"What did he know? You never let him see anybody else!"
"It wasn't necessary. His family took care of him."
She stared at it, feeling more strongly than ever, the difference between them-the unbridgeable alienness of Nikanj. She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate. It could do the same with her, although it could force her to obey whether she understood or not. Or it could turn her over to others who would use force against her.
"His family thought you should have mated with him," it said. "They knew you wouldn't stay with him permanently, but they believed you would share sex with him at least once."
Share sex, she thought sadly. Where had it picked up that expression? She had never said it. She liked it, though. Should she have shared sex with Paul Titus? "And maybe gotten pregnant," she said aloud.
"You would not have gotten pregnant," Nikanj said.
And it had her full attention. "Why not?" she demanded.
"It isn't time for you to have children yet."
"Have you done something to me? Am I sterile?"
"Your people called it birth control. You are slightly changed. It was done while you slept, as it was done to all humans at first. It will be undone eventually."
"When?" she asked bitterly. "When you're ready to breed me?"
"No. When you're ready. Only then."
"Who decides? You?"
"You, Lilith. You."
Its sincerity confused her. She felt that she had learned to read its emotions through posture, sensory tentacle position, tone of voice. . . . It seemed not only to be telling the truth-as usual-but to be telling a truth it considered important. Yet Paul Titus, too, had seemed to be telling the truth. "Does Paul really have over seventy children?" she asked.
"Yes. And he's told you why. The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay." Nikanj hesitated. "They should not have told Paul what they were doing. But that's always a difficult thing to realize-and sometimes we realize it too late."
"He had a right to know!"
"Knowing frightened him and made him miserable. You discovered one of his fears-that perhaps one of his female relatives had survived and been impregnated with his sperm. He's been told that this did not happen. Sometimes he believes; sometimes he doesn't."
"He still had a right to know. I would want to know."
Silence.
"Has it been done to me, Nikanj?"
"No."
"And . . . will it be?"
It hesitated, then spoke softly. "The Toaht have a print of you-of every human we brought aboard. They need the genetic diversity. We're keeping prints of the humans they take away, too. Millenia after your death, your body might be reborn aboard the ship. It won't be you. it will develop an identity of its own."
"A clone," she said tonelessly. Her left arm throbbed, and she rubbed it without actually focusing on the pain.
"No," Nikanj said. "What we've preserved of you isn't living tissue. It's memory. A gene map, your people might call it-though they couldn't have made one like those we remember and use. It's more like what they would call a mental blueprint. A plan for the assembly of one specific human being: You. A tool for reconstruction."
It let her digest this, said nothing more to her for several minutes. So few humans could do that-just let someone have a few minutes to think.
"Will you destroy my print if I ask you to?" she asked.
"It's a memory, Lilith, a complete memory carried by several people. How would I destroy such a thing?"
A literal memory, then, not some kind of mechanical recording or written record. Of course.
After a while, Nikanj said, "Your print may never be used. And if it is, the reconstruction will be as much at home aboard the ship as you were on Earth. She'll grow up here and the people she grows up among will be her people. You know they won't harm her."
She sighed. "I don't know any such thing. I suspect they'll do what they think is best for her. Heaven help her."
It sat beside her and touched her aching left arm with several head tentacles. "Did you really need to know that?" it asked. "Should I have told you?"
It had never asked such a question before. Her arm hurt more than ever for a moment, then felt warm and pain-free. She managed not to jerk away, though Nikanj had not paralyzed her.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"You were having pain in that arm. There's no need for you to suffer."
"I hurt all over."
"I know. I'll take care of it. I just wanted to talk to you before you slept again."
She lay still for a moment, glad that the arm was no longer throbbing. She had barely been aware of this individual pain before Nikanj stopped it. Now she realized it had been among the worst of the many. The hand, the wrist, the lower arm.
"You had a bone broken in your wrist," Nikanj told her. "It will be completely healed by the time you awaken again." And it repeated its question. "Did you really need to know, Lilith?"
"Yes," she said. "It concerned me. I needed to know."
It said nothing for a while and she did not disturb its thoughts. "I will remember that," it said softly, finally.
And she felt as though she had communicated something important. Finally.
"How did you know my arm was bothering me?"
"I could see you rubbing it. I knew it was broken and that I had done very little to it. Can you move your fingers?"
She obeyed, amazed to see the fingers move easily, painlessly.
"Good. I'll have to make you sleep again now."
"Nikanj, what happened to Paul?"
It shifted the focus of some of its head tentacles from her arm to her face. "He's asleep."
She frowned. "Why? I didn't hurt him. I couldn't have."
"He was. . . enraged. Out of control. He attacked members of his family. They say he would have killed them if he could have. When they restrained him, he wept and spoke incoherently. He refused to speak Oankali at all. In English, he cursed his family, you, everyone. He had to be put to sleep-perhaps for a year or more. The long sleeps are healing to nonphysical wounds."
"A year... ?"
