Imago

1

I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed. Metamorphoses were not supposed to begin that way. Most people begin with small, obvious, physical changes—the loss of fingers and toes, for instance, or the budding of new fingers and toes of a different design.

I wish my experience had been that normal, that safe.

For several days, I changed without attracting attention. Early stages of metamorphosis didn’t normally last for days without bringing on deep sleep, but mine did. My first changes were sensory. Tastes, scents, all sensations suddenly became complex, confusing, yet unexpectedly seductive.

I had to relearn everything. River water, for instance: when I swam in it, I noticed that it had two distinctive major flavors—hydrogen and oxygen?—and many minor flavors. I could separate out and savor each one individually. In fact, I couldn’t help separating them. But I learned them quickly and accepted them in their new complexity so that only occasional changes in minor flavors demanded my attention.

Our river water at Lo always came to us clouded with sediment. “Rich,” the Oankali called it. “Muddy,” the Humans said, and filtered it or let the silt settle to the bottom before they drank it. “Just water,” we constructs said, and shrugged. We had never known any other water.

As quickly as I could, I learned again to understand and accept my sensory impressions of the people and things around me. The experience absorbed so much of my attention that I didn’t understand how my family could fail to see that something unusual was happening to me. But beyond mentioning that I was daydreaming too much, even my parents missed the signs.

They were, after all, the wrong signs. No one was expecting them, so no one noticed when they appeared.

All five of my parents were old when I was born. They didn’t look any older than my adult sisters and brothers, but they had helped with the founding of Lo. They had grandchildren who were old. I don’t think I had ever surprised them before. I wasn’t sure I liked surprising them now. I didn’t want to tell them. I especially didn’t want to tell Tino, my Human father. He was supposed to stay with me through my metamorphosis—since he was my same-sex Human parent. But I did not feel drawn to him as I should have. Nor did I feel drawn to Lilith, my birth mother. She was Human, too, and what was happening to me was definitely not a Human thing. Strangely I didn’t want to go to my Oankali father, Dichaan, either, and he was my logical choice after Tino. My Oankali mother, Ahajas, would have talked to one of my fathers for me. She had done that for two of my brothers who had been afraid of metamorphosis—afraid they would change too much, lose all signs of their Humanity. That could happen to me, though I had never worried about it. Ahajas would have talked to me and for me, no matter what my problem was. Of all my parents, she was the easiest to talk to. I would have gone to her if the thought of doing so had been more appealing—or if I had understood why it was so unappealing. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t shy or afraid, but when I thought of going to her, I felt first drawn, then

almost repelled.

Finally there was my ooloi parent, Nikanj.

It would tell me to go to one of my same-sex parents—one of my fathers. What else could it say? I knew well enough that I was in metamorphosis, and that that was one of the few things ooloi parents could not help with. There were still some Humans who insisted on seeing the ooloi as some kind of male-female combination, but the ooloi were no such thing. They were themselves—a different sex altogether.

So I went to Nikanj only hoping to enjoy its company for a while. Eventually it would notice what was happening to me and send me to my fathers. Until it did, I would rest near it. I was tired, sleepy. Metamorphosis was mostly sleep.

I found Nikanj inside the family house, talking to a pair of Human strangers. The Humans were standing back from Nikanj. The female was almost sheltering behind the male, and the male was making a painful effort to appear courageous. Both looked alarmed when they saw me open a wall and step through into the room. Then, as they got a look at me, they seemed to relax a little. I looked very Human—especially if they compared me to Nikanj, who wasn’t Human at all.

The Humans smelled most obviously of sweat and adrenaline, food and sex. I sat down on the floor and let myself work out the complex combinations of scents. My new awareness wouldn’t allow me to do anything else. By the time I was finished, I thought I would be able to track those two Humans through anything.

Nikanj paid no attention to me except to notice me when I came in. It was used to its children coming and going as they chose, used to all of us spending time with it, learning whatever it was willing to teach us.

It had an incredibly complex scent because it was ooloi. It had collected within itself not only the reproductive material of other members of the family but cells of other plant and animal species that it had dealt with recently. These it would study, memorize, then either consume or store. It consumed the ones it knew it could re-create from memory, using its own DNA. It kept the others alive in a kind of stasis until they were needed.

Its most noticeable underscent was Kaal, the kin group it was born into. I had never met its parents, but I knew the Kaal scent from other members of the Kaal kin group. Somehow, though, I had never noticed that scent on Nikanj, never separated it out this way.

The main scent was Lo, of course. It had mated with Oankali of the Lo kin group, and on mating, it had altered its own scent as an ooloi must. The word “ooloi” could not be translated directly into English because its meaning was as complex as Nikanj’s scent. “Treasured stranger.” “Bridge.” “Life trader.” “Weaver.” “Magnet.”

Magnet, my birth mother says. People are drawn to ooloi and can’t escape. She couldn’t, certainly. But then, neither could Nikanj escape her or any of its mates. The Oankali said the chemical bonds of mating were as difficult to break as the habit of breathing.

Scents

The two visiting Humans were longtime mates and smelled of each other.

“We don’t know yet whether we want to emigrate,” the female was saying. “We’ve come to see for ourselves and for our people.”

“You’ll be shown everything,” Nikanj told them. “There are no secrets about the Mars colony or travel to it. But right now the shuttles allotted to emigration are all in use. We have a guest area where Humans can wait.”

The two Humans looked at one another. They still smelled frightened, but now both were making an effort to look brave. Their faces were almost expressionless.

“We don’t want to stay here,” the male said. “We’ll come back when there’s a ship.”

Nikanj stood up—unfolded, as Humans say. “I can’t tell you when there’ll be a ship,” it said. “They arrive when they arrive. Let me show you the guest area. It isn’t like this house. Humans built it of cut wood.”

The pair stumbled back from Nikanj.

Nikanj’s sensory tentacles flattened against its body in amusement. It sat down again. “There are other Humans waiting in the guest area,” it told them gently. “They’re like you. They want their own all-Human world. They’ll be traveling with you when you go.” It paused, looked at me. “Eka, why don’t you show them?”

I wanted to stay with it now more than ever, but I could see that the two Humans were relieved to be turned over to someone who at least looked Human. I stood up and faced them.

“This is Jodahs,” Nikanj told them, “one of my younger children.”

The female gave me a look that I had seen too often not to recognize. She said, “But I thought

”

“No,” I said to her, and smiled. “I’m not Human. I’m a Human-born construct. Come out this way. The guest area isn’t far.”

They did not want to follow me through the wall I opened until it was fully open—as though they thought the wall might close on them, as though it would hurt them if it did.

“It would be like being grasped gently by a big hand,” I told them when we were all outside.

“What?” the male asked.

“If the wall shut on you. It couldn’t hurt you because you’re alive. It might eat your clothing, though.”

“No, thanks!”

I laughed. “I’ve never seen that happen, but I’ve heard it can.”

“What’s your name?” the female asked.

“All of it?” She looked interested in me—smelled sexually attracted, which made her interesting to me. Human females did tend to like me as long as I kept my few body tentacles covered by clothing and my few head tentacles hidden in my hair. The sensory spots on my face and arms looked like ordinary skin, though they didn’t feel ordinary.

“Your Human name,” the female said. “I already know

Eka and Jodahs, but I’m not sure which to call you.”

“Eka is just a term of endearment for young children,” I told her, “like lelka for married children and Chka between mates. Jodahs is my personal name. The Human version of my whole name is Jodahs Iyapo Leal Kaalnikanjlo. My name, the surnames of my birth mother and Human father, and Nikanj’s name beginning with the kin group it was born into and ending with the kin group of its Oankali mates. If I were Oankali-born or if I gave you the Oankali version of my name, it would be a lot longer and more complicated.”

“I’ve heard some of them,” the female said. “You’ll probably drop them eventually.”

“No. We’ll change them to suit our needs, but we won’t drop them. They give very useful information, especially when people are looking for mates.”

“Jodahs doesn’t sound like any name I’ve heard before,” the male said.

“Oankali name. An Oankali named Jodahs died helping with the emigration. My birth mother said he should be remembered. The Oankali don’t have a tradition of remembering people by naming kids after them, but my birth mother insisted. She does that sometimes—insists on keeping Human customs.”

“You look very Human,” the female said softly.

I smiled. “I’m a child. I just look unfinished.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Good god! When will you be considered an adult?”

“After metamorphosis.” I smiled to myself. Soon. “I have a brother who went through it at twenty-one, and a sister who didn’t reach it until she was thirty-three. People change when their bodies are ready, not at some specific age.”

She was silent for some time. We reached the last of the true houses of Lo—the houses that had been grown from the living substance of the Lo entity. Humans without Oankali mates could not open walls or raise table, bed, or chair platforms in such houses. Left alone in our houses, these Humans were prisoners until some construct, Oankali, or mated Human freed them. Thus, they had been given first a guest house, then a guest area. In that area they had built their dead houses of cut wood and woven thatch. They used fire for light and cooking and occasionally they burned down one of their houses. Houses that did not burn became infested with rodents and insects which ate the Human’s food and bit or stung the Humans themselves. Periodically Oankali went in and drove the non-Human life out. It always came back. It had been feeding on Humans, eating their food, and living in their buildings since long before the Oankali arrived. Still the guest area was reasonably comfortable. Guests ate from trees and plants that were not what they appeared to be. They were extensions of the Lo entity. They had been induced to synthesize fruits and vegetables in shapes, flowers, and textures that Humans recognized. The foods grew from what appeared to be their proper trees and plants. Lo took care of the Humans’ wastes, keeping their area clean, though they tended to be careless about where they threw or dumped things in this temporary place.

“There’s an empty house there,” I said, pointing.

The female stared at my hand rather than at where I pointed. I had, from a Human point of view, too many fingers and toes. Seven per. Since they were part of distinctly Human-looking hands and feet, Humans didn’t usually notice them at once.

I held my hand open, palm up so that she could see it, and her expression flickered from curiosity and surprise through embarrassment back to curiosity.

“Will you change much in metamorphosis?” she asked.

“Probably. The Human-born get more Oankali and the Oankali-born get more Human. I’m first-generation. If you want to see the future, take a look at some of the third and fourth-generations constructs. They’re a lot more uniform from start to finish.”

“That’s not our future,” the male said.

“Your choice,” I said.

The male walked away toward the empty house. The female hesitated. “What do you think of our emigration?” she asked.

I looked at her, liking her, not wanting to answer. But such questions should be answered. Why, though, were the Human females who insisted on asking them so often small, weak people? The Martian environment they were headed for was harsher than any they had known. We would see that they had the best possible chance to survive. Many would live to bear children on their new world. But they would suffer so. And in the end, it would all be for nothing. Their own genetic conflict had betrayed and destroyed them once. It would do so again.

“You should stay,” I told the female. “You should join us.”

“Why?”

I wanted very much not to look at her, to go away from her. Instead I continued to face her. “I understand that Humans must be free to go,” I said softly. “I’m Human enough for my body to understand that. But I’m Oankali enough to know that you will eventually destroy yourselves again.”

She frowned, marring her smooth forehead. “You mean another war?”

“Perhaps. Or maybe you’ll find some other way to do it. You were working on several ways before your war.”

“You don’t know anything about it. You’re too young.”

“You should stay and mate with constructs or with Oankali,” I said. “The children we construct are free of inherent flaws. What we build will last.”

“You’re just a child, repeating what you’ve been told!”

I shook my head. “I perceive what I perceive. No one had to tell me how to use my senses any more than they had to tell you how to see or hear. There is a lethal genetic conflict in Humanity, and you know it.”

“All we know is what the Oankali have told us.” The male had come back. He put his arm around the female, drawing her away from me as though I had offered some threat. “They could be lying for their own reasons.”

I shifted my attention to him. “You know they’re not,” I said softly. “Your own history tells you. Your people are intelligent, and that’s good. The Oankali say you’re potentially one of the most intelligent species they’ve found. But you’re also hierarchical—you and your nearest animal relatives and your most distant animal ancestors. Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient. The new was too often put at the service of the old. It will be again. You’re bright enough to learn to live on your new world, but you’re so hierarchical you’ll destroy yourselves trying to dominate it and each other. You might last a long time, but in the end, you’ll destroy yourselves.”

“We could last a thousand years,” the male said. “We did all right on Earth until the war.”

“You could. Your new world will be difficult. It will demand most of your attention, perhaps occupy your hierarchical tendencies safely for a while.”

“We’ll be free—us, our children, their children.”

“Perhaps.”

“We’ll be fully Human and free. That’s enough. We might even get into space again on our own someday. Your people might be dead wrong about us.”

“No.” He couldn’t read the gene combinations as I could. It was as though he were about to walk off a cliff simply because he could not see it—or because he, or rather his descendants, would not hit the rocks below for a long time. And what were we doing, we who knew the truth? Helping him reach the cliff. Ferrying him to it.

“We might outlast your people here on Earth,” he said.

“I hope so,” I told him. His expression said he didn’t believe me, but I meant it. We would not be here—the Earth he knew would not be here—for more than a few centuries. We, Oankali and construct, were space-going people, as curious about other life and as acquisitive of it as Humans were hierarchical. Eventually we would have to begin the long, long search for a new species to combine with to construct new life-forms. Much of Oankali existence was spent in such searches. We would leave this solar system in perhaps three centuries. I would live to see the leave-taking myself. And when we broke and scattered, we would leave behind a lump of stripped rock more like the moon than like his blue Earth. He did not know that. He would never know it. To tell him would be a cruelty.

“Do you ever think of yourself or your kind as Human?” the female asked. “Some of you look so Human.”

“We feel our Humanity. It helps us to understand both you and the Oankali. Oankali alone could never have let you have your Mars colony.”

“I heard they were helping!” the male said. “Your

your parent said they were helping!”

“They help because of what we constructs tell them: that you should be allowed to go even though you’ll eventually destroy yourselves. The Oankali believe

the Oankali know to the bone that it’s wrong to help the Human species regenerate unchanged because it will destroy itself again. To them it’s like deliberately causing the conception of a child who is so defective that it must die in infancy.”

“They’re wrong. Someday we’ll show them how wrong.”

It was a threat. It was meaningless, but it gave him some slight satisfaction. “The other Humans here will show you where to gather food,” I said. “If you need anything else, ask one of us.” I turned to go.

“So goddamn patronizing,” the male muttered.

I turned back without thinking. “Am I really?”

The male frowned, muttered a curse, and went back into the house. I understood then that he was just angry. It bothered me that I sometimes made them angry. I never intended to.

The female stepped to me, touched my face, examined a little of my hair. Humans who hadn’t mated among us never really learned to touch us. At best, they annoyed us by rubbing their hands over sensory spots, and once their hands found the spots they never liked them.

The female jerked her hand back when her fingers discovered the one below my left ear.

“They’re a little like eyes that can’t close to protect themselves,” I said. “It doesn’t exactly hurt us when you touch them, but we don’t like you to.”

“So what? You have to teach people how to touch you?”

I smiled and took her hand between my own. “Hands are always safe,” I said. I left her standing there, watching me. I could see her through sensory tentacles in my hair. She stood there until the male came out and drew her inside.

2

I went back to Nikanj and sat near it while it took care of family matters, while it met with people from the Oankali homeship, Chkahichdahk, which circled the Earth out beyond the orbit of the moon, while it exchanged information with other ooloi or took biological information from my siblings. We all brought Nikanj bits of fur, flesh, pollen, leaves, seeds, spores, or other living or dead cells from plants or animals that we had questions about or that were new to us.

No one paid any attention to me. There was an odd comfort in that. I could examine them all with my newly sharpened senses, see what I had never seen before, smell what I had never noticed. I suppose I seemed to doze a little. For a time, Aaor, my closest sibling—my Oankali-born sister—came to sit beside me. She was the child of my Oankali mother, and not yet truly female, but I had always thought of her as a sister. She looked so female—or she had looked female before I began to change. Now she

Now it looked the way it always should have. It looked eka in the true meaning of the word—a child too young to have developed sex. That was what we both were—for now. Aaor smelled eka. It could literally go either way, become male or female. I had always known this, of course, about both of us. But now, suddenly, I could no longer even think of Aaor as she. It probably would be female someday, just as I would probably soon become the male I appeared to be. The Human-born rarely change their apparent sex. In my family, only one Human-born had changed from apparent female to actual male. Several Oankali-born had changed, but most knew long before their metamorphosis that they felt more drawn to become the opposite of what they seemed.

Aaor moved close and examined me with a few of its head and body tentacles. “I think you’re close to metamorphosis,” it said. It has not spoken aloud. Children learned early that it was ill mannered to speak aloud among themselves if others nearby were having ongoing vocal conversations. We spoke through touch signals, signs, and multisensory illusions transmitted through head or body tentacles—direct neural stimulation.

“I am,” I answered silently. “But I feel

different.”

“Show me.”

I tried to re-create my increased sensory awareness for it, but it drew away.

After a time, it touched me again lightly. In tactile signals only, it said, “I don’t like it. Something’s wrong. You should show Dichaan.”

I did not want to show Dichaan. That was odd. I hadn’t minded showing Aaor. I felt no aversion to showing Nikanj—except that it would probably send me to my fathers.

“What about me disturbs you?” I asked Aaor.

“I don’t know,” it answered. “But I don’t like it. I’ve never felt it before. Something is wrong.” It was afraid, and that was odd. New things normally drew its attention. This new thing repelled it.

“It isn’t anything that will hurt you,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

It got up and went away. It didn’t say anything. It just left. That was out of character. Aaor and I had always been close. It was only three months younger than I was, and we’d been together since it was born. It had never walked away from me before. You only walk away from people you could no longer communicate with.

I went over to Nikanj. It was alone now. One of our neighbors had just left it. It focused a cone of its long head tentacles on me, finally noticing that there was something different about me.

“Metamorphosis, Eka?”

“I think so.”

“Let me check. Your scent is

strange.”

The tone of its voice was strange. I had been around when siblings of mine went into metamorphosis. Nikanj had never sounded quite that way.

It wrapped the tip of one sensory arm around my arm and extended its sensory hand. Sensory hands were ooloi appendages. Nikanj did not normally use them to check for metamorphosis. It could have used its head or body tentacles just like anyone else, but it was disturbed enough to want to be more precise, more certain.

I tried to feel the filaments of the sensory hand as they slipped through my flesh. I had never been able to before, but I felt them clearly now. There was no pain, of course. No communication. But I felt as though I had found what I had been looking for. The deep touch of the sensory hand was air after a long, blundering swim underwater. Without thinking I caught its second sensory arm between my hands.

Something went wrong then. Nikanj didn’t sting me. It wouldn’t do that. But something happened. I startled it. No, I shocked it profoundly—and it transmitted to me the full impact of that shock. Its multisensory illusions felt more real than things that actually happened, and this was worse than an illusion. This was a sudden, swift cycling of its own intense surprise and fear. From me to it to me. Closed loop.

I lost focus on everything else. I wasn’t aware of collapsing or of being caught in Nikanj’s two almost Human-looking strength arms. Later, I examined my latent memories of this and knew that for several seconds I had been simply held in all four of Nikanj’s arms. It had stood utterly still, frozen in shock and fear.

Finally, its shock ebbing, its fear growing, it put me on a broad platform. It focused a sharp cone of head tentacles on me and stood rock still again, observing. After a time it lay down beside me and helped me understand why it was so upset.

