Imago

“I think the mountains better,” she said. “The air is not so thick or so wet. Home is always better.”

“Maybe not if you can’t see it or hear it. I don’t want that life, Jesusa. I don’t think I can stand it. Why should I help give the people more ugly cripples anyway? Will my children thank me? I don’t think they will.”

Jesusa made no comment.

“I’ll see that you get back,” he said. “I promise you that.”

“We’ll both get back,” she said with uncharacteristic harshness. “You know your duty as well as I know mine.”

There was no more talk.

There was no more need for talk. They were fertile! Both of them. That was what I had spotted in TomÁs—spotted, but not recognized. He was fertile, and he was young. He was young! I had never touched a Human like him before—and he had never touched an ooloi. I had thought his rapid aging was part of his genetic disorder, but I could see now that he was aging the way Humans had aged before their war—before the Oankali arrived to rescue the survivors and prolong their lives.

TomÁs was probably younger than I was. They were both probably younger than I was. I could mate with them!

Young Humans, born on Earth, fertile among themselves. A colony of them, diseased, deformed, but breeding!

Life.

I lay utterly still. I had all I could do to keep myself from getting up, going to them at once. I wanted to bind them to me absolutely, permanently. I wanted to lie between them tonight. Now. Yet if I weren’t careful, they would reject me, escape me. Worse, their hidden people would have to be found. I would have to betray them to my family, and my family would have to tell others. The settlement of fertile Humans would be found and the people in it collected. They would be allowed to choose Mars or union with us or sterility here on Earth. They could not be allowed to continue to reproduce here, then to die when we separated and left an uninhabitable rock behind.

No Human who did not decide to mate with us was told this last. They were given their choices and not told why.

What could TomÁs and Jesusa be told? What should they be told to ease the knowledge that their people could not remain as they were? Obviously Jesusa, in particular, cared deeply about these people—was about to sacrifice herself for them. TomÁs cared enough to walk away from certain healing when it was what he desperately wanted. Now, clearly, he was thinking about death, about dying. He did not want to reach his home again.

How could either of them mate with me, knowing what my people would do to theirs?

And how should I approach them? If they were potential mates and nothing more, I would go to them now. But once Jesusa understood that I knew their secret, her first question would be, “What will happen to our people?” She would not accept evasion. If I lied to her, she would learn the truth eventually, and I did not think she would forgive me for the lies. Would she forgive me for the truth?

When she and TomÁs saw that they had given their people away, would they decide to kill me, to die themselves, or to do both?

7

The next day, Jesusa and TomÁs crossed the river and began their journey home. I followed. I let them cross, waited until I could no longer see or hear them, then swam across myself. I swam upriver for a while, enjoying the rich, cool water. Finally I went up the bank and sorted their scent from the many.

I followed it silently, resting when they rested, grazing on whatever happened to be growing nearby. I had not decided what I would do, but there was comfort for me just being within range of their scent.

Perhaps I should follow them all the way to their home, see its location, and take news of it back to my family. Then other people, Oankali and construct, would do what was necessary. I would not be connected with it. But I also might not be allowed to mate with Jesusa and TomÁs. I might be sent to the ship in spite of everything. Jesusa and TomÁs might choose Mars once others had healed them and explained their choices to them. Or they might mate with others

.

The more I followed them, the more I wanted them, and the more unlikely it seemed that I would ever mate with them.

After four days, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just joined them. If I could not have them as mates permanently, I could enjoy them for a while.

They had caught no fish that night. They had found wild figs and eaten them, but I doubted that these had satisfied them.

I found nuts and fruit for them, and root stalks that could be roasted and eaten. I wrapped all this in a crude basket I had woven of thin lianas and lined with large leaves. I could only do this by biting through the lianas in a way that would have disturbed the resisters, so I was glad they could not see me. A resister had said to me years before that we constructs and Oankali were supposed to be superior beings, but we insisted on acting like animals. Oddly both ideas seemed to disturb him.

I took my basket of food and went quietly into Jesusa and TomÁs’s camp. It was dark and they had built a small shelter and made a fire. Their fire still burned, but they had lain down on their pallets. Jesusa’s even breathing said she was asleep, but TomÁs lay awake. His eyes were open, but he did not see me until I was beside him.

Then before he could get up, before he could shout, I was down beside him, one hand over his mouth, the other grasping his hand and forcing it to maintain its hold on the machete, but to be still.

“Jodahs,” I whispered, and he stopped struggling and stared at me.

“It can’t be you!” he whispered when I let him speak. He remembered a scaly Jodahs, like a humanoid reptile. But I could not stay within range of their scent for four days and go on looking that way. Now I was brown-skinned and black-haired and I thought it was likely that I looked the way TomÁs would when I healed him. He was the one I had touched and studied.

He let me take the machete from his hand and put it aside. I already had several body tentacles linked into his nervous system. I put him to sleep so that I could take care of Jesusa before she awoke.

From the moment I said my name, he was never afraid. “Will you heal me?” he whispered in his last moments of consciousness.

“I will,” I said. “Completely.”

He closed his eye, trusting himself to me in a way that made it hard for me to withdraw from him and turn to attend to Jesusa.

When I did turn, it was almost too late. She was awake, her eyes full of confusion and terror. She drew back as I turned, and she almost pulled the trigger on the rifle she was holding.

“I’m Jodahs,” I told her.

She shot me.

The bullet went through one of my hearts and I had all I could do to stop myself from lunging at her reflexively and stinging her to death. I grabbed the gun from her and threw it against a nearby tree. It broke into two pieces, the wooden stock splintering and separating from the metal, and the metal bending.

I grasped her wrists so she couldn’t run. I couldn’t trust myself to put her to sleep until I had my own problem under control.

She struggled and shouted for TomÁs to wake up and help her. She managed to bite me twice, managed to kick me between the legs, then stopped her struggling for a moment to absorb the reality that I had only smooth skin between my legs, and that her kick did not bother me at all.

She twisted frantically and tried to gouge my eyes. I held on. I had to hold her. She couldn’t see in the dark. She might run into the surrounding forest and hurt herself—or run toward the river and fall down the high, steep bluff there. Or perhaps she meant to try to shoot me again with what was left of the gun or use the machete on me. I could not let her hurt herself or hurt me again and perhaps make me kill her. Nothing would be more irrational than that.

She stopped struggling abruptly and stared at one of the bite wounds she had inflicted on my left arm. In the firelight, even Human eyes could see it. It was healing, and that seemed to fascinate her. She watched until there was no visible sign of injury. Just a little smeared blood and saliva.

“You’re doing that inside,” she said, “healing your wound.”

I lay down, dragging her with me. She lay facing me, watching me with fear and distrust.

“I can heal myself as well as most adults,” I said. “I’m not very good at controlling pain in myself, though.”

She looked concerned, then deliberately hardened her expression. “What did you do to TomÁs?”

“He’s only asleep.”

“No! He would have awakened.”

“I drugged him a little. He didn’t mind. I promised I would heal him.”

“We don’t want your healing!”

The worst of the pain from my wound was over. I relaxed in relief and drew a long breath. I let go of her hands and she drew them away, looked at them, then back to me.

I grinned at her. “You’re not afraid of me now. And you don’t want to hurt me again.”

I could feel her face grow warmer. She sat up abruptly, very much against her own will. My scent was at work on her. She would probably have difficulty resisting it because she was not consciously aware of it.

“We truly don’t want your healing,” she repeated. “Though

I’m sorry I shot you.” She sat still, looking down at me. “You look like TomÁs, you know? You look the way he should look. You could be our brother—or perhaps our sister.”

“Neither.”

“I know. Why did you follow us?”

“Why did you run from me?”

She stared at the machete. She would have to get over or around both TomÁs and me to get it.

“No, Jesusa,” I said. “Stay here. Let me talk to you.”

“You know about us, don’t you?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“I knew you would—once you’d touched us both.”

“I should have known from your scent alone. I let your disorder and my own inexperience confuse me. But, no, I didn’t learn what I know from touching you just now. I learned it from following you and hearing you and TomÁs talk.”

Her face took on a look of outrage. “You listened? You hid in the bushes and listened to what I said to my brother!”

“Yes. I’m sorry. We don’t usually do such things, but I needed to know about you. I needed to understand you.”

“You needed nothing!”

“You were new to me. New, different, in need of help with your genetic disorder, and alone. You knew I could help you, yet you ran away. When you know us better, you may understand that it was as though you were dragging me by several ropes. The question wasn’t whether I would follow you, but how long I could follow before I joined you again.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I like your people if you’re all compelled to do such things.”

“It’s been a century since anyone in my family has seen anyone like you. And you

perhaps you won’t have to worry about attracting the attention of others of my people.”

“What will you do, now that you know about us? What do you want of us?”

“That we must talk about,” I said, “you, TomÁs, and me. But I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Yes?” she said.

I looked at her for some time, simply enjoying the look and the scent of her. She still might leave me. She no longer wanted to, but she was capable of causing herself pain if she thought it was the right thing to do.

“Lie here with me,” I said, knowing she would not. Not yet.

“Why?” she asked, frowning.

“We’re very tactile. We don’t just enjoy contact, we need it.”

“Not with me.”

At least she did not move away from me. My left heart was not yet healed so I did not get up. I took her hand and held it for a while, examined it with body tentacles. This startled her, but did not bring out the phobic terror some Humans are subject to when we touch them that way. Instead, she bent to get a better look at my body tentacles. They were widely scattered now, and the same brown as the rest of my skin. My head tentacles, all hidden in my hair now, were as black as my hair.

“Can you move them all at will?” she asked.

“Yes. As easily as you move your fingers. You’ve never seen them before, have you?”

“I’ve heard of them. All my life, I’ve heard that they were like snakes and the Oankali were covered with them.”

“Some are. No Oankali has as few of them as I do now. Even I have the potential to develop a great many more.”

She looked at her own arm and its dozens of small tumors. “Actually I think mine are uglier,” she said.

I laughed and, with great relief, pulled her down beside me again. She didn’t really mind. She was wary, but not afraid.

“You have to tell me what will happen,” she said. “I’m afraid for my people. You have to tell me.”

I put her head on my shoulder so that I could reach her with both head and body tentacles. She let me position her, then lay relaxed and alert against me. I eased her weariness, but did not let her become drowsy. She was younger than I had thought. She had never had a mate in the Human way. Now she never would. I felt as though I could absorb her into myself. And yet she seemed too far away. If I could just bring her closer, touch her with more sensory tentacles, touch her with

with what I did not yet possess.

“This is wonderful,” she said. “But I don’t know why it should be.” She said nothing for a while. On her own, she discovered that if she touched me now with her hand, she felt the touch as though on her own skin, felt pleasure or discomfort just as she made me feel.

“Touch me,” she said.

I touched her thigh, and her body flared with sexual feeling. This surprised and frightened her and she caught my free hand and held it in her own. “You haven’t told me anything,” she said.

“In a way, I’ve told you everything,” I said, “and all without words.”

She let go of my hand and touched me again, let the sensation we shared guide her so that her fingertips slid around the bases of some of my sensory tentacles. She stopped an instant before I would have stopped her. The sensation was too intense.

She took my hand and put it on her breasts, and I remembered what it had been like to have breasts for JoĂo, and to drink from Lilith’s breasts. Jesusa’s breasts, covered by rough cloth that scratched against the top of my hand, were small and wonderfully sensitive. How had she become accustomed to the rough cloth? Probably she had never worn anything else.

She moaned and shared with me the pleasure of her body until I took my hand away and reluctantly detached from her.

“No!” she said.

“I know. We’ll sleep together tonight. I have to talk to you, though, and I wanted you to experience a little of that first. I wanted you to live in my skin for a while.”

She sat up and glanced at TomÁs, who slept on. “Is that what you do?” she asked. She meant was that all I did.

“For now. When I’m an adult, I’ll be able to do more. And also

even now, if I spend much time with you, I’ll heal you. I can’t help it.”

“I can’t go home if you heal me.”

“Jesusa

that doesn’t really matter.”

“My people matter. They matter very much to me.”

“Your people are tormenting themselves unnecessarily. They don’t even know about the Mars colony, do they?”

“The what?”

“I thought not. And with their background in high-altitude living, they may be better suited to it than most Humans. The Mars colony is exactly what it sounds like: a colony of Humans living and reproducing on the planet Mars. We transport them and we’ve given them the tools to make Mars livable.”

“Why?”

“There are no Oankali living on Mars. It’s a Human world.”

“This should be a Human world!”

“It isn’t anymore. It won’t ever be again.”

Silence.

“That’s a hard thing to think about, but it’s true. Humans who are sent to Mars are healed completely of any disease or defect. They’ll pass only good health on to their children.”

“What else had been done to them?”

“Nothing. Not even what I’ve already done with you. Their healing won’t be done by some hungry ooloi child. It will be done by people who are adult and mated and not especially interested in them. That’s good if they want to go to Mars. That’s safe.”

“And I think what we did is not safe.”

“Not safe at all.”

“Then you must tell me what you want of me—and of TomÁs?”

I turned my face away from her for a moment. I could still lose her. I stood a good chance of losing her. “You know what I want of you. Your people must have warned you. I want to mate with you. With both of you. I want you to stay with me.”

“To

to marry? But you’re

we’re strangers.”

“Are we? Not really. Not after what we’ve shared. I don’t think one of your priests would make us a marriage ceremony, but Oankali and constructs don’t have much of a ceremony. For us, mating is biological

neurochemical.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Our bodies please one another and depend on one another. We keep one another well and make children together. We—”

“Have children with my brother!”

“Jesusa

” I shook my head. “Your flesh is so like his that I could transplant some of it to his body, and with only a small adjustment, it would live and grow on him as well as it does on you. Your people have been breeding brother to sister and parent to child for generations.”

“Not anymore! We don’t have to do that anymore!”

“Because there are more of you now—all closely related. Isn’t that so?”

She said nothing.

“And unfortunately there was a mutation. Or perhaps one of your founding parents had a serious genetic defect that was controlled, but not corrected. That wouldn’t have mattered if they’d had an ooloi to clear the way for them, but they didn’t.” I touched her face. “You have one now, so why should you be separated from TomÁs?”

She drew back from me. “We’ve never touched one another that way!”

“I know.”

“People had to do what they did in the past. Like the children of Adam and Eve. There wasn’t anyone else.”

“On Mars there are already a great many others. Why should your people want to stay here and breed dead children or disabled children? They should go to Mars or come to us. We would welcome them.”

She shook her head slowly. “They told us you were of the devil.”

Now it was my turn to keep quiet. She didn’t believe in devils. In spite of her name, she probably didn’t believe strongly in gods. She believed in her people and in what her senses told her.

“Your people won’t be hurt,” I assured her. “People who spend as much time as we do living inside one another’s skins are very slow to kill. And if we injure people, we heal them.”

“You should let them alone.”

“No. We shouldn’t.”

“They own themselves. They don’t belong to you.”

“They can’t survive as they are. Their gene pool is too small. It’s only a matter of time before some disease or defect wipes them out.” I stopped for a moment, thinking. “I’m Human enough to understand what they’re trying to do. One of my brothers began the Mars colony because he understood the need of Humans to live as themselves, not to blend completely with the Oankali.”

“You have brothers?” She was frowning at me as though it had never occurred to her that she and I had anything in common.

“I have brothers and sisters. I even have one ooloi sibling.” Had it completed its first metamorphosis yet? Was the family simply waiting for me to return so that Aaor and I could begin our extraterrestrial exile? Let them wait.

I focused on Jesusa. I couldn’t lie to her, yet I couldn’t tell her everything. I was desperate to keep her and TomÁs with me. The people would almost certainly not allow me to find Human mates on the ship, but they would not take away mates I had found on my own. And perhaps they would not exile me at all if they saw that with these two Humans, I was stable—not changing others, not changing myself except in a deliberate, controlled way. And Aaor could get mates from among Jesusa’s people. It would want them. I had no doubt of that.

So what to do?

“My people will fight,” Jesusa said.

“They’ll be gassed and taken,” I said. “My people like to get that kind of thing over quickly so that they don’t have to hurt anyone.”

She looked at me with anger—almost with hatred. “I won’t tell you where my people are. I would drown myself before I would tell you.”

“I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Why? How will you find out?”

“I won’t. My people will. Once they know that your people exist, they’ll find them.”

She did not look toward the broken gun. She probably could not have seen it in the darkness now, but her body wanted to turn and look. Her hands wanted the gun. Her muscles twitched. If she killed me, no one would find out what I knew. No one would look for her hidden people.

I made up my mind abruptly. She had to know everything or she might die defending her people. She probably could not kill me, but she could force me to act reflexively and kill her.

“Jesusa,” I said, “come over here.”

She stared at me with hostility.

“Come. I’m going to tell you something my own Human mother didn’t learn until she had given birth to two construct children. Your people are not usually told this at all. I

I should not tell it to you, but I think I have to. Come.”

Her muscles wanted to move her toward me. My scent and her memory of comfort and pleasure drew her, but she moved deliberately away. “Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me. Don’t touch me again.”

I said nothing for a while. It would be easier for her to believe what I said if we were in contact. Humans did not usually understand why being linked into our nervous systems enabled them to feel the truth of what we said, but they did feel it. Now she would not. All her body language told me she would not be persuaded.

Should she still be told?

Se had to be.

I spoke to her very softly. “You and your brother mean life to me.” I paused. “And in a different way, I mean life to your people. They’ll die if they stay where they are. They’ll all die.”

“Some of us die. Some live.” She shook her head. “I don’t care what you say. Nothing will kill us if your people let us alone. We’re strong enough to stand anything else.”

“No.”

“You don’t know—”

“Jesusa! Listen.” When she had settled into an angry silence, I told her what would happen to the Earth, what would be left of it when we were gone. “Nothing will be able to live on what we leave,” I said. “If your people stay where they are and keep breeding, they’ll be destroyed. Every one of them. There’s life for them on Mars, and there’s life here with us. But if they insist on staying where they are

they won’t be allowed to keep having children. That way, by the time we break away from Earth, your people will have died of age.”

She shook her head slowly as I spoke. “I don’t believe you. Even your people can’t destroy all the Earth.”

“Not all of it, no. It’s like

when you eat a piece of fruit that has an inedible core or inedible seeds. There will be a rocky core of the Earth left—a great mass of material, useful for mining, but not for living on. We’ll be scattering in a great many ships. Each one will have to be self-sustaining in interstellar space perhaps for thousands of years.”

“Self-sustaining in

?”

“Just think of it as being beyond any possible help or dependable resupply.”

“In space

between the stars. That’s what you mean. No sun. Almost nothing.”

“Yes.”

“The elders who raised us when our mother died

they knew about such things. One used to write about them before the war to help others understand.”

I said nothing. Let her think for a while.

She sat silent, frowning, sometimes shaking her head. After a while, she rubbed her face with both hands and moved to sit next to TomÁs.

“Shall I wake him?” I asked.

She shook her head.

I went into the forest and brought back a few sticks of dry wood. The rain began just as I returned. Jesusa sat where I had left her, rocking back and forth a little. I hung the basket of food that I had brought on the stump of a branch that had been left on one of the support saplings. Jesusa was hungry, but she did not want to eat now. I could satisfy the needs of her body without getting her to eat. Linked with her, I could transfer nourishment to her.

