Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Xenogenesis Trilogy) by Octavia E. Butler Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    “We all do it naturally to some degree,” she said warily. “Sexual reproduction—”
    “The ooloi do it for us. They have special organs for it. They can do it for you too—make sure of a good, viable gene mix.
    It is part of our reproduction, but it’s much more deliberate than what any mated pair of humans have managed so far.
    “We’re not hierarchical, you see. We never were. But we are powerfully acquisitive. We acquire new life—seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it. We carry the drive to do this in a minuscule cell within a cell—a tiny organelle within every cell of our bodies. Do you understand me?”
    “I understand your words. Your meaning, though … it’s as alien to me as you are.”
    “That’s the way we perceived your hierarchical drives at first.” He paused. “One of the meanings of Oankali is gene trader. Another is that organelle—the essence of ourselves, the origin of ourselves. Because of that organelle, the ooloi can perceive DNA and manipulate it precisely.”
    “And they do this … inside their bodies?”
    “Yes.”
    “And now they’re doing something with cancer cells inside their bodies?”
    “Experimenting, yes.”
    “That sounds … a long way from safe.”
    “They’re like children now, talking and talking about possibilities.”
    “What possibilities?”
    “Regeneration of lost limbs. Controlled malleability. Future Oankali may be much less frightening to potential trade partners if they’re able to reshape themselves and look more like the partners before the trade. Even increased longevity, though compared to what you’re used to, we’re very long-lived now.”
    “All that from cancer.”
    “Perhaps. We listen to the ooloi when they stop talking so much. That’s when we find out what our next generations will be like.”
    “You leave all that to them? They decide?”
    “They show us the tested possibilities. We all decide.”
    He tried to lead her into his family’s woods, but she held back. “There’s something I need to understand now,” she said. “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.”
    “How?”
    “The ooloi will explain that when the time comes.”
    She spoke quickly, trying to blot out thoughts of more surgery or some sort of sex with the damned ooloi. “What will you make of us? What will our children be?”
    “Different, as I said. Not quite like you. A little like us.”
    She thought of her son—how like her he had been, how like his father. Then she thought of grotesque, Medusa children. “No!” she said. “No. I don’t care what you do with what you’ve already learned—how you apply it to yourselves—but leave us out of it. Just let us go. If we have the problem you think we do, let us work it out as human