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“He’s old, he’s short, and he’s ugly. Haven’t you got any discrimination at all?”
She just wanted to prove she could have him—and in the process, try him out.
“A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape. But you’re more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. We’re interested in those too. That’s why we saved as many of you as we could.”
“Do you see?” he asked gently. “Do you understand why they chose you—someone who desperately doesn’t want the responsibility, who doesn’t want to lead, who is a woman?” The condescension in his voice first startled, then angered her. “Do I see, Joe? Oh, yes. I’ve had plenty of time to see.”
Men, am I right?
that she would resist Nikanj’s invitation—or that she wanted to resist it.
This was what had captured Paul Titus, she thought. This, not sorrow over his losses or fear of a primitive Earth.
She felt it tremble against her, and knew it was in.
What was in...
She never knew whether she was receiving Nikanj’s approximation of Joseph, a true transmission of what Joseph was feeling, some combination of truth and approximation, or just a pleasant fiction.
There was comfort in eating together—one of their few comforts.
“How many times can you have everyone taken from you and still have the will to start again?” Tate muttered.
“I liked it,” she said softly. “Didn’t you?” “That thing will never touch me again if I have anything to say about it.”
“Don’t let him touch you! If you have a choice, keep away from him!”
She did not want to see Paul Titus in Joseph.
She got up, knowing that she had not given him the promise he wanted, knowing that he would remember her silence.
Lilith stared at him. He was garbage. Human garbage. How had she made the mistake of Awakening him? And what could she do with him now?
“There’ll be no rape here,” she said evenly. She raised her voice. “Nobody here is property. Nobody here has the right to the use of anybody else’s body. There’ll be no back-to-the-Stone-Age, caveman bullshit!” She let her voice drop to normal. “We stay human. We treat each other like people, and we get through this like people. Anyone who wants to be something less will have his chance in the forest. There’ll be plenty of room for him to run away and play at being an ape.”
The room was a scene of quiet, strangely gentle chaos.
“Rather with any human than with me,” Nikanj supplied softly. Joseph only stared at it. “And yet I pleased you. I pleased you very much.”
a way of turning him against himself, causing him to demean himself in alien perversions. His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.
“They’ll help you.” Very softly. “They’ll help both you and Tehjaht. They will help.”
When they took her hands, they felt right. There was a real chemical affinity.
“Will we want to by then? What will we be, I wonder? Not human. Not anymore.”
Let them learn that it isn’t shameful to be together with one another and with us.”
Nikanj came around the buttress, destroying her sense of solitude and home.
“It might be better for both our peoples if we were not so strongly drawn to you.”
He’s taken like a woman
she had developed climbing skill and confidence—and a love of being so close to something so much of Earth.
Would it give the humans a feeling of power to know that they could make their ooloi feel sick and abandoned?
So why didn’t they go to their mates when their humans left? Why did they stay and get sick?
The Oankali’s price for saving the few remaining fragments of humanity.
“In spite of the sun, the moon and the stars? In spite of the rain and the trees that have obviously been here for hundreds of years?”
“What the Oankali let you see and made you feel. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff Kahguyaht has made me feel.”
“Why would you stay?” The whispered words had the impact of a shout.
She resented his silence, but accepted it.
There would be no Nikanj tonight to heal her insect bites, no gentle, multiple touches of sensory tentacles and sensory hands. Was she the only one who would miss them?
“It was a pass-fail course, Gabe. A live-die course.” She turned and began walking upriver, breaking trail. After a while, she heard them following.
Had she hated Kahguyaht so much? Lilith wondered. Or was she only beginning to miss it and trying to defend herself against her own feelings?
She did not expect to make love. But she was bothered by the care he took not to touch her. She reached out and touched his face to make him turn toward her. Instead, he drew away.
His flesh felt wrong somehow, oddly repellant.
He had been water after a very long drought. But then Nikanj had come to stay.
Had that unity now become a necessary feature of their human lives? If it had, what could they do? Would the effect wear off?
He tried to jerk away reflexively, then he seemed to realize something was wrong. He held her hand for a long, increasingly uncomfortable moment. Finally it was she who drew away, shuddering with revulsion and relief.
She must get nonhumans to help her against her own people in a place that might or might not be on Earth.
Learn and run. Learn to live in this country, then lose themselves in it, go beyond the reach of the Oankali. Learn to touch one another as human beings again.
did not understand how she could even look at Joseph’s body so mutilated, dead.
Her last memory was of him flinching away from her too-human touch.
It had not helped Joseph. She did not need anything from it now. Yet she only twisted in its grasp.
Curt had walked away and left him as though he were a dead animal. He should be buried.
Why should it feel comfortable about parasitizing her feelings for Joseph—her feelings for anything?
Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair—an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.
