Adulthood Rites

“I know. Apparently, though, it looks more threatening or more suspicious now.”

She tried to laugh.

“You don’t think he’ll come in, do you? It really could kill you if someone tried to pull us apart.”

“He won’t. He learned a long time ago not to do things like that.”

“Okay. You won’t sleep as quickly as you would with an ooloi because I can’t sting you unconscious. I have to convince your body to do all the work. Keep still now.”

He put one arm around her to keep her in position when she lost consciousness, then put his mouth to the side of her neck. From then on, he was aware only of her body—its injured organs and poorly healed fractures

and its activation of her old illness, her Huntington’s disease. Did she know? Had the disease caused her to fall? It could have. Or she could have fallen deliberately in the hope of escaping the disease.

She had strained and bruised the ligaments in her back. She had dislocated one of the disks of cartilage between the vertebrae of her neck. She had broken her left kneecap badly. Her kidneys were damaged. Both kidneys. How had she managed to do that? How far had she fallen?

Her left wrist had been broken but had been set and had almost healed. There were also two rib fractures, nearly healed.

Akin lost himself in the work—the pleasure—of finding injuries and stimulating her body’s own healing ability. He stimulated her body to produce an enzyme that turned off the Huntington’s gene. The gene would eventually become active again. She must have an ooloi take care of the disease permanently before she left Earth. He could not replace the deadly gene or trick her body into using genes she had not used since before her birth. He could not help her create new ova clean of the Huntington’s gene. What he had already done to suppress the gene was as much as he dared to do.

3

Gabe’s interruption of Akin’s healing produced the only serious disruption in his memory Akin ever experienced. All he recalled of it later was abrupt agony.

In spite of his warning to Gabe, in spite of Tate’s reassurance, Gabe came into the room before the healing was complete. Akin learned later that Gabe returned because hours had passed without a sound from Akin or Tate. He was afraid for Tate, afraid something had gone wrong, and suspicious of Akin.

He found Akin apparently unconscious, his mouth still against Tate’s neck. Akin did not even seem to breathe. Nor did Tate. Her flesh was cool—almost cold—and that frightened Gabe. He believed she was dying, feared she might already be dead. He panicked.

First he tried to pull Tate free, alerting Akin on some level that something was wrong. But Akin’s attention was too much on Tate. He had only begun to disengage when Gabe hit him.

Gabe was afraid of Akin’s sting. He would not grasp Akin and try to pull him away from Tate. Instead, he tried to knock Akin away with quick, hard punches.

The first blow all but tore Akin loose. It hurt him more than he had ever been hurt, and he could not help passing some of his pain on to Tate.

Yet he managed not to poison her. He did not know when she began to scream. He continued automatically to hold her. That and the fact that he was stronger than the larger Gabe enabled him to withdraw from Tate’s nervous system and then from her body without being badly injured—and without killing. Later he was amazed that he had done this. His teacher had warned him that males did not have the control to do such things. Oankali males and females avoided healing not only because they were not needed as healers but because they were more likely than ooloi to kill by accident. They could be driven to kill unintentionally by interruptions and even by their subjects if things went wrong. Even Gabe should have been in danger. Akin should have struck at him blindly, reflexively.

Yet he did not.

His body coiled into a painfully tight fetal knot and lay vulnerable and more completely unconscious than it had ever been.

4

When Akin became able to perceive the world around him again he discovered that he could not move or speak. He lay frozen, aware that sometimes there were Humans around him. They looked at him, sat with him sometimes, but did not touch him. For some time he did not know who they were—or where he was. Later, he compared this period with his earliest infancy. It was a time he remembered but took no part in. But even as an infant, he had been fed and washed and held. Now no hand touched him.

He slowly became aware that two people did talk to him. Two females, both Human, one small and yellow-haired and pale. One slightly larger, dark-haired, and sun-browned.

He was glad when they were with him.

He dreaded their coming.

They aroused him. Their scents reached deep into him and drew him to them. Yet he could not move. He lay, being drawn and drawn and utterly still. It was torment, but he preferred it to solitude.

The females talked to him. After a while, he came to know that they were Tate and Yori. And he remembered all that he knew of Tate and Yori.

Tate sat close to him and said his name. She told him how well she felt and how her crops were growing and what different people in the settlement were doing. She did her sewing and her writing while sitting with Akin. She kept a journal.

Yori kept one, too. Yori’s became a study of him. She told him so. He was in metamorphosis, she said. She had never seen metamorphosis before, but she had heard it described. Already there were small, new sensory tentacles on his back, on his head, on his legs. His skin was gray now, and he was losing his hair. She said he must find a way to tell them if he wished to be touched. She said Tate was all right, and Akin must find a way to communicate. She said anything he asked would be done for him. She would see to it. She said he must not worry about being alone because she would see that someone was always with him.

This comforted him more than she could know. People in metamorphosis had little tolerance for solitude.

Gabe sat with him. Gabe and the two women had lifted the bench he lay on and carried it and him into a small sunlit room.

Sometimes Gabe tempted him with food or water. He could not know that the scent of the women tempted Akin more strongly than anything Gabe could place near him. He would have wanted food before he fell asleep if he had gone into metamorphosis normally. He would have eaten, then slept. He had heard that ooloi did not sleep straight through much of their second metamorphosis. Lilith had told him that Nikanj slept most of the time, but woke up now and then to eat and talk. Eventually it would fall into another deep sleep. Males and females slept through most of their one metamorphosis. They did not eat, drink, urinate, or defecate. The women stirred Akin, focused his attention, but the smells of food and water did not interest him. He noticed them because they were intermittent. They were environmental changes that he could not fail to notice.

Gabe brought him plants, and he realized after a while that the plants were some of those that he had enjoyed eating when he was younger, upon which Gabe had seen him grazing. The man remembered. That pleased him and eased the sudden shock when, one day, Gabe touched him.

There was no warning. As Gabe had decided to come into the room and separate Akin and Tate, he now decided to do one of the things Yori had told him and Tate not to do.

He simply placed his hand on Akin’s back and shook Akin.

After a moment, Akin shuddered. His small, new sensory tentacles moved for the first time, elongating reflexively toward the touching hand.

Gabe jerked his hand away. He would not have been hurt, but he did not know that, and Akin could not tell him. Gabe did not touch him again.

Pilar and Mateo Leal took their turns sitting with Akin. Tino’s parents. Mateo had killed people Akin had cared for very much. For a time, his presence made Akin intensely uncomfortable. Then, because he had no choice, Akin adjusted.

Kolina Wilton sat with him sometimes but never spoke to him. One day, to his surprise, Macy Wilton sat with him. So the man was not always lying drunk in the street.