Dawn

The long wall opposite the bathrooms concealed eighty sleeping human beings-healthy, under fifty, English-speaking, and frighteningly ignorant of what was in store for them.

Lilith was to choose and Awaken no fewer than forty. No wall would open to let her or those she Awakened out until at least forty human beings were ready to meet the Oankali.

The great room was darkening slightly. Evening. Lilith found surprising comfort and relief in having time divided visibly into days and nights again. She had not realized how she had missed the slow change of light, how welcome the darkness would be.

"It's time for you to get used to having planetary night again," Nikanj had told her.

On impulse, she had asked if there were anywhere in the ship where she could look at the stars.

Nikanj had taken her, on the day before it put her into this huge, empty room, down several corridors and ramps, then by way of something very like an elevator. Nikanj said it corresponded closer to a gas bubble moving harmlessly through a living body. Her destination turned out to be a kind of observation bubble through which she could see not only stars, but the disk of the Earth, gleaming like a full moon in the black sky.

"We're still beyond the orbit of your world's satellite," it told her as she searched hungrily for familiar continental outlines. She believed she had found a few of them-part of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Or that was what it looked like, hanging there in the middle of a sky that was both above and beneath her feet. There were more stars out there than she had ever seen, but it was Earth that drew her gaze. Nikanj let her look at it until her own tears blinded her. Then it wrapped a sensory arm around her and led her to the great room.

She had been in the great room alone for three days now, thinking, reading, writing her thoughts. All her books, papers, and pens had been left for her. With them were eighty dossiers-short biographies made up of transcribed conversations, brief histories, Oankali observations and conclusions, and pictures. The human subjects of the dossiers had no living relatives. They were all strangers to one another and to Lilith.

She had read just over half the dossiers, searching not only for likely people to Awaken, but for a few potential allies-people she could Awaken first and perhaps come to trust. She needed to share the burden of what she knew, what she must do. She needed thoughtful people who would hear what she had to say and not do anything violent or stupid. She needed people who could give her ideas, push her mind in directions she might otherwise miss. She needed people who could tell her when they thought she was being a fool-people whose arguments she could respect. On another level, she did not want to Awaken anyone. She was afraid of these people, and afraid for them. There were so many unknowns, in spite of the information in the dossiers. Her job was to weave them into a cohesive unit and prepare them for the Oankali-prepare them to be the Oankali's new trade partners. That was impossible.

How could she Awaken people and tell them they were to be part of the genetic engineering scheme of a species so alien that the humans would not be able to look at it comfortably for a while? How would she Awaken these people, these survivors of war, and tell them that unless they could escape the Oankali, their children would not be human?

Better to tell them little or none of that for a while. Better not to Awaken them at all until she had some idea how to help them, how not to betray them, how to get them to accept their captivity, accept the Oankali, accept anything until they were sent to Earth. Then to run like hell at the first opportunity.

Her mind slipped into the familiar track: There was no escape from the ship. None at all. The Oankali controlled the ship with their own body chemistry. There were no controls that could be memorized or subverted. Even the shuttles that traveled between Earth and the ship were like extensions of Oankali bodies.

No human could do anything aboard the ship except make trouble and be put back into suspended animation-or be killed. Therefore, the only hope was Earth. Once they were on Earth-somewhere in the Amazon basin, she had been told-they would at least have a chance.

That meant they must control themselves, learn all she could teach them, all the Oankali could teach them, then use what they had learned to escape and keep themselves alive.

What if she could make them understand that? And what if it turned out that that was exactly what the Oankali wanted her to do? Of course, they knew it was what she would do. They knew her. Did that mean they were plan. fling their own betrayal: No trip to Earth. No chance to run. Then why had they made her spend a year being taught to live in a tropical forest? Perhaps the Oankali were simply very certain of their ability to keep humans corralled even on Earth.

What could she do? What could she tell the humans but "Learn and run!" What other possibility for escape was there?

None at all. Her only other personal possibility was to refuse to Awaken anyone-hold out until the Oankali gave up on her and went looking for a more cooperative subject. Another Paul Titus, perhaps-someone who had truly given up on humanity and cast his lot with the Oankali. A man like that could make Titus' predictions self-fulfilling. He could undermine what little civilization might be left in the minds of those he Awoke. He could make them a gang. Or a herd.

What would she make them?

She lay on her bed platform, staring at a picture of a man. Five-seven, his statistics said. One hundred and forty pounds, thirty-two years old, missing the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of his left hand. He had lost the fingers in a childhood accident with a lawnmower, and he was self-conscious about the incomplete hand. His name was Victor Dominic-Vidor Domonkos, really. His parents had come to the United States from Hungary just -before he was born. He had been a lawyer. The Oankali suspected he had been a good one. They had found him intelligent, talkative, understandably suspicious of unseen questioners, and very creative at lying to them. He had probed constantly for their identity, but was, like Lilith, one of the few native Englishspeakers who had never expressed the suspicion that they might be extraterrestrials.

He had been married three times already, but had fathered no children due to a biological problem the Oankali believed they had corrected. Not fathering children had bothered him intensely, and he had blamed his wives, all the while refusing to see a doctor himself.

Apart from this, the Oankali had found him reasonable and formidable. He had never broken down in his unexplained solitary confinement, had never wept or attempted suicide. He had, however, promised to kill his captors if he ever got the chance. He had said this only once, calmly, more as though he were making a casual remark than as though he were seriously threatening murder.

Yet his Oankali interrogator had been disturbed by the words, and bad put Victor Dominic back to sleep at once.

Lilith liked the man. He had brains and, except for the foolishness with his wives, self-control--exactly what she needed. But she also feared him.

What if he decided she was one of his captors? She was bigger, and now certainly stronger than he was, but that did not have to matter. He would have too many chances to attack when she was off guard.

Better to Awaken him later when she had allies. She put his dossier to one side on the smaller of two piles-people she definitely wanted, but did not dare to Awaken first. She sighed and picked up a new dossier.

Leah Bede. Quiet, religious, slow-slow-moving, not slow-witted, though the Oankali had not been particularly impressed by her intelligence. It was her patience and self-sufficiency that had impressed them. They had not been able to make her obey. She had outwaited them in stolid silence. Outwaited Oankali! She had starved herself almost to death when they stopped feeding her to coerce her cooperation. Finally, they had drugged her, gotten the information they wanted, and, after a period of letting her regain weight and strength, they had put her back to sleep.

Why, Lilith wondered. Why hadn't the Oankali not simply drugged her as soon as they realized she was stubborn? Why had they not drugged Lilith herself? Perhaps because they wanted to see how far human beings had to be pushed before they broke. Perhaps they even wanted to see how each individual broke. Or perhaps the Oankali version of stubbornness was so extreme from a human point of view that very few humans tried their patience. Lilith had not. Leah had.

The photo of Leah was of a pale, lean, tired-looking woman, though an ooloi had noted that she had a physiological tendency to be heavy.

Lilith hesitated, then put Leah's folder atop Victor's. Leah, too, sounded like a good potential ally, but not a good one to Awaken first. She sounded as though she could be an intensely loyal friend-unless she got the idea Lilith was one of her captors.

Anyone Lilith Awakened might get that idea-almost certainly would get it the moment Lilith opened a wall or caused new walls to grow, thus proving she had abilities they did not. The Oankali had given her information, increased physical strength, enhanced memory, and an ability to control the walls and the suspended animation plants. These were her tools. And every one of them would make her seem less human.

"What else shall we give you?" Ahajas had asked her when Lilith saw her last. Ahajas had worried about her, found her too small to be impressive. She had discovered that humans were impressed by size. The fact that Lilith was taller and heavier than most women seemed not enough. She was not taller and heavier than most men. But there was nothing to be done about it.

"Nothing you could give me would be enough," Lilith had answered.

Dichaan had heard this and come over to take Lilith's hands. "You want to live," he told her. "You won't squander your life."

They were squandering her life.

She picked up the next folder and opened it.

Joseph Li-Chin Shing. A widower whose wife had died before the war. The Oankali had found him quietly grateful for that. After his own period of stubborn silences he had discovered that he didn't mind talking to them. He seemed to accept the reality that his life was, as he said, "on hold" until he found out what had happened in the world and who was running things now. He constantly probed for answers to these questions. He admitted that he remembered deciding, not long after the war, that it was time for him to die. He believed that he had been captured before he could attempt suicide. Now, he said, he had reason to live-to see who had caged him and why and how he might want to repay them.

He was forty years old, a small man, once an engineer, a citizen of Canada, born in Hong Kong. The Oankali had considered making him a parent of one of the human groups they meant to establish. But they had been put off by his threat. It was, the Oankali questioner thought, soft, but potentially quite deadly. Yet the Oankali recommended him to her-to any first parent. He was intelligent, they said, and steady. Someone who could be depended on.

Nothing special about his looks, Lilith thought. He was a small, ordinary man, yet the Oankali had been very interested in him. And the threat he had made was surprisingly conservative-deadly only if Joseph did not like what he found out. He would not like it, Lilith thought. But he would also be bright enough to realize that the time to do something about it would be when they were all on the ground, not while they were caged in the ship.

Lilith's first impulse was to Awaken Joseph Shing-Awaken him at once and end her solitude. The impulse was so strong that she sat still for several moments, hugging herself, holding herself rigid against it. She had promised herself that she would not Awaken anyone until she had read all the dossiers, until she had had time to think. Following the wrong impulse now could kill her.

She went through several more dossiers without finding anyone she thought compared with Joseph, though some of the people she found would definitely be Awakened.

There was a woman named Celene Ivers who had spent much of her short interrogation period crying over the death of her husband and her twin daughters, or crying over her own unexplained captivity and her uncertain future. She had wished herself dead over and over, but had never made any attempt at suicide. The Oankali had found her very pliable, eager to please-or rather, fearful of displeasing. Weak, the Oankali had said. Weak and sorrowing, not stupid, but so easily frightened that she could be induced to behave stupidly.

Harmless, Lilith thought. One person who would not be a threat, no matter how strongly she suspected Lilith of being her jailer.

There was Gabriel Rinaldi, an actor, who had confused the Oankali utterly for a while because he played roles for them instead of letting them see him as he was. He was another they had finally stopped feeding on the theory that sooner or later hunger would bring out the true man They were not entirely sure that it had. Gabriel must have been good. He was also very good-looking. He had never tried to harm himself or threatened to harm the Oankali. And for some reason, they had never drugged him. He was, the Oankali said, twenty-seven, thin, physically stronger than be looked, stubborn and not as bright as he liked to think.

That last, Lilith thought, could be said of most people. Gabriel, like the others who had defeated or come near defeating the Oankali, was potentially valuable. She did wonder whether she would ever be able to trust Gabriel, but his dossier remained with those she meant to Awaken.

There was Beatrice Dwyer who had been completely unreachable while she was naked, but whom clothing had transformed into a bright, likable person who seemed actually to have made a friend of her interrogator. That interrogator, an experienced ooloi, had attempted to have Beatrice accepted as a first parent. Other interrogators had observed her and disagreed for no stated reason. Maybe it was just the woman's extreme physical modesty. Nevertheless, one ooloi had been completely won over.

There was Hilary Ballard, poet, artist, playwright, actress, singer, frequent collector of unemployment compensation. She really was bright; she had memorized poetry, plays, songs-her own and those of more established writers. She had something that would help future human children remember who they were. The Oankali thought she was unstable, but not dangerously so. They had had to drug her because she injured herself trying to break free of what she called her cage. She had broken both her arms.

And that was not dangerously unstable?

No, probably was not. Lilith herself had panicked at being caged. So had a great many other people. Hilary's panic had simply been more extreme than most. She probably should not be given crucial work to do. The survival of the group should never depend on her-but then it should not depend on any one person. The fact that it did was not the fault of human beings.

There was Conrad Loehr-called Curt-who had been a cop in New York, and who had survived only because his wife had finally dragged him off to Colombia where her family lived. They had not gone anywhere for years before that. The wife had been killed in one of the riots that began shortly after the last missile exchange. Thousands had been killed even before it began to get cold. Thousands had simply trampled one another or torn one another apart in panic. Curt had been picked up with seven children, none of them his own, whom he had been guarding. His own four children, left back in the States with his relatives, were all dead. Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal-or dead. He had, alone in his isolation room, done his best to tear out his own throat with his fingernails.

Derick Wolski had been working in Australia. He was single, twenty-three, had no strong idea what he wanted to do with his life, had done nothing so far except go to school and work at temporary or part-time jobs. He'd fried hamburgers, driven a delivery truck, done construction work, sold household products door to door-badly--bagged groceries, helped clean office buildings, and on his own, done some nature photography. He'd quit everything except the photography. He liked the outdoors, liked animals. His father thought that sort of thing was nonsense, and he had been afraid his father might be right. Yet, he had been photographing Australian wildlife when the war began.

Tate Marah had just quit another job. She had some genetic problem that the Oankali had controlled, but not cured. But her real problem seemed to be that she did things so well that she quickly became bored. Or she did them so badly that she abandoned them before anyone noticed her incompetence. People had to see her as a formidable presence, bright, dominant, well off.

Her family had had money-had owned a very successful real estate business. Part of her problem, the Oankali believed, was that she did not have to do anything. She had great energy, but needed some external pressure, some challenge to force her to focus it.

How about the preservation of the human species?

She had attempted suicide twice before the war. After the war, she fought to live. She had been alone, vacationing in Rio de Janeiro when war came. It had not been a good time to be a North American, she felt, hut she had survived and managed to help others. She had that in common with Curt Loehr. Under Oankali interrogation, she had engaged in verbal fencing and game playing that eventually exasperated the ooloi questioner. But in the end, the ooloi had admired her. It thought she was more like an ooloi than like a female. She was good at manipulating people-could do it in ways they did not seem to mind. That had bored her too in the past. But boredom had not driven her to do harm to anyone except herself. There had been times when she withdrew from people to protect them from the possible consequences of her own frustration. She had withdrawn from several men this way, occasionally pairing them off with female friends. Couples she brought together tended to marry.

Lilith put Tate Marah's dossier down slowly, left it by itself on the bed. The only other one that was by itself was Joseph Shing's. Tate's dossier fell open, once again displaying the woman's small, pale, deceptively childlike face. The face was smiling slightly, not as though posing for a picture, but as though sizing up the photographer. In fact, Tate had not known the picture was being made. And the pictures were not photographs. They were paintings, impressions of the inner person as well as the outer physical reality. Each contained print memories of their subjects. Oankali interrogators had painted these pictures with sensory tentacles or sensory arms, using deliberately produced bodily fluids. Lilith knew this, but the pictures looked like, even felt like photos. They had been done on some kind of plastic, not on paper. The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were-or who the Oankali thought they were.

Tate Marah, they thought, was bright, somewhat flexible, and not dangerous except perhaps to the ego.

Lilith left the dossiers, left her private cubicle, and began building another near it.

The walls that would not open to let her out responded to her touch now by growing inward along a line of her sweat or saliva drawn along the floor. Thus the old walls extruded new ones, and the new ones would open or close, advance or retreat as she directed. Nikanj had made very sure she knew how to direct them. And when it finished instructing her, its mates, Dichaan and Ahajas, told her to seal herself in if her people attacked her. They had both spent time interrogating isolated humans and they seemed more worried about her than Nikanj did. They would get her out, they promised. They would not leave her to die for someone else's miscalculation.

Which was fine if she could spot the trouble and seal herself in time.

Better to choose the right people, bring them along slowly, and Awaken new ones only when she was sure of the ones already Awake.

She drew two walls to within about eighteen inches of each other. That left a narrow doorway-one that would preserve as much privacy as possible without a door. She also turned one wall inward, forming a tiny entrance hall that concealed the room itself from casual glances. There would be nothing among the people she Awoke to borrow or steal, and anyone who thought now was a good time to play Peeping Tom would have to be disciplined by the group. Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

Within the new room, Lilith raised a bed platform, a table platform, and three chair platforms around the table. The table and chairs would be at least a small change from what they were all used to in the Oankali isolation rooms. A more human arrangement.

Creating the room took some time. Afterward Lilith gathered all but eleven of the dossiers and sealed them inside her own table platform. Some of these eleven would be her core group, first Awake, and first to show her just how much of a chance she had to survive and do what was necessary.

Tate Marah first. Another woman. No sexual tension.

Lilith took the picture, went to the long, featureless stretch of wall opposite the rest rooms and stood for a moment, staring at the face.

Once people were Awake, she would have no choice but to live with them. She could not put them to sleep again. And in some ways, Tate Marah would probably be hard to live with.

Lilith rubbed her hand across the surface of the picture, then placed the picture flat against the wall. She began at one end of the wall and walked slowly toward the other, far away, keeping the face of the picture against the wall. She closed her eyes as she moved, remembering that it had been easier when she practiced this with Nikanj if she ignored her other senses as much as possible. All her attention should be focused on the hand that held the picture flat against the wall. Male and female Oankali did this with head tentacles.

Oankali did it with their sensory arms. Both did it from memory, without pictures impregnated with prints. Once they read someone's print or examined someone and took a print, they remembered it, could duplicate it. Lilith would never be able to read prints or duplicate them. That required Oankali organs of perception. Her children would have them, Kahguyaht had said.

She stopped now and then to rub one sweaty hand over the picture, renewing her own chemical signature.

More than halfway down the hail, she began to feel a response, a slight bulging of the surface against the picture, against her hand.

She stopped at once, not certain at first that she had felt anything at all. Then the bulge was unmistakable. She pressed against it lightly, maintaining the contact until the wall began to open beneath the picture. Then she drew back to let the wall disgorge its long, green plant. She went to a space at one end of the great room, opened a wall, and took out a jacket and a pair of pants. These people would probably welcome clothing as eagerly as she had.

The plant lay, writhing slowly, still surrounded by the foul odor that had followed it through the wall. She could not see well enough through its thick, fleshy body to know which end concealed Tate Marah's head, but that did not matter. She drew her hands along the length of the plant as though unzipping it, and it began to come apart.

There was no possibility this time of the plant trying to swallow her. She would be no more palatable to it now than Nikanj would.

Slowly, the face and body of Tate Marah became visible. Small breasts. Figure like that of a girl who had barely reached puberty. Pale, translucent skin and hair. Child's face. Yet Tate was twenty-seven.

She would not awaken until she was lifted completely clear of the suspended animation plant. Her body was wet and slippery, but not heavy. Sighing, Lilith lifted her clear.

2

"Get away from me!" Tate said the moment she opened her eyes. "Who are you? What are you doing?"

"Trying to get you dressed," Lilith said. "You can do it yourself now-if you're strong enough."

Tate was beginning to tremble, beginning to react to being awakened from suspended animation. it was surprising that she had been able to speak her few coherent words before succumbing to the reaction.

Tate made a tight, shuddering fetal knot of her body and lay moaning. She gasped several times, gulping air as she might have gulped water.

"Shit!" she whispered minutes later when the reaction began to wane. "Oh shit. It wasn't a dream, I see."

"Finish dressing," Lilith told her. "You knew it wasn't a dream."

Tate looked up at Lilith, then down at her own half naked body. Lilith had managed to get pants on her, but had only gotten one of her arms into the jacket. She had managed to work that arm free as she suffered through the reaction. She picked up the jacket, put it on, and in a moment, had discovered how to close it. Then she turned to watch silently as Lilith closed the plant, opened the wall nearest to it, and pushed the plant through. In seconds the only sign left of it was a rapidly drying spot on the floor.

