Then she lay down, perversely eager for what it could give her. She positioned herself against it, and was not content until she felt the deceptively light touch of the sensory hand and felt the ooloi body tremble against her.
13
Humans were kept drugged for days-drugged, and guarded, each individual or pair by an ooloi.
"Imprinting is the best word for what they're doing," Nikanj told Joseph. "Imprinting, chemical and social."
"What you're doing to me!" Joseph accused.
"What I'm doing to you, what I've done to Lilith. It has to be done. No one will be returned to Earth without it."
"How long will they be drugged?"
"Some are not heavily drugged now. Tate Marah isn't. Gabriel Rinaldi is." It focused on Joseph. "You aren't. You know."
Joseph looked away. "No one should be."
"In the end, no one will be. We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves. We teach you more pleasant things to do."
"That's not enough!"
"It's a beginning."
14
Peter's ooloi proved that ooloi were not infallable. Drugged, Peter was a different man. For perhaps the first time since his Awakening, he was at peace, not fighting even with himself, not trying to prove anything, joking with Jean and their ooloi about his arm and the fighting.
Lilith, hearing this later, wondered what there was to laugh at in that incident. But the ooloi-produced drugs could be potent. Under their influence, Peter might have laughed at anything. Under their influence, he accepted union and pleasure. When that influence was allowed to wane and Peter began to think, he apparently decided he had been humiliated and enslaved. The drug seemed to him to be not a less painful way of getting used to frightening nonhumans, but a way of turning him against himself, causing him to demean himself in alien perversions. His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.
Peter's ooloi should have noticed that at some point what Peter said and the expression he assumed ceased to agree with what his body told it. Perhaps it did not know enough about human beings to handle someone like Peter. It was older than Nikanj-more a contemporary of Kahguyaht. But it was not as perceptive as either of them-and perhaps not as bright.
Sealed in Peter's room, alone with Peter, it allowed itself to be attacked, pounded by Peter's bare fists. Unfortunately for Peter, he hit a sensitive spot with his first hammering blow, and triggered the ooloi's defensive reflexes. It gave him a lethal sting before it could regain control of itself and he collapsed in convulsions. His own contracting muscles broke several of his bones, then he went into shock.
The ooloi tried to help him once it had recovered from the worst of its own pain, but it was too late. He was dead. The ooloi sat down beside his body, its head and body tentacles drawn into hard lumps. It did not move or speak. Its cool flesh grew even cooler, and it seemed to be as dead as the human it was apparently mourning.
There were no Oankali on watch above. Peter might have been saved if there had been. But the great room was full of ooloi. Where was the need to keep watch?
By the time one of these ooloi noticed Jean sitting alone and forlorn outside the sealed room, it was too late. There was nothing to do but take Peter's body out and send for the ooloi's mates. The ooloi remained catatonic.
Jean, still lightly drugged, frightened, and alone, retreated from the people clustering around the room. She stood apart and watched as the body was carried out. Lilith noticed her, approached her, knowing she couldn't help, but hoping at least to give comfort.
"No!" Jean said, backing toward a wall. "Get away!"
Lilith sighed. Jean was going through a prolonged period of ooloi-induced reclusiveness. All of the humans who had been kept heavily drugged were this way-unable to tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them. Neither Lilith nor Joseph had experienced this extreme reaction. Lilith had hardly noticed any reaction at all beyond an increased aversion to Kahguyaht back when Nikanj matured and bound her to it. More recently, Joseph had reacted by simply staying close to Lilith and Nikanj for a couple of days. Then his reaction passed. Jean's was far from passing. What would happen to her now?
Lilith looked around for Nikanj. She spotted it in a cluster of ooloi, went to it and laid a hand on its shoulder.
It focused on her without turning or breaking the various sensory tentacle and sensory arm contacts it had with the others. She spoke to the point of a thin cone of head tentacles.
"Can't you help Jean?"
"Help is coming for her."
"Look at her! She's going to break before it gets here." The cone focused on Jean. She had wedged herself into a corner. Now she stood crying silently and looking around in confusion. She was a tall, strongly built woman. Now, though, she looked like a large child.
Nikanj detached itself from the other ooloi, apparently ending whatever communication was going on. The other ooloi relaxed away from one another. They went to their various human charges who stood waiting for them in widely separated ones and twos. The moment the news of the death had gone around, every human except Lilith and Jean had been drugged heavily. Nikanj had refused to drug Lilith. It trusted her to control her own behavior and the other ooloi trusted it. As for Jean, there was no one present who could drug her without harming her.
Nikanj closed to within about ten feet of Jean. It stopped there and waited until she saw it.
She trembled, but did not try to cringe further into her corner.
"I won't come closer," Nikanj said softly. "Others will come to help you. You aren't alone."
"But. . . But I am alone," she whispered. "They're dead. I saw them."
"One is dead," Nikanj corrected, keeping its voice low. She hid her face in her hands and shook her head from side to side.
"Peter is dead," Nikanj told her, "but Tehjaht is only... injured. And you have siblings coming to help."
"What?''
"They'll help you."
She sat down on the floor, head down, voice muffled when she spoke. "I've never had any brothers or sisters. Not even before the war."
