Dawn

Hugo and Nebula Award Winner

Octavia E. Butler

DAWN

Book one of the Xenogenesis series

I

WOMB

1

Alive!

Still alive.

Alive. . . again.

Awakening was hard, as always. The ultimate disappointment. It was a struggle to take in enough air to drive off nightmare sensations of asphyxiation. Lilith Iyapo lay gasping, shaking with the force of her effort. Her heart beat too fast, too loud. She curled around it, fetal, helpless. Circulation began to return to her arms and legs in flumes of minute, exquisite pains.

When her body calmed and became reconciled to reanimation, she looked around. The room seemed dimly lit, though she had never Awakened to dimness before. She corrected her thinking. The room did not only seem dim, it was dim. At an earlier Awakening, she had decided that reality was whatever happened, whatever she perceived. It had occurred to her-how many times?-that she might be insane or drugged, physically ill or injured. None of that mattered. It could not matter while she was confined this way, kept helpless, alone, and ignorant.

She sat up, swayed dizzily, then turned to look at the rest of the room.

The walls were light-colored-white or gray, perhaps. The bed was what it had always been: a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor. There was, across the room, a doorway that probably led to a bathroom. She was usually given a bathroom. Twice she had not been, and in her windowless, doorless cubicle, she had been forced simply to choose a corner.

She went to the doorway, peered through the uniform dimness, and satisfied herself that she did, indeed, have a bathroom. This one had not only a toilet and a sink, but a shower. Luxury.

What else did she have?

Very little. There was another platform perhaps a foot higher than the bed. It could have been used as a table, though there was no chair. And there were things on it. She saw the food first. It was the usual lumpy cereal or stew, of no recognizable flavor, contained in an edible bowl that would disintegrate if she emptied it and did not eat it.

And there was something beside the bowl. Unable to see it clearly, she touched it.

Cloth! A folded mound of clothing. She snatched it up, dropped it in her eagerness, picked it up again and began putting it on. A light-colored, thigh-length jacket and a pair of long, loose pants both made of some cool, exquisitely soft material that made her think of silk, though for no reason she could have stated, she did not think this was silk. The jacket adhered to itself and stayed closed when she closed it, but opened readily enough when she pulled the two front panels apart. The way they came apart reminded her of Velcro, though there was none to be seen. The pants closed in the same way. She had not been allowed clothing from her first Awakening until now. She had pleaded for it, but her captors had ignored her. Dressed now, she felt more secure than she had at any other time in her captivity, it was a false security she knew, but she had learned to savor any pleasure, any supplement to her self-esteem that she could glean.

Opening and closing her jacket, her hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third Awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her. What had she lost or gained, and why? And what else might be done?

She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge.

It enraged her during later Awakenings that there had been moments when she actually felt grateful to her mutilators for letting her sleep through whatever they bad done to her-and for doing it well enough to spare her pain or disability later.

She rubbed the scar, tracing its outline. Finally she sat on the bed and ate her bland meal, finishing the bowl as well, more for a change of texture than to satisfy any residual hunger. Then she began the oldest and most futile of her activities: a search for some crack, some sound of hollowness, some indication of a way out of her prison.

She had done this at every Awakening. At her first Awakening, she had called out during her search. Receiving no answer, she had shouted, then cried, then cursed until her voice was gone. She bad pounded the walls until her bands bled and became grotesquely swollen.

There had not been a whisper of response. Her captors spoke when they were ready and not before. They did not show themselves at all. She remained sealed in her cubicle and their voices came to her from above like the light. There were no visible speakers of any kind, just as there was no single spot from which light originated. The entire ceiling seemed to be a speaker and a light-and perhaps a ventilator since the air remained fresh. She imagined herself to be in a large box, like a rat in a cage. Perhaps people stood above her looking down through one-way glass or through some video arrangement.

Why?

There was no answer. She had asked her captors when they began, finally, to talk to her. They had refused to tell her. They bad asked her questions. Simple ones at first.

How old was she?

Twenty-six, she thought silently. Was she still only twenty-six? How Long had they held her captive? They would not say.

Had she been married?

Yes, but he was gone, long gone, beyond their reach, beyond their prison.

Had she had children?

Oh god. One child, long gone with his father. One son. Gone. If there were an afterworld, what a crowded place it must be now.

Had she had siblings? That was the word they used. Siblings.

Two brothers and a sister, probably dead along with the rest of her family. A mother, long dead, a father, probably dead, various aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews... probably dead.

What work had she done?

None. Her son and her husband had been her work for a few brief years. After the auto accident that killed them, she had gone back to college, there to decide what else she might do with her life.

Did she remember the war?

Insane question. Could anyone who had lived through the war forget it? A handful of people tried to commit humanicide. They had nearly succeeded. She had, through sheer luck, managed to survive-only to be captured by heaven knew who and imprisoned. She had offered to answer their questions if they let her out of her cubical. They refused.

She offered to trade her answers for theirs: Who were they? Why did they hold her? Where was she? Answer for answer. Again, they refused.

So she refused them, gave them no answers, ignored the tests, physical and mental, that they tried to put her through. She did not know what they would do to her. She was terrified that she would be hurt, punished. But she felt she had to risk bargaining, try to gain something, and her only currency was cooperation.

They neither punished her nor bargained. They simply ceased to talk to her.

Food continued to appear mysteriously when she napped. Water still flowed from the bathroom faucets. The light still shone. But beyond that, there was nothing, no one, no sound unless she made it, no object with which to amuse herself. There were only her bed and table platforms. These would not come up from the floor, no matter how she abused them. Stains quickly faded and vanished from their surfaces. She spent hours vainly trying to solve the problem of how she might destroy them. This was one of the activities that helped keep her relatively sane. Another was trying to reach the ceiling. Nothing she could stand on put her within leaping distance of it. Experimentally, she threw a bowl of food-her best available weapon-at it. The food spattered against it, telling her it was solid, not some kind of projection or mirror trick. But it might not be as thick as the walls. It might even be glass or thin plastic.

She never found out.

She worked out a whole series of physical exercises and would have done them daily if she had had any way of distinguishing one day from the next or day from night. As it was, she did them after each of her longer naps.

She slept a lot and was grateful to her body for responding to her alternating moods of fear and boredom by dozing frequently. The small, painless awakenings from these naps eventually began to disappoint her as much as had the greater Awakening.

The greater Awakening from what? Drugged sleep? What else could it be? She had not been injured in the war; had not requested or needed medical care. Yet here she was.

She sang songs and remembered books she had read, movies and television shows she had seen, family stories she had heard, bits of her own life that had seemed so ordinary while she was free to live it. She made up stories and argued both sides of questions she had once been passionate about, anything!

More time passed. She held out, did not speak directly to her captors except to curse them. She offered no cooperation. There were moments when she did not know why she resisted. What would she be giving up if she answered her captors' questions? What did she have to lose beyond misery, isolation, and silence? Yet she held out.

There came a time when she could not stop talking to herself, when it seemed that every thought that occurred to her must be spoken aloud. She would make desperate efforts to be quiet but somehow the words began to spill from her again. She thought she would lose her sanity; had already begun to lose it. She began to cry.

Eventually, as she sat on the floor rocking, thinking about losing her mind, and perhaps talking about it too, something was introduced into the room-some gas, perhaps. She fell backward and drifted into what she had come to think of as her second long sleep.

At her next Awakening, whether it came hours, days, or years later, her captors began talking to her again, asking her the same questions as though they had not asked them before. This time she answered. She lied when she wanted to but she always responded. There had been healing in the long sleep. She Awoke with no particular inclination to speak her thoughts aloud or cry or sit on the floor and rock backward and forward, but her memory was unimpaired. She remembered all too well the long period of silence and isolation. Even an unseen inquisitor was preferable.

The questions became more complex, actually became conversations during later Awakenings. Once, they put a child in with her-a small boy with long, straight black hair and smoky-brown skin, paler than her own. He did not speak English and he was terrified of her. He was only about five years old-a little older than Ayre, her own son. Awakening beside her in this strange place was probably the most frightening thing the little boy had ever experienced.

He spent many of his first hours with her either hiding in the bathroom or pressed into the corner farthest from her. It took her a long time to convince him that she was not dangerous. Then she began teaching him English-and he began teaching her whatever language he spoke. Sharad was his name. She sang songs to him and be learned them instantly. He sang them back to her in almost accentless English. He did not understand why she did not do the same when he sang her his songs.

She did eventually learn the songs. She enjoyed the exercise. Anything new was treasure.

Sharad was a blessing even when he wet the bed they shared or became impatient because she failed to understand him quickly enough. He was not much like Ayre in appearance or temperament, but she could touch him. She could not remember when she had last touched someone. She had not realized how much she had missed it. She worried about him and wondered bow to protect him. Who knew what their captors had done to him-or what they would do? But she bad no more power than he did. At her next Awakening, he was gone. Experiment completed.

She begged them to let him come back, but they refused. They said he was with his mother. She did not believe them. She imagined Sharad locked alone in his own small cubicle, his sharp, retentive mind dulling as time passed.

Unconcerned, her captors began a complex new series of questions and exercises.

2

What would they do this time? Ask more questions? Give her another companion? She barely cared.

She sat on the bed, dressed, waiting, tired in a deep, emptied way that had nothing to do with physical weariness. Sooner or later, someone would speak to her.

She had a long wait. She had lain down and was almost asleep when a voice spoke her name.

"Lilith?" The usual, quiet, androgynous voice.

She drew a deep, weary breath. "What?" she asked. But as she spoke, she realized the voice bad not come from above as it always had before. She sat up quickly and looked around. In one corner she found the shadowy figure of a man, thin and long-haired.

Was he the reason for the clothing, then? He seemed to be wearing a similar outfit. Something to take off when the two of them got to know each other better? Good god.

"I think," she said softly, "that you might be the last straw."

"I'm not here to hurt you," he said.

"No. Of course you're not."

"I'm here to take you outside?'

Now she stood up, staring hard at him, wishing for more light. Was he making a joke? Laughing at her?

"Outside to what?"

"Education. Work. The beginning of a new life."

She took a step closer to him, then stopped. He scared her somehow. She could not make herself approach him. "Something is wrong," she said. "Who are you?"

He moved slightly. "And what am I?"

She jumped because that was what she had almost said.

"I'm not a man," he said. "I'm not a human being."

She moved back against the bed, but did not sit down. "Tell me what you are."

"I'm here to tell you. . . and 'show you. Will you look at me now?"

Since she was looking at him-it--she frowned. "The light-''

"It will change when you're ready."

"You're. . . what? From some other world?"

"From a number of other worlds. You're one of the few English speakers who never considered that she might be in the hands of extraterrestrials."

"I did consider it," Lilith whispered. "Along with the possibility that I might be in prison, in an insane asylum, in the hands of the FBI, the CIA, or the KGB. The other possibilities seemed marginally less ridiculous."

The creature said nothing. It stood utterly still in its corner, and she knew from her many Awakenings that it would not speak to her again until she did what it wished- until she said she was ready to look at it, then, in brighter light, took the obligatory look. These things, whatever they were, were incredibly good at waiting. She made this one wait for several minutes, and not only was it silent, it never moved a muscle. Discipline or physiology?

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by "ugly" faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage.

"All right," she said. "Show me."

The lights brightened as she had supposed they would, and what had seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose-no bulge, no nostrils-just flat, gray skin. It was gray all over-pale gray skin, darker gray hair on its head that grew down around its eyes and ears and at its throat. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the creature could see. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears as well as around them. Above, it joined the eye hair, and below and behind, it joined the head hair. The island of throat hair seemed to move slightly, and it occurred to her that that might be where the creature breathed-a kind of natural tracheostomy.

Lilith glanced at the humanoid body, wondering how humanlike it really was. "I don't mean any offense," she said, "but are you male or female?"

"It's wrong to assume that I must be a sex you're familiar with," it said, "but as it happens, I'm male."

Good. "It" could become "he" again. Less awkward.

"You should notice," he said, "that what you probably see as hair isn't hair at all. I have no hair. The reality seems to bother humans."

'"What?''

"Come closer and look."

She did not want to be any closer to him. She had not known what held her back before. Now she was certain it was his alienness, his difference, his literal unearthliness. She found herself still unable to take even one more step toward him.

"Oh god," she whispered. And the hair-the whatever-it-was---moved. Some of it seemed to blow toward her as though in a wind-though there was no stirring of air in the room.

She frowned, strained to see, to understand. Then, abruptly, she did understand. She backed away, scrambled around the bed and to the far wall. When she could go no farther, she stood against the wall, staring at him.

Medusa.

Some of the "hair" writhed independently, a nest of snakes startled, driven in all directions.

Revolted, she turned her face to the wall.

"They're not separate animals," he said. "They're sensory organs. They're no more dangerous than your nose or eyes. It's natural for them to move in response to my wishes or emotions or to outside stimuli. We have them on our bodies as well. We need them in the same way you need your ears, nose, and eyes."

"But. . ." She faced him again, disbelieving. Why should he need such things-tentacles--to supplement his senses?

"When you can," he said, "come closer and look at me. I've had humans believe they saw human sensory organs on my head-and then get angry with me when they realized they were wrong."

"I can't," she whispered, though now she wanted to. Could she have been so wrong, so deceived by her own eyes?

"You will," he said. "My sensory organs aren't dangerous to you. You'll have to get used to them."

"No!"

The tentacles were elastic. At her shout, some of them lengthened, stretching toward her. She imagined big, slowly writhing, dying night crawlers stretched along the sidewalk after a rain. She imagined small, tentacled sea slugs- nudibranchs-grown impossibly to human size and shape, and, obscenely, sounding more like a human being than some humans. Yet she needed to hear him speak. Silent, he was utterly alien.

She swallowed. "Listen, don't go quiet on me. Talk!"

"Yes?"

"Why do you speak English so well, anyway? You should at least have an unusual accent."

"People like you taught me. I speak several human languages. I began learning very young."

"How many other humans do you have here? And where's here?"

"This is my home. You would call it a ship-a vast one compared to the ones your people have built. What it truly is doesn't translate. You'll be understood if you call it a ship. It's in orbit around your Earth, somewhat beyond the orbit of Earth's moon. As for how many humans are here: all of you who survived your war. We collected as many as we could. The ones we didn't find in time died of injury, disease, hunger, radiation, cold. . . . We found them later."

She believed him. Humanity in its attempt to destroy itself had made the world unlivable. She had been certain she would die even though she had survived the bombing without a scratch. She had considered her survival a misfortune-a promise of a more lingering death. And now...?

"Is there anything left on Earth?" she whispered. "Anything alive, I mean."

"Oh, yes. Time and our efforts have been restoring it." That stopped her. She managed to look at him for a moment without being distracted by the slowly writhing tentacles. "Restoring it? Why?"

"For use. You'll go back there eventually."

"You'll send me back? And the other humans?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"That you will come to understand little by little."

She frowned. "All right, I'll start now. Tell me."

His head tentacles wavered. Individually, they did look more like big worms than small snakes. Long and slender or short and thick as. . . . As what? As his mood changed? As his attention shifted? She looked away.

"No!" he said sharply. "I'll only talk to you, Lilith, if you look at me."

She made a fist of one hand and deliberately dug her nails into her palm until they all but broke the skin. With the pain of that to distract her, she faced him. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Kaaltediinjdahya lel Kahguyaht aj Dinso."

She stared at him, then sighed, and shook her head.

"Jdahya," he said. "That part is me. The rest is my family and other things."

She repeated the shorter name, trying to pronounce it exactly as he had, to get the unfamiliar ghost j sound just right. "Jdahya," she said, "I want to know the price of your people's help. What do you want of us?"

"Not more than you can give-but more than you can understand here, now. More than words will be able to help you understand at first. There are things you must see and hear outside."

"Tell me something now, whether I understand it or not."

His tentacles rippled. "I can only say that your people have something we value. You may begin to know how much we value it when I tell you that by your way of measuring time, it has been several million years since we dared to interfere in another people's act of self-destruction. Many of us disputed the wisdom of doing it this time. We thought.. . that there had been a consensus among you, that you had agreed to die."

