Adulthood Rites

  But Iriarte carried him away, and he believed that if he cried out, the man might be killed. Certainly some people would be killed. Perhaps it would only be Galt who kicked at him whenever he was nearby and Damek who had clubbed Tino down. But more likely, it would be all four of his abductors and several village men. He might die himself. He had seen that men could go mad when they were fighting. They could do things that afterward amazed and shamed them.

  Akin let himself be carried to the raiders’ canoes. They had two now—the one they had begun with and a light, new one found in Hillmann. Akin was put into the new one between two balanced mounds of trade goods. Behind one mound Iriarte rowed. In front of the other, Kaliq rowed. Akin was glad, at least, not to have to worry about Galt’s feet or his oar. And he continued to avoid Damek when he could, though the man showed him friendliness. Damek acted as though Akin had not seen him club Tino down.

  8

  THERE WERE OANKALI IN Vladlengrad. Galt saw them through the rain at yet another branching of the river. They were far away, and Akin himself did not see them at first—gray beings, slipping from gray water into the shadow of the trees on the bank, and all this through heavy rain.

  The man ignored their weariness to row hard into the left fork of the river, leaving the right fork to Vladlengrad and the Oankali.

  The men rowed until they were completely exhausted. Finally, reluctantly, they dragged themselves and their boats onto a low bank. They concealed their boats, ate smoked fish and dried fruit from Siwatu, and drank a mild wine. Kaliq held Akin and gave him some of the wine. Akin discovered that he liked it, but he drank only a little. His body did not like the disorientation it caused and would have expelled a larger amount. When he had eaten the food Kaliq had given him, he went out to graze. While he was out, he gathered several large nuts in a wide leaf and took them back to Kaliq.

  “I’ve seen these,” Kaliq said, examining one. “I think they’re one of the new postwar species. I wondered whether they were good to eat.”

  “I wouldn’t eat them,” Galt said. “Anything that wasn’t here before the war. I don’t need.”

  Kaliq took two of the nuts in one hand and squeezed. Akin could hear the shells cracking. When he opened his hand, several small round nuts rolled around amid the shell fragments. Kaliq offered them to Akin, and Akin took most of them gratefully. He ate them with such obvious enjoyment that Kaliq laughed and ate one of them himself. He chewed slowly, tentatively.

  “It tastes like … I don’t know.” He ate the rest. “It’s very good. Better than anything I’ve had for a long time.” He settled to breaking and eating the rest while Akin brought another leafful to Iriarte. There were not many good nuts on the ground. Most were insect-infested. He checked each one with his tongue to make sure they were all right. When Damek went out and gathered nuts of his own, almost every one was infested with insect larvae. This made him stare at Akin with suspicion and doubt. Akin watched him without facing him, watched him without eyes until he shrugged and threw the last of his nuts away in disgust. He looked at Akin once more and spat on the ground.

  9

  PHOENIX.

  The four resisters had been avoiding it, they said, because they knew it was Tino’s home village. The Oankali would check it first, perhaps stay there the longest. But Phoenix was also the richest resister village they knew of. It sent people into the hills to salvage metal from prewar sites and had people who knew how to shape the metal. It had more women than any other village because it traded metal for them. It grew cotton and made soft, comfortable clothing. It raised and tapped not only rubber trees, but trees that produced a form of oil that could be burned in their lamps without refinement. And it had fine, large houses, a church, a store, vast farms …

  It was, the raiders said, more like a prewar town—and less like a group of people who have given up, whose only hope was to kill a few Oankali before they died.

  “I almost settled there once,” Damek said when they had hidden the canoes and begun their single-file walk toward the hills and Phoenix. Phoenix was many days south of Hillmann on a different branch of the river, but it, too, was located closer to the mountains than most trader and resister villages. “I swear,” Damek continued, “they’ve got everything there but kids.”

  Iriarte, who was carrying Akin, sighed quietly. “They’ll buy you, niño,” he said. “And if you don’t frighten them, they’ll treat you well.”

