the lightning?mindless and perhaps deadly.?
I looked at it, my own head tentacles swept forward, focused. ?What did you learn when you examined me? You weren?t satisfied. Does that mean you think I can?t learn control??
?I don?t know whether you can or not. I couldn?t tell. Nikanj says you can, but that it will be hard. I don?t know what it sees to draw that conclusion. Perhaps it only sees its first same-sex child.?
?Do you still think I should go to the ship??
?Yes. For your sake. For everyone?s.? It rubbed its right hand, and I saw that it had developed a duplicate of my crusty, running tumor.
?I?m sorry,? I said. ?Do you know what I did wrong to cause that??
?A combination of things. I don?t understand all of them yet. You should take this to Nikanj, now.?
?Will you be all right??
?Yes.?
I looked at it, missing it already?a smaller than average pale gray ooloi from the Jah kin group. It uncoiled one sensory arm and touched a sensory spot on my face. It could see the spots?as I could now. Their texture was slightly rougher than the skin around them. Tehkorahs made the contact a sharp, sweet shock of pleasure that washed over me like a sudden, cool rain. It ebbed slowly away. A goodbye.
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.
