“What I want to know,” Rinaldi said, “is just how un-Human he is … mentally. Come here, kid.”
Akin did not want to go. Showing his tongue was one thing. Deliberately putting himself in hands that might be unfriendly was another. He looked up at Iriarte, hoping the man would not let him go. Instead Iriarte put him down and gave him a shove toward Rinaldi. Reluctantly, he edged toward the man.
Rinaldi got up impatiently and lifted Akin into his arms. He sat down, turned Akin about on his lap looking at him, then held Akin facing him. “Okay, they say you can talk. So talk.”
Again Akin turned to look at Iriarte. He did not want to begin talking in a room full of men when talking had already made one of those men hate him.
Iriarte nodded. “Talk, niño. Do as he says.”
“Tell us your name,” Rinaldi said.
Akin caught himself smiling. Twice now, he had been asked his name. These people seemed to care who he was, not just what he was. “Akin,” he said softly.
“Ah-keen?” Rinaldi frowned down at him. “Is that a Human name?”
“Yes.”
“What language?”
“Yoruba.”
“Yor—… what? What country?”
“Nigeria.”
“Why should you have a Nigerian name? Is one of your parents Nigerian?”
“It means hero. If you put an s on it, it means brave boy. I’m the first boy born to a Human woman on Earth since the war.”
“That’s what the worms hunting for you said,” Rinaldi agreed. He was frowning again. “Can you read?”
“Yes.”
“How can you have had time to learn to read?”
Akin hesitated. “I don’t forget things,” he said softly.
The raiders looked startled. “Ever?” Damek demanded. “Anything?”
Rinaldi only nodded. “That’s the way the Oankali are,” he said. “They can bring out the ability in Humans when they want to—and when the Humans agree to be useful to them. I thought that was the boy’s secret.”
Akin, who had considering lying, was glad he had not. He had always found it easy to tell the truth and difficult to make himself lie. He could lie very convincingly, though, if lying would keep him alive and spare him pain among these men. It was easier, though, to divert questions—as he had diverted the question about his parents.
“Do you want to stay here, Akin?” Rinaldi asked.
“If you buy me, I’ll stay,” Akin said.
“Shall we buy you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Akin glanced at Iriarte. “They want to sell me. If I have to be sold, I’d like to stay here.”
“Why?”
“You aren’t afraid of me, and you don’t hate me. I don’t hate you, either.”
Rinaldi laughed. Akin was pleased. He had hoped to make the man laugh. He had learned back in Lo that if he made Humans laugh, they were more comfortable with him—though, of course, in Lo, he had never been exposed to people who might injure him simply because he was not Human.
Rinaldi asked his age, the number of languages he spoke, and the purpose of his long, gray tongue. Akin withheld information only about the tongue.
“I smell and taste with it,” he said. “I can smell with my nose, too, but my tongue tells me more.” All true, but Akin had decided not to tell anyone what else his tongue could do. The idea of his tasting their cells, their genes, might disturb them too much.
A woman called a doctor came in, took Akin from Rinaldi, and began to examine, poke, and probe his body. She did not talk to him, though Rinaldi had told her he could talk.
“He’s got some oddly textured spots on his back, arms, and abdomen,” she said. “I suspect they’re where he’ll grow tentacles in a few years.”
“Are they?” Rinaldi asked him.
“I don’t know,” Akin said. “People never know what they’ll be like after metamorphosis.”
The doctor stumbled back from him with a wordless sound.
“I told you he could talk, Yori.”
She shook her head. “I thought you meant … baby talk.”
“I meant like you and me. Ask him questions. He’ll answer.”
“What can you tell me about the spots?” she asked.
“Sensory spots. I can see and taste with most of them.” And he could complete sensory connections with anyone else who had sensory tentacles or spots. But he would not talk to Humans about that.
“Does it bother you when we touch them?”
“Yes. I’m used to it, but it still bothers me.”
Two women came into the room and called Rinaldi away.
A man and woman came in to look at Akin—just to stand and stare at him and listen as he answered the doctor’s questions. He guessed who they were before they finally spoke to him.
“Did you really know our son?” the woman asked. She was very small. All the women he had seen so far were almost tiny. They would have looked like children alongside his mother and sisters. Still, they were gentle and knew how to lift him without hurting him. And they were neither afraid of him nor disgusted by him.
“Was Tino your son?” he asked the woman.
She nodded, mouth pulled tight. Small lines had gathered between her eyes. “Is it true?” she asked. “Have they killed him?”
Akin bit his lips, suddenly caught by the woman’s emotion. “I think so. Nothing could save him unless an Oankali found him quickly—and no Oankali heard when I screamed for help.”
