough for him to know that he had pleased Akin very much.

Gabe did not smile back, but only because he made an obvious effort not to.

When they reached camp a few days later, Gabe met Tate with none of the odd anxiety he often showed when she had been out of his sight for a while.

23

Ten days after Akin and Gabe returned, a new salvage team arrived to take their turn at the dig. While both teams were still on the site, the Oankali arrived.

They were not seen. There was no outcry among the Humans. Akin was busy scrubbing a small, ornate crystal vase when he noticed the Oankali scent.

He put the vase down carefully in a wooden box lined with cloth—a box used for especially delicate, especially beautiful finds. Akin had never broken one of these. There was no reason to break one now.

What should he do? If Humans spotted the Oankali, there might be fighting. Humans could so easily provoke the lethal sting reflex of the Oankali. What to do?

He spotted Tate and called to her. She was digging very carefully around something large and apparently delicate. She was digging with what looked like a long, thin knife and a brush made of twigs. She ignored him.

He went to her quickly, glad there was no one near her to hear.

“I have to go,” he whispered. “They’re here.”

She almost stabbed herself with the knife. “Where!”

“That way.” He looked east but did not point.

“Of course.”

“Walk me out there. People will notice if I get too far from camp alone.”

“Me? No!”

“If you don’t, someone might get killed.”

“If I do, I might get killed!”

“Tate.”

She looked at him.

“You know they won’t hurt you. You know. Help me. Your people are the ones I’m trying to save.”

She gave him a look so hostile that he stumbled back from her. Abruptly she grabbed him, picked him up, and began walking east.

“Put me down,” he said. “Let me walk.”

“Shut up!” she said. “Just tell me when I’m getting close to them.”

He realized belatedly that she was terrified. She could not have been afraid of being killed. She knew the Oankali too well for that. What then?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You were the only one I dared to ask. It will be all right.”

She took a breath and put him down, held his hand. “It won’t be all right,” she said. “But that’s not your fault.”

They went over a rise, out of sight of the camp. There, several Oankali and two Humans waited. One of the Humans was Lilith. The other

looked like Tino.

“Oh, Jesus God!” Tate whispered as she caught sight of the Oankali. She froze. Akin thought she might turn and run, but somehow she managed not to move. Akin wanted to go to his family, but he too kept very still. He did not want to leave Tate standing alone and terrified.

Lilith came over to him. She moved so quickly that he had no time to react before she was there, bending, lifting him, hugging him so hard it hurt.

She had not made a sound. She let Akin taste her neck and feel the utter security of flesh as familiar as his own.

“I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” he whispered finally.

“I’ve been looking for you for so long,” she said, her voice hardly sounding like her voice at all. She kissed his face and stroked his hair and finally held him away from her. “Three years old,” she said. “So big. I kept worrying that you wouldn’t remember me—but I knew you would. I knew you would.”

He laughed at the impossible notion of his forgetting her and looked to see whether she was crying. She was not. She was examining him—his hands and arms, his legs

A shout made them both look up. Tate and the other Human stood facing one another. The sound had been Tate shouting Tino’s name.

Tino was smiling at her uncertainly. He did not speak until she took him by the arms and said, “Tino, don’t you recognize me? Tino?”

Akin looked at Tino’s expression, and he knew he did not recognize her. He was alive, but something was the matter with him.

“I’m sorry,” Tino said. “I’ve had a head injury. I remember a lot of my past, but

some things are still coming back to me.”

Tate looked at Lilith. Lilith looked back with no sign of friendliness. “They tried to kill him when they took Akin,” she said. “They clubbed him down, fractured his skull so badly he nearly did die.”

“Akin said he was dead.”

“He had good reason to think so.” She paused. “Was it worth his life for you to have my son?”

“She didn’t do it,” Akin said quickly. “She was my friend. The men who took me tried to sell me in a lot of places before

before Phoenix wanted to buy me.”

“Most of the men who took him are dead,” Tate said. “The survivor is paralyzed. There was a fight.” She glanced at Tino. “Believe me, you and Tino are avenged.”

The Oankali began communicating silently among themselves as they heard this. Akin could see his Oankali parents among them, and he wanted to go to them, but he also wanted to go to Tino, wanted to make the man remember him, wanted to make him sound like Tino again.

“Tate

?” Tino said staring at her. “Is it

? Are you

?”

“It’s me,” she said quickly. “Tate Rinaldi. You did half of your growing up in my house. Tate and Gabe. Remember?”

“Kind of.” He thought for a moment. “You helped me. I was going to leave Phoenix and you said

you told me how to get to Lo.”

Lilith looked surprised. “You did?” she asked Tate.

“I thought he would be safe in Lo.”

“He should have been.” Lilith drew a deep breath. “That was our first raid in years. We’d gotten careless.”

Ahajas, Dichaan, and Nikanj detached themselves from the other Oankali and came over to the Human group. Akin could not wait any longer. He reached toward Dichaan, and Dichaan took him and held him for several minutes of relief and reacquaintance and joy. He did not know what the Humans said while he and Dichaan were locked together by as many of Dichaan’s sensory tentacles as could reach him and by Akin’s own tongue. Akin learned how Dichaan had found Tino and struggled to keep him alive and got home only to discover that Ahajas’s child was soon to be born. The family could not search. But others had searched. At first.

“Was I left among them for so long so that I could study them?” Akin asked silently.

Dichaan rustled his free tentacles in discomfort. “There was a consensus,” he said. “Everyone came to believe it was the right thing to do except us. We’ve never been alone that way before. Others were surprised that we didn’t accept the general will, but they were wrong. They were wrong to even want to risk you!”

“My sibling?”

Silence. Sadness. “It remembers you as something there then not there. Nakanj kept you in its thoughts for a while, and the rest of us searched. As soon as we could leave it, we began searching. No one would help us until now.”

“Why now?” Akin asked.

“The people believed you had learned enough. They knew they had deprived you of your sibling.”

“It’s

too late for bonding.” He knew it was.

“Yes.”

“There was a pair of construct siblings here.”

“We know. They’re all right.”

“I saw what they had, how it was for them.” He paused for a moment remembering, longing. “I’ll never have that.” Without realizing it, he had begun to cry.

“Eka, you’ll have something very like it when you mate. Until then, you have us.” Dichaan did not have to be told how little this was. It would be long years before Akin was old enough to mate. And bonding with parents was not the same as bonding with a close sibling. Nothing he had touched was as sweet as that bonding.

Dichaan gave him to Nikanj, and Nikanj coaxed from him all the information he had discovered about plant and animal life, about the salvage pit. This could be given with great speed to an ooloi. It was the work of ooloi to absorb and assimilate information others had gathered. They compared familiar forms of life with what had been or should be. They detected changes and found new forms of life that could be understood, assembled, and used as they were needed. Males and females went to the ooloi with caches of biological information. The ooloi took the information and gave in exchange intense pleasure. The taking and the giving were one act.

Akin had experienced mild versions of this exchange with Nikanj all his life, but this experience taught him he had known nothing about what an ooloi could take and give until now. Locked to Nikanj, he forgot for a time the pain of being denied bonding with his sibling.

When he was able to think again, he understood why people treasured the ooloi. Males and females did not collect information only to please the ooloi or get pleasure from them. They collected it because the collecting felt necessary to them and pleased them.

But, still, they did know that at some point an ooloi must take the information and coordinate it so that the people could use it. At some point, an ooloi must give them the sensation that only an ooloi could give. Even Humans were vulnerable to this enticement. They could not deliberately gather the kind of specific biological information the ooloi wanted, but they could share with an ooloi all that they had recently eaten, breathed, or absorbed through their skins. They could share any changes in their bodies since their last contact with the ooloi. They did not understand what they gave the ooloi. But they knew what the ooloi gave them. Akin understood exactly what he was giving to Nikanj. And for the first time, he began to understand what an ooloi could give him. It did not take the place of an ongoing closeness like Amma’s and Shkaht’s. Nothing could do that. But this was better than anything he had ever known. It was an easing of pain for now and a foreshadowing of healing for the distant, adult future.

Sometime later, Akin became aware again of the three Humans. They were sitting on the ground talking to one another. On the hill behind them, the hill that concealed them from the salvage camp, Gabe stood. Apparently, none of the Humans had seen him yet. All the Oankali must be aware of him. He was watching Tate, no doubt focusing on her yellow hair.

“Don’t say anything,” Nikanj told him silently. “Let them talk.”