"No species would do that!"

"Yes. Some have. And a few of those who have have taken whole ships of our people with them. We've learned. Mass suicide is one of the few things we usually let alone."

"Do you understand now what happened to us?"

"I'm aware of what happened. It's... alien to me. Frighteningly alien."

"Yes. I sort of feel that way myself, even though they're my people. It was. . . beyond insanity."

"Some of the people we picked up had been hiding deep underground. They had created much of the destruction."

"And they're still alive?"

"Some of them are."

"And you plan to send them back to Earth?"

''No."

"What?''

"The ones still alive are very old now. We've used them slowly, learned biology, language, culture from them. We Awakened them a few at a time and let them live their lives here in different parts of the ship while you slept."

"Slept. . . Jdahya, how long have I slept?"

He walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. He had folded himself compactly into an uncomfortable-looking seated position. He ignored her sudden move-except for his head tentacles which all swept toward her as though in a wind. He seemed to watch as she inched back to the bed. Could a being with sensory tentacles instead of eyes watch?

When she had come as close to him as she could, she stopped and sat on the floor. It was all she could do to stay where she was. She drew her knees up against her chest and bugged them to her tightly.

"I don't understand why I'm so. . . afraid of you," she whispered. "Of the way you look, I mean. You're not that different. There are-or were-life forms on Earth that looked a little like you."

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. "Is it something you're doing?" she demanded, "something I don't know about?"

"I'm here to teach you to be comfortable with us," be said. "You're doing very well."

She did not feel she was doing well at all. "What have others done?"

"Several have tried to kill me."

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. "What did you do to them?"

"For trying to kill me?"

"No, before-to incite them."

"No more than I'm doing to you now."

"I don't understand." She made herself stare at him. "Can you really see?"

"Very well."

"Colors? Depth?"

"Yes."

Yet it was true that he had no eyes. She could see now that there were only dark patches where tentacles grew thickly. The same with the sides of his head where ears should have been. And there were openings at his throat. And the tentacles around them didn't look as dark as the others. Murkily translucent, pale gray worms.

"In fact," he said, "you should be aware that I can see wherever I have tentacles-and I can see whether I seem to notice or not. I can't not see."

That sounded like a horrible existence-not to be able to close one's eyes, sink into the private darkness behind one's own eyelids. "Don't you sleep?"

"Yes. But not the way you do."

She shifted suddenly from the subject of his sleeping to her own. "You never told me how long you kept me asleep."

"About. . . two hundred and fifty of your years."

This was more than she could assimilate at once. She said nothing for so long that he broke the silence.

"Something went wrong when you were first Awakened. I heard about it from several people. Someone handled you badly-underestimated you. You are like us in some ways, but you were thought to be like your military people hidden underground. They refused to talk to us too. At first. You were left asleep for about fifty years after that first mistake."

She crept to the bed, worms or no worms, and leaned against the end of it. "I'd always thought my Awakenings might be years apart, but I didn't really believe it."

"You were like your world. You needed time to heal. And we needed time to learn more about your kind." He paused. "We didn't know what to think when some of your people killed themselves. Some of us believed it was because they had been left out of the mass suicide-that they simply wanted to finish the dying. Others said it was because we kept them isolated. We began putting two or more together, and many injured or killed one another. Isolation cost fewer lives."

These last words touched a memory in her. "Jdahya?" she said.

The tentacles down the sides of his face wavered, looked for a moment like dark, muttonchop whiskers.

"At one point a little boy was put in with me. His name was Sharad. What happened to him?"

He said nothing for a moment, then all his tentacles stretched themselves upward. Someone spoke to him from above in the usual way and in a voice much like his own, but this time in a foreign language, choppy and fast.

"My relative will find out," he told her. "Sharad is almost certainly well, though he may not be a child any longer."

"You've let children grow up and grow old?"

"A few, yes. But they've lived among us. We haven't isolated them."

"You shouldn't have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another."

His tentacles writhed repulsively. "We know. I wouldn't have cared to endure as much solitude as you have. But we had no skill at grouping humans in ways that suited them."

"But Sharad and I-"

"He may have had parents, Lilith."

Someone spoke from above, in English this time. "The boy has parents and a sister. He's asleep with them, and he's still very young." There was a pause. "Lilith, what language did he speak?"

"I don't know," Lilith said. "Either he was too young to tell me or he tried and I didn't understand. I think he must have been East Indian, though-if that means anything to you."

"Others know. I was only curious."

"You're sure he's all right?"

"He's well."

She felt reassured at that and immediately questioned the emotion. Why should one more anonymous voice telling her everything was fine reassure her?

"Can I see him?" she asked.

"Jdahya?" the voice said.

Jdahya turned toward her. "You'll be able to see him when you can walk among us without panic. This is your last isolation room. When you're ready, I'll take you outside."

3

Jdahya would not leave her. As much as she had hated her solitary confinement, she longed to be rid of him. He fell silent for a while and she wondered whether he might be sleeping-to the degree that he did sleep. She lay down herself, wondering whether she could relax enough to sleep with him there. It would be like going to sleep knowing there was a rattlesnake in the room, knowing she could wake up and find it in her bed.

She could not fall asleep facing him. Yet she could not keep her back to him long. Each time she dozed, she would jolt awake and look to see if he had come closer. This exhausted her, but she could not stop doing it. Worse, each time she moved, his tentacles moved, straightening lazily in her direction as though he were sleeping with his eyes open-as he no doubt was.

Painfully tired, head aching, stomach queasy, she climbed down from her bed and lay alongside it on the floor. She could not see him now, no matter how she turned. She could see only the platform beside her and the walls. He was no longer part of her world.

"No, Lilith," he said as she closed her eyes.

She pretended not to hear him.

"Lie on the bed," he said, "or on the floor over here. Not over there."

She lay rigid, silent.

"If you stay where you are, I'll take the bed."

That would put him just above her-too close, looming over her, Medusa leering down.

She got up and all but fell across the bed, damning him, and, to her humiliation, crying a little. Eventually she slept. Her body had simply had enough.

She awoke abruptly, twisting around to look at him. He was still on the platform, his position hardly altered. When his head tentacles swept in her direction she got up and ran into the bathroom. He let her hide there for a while, let her wash and be alone and wallow in self-pity and self-contempt. She could not remember ever having been so continually afraid, so out of control of her emotions. Jdahya had done nothing, yet she cowered.

When he called her, she took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom. "This isn't working," she said miserably. "Just put me down on Earth with other humans. I can't do this."

He ignored her.

After a time she spoke again on a different subject. "I have a scar," she said, touching her abdomen. "I didn't have it when I was on Earth. What did your people do to me?"

"You had a growth," he said. "A cancer. We got rid of it. Otherwise, it would have killed you."

She went cold. Her mother had died of cancer. Two of her aunts had had it and her grandmother had been operated on three times for it. They were all dead now, killed by someone else's insanity. But the family "tradition" was apparently continuing.

"What did I lose along with the cancer?" she asked softly.

"Nothing."

"Not a few feet of intestine? My ovaries? My uterus?"

"Nothing. My relative tended you. You lost nothing you would want to keep."

"Your relative is the one who... performed surgery on me?"

"Yes. With interest and care. There was a human physician with us, but by then she was old, dying. She only watched and commented on what my relative did."

"How would he know enough to do anything for me? Human anatomy must be totally different from yours."

"My relative is not male-or female. The name for its sex is ooloi. It understood your body because it is ooloi. On your world there were vast numbers of dead and dying humans to study. Our ooloi came to understand what could be normal or abnormal, possible or impossible for the human body. The ooloi who went to the planet taught those who stayed here. My relative has studied your people for much of its life."

"How do ooloi study?" She imagined dying humans caged and every groan and contortion closely observed. She imagined dissections of living subjects as well as dead ones. She imagined treatable diseases being allowed to run their grisly courses in order for ooloi to learn.

"They observe. They have special organs for their kind of observation. My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer."

"I wouldn't call it a talent. A curse, maybe. But how could your relative know about that from just. . . observing."

"Maybe perceiving would be a better word," he said. "There's much more involved than sight. It knows everything that can be learned about you from your genes. And by now, it knows your medical history and a great deal about the way you think. It has taken part in testing you."

"Has it? I may not be able to forgive it for that. But listen, I don't understand how it could cut out a cancer without. . . well, without doing damage to whichever organ it was growing on."

"My relative didn't cut out your cancer. It wouldn't have cut you at all, but it wanted to examine the cancer directly with all its senses. It had never personally examined one before. When it had finished, it induced your body to reabsorb the cancer.

"It. . . induced my body to reabsorb. . . cancer?"

"Yes. My relative gave your body a kind of chemical command."

"Is that how you cure cancer among yourselves?"

"We don't get them."

Lilith sighed. "I wish we didn't. They've created enough hell in my family."

"They won't be harming you anymore. My relative says they're beautiful, but simple to prevent."

"Beautiful?"

"It perceives things differently sometimes. Here's food, Lilith. Are you hungry?"

She stepped toward him, reaching out to take the bowl, then realized what she was doing. She froze, but managed not to scramble backward. After a few seconds, she inched toward him. She could not do it quickly-snatch and run. She could hardly do it at all. She forced herself forward slowly, slowly.

Teeth clenched, she managed to take the bowl. Her hand shook so badly that she spilled half the stew. She withdrew to the bed. After a while she was able to eat what was left, then finish the bowl. It was not enough. She was still hungry, but she did not complain. She was not up to taking another bowl from his hand. Daisy hand. Palm in the center, many fingers all the way around. The fingers had bones in them, at least; they weren't tentacles. And there were only two hands, two feet. He could have been so much uglier than he was, so much less. . . human. Why couldn't she just accept him? All he seemed to be asking was that she not panic at the sight of him or others like him. Why couldn't she do that?

She tried to imagine herself surrounded by beings like him and was almost overwhelmed by panic. As though she had suddenly developed a phobia-something she had never before experienced. But what she felt was like what she had heard others describe. A true xenophobia-and apparently she was not alone in it.

She sighed, realized she was still tired as well as still hungry. She rubbed a hand over her face. If this were what a phobia was like, it was something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. She looked at Jdahya. "What do your people call themselves?" she asked. "Tell me about them."

"We are Oankali."

"Oankali. Sounds like a word in some Earth language."

"It may be, but with different meaning."

"What does it mean in your language?"

"Several things. Traders for one."

"You are traders?"

"Yes."

"What do you trade?"

"Ourselves."

"You mean. . . each other? Slaves?"

"No. We've never done that."

"What, then?"

"Ourselves."

"I don't understand."

He said nothing, seemed to wrap silence around himself and settle into it. She knew he would not answer.

She sighed. "You seem too human sometimes. If I weren't looking at you, I'd assume you were a man."

"You have assumed that. My family gave me to the human doctor so that I could learn to do this work. She came to us too old to bear children of her own, but she could teach."

"I thought you said she was dying."

"She did die eventually. She was a hundred and thirteen years old and had been awake among us off and on for fifty years. She was like a fourth parent to my siblings and me. It was hard to watch her age and die. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it."

"I've heard humans say that." She frowned. "Couldn't your ooloi have helped her live longer-if she wanted to live longer than a hundred and thirteen years, that is."

"They did help her. They gave her forty years she would not have had, and when they could no longer help her heal, they took away her pain, if she had been younger when we found her, we could have given her much more time."

Lilith followed that thought to its obvious conclusion. "I'm twenty-six," she said.

"Older," he told her. "You've aged whenever we've kept you awake. About two years altogether."

She had no sense of being two years older, of being, suddenly, twenty-eight because he said she was. Two years of solitary confinement. What could they possibly give her in return for that? She stared at him.

His tentacles seemed to solidify into a second skin-dark patches on his face and neck, a dark, smooth-looking mass on his head. "Barring accident," he said, "you'll live much longer than a hundred and thirteen years. And for most of your life, you'll be biologically quite young. Your children will live longer still."

He looked remarkably human now. Was it only the tentacles that gave him that sea-slug appearance? His coloring hadn't changed. The fact that he had no eyes, nose, or ears still disturbed her, but not as much.

"Jdahya, stay that way," she told him. "Let me come close and look at you. . . if I can."

The tentacles moved like weirdly rippling skin, then resolidified. "Come," he said.

She was able to approach him hesitantly. Even viewed from only a couple of feet away, the tentacles looked like a smooth second skin. "Do you mind if.. ." She stopped and began again. "I mean... may I touch you?"

"Yes."

It was easier to do than she had expected. His skin was cool and almost too smooth to be real flesh-smooth the way her fingernails were and perbaps as tough as a fingernail.

"Is it hard for you to stay like this?" she asked.

"Not hard. Unnatural. A muffling of the senses."

"Why did you do it-before I asked you to, I mean."

"It's an expression of pleasure or amusement."

"You were pleased a minute ago?"

"With you. You wanted your time back-the time we've taken from you. You didn't want to die."

She stared at him, shocked that he had read her so clearly. And he must have known of humans who did want to die even after hearing promises of long life, health, and lasting youth. Why? Maybe they'd heard the part she hadn't been told about yet: the reason for all this. The price.

"So far," she said, "only boredom and isolation have driven me to want to die."

"Those are past. And you've never tried to kill yourself, even then."

"...no."

"Your desire to live is stronger than you realize."

She sighed. "You're going to test that, aren't you? That's why you haven't told me yet what your people want of us."

"Yes," he admitted, alarming her.

"Tell me!"

Silence.

"If you knew anything at all about the human imagination, you'd know you were doing exactly the wrong thing," she said.

"Once you're able to leave this room with me, I'll answer your questions," he told her.

She stared at him for several seconds. "Let's work on that, then," she said grimly. "Relax from your unnatural position and let's see what happens."

He hesitated, then let his tentacles flow free. The grotesque sea-slug appearance resumed and she could not stop herself from stumbling away from him in panic and revulsion. She caught herself before she had gone far.

"God, I'm so tired of this," she muttered. "Why can't I stop it?"

"When the doctor first came to our household," he said, "some of my family found her so disturbing that they left home for a while. That's unheard-of behavior among us."

"Did you leave?"

He went smooth again briefly. "I had not yet been born. By the time I was born, all my relatives had come home. And I think their fear was stronger than yours is now. They had never before seen so much life and so much death in one being. It hurt some of them to touch her."

"You mean... because she was sick?"

"Even when she was well. It was her genetic structure that disturbed them. I can't explain that to you. You'll never sense it as we do." He stepped toward her and reached for her hand. She gave it to him almost reflexively with only an instant's hesitation when his tentacles all flowed forward toward her. She looked away and stood stiffly where she was, her hand held loosely in his many fingers."

"Good," he said, releasing her. "This room will be nothing more than a memory for you soon."

4

Eleven meals later he took her outside.

She had no idea how long she was in wanting, then consuming, those eleven meals. Jdahya would not tell her, and he would not be hurried. He showed no impatience or annoyance when she urged him to take her out. He simply fell silent. He seemed almost to turn himself off when she made demands or asked questions he did not intend to answer. Her family had called her stubborn during her life before the war, but he was beyond stubborn.

Eventually he began to move around the room. He had been still for so long-had seemed almost part of the furniture-that she was startled when he suddenly got up and went into the bathroom. She stayed where she was on the bed, wondering whether he used a bathroom for the same purposes she did. She made no effort to find out. Sometime later when he came back into the room, she found herself much less disturbed by him. He brought her something that so surprised and delighted her that she took it from his hand without thought or hesitation: A banana, fully ripe, large, yellow, firm, very sweet.

She ate it slowly, wanting to gulp it, not daring to. It was literally the best food she had tasted in two hundred and fifty years. Who knew when there would be another-if there would be another. She ate even the white, inner skin.

He would not tell her where it had come from or how be had gotten it. He would not get her another. He did evict her from the bed for a while. He stretched out flat on it and lay utterly still, looked dead. She did a series of exercises on the floor, deliberately tired herself as much as she could, then took his place on the platform until he got up and let her have the bed.

