I didn't answer.
"Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?"
"Yes!" Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn't had to watch Lomas. She'd be proud. not terrified.
T'Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.
"I'll sleep in Hoa's room tonight," she said. "And sometime tonight or in the morning, I'll tell her."
This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T'Gatoi and still love me.
"Wait! Gatoi!"
She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned it to face me. "These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!"
"But she's. my sister."
"I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!" "But—"
"It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her."
Human lives. Human young who would someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.
I shook my head. "Don't do it to her, Gatoi." I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?
"Don't do it to Hoa," 1 repeated.
She stared at me, utterly still.
I looked away, then back at her. "Do it to me."
I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.
"No," I told her.
"It's the law," she said.
"Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday."
She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn't let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.
"Leave it here!" I repeated. "If we're not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner."
It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about our other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.
"I will implant the first egg tonight," she said as I put the gun away. "Do you hear, Gan?"
Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T'Gatoi imagine I hadn't known?
"I hear."
"Now!" I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. "You would have done it to Hoa tonight!" I accused.
"I must to do it to someone tonight."
I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. "Don't you care who?"
She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa's room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.
Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn't, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.
"So you care?" I asked. "Do you care that it's me?"
She did not answer for some time. Finally, "You were the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago." "Would you have gone to Hoa?"
"Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?"
"It wasn't. hate."
"I know what it was."
"I was afraid."
Silence.
"I still am." I could admit it to her here, now.
"But you came to me. to save Hoa."
"Yes." I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. "And to keep you for myself," I said. It was so. I didn't understand it, but it was so.
She made a soft hum of contentment. "I couldn't believe I had made such a mistake with you," she said. "I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me."
"I had, but.
"Lomas."
"Yes."
"I have never known a Terran to see and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn't he?"
"Yes."
"Tenarts should be protected from seeing."
I didn't like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. "Not protected," I said. "Shown. Shown when we're young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N'Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death."
She looked down at me. "It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing."
Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.
"You won't see it again," she said. "I don't want you thinking anymore about shooting me."
The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.
"I wouldn't have shot you," I said. "Not you." She had been taken from my father's flesh when he was my age.
"You could have," she insisted.
"Not you." She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.
"Would you have destroyed yourself?"
I moved carefully, uncomfortably. "I could have done that. I nearly did. That's Qui's `away, I wonder if he knows." "What?"
I did not answer.
"You will live now."
"Yes." Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.
"I'm healthy and young," she said. "I won't leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N'Tlic. I'll take care of you."