"And in spite of all that," Lilith said, facing Tate, "I'm a prisoner just as you are."

"More like a trustee," Tate said quietly.

"More like. I have to Awaken at least thirty-nine more people before any of us are allowed out of this room. I chose to start with you."

"Why?" She was incredibly self-possessed--or seemed to be. She had only been Awakened twice before-average among people not chosen to parent a group-but she behaved almost as though nothing unusual were happening. That was a relief to Lilith, a vindication of her choice of Tate.

"Why did I begin with you?" Lilith said. "You seemed least likely to try to kill me, least likely to fall apart, and most likely to be able to help with the others as they Awaken."

Tate seemed to think about that. She fiddled with her jacket, re-examining the way the front panels adhered to one another, the way they pulled apart. She felt the material itself, frowning.

"Where the hell are we?" she asked.

"Some distance beyond the orbit of the moon."

Silence. Then finally, "What was that big green slug-thing you pushed into the wall?"

"A... a plant. Our captors-our rescuers-use them for keeping people in suspended animation. You were in the one you saw. I took you out of it."

"Suspended animation?"

"For over two hundred and fifty years. The Earth is just about ready to have us back now."

"We're going back!"

"Yes."

Tate looked around at the vast, empty room. "Back to what?"

"Tropical forest. Somewhere in the Amazon basin. There are no more Cities."

"No. I didn't think there would be." She drew a deep breath. "When are we fed?"

"I put some food in your room before I Awoke you. Come on."

Tate followed. "I'm hungry enough to eat even that plaster of Paris garbage they served me when I was Awake before."

"No more plaster. Fruit, nuts, a kind of stew, bread, something like cheese, coconut milk..."

"Meat? A steak?"

"You can't have everything."

Tate was too good to be true. Lilith worried for a moment that at some point she would break-begin to cry or be sick or scream or beat her head against the wall-lose that seemingly easy control. But whatever happened to her Lilith would try to help. Just these few minutes of apparent normality were worth a great deal of trouble. She was actually speaking with and being understood by another human being-after so long.

Tate dove into the food, eating until she was satisfied, not wasting time talking. She had not, Lilith thought, asked one very important question. Of course there was a great deal she had not asked, but one thing in particular made Lilith wonder.

"What's your name, by the' way?" Tate asked, finally resting from her eating. She sipped coconut milk tentatively, then drank it all.

"Lilith Iyapo."

"Lilith. Lil?"

"Lilith. I've never had a nickname. Never wanted one. Is there anything apart from your name that you'd like to be called?"

"No. Tate will do. Tate Marah. They told you my name, didn't they?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. All those damn questions. They kept me Awake and in solitary for. . . it must have been two or three months. Did they tell you that? Or were you watching?"

"I was either asleep or in solitary myself, but yes, I knew about your confinement. It was three months in all. Mine was just over two years."

"It took them that long to make a trustee of you, did it?"

Lilith frowned, took a few nuts and ate them. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.

For an instant, Tate looked uncomfortable, uncertain. The expression appeared and vanished so quickly that Lilith could have missed it through just a moment's inattention.

"Well, why should they keep you awake and alone for so long?" Tate demanded.

"I wouldn't talk to them at first. Then later when I began to talk, apparently a number of them were interested in me. They weren't trying to make a trustee of me at that point. They were trying to decide whether I was fit to be one. If I had had a vote, I'd still be asleep."

"Why wouldn't you talk to them? Were you military?"

"God, no. I just didn't like the idea of being locked up, questioned, and ordered around by I-didn't-know-who. And Tate, it's time you knew who-even though you've been careful not to ask."

She drew a deep breath, rested her forehead on her hand and stared down at the table. "I asked them. They wouldn't tell me. After a while I got scared and stopped asking."

"Yeah. I did that too."

"Are they... Russians?"

"They're not human."

Tate did not move, did not say anything for so long that Lilith continued.

"They call themselves Oankali, and they look like sea creatures, though they are bipedal. They. . . are you taking any of this in?"

''I'm listening.''

Lilith hesitated. "Are you believing?"

Tate looked up at her, seemed to smile a little. "How can I?"

Lilith nodded. "Yeah. But you'll have to sooner or later, of course, and I'm supposed to do what I can to prepare you. The Oankali are ugly. Grotesque. But we can get used to them, and they won't hurt us. Remember that. Maybe it will help when the time comes."

3

For three days, Tate slept a great deal, ate a great deal, and asked questions that Lilith answered completely honestly. Tate also talked about her life before the war. Lilith saw that it seemed to relax her, ease that shell of emotional control she usually wore. That made it worthwhile. It meant Lilith felt obligated to talk a little about herself-her past before the war-something she would not normally have been inclined to do. She had learned to keep her sanity by accepting things as she found them, adapting herself to new circumstances by putting aside the old ones whose memories might overwhelm her. She had tried to talk to Nikanj about humans in general, only occasionally bringing in personal anecdotes. Her father, her brothers, her sister, her husband and son. . . . She chose now to talk about her return to college.

"Anthropology," Tate said disparagingly. "Why did you want to snoop through other people's cultures? Couldn't you find what you wanted in your own?"

Lilith smiled and noticed that Tate frowned as though this were the beginning of a wrong answer. "I started out wanting to do exactly that," Lilith said. "Snoop. Seek. It seemed to me that my culture-ours-was running headlong over a cliff. And, of course, as it turned out, it was. I thought there must be saner ways of life."

"Find any?"

"Didn't have much of a chance. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway. It was the cultures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that counted."

"I wonder."

"What?"

"Human beings are more alike than different-damn sure more alike than we like to admit. I wonder if the same thing wouldn't have happened eventually, no matter which two cultures gained the ability to wipe one another out along with the rest of the world"

Lilith gave a bitter laugh. "You might like it here. The Oankali think a lot like you do."

Tate turned away, suddenly disturbed. She wandered over to look at the new third and fourth rooms Lilith had grown on either side of the second restroom. One of them was back to back with her own room, and in part, an extension of one of her walls. She had watched the walls growing- watched first with disbelief, then anger, refusing to believe she was not being tricked somehow. Then she began to keep her distance from Lilith, to watch Lilith suspiciously, to be jumpy and silent.

That had not lasted long. Tate was adaptable if nothing else. "I don't understand," she had said softly, though by then, Lilith had explained why she could control the walls, how she could find and Awaken specific individuals.

Now, Tate wandered back and said again, "I don't understand. None of this makes sense!"

"I had an easier time believing," Lilith said. "An Oankali sealed himself in my isolation room and refused to leave until I got used to him. You can't look at them and doubt that they're alien."

"Maybe you can't."

"I won't argue with you about it. I've been Awake a lot longer than you have. I've lived among the Oankali and I accept them as what they are."

"What they say they are."

Lilith shrugged. "I want to start Awakening more people. Two new ones today. Will you help me?"

"Who are you Awakening?"

"Leah Bede and Celene Iver."

"Two more women? Why don't you wake up a man?"

"I will eventually."

"You're still thinking about your Paul Titus, aren't you?"

"He wasn't mine." She wished she had not told Tate about him.

"Awaken a man next, Lilith. Awaken the guy who was found protecting the kids."

Lilith turned to look at her. "On the theory that if you fall off a horse, you should immediately get back on?"

"Yes."

"Tate, once he's Awake, he stays Awake. He's six-three, he weighs two-twenty, he's been a cop for seven years, and he's used to ordering people around. He can't save us or protect us here, but he can damn sure screw us up. All he has to do to hurt us is refuse to believe we're on a ship. After that, everything he does will be wrong and potentially deadly."

"So what? You're going to wait until you can Awaken him to a kind of harem?"

"No. Once we've got Leah and Celene awake and reasonably stable, I'm going to Awaken Curt Loehr and Joseph Shing."

"Why wait?"

"I'm going to get Celene out first. You take care of her while I get Leah out. I think Celene might be someone for Curt to take care of."

She went to her room, brought back pictures of both women, and was about to begin hunting for Celene when Tate caught her arm.

"We're being watched, aren't we?" she asked.

"Yes. I don't know that we're watched every minute, but now, when we're both Awake, yes, I'm sure they're watching."

"If there's trouble, will they help?"

"If they decide it's bad enough. I think there were some who would have let Titus rape me. I don't think they would have let him kill me. They might have been too slow to prevent it, though."

"Wonderful," Tate muttered bitterly. "We're on our own."

"Exactly."

Tate shook her head. "I don't know whether I should be shedding the constraints of civilization and getting ready to fight for my life or keeping and enhancing them for the sake of our future."

"We'll do what's necessary," Lilith said. "Sooner or later, that will probably mean fighting for our lives."

"I hope you're wrong," Tate said. "What have we learned if all we can do now is go on fighting among ourselves?" She paused. "You didn't have kids, did you Lilith?"

Lilith began to walk slowly along the wall, eyes closed, Celene's picture flat between the wall and her hand. Tate walked along beside her, distracting her.

"Wait until I call you," Lilith told her. "Searching like this takes all my attention."

"It's really hard for you to talk about your life before, isn't it?" Tate said, with sympathy Lilith did not begin to trust.

"Pointless," Lilith said. "Not hard. I lived in those memories for my two years of solitary. By the time the Oankali showed up in my room, I was ready to move into the present and stay there. My life before was a lot of groping around, looking for I-didn't-know-what. And, as for kids, I had a son. He was killed in an auto accident before the war." Lilith took a deep breath. "Let me alone now. I'll call you when I've found Celene."

Tate moved away, settled against the opposite wall near one of the rest rooms. Lilith closed her eyes and began inching along again. She let herself lose track of time and distance, felt as though she were almost flowing along the wall. The illusion was familiar-as physically pleasing and emotionally satisfying as a drug-a needed drug at this moment.

"If you have to do something, it might as well feel good," Nikanj had told her. It had become very interested in her physical pleasures and pains once its sensory aims were fully grown. Happily, it had paid more attention to pleasure than to pain. It had studied her as she might have studied a book-and it had done a certain amount of rewriting.

The bulge in the wall felt large and distinct when her fingers found it. But when she opened her eyes and looked, she could not see any irregularity.

"There's nothing there!" Tate said over her right shoulder. Lilith jumped, dropped the picture, refused to turn and glare at Tate as she bent to pick it up. "Get away from me!" she said quietly.

Grudgingly, Tate moved back several steps. Lilith could have found the spot again without any particular concentration, without having Tate move away, but Tate had to learn to accept Lilith's authority in anything to do with controlling the walls or dealing with the Oankali and their ship. What the hell did she think she was doing, coming back, creeping along behind Lilith? What was she looking for? Some trick?

Lilith rubbed one hand on the face of the picture and placed it against the wall. She found the bulge at once, though it was still to slight to be seen. It had ceased to grow with the removal of the picture, but had not yet vanished. Now Lilith rubbed it gently with the picture, encouraging it to grow. When she could see the protrusion, she stepped away and waited, gesturing for Tate to come.

Standing together, they watched the wall disgorge the long, translucent green plant. Tate made a sound of disgust and stepped back as the smell drifted to her.

"You want to look at it before I open it?" Lilith asked. Tate came closer and stared at the plant. "Why is it moving?"

"So that every part of it is exposed to the light for a while. If you could mark it, you would see that it's very slowly turning over. The movement is suppose to be good for the people inside, too. it exercises their muscles and changes their position."

"It doesn't really look like a slug," Tate said. "Not when someone's in it." She went to it, stroked it with several fingers, then looked at her fingers.

"Be careful," Lilith told her. "Celene isn't very big. The plant probably wouldn't mind taking someone else in."

"Would you be able to get me out?"

"Yes." She smiled. "The first Oankali to show these to me didn't warn me. I put my hand on the plant and almost panicked when I realized the plant was holding me and growing around my hand."

Tate tried this, and the plant obligingly began to swallow her hand. She tugged at her band, then looked at Lilith, obviously afraid. "Make it let go!"

Lilith touched the plant around her captive hand and the plant released her. "Now," Lilith said, moving to one end of the plant. She drew her hands along the length of the plant. It opened in its usual slow way, and she lifted Celene out and put her on the floor where Tate could look after her. "Get some clothes on her before she wakes up if you can," she told Tate.

But by the time Celene was fully awake, Lilith had Leah Bede out of the wall and out of her plant. She dressed Leah quickly. Not until both women were fully awake and looking around did Lilith push the two plants back through the wall. When that was done, she turned, meaning to sit down with Leah and Celene and answer their questions.

Instead, she was suddenly staggered by Leah's weight as the woman leaped onto her back and began strangling her. Lilith began to fall. Time seemed to slow down for her.

If she fell on Leah, the woman would probably injure her back or her head. The injury might be only superficial, but could be serious. It would be wrong to let a potentially useful person be lost for one act of stupidity.

Lilith managed to fall on her side so that only Leah's arm and shoulder struck the floor. Lilith reached up and took Leah's hands from her throat. It was not difficult. Lilith was even able to go on taking care not to cause injury. She also took care not to let Leah see how easy it was for Lilith to defeat her. She gasped as she tore Leah's hands from her throat, though she was nowhere near desperate for air yet. And she allowed Leah's hands to move in her own as Leah struggled.

"Will you stop it!" she shouted. "I'm a prisoner here just like you. I can't let you out. I can't get out myself. Do you understand?"

Leah stopped struggling. Now she glared up at Lilith.

"Get off me." Her voice was naturally deep and throaty. Now it was almost a growl.

"I intend to," Lilith said. "But don't jump me again. I'm not your enemy."

Leah made a wordless sound.

"Save your strength," Lilith said. "We've got a lot of rebuilding to do."

"Rebuilding?" Leah growled.

"The war," Lilith said. "Remember?"

"I wish I could forget." The growl had softened.

"You kill me here and you'll prove you haven't had enough war yet. You'll prove you're not fit to take part in the rebuilding."

Leah said nothing. After a moment, Lilith released her.

Both women stood up warily.

"Who decides whether or not I'm fit?" Leak asked. "You?"

"Our jailers."

Unexpectedly, Celene whispered, "Who are they?" Her face was already streaked with tears. She and Tate had come up silently to join the discussion-or watch the fight.

Lilith glanced at Tate, and Tate shook her head. "And you were afraid Awakening a man would cause violence," she said.

"I still am," Lilith told her. She looked at Celene, then Leah. "Let's get something to eat. I'll answer any questions I can."

She took them to the room that would be Celene's and watched their eyes widen when they saw, not the expected bowls of god-knew-what, but recognizable food.

It was easier to talk to them when they'd eaten their fill, when they were relatively relaxed and comfortable. They refused to believe they were on a ship beyond the moon's orbit. Leah laughed aloud when she heard that they were being held by extraterrestrials.

"Either you're a liar or you're crazy," she said.

"It's true," Lilith said softly.

"It's crap."

"The Oankali modified me," Lilith told her, "so that I can control the walls and the suspended animation plants. I can't do it as well as they can, but I can Awaken people, feed them, clothe them, and give them a certain amount of privacy. You shouldn't get so wrapped up in doubting me that you ignore the things you see me do. And remember two things in particular that I've told you. We are on a ship. Act as though you believe that even if you don't. There is no place to run on a ship. Even if you could get out of this room, there would be nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free. On the other hand, if we endure our time here, we'll get our world back. We'll be put down on Earth as the first of the returning human colonists."

"Just do as we're told and wait, huh?" Leah said.

"Unless you like it here well enough to stay."

"I don't believe a word you say."

"Believe what you want! I'm telling you how to act if you ever want to feel the ground under your feet again!"

Celene began to cry quietly and Lilith frowned at her. "What's the matter with you?"

Celene shook her head. "I don't know what to believe. I don't even know why I'm still alive."

Tate sighed and shook her head in disgust.

"You are alive," Lilith said coldly. "We have no medical supplies here. If you want to commit suicide, you might succeed. If you want to hang around and help get things started back on Earth... well, that seems a lot more worth succeeding at."

"Did you have any children?" Celene asked, clearly expecting the answer to be no.

"Yes." Lilith made herself reach out, take the woman's hand, though already she disliked her. "All the people I have to Awaken are here without their families. We're all alone. We've got each other, and nobody else. We'll become a community-friends, neighbors, husbands, wives- or we won't."

"When will there be men?" Celene demanded.

"In a day or two. I'll Awaken two men next."

"Why not now?"

"No. I'll get rooms ready for them, get food and clothing out for them-the way I have for you and Leah."

"You mean you build the rooms?"

"It's more accurate to say I grow them. You'll see."

"You grow the food, too?" Leah asked, one eyebrow raised.

"Food and clothing is stored along the walls at each end of the big room. They're replaced as we use them. I can open the storage cabinets, but I can't open the wall behind them. Only the Oankali can do that."

There was silence for a moment. Lilith began gathering her own fruit peelings and seeds. "Any garbage goes into one of the toilets," she said. "You don't have to worry about stopping them up. They're more than they appear to be. They'll digest anything that isn't alive."

"Digest!" Celene said, horrified. "They... they're alive themselves?"

"Yes. The ship is alive and so is almost everything in it. The Oankali use living matter the way we used machinery." She started away toward the nearest bathroom, then stopped. "The other thing I meant to tell you," she said focusing on Leah and Celene, "is that we're being watched-just as we were all watched in our isolation rooms. I don't think the Oankali will bother us this time-not until forty or more of us are Awake and getting along fairly well together. They will come in, though, if we start to murder each other. And the would-be murderers-or actual murderers-will be kept here on the ship for the rest of their lives."

"So you're protected from us," Leah said. "Convenient."

"We're protected from one another," Lilith said. "We're an endangered species-almost extinct. If we're going to survive, we need protection."

4

Lilith did not release Curt Loehr from his suspended animation plant until Joseph Shing's plant lay beside it. Then, quickly, she opened both plants, lifted Joseph out and dragged Loehr out. She set Leah and Tate to work dressing Curt and worked alone to dress Joseph since Celene would not touch him while he was naked. Both men were fully clothed by the time they struggled to full consciousness.

After the initial misery of Awakening, they sat up and looked around. "Where are we?" Curt demanded. "Who's in charge here?"

Lilith winced. "I am," she said. "I Awoke you. We're all prisoners here, but it's my job to Awaken people."

"And who are you working for?" Joseph demanded. He had a slight accent and Curt, hearing it, turned to stare, then to glare at him.

Lilith introduced them quickly. "Conrad Loehr of New York, this is Joseph Shing of Vancouver." Then she introduced each of the women.

Celene had already settled close to Curt, and once she was introduced, she added: "Back when things were normal, everyone called me Cele."

Tate rolled her eyes and Leah frowned. Lilith managed not to smile. She had been right about Celene. Celene would put herself under Curt's protection if he let her. That would keep Curt occupied. Lilith caught a faint smile on Joseph's face.

"We have food if you two are hungry," Lilith said, slipping into what was becoming a standard speech. "While we eat, I'll answer your questions."

"One answer now," Curt said. His question: "Who are you working for? Which side?"

He had not seen her push his suspended animation plant back into the wall. She had not turned her back on him since he had been fully Awake.

"Down on Earth," she said carefully, "there are no people left to draw lines on maps and say which sides of those lines are the right sides. There is no government left. No human government, anyway."

He frowned, then glared at her as he had earlier at Joseph. "You're saying we've been captured by. . . something that isn't human?"

"Or rescued," Lilith said.

Joseph stepped up to her. "You've seen them?"

Lilith nodded.

"You believe they are extraterrestrials?"

"Yes."

"And you believe we are on some kind of. . . what? Space ship?"

"A very, very large one, almost like a small world."

"What proof can you show us?"

"Nothing that you couldn't perceive as a trick if you wanted to."

"Please show us anyway."

She nodded, not minding. Each pair or group of new people would have to be handled slightly differently. She explained what she could of the changes that had been made in her body chemistry, then, with both men watching, she grew another room. Twice she stopped to allow them to inspect the walls. She said nothing when they attempted to control the walls as she did, and then attempted to break them. The living tissue of the walls resisted them, ignored them. Their strength was meaningless. Finally they watched silently as Lilith completed the room.

"It's like the stuff my cell was made of when I was Awake before," Curt said. "What the hell is it? Some kind of plastic?"

"Living matter," Lilith said. "More plant than animal." She let their surprised silence last for a moment, then led them into the room where she and Leah had left the food. Tate was already there, eating a hot rice and bean dish.

Celene handed Curt one of the large edible bowls of food and Lilith offered one to Joseph. But Joseph kept focused on the subject of the living ship. He refused to eat himself or let Lilith eat in peace until he knew everything she did about the way the ship worked. He seemed annoyed that she knew so little.

"Do you believe what she says?" Leah asked him when he finally gave up the interrogation and tasted his cold food.

"I believe that Lilith believes," he said. "I haven't decided yet what I believe." He paused. "It does seem important, though, for us to behave as though we are in a ship-unless we find out for certain that we aren't. A ship in space could be an excellent prison even if we could get out of this room."

Lilith nodded gratefully. "That's it," she said. "That's what's important. If we endure this place, behave as though it's a ship no matter what anyone thinks individually, we can survive here until we're sent to Earth."

And she went on to tell them about the Oankali, about the plan to reseed Earth with human communities. Then she told them about the gene trade because she had decided they must know. If she waited too long to tell them, they might feel betrayed by her silence. But telling them now gave them plenty of time to reject the idea, then slowly begin to think about it and realize what it could mean.

Tate and Leah laughed at her, refused absolutely to believe that any manipulation of DNA could mix humans with extraterrestrial aliens.

"As far as I know," Lilith told them, "I haven't seen any human-Oankali combinations. But because of the things I have seen, because of the changes the Oankali have made in me, I believe they can tamper with us genetically, and I believe they intend to. Whether they'll blend with us or destroy us. . . that I don't know."

"Well, I haven't seen anything," Curt said. He had been quiet for a long time, listening, slipping his arm around

Celene when she sat near him and looked frightened. "Until I do see something-and I don't mean more moving walls-this is all bullshit."

"I'm not sure I'd believe no matter what I saw," Tate said. "It isn't hard to believe our captors intend to do some kind of genetic tampering," Joseph said. "They could do that whether they were human or extraterrestrial. There was a lot of work being done in genetics before the war. That may have devolved into some kind of eugenics program afterward. Hitler might have done something like that after World War Two if he had had the technology and if he had survived." He took a deep breath. "I think our best bet now is to learn all we can. Get facts. Keep our eyes open. Then later we can make the best possible use of any opportunities we might have to escape."

Learn and run, Lilith thought almost gleefully. She could have hugged Joseph. Instead, she took a bite of her cold food.

5

Two days later when Lilith saw that Curt was not likely to cause trouble-at least, not soon-she Awakened Gabriel Rinaldi and Beatrice Dwyer. She asked Joseph to help her with Gabriel and turned Beatrice over to Leah and Curt. Celene was still useless when it came to getting people dressed and oriented. Tate was apparently becoming bored with the process of Awakening people.

"I think we ought to double our numbers every time," she told Lilith. "That way we go through less repetition, get things done faster, get down to Earth faster."

At least now she was beginning to accept the idea that she was not already on Earth, Lilith thought. That was something.

"I'm probably already Awakening people too fast," Lilith told her. "We've got to be able to work together before we reach Earth. It isn't enough for us just to refrain from killing one another. Down in the forest, we'll probably be more interdependent than most of us have ever been. We might be a little better at that if we give each new set of people time to fit in and a growing structure to fit into."

"What structure?" Tate began to smile. "You mean like a family. . . with you as Mama?"

Lilith only looked at her.

After a time, Tate shrugged. "Just wake up a group of them, sit them down, tell them what's going on-they won't believe you, of course-take questions, feed them, and the next day, start on the next batch. Quick and easy. They can't learn to work together if they aren't Awake."

"I've always heard that small classes worked better than large ones," Lilith said. "This is too important to rush."

The argument ended as Lilith' s arguments with Tate usually ended. No resolution. Lilith continued to Awaken people slowly and Tate continued to disapprove.

After three days, Beatrice Dwyer and Gabriel Rinaldi seemed to be settling in. Gabriel paired with Tate. Beatrice avoided the men sexually, but joined in the endless discussions of their situation, first refusing to believe it, then finally accepting it along with the group's learn-and-run philosophy.

Now, Lilith decided, was the time to Awaken two more people. She Awoke two every two or three days, no longer worrying about Awakening men since there had been no real trouble. She did deliberately Awaken a few more women than men in the hope of minimizing violence.

But as the number of people grew, so did the potential for disagreement. There were several short, vicious fist-fights. Lilith tried to keep out of them, allowing people to sort things out for themselves. Her only concern was that the fights do no serious harm. Curt helped with this in spite of his cynicism. Once as they pulled two struggling, bleeding men apart, he told her she might have made a pretty good cop.

There was one fight that Lilith could not keep out of-one begun for a foolish reason as usual. A large, angry, not particularly bright woman named Jean Pelerin demanded an end to the meatless diet. She wanted meat, she wanted it now, and Lilith had better produce it if she knew what was good for her.

Everyone else had accepted, however grudgingly, the absence of meat. "The Oankali don't eat it," Lilith had told them. "And because we can get along without it, they won't give it to us. They say once we're back on Earth, we'll be free to keep and kill animals again-though the ones we're used to are mostly extinct."

Nobody liked the idea. So far she had not Awakened a single voluntary vegetarian. But until Jean Pelerin, no one had tried to do anything about it.

Jean lunged at Lilith punching kicking obviously intending to overwhelm at once.

Surprised, but far from overwhelmed, Lilith struck back. Two short, quick jabs.

Jean collapsed, unconscious, bleeding from her mouth.

Frightened, still angry, Lilith checked to see that the woman was breathing and not badly hurt. She stayed with her until Jean had regained consciousness enough to glare at Lilith. Then, without a word, Lilith left her.

Lilith went to her room, sat thinking for a few moments about the strength Nikanj had given her. She had pulled her punches, not intending to knock Jean unconscious. She was no longer concerned about Jean now, but it bothered her that she no longer knew her own strength. She could kill someone by accident. She could maim someone. Jean did not know how lucky she was with her headache and her split lip.

Lilith slipped to the floor, took off her jacket, and began doing exercises to burn off excess energy and emotion. Everyone knew she exercised. Several other people had begun doing it as well. For Lilith, it was a comfortable, mindless activity that gave her something to do when there was nothing she could do about her situation.

Some people would attack her. She had probably not yet experienced the worst of them. She might have to kill. They might kill her. People who accepted her now might turn away from her if she seriously injured or killed someone.

On the other hand, what could she do? She had to defend herself. What would people say if she had beaten a man as easily as she beat Jean? Nikanj had said she could do it. How long would it be before someone forced her to find out for sure?

"May I come in?"

Lilith stopped her exercising, put her jacket on, and said, "Come."

She was still seated on the floor, breathing deeply, perversely enjoying the slight ache in her muscles when Joseph Shing came around her new curving entrance-hall partition and into the room. She leaned against the bed platform and looked up at him. Because it was him, she smiled.

"You aren't hurt at all?" he asked.

She shook her head. "A couple of bruises."

He sat down next to her. "She's telling people you're a man. She says only a man can fight that way."

To her own surprise, Lilith laughed aloud.

"Some people aren't laughing," he said. "That new man, Van Weerden said he didn't think you were human at all."

She stared at him, then got up to go out, but he caught her hand and held it.

"It's all right. They're not standing out there muttering to themselves and believing fantasy. In fact, I don't think Van Weerden really believes it. They only want someone to focus their frustration on.

"I don't want to be that someone," she muttered.

"What choice have you?"

"I know." She sighed. She let him pull her down beside him again. She found it impossible to delude herself when he was around. This caused her enough pain sometimes to make her wonder why she encouraged him to stay around. Tate, with typical malice, had said, "He's old, he's short, and he's ugly. Haven't you got any discrimination at all?"

"He's forty," Lilith had said. "He doesn't seem ugly to me, and if he can deal with my size, I can deal with his."

"You could do better."

"I'm content." She never told Tate that she had almost made Joseph the first person she Awakened. She shook her head over Tate's halfhearted attempts to lure Joseph away. It wasn't as though Tate wanted him. She just wanted to prove she could have him-and in the process, try him out. Joseph seemed to find the whole sequence funny. Other people were less relaxed about similar situations. That caused some of the most savage fights. An increasing number of bored, caged humans could not help finding destructive things to do.

"You know," she told him, "you could become a target yourself. Some people could decide to take their anger at me out on you."

"I know kung fu," he said examining her bruised knuckles.

"Do you really?"

He smiled. "No, just a little tai chi for exercise. Not so much sweating."

She decided he was telling her she smelled-which she did. She started to get up to go wash, but he would not let her go.

"Can you talk to them?" he asked.

She looked at him. He was growing a thin black beard. All the men were growing beards since no razors had been provided. Nothing hard or sharp had been provided.

"You mean talk to the Oankali?" she asked.

"Yes."

"They hear us all the time."

"But if you ask for something, will they provide it?"

"Probably not. I think it was a major concession for them just to give us all clothing."

"Yes. I thought you might say that. Then you should do what Tate wants you to do. Awaken a large number of people at once. There's too little to do here. Get people busy helping one another, teaching one another. There are fourteen of us now. Awaken ten more tomorrow."

Lilith shook her head. "Ten? But-"

"It will take some of the negative attention off you. Busy people have less time for fantasizing and fighting."

She moved away from his side to sit facing him. "What is it, Joe? What's wrong?"

"People being people, that's all. You're probably not in any danger now, but you will be soon. You must know that."

She nodded.

"When there are forty of us, will the Oankali take us out of here or-"

"When there are forty of us, and the Oankali decide we're ready, they'll come in. Eventually, they'll take us to be taught to live on Earth. They have a. . . an area of the ship that they've made over into a fragment of Earth. They've grown a small tropical forest there-like the forest we'll be sent to on Earth. We'll be trained there."

"You've seen this place?"

"I spent a year there."

"Why?"

"First learning, then proving I'd learned. Knowing and using the knowledge aren't the same thing."

"No." He thought for a moment. "The presence of the Oankali will bring them together, but it might turn them even more strongly against you. Especially if the Oankali really scare them."

"The Oankali will scare them."

"That bad?"

"That alien. That ugly. That powerful."

"Then. . . don't come into the forest with us. Try to get out of it."

She smiled sadly. "I speak their language, Joe, but I've never yet been able to convince them to change one of their decisions."

"Try, Lilith!"

His intensity surprised her. Had he really seen something she had missed-something he wouldn't tell her? Or was he simply understanding her position for the first time? She had known for a long time that she might be doomed. She had had time to get used to the idea and to understand that she must struggle not against nonhuman aliens, but against her own kind.

"Will you talk to them?" Joseph asked.

She had to think for a moment to realize he meant the Oankali. She nodded. "I'll do what I can," she said. "You and Tate may be right about Awakening people faster, too. I think I'm ready to try that."

"Good. You have a fair core group around you. The new ones you Awaken can work things out in the forest. There they should have more to do."

"Oh, they'll have plenty to do. The tedium of some of it, though. . . wait until I teach you to weave a basket or a hammock or to make your own garden tools and use them to grow your food."

"We'll do what's necessary," he said. "If we can't, then we won't survive." He paused, looked away from her. "I've been a city man all my life. I might not survive."

"If I do, you will," she said grimly.

He broke the mood by laughing quietly. "That's foolishness- but it's a lovely foolishness. I feel the same way about you. You see what comes of being shut up together and having so little to do. Good things as well as bad. How many people will you Awaken tomorrow?"

She had bent her body almost in thirds, arms clasped around doubled knees, head resting on knees. Her body shook with humorless laughter. He had awakened her one night, seemingly out of the blue and asked her if he might come to bed with her. She had had all she could do to stop herself from grabbing him and pulling him in.

But they had not talked about their feelings until now. Everyone knew. Everyone knew everything. She knew, for instance, that people said he slept with her to get special privileges or to escape their prison. Certainly, he was not someone she would have noticed on prewar Earth. And he would not have noticed her. But here, there had been a pull between them from the moment he Awoke, intense, inescapable, acted upon, and now, spoken.

"I'll Awaken ten people as you said," she told him finally. "It seems a good number. It will occupy everyone I would dare to trust to look after a newly Awakened person. As for the others. . . I don't want them free to wander around and cause trouble or get together and cause trouble. I'll double them with you, Tate, Leah, and me."

"Leah?" he said.

"Leah's all right. Surly, moody, stubborn. And hardworking, loyal, and hard to scare. I like her."

"I think she likes you," he said. "That surprises me. I would have expected her to resent you."

Behind him, the wall began to open.

Lilith froze, then sighed and deliberately stared at the floor. When she looked up again, seeming to look at Joseph, she could see Nikanj coming through the opening.

6

She moved over beside Joseph who, leaning against the bed platform, had noticed nothing. She took his hand, held it for a moment between her own, wondering if she were about to lose him. Would he stay with her after tonight? Would he speak to her tomorrow beyond absolute necessity? Would he join her enemies, confirming to them things they only suspected now? What the hell did Nikanj want anyway? Why couldn't it stay out as it had said it would. There: She had finally caught it in a lie. She would not forgive it if that lie destroyed Joseph's feelings for her.

"What is it?" Joseph was saying as Nikanj strode across the room in utter silence and sealed the doorway.

"For God knows what reason, the Oankali have decided to give you a preview," she said softly, bitterly. "You aren't in any physical danger. You won't be hurt." Let Nikanj make a lie of that and she would force it to put her back into suspended animation.

Joseph looked around sharply, froze when he saw Nikanj. After a moment of what Lilith suspected was absolute terror, he jerked himself to his feet and stumbled back against the wall, cornering himself between the wall and the bed platform.

"What is it!" Lilith demanded in Oankali. She stood to face Nikanj. "Why are you here?"

Nikanj spoke in English. "So that he could endure his fear now, privately, and be of help to you later."

A moment after hearing the quiet, androgenous, human sounding voice speak in English, Joseph came out of his corner. He moved to Lilith's side, stood staring at Nikanj. He was trembling visibly. He said something in Chinese- the first time Lilith had heard him speak the language--then somehow, stilled his trembling. He looked at her.

"You know this one?"

"Kaalnikanjl oo Jdahyatediinkahguyaht aj Dinso," she said, staring at Nikanj's sensory arms, remembering how much more human it had looked without them. "Nikanj," she said when she saw Joseph frowning.

"I didn't believe," he said softly. "I couldn't, even though you said it."

She did not know what to say. He was handling the situation better than she had. Of course he had been warned and he was not being kept isolated from other humans. Still, he was doing well. He was as adaptable as she had suspected.

Moving slowly, Nikanj reached the bed and boosted itself up with one hand, folding its legs under it as it settled. Its head tentacles focused sharply on Joseph. "There's no hurry," it said. "We'll talk for a while. If you're hungry, I'll get you something."

"I'm not hungry," Joseph said. "Others may be, though."

"They must wait. They should spend a little time waiting for Lilith, understanding that they're helpless without her."

"They're just as helpless with me," Lilith said softly. "You've made them dependent on me. They may not be able to forgive me for that."

"Become their leader, and there'll be nothing to forgive." Joseph looked at her as though Nikanj had finally said something to distract him from the strangeness of its body. "Joe," she said, "it doesn't mean leader. It means Judas goat."

"You can make their lives easier," Nikanj said. "You can help them accept what is to happen to them. But whether you lead them or not, you can't prevent it. It would happen even if you died. If you lead them, more of them will survive. If you don't, you may not survive yourself." She stared at it, remembered lying next to it when it was weak and helpless, remembered breaking bits of food into small pieces and slowly, carefully feeding it those pieces.

After a time its head and body tentacles drew themselves into knotted lumps and it hugged itself with its sensory arms. It spoke to her in Oankali: "I want you to live! Your mate is right! Some of these people are already plotting against you!"

"I told you they would plot against me," she said in English. "I told you they would probably kill me."

"You didn't tell me you would help them!"

She leaned against her table platform, head down. "I'm trying to live," she whispered. "You know I am."

"You could clone us," Joseph said. "Is that right?"

"Yes."

"You could take reproductive cells from us and grow human embryos in artificial wombs?"

"Yes."

"You can even re-create us from some kind of gene map or print."

"We can do that too. We have already done these things. We must do them to understand a new species better. We must compare them to normal human conception and birth. We must compare the children we have made to those we took from Earth. We're very careful to avoid damaging new partner-species."

"Is that what you call it?" Joseph muttered in bitter revulsion."

Nikanj spoke very softly. "We revere life. We had to be certain we had found ways for you to live with the partnership, not simply to die of it."

"You don't need us!" Joseph said. "You've created your own human beings. Poor bastards. Make them your partners."

"We. . . do need you." Nikanj spoke so softly that Joseph leaned forward to hear. "A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you've captured us, and we can't escape. But you're more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. We're interested in those too. That's why we saved as many of you as we could."

Joseph shuddered. "We've seen how you saved us-your prison cells and your suspended animation plants, and now this."

"Those are the simplest things we do. And they leave you relatively untouched. You are what you were on Earth- minus any disease or injury. With a little training, you can go back to Earth and sustain yourselves comfortably."

"Those of us who survive this room and the training room."

"Those of you who survive."

"You could have done this another way!"

"We've tried other ways. This way is best. There is incentive not to do harm. No one who has killed or severely injured another will set foot on Earth again."

"They'll be kept here?"

"For the rest of their lives."

"Even. . ." Joseph glanced at Lilith, then faced Nikanj again. "Even if the killing is in self-defense?"

"She is exempt," Nikanj said.

"What?"

"She knows. We've given her abilities that at least one of you must have. They make her different, and therefore they make her a target. It would be self-defeating for us to forbid her to defend herself."

"Nikanj," Lilith said, and when she saw that she had its attention she spoke in Oankali. "Exempt him."

Flat refusal. That was that, and she knew it. But she could not help trying. "He's a target because of me," she said. "He could be killed because of me."

Nikanj spoke in Oankali. "And I want him to live because of you. But I didn't make the decision to keep humans who kill away from Earth-and I didn't exempt you. It was a consensus. I can't exempt him."

"Then... strengthen him the way you did me."

"He would be more likely to kill then."

"And less likely to die. I mean give him more resistance to injury. Help him heal faster if he is injured. Give him a chance!"

"What are you talking about?" Joseph said to her angrily. "Speak English!"