“He’s her mate,” Akin whispered aloud. “He’s afraid she’ll come with us and leave him.”

“Yes.”

“Let me go and get him.”

“No, Eka.”

“He’s a friend. He took me all around the hills. It was because of him that I had so much information to give you.”

“He’s a resister. I won’t give him the chance to use you as a hostage. You don’t realize how valuable you are.”

“He wouldn’t do it.”

“What if he simply picked you up and stepped over the hill and called his friends. There are guns in that camp, aren’t there?”

Silence. Gabe might do such a thing if he thought he was losing both Akin and Tate. He might. Just as Tino’s father had gathered his friends and killed so many even though he believed nothing he could do would bring Tino back or even properly avenge him.

“Come with us!” Lilith was saying. “You like kids? Have some of your own. Teach them everything you know about what Earth used to be.”

“That’s not what you used to say,” Tate said softly.

Lilith nodded. “I used to think you resisters would find an answer. I hoped you would. But, Jesus, your only answer has been to steal kids from us. The same kids you’re too good to have yourselves. What’s the point?”

“We thought

we thought they would be able to have children without an ooloi.”

Lilith took a deep breath. “No one does it without the ooloi. They’ve seen to that.”

“I can’t come back to them.”

“It’s not bad,” Tino said. “It’s not what I thought.”

“I know what it is! I know exactly what it is. So does Gabe. And I don’t think anything I could say would make him go through that again.”

“Call him,” Lilith said. “He’s there on the hill.”

Tate looked up, saw Gabe. She stood up. “I have to go.”

“Tate!” Lilith said urgently.

Tate looked back at her.

“Bring him to us. Let’s talk. What harm can it do?”

But Tate would not. Akin could see that she would not. “Tate,” he called to her.

She looked at him, then looked away quickly.

“I’ll do what I said I would,” he told her. “I don’t forget things.”

She came over to him, and kissed him. The fact that Nikanj was still holding him seemed not to bother her.

“If you ask,” Nikanj said, “my parents will come from the ship. They haven’t found other Human mates.”

She looked at Nikanj but did not speak to it. She walked away up the hill and over it, not stopping even to speak to Gabe. He followed her, and both disappeared over the hill.

1

The boy wanders too much,” Dichaan said as he sat sharing a meal with Tino. “It’s too early for the wandering phase of his life to begin.” Dichaan ate with his fingers from a large salad of fruits and vegetables that he had prepared himself. Only he knew best what he felt like eating and exactly what his current nutritional needs were.

Tino ate a corn and bean dish and had beside him a sliced melon with sweet orange flesh and dishes of fried plantains and roasted nuts. He was, Dichaan thought, paying more attention to his food than to what Dichaan was saying.

“Tino, listen to me!”

“I hear.” The man swallowed and licked his lips. “He’s twenty, ‘Chaan. If he weren’t showing some independence by now, I would be the one who was worried.”

“No.” Dichaan rustled his tentacles. “His Human appearance is deceiving you. His twenty years are like

like twelve Human years. Less in some ways. He isn’t fertile now. He won’t be until his metamorphosis is complete.”

“Four or five more years?”

“Perhaps. Where does he go, Tino?”

“I won’t tell you. He’s asked me not to.”

Dichaan focused sharply on him. “I haven’t wanted to follow him.”

“Don’t follow him. He isn’t doing any harm.”

“I’m his only same-sex parent. I should understand him better. I don’t because his Human inheritance makes him do things that I don’t expect.”

“What would a twenty-year-old Oankali be doing?”

“Developing an affinity for one of the sexes. Beginning to know what it would become.”

“He knows that. He doesn’t know how he’ll look, but he knows he’ll become male.”

“Yes.”

“Well, a twenty-year-old Human male in a place like this would be exploring and hunting and chasing girls and showing off. He’d be trying to see to it that everyone knew he was a man and not a kid anymore. That’s what I was doing.”

“Akin is still a kid, as you say.”

“He doesn’t look like one, in spite of his small size. And he probably doesn’t feel like one. And whether he’s fertile or not, he’s damned interested in girls. And they don’t seem to mind.”

“Nikanj said he would go through a phase of quasi-Human sexuality.”

Tino laughed. “This must be it, then.”

“Later he’ll want an ooloi.”

“Yeah. I can understand that, too.”

Dichaan hesitated. He had come to the question he most wanted to ask, and he knew Tino would not appreciate his asking. “Does he go to the resisters, Tino? Are they the reason for his wandering?”

Tino looked startled, then angry. “If you knew, why did you ask?”

“I didn’t know. I guessed. He must stop!”

“No.”

“They could kill him, Tino! They kill each other so easily!”

“They know him. They look after him. And he doesn’t go far.”

“You mean they know him as a construct man?”

“Yes. He’s picked up some of their languages. But he hasn’t hidden his identity from them. His size disarms them. Nobody that small could be dangerous, they think. On the other hand, that means he’s had to fight a few times. Some guys think if he’s small, he’s weak, and if he’s weak, he’s fair game.”

“Tino, he is too valuable for this. He’s teaching us what a Human-born male can be. There are still so few like him because we’re too unsure to form a consensus—”

“Then learn from him! Let him alone and learn!”

“Learn what? That he enjoys the company of resisters? That he enjoys fighting?”

“He doesn’t enjoy fighting. He had to learn to do it in self-defense, that’s all. And as for the resisters, he says he has to know them, has to understand them. He says they’re part of him.”

“What is there still for him to learn?”

Tino straightened his back and stared at Dichaan. “Does he know everything about the Oankali?”

“

no.” Dichaan let his head and body tentacles hang limp. “I’m sorry. The resisters don’t seem very complex—except biologically.”

“Yet they resist. They would rather die than come here and live easy, pain-free lives with you.”

Dichaan put his food aside and focused a cone of head tentacles on Tino. “Is your life pain-free?”

“ Sometimes—biologically.”

He did not like Dichaan to touch him. It had taken Dichaan a while to realize that this was not because Dichaan was Oankali, but because he was male. He touched hands with or threw an arm around other Human males, but Dichaan’s maleness disturbed him. He had finally gone to Lilith for help in understanding this.

“You’re one of his mates,” she had told him solemnly. “Believe me, ‘Chaan, he never expected to have a male mate. Nikanj was difficult enough for him to get used to.”

Dichaan didn’t see that Tino had found it difficult to get used to Nikanj. People got used to Nikanj very quickly. And in the long, unforgettable group matings, Tino had not seemed to have any difficulty with anyone. Though afterward, he did tend to avoid Dichaan. Yet Lilith did not avoid Ahajas.

Dichaan got up from his platform, left his salad, and went to Tino. The man started to draw back, but Dichaan took his arms.

“Let me try to understand you, Chkah. How many children have we had together? Be still.”

Tino sat still and allowed Dichaan to touch him with a few long, slender head tentacles. They had had six children together. Three boys from Ahajas and three girls from Lilith. The old pattern.

“You chose to come here,” Dichaan said. “And you’ve chosen to stay. I’ve been very glad to have you here—a Human father for the children and a Human male to balance group mating. A partner in every sense. Why does it hurt you to stay here?”

“How could it not hurt?” Tino asked softly. “And how could you not know? I’m a traitor to my people. Everything I do here is an act of betrayal. Someday, my people won’t exist at all, and I will have helped their destroyers. I’ve betrayed my parents

everyone.” His voice had all but vanished even before he finished speaking. His stomach hurt him, and he was developing a pain in his head. He got very bad pains in his head sometimes. And he would not tell Nikanj. He would go away by himself and suffer. If someone found him, he might curse them. He would not struggle against help, though.

Dichaan moved closer to the platform on which Tino sat. He penetrated the flesh’ of the platform—of the Lo entity—and asked it to send Nikanj. It liked doing such things. Nikanj always pleasured it when it passed along such a message.

“Chkah, does Lilith feel the way you do?” he asked Tino.

“Do you really not know the answer to that?”

“I know she did at first. But she knows that resisters’ genes are just as available to us as any other Human genes. She knows there are no resisters, living or dead, who are not already parents to construct children. The difference between them and her—and you—is that you have decided to act as parents.”

“Does Lilith really believe that?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

Tino looked away, head throbbing. “I guess I believe it. But it doesn’t matter. The resisters haven’t betrayed themselves or their Humanity. They haven’t helped you do what you’re doing. They may not be able to stop you, but they haven’t helped you.”

“If all Humans were like them, our construct children would be much less Human, no matter how they looked. They would know only what we could teach them of Humans. Would that be better?”

