"I wouldn't call it a talent. A curse, maybe. But how could your relative know about that from just. . . observing."
"Maybe perceiving would be a better word," he said. "There's much more involved than sight. It knows everything that can be learned about you from your genes. And by now, it knows your medical history and a great deal about the way you think. It has taken part in testing you."
"Has it? I may not be able to forgive it for that. But listen, I don't understand how it could cut out a cancer without. . . well, without doing damage to whichever organ it was growing on."
"My relative didn't cut out your cancer. It wouldn't have cut you at all, but it wanted to examine the cancer directly with all its senses. It had never personally examined one before. When it had finished, it induced your body to reabsorb the cancer.
"It. . . induced my body to reabsorb. . . cancer?"
"Yes. My relative gave your body a kind of chemical command."
"Is that how you cure cancer among yourselves?"
"We don't get them."
Lilith sighed. "I wish we didn't. They've created enough hell in my family."
"They won't be harming you anymore. My relative says they're beautiful, but simple to prevent."
"Beautiful?"
"It perceives things differently sometimes. Here's food, Lilith. Are you hungry?"
She stepped toward him, reaching out to take the bowl, then realized what she was doing. She froze, but managed not to scramble backward. After a few seconds, she inched toward him. She could not do it quickly-snatch and run. She could hardly do it at all. She forced herself forward slowly, slowly.
Teeth clenched, she managed to take the bowl. Her hand shook so badly that she spilled half the stew. She withdrew to the bed. After a while she was able to eat what was left, then finish the bowl. It was not enough. She was still hungry, but she did not complain. She was not up to taking another bowl from his hand. Daisy hand. Palm in the center, many fingers all the way around. The fingers had bones in them, at least; they weren't tentacles. And there were only two hands, two feet. He could have been so much uglier than he was, so much less. . . human. Why couldn't she just accept him? All he seemed to be asking was that she not panic at the sight of him or others like him. Why couldn't she do that?
She tried to imagine herself surrounded by beings like him and was almost overwhelmed by panic. As though she had suddenly developed a phobia-something she had never before experienced. But what she felt was like what she had heard others describe. A true xenophobia-and apparently she was not alone in it.
She sighed, realized she was still tired as well as still hungry. She rubbed a hand over her face. If this were what a phobia was like, it was something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. She looked at Jdahya. "What do your people call themselves?" she asked. "Tell me about them."
"We are Oankali."
"Oankali. Sounds like a word in some Earth language."
"It may be, but with different meaning."
"What does it mean in your language?"
"Several things. Traders for one."
"You are traders?"
"Yes."
"What do you trade?"
"Ourselves."
"You mean. . . each other? Slaves?"
"No. We've never done that."
"What, then?"
"Ourselves."
"I don't understand."
He said nothing, seemed to wrap silence around himself and settle into it. She knew he would not answer.
She sighed. "You seem too human sometimes. If I weren't looking at you, I'd assume you were a man."
"You have assumed that. My family gave me to the human doctor so that I could learn to do this work. She came to us too old to bear children of her own, but she could teach."
"I thought you said she was dying."
"She did die eventually. She was a hundred and thirteen years old and had been awake among us off and on for fifty years. She was like a fourth parent to my siblings and me. It was hard to watch her age and die. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it."
"I've heard humans say that." She frowned. "Couldn't your ooloi have helped her live longer-if she wanted to live longer than a hundred and thirteen years, that is."
"They did help her. They gave her forty years she would not have had, and when they could no longer help her heal, they took away her pain, if she had been younger when we found her, we could have given her much more time."
Lilith followed that thought to its obvious conclusion. "I'm twenty-six," she said.
"Older," he told her. "You've aged whenever we've kept you awake. About two years altogether."
She had no sense of being two years older, of being, suddenly, twenty-eight because he said she was. Two years of solitary confinement. What could they possibly give her in return for that? She stared at him.
His tentacles seemed to solidify into a second skin-dark patches on his face and neck, a dark, smooth-looking mass on his head. "Barring accident," he said, "you'll live much longer than a hundred and thirteen years. And for most of your life, you'll be biologically quite young. Your children will live longer still."
He looked remarkably human now. Was it only the tentacles that gave him that sea-slug appearance? His coloring hadn't changed. The fact that he had no eyes, nose, or ears still disturbed her, but not as much.
"Jdahya, stay that way," she told him. "Let me come close and look at you. . . if I can."
The tentacles moved like weirdly rippling skin, then resolidified. "Come," he said.
She was able to approach him hesitantly. Even viewed from only a couple of feet away, the tentacles looked like a smooth second skin. "Do you mind if.. ." She stopped and began again. "I mean... may I touch you?"
"Yes."
It was easier to do than she had expected. His skin was cool and almost too smooth to be real flesh-smooth the way her fingernails were and perbaps as tough as a fingernail.
"Is it hard for you to stay like this?" she asked.
"Not hard. Unnatural. A muffling of the senses."
"Why did you do it-before I asked you to, I mean."
"It's an expression of pleasure or amusement."
"You were pleased a minute ago?"
"With you. You wanted your time back-the time we've taken from you. You didn't want to die."
She stared at him, shocked that he had read her so clearly. And he must have known of humans who did want to die even after hearing promises of long life, health, and lasting youth. Why? Maybe they'd heard the part she hadn't been told about yet: the reason for all this. The price.
"So far," she said, "only boredom and isolation have driven me to want to die."
"Those are past. And you've never tried to kill yourself, even then."
"...no."
"Your desire to live is stronger than you realize."
She sighed. "You're going to test that, aren't you? That's why you haven't told me yet what your people want of us."
"Yes," he admitted, alarming her.
"Tell me!"
Silence.
"If you knew anything at all about the human imagination, you'd know you were doing exactly the wrong thing," she said.
"Once you're able to leave this room with me, I'll answer your questions," he told her.
She stared at him for several seconds. "Let's work on that, then," she said grimly. "Relax from your unnatural position and let's see what happens."
He hesitated, then let his tentacles flow free. The grotesque sea-slug appearance resumed and she could not stop herself from stumbling away from him in panic and revulsion. She caught herself before she had gone far.
"God, I'm so tired of this," she muttered. "Why can't I stop it?"
"When the doctor first came to our household," he said, "some of my family found her so disturbing that they left home for a while. That's unheard-of behavior among us."
"Did you leave?"
He went smooth again briefly. "I had not yet been born. By the time I was born, all my relatives had come home. And I think their fear was stronger than yours is now. They had never before seen so much life and so much death in one being. It hurt some of them to touch her."