Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)

by Octavia E. Butler

She had not been allowed clothing from her first Awakening until now. She had pleaded for it, but her captors had ignored her.

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.

She made up stories and argued both sides of questions she had once been passionate about, anything!

You’re one of the few English speakers who never considered that she might be in the hands of extraterrestrials.”

“This is my home. You could call it a ship—a vast one compared to the ones your people have built. What it truly is doesn’t translate. You’ll be understood if you call it a ship. It’s in orbit around your Earth, somewhat beyond the orbit of Earth’s moon. As for how many humans are here: all of you who survived your war. We collected as many as we could. The ones we didn’t find in time died of injury, disease, hunger, radiation, cold… We found them later.”

You may begin to know how much we value it when I tell you that by your way of measuring time, it has been several million years since we dared to interfere in another people’s act of self-destruction. Many of us disputed the wisdom of doing it this time. We thought… that there had been a consensus among you, that you had agreed to die.”

She looked at Jdahya. “What do your people call themselves?” she asked. “Tell me about them.” “We are Oankali.”

It was hard to watch her age and die. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.”

There are new plants—mutations of old ones and additions we’ve made. Some things that used to be edible are lethal now. Some things are deadly only if they aren’t prepared properly. Some of the animal life isn’t as harmless as it apparently once was. Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed.”

“There must be ruins,” she said softly. “There were. We’ve destroyed many of them.” She seized his arm without thinking. “You destroyed them? There were things left and you destroyed them?” “You’ll begin again. We’ll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were.”

“The human doctor used to say it loved us. There is an affinity, but it’s biological—a strong, symbiotic relationship. We serve the ship’s needs and it serves ours. It would die without us and we would be planetbound without it. For us, that would eventually mean death.”

“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.”

“This is how we grow—how we’ve always grown. We’ll take the knowledge of shipgrowing with us so that our descendants will be able to leave when the time comes. We couldn’t survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.”

Memory of a division is passed on biologically. I remember every one that has taken place in my family since we left the homeworld.”

“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.”

“You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It’s a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all…” The rattling sounded again. “That was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing.”

“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.”

He wanted her dependent. That was the reason for her continued isolation from her own kind. She was to be dependent on an Oankali—dependent and trusting. To hell with that!

We trade the essence of ourselves. Our genetic material for yours.” Lilith frowned, then shook her head. “How? I mean, you couldn’t be talking about interbreeding.” “Of course not.” His tentacles smoothed. “We do what you would call genetic engineering. We know you had begun to do it yourselves a little, but it’s foreign to you. We do it naturally. We must do it. It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species instead of specializing ourselves into extinction or stagnation.”

“Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you. Your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to regenerate limbs and reshape our bodies, we’ll share those abilities with you. That’s part of the trade. We’re overdue for it.” “It is crossbreeding, then, no matter what you call it.” “It’s what I said it was. A trade.

“You won’t do that yourself—won’t just spring it on me?” “No.” “Why not?” “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, do you ever build machinery? Tamper with metal and plastic instead of living things?” “We do that when we have to. We… don’t like it. There’s no trade.”

“I never got to do it before,” he whispered. “Never once with a woman. But who knows who they mixed the stuff with.” He paused, stared at her where she had fallen. “They said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!” He kicked her hard. The last sound she heard before she lost consciousness was his ragged, shouted curse.

The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay.”

“The Toaht have a print of you—of every human we brought aboard. They need the genetic diversity. We’re keeping prints of the humans they take away, too. Millenia after your death, your body might be reborn aboard the ship. It won’t be you. It will develop an identity of its own.”

“He was… enraged. Out of control. He attacked members of his family. They say he would have killed them if he could have. When they restrained him, he wept and spoke incoherently. He refused to speak Oankali at all. In English, he cursed his family, you, everyone. He had to be put to sleep—perhaps for a year or more. The long sleeps are healing to nonphysical wounds.”