But by then, I knew.

“You’re becoming ooloi,” it said quietly.

I began to be afraid for myself. Nikanj lay alongside me. Its head and body tentacles did not touch me. It offered no comfort or reassurance, no movement, no sign that it was even conscious.

“Ooan?” I said. I hadn’t called it that for years. My older siblings called our parents by their names, and I had begun early to imitate them. Now, though, I was afraid. I did not want “Nikanj.” I wanted “Ooan,” the parent I had most often gone to or been carried to for healing or teaching. “Ooan, can’t you change me back? I still look male.”

“You know better,” it said aloud.

“But

”

“You were never male, no matter how you looked. You were eka. You know that.”

I said nothing. All my life, I had been referred to as “he” and treated as male by my Human parents, by all the Humans in Lo. Even Oankali sometimes said “he.” And everyone had assumed that Dichaan and Tino were to be my same-sex parents. People were supposed to feel that way so that I would be prepared for the change that should have happened.

But the change had gone wrong. Until now, no construct had become ooloi. When people reached adulthood and were ready to mate, they went to the ship and found an Oankali ooloi or they signaled the ship and an Oankali ooloi was sent down.

Human-born males were still considered experimental and potentially dangerous. A few males from other towns had been sterilized and exiled to the ship. Nobody was ready for a construct ooloi. Certainly nobody was ready for a Human-born construct ooloi. Could there be a more potentially deadly being?

“Ooan!” I said desperately.

It drew me against it, its head and body tentacles touching, then penetrating my flesh. Its sensory arm coiled around me so that the sensory hand could seat itself at the back of my neck. This was the preferred ooloi grip with Humans and with many constructs. Both brain and spinal cord were easily accessible to the slender, slender filaments of the sensory hand.

For the first time since I stopped nursing, Nikanj drugged me—immobilized me—as though it could not trust me to be still. I was too frightened even to be offended. Maybe it was right not to trust me.

Still, it did not hurt me. And it did not calm me. Why should it calm me? I had good reason to be afraid.

“I should have noticed this,” it said aloud. “I should have

I constructed you to look very male—so male that the females would be attracted to you and help convince you that you were male. Until today, I thought they had. Now I know I was the one who was convinced. I deceived myself into carelessness and blindness.”

“I’ve always felt male,” I said. “I’ve never thought about being anything else.”

“I should have sent you to spend more time with Tino and Dichaan.” It paused for a moment, rustled its unengaged body tentacles. It did that when it was thinking. A dozen or so body tentacles rubbed together sounded like wind blowing through the trees. “I liked having you around too much,” it said. “All my children grow up and turn away from me, turn to their same-sex parents. I thought you would, too, when the time came.”

“That’s what I thought. I never wanted to do it, though.”

“You didn’t want to go to your fathers?”

“No. I only left you when I knew I would be in the way.”

“I never felt that you were in the way.”

“I tried to be careful.”

It rustled its tentacles again, repeated, “I should have noticed

.”

“You were always lonely,” I said. “You had mates and children, but to me, you always tasted

empty in some way—as though you were hungry, almost starving.”

It said nothing for some time. It did not move, but I felt safely enveloped by it. Some Humans tried to give you that feeling when they hugged you and irritated your sensory spots and pinched your sensory tentacles. Only the Oankali could give it, really. And right now, only Nikanj could give it to me. In all its long life, it had had no same-sex child. It had used all its tricks to protect us from becoming ooloi. It had used all its tricks to keep itself agonizingly alone.

I think I had always known how lonely it was. Surely, of my five parents, I had always loved it best. Apparently my body had responded to it in the way an Oankali child’s would. I was taking on the sex of the parent I had felt most drawn to.

“What will happen to me?” I asked after a long silence.

“You’re healthy,” it said. “Your development is exactly right. I can’t find any flaw in you.”

And that meant there was no flaw. It was a good ooloi. Other ooloi came to it when they had problems beyond their perception or comprehension.

“What will happen?” I repeated.

“You’ll stay with us.”

No qualification. It would not allow me to be sent away. Yet it had agreed with other Oankali a century before that any accidental construct ooloi must be sent to the ship. There it could be watched, and any damage it did could be spotted and corrected quickly. On the ship, its every move could be monitored. On Earth, it might do great harm before anyone noticed.

But Nikanj would not allow me to be sent away. It had said so.

3

Quickly Nikanj called all my parents together. I would sleep soon. Metamorphosis is mostly deep sleep while the body changes and matures. Nikanj wanted to tell the others while I was still awake.

My Human mother came in, looked at Nikanj and me, then walked over to me and took my hands. No one had said anything aloud, but she knew something was wrong. She certainly knew that I was in metamorphosis. She had seen that often enough.

She looked closely at me, holding her face near mine, since her eyes were her only organs of sight. Then she looked at Nikanj. “What’s wrong with him? This isn’t just metamorphosis.”

Through her hands, I had begun to study her flesh in a way I never had before. I knew her flesh better than I knew anyone’s, but there was something about it now—a flavor, a texture I had never noticed.

She took her hands from me abruptly and stepped away. “Oh, good go

.”

Still, no one had spoken to her. Yet she knew.

“What is it?” my Human father asked.

My mother looked at Nikanj. When it did not speak, she said, “Jodahs

Jodahs is becoming ooloi.”

My Human father frowned. “But that’s impos—” He stopped, followed my mother’s gaze to Nikanj. “It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“No,” Nikanj said softly.

He went to Nikanj, stood stiffly over it. He looked more frightened than angry. “How could you let this happen?” he demanded. “Exile, for godsake! Exile for your own child!”

“No, Chka,” Nikanj whispered.

“Exile! It’s your law, you ooloi!”

“No.” It focused a cone of head tentacles on its Oankali mates. “The child is perfect. My carelessness has allowed it to become ooloi, but I haven’t been careless in any other way.” It hesitated. “Come. Know for certain. Know for the people.”

My Oankali mother and father joined with it in a tangle of head and body tentacles. It did not touch them with its sensory arms, did not even uncoil the arms until Dichaan took one arm and Ahajas took the other. In unison, then, all three focused cones of head tentacles on my two Human parents. The Humans glared at them. After a time, Lilith went to the Oankali, but did not touch them. She turned and held one arm out to Tino. He did not move.

“Your law!” he repeated to Nikanj.

But it was Lilith who answered. “Not law. Consensus. They agreed to send accidental ooloi to the ship. Nika believes it can change the agreement.”

“Now? In the middle of everything?”

“Yes.”

“What if it can’t?”

Lilith swallowed. I could see her throat move. “Then maybe we’ll have to leave Lo for a while—live apart in the forest.”

He went to her, looked at her the way he does sometimes when he wants to touch her, maybe to hold her the way Humans hold each other in the guest area. But Humans who accept Oankali mates give up that kind of touching. They don’t give up wanting to do it, but once they mate Oankali, they find each other’s touch repellent.

Tino shifted his attention to Nikanj. “Why don’t you talk to me? Why do you leave her to tell me what’s going on?”

Nikanj extended a sensory arm toward him.

“No! Goddamnit, talk to me! Speak aloud!”

“

all right,” Nikanj whispered, its body bent in an attitude of deep shame.

Tino glared at it.

“I cannot restore

your same-sex child to you,” it said.

“Why did you do this? How could you do it?”

“I made a mistake. I only realized earlier today what I had allowed to happen. I

I would not have done it deliberately, Chka. Nothing could have made me do it. It happened because after so many years I had begun to relax about our children. Things have always gone well. I was careless.”

My Human father looked at me. It was as though he looked from a long way away. His hands moved, and I knew he wanted to touch me, too. But if he did, it would go wrong the way it had earlier with my mother. They couldn’t touch me anymore. Within families, people could touch their same-sex children, their unsexed children, their same-sex mates, and their ooloi mates.

Now, abruptly, my Human father turned and grasped the sensory arm Nikanj offered. The arm was a tough, muscular organ that existed to contain and protect the essential ooloi sensory and reproductive organs. It probably could not be injured by bare Human hands, but I think Tino tried. He was angry and hurt, and that made him want to hurt others. Of my two Human parents, only he tended to react this way. And now the only being he could turn to for comfort was the one who had caused all his trouble. An Oankali would have opened a wall and gone away for a while. Even Lilith would have done that. Tino tried to give pain. Pain for pain.

Nikanj drew him against its body and held him motionless as it comforted him and spoke silently with him. It held him for so long that my Oankali parents raised platforms and sat on them to wait. Lilith came to share my platform, though she could have raised her own. My scent must have disturbed her, but she sat near me and looked at me.

“Do you feel all right?” she said.

“Yes. I’ll fall asleep soon, I think.”

“You look ready for it. Does my being here bother you?”

“Not yet. But it must bother you.”

“I can stand it.”

She stayed where she was. I could remember being inside her. I could remember when there was nothing in my universe except her. I found myself longing to touch her. I hadn’t felt that before. I had never before been unable to touch her. Now I discovered a little of the Human hunger to touch where I could not.

“Are you afraid?” Lilith asked.

“I was. But now that I know I’m all right, and that you’ll all keep me here, I’m fine.”

She smiled a little. “Nika’s first same-sex child. It’s been so lonely.”

“I know.”

“We all knew,” Dichaan said from his platform. “All the ooloi on Earth must be feeling the desperation Nikanj felt. The people are going to have to change the old agreement before more accidents happen. The next one might be a flawed ooloi.”

A flawed natural genetic engineer—one who could distort or destroy with a touch. Nothing could save it from confinement on the ship. Perhaps it would even have to be physically altered to prevent it from functioning in any way as an ooloi. Perhaps it would be so dangerous that it would have to spend its existence in suspended animation, its body used by others for painless experimentation, its consciousness permanently shut off.

I shuddered and lay down again. At once, both Nikanj and Tino were beside me, reconciled, apparently, by their concern for me. Nikanj touched me with a sensory arm, but did not expose the sensory hand. “Listen, Jodahs.”

I focused on it without opening my eyes.

“You’ll be all right here. I’ll stay with you. I’ll talk to the people from here, and when you’ve reached the end of this first metamorphosis, you’ll remember all that I’ve said to them— and all they’ve said.” It slipped a sensory arm around my neck and the feel of it there comforted me. “We’ll take care of you,” it said.

Later, it stripped my clothing from me as I floated atop sleep, a piece of straw floating on a still pond. I could not slip beneath the surface yet.

Something was put into my mouth. It had the flavor and texture of chunks of pineapple, but I knew from tiny differences in its scent that it was a Lo creation. It was almost pure protein—exactly what my body needed. When I had eaten several pieces, I was able to slip beneath the surface into sleep.

4

Metamorphosis is sleep. Days, weeks, months of sleep broken by a few hours now and then of waking, eating, talking. Males and females slept even more, but they had just the one metamorphosis. Ooloi go through this twice.

There were times when I was aware enough to watch my body develop. A sair was growing at my throat so that I would eventually be able to breathe as easily in water as in air. My nose was not absorbed into my face, but it became little more than an ornament.

I didn’t lose my hair, but I grew many more head and body tentacles. I would not develop sensory arms until my second metamorphosis, but my sensitivity had already been increased, and I would soon be able to give and receive more complex multisensory illusions, and handle them much faster.

And something was growing between my hearts.

Because I was Human-born, my internal arrangement was basically Human. Ooloi are careful not to construct children who provoke uncontrollable immune reactions in their birth mothers. Even two hearts seem radical to some Humans. Sometimes they shoot us where they think a heart should be—where their own hearts are—then run away in panic because that kind of thing doesn’t stop us. I don’t think many Humans have seen what the Oankali look like inside—or what we constructs look like. Two hearts are just double the Human allotment. But the organ now growing between my hearts was not Human at all.

Every construct had some version of it. Males and females used it to store and keep viable the cells of unfamiliar living things that they sought out and brought home to their ooloi mate or parent. In ooloi, the organ was larger and more complex. Within it, ooloi manipulated molecules of DNA more deftly than Human women manipulated the bits of thread they used to sew their cloth. I had been constructed inside such an organ, assembled from the genetic contributions of my two mothers and my two fathers. The construction itself and a single Oankali organelle was the only ooloi contribution to my existence. The organelle had divided within each of my cells as the cells divided. It had become an essential part of my body. We were what we were because of that organelle. It made us collectors and traders of life, always learning, always changing in every way but one—that one organelle. Ooloi said we were that organelle—that the original Oankali had evolved through that organelle’s invasion, acquisition, duplication, and symbiosis. Sometimes on worlds that had no intelligent, carbonbased life to trade with, Oankali deliberately left behind large numbers of the organelle. Abandoned, it would seek a home in the most unlikely indigenous life-forms and trigger changes— evolution in spurts. Hundreds of millions of years later, perhaps some Oankali people would wander by and find interesting trade partners waiting for them. The organelle made or found compatibility with life-forms so completely dissimilar that they were unable even to perceive one another as alive.

Once I had been all enclosed within Nikanj in a mature version of the organ I was growing between my hearts. That, I did not remember. I came to consciousness within my Human mother’s uterus.

Yashi, the ooloi called their organ of genetic manipulation. Sometimes they talked about it as though it were another person. “I’m going out to taste the river and the forest. Yashi is hungry and twisting for something new.”

Did it really twist? I probably wouldn’t find out until my second metamorphosis when my sensory arms grew. Until then, yashi would enlarge and develop to become only a little more useful than that of a male or a female.

Other Oankali organs began to develop now as genes, dormant since my conception, became active and stimulated the growth of new, highly specialized tissues. Adult ooloi were more different than most Humans realized. Beyond their insertion of the Oankali organelle, they made no genetic contribution to their children. They left their birth families and mated with strangers so that they would not be confronted with too much familiarity. Humans said familiarity bred contempt. Among the ooloi, it bred mistakes. Male and female siblings could mate safely as long as their ooloi came from a totally different kin group.

So, for an ooloi, a same-sex child was as close as it would ever come to seeing itself in its children.

For that reason among others, Nikanj shielded me.

I felt as though it stood between me and the people so that they could not get past it to take me away.

I absorbed all that happened in the room with me, and all that came through the platform to me from Lo.

“How can we trust you?” the people demanded of Nikanj. Their messages reached us through Lo, and reached Lo either directly from our neighbors or by way of radio signals from other towns relayed to Lo by the ship. And we heard from people who lived on the ship. A few messages came from nearby towns that could make direct underground contact with Lo. The messages were all essentially the same. “How can we possibly trust you? No one else has made such a dangerous mistake.”

Through Lo, Nikanj invited the people to examine it and its findings as though it were some newly discovered species. It invited them to know all that it knew about me. It endured all the tests people could think of and agree on. But it kept them from touching me.

In spite of its mistakes, it was my same-sex parent. Since it said I must not be disturbed in metamorphosis, and since they were not yet convinced that it had lost all competence, they would not disturb me. Humans thought this sort of thing was a matter of authority—who had authority over the child. Constructs and Oankali knew it was a matter of physiology. Nikanj’s body “understood” what mine was going through— what it needed and did not need. Nikanj let me know that I was all right and reassured me that I wasn’t alone. In the way of Oankali and construct same-sex parents, it went through metamorphosis with me. It knew exactly what would disturb me and what was safe. Its body knew, and no one would argue with that knowledge. Even Human same-sex parents seemed to reach an empathy with their children that the people respected. Without that empathy, some developing males and females had had a strange time of it. One of my brothers was completely cut off from the family and from Oankali and construct companionship during his metamorphosis. He reacted to his unrelated, all-Human companions by losing all visible traces of his own Human heritage. He survived all right. The Humans had taken care of him as best they could. But after metamorphosis he had had to accept people treating him as though he were an entirely different person. He was Human-born, but our Human parents didn’t recognize him at all when he came home.

“I don’t want to push you toward the Human or the Oankali extreme,” Nikanj said once when the people gave it a few hours of peace. It talked to me often, knowing that whether I was conscious or not, I would hear and remember. Its presence and its voice comforted me. “I want you to develop as you should in every way. The more normal your changes are, the sooner the people will accept you as normal.”

It had not yet convinced the people to accept anything about me. Not even that I should be allowed to stay on Earth and live in Lo through my subadult stage and second metamorphosis. The consensus now was that I should be brought up to the ship as soon as I had completed this first metamorphosis. Subadults were still seen as children, but they could work as ooloi in ways that did not involve reproduction. Subadults could not only heal or cause disease, but they could cause genetic changes—mutations—in plants and animals. They could do anything that could be done without mates. They could be unintentionally deadly, changing insects and microorganisms in unexpected ways.

“I don’t want to hurt anything,” I said toward the end of my months-long change when I could speak again. “Don’t let me do any harm.”

“No harm, Oeka,” Nikanj said softly. It had lain down beside me as it often did so that while I slept, it could be with me, yet sink its head and body tentacles into the platform—the flesh of Lo—and communicate with the people. “There is no flaw in you,” it continued. “You should be aware of everything you do. You can make mistakes, but you can also perceive them. And you can correct them. I’ll help you.”

Its words gave a security nothing else could have. I had begun to feel like one of the dormant volcanoes high in the mountains beyond the forest—like a thing that might explode anytime, destroying whatever happened to be nearby.

“There is something that you must be aware of, though,” Nikanj said.

“Yes?”

“You will be complete in ways that male and female constructs have not been. Eventually you and others like you will awaken dormant abilities in males and females. But you, as an ooloi, can have no dormant abilities.”

“What will it mean

to be complete?”

“You’ll be able to change yourself. What we can do from one generation to the next—changing our form, reverting to earlier forms or combinations of forms—you’ll be able to do within yourself. Superficially, you may even be able to create new forms, new shells for camouflage. That’s what we intended.”

“If I can change my shape

” I focused narrowly on Nikanj. “Could I become male?”

Nikanj hesitated. “Do you still want to be male?”

Had I ever wanted to be male? I had just assumed I was male, and would have no choice in the matter. “The people wouldn’t be as hard on you if I were male.”

It said nothing.

“They haven’t accepted me yet,” I argued. “They could go on rejecting me until the family had to leave Lo—all because of me.”

It continued to focus on me silently. There were times when I envied Humans their ability to shut off their sight by closing their eyes, shut off their understanding by some conscious act of denial that was beyond me.

I closed my throat, then drew and released a noisy, Human breath by mouth. It wasn’t necessary now when I wasn’t talking, but it filled time.

“I have too many feelings,” I said. “I want to be your same-sex child, but I don’t want to cause the family trouble.”

“What do you want for yourself?”

Now I could not speak. I would hurt it, no matter what I said.

“Oeka, I must know what you want, what you feel, and for your own sake, you must tell me. It will be better for you if the people only see you through me until your metamorphosis is complete.”

It was right. The thought of a lot of other people interfering with me now was frightening, terrifying. I hadn’t known it would be, but it was. “I wouldn’t want to give up being what I am,” I said. “I

I want to be ooloi. I really want it. And I wish I didn’t. How can I want to cause the family so much trouble?”

“You want to be what you are. That’s healthy and right for you. What we do about it is our decision, our responsibility. Not yours.”

I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds.

Nikanj, on the other hand, meant what it said. Its body and its mouth said the same things. It believed that I should want to be what I was. But

“Ooan, could I change if I wanted to?”