She opened her mouth, but Nikanj spoke first. "She's speaking for you. She wants you protected."

He looked at Lilith for confirmation. She nodded. "I'm afraid for you. I wanted you exempted too. It says it can't do that. So I've asked it to. . ." She stopped, looked from Nikanj to Joseph. "I've asked it to strengthen you, give you at least a chance."

He frowned at her. "Lilith, I'm not large, but I'm stronger than you think. I can take care of myself."

"I didn't speak in English because I didn't want to hear you say that. Of course you can't take care of yourself. No one person could against what might happen out there. I only wanted to give you more of a chance than you have now."

"Show him your hand," Nikanj said.

She hesitated, fearing that he would begin to see her as alien or too close to aliens-too much changed by them. But now that Nikanj had drawn attention to her hand, she could not conceal it. She raised her no-longer-bruised knuckles and showed them to Joseph.

He examined her hand minutely, then looked at the other one just to be certain he had not made a mistake. "They did this?" he asked. "Enabled you to heal so quickly?"

"Yes."

"What else?"

"Made me stronger than I was-and I was strong before- and enabled me to control interior walls and suspended animation plants. That's all."

He faced Nikanj. "How did you do this?"

Nikanj rustled its tentacles. "For the walls, I altered her body chemistry slightly. For the strength, I gave her more efficient use of what she already has. She should have been stronger. Her ancestors were stronger--her nonhuman ancestors in particular. I helped her fulfill her potential."

"How?"

"How do you move and coordinate the fingers of your hands? I'm an ooloi bred to work with humans. I can help them do anything their bodies are capable of doing. I made biochemical changes that caused her regular exercises to be much more effective than they would have been otherwise. There is also a slight genetic change. I haven't added or subtracted anything, but I have brought out latent ability. She is as strong and as fast as her nearest animal ancestors were." Nikanj paused, perhaps noticing the way Joseph was looking at Lilith. "The changes I've made are not hereditary," it said.

"You said you changed her genes!" Joseph charged.

"Body cells only. Not reproductive cells."

"But if you cloned her. .

"I will not clone her."

There was a long silence. Joseph looked at Nikanj, then stared long at Lilith. She spoke when she thought she had endured his stare long enough.

"If you want to go out and join the others, I'll open the wall," she said.

"Is that what you think?" he asked.

"That's what I fear," she whispered.

"Could you have prevented what was done to you?"

"I didn't try to prevent it." She swallowed. "They were going to give me this job no matter what I said. I told them they might as well kill me themselves. Even that didn't stop them. So when Nikanj and its mates offered me as much as they could offer, I didn't even have to think about it. I welcomed it."

After a time, he nodded.

"I'll give you some of what I gave her," Nikanj said. "I won't increase your strength, but I will enable you to heal faster, recover from injuries that might otherwise kill you. Do you want me to do this?"

"You're giving me a choice?"

"Yes."

"The change is permanent?"

"Unless you ask to be changed back."

"Side effects?"

"Psychological."

Joseph frowned. "What do you mean, psycho.. . Oh. So that's why you won't give me the strength."

"Yes."

"But you trust. . . Lilith."

"She has been Awake and living with my families for years. We know her. And, of course, we're always watching."

After a time, Joseph took Lilith's hands. "Do you see?" he asked gently. "Do you understand why they chose you-someone who desperately doesn't want the responsibility, who doesn't want to lead, who is a woman?"

The condescension in his voice first startled, then angered her. "Do I see, Joe? Oh, yes. I've had plenty of time to see."

He seemed to realize how he had sounded. "You have, yes-not that it helps to know."

Nikanj had shifted its attention from one of them to the other. Now it focused on Joseph. "Shall I make the change in you?" it asked.

Joseph released Lilith's hands. "What is it? Surgery? Something to do with blood or bone marrow?"

"You will be made to sleep. When you awake, the change will have been made. There won't be any pain or illness, no surgery in the usual sense of the word."

"How will you do it?"

"These are my tools." It extended both sensory arms. "Through them, I'll study you, then make the necessary adjustments. My body and yours will produce any substances I need."

Joseph shuddered visibly. "I. . . I don't think I could let you touch me."

Lilith looked at him until he turned to face her. "I was shut up for days with one of them before I could touch him," she said. "There were times... I'd rather take a beating than go through anything like that again."

Joseph moved closer to her, his manner protective. It was easier for him to give comfort than to ask for it. Now he managed to do both at once.

"How long are you going to stay here now?" he demanded of Nikanj.

"Not much longer. I'll come back. You'll probably feel less afraid when you see me again." It paused. "Eventually you must touch me. You must show at least that much control before I change you."

"I don't know. Maybe I don't want you to change me. I don't really understand what it is you do with those. . . those tentacles."

"Sensory arms, we call them in English. They're more than arms-much more-but the term is convenient." It focused its attention on Lilith and spoke in Oankali. "Do you think it would help if he saw a demonstration?"

"I'm afraid he would be repelled," she said.

"He's an unusual male. I think he might surprise you."

"No."

"You should trust me. I know a great deal about him."

"No! Leave him to me."

It stood up, unfolding itself dramatically. When she saw that it was about to leave, she almost relaxed. Then in a single swift sweep of motion, it stepped to her and looped a sensory arm around her neck forming an oddly comfortable noose. She was not afraid. She had been through this often enough to be used to it. Her first thoughts were concern for Joseph and anger at Nikanj.

Joseph had not moved. She stood between the two of them.

"It's all right," she told him. "It wanted you to see. This is all the contact it would need."

Joseph stared at the coil of sensory arm, looked from the arm to Nikanj and back to the arm again where it rested against Lilith's flesh. After a moment, he raised his hand toward it. He stopped. His hand twitched, drew back, then slowly reached out again. With only a moment's hesitation, he touched the cool, hard flesh of the sensory arm. His fingers rested on its hornlike tip and that tip twisted to grasp his wrist.

Now Lilith was no longer their intermediary. Joseph stood rigid and silent, sweating, but not trembling, his hand upright, fingers clawlike, a noose of sensory tentacle settled in a painless, unbreakable grip around the wrist.

With a sound that could have been the beginning of a scream, Joseph collapsed.

Lilith stepped to him quickly, but Nikanj caught him. He was unconscious. She said nothing until she had helped Nikanj put him on the bed. Then she caught it by the shoulders and turned it to face her.

"Why couldn't you let him alone!" she demanded. "I'm supposed to be in charge of them. Why didn't you just leave him to me?"

"Do you know," it said, "that no undrugged human has ever done that before? Some have touched us by accident this soon after meeting us, but no one has done it deliberately. I told you he was unusual."

"Why couldn't you let him alone!"

It unfastened Joseph's jacket and began to remove it. "Because there are already two human males speaking against him, trying to turn others against him. One has decided he's something called a faggot and the other dislikes the shape of his eyes. Actually, both are angry about the way he's allied himself with you. They would prefer to have you without allies. Your mate needs any extra protection I can give him now."

She listened, appalled. Joseph had talked about the danger to her. Had he known how immediate his own danger was?

Nikanj threw the jacket aside and lay down beside Joseph. It wrapped one sensory tentacle around Joseph's neck and the other around his waist, drawing Joseph's body close against its own.

"Did you drug him, or did he faint?" she asked-then wondered why she cared.

"I drugged him as soon as I grasped his arm. He had reached his breaking point, though. He might have fainted on his own. This way, he can be angry with me for drugging him, not for making him look weak in front of you."

She nodded. "Thank you."

"What is a faggot?" it asked.

She told it.

"But they know he's not that. They know he's mated with you."

"Yes. Well, there's been some doubt about me, too, I hear."

"None of them really believe it."

"Yet."

"Serve them by leading them, Lilith. Help us send as many of them borne as we can."

She stared at it for a long time, feeling frightened and empty. It sounded so sincere-not that that mattered. How could she become the leader of people who saw her as their jailer? On some level, a leader had to be trusted. Yet every act she performed that proved the truth of what she said also made her loyalties, and even her humanity suspect.

She sat down on the floor, cross-legged and at first stared at nothing. Eventually, her eyes were drawn to Nikanj holding Joseph on the bed. The pair did not move, though once she heard Joseph sigh. Was he no longer completely unconscious, then? Was he already learning the lesson all adult ooloi eventually taught? So much in only one day.

''Lilith?''

She jumped. Both Joseph and Nikanj had spoken her name, though clearly, only Nikanj was enough awake to know what it was saying. Joseph, drugged and under the influence of multiple neural links, would shadow everything Nikanj said or did unless Nikanj split its attention enough to stop him. Nikanj did not bother.

"I have adjusted him, even strengthened him a little, though he'll have to exercise to be able to use that to his best advantage. He will be more difficult to injure, faster to heal, and able to survive and recover from injuries that would have killed him before." Joseph unknowing, spoke every word exactly in unison with Nikanj.

"Stop that!" Lilith said sharply.

Nikanj altered its connection without missing a beat. "Lie here with us," it said, speaking alone. "Why should you be down there by yourself?"

She thought there could be nothing more seductive than an ooloi speaking in that particular tone, making that particular suggestion. She realized she had stood up without meaning to and taken a step toward the bed. She stopped, stared at the two of them. Joseph's breathing now became a gentle snore and he seemed to sleep comfortably against Nikanj as she had awakened to find him sleeping comfortably against her many times. She did not pretend outwardly or to herself that she would resist Nikanj's invitation-or that she wanted to resist it. Nikanj could give her an intimacy with Joseph that was beyond ordinary human experience. And what it gave, it also experienced. This was what had captured Paul Titus, she thought. This, not sorrow over his losses or fear of a primitive Earth.

She clenched her fists, holding back. "This won't help me," she said. "It will just make it harder for me when you're not around."

Nikanj freed one sensory arm from Joseph's waist and extended it toward her.

She stayed where she was for a moment longer, proving to herself that she was still in control of her behavior. Then she tore off her jacket and seized the ugly, ugly elephant's trunk of an organ, letting it coil around her as she climbed onto the bed. She sandwiched Nikanj's body between her own and Joseph's, placing it for the first time in the ooloi position between two humans. For an instant, this frightened her. This was the way she might someday be made pregnant with an other-than-human child. Not now while Nikanj wanted other work from her, but someday. Once it plugged into her central nervous system it could control her and do whatever it wanted.

She felt it tremble against her, and knew it was in.

7

She did not lose consciousness. Nikanj did not want to cheat itself of sensation. Even Joseph was conscious, though utterly controlled, unafraid because Nikanj kept him tranquil. Lilith was not controlled. She could lift a free hand across Nikanj to take Joseph's cool, seemingly lifeless hand.

"No," Nikanj said softly into her ear-or perhaps it stimulated the auditory nerve directly. It could do that- stimulate her senses individually or in any combination to make perfect hallucinations. "Only through me," its voice insisted.

Lilith's hand tingled. She released Joseph's hand and immediately received Joseph as a blanket of warmth and security, a compelling, steadying presence.

She never knew whether she was receiving Nikanj's approximation of Joseph, a true transmission of what Joseph was feeling, some combination of truth and approximation, or just a pleasant fiction.

What was Joseph feeling from her?

It seemed to her that she had always been with him. She had no sensation of shifting gears, no "time alone" to contrast with the present "time together." He had always been there, part of her, essential.

Nikanj focused on the intensity of their attraction, their union. It left Lilith no other sensation. It seemed, itself, to vanish. She sensed only Joseph, felt that he was aware only of her.

Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them tireless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.

Noon, evening, dusk, darkness.

Her throat hurt. Her first solitary sensation was pain-as though she had been shouting, screaming. She swallowed painfully and raised her hand to her throat, but Nikanj's sensory aim was there ahead of her and brushed her hand away. It laid its exposed sensory hand across her throat. She felt it anchor itself, sensory fingers stretching, clasping. She did not feel the tendrils of its substance penetrate her flesh, but in a moment the pain in her throat was gone.

"All that and you only screamed once," it told her.

"How'd you let me do even that?" she asked.

"You surprised me. I've never made you scream before." She let it withdraw from her throat, then moved languidly to stroke it. "How much of that experience was Joseph's and mine?" she asked. "How much did you make up?"

"I've never made up an experience for you," it said. "I won't have to for him either. You both have memories filled with experiences."

"That was a new one."

"A combination. You had your own experiences and his. He had his and yours. You both had me to keep it going much longer than it would have otherwise. The whole was. . . overwhelming."

She looked around. "Joseph?"

"Asleep. Very deeply asleep. I didn't induce it. He's tired. He's all right, though."

"He.. . felt everything I felt?"

"On a sensory level. Intellectually, he made his interpretations and you made yours."

"I wouldn't call them intellectual."

"You understand me."

"Yes." She moved her hand over its chest, taking a perverse pleasure in feeling its tentacles squirm, then flatten under her hand.

"Why do you do that?" it asked.

"Does it bother you?" she asked stilling her hand.

"No."

"Let me do it, then. I didn't used to be able to."

"I have to go. You should wash, then feed your people. Seal your mate in. Be certain you're the first to talk to him when he wakes."

She watched it climb over her, joints bending all wrong, and lower itself to the floor. She caught its hand before it could head for a wall. Its head tentacles pointed at her loosely in unspoken question.

"Do you like him?" she asked.

The point focused briefly on Joseph. "Ahajas and Dichaan are mystified," it said. "They thought you would choose one of the big dark ones because they're like you. I said you would choose this one-because he's like you."

"What?"

"During his testing, his responses were closer to yours than anyone else I'm aware of. He doesn't look like you, but he's like you."

"He might. . ." She forced herself to voice the thought. "He might not want anything more to do with me when he realizes what I helped you do with him."

"He'll be angry-and frightened and eager for the next time and determined to see that there won't be a next time. I've told you, I know this one."

"How do you know him so well? What have you had to do with him before?"

Its head and body smoothed so that even with its sensory arms, it resembled a slender, hairless, sexless human.

"He was the subject of one of my first acts of adult responsibility," it said. "I knew you by then, and I set out to find someone for you. Not another Paul Titus, but someone you would want. Someone who would want you. I examined memory records of thousands of males. This one might have been taught to parent a group himself, but when I showed other ooloi the match, they agreed that the two of you should be together."

"You. . . You chose him for me?"

"I offered you to one another. The two of you did your own choosing." It opened a wall and left her.

8

People gathered around silently, radiating hostility when Lilith called them out to eat. Most were already out, waiting for her sullenly, impatiently, hungrily. Lilith ignored their annoyance.

"It's about time," Peter Van Weerden muttered as she opened the various wall cabinets and people began to come forward and take food. This was the man who claimed she was not human, she recalled.

"If you're through screwing, that is," Jean Pelerin added. Lilith turned to look at Jean and managed to examine the woman's bruised, swollen face before Jean turned away.

Troublemakers. Only two of them out in the open so far. How long would that last?

"I'll be Awakening ten more people tomorrow," she said before anyone could leave. "You'll all be helping with them singly or in pairs." She paced alongside the food wall, automatically drawing her fingers around the circular cabinet openings, keeping them from closing while people chose what they wanted. Even the newest people were used to this, but Gabriel Rinaldi complained mildly.

"It's ridiculous for you to have to do that, Lilith. Make them stay open."

"That's the idea," she said. "They stay open for two or three minutes, then they close unless I touch them again." She stopped, took the last bowl of hot, spicy beans from one cabinet, and let it close. The cabinet would not begin to refill itself until the wall was sealed. She put the beans on the floor to one side for her own meal later. People sat around on the floor, eating from edible dishes. There was comfort in eating together-one of their few comforts. Groups formed and people talked quietly among themselves. Lilith was taking fruit for herself when Peter spoke from his group nearby. His group of Jean, Curt Loehr, and Celene Ivers.

"If you ask me, the walls are fixed that way to keep us from thinking about what we ought to do to our jailor," Peter said.

Lilith waited, wondering whether anyone would defend her. No one did,' though silence spread to other groups.

She drew a deep breath, walked over to Peter's group. "Things can change," she said quietly. "Maybe you can turn everybody here against me. That would make me a failure." She raised her voice slightly, though even her quiet words had carried. "That would mean all of you put back into suspended animation so that you can be separated and put through all this again with other people." She paused. "If that's what you want-to be split up, to begin again alone, to go through this however many times it takes for you to let yourself get all the way through it, keep trying. You might succeed."

She left him, took her food and joined Tate, Gabriel, and Leah.

"Not bad," Tate said when people had resumed their own conversations. "Clear warning to everyone. It's overdue."

"It won't work," Leah said. "These people don't know each other. What do they care if they have to start again?"

"They care," Gabriel told her. Even with his blue-black beard, he was one of the best looking men Lilith had ever seen. And he was still sleeping exclusively with Tate. Lilith liked him, but she was aware that he did not quite trust her. She could see that in his expression when she caught him watching her sometimes. Yet he was careful to keep her goodwill-keep his options open.

"They've made personal ties here," he said to Leah. "Think what they had before: War, chaos, family and friends dead. Then solitary. A jail cell and shit to eat. They care very much. So do you."

She turned to face him angrily, mouth already open, but the handsome face seemed to disarm her. She sighed and nodded sadly. For a moment she seemed close to tears.

"How many times can you have everyone taken from you and still have the will to start again?" Tate muttered.

As many times as it took, Lilith thought wearily. As many times as human fear, suspicion, and stubbornness made necessary. The Oankali were as patient as the waiting Earth.

She realized that Gabriel was staring at her.

"You're still worried about them, aren't you?" he asked.

She nodded.

"I think they believed you. All of them, not just Van Weerden and Jean."

"1 know. They'll believe me for a little while. Then some of them will decide I'm lying to them or that I've been lied to."

"Are you sure you haven't?" Tate asked.

"I'm sure I have," Lilith said bitterly. "By omission, at least."

"But then-"

"This is what I know," Lilith said: "Our rescuers, our captors are extraterrestrials. We are aboard their ship. I've seen and felt enough-including weightlessness-to be convinced that it is a ship. We're in space. And we're in the hands of people who manipulate DNA as naturally as we manipulate pencils and paintbrushes. That's what I know. That's what I've told you all. And if any of you decide to behave as though it isn't true, we'll all be lucky if we're just put to sleep and split up."

She looked at the three faces and forced a weary smile.

"End of speech," she said. "I'd better get something for Joseph."

"You should have gotten him out here," Tate said.

"Don't worry about it," Lilith told her.

"You could bring me a meal now and then," Gabriel said to her as Lilith left them.

"See what you've done!" Tate called after her.

Lilith found herself smiling an unforced smile as she took more food from the cabinets.. It was inevitable that some of the people she Awakened would disbelieve her, dislike her, distrust her. At least there were others she could talk to, relax with. There was hope if she could only keep the skeptics from self-destructing.

9

For a time, Joseph would not speak or take food from her hands. Once she understood this, she sat with him to wait. She had not Awakened him when she came back to the room, had sealed the room and slept beside him until his movements woke her. Now she sat with him, worried but feeling no real hostility from him. He did not seem to resent her presence.

He was sorting out his feelings, she thought. He was trying to understand what had happened.

