If the child would just take her somewhere and leave her for a while. If it would give her a little more of what she had thought she would never want again: Solitude.
Nikanj touched her forehead with a few head tentacles, as though sampling her sweat. She jerked her head away, not wanting to be sampled anymore by anyone.
Nikanj opened a wall into the family apartment and led her into a room that was a twin of the isolation room she thought she had left behind. 'Rest here,' it told her. 'Sleep.'
There was even a bathroom, and on the familiar table platform, there was a clean set of clothing. And replacing Jdahya was Nikanj. She could not get rid of it. It had been told to stay with her, and it meant to stay. Its tentacles settled into ugly irregular lumps when she shouted at it, but it stayed.
Defeated, she hid for a while in the bathroom. She rinsed her old clothing, though no foreign matter stuck to it-not dirt, not sweat, not grease or water. It never stayed wet for more than a few minutes. Some Oankali synthetic.
Then she wanted to sleep again. She was used to sleeping whenever she felt tired, and not used to walking long distances or meeting new people. Surprising how quickly the Oankali had become people to her. But then, who else was there?
She crawled into the bed and turned her back to Nikanj, who had taken Jdahya's place on the table platform. Who else would there be for her if the Oankali had their way- and no doubt they were used to having their way. Modifying carnivorous plants . . . What had they modified to get their ship? And what useful tools would they modify human beings into? Did they know yet, or were they planning more experiments? Did they care? How would they make their changes? Or had they made them already-done a little extra tampering with her while they took care of her tumor? Had she ever had a tumor? Her family history led her to believe she had. They probably had not lied about that. Maybe they had not lied about anything. Why should they bother to lie? They owned the Earth and all that was left of the human species.
How was it that she had not been able to take what Jdahya offered?
She slept, finally. The light never changed, but she was used to that. She awoke once to find that Nikanj had come onto the bed with her and lay down. Her first impulse was to push the child away in revulsion or get up herself. Her second, which she followed, wearily indifferent, was to go back to sleep.
4
It became irrationally important to her to do two things:
First, to talk to another human being. Any human would do, but she hoped for one who had been Awake longer than she had, one who knew more than she had managed to learn.
Second, she wanted to catch an Oankali in a lie. Any Oankali. Any lie.
But she saw no sign of other humans. And the closest she came to catching the Oankali lying was to catch them in half-truths--though they were honest even about this. They freely admitted that they would tell her only part of what she wanted to know. Beyond this, the Oankali seemed to tell the truth as they perceived it, always. This left her with an almost intolerable sense of hopelessness and helplessness- as though catching them in lies would make them vulnerable. As though it would make the thing they intended to do less real, easier to deny.
Only Nikanj gave her any pleasure, any forgetfulness. The ooloi child seemed to have been given to her as much as she had been given to it. It rarely left her, seemed to like her-though what 'liking' a human might mean to an Oankali, she did not know. She had not even figured out Oankali emotional ties to one another. But Jdahya had cared enough for her to offer to do something he believed was utterly wrong. What might Nikanj do for her eventually?
In a very real sense, she was an experimental animal. Not a pet. What could Nikanj do for an experimental animal? Protest tearfully (?) when she was sacrificed at the end of the experiment?
But, no, it was not that kind of experiment. She was intended to live and reproduce, not to die. Experimental animal, parent to domestic animals? Or . . . nearly extinct animal, part of a captive breeding program? Human biologists had done that before the war-used a few captive members of an endangered animal species to breed more for the wild population. Was that what she was headed for? Forced artificial insemination. Surrogate motherhood? Fertility drugs and forced 'donations' of eggs? Implantation of unrelated fertilized eggs. Removal of children from mothers at birth . . . Humans had done these things to captive breeders- all for a higher good, of course.
This was what she needed to talk to another human about.
Only a human could reassure her-or at least understand her fear. But there was only Nikanj. She spent all her time teaching it and learning what she could from it. It kept her as busy as she would permit. It needed less sleep than she did, and when she was not asleep, it expected her to be learning or teaching. It wanted not only language, but culture, biology, history, her own life story . . . . Whatever she knew, it expected to learn.
This was a little like having Sharad with her again. But Nikanj was much more demanding-more like an adult in its persistence. No doubt she and Sharad had been given their time together so that the Oankali could see how she behaved with a foreign child of her own species-a child she had to share quarters with and teach.
Like Sharad, Nikanj had an eidetic memory. Perhaps all Oankali did. Anything Nikanj saw or heard once, it remembered, whether it understood or not. And it was bright and surprisingly quick to understand. She became ashamed of her own plodding slowness and haphazard memory.
She had always found it easier to learn when she could write things down. In all her time with the Oankali, though, she had never seen any of them read or write anything.
'Do you keep any records outside your own memories?' she asked Nikanj when she had worked with it long enough to become frustrated and angry. 'Do you ever read or write?'
'You have not taught me those words,' it said.
'Communication by symbolic marks. . .' She looked around for something she could mark, but they were in their bedroom and there was nothing that would retain a mark long enough for her to write words-even if she had had something to write with. 'Let's go outside,' she said. 'I'll show you.'
It opened a wall and led her out. Outside, beneath the branches of the pseudotree that contained their living quarters, she knelt on the ground and began to write with her finger in what seemed to be loose, sandy soil. She wrote her name, then experimented with different possible spellings of Nikanj's name. Necange didn't look right-nor did Nekahnge.