When she awoke, he took his jacket off and let her see the tufts of sensory tentacles scattered over his body. To her surprise, she got used to these quickly. They were merely ugly. And they made him look even more like a misplaced sea creature.

"Can you breathe underwater?" she asked him.

"Yes."

"I thought your throat orifices looked as though they could double as gills. Are you more comfortable underwater?"

"I enjoy it, but no more than I enjoy air."

"Air. . . oxygen?"

"I need oxygen, yes, though not as much of it as you do." Her mind drifted back to his tentacles and another possible similarity to some sea slugs. "Can you sting with any of your tentacles?"

"With all of them."

She drew back, though she was not close to him. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I wouldn't have stung you."

Unless she had attacked him. "So that's what happened to the humans who tried to kill you."

"No, Lilith. I'm not interested in killing your people. I've been trained all my life to keep them alive."

"What did you do to them, then?"

"Stopped them. I'm stronger than you probably think."

"But. . . if you had stung them?"

"They would have died. Only the ooloi can sting without killing. One group of my ancestors subdued prey by stinging it. Their sting began the digestive process even before they began to eat. And they stung enemies who tried to eat them. Not a comfortable existence."

"It doesn't sound that bad."

"They didn't live long, those ancestors. Some things were immune to their poison."

"Maybe humans are."

He answered her softly. "No, Lilith, you're not."

Sometime later he brought her an orange. Out of curiosity, she broke the fruit and offered to share it with him. He accepted a piece of it from her hand and sat down beside her to eat it. When they were both finished, he turned to face her-a courtesy, she realized, since he had so little face- and seemed to examine her closely. Some of his tentacles actually touched her. When they did, she jumped. Then she realized she was not being hurt and kept still. She did not like his nearness, but it no longer terrified her. After... however many days it had been, she felt none of the old panic; only relief at somehow having finally shed it.

"We'll go out now," he said. "My family will be relieved to see us. And you-you have a great deal to learn."

5

She made him wait until she had washed the orange juice from her hands. Then he walked over to one of the walls and touched it with some of his longer head tentacles.

A dark spot appeared on the wall where he made contact. It became a deepening, widening indentation, then a hole through which Lilith could see color and light-green, red, orange, yellow.

There had been little color in her world since her capture. Her own skin, her blood-within the pale walls of her prison, that was all. Everything else was some shade of white or gray. Even her food had been colorless until the banana. Now, here was color and what appeared to be sunlight. There was space. Vast space.

The hole in the wall widened as though it were flesh rippling aside, slowly writhing. She was both fascinated and repelled.

"Is it alive?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

She had beaten it, kicked it, clawed it, tried to bite it. It had been smooth, tough, impenetrable, but slightly giving like the bed and table. It had felt like plastic, cool beneath her hands.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Flesh. More like mine than like yours. Different from mine, too, though. It's... the ship."

"You're kidding. Your ship is alive?"

"Yes. Come out." The hole in the wall had grown large enough for them to step through. He ducked his head and took the necessary step. She started to follow him, then stopped. There was so much space out there. The colors she had seen were thin, hairlike leaves and round, coconut-sized fruit, apparently in different stages of development. All hung from great branches that overshadowed the new exit. Beyond them was a broad, open field with scattered trees- impossibly huge trees-distant hills, and a bright, sunless ivory sky. There was enough strangeness to the trees and the sky to stop her from imagining that she was on Earth. There were people moving around in the distance, and there were black, German shepherd-sized animals that were too far away for her to see them clearly-though even in the distance the animals seemed to have too many legs. Six? Ten? The creatures seemed to be grazing.

"Lilith, come out," Jdahya said.

She took a step backward, away from all the alien vastness. The isolation room that she had hated for so long suddenly seemed safe and comforting.

"Back into your cage, Lilith?" Jdahya asked softly.

She stared at him through the hole, realized at once that he was trying to provoke her, make her overcome her fear. It would not have worked if he had not been so right. She was retreating into her cage-like a zoo animal that had been shut up for so long that the cage had become home.

She made herself step up to the opening, and then, teeth clenched, step through.

Outside, she stood beside him and drew a long, shuddering breath. She turned her head, looked at the room, then turned away quickly, resisting an impulse to flee back to it. He took her band and led her away.

When she looked back a second time, the hole was closing and she could see that what she had come out of was actually a huge tree. Her room could not have taken more than a tiny fraction of its interior. The tree had grown from what appeared to be ordinary, pale-brown, sandy soil. Its lower limbs were heavily laden with fruit. The rest of it looked almost ordinary except for its size. The trunk was bigger around than some office buildings she remembered. And it seemed to touch the ivory sky. How tall was it? How much of it served as a building?

"Was everything inside that room alive?" she asked.

"Everything except some of the visible plumbing fixtures," Jdahya said. "Even the food you ate was produced from the fruit of one of the branches growing outside. It was designed to meet your nutritional needs."

"And to taste like cotton and paste," she muttered. "I hope I won't have to eat any more of that stuff."

"You won't. But it's kept you very healthy. Your diet in particular encouraged your body not to grow cancers while your genetic inclination to grow them was corrected."

"It has been corrected, then?"

"Yes. Correcting genes have been inserted into your cells, and your cells have accepted and replicated them. Now you won't grow cancers by accident."

That, she thought, was an odd qualification, but she let it pass for the moment. "When will you send me back to Earth?" she asked.

"You couldn't survive there now-especially not alone."

"You haven't sent any of us back yet?"

"Your group will be the first."

"Oh." This had not occurred to her-that she and others like her would be guinea pigs trying to survive on an Earth that must have greatly changed. "How is it there now?"

"Wild. Forests, mountains, deserts, plains, great oceans. It's a rich world, clean of dangerous radiation in most places. The greatest diversity of animal life is in the seas, but there are a number of small animals thriving on land: insects, worms, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals. There's no doubt your people can live there."

"When?"

"That will not be hurried. You have a very long life ahead of you, Lilith. And you have work to do here."

"You said something about that once before. What work?"

"You'll live with my family for a while-live as one of us as much as possible. We'll teach you your work."

"But what work?"

"You'll Awaken a small group of humans, all English-speaking, and help them learn to deal with us. You'll teach them the survival skills we teach you. Your people will all be from what you would call civilized societies. Now they'll have to learn to live in forests, build their own shelters, and raise their own food all without machines or outside help."

"Will you forbid us machines?" she asked uncertainly.

"Of course not. But we won't give them to you either. We'll give you hand tools, simple equipment, and food until you begin to make the things you need and grow your own crops. We've already armed you against the deadlier microorganisms. Beyond that, you'll have to fend for yourselves- avoiding poisonous plants and animals and creating what you need."

"How can you teach us to survive on our own world? How can you know enough about it or about us?"

"How can we not? We've helped your world restore itself. We've studied your bodies, your thinking, your literature, your historical records, your many cultures. . . . We know more of what you're capable of than you do."

Or they thought they did. If they really had had two hundred and fifty years to study, maybe they were right. "You've inoculated us against diseases?" she asked to be sure she had understood.

"No."

"But you said-"

"We've strengthened your immune system, increased your resistance to disease in general."

"How? Something else done to our genes?"

He said nothing. She let the silence lengthen until she was certain he would not answer. This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good. "We used to treat animals that way," she muttered bitterly.

"What?" he said.

"We did things to them-inoculations, surgery, isolation- all for their own good. We wanted them healthy and protected-sometimes so we could eat them later."

His tentacles did not flatten to his body, but she got the impression he was laughing at her. "Doesn't it frighten you to say things like that to me?" he asked.

"No," she said. "It scares me to have people doing things to me that I don't understand."

"You've been given health. The ooloi have seen to it that you'll have a chance to live on your Earth-not just to die on it."

He would not say any more on the subject. She looked around at the huge trees, some with great branching multiple trunks and foliage like long, green hair. Some of the hair seemed to move, though there was no wind. She sighed. The trees, too, then-tentacled like the people. Long, slender, green tentacles.

"Jdahya?"

His own tentacles swept toward her in a way she still found disconcerting, though it was only his way of giving her his attention or signaling her that she had it.

"I'm willing to learn what you have to teach me," she said, "but I don't think I'm the right teacher for others. There were so many humans who already knew how to live in the wilderness-so many who could probably teach you a little more. Those are the ones you ought to be talking to."

"We have talked to them. They will have to be especially careful because some of the things they 'know' aren't true anymore. There are new plants-mutations of old ones and additions we've made. Some things that used to be edible are lethal now. Some things are deadly only if they aren't prepared properly. Some of the animal life isn't as harmless as it apparently once was. Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed."

She nodded, wondering why she could absorb his words so easily. Perhaps because she had known even before her capture that the world she had known was dead. She had already absorbed that loss to the degree that she could.

"There must be ruins," she said softly.

"There were. We've destroyed many of them."

She seized his arm without thinking. "You destroyed them? There were things left and you destroyed them?"

"You'll begin again. We'll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were."

"And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?"

"No. Only different." She realized suddenly that she was facing him, grasping his arm in a grip that should have been painful to him. It was painful to her. She let go of him and his arm swung to his side in the oddly dead way in which his limbs seemed to move when he was not using them for a specific purpose.

"You were wrong," she said. She could not sustain her anger. She could not look at his tentacled, alien face and sustain anger-but she had to say the words. "You destroyed what wasn't yours," she said. "You completed an insane act."

"You are still alive," be said.

She walked beside him, silently ungrateful. Knee-high tufts of thick, fleshy leaves or tentacles grew from the soil. He stepped carefully to avoid them-which made her want to kick them. Only the fact that her feet were bare stopped her. Then she saw, to her disgust, that the leaves twisted or contracted out of the way if she stepped near one-like plants made up of snake-sized night crawlers. They seemed to be rooted to the ground. Did that make them plants?

"What are those things?" she asked, gesturing toward one with a foot.

"Part of the ship. They can be induced to produce a liquid we and our animals enjoy. It wouldn't be good for you."

"Are they plant or animal?"

"They aren't separate from the ship."

"Well, is the ship plant or animal?"

"Both, and more."

Whatever that meant. "Is it intelligent?"

"It can be. That part of it is dormant now. But even so, the ship can be chemically induced to perform more functions than you would have the patience to listen to. it does a great deal on its own without monitoring. And it. . ." He fell silent for a moment, his tentacles smooth against his body. Then he continued, "The human doctor used to say it loved us. There is an affinity, but it's biological-a strong, symbiotic relationship. We serve the ship's needs and it serves ours. It would die without us and we would be planetbound without it. For us, that would eventually mean death."

"Where did you get it?"

"We grew it."

"You. . . or your ancestors?"

"My ancestors grew this one. I'm helping to grow another."

"Now? Why?"

"We'll divide here. We're like mature asexual animals in that way, but we divide into three: Dinso to stay on Earth until it is ready to leave generations from now; Toaht to leave in this ship; and Akjai to leave in the new ship."

Lilith looked at him. "Some of you will go to Earth with us?"

"I will, and my family and others. All Dinso."

"Why?"

"This is how we grow-how we've always grown. We'll take the knowledge of shipgrowing with us so that our descendants will be able to leave when the time comes. We couldn't survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world."

"Will you take. . . seeds or something?"

"We'll take the necessary materials."

"And those who leave-Toaht and Akjai-you'll never see them again?"

"I won't. At some time in the distant future, a group of my descendants might meet a group of theirs. I hope that will happen. Both will have divided many times. They'll have acquired much to give one another."

"They probably won't even know one another. They'll remember this division as mythology if they remember it at all."

"No, they'll recognize one another. Memory of a division is passed on biologically. I remember every one that has taken place in my family since we left the homeworld."

"Do you remember your homeworld itself? I mean, could you get back to it if you wanted to?"

"Go back?" His tentacles smoothed again. "No, Lilith, that's the one direction that's closed to us. This is our homeworld now." He gestured around them from what seemed to be a glowing ivory sky to what seemed to be brown soil.

There were many more of the huge trees around them now, and she could see people going in and out of the trunks-naked, gray Oankali, tentacled all over, some with two arms, some, alarmingly, with four, but none with anything she recognized as sexual organs. Perhaps some of the tentacles and extra arms served a sexual function.

She examined every cluster of Oankali for humans, but saw none. At least none of the Oankali came near her or seemed to pay any attention to her. Some of them, she noticed with a shudder, had tentacles covering every inch of their heads all around. Others had tentacles in odd, irregular patches. None had quite Jdahya's humanlike arrangement- tentacles placed to resemble eyes, ears, hair. Had Jdahya's work with humans been suggested by the chance arrangement of his head tentacles or had he been altered surgically or in some other way to make him seem more human?

"This is the way I have always looked," he said when she asked, and he would not say any more on the subject.

Minutes later they passed near a tree and she reached out to touch its smooth, slightly giving bark-like the walls of her isolation room, but darker-colored. "These trees are all buildings, aren't they?" she asked.

"These structures are not trees," he told her. "They're part of the ship. They support its shape, provide necessities for us-food, oxygen, waste disposal, transport conduits, storage and living space, work areas, many things."

They passed very near a pair of Oankali who stood so close together their head tentacles writhed and tangled together. She could see their bodies in clear detail. Like the others she had seen, these were naked. Jdahya had probably worn clothing only as a courtesy to her. For that she was grateful.

The growing number of people they passed near began to disturb her, and she caught herself drawing closer to Jdahya as though for protection. Surprised and embarrassed, she made herself move away from him. He apparently noticed.

"Lilith?" he said very quietly.

''What?"

Silence.

"I'm all right," she said. "It's just. . . so many people, and so strange to me."

"Normally, we don't wear anything."

"I'd guessed that."

"You'll be free to wear clothing or not as you like."

"I'll wear it!" She hesitated. "Are there any other humans Awake where you're taking me?"

"None."

She hugged herself tightly, arms across her chest. More isolation.

To her surprise, he extended his hand. To her greater surprise, she took it and was grateful.

"Why can't you go back to your homeworld?" she asked. "It. . . still exists, doesn't it?"

He seemed to think for a moment. "We left it so long ago. . . I doubt that it does still exist."

"Why did you leave?"

"It was a womb. The time had come for us to be born." She smiled sadly. "There were humans who thought that way-right up to the moment the missiles were fired. People who believed space was our destiny. I believed it myself."

"I know-though from what the ooloi have told me, your people could not have fulfilled that destiny. Their own bodies handicapped them."

"Their... our bodies? What do you mean? We've been into space. There's nothing about our bodies that prevented-"

"Your bodies are fatally flawed. The ooloi perceived this at once. At first it was very hard for them to touch you. Then you became an obsession with them. Now it's hard for them to let you alone."

"What are you talking about!"

"You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have al the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you."

She shook her head. "If you're saying we were genetically programmed to do what we did, blow ourselves up.-"

"No. Your people's situation was more like your own with the cancer my relative cured. The cancer was small. The human doctor said you would probably have recovered and been well even if humans had discovered it and removed it at that stage. You might have lived the rest of your life free of it, though she said she would have wanted you checked regularly."

"With my family history, she wouldn't have had to tell me that last."

"Yes. But what if you hadn't recognized the significance of your family history? What if we or the humans hadn't discovered the cancer."

"It was malignant, I assume."

"Of course."

"Then I suppose it would eventually have killed me."

"Yes, it would have. And your people were in a similar position. If they had been able to perceive and solve their problem, they might have been able to avoid destruction. Of course, they too would have to remember to reexamine themselves periodically."

"But what was the problem? You said we had two incompatible characteristics. What were they?"

Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to come from his mouth or throat. "You are intelligent," he said. "That's the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we've found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics."

"What's the second characteristic?"

"You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all. . ." The rattling sounded again. "That was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing."

"I don't think most of us thought of it as a genetic problem. I didn't. I'm not sure I do now." Her feet had begun to hurt from walking so long on the uneven ground. She wanted to end both the walk and the conversation. The conversation made her uncomfortable. Jdahya sounded... almost plausible.

"Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter. A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not."

"I just don't believe it's that simple. Just a bad gene or two."

"It isn't simple, and it isn't a gene or two. It's many-the result of a tangled combination of factors that only begins with genes." He stopped, let his head tentacles drift toward a rough circle of huge trees. The tentacles seemed to point. "My family lives there," he said.