She had put a few pieces of fruit on the bed between them. She had said, knowing he would not answer, "It was a neurosensory illusion. Nikanj stimulates nerves directly, and we remember or create experiences to suit the sensations. On a physical level, Nikanj feels what we feel. It can't read our thoughts. It can't get away with hurting us-unless it's willing to suffer the same pain." She hesitated. "It said it strengthened you a little. You'll have to be careful at first, and exercise. You won't get hurt easily. if something does happen to you you'll heal the way I do."

He had not spoken, had not looked at her, but she knew he had heard. There was nothing vacant about him.

She sat with him, waited, oddly comfortable, nibbling at the fruit now and then. After a time, she lay back, feet on the floor, body stretched across the bed. The movement attracted him.

He turned, stared at her as though he had forgotten she was there. "You should get up," he said. "The light's coming back. Morning."

"Talk to me," she said.

He rubbed his head. "It wasn't real? Not any of it?"

"We didn't touch each other."

He grabbed her hand and held it. "That thing. . . did it all."

"Neural stimulation."

"How?"

"They hook into our nervous systems somehow. They're more sensitive than we are. Anything we feel a little, they feel a lot-and they feel it almost before we're conscious of it. That helps them stop doing anything painful before we notice that they've begun."

"They've done it to you before?"

She nodded.

"With. . . other men?"

"Alone or with Nikanj's mates."

Abruptly, he got up and began to pace.

"They aren't human," she said.

"Then how can they. . .? Their nervous systems can't be like ours. How can they make us feel. . . what I felt?"

"By pushing the right electrochemical buttons. I don't claim to understand it. It's like a language that they have a special gift for. They know our bodies better than we do."

"Why do you let them. . . touch you?"

"To have changes made. The strength, the fast healing-"

He stopped in front of her, faced her. "Is that all?" he demanded.

She stared at him, seeing the accusation in his eyes, refusing to defend herself. "I liked it," she said softly. "Didn't you?"

"That thing will never touch me again if I have anything to say about it."

She did not challenge this.

"I've never felt anything like that in my life," he shouted.

She jumped, but said nothing.

"If a thing like that could be bottled, it would have out sold any illegal drug on the market."

"I'm going to Awaken ten people this morning," she said. "Will you help?"

"You're still going to do that?"

"Yes."

He breathed deeply. "Let's go then." But he did not move. He still stood watching her. "Is it. . . like a drug?" he asked.

"You mean am I addicted?"

"Yes."

"I don't think so. I was happy with you. I didn't want Nikanj here."

"I don't want him here again."

"Nikanj isn't male-and I doubt whether it really cares what either of us wants."

"Don't let him touch you! If you have a choice, keep away from him!"

The refusal to accept Nikanj's sex frightened her because it reminded her of Paul Titus. She did not want to see Paul Titus in Joseph.

"It isn't male, Joseph."

"What difference does that make!"

"What difference does any self-deception make? We need to know them for what they are, even if there are no human parallels-and believe me, there are none for the ooloi." She got up, knowing that she had not given him the promise he wanted, knowing that he would remember her silence. She unsealed the doorway and left the room.

10

Ten new people.

Everyone was kept busy trying to keep them out of trouble and give them some idea of their situation. The woman Peter was helping laughed in his face and told him he was crazy when he mentioned, as he said, "the possibility that our captors might somehow be extraterrestrials. . ."

Leah's charge, a small blond man, grabbed her, hung on, and might have raped her if he had been bigger or she smaller. She stopped him from doing any harm, but Gabriel had to help her get him off. She was surprisingly tolerant of the man's efforts. She seemed more amused than angry.

Nothing the new people did for the first few minutes was taken seriously or held against them. Leah's attacker was simply held until he stopped trying to get at her, until he grew quiet and began to look around at the many human faces, until he began to cry.

The man's name was Wray Ordway and a few days after his Awakening, he was sleeping with Leah with her full consent.

Two days after that, Peter Van Weerden and six followers seized Lilith and held her while a seventh follower, Derrick Wolski, swept a dozen or so leftover biscuits out of one of the food cabinets and climbed into it before it could close.

When Lilith realized what Derrick was doing she stopped struggling. There was no need to hurt anyone. The Oankali would take care of Derrick.

"What does he think he's going to do?" she asked Curt. He had taken part in holding her, though, of course Celene had not. He still held one of her arms.

Watching him, she shook the others off. Now that Derrick was gone from sight, they did not try hard to hold her. She knew now that if she had been willing to hurt or kill them, they could not have held her. She was not stronger than all six combined, but she was stronger than any two. And faster than any of them. The knowledge was not as comforting as it should have been.

"What's he supposed to be doing?" she repeated.

Curt released the arm she had left in his hands. "Finding out what's really going on," he said. "There are people refilling those cabinets and we intend to find out who they are. We want to get a look at them before they're ready to be seen-before they're ready to convince us they're Martians."

She sighed. He had been told that the cabinets refilled automatically. Just one more thing he had decided not to believe. "They're not Martians," she said.

He crooked his mouth in something less than a smile. "I knew that. I never believed your fairy tales."

"They're from another solar system," she said. "I don't know which one. It doesn't matter. They left it so long ago, they don't even know whether it still exists."

He cursed her and turned away.

"What's going to happen?" another voice asked.

Lilith looked around, saw Celene, and sighed. Wherever Curt was, Celene was trembling nearby. Lilith had matched them as well as Nikanj had matched her with Joseph. "I don't know," she said. "The Oankali won't let him get hurt, but I don't know whether they'll put him back in here."

Joseph strode up to her, obviously concerned. Someone had apparently gone to his room and told him what was going on.

"It's all right," she said. "Derrick has gone out to look at the Oankali." She shrugged at his look of alarm. "I hope they send back-or bring him back. These people are going to have to see for themselves."

"That could start a panic!" he whispered.

"I don't care. They'll recover. But if they keep doing stupid things like this, they'll eventually manage to hurt themselves."

Derrick was not sent back.

Eventually even Peter and Jean did not object when Lilith went to the wall and opened the cabinet to prove that Derrick had not asphyxiated inside. She had to open every cabinet in the general area of the one he had used because most of the others could not locate the individual cabinet on the broad, unmarked expanse of wall. Lilith had at first been surprised at her own ability to locate each one easily and exactly. Once she found them the first time she remembered their distance from floor and ceiling, from right and left walls. Some people, since they could not do this themselves, found the ability suspicious.

Some people found everything about her suspicious.

"What happened to Derrick!" Jean Pelerin demanded.

"He did something stupid," Lilith told her. "And while he was doing it, you helped hold me so that I couldn't stop him."

Jean drew back a little, spoke louder. "What happened to him?"

"I don't know."

"Liar!" The volume increased again. "What did your friends do to him? Kill him?"

"What ever happened to him, you're partly to blame," Lilith said. "Handle your own guilt." She looked around at other equally guilty, equally accusing faces. Jean never made her complaints privately. She needed an audience.

Lilith turned and went to her room. She was about to seal herself in when Tate and Joseph joined her. A moment later, Gabriel followed them in. He sat on the corner of Lilith's table and faced her.

"You're losing," he said flatly.

"You're losing," she countered. "If I lose, everyone loses."

"That's why we're here."

"If you have an idea, I'll listen."

"Give them a better show. Get your friends to help you impress them."

"My friends?"

"Look, I don't care. You say they're extraterrestrials. Okay. They're extraterrestrials. What the hell are they going to gain if those assholes out there kill you?"

"I agree. I was hoping they would send or bring Derrick back. They might still. But their timing is terrible."

"Joe says you can talk to them."

She turned to stare at Joseph in betrayal and surprise.

"Your enemies are gathering allies," he said. "Why should you be alone?"

She looked at Tate and the woman shrugged. "Those people out there are assholes," she said. "If they had a brain between them they'd shut up and open their eyes and ears until they had some idea what was really going on."

"That's all I hoped for," Lilith said. "I didn't expect it, but I hoped for it."

"Those are frightened people looking for someone to save them," Gabriel said. "They don't want reason or logic or your hopes or expectations. They want Moses or somebody to come and lead them into lives they can understand."

"Van Weerden can't do that," Lilith said.

"Of course he can't. But right now they think he can, and they're following. Next, he'll tell them the only way to get out of here is to knock you around until you tell all your secrets. He'll say you know the way out. And by the time its clear that you don't, you'll be dead."

Would she? He had no idea how long it would take to torture her to death. Her and Joseph. She looked at him bleakly.

"Victor Dominic," Joseph said. "And Leah and that guy she's picked up and Beatrice Dwyer and-"

"Potential allies?" Lilith asked.

"Yes, and we'd better hurry. I saw Beatrice with one of the guys from the other side this morning."

"Loyalties can change according to who people are sleeping with," Lilith said.

"So what!" demanded Gabriel. "So you don't trust anybody? So you wind up in pieces on the floor?"

Lilith shook her head. "I know it has to be done. So stupid, isn't it. It's like 'Let's play Americans against the Russians. Again.'"

"Talk to your friends," Gabriel said. "Maybe that's not the show they had in mind. Maybe they'll help you rewrite the script."

She stared at him, frowning. "Do you really talk like that?"

"Whatever works," he said.

11

The Oankali did not choose to play the part of Lilith's friends. When she sealed herself into her room and spoke to them, they neither appeared nor answered her calls. And they continued to hold Derrick. Lilith thought he had probably been made to sleep again.

None of this surprised her. She would organize the humans into a coherent unit or she would serve as a scapegoat for whoever else organized them. Nikanj and its mates would save her life if they could-if it seemed her life was in immediate danger. But beyond that, she was on her own.

But she did have powers. Or that was the way people thought of the things she could do with the walls and the suspended animation plants. Peter Van Weerden had nothing. Some people believed he had caused Derrick's disappearance, perhaps his death. Fortunately Peter was not eloquent enough, not charismatic enough to shift blame for this to Lilith-though he tried.

What he did manage to do was portray Derrick as a hero, a martyr who had acted for the group, who had at least tried to do something. What the hell was Lilith doing, he would demand. What was her group doing? Sitting on their hands, talking and talking, waiting for their captors to tell them what to do next.

People who favored action sided with Peter. People like Leah and Wray, Tate and Gabriel who were biding their time, waiting for more information or a real chance to escape sided with Lilith.

There were also people like Beatrice Dwyer who were afraid of any kind of action, but who had lost hope of ever controlling their own destinies These sided with Lilith in the hope of peace and continued life. They wanted, Lilith thought, only to be let alone. That was all many people had wanted before the war. It was the one thing they could not have, then or now.

Nevertheless, Lilith recruited these, too, and when she Awakened ten more people, she used only her recruits to help them. Peter's people were reduced to heckling and jeering. The new people saw them first as troublemakers.

Perhaps that was why Peter decided to impress his followers by helping one of them get a woman.

The woman, Allison Zeigler, had not yet found a man she liked, but she had chosen Lilith's side over Peter's. She screamed Lilith's name when Peter and the new man, Gregory Sebastes, stopped arguing with her and decided to drag her off to Gregory's room.

Lilith, alone in her own room, frowned, not certain what she had heard. Another fight?

Wearily, she put down the stack of dossiers that she had been going through in search of a few more allies. She went out and saw the trouble at once.

Two men holding a struggling woman between them. The trio was prevented from reaching any of the bedrooms by Lilith's people who stood blocking the way. And Lilith's people were prevented from reaching the trio by several of Peter's people.

A stand-off-potentially deadly.

"What the hell is she saving herself for?" Jean was domanding. "It's her duty to get together with someone. There aren't that many of us left."

"It's my duty to find out where I am and how to get free," Allison shouted. "Maybe you want to give whoever's holding us prisoner a human baby to fool around with, but I don't!"

"We pair off!" Curt bellowed, drowning her out. "One man, one woman. Nobody has the right to hold out. It just causes trouble."

"Trouble for who!" someone demanded.

"Who the shit are you to tell us our rights!" called someone else.

"What is she to you!" Gregory used his free hand to knock someone away from Allison. "Get your own damn woman!"

At that moment, Allison bit him. He cursed and hit her. She screamed, twisted her body violently. Blood streamed from her nose.

Lilith reached the crowd. "Stop," she called. "Let her go!" But her voice was lost in the many.

"Goddammit, stop!" She shouted in a voice that surprised even her.

People near her froze, staring at her, but the group around Allison was too involved to notice her until she reached it.

This was too familiar, too much like what Paul Titus had said and done.

She stepped up to the knot of people surrounding Allison, too furious to worry about their blocking her. Two of them caught her arms. She threw them aside without ever seeing their faces. For once she did not care what happened to them. Cavemen. Fools!

She grabbed Peter's free arm as he tried to hit her. She held the arm, squeezed it, twisted it.

Peter screamed and fell to his knees, his grip on Allison released, forgotten. For a moment, Lilith stared at him. He was garbage. Human garbage. How had she made the mistake of Awakening him? And what could she do with him now?

She threw him aside, not caring that he hit a nearby wall. The other man, Gregory Sebastes, held his ground. Curt stood beside him, challenging Lilith. They had seen what she had done to Peter, but they did not seem to believe it. They let her walk up to them.

She hit Curt hard in the stomach, doubling him, toppling him.

Gregory let go of Allison and lunged at Lilith.

She hit him, catching him in midair, snapping his head back, collapsing him to the floor unconscious.

Abruptly, all was still except for Curt's gasping and Peter's groaning-"My arm! Oh, god, my arm!"

Lilith looked at each of Peter's people, daring them to attack, almost wanting them to attack. But now five of them were injured, and Lilith was untouched. Even her own people stood back from her.

"There'll be no rape here," she said evenly. She raised her voice. "Nobody here is property. Nobody here has the right to the use of anybody else's body. There'll be no back-to-the-Stone-Age, caveman bullshit!" She let her voice drop to normal. "We stay human. We treat each other like people, and we get through this like people. Anyone who wants to be something less will have his chance in the forest. There'll be plenty of room for him to run away and play at being an ape."

She turned and walked back toward her room. Her body trembled with residual anger and frustration. She did not want the others to see her tremble. She had never come closer to losing control, killing people.

Joseph spoke her name softly. She swung around, ready to fight, then made herself relax as she recognized his voice. She stood looking at him, longing to go to him, but restraining herself. What did he think of what she had done?

"I know those guys don't deserve it," he said, "but some of them need help. Peter's arm is broken. The others... Can you get the Oankali to help them?"

Alarmed, she looked back at the carnage she had created. She drew a deep breath, managed to still her trembling. Then she spoke quietly in Oankali.

"Whoever is on watch, come in and check these people. Some of them may be badly hurt."

"Not so badly," a disembodied voice answered in Oankali. "The ones on the floor will heal without help. I'm in contact with them through the floor."

"What about the one with the broken arm?"

"We'll take care of him. Shall we keep him?"

"I'd love to have you keep him. But no, leave him with us. You're already suspected of being murderers."

"Derrick is asleep again."

"I thought so. What shall we do with Peter?"

"Nothing. Let him think for a while about his behavior."

"Ahajas?"

"Yes?"

Lilith drew another deep breath. "I'm surprised to realize how good it is to hear your voice."

There was no answer. Nothing more to be said. "What did he say?" Joseph wanted to know. "She. She said no one was seriously hurt. She said the Oankali would take care of Peter after he's had time to think about his behavior."

"What do we do with him until then?"

"Nothing."

"I thought they wouldn't talk to you," Gabriel said, his voice filled with unconcealed suspicion. He and Tate and a few others had come over to her. They stood back cautiously.

"They talk when they want to," she said. "This is an emergency so they decided to talk."

"You knew that one, didn't you?"

She looked at Gabriel. "Yes, I knew her."

"I thought so. Your tone and the way you looked when you talked to her.. . You relaxed more, seemed almost wistful."

"She knows 1 never wanted this job."

"Was she a friend?"

"As much as it's possible to be friends with someone of a totally different species." She gave a humorless laugh. "It's hard enough for human beings to be friends with each other."

Yet she did think of Ahajas as a friend-Ahajas, Dichaan, Nikanj. . . But what was she to them? A tool? A pleasurable perversion? An accepted member of the household? Accepted as what? Round and round. It would have been easier not to care. Down on Earth, it would not matter. The Oankali used her relentlessly for their own purposes, and she worried about what they thought of her.

"How can you be this strong?" Tate demanded. "How can you do all this?"

Lilith rubbed a hand over her face wearily. "The same way I can open walls," she said. "The Oankali changed me a little. I'm strong. I move fast. I heal fast. And all that is supposed to help me get as many of you as possible through this experience and back on Earth." She looked around. "Where's Allison?"

"Here." The woman stepped forward. She had already cleaned most of the blood from her face and now seemed to be trying to look as though nothing had happened. That was Allison. She would not be seen at anything less than her best for a moment longer than necessary.

Lilith nodded. "Well, I can see you're all right."

"Yes. Thank you." Allison hesitated. "Look, I really am grateful to you no matter what the truth turns out to be, but..."

"But?"

Allison looked down, then seemed to force herself to face Lilith again. "There isn't any nice way of saying this, but I've got to ask. Are you really human?"

Lilith stared at her, tried to raise indignation, but managed only weariness. How many times would she have to answer that question? And why did she bother? Would her words ease anyone's suspicions?

"This would be so goddamn much easier if I weren't human," she said. "Think about it. If I weren't human, why the hell would I care whether you got raped?"

She turned Once more toward her room, then stopped, turned back, remembering. "I'm Awakening ten more people tomorrow. The final ten."

12

There was a shuffling of people. Some avoided Lilith because they were afraid of her-afraid she was not human, or not human enough. Others came to her because they believed that she would win. They did not know what that would mean, but they thought it would be better to be with her than to have her as an enemy.

Her core group, Joseph, Tate and Gabriel, Leah and Wray did not change. Peter's core group shifted. Victor was added. He was a strong personality and he had been Awake longer than most people. That encouraged a few of the newer people to follow him.

Peter himself was replaced by Curt. Peter's broken arm kept him quiet, sullen, and usually alone in his room. Curt was brighter and more physically impressive anyway. He would probably have led the group from the first if he had moved a little faster.

Peter's arm remained broken, swollen, painful and useless for two days. On the night of the second day, he was healed. He slept late, missed breakfast, but when he awoke, his arm was no longer broken-and he was a badly frightened man. He could not simply pass off two days of debilitating pain as illusion or trickery. The bones of his arm had been broken, and badly broken. Everyone who looked at it had seen the displacement, the swelling, the discoloration. Everyone had seen that he could not use his hand.

Now everyone saw a whole arm, undistorted, normal, and a hand that worked easily and well. Peter's own people looked askance at him.

Following lunch on the day of his healing, Lilith told the people carefully censored stories of her life among the Oankali. Peter did not stay to listen.

"You need to hear these things more than the others do," she told him later. "The Oankali will be a shock even if you're prepared. They fixed your arm while you were asleep because they didn't want you terrified and fighting them while they tried to help you."

"Tell them how grateful I am," he muttered.

"They want sanity, not gratitude," she said. "They want-and I want-you to be bright enough to survive."

He stared at her with contempt so great that it made his face almost unrecognizable.

She shook her head, spoke softly. "I hurt you because you were trying to hurt another person. No one else has hurt you at all. The Oankali have saved your life. Eventually, they'll send you back to Earth to make a new life for yourself." She paused. "A little thought, Pete. A little sanity."

She got up to leave him. He said nothing to her, only watched her with hatred and contempt. "Now there are forty-three of us," she said. "The Oankali could show themselves anytime. Don't do anything that will make them keep you here alone."

