Adulthood Rites

  The startling thing was, Taishokaht knew it, too. The thirty-two toes of its two bare feet told it exactly what the Akjai’s limbs told it. He had never noticed Oankali doing this at home. He had certainly never done it himself with his very Human, five-toed feet.

  He was no longer afraid.

  No matter how closely he was joined to the two ooloi, he was aware of himself. He was equally aware of them and their bodies and their sensations. But, somehow, they were still themselves, and he was still himself. He felt as though he were a floating, disembodied mind, like the souls some resisters spoke of in their churches, as though he looked from some impossible angle and saw everything, including his own body as it leaned against the Akjai. He tried to move his left hand and saw it move. He tried to move one of the Akjai’s limbs, and once he understood the nerves and musculature, the limb moved.

  “You see?” the Akjai said, its touches feeling oddly like Akin touching his own skin. “People don’t lose themselves. You can do this.”

  He could. He examined the Akjai’s body, comparing it to Taishokaht’s and to his own. “How can Dinso and Toaht people give up such strong, versatile bodies to trade with Humans?” he asked.

  Both ooloi were amused. “You only ask that because you don’t know your own potential,” the Akjai told him. “Now I’ll show you the structure of a tilio. You don’t know it even as completely as a child can. When you understand it, I’ll show you the things that go wrong with it and what you can do about them.”

  7

  AKIN LIVED WITH THE Akjai as it traveled around the ship. The Akjai taught him, withholding nothing that he could absorb. He learned to understand not only the animals of Chkahichdahk and Earth, but the plants. When he asked for information on the resisters’ bodies, the Akjai found several visiting Dinso ooloi. It learned in a matter of minutes all that they could teach it. Then it fed the information to Akin in a long series of lessons.

  “Now you know more than you realize,” the Akjai said when it had given its information on Humans. “You have information you won’t even be able to use until after your own metamorphosis.”

  “I know more than I thought I could learn,” Akin said. “I know enough to heal ulcers in a resister’s stomach or cuts or puncture wounds in flesh and in organs.”

  “Eka, I don’t think they’ll let you.”

  “Yes, they will. At least, they will until I change. Some will.”

  “What do you want for them, Eka? What would you give them?”

  “What you have. What you are.” Akin sat with his back against the Akjai’s curved side. It could touch him with several limbs and give him one sensory limb to signal into. “I want a Human Akjai,” he told it.

  “I’ve heard that you did. But your kind can’t exist alongside them. Not separately. You know that.”

  Akin took the slender, glowing limb from his mouth and looked at it. He liked the Akjai. It had been his teacher for months now. It had taken him into parts of the ship that most people never saw. It had enjoyed his fascination and deliberately suggested new things that he might be interested in learning. He was, it said, more energetic than the older students it had had.

  It was a friend. Perhaps he could talk to it, reach it as he had not been able to reach his family. Perhaps he could trust it. He tasted the limb again.

  “I want to make a place for them,” he said. “I know what will happen to Earth. But there are other worlds. We could change the second one or the fourth one—make one of them more like Earth. A few of us could do it. I’ve heard that there is nothing living on either world.”

  “There’s nothing living there. The fourth world could be more easily transformed than the second.”

  “It could be done?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was so obvious. … I thought I might be wrong, thought I had missed something.”

  “Time, Akin.”

  “Get things started and turn them over to the resisters. They need metal, machinery, things they can control.”

  “No.”

  Akin focused his whole attention on the Akjai. It was not saying, no, the Humans could not have their machines. Its signals did not communicate that at all. It was saying, no, Humans did not need machines.

  “We can make it possible for them to live on the fourth world,” it said. “They wouldn’t need machines. If they wanted them, they would have to build them themselves.”

  “I would help. I would do whatever was needed.”

  “When you change, you’ll want to mate.”

  “I know. But—”

  “You don’t know. The urge is stronger than you can understand now.”

  “It’s …” He projected amusement. “It’s pretty strong now. I know it will be different after metamorphosis. If I have to mate, I have to mate. I’ll find people who’ll work with me on this. There must be others that I can convince.”

  “Find them now.”

  Startled, Akin said nothing for a moment. Finally he asked, “Do you mean I’m close to metamorphosis now?”