"He'll be all right. He won't age. And his family will be waiting for him when he Awakes. He is very attached to them-and they to him. Toaht family bonds are. . . beautiful, and very strong."
She rested her right arm across her forehead. "His family," she said bitterly. "You keep saying that. His family is dead! Like mine. Like Fukumoto's. Like just about everyone's. That's half our problem. We haven't got any real family bonds."
"He has."
"He has nothing! He has no one to teach him to be a man, and he damn sure can't be an Oankali, so don't talk to me about his family!"
"Yet they are his family," Nikanj insisted softly. "They have accepted him and he has accepted them. He has no other family, but he has them."
She made a sound of disgust and turned her face away. What did Nikanj tell others about her? Did it talk about her family? According to her new name, she had been adopted, after all. She shook her head, confused and disturbed.
"He beat you, Lilith," Nikanj said. "He broke your bones. If you had gone untreated, you might have died of what he did."
"He did what you and his so-called family set him up to do!"
It rustled its tentacles. "That's truer than I would like. It's hard for me to influence people now. They think I'm too young to understand. I did warn them, though, that you wouldn't mate with him. Since I'm not yet mature, they didn't believe me. His family and my parents overruled me. That won't happen again."
It touched the back of her neck, pricking the skin with several sensory tentacles. She realized what it was doing as she felt herself beginning to lose consciousness.
"Put me back, too," she demanded while she could still talk. "
Let me sleep again. Put me where they've put him. I'm no more what your people think than he was. Put me back. Find someone else!"
10
But the ease of her awakening, when it came, told her that her sleep had been ordinary and relatively brief, returning her all too quickly to what passed for reality. At least she was not in pain.
She sat up, found Nikanj lying stone-still next to her. As usual, some of its head tentacles followed her movements lazily as she got up and went to the bathroom.
Trying not to think, she bathed, worked to scrub off an odd, sour smell that her body had acquired-some residual effect of Nikanj's healing, she supposed. But the smell would not wash away. Eventually she gave up. She dressed and went back out to Nikanj. It was sitting up on the bed, waiting for her.
"You won't notice the smell in a few days," it said. "It isn't as strong as you think."
She shrugged, not caring.
"You can open walls now."
Startled, she stared at it, then went to a wall and touched it with the fingertips of one hand. The wall reddened as Paul Titus' wall had under Nikanj's touch.
"Use all your fingers," it told her.
She obeyed, touching the fingers of both hands to the wall. The wall indented, then began to open.
"If you're hungry," Nikanj said, "you can get food for yourself now. Within these quarters, everything will open for you."
"And beyond these quarters?" she asked.
"These walls will let you out and back in again. I've changed them a little too. But no other walls will open for you."
So she could walk the corridors or walk among the trees, but she couldn't get into anything Nikanj didn't want her in. Still, that was more freedom than she had had before it put her to sleep.
"Why did you do this?" she asked, staring at it.
"To give you what I could. Not another long sleep or solitude. Only this. You know the layout of the quarters now, and you know Kaal. And the people nearby know you.,'
So she could be trusted out alone again, she thought bitterly. And within the quarters, she could be depended on not to do the local equivalent of spilling the drain-cleaner or starting a fire. She could even be trusted not to annoy the neighbors. Now she could keep herself occupied until someone decided it was time to send her off to the work she did not want and could not do-the work that would probably get her killed. How many more Paul Tituses could she survive, after all?
Nikanj lay down again and seemed to tremble. It was trembling. Its body tentacles exaggerated the movement and made its whole body seem to vibrate. She neither knew nor cared what was wrong with it. She left it where it was and went out to get food.
In one compartment in the seemingly empty little living-room-dining-room-kitchen, she found fresh fruit: oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and melons of different kinds. In other compartments she found nuts, bread, and honey.
Picking and choosing, she made herself a meal. She had intended to take it outside, to eat-the first meal she had not had to ask for or wait for. The first meal she would eat under the pseudotrees without first having to be let out like a pet animal.
She opened a wall to go out, then stopped. The wall began to close after a moment. She sighed and turned away from it.
Angrily, she reopened the food compartments, took out extra food and went back in to Nikanj. It was still lying down, still trembling. She put a few pieces of fruit down next to it.
"Your sensory arms have already begun, haven't they?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Do you want anything to eat?"
"Yes." It took an orange and bit into it, eating skin and all. It hadn't done that before.
"We generally peel them," she said.
"I know. Wasteful."
"Look, do you need anything? Want me to find one of your parents?"
"No. This is normal. I'm glad I changed you when I did. I wouldn't trust myself to do it now. I knew this was coming."
"Why didn't you tell me it was so close?"
"You were too angry."
She sighed, tried to understand her own feelings. She was still angry-angry, bitter, frightened...
And yet she had come back. She had not been able to leave Nikanj trembling in its bed while she enjoyed her greater freedom.
Nikanj finished the orange and began on a banana. It did not peel this either.
"Can I see?" she asked.
It raised one arm, displaying ugly, lumpy, mottled flesh perhaps six inches beneath the arm.
"Does it hurt?"
