Adulthood Rites

“I guess so. I’m not a good storyteller, though.”

Lilith turned to the still gathering crowd. “All right,” she said loudly. And when they had quieted: “His name is Augustino Leal. He comes from a long way away, and he says he feels like talking.”

People cheered.

“If anyone wants to go home to get something to eat or drink, we’ll wait.”

Several Humans and constructs left, ordering her not to let anything begin without them. An Oankali took Akin from her back. Dichaan. Akin flattened against him happily, sharing what he had learned of the new Human.

“You like him?” Dichaan asked by way of tactile signals shaded with sensory images.

“Yes. He’s a little afraid and dangerous. Mother had to take his weapon. But he’s mostly curious. He’s so curious he feels like one of us.”

Dichaan projected amusement. Maintaining his sensory link with Akin, he watched Lilith give Tino something to drink. The man tasted the drink and smiled. People had gathered around him, sitting on the floor. Most of them were children, and this seemed to put him at ease in one way—he was no longer afraid—and excite him in another. His eyes focused on one child after another, examining the wide variety of them.

“Will he try to steal someone?” Akin asked silently.

“If he did, Eka, it would probably be you.” Dichaan softened the statement with amusement, but there was a seriousness beneath it that Akin did not miss. The man probably meant no harm, was probably not a child thief. But Akin should be careful, should not allow himself to be alone with Tino.

People brought food, shared it among themselves and with Lilith as they accepted what she offered. They fed their own children and each other’s children as usual. A child who could walk could get bits of food anywhere.

Lilith prepared Tino and her younger children dishes of flat cassava bread layered with hot scigee and quat alongside hot, spicy beans. There were slices of pineapple and papaya for dessert. She fed Akin small amounts of quat mixed with cassava. She did not let him nurse until she had settled down with everyone else to talk and listen to Tino.

“They named our village Phoenix before my parents reached it,” Tino told them. “We weren’t original settlers. We came in half-dead from the forest—we’d eaten something bad, some kind of palm fruit. It was edible, all right, but only if you cooked it—and we hadn’t. Anyway, we stumbled in, and the people of Phoenix took care of us. I was the only child they had—the only Human child they’d seen since before the war. The whole village sort of adopted me because

” He stopped, glanced at a cluster of Oankali. “Well, you know. They wanted to find a little girl. They thought maybe the few kids who hadn’t gone through puberty before they were set free might be fertile together when they grew up.” He stared at the nearest Oankali, who happened to be Nikanj. “True or false?” he asked.

“False,” Nikanj said softly. “We told them it was false. They chose not to believe.”

Tino stared at Nikanj—gave it a look that Akin did not understand. The look was not threatening, but Nikanj drew its body tentacles up slightly into the beginnings of a prestrike threat gesture. Humans called it knotting up or getting knotty. They knew it meant getting angry or otherwise upset. Few of them realized it was also a reflexive, potentially lethal gesture. Every sensory tentacle could sting. The ooloi could also sting with their sensory arms. But at least they could sting without killing. Male and female Oankali and constructs could only kill. Akin could kill with his tongue. This was one of the first things Nikanj had taught him not to do. Let alone, he might have discovered his ability by accident and killed Lilith or some other Human. The thought of this had frightened him at first, but he no longer worried about it. He had never seen anyone sting anyone.

Even now, Nikanj’s body language indicated only mild upset. But why should Tino upset it at all? Akin began to watch Nikanj instead of Tino. As Tino spoke, all of Nikanj’s long head tentacles swung around to focus on him. Nikanj was intensely interested in this newcomer. After a moment, it got up and made its way over to Lilith. It took Akin from her arms.

Akin had finished nursing and now flattened obligingly against Nikanj, giving what he knew Nikanj wanted: genetic information about Tino. In trade, he demanded to have explained the feelings Nikanj had expressed with its indrawn sensory tentacles.

In silent, vivid images and signals, Nikanj explained. “That one wanted to stay with us when he was a child. We couldn’t agree to keep him, but we hoped he would come to us when he was older.”

“You knew him then?”

“I handled his conditioning. He spoke only Spanish then. Spanish is one of my Human languages. He was only eight years old and not afraid of me. I didn’t want to let him go. Everyone knew his parents would run when we released them. They would become resisters and perhaps die in the forest. But I couldn’t get a consensus. We aren’t good at raising Human children, so no one wanted to break up the family. And even I didn’t want to force them all to stay with us. We had prints of them. If they died or kept resisting we could fashion genetic copies of them to be born to trader Humans. They wouldn’t be lost to the gene pool. We decided that might have to be enough.”

“Tino recognized you?”

“Yes, but in a very Human way, I think. I don’t believe he understands why I caught his attention. He doesn’t have complete access to memory.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“It’s a Human thing. Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them—usually—but lose the experience itself. We can retrieve it for them—enable them to recall everything—but for many of them, that would only create confusion. They would remember so much that their memories would distract them from the present.”

Akin received an impression of a dazed Human whose mind so overflowed with the past that every new experience triggered the reliving of several old ones, and those triggered others.

“Will I get that way?” he asked fearfully.

“Of course not. No construct is that way. We were careful.”

“Lilith isn’t that way, and she remembers everything.”

“Natural ability, plus some changes I made. She was chosen very carefully.”

“How did Tino find you again? Did you bring him here before you let him go? Did he remember?”

“This place didn’t exist when we let his family and a few others go. He was probably following the river. Did he have a canoe?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“If you follow the river and keep your eyes open, you’ll find villages.”

“He found Mother and me.”

“He’s Human—and he’s a resister. He wouldn’t want to just walk into a village. He would want to have a look at it first. And he was lucky enough to meet some harmless villagers—people who might introduce him into the village safely or who could let him know why he should avoid the village.”

“Mother isn’t harmless.”

“No, but she finds it convenient to seem harmless.”

“What kind of village would he avoid?”

“Other resister villages, probably. Resister villages—especially widely separated ones—are dangerous in different ways. Some of them are dangerous to one another. A few become dangerous to us, and we have to break them up. Human diversity is fascinating and seductive, but we can’t let it destroy them—or us.”

“Will you keep Tino here?”

“Do you like him?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Your mother doesn’t yet, but she might change her mind. Perhaps he’ll want to stay.”

Akin, curious about adult relationships, used all his senses to perceive what went on between his parents and Tino.

First there was Tino’s story to be finished.

“I don’t know what to tell you about our village,” he was saying. “It’s full of old people who look young—just like here, I guess. Except here you have kids. We worked hard, getting things as much like they used to be as possible. That’s what kept everyone going. The idea that we could use our long lives to bring back civilization—get things ready for when they found a girl for me or discovered some way to get kids of their own. They believed it would happen. I believed. Hell, I believed more than anyone.