3

Aaor was in its second metamorphosis. When Nikanj brought it to me after several days of reconstruction, it was not yet recognizable. Not like a Human or an Oankali or any construct I had ever seen.

Its skin was deep gray. Patches of it still glistened with slime. Aaor could not walk very well. It was bipedal again, but very weak, and its coordination had not returned as it should have.

It was hairless.

It could not speak aloud.

Its hands were webbed flippers.

“It keeps slipping away,” Nikanj said. “I’d brought it almost back to normal, but it has no control left. The moment I release it, it drifts toward a less complex form.”

It placed Aaor on the pallet we had prepared for it. TomÁs had followed it in. Now he stood staring as Aaor’s body retreated further and further from what it should have been. Jesusa had not come in at all.

“Can you help it?” TomÁs asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. I lay down alongside it, saw that it was watching me. Its reconstructed eyes were not what they should have been either. They were too small. They protruded too much. But it could see with them. It was staring at my sensory arms. I wrapped them both around it, wrapped my strength arms around it as well.

It was deeply, painfully afraid, desperately lonely and hungry for a touch it could not have.

“Lie down behind me, TomÁs,” I said, and saw with my sensory tentacles how he hesitated, how his throat moved when he swallowed. Yet he lay behind me, drew up close, and let me share him with Aaor as I had already shared him with Jesusa.

In spite of my efforts, there was no pleasure in the exercise. Something had gone seriously wrong with Aaor’s body, as Nikanj had said. It kept slipping away from me—simplifying its body. It had no control of itself, but like a rock rolling downhill, it had inertia. Its body “wanted” to be less and less complex. If it had stayed unattended in the water for much longer, it would have begun to break down completely—individual cells each with its own seed of life, its own Oankali organelle. These might live for a while as single-cell organisms or invade the bodies of larger creatures at once, but Aaor as an individual would be gone. In a way, then, Aaor’s body was trying to commit suicide. I had never heard of any carrier of the Oankali organism doing such a thing. We treasured life. In my worst moments before I found Jesusa and TomÁs, such dissolution had not occurred to me. I didn’t doubt that it would have happened eventually—not as something desirable, but as something inescapable, inevitable. We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. The word had not been chosen frivolously. One who could hunger could starve.

The people who had wanted me safely shut away on Chkahichdahk had been afraid not only of what my instability might cause me to do but of what my hunger might cause me to do. Dissolution had been one unspoken possibility. Dissolution in the river would be bound to affect—to infect—plants and animals. Infected animals would be drawn to areas like Lo, where ship organisms were growing. So would free-living cells be drawn to such places. Only a very few cells would end by causing trouble—causing diseases and mutations in plants, for instance.

Aaor wanted to continue living as Aaor. It tried to help me bring it back to a normal metamorphosis, but without words, I discouraged its efforts. It had not even enough control to help in its own restoration.

TomÁs wanted desperately to withdraw from me and from Aaor. I put him to sleep and kept him with me. His presence would help Aaor whether he was conscious or not.

For a day and a half, the three of us lay together, forcing Aaor’s body to do what it no longer wanted to do. By the time TomÁs and I got up to go to bathe and eat, Aaor looked almost as it had before it went away. Smooth brown skin, a sensory arm bud under each strength arm, a dusting of black hair on its head, fingers without webbing, speech.

“What am I going to do?” it asked just before we left it with Nikanj.

“We’ll take care of you,” I promised.

Without a word to each other, TomÁs and I went to the river and scrubbed ourselves.

“I don’t ever want to do that again,” TomÁs said as we emerged from the water.

I said nothing. The next day, as Aaor’s body shape began to change in the wrong way, TomÁs and I did it again. He didn’t want to, but he looked at Aaor and me and reluctantly lay down alongside me.

The next time it happened, I called Jesusa. Afterward, at the river, she said, “I feel as though I’ve been crawled over by a lot of slugs!”

Aaor’s body did not learn stability. Again and again, it had to be brought back from drifting toward dissolution. Working with Jesusa and TomÁs, I could always bring it back, but I couldn’t hold it. Our work was never finished.

“Why does it always feel so disgusting?” Jesusa demanded after a long session. We had washed. Now three of us shared a meal—something we weren’t able to do very often.

“Two reasons,” I said. “First, Aaor isn’t me. Mated people don’t want that kind of contact with ooloi who aren’t their mates. The reasons are biochemical.” I stopped. “Aaor smells wrong and tastes wrong to you. I wish I could mask that for you, but I can’t.”

“We never touch it, and yet I feel it,” Jesusa said.

“Because it needs to feel you. I make you sleep because it doesn’t need to feel your revulsion. You can’t help feeling revulsion, I know, but Aaor doesn’t need to share it.”

“What’s the second reason?” TomÁs asked.

I hugged myself with my strength arms. “Aaor is ill. It should not keep sliding away from us the way it does. It should stabilize the way my siblings used to help me stabilize. But it can’t.” I looked at his face—thinner than it should have been, though he got plenty to eat. The effects of his sessions with Aaor were beginning to show. And Jesusa looked older than she should have. The vertical lines between her eyes had deepened and become set. When all this was over I would erase them.

She and TomÁs looked at one another bleakly.

“What is it?” I asked.

Jesusa moved uncomfortably. “What will happen to Aaor?” she asked. “How long will we have to keep helping it?” She leaned back against the cabin wall. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”

“If we can get it through metamorphosis,” I said, “it might stabilize just because its body is mature.”

“Do you think you would have without us?” Jesusa asked.

