"Have you eaten?" the man asked.
"Yes," she said, suddenly shy.
There was a long silence. "What were you before?" he asked. "I mean, did you work?"
"I had gone back to school," she said. "I was majoring in anthropology." She laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork-but how the hell do I get out of the field?"
"Anthropology?" he said, frowning. "Oh yeah, I remember reading some stuff by Margaret Mead before the war. So you wanted to study what? People in tribes?"
"Different people anyway. People who didn't do things the way we did them."
"Where were you from?" he asked.
"Los Angeles."
"Oh, yeah. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, movie stars. . . . I always wanted to go there."
One trip would have shattered his illusions. "And you were from... ?"
"Denver."
"Where were you when the war started?"
"Grand Canyon-shooting the rapids. That was the first time we'd ever really done anything, gone anywhere really good. We froze afterward. And my father used to say nuclear winter was nothing but politics."
"I was in the Andes in Peru," she said, "hiking toward Machu Picchu. I hadn't been anywhere either, really. At least not since my husband-"
"You were married?"
"Yes. But he and my son. . . were killed-before the war, I mean. I had gone on a study tour of Peru. Part of going back to college. A friend talked me into taking that trip. She went too. . . and died."
"Yeah." He shrugged uncomfortably. "I was sort of looking forward to going to college myself. But I had just gotten through the tenth grade when everything blew up."
"The Oankali must have taken a lot of people out of the southern hemisphere," she said, thinking. "I mean we froze too, but I heard the southern freeze was spotty. A lot of people must have survived."
He drifted into his own thoughts. "It's funny," he said. "You started out years older than me, but I've been Awake for so long. . . I guess I'm older than you are now."
"I wonder how many people they were able to get out of the northern hemisphere-other than the soldiers and politicians whose shelters hadn't been bombed open." She turned to ask Nikanj and saw that it was gone.
"He left a couple of minutes ago," the man said. "They can move really quietly and fast when they want to."
"But-"
"Hey, don't worry. He'll come back. And if he doesn't, I can open the walls or get food for you if you want anything."
"You can?"
"Sure. They changed my body chemistry a little when I decided to stay. Now the walls open for me just like they do for them."
"Oh." She wasn't sure she liked being left with the man this way-especially if he was telling the truth. If he could open walls and she could not, she was his prisoner.
"They're probably watching us," she said. And she spoke in Oankali, imitating Nikanj's voice: "Now let's see what they'll do if they think they're alone."
The man laughed. "They probably are. Not that it matters."
"It matters to me. I'd rather have watchers where I can keep an eye on them, too."
The laughter again. "Maybe he thought we might be kind of inhibited if he stayed around."
She deliberately ignored the implications of this. "Nikanj isn't male," she said. "It's ooloi."
"Yeah, I know. But doesn't yours seem male to you?" She thought about that. "No. I guess I've taken their word for what they are."
"When they woke me up, I thought the ooloi acted like men and women while the males and females acted like eunuchs. I never really lost the habit of thinking of ooloi as male or female."
That, Lilith thought, was a foolish way for someone who had decided to spend his life among the Oankali to think-a kind of deliberate, persistent ignorance.
"You wait until yours is mature," he said. "You'll see what I mean. They change when they've grown those two extra things." He lifted an eyebrow. "You know what those things are?"
"Yes," she said. He probably knew more, but she realized that she did not want to encourage him to talk about sex; not even Oankali sex.
"Then you know they're not arms, no matter what they tell us to call them. When those things grow in, ooloi let everyone know who's in charge. The Oankali need a little women's and men's lib up here."
She wet her lips. "It wants me to help it through its metamorphosis."
"Help it. What did you tell it?"
"I said I would. It didn't sound like much."
He laughed. "It isn't hard. Puts them in debt to you, though. Not a bad idea to have someone powerful in debt to you. It proves you can be trusted, too. They'll be grateful and you'll be a lot freer. Maybe they'll fix things so you can open your own walls."
"Is that what happened with you?"
He moved restlessly. "Sort of." He got up from his platform, touched all ten fingers to the wall behind him, and waited as the wall opened. Behind the wall was a food storage cabinet of the kind she had often seen at home. Home? Well, what else was it? She lived there.
He took out sandwiches, something that looked like a small pie-that was a pie-and something that looked like French fries.
