Adulthood Rites

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.