6

It was raining when we left. Pouring. A brief waterfall from the sky. Lilith said rains like this happened to remind us that we lived in a rain forest. She had been born in a desert place called Los Angeles. She loved sudden, drenching rains.

There were eleven of us. My five parents, Aaor and me, Oni and Hozh, Ayodele and Yedik. These last four were my youngest siblings. They could have been left behind with some of our adult siblings, but they didn’t want to stay. I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have wanted to part with our parents at that premetamorphosal state either. Even now, between metamorphoses, I needed them. And the family would have felt wrong without the younger siblings. My parents had only one pair per decade now. Ordinarily they would already have begun the next pair. But during the months of my metamorphosis, they had decided to wait until they could return to Lo—with or without me.

We headed first toward Lilith’s garden to gather a few more fresh fruits and vegetables. I think she and Tino just wanted to see it again.

“It’s time to rest this land anyway,” Lilith said as we walked. She changed the location of her garden every few years, and let the forest reclaim the land. With these changes and with her habit of using fertilizer and river mud, she had used and reused the land beyond Lo for a century. She abandoned her gardens only when Lo grew too close to them.

But this garden had been destroyed.

It had not simply been raided. Raids happened occasionally. Resisters were afraid to raid Oankali towns—afraid the Oankali would begin to see them as real threats and transfer them permanently to the ship. But Lilith’s gardens were clearly not Oankali. Resisters knew this and seemed to feel free to steal fruit or whole plants from them. Lilith never seemed to mind. She knew resisters thought of her—of any mated Human—as a traitor to Humanity, but she never seemed to hold it against them.

This time almost everything that had not been stolen had been destroyed. Melons had been stomped or smashed against the ground and trees. The line of papaya trees in the center of the garden had been broken down. Beans, peas, corn, yams, cassava, and pineapple plants had been uprooted and trampled. Nearby nut, fig, and breadfruit trees that were nearly a century old had been hacked and burned, though the fire had not destroyed most of them. Banana trees had been hacked down.

“Shit!” Lilith whispered. She stared at the destruction for a moment, then turned away and went to the edge of the garden clearing. There, she stood with her back to us, her body very straight. I thought Nikanj would go to her, offer comfort. Instead, it began gathering and trimming the least damaged cassava stalks. These could be replanted. Ahajas found an undamaged stalk of ripening bananas and Dichaan found and unearthed several yams, though the aboveground portions of the plants had been broken and scattered. Oankali and constructs could find edible roots and tubers easily by sitting on the ground and burrowing into it with the sensory tentacles of their legs. These short body tentacles could extend to several times their resting length.

It was Tino who went to Lilith. He walked around her, stood in front of her, and said, “What the hell? You know you’ll have other gardens.”

She nodded.

His voice softened. “I think we met in this one. Remember?”

She nodded again, and some of the rigidity went out of her posture. “How many kids ago was that?” she asked softly. The humor in her voice surprised me.

“More than I ever expected to have,” he said. “Perhaps not enough, though.”

And she laughed. She touched his hair, which he wore long and bound with a twist of grass into a long tail down his back. He touched hers—a soft black cloud around her face. They could touch each other’s hair without difficulty because hair was essentially dead tissue. I had seen them touch that way before. It was the only way left to them.

“As much as I’ve loved my gardens,” she said, “I never raised them just for myself or for us. I wanted the resisters to take what they needed.”

Tino looked away, found himself staring at the downed papaya trees, and turned his head again. He had been a resister—had spent much of his life among people who believed that Humans who mated with Oankali were traitors, and that anything that could be done to harm them was good. He had left his people because he wanted children. The Mars colony did not exist then. Humans either came to the Oankali or lived childless lives. Lilith had told me once that Tino did not truly let go of his resister beliefs until the Mars colony was begun and his people could escape the Oankali. She had never been a resister. She had been placed with Nikanj when it was about my age. She did not understand at the time what that meant, and no one told her. Nikanj said she did not stop trying to break away until one of my brothers convinced the people to allow resisting Humans to settle on Mars.

