She begged them to let him come back, but they refused. They said he was with his mother. She did not believe them. She imagined Sharad locked alone in his own small cubicle, his sharp, retentive mind dulling as time passed.
Unconcerned, her captors began a complex new series of questions and exercises.
2
What would they do this time? Ask more questions? Give her another companion? She barely cared.
She sat on the bed, dressed, waiting, tired in a deep, emptied way that had nothing to do with physical weariness. Sooner or later, someone would speak to her.
She had a long wait. She had lain down and was almost asleep when a voice spoke her name.
'Lilith?' The usual, quiet, androgynous voice.
She drew a deep, weary breath. 'What?' she asked. But as she spoke, she realized the voice bad not come from above as it always had before. She sat up quickly and looked around. In one corner she found the shadowy figure of a man, thin and long-haired.
Was he the reason for the clothing, then? He seemed to be wearing a similar outfit. Something to take off when the two of them got to know each other better? Good god.
'I think,' she said softly, 'that you might be the last straw.'
'I'm not here to hurt you,' he said.
'No. Of course you're not.'
'I'm here to take you outside?'
Now she stood up, staring hard at him, wishing for more light. Was he making a joke? Laughing at her?
'Outside to what?'
'Education. Work. The beginning of a new life.'
She took a step closer to him, then stopped. He scared her somehow. She could not make herself approach him. 'Something is wrong,' she said. 'Who are you?'
He moved slightly. 'And what am I?'
She jumped because that was what she had almost said.
'I'm not a man,' he said. 'I'm not a human being.'
She moved back against the bed, but did not sit down. 'Tell me what you are.'
'I'm here to tell you. . . and 'show you. Will you look at me now?'
Since she was looking at him-it--she frowned. 'The light-''
'It will change when you're ready.'
'You're. . . what? From some other world?'
'From a number of other worlds. You're one of the few English speakers who never considered that she might be in the hands of extraterrestrials.'
'I did consider it,' Lilith whispered. 'Along with the possibility that I might be in prison, in an insane asylum, in the hands of the FBI, the CIA, or the KGB. The other possibilities seemed marginally less ridiculous.'
The creature said nothing. It stood utterly still in its corner, and she knew from her many Awakenings that it would not speak to her again until she did what it wished- until she said she was ready to look at it, then, in brighter light, took the obligatory look. These things, whatever they were, were incredibly good at waiting. She made this one wait for several minutes, and not only was it silent, it never moved a muscle. Discipline or physiology?
She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by 'ugly' faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage.
'All right,' she said. 'Show me.'
The lights brightened as she had supposed they would, and what had seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose-no bulge, no nostrils-just flat, gray skin. It was gray all over-pale gray skin, darker gray hair on its head that grew down around its eyes and ears and at its throat. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the creature could see. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears as well as around them. Above, it joined the eye hair, and below and behind, it joined the head hair. The island of throat hair seemed to move slightly, and it occurred to her that that might be where the creature breathed-a kind of natural tracheostomy.
Lilith glanced at the humanoid body, wondering how humanlike it really was. 'I don't mean any offense,' she said, 'but are you male or female?'
'It's wrong to assume that I must be a sex you're familiar with,' it said, 'but as it happens, I'm male.'
Good. 'It' could become 'he' again. Less awkward.
'You should notice,' he said, 'that what you probably see as hair isn't hair at all. I have no hair. The reality seems to bother humans.'
''What?''
'Come closer and look.'
She did not want to be any closer to him. She had not known what held her back before. Now she was certain it was his alienness, his difference, his literal unearthliness. She found herself still unable to take even one more step toward him.