I fed the fire, then went to sit with her, TomÁs lying between us.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said softly. “My brother was going to die, you know.” She stroked his black hair. “Someone is always going to die.” She paused. “He was going to kill himself as soon as he got me within sight of home. I don’t know whether I could have stopped him this time.”

“He tried before?” I asked.

She nodded. “That was the reason for this trip. To keep him alive a little longer.” She looked at me solemn-faced. “We didn’t need you to tell us he was becoming disabled. We’ve watched it happen to too many of our people. And

they just go on having children until they die or it becomes physically impossible.” She touched his misshapen face. “Last year, he broke his leg and had to lie on his back with his leg splinted and attached to weights for weeks. He told the elders he didn’t remember what happened. I told them he fell. They would have locked him up otherwise. We both knew he’d jumped. He meant to die. That long fall down to the river should have killed him. Thank god it didn’t. I promised him we would make this trip before they married us off. I said when his leg was strong, we would slip away. He had wanted to do that for years. Only I knew. It was wrong, of course. Fertile young people risking themselves in the lowland forests, risking the welfare of everyone

. I did it for him. I didn’t even want to come here.” Tears streamed down her face, but she made no sound of crying, no move to wipe her face.

I reached over TomÁss, caught her by the waist, and lifted her. She wasn’t heavy at all. I put her down beside me so that I was between the two of them—where I belonged.

“You’ve saved him,” I said. “You’ve saved his life and your people’s lives. You’ve saved yourself from a life of unnecessary misery.”

“Have I done so much good? Then how is it that my people would kill me if they found out?”

She believed me. It didn’t make her feel any better, but she did believe.

“We can’t go home,” she said. “The elders always told us that if even one of your people learned the truth about us, they would find us, and the thing we were trying to rebuild would be destroyed.”

“Perhaps it will only be healed and transported to Mars. Everyone who wants to go will be sent.”

“They won’t believe you. They wouldn’t even believe me. Even if I went home now, when your people came to collect us, my people would know who had betrayed them.”

“That’s not what you’ve done. Anyway, I want you to stay with me.”

She studied me, vertical frowns forming between her eyes where there was a small expanse of clear skin. “I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“You’re with me now.” I lay down and moved close against TomÁs so that all the sensory tentacles on his side of my body could reach him. Linking into him was such a sharp, sweet shock that for a moment, I could not see. When the shock had traveled through me, I became aware of Jesusa watching. I reached up and pulled her down with us. She gasped as the contact was completed. Then she groaned and twisted her body so that she could bring more of it into contact with me. TomÁs, not really awake yet, did the same, and we lay utterly submerged in one another.

8

By the next morning, most of Jesusa’s small tumors had vanished, reabsorbed into her body. She was not truly healed yet, but her skin was soft and smooth for the first time since her early childhood. She cried as she ate the breakfast I prepared from my basket. She examined herself over and over.

TomÁs’s tumors had been bigger and would take longer to get rid of, but they had clearly begun to shrink.

We had all awakened together—which meant they had awakened when I did. I didn’t want to take a chance on Jesusa rationalizing and running again, or worse, deciding to try to kill me again.

They awoke content and rested and in better physical shape than they’d been in for years. Both were fascinated by the obvious changes in Jesusa.

I lay between them, comfortably exhausted on a brand-new level. My body had been working hard all night on two people. And yet, I’d never felt this well, this complete before.

Jesusa, after touching her face and her arms and her legs and finding only smooth skin and beginning to cry, leaned down and kissed me.

“I have,” TomÁs said, “a very strange compulsion to do that, too.” He kept his tone light, but there was real confusion behind it.

I sat up and kissed him, savoring the healing that had taken place so far. Invisible healing as well as shrinkage of visible tumors. His optic nerve was being restored—against the original genetic advice of his body. Insanely one bit of genetic information said the nerve was complete and the genes controlling its development were not to become active again. Yet his genetic disorder went on causing the growth of more and more useless, dangerous tissue on such finished organs and preventing them from carrying on their function.

TomÁs had grown patches of hair on his face overnight. When I touched one of them, he smiled. “I have to shave,” he said. “I’d grow a beard if I could, but when I tried, Jesusa said it looked like an alpaca sheared by a five-year-old-child.”

I frowned. “Alpaca?”

“A highland animal. We raise them for wool to make clothing.”

“Oh.” I smiled. “I think your beard will grow more evenly when I’ve finished with you,” I said.

“Do you think you’ll ever do that?” he asked. “Finish with us?”

My free head and body tentacles tightened flat to my skin with pleasurable sexual tension. “No,” I said softly. “I don’t think so.”

He had to be told everything. He and Jesusa and I talked and rested all that day, then lay together to share the night. The next morning we began several days of walking—drifting, really—back toward my family’s camp. We were in no hurry. I taught them to find and make safe use of wild forest foods. They talked about their people and worried about them. Jesusa talked with real horror about the breaking apart of the planet, but TomÁs seemed less concerned.

“It isn’t real to me,” he said simply. “It will happen long after I’m dead. And if you’re telling us the truth, Jodahs, there’s nothing we can do to prevent it.”

“Will you stay with me?” I asked.

He looked at Jesusa, and Jesusa looked away. “I don’t know,” he said softly.

“If you stay with me, you’ll almost certainly live past the time of separation.”

He stared at me, frowning, thinking. They both had their silent, thoughtful times.

We wandered downstream, walking and resting and enjoying one another for seven days. Seven very good days. TomÁs’s tumors vanished and the sight of his eye returned. His hearing improved. He looked at himself in the water of a small pond and said, “I don’t know how I’ll get used to being so beautiful.”

Jesusa threw a handful of mud at him.

On the morning of our eighth day together, I was more tired than I should have been. I didn’t understand why until I realized that the flesh under my arms itched more than usual, and that it was swollen a little. Just a little.

I was beginning my second metamorphosis. Soon, in the middle of the forest, far from even our temporary home, I would fall into a sleep so deep that TomÁs and Jesusa would not be able to awaken me.

9

“Will you stay with me?” I asked TomÁs and Jesusa as we ate that morning. I had not asked either of them that question since we began to travel together. I had slept in a cocoon of their bodies every night. Perhaps that had helped bring on the change. Oankali ooloi usually made the final change after they had found mates. Mates gave them the security to change. Mates would look after them while they were helpless and be there for them when they awoke. Now, looking at Jesusa and TomÁs, I felt afraid, desperate. They had no idea how much I needed them.

Jesusa looked at TomÁs, and TomÁs spoke.

“I want to stay with you. I don’t really know what that will mean, but I want it. There’s no place else for me. But you want us both, don’t you?”

“Want?” I whispered, and shook my head. “I need you both very much.”

I think that surprised them. Jesusa leaned toward me. “You’ve known Human beings all your life,” she said. “But we’ve never known anyone like you. And

you want me to have children with my brother.”

Ah. “Touch him.”

“What?”

I waited. They had not touched one another since their first night with me. They were not aware of it, but they were avoiding contact.

TomÁs reached out toward Jesusa’s arm. She flinched, then kept still. TomÁs’s hand did not quite reach her. He frowned, then drew back. He turned to face me.

“What is it?”

“Nothing harmful. You can touch her. You won’t enjoy it, but you can do it. If she were drowning, you could save her.”

Jesusa reached out abruptly and grasped his wrist. She held on for a moment, both of them rigid with a revulsion they might not want to recognize. TomÁs made himself cover her repellent hand with his own.

As abruptly as they had come together, they broke apart. Jesusa managed to stop herself from wiping her hand against her clothing. TomÁs did not.

“Oh, god,” she said. “What have you done to us?”

I got up, went around her to sit between them. I could still walk normally, but even those few steps were exhausting.

I took their hands, rested each of them on one of my thighs so that I would not have to maintain a grip. I linked into their nervous systems and brought them together as though they were touching one another. It was not illusion. They were in contact through me. Then I gave them a bit of illusion. I “vanished” for them. For a moment, they were together, holding one another. There was no one between them.

By the time Jesusa finished her scream of surprise, I was “back,” and more exhausted than ever. I let them go and lay down.

“If you stay,” I said, “what you do, you’ll do through me. You literally won’t touch one another.”

“What’s the matter with you?” TomÁs asked. “You didn’t feel the same just now.”

“Oh, I’m not the same. I’m changing. Now, I’m maturing.”

They did not understand. I saw concern and questioning on their faces, but no alarm. Not yet.

“My final metamorphosis is beginning now,” I said. “It will last for several months.”

Now they looked alarmed. “What will happen to you?” Jesusa asked. “What shall we do for you?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “I had no idea it was so close. The first time, I had several days’ warning. If it had happened that way this time, I would have been able to go into the river and get home without your help. I can’t do that now.”

“Did you think we would abandon you?” she demanded. “Is that why you asked us again to stay?”

“Not that you would walk away and leave me here, no. But that

you wouldn’t wait.”

“A few months?”

“As much as a year.”

“We have to get you back to your people. We can’t find enough food

.”

“Wait. Can you

will you make a raft? There are young cecropia trees just above the sandbar. Farther inland, there are plenty of lianas. If you can put something together while I’m awake, we can go downriver to my family’s camp. I won’t let you pass it. Then

if you want to leave me, my family won’t try to hold you.”

Jesusa moved to sit near my head. “Will you be all right if we leave?”

I looked at her for a long time before I could make myself answer. “Of course not.”

She got up and walked a short distance away from me, kept her back to me. TomÁs moved to where she had been and took my hand.

“We’ll build the raft,” he said. “We’ll get you home.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t see why we can’t stay until you finish your metamorphosis.”

I closed my eyes, and I said nothing. Was that how Nikanj had done it a century before? Lilith had been with it when its second metamorphosis began. Had it been tempted to say, “If you stay with me now, you’ll never leave?” Or had it simply never thought to say anything? It was Oankali. It had probably never thought to say anything. It wouldn’t have been harboring any sexual feeling for her at that point. It had enjoyed her because she was so un-Oankali—different and dangerous and fascinating.

I felt those things myself about these two, but I felt more. As Nikanj had said, I was precocious.

I said nothing at all to TomÁs. Someday he would curse me for my silence.

He went to Jesusa and said, “If we stay, we’ll have a chance to see how their families work.”

“I’m afraid to stay,” she said.

“Afraid?”

She picked up the machete. “We should get started on the raft.”

“Jesusita, why are you afraid?”

“Why aren’t you?” she said. She looked at me, then at him. “This is an alien thing Jodahs wants of us. Certainly it’s an un-Christian thing, an un-Human thing. It’s the thing we’ve been taught against all our lives. How can we be accepting it or even considering it so easily?”

“Are you?” he asked quietly.

“Of course I am. So are you. You’ve said you want to stay.”

“Yes, but—”

“Something is not right. Jodahs sleeps with us and heals us and pleasures us—and asks only for the opportunity to go on doing these things.” She paused, shook her head. “When I think of leaving Jodahs, finding other Human beings, or perhaps going to the colony on Mars, my stomach knots. It wants us to stay and I want to stay and so do you, and we shouldn’t! Something is wrong.”

I fell asleep at that point. It was not deliberate, but it could not have been better timed. Second metamorphosis, I had been told, was not one long sleep as the first one had been. It was a series of shorter sleeps—sleeps several days long.

I frightened them. Jesusa thought first that I was faking, then that I was dead. Only when they were able to get some reaction from my body tentacles did they decide I was alive and probably all right. They carried me down to the river and left me under a tree while they found other, small trees to chop down with their machete. Slow, hard work. I perceived and remembered everything in latent memories, stored away for consideration later when I was conscious.

They took good care of me, moving me when they moved, keeping me near them. Without realizing it, they became a torment to me when they touched me, when I could smell them. But they were a much worse torment when they went too far away. My only salvation was the certainty that they would not abandon me and the knowledge that this, uncomfortable as it was, was normal. It would be the same if I were being cared for by a pair of Oankali or a pair of constructs. Nikanj had warned me. Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.

I endured, grateful to Jesusa and TomÁs for their loyalty.

The raft took four days to finish. Not only was the machete not the best tool for the job, but Jesusa and TomÁs had never built such a thing before. They were not sure what would work and they would not load me onto a craft that would come apart in the water or one they could not control. They spent time learning to control it with long poles and with paddles. They worried that in some places the river might be too deep for poles. They worried about hostile people, too. We would be very visible on the river. People with guns could pick us off if they wanted to. What could we do about that?

I awoke as they were loading me and baskets of food onto the raft. Figs, nuts, bean pods with edible pulp, and several baked applesauce tubers.

“Are you all right?” TomÁs asked when he saw my eyes open. He was carrying me toward the raft. I felt as though I could sink into him, merge with him, become him. Yet I felt as though he were days away from me and beyond my reach completely.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t drop you. Jesusa might, but I won’t.”

“Don’t say that!” Jesusa said quickly. “Jodahs may not know you’re joking.”

TomÁs put me down on the raft. They had made a pallet for me there of large leaves covering soft grasses. I made myself relax and not clutch at TomÁs as he put me down.

He sat down next to me for a moment. “Is there anything you need? You haven’t eaten for days.”

“People don’t eat much during metamorphosis,” I said. “On the other hand, eating can take my mind off

other things. Do you see the bush there with the deep green leaves?”

He looked around, then pointed.

“Yes, that one. Pull several branches of young leaves from it. I eat the leaves.”

“Truly? They’re good for you?”

“Yes, but not for you, so don’t ever eat them. I can digest them and use their nutrients.”

“Eat some nuts.”

“No. You eat the nuts. Bring me the leaves.”

He obeyed, though slowly.

I ate the first few leaves while he watched incredulously. “I don’t understand enough about you,” he said.

“Because I eat leaves? I can eat almost anything. Some things are more worth the effort than others.”

“More than that. Something I’ve been trying to figure out. How do you

? I don’t mean to offend you, but I can’t figure this out on my own.” He hesitated, looked around to see where Jesusa was. She was out of sight among the trees. “How do you shit?” he demanded. “How do you piss? You’re all closed up.”

I laughed aloud. My Human mother had been with Nikanj for almost a year before she asked that question. “We’re very thorough,” I said. “What we leave behind would make poor fertilizer—except for our ships. We shed what we don’t need.”

“The way we shed hair or dead skin?”

“Yes. At home, the ship or the town would take it as soon as it was shed. Here, it’s dust. I leave it behind when I sleep—when I sleep normally, anyway. People in metamorphosis leave almost nothing behind.”

“I’ve never seen anything.”

“Dust.”

“And water?”

I smiled. “Easiest to shed when I’m in it, though I can sweat as you do.”

“And?”

“That’s all. Think TomÁs. When did you last see me drink water? I can drink, of course, but normally I get all the moisture I need from what I eat. We use everything that we take in much more thoroughly than you do.”

“Why aren’t you ever covered in mud?”

“I do one thing at a time.”

“And

our children would be like you?”

“Not at first. Human-born children look very Human at first. They eliminate in Human ways until metamorphosis.” I changed the subject abruptly. “TomÁs, I’m going to stay awake through as much of this trip as I can. I should be able to warn you if we’re near people so that we can at least stay close to the opposite shore. And I’ll have to stop you at my family’s camp. You won’t be able to see it from the river.”

“All right,” he said.

“If I do fall asleep, make camp. Wait for me to wake up. This is a very long river, and I’m not up to backtracking.”

“All right,” he repeated.

Jesusa arrived them. She had found a cacao tree the night before, and today had climbed it again for one last harvest. I had pointed a cacao tree out to her as we traveled together, and she had discovered she especially liked the pulp of the pods. She put her basket, stuffed with pods, onto the raft, then helped TomÁs push off. They poled us into the current not far from shore.

“Listen,” I said to them once the raft was moving easily.

Both glanced around to show me they were listening.

“If we’re attacked or we have to abandon the raft for any reason, push me off into the water—whether I’m awake or not. I can breathe in the water and nothing that lives there will be interested in eating me. Get me out later if you can. If you can’t, don’t worry about me. Get yourselves out and keep each other safe. I’m much harder to kill than you are.”

They didn’t argue. Jesusa gave me an odd look, and I remembered her shooting me. Her gun had not been salvageable. The metal parts had been too damaged. Was she remembering how hard I was to kill—or how I had destroyed their most powerful weapon? After a time, she left poling the raft to TomÁs. He seemed to have no trouble letting the current carry us and preventing us from drifting too close to either bank, where fallen trees and sandbars made progress slow and dangerous.

Jesusa sat with me and fed me cacao pulp and did not talk to me at all.

10

We drifted for days on the river.

I could not help with paddles or poles. It took all the energy I had just to stay awake. I could and did sit up and spot barely submerged sandbars for them and keep them aware of the general depth of the water. I kept quiet about the animals I could see in the water. The Humans could see almost nothing through the brown murk, but we often drifted past animals that would eat Human flesh if they could get it. Fortunately the worst of the carnivorous fish preferred slow, quieter waters, and were no danger to us.

It was the people who were dangerous.

Twice I directed Jesusa and TomÁs away from potentially hostile people—Humans grouped on one side of the river or the other. Resisters still fought among themselves and sometimes robbed and murdered strangers.

I didn’t scent the third group of Humans in time. And, unlike the first two, the third group spotted us.

There was a shot—a loud crack like the first syllable of a phrase of thunder. We all fell flat to the logs of the raft, Jesusa losing her pole as she fell.

She was wounded. I could smell the blood rushing out of her.

I lost myself then. I was not fully conscious anymore, but my latent memories told me later that I dragged myself toward her, my body still flat against the logs. From shore, the Humans fired several more times, and TomÁs, unaware of Jesusa’s injury, cursed them, cursed the current that was not moving us beyond their reach quickly enough, cursed his own broken rifle

.

I reached Jesusa, unconscious, bleeding from the abdomen, and I locked on to her.

I was literally unconscious now. There was nothing at work except my body’s knowledge that Jesusa was necessary to it, and that she would die from her wound if it didn’t help her. My body sought to do for her what it would have done for itself. Even if I had been conscious and able to choose, I could not have done more. Her right kidney and the large blood vessels leading to it had been severely damaged. Her colon had been damaged. She was bleeding internally and poisoning herself with bodily wastes. Fortunately she was unconscious or her pain might have caused her to move away before I could lock into her. Once I was in, though, nothing could have driven me off.

We drifted beyond the range and apparently beyond the interest of the resisters. I was regaining consciousness as TomÁs crawled back to us. I saw him freeze as he noticed the blood, saw him look at us, saw him lunge toward us, rocking the raft, then stop just short of touching us.

“Is she alive?” he whispered.

It was an effort to speak. “Yes,” I answered after a moment. I couldn’t manage anything else.

“What can I do to help?”

One more word. “Home.”

I was of no use at all to him after that. I had all I could do to keep Jesusa unconscious and alive while my own body insisted on continuing its development and change. I could not heal Jesusa quickly. I wasn’t sure I could heal her at all. I had stopped the blood loss, stopped her bodily wastes from poisoning her. It seemed a very long time, though, before I was able to seal the hole in her colon and begin the complicated process of regenerating a new kidney. The wounded one was not salvageable. I used it to nourish her—which involved me breaking the kidney down to its useful components and feeding them to her intravenously. It was the most nutritious meal she had had in days. That was part of the problem. Neither she nor I was in particularly good condition. I worried that my efforts at regeneration would trigger her genetic disorder, and I tried to keep watch. It occurred to me that I could have left her with one kidney until I was through my metamorphosis and able to look after her properly. That was what I should have done.

