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

Nikanj. She spent all her time teaching it and learning what she could from it. It kept her as busy as she would permit. It needed less sleep than she did, and when she was not asleep, it expected her to be learning or teaching. It wanted not only language, but culture, biology, history, her own life story. … Whatever she knew, it expected to learn.
    This was a little like having Sharad with her again. But Nikanj was much more demanding—more like an adult in its persistence. No doubt she and Sharad had been given their time together so that the Oankali could see how she behaved with a foreign child of her own species—a child she had to share quarters with and teach.
    Like Sharad, Nikanj had an eidetic memory. Perhaps all Oankali did. Anything Nikanj saw or heard once, it remembered, whether it understood or not. And it was bright and surprisingly quick to understand. She became ashamed of her own plodding slowness and haphazard memory.
    She had always found it easier to learn when she could write things down. In all her time with the Oankali, though, she had never seen any of them read or write anything.
    “Do you keep any records outside your own memories?” she asked Nikanj when she had worked with it long enough to become frustrated and angry. “Do you ever read or write?”
    “You have not taught me those words,” it said.
    “Communication by symbolic marks …” She looked around for something she could mark, but they were in their bedroom and there was nothing that would retain a mark long enough for her to write words—even if she had had something to write with. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
    It opened a wall and led her out. Outside, beneath the branches of the pseudotree that contained their living quarters, she knelt on the ground and began to write with her finger in what seemed to be loose, sandy soil. She wrote her name, then experimented with different possible spellings of Nikanj’s name. Necange didn’t look right—nor did Nekahnge. Nickahnge was closer. She listened in her mind to Nikanj saying its name, then wrote Nikanj. That felt right, and she liked the way it looked.
    “That’s about what your name would look like written down,” she said. “I can write the words you teach me and study them until I know them. That way I wouldn’t have to ask you things over and over. But I need something to write with—and on. Thin sheets of paper would be best.” She was not sure it knew what paper was, but it did not ask. “If you don’t have paper, I could use thin sheets of plastic or even cloth if you can make something that will mark them. Some ink or dye—something that will make a clear mark. Do you understand?”
    “You can do what you’re doing with your fingers,” it told her.
    “That’s not enough. I need to be able to keep my writing … to study it. I need—”
    “No.”
    She stopped in midsentence, blinked at 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