"I didn't match Peter and Jean. Their own temperaments did-like fire and gasoline."
"...yes. Anyway, Celene is not ready to lose another mate. She'll hold on to him. And Curt, since he sees her as much more vulnerable than she is, will have good reason not to risk himself, not to chance leaving her alone. They'll be all right."
"They won't," Gabriel told her later. He too was free of the drug, finally, but he was handling it better. Kahguyaht, who had been so eager to push Lilith, coerce her, ridicule her, seemed to be infinitely patient with Tate and Gabriel.
"Look at things from Curt's point of view," Gabriel said. "He's not in control even of what his own body does and feels. He's taken like a woman and.. . . No, don't explain!" He held up his hand to stop her from interrupting. "He knows the ooloi aren't male. He knows all the sex that goes on is in his head. It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter! Someone else is pushing all his buttons. He can't let them get away with that."
Honestly frightened, Lilith asked, "How have you... made your peace with it?"
"Who says I have?"
She stared at him. "Gabe, we can't lose you, too."
He smiled. Beautiful, perfect, white teeth. They made her think of some predator. "I don't take the next step," he said, "until I see where I'm standing now. You know I still don't believe this isn't Earth."
"I know."
"A tropical forest in a space ship. Who'd believe that?"
"But the Oankali. You can see that they're not of Earth."
"Sure. But they're here now on what sure looks, sounds, and smells like Earth."
"It isn't."
"So you say. Sooner or later I'll find out for myself."
"Kahguyaht could show you things that would make you sure now. They might even convince Curt."
"Nothing will convince Curt. Nothing will reach him."
"You think he'll do what Peter did?"
"Much more efficiently."
"Oh god. Did you know they put Jean back into suspended animation? She won't even remember Peter when she wakes up."
"I heard. That will make it easier on her when they put her with another guy, I guess."
"Is that what you would want for Tate?" He shrugged, turned, and walked away.
3
Lilith taught all the humans to make thatch shingles and place them in overlapping rows on rafters so that they would not leak. She showed them the best trees to cut for flooring and frame. They all worked several days to construct a large thatch-roofed cabin on stilts, well above the river's highwater mark. The cabin was a twin to the one they had all squeezed into so far-the one Lilith and the ooloi had constructed then the ooloi brought them all through the miles of corridors to the training room.
The ooloi left this second construction strictly to the humans. They watched or sat talking among themselves or disappeared on errands of their own. But when the work was finished they brought in a small feast to celebrate.
"We won't provide food for much longer," one of them told the group. "You'll learn to live on what grows here and to cultivate gardens."
No one was surprised. They had already been cutting hands of green bananas from existing trees and hanging them from beams or from the porch railing. As the bananas ripened, the humans discovered they had to compete with the insects for them.
A few people had also been cutting pineapples and picking papayas and breadfruits from existing trees. Most people did not like the breadfruit until Lilith showed them the seeded form of the fruit, the breadnut. When they roasted the seeds as she instructed and ate them, they realized they had been eating them all along back in the great room.
They had pulled sweet cassava from the ground and dug up the yams Lilith had planted during her own training.
Now it was time for them to begin planting their own crops.
And, perhaps, now it was time for the Oankali to begin to see what they would harvest in their human crop.
Two men and a woman took their allotted tools and vanished into the forest. They did not really know enough yet to be on their own, but they were gone. Their ooloi did not go after them.
The group of ooloi put their head tentacles and sensory arms together for a moment and seemed to come to a very fast agreement None of them would pay any attention to the three missing people.
"No one has escaped," Nikanj told Joseph and Lilith when they asked what would be done. "The missing people are still on the island. They're being watched."
"Watched through all these trees?" Joseph demanded.
"The ship is keeping track of them. If they're hurt, they'll be taken care of."
Other humans left the settlement. As the days passed, some of their ooloi seemed acutely uncomfortable. They kept to themselves, sat rock still, their head and body tentacles drawn into thick, dark lumps that looked, as Leah said, like grotesque tumors. These ooloi could be shouted at, rained on, tripped over. They never moved. When their head tentacles ceased to follow the movements of those around them, their mates arrived to tend them.
Male and female Oankali came out of the forest and took charge of their particular ooloi. Lilith never saw any of them called, but she saw one pair arrive.
She had gone alone to a place on the river where there was a heavily laden breadnut tree. She had climbed the tree, not only to get the fruit, but to enjoy the solitude and the beauty of the tree. She had never been much of a climber even as a child, but during her training, she had developed climbing skill and confidence-and a love of being so close to something so much of Earth.
From the tree, she saw two Oankali come out of the water. They did not seem to swim in toward land, but simply stood up near shore and walked in. Both focused on her for a moment, then headed inland toward the settlement.
She had watched them in utter silence, but they had known she was there. One more male and female, come to rescue a sick, abandoned ooloi.
Would it give the humans a feeling of power to know that they could make their ooloi feel sick and abandoned? Ooloi did not endure well when bereft of all those who carried their particular scent, their particular chemical marker. They lived. Metabolisms slowed, they retreated deep within themselves until called back by their families or, less satisfactorily, by another ooloi behaving as a kind of physician. So why didn't they go to their mates when their humans left? Why did they stay and get sick?
Lilith walked back to the settlement, a long crude basket filled with breadnuts on her back. She found the male and female ministering to their ooloi holding it between them and entangling its head and body tentacles with their own. Wherever the three touched, tentacles joined them. It was an intimate, vulnerable position, and other ooloi lounged nearby, guarding without seeming to guard. There were also a few humans watching. Lilith looked around the settlement, wondering how many of the humans not present would not come back from their day of wandering or food gathering. Did those who left come together on some other part of the island? Had they built a shelter? Were they building a boat? A wild thought struck her: What if they were right? What if they somehow were on Earth? What if it were possible to row a boat to freedom? What if, in spite of all she had seen and felt, this was some kind of hoax? How would it be perpetrated? Why would it be perpetrated? Why would the Oankali go to so much trouble?
No. She did not understand why the Oankali had done some of what they had done, but she believed the basics. The ship. The Earth, waiting to be recolonized by its people. The Oankali's price for saving the few remaining fragments of humanity.
But more people were leaving the settlement. Where were they? What if-The thought would not let her alone no matter what facts she felt she knew. What if the others were right?
Where had the doubt come from?
That evening as she brought in a load of firewood, Tate blocked her path.
"Curt and Celene are gone," she said quietly. "Celene let it slip to me that they were leaving."