  Akin moved in the man’s arms to show that he was listening. Iriarte had developed a habit of talking to him. He seemed to accept movement as sufficient response.

  “Talk to them,” Iriarte whispered. “I’m going to tell them you can talk and understand like a much older kid, and you do it. It’s no good pretending to be something you aren’t and then scaring them with what you really are. You understand?”

  Akin moved again.

  “Tell me, niño. Speak to me. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

  “I understand,” Akin whispered into his ear.

  He held Akin away from him for a moment and stared at him. Finally he smiled, but it was a strange smile. He shook his head and held Akin against him again. “You still look like one of my kids,” he said. “I don’t want to give you up.”

  Akin tasted him. He made the gesture very quick, deliberately placing his mouth against the man’s neck in the way that Humans called kissing. Iriarte would feel a kiss and nothing more. That was good. He thought a Human who felt as he did might have expressed the feeling with a kiss. His own need was to understand Iriarte better and keep that understanding. He wished he dared to study the man in the leisurely, thorough way he had studied Tino. What he had now was an impression of Iriarte. He could have given an ooloi the few cells he had taken from Iriarte, and the ooloi could have used the information to build a new Iriarte. But it was one thing to know what the man was made of and another to know how the parts worked together—how each bit was expressed in function, behavior, and appearance.

  “You’d better watch that kid,” Galt called from several steps behind. “A kiss from him could be the same as a kiss from a bushmaster.”

  “That man had three children before the war,” Iriarte whispered. “He liked you. You shouldn’t have frightened him.”

  Akin knew this. He sighed. How could he avoid scaring people? He had never seen a Human baby. How could he behave as one? Would it be easier to avoid scaring villagers who knew he could talk? It should be. After all, Tino had not been afraid. Curious, suspicious, startled when an un-Human-looking child touched him, but not frightened. Not dangerous.

  And the people of Phoenix were his people.

  Phoenix was larger and more beautiful than Hillmann. The houses were large and colored white or blue or gray. They had the glass windows Tino had boasted of—windows that glittered with reflected light. There were broad fields and storage buildings and an ornate structure that must have been the church. Tino had described it to Akin and tried to make Akin understand what it was for. Akin still did not understand, but he could repeat Tino’s explanation if he had to. He could even say his prayers. Tino had taught him, thinking it scandalous that he had not known them before.

  Human men worked in the fields, planting something. Human men came out of their houses to look at the visitors. There was a faint scent of Oankali in the village. It was many days old—searchers who had come and searched and waited and finally left. None of the searchers had been members of his family.

  Where were his parents looking?

  And in this village, where were the Human women?

  Inside. He could smell them in their houses—could smell their excitement.

  “Don’t say a word until I tell you to,” Iriarte whispered.

  Akin moved to show that he had heard, then twisted in Iriarte’s arms to face the large, well-built, low-stilted house they were walking toward and the tall, lean man who awaited them in the shade of its roof in what seemed to be a partially enclosed room. The walls were only a
s high as the man’s waist, and the roof was held up by regularly spaced, rounded posts. The half-room reminded Akin of a drawing he had seen by a Human Lo woman, Cora: great buildings whose overhanging roofs were supported by huge, ornately decorated, round posts.

  “So that’s the kid,” the tall man said. He smiled. He had a short, well-tended black beard and short hair, very black. He wore a white shirt and short pants, displaying startlingly hairy arms and legs.

  A small blond woman came from the house to stand beside him. “My god,” she said, “that’s a beautiful child. Isn’t there anything wrong with him?”

  Iriarte walked up several steps and put Akin into the woman’s arms. “He is beautiful,” Iriarte told her quietly. “But he has a tongue you’ll have to get used to—in more than one way. And he is very, very intelligent.”

  “And he is for sale,” the tall man said, his eyes on Iriarte. “Come in, gentlemen. My name is Gabriel Rinaldi. This is my wife Tate.”