I hadn’t done it because on some level, I was afraid Nikanj would take care of her if I didn’t. I couldn’t stand to think of it touching her, or touching TomÁs.

That one thought drove me harder than anything else could have. It almost caused me to let us pass my family’s home site.

The scent of home and relatives got through to me somehow. “TomÁs!” I called hoarsely. And when I saw that I had his attention, I pointed. “Home.”

He managed to bring us to the bank some distance past my family’s cabin. He waded to shore and pulled the raft as close to the bank as he could.

“There’s no one around,” he said. “And no house that I can see.”

“They didn’t want to be easily visible from the river,” I said. I detached myself from Jesusa and examined her visually. No new tumors. Smooth skin beneath her ragged, bloody, filthy clothing. Smooth skin across her abdomen.

“Is she all right?” TomÁs asked.

“Yes. Just sleeping now. I’ve lost track. How long has it been since she was shot?”

“Two days.”

“That long

?” I focused on him with sensory tentacles and saw evidence of the load of worry and work that he had carried. I could think of nothing sufficient to say to him. “Thank you for taking care of us.”

He smiled wearily. “I’ll go look for some of your people.”

“No, they’ll notice my scent if they haven’t already. They’ll be coming. Help Jesusa off, then come back for me. She can walk.”

I shook her and she awoke—or half awoke. She cringed away when TomÁs waded into the shallow water and reached for her. He drew back. After a while, she got up slowly, swayed, and followed TomÁs’s beckoning hand.

“Come on, Jesusita,” he whispered. “Off the raft.” He walked beside her through the water and up the bank where the ground was dry enough to be firm. There, she sat down and seemed to doze again.

When he came back for me, he held something in his fingers—held it up for me to see. An irregularly shaped piece of metal smaller than the end point of his smallest finger. It was the bullet I had caused Jesusa’s body to expel.

“Throw it away,” I said. “It almost took her from us.”

He threw it far out into the river.

11

Some of my family is coming now,” I said. TomÁs had put me on the bank beside Jesusa. He had sat down beside me to rest. Now he became alert again.

“TomÁs,” I said softly.

He glanced at me.

“You won’t feel comfortable about letting them get close to you or letting them surround you. Jesusa won’t either. My family will understand that. And no one will touch you—except the children. You won’t mind their touch.”

He frowned, gave me a longer look. “I don’t understand.”

“I know. It has to do with your being with me, letting me heal you, letting me sleep with you. You’ll feel

drawn to be with Jesusa and me and strongly repelled by others. The feeling won’t last. It’s normal, so don’t let it worry you.”

Lilith, Nikanj, and Aaor came out of the trees together. Aaor. It was awake and strong. The family must only have been waiting for me to get home. Exile—true exile—had been that close.

The three stood near enough to speak normally, but not near enough to make TomÁs uncomfortable.

“I’m going to have to learn not to worry about you,” Lilith said, smiling. “Welcome back.” She had spoken in Oankali. She switched to Spanish, which meant she had heard me talking to TomÁs. “Welcome,” she said to him. “Thank you for caring for our child and bringing it home.” She inserted the English “it” because in English the word was truly neuter. Spanish did not have a word that translated exactly. Spanish-speaking people usually handled the ooloi gender by ignoring it. They used masculine or feminine, whichever felt right to them—when they had to use anything.

I took TomÁs’s hand, felt it grip mine desperately, almost painfully, yet his face betrayed no sign of emotion.

“These are two of my parents,” I told him, gesturing with my free hand. “Lilith is my birth mother and Nikanj is my same-sex parent. This third one is Aaor, my paired sibling.” I enjoyed the sight of it for a moment. It was gray-furred now and, oddly, not that unusual-looking. Perhaps the other siblings helped it stay almost normal. “Aaor has been closer to me than my skin at times,” I said. “I think it turned out to be more like me than it would have preferred.”

Aaor, who was restraining itself with an obvious effort, said, “When I touch you, Jodahs, I won’t let you go for at least a day.”

I laughed, remembering its touch, realizing that I was eager to touch it, too, and understand exactly how it had changed. We would not be the same—Human-born and Oankali-born. Examining it would teach me more about myself by similarity and by contrast. And it would want even more urgently to know where I had found Jesusa and TomÁs. If its own sense of smell had not recognized them as young and fertile—as mine had not when I met them—Nikanj would have let it know.

“I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “But put us somewhere dry, first, and feed us.” I meant, and all three of them knew it, that TomÁs and Jesusa should be given a dry place and food.

Nikanj rested a sensory arm on Aaor’s shoulders and some of the straining eagerness went out of Aaor.

“What are you called?” Nikanj asked TomÁs. It spoke very softly, yet that soft voice carried so well. Did I sound that way?

TomÁs leaned forward, responding to the voice, then was barely able to keep himself from drawing back. He had never seen an Oankali before, and Nikanj, an adult ooloi, was especially startling. He stared, and then was ashamed and looked away. Then he stared again.

“What are you called?” Nikanj repeated.

“TomÁs,” he answered finally. “TomÁs Serrano y MartÍn.” He had not told me that much. He paused, then said, “This is Jesusa, my sister.” He touched her hair the way my Human parents sometimes touched one another’s hair. “She was shot.”

Nikanj focused sharply on me.

“She’s all right,” I said. “She’s exhausted because she hasn’t been eating well for a while—and you know how hard I had to make her body work.” I turned and shook her. “Jesusa,” I whispered. “You’re all right. Wake up. We’ve reached my family.” I kept my hand on her shoulder, shook her again gently, wishing I could give her the kind of comfort I would have been able to give only a few days before. But I had had all I could do to save her life.

She opened her eyes, looked around, and saw Nikanj. She turned her face from it and whimpered—a sound I had not heard from her before.

“You’re safe,” I told her. “These people are here to help us. You’re all right. No one will harm you.”

She realized finally what I was saying. She fell silent and became almost still. She could not stop her trembling, but she looked at me, then at Lilith, Aaor, and Nikanj. She made herself look longest at Nikanj.

“Excuse me,” she said after a moment. “I

haven’t seen anyone like you before.”

Nikanj’s many sensory tentacles flattened smooth as its body. “I haven’t seen anyone like you for a century,” it said.

At the sound of its voice, she looked startled. She turned to look at me, then looked back at Nikanj. I introduced it along with Lilith and Aaor.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Jesusa lied politely. She watched Nikanj, fascinated, not knowing that it held its position of amusement, of smoothness, extra long for her benefit. I went smooth every time I laughed, but my few sensory tentacles were not that visible even when they were not flattened. And I did laugh. Nikanj did not.

“I’m amazed and pleased,” Nikanj said. And to me in Oankali, it said, “Where are they from?”

“Later,” I said.

“Will they stay, Oeka?”

“Yes.”

It focused on me, seemed to expect me to say more. I kept quiet.

Aaor broke the silence. “You can’t walk, can you?” it said in Spanish. “We’ll have to carry you.”

TomÁs stood up quickly. “If you’ll show me the way,” he said, “I’ll carry Jodahs.” He hesitated for a moment beside Jesusa. “Sister, can you walk?”

“Yes.” She stood up slowly, holding her ragged bloody clothing together. She took a tentative step. “I feel all right,” she said, “but

so much blood.”

Aaor had turned to lead the way back to the cabin. TomÁs lifted me, and Jesusa walked close to him. I spoke to her from his arms. “You’ll have good food to eat here,” I told her. “You’ll probably be a little hungrier than usual for a while because you’re still regrowing part of yourself. Aside from that, you’re well.”

She took my dangling hand and kissed it.

TomÁs smiled. “If you really feel well, Jesusa, give it one more for me. You don’t know what it brought you back from.”

She looked ahead at Nikanj. “I don’t know what it’s brought me back to,” she whispered.

“No one will hurt you here,” I told her again. “No one will touch you or even come near you. No one will keep you from coming to me when you want to.”

“Will they let me go?” she asked.

I turned my head so that I could look at her with my eyes. “Don’t leave me,” I said very softly.

“I’m afraid. I don’t see how I can stay here with your

family.”

“Stay with me.”

“Your

relative. The Oankali one

.”

“Nikanj. My ooloi parent. It will never touch you.” I would get that promise from it before I slept again.

“It’s

ooloi, like you.”

Ah. “No, not like me. It’s Oankali. No Human admixture at all. Jesusa, my birth mother is as Human as you are. My Human father looks like a relative of yours. Even when I’m adult, I won’t look the way Nikanj does. You’ll never have reason to fear me.”

“I fear you now because I still don’t understand what’s happening.”

TomÁs spoke up. “Jesusa, it saved you. It could hardly move, but it saved you.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m grateful. More grateful than I can say.” She touched my face, then moved her hand to my hair and let her fingers slide expertly around the base of a group of sensory tentacles.

I shuddered with sudden pleasure and frustrated need.

“I’ll try to stay until your metamorphosis is over,” she said. “I owe you that and more. I promise to stay that long.”

My mother turned her head and looked at Jesusa, then at me, looked long at me.

I met her gaze, but said nothing to her.

After a time, she turned back to the path. Her scent, as it reached me, said she was upset, under great stress. But like me, she said nothing at all.

12

We were given food. For a change, I actually needed it. Healing Jesusa had depleted my resources. I had no strength at all, and Jesusa fed me as she fed herself. She seemed to take some comfort in feeding me.

Jesusa and TomÁs were given clean, dry clothing. They went to the river to wash themselves and came back to the house clean and content. They ate parched nuts and relaxed with my family.

“Tell us about your people,” Aaor said as the sun went down and Dichaan put more wood on the fire. “I know there are things you don’t want to tell us, but

tell us how your people came to exist. How did your fertile ancestors find one another?”

Jesusa and TomÁs looked at each other. Jesusa looked apprehensive, but TomÁs smiled. It was a tired, sad smile.

“Our first postwar ancestors never found one another,” he said. “I’ll tell you if you like.”

“Yes!”

“Our elders were people who joined together because they could communicate,” he said. “They all spoke Spanish. They were from Mexico and Peru and Spain and Chile and other countries. The First Mother was from Mexico. She was fifteen years old and traveling with her parents. There were others with them who knew this country and who said it would be best to live higher in the mountains. They were on the way up when the First Mother and her own mother were attacked. They had left the group to bathe. The Mother never saw her attackers. She was hit from behind. She was raped—probably many times.

“When she regained consciousness, she was alone. Her mother was there, but she was dead. The First Mother was badly injured. She had to crawl and drag herself back to her people. They cared for her as best they could. Her father couldn’t help her. He left her to others. He was so angry at what had been done to her and to her mother that eventually he left the group. The Mother awoke one morning and he was gone. She never saw him again.

“The people had already begun to make homes for themselves in the place they had chosen when they realized the Mother would have a child. No one had thought it was possible. People had tried to accept their sterility. They said it was better to have no children than

than to have un-Human children.” TomÁs looked down at his hands. When he raised his head, he found himself looking directly at Tino.

“My people said the same thing before I left them,” Tino said. “They believed it. But it’s a lie.”

TomÁs looked at Lilith, his gaze questioning.

“You know it’s a lie,” Lilith said quietly.

TomÁs looked at me, then continued his story. “The people worried that the Mother’s child might not be Human. No one had seen her attackers. No one knew who or what they had been.”

Nikanj spoke up. “They could not have believed we would send them away sterile, then change our minds and impregnate one of them while killing another.” Even with its soft mature-ooloi’s voice, it managed to sound outraged.

TomÁs was already able to look at it, speak to it. It had been careful not to notice when he studied it as he ate. Now he said, “They said you could do almost anything. Some of them said your powers came from the devil. Some said you were devils. Some were disgusted with that kind of talk. To them, you were only the enemy. They didn’t believe you had raped the Mother. They believed the Mother could be their tool to defeat you. They took her in and cared for her and fed her even when they didn’t have enough to eat themselves. When her son was born, they helped her care for him and they showed him to everyone so that the people could see that he was perfect and Human. They called him Adan. The mother’s name was MarÍa de la Luz. When Adan was weaned, they cared for him. They encouraged his mother to work in the gardens and help with the building and be away from her son. That way, when the time came, when Adan was thirteen years old, they were able to put mother and son together. By then, both had been taught their duty. And by then, everyone had realized that the Mother was not only fertile but mortal—as they seemed not to be. By the time her first daughter was born, the Mother looked older than some of those who had helped her raise her son.

“The Mother bore three daughters eventually. She died with the birth of her second son. That son was

seriously deformed. He had a hole in his back. People say you could see the spine. And he had other things wrong with him. He died and was buried with the Mother in a place

that is sacred to us. The people built a shrine there. Some have seen the Mother when they went there to think or to pray. They’ve seen her spirit.” TomÁs stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?”

“We believe in life,” Ahajas said.

“Life after death?”

Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.”

“But I mean—”

“If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”

“

it would?”

“Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.”

“Nothing more?”

Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”

He did not ask what “Lelka” meant, though he couldn’t have known. It meant mated child—something parents called their adult children and mates of their children. I would have to ask her not to call him that. Not yet.

“When I was little,” TomÁs said, “I planted a tree at the Mother’s shrine.” He smiled, apparently remembering. “Some people wanted to pull it up. It grew so well, though, that no one touched it. People said the Mother must like having it there.” He stopped and looked at Ahajas.

She nodded Humanly and watched him with interest and approval.

“The Mother had twenty-three grandchildren,” he continued. “Fifteen survived. Among these were several who were deformed or who grew deformed. They were fertile, and not all of their children had the deformities. The deformed ones could not be spared. Sometimes smooth children with only a few dark spots on their skin had deformed young. One of our elders said this was a disorder that had been known before the war. He had known a woman who had it and who looked much the way I did before Jodahs healed me.”

Everyone turned at once and focused on me.

“Ask me when his story is finished,” I said. “I don’t know a name for the disease anyway. I can only describe it.”

“Describe it,” Lilith said.

I looked at her and understood that she was asking me for more than a description of the disorder. Her face was set and grim, as it had been since Jesusa promised to stay with me through metamorphosis. She wanted to know what reason there might be apart from her love for me for not telling the Humans how bound to me they were becoming. She wanted to know why she should betray her own kind with silence.

“It was a genetic disorder,” I said. “It affected their skin, their bones, their muscles, and their nervous systems. It made tumors—large ones on TomÁs’s face and upper body. His optic nerve was affected. The bones of his neck and one arm were affected. His hearing was affected. Jesusa was covered head to foot in small very visible tumors. They didn’t impair her ability to move or to use her senses.”

“I was very lucky,” Jesusa said quietly. “I looked ugly, but people didn’t care, because I could have children. I didn’t suffer the way TomÁs did.”

TomÁs looked at her. The look said more than even a shout of protest could have. “You suffered,” he said. “And if not for Jodahs, you would have made yourself go back and suffer more. For the rest of your life.”

She stared at the floor, then into the fire. There was no shyness in the gesture. She simply did not agree with him. The corners of her mouth turned slightly downward. As her brother began speaking again, I took her hand. She jumped, looked at me as though I were a stranger. Then she took my hand between her own and held it. I didn’t think she had noticed that across the room from us Tino was holding one of Nikanj’s sensory arms in exactly the same way.

“Sometimes,” TomÁs was saying, “people have only brown spots and no tumors. Sometimes they have both. And sometimes their minds are affected. Sometimes there are other troubles and they die. Children die.” He let his voice vanish away.

“No more!” Lilith said. “That misery will soon be over for them.”

TomÁs turned to face her. “You must know they won’t thank me or Jesusa for that. They’ll hate us as traitors.”

“I know.”

“Was it that way for you?”

Lilith looked downward for a moment, moving only her eyes. “Has Jodahs told you about the Mars colony?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t exist as an alternative for me.”

“My people may not see it as an alternative either.”

“If they’re wise, they will.” She looked at Nikanj. “Their disorder does sound like something that was around before the war, if it matters. In the United States, people called it neurofibromatosis. I don’t know the Spanish name for it. It could have occurred as a mutation in one or more of the Mother’s children if no one had it until the third generation. I remember reading about a couple of especially horrible prewar cases. Sometimes the tumors became malignant. That would be a special attraction to Jodahs, I think. Ooloi can see great unused potential in that kind of thing.”

“See it and smell it and taste it,” Aaor said.

Everyone focused on it.

“I can change to look the way Jodahs does,” it said. “There must be two more or at least one more sick Human among the Mother’s people who would join me.”

Silence. Jesusa and TomÁs looked startled.

“You don’t understand how strongly we’re taught against you,” TomÁs said. “And most of us believe. Jesusa and I came down to the lowlands to see a little of the world before she began to have child after child, and before I became too crippled. No one else we know of had done such a thing. I don’t think anyone else would.”

“If I could reach them,” Aaor said, “I could convince them.”

I could see the hunger in it, the desperation. Ayodele and Yedik moved to sit on either side of it and ease its discomfort as best they could. They seemed to do this automatically, as though they had finally adapted to having ooloi siblings.

But Aaor was not comforted. “I’m one more mistake!” it said. “One more ooloi who shouldn’t exist. There’s no other place on Earth for me to find mates. And if their people are collected and given the choice of Mars, union with us, or sterility where they are, I’ll never get near them! Even the ones who choose union with us will be directed to other mates. Mates who are not accidents.”

“None of them will accept union,” Jesusa said. “I know them. I know what they believe.”

“But you don’t know us well enough yet,” Aaor said. “Did you know what you would do

before Jodahs reached you?”

“I know I won’t lead you or anyone else to my people,” she told it. “If your people can find mine without us as Jodahs said, we can’t stop you. But nothing you can say would make us help you.”

“You don’t understand!” it said, leaning toward her.

“I know that,” she admitted, “and I’m sorry.”

They said more as I drifted into sleep, but they found no common ground. Throughout the argument, Jesusa never let go of my hand. When Nikanj saw that I had fallen asleep, it said I should be taken to the small room that had been set aside for Aaor’s metamorphosis.

“There are too many distractions for it out here,” it told Jesusa and TomÁs. “Too much stimulation. It should be isolated and allowed to focus inward on the changes its body must make.”

“Does it have to be isolated from us?” TomÁs asked.

“Of course not. The room is large enough for three, and Jodahs will always need the companionship of at least one person. If you both have to leave it for a while, tell Aaor or tell me. The room is over there.” It pointed with a strength hand.

TomÁs lifted my unconscious body, Jesusa helping him with me now that I was deadweight. I have a clear, treasured memory of the two of them carrying me into the small room. They did not know then that my memory went on recording everything my senses perceived even when I was unconscious. Yet they handled me with great gentleness and care, as they had from the beginning of my change. They did not know that this was exactly what Oankali mates did at these times. And they did not see Aaor watching them with a hunger that was so intense that its face was distorted and its head and body tentacles elongated toward us.

1

During my metamorphosis, Aaor lost its coat of gray fur. Its skin turned the same soft, bright brown as Jesusa’s, TomÁs’s and my own. It grew long, black Human-looking hair and began to wear it as Tino wore his—bound with a twist of grass into a long tail down his back. I wore mine loose.

“Apart from that,” Jesusa told me during one of my waking times, “the two of you could be twins.”

Yet she avoided Aaor—as did TomÁs. It smelled more like me than anyone else alive. But it did not smell exactly like me. Their Human noses had no trouble perceiving the difference. They didn’t know that was what they were perceiving, but they avoided Aaor.

And it did not want to be avoided.

