His accent was as American as her own and her mind overflowed with questions. Where had he lived before the war? How had he survived? Who was he beyond a name? Had he seen any other humans? Had he- 'Have you really decided to stay here?' she demanded abruptly. It was not the first question she had intended to ask.
The man sat cross-legged in the middle of a platform large enough to be a serving table or a bed.
'I was fourteen when they woke me up,' he said. 'Everyone I knew was dead. The Oankali said they'd send me back to Earth eventually if I wanted to go. But once I had been here for a while, I knew this was where I wanted to be. There's nothing that I care about left on Earth.'
'Everyone lost relatives and Mends,' she said. 'As far as I know, I'm the only member of my family still alive.'
'I saw my father, my brother-their bodies. I don't know what happened to my mother. I was dying myself when the Oankali found me. They tell me I was. I don't remember, but I believe them.'
'I don't remember their finding me either.' She twisted around. 'Nikanj, did your people do something to us to keep us from remembering?'
Nikanj seemed to rouse itself slowly. 'They had to,' it said. 'Humans who were allowed to remember their rescue became uncontrollable. Some died in spite of our care.'
Not surprising. She tried to imagine what she had done when in the middle of the shock of realizing that her home, her family, her Mends, her world were all destroyed. She was confronted with a collecting party of Oankali. She must have believed she had lost her mind. Or perhaps she did lose it for a while. It was a miracle that she had not killed herself trying to escape them.
'Have you eaten?' the man asked.
'Yes,' she said, suddenly shy.
There was a long silence. 'What were you before?' he asked. 'I mean, did you work?'
'I had gone back to school,' she said. 'I was majoring in anthropology.' She laughed bitterly. 'I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork-but how the hell do I get out of the field?'
'Anthropology?' he said, frowning. 'Oh yeah, I remember reading some stuff by Margaret Mead before the war. So you wanted to study what? People in tribes?'
'Different people anyway. People who didn't do things the way we did them.'
'Where were you from?' he asked.
'Los Angeles.'
'Oh, yeah. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, movie stars. . . . I always wanted to go there.'
One trip would have shattered his illusions. 'And you were from... ?'
'Denver.'
'Where were you when the war started?'
'Grand Canyon-shooting the rapids. That was the first time we'd ever really done anything, gone anywhere really good. We froze afterward. And my father used to say nuclear winter was nothing but politics.'
'I was in the Andes in Peru,' she said, 'hiking toward Machu Picchu. I hadn't been anywhere either, really. At least not since my husband-'
'You were married?'
'Yes. But he and my son. . . were killed-before the war, I mean. I had gone on a study tour of Peru. Part of going back to college. A friend talked me into taking that trip. She went too. . . and died.'
'Yeah.' He shrugged uncomfortably. 'I was sort of looking forward to going to college myself. But I had just gotten through the tenth grade when everything blew up.'
'The Oankali must have taken a lot of people out of the southern hemisphere,' she said, thinking. 'I mean we froze too, but I heard the southern freeze was spotty. A lot of people must have survived.'
He drifted into his own thoughts. 'It's funny,' he said. 'You started out years older than me, but I've been Awake for so long. . . I guess I'm older than you are now.'
'I wonder how many people they were able to get out of the northern hemisphere-other than the soldiers and politicians whose shelters hadn't been bombed open.' She turned to ask Nikanj and saw that it was gone.
'He left a couple of minutes ago,' the man said. 'They can move really quietly and fast when they want to.'
'But-'
'Hey, don't worry. He'll come back. And if he doesn't, I can open the walls or get food for you if you want anything.'
'You can?'
'Sure. They changed my body chemistry a little when I decided to stay. Now the walls open for me just like they do for them.'
'Oh.' She wasn't sure she liked being left with the man this way-especially if he was telling the truth. If he could open walls and she could not, she was his prisoner.
'They're probably watching us,' she said. And she spoke in Oankali, imitating Nikanj's voice: 'Now let's see what they'll do if they think they're alone.'
The man laughed. 'They probably are. Not that it matters.'
'It matters to me. I'd rather have watchers where I can keep an eye on them, too.'
