Imago

Life.

I lay utterly still. I had all I could do to keep myself from getting up, going to them at once. I wanted to bind them to me absolutely, permanently. I wanted to lie between them tonight. Now. Yet if I weren’t careful, they would reject me, escape me. Worse, their hidden people would have to be found. I would have to betray them to my family, and my family would have to tell others. The settlement of fertile Humans would be found and the people in it collected. They would be allowed to choose Mars or union with us or sterility here on Earth. They could not be allowed to continue to reproduce here, then to die when we separated and left an uninhabitable rock behind.

No Human who did not decide to mate with us was told this last. They were given their choices and not told why.

What could TomÁs and Jesusa be told? What should they be told to ease the knowledge that their people could not remain as they were? Obviously Jesusa, in particular, cared deeply about these people—was about to sacrifice herself for them. TomÁs cared enough to walk away from certain healing when it was what he desperately wanted. Now, clearly, he was thinking about death, about dying. He did not want to reach his home again.

How could either of them mate with me, knowing what my people would do to theirs?

And how should I approach them? If they were potential mates and nothing more, I would go to them now. But once Jesusa understood that I knew their secret, her first question would be, “What will happen to our people?” She would not accept evasion. If I lied to her, she would learn the truth eventually, and I did not think she would forgive me for the lies. Would she forgive me for the truth?

When she and TomÁs saw that they had given their people away, would they decide to kill me, to die themselves, or to do both?

7

The next day, Jesusa and TomÁs crossed the river and began their journey home. I followed. I let them cross, waited until I could no longer see or hear them, then swam across myself. I swam upriver for a while, enjoying the rich, cool water. Finally I went up the bank and sorted their scent from the many.

I followed it silently, resting when they rested, grazing on whatever happened to be growing nearby. I had not decided what I would do, but there was comfort for me just being within range of their scent.

Perhaps I should follow them all the way to their home, see its location, and take news of it back to my family. Then other people, Oankali and construct, would do what was necessary. I would not be connected with it. But I also might not be allowed to mate with Jesusa and TomÁs. I might be sent to the ship in spite of everything. Jesusa and TomÁs might choose Mars once others had healed them and explained their choices to them. Or they might mate with others

.

The more I followed them, the more I wanted them, and the more unlikely it seemed that I would ever mate with them.

After four days, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just joined them. If I could not have them as mates permanently, I could enjoy them for a while.

They had caught no fish that night. They had found wild figs and eaten them, but I doubted that these had satisfied them.

I found nuts and fruit for them, and root stalks that could be roasted and eaten. I wrapped all this in a crude basket I had woven of thin lianas and lined with large leaves. I could only do this by biting through the lianas in a way that would have disturbed the resisters, so I was glad they could not see me. A resister had said to me years before that we constructs and Oankali were supposed to be superior beings, but we insisted on acting like animals. Oddly both ideas seemed to disturb him.

I took my basket of food and went quietly into Jesusa and TomÁs’s camp. It was dark and they had built a small shelter and made a fire. Their fire still burned, but they had lain down on their pallets. Jesusa’s even breathing said she was asleep, but TomÁs lay awake. His eyes were open, but he did not see me until I was beside him.

Then before he could get up, before he could shout, I was down beside him, one hand over his mouth, the other grasping his hand and forcing it to maintain its hold on the machete, but to be still.

“Jodahs,” I whispered, and he stopped struggling and stared at me.

“It can’t be you!” he whispered when I let him speak. He remembered a scaly Jodahs, like a humanoid reptile. But I could not stay within range of their scent for four days and go on looking that way. Now I was brown-skinned and black-haired and I thought it was likely that I looked the way TomÁs would when I healed him. He was the one I had touched and studied.

He let me take the machete from his hand and put it aside. I already had several body tentacles linked into his nervous system. I put him to sleep so that I could take care of Jesusa before she awoke.

From the moment I said my name, he was never afraid. “Will you heal me?” he whispered in his last moments of consciousness.

“I will,” I said. “Completely.”

He closed his eye, trusting himself to me in a way that made it hard for me to withdraw from him and turn to attend to Jesusa.

When I did turn, it was almost too late. She was awake, her eyes full of confusion and terror. She drew back as I turned, and she almost pulled the trigger on the rifle she was holding.

“I’m Jodahs,” I told her.

She shot me.

The bullet went through one of my hearts and I had all I could do to stop myself from lunging at her reflexively and stinging her to death. I grabbed the gun from her and threw it against a nearby tree. It broke into two pieces, the wooden stock splintering and separating from the metal, and the metal bending.

I grasped her wrists so she couldn’t run. I couldn’t trust myself to put her to sleep until I had my own problem under control.

She struggled and shouted for TomÁs to wake up and help her. She managed to bite me twice, managed to kick me between the legs, then stopped her struggling for a moment to absorb the reality that I had only smooth skin between my legs, and that her kick did not bother me at all.

She twisted frantically and tried to gouge my eyes. I held on. I had to hold her. She couldn’t see in the dark. She might run into the surrounding forest and hurt herself—or run toward the river and fall down the high, steep bluff there. Or perhaps she meant to try to shoot me again with what was left of the gun or use the machete on me. I could not let her hurt herself or hurt me again and perhaps make me kill her. Nothing would be more irrational than that.

She stopped struggling abruptly and stared at one of the bite wounds she had inflicted on my left arm. In the firelight, even Human eyes could see it. It was healing, and that seemed to fascinate her. She watched until there was no visible sign of injury. Just a little smeared blood and saliva.

“You’re doing that inside,” she said, “healing your wound.”

I lay down, dragging her with me. She lay facing me, watching me with fear and distrust.

“I can heal myself as well as most adults,” I said. “I’m not very good at controlling pain in myself, though.”

She looked concerned, then deliberately hardened her expression. “What did you do to TomÁs?”

“He’s only asleep.”

“No! He would have awakened.”

“I drugged him a little. He didn’t mind. I promised I would heal him.”

“We don’t want your healing!”

The worst of the pain from my wound was over. I relaxed in relief and drew a long breath. I let go of her hands and she drew them away, looked at them, then back to me.

I grinned at her. “You’re not afraid of me now. And you don’t want to hurt me again.”

I could feel her face grow warmer. She sat up abruptly, very much against her own will. My scent was at work on her. She would probably have difficulty resisting it because she was not consciously aware of it.

“We truly don’t want your healing,” she repeated. “Though

I’m sorry I shot you.” She sat still, looking down at me. “You look like TomÁs, you know? You look the way he should look. You could be our brother—or perhaps our sister.”