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."
"What did he know? You never let him see anybody else!"
"It wasn't necessary. His family took care of him."
She stared at it, feeling more strongly than ever, the difference between them-the unbridgeable alienness of Nikanj. She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate. It could do the same with her, although it could force her to obey whether she understood or not. Or it could turn her over to others who would use force against her.
"His family thought you should have mated with him," it said. "They knew you wouldn't stay with him permanently, but they believed you would share sex with him at least once."
Share sex, she thought sadly. Where had it picked up that expression? She had never said it. She liked it, though. Should she have shared sex with Paul Titus? "And maybe gotten pregnant," she said aloud.
"You would not have gotten pregnant," Nikanj said.
And it had her full attention. "Why not?" she demanded.
"It isn't time for you to have children yet."
"Have you done something to me? Am I sterile?"
"Your people called it birth control. You are slightly changed. It was done while you slept, as it was done to all humans at first. It will be undone eventually."
"When?" she asked bitterly. "When you're ready to breed me?"
"No. When you're ready. Only then."
"Who decides? You?"
"You, Lilith. You."
Its sincerity confused her. She felt that she had learned to read its emotions through posture, sensory tentacle position, tone of voice. . . . It seemed not only to be telling the truth-as usual-but to be telling a truth it considered important. Yet Paul Titus, too, had seemed to be telling the truth. "Does Paul really have over seventy children?" she asked.
"Yes. And he's told you why. The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay." Nikanj hesitated. "They should not have told Paul what they were doing. But that's always a difficult thing to realize-and sometimes we realize it too late."
"He had a right to know!"
"Knowing frightened him and made him miserable. You discovered one of his fears-that perhaps one of his female relatives had survived and been impregnated with his sperm. He's been told that this did not happen. Sometimes he believes; sometimes he doesn't."
"He still had a right to know. I would want to know."
Silence.
"Has it been done to me, Nikanj?"
"No."
"And . . . will it be?"
It hesitated, then spoke softly. "The Toaht have a print of you-of every human we brought aboard. They need the genetic diversity. We're keeping prints of the humans they take away, too. Millenia after your death, your body might be reborn aboard the ship. It won't be you. it will develop an identity of its own."
"A clone," she said tonelessly. Her left arm throbbed, and she rubbed it without actually focusing on the pain.
"No," Nikanj said. "What we've preserved of you isn't living tissue. It's memory. A gene map, your people might call it-though they couldn't have made one like those we remember and use. It's more like what they would call a mental blueprint. A plan for the assembly of one specific human being: You. A tool for reconstruction."
It let her digest this, said nothing more to her for several minutes. So few humans could do that-just let someone have a few minutes to think.
"Will you destroy my print if I ask you to?" she asked.
"It's a memory, Lilith, a complete memory carried by several people. How would I destroy such a thing?"
A literal memory, then, not some kind of mechanical recording or written record. Of course.
After a while, Nikanj said, "Your print may never be used. And if it is, the reconstruction will be as much at home aboard the ship as you were on Earth. She'll grow up here and the people she grows up among will be her people. You know they won't harm her."
She sighed. "I don't know any such thing. I suspect they'll do what they think is best for her. Heaven help her."
It sat beside her and touched her aching left arm with several head tentacles. "Did you really need to know that?" it asked. "Should I have told you?"
It had never asked such a question before. Her arm hurt more than ever for a moment, then felt warm and pain-free. She managed not to jerk away, though Nikanj had not paralyzed her.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"You were having pain in that arm. There's no need for you to suffer."
"I hurt all over."
"I know. I'll take care of it. I just wanted to talk to you before you slept again."
She lay still for a moment, glad that the arm was no longer throbbing. She had barely been aware of this individual pain before Nikanj stopped it. Now she realized it had been among the worst of the many. The hand, the wrist, the lower arm.