“I tell myself it wouldn’t,” Tino said. “I tell myself there’s some justification for what I’m doing. Most of the time, I think I’m lying. I wanted kids. I wanted

the way Nikanj makes me feel. And to get what I wanted, I’ve betrayed everything I once was.”

Dichaan moved Tino’s food off his platform and told him to lie down. Tino only looked at him. Dichaan rustled his body tentacles uncomfortably. “Nikanj says you prefer to endure your pain. It says you need to make yourself suffer so that you can feel that your people are avenged and you’ve paid your debt to them.”

“That’s shit!”

Nikanj came through a wall from the outside. It looked at the two of them and shot them a bad smell.

“He insists on hurting himself,” Dichaan said. “I wonder if he hasn’t convinced Akin to hurt himself, too.”

“Akin does as he pleases!” Tino said. “He understands what I feel better than either of you could, but it’s not what he feels. He has his own ideas.”

“You aren’t part of his body,” Nikanj said, pushing him backward so that he would lie down. He did lie down this time. “But you’re part of his thoughts. You’ve done more than Lilith would have to make him feel that the resisters have been wronged and betrayed.”

“Resisters have been wronged and betrayed,” Tino said. “I never told Akin that, though. I never had to. He saw it for himself.”

“You’re working on another ulcer,” Nikanj said.

“So what?”

“You want to die. And yet you want to live. You love your children and your parents and that is a terrible conflict. You even love us—but you don’t think you should.” It climbed onto the platform and lay down alongside Tino. Dichaan touched the platform with his head tentacles, encouraging it to grow, to broaden and make room for him. He was not needed, but he wanted to know firsthand what happened to Tino.

“I remember Akin telling me about a Human who bled to death from ulcers,” he said to Nikanj. “One of his captors.”

“Yes. He gave the man’s identity. I found the ooloi who had conditioned the man and learned that he had had ulcers since adolescence. The ooloi tried to keep him for his own sake, but the man wouldn’t stay.”

“What was his name?” Tino demanded.

“Joseph Tilden. I’m going to put you to sleep, Tino.”

“I don’t care,” Tino muttered. After a time, he drifted off to sleep.

“What did you say to him?” Nikanj asked Dichaan.

“I asked him about Akin’s disappearances.”

“Ah. You should have asked Lilith.”

“I thought Tino would know.”

“He does. And it disturbs him very much. He thinks Akin is more loyal to Humanity than Tino himself. He doesn’t understand why Akin is so focused on the resisters.”

“I didn’t realize how focused he was,” Dichaan admitted. “I should have.”

“The people deprived Akin of closeness with his sibling and handed him a compensating obsession. He knows this.”

“What will he do?”

“Chkah, he’s your child, too. What do you think he’ll do?”

“Try to save them—what’s left of them—from their empty, unnecessary deaths. But how?”

Nikanj did not answer.

“It’s impossible. There’s nothing he can do.”

“Maybe not, but the problem will occupy him until his metamorphosis. Then I hope the other sexes will occupy him.”

“But there must be more to it than that!”

Nikanj smoothed its body tentacles in amusement. “Anything to do with Humans always seems to involve contradictions.” It paused. “Examine Tino. Inside him, so many very different things are working together to keep him alive. Inside his cells, mitochondria, a previously independent form of life, have found a haven and trade their ability to synthesize proteins and metabolize fats for room to live and reproduce. We’re in his cells too now, and the cells have accepted us. One Oankali organism within each cell, dividing with each cell, extending life, and resisting disease. Even before we arrived, they had bacteria living in their intestines and protecting them from other bacteria that would hurt or kill them. They could not exist without symbiotic relationships with other creatures. Yet such relationships frighten them.”

“Nika

” Dichaan deliberately tangled his head tentacles with those of Nikanj. “Nika, we aren’t like mitochondria or helpful bacteria, and they know it.”

Silence.

“You shouldn’t lie to them. It would be better to say nothing.”

“No, it wouldn’t. When we keep quiet, they suppose it’s because the truth is terrible. I think we’re as much symbionts as their mitochondria were originally. They could not have evolved into what they are without mitochondria. Their earth might still be inhabited only by bacteria and algae. Not very interesting.”

“Is Tino going to be all right?”

“No. But I’ll take care of him.”

“Can’t you do something to stop him from hurting himself?”

“I could make him forget some of his past again.”

“No!”

“You know I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t even if I hadn’t seen the pleasant, empty man he was before his memories came back. I wouldn’t do it. I don’t like to tamper with them that way. They lose too much of what I value in them.”

“What will you do, then? You just go on repairing him until finally he leaves us and maybe kills himself?”

“He won’t leave us.”

It meant it would not let him go, could not. Ooloi could be that way when they found a Human they were strongly attracted to. Nikanj certainly could not let Lilith go, no matter how much it let her wander.

“Will Akin be all right?”

“I don’t know.”

Dichaan detached himself from Nikanj and sat up, folding his legs under him. “I’m going to separate him from the resisters.”

“Why?”

“Sooner or later, one of them will kill him. We’ve collected their guns twice since they took him. They always make more, and the new ones are always more effective. Greater range, greater accuracy, greater safety for the Humans using them

Humans are too dangerous. And they’re only one part of him. Let him learn what else he is.”

Nikanj drew its body tentacles in, upset, but it said nothing. If it had favorites among its children, Akin was one of them. It had no same-sex children, and that was a real deprivation. Akin was unique, and when he was at home, he spent much of his time with Nikanj. But Dichaan was still his same-sex parent.

“Not for long, Chkah,” Dichaan said softly. “I won’t keep him from you long. And he’ll bring you all the changes he finds in Chkahichdahk.”

“He always brings me things,” Nikanj whispered. It seemed to relax, accepting Dichaan’s decision. “He goes out of his way to find unusual things to taste and bring back. There’s so little time until he metamorphoses and begins giving all his acquisitions to his mates.”

“A year,” Dichaan said. “I’ll bring him back in only a year.” He lay down again to comfort Nikanj and was not surprised to find that the ooloi needed comfort. It had been upset by the way Tino continually took his frustration and confusion out on his own body. Now it was even more upset. It was to lose a year of Akin’s childhood. In its home with its large family all around, it felt alone and tired.

Dichaan linked himself into the nervous system of the ooloi. He could feel his own deep family bond stimulating Nikanj’s. These bonds expanded and changed over the years, but they did not weaken. And they never failed to capture Nikanj’s most intense interest.

Later Dichaan would tell Lo to signal the ship and have it send a shuttle. Later he would tell Akin it was time for him to learn more about the Oankali side of his heritage.

2

Sometimes it seemed to Akin that his world was made up of tight units of people who treated him kindly or coldly as they chose, but who could not let him in, no matter how much they might want to.

He could remember a time when blending into others seemed not only possible but inevitable—when Tiikuchahk was still unborn and he could reach out and taste it and know it as his closest sibling. Now, though, because he had not been able to bond with it, it was perhaps his least interesting sibling. He had spent as little time as possible with it.

Now it wanted to go to Chkahichdahk with him.

“Let it go and let me stay here,” he had told Dichaan.

“It is alone, too,” Dichaan had answered. “You and it both need to learn more about what you are.”

“I know what I am.”

“Yes. You are my same-sex child, near his metamorphosis.”

Akin had not been able to answer this. It was time for him to listen to Dichaan, learn from him, prepare to be a mature male. He felt strongly inclined to obey.

Yet he had lost himself in the forest for days, resisting the inclination and deeply resenting it each time it returned to nag him.

No one came after him. And no one seemed surprised when he came home. The shuttle had eaten a new clearing waiting for him.

He stood staring at it. It was a great green-shelled thing—a male itself to the degree that the ship-entities could be of one sex or the other. Each one had the capacity to become female. But as long as it received a controlling substance from the body of Chkahichdahk, it would remain small and male. It would extend the reach of Chkahichdahk by investigating planets and moons of solar systems, bringing back information, supplies of minerals, life. It would carry passengers and work with them in exploration. And it would ferry people to the ship and back.

Akin had never been inside one. He would not be allowed to link into one’s nervous system until he was an adult. So much had to wait until he was an adult.

When he was an adult, he could speak for the resisters. Now, his voice could be ignored, would not even be heard without the amplification provided by one of the adult members of his family. He remembered Nikanj’s stories of its own childhood—of being right, knowing it was right, and yet being ignored because it was not adult. Lilith had occasionally been hurt during those years because people did not listen to Nikanj, who knew her better than they did.