She stood still, now truly frightened.

"No one will touch you without your consent," he said. "And I'll stay with you for as long as you like."

She was comforted by his words and ashamed of needing comfort. How had she become so dependent on him? She shook her head. The answer was obvious. He wanted her dependent. That was the reason for her continued isolation from her own kind. She was to be dependent on an Oankali- dependent and trusting. To hell with that!

"Tell me what you want of me," she demanded abruptly, "and what you want of my people."

His tentacles swung to examine her. "I've told you a great deal."

"Tell me the price, Jdahya. What do you want? What will your people take from us in return for having saved us?"

All his tentacles seemed to hang limp, giving him an almost comical droop. Lilith found no humor in it. "You'll live," he said. "Your people will live. You'll have your world again. We already have much of what we want of you. Your cancer in particular."

"What?"

"The ooloi are intensely interested in it. It suggests abilities we have never been able to trade for successfully before."

"Abilities? From cancer?"

"Yes. The ooloi see great potential in it. So the trade has already been useful."

"You're welcome to it. But before when I asked, you said you trade.. . yourselves."

"Yes. We trade the essence 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 beings."

"We are committed to the trade," he said, softly implacable.

"No! You'll finish what the war began. In a few generations-"

"One generation."

"No!"

He wrapped the many fingers of one hand around her arm. "Can you hold your breath, Lilith? Can you hold it by an act of will until you die?"

"Hold my-?"

"We are as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done-to the rebirth of your people and mine."

"No!" she shouted. "A rebirth for us can only happen if you let us alone! Let us begin again on our own."

Silence.

She pulled at her arm, and after a moment he let her go. She got the impression he was watching her very closely.

"I think I wish your people had left me on Earth," she whispered. "If this is what they found me for, I wish they'd left me." Medusa children. Snakes for hair. Nests of night crawlers for eyes and ears.

He sat down on the bare ground, and after a minute of surprise, she sat opposite him, not knowing why, simply following his movement.

"I can't unfind you," he said. "You're here. But there is... a thing I can do. It is. . .deeply wrong of me to offer it. I will never offer it again."

"What?" she asked barely caring. She was tired from the walk, overwhelmed by what he had told her. It made no sense. Good god, no wonder he couldn't go home-even if his home still existed. Whatever his people had been like when they left it, they must be very different by now-the children of the last surviving human beings would be different.

"Lilith?" he said.

She raised her head, stared at him.

"Touch me here now," he said, gesturing toward his head tentacles, "and I'll sting you. You'll die-very quickly and without pain."

She swallowed.

"If you want it," he said.

It was a gift he was offering. Not a threat.

"Why?" she whispered. He would not answer.

She stared at his head tentacles. She raised her hand, let it reach toward him almost as though it had its own will, its own intent. No more Awakenings. No more questions. No more impossible answers. Nothing.

Nothing.

He never moved. Even his tentacles were utterly still. Her hand hovered, wanting to fall amid the tough, flexible, lethal organs. It hovered, almost brushing one by accident.

She jerked her hand away, clutched it to her. "Oh god," she whispered. "Why didn't I do it? Why can't I do it?"

He stood up and waited uncomplaining for several minutes until she dragged herself to her feet.

"You'll meet my mates and one of my children now," he said. "Then rest and food, Lilith."

She looked at him, longing for a human expression. "Would you have done it?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Why?"

"For you."

II

FAMILY

1

Sleep.

She barely remembered being presented to three of Jdahya's relatives, then guided off and given a bed. Sleep. Then a small, confused awakening.

Now food and forgetting.

Food and pleasure so sharp and sweet it cleared everything else from her mind. There were whole bananas, dishes of sliced pineapple, whole figs, shelled nuts of several kinds, bread and honey, a vegetable stew filled with corn, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, mushrooms, herbs, and spices.

Where had all this been, Lilith wondered. Surely they could have given her a little of this instead of keeping her for so long on a diet that made eating a chore. Could it all have been for her health? Or had there been some other purpose--something to do with their damned gene trade?

When she had eaten some of everything, savored each new taste lovingly, she began to pay attention to the four Oankali who were with her in the small, bare room. They were Jdahya and his wife lel Kahguyaht aj Dinso. And there was Jdahya's ooloi mate Kahguyaht--Ahtrekahguyahtkaal lel Jdahyatediin aj Dinso. Finally there was the family's ooloi child Nikanj--Kaalnikanj oo Jdahyatediinkahguyaht aj Dinso.

The four sat atop familiar, featureless platforms eating Earth foods from their several small dishes as though they had been born to such a diet.

There was a central platform with more of everything on it, and the Oankali took turns filling one another's dishes. One of them could not, it seemed, get up and fill only one dish. Others were immediately handed forward, even to Lilith. She filled Jdahya's with hot stew and returned it to him, wondering when he had eaten last-apart from the orange they had shared.

"Did you eat while we were in that isolation room?" she asked him.

"I had eaten before I went in," he said. "I used very little energy while I was there so I didn't need any more food."

"How long were you there?"

"Six days, your time."

She sat down on her platform and stared at him. "That long?"

"Six days," he repeated.

"Your body has drifted away from your world's twenty-four-hour day," the ooloi Kahguyaht said. That happens to all your people. Your day lengthens slightly and you lose track of how much time has passed."

''But-''

"How long did it seem to you?"

"A few days. . . I don't know. Fewer than six."

"You see?" the ooloi asked softly.

She frowned at it. It was naked as were the others except for Jdahya. This did not bother her even at close quarters as much as she had feared it might. But she did not like the ooloi. It was smug and it tended to treat her condescendingly. It was also one of the creatures scheduled to bring about the destruction of what was left of humanity. And in spite of Jdahya's claim that the Oankali were not hierarchical, the ooloi seemed to be the head of the house. Everyone deferred to it.

It was almost exactly Lilith's size-slightly larger than Jdahya and considerably smaller than the female Tediin. And it had four arms. Or two arms and two arm-sized tentacles. The big tentacles, gray and rough, reminded her of elephants' trunks-except that she could not recall ever being disgusted by the trunk of an elephant. At least the child did not have them yet-though Jdahya had assured her that it was an ooloi child. Looking at Kahguyaht, she took pleasure in the knowledge that the Oankali themselves used the neuter pronoun in referring to the ooloi. Some things deserved to be called "it."

She turned her attention back to the food. "How can you eat all this?" she asked. "I couldn't eat your foods, could I?"

"What do you think you've eaten each time we've Awakened you?" the ooloi asked.

"I don't know," she said coldly. "No one would tell me what it was."

Kahguyaht missed or ignored the anger in her voice. "It was one of our foods-slightly altered to meet your special needs," it said.

Thought of her "special needs" made her realize that this might be Jdahya's "relative" who had cured her cancer. She had somehow not thought of this until now. She got up and filled one of her small bowls with nuts-roasted, but not salted-and wondered wearily whether she had to be grateful to Kahguyaht. Automatically she filled with the same nuts, the bowl Tediin had thrust forward at her.

"Is any of our food poison to you?" she asked flatly.

"No," Kahguyaht answered. "We have adjusted to the foods of your world."

"Are any of yours poison to me?"

"Yes. A great deal of it. You shouldn't eat anything unfamiliar that you find here."

"That doesn't make sense. Why should you be able to come from so far away-another world, another star system- and eat our food?"

"Haven't we had time to learn to eat your food?" the ooloi asked.

"What?''

It did not repeat the question.

"Look," she said, "how can you learn to eat something that's poison to you?"

"By studying teachers to whom it isn't poison. By studying your people, Lilith. Your bodies."

"I don't understand."

"Then accept the evidence of your eyes. We can eat anything you can. It's enough for you to understand that."

Patronizing bastard, she thought. But she said only, "Does that mean that you can learn to eat anything at all? That you can't be poisoned?"

"No. I didn't mean that."

She waited, chewing nuts, thinking. When the ooloi did not continue, she looked at it.

It was focused on her, head tentacles pointing. "The very old can be poisoned," it said. "Their reactions are slowed. They might not be able to recognize an unexpected deadly substance and remember how to neutralize it in time. The seriously injured can be poisoned. Their bodies are distracted, busy with self-repair. And the children can be poisoned if they have not yet learned to protect themselves."

"You mean. . . just about anything might poison you if you weren't somehow prepared for it, ready to protect yourselves against it?"

"Not just anything. Very few things, really. Things we were especially vulnerable to before we left our original homeworld."

"Like what?"

"Why do you ask, Lilith? What would you do if I told you? Poison a child?"

She chewed and swallowed several peanuts, all the while staring at the ooloi, making no effort to conceal her dislike. "You invited me to ask," she said.

"No. That isn't what I was doing."

"Do you really imagine I'd hurt a child?"

"No. You just haven't learned yet not to ask dangerous questions."

"Why did you tell me as much as you did?"

The ooloi relaxed its tentacles "Because we know you, Lilith. And, within reason, we want you to know us."

2

The ooloi took her to see Sharad. She would have preferred to have Jdahya take her, but when Kahguyaht volunteered, Jdahya leaned toward her and asked very softly, "Shall I go?"

She did not imagine that she was intended to miss the unspoken message of the gesture-that Jdahya was indulging a child. Lilith was tempted to accept the child's role and ask him to come along. But he deserved a vacation from her-and she from him. Maybe he wanted to spend some time with the big, silent Tediin. How, she wondered, did these people manage their sex lives, anyway? How did the ooloi fit in? Were its two arm-sized tentacles sexual organs? Kahguyaht had not used them in eating-had kept them either coiled against its body, under its true arms or draped over its shoulders.

She was not afraid of it, ugly as it was. So far it had inspired only disgust, anger, and dislike in her. How had Jdahya connected himself with such a creature?

Kahguyaht led her through three walls, opening all of them by touching them with one of its large tentacles. Finally they emerged into a wide, downward-sloping, well-lighted corridor. Large numbers of Oankali walked or rode flat, slow, wheel-less conveyances that apparently floated a fraction of an inch above the floor. There were no collisions, no near-misses, yet Lilith saw no order to the traffic. People walked or drove wherever they could find an opening and apparently depended on others not to hit them. Some of the vehicles were loaded with unrecognizable freight-transparent

beachball-sized blue spheres filled with some liquid, two-foot-long centipede-like animals stacked in rectangular cages, great trays of oblong, green shapes about six feet long and three feet thick. These last writhed slowly, blindly.

"What are those?" she asked the ooloi.

It ignored her except to take her arm and guide her where traffic was heavy. She realized abruptly that it was guiding her with the tip of one of its large tentacles.

"What do you call these?" she asked, touching the one wrapped around her arm. Like the smaller ones it was cool and as hard as her fingernails, but clearly very flexible.

"You can call them sensory arms," it told her.

"What are they for?"

Silence.

"Look, I thought I was supposed to be learning. I can't learn without asking questions and getting answers."

"You'll get them eventually-as you need them."

In anger she pulled loose from the ooloi's grip. It was surprisingly easy to do. The ooloi did not touch her again, did not seem to notice that twice it almost lost her, made no effort to help her when they passed through a crowd and she realized she could not tell one adult ooloi from another.

"Kahguyaht!" she said sharply.

"Here." It was beside her, no doubt watching, probably laughing at her confusion. Feeling manipulated, she grasped one of its true arms and stayed close to it until they had come into a corridor that was almost empty. From there they entered a corridor that was empty. Kahguyaht ran one sensory arm along the wall for several feet, then stopped, and flattened the tip of the arm against the wall.

An opening appeared where the arm had touched and Lilith expected to be led into one more corridor or room. Instead the wall seemed to form a sphincter and pass something. There was even a sour smell to enhance the image. One of the big semitransparent green oblongs slid into view, wet and sleek.

"It's a plant," the ooloi volunteered. "We store it where it can be given the kind of light it thrives best under."

Why couldn't it have said that before, she wondered.

The green oblong writhed very- slowly as the others had while the ooloi probed it with both sensory arms. After a time, the ooloi paid attention only to one end. That end, it massaged with its sensory arms.

Lilith saw that the plant was beginning to open, and suddenly she knew what was happening.

"Sharad is in that thing, isn't he?"

"Come here."

She went over to where it had sat on the floor at the now-open end of the oblong. Sharad's head was just becoming visible. The hair that she recalled as dull black now glistened, wet and plastered to his head. The eyes were closed and the look on the face peaceful-as though the boy were in a normal sleep. Kahguyaht had stopped the opening of the plant at the base of the boy's throat, but she could see enough to know Sharad was only a little older than he had been when they had shared an isolation room. He looked healthy and well.

"Will you wake him?" she asked.

"No." Kahguyaht touched the brown face with a sensory arm. "We won't be Awakening these people for a while. The human who will be guiding and training them has not yet begun his own training."

She would have pleaded with it if she had not had two years of dealing with the Oankali to tell her just how little good pleading did. Here was the one human being she had seen in those two years, in two hundred and fifty years. And she could not talk to him, could not make him know she was with him.

She touched his cheek, found it wet, slimy, cool. "Are you sure he's all right?"

"He's fine." The ooloi touched the plant where it had drawn aside and it began slowly to close around Sharad again. She watched the face until it was completely covered. The plant closed seamlessly around the small head.

"Before we found these plants," Kahguyaht said, "they used to capture living animals and keep them alive for a long while, using their carbon dioxide and supplying them with oxygen while slowly digesting nonessential parts of

their bodies: limbs, skin, sensory organs. The plants even passed some of their own substance through their prey to nourish the prey and keep it alive as long as possible. And the plants were enriched by the prey's waste products. They gave a very, very long death.

Lilith swallowed. "Did the prey feel what was being done to it?"

"No. That would have hastened death. The prey . . . slept." Lilith stared at the green oblong, writhing slowly like an obscenely fat caterpillar. "How does Sharad breathe?"

"The plant supplies him with an ideal mix of gasses."

"Not just oxygen?"

"No. It suits its care to his needs. It still benefits from the carbon dioxide he exhales and from his rare waste products. It floats in a bath of nutrients and water. These and the light supply the rest of its needs."

Lilith touched the plant, found it firm and cool. It yielded slightly under her fingers. Its surface was lightly coated with slime. She watched with amazement as her fingers sank more deeply into it and it began to engulf them. She was not frightened until she tried to pull away and discovered it would not let go-and pulling back hurt sharply.

"Wait," Kahguyaht said. With a sensory arm, it touched the plant near her hand. At once, she felt the plant begin to let go. When she was able to raise her hand, she found it numb, but otherwise unharmed. Feeling returned to the hand slowly. The print of it was still clear on the surface of the plant when Kahguyaht first rubbed its own hands with its sensory arms, then opened the wall and pushed the plant back through it.

"Sharad is very small," it said when the plant was gone "The plant could have taken you in as well."

She shuddered. "I was in one...wasn't I?"

Kahguyaht ignored the question. But of course she had been in one of the plants-had spent most of the last two and a half centuries within what was basically a carnivorous plant. And the thing had taken good care of her, kept her young and well.

"How did you make them stop eating people?" she asked.

"We altered them genetically-changed some of their requirements, enabled them to respond to certain chemical stimuli from us."

She looked at the ooloi. "It's one thing to do that to a plant. It's another to do it to intelligent, self-aware beings."

"We do what we do, Lilith."

"You could kill us. You could make mules of our children- sterile monsters."

"No," it said. "There was no life at all on your Earth when our ancestors left our original homeworld, and in all that time we've never done such a thing."

"You wouldn't tell me if you had," she said bitterly.

It took her back through the crowded corridors to what she had come to think of as Jdahya's apartment. There it turned her over to the child, Nikanj.

"It will answer your questions and take you through the walls when necessary," Kahguyaht said. "It is half again your age and very knowledgeable about things other than humans. You will teach it about your people and it will teach you about the Oankali."

Half again her age, three-quarters her size, and still growing. She wished it were not an ooloi child. She wished it were not a child at all. How could Kahguyaht first accuse her of wanting to poison children, then leave her in the care of its own child?

At least Nikanj did not look like an ooloi yet.

