'You'll live with my family for a while-live as one of us as much as possible. We'll teach you your work.'
'But what work?'
'You'll Awaken a small group of humans, all English-speaking, and help them learn to deal with us. You'll teach them the survival skills we teach you. Your people will all be from what you would call civilized societies. Now they'll have to learn to live in forests, build their own shelters, and raise their own food all without machines or outside help.'
'Will you forbid us machines?' she asked uncertainly.
'Of course not. But we won't give them to you either. We'll give you hand tools, simple equipment, and food until you begin to make the things you need and grow your own crops. We've already armed you against the deadlier microorganisms. Beyond that, you'll have to fend for yourselves- avoiding poisonous plants and animals and creating what you need.'
'How can you teach us to survive on our own world? How can you know enough about it or about us?'
'How can we not? We've helped your world restore itself. We've studied your bodies, your thinking, your literature, your historical records, your many cultures. . . . We know more of what you're capable of than you do.'
Or they thought they did. If they really had had two hundred and fifty years to study, maybe they were right. 'You've inoculated us against diseases?' she asked to be sure she had understood.
'No.'
'But you said-'
'We've strengthened your immune system, increased your resistance to disease in general.'
'How? Something else done to our genes?'
He said nothing. She let the silence lengthen until she was certain he would not answer. This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good. 'We used to treat animals that way,' she muttered bitterly.
'What?' he said.
'We did things to them-inoculations, surgery, isolation- all for their own good. We wanted them healthy and protected-sometimes so we could eat them later.'
His tentacles did not flatten to his body, but she got the impression he was laughing at her. 'Doesn't it frighten you to say things like that to me?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'It scares me to have people doing things to me that I don't understand.'
'You've been given health. The ooloi have seen to it that you'll have a chance to live on your Earth-not just to die on it.'
He would not say any more on the subject. She looked around at the huge trees, some with great branching multiple trunks and foliage like long, green hair. Some of the hair seemed to move, though there was no wind. She sighed. The trees, too, then-tentacled like the people. Long, slender, green tentacles.
'Jdahya?'
His own tentacles swept toward her in a way she still found disconcerting, though it was only his way of giving her his attention or signaling her that she had it.
'I'm willing to learn what you have to teach me,' she said, 'but I don't think I'm the right teacher for others. There were so many humans who already knew how to live in the wilderness-so many who could probably teach you a little more. Those are the ones you ought to be talking to.'
'We have talked to them. They will have to be especially careful because some of the things they 'know' aren't true anymore. There are new plants-mutations of old ones and additions we've made. Some things that used to be edible are lethal now. Some things are deadly only if they aren't prepared properly. Some of the animal life isn't as harmless as it apparently once was. Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed.'
She nodded, wondering why she could absorb his words so easily. Perhaps because she had known even before her capture that the world she had known was dead. She had already absorbed that loss to the degree that she could.
'There must be ruins,' she said softly.
'There were. We've destroyed many of them.'
She seized his arm without thinking. 'You destroyed them? There were things left and you destroyed them?'
'You'll begin again. We'll put you in areas that are clean of radioactivity and history. You will become something other than you were.'
'And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?'
'No. Only different.' She realized suddenly that she was facing him, grasping his arm in a grip that should have been painful to him. It was painful to her. She let go of him and his arm swung to his side in the oddly dead way in which his limbs seemed to move when he was not using them for a specific purpose.
'You were wrong,' she said. She could not sustain her anger. She could not look at his tentacled, alien face and sustain anger-but she had to say the words. 'You destroyed what wasn't yours,' she said. 'You completed an insane act.'
'You are still alive,' be said.
She walked beside him, silently ungrateful. Knee-high tufts of thick, fleshy leaves or tentacles grew from the soil. He stepped carefully to avoid them-which made her want to kick them. Only the fact that her feet were bare stopped her. Then she saw, to her disgust, that the leaves twisted or contracted out of the way if she stepped near