Akin would not make Nikanj’s mistake. He had decided that long ago. But now

Why had Dichaan decided to send him to Chkahichdahk? Was it only to keep him out of danger or was there some other reason?

He moved closer to the shuttle, waiting to go inside but wanting first to walk around the thing, look at it, appreciate it with the senses he and the Humans shared.

It looked from every angle like a perfectly symmetrical high hill. Once it was airborne, it would be spherical. Its shell plates would slide around and lock—three layers of them—and nothing would get in or out.

“Akin.”

He looked around without moving his body and saw Ahajas coming from the direction of Lo. Everyone else made some noise when they walked, but Ahajas, larger, taller than almost everyone else, seemed to flow along, sixteen-toed feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. If she did not want to be heard, no one heard her. Females had to be able to hide if possible and to fight if hiding was impossible or useless. Nikanj had said that.

He would not see Nikanj for a year. Perhaps longer.

She came towering over him, then folded herself into a sitting position opposite him the way some Humans used to stoop or kneel to talk to him when he was younger. Now his head and hers were at the same level.

“I wanted to see you before you left. You might not still be a child when you come back.”

“I will be.” He put his hand in among her head tentacles and felt them grasp and penetrate. “I’m still years away from changing.”

“Your body can change faster than you think. The stress of having to adjust to a new environment could make things go more quickly. You should see everyone now.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. You don’t want to leave so you don’t want to say goodbye. You didn’t even go to your resister friends.”

She didn’t smell them on him. He had been particularly embarrassed to realize that she and others knew by scent when he had been with a woman. He washed, of course, but still they knew.

“You should have gone to them. You might change a great deal during your metamorphosis. Humans don’t accept that easily.”

“Lilith?”

“You know better. In spite of the things she says, I’ve never seen her reject one of her children. But would you want to leave without seeing her?”

Silence.

“Come on, Eka.” She released his hand and stood up.

He followed her back to the village, feeling resentful and manipulated.

3

An outdoor feast was arranged for him. The people stopped their activities and came together in the center of the village for him and for Tiikuchahk. Tiikuchahk seemed to enjoy the party, but Akin simply endured it. Margit, who was known to be on the verge of her metamorphosis, came to sit beside him. She was still his favorite sibling, although she spent more time with her own paired sibling. She held out a gray hand to him, and he almost took it between his own before he noticed what she was showing him. She had always had too many fingers for a Human-born child—seven on each hand. But the hand she held out to him now had only five long, slender, gray fingers.

He stared at her, then carefully took the offered hand and examined it. There was no wound, no scars.

“How

?” he asked.

“I woke up this morning, and they were gone. Nothing left but the nail and some shriveled, dead skin.”

“Did your hand hurt?”

“It felt fine. It still does. I’m sleepy, but that’s all so far.” She hesitated. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”

He hugged her and was barely able to stop himself from crying. “I won’t even know you when I come back. You’ll be someone else, probably mated and pregnant.”

“I may be mated and pregnant, but you’ll know me. I’ll see to that!”

He only looked at her. Everyone changed, but, irrationally, he did not want her to change.

“What is it?” Tiikuchahk asked.

Akin did not understand why he did it, but after looking to see that it was all right with Margit, he took her hand and showed it to Tiikuchahk.

Tiikuchahk, who looked a great deal more Human than Margit did in spite of being Oankali-born, began to cry. It kissed her hand and let it go sadly. “Things are going to change too much while we’re gone,” it said, silent tears sliding down its gray face. “We’ll be strangers when we come back.” Its few small sensory tentacles tightened into lumps against its body, making it look the way Akin felt.

Now others wanted to know what was wrong, and Lilith came to them, looking as though she already knew.

“Margit?” she said softly.

Margit held up her hands and smiled. “I thought so,” Lilith said. “Now this is your party, too. Come on.” She led Margit away to show others.

Akin and Tiikuchahk got up together without speaking. They did sometimes act in unison in the way of paired siblings, but the phenomenon always startled them and somehow never gave the comfort it seemed to give to sibling pairs who had bonded properly in infancy. Now, though, they moved together toward Ayre, their oldest sister. She was a construct adult—the oldest construct adult in Lo—and she had been watching them, training several head tentacles on them as she sat talking to one of Leah’s Oankali-born sons. She had been born in Chkahichdahk. She had passed her metamorphosis on Earth, mated, and borne several children. The things that they still faced, she had already survived.

“Sit with me,” Ayre said as they came up to her. “Sit here.” She positioned them on either side of her. She immediately tangled her long head tentacles with Tiikuchahk’s. Akin had come to find having only one true sensory tentacle, and that one in his mouth, very inconvenient. Resisters liked it because they did not have to look at it, but it inhibited communication with Oankali and constructs. He had quickly grown too large to be held in someone’s arms.

But Ayre, being Ayre, simply took him under one arm and pulled him against her so that it was easy for him to link with her as she used her body tentacles to link with him.

“We don’t know what will happen to us,” both he and Tiikuchahk said in silent unison. It was a cry of fear from both of them and, for Akin, also a cry of frustration. Time was being stolen from him. He knew the people and languages of a Chinese resister village, an Igbo village, three Spanish-speaking villages made up of people from many countries, a Hindu village, and two villages of Swahili-speaking people from different countries. So many resisters. Yet there were so many more. He had been driven out of, of all things, a village of English-speaking people because he was browner than the villagers were. He did not understand this, and he had not dared to ask anyone in Lo. But still, there were resisters he had never seen, resisters whose ideas he had not heard, resisters who believed their only hope was to steal construct children or to die as a species. There were stories now of a village whose people had gathered in their village square and drunk poison. No one Akin had talked to knew the name of this village, but everyone had heard about it.

Would there be any Humans left to save when he was finally old enough to have his opinions respected?

And would he still look Human enough to persuade them?

Or was all that foolishness? Would he truly be able to help them at all, no matter what happened? The Oankali would not stop him from doing anything they did not consider harmful. But if there were no consensus, they would not help him. And he could not help the Humans alone.

He could not, for instance, give them a ship entity. As long as they remained Human enough to satisfy their beliefs, they could not communicate with a ship. Some of them insisted on believing the ships were not alive—that they were metal things that anyone could learn to control. They had not understood at all when Akin tried to explain that ships controlled themselves. You either joined with them, shared their experiences, and let them share yours, or there was no trade. And without trade, the ships ignored your existence.

“You know you must help each other,” Ayre said.

Akin and Tiikuchahk drew back reflexively.

“You can’t be what you should have been, but you can help each other.” Akin could not miss the certainty Ayre felt. “You’re both alone. You’ll both be strangers. And you’re like one pea cut in half. Let yourselves depend on each other a little.”

Neither Akin nor Tiikuchahk responded.

“Is a pea cut in half one wounded thing or two?” she asked softly.

“We can’t heal each other,” Tiikuchahk said.

“Metamorphosis will heal you, and it may be closer than you think.”

And they were afraid again. Afraid of changing, afraid of returning to a changed, unrecognizable home. Afraid of going to a place even less their own than the one they were leaving. Ayre sought to divert them. “Ti, why do you want to go to Chkahichdahk?” she asked.

Tiikuchahk did not want to answer the question. Both Akin and Ayre received only a strong negative feeling from it.

“There are no resisters there,” Ayre said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

Tiikuchahk said nothing.

“Has Ahajas said you would be female?” Ayre asked.

“Not yet.”

“Do you want to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think you might want to be male?”

“Maybe.”

“If you want to be male, you should stay here. Let Akin go. Spend your time with Dichaan and Tino and with your sisters. Male parents, female siblings. Your body will know how to respond.”

“I want to see Chkahichdahk.”

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

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

“Then you will probably be female.”

Sadness. “I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

interesting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She seemed tired. “I was thinking about Margit growing up, you and Ti going

. But you should go.” She took his hand and held it. “You should know the Oankali part of yourselves, too. But I can hardly stand the thought of losing what may be the last year of your childhood.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Make it useful!”

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

“Do you?”

“I have ideas.”

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

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

“Of course.”

“Now.”

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it ended.

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

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

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

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

“But—”

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

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

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

“But

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

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

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

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

“There will be.”

“When?”

“Eka

when we feel more secure about you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But we will be Oankali. They will only be

something we consumed.”

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

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

“I’m what Nikanj made me.”

“What has it consumed?”

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

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

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

“They live, Eka. In you.”

