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“They will! He isn’t Human. Un-Human women are offensive to them, but they don’t usually try to hurt them, and they do sleep with them—like a racist sleeping with racially different women. But Akin … They’ll see him as a threat. Hell, he is a threat. He’s one of their replacements.”
“Trade means change. Bodies change. Ways of living must change. Did you think your children would only look different?”
But if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone.”
If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.
Akin is the child of a man who died nearly thirty years ago.”
“So you’re what? In your fifties?” “Fifty-five.”
truth. On the other hand, reasons and justifications can sound just as good when they’re made up as an afterthought. Have your fun, then come up with a wonderful-sounding reason why it was the right thing for you to do.”
“What’s he got between his legs?”
dsigusting
The Human Contradiction again. The Contradiction, it was more often called among Oankali. Intelligence and hierarchical behavior. It was fascinating, seductive, and lethal. It had brought Humans to their final war.
“We’ve given them what we can of the things they value—long life, freedom from disease, freedom to live as they wish. We can’t help them create more life only to destroy it.”
“If your flesh knows you’ve done all you can for Humanity, their flesh should know as mine does that you’ve done almost nothing. Their flesh should know that resister Humans must survive as a separate, self-sufficient species. Their flesh should know that Humanity must live!”
All people who know what it is to end should be allowed to continue if they can continue.
You and those who help you will give them the tools to create a civilization that will destroy itself as certainly as the pull of gravity will keep their new world in orbit around its sun.”
Humans seemed almost not to be there when they closed their eyes. They could close off all visual awareness and shut themselves too completely within their own flesh.
“Get someone to help her,” he said. Akin could recall hearing him curse in that same tone of voice. Only Humans could do that: say, “Get someone to help her,” with their mouths, and “Damn her to hell!” with their voices and bodies.
“Humanity extinguishing itself in boredom, hopelessness, bitterness … I’m surprised we’ve lasted this long.”
“That you can’t grow out of it, can’t resolve it in favor of intelligence. That hierarchical behavior selects for hierarchical behavior, whether it should or not. That not even Mars will be enough of a challenge to change you.” He paused. “That to give you a new world and let you procreate again would … would be like breeding intelligent beings for the sole purpose of having them kill one another.”
“Yori, Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.”
“Chance exists. Mutation. Unexpected effects of the new environment. Things no one has thought of. The Oankali can make mistakes.”
WHEN HE AWOKE, THE house was aflame.
The other was Neci. She had graduated from attempting mutilation to attempting murder.
He was perhaps the last to see the smoke cloud behind them and Phoenix still burning.