"You do speak English, don't you?" she asked when Kahguyaht had opened a wall and left the room. The room was the one they had eaten in, empty now except for Lilith and the child. The leftover food and the dishes had been removed and she had not seen Jdahya or Tediin since her return.

"Yes," the child said. "But... not much. You teach."

Lilith sighed. Neither the child nor Tediin had said a word to her beyond greeting, though both had occasionally spoken in fast, choppy Oankali to Jdahya or Kahguyaht. She had wondered why. Now she knew.

"I'll teach what I can," she said. "I teach. You teach."

"Yes."

"Good. Outside?"

"You want me to go outside with you?"

It seemed to think for a moment. "Yes," it said final

"Why?"

The child opened its mouth, then closed it again, head tentacles writhing. Confusion? Vocabulary problem?

"It's all right," Lilith said. "We can go outside if you like."

Its tentacles smoothed flat against its body briefly, then it took her hand and would have opened the wall and led her out but she stopped it.

"Can you show me how to make it open?" she asked. The child hesitated, then took one of her hands and brushed it over the forest of its long head tentacles, leaving the hand slightly wet. Then it touched her fingers to the wall, and the wall began to open.

More programmed reaction to chemical stimuli. No special areas to press, no special series of pressures. Just a chemical the Oankali manufactured within their bodies. She would go on being a prisoner, forced to stay wherever they chose to leave her. She would not be permitted even the illusion of freedom.

The child stopped her once they were outside. It struggled through a few more words. "Others," it said, then hesitated. "Others see you? Others not see human...never."

Lilith frowned, certain she was being asked a question. The child's rising inflection seemed to indicate questioning if she could depend on such clues from an Oankali. "Are you asking me whether you can show me off to your friends?" she asked.

The child turned its face to her. "Show you...off?"

"It means...to put me on display-take me out to be seen."

"Ah. Yes. I show you off?"

"All right," she said smiling.

"I talk...more human soon. You say...if I speak bad."

"Badly," she corrected.

"If I speak badly?"

"Yes."

There was a long silence. "Also, goodly?" it asked.

"No, not goodly. Well."

"Well." The child seemed to taste the word. "I speak well soon," it said.

3

Nikanj's friends poked and prodded her exposed flesh and tried to persuade her through Nikanj to take off her clothing. None of them spoke English. None seemed in the least childlike, though Nikanj said all were children. She got the feeling some would have enjoyed dissecting her. They spoke aloud very little, but there was much touching of tentacles to flesh or tentacles to other tentacles. When they saw that she would not strip, no more questions were addressed to her. She was first amused, then annoyed, then angered by their attitude. She was nothing more than an unusual animal to them, Nikanj's new pet.

Abruptly she turned away from them. She had had enough of being shown off. She moved away from a pair of children who were reaching to investigate her hair, and spoke Nikanj's name sharply.

Nikanj disentangled its long head tentacles from those of another child and came back to her. If it had not responded to its name, she would not have known it. She was going to have to learn to tell people apart. Memorize the various head-tentacle patterns, perhaps.

"I want to go back," she said.

"Why?" it asked.

She sighed, decided to tell as much of the truth as she thought it could understand. Best to find out now just how far the truth would get her. "I don't like this," she said. "I don't want to be shown off anymore to people I can't even talk to."

It touched her arm tentatively. "You . . . anger?"

"I'm angry, yes. I need to be by myself for a while."

It thought about that. "We go back," it said finally.

Some of the children were apparently unhappy about her leaving. They clustered around her and spoke aloud to Nikanj, but Nikanj said a few words and they let her pass.

She discovered she was trembling and took deep breaths to relax herself. How was a pet supposed to feel? How did zoo animals feel?

If the child would just take her somewhere and leave her for a while. If it would give her a little more of what she had thought she would never want again: Solitude.

Nikanj touched her forehead with a few head tentacles, as though sampling her sweat. She jerked her head away, not wanting to be sampled anymore by anyone.

Nikanj opened a wall into the family apartment and led her into a room that was a twin of the isolation room she thought she had left behind. "Rest here," it told her. "Sleep."

There was even a bathroom, and on the familiar table platform, there was a clean set of clothing. And replacing Jdahya was Nikanj. She could not get rid of it. It had been told to stay with her, and it meant to stay. Its tentacles settled into ugly irregular lumps when she shouted at it, but it stayed.

Defeated, she hid for a while in the bathroom. She rinsed her old clothing, though no foreign matter stuck to it-not dirt, not sweat, not grease or water. It never stayed wet for more than a few minutes. Some Oankali synthetic.

Then she wanted to sleep again. She was used to sleeping whenever she felt tired, and not used to walking long distances or meeting new people. Surprising how quickly the Oankali had become people to her. But then, who else was there?

She crawled into the bed and turned her back to Nikanj, who had taken Jdahya's place on the table platform. Who else would there be for her if the Oankali had their way- and no doubt they were used to having their way. Modifying carnivorous plants . . . What had they modified to get their ship? And what useful tools would they modify human beings into? Did they know yet, or were they planning more experiments? Did they care? How would they make their changes? Or had they made them already-done a little extra tampering with her while they took care of her tumor? Had she ever had a tumor? Her family history led her to believe she had. They probably had not lied about that. Maybe they had not lied about anything. Why should they bother to lie? They owned the Earth and all that was left of the human species.

How was it that she had not been able to take what Jdahya offered?

She slept, finally. The light never changed, but she was used to that. She awoke once to find that Nikanj had come onto the bed with her and lay down. Her first impulse was to push the child away in revulsion or get up herself. Her second, which she followed, wearily indifferent, was to go back to sleep.

4

It became irrationally important to her to do two things:

First, to talk to another human being. Any human would do, but she hoped for one who had been Awake longer than she had, one who knew more than she had managed to learn.

Second, she wanted to catch an Oankali in a lie. Any Oankali. Any lie.

But she saw no sign of other humans. And the closest she came to catching the Oankali lying was to catch them in half-truths--though they were honest even about this. They freely admitted that they would tell her only part of what she wanted to know. Beyond this, the Oankali seemed to tell the truth as they perceived it, always. This left her with an almost intolerable sense of hopelessness and helplessness- as though catching them in lies would make them vulnerable. As though it would make the thing they intended to do less real, easier to deny.

Only Nikanj gave her any pleasure, any forgetfulness. The ooloi child seemed to have been given to her as much as she had been given to it. It rarely left her, seemed to like her-though what "liking" a human might mean to an Oankali, she did not know. She had not even figured out Oankali emotional ties to one another. But Jdahya had cared enough for her to offer to do something he believed was utterly wrong. What might Nikanj do for her eventually?

In a very real sense, she was an experimental animal. Not a pet. What could Nikanj do for an experimental animal? Protest tearfully (?) when she was sacrificed at the end of the experiment?

But, no, it was not that kind of experiment. She was intended to live and reproduce, not to die. Experimental animal, parent to domestic animals? Or . . . nearly extinct animal, part of a captive breeding program? Human biologists had done that before the war-used a few captive members of an endangered animal species to breed more for the wild population. Was that what she was headed for? Forced artificial insemination. Surrogate motherhood? Fertility drugs and forced "donations" of eggs? Implantation of unrelated fertilized eggs. Removal of children from mothers at birth . . . Humans had done these things to captive breeders- all for a higher good, of course.

This was what she needed to talk to another human about.

Only a human could reassure her-or at least understand her fear. But there was only 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-"

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 reason?" Silence again. It let its sensory tentacles droop. This made it look smaller-like a furry animal that had gotten wet.

"It can't be that you don't have-or can't make-writing materials," she said.

"We can make anything your people could," it said. "Though we would not want to make most of their things."

"This is such a simple thing . . ." She shook her head. "Have you been told not to tell me why?"

It refused to answer. Did that mean not telling her was its own idea, its own childish exercise of power? Why shouldn't the Oankali do such things as readily as humans did?

After a time, it said, "Come back in. I'll teach you more of our history." It knew she liked stories of the long, multispecies Oankali history, and the stories helped her Oankali vocabulary. But she was in no mood to be cooperative now. She sat down on the ground and leaned back against the pseudotree. After a moment, Nikanj sat down opposite her and began to speak.

"Six divisions ago, on a white-sun water world, we lived in great shallow oceans," it said. "We were many-bodied and spoke with body lights and color patterns among ourself and among ourselves. . .

She let it go on, not questioning when she did not understand, not wanting to care. The idea of Oankali blending with a species of intelligent, schooling, fishlike creatures was fascinating, but she was too angry to give it her full attention. Writing materials. Such small things, and yet they were denied to her. Such small things!

When Nikanj went into the apartment to get food for them both, she got up and walked away. She wandered, freer than she ever had before through the parklike area outside the living quarters-the pseudotrees. Oankali saw her, but seemed to pay no more than momentary attention to her. She had become absorbed in looking around when abruptly Nikanj was beside her.

"You must stay with me," it said in a tone that reminded her of a human mother speaking to her five-year-old. That, she thought, was about right for her rank in its family.

After that incident she slipped away whenever she could. Either she would be stopped, punished, and/or confined, or she would not be.

She was not. Nikanj seemed to get used to her wandering. Abruptly, it ceased to show up at her elbow minutes after she had escaped it. It seemed willing to give her an occasional hour or two out of its sight. She began to take food with her, saving easily portable items from her meals-a highly seasoned rice dish wrapped in an edible, high-protein envelope, nuts, fruit or quatasayasha, a sharp, cheeselike Oankali food that Kahguyaht had said was safe. Nikanj had acknowledged its acceptance of her wandering by advising her to bury any uneaten food she did not want. "Feed it to the ship" was the way it put the suggestion.

She would fashion her extra jacket into a bag and put her lunch into it, then wander alone, eating and thinking. There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.

Other Oankali tried to talk with her sometimes, but she could not understand enough of their language to hold a conversation. Sometimes even when they spoke slowly, she would not recognize words she should have known and did know moments after the encounter had ended. Most of the time she wound up resorting to gestures-which did not work very well-and feeling impenetrably stupid. The only certain communication she managed was in enlisting help from strangers when she was lost.

Nikanj had told her that if she could not find her way "home" she was to go to the nearest adult and say her name with new Oankali additions: Dhokaaltediinjdahyalilith eka Kahguyaht aj Dinso. The Dho used as prefix indicated an adopted non-Oankali. KaaI was a kinship group name. Then Tediin's and Jdahya's names with Jdahya's last because he had brought her into the family. Eka meant child. A child so young it literally had no sex-as very young Oankali did not. Lilith had accepted this designation hopefully. Surely sexless children were not used in breeding experiments. Then there was Kahguyaht's name. It was her third "parent," after all. Finally there was the trade status name. The Dinso group was staying on Earth, changing itself by taking part of humanity's genetic heritage, spreading its own genes like a disease among unwilling humans... Dinso. It wasn't a surname. It was a terrible promise, a threat.

Yet if she said this long name-all of it-people immediately understood not only who she was but where she should be, and they pointed her toward "home." She was not particularly grateful to them.

On one of these solitary walks, she heard two Oankali use one of their words for humans--kaizidi--and she slowed down to listen. She assumed the two were talking about her. She often supposed people she walked among were discussing her as though she were an unusual animal. These two confirmed her fears when they fell silent at her approach and continued their conversation silently with mutual touching of head tentacles. She had all but forgotten this incident when, several walks later, she heard another group of people in the same area speaking again of a kaizidi-a male they called Fukumoto.

Again everyone fell silent at her approach. She had tried to freeze and listen, just hidden by the trunk of one of the great pseudotrees, but the moment she stopped there, conversation went silent among the Oankali. Their hearing, when they chose to focus their attention on it, was acute. Nikanj had complained early on in her stay about the loudness of her heartbeat.

She walked on, ashamed in spite of herself of having been caught eavesdropping. There was no sense to such a feeling. She was a captive. What courtesy did a captive owe beyond what was necessary for self-preservation?

And where was Fukumoto?

She replayed in her mind what she remembered of the fragments she had heard. Fukumoto had something to do with the Tiej kinship group-also a Dinso people. She knew vaguely where their area was, though she had never been there.

Why had people in Kaal been discussing a human in Tiej? What had Fukumoto done? And how could she reach him?

She would go to Tiej. She would do her wandering there if she could-if Nikanj did not appear to stop her. It still did that occasionally, letting her know that it could follow her anywhere, approach her anywhere, and seem to appear from nowhere. Maybe it liked to see her jump.

She began to walk toward Tiej. She might manage to see the man today if he happened to be outside-addicted to wandering as she was. And if she saw him, he might speak English. If he spoke English, his Oankali jailers might not prevent him from speaking to her. If the two of them spoke together, he might prove as ignorant as she was. And if he were not ignorant, if they met and spoke and all went well, the Oankali might decide to punish her. Solitary confinement again? Suspended animation? Or just closer confinement with Nikanj and its family? If they did either of the first two she would simply be relieved of a responsibility she did not want and could not possibly handle. If they did the third, what difference would it really make? What difference balanced against the chance to see and speak with one of her own kind again, finally?

None at all.

She never considered going back to Nikanj and asking it or its family to let her meet Fukumoto. They had made it clear to her that she was not to have contact with humans or human artifacts.

The walk to Tiej was longer than she had expected. She had not yet learned to judge distances aboard the ship. The horizon, when it was not obscured by pseudotrees and hill-like entrances to other levels, seemed startlingly close. But how close, she could not have said.

At least no one stopped her. Oankali she passed seemed to assume that she belonged wherever she happened to be. Unless Nikanj appeared, she would be able to wander in Tiej for as long as she liked.

She reached Tiej and began her search. The pseudotrees in Tiej were yellow-brown rather than the gray-brown of Kaal, and their bark looked rougher-more like what she expected of tree bark. Yet people opened them in the way to come and go. She peered through the openings they made when she got the chance. This trip, she felt, would be worthwhile if she could just catch a glimpse of Fukumoto- of any human Awake and aware. Anyone at all.

She had not realized until she actually began looking how important it was for her to find someone. The Oankali had removed her so completely from her own people-only to tell her they planned to use her as a Judas goat. And they had done it all so softly, without brutality, and with patience and gentleness so corrosive of any resolve on her part.

She walked and looked until she was too tired to continue. Finally, discouraged and more disappointed than even she thought reasonable, she sat down against a pseudotree and ate the two oranges she had saved from the lunch she had eaten earlier in Kaal.

Her search, she admitted finally, had been ridiculous. She could have stayed in Kaal, daydreamed about meeting an-other human, and gotten more satisfaction from it. She could not even be certain how much of Tiej she had covered. There were no signs that she could read. Oankali did not use such things. Their kinship group areas were clearly scent-marked. Each time they opened a wall, they enhanced the local scent markers-or they identified themselves as visitors, members of a different kinship group. Ooloi could change their scent, and did when they left home to mate. Males and females kept the scents they were born with and never lived outside their kinship area. Lilith could not read scent signs. As far as she was concerned Oankali had no odor at all.

That was better, she supposed, than their having a foul odor and forcing her to endure it. But it left her bereft of signposts.

She sighed and decided to go back to Kaal-if she could find her way back. She looked around, confirmed her suspicions that she was already disoriented, lost. She would have to ask someone to aim her toward Kaal.

She got up, moved away from the pseudotree she had been leaning against, and scratched a shallow hole in the soil-it actually was soil, Nikanj had told her. She buried her orange peelings, knowing they would be gone within a day, broken down by tendrils of the ship's own living matter.

Or that was what was supposed to happen.

As she shook out her extra jacket and brushed herself off, the ground around the buried peelings began to darken. The color change recaptured her attention and she watched as the soil slowly became mud and turned the same orange that the peelings had been. This was an effect she had never seen before.

The soil began to smell, to stink in a way she found hard to connect with oranges. It was probably the smell that drew the Oankali. She looked up and found two of them standing near her, their head tentacles swept toward her in a point.

One of them spoke to her, and she tried hard to understand the words-did understand some of them, but not fast enough or completely enough to catch the sense of what was being said.