“Let them live in themselves!”

Silence.

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

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

“I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

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

“What do you think I will destroy?”

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

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

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

“It should have another chance.”

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said. “Do it. It hurts, and you won’t like it, but there’s something more in it than pain, something you won’t feel until afterward. I think maybe

maybe it’s a shadow of the way it will be for us when we’re adult and able to perceive directly. It’s worth what it costs, worth reaching for.”

5

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

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

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

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

“This is a bad way to bring Humans in,” Dichaan was saying as they walked. “Most of them are disturbed at being so closed in. If you ever have to bring any in, have the shuttle take you as close as possible to one of the true corridors and get them into that corridor as quickly as possible. They don’t like the flesh movement either. Try to keep them from seeing it.”

“They see it at home,” Tiikuchahk said.

“Not this massive kind of movement. Lilith says it makes her think of being swallowed alive by some huge animal. At least she can stand it. Some Humans go completely out of control and hurt themselves—or try to hurt us.” He paused. “Here’s a true corridor. Now we ride.”

Dichaan led them to a tilio feeding station and chose one of the large, flat animals. The three of them climbed onto it, and Dichaan touched several head tentacles to it. The animal was curious and sent up pseudotentacles to investigate them.

“This one’s never carried an Earth-born construct before,” Dichaan said. “Taste it. Let it taste you. It’s harmless.”

It reminded Akin of an agouti or an otter, although it was brighter than either of those animals. It carried them through other riders and through pedestrians—Oankali, construct, and Human. Dichaan had told it where he wanted to go, and it found its way without trouble. And it enjoyed meeting strange-tasting visitors.

“Will we have these animals on Earth eventually?” Tiikuchahk asked.

“We’ll have them when we need them,” Dichaan said. “All our ooloi know how to assemble them.”

Assemble was the right word, Akin thought. The tilio had been fashioned from the combined genes of several animals. Humans put animals in cages or tied them to keep them from straying. Oankali simply bred animals who did not want to stray and who enjoyed doing what they were intended to do. They were also pleased to be rewarded with new sensations or pleasurable familiar sensations. This one seemed particularly interested in Akin, and he spent the journey telling it about Earth and about himself—giving it simple sensory impressions. Its delight with these gave him as much pleasure as he gave the tilio. When they reached the end of their journey, Akin hated to leave the animal. Dichaan and Tiikuchahk waited patiently while he detached himself from it and gave it a final touch of farewell.

“I liked it,” he said unnecessarily as he followed Dichaan through a wall and up a slope toward another level.

Without turning, Dichaan focused a cone of head tentacles on him. “It paid a great deal of attention to you. More than to either of us. Earth animals pay attention to you, too, don’t they?”

“They let me touch them sometimes, even let me taste them. But if someone else is with me, they run away.”

“You can train here to look after animals—to understand their bodies and keep them healthy.”

“Ooloi work?”

“You can be trained to do it. Everything except controlling their breeding. And ooloi must mix their young.”

Of course. You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction—controlling it absolutely. But perhaps Akin could learn something that would be of use to the resisters. And he liked animals.

“Would I be able to work with shuttles or with Chkahichdahk?” he asked.

“If you choose to, after you change. There will be a need for people to do that kind of work during your generation.”

“You told me once that people who work with the ship had to look different—really different.”

“That change won’t be needed on Earth for several generations.”

“Working with animals won’t affect the way I look at all?”

“Not at all.”

“I want to do it then.” After a few steps, he looked back at Tiikuchahk. “What will you do?”

“Find us an ooloi subadult,” it said.

He would have walked faster if he had known the way. He wanted to get away from Tiikuchahk. The thought of it finding an ooloi—even an immature one—to unite the two of them, even briefly, was disturbing, almost disgusting.

“I meant what work will you do?”

“Gather knowledge. Collect information on Toaht and Akjai changes that have taken place since Dinso settled on Earth. I don’t think I would be allowed to do much more. You know what your sex will be. It’s as though you were never really eka. But I am.”

“You won’t be prevented from learning work,” Dichaan said. “You won’t be taken seriously, but no one will stop you from doing what you choose. And if you want help, people will help you.”

“I’ll gather knowledge,” Tiikuchahk insisted. “Maybe while I’m doing that, I’ll see some work that I want to do.”

“This is Lo aj Toaht,” Dichaan said, leading them into one of the vast living areas. Here grew great treelike structures bigger than any tree Akin had ever seen on Earth. Lilith had said they were as big as high-rise office buildings, but that had meant nothing to Akin. They were living quarters, storage space, internal support structures, and providers of food, clothing, and other desired substances such as paper, waterproof covering, and construction materials. They were not trees but parts of the ship. Their flesh was the same as the rest of the ship’s flesh.

When Dichaan touched his head tentacles to what appeared to be the bark of one of them, it opened as walls opened at home, and inside was a familiar room, empty of resister-style furniture but containing several platforms grown for sitting or for holding containers of food. The walls and platforms were all a pale yellow-brown.

As the three of them entered, the wall on the opposite side of the room opened, and three Oankali Akin had never seen before came in.

Akin drew air over his tongue and his sense of smell told him that the male and female newcomers were Lo—close relatives, in fact. The ooloi must be their mate. There was no scent of family familiarity to it at all as there would have been if it had been ooan Dichaan. These were not parents, then. But they were relatives. Dichaan’s brother and sister and their ooloi mate, perhaps.

The adults came together silently, head and body tentacles tangling together, locking together in intense feeling. After a time, probably after feelings and communications had slowed, cooled to something a child could tolerate, they drew Tiikuchahk in, handling and examining it with great curiosity. It examined them as well and made their acquaintance. Akin envied it its head tentacles. When the adults released it and took him into their midst, he could taste only one of them at a time, and there was no time to savor them all as he wished. Children and resisters were easier to cope with.

Yet these people welcomed him. They could see themselves in him and see his alien Humanity. The latter fascinated them, and they chose to take the time to perceive themselves through his senses.

The ooloi was particularly fascinated by him. Taishokaht its name was—Jahtaishokahtlo lei Surohahwahj aj Toaht. He had never touched a Jah ooloi before. It was shorter and stockier than ooloi from the Kaal or Lo. In fact, it was built rather like Akin himself, although it was taller than Akin. Everyone was taller than Akin. There was a feeling of intensity and confidence to the ooloi and a feeling almost of humor—as though he amused it very much, but it liked him.

“You don’t know what an intricate mix you are,” it told him silently. “If you’re the prototype for Human-born males, there are going to be a great many of us who settle for daughters only from our Human mates. And that would be a loss.”

“There are several others now,” Dichaan told it aloud. “Study him. Maybe you’ll mix the first for Lo Toaht.”

“I don’t know whether I’d want to.”

Akin, still in contact with it, broke the contact and drew back to look at it. It wanted to. It wanted to badly. “Study me all you want,” he said. “But share what you learn with me as much as you can.”

“Trade, Eka,” it said with amusement. “I’ll be interested to see how much you can perceive.”

Akin was not sure he liked the ooloi. It had a soft, paper-dry voice and an attitude that irritated Akin. The ooloi did not care that Akin was clearly going to be male and was close to metamorphosis. To it, he was eka: sexless child. Child trying to make adult bargains. Amusing. But that was what Dichaan had promised Tiikuchahk. They would be helped and taught with a certain lack of seriousness. In a sense, they would be humored. Children who lived in the safety of the ship did not have to grow up as quickly as those on Earth. Except for young ooloi who underwent two metamorphoses with their subadult years between, everyone was allowed a long, easy childhood. Even the ooloi were not seriously challenged until they proved they were to be ooloi—until they reached the subadult stage. No one abducted them in infancy or carried them around by their arms and legs. No one threatened them. They did not have to keep themselves alive among well-meaning but ignorant resisters.

Akin looked at Dichaan. “How can it be good for me to be treated as though I were younger than I am?” he asked. “What lesson is condescension supposed to teach me about this group of my people?”

He would not have spoken so bluntly if Lilith had been with him. She insisted on more respect for adults. Dichaan, though, simply answered his questions as he had expected. “Teach them who you are. Now they only know what you are. Both of you.” He focused for a moment on Tiikuchahk. “You’re here to teach as well as to learn.” Which was just about what Taishokaht had said, but Taishokaht had said it as though to a much younger child.

At that moment, for no reason he could understand, Tiikuchahk touched him, and they fell into their grating, dissonant near-synchronization.