  The house was cool and dark and sweet-smelling inside. It smelled of herbs and flowers. The blond woman took Akin into another room with her and gave him a chunk of pineapple to eat while she poured some drinks for the guests.

  “I hope you won’t wet the floor,” she said, glancing at him.

  “I won’t,” he said impulsively. Something made him want to talk to this woman. He had wanted to speak to the women of Siwatu, but he had been afraid. He was never alone with one of them. He had feared their group reaction to his un-Human aspect.

  The woman looked at him, eyes momentarily wide. Then she smiled with only the left side of her mouth. “So that’s what the raider meant about that tongue of yours.” She lifted him and put him on a counter so that she could talk to him without bending or stooping. “What’s your name?”

  “Akin.” No one else had asked his name during his captivity. Not even Iriarte.

  “Ah-keen,” she pronounced. “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen months.” Akin thought for a moment. “No, eighteen now.”

  “Very, very intelligent,” Tate said, echoing Iriarte. “Shall we buy you, Akin?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But?”

  “They want a woman.”

  Tate laughed. “Of course they do. We might even find them one. Men aren’t the only ones who get itchy feet. But, Jesus, four men! She’d better have another itchy part or two.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, little one. Why do you want us to buy you?”

  Akin hesitated, said finally, “Iriarte likes me and so does Kaliq. But Galt hates me because I look more Human than I am. And Damek killed Tino.” He looked at her blond hair, knowing she was no relative of Tino’s. But perhaps she had known him, liked him. It would be hard to know him and not like him. “Tino used to live here,” he said. “His whole name is Augustino Leal. Did you know him?”

  “Oh, yes.” She had become very still, totally focused on Akin. If she had been Oankali, all her head tentacles would have been elongated toward him in a cone of living flesh. “His parents are here,” she said. “He … couldn’t have been your father. You look like him, though.”

  “My Human father is dead. Tino took his place. Damek called him a traitor and killed him.”

  She closed her eyes, turned her face away from Akin. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “He was alive when they took me away, but the bones of his head had been broken with the wooden part of Damek’s gun. There was no one around to help him. He must have died.”

  She took Akin down from the counter and hugged him. “Did you like him, Akin?”

  “Yes.”

  “We loved him here. He was the son most of us never had. I knew he was going, though. What was there for him in a place like this? I gave him a packet of food to take with him and aimed him toward Lo. Did he reach it?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled again with only half her mouth. “So you’re from Lo. Who’s your mother?”

  “Lilith Iyapo.” Akin did not think she would have liked hearing Lilith’s long Oankali name.

  “Son of a bitch!” Tate whispered. “Listen, Akin, don’t say that name to anyone else. It may not matter anymore, but don’t say it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are people here who don’t like your mother. There are people here who might hurt you because they can’t get at her. Do you understand?”

  Akin looked into her sun-browned face. She had very blue eyes—not like Wray Ordway’s pale eyes, but a deep, intense color. “I don’t understand,” he said, “but I believe you.”

  “Good. If you do that, we’ll buy you. I’ll see to it.”

  “At Siwatu, the raiders took me away because they were afraid the men were going to try to steal me.”

  “Don’t you worry. Once I drop this tray and you in the living room, I’ll see to it that they don’t go anywhere until our business with them is done.”

  She carried the tray of drinks and let Akin walk back to her husband and the resisters. Then she left them.

  Akin climbed onto Iriarte’s lap, knowing he was about to lose the man, missing him already.

  “We’ll have to have our doctor look at him,” Gabriel Rinaldi was saying. He paused. “Let me see your tongue, kid.”

  Obligingly, Akin opened his mouth. He did not stick his tongue out to its full extent, but he did nothing to conceal it.

  The man got up and looked for a moment, then shook his head. “Ugly. And he’s probably venomous. The constructs usually are.”

