'This is a human place!' Curt continued. 'It's off limits to you and your animals.' He stared at Lilith, held his ax ready.
She stared back, afraid of the ax, but wanting him. Wanting to kill him. Wanting to take the ax from him and beat him to death with her own hands. Let him die here and rot in this alien place where he had left Joseph.
'Do nothing,' Nikanj whispered to her. 'He has lost all hope of Earth. He's lost Celene. She'll be sent to Earth without him. And he's lost mental and emotional freedom. Leave him to us.'
She could not understand it at first-literally could not comprehend the words it spoke. There was nothing in her world but a dead Joseph and an obscenely alive Curt.
Nikanj held her until it too had to be acknowledged as part of her world. When it saw that she looked at it, struggled against it instead of simply struggling toward Curt, it repeated its words until she heard them, until they penetrated, until she was still. It never made any attempt to drug her, and it never let her go.
Off to one side, Kahguyaht was speaking to Tate. Tate stood well back from it, holding a machete and staying close to Gabriel who held an ax. It was Gabriel who had convinced her to abandon Lilith. It had to be. And what had convinced Leah? Practicality? A fear of being abandoned alone, left as much an outcast as Lilith?
Lilith found Leah and stared at her, wondering. Leah looked away. Then her attention was drawn back to Tate.
'Go away,' Tate was pleading in a voice that did not sound like her. 'We don't want you! I don't want you! Let us alone!' She sounded as though she would cry. In fact, tears streamed down her face.
'I have never lied to you,' Kahguyaht told her. 'If you manage to use your machete on anyone, you'll lose Earth.
You'll never see your homeworld again. Even this place will be denied to you.' It stepped toward her. 'Don't do this Tate. We're giving you the thing you want most: Freedom and a return home.'
'We've got that here,' Gabriel said.
Curt came to join him. 'We don't need anything else from you!' he shouted.
The others behind him agreed loudly.
'You would starve here,' Kahguyaht said. 'Even in the short time you've been here, you've had trouble finding food. There isn't enough, and you don't yet know how to use what there is.' Kahguyaht raised its voice, spoke to all of them. 'You were allowed to leave us when you wished so that you could practice the skills you'd learned and learn more from each other and from Lilith. We had to know how you would behave after leaving us. We knew you might be injured, but we didn't think you would kill one another.'
'We didn't kill a human being,' Curt shouted. 'We killed one of your animals!'
'We?' Kahguyaht said mildly. 'And who helped you kill him?'
Curt did not answer.
'You beat him,' Kahguyaht continued, 'and when he was unconscious, you killed him with your ax. You did it alone, and in doing it, you've exiled yourself permanently from your Earth.' It spoke to the others. 'Will you join him? Will you be taken from this training room and placed with Toaht families to live the rest of your lives aboard the ship?'
The faces of some of the others began to change---doubts beginning or growing.
Allison's ooloi went to her, became the first to touch the human it had come to retrieve. It spoke very quietly. Lilith could not hear what it said, but after a moment, Allison sighed and offered it her machete.
It declined the knife with a wave of one sensory arm while settling the other arm around her neck. It drew her back behind the line of Oankali where Lilith stood with Nikanj. Lilith stared at her, wondering how Allison could turn against her. Had it only been fear? Curt could frighten just about anyone if he worked at it. And this was Curt with an ax-an ax he had already used on one man...
Allison met her gaze, looked away, then faced her again. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered. 'We thought we could avoid bloodshed by going along with them, doing what they said. We thought. . . I'm sorry.'
Lilith turned away, tears blurring her vision again. Somehow, she had been able to put Joseph's death aside for a few minutes. Allison's words brought it back.
Kahguyaht stretched out a sensory arm to Tate but Gabriel snatched her away.
'We don't want you here!' he grated. He thrust Tate behind him.
Curt shouted-a wordless scream of rage, a call to attack. He lunged at Kahguyaht and several of his people joined his attack, lunging at the other ooloi with their weapons.
Nikanj thrust Lilith toward Allison and plunged into the fighting. Allison's ooloi paused only long enough to say, 'Keep her out of this!' in rapid Oankali. Then it, too, joined the fight.
Things happened almost too quickly to follow. Tate and the few other humans who seemed to want nothing more than to get clear found themselves caught in the middle. Wray and Leah, half supporting one another, stumbled out of the fighting between a pair of ooloi who seemed about to be slashed by three machete-wielding humans. Lilith realized suddenly that Leah was bleeding, and she ran to help get her away from the danger.
The humans shouted. The ooloi did not make a sound. Lilith saw Gabriel swing at Nikanj, narrowly missing it, saw him raise his ax again for what was clearly intended to be a death blow. Then Kahguyaht drugged him from behind.
Gabriel made a small gasp of sound-as though there were not enough strength in him to force out a scream. He collapsed.
Tate screamed, grabbed him, and tried to drag him clear of the fighting. She had dropped her machete, was clearly no threat.
Curt had not dropped his ax. It gave him a long, deadly reach. He swung it like a hatchet, controlling it easily in spite of its weight, and no ooloi risked being hit by it.