"Tehjaht has mates. They'll take care of you."
"No. They'll blame me . . . because Tehjaht is hurt."
"They'll help you." Very softly. "They'll help both you and Tehjaht. They will help."
She frowned, looking more childlike than ever as she tried to understand. Then her face changed. Curt, heavily drugged, edged along the wall toward her. He kept himself comfortably far from Nikanj, but moved a little too close to Jean. She cringed back from him.
Curt shook his head, took a step backward. "Jeanie?" he called, his heavy voice sounding too loud, sounding drunk.
Jean jumped, but said nothing.
Curt faced Nikanj. "She's one of ours! We should be the ones to take care of her!"
"It isn't possible," Nikanj said.
"It should be possible! It should be! Why isn't it?"
"Her bonding with her ooloi is too strong, too heavily reinforced--as yours is with your ooloi. Later when the bond is more relaxed, you'll be able to go near her again. Later. Not now."
"Goddammit, she needs us now!"
"No."
Curt's ooloi came up to him, took him by the arm. Curt would have pulled away, but suddenly his strength seemed to leave him. He stumbled, fell to his knees. Nearby, Lilith looked away. Curt was as unlikely to forgive any humbling as Peter had been. And he would not always be drugged. He would remember.
Curt's ooloi helped Curt to his feet and led him away to the room he now shared with it and with Celene. As he left, the wall opened at the far end of the room and a male and female Oankali came in.
Nikanj gestured to the pair and they came toward it. They held on to one another, walking as though wounded, as though holding one another up. They were two when they should have been three, missing an essential part.
The male and female made their way to Nik
anj, and past it to Jean. Frightened, Jean stiffened. Then she frowned as though something had been said, and she had not quite heard.
Lilith watched sadly, knowing that the first signals Jean received were olfactory. The male and female smelled good, smelled like family, all brought together by the same ooloi, When they took her hands, they felt right. There was a real chemical affinity.
Jean seemed still to be afraid of the two strangers, but she was also relieved. They were what Nikanj had said they would be. People who could help. Family.
She let them lead her into the room where Tehjaht sat frozen. No words had been spoken. Strangers of a different species had been accepted as family. A human friend and ally had been rejected.
Lilith stood staring after Jean, hardly aware of Joseph's coming to stand beside her. He was drugged, but the drug had only made him reckless.
"Peter was right," he said angrily.
She frowned. "Peter? Right to try to kill? Right to die?"
"He died human! And he almost managed to take one of them with him!"
She looked at him. "So what? What's changed? On Earth we can change things. Not here."
"Will we want to by then? What will we be, I wonder? Not human. Not anymore."
IV
THE TRAINING FLOOR
1
The training room was brown and green and blue. Brown, muddy ground was visible through thin, scattered leaf litter. Brown, muddy water flowed past the land, glittering in the light of what seemed to be the sun. The water was too laden with sediment to appear blue, though above it, the ceiling- the sky-was a deep, intense blue. There was no smoke, no smog, only a few clouds-remains of a recent rain.
Across the wide river, there was the illusion of a line of trees on the opposite bank. A line of green. Away from the river, the predominant color was green. Above was the very real green canopy-trees of all sizes, many burdened with a profusion of other life: bromeliads, orchids, ferns, mosses, lichens, lianas, parasitic vines, plus a generous complement of insect life and a few frogs, lizards, and snakes.
One of the first things Lilith had learned during her own earlier training period was not to lean against the trees.
There were few flowers, and those mainly bromiliads and orchids, high in the trees. On the ground, a colorful stationary object was likely to be a leaf or some kind of fungus. Green was everywhere. The undergrowth was thin enough to walk through without difficulty except near the river where in some places a machete was essential-and not yet permitted.
"Tools will come later," Nikanj told Lilith. "Let the humans get used to being here now. Let them explore and see for themselves that they are in a forest on an island. Let them begin to feel what it's like to live here." It hesitated. "Let them settle more firmly into their places with their ooloi. They can tolerate one another now. Let them learn that it isn't shameful to be together with one another and with us."
It had gone with Lilith to the riverbank at a place where a great piece of earth had been undercut and had fallen into the river, taking several trees and much undergrowth with it. There was no trouble here in reaching the water, though there was a sharp drop of about ten feet. At the edge of the drop was one of the giants of the island-a huge tree with buttresses that swept well over Lilith's head and, like walls, separated the surrounding land into individual rooms. In spite of the great variety of life that the tree supported, Lilith stood between a pair of buttresses, two-thirds enclosed by the tree. She felt enveloped in a solidly Earthly thing. A thing that would soon be undercut as its neighbors had been, that would soon fall into the river and die.
"They'll cut the trees down, you know," she said softly. "They'll make boats or rafts. They think they're on Earth."
"Some of them believe otherwise," Nikanj told her. "They believe because you do."
"That won't stop the boat building."
"No. We won't try to stop it. Let them row their boats to the walls and back. There's no way out for them except the way we offer: to learn to feed and shelter themselves in this environment-to become self-sustaining. When they've done that, we'll take them to Earth and let them go."
