Adulthood Rites

“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.”