Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)

by Octavia E. Butler

It enraged her during later Awakenings that there had been moments when she actually felt grateful to her mutilators for letting her sleep through whatever they had done to her—and for doing it well enough to spare her pain or disability later.

Then she began the oldest and most futile of her activities: a search for some crack, some

sound of hollowness, some indication of a way out of her prison.

There had not been a whisper of response. Her captors spoke when they were ready and not before. They did not show themselves at all. She remained sealed in her cubicle and their voices came to her from above like the light. There were no visible speakers of any kind, just as there was no single spot from which light originated. The entire ceiling seemed to be a speaker and a light—and perhaps a ventilator since the air remained fresh.

She slept a lot and was grateful to her body for responding to her alternating moods of fear and boredom by dozing frequently. The small, painless awakenings from these naps eventually began to disappoint her as much as had the greater Awakening.

The questions became more complex, actually became conversations during later Awakenings. Once, they put a child in with her—a small boy

with long, straight black hair and smoky-brown skin, paler than her own. He did not speak English and he was terrified of her. He was only about five years old—a little older than Ayre, her own son. Awakening beside her in this strange place was probably the most frightening thing the little boy had ever experienced.

She begged them to let him come back, but they refused. They said he was with his mother. She did not believe them. She imagined Sharad locked alone in his own small cubicle,

“I’m here to tell you … and show you. Will you look at me now?” Since she was looking at him—it—she frowned. “The light—” “It will change when you’re ready.” “You’re … what? From some other world?” “From a number of other worlds. You’re one of the few English speakers who never considered that she might be in the hands of extraterrestrials.”

The lights brightened as she had supposed they would, and what had seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose—no bulge, no nostrils—just flat, gray skin. It was gray all over—pale gray skin, darker gray hair on its head. The hair grew down around its eyes and ears and at its throat. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the creature could see. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears as well as around them.

“It’s wrong to assume that I must be a sex you’re familiar with,” it said, “but as it happens, I’m male.”

When she could go no farther, she stood against the wall, staring at him. Medusa. Some of the “hair” writhed independently, a nest of snakes startled, driven in all directions. Revolted, she turned her face to the wall. “They’re not separate animals,” he said. “They’re sensory organs. They’re no more dangerous than your nose or eyes. It’s natural for them to move in response to my wishes or emotions or to outside stimuli. We have them on our bodies as well. We need them in the same way you need your ears, nose, and eyes.”

“I can’t,” she whispered, though now she wanted to. Could she have been so wrong, so deceived by her own eyes? “You will,” he said. “My sensory organs aren’t dangerous to you. You’ll have to get used to them.” “No!” The tentacles were elastic. At her shout, some of them lengthened, stretching toward her. She imagined big, slowly writhing, dying night crawlers stretched along the sidewalk after a rain.

“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.”

She believed him. 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 ...

“Is there anything left on Earth?” she whispered. “Anything alive, I mean.” “Oh, yes. Time and our efforts have been restoring it.” That stopped her. She managed to look at him for a moment without being distracted by the slowly writhing tentacles...

“No!” he said sharply. “I’ll only talk to you, Lilith, if you look at me.” She made a fist of one hand and deliberately dug her nails into her palm until they all but broke the skin. With the pain of that to distract her, she faced him. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Kaaltediinjdahya lel Kahguyaht aj Dinso.”

“Jdahya,” he said. “That part is me. The rest is my family and other things.”

right. “Jdahya,” she said, “I want to know the price of your people’s help. What do you want of us?” “Not more than you can give—but more than you can understand here, now. More than words will be able to help you understand at first. There are things you must see and hear outside.”

“Do you understand now what happened to us?” “I’m aware of what happened. It’s … alien to me. Frighteningly alien.” “Yes. I sort of feel that way myself, even though they’re my people. It was … beyond insanity.” “Some of the people we picked up had been hiding deep underground. They had created much of the destruction.” “And they’re still alive?”

“The ones still alive are very old now. We’ve used them slowly, learned biology, language, culture from them. We Awakened them a few at a time and let them live their lives here in different parts of the ship while you slept.” “Slept … Jdahya, how long have I slept?”

The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.” She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?” “Several have tried to kill me.” She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?”

“Can you really see?” “Very well.” “Colors? Depth?” “Yes.”

She could see now that there were only dark patches where tentacles grew thickly. The same with the sides of his head where ears should have been. And there were openings at his throat. And the tentacles around them didn’t look as dark as the others. Murkily translucent, pale gray worms.

“About … two hundred and fifty of your years.” This was more than she could assimilate at once. She said nothing for so long that he broke the silence.

Some of us believed it was because they had been left out of the mass suicide—that they simply wanted to finish the dying. Others said it was because we kept them isolated. We began putting two or more together, and many injured or killed one another. Isolation cost fewer lives.”

“Can I see him?” she asked. “Jdahya?” the voice said. Jdahya turned toward her. “You’ll be able to see him when you can walk among us without panic.