The man stepped close to Akin, wearing an expression Akin had never seen before—yet he understood it. “Which one of them killed him?” the man demanded. His voice was very low, and only Akin and the two women heard. The doctor, slightly behind the man, shook her head. Her eyes were like his Human father Joseph’s had been—more narrow than round. Akin had been waiting for a chance to ask her whether she was Chinese. Now, though, her eyes were big with fear. Akin knew fear when he saw it.
“One who died,” Akin lied quietly. “His name was Tilden. He had a sickness that made him bleed and hurt and hate everyone. The other men called it an ulcer. One day, he threw up too much blood, and he died. I think the others buried him. One of them took me away so I wouldn’t see.”
“You know that he’s dead? You’re sure?”
“Yes. The others were angry and sad and dangerous for a long time after that. I had to be very careful.”
The man stared at him for a long time, trying to see what any Oankali would have known at a touch, what this man would never know. He had loved Tino, this man. How could Akin, even without the doctor’s warning, send him with his bare hands to face a man who had a gun, who had three friends with guns?
Tino’s father turned from Akin and went to the other side of the room, where both Rinaldis, the two women who had come in, and the four raiders were talking, shouting, gesturing. They had, Akin realized, begun the business of trading for him. Tino’s father was smaller than most of the men, but when he stalked into their midst, everyone stopped talking. Perhaps it was the look on the man’s face that made Iriarte finger the rifle beside him.
“Is there one of you called Tilden?” Tino’s father asked. His voice was calm and soft.
The raiders did not answer for a moment. Then, ironically, it was Damek who said, “He died, mister. That ulcer of his finally got him.”
“Did you know him?” Iriarte asked.
“I would like to have met him,” Tino’s father said. And he walked out of the house. Tate Rinaldi looked over at Akin, but no one else seemed to pay attention to him. Attention shifted from Tino’s father back to the subject of the trade. Tino’s mother smoothed back Akin’s hair and looked into his face for a moment.
“What was my son to you?” she asked.
“He took the place of my dead Human father.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, and tears ran down her face. Finally she kissed his cheek and went away.
“Akin,” the doctor said
softly, “did you tell them the truth?”
Akin looked at her and decided not to answer. He wished he had not told Tate Rinaldi the truth. She had sent Tino’s parents to him. It would have been better not to meet them at all until the raiders had gone away. He had to remember, had to keep reminding himself how dangerous Human beings were.
“Never tell them,” Yori whispered. His silence had apparently told her enough. “There has been enough killing. We die and die and no one is born.” She put her hands on either side of his face and looked at him, her expression shifting from pain to hatred to pain to something utterly unreadable. She hugged him suddenly, and he was afraid she would crush him or scratch him with her nails or thrust him away from her and hurt him. There was so much suppressed emotion in her, so much deadly tension in her body.
She left him. She spoke for a few moments with Rinaldi, then left the house.
10
BARGAINING WENT ON INTO the night. People ate and drank and told stories and tried to outtrade one another. Tate gave Akin what she called a decent vegetarian meal, and he did not tell her that it was not decent at all. It did not contain nearly enough protein to satisfy him. He ate it, then slipped out a door at the back of the house and supplemented his meal with peas and seed from her garden. He was eating these things when the shooting began inside.
The first shot startled him so much that he fell over. As he stood up, there were more shots. He took several steps toward the house, then stopped. If he went in, someone might shoot him or step on him or kick him. When the shooting stopped, he would go in. If Iriarte or Tate called him, he would go in.
There was the noise of furniture smashing—heavy bodies thrown about, people shouting, cursing. It was as though the people inside intended to destroy both the house and themselves.
Other people rushed into the house, and the sounds of fighting increased, then died.
When there had been several moments of silence, Akin went up the steps and into the house, moving slowly but not quietly. He made small noises deliberately, hoping he would be heard and seen and known not to be dangerous.
He saw first broken dishes. The clean, neat room where Tate had given him pineapple and talked to him was now littered with broken dishes and broken furniture. He had to move very carefully to avoid cutting his feet. His body healed faster than the bodies of Humans, but he found injuring himself just as painful as they seemed to.
Blood.
He could smell it strongly enough to be frightened. Someone must be dead with so much blood spilled.
In the living room, there were people lying on the floor and others tending them. In one corner, Iriarte lay untended.
Akin ran toward the man. Someone caught him before he could reach Iriarte and picked him up in spite of his struggles and cries.
Rinaldi.
Akin yelled, twisted, and bit the man’s thumb.
Rinaldi dropped him, shouting that he had been poisoned—which he had not—and Akin scrambled to Iriarte.
But Iriarte was dead.
Someone had struck him several times across the body with what must have been a machete. He had gaping, horrible wounds, some spilling entrails onto the floor.
Akin screamed in shock and frustration and grief. When he came to know a man, the man died. His Human father was dead without Akin ever knowing him except through Nikanj. Tino was dead. Now Iriarte was dead. His years had been cut off unfinished. His Human children had died in the war, and his construct children, created from material the ooloi had collected long ago, would never know him, never taste him and find themselves in him.
Why?
Akin looked around the room. Yori and a few others were doing what they could for the injured, but most of the people in the room were just staring at Akin or at Gabriel Rinaldi.
“He’s not poisoned!” Akin said with disgust. “You’re the ones who kill people, not me!”
“He’s all right?” Tate said. She was standing with her husband, looking frightened.
“Yes.” He looked at her for a moment, then looked again at Iriarte. He looked around, saw that Galt also appeared to be dead, hacked about the head and shoulders. Yori was working over Damek. What irony if Damek lived while Iriarte died for the murder Damek had committed.
Tino’s murder must be the reason for all this.
On the floor near Damek lay Tino’s father, wounded in his left thigh, his left arm, and his right shoulder. His wife was weeping over him, but he was not dead. A man was using something other than water to clean away blood from the shoulder wound. Another man was holding Tino’s father down.
There were other wounded and dead around the room. Akin found Kaliq dead behind a long cushion-covered wooden bench. He had only one wound, bloody but small. It was a chest wound, probably involving his heart.
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.
Akin came out of his corner to look at one of the bits of metal—a gray pellet covered with the blood of Tino’s father.
Tate came over to him and picked him up. To his own surprise, he held on to her. He put his head on her shoulder and did not want to be put down.
“Don’t you bite me,” she said. “If you want to get down, you tell me. Bite me and I’ll bounce you off a wall.”
He sighed, feeling alone even in her arms. She was not the haven he had needed. “Put me down,” he said.
She held him away from her and looked at him. “Really?”
Surprised, he looked back. “I thought you didn’t want to hold me.”
“If I didn’t want to hold you, I wouldn’t have picked you up. I just want us to understand each other. Okay?”
“Yes.”
And she held him to her again and answered his questions, told him about bullets and how they were fired from guns, how Tino’s father Mateo had come with his friends to take revenge on the raiders in spite of their guns. There were no guns in Phoenix before the raiders arrived.
“We voted not to have them,” she said. “We have enough things to hurt each other with. Now … well, we’ve got our first four. I’ll bury the damned things if I get the chance.”
She had taken him in among the broken dishes and sat him on the counter. He watched while she lit a lamp. The lamp reminded him suddenly, painfully, of the guest house back in Lo.
“You want anything else to eat?” she asked.
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No … what?”
“Shame on Lilith. ‘No, thank you,’ little one. Or ‘Yes, please.’ Understand?”
“I didn’t know resisters said those things.”
“In my house they do.”
“Did you tell Mateo who killed Tino?”
“God, no. I was afraid you told him. I forgot to tell you to keep that to yourself.”
“I told him the man who killed Tino was dead. One of the raiders really did die. He was sick. I thought if Mateo believed it was that one, he wouldn’t hurt anyone else.”
She nodded. “That should have worked. You’re brighter than I thought. And Mateo is crazier than I thought.” She sighed. “Hell, I don’t know. I never had any kids. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had one and someone killed him.”
“You shouldn’t have told Tino’s parents anything at all until the raiders were gone,” Akin said quietly
.
She looked at him, then looked away. “I know. All I said was that you had known Tino and that he had been killed. Of course they wanted to know more, but I told them to wait until we had settled you in—that you were just a baby, after all.” She looked at him again, frowning, shaking her head. “I wonder what the hell you really are.”
“A baby,” he said. “A Human-Oankali construct. I wish I were something more because the Oankali part of me scares people, but it doesn’t help me when they try to hurt me.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
Akin looked at her, then looked toward the room in which Iriarte lay dead.
Tate made herself very busy cleaning up the broken dishes and glass.
11
BOTH DAMEK AND MATEO lived.
Akin avoided both of them and stayed with the Rinaldis. Tino’s mother Pilar wanted him, seemed to believe she had a right to him since her son was dead. But Akin did not want to be near Mateo, and Tate knew it. Tate wanted him herself. She also felt guilty about the shooting, about her misjudgment. Akin trusted her to fight for him. He did not want to chance making an enemy of Pilar.
Other women fed him and held him when they could. He tried to speak to them or at least be heard speaking before they could get their hands on him. This made some of them back away from him. It kept them all from talking baby talk to him—most of the time. It also kept them from making fools of themselves and later resenting him for it. It forced them to either accept him for what he was or reject him.
And it had been Tate’s idea.
She reminded him of his mother, though the two were physical opposites. Pink skin and brown, blond hair and black, short stature and tall, small-boned and large. But they were alike in the way they accepted things, adapted to strangeness, thought quickly, and turned situations to their advantage. And they were both, at times, dangerously angry and upset for no apparent reason. Akin knew that Lilith sometimes hated herself for working with the Oankali, for having children who were not fully Human. She loved her children, yet she felt guilt for having them.