She tried to imagine herself surrounded by beings like him and was almost overwhelmed by panic. As though she had suddenly developed a phobia—something she had never before experienced. But what she felt was like what she had heard others describe. A true xenophobia—and apparently she was not alone in it.
She sighed, realized she was still tired as well as still hungry. She rubbed a hand over her face. If this were what a phobia was like, it was something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. She looked at Jdahya. “What do your people call themselves?” she asked. “Tell me about them.”
“We are Oankali.”
“Oankali. Sounds like a word in some Earth language.”
“It may be, but with different meaning.”
“What does it mean in your language?”
“Several things. Traders for one.”
“You are traders?”
“Yes.”
“What do you trade?”
“Ourselves.”
“You mean … each other? Slaves?”
“No. We’ve never done that.”
“What, then?”
“Ourselves.”
“I don’t understand.”
He said nothing, seemed to wrap silence around himself and settle into it. She knew he would not answer.
She sighed. “You seem too human sometimes. If I weren’t looking at you, I’d assume you were a man.”
“You have assumed that. My family gave me to the human doctor so that I could learn to do this work. She came to us too old to bear children of her own, but she could teach.”
“I thought you said she was dying.”
“She did die eventually. She was a hundred and thirteen years old and had been awake among us off and on for fifty years. She was like a fourth parent to my siblings and me. It was hard to watch her age and die. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.”
“I’ve heard humans say that.” She frowned. “Couldn’t your ooloi have helped her live longer—if she wanted to live longer than a hundred and thirteen years, that is.”
“They did help her. They gave her forty years she would not have had, and when they could no longer help her heal, they took away her pain. If she had been younger when we found her, we could have given her much more time.”
Lilith followed that thought to its obvious conclusion. “I’m twenty-six,” she said.
“Older,” he told her. “You’ve aged whenever we’ve kept you awake. About two years altogether.”
She had no sense of being two years older, of being, suddenly, twenty-eight because he said she was. Two years of solitary confinement. What could they possibly give her in return for that? She stared at him.
His tentacles seemed to solidify into a second skin—dark patches on his face and neck, a dark, smooth-looking mass on his head. “Barring accident,” he said, “you’ll live much longer than a hundred and thirteen years. And for most of your life, you’ll be biologically quite young. Your children will live longer still.”
He looked remarkably human now. Was it only the tentacles that gave him that sea-slug appearance? His coloring hadn’t changed. The fact that he had no eyes, nose, or ears still disturbed her, but not as much.
“Jdahya, stay that way,” she told him. “Let me come close and look at you … if I can.”
The tentacles moved like weirdly rippling skin, then resolidified. “Come,” he said.
She was able to approach him hesitantly. Even viewed from only a couple of feet away, the tentacles looked like a smooth second skin. “Do you mind if …” She stopped and began again. “I mean … may I touch you?”
“Yes.”
It was easier to do than she had expected. His skin was cool and almost too smooth to be real flesh—smooth the way her fingernails were and perhaps as tough as a fingernail.
“Is it hard for you to stay like this?” she asked.
“Not hard. Unnatural. A muffling of the senses.”
“Why did you do it—before I asked you to, I mean.”
“It’s an expression of pleasure or amusement.”
“You were pleased a minute ago?”
“With you. You wanted your time back—the time we’ve taken from you. You didn’t want to die.”
She stared at him, shocked that he had read her so clearly. And he must have known of humans who did want to die even after hearing promises of long life, health, and lasting youth. Why? Maybe they’d heard the part she hadn’t been told about yet; the reason for all this. The price.
“So far,” she said, “only boredom and isolation have driven me to want to die.”
“Those are past. And you’ve never tried to kill yourself, even then.”
“ … no.”
“Your desire to live is stronger than you realize.”
She sighed. “You’re going to test that, aren’t you? That’s why you haven’t told me yet what your people want of us.”
“Yes,” he admitted, alarming her.
“Tell me!”
Silence.
“If you knew anything at all about the human imagination, you’d know you were doing exactly the wrong thing,” she said.
“Once you’re able to leave this room with me, I’ll answer your questions,” he told her.
She stared at him for several seconds. “Let’s work on that, then,” she said grimly. “Relax from your unnatural position and let’s see what happens.”
He hesitated, then let his tentacles flow free. The grotesque sea-slug appearance resumed and she could not stop herself from stumbling away from him in panic and revulsion. She caught herself before she had gone far.
“God, I’m so tired of this,” she muttered. “Why can’t I stop it?”
“When the doctor first came to our household,” he said, “some of my family found her so disturbing that they left home for a while. That’s unheard-of behavior among us.”
“Did you leave?”
