"Very well."
"Colors? Depth?"
"Yes."
Yet it was true that he had no eyes. She could see now that there were only dark patches where tentacles grew thickly. The same with the sides of his head where ears should have been. And there were openings at his throat. And the tentacles around them didn't look as dark as the others. Murkily translucent, pale gray worms.
"In fact," he said, "you should be aware that I can see wherever I have tentacles-and I can see whether I seem to notice or not. I can't not see."
That sounded like a horrible existence-not to be able to close one's eyes, sink into the private darkness behind one's own eyelids. "Don't you sleep?"
"Yes. But not the way you do."
She shifted suddenly from the subject of his sleeping to her own. "You never told me how long you kept me asleep."
"About. . . two hundred and fifty of your years."
This was more than she could assimilate at once. She said nothing for so long that he broke the silence.
"Something went wrong when you were first Awakened. I heard about it from several people. Someone handled you badly-underestimated you. You are like us in some ways, but you were thought to be like your military people hidden underground. They refused to talk to us too. At first. You were left asleep for about fifty years after that first mistake."
She crept to the bed, worms or no worms, and leaned against the end of it. "I'd always thought my Awakenings might be years apart, but I didn't really believe it."
"You were like your world. You needed time to heal. And we needed time to learn more about your kind." He paused. "We didn't know what to think when some of your people killed themselves. Some of us believed it was because they had been left out of the mass suicide-that they simply wanted to finish the dying. Others said it was because we kept them isolated. We began putting two or more together, and many injured or killed one another. Isolation cost fewer lives."
These last words touched a memory in her. "Jdahya?" she said.
The tentacles down the sides of his face wavered, looked for a moment like dark, muttonchop whiskers.
"At one point a little boy was put in with me. His name was Sharad. What happened to him?"
He said nothing for a moment, then all his tentacles stretched themselves upward. Someone spoke to him from above in the usual way and in a voice much like his own, but this time in a foreign language, choppy and fast.
"My relative will find out," he told her. "Sharad is almost certainly well, though he may not be a child any longer."
"You've let children grow up and grow old?"
"A few, yes. But they've lived among us. We haven't isolated them."
"You shouldn't have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another."
His tentacles writhed repulsively. "We know. I wouldn't have cared to endure as much solitude as you have. But we had no skill at grouping humans in ways that suited them."
"But Sharad and I-"
"He may have had parents, Lilith."
Someone spoke from above, in English this time. "The boy has parents and a sister. He's asleep with them, and he's still very young." There was a pause. "Lilith, what language did he speak?"
"I don't know," Lilith said. "Either he was too young to tell me or he tried and I didn't understand. I think he must have been East Indian, though-if that means anything to you."
"Others know. I was only curious."
"You're sure he's all right?"
"He's well."
She felt reassured at that and immediately questioned the emotion. Why should one more anonymous voice telling her everything was fine reassure her?
"Can I see him?" she asked.
"Jdahya?" the voice said.
Jdahya turned toward her. "You'll be able to see him when you can walk among us without panic. This is your last isolation room. When you're ready, I'll take you outside."
3
Jdahya would not leave her. As much as she had hated her solitary confinement, she longed to be rid of him. He fell silent for a while and she wondered whether he might be sleeping-to the degree that he did sleep. She lay down herself, wondering whether she could relax enough to sleep with him there. It would be like going to sleep knowing there was a rattlesnake in the room, knowing she could wake up and find it in her bed.
She could not fall asleep facing him. Yet she could not keep her back to him long. Each time she dozed, she would jolt awake and look to see if he had come closer. This exhausted her, but she could not stop doing it. Worse, each time she moved, his tentacles moved, straightening lazily in her direction as though he were sleeping with his eyes open-as he no doubt was.
Painfully tired, head aching, stomach queasy, she climbed down from her bed and lay alongside it on the floor. She could not see him now, no matter how she turned. She could see only the platform beside her and the walls. He was no longer part of her world.
"No, Lilith," he said as she closed her eyes.
She pretended not to hear him.
"Lie on the bed," he said, "or on the floor over here. Not over there."
She lay rigid, silent.
"If you stay where you are, I'll take the bed."
That would put him just above her-too close, looming over her, Medusa leering down.
She got up and all but fell across the bed, damning him, and, to her humiliation, crying a little. Eventually she slept. Her body had simply had enough.
She awoke abruptly, twisting around to look at him. He was still on the platform, his position hardly altered. When his head tentacles swept in her direction she got up and ran into the bathroom. He let her hide there for a while, let her wash and be alone and wallow in self-pity and self-contempt. She could not remember ever having been so continually afraid, so out of control of her emotions. Jdahya had done nothing, yet she cowered.
When he called her, she took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom. "This isn't working," she said miserably. "Just put me down on Earth with other humans. I can't do this."
He ignored her.
After a time she spoke again on a different subject. "I have a scar," she said, touching her abdomen. "I didn't have it when I was on Earth. What did your people do to me?"
"You had a growth," he said. "A cancer. We got rid of it. Otherwise, it would have killed you."
She went cold. Her mother had died of cancer. Two of her aunts had had it and her grandmother had been operated on three times for it. They were all dead now, killed by someone else's insanity. But the family "tradition" was apparently continuing.
"What did I lose along with the cancer?" she asked softly.
"Nothing."
"Not a few feet of intestine? My ovaries? My uterus?"
"Nothing. My relative tended you. You lost nothing you would want to keep."
"Your relative is the one who... performed surgery on me?"
"Yes. With interest and care. There was a human physician with us, but by then she was old, dying. She only watched and commented on what my relative did."
"How would he know enough to do anything for me? Human anatomy must be totally different from yours."
"My relative is not male-or female. The name for its sex is ooloi. It understood your body because it is ooloi. On your world there were vast numbers of dead and dying humans to study. Our ooloi came to understand what could be normal or abnormal, possible or impossible for the human body. The ooloi who went to the planet taught those who stayed here. My relative has studied your people for much of its life."
"How do ooloi study?" She imagined dying humans caged and every groan and contortion closely observed. She imagined dissections of living subjects as well as dead ones. She imagined treatable diseases being allowed to run their grisly courses in order for ooloi to learn.
"They observe. They have special organs for their kind of observation. My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer."