She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away.
The moment passed, left her almost gasping. She jumped when Nikanj touched her with the tip of a sensory arm. She stared at it for a moment longer wondering how she had lost her horror of such a being.
Then she lay down, perversely eager for what it could give her. She positioned herself against it, and was not content until she felt the deceptively light touch of the sensory hand and felt the ooloi body tremble against her.
13
Humans were kept drugged for days-drugged, and guarded, each individual or pair by an ooloi.
'Imprinting is the best word for what they're doing,' Nikanj told Joseph. 'Imprinting, chemical and social.'
'What you're doing to me!' Joseph accused.
'What I'm doing to you, what I've done to Lilith. It has to be done. No one will be returned to Earth without it.'
'How long will they be drugged?'
'Some are not heavily drugged now. Tate Marah isn't. Gabriel Rinaldi is.' It focused on Joseph. 'You aren't. You know.'
Joseph looked away. 'No one should be.'
'In the end, no one will be. We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves. We teach you more pleasant things to do.'
'That's not enough!'
'It's a beginning.'
14
Peter's ooloi proved that ooloi were not infallable. Drugged, Peter was a different man. For perhaps the first time since his Awakening, he was at peace, not fighting even with himself, not trying to prove anything, joking with Jean and their ooloi about his arm and the fighting.
Lilith, hearing this later, wondered what there was to laugh at in that incident. But the ooloi-produced drugs could be potent. Under their influence, Peter might have laughed at anything. Under their influence, he accepted union and pleasure. When that influence was allowed to wane and Peter began to think, he apparently decided he had been humiliated and enslaved. The drug seemed to him to be not a less painful way of getting used to frightening nonhumans, but a way of turning him against himself, causing him to demean himself in alien perversions. His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.
Peter's ooloi should have noticed that at some point what Peter said and the expression he assumed ceased to agree with what his body told it. Perhaps it did not know enough about human beings to handle someone like Peter. It was older than Nikanj-more a contemporary of Kahguyaht. But it was not as perceptive as either of them-and perhaps not as bright.
Sealed in Peter's room, alone with Peter, it allowed itself to be attacked, pounded by Peter's bare fists. Unfortunately for Peter, he hit a sensitive spot with his first hammering blow, and triggered the ooloi's defensive reflexes. It gave him a lethal sting before it could regain control of itself and he collapsed in convulsions. His own contracting muscles broke several of his bones, then he went into shock.
The ooloi tried to help him once it had recovered from the worst of its own pain, but it was too late. He was dead. The ooloi sat down beside his body, its head and body tentacles drawn into hard lumps. It did not move or speak. Its cool flesh grew even cooler, and it seemed to be as dead as the human it was apparently mourning.
There were no Oankali on watch above. Peter might have been saved if there had been. But the great room was full of ooloi. Where was the need to keep watch?
By the time one of these ooloi noticed Jean sitting alone and forlorn outside the sealed room, it was too late. There was nothing to do but take Peter's body out and send for the ooloi's mates. The ooloi remained catatonic.
Jean, still lightly drugged, frightened, and alone, retreated from the people clustering around the room. She stood apart and watched as the body was carried out. Lilith noticed her, approached her, knowing she couldn't help, but hoping at least to give comfort.
'No!' Jean said, backing toward a wall. 'Get away!'
Lilith sighed. Jean was going through a prolonged period of ooloi-induced reclusiveness. All of the humans who had been kept heavily drugged were this way-unable to tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them. Neither Lilith nor Joseph had experienced this extreme reaction. Lilith had hardly noticed any reaction at all beyond an increased aversion to Kahguyaht back when Nikanj matured and bound her to it. More recently, Joseph had reacted by simply staying close to Lilith and Nikanj for a couple of days. Then his reaction passed. Jean's was far from passing. What would happen to her now?
Lilith looked around for Nikanj. She spotted it in a cluster of ooloi, went to it and laid a hand on its shoulder.
It focused on her without turning or breaking the various sensory tentacle and sensory arm contacts it had with the others. She spoke to the point of a thin cone of head tentacles.
'Can't you help Jean?'
'Help is coming for her.'
'Look at her! She's going to break before it gets here.' The cone focused on Jean. She had wedged herself into a corner. Now she stood crying silently and looking around in confusion. She was a tall, strongly built woman. Now, though, she looked like a large child.
Nikanj detached itself from the other ooloi, apparently ending whatever communication was going on. The other ooloi relaxed away from one another. They went to their various human charges who stood waiting for them in widely separated ones and twos. The moment the news of the death had gone around, every human except Lilith and Jean had been drugged heavily. Nikanj had refused to drug Lilith. It trusted her to control her own behavior and the other ooloi trusted it. As for Jean, there was no one present who could drug her without harming her.
Nikanj closed to within about ten feet of Jean. It stopped there and waited until she saw it.