It knew they would run, she thought. It must know. Yet it talked about mixed settlements, human and Oankali-trade partner settlements within which ooloi would control the fertility and "mix" the children of both groups.
She looked up at the sloping, wedge-shaped buttresses. Semi-enclosed as she was, she could not see Nikanj or the river. There was only brown and green forest-the illusion of wilderness and isolation.
Nikanj left her the illusion for a while. It said nothing, made no sound. Her feet tired and she looked around for something to sit on. She did not want to go back to the others any sooner than she had to. They could tolerate one another again now; the most difficult phase of their bonding was over. There was very little drugging still going on. Curt and Gabriel were still drugged along with a few others. Lilith worried about these. Oddly, she also admired them for being able to resist conditioning. Were they strong, then? Or simply unable to adapt?
"Lilith?" Nikanj said softly.
She did not answer.
"Let's go back."
She had found a dry, thick liana root to sit on. It hung like a swing, dropping down from the canopy, then curving upward again to lock itself into the branches of a nearby smaller tree before dropping to the ground and digging in. The root was thicker than some trees and the few insects on it looked harmless. It was an uncomfortable seat-twisted and hard-but Lilith was not yet ready to leave it.
"What will you do with the humans who can't adapt?" she asked.
"If they aren't violent, we'll take them to Earth with the rest of you." Nikanj came around the buttress, destroying her sense of solitude and home. Nothing that looked and moved as Nikanj did could come from home. She got up wearily and walked with it.
"Have the ants bitten you?" it asked.
She shook her head. It did not like her to conceal small injuries. It considered her health very much its business, and looked after her insect bites-especially her mosquito bites-at the end of each day. She thought it would have been easier to have left mosquitoes out of this small simulation of Earth. But Oankali did not think that way. A simulation of a tropical forest of Earth had to be complete with snakes, centipedes, mosquitoes and other things Lilith would have preferred to live without. Why should the Oankali worry, she thought cynically. Nothing bit them.
"There are so few of you," Nikanj said as they walked. "No one wants to give up on any of you."
She had to think back to realize what it was talking about.
"Some of us thought we should hold off bonding with you until you were brought here," it told her. "Here it would have been easier for you to band together, become a family."
Lilith glanced at it uneasily, but said nothing. Families had children. Was Nikanj saying children should be conceived and born here?
"But most of us couldn't wait," it continued. It wrapped a sensory arm around her neck loosely. "It might be better for both our peoples if we were not so strongly drawn to you."
2
Tools, when they were finally handed out, were waterproof tarpaulins, machetes, axes, shovels, hoes, metal pots, rope, hammocks, baskets, and mats. Lilith spoke privately with each of the most dangerous humans before they were given their tools.
One more try, she thought wearily.
"I don't care what you think of me," she told Curt. "You're the kind of man the human race is going to need down on Earth. That's why I woke you. I want you to live to get down there." She hesitated. "Don't go Peter's way, Curt."
He stared at her. Only recently free of the drug, only recently capable of violence, he stared.
"Make him sleep again!" Lilith told Nikanj. "Let him forget! Don't give him a machete and wait for him to use it on someone."
"Yahjahyi thinks he'll be all right," Nikanj said. Yahjahyi was Curt's ooloi.
"Does it?" Lilith said. "What did Peter's ooloi think?"
"It never told anyone what it thought. As a result, no one realized it was in trouble. Incredible behavior. I said it would be better if we weren't so drawn to you."
She shook her head. "If Yahjahyi thinks Curt is all right, it's deluding itself."
"We've observed Curt and Yahjahyi," Nikanj said. "Curt will go through a dangerous time now, but Yahjahyi is ready. Even Celene is ready."
"Celene!" Lilith said with contempt.
"You did a good job matching them. Much better than with Peter and Jean."
"I didn't match Peter and Jean. Their own temperaments did-like fire and gasoline."
"...yes. Anyway, Celene is not ready to lose another mate. She'll hold on to him. And Curt, since he sees her as much more vulnerable than she is, will have good reason not to risk himself, not to chance leaving her alone. They'll be all right."
"They won't," Gabriel told her later. He too was free of the drug, finally, but he was handling it better. Kahguyaht, who had been so eager to push Lilith, coerce her, ridicule her, seemed to be infinitely patient with Tate and Gabriel.
"Look at things from Curt's point of view," Gabriel said. "He's not in control even of what his own body does and feels. He's taken like a woman and.. . . No, don't explain!" He held up his hand to stop her from interrupting. "He knows the ooloi aren't male. He knows all the sex that goes on is in his head. It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter! Someone else is pushing all his buttons. He can't let them get away with that."
Honestly frightened, Lilith asked, "How have you... made your peace with it?"
"Who says I have?"
She stared at him. "Gabe, we can't lose you, too."
He smiled. Beautiful, perfect, white teeth. They made her think of some predator. "I don't take the next step," he said, "until I see where I'm standing now. You know I still don't believe this isn't Earth."
"I know."
"A tropical forest in a space ship. Who'd believe that?"
"But the Oankali. You can see that they're not of Earth."
"Sure. But they're here now on what sure looks, sounds, and smells like Earth."
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