The orange spot on the ground began to bubble and grow. Lilith stepped away from it. "What's happening?" she asked. "Do either of you speak English?"

The larger of the two Oankali-Lilith thought this one was female--spoke in a language neither Oankali nor English. This confused her at first. Then she realized the language sounded like Japanese.

"Fukumoto-san?" she asked hopefully.

There was another burst of what must have been Japanese, and she shook her head. "I don't understand," she said in Oankali. Those words she had learned quickly through repetition. The only Japanese words that came quickly to mind were stock phrases from a trip she had made years before to Japan: Konichiwa, arigato gozaimaso, sayonara.

Other Oankali had gathered to watch the bubbling ground. The orange mass had grown to be about three feet across and almost perfectly circular. It had touched one of the fleshy, tentacled pseudoplants and the pseudoplant darkened and lashed about as though in agony. Seeing its violent twisting Lilith forgot that it was not an individual organism. She focused on the fact that it was alive and she had probably caused it pain. She had not merely caused an interesting effect, she had caused harm.

She made herself speak in slow, careful Oankali. "I can't change this," she said, wanting to say that she couldn't repair the damage. "Will you help?"

An ooloi stepped up, touched the orange mud with one of its sensory arms, held the arm still in the mud for several seconds. The bubbling slowed, then stopped. By the time the ooloi withdrew, the bright orange coloring was also beginning to fade to normal.

The ooloi said something to a big female and she answered, gesturing toward Lilith with her head tentacles.

Lilith frowned suspiciously at the ooloi. "Kahguyaht?" she asked, feeling foolish. But the pattern of this ooloi's head tentacles was the same as Kahguyaht's.

The ooloi pointed its head tentacles toward her. "How have you managed," it asked her, "to remain so promising and yet so ignorant?"

Kahguyaht.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

Silence. It shifted its attention to the healing ground, seemed to examine it once more, then said something loudly to the gathered people. Most of them went smooth and began to disperse. She suspected it had made a joke at her expense.

"So you finally found something to poison," it said to her.

She shook her head. "I just buried a few orange peelings. Nikanj told me to bury my leavings."

"Bury anything you like in Kaal. When you leave Kaal, and you want to throw something away, give it to an ooloi. And don't leave Kaal again until you're able to speak to people. Why are you here?"

Now she refused to answer.

"Fukumoto-san died recently," it said. "No doubt that's why you heard talk of him. You did hear people talking about him, didn't you?"

After a moment she nodded.

"He was one hundred and twenty years old. He spoke no English."

"He was human," she whispered.

"He lived here awake for almost sixty years. I don't think he saw another human more than twice."

She stepped closer to Kahguyaht, studying it. "And it doesn't occur to you that that was a cruelty?"

"He adjusted very well."

"But still-"

"Can you find your way home, Lilith?"

"We're an adaptable species," she said, refusing to be stopped, "but it's wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it."

"Learn our language. When you have, one of us will introduce you to someone who, like Fukumoto, has chosen to live and die among us instead of returning to Earth."

"You mean Fukumoto chose-"

"You know almost nothing," it said. "Come on. I'll take you home-and speak to Nikanj about you."

That made her speak up quickly. "Nikanj didn't know where I was going. It might be tracking me right now."

"No, it isn't. I was. Come on."

5

Kahguyaht took her beneath a hill onto a lower level. There it ordered her onto a small, slow-moving flat vehicle. The transport never moved faster than she could have run, but it got them home surprisingly quickly, no doubt taking a more direct route than she had.

Kahguyaht would not speak to her during the trip. She got the impression it was angry, but she didn't really care. She only hoped it wasn't too angry with Nikanj. She had accepted the possibility that she might be punished somehow for her Tiej trip, but she had not intended to make trouble for Nikanj.

Once they were home, Kahguyaht took Nikanj into the mom she and Nikanj shared, leaving her in what she had come to think of as the dining room. Jdahya and Tediin were there, eating Oankali food this time, the products of plants that would have been deadly to her.

She sat down silently and after a while, Jdahya brought her nuts, fruit, and some Oankali food that had a vaguely meaty taste and texture, though it was actually a plant product.

"Just how much trouble am I in?" she asked as he handed her her dishes.

He smoothed his tentacles. "Not so much, Lilith."

She frowned. "I got the impression Kahguyaht was angry."

Now the smooth tentacles became irregular, raised knots. "That was not exactly anger. It is concerned about Nikanj."

"Because I went to Tiej?"

"No." His lumps became larger, uglier. "Because this is a hard time for it-and for you. Nikanj has left you for it to stumble over."

''What?''

Tediin said something in rapid, incomprehensible Oankali, and Jdahya answered her. The two of them spoke together for a few minutes. Then Tediin spoke in English to Lilith.

"Kahguyaht must teach... same-sex child. You see?"

"And I'm part of the lesson," Lilith answered bitterly.

"Nikanj or Kahguyaht," Tediin said softly.

Lilith frowned, looked to Jdahya for an explanation.

"She means if you and Nikanj weren't supposed to be teaching each other, you would be learning from Kahguyaht."

Lilith shuddered. "Good god," she whispered. And seconds later. "Why couldn't it be you?"

"Ooloi generally handle the teaching of new species."

"Why? If I have to be taught, I'd rather you did it."

His head tentacles smoothed.

"You like him or Kahguyaht?" Tediin asked. Her unpracticed English, acquired just from hearing others speak was much better than Lilith's Oankali.

"No offense," Lilith said, "but I prefer Jdahya."

"Good," Tediin said, her own head smooth, though Lilith did not understand why. "You like him or Nikanj?"

Lilith opened her mouth, then hesitated. Jdahya had left her completely to Nikanj for so long-deliberately, no doubt. And Nikanj. . . Nikanj was appealing-probably be-cause it was a child. It was no more responsible for the thing that was to happen to the remnants of humanity than she was. It was simply doing-or trying to do-what the adults around it said should be done. Fellow victim?

No, not a victim. Just a child, appealing in spite of itself. And she liked it in spite of herself.

"You see?" Tediin asked, smooth all over now.

"I see." She took a deep breath. "I see that everyone including Nikanj wants me to prefer Nikanj. Well you win. I do." She turned to Jdahya. "You people are manipulative as hell, aren't you?"

Jdahya concentrated on eating.

"Was I that much of a burden?" she asked him.

He did not answer.

"Will you help me to be less of a burden in one way, at least?"

He aimed some of his tentacles at her. "What do you want?"

"Writing materials. Paper. Pencils or pens-whatever you've got."

"No."

There was no give behind the refusal. He was part of the family conspiracy to keep her ignorant-while trying as hard as they could to educate her. Insane.

She spread both hands before her, shaking her head. "Why?"

"Ask Nikanj."

"I have! It won't tell me."

"Perhaps it will now. Have you finished eating?"

"I've had enough-in more ways than one."

"Come on. I'll open the wall for you."

She unfolded herself from her platform and followed him to the wall.

"Nikanj can help you remember without writing," he told her as he touched the wall with several head tentacles.

"How?"

"Ask it."

She stepped through the hole as soon as it was large enough, and found herself intruding on the two ooloi who refused to notice her beyond the automatic sweep of some of their head tentacles. They were talking-arguing---in very fast Oankali. She was, no doubt, the reason for their dispute.

She looked back, hoping to step back through the wall and leave them. Let one of them tell her later what had been decided. She didn't imagine it would be anything she would be eager to hear. But the wall had sealed itself-abnormally quickly.

Nikanj seemed to be holding its own, at least. At one point, it beckoned to her with a sharp movement of head tentacles. She moved to stand beside it, willing to offer whatever moral support she could against Kahguyaht.

Kahguyaht stopped whatever it had been saying and faced her. "You haven't understood us at all, have you?" it asked in English.

"No," she admitted.

"Do you understand me now?" it asked in slow Oankali.

"Yes."

Kahguyaht turned its attention back to Nikanj and spoke rapidly. Straining to understand, Lilith thought it said something close to, "Well, at least we know she's capable of learning."

"I'm capable of learning even faster with paper and pencil," she said. "But with or without them, I'm capable of telling you what I think of you in any one of three human languages!"

Kahguyaht said nothing for several seconds. Finally it turned, opened a wall, and left the room.

When the wall had closed, Nikanj lay down on the bed and crossed its arms over its chest, hugging itself.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"What are the other two languages?" it asked softly.

She managed a smile. "Spanish and German. I used to speak a little German. I still know a few obscenities."

"You are . . . not fluent?"

"I am in Spanish."

"But why not in German?"

"Because it's been years since I've studied it or spoken it-years before the war, I mean. We humans . . . if we don't use a language, we forget it."

"No. You don't."

She looked at its tightly contracted body tentacles and decided it did not look happy. It really was concerned over her failure to learn quickly and retain everything. "Are you going to let me have writing materials?" she asked.

"No. It will be done our way. Not yours."

"It ought to be done the way that works. But what the hell. You want to spend two or three times as long teaching me, you go right ahead."

''I don't.''

She shrugged, not caring whether it missed the gesture or failed to understand it.

"Ooan was upset with me, Lilith, not with you."

"But because of me. Because I'm not learning fast enough."

"No. Because . . . because I'm not teaching you as it thinks I should. It fears for me."

"Fears...? Why?"

"Come here. Sit here. I will tell you."

After a time, she shrugged again and went to sit beside it.

"I'm growing up," it told her. "Ooan wants me to hurry with you so that you can be given your work and I can mate."

"You mean . . . the faster I learn, the sooner you mate?"

"Yes. Until I have taught you, shown that I can teach you, I won't be considered ready to mate."

There it was. She was not just its experimental animal. She was, in some way she did not fully understand, its final exam. She sighed and shook her head. "Did you ask for me Nikanj, or did we just get dumped on one another?"

It said nothing. It doubled one of its arms backward in a way natural to it, but still startling to Lilith, and rubbed its armpit. She tilted her head to one side to examine the place it was rubbing.

"Do you grow the sensory arms after you've mated or before?" she asked.

"They will come soon whether I mate or not."

"Should they grow in after you're mated?"

"Mates like them to come in afterward. Males and females mature more quickly than ooloi. They like to feel that they have... how do you say? Helped their ooloi out of childhood."

"Helped raise them," Lilith said, "or helped rear them."

"... rear?''

"The word has multiple meanings."

"Oh. There's no logic to such things."

"There probably is, but you'd need an etymologist to explain it. Is there going to be trouble between you and your mates?"

"I don't know. I hope not. I'll go to them when I can. I've told them that." It paused. "Now I must tell you something."

"What?"

"Ooan wanted me to act and say nothing... to... surprise you. I won't do that."

"What!"

"I must make small changes-a few small changes. I must help you reach your memories as you need them."

"What do you mean? What is it you want to change?"

"Very small things. In the end, there will be a tiny alteration in your brain chemistry."

She touched her forehead in an unconsciously protective gesture. "Brain chemistry?" she whispered.

"I would like to wait, do it when I'm mature. I could make it pleasurable for you then. It should be pleasurable. But ooan . . . I understand what it feels. It says I have to change you now."

"I don't want to be changed!"

"You would sleep through it the way you did when Ooan Jdahya corrected your tumor."

"Ooan Jdahya? Jdahya's ooloi parent did that? Not Kahguyaht?"

"Yes. It was done before my parents were mated."

"Good." No reason at all to be grateful to Kahguyaht.

"Lilith?" Nikanj laid a many-fingered hand-a sixteen-fingered hand-on her arm. "It will be like this. A touch. Then a . . . a small puncture. That's all you'll feel. When you wake up the change will be made."

"I don't want to be changed!"

There was a long silence. Finally it asked, "Are you afraid?"

"I don't have a disease! Forgetting things is normal for most humans! I don't need anything done to my brain!"

"Would it be so bad to remember better? To remember the way Sharad did-the way I do?"

"What's frightening is the idea of being tampered with." She drew a deep breath. "Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain. I don't want-"

"Who you are won't be changed. I'm not old enough to make the experience pleasant for you, but I'm old enough to function as an ooloi in this way. If I were unfit, others would have noticed by now."

"If everyone's so sure you're fit, why do you have to test yourself with me?"

It refused to answer, remained silent for several minutes. When it tried to pull her down beside it, she broke away and got up, paced around the room. Its head tentacles followed her with more than their usual lazy sweep. They kept sharply pointed at her and eventually she fled to the bathroom to end the staring.

There, she sat on the floor, arms folded, hands clutching her forearms.

What would happen now? Would Nikanj follow orders and surprise her sometime when she was asleep? Would it turn her over to Kahguyaht? Or would they both-please heaven-let her alone!

6

She had no idea how much time passed. She found herself thinking of Sam and Ayre, her husband and son, both taken from her before the Oankali, before the war, before she realized how easily her life-any human life-could be destroyed.

There had been a carnival-a cheap little vacant-lot carnival with rides and games and noise and scabby ponies. Sam had decided to take Ayre to see it while Lilith spent time with her pregnant sister. It had been an ordinary Saturday on a broad, dry street in bright sunshine. A young girl, just learning to drive, had rammed head-on into Sam's car. She had swerved to the wrong side of the road, had perhaps somehow lost control of the car she was driving. She'd had only a learner's permit and was not supposed to drive alone. She died for her mistake. Ayre died-was dead when the ambulance arrived, though paramedics tried to revive him.

Sam only half died.

He had head injuries-brain damage. It took him three months to finish what the accident had begun. Three months to die.

He was conscious some of the time-more or less-but he did not know anyone. His parents came from New York to be with him. They were Nigerians who had lived in the United States long enough for their son to be born and grow up there. Still, they had not been pleased at his marriage to Lilith. They had let Sam grow up as an American, but had sent him to visit their families in Lagos when they could. They had hoped he would marry a Yoruban girl. They had never seen their grandchild. Now they never would.

And Sam did not know them.

He was their only son, but he stared through them as he stared through Lilith, his eyes empty of recognition, empty of him. Sometimes Lilith sat alone with him, touched him, gained the empty attention of those eyes briefly. But the man himself had already gone. Perhaps he was with Ayre, or caught between her and Ayre-between this world and the next.

Or was he aware, but isolated in some part of his mind that could not make contact with anyone outside-trapped in the narrowest, most absolute solitary confinement-until, mercifully, his heart stopped.

That was brain damage-one form of brain damage. There were other forms, many worse. She saw them in the hospital over the months of Sam's dying.

He was lucky to have died so quickly.

She had never dared speak that thought aloud. It had come to her even as she wept for him. It came to her again now. He was lucky to have died so quickly.

Would she be equally lucky?

If the Oankali damaged her brain, would they have the decency to let her die-or would they keep her alive, a prisoner, permanently locked away in that ultimate solitary confinement?

She became aware abruptly that Nikanj had come into the bathroom silently and sat down opposite her. It had never intruded on her this way before. She stared at it, outraged.

"It isn't my ability to cope with your physiology that anyone questions," it said softly. "If I couldn't do that, my defects would have been noticed long ago."

"Get out of here!" she shouted. "Get away from me!" It did not move. It continued to speak in the same soft voice. "Ooan says humans won't be worth talking to for at least a generation." Its tentacles writhed. "I don't know how to be with someone I can't talk to."

"Brain damage isn't going to improve my conversation," she said bitterly.

"I would rather damage my own brain than yours. I won't damage either." It hesitated. "You know you must accept me or ooan."

She said nothing.

"Ooan is an adult. It can give you pleasure. And it is not as . . . as angry as it seems."

"I'm not looking for pleasure. I don't even know what you're talking about. I just want to be let alone."

"Yes. But you must trust me or let ooan surprise you when it's tired of waiting."

"You won't do that yourself-won't just spring it on me?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"There's something wrong with doing it that way- surprising people. It's . . . treating them as though they aren't people, as though they aren't intelligent."

Lilith laughed bitterly. "Why should you suddenly start to worry about that?"

"Do you want me to surprise you?"

"Of course not!"

Silence.

After a while, she got up and went to the bed platform. She lay down and eventually managed to fall asleep.

