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Opening and closing her jacket, her
hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third Awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her. What had she lost or gained, and why? And what else might be done? She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge.
But she felt she had to risk bargaining, try to gain something, and her only currency was cooperation.
She would make desperate efforts to be quiet but somehow the words began to spill from her again. She thought she would lose her sanity; had already begun to lose it. She began to cry.
Something to take off when the two of them got to know each other better? Good god.
LMAOAOA
She made this one wait for several minutes, and not only was it silent, it never moved a muscle. Discipline or physiology?
Humanity in its attempt to destroy itself had made the world unlivable.
She had considered her survival a misfortune—a promise of a more lingering death.
“No!” he said sharply. “I’ll only talk to you, Lilith, if you look at me.”
Securityyy
Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.”
Some things were immune to their poison.” “Maybe humans are.” He answered her softly. “No, Lilith, you’re not.”
The isolation room that she had hated for so long suddenly seemed safe and comforting. “Back into your cage, Lilith?” Jdahya asked softly.
She was retreating into her cage—like a zoo animal that had been shut up for so long that the cage had become home.
Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed.”
She hugged herself tightly, arms across her chest. More isolation.
“You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you.”
“You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It’s a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all…” The rattling sounded again. “That was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing.”
“intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”
She jerked her head away, not wanting to be sampled anymore by anyone.
Its tentacles settled into ugly irregular lumps when she shouted at it, but it stayed.
How was it that she had not been able to take what Jdahya offered?
Humans had done these things to captive breeders—all for a higher good, of course.
Writing materials. Such small things, and yet they were denied to her. Such small things!
There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.
The Dinso group was staying on Earth, changing itself by taking part of humanity’s genetic heritage, spreading its own genes like a disease among unwilling humans… Dinso. It wasn’t a surname. It was a terrible promise, a threat.
The Oankali had removed her so completely from her own people—only to tell her they planned to use her as a Judas goat. And they had done it all so softly, without brutality, and with patience and gentleness so corrosive of any resolve on her part.
She focused on the fact that it was alive and she had probably caused it pain. She had not merely caused an interesting effect, she had caused harm.
He had head injuries—brain damage. It took him three months to finish what the accident had begun. Three months to die.
He was their only son, but he stared through them as he stared through Lilith, his eyes empty of recognition, empty of him.
Perhaps he was with Ayre, or caught between her and Ayre—between this world and the next.
“There’s something wrong with doing it that way—surprising people. It’s… treating them as though they aren’t people, as though they aren’t intelligent.”
How would it be to awaken with Kahguyaht there instead, lying beside her like a grotesque lover instead of an unhappy child?
Then there were confused memories, dreams, finally nothing.
Your scent, your touch is different, neutral.” Thank god, she thought.
If he were thoroughly enough divorced from his humanity to want to stay here, who knew what else he might be willing to do.
He was beautiful. Even if he had been bent and old, he would have been beautiful.
The sound of his voice—deep, definitely human, definitely male—fed a hunger in her.
If he could open walls and she could not, she was his prisoner.
a kind of deliberate, persistent ignorance.
You know what you’ll have to pay down there!” “What have you paid to stay up here?” Silence.
Oh aii
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 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.
She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate.
“I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will.”
Burn
Not fathering children had bothered him intensely, and he had blamed his wives, all the while refusing to see a doctor himself.
Silly goose
These were her tools. And every one of them would make her seem less human.
Or she did them so badly that she abandoned them before anyone noticed her incompetence. People had to see her as a formidable presence, bright, dominant, well off.
“On the theory that if you fall off a horse, you should immediately get back on?”
“We’re protected from one another,” Lilith said. “We’re an endangered species—almost extinct. If we’re going to survive, we need protection.”
Learn and run, Lilith thought almost gleefully.
