There was no end to the forest. The trees and smaller plants changed. Some varieties vanished, but the forest continued. It was a heavy coat of green fur on the hills and later on the nearly vertical cliffs of the mountains. There were places where we could not have gotten through without machetes.
There were old trails, ledges along cliff faces that perhaps dated back to a time before the war. Below us, a branch of the river cut through a deep, narrow gorge. Above us the mountains were green and sheer, bordering a blue and white band of sky that broadened ahead of us. The water ran high and fast below us, green and white, breaking over huge rocks. I might survive a fall to it, but it was unlikely that any of the others would.
But my Human mates were in their own country, surefooted and confident. I had wondered whether they would be able to find their way home. They had traveled this route only once, nearly two years before. But Jesusa in particular was at home as soon as the landscape became more vertical than horizontal. Most often she broke trail for us just because she obviously loved the job and was better at it than any of us could have been. When our trail, narrow ledge that it was, vanished, she was usually the first to spot it above us or below or beginning again some distance away. And if she spotted it, she led the climb toward it. She never waited to see what the rest of us wanted to do—she simply found the best way across. The first time I saw her spread flat against the mountain, finding tiny hand- and footholds in the vegetation and the rock, making her way upward like a spider, I froze in absolute panic.
“She’s part lizard,” TomÁs said, smiling. “It’s disgusting. I’m not clumsy myself, I’ve never even seen her fall.”
“She’s always done this?” Aaor asked.
“I’ve seen her go up naked rock,” TomÁs said.
I looked at Aaor and saw that it, too, had reacted with fear. This trip had begun to do it good. The trip had forced it to use its body and focus attention on something other than its own misery. It had made the safety of the two Humans its main concern. It understood the sacrifice they were making for it, and the sacrifice they had already made.
It was last across the gulf, holding on with both feet and all four arms. “I make a better insect than you do,” it told TomÁs as it reached the rest of us and safety.
TomÁs laughed as much with surprise as with pleasure. I don’t think he had ever heard Aaor even try to make a joke before.
There were times when we could descend to the river and walk alongside it or bathe in it. Jesusa and TomÁs caught fish occasionally and cooked and ate them while Aaor and I took ourselves as far away as we could and focused on other things.
“Why do you let them do that?” Aaor demanded of me the second time it happened. “They shouldn’t be hungry.”
“They’re not,” I agreed. “Jesusa told me they lost most of their supplies coming out of the mountains—accidentally dropped them into those rapids we passed two days ago.”
“That was then! They don’t have to kill animals and eat them now!” Aaor sounded petulant and miserable. It brushed away my sensory arm when I reached out to it, then changed its mind and grasped the sensory arm in its strength hands.
I extended my sensory hand and reached into its body to understand what was wrong with it. As always, it was like reaching into a slightly different version of myself. It was feeling sick—nauseated, disgusted, oddly Human, yet unable to cope with the Humanity of Jesusa and TomÁs.
“When you have Human mates,” I told it, “you have to remember to let them be Human. They’ve killed fish and eaten them all their lives. They know we hate it. They need to do it anyway—for reasons that don’t have much to do with nutrition.”
Aaor let me soothe it, but still said, “What reasons?”
“Sometimes they need to prove to themselves that they still own themselves, that they can still care for themselves, that they still have things—customs—that are their own.”
“Sounds like an expression of the Human conflict,” Aaor said.
“It is,” I agreed. “They’re proving their independence at a time when they’re no longer independent. But if this is the worst thing they do, I’ll be grateful.”
“Will you sleep with them tonight?”
“No. And they know it.”
“They—” It stopped, froze utterly still, and signaled me silently. “There are other Humans nearby!”
“Where?” I demanded, silent and frozen myself, trying to catch the sight or the scent.
“Ahead. Can’t you smell them?” It gave me an illusion of scent, faint and strange and dangerous. Even with this prompting, I could not smell the new Humans on my own, but Aaor was completely focused on them.
“Males,” it said. “Three, I think. Maybe four. Headed away from us. No females.”
“At least they’re headed away,” I whispered aloud. “Do any of them smell anything like TomÁs? I can’t tell from what you gave me.”
“They all smell very much like TomÁs. That’s why I can’t tell how many there are. Like TomÁs, but including a certain odd element. The genetic disorder, I suppose. Can’t you smell them?”
“I can now. They’re so far away, though, I don’t think I would have noticed them on my own. They have a dead animal with them, did you notice?”
Aaor nodded miserably.
“They’ve been hunting,” I said. “Now they’re probably heading home. Although I don’t smell anything that could be their home. Do you?”
“No,” it said. “I’ve been trying. Maybe they’re just looking for a place to camp—a place to cook the animal and eat it.”
“Whatever their intentions, we’ll have to be careful tomorrow.” I focused on it. “You’ve never been shot, have you?”
“Never. People always aim at you for some reason.”
I shook my head. “You’re picking up TomÁs’s sense of humor. I don’t know what your new mates will think of that.” I paused. “Being shot hurts more than I would want to show you. I could probably handle the pain better now, but I wouldn’t want to have to. I wouldn’t want you to have to.”