“He beat you, Lilith,” Nikanj said. “He broke your bones. If you had gone untreated, you might have died of what he did.” “He did what you and his so-called family set him up to do!”

“Put me back, too,” she demanded while she could still talk. “Let me sleep again. Put me where they’ve put him. I’m no more what your people think than he was. Put me back. Find someone else!”

Kahguyaht retracted the hand so quickly that it seemed to vanish. It lowered the sensory arm. “Humans and Oankali tend to bond to one ooloi,” it told her. “The bond is chemical and not strong in you now because of Nikanj’s immaturity. That’s why my scent makes you uncomfortable.”

Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles. “I didn’t want to accept you, Lilith. Not for Nikanj or for the work you’ll do. I believed that because of the way human genetics were expressed in culture, a human male should be chosen to parent the first group. I think now that I was wrong.”

Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will.”

How could she Awaken people and tell them they were to be part of the genetic engineering scheme of a species so alien that the humans would not be able to look at it comfortably for a while? 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?

Her mind slipped into the familiar track: 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.

Oankali did it with their sensory arms. Both did it from memory, without pictures impregnated with prints. Once they read someone’s print or examined someone and took a print, they remembered it, could duplicate it. Lilith would never be able to read prints or duplicate them. That required Oankali organs of perception. Her children would have them, Kahguyaht had said.

I’m sure they’re watching.” “If there’s trouble, will they help?” “If they decide it’s bad enough. I think there were some who would have let Titus rape me. I don’t think they would have let him kill me. They might have been too slow to prevent it, though.”

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

“it doesn’t mean leader. It means Judas goat.” “You can make their lives easier,” Nikanj said. “You can help them accept what is to happen to them. But whether you lead them or not, you can’t prevent it. It would happen even if you died. If you lead them, more of them will survive. If you don’t, you may not survive yourself.”

Nikanj spoke very softly. “We revere life. We had to be certain we had found ways for you to live with the partnership, not simply to die of it.”

“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.”

Joseph took Lilith’s hands. “Do you see?” he asked gently. “Do you understand why they chose you—someone who desperately doesn’t want the responsibility, who doesn’t want to lead, who is a woman?”

“Serve them by leading them, Lilith. Help us send as many of them home as we can.”

She sandwiched Nikanj’s body between her own and Joseph’s, placing it for the first time in the ooloi position between two humans. For an instant, this frightened her. This was the way she might someday be made pregnant with an other-than-human child. Not now while Nikanj wanted other work from her, but someday. Once it plugged into her central nervous system it could control her and do whatever it wanted. She felt it tremble against her, and knew it was in.

“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.”

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.

Your body knows how to cause some of its cells to revert to an embryonic stage. It can awaken genes that most humans never use after birth. We have comparable genes that go dormant after metamorphosis. Your body showed mine how to awaken them, how to stimulate growth of cells that would not normally regenerate. The lesson was complex and painful, but very much worth learning.” “You mean…” She frowned. “You mean my family problem with cancer, don’t you?” “It isn’t a problem anymore,” Nikanj said, smoothing its body tentacles. “It’s a gift. It has given me my life back.”

“They can’t even touch one another, the men and the women. Is that it?” “That will pass when they’ve been away from us for a while. But it won’t matter.” “Why not?” “They need us now. They won’t have children without us. Human sperm and egg will not unite without us.”

“It won’t be a daughter.” She pulled again at her arms, but it would not let her go. “It will be a thing—not human.” She stared down at her own body in horror. “It’s inside me, and it isn’t human!”

“You shouldn’t begin to lie to yourself. It’s a deadly habit. The child will be yours and Joseph’s. Ahajas’ and Dichaan’s. And because I’ve mixed it, shaped it, seen that it will be beautiful and without deadly conflicts, it will be mine.

“Our children will be better than either of us,” it continued. “We will moderate your hierarchical problems and you will lessen our physical limitations. Our children won’t destroy themselves in a war, and if they need to regrow a limb or to change themselves in some other way they’ll be able to do it.