Nikanj’s friends poked and prodded her exposed flesh and tried to persuade her through Nikanj to take off her clothing. None of them spoke English. None seemed in the least childlike, though Nikanj said all were children. She got the feeling some would have enjoyed dissecting her. They spoke aloud very little, but there was much touching of tentacles to flesh or tentacles to other tentacles. When they saw that she would not strip, no more questions were addressed to her. She was first amused, then annoyed, then angered by their attitude. She was nothing more than an unusual animal to them. Nikanj’s new pet.
Abruptly she turned away from them. She had had enough of being shown off. She moved away from a pair of children who were reaching to investigate her hair, and spoke Nikanj’s name sharply.
Nikanj disentangled its long head tentacles from those of another child and came back to her. If it had not responded to its name, she would not have known it. She was going to have to learn to tell people apart. Memorize the various head-tentacle patterns, perhaps.
“I want to go back,” she said.
“Why?” it asked.
She sighed, decided to tell as much of the truth as she thought it could understand. Best to find out now just how far the truth would get her. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t want to be shown off anymore to people I can’t even talk to.”
It touched her arm tentatively. “You … anger?”
“I’m angry, yes. I need to be by myself for a while.”
It thought about that. “We go back,” it said finally.
Some of the children were apparently unhappy about her leaving. They clustered around her and spoke aloud to Nikanj, but Nikanj said a few words and they let her pass.
She discovered she was trembling and took deep breaths to relax herself. How was a pet supposed to feel? How did zoo animals feel?
If the child would just take her somewhere and leave her for a while. If it would give her a little more of what she had thought she would never want again: Solitude.
Nikanj touched her forehead with a few head tentacles, as though sampling her sweat. She jerked her head away, not wanting to be sampled anymore by anyone.
Nikanj opened a wall into the family apartment and led her into a room that was a twin of the isolation room she thought she had left behind. “Rest here,” it told her. “Sleep.”
There was even a bathroom, and on the familiar table platform, there was a clean set of clothing. And replacing Jdahya was Nikanj. She could not get rid of it. It had been told to stay with her, and it meant to stay. Its tentacles settled into ugly irregular lumps when she shouted at it, but it stayed.
Defeated, she hid for a while in the bathroom. She rinsed her old clothing, though no foreign matter stuck to it—not dirt, not sweat, not grease or water. It never stayed wet for more than a few minutes. Some Oankali synthetic.
Then she wanted to sleep again. She was used to sleeping whenever she felt tired, and not used to walking long distances or meeting new people. Surprising how quickly the Oankali had become people to her. But then, who else was there?
She crawled into the bed and turned her back to Nikanj, who had taken Jdahya’s place on the table platform. Who else would there be for her if the Oankali had their way—and no doubt they were used to having their way. Modifying carnivorous plants … What had they modified to get their ship? And what useful tools would they modify human beings into? Did they know yet, or were they planning more experiments? Did they care? How would they make their changes? Or had they made them already—done a little extra tampering with her while they took care of her tumor? Had she ever had a tumor? Her family history led her to believe she had. They probably had not lied about that. Maybe they had not lied about anything Why should they bother to lie? They owned the Earth and all that was left of the human species.
How was it that she had not been able to take what Jdahya offered?
She slept, finally. The light never changed, but she was used to that. She awoke once to find that Nikanj had come onto the bed with her and lay down. Her first impulse was to push the child away in revulsion or get up herself. Her second, which she followed, wearily indifferent, was to go back to sleep.