Lilith's Brood (Xenogenesis, #1-3)

by Octavia E. Butler

“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.” Lilith looked at him. “Some of you will go to Earth with us?” “I will, and my family and others. All Dinso.” “Why?” “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.” “Will you take … seeds or something?” “We’ll take the necessary materials.”

“And those who leave—Toaht and Akjai—you’ll never see them again?” “I won’t. At some time in the distant future, a group of my descendants might meet a group of theirs. I hope that will happen. Both will have divided many times. They’ll have acquired much to give one another.” “They probably won’t even know one another. They’ll remember this division as mythology if they remember it at all.” “No, they’ll recognize one another. Memory of a division is passed on biologically. I remember every one that has taken place in my family since we left the homeworld.”

“Why can’t you go back to your homeworld?” she asked. “It … still exists, doesn’t it?” He seemed to think for a moment. “We left it so long ago … I doubt that it does still exist.” “Why did you leave?” “It was a womb. The time had come for us to be born.” She smiled sadly. “There were humans who thought that way—right up to the moment the missiles were fired. People who believed space was our destiny. I believed it myself.” “I know—though from what the ooloi have told me, your people could not have fulfilled that destiny. Their own bodies handicapped them.” “Their … our bodies? What do you mean? We’ve been into space. There’s nothing about our bodies that prevented—” “Your bodies are fatally flawed. The ooloi perceived this at once. At first it was very hard for them to touch you. Then you became an obsession with them. Now it’s hard for them to let you alone.” “What are you talking about?” “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.”

“It was malignant, I assume.” “Of course.” “Then I suppose it would eventually have killed me.” “Yes, it would have. And your people were in a similar position. If they had been able to perceive and solve their problem, they might have been able to avoid destruction. Of course, they too would have to remember to reexamine themselves periodically.”

“But what was the problem? You said we had two incompatible characteristics. What were they?” Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to come from his mouth or throat. “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. 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.”

“You’re welcome to it. But before when I asked, you said you trade … yourselves.” “Yes. 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.”

“This isn’t anything dangerous,” she said. “Some of your people must have seen our books, tapes, disks, films—our records of history, medicine, language, science, all kinds of things. I just want to make my own records of your language.” “I know about the … records your people kept. I didn’t know what they were called in English, but I’ve seen them. We’ve saved many of them and learned to use them to know humans better. I don’t understand them, but others do.” “May I see them?” “No. None of your people are permitted to see them.” “Why?” It did not answer. “Nikanj?” Silence. “Then … at least let me make my own records to help me learn your language. We humans need to do such things to help us remember.” “No.” She frowned. “But … what do you mean, ‘no’? We do.” “I cannot give you such things. Not to write or to read.” “Why!” “It is not allowed. The people have decided that it should not be allowed.” “That doesn’t answer anything. What was their reason?” Silence again.

Ahajas alone could have carried it. She was big like most Oankali females—slightly larger than Tediin. She and Dichaan were brother and sister as usual in Oankali matings. Males and females were closely related and ooloi were outsiders. One translation of the world ooloi was “treasured strangers.” According to Nikanj, this combination of relatives and strangers served best when people were bred for specific work—like opening a trade with an alien species. The male and female concentrated desirable characteristics and the ooloi prevented the wrong kind of concentrations. Tediin and Jdahya were cousins. They had both not particularly liked their siblings. Unusual.

The long wall opposite the bathrooms concealed eighty sleeping human beings—healthy, under fifty, English-speaking, and frighteningly ignorant of what was in store for them. Lilith was to choose and Awaken no fewer than forty. No wall would open to let her or those she Awakened out until at least forty human beings were ready to meet the Oankali. The great room was darkening slightly. Evening. Lilith found surprising comfort and relief in having time divided visibly into days and nights again. She had not realized how she had missed the slow change of light, how welcome the darkness would be. “It’s time for you to get used to having planetary night again,” Nikanj had told her. On impulse, she had asked if there were anywhere in the ship where she could look at the stars.

There were more stars out there than she had ever seen, but it was Earth that drew her gaze. Nikanj let her look at it until her own tears blinded her. Then it wrapped a sensory arm around her and led her to the great room. She had been in the great room alone for three days now, thinking, reading, writing her thoughts. All her books, papers, and pens had been left for her. With them were eighty dossiers—short biographies made up of transcribed conversations, brief histories, Oankali observations and conclusions, and pictures. The human subjects of the dossiers had no living relatives. They were all strangers to one another and to Lilith.

