She stared at it, feeling more strongly than ever, the difference between them-the unbridgeable alienness of Nikanj. She could spend hours talking to it in its own language and fail to communicate. It could do the same with her, although it could force her to obey whether she understood or not. Or it could turn her over to others who would use force against her.
'His family thought you should have mated with him,' it said. 'They knew you wouldn't stay with him permanently, but they believed you would share sex with him at least once.'
Share sex, she thought sadly. Where had it picked up that expression? She had never said it. She liked it, though. Should she have shared sex with Paul Titus? 'And maybe gotten pregnant,' she said aloud.
'You would not have gotten pregnant,' Nikanj said.
And it had her full attention. 'Why not?' she demanded.
'It isn't time for you to have children yet.'
'Have you done something to me? Am I sterile?'
'Your people called it birth control. You are slightly changed. It was done while you slept, as it was done to all humans at first. It will be undone eventually.'
'When?' she asked bitterly. 'When you're ready to breed me?'
'No. When you're ready. Only then.'
'Who decides? You?'
'You, Lilith. You.'
Its sincerity confused her. She felt that she had learned to read its emotions through posture, sensory tentacle position, tone of voice. . . . It seemed not only to be telling the truth-as usual-but to be telling a truth it considered important. Yet Paul Titus, too, had seemed to be telling the truth. 'Does Paul really have over seventy children?' she asked.
'Yes. And he's told you why. The Toaht desperately need more of your kind to make a true trade. Most humans taken from Earth must be returned to it. But Toaht must have at least an equal number stay here. It seemed best that the ones born here be the ones to stay.' Nikanj hesitated. 'They should not have told Paul what they were doing. But that's always a difficult thing to realize-and sometimes we realize it too late.'
'He had a right to know!'
'Knowing frightened him and made him miserable. You discovered one of his fears-that perhaps one of his female relatives had survived and been impregnated with his sperm. He's been told that this did not happen. Sometimes he believes; sometimes he doesn't.'
'He still had a right to know. I would want to know.'
Silence.
'Has it been done to me, Nikanj?'
'No.'
'And . . . will it be?'
It hesitated, then spoke softly. 'The Toaht have a print of you-of every human we brought aboard. They need the genetic diversity. We're keeping prints of the humans they take away, too. Millenia after your death, your body might be reborn aboard the ship. It won't be you. it will develop an identity of its own.'
'A clone,' she said tonelessly. Her left arm throbbed, and she rubbed it without actually focusing on the pain.
'No,' Nikanj said. 'What we've preserved of you isn't living tissue. It's memory. A gene map, your people might call it-though they couldn't have made one like those we remember and use. It's more like what they would call a mental blueprint. A plan for the assembly of one specific human being: You. A tool for reconstruction.'
It let her digest this, said nothing more to her for several minutes. So few humans could do that-just let someone have a few minutes to think.
'Will you destroy my print if I ask you to?' she asked.
'It's a memory, Lilith, a complete memory carried by several people. How would I destroy such a thing?'
A literal memory, then, not some kind of mechanical recording or written record. Of course.
After a while, Nikanj said, 'Your print may never be used. And if it is, the reconstruction will be as much at home aboard the ship as you were on Earth. She'll grow up here and the people she grows up among will be her people. You know they won't harm her.'
She sighed. 'I don't know any such thing. I suspect they'll do what they think is best for her. Heaven help her.'
It sat beside her and touched her aching left arm with several head tentacles. 'Did you really need to know that?' it asked. 'Should I have told you?'
It had never asked such a question before. Her arm hurt more than ever for a moment, then felt warm and pain-free. She managed not to jerk away, though Nikanj had not paralyzed her.
'What are you doing?' she asked.
'You were having pain in that arm. There's no need for you to suffer.'
'I hurt all over.'
'I know. I'll take care of it. I just wanted to talk to you before you slept again.'
She lay still for a moment, glad that the arm was no longer throbbing. She had barely been aware of this
