Peter’s ooloi proved that ooloi were not infallible. Drugged, Peter was a different man. For perhaps the first time since his Awakening, he was at peace, not fighting even with himself, not trying to prove anything, joking with Jean and their ooloi about his arm and the fighting.
Lilith, hearing this later, wondered what there was to laugh at in that incident. But the ooloi-produced drugs could be potent. Under their influence, Peter might have laughed at anything. Under their influence, he accepted union and pleasure. When that influence was allowed to wane and Peter began to think, he apparently decided he had been humiliated and enslaved. The drug seemed to him to be not a less painful way of getting used to frightening nonhumans, but a way of turning him against himself, causing him to demean himself in alien perversions. His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.
Peter’s ooloi should have noticed that at some point what Peter said and the expression he assumed ceased to agree with what his body told it. Perhaps it did not know enough about human beings to handle someone like Peter. It was older than Nikanj—more a contemporary of Kahguyaht. But it was not as perceptive as either of them—and perhaps not as bright.
Sealed in Peter’s room, alone with Peter, it allowed itself to be attacked, pounded by Peter’s bare fists. Unfortunately for Peter, he hit a sensitive spot with his first hammering blow, and triggered the ooloi’s defensive reflexes. It gave him a lethal sting before it could regain control of itself and he collapsed in convulsions. His own contracting muscles broke several of his bones, then he went into shock.
The ooloi tried to help him once it had recovered from the worst of its own pain, but it was too late. He was dead. The ooloi sat down beside his body, its head and body tentacles drawn into hard lumps. It did not move or speak. Its cool flesh grew even cooler, and it seemed to be as dead as the human it was apparently mourning.
There were no Oankali on watch above. Peter might have been saved if there had been. But the great room was full of ooloi. Where was the need to keep watch?
By the time one of these ooloi noticed Jean sitting alone and forlorn outside the sealed room, it was too late. There was nothing to do but take Peter’s body out and send for the ooloi’s mates. The ooloi remained catatonic.
Jean, still lightly drugged, frightened, and alone, retreated from the people clustering around the room. She stood apart and watched as the body was carried out. Lilith noticed her, approached her, knowing she couldn’t help, but hoping at least to give comfort.
“No!” Jean said, backing toward a wall. “Get away!”
Lilith sighed. Jean was going through a prolonged period of ooloi-induced reclusiveness. All of the humans who had been kept heavily drugged were this way—unable to tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them. Neither Lilith nor Joseph had experienced this extreme reaction. Lilith had hardly noticed any reaction at all beyond an increased aversion to Kahguyaht back when Nikanj matured and bound her to it. More recently, Joseph had reacted by simply staying close to Lilith and Nikanj for a couple of days. Then his reaction passed. Jean’s was far from passing. What would happen to her now?
Lilith looked around for Nikanj. She spotted it in a cluster of ooloi, went to it and laid a hand on its shoulder.
It focused on her without turning or breaking the various sensory tentacle and sensory arm contacts it had with the others. She spoke to the point of a thin cone of head tentacles.
“Can’t you help Jean?”
“Help is coming for her.”
“Look at her! She’s going to break before it gets here.”
The cone focused on Jean. She had wedged herself into a corner. Now she stood crying silently and looking around in confusion. She was a tall, strongly built woman. Now, though, she looked like a large child.
Nikanj detached itself from the other ooloi, apparently ending whatever communication was going on. The other ooloi relaxed away from one another. They went to their various human charges who stood waiting for them in widely separated ones and twos. The moment the news of the death had gone around, every human except Lilith and Jean had been drugged heavily. Nikanj had refused to drug Lilith. It trusted her to control her own behavior and the other ooloi trusted it. As for Jean, there was no one present who could drug her without harming her.
Nikanj closed to within about ten feet of Jean. It stopped there and waited until she saw it.
She trembled, but did not try to cringe farther into her corner.
“I won’t come closer,” Nikanj said softly. “Others will come to help you. You aren’t alone.”
“But… But I am alone,” she whispered. “They’re dead. I saw them.”
“One is dead,” Nikanj corrected, keeping its voice low.
She hid her face in her hands and shook her head from side to side.
“Peter is dead,” Nikanj told her, “but Tehjaht is only … injured. And you have siblings coming to help.”
“What?”
“They’ll help you.”
She sat down on the floor, head down, voice muffled when she spoke. “I’ve never had any brothers or sisters. Not even before the war.
“Tehjaht has mates. They’ll take care of you.”
“No. They’ll blame me … because Tehjaht is hurt.”
“They’ll help you.” Very softly. “They’ll help both you and Tehjaht. They will help.”
She frowned, looking more childlike than ever as she tried to understand. Then her face changed. Curt, heavily drugged, edged along the wall toward her. He kept himself comfortably far from Nikanj, but moved a little too close to Jean. She cringed back from him.
Curt shook his head, took a step backward. “Jeanie?” he called, his heavy voice sounding too loud, sounding drunk.
Jean jumped, but said nothing.
Curt faced Nikanj. “She’s one of ours! We should be the ones to take care of her!”
“It isn’t possible,” Nikanj said.
“It should be possible! It should be! Why isn’t it?”
“Her bonding with her ooloi is too strong, too heavily reinforced—as yours is with your ooloi. Later when the bond is more relaxed, you’ll be able to go near her again. Later. Not now.”
“Goddammit, she needs us now!”
“No.”
Curt’s ooloi came up to him, took him by the arm. Curt would have pulled away, but suddenly his strength seemed to leave him. He stumbled, fell to his knees. Nearby, Lilith looked away. Curt was as unlikely to forgive any humbling as Peter had been. And he would not always be drugged. He would remember.
Curt’s ooloi helped Curt to his feet and led him away to the room he now shared with it and with Celene. As he left, the wall opened at the far end of the room and a male and female Oankali came in.
Nikanj gestured to the pair and they came toward it. They held on to one another, walking as though wounded, as though holding one another up. They were two when they should have been three, missing an essential part.
The male and female made their way to Nikanj, and past it to Jean. Frightened, Jean stiffened. Then she frowned as though something had been said, and she had not quite heard.
Lilith watched sadly, knowing that the first signals Jean received were olfactory. The male and female smelled good, smelled like family, all brought together by the same ooloi. When they took her hands, they felt right. There was a real chemical affinity.
Jean seemed still to be afraid of the two strangers, but she was also relieved. They were what Nikanj had said they would be. People who could help. Family.
She let them lead her into the room where Tehjaht sat frozen. No words had been spoken. Strangers of a different species had been accepted as family. A human friend and ally had been rejected.
Lilith stood staring after Jean, hardly aware of Joseph’s coming to stand beside her. He was drugged, but the drug had only made him reckless.
“Peter was right,” he said angrily.
She frowned. “Peter? Right to try to kill? Right to die?”
“He died human! And he almost managed to take one of them with him!”
She looked at him. “So what? What’s changed? On Earth we can change things. Not here.”
“Will we want to by then? What will we be, I wonder? Not human. Not anymore.”