I found its loneliness and need agonizing when it touched me. It awoke me several times as I lay changing. It didn’t mean to, but my body perceived it as an unhealed wound, and I could not rest until I had erased its pain and given

not healing, but momentary relief. What I gave was inadequate and short-lived, but Aaor came back for it again and again.

Once, lying linked with me, it asked if I could give it one of the young Humans.

I hurt it. I didn’t mean to, but what it said provoked reaction before I could control myself. Direct neural stimulation. Pure pain. As pure as any sensation can be. I did manage not to loop the pain between us and keep it going. Yet afterward, Aaor needed more healing. I kept it with me to give it comfort and ease its loneliness. It stayed until I fell asleep.

I never gave Aaor a verbal answer to its question. It never repeated the question. It seemed to realize that I could no longer separate myself deliberately from TomÁs and Jesusa. They could still leave me, but they wouldn’t. Jesusa took the promises she gave very seriously. She would not try to leave until I was on my feet again. And TomÁs would not leave without her. By the time they were prepared to go, it would be too late.

My only fear was that someone in the family would tell them. My mother believed she should, but she had not, so far. She loved me, and yet, until now, she had been able to do nothing to help me. She had not been able to make herself destroy the only chance I was likely to get of having the mates I needed.

Yet she was weighted with guilt. One more betrayal of her own Human kind for people who were not Human, or not altogether Human. She spoke to Jesusa as a much older sister—or as a same-sex parent. She advised her.

“Listen to Jodahs,” I heard her say on one occasion. “Listen carefully. It will tell you what it wants you to know. It won’t lie to you. But it will withhold information. Once you’ve heard what it has to say, get away from it. Get out of the house. Go to the river or a short way into the forest. Do your thinking there about what it’s told you, and decide what questions you still need answers to. Then come home and ask.”

“Home?” Jesusa whispered so softly I almost failed to hear. They were outside the house, replacing the roof thatch. They were not near my room, but my mother probably knew I could hear them.

“You live here,” my mother said. “That makes this home. It isn’t a permanent home for any of us.” She was good at evasion and withholding information herself.

“Would you go to Mars if you could?” Jesusa asked.

“Leave my family?”

“If you were as I am. If you had no family.”

My mother did not answer for a long time. She sighed finally. “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m content with these people. More than content. I lost my husband and my son before the war. They died in an accident. When the war came, I lost everything else. We all did, we elders, as you call us. I couldn’t give up and die, but I expected almost nothing. Food and shelter, maybe. An absence of pain. Nikanj said it knew I needed children, so it took seed from the man I had then and made me pregnant. I didn’t think I would ever forgive it for that.”

“But

you have forgiven it?”

“I’ve understood it. I’ve accepted it. I wouldn’t have believed I could do that much. Back when I met my first mature ooloi, Nikanj’s parent Kahguyaht, I found it alien, arrogant, and terrifying. I hated it. I thought I hated all ooloi.”

She paused. “Now I feel as though I’ve loved Nikanj all my life. Ooloi are dangerously easy to love. They absorb us, and we don’t mind.”

“Yes,” Jesusa agreed, and I smiled. “I’m afraid, though, because I don’t understand them. I’ll go to Mars if I don’t stay with Jodahs. I can understand settling a new place. I know what to expect from a Human husband.”

“Look at my family, Jesusa—and realize you’re only seeing six of our children. This is what you can expect if you mate with Jodahs. There’s closeness here that I didn’t have with the family I was born into or with my husband and son.”

“But you have Oankali mates other than Nikanj.”

“You will, too, eventually. With Jodahs, I mean. And your children will look much like mine. And half of them will be born to an Oankali female, but will inherit from all five of you.”

After a time, Jesusa said, “Ahajas and Dichaan aren’t so bad. They seem

very gentle.”

“Good mates. I was with Nikanj before they were—like you with Jodahs. That’s best, I think. An ooloi is probably the strangest thing any Human will come into contact with. We need time alone with it to realize it’s probably also the best thing.”

“Where would we live?”

“You and your new family? In one of our towns. I think any one of them would eventually welcome the three of you. You’d be something brand-new—the center of a lot of attention. Oankali and constructs love new things.”

“Jodahs says it had to go into exile because it was a new thing.”

“Is that what it said, really?”

Silence. What was Jesusa doing? Searching her memory for exactly what I had said? “It said it was the first of its kind,” she said finally. “The first construct ooloi.”

“Yes.”

“It said there weren’t supposed to be any construct ooloi yet, so the people didn’t trust it. They were afraid it would not be able to control itself as an ooloi must. They were afraid it would hurt people.”

“It did hurt some people, Jesusa. But it’s never hurt Humans. And it’s never hurt anyone when it’s had Humans with it.”

“It told me that.”

“Good. Because if it hadn’t, I would have. It needs you more than Nikanj ever needed me.”

“You want me to stay with it.”

“Very much.”

“I’m afraid. This is all so different

. How did you ever

? I mean

with Nikanj

. How did you decide?”

My mother said nothing at all.

“You didn’t have a choice, did you?”

“I did, oh, yes. I chose to live.”

“That’s no choice. That’s just going on, letting yourself be carried along by whatever happens.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said.

After that, there was no talk for a while. My mother had not shouted those last words, as some Humans would have. She had almost whispered them. Yet they carried such feeling, they would have silenced me, too—and I did know much of what my birth mother had survived. And it was so much more than she had said that Jesusa would not have wanted to hear it. Yet, in a way, in my mother’s voice she had heard it. It was not until I had almost drifted off to sleep that they spoke again. Jesusa began.

“It’s flattering to think that Jodahs needs us. It seems so powerful, so able to endure anything. At first I couldn’t understand why it even wanted us. I was suspicious.”

“It can endure a great deal of physical suffering. And it will have to if you leave it.”

“There are other Humans for it to mate with.”

“No, there aren’t. There’s Mars now. Resisters choose to go there. Ordinary resisters are too old for Jodahs anyway. As for the few young Humans born on the ship, they’re rare and spoken for.”

“So

what will happen to Jodahs if we leave?”

“I don’t know. Just as I don’t know what’s going to happen to Aaor, period. It’s Aaor that I’m most worried about now.”

“It asked me if I would tell it where my people were—tell it alone so that it could go to them and try to persuade two of them to mate with it.”

“What was your answer?”

“That they would kill it. They would kill it as soon as they realized what it was.”

“And?”

“It said it didn’t care. It said Jodahs had us, but it was starving.”

“Did you tell it what it wanted to know?”

“I couldn’t. Even if I didn’t know how my people would greet it, I couldn’t betray them that way. They’ll already think of me as a traitor when the Oankali come for them.”

“I know. Aaor knows, too, really. But it’s desperate.”

“TomÁs says it asked him, too.”

“That’s unusual. Has it asked you more than once?”

“Three times.”

“That goes beyond unusual. I’ll talk to Nikanj about it.”

“I don’t mean to make trouble for it. I wish I could help it.”

“It’s already in trouble. And right now, Nikanj is probably the only one who can help it.”

I stopped fighting sleep and let myself drift off. I would talk to Aaor when I awoke again. It was starving. I didn’t know what I could do about that, but there must be something.

2

But I had no chance to talk to Aaor before my second metamorphosis ended. It left home as I had. It wandered, perhaps looking for some sign of Jesusa and TomÁs’s people.

It found only aged, hostile, infertile resisters who had nothing to offer it except bullets and arrows.

It changed radically: grew fur again, lost it, developed scales, lost them, developed something very like tree bark, lost that, then changed completely, lost its limbs, and went into a tributary of our river.

When it realized it could not force itself back to a Human or Oankali form, could not even become a creature of the land again, it swam home. It swam in the river near our cabin for three days before anyone realized what it was. Even its scent had changed.

I was awake, but not yet strong enough to get up. My sensory arms were fully developed, but I had not yet used them. By the time Oni and Hozh found Aaor in the river, I was just learning to coordinate them as lifting and handling limbs.

Hozh showed me what Aaor had become—a kind of near mollusk, something that had no bones left. Its sensory tentacles were intact, but it no longer had eyes or other Human sensory organs. Its skin, very smooth, was protected by a coating of slime. It could not speak or breathe air or make any sound at all. It had attracted Hozh’s attention by crawling up the bank and forcing part of its body out of the water. Very difficult. Painful. Its altered flesh was very sensitive to sunlight.

“I would never have recognized it if I hadn’t touched it,” Hozh told me. “It didn’t even smell the same. In fact, it hardly smelled at all.”

“I don’t understand that,” I said. “It isn’t an adult yet. How can it change its scent?”

“Suppressed. It suppressed its scent. I don’t think it intended to.”

“It doesn’t sound as though it intended to become what it has in any way. When it can be brought to the house, tell Ooan to bring it to me.”

“Ooan has taken it back into the water to help it change back. Ooan says it almost lost itself. It was becoming more and more what it appeared to be.”

“Hozh, are Jesusa and TomÁs around the house?”

“They’re at the river. Everyone is.”

“Ask them to come to me.”

“Can you help Aaor?”

“I think so.”

It went away. A short time later Jesusa and TomÁs came to me and sat on either side of me. I thought about sitting up to say what I had to say to them, but that would have been exhausting, and there were other things I wanted to do with the energy I had.

“You saw Aaor?” I asked them.

TomÁs nodded. Jesusa shuddered and said, “It was a

a great slug.”

“I think we can help it,” I said. “I wish it had come to me before it went away. I think we could have helped it even then.”

“We?” TomÁs said.

“One of you on one side of me and Aaor on the other. I think I can bring you and it together enough to satisfy it. I think I can do that with no discomfort to you.” I touched each of them with a sensory arm. “In fact, I hope I can arrange things so that you enjoy it.”

TomÁs examined my left sensory arm, his touch bringing it to life as nothing else could. “So you’ll give Aaor a little pleasure,” he said. “What good will that do?”

“Aaor wants Human mates. It must have mates of some kind. Until it can get them, will you share what we have with it?”

Jesusa took my right sensory arm and simply held it. “I couldn’t touch Aaor,” she said.

“No need. I’ll touch it. You touch me.”

“Will it be changed back to what it was? Will Nikanj finish changing it before it brings it to us?”

“It will not be a limbless slug when it’s brought to us. But it won’t be what it was when it left us either. Nikanj will make it a land creature again. That will take days. Nikanj won’t even bring it out of the river until it has developed bones again and can support itself. By the time it’s able to come to us, we’ll be ready for it.”

Jesusa let go of my sensory arm. “I don’t know whether I can be ready for it. You didn’t see it, Jodahs. You don’t know how it looked.”

“Hozh showed me. Very bad, I know. But it’s my paired sibling. It’s also the only other being in existence that’s like me. I don’t know what will happen to it if I don’t help it.”

“But Nikanj could—”

“Nikanj is our parent. It will do all it can. It did all it could for me.” I paused, watching her. “Jesusa, do you understand that what happened to Aaor is what was in the process of happening to me when you found me?”

TomÁs moved against me slightly. “You were still in control of yourself,” he said. “You were even able to help us.”

“I never stayed away from home as long as Aaor has. As it was, I don’t think I would have gotten back without you. I would have gone into the water or into the ground for my second metamorphosis. Our changes don’t go well when we’re alone. I don’t know what I would have become.”

“You think Aaor is in its second metamorphosis?” Jesusa asked.

“Probably.”

“No one said so.”

“They would have if you’d asked them. To them it was obvious. Once we get Aaor stabilized, it can finish its change in here. I’ll be up soon.”

“Where will we sleep?” Jesusa asked.

With me! I thought instantly. But I said, “In the main room. We can build a partition if you like.”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll have to go on spending some of our time with Aaor. If we don’t, its change will go wrong again.”

“Oh, god,” Jesusa whispered.

“Have the two of you eaten recently?”

“Yes,” TomÁs said. “We were having dinner with your Human parents when Oni and Hozh found Aaor.”

“Good.” They could share their meal with me and save me the trouble of eating. “Lie down with me.”

They did that willingly enough. Jesusa cringed a little when for the first time I looped a sensory arm around her neck. When she was still, I settled into her with every sensory tentacle on her side of my body. I could not let her move again for a while.

Then with relief that was beyond anything I had ever felt with her, I extended my sensory hand, grasped the back of her neck with it, and sank filaments of it bloodlessly into her flesh.

For the first time, I injected—could not avoid injecting—my own adult ooloi substance into her.

By the neural messages I intercepted, I knew she would have convulsed if she had been able to move at all. She did shout, and for an instant I was distracted by the abrupt adrenaline scent of TomÁs’s alarm.

With my free sensory arm, I touched the skin of his face. “She’s all right,” I made myself say. “Wait.”

Perhaps he believed me. Perhaps the expression on Jesusa’s face reassured him. Whatever the reason, he grew calm and I focused completely on Jesusa. I should have gone into both of them at once, but this first time as an adult, I wanted to savor their individual essences separately.

Adult awareness felt sharper to me, finer and different in some way I had not yet defined. The smell-taste-feel of Jesusa, the rhythm of her heartbeat, the rush of her blood, the texture of her flesh, the easy, right, life-sustaining working of her organs, her cells, the smallest organelles within her cells—all this was a vast, infinitely absorbing complexity. The genetic error that had caused her and her people so much misery was as obvious to me as a single cloud in an otherwise clear sky. I was tempted to begin now to make repairs. Her body cells would be easy to alter, though the alteration would take time. The sex cells, though, the ova, would have to be replaced. Both her parents had the disorder and about three quarters of her own ova were defective. I would have to cause parts of her body to function as they had not since before her birth. Best to save that kind of work until later. Best simply to enjoy Jesusa now—the complex harmonies of her, the built-in danger of her genetically inevitable Human conflict: intelligence versus hierarchical behavior. There was a time when that conflict or contradiction—it was called both—frightened some Oankali so badly that they withdrew from contact with Humans. They became Akjai—people who would eventually leave the vicinity of Earth without mixing with Humans.

To me, the conflict was spice. It had been deadly to the Human species, but it would not be deadly to Jesusa or TomÁs any more than it had been to my parents. My children would not have it at all.

Jesusa, solemn and questioning, beautiful on levels she would probably never understand, would surely be one of the mothers of those children.

I enjoyed her for a few moments more, especially enjoyed her pleasure in me. I could see how my own ooloi substance stimulated the pleasure centers of her brain.

“Monitor them very carefully,” Nikanj had told me. “Give them as much as they can take, and no more. Don’t hurt them, don’t frighten them, don’t overstimulate them. Start them slowly, and in only a little time, they will be more willing to give up eating than to give you up.”

Jesusa had only begun to taste me—me as an adult—and I could see that this was true. She had liked me very much as a subadult. But what she felt now went beyond liking, beyond loving, into the deep biological attachment of adulthood. Literal, physical addiction to another person, Lilith called it. I couldn’t think about it that coldly. For me it meant that soon Jesusa would not want to leave me, would not be able to leave me for more than a few days at a time.

It worked both ways, of course. Soon I would not be able to stand long separation from her. And she could hurt me by deliberately avoiding me. From what I knew of her, she would be willing to do this if she thought she had cause—even though she would inflict as much pain on herself as on me. Lilith had done that to Nikanj many times before the Mars colony was established.

Human males could be dangerous, and Human females frustrating. Yet I felt compelled to have both. So did Aaor, no doubt. If Jesusa and TomÁs ever turned their worst Human characteristics against me, it would probably be on account of Aaor. I had no choice but to try to help it, and Jesusa and TomÁs must help me with it. I did not know whether I could make the experience easy for them.

All the more reason to see that they enjoyed this experience.

Jesusa grew pleasantly weary as I explored her and healed the few bruises and small wounds she had acquired. Her greatest enjoyment would happen when I brought her together with TomÁs and shared the pleasure of each of them with the other, mingling with it my own pleasure in them both. When I could make an ongoing loop of this, we would drown in one another.

But that was for later. Now, without apparent movement, I caressed and lulled Jesusa into deep sleep.

“They will never understand what treasure they are,” Nikanj had said to me once while it sat with me. “They see our differences—even yours, Lelka—and they wonder why we want them.”

I detached myself from Jesusa, lingering for a moment over the salt taste of her skin. I had once heard my mother say to Nikanj, “It’s a good thing your people don’t eat meat. If you did, the way you talk about us, our flavors and your hunger and your need to taste us, I think you would eat us instead of fiddling with our genes.” And after a moment of silence, “That might even be better. It would be something we could understand and fight against.”

Nikanj had not said a word. It might have been feeding on her even then—sharing bits of her most recent meal, taking in dead or malformed cells from her flesh, even harvesting a ripe egg before it could begin its journey down her fallopian tubes to her uterus. It stored some of the eggs and consumed the rest. I would have taken an egg from Jesusa if one had been ready. “We feed on them every day,” Nikanj had said to me. “And in the process, we keep them in good health and mix children for them. But they don’t always have to know what we’re doing.”

I turned to face TomÁs, and without a word, he lay down beside me, and used his arms to pull me closer to him. When he had kissed me very thoroughly, he said, “Will I always have to wait?”

“Oh, no,” I said, positioning him so that he would be comfortable. “Once I’ve tasted you this way, I doubt that I’ll ever be able to keep you waiting again.”

I looped one sensory arm around his neck, exposed my sensory hand. I paralyzed him as I had Jesusa, but left him an illusion of movement. “Males in particular need to feel that they’re moving,” Nikanj had told me. “You’ll enjoy them more if you give them the illusion they’re climbing all over you.”

It was entirely right. And though I had not been able to collect an egg from Jesusa, I collected considerable sperm from TomÁs. Much of it carried the defective gene and was useless for procreation. Protein. The rest of it I stored for future use.

TomÁs was stronger than Jesusa. He lasted longer before he tired. Just before I put him to sleep, he said, “I never intended to let you get away from me. Now I know you never will.”

I used his muscles to move us both close against Jesusa. There, with me wedged between them, the two could sleep and I could rest and take a little more of their dinner. They wouldn’t feel it. They could spare it, and I needed it to build strength fast now—for Aaor’s sake.

3

Aaor was in its second metamorphosis. When Nikanj brought it to me after several days of reconstruction, it was not yet recognizable. Not like a Human or an Oankali or any construct I had ever seen.

Its skin was deep gray. Patches of it still glistened with slime. Aaor could not walk very well. It was bipedal again, but very weak, and its coordination had not returned as it should have.

It was hairless.

It could not speak aloud.

Its hands were webbed flippers.

“It keeps slipping away,” Nikanj said. “I’d brought it almost back to normal, but it has no control left. The moment I release it, it drifts toward a less complex form.”

It placed Aaor on the pallet we had prepared for it. TomÁs had followed it in. Now he stood staring as Aaor’s body retreated further and further from what it should have been. Jesusa had not come in at all.

“Can you help it?” TomÁs asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. I lay down alongside it, saw that it was watching me. Its reconstructed eyes were not what they should have been either. They were too small. They protruded too much. But it could see with them. It was staring at my sensory arms. I wrapped them both around it, wrapped my strength arms around it as well.

It was deeply, painfully afraid, desperately lonely and hungry for a touch it could not have.

“Lie down behind me, TomÁs,” I said, and saw with my sensory tentacles how he hesitated, how his throat moved when he swallowed. Yet he lay behind me, drew up close, and let me share him with Aaor as I had already shared him with Jesusa.