It smoothed its head and body tentacles flat against its skin, accepting my curiosity with amusement. “Not now. But when you’re mature, you’ll be able to cause yourself to look male. You wouldn’t be satisfied with a male sexual role, though, and you wouldn’t be able to make a male contribution to reproduction.”

I tried to move, tried to reach toward it, but I was still too weak. Talking was exhausting, most other movement was impossible. My head tentacles swept toward it.

It moved closer and let me touch it, let me examine its flesh so that I could begin to understand the difference between its flesh and my own. I would be the most extreme version of a construct—not just a mix of Human and Oankali characteristics, but able to use my body in ways that neither Human nor Oankali could. Synergy.

I studied a single cell of Nikanj’s arm, comparing it with cells of my own. Apart from my Human admixture, the main difference seemed to be that certain genes of mine had activated and caused my metamorphosis. I wondered what might happen if these genes activated in Nikanj. It was mature. Were there other changes it might undergo?

“Stop,” Nikanj said quietly. It signaled silently and spoke aloud. Its silent signal felt urgent. What was I doing?

“Look what you’ve done.” Now it spoke only silently.

I reexamined the cell I had touched and realized that somehow I had located and activated the genes I had been curious about. These genes were trying to activate others of their kind in other cells, trying to cause Nikanj’s body to begin the secretion of inappropriate hormones that would cause inappropriate growth.

What would grow?

“Nothing would grow in me,” Nikanj said, and I realized it had perceived my curiosity. “The cell will die. You see?”

The cell died as I watched.

“I could have kept it alive,” Nikanj said. “By a conscious act, I could have prevented my body from rejecting it. Without you, though, I could not have activated the dormant genes. My body rejects that kind of behavior as

deeply self-destructive.”

“But it didn’t seem wrong or dangerous,” I said. “It just felt

out of place.”

“Out of place, out of its time. In a Human, that could be enough to kill.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. My curiosity burned away in fear.

“When you touch them, never withdraw without checking to see whether you’ve done harm.”

“I won’t touch them at all.”

“You won’t be able to resist them.”

It didn’t doubt or guess or suspect. It knew. “What shall I do?” I whispered aloud. It couldn’t be wrong about such things. It had lived too long, seen too much.

“For now you can only be careful. After your second metamorphosis, you’ll mate and you won’t be quite so interested in investigating people who aren’t your mates.”

“But that could be two or three years from now.”

“Less, I think. Your body feels as though it will develop quickly now. Until it has, you know how careful you’ll have to be.”

“I don’t know whether I can do it. To be so careful of every touch

”

“Only deep touches.” Touches that penetrated flesh with sensory tentacles or, later, sensory arms. Only Humans could be satisfied with less than deep touches.

“I don’t see how I can be that careful,” I said. “But I have to.”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

It touched my head tentacles with several of its own, agreeing. Then it examined the rest of my body closely, again checking for dangerous flaws, gathering information for the people. I relaxed and let it work, and it said instantly, “No!”

“What?” I asked. I really hadn’t done anything this time. I knew I hadn’t.

“Until you know yourself a great deal better, you can’t afford to relax that way while you’re in contact with another person. Not even with me. You’re too competent, too well able to make tiny, potentially deadly changes in genes, in cells, in organs. What males, females, and even some ooloi must struggle to perceive, you can’t fail to perceive on one level or another. What they must be taught to do, what they must strain to do, you can do almost without thought. You have all the sensitivity I could give you, and that’s a great deal. And you have the latent abilities of your Human ancestors. In you, those abilities are no longer latent. That’s why you were able to activate genes in me that even I can’t reawaken. That’s why the Humans are such treasure. They’ve given us regenerative abilities we had never been able to trade for before, even though we’ve found other species that had such abilities. I’m here because a Human was able to share such ability with me.”

It meant Lilith, my birth mother. Every child in the family had heard that story. One of Nikanj’s sensory arms had been all but severed from its body, but Lilith allowed it to link into her body and activate certain of her highly specialized genes. It used what it learned from these to encourage its own cells to grow and reattach the complex structures of the arm. It could not have done this without the triggering effect of Lilith’s genetic help.

Lilith’s ability had run in her family, although neither she nor her ancestors had been able to control it. It had either lain dormant in them or come to life in insane, haphazard fashion and caused the growth of useless new tissue. New tissue gone obscenely wrong.

Humans called this condition cancer. To them, it was a hated disease. To the Oankali, it was treasure. It was beauty beyond Human comprehension.

Nikanj might have died without Lilith’s help. If it had lived, maimed, it could not have functioned as an ooloi. Its mates would have had to find another ooloi. They were young then. They might have survived the break and managed to accept someone else. But then we wouldn’t exist—we, the children Nikanj had constructed gene by gene, chromosome by chromosome. A different ooloi would have chosen a different mix, would have manufactured a different series of genes to patch the created whole together and make it viable. All our construct uniqueness was the work of our ooloi parent. Until Nikanj’s mistake with me, it had been known for the beauty of its children. It had shared all that it knew about mixing construct children, and it had probably saved other people from pain, trouble, and deadly error. It had been able to do all this because, thanks to Lilith, it had two functioning sensory arms.

“You could give Humans back their cancers,” it said, rousing me from my thoughts. “Or you could affect them genetically. You could damage their immune systems, cause neurological disorders, glandular problems

. You could give them diseases they don’t have names for. You could do all that with just a moment’s inattention.” It paused, wholly focused on me. “Humans will attract you and seduce you without realizing what they’re doing. But they’ll have no defense against you. And you’re probably as sexually precocious as any Human-born construct.”

“I don’t have sensory arms,” I said. “What can I do sexually until they grow?” I had nothing between my legs anymore. No one could see me naked and mistake me for male—or female. I was an ooloi subadult, and I would be one for years—or perhaps only for months if Nikanj was right about the speed of my maturing.

“You’ll be able to take pleasure in new sensation,” Nikanj said. “Especially in the complex, frightening, promising taste of Humans. I didn’t enjoy them often when I was subadult because I could give little in return. I tasted Lilith when I could heal her or make necessary changes. But I couldn’t give pleasure until I was adult. You may be able to give it now with sensory tentacles.”

I drew my sensory tentacles tight against me, wondering. There had been that Human couple I met just before I fell asleep months ago. They were on their way to Mars by now. But what would they have tasted like? The female might have let me find out. But the male

? How did any ooloi seduce Human males? Males were suspicious, hostile, dangerous. I suddenly wanted very much to taste one. I had touched my Human father and other mated males before my change, but I wasn’t as perceptive then. I wanted to touch an unmated stranger—perhaps a potential mate.

“Precocious,” Nikanj said flatly. “Stick to constructs for a while. They aren’t defenseless. But even they can be hurt. You can damage them so subtly that no one notices the problem until it becomes serious. Be more careful than you have ever been.”

“Will they let me touch them?”

“I don’t know. The people haven’t decided yet.”

I thought about what it might be like to spend all my subadulthood alone in the forest with only my parents and unmated siblings as company. A shudder went through my body and Nikanj touched its sensory tentacles to mine, concerned.

“I want them to accept me,” I said unnecessarily.

“Yes. I can see that any exile could be hard on you, bad for you. But

perhaps Chkahichdahk exile would be least hard. My parents are still there. They would take you in.”

Ship exile. “You said you wouldn’t let them take me!”

“I won’t. You’ll stay with us for as long as you want to stay.”

It meant as long as I was not more miserable alone with the family than it believed I would be if I were cut off from the family and sent to the ship. Humans tended to misunderstand ooloi when ooloi said things like that. Humans thought the ooloi were promising that they would do nothing until the Humans said they had changed their minds—told the ooloi with their mouths, in words. But the ooloi perceived all that a living being said—all words, all gestures, and a vast array of other internal and external bodily responses. Ooloi absorbed everything and acted according to whatever consensus they discovered. Thus ooloi treated individuals as they treated groups of beings. They sought a consensus. If there was none, it meant the being was confused, ignorant, frightened, or in some other way not yet able to see its own best interests. The ooloi gave information and perhaps calmness until they could perceive a consensus. Then they acted.

If, someday, Nikanj saw that I needed mates more than I needed my family, Nikanj would send me to the ship no matter what I said.

5

As the days passed, I grew stronger. I hoped, I wished, I pleaded with myself for Nikanj to have no reason ever to seek a consensus within me. If only the people would trust me, perceive that I was no more interested in using my new abilities to hurt other living things than I was in hurting myself.

Unfortunately I often did both. Every day, at least, Nikanj had to correct some harm that I had done to Lo—to the living platform on which I lay. Lo’s natural color was gray-brown. Beneath me, it turned yellow. It developed swellings. Rough, diseased patches appeared on it. Its odor changed, became foul. Parts of it sloughed off. Sometimes it developed deep, open sores.

And all that I did to Lo, I also did to myself. But it was Lo that I felt guilty about. Lo was parent, sibling, home. It was the world I had been born into. As an ooloi, I would have to leave it when I mated. But woven into its genetic structure and my own was the unmistakable Lo kin group signature. I would have done anything to avoid giving Lo pain.

I got up from my platform as soon as I could and collected dead wood to sleep on.

Lo ate the wood. It was not intelligent enough to reason with—would not be for perhaps a hundred years. But it was self-aware. It knew what was part of it and what wasn’t. I was part of it—one of its many parts. It would not have me with it, yet so distant from it, separated by so much dead matter. It preferred whatever pain I gave it to the unnatural itch of apparent rejection.

So I went on giving it pain until I was completely recovered. By then, I knew as well as anyone else that I had to go. The people still wanted me to go to Chkahichdahk because the ship was a much older, more resistant organism. It was as able as most ooloi to protect and heal itself. Lo would be that resistant someday, but not for more than a century. And on the ship, I could be watched by many more mature ooloi.

Or I could go into exile here on Earth—before I did more harm to Lo or to someone in Lo. Those were my only choices. Through Lo, Nikanj had kept a check on the air of my room. It had seen that I did not change the microorganisms I came into contact with. And outside, insects avoided me as they avoided all Oankali and constructs. The people would permit me Earth exile, then.

“With no real discussion, we prepared to go. My Human parents made packs for themselves, wrapping Lo cloth hammocks around prewar books, tools, extra clothing, and food from Lilith’s garden—food grown in the soil of Earth, not from the substance of Lo. Both Lilith and Tino knew that their Oankali mates would provide for all their physical needs, yet they could not easily accept being totally dependent. This was a characteristic of adult Humans that the Oankali never understood. The Oankali simply accepted it as best they could and were pleased to see that we constructs understood.

I went to my Human mother and watched her assemble her pack. I did not touch her—had not touched any Human since my metamorphosis ended. As a reminder of my unstable condition, I had developed a rough, crusty growth on my right hand. I had deliberately reabsorbed it twice, but each night it grew again. I saw Lilith staring at it.

“It will heal,” I told her. “Nikanj will help me with it.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No. It just feels

wrong. Like a weight tied there where it shouldn’t be.”

“Why is it wrong?”

I looked at the growth. It was red and broken in places, crusty with distorted flesh and dried blood. It always seemed to be bleeding a little. “I caused it,” I said, “but I don’t understand how I did it. I fixed a couple of obvious problems, but the growth keeps coming back.”

“How are you otherwise?”

“Well, I think. And once Ooan shows me how to take care of this growth, I’ll remember.”

I think my scent was beginning to bother. She stepped away, but looked at me as though she wanted to touch me. “How can I help you?” she asked.

“Make a pack for me.”

She looked surprised. “What shall I put in it?”

I hesitated, afraid my answer would hurt her. But I wanted the pack, and only she could put it together as I wished. “I may not live here again,” I said.

She blinked, looked at me with the pain I had hoped not to see.

“I want Human things,” I said. “Small Human things that you and Tino would leave behind. And I want yams from your garden—and cassava and fruit and seed. Samples of all the seed or whatever is needed to grow your plants.”

“Nikanj could give you cell samples.”

“I know

. But will you?”

“Yes.”

I hesitated again. “I would have to leave Lo anyway, you know. Even without this exile, I couldn’t mate here where I’m related to almost everyone.”

“I know. But it will be a while before you mate. And if you were leaving to do that, we’d see you again. If you have to go to the ship

we may not.”

“I belong to this world,” I said. “I intend to stay. But even so, I want something of yours and Tino’s.”

“All right.”

We looked at one another as though we were already saying goodbye—as though only I were leaving. I did leave her then, to take a final walk around Lo to say goodbye to the people I had spent my life with. Lo was more than a town. It was a family group. All the Oankali males and females were related in some way. All constructs were related except the few males who drifted in from other towns. All the ooloi had become part of Lo when they mated here. And any Human who stayed long in a relationship with an Oankali family was related more closely than most Humans realized.

It was hard to say goodbye to such people, to know that I might not see them again.

It was hard not to dare to touch them, not to allow them to touch me. But I would certainly do to some of them what I kept doing to Lo—change them, damage them as I kept changing and damaging myself. And because I was ooloi and construct, theoretically I could survive more damage than they could. I was to let Nikanj know if I touched anyone.

Everywhere I went, ooloi watched me with a terrible mixture of suspicion and hope, fear and need. If I didn’t learn control, how long would it be before they could have same-sex children? I could hurt them more than anyone else they knew. The sharp, attentive cones of their head tentacles followed me everywhere and weighed on me like logs. If there were anything I would be glad to be away from, it was their intense, sustained attention.

I went to our neighbor Tehkorahs, an ooloi whose Human mates were especially close to my Human parents. “Do you think I should go into exile on the ship?” I asked it.

“Yes.” Its voice was softer than most soft ooloi voices. It preferred not to speak aloud at all. But signs were sterile without touch to supplement them, and even Tehkorahs would not touch me. That hurt because it was ooloi and safe from anything I was likely to do. “Yes,” it repeated uncharacteristically.

“Why! You know me. I won’t touch people. And I’ll learn control.”

“If you can.”

“

yes.”

“There are resisters in the forest. If you’re out there long enough, they’ll find you.”

“Most of them have emigrated.”

“Many. Not most.”

“I won’t touch them.”

“Of course you will.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it in the face of Tehkorahs’s certainty. There was no reserve in it, no concealment. It was speaking what it believed was the truth.

After a time, it said, “How hungry are you?”

I didn’t answer It wasn’t asking me how badly I wanted food, but when I’d last been touched. Just before I would have walked away, it held out all four arms. I hesitated, then stepped into its embrace.

It was not afraid of me. It was a forest fire of curiosity, longing, and fear, and I stood comforted and reassured while it examined me with every sensory tentacle that could reach me and both sensory arms.

We fed each other. My hunger was to be touched and its was to know everything firsthand and understand it all. Observing it, I understood that it was looking mainly for reassurance of its own. It wanted to see from an understanding of my body that I would gain control. It wanted me to be a clear success so that it would know it would be allowed to have its own same-sex children. Soon.

When it let me go, it was still uncomprehending. “You were very hungry,” it said. “And that after only a day or two of being avoided.” It knotted its head and body tentacles hard against its flesh. “You know something of what we can do, we ooloi, but I think you had no idea how much we need contact with other people. And you seem to need it more than we do. Spend more time with your paired sibling or you could become dangerous.”

“I don’t want to hurt Aaor.”

“Nikanj will heal it until you learn to. If you learn to.”

“I still don’t want to hurt it.”

“I don’t think you can do it much harm. Not being able to go to anyone for comfort, though, can make you like the lightning—mindless and perhaps deadly.”

I looked at it, my own head tentacles swept forward, focused. “What did you learn when you examined me? You weren’t satisfied. Does that mean you think I can’t learn control?”

“I don’t know whether you can or not. I couldn’t tell. Nikanj says you can, but that it will be hard. I don’t know what it sees to draw that conclusion. Perhaps it only sees its first same-sex child.”

“Do you still think I should go to the ship?”

“Yes. For your sake. For everyone’s.” It rubbed its right hand, and I saw that it had developed a duplicate of my crusty, running tumor.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you know what I did wrong to cause that?”

“A combination of things. I don’t understand all of them yet. You should take this to Nikanj, now.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes.”

I looked at it, missing it already—a smaller than average pale gray ooloi from the Jah kin group. It uncoiled one sensory arm and touched a sensory spot on my face. It could see the spots—as I could now. Their texture was slightly rougher than the skin around them. Tehkorahs made the contact a sharp, sweet shock of pleasure that washed over me like a sudden, cool rain. It ebbed slowly away. A goodbye.

6

It was raining when we left. Pouring. A brief waterfall from the sky. Lilith said rains like this happened to remind us that we lived in a rain forest. She had been born in a desert place called Los Angeles. She loved sudden, drenching rains.

There were eleven of us. My five parents, Aaor and me, Oni and Hozh, Ayodele and Yedik. These last four were my youngest siblings. They could have been left behind with some of our adult siblings, but they didn’t want to stay. I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have wanted to part with our parents at that premetamorphosal state either. Even now, between metamorphoses, I needed them. And the family would have felt wrong without the younger siblings. My parents had only one pair per decade now. Ordinarily they would already have begun the next pair. But during the months of my metamorphosis, they had decided to wait until they could return to Lo—with or without me.

We headed first toward Lilith’s garden to gather a few more fresh fruits and vegetables. I think she and Tino just wanted to see it again.

“It’s time to rest this land anyway,” Lilith said as we walked. She changed the location of her garden every few years, and let the forest reclaim the land. With these changes and with her habit of using fertilizer and river mud, she had used and reused the land beyond Lo for a century. She abandoned her gardens only when Lo grew too close to them.

But this garden had been destroyed.

It had not simply been raided. Raids happened occasionally. Resisters were afraid to raid Oankali towns—afraid the Oankali would begin to see them as real threats and transfer them permanently to the ship. But Lilith’s gardens were clearly not Oankali. Resisters knew this and seemed to feel free to steal fruit or whole plants from them. Lilith never seemed to mind. She knew resisters thought of her—of any mated Human—as a traitor to Humanity, but she never seemed to hold it against them.

This time almost everything that had not been stolen had been destroyed. Melons had been stomped or smashed against the ground and trees. The line of papaya trees in the center of the garden had been broken down. Beans, peas, corn, yams, cassava, and pineapple plants had been uprooted and trampled. Nearby nut, fig, and breadfruit trees that were nearly a century old had been hacked and burned, though the fire had not destroyed most of them. Banana trees had been hacked down.

“Shit!” Lilith whispered. She stared at the destruction for a moment, then turned away and went to the edge of the garden clearing. There, she stood with her back to us, her body very straight. I thought Nikanj would go to her, offer comfort. Instead, it began gathering and trimming the least damaged cassava stalks. These could be replanted. Ahajas found an undamaged stalk of ripening bananas and Dichaan found and unearthed several yams, though the aboveground portions of the plants had been broken and scattered. Oankali and constructs could find edible roots and tubers easily by sitting on the ground and burrowing into it with the sensory tentacles of their legs. These short body tentacles could extend to several times their resting length.

It was Tino who went to Lilith. He walked around her, stood in front of her, and said, “What the hell? You know you’ll have other gardens.”

She nodded.

His voice softened. “I think we met in this one. Remember?”

She nodded again, and some of the rigidity went out of her posture. “How many kids ago was that?” she asked softly. The humor in her voice surprised me.

“More than I ever expected to have,” he said. “Perhaps not enough, though.”

