She slept a lot and was grateful to her body for responding to her alternating moods of fear and boredom by dozing frequently. The small, painless awakenings from these naps eventually began to disappoint her as much as had the greater Awakening.
The greater Awakening from what? Drugged sleep? What else could it be? She had not been injured in the war; had not requested or needed medical care. Yet here she was.
She sang songs and remembered books she had read, movies and television shows she had seen, family stories she had heard, bits of her own life that had seemed so ordinary while she was free to live it. She made up stories and argued both sides of questions she had once been passionate about, anything!
More time passed. She held out, did not speak directly to her captors except to curse them. She offered no cooperation. There were moments when she did not know why she resisted. What would she be giving up if she answered her captors' questions? What did she have to lose beyond misery, isolation, and silence? Yet she held out.
There came a time when she could not stop talking to herself, when it seemed that every thought that occurred to her must be spoken aloud. 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.
Eventually, as she sat on the floor rocking, thinking about losing her mind, and perhaps talking about it too, something was introduced into the room-some gas, perhaps. She fell backward and drifted into what she had come to think of as her second long sleep.
At her next Awakening, whether it came hours, days, or years later, her captors began talking to her again, asking her the same questions as though they had not asked them before. This time she answered. She lied when she wanted to but she always responded. There had been healing in the long sleep. She Awoke with no particular inclination to speak her thoughts aloud or cry or sit on the floor and rock backward and forward, but her memory was unimpaired. She remembered all too well the long period of silence and isolation. Even an unseen inquisitor was preferable.
The questions became more complex, actually became conversations during later Awakenings. Once, they put a child in with her-a small boy with long, straight black hair and smoky-brown skin, paler than her own. He did not speak English and he was terrified of her. He was only about five years old-a little older than Ayre, her own son. Awakening beside her in this strange place was probably the most frightening thing the little boy had ever experienced.
He spent many of his first hours with her either hiding in the bathroom or pressed into the corner farthest from her. It took her a long time to convince him that she was not dangerous. Then she began teaching him English-and he began teaching her whatever language he spoke. Sharad was his name. She sang songs to him and be learned them instantly. He sang them back to her in almost accentless English. He did not understand why she did not do the same when he sang her his songs.
She did eventually learn the songs. She enjoyed the exercise. Anything new was treasure.
Sharad was a blessing even when he wet the bed they shared or became impatient because she failed to understand him quickly enough. He was not much like Ayre in appearance or temperament, but she could touch him. She could not remember when she had last touched someone. She had not realized how much she had missed it. She worried about him and wondered bow to protect him. Who knew what their captors had done to him-or what they would do? But she bad no more power than he did. At her next Awakening, he was gone. Experiment completed.
She begged them to let him come back, but they refused. They said he was with his mother. She did not believe them. She imagined Sharad locked alone in his own small cubicle, his sharp, retentive mind dulling as time passed.
Unconcerned, her captors began a complex new series of questions and exercises.
2
What would they do this time? Ask more questions? Give her another companion? She barely cared.
She sat on the bed, dressed, waiting, tired in a deep, emptied way that had nothing to do with physical weariness. Sooner or later, someone would speak to her.
She had a long wait. She had lain down and was almost asleep when a voice spoke her name.
"Lilith?" The usual, quiet, androgynous voice.
She drew a deep, weary breath. "What?" she asked. But as she spoke, she realized the voice bad not come from above as it always had before. She sat up quickly and looked around. In one corner she found the shadowy figure of a man, thin and long-haired.
Was he the reason for the clothing, then? He seemed to be wearing a similar outfit. Something to take off when the two of them got to know each other better? Good god.
"I think," she said softly, "that you might be the last straw."
"I'm not here to hurt you," he said.
"No. Of course you're not."
"I'm here to take you outside?'
Now she stood up, staring hard at him, wishing for more light. Was he making a joke? Laughing at her?
"Outside to what?"
"Education. Work. The beginning of a new life."
She took a step closer to him, then stopped. He scared her somehow. She could not make herself approach him. "Something is wrong," she said. "Who are you?"
He moved slightly. "And what am I?"
She jumped because that was what she had almost said.
"I'm not a man," he said. "I'm not a human being."
She moved back against the bed, but did not sit down. "Tell me what you are."
"I'm here to tell you. . . and 'show you. Will you look at me now?"
Since she was looking at him-it--she frowned. "The light-''
"It will change when you're ready."
"You're. . . what? From some other world?"
"From a number of other worlds. You're one of the few English speakers who never considered that she might be in the hands of extraterrestrials."
"I did consider it," Lilith whispered. "Along with the possibility that I might be in prison, in an insane asylum, in the hands of the FBI, the CIA, or the KGB. The other possibilities seemed marginally less ridiculous."
The creature said nothing. It stood utterly still in its corner, and she knew from her many Awakenings that it would not speak to her again until she did what it wished- until she said she was ready to look at it, then, in brighter light, took the obligatory look. These things, whatever they were, were incredibly good at waiting. She made this one wait for several minutes, and not only was it silent, it never moved a muscle. Discipline or physiology?
She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by "ugly" faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage.
"All right," she said. "Show me."
The lights brightened as she had supposed they would, and what had seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose-no bulge, no nostrils-just flat, gray skin. It was gray all over-pale gray skin, darker gray hair on its head that grew down around its eyes and ears and at its throat. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the creature could see. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears as well as around them. Above, it joined the eye hair, and below and behind, it joined the head hair. The island of throat hair seemed to move slightly, and it occurred to her that that might be where the creature breathed-a kind of natural tracheostomy.
Lilith glanced at the humanoid body, wondering how humanlike it really was. "I don't mean any offense," she said, "but are you male or female?"
"It's wrong to assume that I must be a sex you're familiar with," it said, "but as it happens, I'm male."
Good. "It" could become "he" again. Less awkward.
"You should notice," he said, "that what you probably see as hair isn't hair at all. I have no hair. The reality seems to bother humans."