Imago

I never gave Aaor a verbal answer to its question. It never repeated the question. It seemed to realize that I could no longer separate myself deliberately from TomÁs and Jesusa. They could still leave me, but they wouldn’t. Jesusa took the promises she gave very seriously. She would not try to leave until I was on my feet again. And TomÁs would not leave without her. By the time they were prepared to go, it would be too late.

My only fear was that someone in the family would tell them. My mother believed she should, but she had not, so far. She loved me, and yet, until now, she had been able to do nothing to help me. She had not been able to make herself destroy the only chance I was likely to get of having the mates I needed.

Yet she was weighted with guilt. One more betrayal of her own Human kind for people who were not Human, or not altogether Human. She spoke to Jesusa as a much older sister—or as a same-sex parent. She advised her.

“Listen to Jodahs,” I heard her say on one occasion. “Listen carefully. It will tell you what it wants you to know. It won’t lie to you. But it will withhold information. Once you’ve heard what it has to say, get away from it. Get out of the house. Go to the river or a short way into the forest. Do your thinking there about what it’s told you, and decide what questions you still need answers to. Then come home and ask.”

“Home?” Jesusa whispered so softly I almost failed to hear. They were outside the house, replacing the roof thatch. They were not near my room, but my mother probably knew I could hear them.

“You live here,” my mother said. “That makes this home. It isn’t a permanent home for any of us.” She was good at evasion and withholding information herself.

“Would you go to Mars if you could?” Jesusa asked.

“Leave my family?”

“If you were as I am. If you had no family.”

My mother did not answer for a long time. She sighed finally. “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m content with these people. More than content. I lost my husband and my son before the war. They died in an accident. When the war came, I lost everything else. We all did, we elders, as you call us. I couldn’t give up and die, but I expected almost nothing. Food and shelter, maybe. An absence of pain. Nikanj said it knew I needed children, so it took seed from the man I had then and made me pregnant. I didn’t think I would ever forgive it for that.”

“But

you have forgiven it?”

“I’ve understood it. I’ve accepted it. I wouldn’t have believed I could do that much. Back when I met my first mature ooloi, Nikanj’s parent Kahguyaht, I found it alien, arrogant, and terrifying. I hated it. I thought I hated all ooloi.”

She paused. “Now I feel as though I’ve loved Nikanj all my life. Ooloi are dangerously easy to love. They absorb us, and we don’t mind.”

“Yes,” Jesusa agreed, and I smiled. “I’m afraid, though, because I don’t understand them. I’ll go to Mars if I don’t stay with Jodahs. I can understand settling a new place. I know what to expect from a Human husband.”

“Look at my family, Jesusa—and realize you’re only seeing six of our children. This is what you can expect if you mate with Jodahs. There’s closeness here that I didn’t have with the family I was born into or with my husband and son.”

“But you have Oankali mates other than Nikanj.”

“You will, too, eventually. With Jodahs, I mean. And your children will look much like mine. And half of them will be born to an Oankali female, but will inherit from all five of you.”

After a time, Jesusa said, “Ahajas and Dichaan aren’t so bad. They seem

very gentle.”

“Good mates. I was with Nikanj before they were—like you with Jodahs. That’s best, I think. An ooloi is probably the strangest thing any Human will come into contact with. We need time alone with it to realize it’s probably also the best thing.”

“Where would we live?”

“You and your new family? In one of our towns. I think any one of them would eventually welcome the three of you. You’d be something brand-new—the center of a lot of attention. Oankali and constructs love new things.”

“Jodahs says it had to go into exile because it was a new thing.”

“Is that what it said, really?”

Silence. What was Jesusa doing? Searching her memory for exactly what I had said? “It said it was the first of its kind,” she said finally. “The first construct ooloi.”

“Yes.”

“It said there weren’t supposed to be any construct ooloi yet, so the people didn’t trust it. They were afraid it would not be able to control itself as an ooloi must. They were afraid it would hurt people.”

“It did hurt some people, Jesusa. But it’s never hurt Humans. And it’s never hurt anyone when it’s had Humans with it.”

“It told me that.”

“Good. Because if it hadn’t, I would have. It needs you more than Nikanj ever needed me.”

“You want me to stay with it.”

“Very much.”

“I’m afraid. This is all so different

. How did you ever

? I mean

with Nikanj

. How did you decide?”

My mother said nothing at all.

“You didn’t have a choice, did you?”

“I did, oh, yes. I chose to live.”

“That’s no choice. That’s just going on, letting yourself be carried along by whatever happens.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said.

After that, there was no talk for a while. My mother had not shouted those last words, as some Humans would have. She had almost whispered them. Yet they carried such feeling, they would have silenced me, too—and I did know much of what my birth mother had survived. And it was so much more than she had said that Jesusa would not have wanted to hear it. Yet, in a way, in my mother’s voice she had heard it. It was not until I had almost drifted off to sleep that they spoke again. Jesusa began.

“It’s flattering to think that Jodahs needs us. It seems so powerful, so able to endure anything. At first I couldn’t understand why it even wanted us. I was suspicious.”

“It can endure a great deal of physical suffering. And it will have to if you leave it.”

“There are other Humans for it to mate with.”

“No, there aren’t. There’s Mars now. Resisters choose to go there. Ordinary resisters are too old for Jodahs anyway. As for the few young Humans born on the ship, they’re rare and spoken for.”

“So

what will happen to Jodahs if we leave?”

“I don’t know. Just as I don’t know what’s going to happen to Aaor, period. It’s Aaor that I’m most worried about now.”

“It asked me if I would tell it where my people were—tell it alone so that it could go to them and try to persuade two of them to mate with it.”

“What was your answer?”

“That they would kill it. They would kill it as soon as they realized what it was.”

“And?”

“It said it didn’t care. It said Jodahs had us, but it was starving.”

“Did you tell it what it wanted to know?”

“I couldn’t. Even if I didn’t know how my people would greet it, I couldn’t betray them that way. They’ll already think of me as a traitor when the Oankali come for them.”

“I know. Aaor knows, too, really. But it’s desperate.”

“TomÁs says it asked him, too.”

“That’s unusual. Has it asked you more than once?”

“Three times.”

“That goes beyond unusual. I’ll talk to Nikanj about it.”

“I don’t mean to make trouble for it. I wish I could help it.”

“It’s already in trouble. And right now, Nikanj is probably the only one who can help it.”

I stopped fighting sleep and let myself drift off. I would talk to Aaor when I awoke again. It was starving. I didn’t know what I could do about that, but there must be something.

2

But I had no chance to talk to Aaor before my second metamorphosis ended. It left home as I had. It wandered, perhaps looking for some sign of Jesusa and TomÁs’s people.