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We’ve studied your bodies, your thinking, your literature, your historical records, your many cultures . . . We know more of what you’re capable of than you do.”
This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good.
“Doesn’t it frighten you to say things like that to me?” he asked. “No,” she said. “It scares me to have people doing things to me that I don’t understand.”
Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed.”
“You’ll begin again. We’ll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were.” “And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?” “No. Only different.”
“It was a womb. The time had come for us to be born.”
“You are intelligent,” he said. “That’s the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we’ve found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics.” “What’s the second characteristic?” “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,
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“Yes,” he said, “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.”
“Would you have done it?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “Why?” “For you.”
Beyond this, the Oankali seemed to tell the truth as they perceived it, always. This left her with an almost intolerable sense of hopelessness and helplessness—as though catching them in lies would make them vulnerable. As though it would make the thing they intended to do less real, easier to deny.
In a very real sense, she was an experimental animal. Not a pet. What could Nikanj do for an experimental animal? Protest tearfully (?) when she was sacrificed at the end of the experiment?
She was intended to live and reproduce, not to die. Experimental animal, parent to domestic animals? Or . . . nearly extinct animal, part of a captive breeding program? Human biologists had done that before the war—used a few captive members of an endangered animal species to breed more for the wild population. Was that what she was headed for? Forced artificial insemination. Surrogate motherhood? Fertility drugs and forced “donations” of eggs? Implantation of unrelated fertilized eggs. Removal of children from mothers at birth . . . Humans had done these things to captive breeders—all for a
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“That’s foolishness—but it’s a lovely foolishness. I feel the same way about you. You see what comes of being shut up together and having so little to do. Good things as well as bad.
“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.”