Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)

by Octavia E. Butler

Opening and closing her jacket, her hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third Awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her. What had she lost or gained, and why? And what else might be done? She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge.

Humanity in its attempt to destroy itself had made the world unlivable. She had been certain she would die even though she had survived the bombing without a scratch. She had considered her survival a misfortune—a promise of a more lingering death.

She nodded, wondering why she could absorb his words so easily. Perhaps because she had known even before her capture that the world she had known was dead. She had already absorbed that loss to the degree that she could.

“We’ll divide here. We’re like mature asexual animals in that way, but we divide into three: Dinso to stay on Earth until it is ready to leave generations from now; Toaht to leave in this ship; and Akjai to leave in the new ship.”

Reference highlight.

“You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you.”

“intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

And yet they seem to be surprised by the violence of men.

“There was no life at all on your Earth when our ancestors left our original homeworld, and in all that time we’ve never done such a thing.” “You wouldn’t tell me if you had,” she said bitterly.

"You'd lie to me anyway, so why are you saying anything?" - Lilith with the boss-level sass.

She was a captive. What courtesy did a captive owe beyond what was necessary for self-preservation?

“We’re an adaptable species,” she said, refusing to be stopped, “but it’s wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it.”

“There’s something wrong with doing it that way—surprising people. It’s… treating them as though they aren’t people, as though they aren’t intelligent.”

“You’re filled with so much life and death and potential for change,” Nikanj continued. “I understand now why some people took so long to get over their fear of your kind.”

Nikanj, y'all have spider faces and penis arms that you use for non-consensual mind-sex, please don't lecture on fear.

She deliberately ignored the implications of this. “Nikanj isn’t male,” she said. “It’s ooloi.” “Yeah, I know. But doesn’t yours seem male to you?” She thought about that. “No. I guess I’ve taken their word for what they are.”

Say it louder for the folks in the back.

He ate several more bites of food. “The price,” he said softly, “is just the same. When they’re finished with us there won’t be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they’ll finish.”

She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually—as soon as they realized they could get away with it.

250 years studying humans, and the Oankali still underestimate this. Why not edit out the violent nature along with the need for hierarchy?

“They didn’t have enough of us for what they call a normal trade,” he said. “Most of the ones they have will be Dinso—people who want to go back to Earth. They didn’t have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more.”

He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.

I mean, he lives up to our worst characteristics. I get it, Lilith.

There were times when she brought the walls together, sealing herself away from the empty vastness outside—away from the decisions she must make. The walls and floor of the great room were hers to reshape as she pleased. They would do anything she was able to ask of them except let her out.

The food, she had been told, would be replaced as it was used—replaced by the ship itself which drew on its own substance to make print reconstructions of whatever each cabinet had been taught to produce.

She had read just over half the dossiers, searching not only for likely people to Awaken, but for a few potential allies—people she could Awaken first and perhaps come to trust. She needed to share the burden of what she knew, what she must do. She needed thoughtful people who would hear what she had to say and not do anything violent or stupid. She needed people who could give her ideas, push her mind in directions she might otherwise miss. She needed people who could tell her when they thought she was being a fool—people whose arguments she could respect.

Violent and stupid are humans middle names, Lilith.

How would she Awaken these people, these survivors of war, and tell them that unless they could escape the Oankali, their children would not be human?

There was no escape from the ship. None at all. The Oankali controlled the ship with their own body chemistry. There were no controls that could be memorized or subverted. Even the shuttles that traveled between Earth and the ship were like extensions of Oankali bodies.

What could she do? What could she tell the humans but “Learn and Run!” What other possibility for escape was there?

The Oankali had given her information, increased physical strength, enhanced memory, and an ability to control the walls and the suspended animation plants. These were her tools. And every one of them would make her seem less human.

“Tate, once he’s Awake, he stays Awake. He’s six-three, he weighs two-twenty, he’s been a cop for seven years, and he’s used to ordering people around. He can’t save us or protect us here, but he can damn sure screw us up. All he has to do to hurt us is refuse to believe we’re on a ship. After that, everything he does will be wrong and potentially deadly.”

Lilith would've picked the bear. See also: ACAB.

Tate shook her head. “I don’t know whether I should be shedding the constraints of civilization and getting ready to fight for my life or keeping and enhancing them for the sake of our future.”

“We’ll do what’s necessary,” Lilith said. “Sooner or later, that will probably mean fighting for our lives.”

“If you have to do something, it might as well feel good,” Nikanj had told her. It had become very interested in her physical pleasures and pains once its sensory arms were fully grown. Happily, it had paid more attention to pleasure than to pain. It had studied her as she might have studied a book—and it had done a certain amount of rewriting.

Lilith glanced at Tate, and Tate shook her head. “And you were afraid Awakening a man would cause violence,” she said. “I still am,” Lilith told her.

Paging Curt...

“Digest!” Celene said, horrified. “They… they’re alive themselves?” “Yes. The ship is alive and so is almost everything in it. The Oankali use living matter the way we used machinery.”