  “Closer than you think. But that isn’t what I meant.”

  “You agree with me that it can be done? The resisters can be transplanted? Their Human-to-Human fertility can be restored?”

  “It’s possible if you can get a consensus. But if you get a consensus, you may find that you’ve chosen your life’s work.”

  “Wasn’t that work chosen for me years ago?”

  The Akjai hesitated. “I know about that. The Akjai had no part in the decision to leave you so long with the resisters.”

  “I didn’t think you had. I’ve never been able to talk about it to anyone I felt had taken part—who had chosen to break me from my nearest sibling.”

  “Yet you’ll do the work that was chosen for you?”

  “I will. But for the Humans and for the Human part of me. Not for the Oankali.”

  “Eka …”

  “Shall I show you what I can feel, all I can feel with Tiikuchahk, my nearest sibling? Shall I show you all I’ve ever had with it? All Oankali, all constructs have something that Oankali and constructs came together and decided to deny me.”

  “Show me.”

  Again Akin was startled. But why? What Oankali would decline a new sensation? He remembered for it all the jarring, tearing dissonance of his relationship with Tiikuchahk. He duplicated the sensations in the Akjai’s body along with the revulsion they made him feel and the need he felt to avoid this person whom he should have been closest to.

  “I think it almost wants to be male to avoid any sexual feelings for me,” he finished.

  “Keeping you separated was a mistake,” the Akjai agreed. “I can see now why it was done, but it was a mistake.”

  Only Akin’s family had ever said that before. They had said it because he was one of them, and it hurt them to see him hurt. It hurt them to see the family unbalanced by paired siblings who had failed to pair. People who had never had close siblings or whose closest siblings had died did not damage the balance as much as close siblings who had failed to bond.

  “You should go back to your relatives,” the Akjai said. “Make them find a young ooloi for you and your sibling. You should not go through metamorphosis with so much pain cutting you off from your sibling.”

  “Ti was talking about finding a young ooloi before I left to study with you. I don’t think I could stand to share an ooloi with it.”

  “You will,” the Akjai said. “You must. Go back now, Eka. I can feel what you’re feeling, but it doesn’t matter. Some things hurt. Go back and reconcile with your sibling. Then come to me and I’ll find new teachers for you—people who know the processes of changing a cold, dry, lifeless world into something Humans might survive on.”

  The Akjai straightened its body and broke contact with him. When Akin stood still, looking at it, not wanting to leave it, it turned and left him, opening the floor beneath itself and surging into the hole it had made. Akin let the hole seal itself, knowing that once it
was sealed he would not find the Akjai again until it wished to be found.

  8

  THE OOLOI SUBADULT WAS a relative of Taishokaht. Jahdehkiaht, its personal name was at this stage of its life. Dehkiaht. It had been living with Taishokaht’s family and Tiikuchahk, waiting for him to return from the Akjai.

  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 stil
l 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.

  He breathed deeply and enjoyed the many light touches of Dehkiaht’s head and body tentacles.

  “Better,” he whispered. “Will I stay this way, or will you have to keep readjusting me?”

  “If you stayed this way, you’d never do any work,” the ooloi said, flattening its free tentacles in amusement. “This is good, though. Especially after the other. Tiikuchahk is here.”

  “Ti?” Akin raised his head to look over the ooloi’s body. “I didn’t … I don’t feel you.”

  It gave him a Human smile. “I feel you, but no more than I do anyone else I’m near.”

  Feeling oddly bereft, Akin reached over Dehkiaht to touch it.

  Dehkiaht seized his hand and put it back at his side.

  Surprised, Akin focused all his senses on it. “Why should you care whether I touch Ti? You aren’t mature. We aren’t mated.”

  “Yes. I do care, though. It would be better if you don’t touch each other for a while.”

  “I … I don’t want to be bound to you.”

  “I couldn’t bind you. That’s why you confused me so. I went back to my parents to show them what I had learned about you and ask their advice. They say you can’t be bound. You were not constructed to be bound.”

  Akin moved against Dehkiaht, wanting to move closer, welcoming the inadequate strength arm the ooloi put around him. It was not an Oankali thing to put strength arms around people or to caress with strength hands. Someone must have told Dehkiaht that Humans and constructs found such gestures comforting.