In spite of my efforts, there was no pleasure in the exercise. Something had gone seriously wrong with Aaor’s body, as Nikanj had said. It kept slipping away from me—simplifying its body. It had no control of itself, but like a rock rolling downhill, it had inertia. Its body “wanted” to be less and less complex. If it had stayed unattended in the water for much longer, it would have begun to break down completely—individual cells each with its own seed of life, its own Oankali organelle. These might live for a while as single-cell organisms or invade the bodies of larger creatures at once, but Aaor as an individual would be gone. In a way, then, Aaor’s body was trying to commit suicide. I had never heard of any carrier of the Oankali organism doing such a thing. We treasured life. In my worst moments before I found Jesusa and TomÁs, such dissolution had not occurred to me. I didn’t doubt that it would have happened eventually—not as something desirable, but as something inescapable, inevitable. We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. The word had not been chosen frivolously. One who could hunger could starve.

The people who had wanted me safely shut away on Chkahichdahk had been afraid not only of what my instability might cause me to do but of what my hunger might cause me to do. Dissolution had been one unspoken possibility. Dissolution in the river would be bound to affect—to infect—plants and animals. Infected animals would be drawn to areas like Lo, where ship organisms were growing. So would free-living cells be drawn to such places. Only a very few cells would end by causing trouble—causing diseases and mutations in plants, for instance.

Aaor wanted to continue living as Aaor. It tried to help me bring it back to a normal metamorphosis, but without words, I discouraged its efforts. It had not even enough control to help in its own restoration.

TomÁs wanted desperately to withdraw from me and from Aaor. I put him to sleep and kept him with me. His presence would help Aaor whether he was conscious or not.

For a day and a half, the three of us lay together, forcing Aaor’s body to do what it no longer wanted to do. By the time TomÁs and I got up to go to bathe and eat, Aaor looked almost as it had before it went away. Smooth brown skin, a sensory arm bud under each strength arm, a dusting of black hair on its head, fingers without webbing, speech.

“What am I going to do?” it asked just before we left it with Nikanj.

“We’ll take care of you,” I promised.

Without a word to each other, TomÁs and I went to the river and scrubbed ourselves.

“I don’t ever want to do that again,” TomÁs said as we emerged from the water.

I said nothing. The next day, as Aaor’s body shape began to change in the wrong way, TomÁs and I did it again. He didn’t want to, but he looked at Aaor and me and reluctantly lay down alongside me.

The next time it happened, I called Jesusa. Afterward, at the river, she said, “I feel as though I’ve been crawled over by a lot of slugs!”

Aaor’s body did not learn stability. Again and again, it had to be brought back from drifting toward dissolution. Working with Jesusa and TomÁs, I could always bring it back, but I couldn’t hold it. Our work was never finished.

“Why does it always feel so disgusting?” Jesusa demanded after a long session. We had washed. Now three of us shared a meal—something we weren’t able to do very often.

“Two reasons,” I said. “First, Aaor isn’t me. Mated people don’t want that kind of contact with ooloi who aren’t their mates. The reasons are biochemical.” I stopped. “Aaor smells wrong and tastes wrong to you. I wish I could mask that for you, but I can’t.”

“We never touch it, and yet I feel it,” Jesusa said.

“Because it needs to feel you. I make you sleep because it doesn’t need to feel your revulsion. You can’t help feeling revulsion, I know, but Aaor doesn’t need to share it.”

“What’s the second reason?” TomÁs asked.

I hugged myself with my strength arms. “Aaor is ill. It should not keep sliding away from us the way it does. It should stabilize the way my siblings used to help me stabilize. But it can’t.” I looked at his face—thinner than it should have been, though he got plenty to eat. The effects of his sessions with Aaor were beginning to show. And Jesusa looked older than she should have. The vertical lines between her eyes had deepened and become set. When all this was over I would erase them.

She and TomÁs looked at one another bleakly.

“What is it?” I asked.

Jesusa moved uncomfortably. “What will happen to Aaor?” she asked. “How long will we have to keep helping it?” She leaned back against the cabin wall. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”

“If we can get it through metamorphosis,” I said, “it might stabilize just because its body is mature.”

“Do you think you would have without us?” Jesusa asked.

I didn’t answer. After a moment, no answer was necessary.

“What will happen to it?” she insisted.

“Ship exile, probably. We’ll take it back to Lo, and it will be sent to the ship. There it may find Oankali or construct mates who can stabilize it. Or perhaps it will finally be

be allowed to dissolve. Its life now is terrible. If it has nothing better to look forward to

”

They turned simultaneously and looked at each other again. They were paired siblings, after all, though they did not think in such terms. They were like Aaor and me. Between them a look said a great deal. That same look excluded me.

Jesusa took one of my sensory arms between her hands and coaxed out the sensory hand. She seemed to do this as naturally as my male and female parents did it with Nikanj. She rarely touched my strength arms now that my sensory arms had grown.

“Nikanj has talked to us about Aaor,” she said softly.

I focused narrowly on her. “Nikanj?”

“It told us what you’ve just told us. It said Aaor probably would dissolve. Die.”

“Not exactly die.”

“Yes! Yes, die. It will not be Aaor any longer no matter how many of its cells live. Aaor will be gone!”

I was startled by her sudden vehemence. I resisted the impulse to calm her chemically because she did not want to be calmed.

“We know more about dying than you do,” she said bitterly. “And, I tell you, I know death when I see it.”

I put my strength arm around her, but could not think of anything to say.

TomÁs spoke finally. “At home, she was made to help with the sick and the dying. She hated it, but people trusted her. They knew she would do what was necessary, no matter how she felt.” He sighed. “Like you, I suppose. There must be something wrong with me—to love only serious, duty-bound people.”

I smiled and extended my free sensory arm to him.

He came to sit with us and accepted the arm. No intensity now. Only comfort in being together. We’d had little of that lately.

“If Aaor had a chance to mate with a pair of Humans,” Jesusa said, “would it survive?”

She felt frightened and sick to her stomach. She spoke as though the words had been beaten out of her. Both TomÁs and I stared at her.

“Well, Jodahs? Would it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Almost certainly.”

She nodded. “What I was thinking is that if you could fix our faces back the way they were, we could go home. I can think of people who might be willing to join us once they know what we’ve found—what we’ve learned.”

“We’d be locked up and bred!” TomÁs protested.

“I don’t think any elders or parents would have to see us. You were always good at coming and going without being seen when you thought you might be put to work.”

“That was nothing. This is serious.” He paused. “With a name like yours, sister, this isn’t a role you should play.”

She turned her face away from him, rested her head against my shoulder. “I don’t want to do it,” she said. “But why should Aaor die? We know our people will be taken and moved or absorbed or sterilized. It’s too late to prevent that. How can we watch Aaor suffer and know it will probably die and just do nothing? It’s true that our people will think badly of us when they find out that we’ve joined the Oankali. But they will find out eventually, no matter what.”

“They’ll kill us if they get the chance,” TomÁs said.

Jesusa shook her head. “Not if we look the way we used to look. Jodahs will have to change us back in every way. Even your neck must be stiff again. That will give us a chance to get out again sooner or later, even if we’re caught.” She thought for a moment. “They can’t know yet what we’ve done, can they, Jodahs?”

“Not yet,” I admitted. “Nikanj has avoided sending word to the ship or to any of the towns.”

“Because it hoped we would do just what we’re doing.”

I nodded. “It would not ask either of you. It only hoped.”

“And you?”

“I couldn’t ask either. You had already refused. We understood your refusal.”

She said nothing for a while. She sat utterly still, staring at the floor. Adrenaline flowed into her system, and she began to shake.

“Jesusa?” I said.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said. “You think you understand. You don’t. You can’t.”

I held her and stroked her until she stopped shaking. TomÁs touched her hair, reaching across me to do it, and making me want to grab his hand and stop him. Oankali male and female mates had no need to do this. I had to learn to endure it in Human mates.

“Shall we do it?” she asked him suddenly.

He drew back from her, looked from one of us to the other, then looked away.

She looked at me. “Shall we?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to say yes, she should, of course. Then I closed it. “I don’t want you to destroy yourself,” I said after a while. “I don’t want to trade my sibling’s life for yours.” I felt what she felt. She could not give me multisensory illusions. Humans did not have that kind of control. But I could feel how tightly she held herself, how her stomach hurt her and her muscles ached. I had to keep stopping myself from giving her relief. She didn’t need or want that from me now. Both my mother and Nikanj had warned me that not every pain should be immediately healed. Her body language would tell me when she wanted relief.

“I won’t die,” she whispered. “I’m not that fragile. Or maybe

not that lucky. If I can save your sibling, I will. But I think it would be easier for me to break several of my bones.”

Now she and I both looked at TomÁs.

He shook his head. “I hate that place,” he said softly. “Full of pain and sickness and duty and false hope. I meant to die rather than see it again. You both know that.”

I nodded. Jesusa made no move at all. She watched him.

“Yet I love those people,” he said. “I don’t want to do this to them. Isn’t there any other way?”

“None that anyone’s thought of,” I said. “If you can do this, you’ll save Aaor. If you can’t, we’ll get it to the ship and

hope for the best.”

“We’ve already betrayed our people,” Jesusa said softly. “We did that with you, Jodahs. All we’re doing now is arguing about whether to bring two more of our people out early or let them all wait until the Oankali arrive.”

“Is that all?” TomÁs said with bitter irony.

“Will you go with me?” she asked.

He sighed. “Didn’t I promise you I’d get you back there?” He ran a hand through his own hair. After a moment he got up, and went outside.

4

There were complications.

We couldn’t leave until Aaor’s metamorphosis ended. Jesusa and TomÁs thought I would give them back their disfigurement and they would go back to the mountains alone. They couldn’t have done that, even if I had been willing to let them try. They couldn’t leave me now.

I never told them they couldn’t leave. They found out as Lilith had. When they had had all they could take of Aaor for a while, when they realized I could not be talked out of going with them to their mountain home, they went away on their own. They went together into the forest and stayed for several days. It was a foretaste for me of what I would suffer when they died.

I panicked when I realized they were gone. TomÁs was supposed to spend the night with Aaor and me. The moment I thought about him, though, I realized he wasn’t in camp. Neither was Jesusa. Their scent was beginning to fade.

Why? Where had they gone? Which way had they gone? I focused all my concentration on picking up their scent trail, finding out where their scent was strongest and freshest. Once I discovered the path they had taken into the forest, I would follow them.

Ahajas stopped me.

She was large and quiet and immensely comfortable to be near. Oankali females tended to be that way. I knew that sometimes after a session with Aaor, Nikanj went to her and literally seemed to grow into her body. She was so much larger, it looked like a child against her.

Now she blocked my path.

“Let them come back to you,” she said quietly.

I stared at her with my eyes while my sensory tentacles all focused to the path Jesusa and TomÁs had taken.

“I saw them leave,” she said. “They took packs and machetes. They’ll be all right, and in a few days, they’ll be back.”

“Resisters could capture them!” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “But it isn’t likely. They were on their own for a long time before they met you.”

“But they—”

“They are as able as any Humans to take care of themselves. Lelka, you should have told them how they were bound to you.”

“I was afraid to. I was afraid they’d do this.”

“They probably would have. But now when they begin to need you and feel desperate and afraid, they won’t know why.”

“That’s why I want to go after them.”

“Speak to Lilith first. She used to do this, you know. Nikanj had to learn very young that she would stretch the cord until it almost strangled her. And if Nikanj went after her, she would curse it and hate it.”

I knew that about Lilith. I went to her and stood near her for a while. She was drawing with black ink or dye on bark cloth. In Lo, other Humans had treasured her drawings— scenes of Earth before the war, of animals long extinct, of distant places, cities, the sea

. She did paintings, too, sometimes with dyes from plants. She had done little of that during our exile. Now she was returning to it, stripping bark from the limb of a nearby fig tree, preparing it and making her dye and her brushes and sharp sticks. She had told me once that it was something she did to calm herself. Something she did to make herself feel Human.

She patted the ground next to her, and I went over and cleared a space and sat down.

“They’re gone,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She was drawing an outdoor family meal with all of us gathered and eating from gourd dishes and Lo bowls. All. My parents, my siblings—even Aaor as it had looked before it went into the forest—and Jesusa and TomÁs. Everyone was completely recognizable, though it seemed to me they shouldn’t have been. They were made up only of a few black lines.

“Your mates will never trust me or Tino again,” she said. “That will be our reward for keeping quiet about what was happening to them.”

“Shall I go after them?”

“Not now. In a few days. Go when your own feelings tell you they’re suffering, maybe turning back. Meet them somewhere between here and wherever they’ve gone. Can you track them well enough to do that?”

“Yes.”

“Do it, then. And don’t expect them to behave as though they’re glad to see you for any reasons except the obvious biological need.”

“I know.”

“They won’t love or even like you for quite a while.”

“Or trust me,” I said miserably.

“That won’t last. It’s us they’ll distrust and resent.”

I moved around to face her. “They’ll know you kept silent for me.”

She smiled a bitter smile. “Pheromones, Lelka. Your scent won’t let them hate you for long. They can hate us, though. I’m sorry for that. I like them. You’re very lucky to have them.”

I did as she said. And when I brought home my silent, resentful mates, they did as she had said they would. Tino and TomÁs seemed to find some common ground by the time Aaor had completed its metamorphosis, but Jesusa held an unyielding grudge. She hardly spoke to my mother from then on. And when it was time for us to go, and she learned that Aaor had to go with us, she almost stopped speaking to me. That was another battle. Aaor did have to go. If we left it behind with only Nikanj to help it, it would not survive. I suspected it was surviving now only because of our combined efforts and its new hope of Human mates to bond with. I suspected, too, that Jesusa understood this. She never threatened to change her mind, to refuse us and leave Aaor to its fate. She was gentler with Aaor than she was with me. Contact with it through me was still torment for her, but its illness reached something in her that perhaps nothing else could. I, on the other hand, was both her comfort and torment. She stopped touching me. She accepted my touch, even enjoyed it as much as she ever had. But she stopped reaching out to me.

“You did wrong,” TomÁs told me when he had been watching us for a while. “If she wasn’t so good at punishing you, I’d have to think of a way to do it myself.”

“But you don’t mind,” I said. He had felt only relief when I met them in the forest and brought them home. Jesusa had been full of resentment and anger.

“She minds,” he said. “She feels trapped and betrayed. I mind that.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I was more afraid of losing you than you can imagine.”

“I can see Aaor,” he said. “I don’t have to imagine.”

“No. It was the two of you I wanted. Not just to avoid pain.”

He looked at me for a moment, then smiled. “She’ll forgive you eventually, you know. And she’ll be very suspicious of why she’s done it. And she’ll be right. Won’t she?”

I looped a sensory arm around his neck and did not bother to answer.

The rainy season was just ending when the four of us prepared to leave camp. Aaor was strong again—able to walk all day and live on whatever it ran across. And if we slept with it every two or three nights, it could hold its shape. Yet with us all around, it was hideously lonely, empty, almost blank. It could follow and care for itself—just barely. I had to touch it sometimes to rouse it. It was as though it were lost within itself, and only surfaced when we were in contact. It rarely spoke.

When we were ready to go, Nikanj stood between my Oankali parents to give me final advice and to say goodbye.

“Don’t come back to this place,” it said. “In a few months, we’ll return to Lo. We’ll give you plenty of time, but we need to go home. Once we get there, everyone will have to know about your mates and their village. Lo will signal the ship and the Humans will be picked up. If the four of you succeed, you’ll be six by then, and perhaps you’ll be back at Lo yourselves.” It focused on me for a time without speaking, and I could not help thinking that if we weren’t careful, we might not live to get back to Lo. I might never see my parents again. Nikanj must have been thinking the same thing.

“Lelka, I have memories to give you,” it said. “Let me pass them to you now. I think it’s time.”

Genetics memories. Viable copies of cells that Nikanj had received from its own ooloi parent or that it had collected itself or accepted from its mates and children. It had duplicated everything it possessed and now it would pass the whole inheritance on to me. It was time. I was a mated adult.

Yet as Nikanj stepped away from Ahajas and Dichaan and reached for me with all four arms, I didn’t feel like an adult. I was afraid of this final step, this final touch. It was as though Nikanj were saying, “Here’s your birthright, my final gift/duty/pleasure to you.” Final.

But Nikanj said nothing at all. When it touched me, I pulled back, resisting. It simply waited until I was calmer. Then it spoke. “You must have this before you go, Lelka.” It paused. “And you must pass it on to Aaor as soon as Aaor is mated and stable. Who knows when the two of you will see me again?”

I made myself step into its embrace and at once I felt myself held and penetrated, held absolutely still, but not paralyzed. Nikanj had a gentler touch than I had yet managed. And it still gave pleasure. Even to me. Even now.

Then the world around me seemed to flare brilliant white. I could no longer see beyond myself. All my senses turned inward as Nikanj used both sensory hands to inject a rush of individual cells, each one a plan by which a whole living entity could be constructed. The cells went straight into my newly mature yashi. The organ seemed to gulp and suckle the way I had once at my mother’s breast.

There was immense newness. Life in more varieties than I could possibly have imagined—unique units of life, most never seen on Earth. Generations of memory to be examined, memorized, and either preserved alive in stasis or allowed to live their natural span and die. Those that I could re-create from my own genetic material, I did not have to maintain alive.

The flood of information was incomprehensible to me at first. I received it and stored it with only a few bits of it catching my attention. There would be plenty of time for me to examine the rest. I wouldn’t lose any of it, and once I understood it, I wouldn’t forget it.

When the flood ended and Nikanj was sure I could stand alone, it let me go.

“Now,” it said, “except for the lack of Oankali or construct mates, you’re an adult.”

I felt confused, stuffed with information, overwhelmed with new sensation, stupefied, unable to do much more than hold myself up. I heard what Nikanj said, but the meanings of the words did not reach me for what seemed to be a long time. I felt it touch me once more with a sensory arm, then draw me to it and walk me over to TomÁs, who was making a pack of the Lo cloth hammock and the other things my parents had given me.

TomÁs got up at once and took me from Nikanj. He was, I recalled later, careful not to touch Nikanj, but no longer concerned about its nearness. Mated adults behaved that way—at ease with one another because they understood where they belonged and what they should and should not do.

“What did you do to it?” TomÁs asked.

“Passed it information it might need on this dangerous trip with you. It’s a little like a drunk Human right now, but it will be all right in a few moments.”

Tom Ás looked at me doubtfully. “Are you sure? We were about to leave.”

“It will be fine.”

I recalled all this later, the way I recalled things I perceived while I was asleep. TomÁs sat me down next to him, finished putting his pack together and rolling it. Then he took one of my sensory arms between his hands and said, “If you don’t wake up, we’ll leave you here and you can come running after us when you’re sober.”

He was amused, but he wasn’t joking. He would leave without Aaor and me and let us catch up as best we could. Jesusa would certainly go along with him.

I groped for him, smelling for him rather than seeing him, hardly able to focus on him at all. He gave me his hand readily enough, and I locked on to it, focused so narrowly on it that I began to see and hear him normally through the incredible confusion of information Nikanj had given me. That information was a weight demanding my attention. It would not begin to “lighten” until I began to understand it. To understand it all could take years, but I must at least begin now.

“It’s not really like being drunk,” I said when I could speak. “It’s more like having billions of strangers screaming from inside you for your individual attention. Incomprehensible

overwhelming

no word is big enough. Let me stay close to you for a while.”

“Nikanj said it just gave you information,” he protested.

“Yes. And if I began now and continued for the rest of our lives, I could only explain a small fraction of it aloud to you. Ooan should have waited until we came back.”