And she laughed. She touched his hair, which he wore long and bound with a twist of grass into a long tail down his back. He touched hers—a soft black cloud around her face. They could touch each other’s hair without difficulty because hair was essentially dead tissue. I had seen them touch that way before. It was the only way left to them.

“As much as I’ve loved my gardens,” she said, “I never raised them just for myself or for us. I wanted the resisters to take what they needed.”

Tino looked away, found himself staring at the downed papaya trees, and turned his head again. He had been a resister—had spent much of his life among people who believed that Humans who mated with Oankali were traitors, and that anything that could be done to harm them was good. He had left his people because he wanted children. The Mars colony did not exist then. Humans either came to the Oankali or lived childless lives. Lilith had told me once that Tino did not truly let go of his resister beliefs until the Mars colony was begun and his people could escape the Oankali. She had never been a resister. She had been placed with Nikanj when it was about my age. She did not understand at the time what that meant, and no one told her. Nikanj said she did not stop trying to break away until one of my brothers convinced the people to allow resisting Humans to settle on Mars.

In one way, the Mars colony freed both my Human parents to find what pleasure they could find in their lives. In another it hadn’t helped at all. They still feel guilt, feel as though they’ve deserted their people for aliens, as though they still suspect that they are the betrayers the resisters accused them of being. No Human could see the genetic conflict that made them such a volcanic species—so certain to destroy themselves. Thus, perhaps no Human completely believed it.

“I was always glad when they took whole plants,” Lilith was saying, “Something to feed them now and something to transplant later.”

“There are some peanuts here that survived,” Tino said. “Do you want them?” He bent to pull a few of the small plants from the loose soil I had watched Lilith prepare for them.

“Leave them,” she said. “I have some.” She turned back to face the garden, watched the Oankali members of the family place what they had gathered on a blanket of overlapping banana leaves. Ahajas stopped Oni from eating a salvaged papaya and sent her to tell Lo what had happened and that the food was being left. Oni was Human-born, and so deceptively Human-looking that I had gone on thinking of her as female— though it would be more than ten years before she would have any sex at all.

“Wait,” Lilith said.

Oni stopped near her, stood looking up at her.

Lilith walked over to Dichaan. “Will you go instead?” she asked him.

“The people who did this are gone, Lilith,” he told her. “They’ve been gone for over a day. There’s no sound of them, no fresh scent.”

“I know. But

just for my peace of mind, will you go?”

“Yes.” He turned and went. He would go only to the edge of Lo where some of the trees and smaller plants were not what they appeared to be. There he could signal Lo by touch, and Lo would pass the message on exactly to the next several people to open a wall or request food or in some other way come into direct contact with the Lo entity. Lo would pass the message on eight or ten times, then stop and store the message away. It couldn’t forget any more than we could, but unless someone requested the memory, it would never bother anyone with it again. Humans could neither leave nor receive such messages. Even though Lilith and a few others had learned some of what they called Oankali codes, their fingers were not sensitive enough to receive messages or fine and penetrating enough to send them.

Oni watched Dichaan go, then returned to Hozh, who had finished her papaya. She stood close to him. He was no more male than she female, but it was easier to go on thinking of them the way I always had. The two of them slipped automatically into silent communication. Whenever they stood close together that way, Hozh’s sensory tentacles immediately found Oni’s sensory spots—she had very few sensory tentacles of her own—and established communication. Paired siblings.

Watching them made me lonely, and I looked around for Aaor. I caught it watching me. It had avoided me carefully since I got up from my metamorphosis. I had let it keep its distance in spite of what Tehkorahs had told me because Aaor obviously did not want contact. It did not seem to need me as much as I needed it. As I watched, it turned away from me and focused its attention on a large beetle.

Lilith and Tino joined the family group where it had settled to wait for Dichaan. “This is just the beginning,” Lilith said to no one in particular. “We’ll be meeting people like the ones who destroyed this garden. Sooner or later they’ll spot us and come after us.”

“You have your machete,” Nikanj said.

It could not have gotten more attention if it had screamed. I focused on it to the exclusion of everything, felt pulled around to face it. Oankali did not suggest violence. Humans said violence was against Oankali beliefs. Actually it was against their flesh and bone, against every cell of them. Humans had evolved from hierarchical life, dominating, often killing other life. Oankali had evolved from acquisitive life, collecting and combining with other life. To kill was not simply wasteful to the Oankali. It was as unacceptable as slicing off their own healthy limbs. They fought only to save their lives and the lives of others. Even then, they fought to subdue, not to kill. If they were forced to kill, they resorted to biological weapons collected genetically on thousands of worlds. They could be utterly deadly, but they paid for it later. It cost them so dearly that they had no history at all of striking out in anger, frustration, jealousy, or any other emotion, no matter how keenly they felt it. When they killed even to save life, they died a little themselves.

I knew all this because it was as much a part of me as it was of them. Life was treasure. The only treasure. Nikanj was the one who had made it part of me. How could Nikanj be the one to suggest that anyone kill?

“

Nika?” Ahajas whispered. She sounded the way I felt. Uncomprehending, disbelieving.

“They have to protect their lives and the family,” Nikanj whispered. “If this were only a journey, we could guard them. We’ve guarded them before. But we’re leaving home. We’ll live cut off from others for

I don’t know, perhaps a long time. There will be times when we aren’t with them. And there are resisters who would kill them on sight.”

“I don’t want anyone to die because of me,” I said. “I thought we were leaving to save life.”

It focused on me, reached out a sensory arm, and drew me to its side. “We’re leaving because the forest is the only place where we can live together as a family,” it said. “No one will die because of you.”

“But—”

“If they die, it will only be because they work very hard to make us kill them.”

My siblings and other parents began to focus away from it. It had never said such things before. I stared at it and saw what they had missed. It was almost making itself sick with this talk. It would have been happier holding its hand in fire.

“There are easier ways to say these things,” it admitted. “But some things shouldn’t be said easily.” It hesitated as Dichaan rejoined us. “We will leave the group only in pairs. We won’t leave if it isn’t necessary. You children—all of you— look out for one another. There will be new things everywhere to taste and understand. If your sibling is tasting something, you stand guard. If you see or smell Humans, hide. If you’re caught in the open, run—even if it means being shot. If you’re brought down, scream. Make as much noise as you can. Don’t let them carry you away. Struggle. Make yourselves inconvenient to hold. If they seem intent on killing you, sting.”

My siblings stood with head and body tentacles hanging undirected. The stings of males, females, and children were lethal.

“Once you’re free, come to me or call me. I may be able to save whoever you’ve stung.” It paused. “These are terrible things. If you stay with the group and stay alert, you won’t have to do them.”

They began to come alive again, focusing a few tentacles on it and understanding why it was speaking so bluntly to them. We were all hard to kill. Even our Human parents had been modified, made strong, more able to survive injury. The main danger was in being overwhelmed and abducted. Once we were taken away from the family, anything could be done to us. Perhaps Oni and Hozh would only be adopted for a time by Humans who were desperate for children. The rest of us looked too much like adult Humans—or adult Oankali. Those who looked female would be raped. Those who looked male would be killed. The Humans would have all the time they needed to beat, cut, and shoot us until we died. Unless we killed them.

Best never to get into such a position.

Nikanj focused on Lilith and Tino for several seconds, but said nothing. It knew them. It knew they would make every effort not to kill their own people—and it knew they would resent being told to take care. I had seen Oankali make the mistake of treating Humans like children. It was an easy mistake to make. Most Humans were more vulnerable than their own half-grown children. The Oankali tried to take care of them. The Humans reacted with anger, resentment, and withdrawal. Nikanj’s way was better.

Nikanj focused for a moment on me. I still stood next to it, a coil of its right sensory arm around my neck. With its left sensory arm, it gestured to Aaor.

“No!” I whispered.

It ignored me. Aaor came toward us slowly, its whole body echoing my “no.” It was afraid of me. Afraid of being hurt?

“Do you understand what you feel?” Nikanj asked when Aaor was close enough for it to loop its left sensory arm around Aaor’s neck.

Aaor shook its head Humanly. “No. I don’t want to avoid Jodahs. I don’t know why I do it.”

“I understand,” Nikanj said. “But I don’t know whether I can help you. This is something new.”

That caught Aaor’s attention. Anything new was of interest.

“Think, Eka. When has an ooloi ever had a paired sibling?”

I almost missed seeing Aaor’s surprise, I was so involved with my own. Of course ooloi did not have paired siblings in the usual sense. In Oankali families, females had three children, one right after the other. One became male, one female, and one ooloi. Their own inclinations decided which became which. The male and the female metamorphosed and found an unrelated ooloi to mate with. The ooloi still had its subadult phase to mature through. It was still called a child—the only child who knew its sex. And it was alone until it neared its second metamorphosis and found mates. I should have had only my parents around me now. But where would that leave Aaor?

“Stop running away from one another,” Nikanj said. “Find out what’s comfortable for you. Do what your bodies tell you is right. This is a new relationship. You’ll be finding the way for others as well as for yourselves.”

“If it touches me, you’ll have to heal it,” I said.

“I know.” It flattened its head and body tentacles in something other than amusement. “Or at least, I think I know. This is new to me, too. Aaor, come to me every day for examination and healing. Come even if you believe nothing is wrong. Jodahs can make very subtle, important changes. Come immediately if you feel pain or if you notice anything wrong.”

“Ooan, help me understand it,” Aaor said. “Let me reach it through you.”

“Shall I?” Nikanj asked me silently.

“Yes,” I answered in the same way.

It wove us into seamless neurosensory union.

And it was as though Aaor and I were touching again with nothing between us. I savored Aaor’s unique taste. It was like part of me, long numb, long out of touch, yet so incredibly welcome back that I could only submerge myself in it.

Aaor said nothing to me. It only wanted to know me again—know me as an ooloi. It wanted to understand as deeply as it could the changes that had taken place in me. And I came to understand from it without words how lonely it had been, how much it wanted me back. It was totally unnatural for paired siblings to be near one another, and yet avoid touching.

Aaor asked wordlessly for release, and Nikanj released us both. For a second I was aware only of frog and insect sounds, the rain dropping from the trees, the sun breaking through the clouds. No one in the family moved or spoke. I hadn’t realized they were all focused on us. I started to look around, then Aaor stepped up to me and touched me. I reached for it with every sensory tentacle I had, and its own more numerous tentacles strained toward me. This was normal. This was what paired siblings were supposed to be able to do whenever they wanted to.

For a moment relief overwhelmed me again. My underarms itched just about where my sensory arms would grow someday. If I had already had the arms, I couldn’t have kept them off Aaor.

“It’s about time,” Ahajas said. “You two look after each other.”

“Let’s go.” Tino said.

We followed him out of the ruined garden, moving single file through the forest. He knew of a place that sounded as though it would make a good campsite—plenty of space, far from other settlements of any kind. Everyone’s fear was that I would make changes in the plant and animal life. These changes could spread like diseases—could actually be diseases. The adults in the family did not know whether they could detect and disarm every change. Sooner or later other people would have to deal with some of them. The idea was for us to isolate ourselves, to minimize and localize any cleaning up that would have to be done later. The place Tino had found years before was an island—a big island with a new growth of cecropia trees at one end and a mix of old growth over the rest. It was moving slowly downstream the way river islands did—mud taken from one end was deposited downstream at the other. All the adults remembered a place like this created aboard the ship and used to train Humans to live in the forest. None of them had liked it. Now they were headed for the real thing— because of me.

Sometime during the afternoon, Aaor’s underarms began to itch and hurt. By the time it went to Nikanj for healing, swellings had begun to appear. I had apparently caused Aaor’s unsexed, immature body to try to grow sensory arms. Instead, it was growing potentially dangerous tumors.

“I’m sorry,” I said when Nikanj had finished with it.

“Just figure out what you did wrong,” it said unhappily. “Find out how to avoid doing it again.”

That was the problem. I hadn’t been aware of doing anything to Aaor. If I had felt myself doing it, I would have stopped myself. I thought I had been careful. I was like a blind Human, trampling what I could not see. But a blind Human’s eyesight could be restored. What I was missing was something I had never had—or at least, something I had never discovered.

“Learn as quickly as you can so we can go home,” Aaor said.

I focused on the trail ahead—on scenting or hearing strangers. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

7

The island should have been three days’ walk upriver. We thought we might make it in five days, since we had to circle around Pascual, an unusually hostile riverine resister settlement. People from Pascual were probably the ones who had destroyed Lilith’s garden. Now we would go far out of our way to avoid repaying them. Too many of them might not survive contact with me.

We never thought we were in danger from Pascual because its people knew better than most resisters what happened to anyone who attacked us. Their village, already shrunken by emigration, would be gassed, and the attackers hunted out by scent. They would be found and exiled to the ship. There, if they had killed, they would be kept either unconscious or drugged to pleasure and contentment. They would never be allowed to awaken completely. They would be used as teaching aids, subjects for biological experiments, or reservoirs of Human genetic material. The people of Pascual knew this, and thus committed only what Lilith called property crimes. They stole, they burned, they vandalized. They had not come as close to Lo as the garden before. They had confined their attentions to travelers.

We did not understand how extreme their behavior had become until we met some of them on our first night away from Lo. We stopped walking at dusk, cooked and ate some of the food Lilith and Tino had brought, and hung our hammocks between trees. We didn’t bother erecting a shelter, since the adults agreed that it wasn’t going to rain.

Only Nikanj cleared a patch of ground and spread its hammock on the bare earth. Because of the connections it had to make with sensory arms and tentacles, it was not comfortable sharing a hanging hammock with anyone. It wanted us to feel free to come to it with whatever wounds, aches, or pains we had developed. It gestured to me first, though I had not intended to go to it at all.

“Come every night until you learn to control your abilities,” it told me. “Observe what I do with you. Don’t drowse.”

“All right.”

It could not heal without giving pleasure. People tended simply to relax and enjoy themselves with it. Instead, this time I observed, as it wished, saw it investigate me almost cell by cell, correcting the flaws it found—flaws I had not noticed. It was as though I had gained an understanding of the complexity of the outside world and lost even my child’s understanding of my inner self. I used to notice quickly when something was wrong. Now my worst problem was uncontrolled, unnecessary cell division. Cancers. They began and grew very quickly—many, many times faster than they could have in a Human. I was supposed to be able to control and use them in myself and in others. Instead, I couldn’t even spot my own when they began. And they began with absolutely no conscious encouragement from me.

“Do you see?” Nikanj asked.

“Yes. But I didn’t before you showed me.”

“I’ve left one.”

I hunted for it and after some time found it growing in my throat, where it would surely kill me if it were allowed to continue. I did not readjust the genetic message of the cells and deactivate the part that was in error. That was what Nikanj had done to the others, but I did not trust my ability to follow its example. I might accidentally reprogram other genes. Instead, I destroyed the few malignant cells.

Then I put my head against Nikanj, let my head tentacles link with its own. I spoke to it silently.

“I’m not learning. I don’t know what to do.”

“Wait.”

“I don’t want to keep being dangerous, hurting Aaor, being afraid of myself.”

“Give yourself time. You’re a new kind of being. There’s never been anyone like you before. But there’s no flaw in you. You just need time to find out more about yourself.”

Its certainty fed me. I rested against it for a while, enjoying the easy, safe contact—my only one now. It nudged me after a while, and I went back to my hammock. Lilith was lying with it when the resisters made themselves known to us.

First they screamed. A female Human screamed again and again, first cursing someone, then begging, then making hoarse, wordless noises. There were also male voices—at least three of them shouting, laughing, cursing.

“Real and not real,” Dichaan said when the screaming began.

“What is it?” Oni demanded.

“The female is being hurt now,” Nikanj said. “And she’s afraid. But something is wrong about this. Her first screams were false. She was not afraid then.”

“If she’s being hurt now, that’s enough!” Tino said. He was on his feet, staring at Nikanj, his posture all urgency and anger.

“Stay here,” Nikanj said. It stood up and grasped Tino with all four arms. “Protect the children.” It shook him once for emphasis, then ran into the forest. Ahajas and Dichaan followed. Oankali were much less likely to be killed even if the shouting Humans made a serious effort.

Our Human parents gathered us together and drew us into thicker forest, where we could see and resisters could not. Lilith and Tino had been modified so that, like us, they could see by infrared light—by heat. For us all, the living forest was full of light.

And the air was full of scents. Humans coming. Not close yet, but coming. Several of them. Eight, nine of them. Males.

Lilith and Tino freed their machetes and backed us farther into the forest.

“Do nothing unless they come after us,” Lilith said. “If they do come, run. If they catch you, kill.”

She sounded like Nikanj. But from Nikanj, the words had sounded like cries of pain. From her they were cries of fear. She feared for us. I could not remember ever seeing her afraid for herself. Years before, concealed high in a tree, I watched her fight off three male resisters who wanted to rape her. She hadn’t been afraid once she saw that they weren’t aware of me. She even managed not to hurt them much. They ran away, believing she was a construct.

The resisters who were hunting us now would not run from us, and both Lilith and Tino knew it. They watched as the resisters discovered the camp, tried to tear down the hammocks, tried to burn them. But Lo cloth would not burn, and no normal Human could cut or tear it.

They stole Lilith’s and Tino’s packs, hacked down the smaller trees we’d tied our hammocks to, ground exposed food into the dirt, and set fire to the trees. They looked for us in the light of the fire, but they were afraid to venture too far into the forest, afraid to scatter too much yet, afraid to seem to huddle together. Perhaps they knew what would happen to them if they found us. Perhaps destroying our belongings would be enough—though they did have guns.

They had not gotten the pack Lilith had made for me. While she and Tino were gathering my siblings, I had grabbed my pack and run with it. I meant to help if there was fighting. I wouldn’t run with my younger siblings. But I also meant to keep what might be my last bit of Lo. No one would steal it.

The fire spread slowly, and the resisters had to leave our campsite. They went back into the trees the way they’d come. We stayed where we were, knowing that the river was nearby. We would run for that if we had to.

But the fire did not spread far. It singed a few standing trees and consumed the few that had been cut. My Oankali parents came back wounded and already healing, carrying a living burden.

The danger seemed past. We smelled nothing except smoke, heard nothing except the crackling of the dying fire and natural sounds. We went out to meet the three Oankali.

As I stepped into the open, into the firelight, I was in front of my Human parents and my siblings. That was good because as an ooloi, I was theoretically more able to survive gunshot wounds than any of them. Now I would find out whether that was true.

I was shot three times. The first two shots came from slightly different directions at almost the same instant. To me, they were a single blow, slamming into me, spinning me all the way around. The first two shots hit me in the left shoulder and left lower back. The third hit me in the chest as I spun. It knocked me down.

I rolled and came to my feet just in time to see my Oankali parents go after the resisters. The resisters stopped firing abruptly and scattered. I could hear them—nine males fleeing in nine directions, knowing that three Oankali could not catch them all.

Nikanj and Dichaan each caught one of them. Ahajas, larger, and apparently unwounded, caught two. Each of those caught had fired their rifles. They smelled of the powder they used to shoot. They also smelled terrified. They were being held by the people they feared most. They struggled desperately. One of them wept and cursed and stank more than the others. This was one of those held by Ahajas.

Silently Nikanj took that one from Ahajas and passed her the one he’d caught. The male who had been given to Nikanj began to scream. Blood spilled out of his nose, though no one had touched his face.