“This is what we are, too,” he said to Taishokaht—only to hear the same words coming from Tiikuchahk. “This is what we need help with!”

The three Oankali tasted them, then drew back. The female, Suroh, drew her body tentacles tight against her and seemed to speak for all of them.

“We heard about that trouble. It’s worse than I thought.”

“It was wrong to separate them,” Dichaan said softly.

Silence. What was there to say? The thing had been done by consensus years before. Adults of Earth and Chkahichdahk had made the decision.

“I know a Tiej family with an ooloi child,” Suroh said. There could be no boy children, no girl children among the Oankali, but a subadult ooloi was often referred to as an ooloi child. Akin had heard the words all his life. Now adults would find an ooloi child for him and for Tiikuchahk. The thought made him shudder.

“My closest siblings have an ooloi child,” Taishokaht said. “It’s young, though. Just through its first metamorphosis.”

“Too young,” Dichaan said. “We need one who understands itself. Shall I stay and help choose?”

“We’ll choose,” the male said, smoothing his body tentacles flat against his skin. “There’s more than one problem to be solved here. You’ve brought us something very interesting.”

“I’ve brought you my children,” Dichaan said quietly.

At once the three of them touched him, reassured him directly, drawing Akin and Tiikuchahk in to let him know that they had a home here, that they would be cared for.

Akin wanted desperately to go back to his true home. When food was served, he did not eat. Food did not interest him. When Dichaan left, it was all Akin could do to keep himself from following and demanding to be taken home to Earth. Dichaan would not have taken him. And no one present would have understood why he was making the gesture. Nikanj would understand, but Nikanj was back on Earth. Akin looked at the Toaht ooloi and saw that it was paying no attention to him.

Alone, and more lonely than he had been since the raiders abducted him, he lay down on his platform and went to sleep.

6

Are you afraid?” Taishokaht asked. “Humans are always afraid of them.”

“I’m not afraid,” Akin said. They were in a large, dark, open area. The walls glowed softly with the body heat of Chkahichdahk. There was only body heat to see by here, deep inside the ship. Living quarters and travel corridors were above—or Akin thought of their direction as above. He had passed through areas where gravity was less, even where it was absent. Words like up and down were meaningless, but Akin could not keep himself from thinking them.

He could see Taishokaht by its body heat—less than his own and greater than that of Chkahichdahk. And he could see the other person in the room.

“I’m not afraid,” he repeated. “Can this one hear?”

“No. Let it touch you. Then taste the limb it offers.”

Akin stepped toward what his sense of smell told him was an ooloi. His sight told him it was large and caterpillarlike, covered with smooth plates that made a pattern of bright and dark as body heat escaped between the plates rather than through them. From what Akin had heard, this ooloi could seal itself within its shell and lose little or no air or body heat. It could slow its body processes and induce suspended animation so that it could survive even drifting in space. Others like it had been the first to explore the war-ruined Earth.

It had mouth parts vaguely like those of some terrestrial insects. Even if it had possessed ears and vocal cords, it could not have formed anything close to Human or Oankali speech.

Yet it was as Oankali as Dichaan or Nikanj. It was as Oankali as any intelligent being constructed by an ooloi to incorporate the Oankali organelle within its cells. As Oankali as Akin himself.

It was what the Oankali had been, one trade before they found Earth, one trade before they used their long memories and their vast store of genetic material to construct speaking, hearing, bipedal children. Children they hoped would seem more acceptable to Human tastes. The spoken language, an ancient revival, had been built in genetically. The first Human captives awakened had been used to stimulate the first bipedal children to talk—to “remember” how to talk.

Now, most of the caterpillarlike Oankali were Akjai like the ooloi that stood before Akin. It or its children would leave the vicinity of Earth physically unchanged, carrying nothing of Earth or Humanity with it except knowledge and memory.

The Akjai extended one slender forelimb. Akin took the limb between his hands as though it were a sensory arm—and it seemed to be just that, although Akin learned in the first instant of contact that this ooloi had six sensory limbs instead of only two.

Its language of touch was the one Akin had first felt before his birth. The familiarity of this comforted him, and he tasted the Akjai, eager to understand the mixture of alienness and familiarity.

There was a long period of getting to know the ooloi and understanding that it was as interested in him as he was in it. At some point—Akin was not certain when—Taishokaht joined them. Akin had to use sight to find out for certain whether Taishokaht had touched him or touched the Akjai. There was an utter blending of the two ooloi—greater than any blending Akin had perceived between paired siblings. This, he thought, must be what adults achieved when they reached for a consensus on some controversial subject. But if it was, how did they continue to think at all as individuals? Taishokaht and Kohj, the Akjai, seemed completely blended, one nervous system communicating within itself as any nervous system did.

“I don’t understand,” he communicated.

And, just for an instant, they showed him, brought him into that incredible unity. He could not even manage terror until the moment had ended.

How did they not lose themselves? How was it possible to break apart again? It was as though two containers of water had been poured together, then separated—each molecule returned to its original container.

He must have signaled this. The Akjai responded. “Even at your stage of growth, Eka, you can perceive molecules. We perceive subatomic particles. Making and breaking this contact is no more difficult for us than clasping and releasing hands is for Humans.”

“Is that because you’re ooloi?” Akin asked.

“Ooloi perceive and, within reproductive cells, manipulate. Males and females only perceive. You’ll understand soon.”

“Can I learn to care for animals while I’m so

limited?”

“You can learn a little. You can begin. First, though, because you don’t have adult perception, you must learn to trust us. What we let you feel, briefly, wasn’t such a deep union. We use it for teaching or for reaching a consensus. You must learn to tolerate it a little early. Can you do that?”

Akin shuddered. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll try to help you. Shall I?”

“If you don’t, I won’t be able to do it. It scares me.”

“I know that. You won’t be so afraid now.”

It was delicately controlling his nervous system, stimulating the release of certain endorphins in his brain—in effect, causing him to drug himself into pleasurable relaxation and acceptance. His body was refusing to allow him to panic. As he was enfolded in a union that felt more like drowning than joining, he kept jerking toward panic only to have the emotion smothered in something that was almost pleasure. He felt as though something were crawling down his throat and he could not manage a reflexive cough to bring it up.

The Akjai could have helped him more, could have suppressed all discomfort. It did not, Akin realized, because it was already teaching. Akin strove to control his own feelings, strove to accept the self-dissolving closeness.

Gradually, he did accept it. He discovered he could, with a shift of attention, perceive as the Akjai perceived—a silent, mainly tactile world. It could see—see far more than Akin could in the dim room. It could see most forms of electromagnetic radiation. It could look at a wall and see great differences in the flesh, where Akin saw none. And it knew—could see—the ship’s circulatory system. It could see, somehow, the nearest outside plates. As it happened, the nearest outside plates were some distance above their heads where Akin’s Earth-trained senses told him the sky should be. The Akjai knew all this and more simply by sight. Tactilely, though, it was in constant contact with Chkahichdahk. If it chose to, it could know what the ship was doing in any part of the huge shipbody at any time. In fact, it did know. It simply did not care because nothing required its attention. All the many small things that had gone wrong or that seemed about to go wrong were being attended to by others. The Akjai could know this through the contact of its many limbs with the floor.

The startling thing was, Taishokaht knew it, too. The thirty-two toes of its two bare feet told it exactly what the Akjai’s limbs told it. He had never noticed Oankali doing this at home. He had certainly never done it himself with his very Human, five-toed feet.

He was no longer afraid.

No matter how closely he was joined to the two ooloi, he was aware of himself. He was equally aware of them and their bodies and their sensations. But, somehow, they were still themselves, and he was still himself. He felt as though he were a floating, disembodied mind, like the souls some resisters spoke of in their churches, as though he looked from some impossible angle and saw everything, including his own body as !t leaned against the Akjai. He tried to move his left hand and saw it move. He tried to move one of the Akjai’s limbs, and once he understood the nerves and musculature, the limb moved.

“You see?” the Akjai said, its touches feeling oddly like Akin touching his own skin. “People don’t lose themselves. You can do this.”

He could. He examined the Akjai’s body, comparing it to Taishokaht’s and to his own. “How can Dinso and Toaht people give up such strong, versatile bodies to trade with Humans?” he asked.

Both ooloi were amused. “You only ask that because you don’t know your own potential,” the Akjai told him. “Now I’ll show you the structure of a tilio. You don’t know it even as completely as a child can. When you understand it, I’ll show you the things that go wrong with it and what you can do about them.”