“Can you travel?” he asked.

“Yes. Just let me stay close to you.”

“I thought that was settled. You’ll never get away from me.”

5

There was no end to the forest. The trees and smaller plants changed. Some varieties vanished, but the forest continued. It was a heavy coat of green fur on the hills and later on the nearly vertical cliffs of the mountains. There were places where we could not have gotten through without machetes.

There were old trails, ledges along cliff faces that perhaps dated back to a time before the war. Below us, a branch of the river cut through a deep, narrow gorge. Above us the mountains were green and sheer, bordering a blue and white band of sky that broadened ahead of us. The water ran high and fast below us, green and white, breaking over huge rocks. I might survive a fall to it, but it was unlikely that any of the others would.

But my Human mates were in their own country, surefooted and confident. I had wondered whether they would be able to find their way home. They had traveled this route only once, nearly two years before. But Jesusa in particular was at home as soon as the landscape became more vertical than horizontal. Most often she broke trail for us just because she obviously loved the job and was better at it than any of us could have been. When our trail, narrow ledge that it was, vanished, she was usually the first to spot it above us or below or beginning again some distance away. And if she spotted it, she led the climb toward it. She never waited to see what the rest of us wanted to do—she simply found the best way across. The first time I saw her spread flat against the mountain, finding tiny hand-and footholds in the vegetation and the rock, making her way upward like a spider, I froze in absolute panic.

“She’s part lizard,” TomÁs said, smiling. “It’s disgusting. I’m not clumsy myself, I’ve never even seen her fall.”

“She’s always done this?” Aaor asked.

“I’ve seen her go up naked rock,” TomÁs said.

I looked at Aaor and saw that it, too, had reacted with fear. This trip had begun to do it good. The trip had forced it to use its body and focus attention on something other than its own misery. It had made the safety of the two Humans its main concern. It understood the sacrifice they were making for it, and the sacrifice they had already made.

It was last across the gulf, holding on with both feet and all four arms. “I make a better insect than you do,” it told TomÁs as it reached the rest of us and safety.

TomÁs laughed as much with surprise as with pleasure. I don’t think he had ever heard Aaor even try to make a joke before.

There were times when we could descend to the river and walk alongside it or bathe in it. Jesusa and TomÁs caught fish occasionally and cooked and ate them while Aaor and I took ourselves as far away as we could and focused on other things.

“Why do you let them do that?” Aaor demanded of me the second time it happened. “They shouldn’t be hungry.”

“They’re not,” I agreed. “Jesusa told me they lost most of their supplies coming out of the mountains—accidentally dropped them into those rapids we passed two days ago.”

“That was then! They don’t have to kill animals and eat them now!” Aaor sounded petulant and miserable. It brushed away my sensory arm when I reached out to it, then changed its mind and grasped the sensory arm in its strength hands.

I extended my sensory hand and reached into its body to understand what was wrong with it. As always, it was like reaching into a slightly different version of myself. It was feeling sick—nauseated, disgusted, oddly Human, yet unable to cope with the Humanity of Jesusa and TomÁs.

“When you have Human mates,” I told it, “you have to remember to let them be Human. They’ve killed fish and eaten them all their lives. They know we hate it. They need to do it anyway—for reasons that don’t have much to do with nutrition.”

Aaor let me soothe it, but still said, “What reasons?”

“Sometimes they need to prove to themselves that they still own themselves, that they can still care for themselves, that they still have things—customs—that are their own.”

“Sounds like an expression of the Human conflict,” Aaor said.

“It is,” I agreed. “They’re proving their independence at a time when they’re no longer independent. But if this is the worst thing they do, I’ll be grateful.”

“Will you sleep with them tonight?”

“No. And they know it.”

“They—” It stopped, froze utterly still, and signaled me silently. “There are other Humans nearby!”

“Where?” I demanded, silent and frozen myself, trying to catch the sight or the scent.

“Ahead. Can’t you smell them?” It gave me an illusion of scent, faint and strange and dangerous. Even with this prompting, I could not smell the new Humans on my own, but Aaor was completely focused on them.

“Males,” it said. “Three, I think. Maybe four. Headed away from us. No females.”

“At least they’re headed away,” I whispered aloud. “Do any of them smell anything like TomÁs? I can’t tell from what you gave me.”

“They all smell very much like TomÁs. That’s why I can’t tell how many there are. Like TomÁs, but including a certain odd element. The genetic disorder, I suppose. Can’t you smell them?”

“I can now. They’re so far away, though, I don’t think I would have noticed them on my own. They have a dead animal with them, did you notice?”

Aaor nodded miserably.

“They’ve been hunting,” I said. “Now they’re probably heading home. Although I don’t smell anything that could be their home. Do you?”

“No,” it said. “I’ve been trying. Maybe they’re just looking for a place to camp—a place to cook the animal and eat it.”

“Whatever their intentions, we’ll have to be careful tomorrow.” I focused on it. “You’ve never been shot, have you?”

“Never. People always aim at you for some reason.”

I shook my head. “You’re picking up TomÁs’s sense of humor. I don’t know what your new mates will think of that.” I paused. “Being shot hurts more than I would want to show you. I could probably handle the pain better now, but I wouldn’t want to have to. I wouldn’t want you to have to.”

It moved closer to me and linked into me with its sensory tentacles. “I’m not sure I could survive being shot,” it said. “I think part of me might, but not as me.”

“You can’t know that for sure.”

It said nothing, but there was no tenacity to it, no feeling that it could withstand abrupt shock and pain. It thought it would dissolve. It was probably right.

“They’ve finished eating their fish,” I said. “Let’s go back.”

We detached from one another and it turned wearily to follow me. “Do you know,” it said, “that before we left home, Ooan still said it couldn’t find the flaw in us, couldn’t see why we needed mates so early—needed, not just wanted? And why we focus so on Humans.” It paused. “Do you want other mates?”

“Oankali mates,” I said. “Not construct.”

“Why?”

“I think

I feel as though it will balance the two parts of me—Human and Oankali. I don’t know what the Oankali will think about that, though.”

“If they ever accept us and if you find two that you like, don’t let them make their decision from a distance.”

I smiled. “What about you? Humans and Oankali?”

It rested one strength arm around my shoulders. It almost never touched me with its sensory arms, though it accepted my own gladly. It behaved as though it were not yet mature. “What about me?” it repeated. “I can’t plan anything. It’s hard for me to believe from one day to the next that I’m even going to survive.” It made a fist with its free strength hand, then relaxed the hand. “Most of the time I feel as though I could just let go like this and dissolve. Sometimes I feel as though I should.”

I slept with it that night. I couldn’t do as much for it alone, but it couldn’t have tolerated Jesusa or TomÁs until they had digested their meal. I couldn’t imagine it not existing, truly gone, never to be touched again—like never being able to touch my own face again.

Two days later, Jesusa and TomÁs told me to give them back the marks of their genetic disorder. We had crawled up the nearly nonexistent trail on the mountain and back down again to the river. We had crossed the trail of the hunters we had scented earlier. There were four of them and they were still ahead of us. And now, when the wind was right, I could scent more Humans. Many more. Aaor’s head and body tentacles kept sweeping forward, controlled by the tantalizing scent.

“The more Human you can make yourselves look, the less likely you are to be shot if you’re seen,” TomÁs told us. He was looking at Aaor as he spoke. Then he faced me. “I’ve seen you both change by accident. Why can’t you change deliberately?”

“I can,” I said. “But Aaor’s control is just not firm enough. It already looks as Human as it can look.”

He drew a deep breath. “Then this is as close as it should get. You should change us and camp here.”

“We can’t even see your town from here,” Aaor protested.

“And they can’t see you. If you round that next bend, though, part of our settlement will be visible to you. But the way is guarded. You would be shot.”

Aaor seemed to sink in on itself. We had made a fireless camp. My mates were on either side of me, linked with me. Aaor was alone. “You should change yourself and go with them,” it said. “They’ll function better if they are not separated from you. I can survive alone for a few days.”

“If we’re caught, we’ll be separated,” Jesusa said. “We’ll be shut up in separate places. We’ll be questioned. I would probably be married off very quickly.” She stopped. “Jodahs, what will happen if someone tries to have sex with me?”

I shook my head. “You’ll fight. You won’t be able to help fighting. You’ll fight so hard, you might win even if the male is much stronger. Or maybe you’ll just make him hurt or kill you.”

“Then she can’t go,” TomÁs said. “I’ll have to do it alone.”

“Neither of you should go,” I said. “If hunters come out this far, we should wait. We have time.”

“That will get you a man,” Jesusa said. “Maybe several men. But women don’t hunt.”

“What do females do?” I asked. “What might bring them out away from the protection of the settlement?”

Jesusa and TomÁs looked at one another, and TomÁs grinned. “They meet,” he said.

“Meet?” I repeated, uncomprehending.

“The elders tell us who we must marry,” he said. “But they can’t tell us who we must love.”

I knew Humans did such things: marry here and mate there and there and there

. There was nothing in Human biology to prevent this. In fact, Human biology encouraged male Humans to have liaisons with more than one female. The male’s investment of time and energy in fathering children was much smaller than the female’s. Still, the concept felt alien to me. To have a mating and somehow put it aside. But then, most construct males never had true mates. They went wherever they found welcome and everyone knew it. There was no permanent bonding, no betrayal, no biological wrongness to contend with.

“Do your people meet this way because they would like to be mated?” I asked.

“Some of them,” TomÁs said. “Others only feel a temporary attraction.”

“It would be good to get a pair for Aaor who already care for one another.”

“We thought that, too,” Jesusa said. “We meant to go to the village and bring away the people we would have been married to. But they wouldn’t be coming out here to be together. They’re brother and sister, too. A brother and two sisters, really.”

“It would be better, safer to go after people who have already slipped away from your village. Is there a place where such people often meet?”

TomÁs sighed. “Change us back tonight. Make us as ugly as we were, just in case. Tomorrow night, we’ll show you some of the places where lovers meet. If you go there at all, it will have to be at night.”

But the next night we were spotted.

6

We did not know we had been seen. As we rounded the final bend before the mountain people’s village, we kept hidden in the trees and undergrowth. All we could see of their village were occasional stonework terraces cut into the sides of forested mountains. Crops grew on the terraces—a great deal of corn, some large melons, more than one species of potato, and other things that I did not recognize at all—foods neither I nor Nikanj had ever collected or stored memories of. These were surprisingly distracting—new things just sitting and waiting to be tasted, remembered. Yashi, between my hearts and protected now by a broad, flat slab of bone that no Human would have recognized as a sternum, did twist—or rather, it contracted like a long-empty Human stomach. Any perception of new living things attracted it and distracted me. I looked at Aaor and saw that it was utterly focused on the village itself, the people.

Its desperation had sharpened and directed its perceptions.

The Humans had built their village well above the river, had stretched it along a broad flattened ridge that extended between two mountains. We could not see it from where we were, but we could see signs of it—a great deal more terracing high up. These terraces could not be reached from where we were, but there was probably a way up nearby. All we could see between the canyon floor and the terraces was a great deal of sheer rock, much of it overgrown with vegetation. It was nothing I would have chosen to climb.

The scent of the Humans was strong now. Aaor, perhaps caught up in it, stumbled and stepped on a dry stick as it regained its balance. The sharp snap of the wood was startling in the quiet night. We all froze. Those stalking us did not freeze—or not quickly enough.

“Humans behind us!” I whispered.

“Are they coming?” TomÁs demanded.

“Yes. Several of them.”

“The guard,” TomÁs said. “They will have guns.”

“You two get away!” Jesusa said. “We’ll have a better chance without you. Wait for us at the cave we passed two days ago. Go!”

The guard meant to catch us against their mountains. We were trapped now, really. If we ran to the river, we would have to go around them or through them, and probably be shot. There was nowhere for us to go except up the sheer cliff. Or down like insects to hide in the thickest vegetation. We could not get away, but we could hide. And if the guard found Jesusa and TomÁs, perhaps they would not look for us.

I pulled Aaor down with me, fearing for it more than I feared for any of us. It was probably right in suspecting that it could not survive being shot.

In the darkness, Humans passed on either side of where Aaor and I lay hidden. They knew the terrain, but they could not see very well at night. Jesusa and TomÁs led them a short distance away from us. They did this by simply walking down the slope toward the river until they walked into the arms of their captors.

Then there was shouting—Jesusa shouting her name, TomÁs demanding that he be let go, that Jesusa be let go, guards shouting that they had caught the intruders.

“Where are the rest of you?” a male voice said. “There were more than two.”

“Make a light, Luis,” Jesusa said with deliberate disgust. “Look at us, then tell me when there has been more than one Jesusa and more than one TomÁs.”

There was silence for a while. Jesusa and TomÁs were walked farther from us—perhaps taken where the moonlight would show more of their faces. Their tumors looked exactly as they had when I met them, so I wasn’t worried about them not being recognized. But still, they had said they would be separated, imprisoned, questioned.

How long would they be imprisoned? If they were separated, they wouldn’t be able to help one another break free. And what might be done to them if they gave answers that their people did not believe? They had, with obvious distaste for lying, created a story of being captured by a small group of resisters and held by separate households so that neither knew the details of the other’s captivity. Resisters actually did such things, though most often, their captives were female. TomÁs would say he had been made to work for his captors. He had done planting, harvesting, hauling, building, cutting wood, whatever needed to be done. Since he had actually done these things while he was with us, he could give accurate descriptions of them. He would say that his sister was held hostage to ensure his good behavior while his captivity kept her in line. Finally the two had been able to get together and escape their resister captors.

This could have happened. If Jesusa and TomÁs could tell it convincingly, perhaps they would not be imprisoned for long.

The two had been recognized now. There were no more hostile cries—only Jesusa’s anguished “Hugo, please let me go. Please! I won’t run away. I’ve just run all the way home. Hugo!”

The last word was a scream. He was touching her, this Hugo. She had known they would touch her. She had not known until now how difficult it would be to endure their touch. She could touch other females in comfort. TomÁs could touch males. They would have to protect one another as best they could.

“Let her alone!” TomÁs said. “You don’t know what she’s been through.” His voice said she had already been released. He was only warning.

“Everyone said you two were dead,” one guard told them.

“Some hoped they were dead,” another voice said softly. “Better them than all of us.”

“No one will die because of us,” TomÁs said.

“We haven’t come home to die,” Jesusa said. “We’re tired. Take us up.”

“Does everyone know them?” the softer voice asked. It sounded almost like an ooloi voice. “Does anyone dispute their identity?”

“We could strip them down here,” someone said. “Just to be sure.”

TomÁs said, “Bring your sister down, Hugo. We’ll strip her, too.”

“My sister stays home where she belongs!”

“And if she didn’t, how would you want her treated? With justice and decency? Or should she be stripped by seven men?”

Silence.

“Let’s go up,” Jesusa said. “Hugo, do you remember the big yellow water jar we used to hide in?”

More silence.

“You know me,” she said. “We were ten years old when we broke that jar, and I got caught and you didn’t and I never told. You know me.”

There was a pause, then the Hugo voice said, “Let’s take them up. Someone will probably have some dinner left over.”

They were taken away.

Aaor and I followed to see the path they would use and to see as much as we could of the guards.

Of the seven, four were obviously distorted by their genetic disorder. They had large tumors on their heads or arms. They looked different enough to be shot on sight by lowland resisters.

We followed as long as there was forest cover, then watched as they went up a pathway that was mostly rough stone stairs leading up the steep slope to the village.

When we could no longer hear them, Aaor pulled me close to it and signaled silently, “We can’t just go wait in the cave. We have to get them out!”

“Give them time,” I said. “They’ll try to find a pair of Humans for you.”

“How can they? They’ll be shut up, guarded.”

“Most of these guards were young and fertile. And perhaps Jesusa will be given female guards. What are guards but villagers doing a tiresome, temporary duty?”

Aaor tried to relax, but its body was still tense against mine. “Seeing them walk away was like beginning to dissolve. I feel as though part of me has walked away with them.”

I said nothing. Part of me had walked away with them. Both they and I knew what it would be like to be separated for a while—worse, to be kept apart by other people who would do all they could to stand between us. I would not begin to miss them physically for a few days, but with my uncertainty, my realization that I might not get them back, I had all I could do to control myself. I sat down on the ground, my body trembling.

Aaor sat next to me and tried to calm me, but it could not give what it did not feel in itself. The Humans could have caught us easily then—two ooloi sitting on the ground shuddering helplessly.

We recovered slowly. We were in control of our bodies again when Aaor said silently, “We can’t give them more than two days to work—and that might not be long enough for them to do anything.”

I could last longer than two days, but Aaor couldn’t. “We’ll give them the time,” I said. “We’ll get as close as we can and rest alert for two days.”

“Then we’ll have to get them out if they can’t escape on their own.”

“I don’t want to do that,” I said. “TomÁs was talking as much to us as to his people when he said no one would die because of him and Jesusa. But if we try to get them out, we could be forced to kill.”

“That’s why it’s best to go in while we’re still in control of ourselves. You know that, Jodahs.”

“I know,” I whispered aloud.

7

We went up a steep, heavily forested slope, crawling up, clinging like caterpillars. Being six-limbed had never been quite so practical.

We climbed to the level of the terraces, and lay near them, hidden, during the next day. “When night came, we explored the terraces and compulsively tried bits of the new foods we found growing there. By then, our skins had grown darker and we were harder for the Humans to see—while we could see everything.

We climbed higher up one of the mountains that formed a corner of the settlement. Just over halfway up, we reached the Human settlement with its houses of stone and wood and thatch. This was a prewar place. It had to be. Parts of it looked ancient. But it did not look like a ruin. All the buildings were well kept and there were terraces everywhere, most of them full of growing things. Away from the village, there was an enclosure containing several large animals of a kind I had not seen before—shaggy, long-necked, small-headed creatures who stood or lay at ease around their pen. Alpacas?

We could smell other, smaller animals caged around the village, and we could smell fertile, young Humans everywhere. Even above us on the mountain, we could smell them. What would they be doing up there?

How many were up there? Three, my nose told me. A female and two males, all young, all fertile, two afflicted with the genetic disorder. Why couldn’t it just be those two for Aaor? What would we do with the third one if we went up? Why hadn’t Jesusa and TomÁs told us about people living in such isolation? Except for their being one too many of them, they were perfect.

“Up?” I said to Aaor.

It nodded. “But there’s an extra male. What do we do with him?”

“I don’t know yet. Let’s see if we can get a look at them before they see us. Separating them might be easier than we think.”

We climbed the slope, noticing, but for the most part not using, the long serpentine path the Humans had made. There had been Humans on it that day. Perhaps there would be Humans on it the next day. Perhaps it led to a guard post, and the guard changed daily. Anyone on top would have a fine view of all approaches from the mountains or the canyon below. Perhaps the people at the top stayed longer than a day and were resupplied from below at regular intervals—though there were a few terraces near the top.

We went up quietly, quickly, eating the most nutritious things we could find along the way. When we reached the terraces, we stopped and ate our fill. We would have to be at our best.

On a broad ledge near the top, we found a stone cabin. Higher up was a cistern and a few more terraces. Inside the cabin, two people slept. Where was the third? We didn’t dare go in until we knew where everyone was.

I linked with Aaor and signaled silently. “Have you spotted the third?”

“Above,” it said. “There is another cabin—or at least another living place. You go up to that one. I want these two.” It was utterly focused on the Human pair.

