Adulthood Rites

“Wait!” the man called.

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

“Watch him!” Lilith whispered to Akin.

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

“What the matter?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Both your parents survived?”

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

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

“And you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can I look at the baby’s?”

“No more than you are now.”

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

“Akin isn’t quite Human,” she said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I mean

What’s different about him?”

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

“Can he talk?”

“All the time. Come on.”

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

“Baby?” the man said peering at him.

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

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

Akin stared at him silently.

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

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

“Tell him your name,” she said.

“What?”

She said nothing more.

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

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

“Shall I call you that?” Akin asked.

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

“Nine months.”

“Can you walk?”

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

“I

don’t know.”

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

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

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

“Akin,” Lilith said, cautioning.

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

Perhaps later he would have the chance.

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

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

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But

you didn’t have to have kids.”

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

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

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

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

“Was it?”

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

5

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

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

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

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

“But

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

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

“Resister?” the child asked.

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

“What does the kid want?” Tino asked.

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