In one way, the Mars colony freed both my Human parents to find what pleasure they could find in their lives. In another it hadn’t helped at all. They still feel guilt, feel as though they’ve deserted their people for aliens, as though they still suspect that they are the betrayers the resisters accused them of being. No Human could see the genetic conflict that made them such a volcanic species—so certain to destroy themselves. Thus, perhaps no Human completely believed it.

“I was always glad when they took whole plants,” Lilith was saying, “Something to feed them now and something to transplant later.”

“There are some peanuts here that survived,” Tino said. “Do you want them?” He bent to pull a few of the small plants from the loose soil I had watched Lilith prepare for them.

“Leave them,” she said. “I have some.” She turned back to face the garden, watched the Oankali members of the family place what they had gathered on a blanket of overlapping banana leaves. Ahajas stopped Oni from eating a salvaged papaya and sent her to tell Lo what had happened and that the food was being left. Oni was Human-born, and so deceptively Human-looking that I had gone on thinking of her as female— though it would be more than ten years before she would have any sex at all.

“Wait,” Lilith said.

Oni stopped near her, stood looking up at her.

Lilith walked over to Dichaan. “Will you go instead?” she asked him.

“The people who did this are gone, Lilith,” he told her. “They’ve been gone for over a day. There’s no sound of them, no fresh scent.”

“I know. But… just for my peace of mind, will you go?”

“Yes.” He turned and went. He would go only to the edge of Lo where some of the trees and smaller plants were not what they appeared to be. There he could signal Lo by touch, and Lo would pass the message on exactly to the next several people to open a wall or request food or in some other way come into direct contact with the Lo entity. Lo would pass the message on eight or ten times, then stop and store the message away. It couldn’t forget any more than we could, but unless someone requested the memory, it would never bother anyone with it again. Humans could neither leave nor receive such messages. Even though Lilith and a few others had learned some of what they called Oankali codes, their fingers were not sensitive enough to receive messages or fine and penetrating enough to send them.

Oni watched Dichaan go, then returned to Hozh, who had finished her papaya. She stood close to him. He was no more male than she female, but it was easier to go on thinking of them the way I always had. The two of them slipped automatically into silent communication. Whenever they stood close together that way, Hozh’s sensory tentacles immediately found Oni’s sensory spots—she had very few sensory tentacles of her own—and established communication. Paired siblings.

Watching them made me lonely, and I looked around for Aaor. I caught it watching me. It had avoided me carefully since I got up from my metamorphosis. I had let it keep its distance in spite of what Tehkorahs had told me because Aaor obviously did not want contact. It did not seem to need me as much as I needed it. As I watched, it turned away from me and focused its attention on a large beetle.

Lilith and Tino joined the family group where it had settled to wait for Dichaan. “This is just the beginning,” Lilith said to no one in particular. “We’ll be meeting people like the ones who destroyed this garden. Sooner or later they’ll spot us and come after us.”

“You have your machete,” Nikanj said.

It could not have gotten more attention if it had screamed. I focused on it to the exclusion of everything, felt pulled around to face it. Oankali did not suggest violence. Humans said violence was against Oankali beliefs. Actually it was against their flesh and bone, against every cell of them. Humans had evolved from hierarchical life, dominating, often killing other life. Oankali had evolved from acquisitive life, collecting and combining with other life. To kill was not simply wasteful to the Oankali. It was as unacceptable as slicing off their own healthy limbs. They fought only to save their lives and the lives of others. Even then, they fought to subdue, not to kill. If they were forced to kill, they resorted to biological weapons collected genetically on thousands of worlds. They could be utterly deadly, but they paid for it later. It cost them so dearly that they had no history at all of striking out in anger, frustration, jealousy, or any other emotion, no matter how keenly they felt it. When they killed even to save life, they died a little themselves.