Nikanj touched his neck with a sensory tentacle and injected calmness.

The male shouted, “No, no, no, no.” But the last “no” was a whimper. He drew a deep breath, choked on his own blood, and coughed several times. After a while, he was quiet and calm. Nikanj let him wipe his nose on the cloth of his shirt at the shoulder. Nikanj touched his neck once more and the male smiled. Nikanj took him to a large tree and made him sit down against it.

“Stay there,” Nikanj said.

The male looked at it, smiled, and nodded. Even in the leaping fire shadows, he looked peaceful, relaxed.

“Run!” one of his companions shouted to him.

The male put his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. He wasn’t unconscious. He was just too comfortable, too relaxed to worry about anything.

Nikanj went to each prisoner and gave comfort and calmness. When there was no need for anyone to hold them, it came to examine me.

I had sat down against a tree myself, glad for the support it gave. I was having a lot of pain, but I had already expelled the two bullets that hadn’t gone all the way through me and I had stopped the bleeding. By the time Nikanj reached me, I was slowly, carefully encouraging my body to repair itself. I had never been injured this badly before, but my body seemed to be handling it. Here was its chance to grow tissue quickly to fulfill need rather than to cause trouble.

“Good,” Nikanj said. “You don’t need me right now.” It stood back from me. “Is anyone else hurt?”

No one was except the Human woman my Oankali parents had rescued. I could have used some help with my pain, but Nikanj had perceived that and ignored it. It wanted to see what I could do on my own.

Nikanj went to the bloody, unconscious Human woman and lay down beside her.

The woman had been beaten about the face, and from her scent, two males had recently had sex with her. I was too involved with my own healing to detect anything else.

Aaor came to sit next to me. It did not touch me, but I was glad it was there. My other siblings and Dichaan kept watch for resisters.

Ahajas spoke to one of the captives—the one who had been so frightened.

“Why did you attack us?” she asked, sitting down in front of him.

The male stared at her, seemed to examine her very carefully with his eyes. Finally he reached out and touched a sensory tentacle on her arm. Ahajas allowed this. He had not been able to hurt her when she captured him. Now that he was drugged, he was not likely even to try.

After a time, he let the tentacle go as though he did not like it. Humans compared ooloi sensory arms to the appendages of extinct animals—elephant trunks. They compared sensory tentacles to large worms or snakes—like the slender, venomous vine snakes of the forest, perhaps, though sensory tentacles could be much more dangerous, more sensitive, and more flexible than vine snakes, and they were not independent at all.

“You were coming to raid us,” the male said. “One of our hunters saw you and warned us.”

“We would not have attacked you,” Ahajas protested. “We’ve never done such a thing.”

“Yes. We were warned. A gang of Oankali and half-Oankali coming to take revenge for the garden.”

“Did you destroy the garden?”

“Some of us did. Not me.” That was true. People drugged the way he was did not bother to lie. It didn’t occur to them. “We thought your animals shouldn’t have real Human food.”

“Animals

?”

“Those!” He waved a hand toward Lilith and Tino.

Ahajas had known. She had simply wanted to know whether he would say it. He looked with interest at Oni and Ayodele. Since my metamorphosis, they were the most Human-looking members of the family. Children born of Lilith-the-animal.

Aaor and I got up in unison and moved to the other side of the tree we had been leaning against. I was still in pain and I had to watch my healing flesh closely to see that it did not go wrong. It could go very wrong it I kept paying attention to the captive and his offensive nonsense.

8

Sometime later the rescued female made a small, wordless noise, and without thinking, I left Aaor and went over to where she lay on the ground alongside Nikanj. I stood, looking down at them. The female was completely unconscious now, and Nikanj was busy healing her. I almost lay down on her other side, but Lilith called my name, and I stopped. I stood where I was, confused, not knowing why I stood there, but not wanting to leave.

Some of Nikanj’s body tentacles lifted toward me. Gradually it detached itself from the female and focused on me. It sat up and extended its sensory tentacles toward me. “Let me see what you’ve done for yourself,” it said.

I stepped around the female, who was still unconscious, and let Nikanj examine me.

“Good,” it said after a moment. “Flawless.” It was clearly surprised.

“Let me touch her,” I said.

“I haven’t finished with her.” Nikanj smoothed its tentacles flat to its body. “There’s work for you to do if you want it.”

I did. That was exactly what I wanted. Yet I knew I shouldn’t have been allowed to touch her. I hesitated, focusing sharply on Nikanj.

“I’ll have to check her afterward,” it said. “You’ll find you won’t like that. But for the sake of her health, I have to do it. Now go ahead. Help her.”

‘ I lay down alongside the female. I don’t think I could have refused Nikanj’s offer. The pull of the female, injured, alone, and in no way related to me was overwhelming.

I might still be too young to give her pleasure. That disturbed me, but there was nothing I could do about it. When I had something to work with besides sensory tentacles, I could give great pleasure. Now, at least, I could give relief from pain.

The female’s face, head, breasts, and abdomen were bruised from blows and would be painful if I woke her. I could find no other injuries. Nikanj had not left me anything serious. I went to work on the bruises.

I held the female close to me and sank as many head and body tentacles into her as I could, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was somehow not close enough to her, not linked deeply enough into her nervous system, that there was something missing.

Of course there was—and there would be until my second metamorphosis. I understood the feeling, but I couldn’t make it go away. I had to be especially careful not to hold her too tightly, not to interfere with her breathing.

The beauty of her flesh was my reward. A foreign Human as incredibly complex as any Human, as full of the Human Conflict—dangerous and frightening and intriguing—as any Human. She was like the fire—desirable and dangerous, beautiful and lethal. Humans never understood why Oankali found them so interesting.

I took my time finishing with the woman. No one hurried me. It was a real effort for me to move aside and let Nikanj check her. I didn’t want it to touch her. I didn’t want to share her with it. I had never felt that way before.

I stood with my arms tightly folded and my attention on the now silent male prisoners. I think Nikanj worked quickly for my sake. After a very short time, it stood up and said, “I think she’s inspired you to get control of your abilities. Stay with her until she wakes. Don’t call me unless she seems likely to hurt herself or to run away.”

“Was she working with them?” I asked, gesturing with head tentacles toward the males.

“She was a captive of their friends. I don’t think she knew what was going to happen to her.” It hesitated. “They’ve learned that false screams won’t lure us away. Her first screams sounded false because she wasn’t frightened yet. Probably they told her to scream. Then they began to beat her.”

The female moaned. Nikanj turned and went to help Lilith and Tino, who had begun to pull undamaged Lo cloth hammocks and pieces of clothing from the ashes. The fire had not gone completely out, but it was burning down rather than spreading. We didn’t seem to be in any danger. I went over and borrowed one of Tino’s salvaged shirts. He rarely wore them himself, but now, for a while, they would conceal some of my new body tentacles. The more familiar I seemed to the female, the less likely she would be to panic. I was gray-brown now. She would know I was a construct. But not such a startling construct.

She awoke, sat up abruptly, looked around in near panic.

“You’re safe,” I said to her. “You’re not hurt and no one here will hurt you.”

She drew back from me, scrambled away, then froze when she saw my parents and siblings.

“You’re safe,” I repeated. “The people who hurt you are not here.”

That seemed to catch her attention. After all, Humans had injured her, not Oankali. She looked around more carefully, jumped when she saw the Human males sitting nearby.

“They can’t hurt you,” I said. “Even if they’ve hurt you before, they can’t now.”

She stared at me, watched my mouth as I spoke.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I sighed, watched her for a while without speaking. She understood me. It was as though it had suddenly occurred to her to pretend not to understand. I had spoken to her in English and her responses had shown me she understood. She had very black hair that reminded me of Tino’s. But hers was loose and uncombed, hanging lank around her narrow, angular brown face. She had not gotten enough to eat for many days. Her body had told me that clearly. But for most of her life, she had been comfortably well nourished. Her body was small, quick, harder muscled than most Human female bodies. Not only had it done hard work, it was probably comfortable doing hard work. It liked to move quickly and eat frequently. It was hungry now.

I went to the tree I had leaned against while I was healing. I’d left my pack there. I found it and brought it back to where the female sat on her knees, watching me. From it I gave her two bananas and a handful of shelled nuts. She didn’t even make a pretense of not wanting them.

I watched her eat and wondered what it would be like to be in contact with her while she ate. How did the food taste and feel to her?

“Why are you staring at me?” she demanded. Fast, choppy English like the firing of guns.

“My name is Jodahs,” I offered. “What’s yours?”

“Marina Rivas. I want to go to Mars.”

I looked away from her, suddenly weary. One more small, thin-boned female to be sacrificed to Human stubbornness. I recalled from examining her that she had never had a child. That was good because her narrow hips were not suitable to bearing children. If her fertility were restored and nothing else changed, she would surely die trying to give birth to her first child. She could be changed, redesigned. I wouldn’t trust myself to do such substantial work, but she must have it done.

“Were you on your way to Lo?” I asked.

“Yes. The ships leave from there, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“You’re from there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I go back with you?”

“We’ll see that you get there. Did your people beat you because you wanted to go to Mars?” Such things had happened. Some resisters killed their “deserters,” as they called those who wanted to emigrate.

“Do they look like my people!” the female demanded harshly. “I was on my way to Lo. When I passed their village, they took me from my canoe and raped me and called me stupid names and made me stay in their pigsty village. The men kept me shut up in an animal pen and they raped me. The women spat on me and put dirt or shit in my food because the men raped me.”

There was so much hatred and anger in her face and voice that I drew back. “I know Humans do such things,” I said. “I understand the biological reasons why they do them, but

I’ve never seen them done.”

“Good. Why should you? Do you have anything else to eat?”

I gave her what I had. She needed it.

“Where did you live before the war?” I asked. She was brown and narrow-eyed and her English was accented in a way I had not heard before. I had siblings who looked a little like her—children of Lilith’s first postwar mate who had come from China. He had been killed by people like the resisters who had shot me.

Aaor came up and stood close so that it could link with me. It was intensely curious about the female. The female stared at it with equal curiosity, but spoke to me.

“I’m from Manila.” Her voice had gone harsh again, as though the words hurt her. “What can that mean to you?”

“The Philippines?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “What do you know about my country?”

I thought for a moment, remembering. “That it was made up of islands, warm and green—some of them like this, I think.” I gestured toward the forest. “That it could have fed everyone easily, but didn’t because some Humans took more than they needed. That it took no part in the last war, but it died anyway.”

“Everything died,” the female said bitterly. “But how do you know even that much? Have you known another Filipina?”

“No, but a few people from the Philippines have come through Lo. Some of my adult siblings told me about them.”

“Do you know any names?”

“No.”

She sighed. “Maybe I’ll see them on Mars. Who is this?” She looked at Aaor.

“My closest sibling, Aaor.”

She stared at us both and shook her head. “I could almost stay,” she said. “It doesn’t seem as bad as it once did—the Oankali, the idea of

different children.

”

“You should stay,” I told her. “Mars may not be green during your lifetime. You won’t be able to go outside the shelters unprotected. Mars is cold and dry.”

“Mars is Human. Now.”

I said nothing.

“I’m tired,” she said after a while. “Does anyone care if I sleep?”

I cleared some ground for her and spread a piece of Lo cloth on it.

“You two are children, aren’t you?” she asked Aaor.

“Yes,” Aaor answered.

“So? Will you be a woman someday?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t understand that. It bothers me more than most things about you people. Come and lie here. I know your kind like to touch everyone. If you want to, you can touch me.”

I took that to include me, too, and pressed two pieces of Lo cloth edge-to-edge so that we could have a wider sleeping mat.

“I didn’t invite you,” she said to me. “You look too much like a man.”

“I’m not male,” I said.

“I don’t care. You look male.”

“Let it sleep here,” Aaor said. “The insects won’t come near you with one of us on either side.”

She stared at me. “Really? You scare the bugs away?”

“Our scent repels them.”

She sniffed, trying to smell us. In fact, she did smell me—unconsciously. I smelled ooloi. Interesting, perhaps attractive to an unmated person.

“All right,” she said. “I’ve never yet caught an Oankali or a construct in a lie. Come and sleep here. You’re honestly not male?”

“I’m honestly not male.”

“Come keep the bugs off, then.”

We kept the bugs off and kept her warm and investigated her thoroughly, though we were careful not to touch her in any way that would alarm her. I thought hands would alarm her, so I only touched her with my longest sensory tentacles. This startled her at first, but once she realized she wasn’t being hurt, she put up with our curiosity. She never knew that I helped her fall asleep.

And I never knew how it happened that during the night she moved completely out of contact with Aaor and against me so that I could reach her with most of my head and body tentacles.

I discovered that I had slightly altered the structure of her pelvis during the night. I hadn’t intended to try such a thing. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try it. Yet it was done. The female could bear children now.

I detached myself from her and sat up, missing the feel of her at once. It was dawn and my parents were already up. Nikanj and Ahajas were cooking something in a suspended pot made of layers of Lo cloth. Lilith was looking through the ashes of the night’s fire. Tino and Dichaan where out of sight, but I could hear and smell them nearby. Last night, once my attention was on Marina Rivas, I had almost stopped sensing them. I had not known then how completely she had absorbed my attention.

Nikanj left the belly of cloth and its weight of cooking food—nut porridge. The Humans would not want it until they had tasted it. Then they would not be able to get enough of it. It might actually contain some nuts from wild trees. Lilith or Tino might have gathered some. More likely, though, all the nuts had been synthesized by Nikanj and Ahajas from the substance of Ahajas’s body. We could eat a great many things that Humans could not or would not touch. Then we could use what we’d eaten to create something more palatable for Humans. My Human parents shrugged and said this was no more than Lo did every day—which was true. But resisters were always repelled if they knew. So we didn’t tell them unless they asked directly.

Nikanj came over to me and checked me carefully.

“You’re all right,” it said. “You’re doing fine. The female is good for you.”

“She’s going to Mars.”

“I heard.”

“I wish I could keep her here.”

“She’s very strong. I think she’ll survive Mars.”

“I changed her a little. I didn’t mean to, but—”

“I know. I’m going to check her very thoroughly just before we leave her, but from what I’ve seen in you, you did a good job. I wish she were not so old. If she were younger, I would help you persuade her to stay.”

She was as old as my Human mother. She might live a century more here on Earth where there was plenty to eat and drink and breathe, where there were Oankali to repair her injuries. I could live five times that long—unless I mated with someone like Marina. Then I would live only as long as I could keep her alive.

“If she were younger, I would persuade her myself,” I said.

Nikanj coiled a sensory arm around my neck briefly, then went to give the male captives their morning drugging. Best to do that before they woke.

Marina was already awake and looking at me. “There’s food,” I said. “It doesn’t look very interesting, but it tastes good.”

She extended a hand. I took it and pulled her to her feet. Four bowls from Lo had been salvaged from the fire. We took two of them down to the river, washed them, washed ourselves, and swam a little. This was my first experience with breathing underwater. I slipped into it so naturally and comfortably that I hardly noticed that I was doing something new.

I heard Marina’s voice calling me and I realized I’d drifted some distance downstream. I turned and swam back to her. She had not taken off her clothing—short pants that had once been longer and a ragged shirt much too big for her.

I had taken off mine. She had stared at me then. Now she stared again. No visible genitals. In fact, no reproductive organs at all.

“I don’t understand,” she said as I walked out of the water. “You must not care what I see or you wouldn’t have undressed. I don’t understand how you can have

nothing.”

“I’m not an adult.”

“But

”

I put my shorts and Tino’s shirt back on.

“Why do you wear clothes?”

“For Humans. Don’t you feel more comfortable now?”

She laughed. I hadn’t heard her laugh before. It was a harsh, sharp shout of joy. “I feel more comfortable!” she said. “But take your clothes off if you want to. What difference does it make?”

My underarms itched painfully. Because there was nothing else for me to do, I took her hand, picked up the bowls, and headed back toward camp and breakfast.

She walked close to me and didn’t shrink away from my sensory tentacles.

“I don’t think you have to worry about becoming a woman,” she said.

“No.”

“You’re almost a man now.”

I stepped in front of her and stopped. She stopped obligingly and watched me, waiting.

“I’m not male. I never will be. I’m ooloi.”

She almost leaped away from me. I saw the shadow of abrupt movement, not quite completed in her muscles. “How can you be?” she demanded. “You have two arms, not four.”

“So far,” I said.

She stared at my arms. “You

You’re truly ooloi?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “No wonder I had dreams about you last night.”

“Oh? Did you like them?”

“Of course I liked them. I liked you. And I shouldn’t have. You look too male. Nothing male should have been appealing to me last night—after what those bastards did to me. Nothing male should be appealing to me for a long, long time.”

“You’re healed.”

“Yes. You did that?”

“Part of it.”

“There’s more to healing than just closing wounds.”

“You’re healed.”

She looked at me for a time, then looked away at the trees. “I must be,” she said.

“More than healed.”

She put her head to one side. “What?”

“When your fertility is restored, you’ll be able to have children without trouble. You couldn’t have done that before.”

Her expression changed to one of remembered pain. “My mother died when I was born. People said she should have had a cesarean, you know?”

“Yes.”

“She didn’t. I don’t know why.”

“You need to be changed a little genetically so that your daughters will be able to give birth safely.”

“Can you do that?”

“I won’t have time. We’ll be escorting you and the male prisoners to Lo today. I’m not experienced enough to do that kind of work anyway.”

“Who’ll do it?”

“An adult ooloi.”

“No!”

“Yes,” I said, taking her by the arms. “Yes. You can’t condemn your daughters to die the way your mother did. Why do adult ooloi frighten you?”

“They don’t frighten me. My response to them frightens me. I feel

as though I’m not in control of myself anymore. I feel drugged—as though they could make me do anything.”

“You won’t be their prisoner. And you won’t be dealing with unmated ooloi. The ooloi who changes you won’t want anything from you.”

“I would rather have you do it—or someone like you.”

“I’m a construct ooloi. The first one. There is no one else like me.”

She looked at me for a little longer, then pulled me closer to her and drew a long, weary breath. “You’re beautiful, you know? You shouldn’t be, but you are. You remind me of a man I knew once.” She sighed again. “Damn.”

9

Back to Lo.

We gave the drugged prisoners to the people of Lo. A house would be grown for them from the substance of Lo and they would not be let out of it until a shuttle came for them. Then they would be transferred to the ship. They understood what was to happen to them, and even drugged, they asked to be spared, to be released. The one who had called Lilith and Tino animals began to cry. Nikanj drugged him a little more and he seemed to forget why he had been upset. That would be his life now. Once he was aboard the ship, one ooloi would drug him regularly. He would come to look forward to it—and he would not care what else was done with him.

I took Marina to the guest area before Nikanj was free to check her. I didn’t want to watch it examine her. I got the impression that it was perfectly willing not to touch her. There must have been too much of my scent on her to make her seem still alone and unrelated.

She kissed me before I left her. I think it was an experiment for her. For me it was an enjoyment. It let me touch her a little more, sink filaments of sensory tentacles into her along the lengths of our bodies. She liked that. She shouldn’t have. I was supposed to be too young to give pleasure. She liked it anyway.

“I’ll send someone to change you genetically,” I said after a time. “Don’t be afraid. Let your children have the same chance you have.”