Lilith stared at the food in surprise. She had been content with the foods the Oankali had given her-good variety and flavor once she began staying with Nikanj's family. She had missed meat occasionally, but once the Oankali made it clear they would neither kill animals for her nor allow her to kill them while she lived with them, she had not minded much. She had never been a particular eater, had never thought of asking the Oankali to make the food they prepared look more like what she was used to.
"Sometimes," he said, "I want a hamburger so bad I dream about them. You know the kind with cheese and bacon and dill pickles and-"
"What's in your sandwich?" she asked.
"Fake meat. Mostly soybean, I guess. And quat." Quatasayasha, the cheeselike Oankali vegetable. "I eat a lot of quat myself," she said.
"Then have some. You don't really want to sit there and watch me eat, do you?"
She smiled and took the sandwich be offered. She was not hungry at all, but eating with him was companionable and safe. She took a few of his French fries, too.
"Cassava," he told her. "Tastes like potatoes, though. I'd never heard of cassava before I got it here. Some tropical plant the Oankali are raising."
"I know. They mean for those of us who go back to Earth to raise it and use it. You can make flour from it and use it like wheat flour."
He stared at her until she frowned. "What's the matter?" she asked.
His gaze slid away from her and he stared downward at nothing. "Have you really thought about what it will be like?" he asked softly. "I mean. . . Stone Age! Digging in the ground with a stick for roots, maybe eating bugs, rats. Rats survived, I hear. Cattle and horses didn't. Dogs didn't. But rats did."
"I know."
"You said you bad a baby."
"My son. Dead."
"Yeah. Well, I'll bet when he was born, you were in a hospital with doctors and nurses all around helping you and giving you shots for the pain. How would you like to do it in a jungle with nothing around but bugs and rats and people who feel sorry for you but can't do shit to help you?"
"I had natural childbirth," she said. "It wasn't any fun, but it went okay."
"What do you mean? No painkiller?"
"None. No hospital either. Just something called a birthing center-a place for pregnant women who don't like the idea of being treated as though they were sick."
He shook his head, smiled crookedly. "I wonder bow many women they had to go through before they came up with you. A lot, I'll bet. You're probably just what they want in ways I haven't even thought of."
His words bit more deeply into her than she let him see. With all the questioning and testing she had gone through, the two and a half years of round-the-clock observation- the Oankali must know her in some ways better than any human being ever had. They knew how she would react to jus
t about everything they put her through. And they knew how to manipulate her, maneuver her into doing whatever they wanted. Of course they knew she had had certain practical experiences they considered important. If she had had an especially difficult time giving birth-if she had had to be taken to the hospital in spite of her wishes, if she had needed a caesarean-they would probably have passed over her to someone else.
"Why are you going back?" Titus asked. "Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?"
"I don't."
His eyes widened. "Then why don't you-"
"We don't have to forget what we know," she said. She smiled to herself. "I couldn't forget if I wanted to. We don't have to go back to the Stone Age. We'll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we'll at least have a chance."
"They don't teach for free! They didn't save us out of kindness! It's all trade with them. You know what you'll have to pay down there!"
"What have you paid to stay up here?"
Silence.
He ate several more bites of food. "The price," he said softly, "is just the same. When they're finished with us there won't be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they'll finish."
"I don't believe it has to be like that."
"Yeah. But then, you haven't been Awake long."
"Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it's still a damn big place."
He looked at her with such open, undisguised pity that she drew back angrily. "Do you think they don't know what a big place it is?" he asked.
"If I thought that, I wouldn't have said anything to you and whoever's listening. They know how I feel."
"And they know how to make you change your mind."
"Not about that. Never about that."
"Like I said, you haven't been Awake long."
What bad they done to him, she wondered. Was it just that they had kept him Awake so long-Awake and for the most part without human companions? Awake and aware that everything he had ever known was dead, that nothing he could have on Earth now could measure up to his former life. How had that gone down with a fourteen-year-old?
"If you wanted it," he said, "they'd let you stay here with me."
"What, permanently?"
"Yeah."
"No."
He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her and came over to her. "You know they expect you to say no," he said. "They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all over again that they were right about you." He stood tall and broad, too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was afraid of him. "Surprise them," he continued softly. "Don't do what they expect-just for once. Don't let them play you like a puppet."
He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.
She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own ranks?
He let her go. "You could be safe here," he said softly. "Down on Earth... how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if you don't forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of them will want to be cavemen-drag you around, put you in a harem, beat the shit out of you." He shook his head. "Tell me I'm wrong. Sit there and tell me I'm wrong."