"No. There isn't a word in English for the way it makes me feel. The closest would be. . . sexually aroused."
She stepped away from it, alarmed.
"Thank you for coming back."
She nodded. "You're not supposed to feel aroused with just me here."
"I'm becoming sexually mature. I'll feel this way from time to time as my body changes even though I don't yet have the organs I would use in sex. It's a little like feeling an amputated limb as though it were still there. I've heard humans do that."
"I've heard that we do, too, but-"
"I would feel aroused if I were alone. You don't make me feel it any more than I would if I were alone. Yet your presence helps me." It drew its head and body tentacles into knots. "Give me something else to eat."
She gave it a papaya and all the nuts she had brought in. It ate them quickly.
"Better," it said. "Eating dulls the feeling sometimes." She sat down on the bed and asked, "What happens now?"
"When my parents realize what's happening to me, they'll send for Ahajas and Dichaan."
"Do you want me to look for them-your parents, I mean?"
"No." It rubbed the bed platform beneath its body. "The walls will alert them. Probably they already have. Wall tissues respond to beginning metamorphosis very quickly."
"You mean the walls will feel different or smell different or something?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what? Which one?"
"All that you said, and more." It changed the subject abruptly. "Lilith, sleep during metamorphosis can be very deep. Don't be afraid if sometimes I don't seem to see or hear."
"All right."
"You'll stay with me?"
"I said I would."
"I was afraid. . . good. Lie here with me until Ahajas and Dichaan come."
She was tired of lying down, but she stretched out beside it.
"When they come to carry me to Lo, you help them. That will tell them the first thing they need to know about you."
11
Leavetaking.
There was no real ceremony. Ahajas and Dichaan arrived and Nikanj immediately retreated into a deep sleep. Even its head tentacles hung limp and still.
Ahajas alone could have carried it. She was big like most Oankali females-slightly larger than Tediin. She and Dichaan were brother and sister as usual in Oankali matings. Males and females were closely related and ooloi were outsiders. One translation of the word ooloi was "treasured strangers." According to Nikanj, this combination of relatives and strangers served best when people were bred for specific work-like opening a trade with an alien species. The male and female concentrated desirable characteristics and the ooloi prevented the wrong kind of concentrations. Tediin and Jdahya were cousins. They had both not particularly liked their siblings. Unusual.
Now Ahajas lifted Nikanj as though it were a young child and held it easily until Dichaan and Lilith took its shoulders. Neither Ahajas nor Dichaan showed surprise at Lilith's participation.
"It has told us about you," Ahajas said as they carried Nikanj down to the lower corridors. Kahguyaht preceded them, opening walls. Jdahya and Tediin followed.
"It's told me a little about you, too," Lilith replied uncertainly. Things were moving too fast for her. She had not gotten up that day with the idea that she would be leaving Kaal-leaving Jdahya and Tediin who had become comfortable and familiar to her. She did not mind leaving Kahguyaht, but it had told her when it brought Aha
jas and Dichaan to Nikanj that it would be seeing her again soon. Custom and biology dictated that as same-sex parent, Kahguyaht was permitted to visit Nikanj during its metamorphosis. Kahguyaht, like Lilith, smelled neutral and could not increase Nikanj's discomfort or stir inappropriate desires in it.
Lilith helped to arrange Nikanj on the flat tillo that sat waiting for them in a public corridor. Then she stood alone, watching as the five conscious Oankali came together, touching and entangling head and body tentacles. Kahguyaht stood between Tediin and Jdahya. Ahajas and Dichaan stood together and made their contacts with Tediin and Jdahya. It was almost as though they were avoiding Kahguyaht too. The Oankali could communicate this way, could pass messages from one to another almost at the speed of thought- or so Nikanj had said. Controlled multisensory stimulation. Lilith suspected it was the closest thing to telepathy she would ever see practiced. Nikanj had said it might be able to help her perceive this way when it was mature. But its maturity was months away. Now she was alone again-the alien, the uncomprehending outsider. That was what she would be again in the home of Ahajas and Dichaan.
When the group broke up, Tediin came over to Lilith, took both Lilith's arms. "It has been good having you with us," she said in Oankali. "I've learned from you. It's been a good trade."
"I've learned too," Lilith said honestly. "I wish I could stay here." Rather than go with strangers. Rather than be sent to teach a lot of frightened, suspicious humans.
"No," Tediin said. "Nikanj must go. You would not like to be separated from it."
She had nothing to say to that. It was true. Everyone, even Paul Titus inadvertently, had pushed her toward Nikanj. They had succeeded.
Tediin let her go and Jdahya came to speak to her in English. "Are you afraid?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Ahajas and Dichaan will welcome you. You're rare-a human who can live among us, learn about us, and teach us. Everyone is curious about you."
"I thought I would be spending most of my time with Nikanj."
"You will be, for a while. And when Nikanj is mature, you'll be taken for training. But there'll be time for you to get to know Ahajas and Dichaan and others."
She shrugged. Nothing he said settled her nervousness now.
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