He went smooth briefly. “I had not yet been born. By the time I was born, all my relatives had come home. And I think their fear was stronger than yours is now. They had never before seen so much life and so much death in one being. It hurt some of them to touch her.”
“You mean … because she was sick?”
“Even when she was well. It was her genetic structure that disturbed them. I can’t explain that to you. You’ll never sense it as we do.” He stepped toward her and reached for her hand. She gave it to him almost reflexively with only an instant’s hesitation when his tentacles all flowed forward toward her. She looked away and stood stiffly where she was, her hand held loosely in his many fingers.
“Good,” he said, releasing her. “This room will be nothing more than a memory for you soon.”
4
ELEVEN MEALS LATER HE took her outside.
She had no idea how long she was in wanting, then consuming, those eleven meals. Jdahya would not tell her, and he would not be hurried. He showed no impatience or annoyance when she urged him to take her out. He simply fell silent. He seemed almost to turn himself off when she made demands or asked questions he did not intend to answer. Her family had called her stubborn during her life before the war, but he was beyond stubborn.
Eventually he began to move around the room. He had been still for so long—had seemed almost part of the furniture—that she was startled when he suddenly got up and went into the bathroom. She stayed where she was on the bed, wondering whether he used a bathroom for the same purposes she did. She made no effort to find out. Sometime later when he came back into the room, she found herself much less disturbed by him. He brought her something that so surprised and delighted her that she took it from his hand without thought or hesitation: A banana, fully ripe, large, yellow, firm, very sweet.
She ate it slowly, wanting to gulp it, not daring to. It was literally the best food she had tasted in two hundred and fifty years. Who knew when there would be another—if there would be another. She ate even the whi
te, inner skin.
He would not tell her where it had come from or how he had gotten it. He would not get her another. He did evict her from the bed for a while. He stretched out flat on it and lay utterly still, looked dead. She did a series of exercises on the floor, deliberately tired herself as much as she could, then took his place on the platform until he got up and let her have the bed.
When she awoke, he took his jacket off and let her see the tufts of sensory tentacles scattered over his body. To her surprise, she got used to these quickly. They were merely ugly. And they made him look even more like a misplaced sea creature.
“Can you breathe underwater?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“I thought your throat orifices looked as though they could double as gills. Are you more comfortable underwater?”
“I enjoy it, but no more than I enjoy air.”
“Air … oxygen?”
“I need oxygen, yes, though not as much of it as you do.”
Her mind drifted back to his tentacles and another possible similarity to some sea slugs. “Can you sting with any of your tentacles?”
“With all of them.”
She drew back, though she was not close to him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wouldn’t have stung you.”
Unless she had attacked him. “So that’s what happened to the humans who tried to kill you.”
“No, Lilith. I’m not interested in killing your people. I’ve been trained all my life to keep them alive.”
“What did you do to them, then?”
“Stopped them. I’m stronger than you probably think.”
“But … if you had stung them?”
“They would have died. Only the ooloi can sting without killing. One group of my ancestors subdued prey by stinging it. Their sting began the digestive process even before they began to eat. And they stung enemies who tried to eat them. Not a comfortable existence.”
“It doesn’t sound that bad.”
“They didn’t live long, those ancestors. Some things were immune to their poison.”
“Maybe humans are.”
He answered her softly. “No, Lilith, you’re not.”
Sometime later he brought her an orange. Out of curiosity, she broke the fruit and offered to share it with him. He accepted a piece of it from her hand and sat down beside her to eat it. When they were both finished, he turned to face her—a courtesy, she realized, since he had so little face—and seemed to examine her closely. Some of his tentacles actually touched her. When they did, she jumped. Then she realized she was not being hurt and kept still. She did not like his nearness, but it no longer terrified her. After … however many days it had been, she felt none of the old panic; only relief at somehow having finally shed it.
“We’ll go out now,” he said. “My family will be relieved to see us. And you—you have a great deal to learn.”
5
SHE MADE HIM WAIT until she had washed the orange juice from her hands. Then he walked over to one of the walls and touched it with some of his longer head tentacles.
A dark spot appeared on the wall where he made contact. It became a deepening, widening indentation, then a hole through which Lilith could see color and light—green, red, orange, yellow. …
There had been little color in her world since her capture. Her own skin, her blood—within the pale walls of her prison, that was all. Everything else was some shade of white or gray. Even her food had been colorless until the banana. Now, here was color and what appeared to be sunlight. There was space. Vast space.
The hole in the wall widened as though it were flesh rippling aside, slowly writhing. She was both fascinated and repelled.
“Is it alive?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
She had beaten it, kicked it, clawed it, tried to bite it. It had been smooth, tough, impenetrable, but slightly giving like the bed and table. It had felt like plastic, cool beneath her hands.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Flesh. More like mine than like yours. Different from mine, too, though. It’s … the ship.”