I knew all this because it was as much a part of me as it was of them. Life was treasure. The only treasure. Nikanj was the one who had made it part of me. How could Nikanj be the one to suggest that anyone kill?

“… Nika?” Ahajas whispered. She sounded the way I felt. Uncomprehending, disbelieving.

“They have to protect their lives and the family,” Nikanj whispered. “If this were only a journey, we could guard them. We’ve guarded them before. But we’re leaving home. We’ll live cut off from others for … I don’t know, perhaps a long time. There will be times when we aren’t with them. And there are resisters who would kill them on sight.”

“I don’t want anyone to die because of me,” I said. “I thought we were leaving to save life.”

It focused on me, reached out a sensory arm, and drew me to its side. “We’re leaving because the forest is the only place where we can live together as a family,” it said. “No one will die because of you.”

“But—”

“If they die, it will only be because they work very hard to make us kill them.”

My siblings and other parents began to focus away from it. It had never said such things before. I stared at it and saw what they had missed. It was almost making itself sick with this talk. It would have been happier holding its hand in fire.

“There are easier ways to say these things,” it admitted. “But some things shouldn’t be said easily.” It hesitated as Dichaan rejoined us. “We will leave the group only in pairs. We won’t leave if it isn’t necessary. You children—all of you— look out for one another. There will be new things everywhere to taste and understand. If your sibling is tasting something, you stand guard. If you see or smell Humans, hide. If you’re caught in the open, run—even if it means being shot. If you’re brought down, scream. Make as much noise as you can. Don’t let them carry you away. Struggle. Make yourselves inconvenient to hold. If they seem intent on killing you, sting.”

My siblings stood with head and body tentacles hanging undirected. The stings of males, females, and children were lethal.

“Once you’re free, come to me or call me. I may be able to save whoever you’ve stung.” It paused. “These are terrible things. If you stay with the group and stay alert, you won’t have to do them.”

They began to come alive again, focusing a few tentacles on it and understanding why it was speaking so bluntly to them. We were all hard to kill. Even our Human parents had been modified, made strong, more able to survive injury. The main danger was in being overwhelmed and abducted. Once we were taken away from the family, anything could be done to us. Perhaps Oni and Hozh would only be adopted for a time by Humans who were desperate for children. The rest of us looked too much like adult Humans—or adult Oankali. Those who looked female would be raped. Those who looked male would be killed. The Humans would have all the time they needed to beat, cut, and shoot us until we died. Unless we killed them.

Best never to get into such a position.

Nikanj focused on Lilith and Tino for several seconds, but said nothing. It knew them. It knew they would make every effort not to kill their own people—and it knew they would resent being told to take care. I had seen Oankali make the mistake of treating Humans like children. It was an easy mistake to make. Most Humans were more vulnerable than their own half-grown children. The Oankali tried to take care of them. The Humans reacted with anger, resentment, and withdrawal. Nikanj’s way was better.

Nikanj focused for a moment on me. I still stood next to it, a coil of its right sensory arm around my neck. With its left sensory arm, it gestured to Aaor.

“No!” I whispered.

It ignored me. Aaor came toward us slowly, its whole body echoing my “no.” It was afraid of me. Afraid of being hurt?

“Do you understand what you feel?” Nikanj asked when Aaor was close enough for it to loop its left sensory arm around Aaor’s neck.

Aaor shook its head Humanly. “No. I don’t want to avoid Jodahs. I don’t know why I do it.”

“I understand,” Nikanj said. “But I don’t know whether I can help you. This is something new.”

That caught Aaor’s attention. Anything new was of interest.

“Think, Eka. When has an ooloi ever had a paired sibling?”