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. On another level, she did not want to Awaken anyone. She was afraid of these people, and afraid for them. There were so many unknowns, in spite of the information in the dossiers. Her job was to weave them into a cohesive unit and prepare them for the Oankali—prepare them to be the Oankali’s new trade partners. That was impossible.

A man like that could make Titus’ predictions self-fulfilling. He could undermine what little civilization might be left in the minds of those he Awoke. He could make them a gang. Or a herd. What would she make them? She lay on her bed platform, staring at a picture of a man. Five-seven, his statistics said. One hundred and forty pounds, thirty-two years old, missing the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of his left hand. He had lost the fingers in a childhood accident with a lawn mower, and he was self-conscious about the incomplete hand. His name was Victor Dominic—Vidor Domonkos, really. His parents had come to the United States from Hungary just before he was born. He had been a lawyer. The Oankali suspected he had been a good one. They had found him intelligent, talkative, understandably suspicious of unseen questioners, and very creative at lying to them. He had probed constantly for their identity, but was, like Lilith, one of the few native English-speakers who had never expressed the suspicion that they might be extraterrestrials. He had been married three times already, but had fathered no children due to a biological problem the Oankali believed they had corrected. Not fathering children had bothered him intensely, and he had blamed his wives, all the while refusing to see a doctor himself.

He had never broken down in his unexplained solitary confinement, had never wept or attempted suicide. He had, however, promised to kill his captors if he ever got the chance. He had said this only once, calmly, more as though he were making a casual remark than as though he were seriously threatening murder. Yet his Oankali interrogator had been disturbed by the words, and had put Victor Dominic back to sleep at once. Lilith liked the man. He had brains and, except for the foolishness with his wives, self-control—exactly what she needed. But she also feared him. What if he decided she was one of his captors? She was bigger, and now certainly stronger than he was, but that did not have to matter. He would have too many chances to attack when she was off guard. Better to Awaken him later when she had allies. She put his dossier to one side on the smaller of two piles—people she definitely wanted, but did not dare to Awaken first. She sighed and picked up a new dossier.

Leah Bede. Quiet, religious, slow—slow-moving, not slow-witted, though the Oankali had not been particularly impressed by her intelligence. It was her patience and self-sufficiency that had impressed them. They had not been able to make her obey. She had outwaited them in stolid silence. Outwaited Oankali! She had starved herself almost to death when they stopped feeding her to coerce her cooperation. Finally, they had drugged her, gotten the information they wanted, and, after a period of letting her regain weight and strength, they had put her back to sleep. Why, Lilith wondered. Why hadn’t the Oankali not simply drugged her as soon as they realized she was stubborn? Why had they not drugged Lilith herself? Perhaps because they wanted to see how far human beings had to be pushed before they broke. Perhaps they even wanted to see how each individual broke. Or perhaps the Oankali version of stubbornness was so extreme from a human point of view that very few humans tried their patience. Lilith had not. Leah had. The photo of Leah was a pale, lean, tired-looking woman, though an ooloi had noted that she had a physiological tendency to be heavy. Lilith hesitated, then put Leah’s folder atop Victor’s. Leah, too, sounded like a good potential ally, but not a good one to Awaken first. She sounded as though she could be an intensely loyal friend—unless she got the idea Lilith was one of her captors.

Joseph Li-Chin Shing. A widower whose wife had died before the war. The Oankali had found him quietly grateful for that. After his own period of stubborn silence, he had discovered that he didn’t mind talking to them. He seemed to accept the reality that his life was, as he said, “on hold” until he found out what had happened in the world and who was running things now. He constantly probed for answers to these questions. He admitted that he remembered deciding, not long after the war, that it was time for him to die. He believed that he had been captured before he could attempt suicide. Now, he said, he had reason to live—to see who had caged him and why and how he might want to repay them. He was forty years old, a small man, once an engineer, a citizen of Canada, born in Hong Kong. The Oankali had considered making him a parent of one of the human groups they meant to establish. But they had been put off by his threat. It was, the Oankali questioner thought, soft, but potentially quite deadly. Yet the Oankali recommended him to her—to any first parent. He was intelligent, they said, and steady. Someone who could be depended on.