“All right.”

I held her a little longer, then left her. I asked Tehkorahs to check her and make the necessary adjustment.

It stood with Wray Ordway, its male Human mate, and Wray smiled and gave me a look of understanding and amusement. He was one of the few people in Lo to speak for me when the exile decision was being made. “A child is a child,” he said through Tehkorahs. “The more you treat it like a freak, the more it will behave like one.” I think people like him eased things for me. They made Earth exile feel less objectionable to the truly frightened people who wanted me safely shut away on the ship.

“You know I’ll take care of the female,” Tehkorahs said. “She seemed to like you very much.”

I felt my head and body tentacles flatten to my skin in remembered pleasure. “Very much.”

Wray laughed. “I told you it would be sexually precocious— just like the construct males and females.”

Tehkorahs looped a sensory tentacle around his neck. “I’m not surprised. Every gene trade brings change. Jodahs, let me check you. The female won’t want to see me for a while. You’ve left too much of yourself with her.”

I stepped close to it and it released Wray and examined me quickly, thoroughly. I felt its surprise before it let me go. “You’re much more in control now,” it said. “I can’t find anything wrong with you. And if your memories of the female are accurate—”

“Of course they are!”

“Then I probably won’t find anything wrong with her either. Except for the genetic problem.”

“She’ll cooperate when you’re ready to correct that.”

“Good. You look like her, you know.”

“What?”

“Your body has been striving to please her. You’re more brown now—less gray. Your face is changed subtly.”

“You look like a male version of her,” Wray said. “She probably thought you were very handsome.”

“She said so,” I admitted amid Wray’s laughter. “I didn’t know I was changing.”

“All ooloi change a little when they mate,” Tehkorahs said. “Our scents change. We fit ourselves into our mates’ kin group. You may fit in better than most of us—just as your descendants will fit more easily when they find a new species for the gene trade.”

If I ever had descendants.

The next day, the family gathered new supplies and left Lo for the second time. I had had one more night to sleep in the family house. I slept with Aaor the way I always used to before my metamorphosis. I think I made it as lonely as I felt myself now that Marina was gone. And that night I gave Aaor, Lo, and myself large, foul-smelling sores.

1

We didn’t stop at the island we had intended to live on. It was too close to Pascual. Living there would have made us targets for more Human fear and frustration. We followed the river west, then south, traveling when we wanted to, resting when we were tired—drifting, really. I was restless, and drifting suited me. The others simply seemed not content with any likely campsite we found. I suspected that they wouldn’t be content again until they returned to Lo to stay.

We edged around Human habitations very carefully. Humans who saw us either stared from a distance or followed us until we left their territory. None approached us.

Twelve days from Lo, we were still drifting. The river was long with many tributaries, many curves and twists. It was good to walk along the shaded forest floor, following the sound and smell of it, and thinking about nothing at all. My fingers and toes became webbed on the third day, and I didn’t bother to correct them. I was wet at least as often as I was dry. My hair fell out and I developed a few more sensory tentacles. I stopped wearing clothing, and my coloring changed to gray-green.

“What are you doing?” my Human mother asked. “Letting your body do whatever it wants to?” Her voice and posture expressed stiff disapproval.

“As long as I don’t develop an illness,” I said.

She frowned. “I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. Deformity is as bad as illness.”

I walked away from her. I had never done that before.

Fifteen days out of Lo, someone shot at us with arrows. Only Lilith was hit. Nikanj caught the archer, drugged him unconscious, destroyed all his weapons, and changed the color of his hair. It had been deep brown. It would be colorless from now on. It would look all white. Finally Nikanj encouraged his face to fall into the permanent creases that this male’s behavior and genetic heritage had dictated for his old age. He would look much older. He would not be weaker or in any way infirm, but appearances were important to Humans. When this male awoke—sometime the next day—his eyes and his fingers would tell him he had paid a terrible price for attacking us. More important, his people would see. They would misunderstand what they saw, and it would frighten them into letting us alone.

Lilith had no special trouble with the arrow. It damaged one of her kidneys and gave her a great deal of pain, but her life was in no danger. Her improved body would have healed quickly even without Nikanj’s help, since the arrow was not poisoned. But Nikanj did not leave her to heal herself. It lay beside her and healed her completely before it returned to whiten the drugged archer’s hair and wrinkle his face. Mates took care of one another.

I watched them, wondering who I would take care of. Who would take care of me?

Twenty-one days out, the bed of our river turned south and we turned with it. Dichaan veered off the trail, and left us for some time, and came back with a male Human who had broken his leg. The leg was grotesque—swollen, discolored, and blistered. The smell of it made Nikanj and me look at one another.

We camped and made a pallet for the injured Human. Nikanj spoke to me before it went to him.

“Get rid of your webbing,” it said. “Try to look less like a frog or you’ll scare him.”

“Are you going to let me heal him?”

“Yes. And it will take a while for you to do it right. Your first regeneration

. Go eat something while I ease his pain.”

“Let me do that,” I said. But it had already turned away and gone back to the male. The male’s leg was worse than worthless. It was poisoning his body. Portions of it were already dead. Yet the thought of taking it disturbed me.

Ahajas and Aaor brought me food before I could look around for it, and Aaor sat with me while I ate.

“Why are you afraid?” it said.

“Not exactly afraid, but

To take the leg

”

“Yes. It will give you a chance to grow something other than webbing and sensory tentacles.”

“I don’t want to do it. He’s old like Marina. You don’t know how I hated letting her go.”

“Don’t I?”

I focused on it. “I didn’t think you did. You didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t want me to. You should eat.”

When I didn’t eat, it moved closer to me and leaned against me, linking comfortably into my nervous system. It had not done that for a while. It wasn’t afraid of me anymore. It had not exactly abandoned me. It had allowed me to isolate myself—since I seemed to want to. It let me know this in simple neurosensory impressions.

“I was lonely,” I protested aloud.

“I know. But not for me.” It spoke with confidence and contentment that confused me.

“You’re changing,” I said.

“Not yet. But soon, I think.”

“Metamorphosis? We’ll lose each other when you change.”

“I know. Share the Human with me. It will give the two of us more time together.”

“All right.”

Then I had to go to the Human. I had to heal him alone. After that, Aaor and I could share him.

People remembered their ooloi siblings. I had heard Ahajas and Dichaan talk about theirs. But they had not seen it for decades. An ooloi belonged to the kin group of its mates. Its siblings were lost to it.

The Human male had lost consciousness by the time I lay down beside him. The moment I touched him, I knew he must have broken his leg in a fall—probably from a tree. He had puncture wounds and deep bruises on the left side of his body. The left leg was, as I had expected, a total loss, foul and poisonous. I separated it from the rest of his body above the damaged tissue. First I stopped the circulation of bodily fluids and poisons to and from the leg. Then I encouraged the growth of a skin barrier at the hip. Finally I helped his body let go of the rotting limb.

When the leg fell away, I withdrew enough of my attention from the male to ask the family to get rid of it. I didn’t want the male to see it.

Then I settled down to healing the many smaller injuries and neutralizing the poisons that had already begun to destroy the health of his body. I spent much of the evening healing him. Finally I focused again on his leg and began to reprogram certain cells. Genes that had not been active since well before the male was born had to be awakened and set to work telling the body how to grow a leg. A leg, not a cancer. The regeneration would take many days and would have to be monitored. We would camp here and keep the man with us until regeneration was complete.

It had been dark for some time when I detached myself from the male. My Human parents and my siblings were asleep nearby. Ahaj as and Dichaan sat near one another guarding the camp and conversing aloud so softly that even I could not hear all they said. A Human intruder would have heard nothing at all. Oankali and construct hearing was so acute that some resisters imagined we could read their thoughts. I wished we could have so that I would have some idea how the male I had healed would react to me. I would have to spend as much time with him as new mates often spent together. That would be hard if he hated or feared me.

“Do you like him, Oeka?” Nikanj asked softly.

I had known it was behind me, sitting, waiting to check my work. Now it came up beside me and settled a sensory arm around my neck. I still enjoyed its touch, but I held stiff against it because I thought it would next touch the male.

“Thorny, possessive ooloi child,” it said, pulling me against it in spite of my stiffness. “I must examine him this once. But if what you tell me and show me matches what I find in him, I won’t touch him again until it’s time for him to go—unless something goes wrong.”

“Nothing will go wrong!”

“Good. Show me everything.”

I obeyed, stumbling now and then because I understood the working of the male’s body better than I understood the vocabulary, silent or vocal, for discussing it. But with neurosensory illusions, I could show it exactly what I meant.

“There are no words for some things,” Nikanj told me as it finished. “You and your children will create them if you need them. We’ve never needed them.”

“Did I do all right with him?”

“Go away. I’ll find out for sure.”

I went to sit with Ahajas and Dichaan and they gave me some of the wild figs and nuts they had been eating. The food did not take my mind off Nikanj touching the Human, but I ate anyway, and listened while Ahajas told me how hard it had been for Nikanj when its ooan Kahguyaht had had to examine Lilith.

“Kahguyaht said ooloi possessiveness during subadulthood is a bridge that helps ooloi understand Humans,” she said. “It’s as though Human emotions were permanently locked in ooloi subadulthood. Humans are possessive of mates, potential mates, and property because these can be taken from them.”

“They can be taken from anyone,” I said. “Living things can die. Nonliving things can be destroyed.”

“But Human mates can walk away from one another,” Dichaan said. “They never lose the ability to do that. They can leave one another permanently and find new mates. Humans can take the mates of other Humans. There’s no physical bond. No security. And because Humans are hierarchical, they tend to compete for mates and property.”

“But that’s built into them genetically,” I said. “It isn’t built into me.”

“No,” Ahajas said. “But, Oeka, you won’t be able to bond with a mate—Human, construct, or Oankali—until you’re adult. You can feel needs and attachments. I know you feel more at this stage than an Oankali would. But until you’re mature, you can’t form a true bond. Other ooloi can seduce potential mates away from you. So other ooloi are suspect.”

That sounded right—or rather, it sounded true. It didn’t make me feel any better, but it helped me understand why I felt like tearing Nikanj loose from the male and standing guard to see that it did not approach him again.

Nikanj came over to me after a while, smelling of the male, tasting of him when it touched me. I flinched in resentment.

“You’ve done a good job,” it said. “How can you do such a good job with Humans and such a poor one with yourself and Aaor?”

“I don’t know,” I said bleakly. “But Humans steady me somehow. Maybe it’s just that Marina and this male are alone—mateless.”

“Go rest next to him. If you want to sleep, sleep linked with him so that he won’t wake up until you do.”

I got up to go.

“Oeka.”

I focused on Nikanj without turning.

“Tino made crutches for him to use for the next few days. They’re near his foot.”

“All right.” I had never seen a crutch, but I had heard of them from the Humans in Lo.

“There’s clothing with the crutches. Lilith says put some of it on and give the rest to him.”

Now I did turn to look at it.

“Put the clothing on, Jodahs. He’s a resister male. It will be hard enough for him to accept you.”

It was right, of course. I wasn’t even sure why I had stopped wearing clothes—except perhaps that I didn’t have anyone to wear them for. I dressed and lay down alongside the male.

2

The male and I awoke together. He saw me and tried at once to scramble away from me. I held him, spoke softly to him. “You’re safe,” I said. “No one will hurt you here. You’re being helped.”

He frowned, watched my mouth. I could read no understanding in his expression, though the softness of my voice seemed to ease him.

“EspaŃol?” I asked.

“PortuguĘs?” he asked hopefully.

Relief. “Sim, senhor. Falo portuguĘs.”

He sighed with relief of his own. “Where am I? What has happened to me?”

I sat up, but with a hand on his shoulder encouraged him to go on lying down. “We found you badly injured, alone in the forest. I think you had fallen from a tree.”

“I remember

my leg. I tried to get home.”

“You can go home in a few days. You’re still healing now.” I paused. “You did a great deal of damage to yourself, but we can fix it all.”

“Who are you?”

“Jodahs Iyapo Leal Kaalnikanjlo. I’m the one who has to see that you walk home on two good legs.”

“It was broken, my leg. Will it be crooked?”

“No. It will be new and straight. What’s your name?”

“Excuse me. I am JoĂo. JoĂo Eduardo Villas da Silva.”

“JoĂo, your leg was too badly injured to be saved. But your new leg has already begun to grow.”

He groped in sudden terror for the missing leg. He stared at me. Abruptly he tried again to scramble away.

I caught his arms and held him still, held him until he stopped struggling. “You are well and healthy,” I told him softly. “In a few days you will have a new leg. Don’t do yourself any more harm now. You’re all right.”

He stared at my face, shook his head, stared again.

“It is true,” I said. “A few days of crutches, then a whole leg again. Look at it.”

He looked, twisting so that I could not see—as though he thought his body still held secrets from me.

“It doesn’t look like a new leg,” he said.

“It’s only a few hours old. Give it time to grow.”

He sat where he was and looked around at the rest of the family. “Who are you all? Why are you here?”

“We’re travelers. One family from Lo, traveling south.”

“My home is to the west in the hills.”

“We won’t leave you until you can go there.”

“Thank you.” He stared at me a little longer. “I mean no offense, but

I’ve met very few of your people—Human and not Human.”

“Construct.”

“Yes. But I don’t know

Are you a man or a woman?”

“I’m not an adult yet.”

“No? You appear to be an adult. You appear to be a young woman—too thin, perhaps, but very lovely.”

I wasn’t surprised this time. My body wanted him. My body sought to please him. What would happen to me when I had two or more mates? Would I be like the sky, constantly changing, clouded, clear, clouded, clear? Would I have to be hateful to one partner in order to please the other? Nikanj looked the same all the time and yet all four of my other parents treasured it. How well would my looks please anyone when I had four arms instead of two?

“No male or female could regenerate your leg,” I told JoĂo. “I am ooloi.”

It was as though the air between us became a crystalline wall—transparent, but very hard. I could not reach him through it anymore. He had taken refuge behind it and even if I touched him, I would not reach him.

“You have nothing to fear from us,” I said, meaning he had nothing to fear from me. “And even though I’m not adult, I can complete your regeneration.”

“Thank you,” he said from behind his cold new shield. “I’m very grateful.” He was not. He did not believe me.

My head and body tentacles drew themselves into tight prestrike coils, and I moved back from JoĂo. It would have been easier if he had leaped away from me the way Marina had almost done. Fear was easier to deal with than this

this cold rejection—this revulsion.

“Why do you hate me?” I whispered. “You would have died without an ooloi to save your life. Why do you hate me for saving your life?”

JoĂo’s face underwent several changes. Surprise, regret, shame, anger, renewed hatred and revulsion. “I did not ask you to save me.”

“Why do you hate me?”

“I know what you do—your kind. You take men as though they were women!”

“No! We—”

“Yes! Your kind and your Human whores are the cause of all our trouble! You treat all mankind as your woman!”

“Is that how I’ve treated you?”

He became sullen. “I don’t know what you’ve done.”

“Your body tells you what I’ve done.” I sat for a time and looked at him with my eyes. When he looked away, I said, “That male over there is my Human father. The female is my Human mother. I came from her body. I didn’t heal you so that you could insult these people.”

He only stared at me. But there was doubt in him now. Lilith was putting something into a Lo cloth pot that she had suspended between two trees. She had not yet made a fire beneath it. Tino was some distance away cutting palm branches. We would build a shelter of sapling trees, Lo cloth, and palm branches and hang our hammocks in it. We had not done that for a while.

My Human parents must have looked much like the people of JoĂo’s home village. When lone resisters had to live among us, they usually found themselves identifying with the mated Humans around them and choosing an Oankali or a construct “protector.” They became temporary mates or temporary adopted siblings. Marina had chosen a kind of temporary mate status, staying with me and hardly speaking at all to anyone else except Aaor. That was what I wanted of JoĂo, too. But I would have to encourage him more, and at the same time convince him that his manhood was not threatened. I had heard that males often felt this way about ooloi. I would have to talk to Tino. He could help me understand the fear and ease it. Reason would clearly not be enough.

“No one will guard you,” I told JoĂo. “You are not a prisoner. But I have to monitor your leg. If you leave before the regeneration is complete, before I make certain the growth process had stopped, you could wind up with a monstrous tumor. It would eventually kill you. If someone cut it away for you, it would grow again.”

He did not want to believe me, but I had frightened him. I had intended to. All that I’d said was true.

I stood up and pointed. “Your crutches are there. And my Human mother has left you clean clothing.” I paused. “Anyone here will give you any help you need if you don’t insult them.”

I wanted to hold my hand out to him, but all of his body language said he would not take it as Marina had. He sat where he was, staring at the place where his leg had been. He made no effort to get up.

I brought him a bowl of fruit and nut porridge and he only sat staring at it. I sat with him and ate mine, but he hardly moved. No, he moved once. When I touched him, he flinched and turned to stare at me. There was nothing in his expression except hatred.

I went away and bathed in the river. Aaor was with JoĂo when I got back to camp. They were not talking, but the stiffness had gone out of JoĂo’s back. Perhaps he was simply tired.

I saw Aaor push the bowl of porridge toward him. He took the bowl and ate. When Aaor touched him, he did not flinch.

3

JoĂo chose Aaor. He accepted help from it and talked to it and caressed its small breasts once he realized that neither it nor anyone else minded this. The breasts did not represent true mammary glands. Aaor would probably lose them when it metamorphosed. Most constructs did, even when they became female. But JoĂo liked them. Aaor simply enjoyed the contact.

At night, JoĂo endured me. I think his greatest shame was that his body did not find me as repellent as he wanted to believe I was. This frightened him as much as it shamed him. Perhaps it told him what I had already realized—that given time he could learn to accept me, to enjoy me very much. I think he hated me more for that than for anything.

In twenty-one days JoĂo’s leg had grown. I had made him eat huge amounts of food—had stimulated his appetite so that he could not stubbornly refuse meals. Also, I chemically encouraged him to be sedentary. He needed all his energy to grow his leg.

I had grown breasts myself, and developed an even more distinctly Human female appearance. I neither directed my body nor attempted to control it. It developed no diseases, no abnormal growths or changes. It seemed totally focused on JoĂo, who ignored it during the day, but caressed it at night and investigated it before I put him to sleep.

I kept him with me for three extra days to help him regain his strength and to be absolutely certain the leg had stopped growing and worked as well as his old one. It was smooth and soft-skinned and very pale. The foot was so tender that I folded lengths of Lo cloth and pressed them together to make sandals for him.

“I haven’t worn anything on my feet since long before you were born,” he told me.

“Wear these back to your home or you’ll damage the new foot badly,” I said.

“You’re really going to let me go?”

“Tomorrow.” It was our twenty-fifth night together. He still pretended to ignore me during the day, but it had apparently become so much trouble for him to manufacture hatred against me at night. He accepted what I did for him and he did not insult me. He didn’t insult anyone. Once I found him telling Aaor, Lilith, and Tino about SĂo Paulo, where he had been born. He had been only nineteen when the war came. He had been a student. He would have become a doctor like his father. “People shook their heads over the war at first,” he told them. “They said it would kill off the north—Europe, Asia, North America. They said the northerners had lost their minds. No one realized we would suffer from sickness, hunger, blindness

.”