  “I saw him bite an agouti and kill it,” Galt put in.

  “But he’s never made any effort to bite any of us,” Iriarte said with obvious irritation. “He’s done what he’s been told to do. He’s taken care of his own toilet needs. And he knows better than we do what’s edible and what isn’t. Don’t worry about his picking up things and eating them. He’s been doing that since we took him—seeds, nuts, flowers, leaves, fungi … and he’s never been sick. He won’t eat fish or meat. I wouldn’t force him to if I were you. The Oankali don’t eat it. Maybe it would make him sick.”

  “What I want to know,” Rinaldi said, “is just how un-Human he is … mentally. Come here, kid.”

  Akin did not want to go. Showing his tongue was one thing. Deliberately putting himself in hands that might be unfriendly was another. He looked up at Iriarte, hoping the man would not let him go. Instead Iriarte put him down and gave him a shove toward Rinaldi. Reluctantly, he edged toward the man.

  Rinaldi got up impatiently and lifted Akin into his arms. He sat down, turned Akin about on his lap looking at him, then held Akin facing him. “Okay, they say you can talk. So talk.”

  Again Akin turned to look at Iriarte. He did not want to begin talking in a room full of men when talking had already made one of those men hate him.

  Iriarte nodded. “Talk, niño. Do as he says.”

  “Tell us your name,” Rinaldi said.

  Akin caught himself smiling. Twice now, he had been asked his name. These people seemed to care who he was, not just what he was. “Akin,” he said softly.

  “Ah-keen?” Rinaldi frowned down at him. “Is that a Human name?”

  “Yes.”

  “What language?”

  “Yoruba.”

  “Yor—… what? What country?”

  “Nigeria.”

  “Why should you have a Nigerian name? Is one of your parents Nigerian?”

  “It means hero. If you put an s on it, it means brave boy. I’m the first boy born to a Human woman on Earth since the war.”

  “That’s what the worms hunting for you said,” Rinaldi agreed. He was frowning again. “Can you read?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you have had time to learn to read?”

  Akin hesitated. “I don’t forget things,” he said softly.

  The raiders looked startled. “Ever?” Damek demanded. “Anything?”

&nb
sp; Rinaldi only nodded. “That’s the way the Oankali are,” he said. “They can bring out the ability in Humans when they want to—and when the Humans agree to be useful to them. I thought that was the boy’s secret.”

  Akin, who had considering lying, was glad he had not. He had always found it easy to tell the truth and difficult to make himself lie. He could lie very convincingly, though, if lying would keep him alive and spare him pain among these men. It was easier, though, to divert questions—as he had diverted the question about his parents.

  “Do you want to stay here, Akin?” Rinaldi asked.

  “If you buy me, I’ll stay,” Akin said.

  “Shall we buy you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Akin glanced at Iriarte. “They want to sell me. If I have to be sold, I’d like to stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “You aren’t afraid of me, and you don’t hate me. I don’t hate you, either.”

  Rinaldi laughed. Akin was pleased. He had hoped to make the man laugh. He had learned back in Lo that if he made Humans laugh, they were more comfortable with him—though, of course, in Lo, he had never been exposed to people who might injure him simply because he was not Human.

  Rinaldi asked his age, the number of languages he spoke, and the purpose of his long, gray tongue. Akin withheld information only about the tongue.

  “I smell and taste with it,” he said. “I can smell with my nose, too, but my tongue tells me more.” All true, but Akin had decided not to tell anyone what else his tongue could do. The idea of his tasting their cells, their genes, might disturb them too much.

  A woman called a doctor came in, took Akin from Rinaldi, and began to examine, poke, and probe his body. She did not talk to him, though Rinaldi had told her he could talk.

  “He’s got some oddly textured spots on his back, arms, and abdomen,” she said. “I suspect they’re where he’ll grow tentacles in a few years.”

  “Are they?” Rinaldi asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Akin said. “People never know what they’ll be like after metamorphosis.”