longer crying. She sat. Insects crawled over her and Nikanj brushed them off. She did not notice.
After a time, Nikanj lifted her to her feet, managing her weight easily. She meant to push it away, make it let her alone. It had not helped Joseph. She did not need anything from it now. Yet she only twisted in its grasp.
It let her pull free and she stumbled back to Joseph. Curt had walked away and left him as though he were a dead animal. He should be buried.
Nikanj came to her again, seemed to read her thoughts. 'Shall we pick him up on our way back and have him sent to Earth?' it asked. 'He can end as part of his homeworld.'
Bury him on Earth? Let his flesh be part of the new beginning there? 'Yes,' she whispered.
It touched her experimentally with a sensory arm. She glared at it, wanting desperately to be let alone.
'No!' it said softly. 'No, I let you alone once, the two of you, thinking you could look after one another. I won't let you alone now.'
She drew a deep breath, accepted the familiar loop of sensory arm around her neck. 'Don't drug me,' she said. 'Leave me. . . leave me what I feel for him, at least.'
'1 want to share, not mute or distort.'
'Share? Share my feelings now?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'Lilith.. .' It began to walk and she walked beside it automatically. The other ooloi moved silently ahead of them. 'Lilith, he was mine too. You brought him tome.'
'You brought him to me.'
'I would not have touched him if you had rejected him.'
'I wish I had. He'd be alive.'
Nikanj said nothing.
'Let me share what you feel,' she said.
It touched her face in a startlingly human gesture. 'Move the sixteenth finger of your left strength hand,' it said softly. One more case of Oankali omniscience: We understand your feelings, eat your food, manipulate your genes. But we're too complex for you to understand.
'Approximate!' she demanded. 'Trade! You're always talking about trading. Give me something of yourself!'
The other ooloi focused back toward them and Nikanj's head and body tentacles drew themselves into lumps of some negative emotion. Embarrassment? Anger? She did not care. Why should it feel comfortable about parasitizing her feelings for Joseph-her feelings for anything? It had helped set up a human experiment. One of the humans had been lost. What did it feel? Guilty for not having been more careful with valuable subjects? Or were they even valuable?
Nikanj pressed the back of her neck with a sensory hand-warning pressure. It would give her something then. They stopped walking by mutual consent and faced one another.
It gave her.. . a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or. . . tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling.
Extinguished.
A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.
Broken.
Gone.
Dead.
The forest came back around her slowly and she realized she was still standing with Nikanj, facing it, her back to the waiting ooloi.
'That's all I can give you,' Nikanj said. 'That's what I feel. I don't even know whether there are words in any human language to speak of it.'
'Probably not,' she whispered. Alter a moment, she let herself hug it. There was some comfort even in cool, gray flesh. Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair-an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.
She walked more willingly with Nikanj now, and the other ooloi no longer isolated them in front or behind.
7
Curt's camp boasted a bigger shelter, not as well made. The roof was a jumble of palm leaves-not thatch, but branches crisscrossed and covering one another. No doubt it leaked. There were walls, but no floor. There was an indoor fire, hot and smoky. That was the way the people looked. Hot, smoky, dirty, angry.
They gathered outside the shelter with axes, machetes, and clubs, and faced the cluster of ooloi. Lilith found herself standing with aliens, facing hostile, dangerous humans.
She drew back. 'I can't fight them,' she said to Nikanj. 'Curt, yes, but not the others.'
'We'll have to fight if they attack,' Nikanj said. 'But you stay out of it. We'll be drugging them heavily-fighting to subdue without killing in spite of their weapons. Dangerous.'
'No closer!' Curt called.
The Oankali stopped.