“Aaor?”

It focused on me with a startlingly quick movement. It was as tight as a fist inside.

“Aaor, there are hundreds of other Humans down there. You’ll have a life. Be careful who you give it to. I was very lucky with Jesusa and TomÁs.”

“Go up and keep the third Human from bothering me.”

I detached from it and went to find the second cabin. Aaor would not hear anything I had to say now, just as I would not have heard anyone who told me to beware of Jesusa and TomÁs. And if the Humans were young enough, they could probably mate successfully with any healthy ooloi. If only Aaor were healthy. It wasn’t. It and the Humans it chose would have to heal each other. If they didn’t, perhaps none of them would survive.

I found not a cabin higher up on the mountain, but a very small cave near the top. Humans had built a rock wall, enclosing part of it. There were signs that they had enlarged the cave on one side. Finally heavy wooden posts had been set against the stone and from these a wooden door had been hung. The door seemed more a barrier against the weather than against people. Tonight the weather was dry and warm and the door was not secured at all. It swung open when I touched it.

The man inside awakened as I stumbled down into his tiny cave. His body heat made him a blaze of infrared in the darkness. It was easy for me to reach him and stop his hands from finding whatever they were grasping for.

Holding his hands, I lay down alongside him on his short, narrow bed and wedged him against the stone wall. I examined him with several sensory tentacles, studying him, but not controlling him. I stopped his hoarse shouting by looping one sensory arm around his neck, then moving the coil up to cover his mouth. He bit me, but his blunt Human teeth couldn’t do any serious harm. My sensory arms existed to protect the sensitive reproductive organs inside. The flesh that covered them was the toughest flesh to be found on my body.

The male I held must have been more at home in his tiny cave than most people would have been. He was tiny himself— half the size of most Human males. Also, he had some skin disease that had made a ruin of his face, his hands, and much of the rest of his body. He was hairless. His skin was as scaly as those of some fish I’d seen. His nose was distorted—flattened from having been broken several times—and that enhanced his fishlike appearance. Strangely he was free of the genetic disorder that Jesusa, TomÁs, and so many of the other people of the village had. He was grotesque without it.

I examined him thoroughly, enjoying the newness of him. By the time I had finished, he had stopped struggling and lay quietly in my arms. I took my sensory arm from his mouth, and he did not shout.

“Do you live here because of the way you look?” I asked him.

He cursed me at great length. In spite of his size, he had a deep, hoarse, grating voice.

I said nothing. We had all night.

After a very long time, he said, “All right. Yes, I’m here because of the way I look. Got any more stupid questions?”

“I don’t have time to help you grow. But if you like, I can heal your skin condition.”

Silence.

“My god,” he whispered finally.

“It won’t hurt,” I said. “And it can be done by morning. If you’re afraid to stay here after you’re healed, you can come with us when we leave. Then I’ll have time to help you grow. If you want to grow.”

“People my age don’t grow,” he said.

I brushed bits of scaly, dead skin from his face. “Oh, yes,” I said. “We can help people your age to grow.”

After another long pause, he said, “Is the town all right?”

“Yes.”

“What will happen to it?”

“Eventually my people will come to it and tell your people they don’t have to live in distorted bodies or in isolation or in fear. Your people have been cut off for a long time. They don’t realize there’s another, larger colony of healthy, fertile Humans living and growing without Oankali.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I know. It’s true, though. Shall I heal you?”

“Can I

see you?”

“At sunrise.”

“I could make a fire.”

“No.”

He shook his head against me. “I should be more afraid than this. My god, I should be pissing on myself. Exactly what the hell are you anyway?”

“Construct. Oankali-Human mixture. Ooloi.”

“Ooloi

The mixed ones—male and female in one body.”

“We aren’t male or female.”

“So you say.” He sighed. “Do you mean to hold me here all night?”

“If I’m to heal you, I’ll have to.”

“Why are you here? You said your people would come eventually. What are you doing here now?”

“Nothing harmful. Do you want hair?”

“What?”

I waited. He had heard the question. Now let him absorb it. Hair was easy. I could start it as an afterthought.

He put his head against my chest. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t even understand

my own feelings.” Much later he said, “Of course I want hair. And I want skin, not scales. I want hair, and I want height. I want to be a man!”

My first impulse was to point out that he was a man. His male organs were well developed. But I understood him. “We’ll take you with us when we go,” I said.

And he was content. After a while, he slept. I never drugged him in the way ooloi usually drugged resisters. Once he had passed his first surprise and fear, he had accepted me much more quickly than Jesusa and TomÁs had—but I had been only a subadult when I met them. And adult ooloi—a construct ooloi—ought to be able to handle Humans better. Or perhaps this man—I had not even asked his name, nor he mine—was particularly susceptible to the ooloi substance that I could not help injecting. In his Human way, he had been very hungry, starving, for any touch. How long had it been since anyone was willing to touch him—except perhaps to break his nose again. He would need an ooloi to steer him away from breaking a few noses himself once he was large enough to reach them. He had probably been treated badly. He did not veer from the Human norm in the same way as other people in the village, and Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not. It was significant that this man was so ready to leave his home with someone he had been taught to think of as a devil—someone he hadn’t even seen yet.

8

By morning, I had given the cave Human a smooth, new skin and the beginnings of a full head of hair.

“It will take me longer to repair your nose,” I told him. “When I have, though, you’ll be able to breathe better with your mouth closed.”

He took a deep breath through his mouth and stared at me, then looked at himself, then stared at me again. He rubbed a hand over the fuzz on his head, then held the hand in front of him and examined it. I had not allowed him to awaken until I’d gotten up myself, opened the door to the dawn, and found the short, thick gun he had been reaching for the night before. I had emptied it and thrown it off the mountain. Then I awoke the man.

Seeing me alarmed him, but he never once reached toward the hiding place of the gun.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Santos.” His voice now was a harsh whisper rather than a harsh growl. “Santos Ibarra Ruiz. How did you do this? How is it possible?” He rubbed the fingers of his right hand over his left arm and seemed to delight in the feel of it.

“Did you think you were dreaming last night?” I asked.

“I haven’t had time to think.”

“Who will come up here today?”

He blinked. “Here? No one.”

“Who will visit the cabin below?”

“I don’t know. I lose track with them. Are you going down there?”

“Eventually. Have your breakfast if you like.”

“What are you called?”

“Jodahs.”

He nodded. “I’ve heard that some of your kind had four arms. I didn’t believe it.”

“Ooloi have four arms.”

He stared for some time at my sensory arms, then asked, “Are you really going to take me away with you and make me grow?”

“Yes.”

He smiled, showing several bad teeth. I would fix those, too—have him shed them and grow more.

Later that morning we went down to the stone cabin. The male and female there were sharing their breakfast with Aaor. Santos and I startled them, but they seemed comfortably at home with Aaor. And Aaor looked better than it had since its first metamorphosis. It looked stable and secure in itself. It looked satisfied.

“Will they come with us?” I asked in Oankali.

“They’ll come,” it answered in Spanish. “I’ve begun to heal them. I’ve told them about you.”

The two Human stared at me curiously.

“This is Jodahs, my closest sibling,” Aaor said. “Without it I would already be dead.” It actually said, “my closest brother-sister,” because that was the best either of us could do in Spanish. No wonder people like Santos thought we were hermaphroditic.

“These are Javier and Paz,” Aaor said. “They are already mates.”

They were also close relatives, of course. They looked as much alike as Jesusa and TomÁs did, and they looked like Jesusa and TomÁs—strong, brown, black-haired, deep-chested people.

Santos and I were given dried fruit, tea, and bread. Javier and Paz seemed most interested in Santos. He was their relative, too, of course.

“Do you feel well, Santos?” Paz asked.

“What do you care?” Santos demanded.

Paz looked at me. “Why do you want him? Wish him a good day, and he’ll spit on you.”

“He needs more healing than I can give him here,” I said. I turned my head so that he would know I was looking at him. “He’ll have less reason to spit when I’m finished with him, so maybe he’ll do less spitting. Perhaps then I’ll find mates for him.”

He watched me while I spoke, then let his eyes slide away from me. He stared, unseeing, I think, at the rough wooden table.

“Will others come up here today?” I asked Paz.

“No,” she said. “Today is still our watch. Juana and Santiago will come tomorrow to relieve us.”

Santos spoke abruptly, urgently. “Are you really going with them?”

“Of course,” Paz said.

“Why? You should be afraid of them. You should be terrified. When we were children they told us the devil had four arms.”

“We’re not children anymore,” Javier said. “Look at my right hand.” He held it up, pale brown and smooth. “I have a right hand again. It’s been a frozen claw for years, and now—”

“Not enough!”

Javier opened his mouth, his expression suddenly angry. Then, without speaking, he closed his mouth.

“I want to go,” Paz said quietly. “I’m tired of telling myself lies about this place and watching my children die.” She pushed very long black hair from her face. As she sat at the table, most of her hair hung to the floor behind her. “Santos, if you had seen our last child before it died, you would thank God for the beauty you had even before your healing.”

Santos looked away from her, shamefaced but stubborn. “I know all that,” he said. “I don’t mean to be cruel. I do know. But

we have been taught all our lives that the aliens would destroy us if they found us. Why did our belief and our fear slip away so quickly?”

Javier sighed. “I don’t know.” He looked at Aaor. “They’re not very fearsome, are they? And they are

very interesting. I don’t know why.” He looked up. “Santos, do you believe we are building a new people here?”

Santos shook his head. “I’ve never believed it. I have eyes. But that’s no reason for us to consent to go away with people we’ve been taught were evil.”

“Did you consent?” Paz asked

“

yes.”

“What else is there, then?”

“Why are they here!” He turned to me. “Why are you here?”

“To get Human mates for Aaor,” I said. “And now I have to get my own Human mates back. They are—”

“Jesusa and TomÁs, we know,” Paz said. “Aaor said they were imprisoned below. We can show you where they’re probably being held but I don’t know how you can get them out.”

“Show us,” I said.

We went outside where the stone village lay below us, spread like a Human-made map. The buildings seemed tiny in the distance, but they could all be seen. The whole flattened ridge was visible.

“See the round building there,” Javier said, pointing.

I didn’t see it at first. So many gray buildings with gray-brown thatched roofs, all tiny in the distance. Then it was clear to me—a stone half-cylinder built against a stone wall.

“There are rooms in it and under it,” Paz said. “Prisoners are kept there. The elders believe people who travel must be made to spend time alone to be questioned and prove they are who they say they are, and that they have not betrayed the people.” She stopped, looked at Javier. “They would say that we’ve betrayed the people.”

“We didn’t bring the aliens here,” he said. “And why do the people need us to produce more dead children?”

“They won’t say that if they catch us.”

“What will they do to you?” I asked.

“Kill us,” Paz whispered.

Aaor stepped between them, one sensory arm around each. “Jodahs, can we take them out, then come back for Jesusa and TomÁs?”

I stared down at the village, at the hundreds of green terraces. “I’m afraid for them. The longer we’re separated, the more likely they are to give themselves away. If only they had told us

Paz, did people watch the canyon from up here before Jesusa and TomÁs left home?”

“No,” she said. “We do this now because they left. The elders were afraid we would be invaded. We made more guns and ammunition, and we posted new guards. Many new guards.”

“This isn’t really a good place to watch from,” Javier said. “We’re too high and the canyon is too heavily forested. People would have to almost make an effort to attract our attention. Light a fire or something.”

I nodded. We had made cold camps for days before we reached the village. Yet we had been spotted. New guards. More vigilance. “You have to help us get you away from here,” I said. “You know where the guards are. We don’t want to hurt them, but we have to get you away and I have to get Jesusa and TomÁs out.”

“We can help you get away,” Paz said. “But we can’t help you reach TomÁs and Jesusa. You’ve seen that they’re guarded and in the middle of town.”

“If they’re where you say, I can get almost to them by climbing around the slope. It looks steep, but there’s good cover.”

“But you can’t get Jesusa and TomÁs out that way.”

I looked at her, liking the way she stood close to Aaor, the way she had put one hand up to hold the sensory arm that encircled her throat. And, though she was a few years older, she was painfully like Jesusa.

I spoke in Oankali to Aaor. “Take your mates tonight and get clear of this place. Wait at the cave down the canyon.”

“You didn’t desert me,” Aaor said obstinately in Spanish.

“I can reach them,” I said. “Alone and focused, I can come up through the terraces and avoid the guards—or surprise them and sting them unconscious. And no door will keep me from Jesusa and TomÁs. I can take them down the slope to the canyon. You’ve seen them climb. Especially Jesusa. I’ll carry TomÁs on my back if I have to—whether he wants me to or not. So tonight, you take your mates to safety. And take Santos for me. I intend to keep my promise to him.”

After a while, Aaor nodded. “I’ll come back for you if you don’t meet us.”

“It might be better for you if you didn’t,” I said.

“Don’t ask the impossible of me,” it said, and guided its mates back into the stone cabin.

9

We meant to leave late that night—Aaor with the Humans down their back-and-forth pathway, then down terraces and a neglected, steep, overgrown path to the canyon floor. I meant to go down the other side of the mountain and work my way around as close as possible to the place where Jesusa and TomÁs were being held.

It would have worked. The mountain village would be free of us and able to continue in isolation until Nikanj sent a shuttle to gas it and collect the people.

But that afternoon a party of armed males came up the trail to the stone cabin.

We heard them, smelled their sweat and their gunpowder long before we saw them. There was no time for Aaor to change Javier and Paz, give them back the deformities it had taken from them.

“Were their faces distorted?” I asked Aaor.

It nodded. “Small tumors. Very visible.”

And nowhere to hide. We could climb up to Santos’s cave, but what good would that do? If villagers found no one in the cabin, they would be bound to check the cave. If we began to climb down the other side of the mountain, we could be picked off. There was nothing to do but wait.

“Four of them?” I asked Aaor.

“I smell four.”

“We let them in and we sting them.”

“I’ve never stung anyone.”

I glanced toward its mates. “Didn’t you make at least one of them unconscious last night?”

Its sensory tentacles knotted against his body in embarrassment, and its mates looked at one another and smiled.

“You can sting,” I said. “And I hope you can stand being shot now. You might be.”

“I feel as though I can stand it. I feel as though I could survive almost anything now.”

It was healthy, then. If we could keep its Humans alive, it would stay healthy.

“Is there a signal you should give?” I asked Javier.

“One of us should be outside, keeping watch,” he said. “They won’t be surprised that we’re not, though. On this duty, I think only the elders watch as much as they should. I mean, Jesusa and TomÁs left two years ago and there’s been no trouble. Until now.”

Laxity. Good.

The cabin was small and there was nowhere in it to hide. I sent the three Humans up the crooked pathway to Santos’s cave. Vegetation was thick even this near the summit, and once they went around one of the turns, they could not be seen from the stone cabin. They would not be found unless someone went up after them. Aaor and I had to see that no one did. We waited inside the cabin. If we could get the newcomers in, there was less chance of accidentally killing one of them by having him fall down the slope.

I touched Aaor as I heard the men reach our level. “For Jesusa and TomÁs’s sake,” I said silently, “we can’t let any of them escape.”

Aaor gave back wordless agreement.

“Javier!” called one of the newcomers before he reached the cabin door. “Hey, Javier, where are you?”

The cabin windows were high and small and the walls were thick. It would have been no easy matter to look in and see whether anyone was inside, so we were not surprised when one of the Humans kicked the door open.

Human eyes adjust slowly to sudden dimness. We stood behind the door and waited, hoping at least two of the men would stumble in, half blind.

Only one did. I stung him just before he would have shouted. To his friends he seemed to collapse without reason. Two of them called to him, stepped up to help him. Aaor got one of them. I just missed the other, struck again, and caught him just outside the door.

The fourth was aiming his rifle at me. I dived under it as he fired. The bullet plowed up the ground next to the face of one of his fallen friends.

I held him with my strength hands, took the gun from him with my sensory arms, emptied it, and threw it far out so that it would clear the slope and fall to the canyon floor. Aaor was getting rid of the others in the same way.

The man in my strength arms struggled wildly, shouting and cursing me, but I did not sting him. He was a tall, unusually strong male, gray-haired and angular. He was one of the sterile old Humans—one of the ones the people here called elders. I wanted to see how he responded to our scent when he got over his first fear. And I wanted to find out why he and the three fertile young males had come up. I wanted to know what he knew about Jesusa and TomÁs.

I dragged him into the cabin and made him sit beside me on the bed. When he stopped struggling, I let go of him.

His sudden freedom seemed to confuse him. He looked at me, then at Aaor, who was just dragging one of his friends into the cabin. Then he lurched to his feet and tried to run.

I caught him, lifted him, and sat him on the bed again. This time, he stayed.

“So those damned little Judases did betray us,” he said. “They’ll be shot! If we don’t return, they’ll be shot!”

I got up and shut the door, then touched Aaor to signal it silently. “Let’s let our scent work on them for a while.”

It consented to do this, though it saw no reason. It turned one of the males over and stripped his shirt. The male’s body and face were distorted by tumors. His mouth was so distorted it seemed unlikely that he could speak normally.

“We have time,” Aaor said aloud. “I don’t want to leave them this way.”

“If you repair them, they won’t be able to go home,” I reminded it. “Their own people might kill them.”

“Then let them come with us!” It lay down next to the male with the distorted mouth and sank a sensory hand and many sensory tentacles into him.

The elder stared, then stood up and stepped toward Aaor. His body language said he was confused, afraid, hostile. But he only watched.

After a while, some of the tumors began to shrink visibly, and the elder stepped back and crossed himself.

“Shall we take them with us, once we’ve healed them?” I asked him. “Would your people kill them?”

He looked at me. “Where are the people who were in this house?”

“With Santos. We were afraid they might be shot by accident.”

“You’ve healed them?”

“And Santos.”

He shook his head. “And what will be the price for all this kindness? Sterility? Long, slow death? That’s what your kind gave me.”

“We aren’t making them sterile.”

“So you say!”

“Our people will be here soon. You will have to decide whether to mate with us, join the Human colony on Mars, or stay here sterile. If these males choose to mate with us or to go to Mars, why should they be sterilized? If they decide to stay here, others can sterilize them. It isn’t a job I’d want.”

“Mars colony? You mean Humans without Oankali are living on Mars? The planet Mars?”

“Yes. Any Humans who want to go. The colony is about fifty years old now. If you go, we’ll give you back your fertility and see that you’re able to father healthy children.”

“No!”

I shrugged.

“This is our world. Your people can go to Mars.”

“You know we won’t.”

Silence.

He looked again at what Aaor was doing. Several of the smallest visible tumors had already vanished. His expression, his body language were oddly false. He was fascinated. He did not want to be. He wanted to be disgusted. He pretended to be disgusted.

He was more than fascinated. He was envious. He must have experienced the touch of an ooloi back before he was released to become a resister. All Humans of his age had been handled by ooloi. Did he remember and want it again, or was it only our scent working on him? Oankali ooloi frightened Humans because they looked so different. Aaor and I were much less frightening. Perhaps that allowed Humans to respond more freely to our scent. Or perhaps, being part Human ourselves, we had a more appealing scent.

When I had checked the two Humans on the floor, seen that they were truly unconscious and likely to stay that way for a while, I took the elder by the shoulder and led him back to the bed.

“More comfortable than the floor,” I said.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“Just have a look at you—make sure you’re as healthy as you appear to be.”