It's rad, honestly.

“We’re protected from one another,” Lilith said. “We’re an endangered species—almost extinct. If we’re going to survive, we need protection.”

And she went on to tell them about the Oankali, about the plan to reseed Earth with human communities. Then she told them about the gene trade because she had decided they must know. If she waited too long to tell them, they might feel betrayed by her silence. But telling them now gave them plenty of time to reject the idea, then slowly begin to think about it and realize what it could mean.

“As far as I know,” Lilith told them, “I haven’t seen any human-Oankali combinations. But because of the things I have seen, because of the changes the Oankali have made in me, I believe they can tamper with us genetically, and I believe they intend to. Whether they’ll blend with us or destroy us… that I don’t know.”

He took a deep breath. “I think our best bet now is to learn all we can. Get facts. Keep our eyes open. Then later we can make the best possible use of any opportunities we might have to escape.” Learn and run, Lilith thought almost gleefully. She could have hugged Joseph.

Nikanj spoke so softly that Joseph leaned forward to hear. “A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape. But you’re more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. We’re interested in those too. That’s why we saved as many of you as we could.”

They have more faith in us than we do in ourselves.

“There’ll be no rape here,” she said evenly. She raised her voice. “Nobody here is property. Nobody here has the right to the use of anybody else’s body. There’ll be no back-to-the-Stone-Age, caveman bullshit!” She let her voice drop to normal. “We stay human. We treat each other like people, and we get through this like people. Anyone who wants to be something less will have his chance in the forest. There’ll be plenty of room for him to run away and play at being an ape.”

Tell them.

“He died human! And he almost managed to take one of them with him!” She looked at him. “So what? What’s changed? On Earth we can change things. Not here.” “Will we want to by then? What will we be, I wonder? Not human. Not anymore.”

Stop scaring us, Joseph.

It knew they would run, she thought. It must know. Yet it talked about mixed settlements, human and Oankali—trade-partner settlements within which ooloi would control the fertility and “mix” the children of both groups.

She thought it would have been easier to have left the mosquitoes out of this small simulation of Earth. But Oankali did not think that way. A simulation of a tropical forest of Earth had to be complete with snakes, centipedes, mosquitoes and other things Lilith would have preferred to live without.

Hell yes, if we can start Earth over, please get rid of mosquitos.

Would it give the humans a feeling of power to know that they could make their ooloi feel sick and abandoned? Ooloi did not endure well when bereft of all those who carried their particular scent, their particular chemical marker. They lived. Metabolisms slowed, they retreated deep within themselves until called back by their families or, less satisfactorily, by another ooloi behaving as a kind of physician. So why didn’t they go to their mates when their humans left? Why did they stay and get sick?

“And in spite of what we see on what seems to be the other side, I believe we’ll find a wall over there.” “In spite of the sun, the moon and the stars? In spite of the rain and the trees that have obviously been here for hundreds of years?” Lilith sighed. “Yes.” “All because the Oankali said so.” “And because of what I saw and felt before I Awoke you.”

An ooloi needed a male and female pair to be able to play its part in reproduction, but it neither needed nor wanted two-way contact between that male and female. Oankali males and females never touched each other sexually. That worked fine for them. It could not possibly work for human beings. She reached out and took Joseph’s hand. He tried to jerk away reflexively, then he seemed to realize something was wrong. He held her hand for a long, increasingly uncomfortable moment. Finally it was she who drew away, shuddering with revulsion and relief.

One more case of Oankali omniscience: We understand your feelings, eat your food, manipulate your genes. But we’re too complex for you to understand. “Approximate!” she demanded. “Trade! You’re always talking about trading. Give me something of yourself!”

It gave her… a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or… tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling. Extinguished. A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.

“Do nothing,” Nikanj whispered to her. “He has lost all hope of Earth. He’s lost Celene. She’ll be sent to Earth without him. And he’s lost mental and emotional freedom. Leave him to us.”

“You should have known,” Lilith said. “You’ve had plenty of time to study us. What did you think would happen when you told us you were going to extinguish us as a species by tampering genetically with our children?”

She was Cassandra, warning and predicting to people who went deaf whenever she began to warn and predict.

Cassandra as a theme just keeps popping up.

Lilith followed automatically, her thoughts shifting from Nikanj to Joseph to Curt. Curt whose body was to be used to teach the ooloi more about cancer. She could not make herself ask whether he would be conscious and aware during these experiments. She hoped he would be.

Die, Curt.

She thought of Joseph, seemed to feel him beside her, hear him telling her to be careful, asking her what was the point in turning both peoples against her. There was no point. She was just tired. And Joseph was not there.

“They need us now. They won’t have children without us. Human sperm and egg will not unite without us.”

Diabolical.

“The child born to you and the child born to Ahajas will be siblings.”

I made this note more for me to remember. Does consent occur to any of these Ooloi?