It did not look like anything Lilith would want to touch. She looked at Kahguyaht and decided to take a chance on its new civility. "What about the sensory hand?" she asked. "Nikanj mentioned that there was such a thing."
Kahguyaht said nothing for several seconds. Finally, in a tone she could not interpret, it said, "Yes. There is such a thing."
"If I've asked something that I shouldn't, just tell me," she said. Something about that odd tone of voice made her want to move away from it, but she kept still.
"You haven't," Kahguyaht said, its voice neutral now. "In fact, it's important that you know about the... sensory hand." It extended one of its sensory arms, long and gray and rough-skinned, still reminding her of a blunt, closed elephant's trunk. "All the strength and resistance to harm of this outer covering is to protect the hand and its related organs," it said. "The arm is closed, you see?" It showed her the rounded tip of the arm, capped by a semitransparent material that she knew was smooth and hard.
"When it's like this, it's merely another limb." Kahguyaht coiled the end of the arm, wormlike, reached out, touched Lilith's head, then held before her eyes a single strand of hair, pulled straight in a twist of the arm. "It is very flexible, very versatile, but only another limb." The arm drew back from Lilith, releasing the hair. The semitransparent material at the end began to change, to move in circular waves away to the sides of the tip and something slender and pale emerged from the center of the tip. As she watched, the slender thing seemed to thicken and divide. There were eight fingers-or rather, eight slender tentacles arranged around a circular palm that looked wet and deeply lined. It was like a starfish-one of the brittle stars with long, slender, snakelike arms.
"How does it seem to you?" Kahguyaht asked.
"On Earth, we had animals that looked like that," she replied. "They lived in the seas. We called them starfish."
Kahguyaht smoothed its tentacles. "I've seen them. There is a similarity." It turned the hand so that she could see it from different angles. The palm, she realized, was covered with tiny projections very like the tube feet of a starfish. They were almost transparent. And the lines she had seen on the palm were actually orifices-openings to a dark interior.
There was a faint odor to the hand-oddly flowery. Lilith did not like it and drew back from it after a moment of looking.
Kahguyaht retracted the hand so quickly that it seemed to vanish. It lowered the sensory arm. "Humans and Oankali tend to bond to one ooloi," it told her. "The bond is chemical and not strong in you now because of Nikanj's immaturity. That's why my scent makes you uncomfortable."
"Nikanj didn't mention anything like that," she said suspiciously.
"It healed your injuries. It improved your memory. It couldn't do those things without leaving its mark. It should have told you."
"Yes. It should have. What is this mark? What will it do to me?"
"No harm. You'll want to avoid deep contact-contact that involves penetration of the flesh-with other ooloi, you understand? Perhaps for a while after Nikanj matures, you'll want to avoid all contact with most people. Follow your feelings. People will understand."
"But... how long will it last?"
"It's different with humans. Some linger in the avoidance stage much longer than we would. The longest I've known it to last is forty days."
"And during that time, Ahajas and Dichaan-"
"You won't avoid them, Lilith. They're part of the household. You'll be comfortable with them."
"What happens if I don't avoid people, if I ignore my feelings?"
"If you managed to do that, you'd make yourself sick, at least. You might manage to kill yourself."
"...that bad."
"Your body will tell you what to do. Don't worry." It shifted its attention to Nikanj. "Nikanj will be most vulnerable when the sensory hands begin to grow. It will need a special food then. I'll show you."
"All right."
"You'll actually have to put the food into its mouth."
"I've already done that with the few things it's wanted to eat."
"Good." Kahguyaht rustled its tentacles. "I didn't want to accept you, Lilith. Not for Nikanj or for the work you'll do. I believed that because of the way human genetics were expressed in culture, a human male should be chosen to parent the first group. I think now that I was wrong."
"Parent?"
"That's the way we think of it. To teach, to give comfort, to feed and clothe, to guide them through and interpret what will be, for them, a new and frightening world. To parent."
"You're going to set me up as their mother?"
"Define the relationship in any way that's comfortable to you. We have always called it parenting." It turned toward a wall as though to open it, then stopped, faced Lilith again. "It's a good thing that you'll be doing. You'll be in a position to help your own people in much the same way you're helping Nikanj now."
"They won't trust me or my help. They'll probably kill me."
"They won't."
"You don't understand us as well as you think you do."
"And you don't understand us at all. You never will, really, though you'll be given much more information about us."
"Then put me back to sleep, dammit, and choose someone you think is brighter! I never wanted this job!"
It was silent for several seconds. Finally, it said, "Do you really believe I was disparaging your intelligence?"
She glared at it, refusing to answer.
"I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will."
III
NURSERY
1
The room was slightly larger than a football field. Its ceiling was a vault of soft, yellow light. Lilith had caused two walls to grow at a corner of it so that she had a room, enclosed except for a doorway where the walls would have met. There were times when she brought the walls together, sealing herself away from the empty vastness outside--away from the decisions she must make. The walls and floor of the great room were hers to reshape as she pleased. They would do anything she was able to ask of them except let her out.
She had erected her cubicle enclosing the doorway of a bathroom. There were eleven more bathrooms unused along one long wall. Except for the narrow, open doorways of these facilities, the great room was featureless. Its walls were pale green and its floors pale brown. Lilith bad asked for color and Nikanj bad found someone who could teach it how to induce the ship to produce color. Stores of food and clothing were encapsulated within the walls in various unmarked cabinets within Lilith's room and at both ends of the great room.
The food, she had been told, would be replaced as it was used--replaced by the ship itself which drew on its own substance to make print reconstructions of whatever each cabinet had been taught to produce.
The long wall opposite the bathrooms concealed eighty sleeping human beings-healthy, under fifty, English-speaking, and frighteningly ignorant of what was in store for them.
Lilith was to choose and Awaken no fewer than forty. No wall would open to let her or those she Awakened out until at least forty human beings were ready to meet the Oankali.
The great room was darkening slightly. Evening. Lilith found surprising comfort and relief in having time divided visibly into days and nights again. She had not realized how she had missed the slow change of light, how welcome the darkness would be.
"It's time for you to get used to having planetary night again," Nikanj had told her.
On impulse, she had asked if there were anywhere in the ship where she could look at the stars.
Nikanj had taken her, on the day before it put her into this huge, empty room, down several corridors and ramps, then by way of something very like an elevator. Nikanj said it corresponded closer to a gas bubble moving harmlessly through a living body. Her destination turned out to be a kind of observation bubble through which she could see not only stars, but the disk of the Earth, gleaming like a full moon in the black sky.