have passed over her to someone else.
'Why are you going back?' Titus asked. 'Why do you want to spend your life living like a cavewoman?'
'I don't.'
His eyes widened. 'Then why don't you-'
'We don't have to forget what we know,' she said. She smiled to herself. 'I couldn't forget if I wanted to. We don't have to go back to the Stone Age. We'll have a lot of hard work, sure, but with what the Oankali will teach us and what we already know, we'll at least have a chance.'
'They don't teach for free! They didn't save us out of kindness! It's all trade with them. You know what you'll have to pay down there!'
'What have you paid to stay up here?'
Silence.
He ate several more bites of food. 'The price,' he said softly, 'is just the same. When they're finished with us there won't be any real human beings left. Not here. Not on the ground. What the bombs started, they'll finish.'
'I don't believe it has to be like that.'
'Yeah. But then, you haven't been Awake long.'
'Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it's still a damn big place.'
He looked at her with such open, undisguised pity that she drew back angrily. 'Do you think they don't know what a big place it is?' he asked.
'If I thought that, I wouldn't have said anything to you and whoever's listening. They know how I feel.'
'And they know how to make you change your mind.'
'Not about that. Never about that.'
'Like I said, you haven't been Awake long.'
What bad they done to him, she wondered. Was it just that they had kept him Awake so long-Awake and for the most part without human companions? Awake and aware that everything he had ever known was dead, that nothing he could have on Earth now could measure up to his former life. How had that gone down with a fourteen- year-old?
'If you wanted it,' he said, 'they'd let you stay here with me.'
'What, permanently?'
'Yeah.'
'No.'
He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her and came over to her. 'You know they expect you to say no,' he said. 'They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all over again that they were right about you.' He stood tall and broad, too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was afraid of him. 'Surprise them,' he continued softly. 'Don't do what they expect-just for once. Don't let them play you like a puppet.'
He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.
She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own ranks?
He let her go. 'You could be safe here,' he said softly. 'Down on Earth... how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if you don't forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of them will want to be cavemen-drag you around, put you in a harem, beat the shit out of you.' He shook his head. 'Tell me I'm wrong. Sit there and tell me I'm wrong.'
She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at first, perhaps, but eventually-as soon as they realized they could get away with it.
He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager boy. That didn't bother her. And she caught herself responding to him in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few minutes of pleasure.
'Look,' she said when he drew back, 'I'm not interested in putting on a show for the Oankali.'
'What difference do they make? It's not like human beings were watching us.'
'It is to me.'
'Lilith,' he said, shaking his head, 'they will always be watching.'
'The other thing I'm not interested in doing is giving them a human child to tamper with.'
'You probably already have.'
Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.
'They didn't have enough of us for what they call a normal trade,' he said. 'Most of the ones they have will be Dinso-people who want to go back to Earth. They didn't have enough for the Toaht. They had to make more.'
'While we slept? Somehow they-?'