He had known I was listening. He hadn’t cared, but he would not have volunteered to tell me anything of his past. He answered my questions, but he volunteered nothing.

The name of his resister village was SĂo Paulo, in memory of his home city, which had once existed far to the east. He had just traveled back to the site of the city—through thick forests and hostile people, across many rivers. Before the war and the coming of the Oankali, SĂo Paulo was a city of millions of Humans and the forests of buildings, large and small. But what the war and its aftermath had not destroyed, the Oankali fed to their shuttles. Shuttles ate whatever they landed on. There were a few ruins left, but the forest now covered most of what had been SĂo Paulo.

JoĂo had talked about his past to Ahajas and Dichaan as well. He avoided Nikanj, at least. I could accept everything he did as long as he avoided Nikanj.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated now, lying beside me. He moved warningly, then sat up. I had told him always to move a little to warn me that he intended to change position or get up—in case I had sensory tentacles linked into him. He had ignored me once. The pain of that had made him scream aloud and roll himself into a tight fetal knot for some time, sweating and gasping. He hurt me as badly as he hurt himself, but I managed not to react as much. I never said anything, but he always made me a small, warning move after that.

He looked down at me. “I didn’t believe you.”

“Your leg is complete and strong. It’s tender. You need to protect it. But you’re whole. Why shouldn’t you leave?”

His mouth said nothing. His face said he wasn’t sure he wanted to go. He wasn’t even sure he appreciated my telling him he could go. But his pride kept him silent.

“All right!” he said finally. “Tomorrow I go. Tomorrow morning.”

I drew him down to our pallet and kissed his face, then his mouth. “I won’t be glad to see you go,” I said. “If you were younger

” I rubbed the back of his neck. My underarms didn’t itch. They hurt.

“I didn’t know my age was important,” he said. He sighed. “I shouldn’t care. I should be grateful. I haven’t changed my opinion

of ooloi.”

“You have, I think.”

“No. I’ve only changed my feelings toward you. I wouldn’t have believed I could do even that.”

“Before you leave, go to Nikanj. Have it check you to be certain that I haven’t missed anything.”

“No!”

“It will only touch you for a moment. Only for a moment. Come to me afterward

to say goodbye.”

“No. I can’t let that thing touch me. I would rather trust you.”

“It’s one of my parents.”

“I know. I mean no offense. But I cannot do that.”

“I won’t send you away to die from some mistake of mine that could have been corrected. You will let it touch you.”

Silence.

“Do it for my sake, JoĂo. Don’t leave me wondering whether I’ve killed you.”

He sighed. After a moment, he nodded.

I put him to sleep. He did not realize it, but I was responsible for strengthening his aversion to Nikanj. No male or female who spent as much time with an ooloi as he had with me would feel comfortable touching another ooloi. JoĂo was not bound to me, but he was chemically oriented toward me and away from others. And adult ooloi could seduce him from me if he truly disliked me and was interested in finding another ooloi. But otherwise, he would stay with me. Lilith had begun this way with Nikanj.

The next morning, I took JoĂo to Nikanj. As I had promised, Nikanj touched him briefly, then let him go.

“You’ve done nothing wrong with him,” he told me. “I wish he could stay and keep you from becoming a frog again.” I was grateful that it spoke in English and JoĂo did not understand.

I gave JoĂo food and a hammock and my machete. He had lost whatever gear he had had with him when he fell.

“There are older Oankali who would mate with you,” I told him. “They could give you pleasure. You could have children.”

“Which of them would look like someone I used to dream about when I was young?” he asked.

“I don’t really look like this, JoĂo. You know I don’t. I didn’t look this way when we met.”

“You look like this for me,” he said. “Tell me who else could do that?”

I shook my head. “No one.”

“You see?”

“Then go to Mars. Find someone who does really look this way. Have Human children.”

“I’ve thought about Mars. It seemed a fantasy, though. To live on another world.

”

“Oankali have lived on many other worlds. Why shouldn’t Humans live on at least one other?”

“Why should the Oankali have the one world that’s ours?”

“They do have it. And you can’t take it back from them. You can stay here and die uselessly, resisting. You can go to Mars and help found a new Human society. Or you can join us in the trade. We will go to the stars eventually. If you join us, your children will go with us.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been among Oankali before. We all have, we resisters. Oankali never made me doubt what I should do.” He smiled. “Before I met you, Jodahs, I knew myself much better.”

He went away undecided. “I don’t even know what I want from you,” he said as he was leaving. “It isn’t the usual thing, certainly, but I don’t want to leave you.”

But, of course, he did leave.

4

Two days after JoĂo had gone, Aaor went into metamorphosis. It did not seem to edge in slowly as I had—though I had been so preoccupied with JoĂo that I could easily have missed the signs. It simply went to its pallet and went to sleep. I was the one who touched it and realized that it was in metamorphosis. And that it was becoming ooloi.

There would be two of us, then. Two dangerous uncertainties who might never be allowed to mate normally, who might spend the rest of our lives in one kind of exile or another.

We had not begun to travel again on the day JoĂo left us. Now we could not. There was no good reason to carry Aaor through the forest, forcing it to assimilate new sensations when it should be isolated and focusing inward on the growth and readjustment of its own body.

We could have put together a raft and traveled down the river to Lo in a fraction of the time it had taken us to reach this point. In an emergency, Nikanj could even signal for help. But what help? A shuttle to take us back to Lo, where we could not stay? A shuttle to take us to Chkahichdahk, where we did not want to go?

We sat grouped around the sleeping Aaor and agreed to do the only thing we really could do: move to higher ground to avoid the rainy season floods and build a more permanent house. My Human mother said it was time to plant a garden.

Nikanj and I stayed with Aaor while the others went to find the site of our new home.

“Do you realize you’ve already lost most of your hair?” Nikanj asked me as we sat on opposite sides of Aaor’s sleeping body.

I touched my head. It still had a very thin covering of hair, but as Nikanj had said, I was nearly bald. Again. I had not noticed. Now I could see that my skin was changing, too, losing the softness it had taken on for JoĂo, losing its even brown coloring. I could not tell yet whether I would return to my natural gray-brown or take on the greenish coloring I’d had just before JoĂo.

“You should be at least as good at monitoring your own body as you are at monitoring a Human,” Nikanj said.

“Will Aaor be like me?” I asked.

It let all its sensory tentacles hang limp. “I’m afraid it might be.” It was silent for a while. “Yes, I believe it will be,” it said finally.

“So now you have two same-sex children to need you

and to resent you.”

It focused on me for a long time with an intensity that first puzzled me, then began to scare me. It had rested one sensory arm across Aaor’s chest, examining, checking.

“Is it all right?” I asked.

“As much as you are.” It rustled its tentacles. “Perfect, but imperfect. It has all that it should have. It can do all that it should be able to do. But that won’t be enough. You’ll have to go to the ship, Oeka. You and Aaor.”

“No!” I felt the way I had once when an apparently friendly Human had hit me in the face.

“You need mates,” it said softly. “No one will mate with you here except old Humans who would steal perhaps four fifths of your life. On the ship, you may be able to get young mates—perhaps even young Humans.”

“And bring them back to Earth?”

“I don’t know.”

“I won’t go then. I won’t take the chance of being held there. I don’t think Aaor will either.”

“It will. You both will when it finishes its metamorphosis.”

“No!”

“Oeka, you’ve seen it yourself. With a potential mate—even a very unsuitable one—your control is flawless. Without a potential mate, you have no control. You were surprised when I told you you were losing your hair. You’ve been surprised by your body again and again. Yet nothing it does should surprise you. Nothing it does should be beyond your control.”

“But I didn’t even grow that hair deliberately. I just

On some level I realized JoĂo would like it. I think I became all the things he liked, even though he never told me what they were.”

“His body told you. His every look, his reactions, his touch, his scent. He never stopped telling you what he wanted. And since he was the sole focus of your attention, you gave him everything he asked for.” It lay down beside Aaor. “We do that, Jodahs. We please them so that they’ll stay and please us. You’re better at it with Humans than I ever was. I was bred for this trade, but you, you’re part of the trade. You can understand both Human and Oankali by looking inside yourself.” It paused, rustled its tentacles. “I don’t believe we would have had many resisters if we had made construct ooloi earlier.”

“You think that, and you still want to send me away?”

“I believe it, yes. But no one else does. We must teach them.”

“I don’t want to teach—. We? We, Ooan?”

“For a while, we’ll all relocate to the ship.”

I almost said no again, but it wouldn’t have paid any attention to me. When it began telling me what I would do, it had decided. Our interests—Aaor’s and mine—and our needs would be best served on Chkahichdahk, even if we were never allowed to come home. The family would stay with us until we were adults, but then it would leave us on the ship. No more forests or rivers. No more wildness filled with things I had not yet tasted. The planet itself was like one of my parents. I would leave it, and I would gain nothing.

No, that wasn’t true. I would gain mates. Eventually. Perhaps. Nikanj would do all it could to get the mates. There were young Humans born and raised on the ship because there had been so few salvageable Humans left after their war and their resulting disease and atmospheric disturbances. There had not been enough for a good trade. Also most of those who wanted to return to Earth had been allowed to return. That left the Toaht Oankali—those who wanted to trade and to leave with the ship—too few Human mates. They had been breeding more Humans as well as accepting violent ones from Earth. But even so, there were not enough for everyone who wanted them. Not yet. How likely would the Toaht be to let me mate with even one?

I shook my head. “Don’t desert me, Ooan.”

It focused on me, its manner questioning. “You know I won’t.”

“I won’t go to Chkahichdahk. I won’t take what they decide to give me and stay if they decide to keep me. I would rather stay here and mate with old Humans.”

It did not shout at me as my Human parents would have. It did not tell me what I already knew. It did not even turn away from me.

“Lie here with me,” it said softly.

I went over and lay down next to it, felt it link into me with more sensory tentacles than I had on my entire body. It looped a sensory arm around my neck.

“Such despair in you,” it said silently. “You could not throw away so much life.”

“Your life will be shorter because of Tino and Lilith,” I told it. “Do you feel that you’re throwing something away?”

“On Chikahichdahk, there are Humans who will live as long as you would normally.”

“So many that a pair would be allowed to come to me? And what about Aaor?”

It began to feel despair of its own. “I don’t know.”

“But you don’t think so. Neither do I.”

“You know I’ll speak for you.”

“Ooan

”

“Yes. I know. I’ve produced two construct ooloi children. No one else has produced any. Who will listen to me?”

“Will anyone?”

“Not many.”

“Why did you threaten to send me to Chkahichdahk, then?”

“You will go, Oeka. There’s no place for you here, and you know it.”

“No! ”

“There’s life there for you. Life!” It paused. “You’re more adaptable than you think. I made you. I know. You could live there. You could find construct or Oankali mates and learn to be content with shipboard life.”

I spoke aloud. “You’re probably right. There used to be Humans who adapted to not being able to see or hear or walk or move. They adapted. But I don’t think any of them chose to be so limited.”

“But think!” It tightened its grip on me. “Where will you live with old Human mates? Will resisters let you join them in one of their villages? How many attacks on you will it take for them to force a lethal response from you? What will happen then? And, Jodahs, what will happen to your children—your Human children? Will you make them sterile or let them mate together without an ooloi and create deformity and disease? Will you try to force them to go to one of our villages? They may not want to join us any more than you want to go to Chkahichdahk. They’ll want the land and the people they know. And if you do a good job when you make them, they could outlive all other resisters. They could outlive this world. If they manage to elude us, they could die when we break the Earth and go our ways.”

I withdrew from it, signaling it to withdraw from me. When the Earth was divided and the new ship entities scattered to the stars, Nikanj would be long dead. If I mated with an Old Human, I would be dead, too. I would not be able to safeguard my children even if they were willing, as adults, to be guided by a parent.

I went away from Nikanj, into the forest. I didn’t go far. Aaor was helpless and Nikanj might need help protecting it. Aaor was more my paired sibling now than ever. Had it known what was happening to it? Had it wanted to be ooloi? Since it was Oankali-born, would it be willing to live on Chkahichdahk?

What difference would it make what Aaor wanted—or what I wanted? We would go to Chkahichdahk. And we would probably not be allowed to come home.

When my parents and siblings returned to move Aaor to the new home site they had chosen, I went down to the river, went in, and crossed.

I wandered for three days, my body green, scaly, and strange. No one came near me. I lived off the plants I found, picking and choosing according to the needs of my body. I ate everything raw. Humans liked fire. They valued cooked food much more than we did. Also, Humans were less able to get the nutrition they needed from the leaves, grasses, seeds, and fungi that were so abundant in the forest. We could digest what we needed from wood if we had to.

I wandered, tasting the forest, tasting the Earth that I would soon be taken from.

After three days, I went back to the family. I spent a couple of days sitting with Aaor, then left again.

That was my pattern during the rest of Aaor’s metamorphosis. Sometimes I brought Nikanj a few cells of some plant or animal that I had run across for the first time. We all did that— brought the adult ooloi of the family living samples of whatever we encountered. Ooloi generally learned a great deal from what their mates and unmated children brought them. And whatever we gave Nikanj, it remembered. It could still recall and re-create a rare mountain plant that one of my brothers had introduced it to over fifty years before. Someday it was supposed to duplicate the cells of its vast store of biological information and pass the copies along to its same-sex children. We were to receive it when we were fully adult and mated. What would that mean, really, for Aaor and me? Someday on Chkahichdahk? Never?

I had always enjoyed bringing Nikanj things. I had enjoyed sharing the pleasure it felt in new tastes, new sensations. Now I needed contact with it more than ever. But I no longer enjoyed the contact. I didn’t blame it for pointing out the obvious: that Aaor and I had to go to the ship. It was our same-sex parent, doing its duty. But every time it touched me, all I could feel was stress. Distress. Its own and mine. I brought out the worst in it.

I began to stay away even longer.

I met resisters occasionally, but I looked so un-Human and so un-Oankali most of the time that they fled. Twice they shot me, then fled. But no matter how my body distorted itself, I could always heal wounds.

My family never tried to control my goings and comings. They accepted my feelings whether they understood them or not. They wanted to help me, and suffered because they could not. When I was at home I sat with them sometimes—with Ayodele and Yedik when they guarded at night. People guarded in pairs except for Nikanj, who stayed with Aaor, and Oni and Hozh, who were too young to guard.

But I could touch Oni and Hozh. I could touch Ayodele and Yedik. They were still children, neutral-scented, and not yet forbidden to me. When I came out of the forest, looking like nothing anyone on Earth would recognize, one or the other pair of them took me between them and stayed with me until I looked like myself again. If I touched only one of them, I would change that one, make it what I was. But if they both stayed with me, they changed me.

“We shouldn’t be able to do this to you,” Yedik said as we guarded one night.

“You make it easy for me not to wander,” I told it. “My body wanders. Even when I come home, it wants to go on wandering.”

“We shouldn’t be able to stop it,” Yedik insisted. “We shouldn’t influence you at all. We’re too young.”

“I want you to influence me.” I looked from one of them to the other. Ayodele looked female and Yedik looked male. I hoped they would be more strongly influenced by the way they looked than I had. Humans said they were beautiful.

“I can change myself,” I told them. “But it’s an effort. And it doesn’t last. It’s easier to do as water does: allow myself to be contained, and take on the shape of my containers.”

“I don’t understand,” Ayodele said.

“You help me do what I want to do.”

“What do Humans do?”

“Shape me according to their memories and fantasies.”

“But—” They both spoke at once. Then, by mutual consent, Ayodele spoke. “Then you’re either out of control or contained by us or forced into a false Human shape.”

“Not forced.”

“When can you be yourself?”

I thought about that. I understood it because I remembered being their age and having a strong awareness of the way my face and body looked, and of that look being me. It never had been, really.

“Changing doesn’t bother me anymore,” I said. “At least, not this kind of deliberate, controlled changing. I wish it didn’t bother other people. I’ve never deformed plants or animals the way people said I might.”

“Just people,” Yedik said quietly. “People and Lo.”

“Lo was barely annoyed. It would have survived that war the Humans killed each other with.”

“It’s part of you and vulnerable to you. You hurt it.”

“I know. And I confused it. But I don’t think I could injure it seriously if I tried—and I wouldn’t try. As for people, have you noticed that the Humans, the people I’m supposed to be the greatest danger to, are the ones I’ve never hurt?”

Silence.

“Does it bother you to have me here with you?”

“It did,” Ayodele said. “We thought your life must be terrible. We can feel your distress when we link with you.”

“This is my place,” I told them. “This world. I don’t belong on the ship—except perhaps for a visit. People go there to absorb more of our past sometimes. I wouldn’t mind that. But I can’t live there. No matter what Ooan says, I can’t live there. It’s a finished place. The people are still making themselves, but the place

”

“It’s still dividing in two to make a ship for the Toaht and a ship for the Akjai.”

“And the two halves will be smaller finished places. No wildness. No newness. I’m Dinso like you, not Toaht or Akjai.”

Again they were silent.

“You two sit together.” I withdrew from them and started to get up.

They watched me with their eyes and their few sensory tentacles. Silently they took my hands and drew me down to sit between them again. They acted more in perfect unison than any of my siblings. Ahajas said they would certainly become mates if they developed as male and female. They did not want me between them. I made them uncomfortable because they wanted to help me and couldn’t help much. On the other hand, they did want me between them because they could help a little, and they knew they would lose me soon, and they liked the way I made their bodies feel. I wasn’t as able to make people feel good as Nikanj was, but I could give them something. And I was old enough to read internal and external body language and understand more of what they were feeling.

I liked that. I liked a lot of what I had been able to do recently. It was only the thought of going to Chkahichdahk, and being kept there, that made me feel caged and frantic.

The next morning that thought drove me into the forest again.

5

Aaor had a long metamorphosis. Eleven months. I was afraid every time I went home that it would be awake and the family would be building a raft.

I began to seek out Humans. I avoided large parties of them, but it was easy to find individuals and small groups.

I followed them silently, dissected and enjoyed their scents, listened to their conversations. Sometimes they became aware that they were being followed, though they never saw me. My coloring had darkened and I hid easily in the shadows. The forest understory was usually wet or at least damp, and it was easy for me to move silently. The Humans I followed often made much more noise than I did. I watched a Human hunter make so much noise that the feeding peccary he was stalking heard him and ran away. The Human went to the place where the peccary had been feeding and he cursed and kicked the fruit the animal had been feeding on. It never occurred to him to eat the fruit or to collect some for his people. I ate some when he was gone.

Once three people stalked me. I considered letting them catch me. But I circled around to have a look at them first, and I heard them talking about opening me up and seeing how I looked inside. Since they all had guns and machetes, I decided to avoid them. Three were too many for a subadult to subdue safely.

I was moving upriver—farther upriver than I had been before—well into the hills. The forest was less varied here, but I had no trouble finding enough to eat, and occasional plants and animals that were new to me. But I found few people in the hills. For several days, I found no one at all. No breeze brought me a Human scent.

I began to feel loneliness as an almost physical pain. I hadn’t realized how much seeing Humans every few days had meant to me.

Now I had to go home. I didn’t want to. Surely Aaor would be awake this time. The thought panicked me, brought back the caged feeling so strongly that I could not think.