She dreamed of Sam and awoke in a cold sweat. Empty, empty eyes. Her head ached. Nikanj had stretched out beside her as usual. It looked limp and dead. How would it be to awaken with Kahguyaht there instead, lying beside her like a grotesque lover instead of an unhappy child? She shuddered, fear and disgust almost overwhelming her. She lay still for several minutes, calming herself, forcing herself to make a decision, then to act on it before fear could silence her.

"Wake up!" she said harshly to Nikanj. The raw sound of her own voice startled her. "Wake up and do whatever it is you claim you have to do. Get it over with."

Nikanj sat up instantly, rolled her over onto her side and pulled away the jacket she had been sleeping in to expose her back and neck. Before she could complain or change her mind, it began.

On the back of her neck, she felt the promised touch, a harder pressure, then the puncture. It hurt more than she had expected, but the pain ended quickly. For a few seconds she drifted in painless semiconsciousness.

Then there were confused memories, dreams, finally nothing.

7

When she awoke, at ease and only mildly confused, she found herself fully clothed and alone. She lay still, wondering what Nikanj had done to her. Was she changed? How? Had it finished with her? She could not move at first, but by the time this penetrated her confusion, she found the paralysis wearing off. She was able to use her muscles again. She sat up carefully just in time to see Nikanj coming through a wall.

Its gray skin was as smooth as polished marble as it climbed onto the bed beside her. "You're so complex," it said, taking both her hands. It did not point its head tentacles at her in the usual way, but placed its head close to hers and touched her with them. Then it sat back, pointing at her. It occurred to her distantly that this behavior was unusual and should have alarmed her. She frowned and tried to feel alarmed.

"You're filled with so much life and death and potential for change," Nikanj continued. "I understand now why some people took so long to get over their fear of your kind."

She focused on it. "Maybe it's because I'm still drugged out of my mind, but I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes. You'll never really know. But when I'm mature, I'll try to show you a little." It brought its head close to hers again and touched her face and burrowed into her hair with its tentacles.

"What are you doing?" she asked, still not really disturbed.

"Making sure you're all right. I don't like what I had to do to you."

"What did you do? I don't feel any different-except a little high."

"You understand me."

It dawned on her slowly that Nikanj had come to her speaking Oankali and she had responded in kind-had responded without really thinking. The language seemed natural to her, as easy to understand as English. She remembered all that she had been taught, all that she had picked up on her own. It was even easy for her to spot the gaps in her knowledge-words and expressions she knew in English, but could not translate into Oankali; bits of Oankali grammar that she had not really understood; certain Oankali words that had no English translation, but whose meaning she had grasped.

Now she was alarmed, pleased, and frightened. . . . She stood slowly, testing her legs, finding them unsteady, but functional. She tried to clear the fog from her mind so that she could examine herself and trust her findings.

"I'm glad the family decided to put the two of us together," Nikanj was saying. "I didn't want to work with you. I tried to get out of it. I was afraid. All I could think of was how easy it would be for me to fail and perhaps damage you."

"You mean . . . you mean you weren't sure of what you were doing just now?"

"That? Of course I was sure. And your 'just now' took a long time. Much longer than you usually sleep."

"But what did you mean about failing-"

"I was afraid I could never convince you to trust me enough to let me show you what I could do-show you that I wouldn't hurt you. I was afraid I would make you hate me. For an ooloi to do that . . . it would be very bad. Worse than I can tell you."

"But Kahguyaht doesn't think so."

"Ooan says humans-any new trade partner species- can't be treated the way we must treat each other. It's right up to a point. I just think it goes too far. We were bred to work with you. We're Dinso. We should be able to find ways through most of our differences."

"Coercion," she said bitterly. "That's the way you've found."

"No. Ooan would have done that. I couldn't have. I would have gone to Ahajas and Dichaan and refused to mate with them. I would have looked for mates among the Akjai since they'll have no direct contact with humans."

It smoothed its tentacles again. "But now when I go to Ahajas and Dichaan, it will be to mate-and you'll go with me. We'll send you to your work when you're ready. And you'll be able to help me through my final metamorphosis." It rubbed its armpit. "Will you help?"

She looked away from it. "What do you want me to do?"

"Just stay with me. There will be times when having Ahajas and Dichaan near me would be tormenting. I would be . . . sexually stimulated, and unable to do anything about it. Very stimulated. You can't do that to me. Your scent, your touch is different, neutral."

Thank god, she thought.

"It would be bad for me to be alone while I change. We need others close to us, more at that time than at any other."

She wondered what it would look like with its second pair of arms, what it would be like as a mature being. More like Kahguyaht? Or maybe more like Jdahya and Tediin. How much did sex determine personality among the Oankali? She shook her head. Stupid question. She did not know how much sex determined personality even among human beings.

"The arms," she said, "they're sexual organs, aren't they?"

"No," Nikanj told her. "They protect sexual organs: the sensory hands."

"But. . ." She frowned. "Kahguyaht doesn't have anything like a hand at the end of its sensory arms." In fact, it had nothing at all at the end of its sensory arms. There was only a blunt cap of hard, cool skin-like a large callus.

"The hand is inside. Ooan will show you if you ask."

"Never mind."

It smoothed. "I'll show you myself-when I have something to show. Will you stay with me while they grow?"

Where else was she going? "Yes. Just make sure I know anything I might need to know about you and them before they start."

"Yes. I'll sleep most of the time, but still, I'll need someone there. If you're there, I'll know and I'll be all right. You. . . you might have to feed me."

"That's all right." There was nothing unusual about the way Oankali ate. Not on the surface, anyway. Several of their front teeth were pointed, but their size was well within the human range. She had, twice, on her walks, seen Oankali females extend their tongues all the way down to their throat orifices, but normally, the long gray tongues were kept inside the mouths and used as humans used tongues.

Nikanj made a sound of relief-a rubbing together of body tentacles in a way that sounded like stiff paper being crumpled. "Good," it said. "Mates know what we feel when they stay near us, they know the frustration. Sometimes they think it's funny."

Lilith was surprised to find herself smiling. "It is, sort of."

"Only for the tormentors. With you there, they'll torment me less. But before all that. . ." It stopped, aimed a loose point at her. "Before that, I'll try to find an English speaking human for you. One as much like you as possible. Ooan will not stand in the way of your meeting one now."

8

A day, Lilith had decided long ago, was what her body said it was. Now it became what her newly improved memory said it was as well. A day was long activity, then long sleep. And now, she remembered every day that she had been awake. And she counted the days as Nikanj searched for an English-speaking human for her. It went alone to interview several. Nothing she said could induce it to take her along or at least tell her about the people it had talked to.

Finally Kahguyaht found someone. Nikanj had a look, then accepted its parent's judgment. "It will be one of the humans who has chosen to stay here," Nikanj told her.

She had expected that from what Kahguyaht had said earlier. It was still hard to believe, though. "Is it a man or a woman?" she asked.

"Male. A man."

"How. . . how could he not want to go home?"

"He's been here among us for a long time. He's only a little older than you are, but he was Awakened young and kept Awake. A Toaht family wanted him and he was willing to stay with them."

Willing? What kind of choice had they given him? Probably the same kind they had given her, and he had been years younger. Only a boy, perhaps. What was he now? What had they created from their human raw material? "Take me to him," she said.

For the second time, Lilith rode one of the flat transports through the crowded corridors. This transport moved no faster than the first one she had ridden. Nikanj did not steer it except occasionally to touch one side or the other with head tentacles to make it turn. They rode for perhaps a half hour before she and Nikanj dismounted. Nikanj touched the transport with several head tentacles to send it away.

"Won't we need it to go back?" she asked.

"We'll get another," Nikanj said. "Maybe you'll want to stay here for a while."

She looked at it sharply. What was this? Step two of the captive breeding program? She glanced around at the retreating transport. Maybe she had been too quick to agree to see this man. If he were thoroughly enough divorced from his humanity to want to stay here, who knew what else he might be willing to do.

"It's an animal," Nikanj said.

"What?"

"The thing we rode. It's an animal. A tilio. Did you know?"

"No, but I'm not surprised. How does it move?"

"On a thin film of a very slippery substance."

"Slime?"

Nikanj hesitated. "I know that word. It's. . . inadequate, but it will serve. I've seen Earth animals who use slime to move. They are inefficient compared to the tilio, but I can see similarities. We shaped the tilio from larger, more efficient creatures."

"It doesn't leave a slime trail."

"No. The tilio has an organ at its rear that collects most of what it spreads. The ship takes in the rest."

"Nikanj, do you ever build machinery? Tamper with metal and plastic instead of living things?"

"We do that when we have to. We. . . don't like it. There's no trade."

She sighed. "Where is the man? What's his name, by the way?"

"Paul Titus."

Well, that didn't tell her anything. Nikanj took her to a nearby wall and stroked it with three long head tentacles. The wall changed from off-white to dull red, but it did not open.

"What's wrong?" Lilith asked.

"Nothing. Someone will open it soon. It's better not to go in if you don't know the quarters well. Better to let the people who live there know you are waiting to go in."

"So what you did is like knocking," she said, and was about to demonstrate knocking for it when the wall began to open. There was a man on the other side, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts.

She stared at him. A human being-tall, stocky, as dark as she was, clean shaved. He looked wrong to her at first-alien and strange, yet familiar, compelling. He was beautiful. Even if he had been bent and old, he would have been beautiful.

She glanced at Nikanj, saw that it had become statue-still. It apparently had no intention of moving or speaking soon.

"Paul Titus?" she asked.

The man opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed, nodded. "Yes," he said finally.

The sound of his voice-deep, definitely human, definitely male-fed a hunger in her. "I'm Lilith Iyapo," she said. "Did you know we were coming or is this a surprise to you?"

"Come in," he said, touching the wall opening. "I knew. And you don't know how welcome you are." He glanced at Nikanj. "Kaalnikanj oo Jdahyatediinkahguyaht aj Dinso, come in. Thank you for bringing her."

Nikanj made a complex gesture of greeting with its head tentacles and stepped into the room-the usual bare room. Nikanj went to a platform in a corner and folded itself into a sitting position on it. Lilith chose a platform that allowed her to sit almost with her back to Nikanj. She wanted to forget it was there, observing, since it clearly did not intend to do anything but observe. She wanted to give all her attention to the man. He was a miracle-a human being, an adult who spoke English and looked more than a little like one of her dead brothers.

His accent was as American as her own and her mind overflowed with questions. Where had he lived before the war? How had he survived? Who was he beyond a name? Had he seen any other humans? Had he- "Have you really decided to stay here?" she demanded abruptly. It was not the first question she had intended to ask.

The man sat cross-legged in the middle of a platform large enough to be a serving table or a bed.

"I was fourteen when they woke me up," he said. "Everyone I knew was dead. The Oankali said they'd send me back to Earth eventually if I wanted to go. But once I had been here for a while, I knew this was where I wanted to be. There's nothing that I care about left on Earth."

"Everyone lost relatives and Mends," she said. "As far as I know, I'm the only member of my family still alive."

"I saw my father, my brother-their bodies. I don't know what happened to my mother. I was dying myself when the Oankali found me. They tell me I was. I don't remember, but I believe them."

"I don't remember their finding me either." She twisted around. "Nikanj, did your people do something to us to keep us from remembering?"

Nikanj seemed to rouse itself slowly. "They had to," it said. "Humans who were allowed to remember their rescue became uncontrollable. Some died in spite of our care."

Not surprising. She tried to imagine what she had done when in the middle of the shock of realizing that her home, her family, her Mends, her world were all destroyed. She was confronted with a collecting party of Oankali. She must have believed she had lost her mind. Or perhaps she did lose it for a while. It was a miracle that she had not killed herself trying to escape them.

"Have you eaten?" the man asked.

"Yes," she said, suddenly shy.

There was a long silence. "What were you before?" he asked. "I mean, did you work?"

"I had gone back to school," she said. "I was majoring in anthropology." She laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork-but how the hell do I get out of the field?"

"Anthropology?" he said, frowning. "Oh yeah, I remember reading some stuff by Margaret Mead before the war. So you wanted to study what? People in tribes?"

"Different people anyway. People who didn't do things the way we did them."

"Where were you from?" he asked.

"Los Angeles."

"Oh, yeah. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, movie stars. . . . I always wanted to go there."

One trip would have shattered his illusions. "And you were from... ?"

"Denver."

"Where were you when the war started?"

"Grand Canyon-shooting the rapids. That was the first time we'd ever really done anything, gone anywhere really good. We froze afterward. And my father used to say nuclear winter was nothing but politics."

"I was in the Andes in Peru," she said, "hiking toward Machu Picchu. I hadn't been anywhere either, really. At least not since my husband-"

"You were married?"

"Yes. But he and my son. . . were killed-before the war, I mean. I had gone on a study tour of Peru. Part of going back to college. A friend talked me into taking that trip. She went too. . . and died."

"Yeah." He shrugged uncomfortably. "I was sort of looking forward to going to college myself. But I had just gotten through the tenth grade when everything blew up."

"The Oankali must have taken a lot of people out of the southern hemisphere," she said, thinking. "I mean we froze too, but I heard the southern freeze was spotty. A lot of people must have survived."

He drifted into his own thoughts. "It's funny," he said. "You started out years older than me, but I've been Awake for so long. . . I guess I'm older than you are now."

"I wonder how many people they were able to get out of the northern hemisphere-other than the soldiers and politicians whose shelters hadn't been bombed open." She turned to ask Nikanj and saw that it was gone.

"He left a couple of minutes ago," the man said. "They can move really quietly and fast when they want to."

"But-"

"Hey, don't worry. He'll come back. And if he doesn't, I can open the walls or get food for you if you want anything."

"You can?"

"Sure. They changed my body chemistry a little when I decided to stay. Now the walls open for me just like they do for them."

"Oh." She wasn't sure she liked being left with the man this way-especially if he was telling the truth. If he could open walls and she could not, she was his prisoner.

"They're probably watching us," she said. And she spoke in Oankali, imitating Nikanj's voice: "Now let's see what they'll do if they think they're alone."

The man laughed. "They probably are. Not that it matters."

"It matters to me. I'd rather have watchers where I can keep an eye on them, too."

The laughter again. "Maybe he thought we might be kind of inhibited if he stayed around."

She deliberately ignored the implications of this. "Nikanj isn't male," she said. "It's ooloi."

"Yeah, I know. But doesn't yours seem male to you?" She thought about that. "No. I guess I've taken their word for what they are."

"When they woke me up, I thought the ooloi acted like men and women while the males and females acted like eunuchs. I never really lost the habit of thinking of ooloi as male or female."

That, Lilith thought, was a foolish way for someone who had decided to spend his life among the Oankali to think-a kind of deliberate, persistent ignorance.

"You wait until yours is mature," he said. "You'll see what I mean. They change when they've grown those two extra things." He lifted an eyebrow. "You know what those things are?"

"Yes," she said. He probably knew more, but she realized that she did not want to encourage him to talk about sex; not even Oankali sex.

"Then you know they're not arms, no matter what they tell us to call them. When those things grow in, ooloi let everyone know who's in charge. The Oankali need a little women's and men's lib up here."

She wet her lips. "It wants me to help it through its metamorphosis."

"Help it. What did you tell it?"

"I said I would. It didn't sound like much."

He laughed. "It isn't hard. Puts them in debt to you, though. Not a bad idea to have someone powerful in debt to you. It proves you can be trusted, too. They'll be grateful and you'll be a lot freer. Maybe they'll fix things so you can open your own walls."

"Is that what happened with you?"

He moved restlessly. "Sort of." He got up from his platform, touched all ten fingers to the wall behind him, and waited as the wall opened. Behind the wall was a food storage cabinet of the kind she had often seen at home. Home? Well, what else was it? She lived there.

He took out sandwiches, something that looked like a small pie-that was a pie-and something that looked like French fries.

Lilith stared at the food in surprise. She had been content with the foods the Oankali had given her-good variety and flavor once she began staying with Nikanj's family. She had missed meat occasionally, but once the Oankali made it clear they would neither kill animals for her nor allow her to kill them while she lived with them, she had not minded much. She had never been a particular eater, had never thought of asking the Oankali to make the food they prepared look more like what she was used to.