She left him, hoping he would begin to think. Hoping, but not believing.

Five days after Peter's healing, the evening meal was drugged.

Lilith was not warned. She ate with the others, sitting off to one side with Joseph. She was aware as she ate of growing relaxation, a particular kind of comfort that made her think of- She sat up straight. What she felt now she had felt before only when she was with Nikanj, when it had established a neural link with her.

And the sweet fog of anticipation dissipated. Her body seemed to shrug it off and she was alert again. Nearby, other people still spoke to one another, laughing a little more than they had before. Laughter had never quite disappeared from the group, though at times it had been rare. There had been more fighting, more bed-hopping and less laughter for the past few days.

Now men and women had begun to hold hands, to sit closer to one another. They slipped arms around one another and sat together probably feeling better than they had since they had been Awakened. It was unlikely that any of them could shake off the feeling the way Lilith had. No ooloi had modified them.

She looked around to see whether the Oankali were coming in yet. There was no sign of them. She turned to Joseph who was sitting next to her frowning.

"Joe?"

He looked at her. The frown smoothed away and he reached for her.

She let him draw her closer, then spoke into his ear. "The Oankali are about to come in. We've been drugged."

He shook off the drug. "I thought. . ." He rubbed his face. "1 thought something was wrong." He breathed deeply, then looked around. "There," he said softly.

She followed the direction of his gaze and saw that the wall between the food cabinets was rippling, opening. In at least eight places, Oankali were coming in.

"Oh no," Joseph said, stiffening, looking away. "Why didn't you leave me comfortably drugged?"

"Sorry," she said, and rested her hand on his arm. He had had only one brief experience with one Oankali. Whatever happened might be almost as hard on him as it was on the others. "You're modified," she said. "I don't think the drug could have held you once things got interesting."

More Oankali came through the openings. Lilith counted twenty-eight altogether. Would that be enough to handle forty-three terrified humans when the drug wore off?

People seemed to react to the nonhuman presence in slow motion. Tate and Gabriel stood up together, leaning on each other, staring at the Oankali. An ooloi approached them and they drew back. They were not terrified as they could have been, but they were frightened.

The ooloi spoke to them and Lilith realized it was Kahguyaht.

She stood up, staring at the trio. She could not distinguish individual words in what Kahguyaht was saying, but its tone was not one she would have associated with Kahguyaht. The tone was quiet, calming, oddly compelling. It was a tone Lilith bad learned to associate with Nikanj.

Somewhere else in the room, a scuffle broke out. Curt, in spite of the drug, had attacked the ooloi that approached him. All the Oankali present were ooloi.

Peter tried to go to Curt's aid, but behind him, Jean screamed, and he turned back to help her.

Beatrice fled from her ooloi. She managed to run several steps before it caught her. It wrapped one sensory arm around her and she collapsed unconscious.

Around the room, other people collapsed-all the fighters, all the runners. No form of panic was tolerated.

Tate and Gabriel were still awake. Leah was awake, but Wray was unconscious. An ooloi seemed to be calming her, probably assuring her that Wray was all right.

Jean was still awake in spite of her momentary panic, but Peter was down.

Celene was awake and frozen in place. An ooloi touched her, then jerked away as though in pain. Celene had fainted.

Victor Dominic and Hilary Ballard were awake and together, holding one another, though they had shown no interest in one another until now.

Allison screamed and threw food at her ooloi, then turned and ran. Her ooloi caught her, but kept her conscious, probably because she did not struggle. She went rigid, but seemed to listen as her ooloi spoke soothingly.

Elsewhere in the room, small groups of people, supporting one another, confronted the ooloi without panic. The drug had quieted them just enough. The room was a scene of quiet, strangely gentle chaos.

Lilith watched Kahguyaht with Tate and Gabriel. The ooloi was sitting down now, facing them, talking to them, even giving them time to stare at the way its joints bent and the way its sensory tentacles followed movement. When it moved, it moved very slowly. When it spoke, Lilith could hear none of the hectoring contempt or amused tolerance that she was used to.

"You know that one?" Joseph asked.

"Yes. It's one of Nikanj's parents. 1 never got along with it.,'

Across the room, Kahguyaht's head tentacles swept in her direction for a moment and she knew it had heard. She considered saying more, giving it an earful-figuratively.

But before she could begin, Nikanj arrived. It stood before Joseph and looked at him critically. "You're doing very well," it said. "How do you feel?"

"I'm all right."

"You will be." It glanced at Tate and Gabriel. "Your friends won't be, I think. Not both of them, anyway."

"What? Why not?"

Nikanj rustled its tentacles. "Kahguyaht will try. I warned it, and it admits I have a talent for humans, but it wants them badly. The woman will survive, but the man may not."

"Why!" Lilith demanded.

"He may choose not to. But Kahguyaht is skillful. Those two humans are the calmest in the room apart from you two." It focused for a moment on Joseph's hands, on the fact that he had gouged one with the nails of the other and that the gouged hand was dripping blood onto the floor.

Nikanj shifted its attention, even turning its body away from Joseph. Its instinct was to help, to heal a wound, stop pain. Yet it knew enough to let Joseph go on hurting himself for now.

"What are you doing, foretelling the future?" Joseph asked. His voice was a harsh whisper. "Gabe will kill himself?"

"Indirectly, he might. I hope not. I can't foretell anything. Maybe Kahguyaht will save him. He's worth saving. But his past behavior says he will be hard to work with." It reached out and took Joseph's hands, apparently unable to stand the gouging any longer.

"You were only given a weak, ooloi-neutral drug in your food," it told him. "I can help you with something better."

Joseph tried to pull away, but it ignored his effort. It examined the hand he had injured, then further tranquilized him, all the while talking to him quietly.

"You know I won't hurt you. You're not afraid of being hurt or of pain. And your fear of my strangeness will pass eventually. No, be still. Let your body go limp. Let it relax. If your body is relaxed, it will be easier for you to handle your fear. That's it. Lean back against this wall. I can help you maintain this state without blurring your intellect. You see?"

Joseph turned his head to look at Nikanj, then turned away, his movements slow, almost languid, belying the emotion behind them. Nikanj moved to sit next to him and maintain its hold on him. "Your fear is less than it was," it said. "And even what you feel now will pass quickly."

Lilith watched Nikanj work, knowing that it would drug Joseph only lightly-perhaps stimulate the release of his own endorphins and leave him feeling relaxed and slightly high. Nikanj's words, spoken with quiet assurance, only reinforced new feelings of security and well-being.

Joseph sighed. "I don't understand why the sight of you should scare me so," Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. "You don't look that threatening. Just. . . very different."

"Different is threatening to most species," Nikanj answered. "Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it's true for you." Nikanj smoothed its head tentacles. "It's safer for your people to overcome the feeling on an individual basis than as members of a large group. That's why we've handled this the way we have." It looked around at individuals and pairs of humans, each with an ooloi.

Nikanj focused on Lilith. "It would have been easier for you to be handled this way-with drugs, with an adult ooloi."

"Why wasn't I?"

"You were being prepared for me, Lilith. Adults believed you would be best paired with me during my subadult stage. Jdahya believed he could bring you to me without drugs, and he was right."

Lilith shuddered. "I wouldn't want to go through anything like that again."

"You won't. Look at your friend Tate."

Lilith turned and saw that Tate had extended a hand to Kahguyaht. Gabriel grabbed it and hauled it back, arguing.

Tate said only a few words while Gabriel said many, but after a while, he let her go. Kahguyaht had not moved or spoken. It waited. It let Tate look at it again, perhaps build up her courage again. When she extended her hand again, it seized the hand in a coil of sensory arm in a move that seemed impossibly swift, yet gentle, nonthreatening. The arm moved like a striking cobra, yet there was that strange gentleness. Tate did not even seem startled.

"How can it move that way?" Lilith murmured.

"Kahguyaht was afraid she would not have the courage to finish the gesture," Nikanj said. "It was right, I think."

"I drew back any number of times."

"Jdahya had to make you do all the work yourself. He couldn't help."

"What will happen now?" Joseph asked.

"We'll stay with you for several days. When you're used to us, we'll take you to the training floor we've created-the forest." It focused on Lilith. "For a little while, you won't have any duties. I could take you and your mate outside for a while, show him more of the ship."

Lilith looked around the room. There were no more struggles, no manifest terror. People who could not control themselves were unconscious. Others were totally focused on their ooloi and suffering through confused combinations of fear and drug-induced well-being.

"I'm the only human who has any idea what's going on," she said. "Some of them might want to talk to me."

Silence.

"Yeah. What about it, Joe? Want to look around outside?"

He frowned. "What just didn't get said?"

She sighed. "The humans here aren't going to want us near them for a while. In fact, you may not want them near you. It's a reaction to the ooloi drugs. So we can stay here and be ignored or we can go outside."

Nikanj coiled the end of one sensory arm around her wrist, prompting her to consider a third possibility. She said nothing, but the eagerness that suddenly blossomed in her was so intense, it was suspicious.

"Let go!" she said.

It released her, but was now completely focused on her. It had felt her body's leap of response to its wordless suggestion- or to its chemical suggestion.

"Did you do that?" she demanded. "Did you. . . inject something."

"Nothing." It wrapped its free sensory arm around her neck. "Oh, but I will 'inject something.' We can go out later." it stood up, bringing them both up with it.

"What?" Joseph said as he was hauled to his feet. "What's happening?"

No one answered him, but he did not resist being guided into Lilith's bedroom. As Lilith sealed the doorway, he asked again, "What's going on?"

Nikanj slid its sensory arm from Lilith's neck. "Wait," it told her. Then it focused on Joseph, releasing him, but not moving away. "The second time will be the hardest for you. I left you no choice the first time. You could not have understood what there was to choose. Now you have some small idea. And you have a choice."

He understood now. "No!" he said sharply. "Not again."

Silence.

"I'd rather have the real thing!"

"With Lilith?"

"Of course." He looked as though he would say something more, but he glanced at Lilith and fell silent.

"Rather with any human than with me," Nikanj supplied softly.

Joseph only stared at it.

"And yet I pleased you. I pleased you very much."

"Illusion!"

"Interpretation. Electrochemical stimulation of certain nerves, certain parts of your brain... What happened was real. Your body knows how real it was. Your interpretations were illusion. The sensations were entirely real. You can have them again-or you can have others."

"No!"

"And all that you have, you can share with Lilith."

Silence.

"All that she feels, she'll share with you." It reached out and caught his hand in a coil of sensory arm. "I won't hurt you. And I offer a oneness that your people strive for, dream of, but can't truly attain alone."

He pulled his arm free. "You said I could choose. I've made my choice!"

"You have, yes." It opened his jacket with its many-fingered true hands and stripped the garment from him. When he would have backed away, it held him. It managed to lie down on the bed with him without seeming to force him down. "You see. Your body has made a different choice."

He struggled violently for several seconds, then stopped. "Why are you doing this?" he demanded.

"Close your eyes."

"What?"

"Lie here with me for a while and close your eyes."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing. Close your eyes."

"I don't believe you."

"You're not afraid of me. Close your eyes."

Silence.

After a long while, he closed his eyes and the two of them lay together. Joseph held his body rigid at first, but slowly, as nothing happened, he began to relax. Sometime later his breathing evened and he seemed to be asleep.

Lilith sat on the table, waiting, watching. She was patient and interested. This might be her only chance ever to watch close up as an ooloi seduced someone. She thought it should have bothered her that the "someone" in this case was Joseph. She knew more than she wanted to about the wildly conflicting feelings he was subject to now.

Yet, in this matter, she trusted Nikanj completely. It was enjoying itself with Joseph. It would not spoil its enjoyment by hurting him or rushing him. In a perverse way, Joseph too was probably enjoying himself, though he could not have said so.

Lilith was dozing when Nikanj stroked Joseph's shoulders, rousing him. His voice roused her.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

"Waking you."

"I wasn't asleep!"

Silence.

"My god," he said after a while. "I did fall asleep, didn't I? You must have drugged me."

"No."

He rubbed his eyes, but made no effort to get up.

"Why didn't you. . . just do it?"

"I told you. This time you can choose."

"I've chosen! You ignored me."

"Your body said one thing. Your words said another." It moved a sensory arm to the back of his neck, looping one coil loosely around his neck. "This is the position," it said. "I'll stop now if you like."

There was a moment of silence, then Joseph gave a long sigh. "I can't give you-or myself-permission," he said. "No matter what I feel, I can't."

Nikanj's head and body became mirror smooth. The change was so dramatic that Joseph jumped and drew back. "Does that . . . amuse you somehow?" he asked bitterly.

"It pleases me. It's what I expected."

"So. . . what happens now?"

"You are very strong-willed. You can hurt yourself as badly as you think necessary to achieve a goal or hold to a conviction."

"Let go of me."

It smoothed its tentacles again. "Be grateful, Joe. I'm not going to let go of you."

Lilith saw Joseph's body stiffen, struggle, then relax, and she knew Nikanj had read him correctly. He neither struggled nor argued as Nikanj positioned him more comfortably against its body. Lilith saw that he had closed his eyes again, his face peaceful. Now he was ready to accept what he had wanted from the beginning.

Silently, Lilith got up, stripped off her jacket, and went to the bed. She stood over it, looking down. For a moment, she saw Nikanj as she had once seen Jdahya-as a totally alien being, grotesque, repellant beyond mere ugliness with its night crawler body tentacles, its snake head tentacles, and its tendency to keep both moving, signaling attention and emotion.

She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away.

The moment passed, left her almost gasping. She jumped when Nikanj touched her with the tip of a sensory arm. She stared at it for a moment longer wondering how she had lost her horror of such a being.

Then she lay down, perversely eager for what it could give her. She positioned herself against it, and was not content until she felt the deceptively light touch of the sensory hand and felt the ooloi body tremble against her.

13

Humans were kept drugged for days-drugged, and guarded, each individual or pair by an ooloi.

"Imprinting is the best word for what they're doing," Nikanj told Joseph. "Imprinting, chemical and social."

"What you're doing to me!" Joseph accused.

"What I'm doing to you, what I've done to Lilith. It has to be done. No one will be returned to Earth without it."

"How long will they be drugged?"

"Some are not heavily drugged now. Tate Marah isn't. Gabriel Rinaldi is." It focused on Joseph. "You aren't. You know."

Joseph looked away. "No one should be."

"In the end, no one will be. We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves. We teach you more pleasant things to do."

"That's not enough!"

"It's a beginning."

14

Peter's ooloi proved that ooloi were not infallable. Drugged, Peter was a different man. For perhaps the first time since his Awakening, he was at peace, not fighting even with himself, not trying to prove anything, joking with Jean and their ooloi about his arm and the fighting.

Lilith, hearing this later, wondered what there was to laugh at in that incident. But the ooloi-produced drugs could be potent. Under their influence, Peter might have laughed at anything. Under their influence, he accepted union and pleasure. When that influence was allowed to wane and Peter began to think, he apparently decided he had been humiliated and enslaved. The drug seemed to him to be not a less painful way of getting used to frightening nonhumans, but a way of turning him against himself, causing him to demean himself in alien perversions. His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.

Peter's ooloi should have noticed that at some point what Peter said and the expression he assumed ceased to agree with what his body told it. Perhaps it did not know enough about human beings to handle someone like Peter. It was older than Nikanj-more a contemporary of Kahguyaht. But it was not as perceptive as either of them-and perhaps not as bright.

Sealed in Peter's room, alone with Peter, it allowed itself to be attacked, pounded by Peter's bare fists. Unfortunately for Peter, he hit a sensitive spot with his first hammering blow, and triggered the ooloi's defensive reflexes. It gave him a lethal sting before it could regain control of itself and he collapsed in convulsions. His own contracting muscles broke several of his bones, then he went into shock.

The ooloi tried to help him once it had recovered from the worst of its own pain, but it was too late. He was dead. The ooloi sat down beside his body, its head and body tentacles drawn into hard lumps. It did not move or speak. Its cool flesh grew even cooler, and it seemed to be as dead as the human it was apparently mourning.

There were no Oankali on watch above. Peter might have been saved if there had been. But the great room was full of ooloi. Where was the need to keep watch?

By the time one of these ooloi noticed Jean sitting alone and forlorn outside the sealed room, it was too late. There was nothing to do but take Peter's body out and send for the ooloi's mates. The ooloi remained catatonic.

Jean, still lightly drugged, frightened, and alone, retreated from the people clustering around the room. She stood apart and watched as the body was carried out. Lilith noticed her, approached her, knowing she couldn't help, but hoping at least to give comfort.

"No!" Jean said, backing toward a wall. "Get away!"

Lilith sighed. Jean was going through a prolonged period of ooloi-induced reclusiveness. All of the humans who had been kept heavily drugged were this way-unable to tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them. Neither Lilith nor Joseph had experienced this extreme reaction. Lilith had hardly noticed any reaction at all beyond an increased aversion to Kahguyaht back when Nikanj matured and bound her to it. More recently, Joseph had reacted by simply staying close to Lilith and Nikanj for a couple of days. Then his reaction passed. Jean's was far from passing. What would happen to her now?

Lilith looked around for Nikanj. She spotted it in a cluster of ooloi, went to it and laid a hand on its shoulder.

It focused on her without turning or breaking the various sensory tentacle and sensory arm contacts it had with the others. She spoke to the point of a thin cone of head tentacles.

"Can't you help Jean?"

"Help is coming for her."

"Look at her! She's going to break before it gets here." The cone focused on Jean. She had wedged herself into a corner. Now she stood crying silently and looking around in confusion. She was a tall, strongly built woman. Now, though, she looked like a large child.

Nikanj detached itself from the other ooloi, apparently ending whatever communication was going on. The other ooloi relaxed away from one another. They went to their various human charges who stood waiting for them in widely separated ones and twos. The moment the news of the death had gone around, every human except Lilith and Jean had been drugged heavily. Nikanj had refused to drug Lilith. It trusted her to control her own behavior and the other ooloi trusted it. As for Jean, there was no one present who could drug her without harming her.

Nikanj closed to within about ten feet of Jean. It stopped there and waited until she saw it.

She trembled, but did not try to cringe further into her corner.

"I won't come closer," Nikanj said softly. "Others will come to help you. You aren't alone."

"But. . . But I am alone," she whispered. "They're dead. I saw them."

"One is dead," Nikanj corrected, keeping its voice low. She hid her face in her hands and shook her head from side to side.

"Peter is dead," Nikanj told her, "but Tehjaht is only... injured. And you have siblings coming to help."

"What?''

"They'll help you."

She sat down on the floor, head down, voice muffled when she spoke. "I've never had any brothers or sisters. Not even before the war."

"Tehjaht has mates. They'll take care of you."

"No. They'll blame me . . . because Tehjaht is hurt."

"They'll help you." Very softly. "They'll help both you and Tehjaht. They will help."

She frowned, looking more childlike than ever as she tried to understand. Then her face changed. Curt, heavily drugged, edged along the wall toward her. He kept himself comfortably far from Nikanj, but moved a little too close to Jean. She cringed back from him.

Curt shook his head, took a step backward. "Jeanie?" he called, his heavy voice sounding too loud, sounding drunk.

Jean jumped, but said nothing.

Curt faced Nikanj. "She's one of ours! We should be the ones to take care of her!"

"It isn't possible," Nikanj said.