There was Gabriel Rinaldi, an actor, who had confused the Oankali utterly for a while because he played roles for them instead of letting them see him as he was. He was another they had finally stopped feeding on the theory that sooner or later hunger would bring out the true man. They were not entirely sure that it had. Gabriel must have been good. He was also very good-looking. He had never tried to harm himself or threatened to harm the Oankali. And for some reason, they had never drugged him. He was, the Oankali said, twenty-seven, thin, physically stronger than he looked, stubborn and not as bright as he liked to think. That last, Lilith thought, could be said of most people. Gabriel, like the others who had defeated or come near defeating the Oankali, was potentially valuable. She did wonder whether she would ever be able to trust Gabriel, but his dossier remained with those she meant to Awaken.

There was Beatrice Dwyer who had been completely unreachable while she was naked, but whom clothing had transformed into a bright, likable person who seemed actually to have made a friend of her interrogator. That interrogator, an experienced ooloi, had attempted to have Beatrice accepted as a first parent. Other interrogators had observed her and disagreed for no stated reason. Maybe it was just the woman’s extreme physical modesty. Nevertheless, one ooloi had been completely won over.

There was Conrad Loehr—called Curt—who had been a cop in New York, and who had survived only because his wife had finally dragged him off to Colombia where her family lived. They had not gone anywhere for years before that. The wife had been killed in one of the riots that began shortly after the last missile exchange. Thousands had been killed even before it began to get cold. Thousands had simply trampled one another or torn one another apart in panic. Curt had been picked up with seven children, none of them his own, whom he had been guarding. His own four children, left back in the States with his relatives, were all dead. Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal—or dead. He had, alone in his isolation room, done his best to tear out his own throat with his fingernails.

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 several men this way, occasionally pairing them off with female friends. Couples she brought together tended to marry. Lilith put Tate Marah’s dossier down slowly, left it by itself on the bed.

Celene handed Curt one of the large edible bowls of food and Lilith offered one to Joseph. But Joseph kept focused on the subject of the living ship. He refused to eat himself or let Lilith eat in peace until he knew everything she did about the way the ship worked. He seemed annoyed that she knew so little. “Do you believe what she says?” Leah asked him when he finally gave up the interrogation and tasted his cold food. “I believe that Lilith believes,” he said. “I haven’t decided yet what I believe.” He paused. “It does seem important, though, for us to behave as though we are in a ship—unless we find out for certain that we aren’t. A ship in space could be an excellent prison even if we could get out of this room.” Lilith nodded gratefully. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s what’s important. If we endure this place, behave as though it’s a ship no matter what anyone thinks individually, we can survive here until we’re sent to Earth.”

“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.” “Well, I haven’t seen anything,” Curt said. He had been quiet for a long time, listening, slipping his arm around Celene when she sat near him and looked frightened. “Until I do see something—and I don’t mean more moving walls—this is all bullshit.” “I’m not sure I’d believe no matter what I saw,” Tate said. “It isn’t hard to believe our captors intend to do some kind of genetic tampering,” Joseph said. “They could do that whether they were human or extraterrestrial. There was a lot of work being done in genetics before the war. That may have devolved into some kind of eugenics program afterward. Hitler might have done something like that after World War Two if he had had the technology and if he had survived.” 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. Instead, she took a bite of her cold food.

She let him pull her down beside him again. She found it impossible to delude herself when he was around. This caused her enough pain sometimes to make her wonder why she encouraged him to stay around. Tate, with typical malice, had said, “He’s old, he’s short, and he’s ugly. Haven’t you got any discrimination at all?” “He’s forty,” Lilith had said. “He doesn’t seem ugly to me, and if he can deal with my size, I can deal with his.” “You could do better.” “I’m content.” She never told Tate that she had almost made Joseph the first person she Awakened. She shook her head over Tate’s halfhearted attempts to lure Joseph away. It wasn’t as though Tate wanted him. She just wanted to prove she could have him—and in the process, try him out. Joseph seemed to find the whole sequence funny. Other people were less relaxed about similar situations. That caused some of the most savage fights. An increasing number of bored, caged humans could not help finding destructive things to do.

“You’re giving me a choice?” “Yes.” “The change is permanent?” “Unless you ask to be changed back.” “Side effects?” “Psychological.” Joseph frowned. “What do you mean, psycho … Oh. So that’s why you won’t give me the strength.” “Yes.” “But you trust … Lilith.” “She has been Awake and living with my families for years. We know her. And, of course, we’re always watching.” After a time, 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?” The condescension in his voice first startled, then angered her. “Do I see, Joe? Oh, yes. I’ve had plenty of time to see.” He seemed to realize how he had sounded. “You have, yes—not that it helps to know.” Nikanj had shifted its attention from one of them to the other. Now it focused on Joseph. “Shall I make the change in you?” it asked.