“You’re kidding. Your ship is alive?”
“Yes. Come out.” The hole in the wall had grown large enough for them to step through. He ducked his head and took the necessary step. She started to follow him, then stopped. There was so much space out there. The colors she had seen were thin, hairlike leaves and round, coconut-sized fruit, apparently in different stages of development. All hung from great branches that overshadowed the new exit. Beyond them was a broad, open field with scattered trees—impossibly huge trees—distant hills, and a bright, sunless ivory sky. There was enough strangeness to the trees and the sky to stop her from imagining that she was on Earth. There were people moving around in the distance, and there were black, German shepherd–sized animals that were too far away for her to see them clearly—though even in the distance the animals seemed to have too many legs. Six? Ten? The creatures seemed to be grazing.
“Lilith, come out,” Jdahya said.
She took a step backward, away from all the alien vastness. The isolation room that she had hated for so long suddenly seemed safe and comforting.
“Back into your cage, Lilith?” Jdahya asked softly.
She stared at him through the hole, realized at once that he was trying to provoke her, make her overcome her fear. It would not have worked if he had not been so right. She was retreating into her cage—like a zoo animal that had been shut up for so long that the cage had become home.
She made herself step up to the opening, and then, teeth clenched, step through.
Outside, she stood beside him and drew a long, shuddering breath. She turned her head, looked at the room, then turned away quickly, resisting an impulse to flee back to it. He took her hand and led her away.
When she looked back a second time, the hole was closing and she could see that what she had come out of was actually a huge tree. Her room could not have taken more than a tiny fraction of its interior. The tree had grown from what appeared to be ordinary, pale-brown, sandy soil. Its lower limbs were heavily laden with fruit. The rest of it looked almost ordinary except for its size. The trunk was bigger around than some office buildings she remembered. And it seemed to touch the ivory sky. How tall was it? How much of it served as a building?
“Was everything inside that room alive?” she asked.
“Everything except some of the visible plumbing fixtures,” Jdahya said. “Even the food you ate was produced from the fruit of one of the branches growing outside. It was designed to meet your nutritional needs.”
“And to taste like cotton and paste,” she muttered. “I hope I won’t have to eat any more of that stuff.”
“You won’t. But it’s kept you very healthy. Your diet in particular encouraged your body not to grow cancers while your genetic inclination to grow them was corrected.”
“It has been corrected, then?”
“Yes. Correcting genes have been inserted into your cells, and your cells have accepted and replicated them. Now you won’t grow cancers by accident.”
That, she thought, was an odd qualification, but she let it pass for the moment. “When will you send me back to Earth?”
“You couldn’t survive there now—especially not alone.”
“You haven’t sent any of us back yet?”
“Your group will be the first.”
“Oh.” This had not occurred to her—that she and others like her would be guinea pigs trying to survive on an Earth that must have greatly changed. “How is it there now?”
“Wild. Forests, mountains, deserts, plains, great oceans. It’s a rich world, clean of dangerous radiation in most places. The greatest diversity of animal life is in the seas, but there are a number of small animals thriving on land: insects, worms, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals. There’s no doubt your people can live there.”
“When?”
“That will not be hurried. You hav
e a very long life ahead of you, Lilith. And you have work to do here.”
“You said something about that once before. What work?”
“You’ll live with my family for a while—live as one of us as much as possible. We’ll teach you your work.”
“But what work?”
“You’ll Awaken a small group of humans, all English-speaking, and help them learn to deal with us. You’ll teach them the survival skills we teach you. Your people will all be from what you would call civilized societies. Now they’ll have to learn to live in forests, build their own shelters, and raise their own food all without machines or outside help.”
“Will you forbid us machines?” she asked uncertainly.
“Of course not. But we won’t give them to you either. We’ll give you hand tools, simple equipment, and food until you begin to make the things you need and grow your own crops. We’ve already armed you against the deadlier microorganisms. Beyond that, you’ll have to fend for yourself—avoiding poisonous plants and animals and creating what you need.”
“How can you teach us to survive on our own world? How can you know enough about it or about us?”
“How can we not? We’ve helped your world restore itself. We’ve studied your bodies, your thinking, your literature, your historical records, your many cultures. … We know more of what you’re capable of than you do.”
Or they thought they did. If they really had had two hundred and fifty years to study, maybe they were right. “You’ve inoculated us against diseases?” she asked to be sure she had understood.
“No.”
“But you said—”
“We’ve strengthened your immune system, increased your resistance to disease in general.”
“How? Something else done to our genes?”
He said nothing. She let the silence lengthen until she was certain he would not answer. This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good. “We used to treat animals that way,” she muttered bitterly.