He had been resisting for a century. He had been teaching children that people like me were devils, monsters, that it was better to endure a disfiguring, disabling genetic disorder than to go down from the mountains and find the Oankali.

He lay down on the bed, eager rather than afraid, and when I lay down beside him, he reached out and pulled me to him, probably in the same way he reached out for his human mate when he was especially eager for her.

10

By the time it began to get dark, our captives had become our allies. They were Rafael, whose tumors Aaor had healed and whose mouth Aaor had improved, and RamÓn, Rafael’s brother. RamÓn was a hunchback, but he knew now that he didn’t have to be. And even though we had had not nearly enough time to change him completely, we had already straightened him a little. There was also Natal, who had been deaf for years. He was no longer deaf.

And there was the elder, Francisco, who was still confused in the way Santos had been. It frightened him that he had accepted us so quickly—but he had accepted us. He did not want to go back down the mountain to his people. He wanted to stay with us. I sent him up to bring Santos, Paz, and Javier back to us. He sighed and went, thinking it was a test of his new loyalty. He was the only one, after all, who had not needed our healing.

Not until he brought them back did I ask him whether he could get Jesusa and TomÁs out.

“I could talk to them,” he said. “But the guards wouldn’t let me take them out. Everyone is too nervous. Two of the guards last night swear they saw four people, not two. That’s why we were sent up here. Some people thought Paz and Javier might have seen something, or worse, might be in trouble.” He looked at Paz and Javier. They had come in and gone straight to Aaor, who coiled a sensory tentacle around each of their necks and welcomed them as though they had been away for days.

Jesusa and TomÁs had been away from me for two days. I was not yet desperate for them, but I might be in two more days if I didn’t get them out. Knowing that made me uneasy, anxious to get started. I left the too-crowded cabin and went to sit on the bare rock of the ledge outside. It was dusk, and the two brothers, Rafael and RamÓn, had gotten into the cabin’s food stores and begun to prepare a meal.

Francisco and Santos came out with me and settled on either side of me. We could see the village below through a haze of smoke from cooking fires.

“When will you leave?” Santos asked.

“After dark, before moonrise.”

“Are you going to help?” he asked Francisco.

Francisco frowned. “I’ve been trying to think of what I could do. I think I’ll go down and just wait. If Jodahs needs help, if it’s caught, perhaps I can give it the time it needs to prove it isn’t a dangerous animal.”

Santos grinned. “It is a dangerous animal.”

Francisco looked at him with distaste.

“You should be looking at Jodahs that way. Its people will come and destroy everything you’ve spent your life building.”

“Go back up to your cave, Santos. Rot there.”

“I’ll follow Jodahs,” Santos said. “I don’t mind. In fact, it’s a pleasure. But I’m not asleep. These people probably won’t kill us, but they’ll swallow us whole.”

Francisco shook his head. “How’s your breathing these days, Santos? How many times have you had that nose of yours broken? And what has it taught you?”

Santos stared at him for a moment, then screeched with laughter.

I looped a sensory arm around Santos’s neck, pulled him against me. He didn’t try to say anything more. He didn’t really seem to be out to do harm. He just enjoyed having the advantage, knowing something a century-old elder didn’t know—something I had overlooked, too. He was laughing at both of us. He kept quiet and held still, though, while I fixed his nose. In the short time I had, I couldn’t make it look much better. That would mean altering bone as well as cartilage. I did a little of that so he could breathe with his mouth closed if he wanted to. But the main thing I did was repair nerve damage. Santos hadn’t just been hit on the nose. He had been thoroughly beaten about the head. His body could “taste” and enjoy the ooloi substance I could not help giving when I penetrated his skin. That had won him over to me. But he could smell almost nothing.

“What are you doing to him?” Francisco asked with no particular concern. His sense of smell was excellent.

“Repairing him a little more,” I said. “It keeps him quiet, and I promised him I’d do it. Eventually he’ll be almost as tall as you are.”

“Seal up his mouth while you’re at it,” Francisco said. “I’ll walk down now.”

“Do you still want to come with us?”

“Of course.”

I smiled, liking him. It seemed I couldn’t help liking the people I seduced. Even Santos. “You’ll go to Mars, won’t you?”

“Yes.” He paused. “Yes, I think so. I might not if you were looking for mates. I wish you were.”

“Thank you,” I said. “If you change your mind, I can help you find Oankali or construct mates.”

“Like you?”

“Your ooloi would be Oankali.”

He shook his head. “Mars, then. With my fertility restored.”

“Absolutely.”

“Where shall I meet you once you’ve gotten TomÁs and Jesusa out?”

“Follow the trail downriver. Come as quickly as you can, but come carefully. If you can’t get away, remember that my people will be coming here soon anyway. They won’t hurt you, and they will send you to Mars if you still want to go.”

“I’d rather leave with you.”

“You’re welcome to come with us. Just don’t get killed trying to do it. You’re much older than I am. You’re supposed to have learned patience.”

He laughed without humor. “I haven’t learned it, little ooloi. I probably never will. Watch for me on the river trail.”

He left us, and I sat repairing Santos until it was time for me to go. I left him with a fairly good sense of smell.

“Don’t make trouble,” I told him. “Use that good mind of yours to help these people get away.”

“Francisco wouldn’t have minded what you’re doing to us,” he said. “I figured it out, and I don’t mind.”

“I’ll do experiments when my mates’ lives are not at stake. Until we’re away from this place, Santos, try to be quiet unless you have something useful to say.”

I went into the cabin and told Aaor I was leaving.

It left its mates and the meal it had been eating. It had used more energy than I had in healing the Humans. It probably needed food.

Now it settled all four of its arms around me and linked. “I will come back if you don’t follow us,” it said silently.

“I’ll follow. Francisco is going to help me—if necessary.”

“I know. I heard. And I still inherit Santos.”

“Use his mind and push his body hard. This trip should do that. You should start down now, too.”

“All right.”

I left it and headed down the mountain, using the path when it was convenient, and ignoring it otherwise. The Humans with Aaor would find it dark and would have to be careful. For me it was well lit with the heat of all the growing plants. I had to climb down past the flattened ridge on which the village had been built. I had to travel along the broad, flat part of the ridge below the level of sight of any guard watching from the village. I had to come up where terraces filled with growing things would conceal me for as long as possible.

9

We meant to leave late that night—Aaor with the Humans down their back-and-forth pathway, then down terraces and a neglected, steep, overgrown path to the canyon floor. I meant to go down the other side of the mountain and work my way around as close as possible to the place where Jesusa and TomÁs were being held.

It would have worked. The mountain village would be free of us and able to continue in isolation until Nikanj sent a shuttle to gas it and collect the people.

But that afternoon a party of armed males came up the trail to the stone cabin.

We heard them, smelled their sweat and their gunpowder long before we saw them. There was no time for Aaor to change Javier and Paz, give them back the deformities it had taken from them.

“Were their faces distorted?” I asked Aaor.

It nodded. “Small tumors. Very visible.”

And nowhere to hide. We could climb up to Santos’s cave, but what good would that do? If villagers found no one in the cabin, they would be bound to check the cave. If we began to climb down the other side of the mountain, we could be picked off. There was nothing to do but wait.

“Four of them?” I asked Aaor.

“I smell four.”

“We let them in and we sting them.”

“I’ve never stung anyone.”

I glanced toward its mates. “Didn’t you make at least one of them unconscious last night?”

Its sensory tentacles knotted against his body in embarrassment, and its mates looked at one another and smiled.

“You can sting,” I said. “And I hope you can stand being shot now. You might be.”

“I feel as though I can stand it. I feel as though I could survive almost anything now.”

It was healthy, then. If we could keep its Humans alive, it would stay healthy.

“Is there a signal you should give?” I asked Javier.

“One of us should be outside, keeping watch,” he said. “They won’t be surprised that we’re not, though. On this duty, I think only the elders watch as much as they should. I mean, Jesusa and TomÁs left two years ago and there’s been no trouble. Until now.”

Laxity. Good.

The cabin was small and there was nowhere in it to hide. I sent the three Humans up the crooked pathway to Santos’s cave. Vegetation was thick even this near the summit, and once they went around one of the turns, they could not be seen from the stone cabin. They would not be found unless someone went up after them. Aaor and I had to see that no one did. We waited inside the cabin. If we could get the newcomers in, there was less chance of accidentally killing one of them by having him fall down the slope.

I touched Aaor as I heard the men reach our level. “For Jesusa and TomÁs’s sake,” I said silently, “we can’t let any of them escape.”

Aaor gave back wordless agreement.

“Javier!” called one of the newcomers before he reached the cabin door. “Hey, Javier, where are you?”

The cabin windows were high and small and the walls were thick. It would have been no easy matter to look in and see whether anyone was inside, so we were not surprised when one of the Humans kicked the door open.

Human eyes adjust slowly to sudden dimness. We stood behind the door and waited, hoping at least two of the men would stumble in, half blind.

Only one did. I stung him just before he would have shouted. To his friends he seemed to collapse without reason. Two of them called to him, stepped up to help him. Aaor got one of them. I just missed the other, struck again, and caught him just outside the door.

The fourth was aiming his rifle at me. I dived under it as he fired. The bullet plowed up the ground next to the face of one of his fallen friends.

I held him with my strength hands, took the gun from him with my sensory arms, emptied it, and threw it far out so that it would clear the slope and fall to the canyon floor. Aaor was getting rid of the others in the same way.

The man in my strength arms struggled wildly, shouting and cursing me, but I did not sting him. He was a tall, unusually strong male, gray-haired and angular. He was one of the sterile old Humans—one of the ones the people here called elders. I wanted to see how he responded to our scent when he got over his first fear. And I wanted to find out why he and the three fertile young males had come up. I wanted to know what he knew about Jesusa and TomÁs.

I dragged him into the cabin and made him sit beside me on the bed. When he stopped struggling, I let go of him.

His sudden freedom seemed to confuse him. He looked at me, then at Aaor, who was just dragging one of his friends into the cabin. Then he lurched to his feet and tried to run.

I caught him, lifted him, and sat him on the bed again. This time, he stayed.

“So those damned little Judases did betray us,” he said. “They’ll be shot! If we don’t return, they’ll be shot!”

I got up and shut the door, then touched Aaor to signal it silently. “Let’s let our scent work on them for a while.”

It consented to do this, though it saw no reason. It turned one of the males over and stripped his shirt. The male’s body and face were distorted by tumors. His mouth was so distorted it seemed unlikely that he could speak normally.

“We have time,” Aaor said aloud. “I don’t want to leave them this way.”

“If you repair them, they won’t be able to go home,” I reminded it. “Their own people might kill them.”

“Then let them come with us!” It lay down next to the male with the distorted mouth and sank a sensory hand and many sensory tentacles into him.

The elder stared, then stood up and stepped toward Aaor. His body language said he was confused, afraid, hostile. But he only watched.

After a while, some of the tumors began to shrink visibly, and the elder stepped back and crossed himself.

“Shall we take them with us, once we’ve healed them?” I asked him. “Would your people kill them?”

He looked at me. “Where are the people who were in this house?”

“With Santos. We were afraid they might be shot by accident.”

“You’ve healed them?”

“And Santos.”

He shook his head. “And what will be the price for all this kindness? Sterility? Long, slow death? That’s what your kind gave me.”

“We aren’t making them sterile.”

“So you say!”

“Our people will be here soon. You will have to decide whether to mate with us, join the Human colony on Mars, or stay here sterile. If these males choose to mate with us or to go to Mars, why should they be sterilized? If they decide to stay here, others can sterilize them. It isn’t a job I’d want.”

“Mars colony? You mean Humans without Oankali are living on Mars? The planet Mars?”

“Yes. Any Humans who want to go. The colony is about fifty years old now. If you go, we’ll give you back your fertility and see that you’re able to father healthy children.”

“No!”

I shrugged.

“This is our world. Your people can go to Mars.”

“You know we won’t.”

Silence.

He looked again at what Aaor was doing. Several of the smallest visible tumors had already vanished. His expression, his body language were oddly false. He was fascinated. He did not want to be. He wanted to be disgusted. He pretended to be disgusted.

He was more than fascinated. He was envious. He must have experienced the touch of an ooloi back before he was released to become a resister. All Humans of his age had been handled by ooloi. Did he remember and want it again, or was it only our scent working on him? Oankali ooloi frightened Humans because they looked so different. Aaor and I were much less frightening. Perhaps that allowed Humans to respond more freely to our scent. Or perhaps, being part Human ourselves, we had a more appealing scent.

When I had checked the two Humans on the floor, seen that they were truly unconscious and likely to stay that way for a while, I took the elder by the shoulder and led him back to the bed.

“More comfortable than the floor,” I said.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“Just have a look at you—make sure you’re as healthy as you appear to be.”

He had been resisting for a century. He had been teaching children that people like me were devils, monsters, that it was better to endure a disfiguring, disabling genetic disorder than to go down from the mountains and find the Oankali.

He lay down on the bed, eager rather than afraid, and when I lay down beside him, he reached out and pulled me to him, probably in the same way he reached out for his human mate when he was especially eager for her.

10

By the time it began to get dark, our captives had become our allies. They were Rafael, whose tumors Aaor had healed and whose mouth Aaor had improved, and RamÓn, Rafael’s brother. RamÓn was a hunchback, but he knew now that he didn’t have to be. And even though we had had not nearly enough time to change him completely, we had already straightened him a little. There was also Natal, who had been deaf for years. He was no longer deaf.

And there was the elder, Francisco, who was still confused in the way Santos had been. It frightened him that he had accepted us so quickly—but he had accepted us. He did not want to go back down the mountain to his people. He wanted to stay with us. I sent him up to bring Santos, Paz, and Javier back to us. He sighed and went, thinking it was a test of his new loyalty. He was the only one, after all, who had not needed our healing.

Not until he brought them back did I ask him whether he could get Jesusa and TomÁs out.

“I could talk to them,” he said. “But the guards wouldn’t let me take them out. Everyone is too nervous. Two of the guards last night swear they saw four people, not two. That’s why we were sent up here. Some people thought Paz and Javier might have seen something, or worse, might be in trouble.” He looked at Paz and Javier. They had come in and gone straight to Aaor, who coiled a sensory tentacle around each of their necks and welcomed them as though they had been away for days.

Jesusa and TomÁs had been away from me for two days. I was not yet desperate for them, but I might be in two more days if I didn’t get them out. Knowing that made me uneasy, anxious to get started. I left the too-crowded cabin and went to sit on the bare rock of the ledge outside. It was dusk, and the two brothers, Rafael and RamÓn, had gotten into the cabin’s food stores and begun to prepare a meal.

Francisco and Santos came out with me and settled on either side of me. We could see the village below through a haze of smoke from cooking fires.

“When will you leave?” Santos asked.

“After dark, before moonrise.”

“Are you going to help?” he asked Francisco.

Francisco frowned. “I’ve been trying to think of what I could do. I think I’ll go down and just wait. If Jodahs needs help, if it’s caught, perhaps I can give it the time it needs to prove it isn’t a dangerous animal.”

Santos grinned. “It is a dangerous animal.”

Francisco looked at him with distaste.

“You should be looking at Jodahs that way. Its people will come and destroy everything you’ve spent your life building.”

“Go back up to your cave, Santos. Rot there.”

“I’ll follow Jodahs,” Santos said. “I don’t mind. In fact, it’s a pleasure. But I’m not asleep. These people probably won’t kill us, but they’ll swallow us whole.”

Francisco shook his head. “How’s your breathing these days, Santos? How many times have you had that nose of yours broken? And what has it taught you?”

Santos stared at him for a moment, then screeched with laughter.

I looped a sensory arm around Santos’s neck, pulled him against me. He didn’t try to say anything more. He didn’t really seem to be out to do harm. He just enjoyed having the advantage, knowing something a century-old elder didn’t know—something I had overlooked, too. He was laughing at both of us. He kept quiet and held still, though, while I fixed his nose. In the short time I had, I couldn’t make it look much better. That would mean altering bone as well as cartilage. I did a little of that so he could breathe with his mouth closed if he wanted to. But the main thing I did was repair nerve damage. Santos hadn’t just been hit on the nose. He had been thoroughly beaten about the head. His body could “taste” and enjoy the ooloi substance I could not help giving when I penetrated his skin. That had won him over to me. But he could smell almost nothing.

“What are you doing to him?” Francisco asked with no particular concern. His sense of smell was excellent.

“Repairing him a little more,” I said. “It keeps him quiet, and I promised him I’d do it. Eventually he’ll be almost as tall as you are.”

“Seal up his mouth while you’re at it,” Francisco said. “I’ll walk down now.”

“Do you still want to come with us?”

“Of course.”

I smiled, liking him. It seemed I couldn’t help liking the people I seduced. Even Santos. “You’ll go to Mars, won’t you?”

“Yes.” He paused. “Yes, I think so. I might not if you were looking for mates. I wish you were.”

“Thank you,” I said. “If you change your mind, I can help you find Oankali or construct mates.”

“Like you?”

“Your ooloi would be Oankali.”

He shook his head. “Mars, then. With my fertility restored.”

“Absolutely.”

“Where shall I meet you once you’ve gotten TomÁs and Jesusa out?”

“Follow the trail downriver. Come as quickly as you can, but come carefully. If you can’t get away, remember that my people will be coming here soon anyway. They won’t hurt you, and they will send you to Mars if you still want to go.”

“I’d rather leave with you.”

“You’re welcome to come with us. Just don’t get killed trying to do it. You’re much older than I am. You’re supposed to have learned patience.”

He laughed without humor. “I haven’t learned it, little ooloi. I probably never will. Watch for me on the river trail.”

He left us, and I sat repairing Santos until it was time for me to go. I left him with a fairly good sense of smell.

“Don’t make trouble,” I told him. “Use that good mind of yours to help these people get away.”

“Francisco wouldn’t have minded what you’re doing to us,” he said. “I figured it out, and I don’t mind.”

“I’ll do experiments when my mates’ lives are not at stake. Until we’re away from this place, Santos, try to be quiet unless you have something useful to say.”

I went into the cabin and told Aaor I was leaving.

It left its mates and the meal it had been eating. It had used more energy than I had in healing the Humans. It probably needed food.

Now it settled all four of its arms around me and linked. “I will come back if you don’t follow us,” it said silently.

“I’ll follow. Francisco is going to help me—if necessary.”

“I know. I heard. And I still inherit Santos.”

“Use his mind and push his body hard. This trip should do that. You should start down now, too.”

“All right.”

I left it and headed down the mountain, using the path when it was convenient, and ignoring it otherwise. The Humans with Aaor would find it dark and would have to be careful. For me it was well lit with the heat of all the growing plants. I had to climb down past the flattened ridge on which the village had been built. I had to travel along the broad, flat part of the ridge below the level of sight of any guard watching from the village. I had to come up where terraces filled with growing things would conceal me for as long as possible.

11

When I reached the village, I lay on a terrace until the sounds of people talking and moving around had all but ceased. I calculated by hearing and smell where the guards patrolled. I tried to hear Jesusa or TomÁs, or her people talking about them, but there was almost nothing. Two males were wondering what they had seen in their wanderings. A female was explaining to a sleepy child that they had been “very, very bad” and were locked up as punishment. And somewhere far from where I lay, Francisco was explaining to someone that five guards on the mountain were enough, and that he wanted to sleep in his own bed, not on a stone floor.