I almost missed seeing Aaor’s surprise, I was so involved with my own. Of course ooloi did not have paired siblings in the usual sense. In Oankali families, females had three children, one right after the other. One became male, one female, and one ooloi. Their own inclinations decided which became which. The male and the female metamorphosed and found an unrelated ooloi to mate with. The ooloi still had its subadult phase to mature through. It was still called a child—the only child who knew its sex. And it was alone until it neared its second metamorphosis and found mates. I should have had only my parents around me now. But where would that leave Aaor?

“Stop running away from one another,” Nikanj said. “Find out what’s comfortable for you. Do what your bodies tell you is right. This is a new relationship. You’ll be finding the way for others as well as for yourselves.”

“If it touches me, you’ll have to heal it,” I said.

“I know.” It flattened its head and body tentacles in something other than amusement. “Or at least, I think I know. This is new to me, too. Aaor, come to me every day for examination and healing. Come even if you believe nothing is wrong. Jodahs can make very subtle, important changes. Come immediately if you feel pain or if you notice anything wrong.”

“Ooan, help me understand it,” Aaor said. “Let me reach it through you.”

“Shall I?” Nikanj asked me silently.

“Yes,” I answered in the same way.

It wove us into seamless neurosensory union.

And it was as though Aaor and I were touching again with nothing between us. I savored Aaor’s unique taste. It was like part of me, long numb, long out of touch, yet so incredibly welcome back that I could only submerge myself in it.

Aaor said nothing to me. It only wanted to know me again—know me as an ooloi. It wanted to understand as deeply as it could the changes that had taken place in me. And I came to understand from it without words how lonely it had been, how much it wanted me back. It was totally unnatural for paired siblings to be near one another, and yet avoid touching.

Aaor asked wordlessly for release, and Nikanj released us both. For a second I was aware only of frog and insect sounds, the rain dropping from the trees, the sun breaking through the clouds. No one in the family moved or spoke. I hadn’t realized they were all focused on us. I started to look around, then Aaor stepped up to me and touched me. I reached for it with every sensory tentacle I had, and its own more numerous tentacles strained toward me. This was normal. This was what paired siblings were supposed to be able to do whenever they wanted to.

For a moment relief overwhelmed me again. My underarms itched just about where my sensory arms would grow someday. If I had already had the arms, I couldn’t have kept them off Aaor.

“It’s about time,” Ahajas said. “You two look after each other.”

“Let’s go.” Tino said.

We followed him out of the ruined garden, moving single file through the forest. He knew of a place that sounded as though it would make a good campsite—plenty of space, far from other settlements of any kind. Everyone’s fear was that I would make changes in the plant and animal life. These changes could spread like diseases—could actually be diseases. The adults in the family did not know whether they could detect and disarm every change. Sooner or later other people would have to deal with some of them. The idea was for us to isolate ourselves, to minimize and localize any cleaning up that would have to be done later. The place Tino had found years before was an island—a big island with a new growth of cecropia trees at one end and a mix of old growth over the rest. It was moving slowly downstream the way river islands did—mud taken from one end was deposited downstream at the other. All the adults remembered a place like this created aboard the ship and used to train Humans to live in the forest. None of them had liked it. Now they were headed for the real thing— because of me.

Sometime during the afternoon, Aaor’s underarms began to itch and hurt. By the time it went to Nikanj for healing, swellings had begun to appear. I had apparently caused Aaor’s unsexed, immature body to try to grow sensory arms. Instead, it was growing potentially dangerous tumors.

“I’m sorry,” I said when Nikanj had finished with it.

“Just figure out what you did wrong,” it said unhappily. “Find out how to avoid doing it again.”

That was the problem. I hadn’t been aware of doing anything to Aaor. If I had felt myself doing it, I would have stopped myself. I thought I had been careful. I was like a blind Human, trampling what I could not see. But a blind Human’s eyesight could be restored. What I was missing was something I had never had—or at least, something I had never discovered.

“Learn as quickly as you can so we can go home,” Aaor said.

I focused on the trail ahead—on scenting or hearing strangers. I couldn’t think of anything to say.