I stayed where I was for a while, cleared a space, made a fire, though I did not need one. It comforted me and reminded me of Humans. I let the fire burn down and roasted several wild tubers in the coals. The smell of the food wasn’t enough to mask the smell of the two Humans when they approached. No doubt it was the food smell that drew them.

They were a male and a female and they smelled

very strange. Wrong. Injured, perhaps. They were armed. I could smell gunpowder. They might shoot me. I decided to risk it. I would not move. I would let them surprise me.

My body at this time was covered with fingernail-sized, overlapping scales. It was also inclined to be quadrapedal, but I had resisted that. Hands were much more useful than clawed forefeet.

Now, while the Humans approached very carefully, very quietly, I prepared for them. My bald, scaly head and scaly face had to look more Human. I didn’t have time to change the rest of me. I could look as though I were wearing unusual clothing, perhaps. In fact, I didn’t wear clothing at all on these trips. It just got in the way.

The Humans kept to cover and circled around, watching me. They wanted to be behind me. I decided to play dead if they shot me. Best to lure them close and disarm them as quickly as possible.

Perhaps they would not shoot me. I used a stick to uncover one of the tubers and roll it out of the coals. It was too hot to eat, but I brushed it off and broke it open. It was well cooked, steaming hot, spicy, and sweet. It had not existed before the Humans had their war. Lilith said it was one of the few good-tasting mutations she had eaten. She called it an applesauce fruit. Apples were an extinct fruit that she had especially liked. She didn’t like the taste of the tubers raw, but sometimes when she had baked one she went away by herself to eat it and remember a different time.

One of the Humans made a small noise behind me—a moan.

I ran a hand over my face. The hand was more clawlike than I would have preferred, but the face was clear and soft now. If it wasn’t beautiful, it was, at least, not terrifying.

“Come join me,” I said loudly. It felt unnatural to talk aloud. I hadn’t spoken at all for about thirty days. “There’s more food. You’re welcome to it.” I repeated the words in Spanish, Portuguese, and Swahili. Those, together with French and English, were the most widely known languages. Most people were fluent in at least one of them. Most survivors were from Africa, Australia, and South America.

The two Humans did not answer me. They did not move, but their heartbeats speeded up. They had heard me and they probably understood that I was talking to them. When had their heartbeats increased? I focused on my memories for a moment. My speaking at all had startled them, but my Spanish had excited them more. My other languages had provoked no further reaction. Spanish, then. I repeated my invitation in Spanish.

They did not come. I thought they understood, but they did not answer, and they remained hidden.

I took the rest of the tubers from the coals and put them on a platter of large leaves.

“They’re yours if you would like them,” I said. I cleared a place well away from the food and lay down to rest. I had not slept in two days. Humans liked regular periods of sleep— preferably at night. Oankali slept when they needed rest. I needed rest now, but I would not sleep until the Humans made some decision—either to go away or to come satisfy their hunger and their curiosity. But I could be still in the Oankali way. I could lie awake using the least possible energy, and as Lilith and Tino said, looking dead. I could do this very comfortably for much longer than most Humans would willingly sit and watch.

The male left cover first. I watched him with a few of my sensory tentacles. All his body language told me he meant to grab the food and run with it. I was prepared to let him do that until I got a good look at him.

He was diseased. His face was half obscured by a large growth. He wore no shirt and I could see that his back and chest were covered with tumorous growths, large and small. One of his eyes was completely covered. The other seemed endangered. If the facial tumor continued to grow, he would soon be unable to see.

I couldn’t let him go. I don’t think any ooloi could have let him go. No living being should be left to wander without care in his condition.

I waited until his attention was totally focused on the food. At first he kept flickering back and forth between the food and me. Finally, though, the food was in reach. He put out his hands to take it.

I had him before he realized I was up. At once, I turned him to face the female, whom I could see now. She was aiming a rifle at me. Let her aim it at him.

He struggled, first wildly, then with calculation, meaning to hurt me and get free. I held him still and investigated him quickly.

He had a genetic disorder. Its effects were worsening slowly. As I had suspected, he would be blind if it were allowed to continue. The disorder had deformed even the bones of his face. He was deaf in one ear. Eventually he would be deaf in the other. His spine was becoming involved. Already he could not turn his head freely. One shoulder was completely covered with fleshy growths. The arm was still useful, but it wouldn’t be for long. And there was something else wrong. Something I didn’t understand. This man was already dying. He was using up his life the way mice did, swallowing it in a few quick gulps, then dying. The disorder threatened to invade his brain and spine. But even without continued tumor growth, he would die in just a few decades. He was genetically programmed to use himself up obscenely quickly.

How could he have such a disorder? An ooloi had examined him before he was set free. Ooloi had examined every Human, correcting defects, slowing aging, strengthening resistance to disease. But perhaps the ooloi had only controlled the disorder—imperfectly—and not tried to correct it. Ooloi had done that with some genetic disorders. Such disorders were complicated and best corrected by mates. Resisters had been altered so that they could not have children without ooloi mates, and thus could not pass their disorder on. Controlling it should have been enough.

I spoke into the male’s one good ear as I held him. “You’ll be completely blind soon. After that you’ll go deaf. Eventually you won’t be able to use your right arm—and that’s the arm you prefer to use. That’s not all. That’s not even the worst. Do you understand me?”

He had stopped struggling. Now he rocked back, trying to get a look at me in spite of his uncooperative neck.

“I can help you,” I said. “I will help you if you let me. And if your friend doesn’t shoot me.” I would help him whether the female shot me or not, but I wanted to avoid being shot if I could. Bullet wounds hurt more than I wanted to think about, and I still wasn’t very good at controlling my own pain.

The man was feeling calmer now. I did not dare drug him much. I could please him a little, relax him a little, but I could not put him to sleep. If he lost consciousness in my arms, the female would surely misunderstand, and shoot me.

“I can help,” I repeated. “All I ask in return is that you not try to kill me.”

“Why should you do anything?” he demanded. “Just let me go!”

I shifted to a more comfortable grip. “Why should you become more and more disabled?” I asked. “Why should you die when you can live and be well? Let me help you.”

“Let go of me!”

“Will you stay, and at least hear me?”

He hesitated. “Yes. All right.” His body was tense—ready to run.

I made a sighing sound so that he would hear it. “If you lie to me, I can’t help knowing.”

That frightened him and made him stiffly resentful in my grasp, but he said nothing.

The female came completely out of her cover and faced us. I kept the male’s body between my own and her rifle. Looking at her, I had absolutely no doubt that she would shoot. But I needed a few moments more with the male before I could have anything serious to show them. The female had tumors, too, though hers were not as big as the male’s. Her face, arms, and legs—all that was visible of her—were covered with small irregularly spaced growths.

“Let him go,” she said quietly. “I won’t shoot you if you let him go.” That was true at least. She was afraid, but she meant what she said.

I nodded to her, then spoke to the male. “I haven’t hurt you. What will you do if I let you go?”

Now the male gave a real sigh. “Leave.”

“You’re hungry. Take the food with you.”

“I don’t want it.” He no longer trusted it—probably because I wanted him to have it.

“Do one thing for me before I let you go.”

“What?”

“Move your neck.”

I kept a firm hold on him, but drew back slightly to let him turn and twist the neck that had been all but frozen in place before I touched him. He swore softly.

“TomÁs?” the female said, her voice filled with doubt.

“I can move it,” he said unnecessarily. He had not stopped moving it.

“Does it hurt?”

“No. It just feels

normal. I had forgotten how it felt to move this way.”

I let him go and spoke softly. “Perhaps when you’ve been blind for a while, you’ll forget how it feels to see.”

He almost fell turning to look at me. When he’d gotten a good look, he took a step back. “You won’t touch me again until I see you heal yourself,” he said. “What

Who are you?”

“Jodahs,” I said. “I’m a construct, Human and Oankali.”

He looked startled, then moved around so that he could get a look at all sides of me. “I never heard that they had scales.” He shook his head. “My god, man, you must frighten more people than we do!”

I laughed. I could feel my sensory tentacles flattening against my scales. “I don’t always look this way,” I said. “If you stay to be healed, I’ll begin to look more like you. More like the way you will look when you’re healed.”

“We can’t be healed,” the female said. “The tumors can be cut off, but they grow back. The disease

we were born with it. No one can heal it.”

“I know you were born with it. You’ll give it to at least some of your children if you decide to go where you can have them. I can correct the problem.”

They looked at each other. “It isn’t possible,” the male said.

I focused on him. He had been such a pleasure to touch. Now there was no need to hurry back home. No need to hurry at anything. Two of them. Treasure.

“Move your neck,” I said again.

The male moved it, shaking his misshapen head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What did you say you were called?”

“Jodahs.”

“I’m TomÁs. This is Jesusa.” No other names. Very deliberately, no other names. “Tell us how you did this.”

I took sticks from the pile I had gathered and built up the fire. The two Humans obligingly sat down around it. The male picked up a baked tuber. The female caught his arm and looked at him, but he only grinned, broke open the tuber, and bit into it. His single visible eye opened wide in surprise and pleasure. The tuber was new to him. He ate a little more, then gave a piece to the female. She scooped out a little with one finger and tasted it. She did not take on the same look of surprised pleasure, but she ate, then examined the peeling carefully in the firelight. It was dark now for resisters. The sun had gone down.

“I haven’t tasted this before. Is it only a lowland plant?”

“It grows here. I’ll show you tomorrow morning.”

There was a silence. Of course they would stay the night in this place. Where else could they go in the dark?

“You’re from the mountains?” I asked softly.

More silence.

“I won’t get to the mountains. I wish I could.”

They were both eating tubers now, and they seemed content to eat and not talk. That was surprising. Nervousness alone should have made at least one of them talkative. How many times had they sat alone in the forest at night with a scaly construct?

“Will you let me begin to heal you tonight?” I asked TomÁs.

“Thank you for healing my neck,” TomÁs said aloud while his entire body recoiled from me in tiny movements.

“It may fuse again if your disorder isn’t cured.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad. Jesusa says it kept me working instead of looking around daydreaming.”

Jesusa touched his forearm and smiled. “Nothing would keep you from daydreaming, brother.”

Brother? Not mate—or husband, as the Humans would say. “Blindness will be bad,” I said. “Deafness will be even worse.”

“Why do you say he’ll go blind or deaf?” Jesusa demanded. “He may not. You don’t know.”

“Of course I know. I couldn’t touch him and not know. And I know there was a time when he could see out of his right eye and hear with his right ear. There was a time when the mass on his shoulder was smaller and his arm wasn’t involved at all. He will be blind and deaf and without the use of his right arm—and he knows it. So do you.”

There was a very long silence. I lay down on the cleared ground and closed my eyes. I could still see perfectly well, and most Humans knew it. Somehow, though, they felt more at ease when they were observed only with sensory tentacles. They felt unobserved.

“Why do you want to heal us?” Jesusa asked. “You waylay us, feed us, and want to heal us. Why?”

I opened my eyes. “I was feeling very lonely,” I said. “I would have been glad to see

almost anyone. But when I realized you had something wrong, I wanted to help. I need to help. I’m not an adult yet, but I can’t ignore illness. I’m ooloi.”

Their mild reaction surprised me. I expected anything from JoĂo’s prejudiced rejection to actually running away into the forest. Only ooloi interacted directly with Humans and produced children. Only ooloi interacted directly with Humans in an utterly non-Human way.

And only ooloi needed to heal. Males and females could learn to heal if they wanted to. Ooloi had no choice. We exist to make the people and to unite them and to maintain them.

Jesusa grabbed TomÁs’s hand and stared at me with terror. TomÁs looked at her, touched his neck thoughtfully, and looked at her again. “So it isn’t true, what they say,” he whispered.

She gave him a look more forceful than a scream.

He drew back a little, touched his neck again, and said nothing else.

“I had thought

” Jesusa’s voice shook and she paused for a moment. When she began again, the quiver was gone. “I thought that all ooloi had four arms—two with bones and two without.”

“Strength arms and sensory arms,” I said. “Sensory arms come with maturity. I’m not old enough to have them yet.”

“You’re a child? A child as big as an adult?”

“I’m as big as I’ll get except for my sensory arms. But I still have to develop in other ways. I’m not exactly a child, though. Young children have no sex. They’re potentially any sex. I’m definitely ooloi—a subadult, or as my parents would say, an ooloi child.”

“Adolescent,” Jesusa decided.

“No. Human adolescents are sexually mature. They can reproduce. I can’t.” I said this to reassure them, but they didn’t seem to be reassured.

“How can you heal us if you’re just a kid?” TomÁs asked.

I smiled. “I’m old enough to do that.” My gaze seemed to confuse him, but it only annoyed her. She frowned at me. She would be the difficult one. I looked forward to touching her, learning her body, curing the disorder she never should have had. Some ooloi had wronged her and TomÁs more than I would have imagined was possible.

I changed the subject abruptly. “Tomorrow I’ll show you some of the things you can eat here in the forest. The tuber was one of many. If you keep moving, the forest will sustain you very comfortably.” I paused. “Can you see well enough to make pallets for yourselves or will you sleep on the bare ground?”

TomÁs sighed and looked around. “Bare ground, I suppose. We’ll do the local insects a good turn.” The pupil of his eye was large, but I doubted that he could see beyond the light of the fire. The moon had not yet risen, and starlight was useful to Humans only in boats on the rivers. Very little of it reached the forest understory.

I got up and stepped around the fire to them. “Let me have your machete for a few moments.”

Jesusa grabbed TomÁs’s arm to stop him, but he simply handed me the machete. I took it and went into the forest. Bamboo was plentiful in the area so I cut that and a few stalks from saplings. I would cover these with palm and wild banana leaves. I also took a stem of bananas. They could be cooked for breakfast. They weren’t ripe enough for Humans to eat raw. And there was a nut tree nearby—not to mention more tubers. All this so close, and yet TomÁs had been very hungry when I touched him.

“You haven’t cut anything for yourself,” Jesusa said as I handed back the machete. It meant a great deal to her to get the knife back and to get a comfortable pallet to sleep on. She was still wary, but less obviously on edge.

“I’m used to the ground,” I said. “No insect will bother me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t smell good to them. I would taste even worse.”

She thought for a moment. “That would protect you against biting insects, but what about those that sting?”

“Even those. I smell offensive and dangerous. Humans don’t notice my scent in any negative way, but insects always do.”

“Oh, I would be willing to stink if it would keep them off me,” TomÁs said. “Can you make me immune to them?”

Jesusa turned to frown at him.

I smiled to myself. “No, I can’t help you with that.” Not until they let me sleep between them. But insects would bother them less while I healed them. If someday they mated with an adult ooloi, insects would hardly bother them at all. There was time enough for them to learn that. I lay down again beside the dying fire.

Jesusa and TomÁs lay quietly, first awake, then drifting into sleep. I did not sleep, though I lay still, resting. The scent of the Humans was a mild torment to me because I could not touch them—would not touch them until they had learned to trust me. There was something strange about them—about TomÁs, anyway—something I didn’t yet understand. And my failure to understand was unusual. Normally if I touched someone to correct a flaw, I understood that person’s body completely. I had to get my hands on TomÁs again. And I had to touch Jesusa. But I wanted them to let me do it. Immature as I was, my scent must be working on them. And TomÁs’s healed neck must be working on him. He couldn’t possibly like his growing disabilities—and surely other Humans did not like the way he looked. Humans cared very much how other people looked. Even Jesusa must seem grotesquely ugly to them—though neither TomÁs nor Jesusa acted as though they cared how they looked. Very unusual. Perhaps it was because there were two of them. If they were siblings they had been together most of their lives. Perhaps they sustained one another.

6

They awoke just before dawn the next morning. Jesusa awoke first. She shook TomÁs awake, then put a hand over his mouth so that he would not speak. He took her hand from his mouth and sat up. How much could they see? It was still fairly dark.

Jesusa pointed downriver through the forest.

TomÁs shook his head, then glanced at me and shook his head again.

Jesusa pulled at him, both her face and her body language communicating pleading and terror.

He shook his head again, tried to take her arms. His manner was reassuring, but she evaded him. She stood up, looked down at him. He would not get up.

She sat down again, touching him, her mouth against his ear. It was more as though she breathed the words. I heard them, but I might not have if I hadn’t been listening for them.

“For the others!” she whispered. “For all of the others, we must go!”

He shut his eyes for a moment, as though the soft words hurt him.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

He got up and followed her into the forest. He did not look at me again. When I couldn’t see them any longer, I got up. I was well rested and ready to track them—to stay out of sight and listen and learn. They were going downriver as I had to do to get home. That was convenient, though the truth was, I would have followed them anywhere. And when I spoke to them again, I would know the things they had not wanted me to know.

I followed them for most of the day. Whatever was driving them, it kept them from stopping for more than a few minutes to rest. They ate almost nothing until the end of the day when, with metal hooks they had not shown me, they managed to catch a few small fish. The smell of these cooking was disgusting, but the conversation, at least, was interesting.

“We should go back,” TomÁs said. “We should cross the river to avoid Jodahs, then we should go back.”

“I know,” Jesusa agreed. “Do you want to?”

“No.”

“It will rain soon. Let’s make a shelter.”

“Once we’re home, we’ll never be free again,” he said. “We’ll be watched all the time, probably shut up for a while.”

“I know. Cut leaves from that plant and that one. They’re big enough for good roofing.”

Silence. Sounds of a machete hacking. And sometime later, TomÁs’s voice, “I would rather stay here and be rained on every day and starve every other day.” There was a pause. “I would almost rather cut my own throat than go back.”

“We will go back,” Jesusa said softly.

“I know.” TomÁs sighed. “Who else would have us anyway—except Jodah’s people.”

Jesusa had nothing to say on that subject. They worked for a while in silence, probably erecting their shelter. I didn’t mind being rained on, so I stretched out silently and lay with most of my attention focused on the two Humans. If someone approached me from a different direction, I would notice, but if people or animals were simply moving around nearby, not coming in my direction, I would not be consciously aware of them.

“We should have let Jodahs teach us about safe, edible plants,” TomÁs said finally. “There’s probably food all around us, but we don’t recognize it. I’m hungry enough to eat that big insect right there.”

Jesusa said, with amusement in her voice, “That is a very pretty red cockroach, brother. I don’t think I’d eat it.”

“At least there will be fewer insects when we get home.”

“They’ll separate us.” Jesusa became grim again. “They’ll make me marry Dario. He has a smooth face. Maybe we’ll have mostly smooth-faced children.” She sighed. “You’ll choose between Virida and Alma.”

“Alma,” he said wearily. “She wants me. How do you think she will like leading me around? And how will we speak to one another when I’m deaf?”

“Hush, little brother. Why think about that?”

“You don’t have to think about it. It won’t happen to you.” He paused, then continued with sad irony. “That leaves you free to worry about bearing child after child after child, watching most of them die, and being told by some smooth-faced elder who looks younger than you do that you’re ready to do it all again—when she’s never done it at all.”

Silence.

“Jesusita.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s true. It happened to Mama. It will happen to me.”

“It may not be so bad. There are more of us now.”

In a tone that made a lie of every word she said, Jesusa agreed. “Yes, little brother. Perhaps it will be better for our generation.”

They were quiet for so long, I thought they wouldn’t speak again, but he said, “I’m glad to have seen the lowland forest. For all its insects and other discomforts, it’s a good place stuffed with life, drunk with life.”