the old panic; only relief at somehow having finally shed it.
'We'll go out now,' he said. 'My family will be relieved to see us. And you-you have a great deal to learn.'
5
She made him wait until she had washed the orange juice from her hands. Then he walked over to one of the walls and touched it with some of his longer head tentacles.
A dark spot appeared on the wall where he made contact. It became a deepening, widening indentation, then a hole through which Lilith could see color and light-green, red, orange, yellow.
There had been little color in her world since her capture. Her own skin, her blood-within the pale walls of her prison, that was all. Everything else was some shade of white or gray. Even her food had been colorless until the banana. Now, here was color and what appeared to be sunlight. There was space. Vast space.
The hole in the wall widened as though it were flesh rippling aside, slowly writhing. She was both fascinated and repelled.
'Is it alive?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said.
She had beaten it, kicked it, clawed it, tried to bite it. It had been smooth, tough, impenetrable, but slightly giving like the bed and table. It had felt like plastic, cool beneath her hands.
'What is it?' she asked.
'Flesh. More like mine than like yours. Different from mine, too, though. It's... the ship.'
'You're kidding. Your ship is alive?'
'Yes. Come out.' The hole in the wall had grown large enough for them to step through. He ducked his head and took the necessary step. She started to follow him, then stopped. There was so much space out there. The colors she had seen were thin, hairlike leaves and round, coconut-sized fruit, apparently in different stages of development. All hung from great branches that overshadowed the new exit. Beyond them was a broad, open field with scattered trees- impossibly huge trees-distant hills, and a bright, sunless ivory sky. There was enough strangeness to the trees and the sky to stop her from imagining that she was on Earth. There were people moving around in the distance, and there were black, German shepherd-sized animals that were too far away for her to see them clearly-though even in the distance the animals seemed to have too many legs. Six? Ten? The creatures seemed to be grazing.
'Lilith, come out,' Jdahya said.
She took a step backward, away from all the alien vastness. The isolation room that she had hated for so long suddenly seemed safe and comforting.
'Back into your cage, Lilith?' Jdahya asked softly.
She stared at him through the hole, realized at once that he was trying to provoke her, make her overcome her fear. It would not have worked if he had not been so right. She was retreating into her cage-like a zoo animal that had been shut up for so long that the cage had become home.
She made herself step up to the opening, and then, teeth clenched, step through.
Outside, she stood beside him and drew a long, shuddering breath. She turned her head, looked at the room, then turned away quickly, resisting an impulse to flee back to it. He took her band and led her away.
When she looked back a second time, the hole was closing and she could see that what she had come out of was actually a huge tree. Her room could not have taken more than a tiny fraction of its interior. The tree had grown from what appeared to be ordinary, pale-brown, sandy soil. Its lower limbs were heavily laden with fruit. The rest of it looked almost ordinary except for its size. The trunk was bigger around than some office buildings she remembered. And it seemed to touch the ivory sky. How tall was it? How much of it served as a building?
'Was everything inside that room alive?' she asked.
'Everything except some of the visible plumbing fixtures,' Jdahya said. 'Even the food you ate was produced from the fruit of one of the branches growing outside. It was designed to meet your nutritional needs.'
'And to taste like cotton and paste,' she muttered. 'I hope I won't have to eat any more of that stuff.'
'You won't. But it's kept you very healthy. Your diet in particular encouraged your body not to grow cancers while your genetic inclination to grow them was corrected.'
'It has been corrected, then?'
'Yes. Correcting genes have been inserted into your cells, and your cells have accepted and replicated them. Now you won't grow cancers by accident.'
That, she thought, was an odd qualification, but she let it pass for the moment. 'When will you send me back to Earth?' she asked.
'You couldn't survive there now-especially not alone.'
'You haven't sent any of us back yet?'
'Your group will be the first.'
'Oh.' This had not occurred to her-that she and others like her would be guinea pigs trying to survive on an Earth that must have greatly changed. 'How is it there now?'
'Wild. Forests, mountains, deserts, plains, great oceans. It's a rich world, clean of dangerous radiation in most places. The greatest diversity of animal life is in the seas, but there are a number of small animals thriving on land: insects, worms, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals. There's no doubt your people can live there.'
'When?'
'That will not be hurried. You have a very long life ahead of you, Lilith. And you have work to do here.'
'You said something about that once before. What work?'