“Do you know,” it said, “that no undrugged human has ever done that before? Some have touched us by accident this soon after meeting us, but no one has done it deliberately. I told you he was unusual.” “Why couldn’t you let him alone!” It unfastened Joseph’s jacket and began to remove it. “Because there are already two human males speaking against him, trying to turn others against him. One has decided he’s something called a faggot and the other dislikes the shape of his eyes. Actually, both are angry about the way he’s allied himself with you. They would prefer to have you without allies. Your mate needs any extra protection I can give him now.” She listened, appalled. Joseph had talked about the danger to her. Had he known how immediate his own danger was?

“What is a faggot?” it asked. She told it. “But they know he’s not that. They know he’s mated with you.” “Yes. Well, there’s been some doubt about me, too, I hear.” “None of them really believe it.” “Yet.”

The other ooloi focused back toward them and Nikanj’s head and body tentacles drew themselves into lumps of some negative emotion. Embarrassment? Anger? She did not care. Why should it feel comfortable about parasitizing her feelings for Joseph—her feelings for anything? It had helped set up a human experiment. One of the humans had been lost. What did it feel? Guilty for not having been more careful with valuable subjects? Or were they even valuable? Nikanj pressed the back of her neck with a sensory hand—warning pressure. It would give her something then. They stopped walking by mutual consent and faced one another. 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. Broken. Gone. Dead.

“We’re comfortable,” Akin’s oldest sister Ayre said. “This isn’t a terrible way to live.” “It’s primitive! You live like savages! I mean …” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just that … I don’t know any polite way to ask this: Why don’t you at least build real houses and get rid of these shacks! You should see what we have! And … Hell, you have spaceships. How can you live this way!” Lilith spoke softly to him. “How many of those real houses of yours were empty when you left, Tino?”

“My people never had a chance! They didn’t make the war. They didn’t make the Oankali. And they didn’t make themselves sterile! But you can be damn sure that everything they did make was good and it worked and they put their hearts into it. Hey, I thought, ‘If we made a town, the … traders … must have made a city!’ And what do I find? A village of huts with primitive gardens. This place is hardly even a clearing!” His voice had risen again. He looked around with disapproval. “You’ve got kids to plan for and provide for, and you’re going to let them slide right back to being cavemen!” A Human woman named Leah spoke up. “Our kids will be okay,” she said. “But I wish we could get more of your people to come here. They’re as close to immortal as a Human being has ever been, and all they can think of to do is build useless houses and kill one another.” “It’s time we offered the resisters a way back to us,” Ahajas said. “I think we’ve been too comfortable here.” Several Oankali made silent gestures of agreement. “Leave them alone,” Tino said. “You’ve done enough to them! I’m not going to tell you where they are!”

Nikanj, still holding Akin, got up and moved through the seated people until it could sit with no one between itself and Tino. “None of the resister villages are hidden from us,” it said softly. “We wouldn’t have asked you where Phoenix was. And we don’t mean to focus on Phoenix. It’s time for us to approach all the resister villages and invite them to join us. It’s only to remind them that they don’t have to live sterile, pointless lives. We won’t force them to come to us, but we will let them know they’re still welcome. We let them go originally because we...

“How many men have we got now, Wray?” Lilith asked. “Five,” he said. “None in the guest house, though. Tino can have it all to himself if he wants.” “Five men.” Tino shook his head. “No wonder you haven’t built anything.” “We build ourselves,” Wray said. “We’re building a new way of life here. You don’t know anything about us. Why don’t you ask questions instead of shooting off your mouth!” “What is there to ask? Except for your garden—which barely looks like a garden—you don’t grow anything. Except for your shacks, you haven’t built anything! And as for building yourselves, the Oankali are doing that. You’re their clay, that’s all!” “They change us and we change them,” Lilith said. “The whole next generation is made up of genetically engineered people, Tino—constructs, whether they’re born to Oankali or to Human mothers.” She sighed.

Dichaan linked with his nervous system and kept his heart beating. The man was a beautiful, terrible physical contradiction, as all Humans were. He was a walking seduction, and he would never understand why. He would not be lost. He could not be another Joseph.

“Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand this, you will. You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.” And she had put her hand on his hair. “When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.” Akin had not understood, but she had said, “It’s all right. Just remember.” And of course, he had remembered every word. It was one of the few times she had encouraged him to express Oankali characteristics. But now … How could he embrace Humans who, in their difference, not only rejected him but made him wish he were strong enough to hurt them?

Then, when he was gone and Lilith was ready to join those already looking for Akin, Ahajas’s child decided to be born. That was the way with children, Human or Oankali. When their bodies were ready, they insisted on being born. Eleven months for the Human-born instead of their original nine. Fifteen months for the Oankali-born instead of the original eighteen. Humans were so quick about everything. Quick and potentially deadly. Construct births on both sides had to be more carefully conventional than Human or Oankali births. Missing parents had to be simulated by the ooloi. The world had to be introduced very slowly after the child had gotten to know its parents. Lilith could not simply assist at the birth, then leave. Nikanj had all it could do simulating Joseph and being itself for the child. More would be uncertain—unsafe for the construct child.

Nikanj sat searching with its sensory arms for the place from which the child would eventually emerge. Lilith’s Human way of giving birth was simpler. The child emerged from an existing orifice—the same one each time. Its birth hurt Lilith, but Nikanj always took away her pain. Ahajas had no birth orifice. Her child had to make its own way out of her body. This did not hurt Ahajas, but it weakened her momentarily, made her want to sit down, made her focus her whole attention on following the child’s progress, helping it if it seemed in distress. It was the duty of her mates to protect her from interference and reassure her that they were with her—all part of her child that was part of her. All interconnected, all united—a network of family into which each child should fall. This should be the best possible time for a family. But with Tino badly injured and Akin abducted, it was a time of confused feelings. The moments of union and anticipation were squeezed between moments of fear for Akin and worry that the Tino they got back might not know them or want them.

Nikanj exposed one of its sensory hands, reached into the orifice, and lightly touched the child’s head tentacles. Instantly, the head tentacles grasped the sensory arm—the familiar thing amid so much strangeness. Ahajas, feeling the sudden movement and understanding it, rolled carefully onto her back. The child knew now that it was coming into an accepting, welcoming place. Without that small contact, its body would have prepared it to live in a harsher place—an environment less safe because it contained no ooloi parent. In truly dangerous environments, ooloi were likely to be killed trying to handle hostile new forms of life. That was why children who had no ooloi parents to welcome them at birth tended to become ooloi themselves when they matured. Their bodies assumed the worst. But in order for them to mature in the assumed hostile environment, they had to become unusually hardy and resilient early. This child, though, would not have to undergo such changes. Nikanj was with it. And someday it would probably be female to balance Akin—if Akin returned in time to influence it.

The four resisters and Akin approached Hillmann through fields of bananas, papaya trees, pineapple plants, and corn. The fields looked well kept and fruitful. They looked more impressive to Akin than Lilith’s gardens because they were so much larger and so many more trees had been cut down. There was a great deal of cassava and rows of something that had not yet come up. Hillmann must have lost a great deal of top soil to the rain in all those long, neat rows. How long could they farm this way before the land was ruined and they had to move? How much land had they already ruined? The village was two neat rows of thatched-roof wooden houses on stilts. Within the village, several large trees had been preserved. Akin liked the way the place looked. There was a calming symmetry to it.

“Seventeen months.” Akin thought for a moment. “No, eighteen now.” “Very, very intelligent,” Tate said, echoing Iriarte. “Shall we buy you, Akin?” “Yes, but …” “But?” “They want a woman.” Tate laughed. “Of course they do. We might even find them one. Men aren’t the only ones who get itchy feet. But, Jesus, four men! She’d better have another itchy part or two.” “What?” “Nothing, little one. Why do you want us to buy you?”

Akin sat beside him while others in the house helped the injured and carried out the dead. No one came for Kaliq while he sat there. Behind him, someone began to scream. Akin looked back and saw that it was Damek. Akin tried not to feel the anguish that came to him reflexively when he saw a Human suffering. One part of his mind screamed for an ooloi to save this irreplaceable Human, this man whom some ooloi somewhere had made prints of, but whom no Oankali or construct truly knew. Another part of his mind hoped Damek would die. Let him suffer. Let him scream. Tino had not even had time to scream. Tino’s father did not scream. He grunted. Bits of metal were cut from his flesh while he held a piece of folded cloth between his teeth and grunted.