"It should be possible! It should be! Why isn't it?"

"Her bonding with her ooloi is too strong, too heavily reinforced--as yours is with your ooloi. Later when the bond is more relaxed, you'll be able to go near her again. Later. Not now."

"Goddammit, she needs us now!"

"No."

Curt's ooloi came up to him, took him by the arm. Curt would have pulled away, but suddenly his strength seemed to leave him. He stumbled, fell to his knees. Nearby, Lilith looked away. Curt was as unlikely to forgive any humbling as Peter had been. And he would not always be drugged. He would remember.

Curt's ooloi helped Curt to his feet and led him away to the room he now shared with it and with Celene. As he left, the wall opened at the far end of the room and a male and female Oankali came in.

Nikanj gestured to the pair and they came toward it. They held on to one another, walking as though wounded, as though holding one another up. They were two when they should have been three, missing an essential part.

The male and female made their way to Nikanj, and past it to Jean. Frightened, Jean stiffened. Then she frowned as though something had been said, and she had not quite heard.

Lilith watched sadly, knowing that the first signals Jean received were olfactory. The male and female smelled good, smelled like family, all brought together by the same ooloi, When they took her hands, they felt right. There was a real chemical affinity.

Jean seemed still to be afraid of the two strangers, but she was also relieved. They were what Nikanj had said they would be. People who could help. Family.

She let them lead her into the room where Tehjaht sat frozen. No words had been spoken. Strangers of a different species had been accepted as family. A human friend and ally had been rejected.

Lilith stood staring after Jean, hardly aware of Joseph's coming to stand beside her. He was drugged, but the drug had only made him reckless.

"Peter was right," he said angrily.

She frowned. "Peter? Right to try to kill? Right to die?"

"He died human! And he almost managed to take one of them with him!"

She looked at him. "So what? What's changed? On Earth we can change things. Not here."

"Will we want to by then? What will we be, I wonder? Not human. Not anymore."

IV

THE TRAINING FLOOR

1

The training room was brown and green and blue. Brown, muddy ground was visible through thin, scattered leaf litter. Brown, muddy water flowed past the land, glittering in the light of what seemed to be the sun. The water was too laden with sediment to appear blue, though above it, the ceiling- the sky-was a deep, intense blue. There was no smoke, no smog, only a few clouds-remains of a recent rain.

Across the wide river, there was the illusion of a line of trees on the opposite bank. A line of green. Away from the river, the predominant color was green. Above was the very real green canopy-trees of all sizes, many burdened with a profusion of other life: bromeliads, orchids, ferns, mosses, lichens, lianas, parasitic vines, plus a generous complement of insect life and a few frogs, lizards, and snakes.

One of the first things Lilith had learned during her own earlier training period was not to lean against the trees.

There were few flowers, and those mainly bromiliads and orchids, high in the trees. On the ground, a colorful stationary object was likely to be a leaf or some kind of fungus. Green was everywhere. The undergrowth was thin enough to walk through without difficulty except near the river where in some places a machete was essential-and not yet permitted.

"Tools will come later," Nikanj told Lilith. "Let the humans get used to being here now. Let them explore and see for themselves that they are in a forest on an island. Let them begin to feel what it's like to live here." It hesitated. "Let them settle more firmly into their places with their ooloi. They can tolerate one another now. Let them learn that it isn't shameful to be together with one another and with us."

It had gone with Lilith to the riverbank at a place where a great piece of earth had been undercut and had fallen into the river, taking several trees and much undergrowth with it. There was no trouble here in reaching the water, though there was a sharp drop of about ten feet. At the edge of the drop was one of the giants of the island-a huge tree with buttresses that swept well over Lilith's head and, like walls, separated the surrounding land into individual rooms. In spite of the great variety of life that the tree supported, Lilith stood between a pair of buttresses, two-thirds enclosed by the tree. She felt enveloped in a solidly Earthly thing. A thing that would soon be undercut as its neighbors had been, that would soon fall into the river and die.

"They'll cut the trees down, you know," she said softly. "They'll make boats or rafts. They think they're on Earth."

"Some of them believe otherwise," Nikanj told her. "They believe because you do."

"That won't stop the boat building."

"No. We won't try to stop it. Let them row their boats to the walls and back. There's no way out for them except the way we offer: to learn to feed and shelter themselves in this environment-to become self-sustaining. When they've done that, we'll take them to Earth and let them go."

It knew they would run, she thought. It must know. Yet it talked about mixed settlements, human and Oankali-trade partner settlements within which ooloi would control the fertility and "mix" the children of both groups.

She looked up at the sloping, wedge-shaped buttresses. Semi-enclosed as she was, she could not see Nikanj or the river. There was only brown and green forest-the illusion of wilderness and isolation.

Nikanj left her the illusion for a while. It said nothing, made no sound. Her feet tired and she looked around for something to sit on. She did not want to go back to the others any sooner than she had to. They could tolerate one another again now; the most difficult phase of their bonding was over. There was very little drugging still going on. Curt and Gabriel were still drugged along with a few others. Lilith worried about these. Oddly, she also admired them for being able to resist conditioning. Were they strong, then? Or simply unable to adapt?

"Lilith?" Nikanj said softly.

She did not answer.

"Let's go back."

She had found a dry, thick liana root to sit on. It hung like a swing, dropping down from the canopy, then curving upward again to lock itself into the branches of a nearby smaller tree before dropping to the ground and digging in. The root was thicker than some trees and the few insects on it looked harmless. It was an uncomfortable seat-twisted and hard-but Lilith was not yet ready to leave it.

"What will you do with the humans who can't adapt?" she asked.

"If they aren't violent, we'll take them to Earth with the rest of you." Nikanj came around the buttress, destroying her sense of solitude and home. Nothing that looked and moved as Nikanj did could come from home. She got up wearily and walked with it.

"Have the ants bitten you?" it asked.

She shook her head. It did not like her to conceal small injuries. It considered her health very much its business, and looked after her insect bites-especially her mosquito bites-at the end of each day. She thought it would have been easier to have left mosquitoes out of this small simulation of Earth. But Oankali did not think that way. A simulation of a tropical forest of Earth had to be complete with snakes, centipedes, mosquitoes and other things Lilith would have preferred to live without. Why should the Oankali worry, she thought cynically. Nothing bit them.

"There are so few of you," Nikanj said as they walked. "No one wants to give up on any of you."

She had to think back to realize what it was talking about.

"Some of us thought we should hold off bonding with you until you were brought here," it told her. "Here it would have been easier for you to band together, become a family."

Lilith glanced at it uneasily, but said nothing. Families had children. Was Nikanj saying children should be conceived and born here?

"But most of us couldn't wait," it continued. It wrapped a sensory arm around her neck loosely. "It might be better for both our peoples if we were not so strongly drawn to you."

2

Tools, when they were finally handed out, were waterproof tarpaulins, machetes, axes, shovels, hoes, metal pots, rope, hammocks, baskets, and mats. Lilith spoke privately with each of the most dangerous humans before they were given their tools.

One more try, she thought wearily.

"I don't care what you think of me," she told Curt. "You're the kind of man the human race is going to need down on Earth. That's why I woke you. I want you to live to get down there." She hesitated. "Don't go Peter's way, Curt."

He stared at her. Only recently free of the drug, only recently capable of violence, he stared.

"Make him sleep again!" Lilith told Nikanj. "Let him forget! Don't give him a machete and wait for him to use it on someone."

"Yahjahyi thinks he'll be all right," Nikanj said. Yahjahyi was Curt's ooloi.

"Does it?" Lilith said. "What did Peter's ooloi think?"

"It never told anyone what it thought. As a result, no one realized it was in trouble. Incredible behavior. I said it would be better if we weren't so drawn to you."

She shook her head. "If Yahjahyi thinks Curt is all right, it's deluding itself."

"We've observed Curt and Yahjahyi," Nikanj said. "Curt will go through a dangerous time now, but Yahjahyi is ready. Even Celene is ready."

"Celene!" Lilith said with contempt.

"You did a good job matching them. Much better than with Peter and Jean."

"I didn't match Peter and Jean. Their own temperaments did-like fire and gasoline."

"...yes. Anyway, Celene is not ready to lose another mate. She'll hold on to him. And Curt, since he sees her as much more vulnerable than she is, will have good reason not to risk himself, not to chance leaving her alone. They'll be all right."

"They won't," Gabriel told her later. He too was free of the drug, finally, but he was handling it better. Kahguyaht, who had been so eager to push Lilith, coerce her, ridicule her, seemed to be infinitely patient with Tate and Gabriel.

"Look at things from Curt's point of view," Gabriel said. "He's not in control even of what his own body does and feels. He's taken like a woman and.. . . No, don't explain!" He held up his hand to stop her from interrupting. "He knows the ooloi aren't male. He knows all the sex that goes on is in his head. It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter! Someone else is pushing all his buttons. He can't let them get away with that."

Honestly frightened, Lilith asked, "How have you... made your peace with it?"

"Who says I have?"

She stared at him. "Gabe, we can't lose you, too."

He smiled. Beautiful, perfect, white teeth. They made her think of some predator. "I don't take the next step," he said, "until I see where I'm standing now. You know I still don't believe this isn't Earth."

"I know."

"A tropical forest in a space ship. Who'd believe that?"

"But the Oankali. You can see that they're not of Earth."

"Sure. But they're here now on what sure looks, sounds, and smells like Earth."

"It isn't."

"So you say. Sooner or later I'll find out for myself."

"Kahguyaht could show you things that would make you sure now. They might even convince Curt."

"Nothing will convince Curt. Nothing will reach him."

"You think he'll do what Peter did?"

"Much more efficiently."

"Oh god. Did you know they put Jean back into suspended animation? She won't even remember Peter when she wakes up."

"I heard. That will make it easier on her when they put her with another guy, I guess."

"Is that what you would want for Tate?" He shrugged, turned, and walked away.

3

Lilith taught all the humans to make thatch shingles and place them in overlapping rows on rafters so that they would not leak. She showed them the best trees to cut for flooring and frame. They all worked several days to construct a large thatch-roofed cabin on stilts, well above the river's highwater mark. The cabin was a twin to the one they had all squeezed into so far-the one Lilith and the ooloi had constructed then the ooloi brought them all through the miles of corridors to the training room.

The ooloi left this second construction strictly to the humans. They watched or sat talking among themselves or disappeared on errands of their own. But when the work was finished they brought in a small feast to celebrate.

"We won't provide food for much longer," one of them told the group. "You'll learn to live on what grows here and to cultivate gardens."

No one was surprised. They had already been cutting hands of green bananas from existing trees and hanging them from beams or from the porch railing. As the bananas ripened, the humans discovered they had to compete with the insects for them.

A few people had also been cutting pineapples and picking papayas and breadfruits from existing trees. Most people did not like the breadfruit until Lilith showed them the seeded form of the fruit, the breadnut. When they roasted the seeds as she instructed and ate them, they realized they had been eating them all along back in the great room.

They had pulled sweet cassava from the ground and dug up the yams Lilith had planted during her own training.

Now it was time for them to begin planting their own crops.

And, perhaps, now it was time for the Oankali to begin to see what they would harvest in their human crop.

Two men and a woman took their allotted tools and vanished into the forest. They did not really know enough yet to be on their own, but they were gone. Their ooloi did not go after them.

The group of ooloi put their head tentacles and sensory arms together for a moment and seemed to come to a very fast agreement None of them would pay any attention to the three missing people.

"No one has escaped," Nikanj told Joseph and Lilith when they asked what would be done. "The missing people are still on the island. They're being watched."

"Watched through all these trees?" Joseph demanded.

"The ship is keeping track of them. If they're hurt, they'll be taken care of."

Other humans left the settlement. As the days passed, some of their ooloi seemed acutely uncomfortable. They kept to themselves, sat rock still, their head and body tentacles drawn into thick, dark lumps that looked, as Leah said, like grotesque tumors. These ooloi could be shouted at, rained on, tripped over. They never moved. When their head tentacles ceased to follow the movements of those around them, their mates arrived to tend them.

Male and female Oankali came out of the forest and took charge of their particular ooloi. Lilith never saw any of them called, but she saw one pair arrive.

She had gone alone to a place on the river where there was a heavily laden breadnut tree. She had climbed the tree, not only to get the fruit, but to enjoy the solitude and the beauty of the tree. She had never been much of a climber even as a child, but during her training, she had developed climbing skill and confidence-and a love of being so close to something so much of Earth.

From the tree, she saw two Oankali come out of the water. They did not seem to swim in toward land, but simply stood up near shore and walked in. Both focused on her for a moment, then headed inland toward the settlement.

She had watched them in utter silence, but they had known she was there. One more male and female, come to rescue a sick, abandoned ooloi.

Would it give the humans a feeling of power to know that they could make their ooloi feel sick and abandoned? Ooloi did not endure well when bereft of all those who carried their particular scent, their particular chemical marker. They lived. Metabolisms slowed, they retreated deep within themselves until called back by their families or, less satisfactorily, by another ooloi behaving as a kind of physician. So why didn't they go to their mates when their humans left? Why did they stay and get sick?

Lilith walked back to the settlement, a long crude basket filled with breadnuts on her back. She found the male and female ministering to their ooloi holding it between them and entangling its head and body tentacles with their own. Wherever the three touched, tentacles joined them. It was an intimate, vulnerable position, and other ooloi lounged nearby, guarding without seeming to guard. There were also a few humans watching. Lilith looked around the settlement, wondering how many of the humans not present would not come back from their day of wandering or food gathering. Did those who left come together on some other part of the island? Had they built a shelter? Were they building a boat? A wild thought struck her: What if they were right? What if they somehow were on Earth? What if it were possible to row a boat to freedom? What if, in spite of all she had seen and felt, this was some kind of hoax? How would it be perpetrated? Why would it be perpetrated? Why would the Oankali go to so much trouble?

No. She did not understand why the Oankali had done some of what they had done, but she believed the basics. The ship. The Earth, waiting to be recolonized by its people. The Oankali's price for saving the few remaining fragments of humanity.

But more people were leaving the settlement. Where were they? What if-The thought would not let her alone no matter what facts she felt she knew. What if the others were right?

Where had the doubt come from?

That evening as she brought in a load of firewood, Tate blocked her path.

"Curt and Celene are gone," she said quietly. "Celene let it slip to me that they were leaving."

"I'm surprised it took them so long."

"I'm surprised Curt didn't brain an Oankali before he left."

Nodding in agreement, Lilith stepped around her and put down her load of wood.

Tate followed and again planted herself in Lilith's path.

"What?" Lilith asked.

"We're going too. Tonight." She kept her voice very low-though no doubt more than one Oankali heard her.

"Where?"

"We don't know. Either we'll find the others or we won't. We'll find something-or make something."

"Just the two of you?"

"Four of us. Maybe more."

Lilith frowned, not knowing how to feel. She and Tate had become friends. Wherever Tate was going, she would not escape. If she did not injure herself or anyone else, she would probably be back.

"Listen," Tate said, "I'm not just telling you for the hell of it. We want you to go with us."

Lilith steered her away from the center of the camp. The Oankali would hear no matter what they did, but there was no need to involve other humans.

"Gabe has already talked to Joe," Tate said. "We want-"

"Gabe what!"

"Shut up! You want to tell everyone? Joe said he'd go. Now what about you?"

Lilith stared at her hostilely. "What about me?"

"I need to know now. Gabe wants to leave soon."

"If I leave with you, we'll leave after breakfast tomorrow morning."

Tate, being Tate, said nothing. She smiled.

"I didn't say I was going. All I mean is that there's no reason to sneak away in the night and step on a coral snake or something. It's pitch black out there at night."

"Gabe thinks we'll have more time before they discover we're gone."

"Where's his mind-and yours? Leave tonight and they'll notice you're gone by tomorrow morning-if you don't wake everyone on your way out by tripping over something or someone. Leave tomorrow morning and they won't notice you're gone until tomorrow night at dinner." She shook her head. "Not that they'll care. They haven't so far. But if you want to slip away, at least do it in a way that will give you a chance to find shelter before nightfall-or in case it rains."

"When it rains," Tate said. "It always rains sooner or later. We thought. . . maybe once we were clear of this place, we'd cross the river, head north, keep heading north until we found a dryer, cooler climate."

"If we are on Earth, Tate, considering what was done to Earth and especially to the northern hemisphere, south would be a better direction."

Tate shrugged. "You don't get a vote unless you come with us."

"I'll talk to Joe."

"But--''

"And you ought to get Gabe to help you with your acting. I haven't said a thing you and Gabe hadn't already thought of. Neither of you is stupid. And you, at least, are no good at bullshitting people."

Characteristically, Tate laughed. "I used to be." She sobered. "Okay, yeah. We've pretty much worked out the best way of doing it-tomorrow morning and south and with someone who probably knows how to stay alive in this country better than anyone but the Oankali."

There was a silence.

"We really are on an island, you know," Lilith said.

"No, I don't know," Tate answered. "But I'm willing to take your word for it. We'll have to cross the river."

"And in spite of what we see on what seems to be the other side, I believe we'll find a wall over there."

"In spite of the sun, the moon and the stars? In spite of the rain and the trees that have obviously been here for hundreds of years?"

Lilith sighed. "Yes."

"All because the Oankali said so."

"And because of what I saw and felt before I Awoke you."

"What the Oankali let you see and made you feel. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff Kahguyaht has made me feel."

"Wouldn't I?"

"I mean, you can't trust what they do to your senses!"

"I knew Nikanj when it was too young to do anything to my senses without my being aware of it."

Tate looked away, stared toward the river where the glint of water could still be seen. The sun-artificial or real-had not quite vanished and the river looked browner than ever.

"Look," she said, "I don't mean anything by this, but I have to say it. You and Nikanj. . ." She let her voice die, abruptly looked at Lilith as though demanding a response. "Well?"

"Well, what?''

"You're closer to him-to it-than we are to Kahguyaht. You..."

Lilith stared at her silently.

"Hell, all I mean is, if you won't go with us, don't try to stop us."

"Has anyone tried to stop anyone from leaving?"

"Just don't say anything. That's all."

"Maybe you are stupid," Lilith said softly.

Tate looked away again and shrugged. "I promised Gabe I'd get you to promise."

"Why?"

"He thinks if you give your word, you'll keep it."

"Otherwise, I'll run and tell, right?"

"I'm beginning not to care what you do."

Lilith shrugged, turned and started back toward camp. It seemed to take Tate several seconds to see that she meant it. Then she ran after Lilith, pulled her back away from the camp.

"All right, I'm sorry you're insulted," Tate rasped. "Now are you going or aren't you?"

"You know the breadnut tree up the bank-the big one?"

"Yes?"

"If we're going, we'll meet you there after breakfast tomorrow."

"We won't wait long."

"Okay."

Lilith turned and walked back to camp. How many Oankali had heard the exchange? One? A few? All of them? No matter. Nikanj would know in minutes. So it would have time to send for Ahajas and Dichaan. It would not have to sit and go catatonic like the others.

In fact, she still wondered why the others had not done it. Surely they had known that their chosen humans were leaving. Kahguyaht would know. What would it do?

Something occurred to her suddenly-a memory of tribal people sending their sons out to live for a while alone in the forest or desert or whatever as a test of manhood.

