The laughter again. 'Maybe he thought we might be kind of inhibited if he stayed around.'
She deliberately ignored the implications of this. 'Nikanj isn't male,' she said. 'It's ooloi.'
'Yeah, I know. But doesn't yours seem male to you?' She thought about that. 'No. I guess I've taken their word for what they are.'
'When they woke me up, I thought the ooloi acted like men and women while the males and females acted like eunuchs. I never really lost the habit of thinking of ooloi as male or female.'
That, Lilith thought, was a foolish way for someone who had decided to spend his life among the Oankali to think-a kind of deliberate, persistent ignorance.
'You wait until yours is mature,' he said. 'You'll see what I mean. They change when they've grown those two extra things.' He lifted an eyebrow. 'You know what those things are?'
'Yes,' she said. He probably knew more, but she realized that she did not want to encourage him to talk about sex; not even Oankali sex.
'Then you know they're not arms, no matter what they tell us to call them. When those things grow in, ooloi let everyone know who's in charge. The Oankali need a little women's and men's lib up here.'
She wet her lips. 'It wants me to help it through its metamorphosis.'
'Help it. What did you tell it?'
'I said I would. It didn't sound like much.'
He laughed. 'It isn't hard. Puts them in debt to you, though. Not a bad idea to have someone powerful in debt to you. It proves you can be trusted, too. They'll be grateful and you'll be a lot freer. Maybe they'll fix things so you can open your own walls.'
'Is that what happened with you?'
He moved restlessly. 'Sort of.' He got up from his platform, touched all ten fingers to the wall behind him, and waited as the wall opened. Behind the wall was a food storage cabinet of the kind she had often seen at home. Home? Well, what else was it? She lived there.
He took out sandwiches, something that looked like a small pie-that was a pie-and something that looked like French fries.
Lilith stared at the food in surprise. She had been content with the foods the Oankali had given her-good variety and flavor once she began staying with Nikanj's family. She had missed meat occasionally, but once the Oankali made it clear they would neither kill animals for her nor allow her to kill them while she lived with them, she had not minded much. She had never been a particular eater, had never thought of asking the Oankali to make the food they prepared look more like what she was used to.
'Sometimes,' he said, 'I want a hamburger so bad I dream about them. You know the kind with cheese and bacon and dill pickles and-'
'What's in your sandwich?' she asked.
'Fake meat. Mostly soybean, I guess. And quat.' Quatasayasha, the cheeselike Oankali vegetable. 'I eat a lot of quat myself,' she said.
'Then have some. You don't really want to sit there and watch me eat, do you?'
She smiled and took the sandwich be offered. She was not hungry at all, but eating with him was companionable and safe. She took a few of his French fries, too.
'Cassava,' he told her. 'Tastes like potatoes, though. I'd never heard of cassava before I got it here. Some tropical plant the Oankali are raising.'
'I know. They mean for those of us who go back to Earth to raise it and use it. You can make flour from it and use it like wheat flour.'
He stared at her until she frowned. 'What's the matter?' she asked.
His gaze slid away from her and he stared downward at nothing. 'Have you really thought about what it will be like?' he asked softly. 'I mean. . . Stone Age! Digging in the ground with a stick for roots, maybe eating bugs, rats. Rats survived, I hear. Cattle and horses didn't. Dogs didn't. But rats did.'
'I know.'
'You said you bad a baby.'
'My son. Dead.'
'Yeah. Well, I'll bet when he was born, you were in a hospital with doctors and nurses all around helping you and giving you shots for the pain. How would you like to do it in a jungle with nothing around but bugs and rats and people who feel sorry for you but can't do shit to help you?'
'I had natural childbirth,' she said. 'It wasn't any fun, but it went okay.'
'What do you mean? No painkiller?'
'None. No hospital either. Just something called a birthing center-a place for pregnant women who don't like the idea of being treated as though they were sick.'
He shook his head, smiled crookedly. 'I wonder bow many women they had to go through before they came up with you. A lot, I'll bet. You're probably just what they want in ways I haven't even thought of.'
His words bit more deeply into her than she let him see. With all the questioning and testing she had gone through, the two and a half years of round-the-clock observation- the Oankali must know her in some ways better than any human being ever had. They knew how she would react to just about everything they put her through. And they knew how to manipulate her, maneuver her into doing whatever they wanted. Of course they knew she had had certain practical experiences they considered important. If she had had an especially difficult time giving birth-if she had had to be taken to the hospital in spite of her wishes, if she had needed a caesarean-they would probably