"Sometimes," he said, "I want a hamburger so bad I dream about them. You know the kind with cheese and bacon and dill pickles and-"

"What's in your sandwich?" she asked.

"Fake meat. Mostly soybean, I guess. And quat." Quatasayasha, the cheeselike Oankali vegetable. "I eat a lot of quat myself," she said.

"Then have some. You don't really want to sit there and watch me eat, do you?"

She smiled and took the sandwich be offered. She was not hungry at all, but eating with him was companionable and safe. She took a few of his French fries, too.

"Cassava," he told her. "Tastes like potatoes, though. I'd never heard of cassava before I got it here. Some tropical plant the Oankali are raising."

"I know. They mean for those of us who go back to Earth to raise it and use it. You can make flour from it and use it like wheat flour."

He stared at her until she frowned. "What's the matter?" she asked.

His gaze slid away from her and he stared downward at nothing. "Have you really thought about what it will be like?" he asked softly. "I mean. . . Stone Age! Digging in the ground with a stick for roots, maybe eating bugs, rats. Rats survived, I hear. Cattle and horses didn't. Dogs didn't. But rats did."

"I know."

"You said you bad a baby."

"My son. Dead."

"Yeah. Well, I'll bet when he was born, you were in a hospital with doctors and nurses all around helping you and giving you shots for the pain. How would you like to do it in a jungle with nothing around but bugs and rats and people who feel sorry for you but can't do shit to help you?"

"I had natural childbirth," she said. "It wasn't any fun, but it went okay."

"What do you mean? No painkiller?"

"None. No hospital either. Just something called a birthing center-a place for pregnant women who don't like the idea of being treated as though they were sick."

He shook his head, smiled crookedly. "I wonder bow many women they had to go through before they came up with you. A lot, I'll bet. You're probably just what they want in ways I haven't even thought of."

His words bit more deeply into her than she let him see. With all the questioning and testing she had gone through, the two and a half years of round-the-clock observation- the Oankali must know her in some ways better than any human being ever had. They knew how she would react to just about everything they put her through. And they knew how to manipulate her, maneuver her into doing whatever they wanted. Of course they knew she had had certain practical experiences they considered important. If she had had an especially difficult time giving birth-if she had had to be taken to the hospital in spite of her wishes, if she had needed a caesarean-they would probably have passed over her to someone else.

"Why are you going back?" Titus asked. "Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?"

"I don't."

His eyes widened. "Then why don't you-"

"We don't have to forget what we know," she said. She smiled to herself. "I couldn't forget if I wanted to. We don't have to go back to the Stone Age. We'll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we'll at least have a chance."

"They don't teach for free! They didn't save us out of kindness! It's all trade with them. You know what you'll have to pay down there!"

"What have you paid to stay up here?"

Silence.

He ate several more bites of food. "The price," he said softly, "is just the same. When they're finished with us there won't be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they'll finish."

"I don't believe it has to be like that."

"Yeah. But then, you haven't been Awake long."

"Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it's still a damn big place."

He looked at her with such open, undisguised pity that she drew back angrily. "Do you think they don't know what a big place it is?" he asked.

"If I thought that, I wouldn't have said anything to you and whoever's listening. They know how I feel."

"And they know how to make you change your mind."

"Not about that. Never about that."

"Like I said, you haven't been Awake long."

What bad they done to him, she wondered. Was it just that they had kept him Awake so long-Awake and for the most part without human companions? Awake and aware that everything he had ever known was dead, that nothing he could have on Earth now could measure up to his former life. How had that gone down with a fourteen-year-old?

"If you wanted it," he said, "they'd let you stay here with me."

"What, permanently?"

"Yeah."

"No."

He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her and came over to her. "You know they expect you to say no," he said. "They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all over again that they were right about you." He stood tall and broad, too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was afraid of him. "Surprise them," he continued softly. "Don't do what they expect-just for once. Don't let them play you like a puppet."

He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.

She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own ranks?

He let her go. "You could be safe here," he said softly. "Down on Earth... how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if you don't forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of them will want to be cavemen-drag you around, put you in a harem, beat the shit out of you." He shook his head. "Tell me I'm wrong. Sit there and tell me I'm wrong."

She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually-as soon as they realized they could get away with it.

He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn't bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure.

"Look," she said when he drew back, "I'm not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali."

"What difference do they make? It's not like human beings were watching us."

"It is to me."

"Lilith," he said, shaking his head, "they will always be watching."

"The other thing I'm not interested in doing is giving them a human child to tamper with."

"You probably already have."

Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.

"They didn't have enough of us for what they call a normal trade," he said. "Most of the ones they have will be Dinso-people who want to go back to Earth. They didn't have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more."

"While we slept? Somehow they-?"

"Somehow!" he hissed. "Anyhow! They took stuff from men and women who didn't even know each other and put it together and made babies in women who never knew the mother or the father of their kid-and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they grew the baby in another kind of animal. They have animals they can adjust to-to incubate human fetuses, as they say. Or maybe they don't even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin from one person and make babies out of it- cloning, you know. Or maybe they use one of their prints- and don't ask me what a print is. But if they've got one of you, they can use it to make another you even if you've been dead for a hundred years and they haven't got anything at all left of your body. And that's just the start. They can make people in ways I don't even know how to talk about. Only thing they can't do, it seems, is let us alone. Let us do it our own way."

His hands were almost gentle on her. "At least they haven't until now." He shook her abruptly. "You know how many kids I got? They say, 'Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.' And I've never even seen a woman in all the time I've been here."

He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.

Yet it would do no good to fight him physically. She was tall, had always thought of herself as strong, but he was much bigger-six-four, six-five, and stocky.

"They've had two hundred and fifty years to fool around with us," she said. "Maybe we can't stop them, but we don't have to help them."

"The hell with them." He tried to unfasten her jacket.

"No!" she shouted, deliberately startling him. "Animals get treated like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send them back to their owners. What do they care? They're just animals!"

He tore her jacket off then fumbled with her pants. She threw her weight against him suddenly and managed to shove him away.

He stumbled backward for several steps, caught himself, came at her again.

Screaming at him, she swung her legs over the platform she had been sitting on and came down standing on the opposite side of it. Now it was between them. He strode around it.

She sat on it again and swung her legs over, keeping it between them.

"Don't make yourself their dog!" she pleaded. "Don't do this!"

He kept coming, too far gone to care what she said. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. He cut her off from the bed by coming over it himself. He cornered her against a wall.

"How many times have they made you do this before?" she asked desperately. "Did you have a sister back on Earth? Would you know her now? Maybe they've made you do it with your sister."

He caught her arm, jerked her to him.

"Maybe they've made you do it with your mother!" she shouted.

He froze and she prayed she had hit a nerve.

"Your mother," she repeated. "You haven't seen her since you were fourteen. How would you know if they brought her to you and you-"

He hit her.

Staggered by shock and pain, she collapsed against him and he half pushed and half threw her away as though he had found himself clutching something loathsome.

She fell hard, but was not quite unconscious when he came to stand over her.

"I never got to do it before," he whispered. "Never once with a woman. But who knows who they mixed the stuff with." He paused, stared at her where she had fallen. "They said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!" He kicked her hard. The last sound she heard before she lost consciousness was his ragged, shouted curse.

9

She awoke to voices--Oankali near her, not touching her. Nikanj and one other.

"Go away now," Nikanj was saying. "She is regaining consciousness."

"Perhaps I should stay," the other said softly. Kahguyaht. She had thought once that all Oankali sounded alike with their quiet androgynous voices, but now she couldn't mistake Kahguyaht's deceptively gentle tones. "You may need help with her," it said.

Nikanj said nothing.

After a while Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles and said, "I'll leave. You're growing up faster than I thought. Perhaps she's good for you after all."

She was able to see it step through a wall and leave. Not until it was gone did she become aware of the aching of her own body-her jaw, her side, her bead, and in particular, her left arm. There was no sharp pain, nothing startling. Only dull, throbbing pain, especially noticeable when she moved.

"Be still," Nikanj told her. "Your body is still healing. The pain will be gone soon."

She turned her face away from it, ignoring the pain. There was a long silence. Finally it said, "We didn't know." It stopped, corrected itself. "I didn't know how the male would behave. He has never lost control so completely before. He hasn't lost control at all for several years."

"You cut him off from his own kind," she said through swollen lips. "You kept him away from women for how long? Fifteen years? More? In some ways you kept him fourteen for all those years."

"He was content with his Oankali family until he met you."

"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 Ahajas 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.

"Dichaan has said he would adjust the walls of their home to you so that you can open them. He and Ahajas can't change you in any way, but they can adjust your new surroundings."

So at least she wouldn't have to go back to the house pet stage, asking every time she wanted to enter or leave a room or eat a snack. "I'm grateful for that, at least," she said.

"It's trade," Jdahya said. "Stay close to Nikanj. Do what it has trusted you to do."

12

Kahguyaht came to see her a few days later. She had been installed in the usual bare room, this one with one bed and two table platforms, a bathroom, and Nikanj who slept so much and so deeply that it too seemed part of the room rather than a living being.

Kahguyaht was almost welcome. It relieved her boredom, and, to her surprise, it brought gifts: a block of tough, thin, white paper-more than a ream-and a handful of pens that said Paper Mate, Parker, and Bic. The pens, Kahguyaht said, had been duplicated from prints taken of centuries-gone originals. This was the first time she had seen anything she knew to be a print re-creation. And it was the first time she had realized that the Oankali re-created nonliving things from prints. She could find no difference between the print copies and the remembered originals.

And Kahguyaht gave her a few brittle, yellowed books- treasures she had not imagined: A spy novel, a Civil War novel, an ethnology textbook, a study of religion, a book about cancer and one about human genetics, a book about an ape being taught sign language and one about the space race of the 1960s.

Lilith accepted them all without comment.

Now that it knew she was serious about looking after Nikanj, it was easier to get along with, more likely to answer if she asked it a question, less ready with its own sarcastic rhetorical questions. It returned several times to sit with her as she attended Nikanj and, in fact, became her teacher, using its body and Nikanj's to help her understand more of Oankali biology. Nikanj slept through most of this. Most often it slept so deeply that its head tentacles did not follow movement.

"It will remember all that happens around it," Kahguyaht said. "It still perceives in all the ways that it would if it were awake. But it cannot respond now. It is not aware now. It is... recording." Kahguyaht lifted one of Nikanj's limp arms to observe the development of the sensory arms. There was nothing to be seen yet but a large, dark, lumpy swelling-a frightening-looking growth.

"Is that the arm itself," she asked, "or will the arm come out of that?"

"That is the arm," Kahguyaht said. "While it's growing, don't touch it unless Nikanj asks you to."

It did not look like anything Lilith would want to touch. She looked at Kahguyaht and decided to take a chance on its new civility. "What about the sensory hand?" she asked. "Nikanj mentioned that there was such a thing."

Kahguyaht said nothing for several seconds. Finally, in a tone she could not interpret, it said, "Yes. There is such a thing."

"If I've asked something that I shouldn't, just tell me," she said. Something about that odd tone of voice made her want to move away from it, but she kept still.

"You haven't," Kahguyaht said, its voice neutral now. "In fact, it's important that you know about the... sensory hand." It extended one of its sensory arms, long and gray and rough-skinned, still reminding her of a blunt, closed elephant's trunk. "All the strength and resistance to harm of this outer covering is to protect the hand and its related organs," it said. "The arm is closed, you see?" It showed her the rounded tip of the arm, capped by a semitransparent material that she knew was smooth and hard.

"When it's like this, it's merely another limb." Kahguyaht coiled the end of the arm, wormlike, reached out, touched Lilith's head, then held before her eyes a single strand of hair, pulled straight in a twist of the arm. "It is very flexible, very versatile, but only another limb." The arm drew back from Lilith, releasing the hair. The semitransparent material at the end began to change, to move in circular waves away to the sides of the tip and something slender and pale emerged from the center of the tip. As she watched, the slender thing seemed to thicken and divide. There were eight fingers-or rather, eight slender tentacles arranged around a circular palm that looked wet and deeply lined. It was like a starfish-one of the brittle stars with long, slender, snakelike arms.

"How does it seem to you?" Kahguyaht asked.

"On Earth, we had animals that looked like that," she replied. "They lived in the seas. We called them starfish."

Kahguyaht smoothed its tentacles. "I've seen them. There is a similarity." It turned the hand so that she could see it from different angles. The palm, she realized, was covered with tiny projections very like the tube feet of a starfish. They were almost transparent. And the lines she had seen on the palm were actually orifices-openings to a dark interior.

There was a faint odor to the hand-oddly flowery. Lilith did not like it and drew back from it after a moment of looking.

Kahguyaht retracted the hand so quickly that it seemed to vanish. It lowered the sensory arm. "Humans and Oankali tend to bond to one ooloi," it told her. "The bond is chemical and not strong in you now because of Nikanj's immaturity. That's why my scent makes you uncomfortable."

"Nikanj didn't mention anything like that," she said suspiciously.

"It healed your injuries. It improved your memory. It couldn't do those things without leaving its mark. It should have told you."

"Yes. It should have. What is this mark? What will it do to me?"

"No harm. You'll want to avoid deep contact-contact that involves penetration of the flesh-with other ooloi, you understand? Perhaps for a while after Nikanj matures, you'll want to avoid all contact with most people. Follow your feelings. People will understand."

"But... how long will it last?"

"It's different with humans. Some linger in the avoidance stage much longer than we would. The longest I've known it to last is forty days."

"And during that time, Ahajas and Dichaan-"

"You won't avoid them, Lilith. They're part of the household. You'll be comfortable with them."

"What happens if I don't avoid people, if I ignore my feelings?"

"If you managed to do that, you'd make yourself sick, at least. You might manage to kill yourself."

"...that bad."

"Your body will tell you what to do. Don't worry." It shifted its attention to Nikanj. "Nikanj will be most vulnerable when the sensory hands begin to grow. It will need a special food then. I'll show you."

"All right."

"You'll actually have to put the food into its mouth."

"I've already done that with the few things it's wanted to eat."

"Good." Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles. "I didn't want to accept you, Lilith. Not for Nikanj or for the work you'll do. I believed that because of the way human genetics were expressed in culture, a human male should be chosen to parent the first group. I think now that I was wrong."

"Parent?"

"That's the way we think of it. To teach, to give comfort, to feed and clothe, to guide them through and interpret what will be, for them, a new and frightening world. To parent."

"You're going to set me up as their mother?"

"Define the relationship in any way that's comfortable to you. We have always called it parenting." It turned toward a wall as though to open it, then stopped, faced Lilith again. "It's a good thing that you'll be doing. You'll be in a position to help your own people in much the same way you're helping Nikanj now."

"They won't trust me or my help. They'll probably kill me."

"They won't."

"You don't understand us as well as you think you do."

"And you don't understand us at all. You never will, really, though you'll be given much more information about us."

"Then put me back to sleep, dammit, and choose someone you think is brighter! I never wanted this job!"

It was silent for several seconds. Finally, it said, "Do you really believe I was disparaging your intelligence?"

She glared at it, refusing to answer.

"I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will."

III

NURSERY

1

The room was slightly larger than a football field. Its ceiling was a vault of soft, yellow light. Lilith had caused two walls to grow at a corner of it so that she had a room, enclosed except for a doorway where the walls would have met. There were times when she brought the walls together, sealing herself away from the empty vastness outside--away from the decisions she must make. The walls and floor of the great room were hers to reshape as she pleased. They would do anything she was able to ask of them except let her out.

She had erected her cubicle enclosing the doorway of a bathroom. There were eleven more bathrooms unused along one long wall. Except for the narrow, open doorways of these facilities, the great room was featureless. Its walls were pale green and its floors pale brown. Lilith bad asked for color and Nikanj bad found someone who could teach it how to induce the ship to produce color. Stores of food and clothing were encapsulated within the walls in various unmarked cabinets within Lilith's room and at both ends of the great room.

The food, she had been told, would be replaced as it was used--replaced by the ship itself which drew on its own substance to make print reconstructions of whatever each cabinet had been taught to produce.