"Everyone lost relatives and Mends," she said. "As far as I know, I'm the only member of my family still alive."
"I saw my father, my brother-their bodies. I don't know what happened to my mother. I was dying myself when the Oankali found me. They tell me I was. I don't remember, but I believe them."
"I don't remember their finding me either." She twisted around. "Nikanj, did your people do something to us to keep us from remembering?"
Nikanj seemed to rouse itself slowly. "They had to," it said. "Humans who were allowed to remember their rescue became uncontrollable. Some died in spite of our care."
Not surprising. She tried to imagine what she had done when in the middle of the shock of realizing that her home, her family, her Mends, her world were all destroyed. She was confronted with a collecting party of Oankali. She must have believed she had lost her mind. Or perhaps she did lose it for a while. It was a miracle that she had not killed herself trying to escape them.
"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."