Boys of a certain age who had been taught how to live in the environment were sent out to prove what they had learned.

Was that it? Train the humans in the basics, then let them go out on their own when they were ready?

Then why the catatonic ooloi?

"Lilith?"

She jumped, then stopped and let Joseph catch up with her. They walked together to the fire where people were sharing baked yams and Brazil nuts from a tree someone had stumbled upon.

"Did you talk to Tate?" he asked. She nodded.

"What did you tell her?" "That I'd talk to you." Silence.

"What do you want to do?" she asked.

"Go."

She stopped, turned to look at him, but his face told her nothing.

"Would you leave me?" she whispered.

"Why would you stay? To be with Nikanj?"

"Would you leave me?"

"Why would you stay?" The whispered words had the impact of a shout.

"Because this is a ship. Because there's nowhere to run."

He looked up at the bright half moon and at the first scattering of stars. "I've got to see for myself," he said softly. "This feels like home. Even though I've never been in a tropical forest before in my life, but this smells and tastes and looks like home."

" . . . I know." "I've got to see!" "Yes."

"Don't make me leave you."

She seized his hand as though it were an animal about to escape.

"Come with us!" he whispered.

She closed her eyes, shutting out the forest and the sky, the people talking quietly around the fire, the Oankali, several physically joined in silent conversation. How many of the Oankali had heard what she and Joseph were saying? None of them behaved as though they had heard.

"All right," she said softly. "I'll go."

4

Joseph and Lilith found no one waiting at the breadnut tree after breakfast the next morning. Lilith had seen Gabriel leave camp, carrying a large basket, his ax, and his machete as though intending to chop wood. People did that as they saw need just as Lilith took her own machete, ax, and baskets and went to gather forest foods when she saw need. She took people with her when she wanted to teach and went alone when she wanted to think.

This morning only Joseph was with her. Tate had left camp before breakfast. Lilith suspected that she might have gone to one of the gardens Lilith and Nikanj's family had planted. There she could dig cassava or yams or cut papayas, bananas, or pineapple. It would not help much. They would soon have to live on what they found in the forest.

Lilith carried roasted breadnuts both because she liked them and because they were a good source of protein. She also carried yams, beans, and cassava. At the bottom of her basket she carried extra clothing, a hammock of light, strong Oankali cloth, and a few sticks of dry tinder.

"We won't wait much longer," Joseph said. "They should be here. Maybe they've come and gone."

"More likely they'll be here as soon as they decide we weren't followed. They'll want to be sure 1 haven't sold them out, told the Oankali."

Joseph looked at her, frowned. "Tate and Gabe?"

"Yes."

"I don't think so."

She shrugged.

"Gabe said you should get out for your own good. He said he'd heard people beginning to talk against you again- now that they can think for themselves again."

"I'll be going toward the dangerous ones, Joe, not away from them. So will you."

He stared at the river for a while, then put his arm around her. "Do you want to go back?"

"Yes. But we won't."

He did not argue. She resented his silence, but accepted it. He wanted to go that badly. His feeling that he was on Earth was that strong.

Sometime later, Gabriel led Tate, Leah, Wray, and Allison to the breadnut tree. He stopped, stared at Lilith for a moment. She was certain he had heard all she had said.

"Let's go," she said.

They headed upriver by mutual consent since no one really wanted to head back toward camp. They stayed near the river to avoid getting lost. This meant occasionally hacking their way through undergrowth and aerial roots, but no one seemed to mind.

In the humidity, everyone perspired freely. Then it began to rain. Beyond walking more carefully in the mud, no one paid any attention. The mosquitoes bothered them less. Lilith slapped at a persistent one. There would be no Nikanj tonight to heal her insect bites, no gentle, multiple touches of sensory tentacles and sensory hands. Was she the only one who would miss them?

The rain ceased eventually. The group walked on until the sun was directly overhead. Then they sat on the wet trunk of a fallen tree, ignoring fungi and brushing away insects.

They ate breadnuts and the ripest of the bananas Tate had brought. They drank from the river, having long ago learned to ignore the sediment. It couldn't be seen in the handfuls of water that they drank, and it was harmless.

There was strangely little conversation. Lilith went aside to relieve herself and when she stepped clear of the tree that had concealed her, every eye was on her. Then abruptly everyone found something else to notice-one another, a tree, a piece of food, their fingernails.

"Oh god, " Lilith muttered. And more loudly: "Let's talk, people." She stood before the fallen tree that they either sat or leaned on. "What is it?" she asked. "Are you waiting for me to desert you and go back to the Oankali? Or maybe you think I have some magic way of signaling them from here? What is it you suspect me of?"

Silence.

"What is it, Gabe?"

He met her gaze levelly. "Nothing." He spread his hands. "We're nervous. We don't know what's going to happen. We're scared. You shouldn't have to take the brunt of our feelings, but. . . but you're the different one. Nobody knows how different."

"She's here!" Joseph said, moving to stand beside her. "That should tell you how much like us she is. Whatever we risk, she risks it too."

Allison slid down off the log. "What is it we risk?" she demanded. She spoke directly to Lilith. "What will happen to us?"

"I don't know. I've guessed, but my guesses aren't worth much."

"Tell us!"

Lilith looked at the others, saw them all waiting. "I think these are our final tests," she said. "People leave camp when they feel ready. They live as best they can. If they can sustain themselves here, they can sustain themselves on Earth. That's why people have been allowed to walk away. That's why no one chases them."

"We don't know that no one chases them," Gabriel said.

"No one is chasing us."

"We don't even know that."

"When will you let yourself know it?"

He said nothing. He stared upriver with an air of impatience.

"Why did you want me on this trip, Gabe? Why did you personally want me here?"

"I didn't. I just-"

"Liar."

He frowned, glared at her. "I just thought you deserved a chance to get away from the Oankali-if you wanted it."

"You thought I might be useful! You thought you'd eat better and be better able to survive out here. You didn't think you were doing me a favor, you thought you were doing yourself one. It could work out that way." She looked around at the others. "But it won't. Not if everyone's sitting around waiting for me to play Judas." She sighed. "Let's go."

"Wait," Allison said as people were getting up. "You still think we're on a ship, don't you?" she asked Lilith.

Lilith nodded. "We are on a ship."

"Does anyone else here think so?" Allison demanded.

Silence.

"I don't know where we are," Leah said. "I don't see how all this could be part of a ship, but whatever it is, wherever it is, we're going to explore it and figure it out. We'll know soon."

"But she already knows," Allison insisted. "Lilith knows this is a ship no matter what the truth is. So what's she doing here?"

Lilith opened her mouth to answer but Joseph spoke first. "She's here because I want her here. I want to explore this place as badly as you all do. And I want her with me."

Lilith wished she had come from behind her tree and pretended not to notice all the eyes and all the silence. All the suspicion.

"Is that it?" Gabriel asked. "You came because Joe asked you to?"

"Yes," she said softly.

"Otherwise you would have stayed with the Oankali?"

"I would have stayed at camp. After all, I know I can live out here. If these are final tests, I've already passed mine."

"And what kind of grade did the Oankali give you?" It was probably the most honest question he had ever asked her-filled with hostility, suspicion, and contempt.

"It was a pass-fail course, Gabe. A live-die course." She turned and began walking upriver, breaking trail. After a while, she heard them following.

5

Upriver was the oldest part of the island, the part with the greatest number of huge old trees, many with broad buttresses. This land had once been connected to the mainland-had become first a peninsula, then an island as the river changed course and cut through the connecting neck of land. Or that was what was supposed to have happened. That was the Oankali illusion. Or was it an illusion?

Lilith found her moments of doubt coming more often as she walked. She had not been along this bank of the river. Like the Oankali, she had not worried about getting lost. She and Nikanj had walked through the interior several times, and she had found it easier to look up at the green canopy and believe herself within a vast room.

But the river seemed so large. As they followed the bank, the far bank changed, seemed nearer, seemed more heavily forested here, more deeply eroded there, ranged from low bluffs to flat bank that slipped into the river, blending almost seamlessly with its reflection. She could pick out individual trees-treetops anyway. Those that towered above the canopy.

"We should stop for the night," she said when the sun told her it was late afternoon. "We should make camp here and tomorrow, we should start to build a boat."

"Have you been here before?" Joseph asked her.

"No. But I've been near here. The opposite bank is as close to us as it gets in this area. Let's see what we can do about shelter. It's going to rain again."

"Wait a minute," Gabriel said.

She looked at him and knew what was coming. She had taken charge out of habit. Now she would hear about it.

"I didn't invite you along to tell us what to do," he said. "We're not in the prison room now. We don't take orders from you."

"You brought me along because I had knowledge you didn't have. What do you want to do? Keep walking until it's too late to put up a shelter? Sleep in the mud tonight? Find a wider section of river to cross?"

"I want to find the others-if they're still free."

Lilith hesitated for a moment in surprise. "And if they're together." She sighed. "Is that what the rest of you want?"

"I want to get as far from the Oankali as I can," Tate said. "I want to forget what it feels like when they touch me."

Lilith pointed. "If that's land over there instead of some kind of illusion, then that's your goal. Your first goal anyway."

"We find the others first!" Gabriel insisted.

Lilith looked at him with interest. He was in the open now. Probably in his mind he was in some kind of struggle with her. He wanted to lead and she did not-yet she had to. He could easily get someone killed.

"If we build a shelter now," she said, "I'll find the others tomorrow if they're anywhere nearby." She held up her hand to stop the obvious objection. "One or all of you can come with me and watch if you want to. It's just that I can't get lost. If I leave you and you don't move, I'll be able to find you again. If we all travel together, I can bring you back to this spot. After all, it's just possible that some or all of the others have already crossed the river. They've had time."

People were nodding.

"Where do we camp?" Allison asked.

"It's early," Leah protested.

"Not to me it isn't," Wray said. "Between the mosquitoes and my feet, I'm glad to stop."

"The mosquitoes will be bad tonight," Lilith told him. "Sleeping with an ooloi was better than any mosquito repellant. Tonight, they'll probably eat us alive."

"I can stand it," Tate said.

Had she hated Kahguyaht so much? Lilith wondered. Or was she only beginning to miss it and trying to defend herself against her own feelings?

"We can clear here," she said aloud. "Don't cut those two saplings. Wait a minute." She looked to see if either young tree were home to colonies of stinging ants. "Yes, these are all right. Find two more of this size or a little bigger and cut them. And cut aerial roots. Thin ones to use as -rope. Be careful. If anything stings or bites you out here.. . We're on our own. You could die. And don't go out of sight of this area. It's easier to get lost than you think."

"But you're so good you can't get lost," Gabriel said.

"Good has nothing to do with it. I have an eidetic memory and I've had more time to get used to the forest." She had never told them why she had an eidetic memory. Every Oankali change she had told them about had diminished her credibility with them.

"Too good to be true," Gabriel said softly.

They chose the highest ground they could find and built a shelter. They believed they would be using it for a few days, at least. The shelter was wall-less-no more than a frame with a roof. They could hang hammocks from it or spread mats beneath it on mattresses of leaves and branches. It was just large enough to keep everyone out of the rain. They roofed it with the tarpaulins some of them had brought. Then they used branches to sweep the ground beneath clean of leaves, twigs, and fungi.

Wray managed to get a fire going with a bow Leah had brought along, but he swore he would never do it again. "Too much work," he said.

Leah had brought corn from the garden. It was dark when they roasted it along with some of Lilith's yams. They ate these along with the last of the breadnuts. The meal was filling, though not satisfying.

"Tomorrow we can fish," Lilith told them.

"Without even a safety pin, a string, and a stick?" Wray said.

Lilith smiled. "Worse than that. The Oankali wouldn't teach me how to kill anything, so the only fish I caught were the ones stranded in some of the little streams. I cut a slender, straight sapling pole, sharpened one end, hardened it in the fire, and taught myself to spear fish. I actually did it-speared several of them."

"Ever try it with bow and arrow?" Wray asked.

"Yes. I was better with the spear."

"I'll try it," he said. "Or maybe I can even put together a jungle version of a safety pin and string. Tomorrow, while the rest of you look for the others, I'll start learning to fish.

"We'll fish," Leah said.

He smiled and took her hand-then let it go in almost the same motion. His smile faded and he stared into the fire. Leah looked away into the darkness of the forest.

Lilith watched them, frowning. What was going on? Was it just trouble between them-or was it something else?

It began to rain suddenly, and they sat dry and united by the darkness and the noise outside. The rain poured down and the insects took shelter with them, biting them and sometimes flying into the fire which had been built up again for light and comfort once the cooking was done.

Lilith tied her hammock to two crossbeams and lay down. Joseph hung his hammock near her-too near for a third person to lie between them. But he did not touch her. There was no privacy. She did not expect to make love. But she was bothered by the care he took not to touch her. She reached out and touched his face to make him turn toward her.

Instead, he drew away. Worse, if he had not drawn away, she would have. His flesh felt wrong somehow, oddly repellant. It had not been this way when he came to her before Nikanj moved in between them. Joseph's touch had been more than welcome. He had been water after a very long drought. But then Nikanj had come to stay. It had created for them the powerful threefold unity that was one of the most alien features of Oankali life. Had that unity now become a necessary feature of their human lives? If it had, what could they do? Would the effect wear off?

An ooloi needed a male and female pair to be able to play its part in reproduction, but it neither needed nor wanted two-way contact between that male and female. Oankali males and females never touched each other sexually. That worked fine for them. It could not possibly work for human beings.

She reached out and took Joseph's hand. He tried to jerk away reflexively, then he seemed to realize something was wrong. He held her hand for a long, increasingly uncomfortable moment. Finally it was she who drew away, shuddering with revulsion and relief.

6

The next morning just after dawn, Curt and his people found the shelter.

Lilith started awake, knowing that something was not right. She sat up awkwardly in the hammock and put her feet on the ground. Near Joseph, she saw Victor and Gregory. She turned toward them, relieved. Now there would be no need to look for the others. They could all get busy building the boat or raft they would need to cross the river. Everyone would find out for certain whether the other side was forest or illusion.

She looked around to see who else had arrived. That was when she saw Curt.

An instant later, Curt hit her across the side of the head with the flat of his machete.

She dropped to the ground, stunned. Nearby, she heard Joseph shout her name. There was the sound of more blows.

She heard Gabriel swearing, heard Allison scream.

She tried desperately to get up, and someone hit her again. This time she lost consciousness.

Lilith awoke to pain and solitude. She was alone in the small shelter she had helped build.

She got up, ignoring her aching head as best she could. It would stop soon.

Where was everyone?

Where was Joseph? He would not have deserted her even if the others did.

Had he been taken away by force? If so, why? Had he been injured and left as she had been?

She stepped out of the shelter and looked around. There was no one. Nothing.

She looked for some sign of where they had gone. She knew nothing in particular about tracking, but the muddy ground did show marks of human feet. She followed them away from the camp. Eventually, she lost them.

She stared ahead, trying to guess which way they had gone and wondering what she would do if she found them. At this point, all she really wanted to do was see that Joseph was all right. If he had seen Curt hit her, he would surely have tried to intervene.

She remembered now what Nikanj had said about Joseph having enemies. Curt had never liked him. Nothing had happened between the two of them in the great room or at the settlement. But what if something had happened now?

She must go back to the settlement and get help from the Oankali. She must get nonhumans to help her against her own people in a place that might or might not be on Earth.

Why couldn't they have left her Joseph? They had taken her machete, her ax, her baskets-everything except her hammock and her extra clothing. They could at least have left Joseph to see that she was all right. He would have stayed to do that if they had let him.

She walked back to the shelter, collected her clothing and hammock, drank water from a small, clear stream that fed into the river, and started back toward the settlement.

If only Nikanj were still there. Perhaps it could spy on the human camp without the humans' knowing, without fighting. Then if Joseph were there, he could be freed. . .if he wanted to be. Would he want it? Or would he choose to stay with the others who were trying to do the thing she had always wanted them all to do? Learn and run. Learn to live in this country, then lose themselves in it, go beyond the reach of the Oankali. Learn to touch one another as human beings again.

If they were on Earth as they believed, they might have a chance. If they were aboard a ship, nothing they did would matter.

If they were aboard a ship, Joseph would definitely be restored to her. But if they were on Earth...

She walked quickly, taking advantage of the path cleared the day before.

There was a sound behind her, and she turned quickly. Several ooloi emerged from the water and waded onto the bank to thrash their way through the thick bank undergrowth.

She turned and went back to them, recognizing Nikanj and Kahguyaht among them.

"Do you know where they've gone?" she asked Nikanj. "We know," it said. It settled a sensory arm around her neck.

She put her hand to the arm, securing it where it was, welcoming it in spite of herself. "Is Joe all right?"

It did not answer, and that frightened her. It released her and led her through the trees, moving quickly. The other ooloi followed, all of them silent, all clearly knowing where they were going and probably knowing what they would find there.

Lilith no longer wanted to know.

She kept their fast pace easily, staying close to Nikanj.

She almost slammed into it when it stopped without warning near a fallen tree.

The tree had been a giant. Even on its side, it was high and hard to climb, rotten and covered with fungi. Nikanj leaped onto it and off the other side with an agility Lilith could not match.

"Wait," it said as she began to climb the trunk. "Stay there." Then it focused on Kahguyaht. "Go on," it urged. "There could be more trouble while you wait here with me."

Neither Kahguyaht nor any of the other ooloi moved. Lilith noticed Curt's ooloi among them, and Allison's and- "Come over now, Lilith."

She climbed over the trunk, jumped down on the other side. And there was Joseph.

He had been attacked with an ax.

She stared, speechless, then rushed to him. He had been hit more than once-blows to the head and neck. His head had been all but severed from his body. He was already cold.

The hatred that someone must have felt for him... "Curt?" she demanded of Nikanj. "Was it Curt?"

"It was us," Nikanj said very softly.

After a time, she managed to turn from the grisly corpse and face Nikanj. "What?"

"Us," Nikanj repeated. "We wanted to keep him safe, you and I. He was slightly injured and unconscious when they took him away. He had fought for you. But his injuries healed. Curt saw the flesh healing. He believed Joe wasn't human."

"Why didn't you help him!" she screamed. She had begun to cry. She turned again to see the terrible wounds and did not understand how she could even look at Joseph's body so mutilated, dead. She had had no last words from him, no memory of fighting alongside him, no chance to protect him. Her last memory was of him flinching away from her too-human touch.

"I'm more different than he was," she whispered. "Why didn't Curt kill me?"

"I don't believe he meant to kill anyone," Nikanj said. "He was angry and afraid and in pain. Joseph had injured him when he hit you. Then he saw Joseph healing, saw the flesh mending itself before his eyes. He screamed. I've never heard a human scream that way. Then he. . . used his ax."

"Why didn't you help?" she demanded. "If you could see and hear everything, why-"

"We don't have an entrance near enough to this place."

She made a sound of anger and despair.

"And there was no sign that Curt meant to kill. He blames you for almost everything, yet he didn't kill you. What happened here was. . . totally unplanned."

She had stopped listening. Nikanj's words were incomprehensible to her. Joseph was dead-hacked to death by Curt. It was all some kind of mistake. Insanity!

She sat on the ground beside the corpse, first trying to understand, then doing nothing at all; not thinking, no longer crying. She sat. Insects crawled over her and Nikanj brushed them off. She did not notice.