protect them from the possible consequences of her own frustration. She had withdrawn from several men this way, occasionally pairing them off with female friends. Couples she brought together tended to marry.
Lilith put Tate Marah's dossier down slowly, left it by itself on the bed. The only other one that was by itself was Joseph Shing's. Tate's dossier fell open, once again displaying the woman's small, pale, deceptively childlike face. The face was smiling slightly, not as though posing for a picture, but as though sizing up the photographer. In fact, Tate had not known the picture was being made. And the pictures were not photographs. They were paintings, impressions of the inner person as well as the outer physical reality. Each contained print memories of their subjects. Oankali interrogators had painted these pictures with sensory tentacles or sensory arms, using deliberately produced bodily fluids. Lilith knew this, but the pictures looked like, even felt like photos. They had been done on some kind of plastic, not on paper. The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were-or who the Oankali thought they were.
Tate Marah, they thought, was bright, somewhat flexible, and not dangerous except perhaps to the ego.
Lilith left the dossiers, left her private cubicle, and began building another near it.
The walls that would not open to let her out responded to her touch now by growing inward along a line of her sweat or saliva drawn along the floor. Thus the old walls extruded new ones, and the new ones would open or close, advance or retreat as she directed. Nikanj had made very sure she knew how to direct them. And when it finished instructing her, its mates, Dichaan and Ahajas, told her to seal herself in if her people attacked her. They had both spent time interrogating isolated humans and they seemed more worried about her than Nikanj did. They would get her out, they promised. They would not leave her to die for someone else's miscalculation.
Which was fine if she could spot the trouble and seal herself in time.
Better to choose the right people, bring them along slowly, and Awaken new ones only when she was sure of the ones already Awake.
She drew two walls to within about eighteen inches of each other. That left a narrow doorway-one that would preserve as much privacy as possible without a door. She also turned one wall inward, forming a tiny entrance hall that concealed the room itself from casual glances. There would be nothing among the people she Awoke to borrow or steal, and anyone who thought now was a good time to play Peeping Tom would have to be disciplined by the group. Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.
Within the new room, Lilith raised a bed platform, a table platform, and three chair platforms around the table. The table and chairs would be at least a small change from what they were all used to in the Oankali isolation rooms. A more human arrangement.
Creating the room took some time. Afterward Lilith gathered all but eleven of the dossiers and sealed them inside her own table platform. Some of these eleven would be her core group, first Awake, and first to show her just how much of a chance she had to survive and do what was necessary.
Tate Marah first. Another woman. No sexual tension.
Lilith took the picture, went to the long, featureless stretch of wall opposite the rest rooms and stood for a moment, staring at the face.
Once people were Awake, she would have no choice but to live with them. She could not put them to sleep again. And in some ways, Tate Marah would probably be hard to live with.
Lilith rubbed her hand across the surface of the picture, then placed the picture flat against the wall. She began at one end of the wall and walked slowly toward the other, far away, keeping the face of the picture against the wall. She closed her eyes as she moved, remembering that it had been easier when she practiced this with Nikanj if she ignored her other senses as much as possible. All her attention should be focused on the hand that held the picture flat against the wall. Male and female Oankali did this with head tentacles.
Oankali did it with their sensory arms. Both did it from memory, without pictures impregnated with prints. Once they read someone's print or examined someone and took a print, they remembered it, could duplicate it. Lilith would never be able to read prints or duplicate them. That required Oankali organs of perception. Her children would have them, Kahguyaht had said.
She stopped now and then to rub one sweaty hand over the picture, renewing her own chemical signature.
More than halfway down the hail, she began to feel a response, a slight bulging of the surface against the picture, against her hand.
She stopped at once, not certain at first that she had felt anything at all. Then the bulge was unmistakable. She pressed against it lightly, maintaining the contact until the wall began to open beneath the picture. Then she drew back to let the wall disgorge its long, green plant. She went to a space at one end of the great room, opened a wall, and took out a jacket and a pair of pants. These people would probably welcome clothing as eagerly as she had.
The plant lay, writhing slowly, still surrounded by the foul odor that had followed it through the wall. She could not see well enough through its thick, fleshy body to know which end concealed Tate Marah's head, but that did not matter. She drew her hands along the length of the plant as though unzipping it, and it began to come apart.
There was no possibility this time of the plant trying to swallow her. She would be no more palatable to it now than Nikanj would.
Slowly, the face and body of Tate Marah became visible. Small breasts. Figure like that of a girl who had barely reached puberty. Pale, translucent skin and hair. Child's face. Yet Tate was twenty-seven.
She would not awaken until she was lifted completely clear of the suspended animation plant. Her body was wet and slippery, but not heavy. Sighing, Lilith lifted her clear.
2
'Get away from me!' Tate said the moment she opened her eyes. 'Who are you? What are you doing?'
'Trying to get you dressed,' Lilith said. 'You can do it yourself now-if you're strong enough.'
Tate was beginning to tremble, beginning to react to being awakened from suspended animation. it was surprising that she had been able to speak her few coherent words before succumbing to the reaction.