It moved closer to me and linked into me with its sensory tentacles. “I’m not sure I could survive being shot,” it said. “I think part of me might, but not as me.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
It said nothing, but there was no tenacity to it, no feeling that it could withstand abrupt shock and pain. It thought it would dissolve. It was probably right.
“They’ve finished eating their fish,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
We detached from one another and it turned wearily to follow me. “Do you know,” it said, “that before we left home, Ooan still said it couldn’t find the flaw in us, couldn’t see why we needed mates so early—needed, not just wanted? And why we focus so on Humans.” It paused. “Do you want other mates?”
“Oankali mates,” I said. “Not construct.”
“Why?”
“I think … I feel as though it will balance the two parts of me—Human and Oankali. I don’t know what the Oankali will think about that, though.”
“If they ever accept us and if you find two that you like, don’t let them make their decision from a distance.”
I smiled. “What about you? Humans and Oankali?”
It rested one strength arm around my shoulders. It almost never touched me with its sensory arms, though it accepted my own gladly. It behaved as though it were not yet mature. “What about me?” it repeated. “I can’t plan anything. It’s hard for me to believe from one day to the next that I’m even going to survive.” It made a fist with its free strength hand, then relaxed the hand. “Most of the time I feel as though I could just let go like this and dissolve. Sometimes I feel as though I should.”
I slept with it that night. I couldn’t do as much for it alone, but it couldn’t have tolerated Jesusa or TomÁs until they had digested their meal. I couldn’t imagine it not existing, truly gone, never to be touched again—like never being able to touch my own face again.
Two days later, Jesusa and TomÁs told me to give them back the marks of their genetic disorder. We had crawled up the nearly nonexistent trail on the mountain and back down again to the river. We had crossed the trail of the hunters we had scented earlier. There were four of them and they were still ahead of us. And now, when the wind was right, I could scent more Humans. Many more. Aaor’s head and body tentacles kept sweeping forward, controlled by the tantalizing scent.
“The more Human you can make yourselves look, the less likely you are to be shot if you’re seen,” TomÁs told us. He was looking at Aaor as he spoke. Then he faced me. “I’ve seen you both change by accident. Why can’t you change deliberately?”
“I can,” I said. “But Aaor’s control is just not firm enough. It already looks as Human as it can look.”
He drew a deep breath. “Then this is as close as it should get. You should change us and camp here.”
“We can’t even see your town from here,” Aaor protested.
“And they can’t see you. If you round that next bend, though, part of our settlement will be visible to you. But the way is guarded. You would be shot.”
Aaor seemed to sink in on itself. We had made a fireless camp. My mates were on either side of me, linked with me. Aaor was alone. “You should change yourself and go with them,” it said. “They’ll function better if they are not separated from you. I can survive alone for a few days.”
“If we’re caught, we’ll be separated,” Jesusa said. “We’ll be shut up in separate places. We’ll be questioned. I would probably be married off very quickly.” She stopped. “Jodahs, what will happen if someone tries to have sex with me?”
I shook my head. “You’ll fight. You won’t be able to help fighting. You’ll fight so hard, you might win even if the male is much stronger. Or maybe you’ll just make him hurt or kill you.”
“Then she can’t go,” TomÁs said. “I’ll have to do it alone.”
“Neither of you should go,” I said. “If hunters come out this far, we should wait. We have time.”
“That will get you a man,” Jesusa said. “Maybe several men. But women don’t hunt.”
“What do females do?” I asked. “What might bring them out away from the protection of the settlement?”
Jesusa and TomÁs looked at one another, and TomÁs grinned. “They meet,” he said.
“Meet?” I repeated, uncomprehending.
“The elders tell us who we must marry,” he said. “But they can’t tell us who we must love.”
I knew Humans did such things: marry here and mate there and there and there…. There was nothing in Human biology to prevent this. In fact, Human biology encouraged male Humans to have liaisons with more than one female. The male’s investment of time and energy in fathering children was much smaller than the female’s. Still, the concept felt alien to me. To have a mating and somehow put it aside. But then, most construct males never had true mates. They went wherever they found welcome and everyone knew it. There was no permanent bonding, no betrayal, no biological wrongness to contend with.
“Do your people meet this way because they would like to be mated?” I asked.
“Some of them,” TomÁs said. “Others only feel a temporary attraction.”
“It would be good to get a pair for Aaor who already care for one another.”
“We thought that, too,” Jesusa said. “We meant to go to the village and bring away the people we would have been married to. But they wouldn’t be coming out here to be together. They’re brother and sister, too. A brother and two sisters, really.”
“It would be better, safer to go after people who have already slipped away from your village. Is there a place where such people often meet?”
TomÁs sighed. “Change us back tonight. Make us as ugly as we were, just in case. Tomorrow night, we’ll show you some of the places where lovers meet. If you go there at all, it will have to be at night.”
But the next night we were spotted.