I didn’t answer. After a moment, no answer was necessary.

“What will happen to it?” she insisted.

“Ship exile, probably. We’ll take it back to Lo, and it will be sent to the ship. There it may find Oankali or construct mates who can stabilize it. Or perhaps it will finally be … be allowed to dissolve. Its life now is terrible. If it has nothing better to look forward to …”

They turned simultaneously and looked at each other again. They were paired siblings, after all, though they did not think in such terms. They were like Aaor and me. Between them a look said a great deal. That same look excluded me.

Jesusa took one of my sensory arms between her hands and coaxed out the sensory hand. She seemed to do this as naturally as my male and female parents did it with Nikanj. She rarely touched my strength arms now that my sensory arms had grown.

“Nikanj has talked to us about Aaor,” she said softly.

I focused narrowly on her. “Nikanj?”

“It told us what you’ve just told us. It said Aaor probably would dissolve. Die.”

“Not exactly die.”

“Yes! Yes, die. It will not be Aaor any longer no matter how many of its cells live. Aaor will be gone!”

I was startled by her sudden vehemence. I resisted the impulse to calm her chemically because she did not want to be calmed.

“We know more about dying than you do,” she said bitterly. “And, I tell you, I know death when I see it.”

I put my strength arm around her, but could not think of anything to say.

TomÁs spoke finally. “At home, she was made to help with the sick and the dying. She hated it, but people trusted her. They knew she would do what was necessary, no matter how she felt.” He sighed. “Like you, I suppose. There must be something wrong with me—to love only serious, duty-bound people.”

I smiled and extended my free sensory arm to him.

He came to sit with us and accepted the arm. No intensity now. Only comfort in being together. We’d had little of that lately.

“If Aaor had a chance to mate with a pair of Humans,” Jesusa said, “would it survive?”

She felt frightened and sick to her stomach. She spoke as though the words had been beaten out of her. Both TomÁs and I stared at her.

“Well, Jodahs? Would it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Almost certainly.”

She nodded. “What I was thinking is that if you could fix our faces back the way they were, we could go home. I can think of people who might be willing to join us once they know what we’ve found—what we’ve learned.”

“We’d be locked up and bred!” TomÁs protested.

“I don’t think any elders or parents would have to see us. You were always good at coming and going without being seen when you thought you might be put to work.”

“That was nothing. This is serious.” He paused. “With a name like yours, sister, this isn’t a role you should play.”

She turned her face away from him, rested her head against my shoulder. “I don’t want to do it,” she said. “But why should Aaor die? We know our people will be taken and moved or absorbed or sterilized. It’s too late to prevent that. How can we watch Aaor suffer and know it will probably die and just do nothing? It’s true that our people will think badly of us when they find out that we’ve joined the Oankali. But they will find out eventually, no matter what.”

“They’ll kill us if they get the chance,” TomÁs said.

Jesusa shook her head. “Not if we look the way we used to look. Jodahs will have to change us back in every way. Even your neck must be stiff again. That will give us a chance to get out again sooner or later, even if we’re caught.” She thought for a moment. “They can’t know yet what we’ve done, can they, Jodahs?”

“Not yet,” I admitted. “Nikanj has avoided sending word to the ship or to any of the towns.”

“Because it hoped we would do just what we’re doing.”

I nodded. “It would not ask either of you. It only hoped.”

“And you?”

“I couldn’t ask either. You had already refused. We understood your refusal.”

She said nothing for a while. She sat utterly still, staring at the floor. Adrenaline flowed into her system, and she began to shake.

“Jesusa?” I said.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said. “You think you understand. You don’t. You can’t.”

I held her and stroked her until she stopped shaking. TomÁs touched her hair, reaching across me to do it, and making me want to grab his hand and stop him. Oankali male and female mates had no need to do this. I had to learn to endure it in Human mates.

“Shall we do it?” she asked him suddenly.

He drew back from her, looked from one of us to the other, then looked away.

She looked at me. “Shall we?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to say yes, she should, of course. Then I closed it. “I don’t want you to destroy yourself,” I said after a while. “I don’t want to trade my sibling’s life for yours.” I felt what she felt. She could not give me multisensory illusions. Humans did not have that kind of control. But I could feel how tightly she held herself, how her stomach hurt her and her muscles ached. I had to keep stopping myself from giving her relief. She didn’t need or want that from me now. Both my mother and Nikanj had warned me that not every pain should be immediately healed. Her body language would tell me when she wanted relief.

“I won’t die,” she whispered. “I’m not that fragile. Or maybe … not that lucky. If I can save your sibling, I will. But I think it would be easier for me to break several of my bones.”

Now she and I both looked at TomÁs.

He shook his head. “I hate that place,” he said softly. “Full of pain and sickness and duty and false hope. I meant to die rather than see it again. You both know that.”

I nodded. Jesusa made no move at all. She watched him.

“Yet I love those people,” he said. “I don’t want to do this to them. Isn’t there any other way?”

“None that anyone’s thought of,” I said. “If you can do this, you’ll save Aaor. If you can’t, we’ll get it to the ship and … hope for the best.”

“We’ve already betrayed our people,” Jesusa said softly. “We did that with you, Jodahs. All we’re doing now is arguing about whether to bring two more of our people out early or let them all wait until the Oankali arrive.”

“Is that all?” TomÁs said with bitter irony.

“Will you go with me?” she asked.

He sighed. “Didn’t I promise you I’d get you back there?” He ran a hand through his own hair. After a moment he got up, and went outside.