7

Akin lived with the Akjai as it traveled around the ship. The Akjai taught him, withholding nothing that he could absorb. He learned to understand not only the animals of Chkahichdahk and Earth, but the plants. When he asked for information on the resisters’ bodies, the Akjai found several visiting Dinso ooloi. It learned in a matter of minutes all that they could teach it. Then it fed the information to Akin in a long series of lessons.

“Now you know more than you realize,” the Akjai said when it had given its information on Humans. “You have information you won’t even be able to use until after your own metamorphosis.”

“I know more than I thought I could learn,” Akin said. “I know enough to heal ulcers in a resister’s stomach or cuts or puncture wounds in flesh and in organs.”

“Eka, I don’t think they’ll let you.”

“Yes, they will. At least, they will until I change. Some will.”

“What do you want for them, Eka? What would you give them?”

“What you have. What you are.” Akin sat with his back against the Akjai’s curved side. It could touch him with several limbs and give him one sensory limb to signal into. “I want a Human Akjai,” he told it.

“I’ve heard that you did. But your kind can’t exist alongside them. Not separately. You know that.”

Akin took the slender, glowing limb from his mouth and looked at it. He liked the Akjai. It had been his teacher for months now. It had taken him into parts of the ship that most people never saw. It had enjoyed his fascination and deliberately suggested new things that he might be interested in learning. He was, it said, more energetic than the older students it had had.

It was a friend. Perhaps he could talk to it, reach it as he had not been able to reach his family. Perhaps he could trust it. He tasted the limb again.

“I want to make a place for them,” he said. “I know what will happen to Earth. But there are other worlds. We could change the second one or the fourth one—make one of them more like Earth. A few of us could do it. I’ve heard that there is nothing living on either world.”

“There’s nothing living there. The fourth world could be more easily transformed than the second.”

“It could be done?”

“Yes.”

“It was so obvious

. I thought I might be wrong, thought I had missed something.”

“Time, Akin.”

“Get things started and turn them over to the resisters. They need metal, machinery, things they can control.”

“No.”

Akin focused his whole attention on the Akjai. It was not saying, no, the Humans could not have their machines. Its signals did not communicate that at all. It was saying, no, Humans did not need machines.

“We can make it possible for them to live on the fourth world,” it said. “They wouldn’t need machines. If they wanted them, they would have to build them themselves.”

“I would help. I would do whatever was needed.”

“When you change, you’ll want to mate.”

“I know. But—”

“You don’t know. The urge is stronger than you can understand now.”

“It’s

” He projected amusement. “It’s pretty strong now. I know it will be different after metamorphosis. If I have to mate, I have to mate. I’ll find people who’ll work with me on this. There must be others that I can convince.”

“Find them now.”

Startled, Akin said nothing for a moment. Finally he asked, “Do you mean I’m close to metamorphosis now?”

“Closer than you think. But that isn’t what I meant.”

“You agree with me that it can be done? The resisters can be transplanted? Their Human-to-Human fertility can be restored?”

“It’s possible if you can get a consensus. But if you get a consensus, you may find that you’ve chosen your life’s work.”

“Wasn’t that work chosen for me years ago?”

The Akjai hesitated. “I know about that. The Akjai had no part in the decision to leave you so long with the resisters.”

“I didn’t think you had. I’ve never been able to talk about it to anyone I felt had taken part—who had chosen to break me from my nearest sibling.”

“Yet you’ll do the work that was chosen for you?”

“I will. But for the Humans and for the Human part of me. Not for the Oankali.”

“Eka

”

“Shall I show you what I can feel, all I can feel with Tiikuchahk, my nearest sibling? Shall I show you all I’ve ever had with it? All Oankali, all constructs have something that Oankali and constructs came together and decided to deny me.”

“Show me.”

Again Akin was startled. But why? What Oankali would decline a new sensation? He remembered for it all the jarring, tearing dissonance of his relationship with Tiikuchahk. He duplicated the sensations in the Akjai’s body along with the revulsion they made him feel and the need he felt to avoid this person whom he should have been closest to.

“I think it almost wants to be male to avoid any sexual feelings for me,” he finished.

“Keeping you separated was a mistake,” the Akjai agreed. “I can see now why it was done, but it was a mistake.”

Only Akin’s family had ever said that before. They had said it because he was one of them, and it hurt them to see him hurt. It hurt them to see the family unbalanced by paired siblings who had failed to pair. People who had never had close siblings or whose closest siblings had died did not damage the balance as much as close siblings who had failed to bond.

“You should go back to your relatives,” the Akjai said. “Make them find a young ooloi for you and your sibling. You should not go through metamorphosis with so much pain cutting you off from your sibling.”

“Ti was talking about finding a young ooloi before I left to study

with you. I don’t think I could stand to share an ooloi with it.”

“You will,” the Akjai said. “You must. Go back now, Eka. I can feel what you’re feeling, but it doesn’t matter. Some things hurt. Go back and reconcile with your sibling. Then come to me and I’ll find new teachers for you—people who know the processes of changing a cold, dry, lifeless world into something Humans might survive on.”

The Akjai straightened its body and broke contact with him. When Akin stood still, looking at it, not wanting to leave it, it turned and left him, opening the floor beneath itself and surging into the hole it had made. Akin let the hole seal itself, knowing that once it was sealed he would not find the Akjai again until it wished to be found.

8

The ooloi subadult was a relative of Taishokaht. Jahdehkiaht, its personal name was at this stage of its life. Dehkiaht. It had been living with Taishokaht’s family and Tiikuchahk, waiting for him to return from the Akjai.

The young ooloi looked sexless but did not smell sexless. It would not develop sensory arms until its second metamorphosis. That made its scent all the more startling and disturbing.

Akin had never been aroused by the scent of an ooloi before. He liked them, but only resister and construct women had interested him sexually. What could an immature ooloi do for anyone sexually, anyway?

Akin took a step back the moment he caught the ooloi scent. He looked at Tiikuchahk who was with the ooloi, who had introduced it eagerly.

There was no one else in the room. Akin and Dehkiaht stared at each other.

“You aren’t what I thought,” it whispered. “Ti told me, showed me

and I still didn’t understand.”

“What didn’t you understand?” Akin asked, taking another step backward. He did not want to feel so drawn to anyone who was clearly already on good terms with Tiikuchahk.

“That you are a kind of subadult yourself,” Dehkiaht said. “Your growth stage now is more like mine than like Ti’s.”

That was something no one had said before. It almost distracted him from the ooloi’s scent. “I’m not fertile yet, Nikanj says.”

“Neither am I. But it’s so obvious with ooloi that no one could make a mistake.”

To Akin’s amazement, he laughed. Just as abruptly, he sobered. “I don’t know how this works.”

Silence.

“I didn’t want it to work before. I do now.” He did not look at Tiikuchahk. He could not avoid looking at the ooloi, although he feared it would see that his motives for wanting success had little to do with it or Tiikuchahk. He had never felt as naked as he did before this immature ooloi. He did not know what to do or say.

It occurred to him that he was reacting exactly as he had the first time he realized a resister woman was trying to seduce him.

He took a deep breath, smiled, and shook his head. He sat down on a platform. “I’m reacting very Humanly to an un-Human thing,” he said. “To your scent. If you can do anything to suppress it, I wish you would. It’s confusing the hell out of me.”

The ooloi smoothed its body tentacles and folded itself onto a platform. “I didn’t know constructs talked about hell.”

“We say what we’ve grown up hearing. Ti, what does its scent do to you?”

“I like it,” Tiikuchahk said. “It makes me not mind that you’re in the room.”

Akin tried to consider this through the distracting scent. “It makes me hardly notice that you’re in the room.”

“See?”

“But

It

I don’t want to feel like this all the time if I can’t do anything about it.”

“You’re the only one here who could do anything about it,” Dehkiaht said.

Akin longed to be back with his Akjai teacher, an adult ooloi who had never made him feel this way. No adult ooloi had made him feel this way.

Dehkiaht touched him.

He had not noticed the ooloi coming closer. Now he jumped. He felt himself more eager than ever for a satisfaction the ooloi could not give. Knowing this, he almost pushed Dehkiaht away in frustration. But Dehkiaht was ooloi. It did have that incredible scent. He could not push it or hit it. Instead, he twisted away from it. It had touched him only with its hand, but even that was too much. He had moved across the room to an outside wall before he could stop. The ooloi, clearly surprised, only watched him.

