"You mean... because she was sick?"
"Even when she was well. It was her genetic structure that disturbed them. I can't explain that to you. You'll never sense it as we do." He stepped toward her and reached for her hand. She gave it to him almost reflexively with only an instant's hesitation when his tentacles all flowed forward toward her. She looked away and stood stiffly where she was, her hand held loosely in his many fingers."
"Good," he said, releasing her. "This room will be nothing more than a memory for you soon."
4
Eleven meals later he took her outside.
She had no idea how long she was in wanting, then consuming, those eleven meals. Jdahya would not tell her, and he would not be hurried. He showed no impatience or annoyance when she urged him to take her out. He simply fell silent. He seemed almost to turn himself off when she made demands or asked questions he did not intend to answer. Her family had called her stubborn during her life before the war, but he was beyond stubborn.
Eventually he began to move around the room. He had been still for so long-had seemed almost part of the furniture-that she was startled when he suddenly got up and went into the bathroom. She stayed where she was on the bed, wondering whether he used a bathroom for the same purposes she did. She made no effort to find out. Sometime later when he came back into the room, she found herself much less disturbed by him. He brought her something that so surprised and delighted her that she took it from his hand without thought or hesitation: A banana, fully ripe, large, yellow, firm, very sweet.
She ate it slowly, wanting to gulp it, not daring to. It was literally the best food she had tasted in two hundred and fifty years. Who knew when there would be another-if there would be another. She ate even the white, inner skin.
He would not tell her where it had come from or how be had gotten it. He would not get her another. He did evict her from the bed for a while. He stretched out flat on it and lay utterly still, looked dead. She did a series of exercises on the floor, deliberately tired herself as much as she could, then took his place on the platform until he got up and let her have the bed.
When she awoke, he took his jacket off and let her see the tufts of sensory tentacles scattered over his body. To her surprise, she got used to these quickly. They were merely ugly. And they made him look even more like a misplaced sea creature.
"Can you breathe underwater?" she asked him.
"Yes."
"I thought your throat orifices looked as though they could double as gills. Are you more comfortable underwater?"
"I enjoy it, but no more than I enjoy air."
"Air. . . oxygen?"
"I need oxygen, yes, though not as much of it as you do." Her mind drifted back to his tentacles and another possible similarity to some sea slugs. "Can you sting with any of your tentacles?"
"With all of them."
She drew back, though she was not close to him. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I wouldn't have stung you."
Unless she had attacked him. "So that's what happened to the humans who tried to kill you."
"No, Lilith. I'm not interested in killing your people. I've been trained all my life to keep them alive."
"What did you do to them, then?"
"Stopped them. I'm stronger than you probably think."
"But. . . if you had stung them?"
"They would have died. Only the ooloi can sting without killing. One group of my ancestors subdued prey by stinging it. Their sting began the digestive process even before they began to eat. And they stung enemies who tried to eat them. Not a comfortable existence."
"It doesn't sound that bad."
"They didn't live long, those ancestors. Some things were immune to their poison."
"Maybe humans are."
He answered her softly. "No, Lilith, you're not."
Sometime later he brought her an orange. Out of curiosity, she broke the fruit and offered to share it with him. He accepted a piece of it from her hand and sat down beside her to eat it. When they were both finished, he turned to face her-a courtesy, she realized, since he had so little face- and seemed to examine her closely. Some of his tentacles actually touched her. When they did, she jumped. Then she realized she was not being hurt and kept still. She did not like his nearness, but it no longer terrified her. After... however many days it had been, she felt none of the old panic; only relief at somehow having finally shed it.
"We'll go out now," he said. "My family will be relieved to see us. And you-you have a great deal to learn."
5
She made him wait until she had washed the orange juice from her hands. Then he walked over to one of the walls and touched it with some of his longer head tentacles.
A dark spot appeared on the wall where he made contact. It became a deepening, widening indentation, then a hole through which Lilith could see color and light-green, red, orange, yellow.
There had been little color in her world since her capture. Her own skin, her blood-within the pale walls of her prison, that was all. Everything else was some shade of white or gray. Even her food had been colorless until the banana. Now, here was color and what appeared to be sunlight. There was space. Vast space.
The hole in the wall widened as though it were flesh rippling aside, slowly writhing. She was both fascinated and repelled.
"Is it alive?" she asked.
"Yes," he said.
She had beaten it, kicked it, clawed it, tried to bite it. It had been smooth, tough, impenetrable, but slightly giving like the bed and table. It had felt like plastic, cool beneath her hands.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Flesh. More like mine than like yours. Different from mine, too, though. It's... the ship."
"You're kidding. Your ship is alive?"
"Yes. Come out." The hole in the wall had grown large enough for them to step through. He ducked his head and took the necessary step. She started to follow him, then stopped. There was so much space out there. The colors she had seen were thin, hairlike leaves and round, coconut-sized fruit, apparently in different stages of development. All hung from great branches that overshadowed the new exit. Beyond them was a broad, open field with scattered trees- impossibly huge trees-distant hills, and a bright, sunless ivory sky. There was enough strangeness to the trees and the sky to stop her from imagining that she was on Earth. There were people moving around in the distance, and there were black, German shepherd-sized animals that were too far away for her to see them clearly-though even in the distance the animals seemed to have too many legs. Six? Ten? The creatures seemed to be grazing.
"Lilith, come out," Jdahya said.
She took a step backward, away from all the alien vastness. The isolation room that she had hated for so long suddenly seemed safe and comforting.
"Back into your cage, Lilith?" Jdahya asked softly.
She stared at him through the hole, realized at once that he was trying to provoke her, make her overcome her fear. It would not have worked if he had not been so right. She was retreating into her cage-like a zoo animal that had been shut up for so long that the cage had become home.
She made herself step up to the opening, and then, teeth clenched, step through.
Outside, she stood beside him and drew a long, shuddering breath. She turned her head, looked at the room, then turned away quickly, resisting an impulse to flee back to it. He took her band and led her away.
When she looked back a second time, the hole was closing and she could see that what she had come out of was actually a huge tree. Her room could not have taken more than a tiny fraction of its interior. The tree had grown from what appeared to be ordinary, pale-brown, sandy soil. Its lower limbs were heavily laden with fruit. The rest of it looked almost ordinary except for its size. The trunk was bigger around than some office buildings she remembered. And it seemed to touch the ivory sky. How tall was it? How much of it served as a building?