Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler

had been kind. Perhaps he would listen.
    “He’ll die,” Akin whispered, feeling as though he were using shameful profanity.
    The red-haired man put him down, stared at him with disbelief.
    “An ooloi would stop the bleeding and the pain,” Akin said. “It wouldn’t keep him or make him do anything. It would just heal him.”
    The man shook his head, let his mouth sag open. “What the hell are you?” There was no longer kindness or friendliness in his voice. Akin realized he had made a mistake. How to recoup? Silence? No, silence would be seen as stubbornness now, perhaps punished as stubbornness.
    “ Why should your friend die? ” he asked with all the passionate conviction he felt.
    “He’s sixty-five,” the man said, drawing away from Akin. “At least he’s been awake for sixty-five years in all. That’s a decent length of time for a Human being.”
    “But he’s sick, in pain.”
    “It’s just an ulcer. He had one before the war. The worms fixed it, but after a few years it came back.”
    “It could be fixed again.”
    “I think he’d cut his own throat before he’d let one of those things touch him again. I know I would.”
    Akin looked at the man, tried to understand his new expression of revulsion and hatred. Did he feel these things toward Akin as well as toward the Oankali? He was looking at Akin.
    “What the hell are you?” he said.
    Akin did not know what to say. The man knew what he was.
    “How old are you really?”
    “Seventeen months.”
    “Crap! Jesus, what are the worms doing to us? What kind of mother did you have?”
    “I was born to a Human woman.” That was what he really wanted to know. He did not want to hear that Akin had two female parents just as he had two male parents. He knew this, though he probably did not understand it. Tino had been intensely curious about it, had asked Akin questions he was too embarrassed to ask his new mates. This man was curious, too, but it was like the kind of curiosity that made some Humans turn over rotting logs—so they could enjoy being disgusted by what lived there.
    “Was that Phoenix your father?”
    Akin began to cry in spite of himself. He had thought of Tino many times, but he had not had to speak of him. It hurt to speak of him. “How could you hate him so much and still want me? He was Human like you, and I’m not, but one of you killed him.”
    “He was a traitor to his own kind. He chose to be a traitor.”
    “He never hurt other Humans. He wasn’t even trying to hurt anyone when you killed him. He was just afraid for me.”
    Silence.
    “How can what he did be wrong if I’m valuable?”
    The man looked at him with deep disgust. “You may not be valuable.”
    Akin wiped his face and stared his own dislike back at this man who defended the killing of Tino, who had never harmed him. “I will be valuable to you,” he said. “All I have to do is be quiet. Then you can be rid of me. And I can be rid of you.”
    The man got up and walked away.
    Akin stayed where he was. The men would not leave him. They would come this way when they went down to the river. He was frightened and miserable and shaking with anger. He had never felt such a mix of intense emotions. And where had his last words come from? They made him think of Lilith when she was angry. Her anger had always frightened him, yet here it was inside him. What he had said was true enough, but he was not Lilith, tall and strong. It might have been better for him not to speak his feelings.
    Yet there had been some fear in the red-haired man’s expression before he went away.
    “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