“You don’t have any idea what you’re doing, do you?” he said to it. He was panting a little.

“I think I don’t,” it admitted. “And I can’t control my scent yet. Maybe I can’t help you.”

“No!” Tiikuchahk said sharply. “The adults said you could help—and you do help me.”

“But I hurt Akin. I don’t know how to stop hurting him.”

“Touch him. Understand him the way you’ve understood me. Then you’ll know how.”

Tiikuchahk’s voice stopped Akin from urging the ooloi to go. Tiikuchahk sounded

not just frightened but desperate. It was his sibling, as tormented by the situation as he was. And it was a child. Even more a child than he was—younger and truly eka.

“All right,” he said unhappily. “Touch me, Dehkiaht. I’ll hold still.”

It held still itself, watching him silently. He had almost injured it. If he had fled from it only a little less quickly, he would have caused it a great deal of pain. And it probably would have stung him reflexively and caused him a great deal of pain. It needed more than Akin’s words to assure it that he would not do such a thing again.

He made himself walk over to it. Its scent made him want to run to it and grab it. Its immaturity and its connection with Tiikuchahk made him want to run the other way. Somehow, he crossed the room to it.

“Lie down,” it told him. “I’ll help you sleep. When I’m finished, I’ll know whether I can help you in any other way.”

Akin lay down on the platform, eager for the relief of sleep. The light touches of the ooloi’s head tentacles were an almost unendurable stimulant, and sleep was not as quick in coming as it should have been. He realized, finally, that his state of arousal was making sleep impossible.

The ooloi seemed to realize this at the same time. It did something Akin was not quick enough to catch, and Akin was abruptly no longer aroused. Then he was no longer awake.

9

Akin awoke alone.

He got up feeling slightly drowsy but unchanged and wandered through the Lo Toaht dwelling, looking for Tiikuchahk, for Dehkiaht, for anyone. He found no one until he went outside. There, people went about their business as usual, their surroundings looking like a gentle, incredibly well-maintained forest. True trees did not grow as large as the ship’s treelike projections, but the illusion of rolling, forested land was inescapable. It was, Akin thought, too tame, too planned. No grazing here for exploring children. The ship gave food when asked. Once it was taught how to synthesize a food, it never forgot. There were no bananas or papayas or pineapples to pick, no cassava to pull, no sweet potatoes to dig, no growing, living things except appendages of the ship. Perfect “sweet potatoes” could be made to grow on the pseudotrees if an Oankali or a construct adult asked it of Chkahichdahk.

He looked up at the limbs above him and saw that nothing other than the usual hairlike, green, oxygen-producing tentacles hung from the huge pseudotrees.

Why was he thinking about such things? Homesickness? Where were Dehkiaht and Tiikuchahk? Why had they left him?

He put his face to the pseudotree he had emerged from and probed with his tongue, allowing the ship to identify him so that it would give him any message they had left.

The ship complied. “Wait,” the message said. Nothing more. They had not abandoned him, then. Most likely, Dehkiaht had taken what it had learned from Akin to some adult ooloi for interpretation. When it came back to him it would probably still smell tormenting. An adult would have to change it—or change him. It would have been simpler for adults to find a solution for him and Tiikuchahk directly.

He went back in to wait and knew at once that Dehkiaht, at least, had already returned.

He could have found it without sight. In fact, its scent overwhelmed his senses so completely that he could hardly see, hear, or feel anything. This was worse than before.

He discovered that his hands were on the ooloi, grasping it as though he expected it to be taken from him, as though it were his own personal property.

Then, gradually, he was able to let go of it, able to think and focus on something other than its enveloping scent. He realized he was lying down again. Lying alongside Dehkiaht, pressed against it, and comfortable.

Content.

Dehkiaht’s scent was still interesting, still enticing, but no longer overwhelming. He wanted to stay near the ooloi, felt possessive of it, but was not so totally focused on it. He liked it. He had felt this way about resister women who let him make love to them and who saw him as something other than a container of sperm they hoped might prove fertile.

He breathed deeply and enjoyed the many light touches of Dehkiaht’s head and body tentacles.

“Better,” he whispered. “Will I stay this way, or will you have to keep readjusting me?”

“If you stayed this way, you’d never do any work,” the ooloi said, flattening its free tentacles in amusement. “This is good, though. Especially after the other. Tiikuchahk is here.”

“Tip” Akin raised his head to look over the ooloi’s body. “I didn’t

I don’t feel you.”

It gave him a Human smile. “I feel you, but no more than I do anyone else I’m near.”

Feeling oddly bereft, Akin reached over Dehkiaht to touch it.

Dehkiaht seized his hand and put it back at his side.

Surprised, Akin focused all his senses on it. “Why should you care whether I touch Ti? You aren’t mature. We aren’t mated.”

“Yes. I do care, though. It would be better if you don’t touch each other for a while.”

“I

I don’t want to be bound to you.”

“I couldn’t bind you. That’s why you confused me so. I went back to my parents to show them what I had learned about you and ask their advice. They say you can’t be bound. You were not constructed to be bound.”

Akin moved against Dehkiaht, wanting to move closer, welcoming the inadequate strength arm the ooloi put around him. It was not an Oankali thing to put strength arms around people or to caress with strength hands. Someone must have told Dehkiaht that Humans and constructs found such gestures comforting.

“I’ve been told that I would wander,” he said. “I wander now when I’m on Earth, but I always come home. I’m afraid that when I’m adult, I won’t have a home.”

“Lo will be your home,” Tiikuchahk said.

“Not the way it will be yours.” It would almost certainly be female and become part of a family like the one he had been raised in. Or it would mate with a construct male like him or his Oankali-born brothers. Even then, it would have an ooloi and children to live with. But who would he live with? His parents’ home would remain the only true home he knew.

“When you’re adult,” Dehkiaht said, “you’ll feel what you can do. You’ll feel what you want to do. It will seem good to you.”

“How would you know!” Akin demanded bitterly.

“You aren’t flawed. I noticed even before I went to my parents that there was a wholeness to you—a strong wholeness. I don’t know whether you’ll be what your parents wanted you to be, but whatever you become, you’ll be complete. You’ll have within yourself everything you need to content yourself. Just follow what seems right to you.”

“Walk away from mates and children?”

“Only if it seems right to you.”

“Some Human men do it. It doesn’t seem right to me, though.”

“Do what seems right. Even now.”

“I’ll tell you what seems right to me. You both should know. It’s what seemed right to me since I was a baby. And it will be right, no matter how my mating situation turns out.”

“Why should we know?”

This was not the question Akin had expected. He lay still, silent, thoughtful. Why, indeed? “If you let go of me, will I go out of control again?”

“No.”

“Let go, then. Let me see if I still want to tell you.”

Dehkiaht released him, and he sat up, looking down at the two of them. Tiikuchahk looked as though it belonged beside the ooloi. And Dehkiaht looked

felt frighteningly necessary to him, too. Looking at it made him want to lie down again. He imagined returning to Earth without Dehkiaht, leaving it to another pair of mates. They would mature and keep it, and the scent of them and the feel of them would encourage its body to mature quickly. When it was mature, they would be a family. A Toaht family if it stayed aboard the ship.

It would mix construct children for other people.

Akin got down from the bed platform and sat beside it. It was easier to think down there. Before today, he had never had sexual feelings for an ooloi—had not had any idea how such feelings would affect him. The ooloi said it could not bind him to it. Adults apparently wanted to be bound by an ooloi—to be joined and woven into a family. Akin felt confused about what he wanted, but he knew he did not want Dehkiaht stimulated to maturity by other people. He wanted it on Earth with him. Yet he did not want to be bound to it. How much of what he felt was chemical—simply a result of Dehkiaht’s provoking scent and its ability to comfort his body?

“Humans are freer to decide what they want,” he said softly.

“They only think they are,” Dehkiaht replied.

Yes. Lilith was not free. Sudden freedom would have terrified her, although sometimes she seemed to want it. Sometimes she stretched the bonds between herself and the family. She wandered. She still wandered. But she always came home. Tino would probably kill himself if he were freed. But what about the resisters? They did terrible things to each other because they could not have children. But before the war—during the war—they had done terrible things to each other even though they could have children. The Human Contradiction held them. Intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior. They were not free. All he could do for them, if he could do anything, was to let them be bound in their own ways. Perhaps next time their intelligence would be in balance with their hierarchical behavior, and they would not destroy themselves.

“Will you come to Earth with us?” he asked Dehkiaht.