We didn’t stop at the island we had intended to live on. It was too close to Pascual. Living there would have made us targets for more Human fear and frustration. We followed the river west, then south, traveling when we wanted to, resting when we were tired—drifting, really. I was restless, and drifting suited me. The others simply seemed not content with any likely campsite we found. I suspected that they wouldn’t be content again until they returned to Lo to stay.
We edged around Human habitations very carefully. Humans who saw us either stared from a distance or followed us until we left their territory. None approached us.
Twelve days from Lo, we were still drifting. The river was long with many tributaries, many curves and twists. It was good to walk along the shaded forest floor, following the sound and smell of it, and thinking about nothing at all. My fingers and toes became webbed on the third day, and I didn’t bother to correct them. I was wet at least as often as I was dry. My hair fell out and I developed a few more sensory tentacles. I stopped wearing clothing, and my coloring changed to gray-green.
“What are you doing?” my Human mother asked. “Letting your body do whatever it wants to?” Her voice and posture expressed stiff disapproval.
“As long as I don’t develop an illness,” I said.
She frowned. “I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. Deformity is as bad as illness.”
I walked away from her. I had never done that before.
Fifteen days out of Lo, someone shot at us with arrows. Only Lilith was hit. Nikanj caught the archer, drugged him unconscious, destroyed all his weapons, and changed the color of his hair. It had been deep brown. It would be colorless from now on. It would look all white. Finally Nikanj encouraged his face to fall into the permanent creases that this male’s behavior and genetic heritage had dictated for his old age. He would look much older. He would not be weaker or in any way infirm, but appearances were important to Humans. When this male awoke—sometime the next day—his eyes and his fingers would tell him he had paid a terrible price for attacking us. More important, his people would see. They would misunderstand what they saw, and it would frighten them into letting us alone.
Lilith had no special trouble with the arrow. It damaged one of her kidneys and gave her a great deal of pain, but her life was in no danger. Her improved body would have healed quickly even without Nikanj’s help, since the arrow was not poisoned. But Nikanj did not leave her to heal herself. It lay beside her and healed her completely before it returned to whiten the drugged archer’s hair and wrinkle his face. Mates took care of one another.
I watched them, wondering who I would take care of. Who would take care of me?
Twenty-one days out, the bed of our river turned south and we turned with it. Dichaan veered off the trail, and left us for some time, and came back with a male Human who had broken his leg. The leg was grotesque—swollen, discolored, and blistered. The smell of it made Nikanj and me look at one another.
We camped and made a pallet for the injured Human. Nikanj spoke to me before it went to him.
“Get rid of your webbing,” it said. “Try to look less like a frog or you’ll scare him.”
“Are you going to let me heal him?”
“Yes. And it will take a while for you to do it right. Your first regeneration…. Go eat something while I ease his pain.”
“Let me do that,” I said. But it had already turned away and gone back to the male. The male’s leg was worse than worthless. It was poisoning his body. Portions of it were already dead. Yet the thought of taking it disturbed me.
Ahajas and Aaor brought me food before I could look around for it, and Aaor sat with me while I ate.
“Why are you afraid?” it said.
“Not exactly afraid, but… To take the leg …”
“Yes. It will give you a chance to grow something other than webbing and sensory tentacles.”
“I don’t want to do it. He’s old like Marina. You don’t know how I hated letting her go.”
“Don’t I?”
I focused on it. “I didn’t think you did. You didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t want me to. You should eat.”
When I didn’t eat, it moved closer to me and leaned against me, linking comfortably into my nervous system. It had not done that for a while. It wasn’t afraid of me anymore. It had not exactly abandoned me. It had allowed me to isolate myself—since I seemed to want to. It let me know this in simple neurosensory impressions.
“I was lonely,” I protested aloud.
“I know. But not for me.” It spoke with confidence and contentment that confused me.
“You’re changing,” I said.
“Not yet. But soon, I think.”
“Metamorphosis? We’ll lose each other when you change.”
“I know. Share the Human with me. It will give the two of us more time together.”
“All right.”
Then I had to go to the Human. I had to heal him alone. After that, Aaor and I could share him.
People remembered their ooloi siblings. I had heard Ahajas and Dichaan talk about theirs. But they had not seen it for decades. An ooloi belonged to the kin group of its mates. Its siblings were lost to it.
The Human male had lost consciousness by the time I lay down beside him. The moment I touched him, I knew he must have broken his leg in a fall—probably from a tree. He had puncture wounds and deep bruises on the left side of his body. The left leg was, as I had expected, a total loss, foul and poisonous. I separated it from the rest of his body above the damaged tissue. First I stopped the circulation of bodily fluids and poisons to and from the leg. Then I encouraged the growth of a skin barrier at the hip. Finally I helped his body let go of the rotting limb.