She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually-as soon as they realized they could get away with it.
He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn't bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure.
"Look," she said when he drew back, "I'm not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali."
"What difference do they make? It's not like human beings were watching us."
"It is to me."
"Lilith," he said, shaking his head, "they will always be watching."
"The other thing I'm not interested in doing is giving them a human child to tamper with."
"You probably already have."
Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.
"They didn't have enough of us for what they call a normal trade," he said. "Most of the ones they have will be Dinso-people who want to go back to Earth. They didn't have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more."
"While we slept? Somehow they-?"
"Somehow!" he hissed. "Anyhow! They took stuff from men and women who didn't even know each other and put it together and made babies in women who never knew the mother or the father of their kid-and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they grew the baby in another kind of animal. They have animals they can adjust to-to incubate human fetuses, as they say. Or maybe they don't even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin from one person and make babies out of it- cloning, you know. Or maybe they use one of their prints- and don't ask me what a print is. But if they've got one of you, they can use it to make another you even if you've been dead for a hundred years and they haven't got anything at all left of your body. And that's just the start. They can make people in ways I don't even know how to talk about. Only thing they can't do, it seems, is let us alone. Let us do it our own way."
His hands were almost gentle on her. "At least they haven't until now." He shook her abruptly. "You know how many kids I got? They say, 'Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.' And I've never even seen a woman in all the time I've been here."
He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.
Yet it would do no good to fight him physically. She was tall, had always thought of herself as strong, but he was much bigger-six-four, six-five, and stocky.
"They've had two hundred and fifty years to fool around with us," she said. "Maybe we can't stop them, but we don't have to help them."
"The hell with them." He tried to unfasten her jacket.
"No!" she shouted, deliberately startling him. "Animals get treated like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send them back to their owners. What do they care? They're just animals!"
He tore her jacket off then fumbled with her pants. She threw her weight against him suddenly and managed to shove him away.
He stumbled backward for several steps, caught himself, came at her again.
Screaming at him, she swung her legs over the platform she had been sitting on and came down standing on the opposite side of it. Now it was between them. He strode around it.
She sat on it again and swung her legs over, keeping it between them.
"Don't make yourself their dog!" she pleaded. "Don't do this!"
He kept coming, too far gone to care what she said. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. He cut her off from the bed by coming over it himself. He cornered her against a wall.
"How many times have they made you do this before?" she asked desperately. "Did you have a sister back on Earth? Would you know her now? Maybe they've made you do it with your sister."
He caught her arm, jerked her to him.
"Maybe they've made you do it with your mother!" she shouted.
He froze and she prayed she had hit a nerve.
"Your mother," she repeated. "You haven't seen her since you were fourteen. How would you
know if they brought her to you and you-"
He hit her.
Staggered by shock and pain, she collapsed against him and he half pushed and half threw her away as though he had found himself clutching something loathsome.
She fell hard, but was not quite unconscious when he came to stand over her.
"I never got to do it before," he whispered. "Never once with a woman. But who knows who they mixed the stuff with." He paused, stared at her where she had fallen. "They said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!" He kicked her hard. The last sound she heard before she lost consciousness was his ragged, shouted curse.
9
She awoke to voices--Oankali near her, not touching her. Nikanj and one other.
"Go away now," Nikanj was saying. "She is regaining consciousness."
"Perhaps I should stay," the other said softly. Kahguyaht. She had thought once that all Oankali sounded alike with their quiet androgynous voices, but now she couldn't mistake Kahguyaht's deceptively gentle tones. "You may need help with her," it said.
Nikanj said nothing.
After a while Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles and said, "I'll leave. You're growing up faster than I thought. Perhaps she's good for you after all."
She was able to see it step through a wall and leave. Not until it was gone did she become aware of the aching of her own body-her jaw, her side, her bead, and in particular, her left arm. There was no sharp pain, nothing startling. Only dull, throbbing pain, especially noticeable when she moved.
"Be still," Nikanj told her. "Your body is still healing. The pain will be gone soon."
She turned her face away from it, ignoring the pain. There was a long silence. Finally it said, "We didn't know." It stopped, corrected itself. "I didn't know how the male would behave. He has never lost control so completely before. He hasn't lost control at all for several years."
"You cut him off from his own kind," she said through swollen lips. "You kept him away from women for how long? Fifteen years? More? In some ways you kept him fourteen for all those years."
"He was content with his Oankali family until he met you."
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