“My relative is not male—or female. The name for its sex is ooloi. It understood your body because it is ooloi. On your world there were vast numbers of dead and dying humans to study. Our ooloi came to understand what could be normal or abnormal, possible or impossible for the human body. The ooloi who went to the planet taught those who stayed here. My relative has studied your people for much of its life.”

It was easier to do than she had expected. His skin was cool and almost too smooth to be real flesh—smooth the way her fingernails were and perhaps as tough as a fingernail. “Is it hard for you to stay like this?” she asked. “Not hard. Unnatural. A muffling of the senses.” “Why did you do it—before I asked you to, I mean.” “It’s an expression of pleasure or amusement.”

“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.”

“You are intelligent,” he said. “That’s the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we’ve found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics.” “What’s the second characteristic?” “You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic.

“You call it a trade. You’ve taken something you value from us and you’re giving us back our world. Is that it? Do you have all you want from us?” “You know it isn’t,” he said softly. “You’ve guessed that much.” She waited, staring at him. “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. The ooloi will make changes in your reproductive cells before conception and they’ll control conception.”

When she had eaten some of everything, savored each new taste lovingly, she began to pay attention to the four Oankali who were with her in the small, bare room. They were Jdahya and his wife Tediin—Kaaljdahyatediin lel Kahguyaht aj Dinso. And there was Jdahya’s ooloi mate Kahguyaht—Ahtrekahguyahtkaal lel Jdayhatediin aj Dinso. Finally there was the family’s ooloi child Nikanj—Kaalnikanj oo Jdahyatediinkahguyaht aj Dinso.

“That doesn’t make sense. Why should you be able to come from so far away—another world, another star system—and eat our food?” “Haven’t we had time to learn to eat your food?” the ooloi asked. “What?” It did not repeat the question. “Look,” she said, “how can you learn to eat something that’s poison to you?” “By studying teachers to whom it isn’t poison. By studying your people, Lilith. Your bodies.”

“Before we found these plants,” Kahguyaht said, “they used to capture living animals and keep them alive for a long while, using their carbon dioxide and supplying them with oxygen while slowly digesting nonessential parts of their bodies: limbs, skin, sensory organs.

“We altered them genetically—changed some of their requirements, enabled them to respond to certain chemical stimuli from us.”

Who else would there be for her if the Oankali had their way—and no doubt they were used to having their way. Modifying carnivorous plants … What had they modified to get their ship? And what useful tools would they modify human beings into? Did they know yet, or were they planning more experiments? Did they care? How would they make their changes?

He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn’t bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure. “Look,” she said when he drew back. “I’m not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali.

Or maybe they don’t even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin from one person and make babies out of it—cloning, you know. Or maybe they use one of their prints—and don’t ask me what a print is. But if they’ve got one of you, they can use it to make another you even if you’ve been dead for a hundred years and they haven’t got anything at all left of your body. And that’s just the start. They can make people in ways I don’t even know how to talk about.

“Knowing frightened him and made him miserable. You discovered one of his fears—that perhaps one of his female relatives had survived and been impregnated with his sperm. He’s been told that this did not happen. Sometimes he believes; sometimes he doesn’t.” “He still had a right to know. I would

Tate Marah had just quit another job. She had some genetic problem that the Oankali had controlled, but not cured. But her real problem seemed to be that she did things so well that she quickly became bored. Or she did them so badly that she abandoned them before anyone noticed her incompetence. People had to see her as a formidable presence, bright, dominant, well off. Her family had had money—had owned a very successful real estate business. Part of her problem, the Oankali believed, was that she did not have to do anything. She had great

energy, but needed some external pressure, some challenge to force her to focus it. How about the preservation of the human species? She had attempted suicide twice before the war. After the war, she fought to live. She had been alone, vacationing in Rio de Janeiro when war came. It had not been a good time to be a North American, she felt, but she had survived and managed to help others. She had that in common with Curt Loehr. Under Oankali interrogation, she had engaged in verbal fencing and game playing that eventually exasperated

the ooloi questioner. But in the end, the ooloi had admired her. It thought she was more like an ooloi than like a female. She was good at manipulating people—could do it in ways they did not seem to mind. That had bored her too in the past. But boredom had not driven her to do harm to anyone except herself. There had been times when she withdrew from people to protect them from the possible consequences of her own frustration. She had withdrawn from ...

After a long while, he closed his eyes and the two of them lay together. Joseph held his body rigid at first, but slowly, as nothing happened, he began to relax. Sometime later his breathing evened and he seemed to be asleep. Lilith sat on the table, waiting, watching. She was patient and interested. This might be her only chance ever to watch close up as an ooloi seduced someone. She thought it should have bothered her that the “someone” in this case was Joseph. She knew more than she wanted to about the wildly conflicting feelings he was subject to now.

Yet, in this matter, she trusted Nikanj completely. It was enjoying itself with Joseph. It would not spoil its enjoyment by hurting him or rushing him. In a perverse way, Joseph too was probably enjoying himself, though he could not have said so. Lilith was dozing when Nikanj stroked Joseph’s shoulders, rousing him. His voice roused her. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Waking you.” “I wasn’t asleep!” Silence.