When the leg fell away, I withdrew enough of my attention from the male to ask the family to get rid of it. I didn’t want the male to see it.
Then I settled down to healing the many smaller injuries and neutralizing the poisons that had already begun to destroy the health of his body. I spent much of the evening healing him. Finally I focused again on his leg and began to reprogram certain cells. Genes that had not been active since well before the male was born had to be awakened and set to work telling the body how to grow a leg. A leg, not a cancer. The regeneration would take many days and would have to be monitored. We would camp here and keep the man with us until regeneration was complete.
It had been dark for some time when I detached myself from the male. My Human parents and my siblings were asleep nearby. Ahaj as and Dichaan sat near one another guarding the camp and conversing aloud so softly that even I could not hear all they said. A Human intruder would have heard nothing at all. Oankali and construct hearing was so acute that some resisters imagined we could read their thoughts. I wished we could have so that I would have some idea how the male I had healed would react to me. I would have to spend as much time with him as new mates often spent together. That would be hard if he hated or feared me.
“Do you like him, Oeka?” Nikanj asked softly.
I had known it was behind me, sitting, waiting to check my work. Now it came up beside me and settled a sensory arm around my neck. I still enjoyed its touch, but I held stiff against it because I thought it would next touch the male.
“Thorny, possessive ooloi child,” it said, pulling me against it in spite of my stiffness. “I must examine him this once. But if what you tell me and show me matches what I find in him, I won’t touch him again until it’s time for him to go—unless something goes wrong.”
“Nothing will go wrong!”
“Good. Show me everything.”
I obeyed, stumbling now and then because I understood the working of the male’s body better than I understood the vocabulary, silent or vocal, for discussing it. But with neurosensory illusions, I could show it exactly what I meant.
“There are no words for some things,” Nikanj told me as it finished. “You and your children will create them if you need them. We’ve never needed them.”
“Did I do all right with him?”
“Go away. I’ll find out for sure.”
I went to sit with Ahajas and Dichaan and they gave me some of the wild figs and nuts they had been eating. The food did not take my mind off Nikanj touching the Human, but I ate anyway, and listened while Ahajas told me how hard it had been for Nikanj when its ooan Kahguyaht had had to examine Lilith.
“Kahguyaht said ooloi possessiveness during subadulthood is a bridge that helps ooloi understand Humans,” she said. “It’s as though Human emotions were permanently locked in ooloi subadulthood. Humans are possessive of mates, potential mates, and property because these can be taken from them.”
“They can be taken from anyone,” I said. “Living things can die. Nonliving things can be destroyed.”
“But Human mates can walk away from one another,” Dichaan said. “They never lose the ability to do that. They can leave one another permanently and find new mates. Humans can take the mates of other Humans. There’s no physical bond. No security. And because Humans are hierarchical, they tend to compete for mates and property.”
“But that’s built into them genetically,” I said. “It isn’t built into me.”
“No,” Ahajas said. “But, Oeka, you won’t be able to bond with a mate—Human, construct, or Oankali—until you’re adult. You can feel needs and attachments. I know you feel more at this stage than an Oankali would. But until you’re mature, you can’t form a true bond. Other ooloi can seduce potential mates away from you. So other ooloi are suspect.”
That sounded right—or rather, it sounded true. It didn’t make me feel any better, but it helped me understand why I felt like tearing Nikanj loose from the male and standing guard to see that it did not approach him again.
Nikanj came over to me after a while, smelling of the male, tasting of him when it touched me. I flinched in resentment.
“You’ve done a good job,” it said. “How can you do such a good job with Humans and such a poor one with yourself and Aaor?”
“I don’t know,” I said bleakly. “But Humans steady me somehow. Maybe it’s just that Marina and this male are alone—mateless.”
“Go rest next to him. If you want to sleep, sleep linked with him so that he won’t wake up until you do.”
I got up to go.
“Oeka.”
I focused on Nikanj without turning.
“Tino made crutches for him to use for the next few days. They’re near his foot.”
“All right.” I had never seen a crutch, but I had heard of them from the Humans in Lo.
“There’s clothing with the crutches. Lilith says put some of it on and give the rest to him.”
Now I did turn to look at it.
“Put the clothing on, Jodahs. He’s a resister male. It will be hard enough for him to accept you.”
It was right, of course. I wasn’t even sure why I had stopped wearing clothes—except perhaps that I didn’t have anyone to wear them for. I dressed and lay down alongside the male.