'Ourselves.'
'You mean. . . each other? Slaves?'
'No. We've never done that.'
'What, then?'
'Ourselves.'
'I don't understand.'
He said nothing, seemed to wrap silence around himself and settle into it. She knew he would not answer.
She sighed. 'You seem too human sometimes. If I weren't looking at you, I'd assume you were a man.'
'You have assumed that. My family gave me to the human doctor so that I could learn to do this work. She came to us too old to bear children of her own, but she could teach.'
'I thought you said she was dying.'
'She did die eventually. She was a hundred and thirteen years old and had been awake among us off and on for fifty years. She was like a fourth parent to my siblings and me. It was hard to watch her age and die. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.'
'I've heard humans say that.' She frowned. 'Couldn't your ooloi have helped her live longer-if she wanted to live longer than a hundred and thirteen years, that is.'
'They did help her. They gave her forty years she would not have had, and when they could no longer help her heal, they took away her pain, if she had been younger when we found her, we could have given her much more time.'
Lilith followed that thought to its obvious conclusion. 'I'm twenty-six,' she said.
'Older,' he told her. 'You've aged whenever we've kept you awake. About two years altogether.'
She had no sense of being two years older, of being, suddenly, twenty-eight because he said she was. Two years of solitary confinement. What could they possibly give her in return for that? She stared at him.
His tentacles seemed to solidify into a second skin-dark patches on his face and neck, a dark, smooth-looking mass on his head. 'Barring accident,' he said, 'you'll live much longer than a hundred and thirteen years. And for most of your life, you'll be biologically quite young. Your children will live longer still.'
He looked remarkably human now. Was it only the tentacles that gave him that sea-slug appearance? His coloring hadn't changed. The fact that he had no eyes, nose, or ears still disturbed her, but not as much.
'Jdahya, stay that way,' she told him. 'Let me come close and look at you. . . if I can.'
The tentacles moved like weirdly rippling skin, then resolidified. 'Come,' he said.
She was able to approach him hesitantly. Even viewed from only a couple of feet away, the tentacles looked like a smooth second skin. 'Do you mind if.. .' She stopped and began again. 'I mean... may I touch you?'
'Yes.'
It was easier to do than she had expected. His skin was cool and almost too smooth to be real flesh-smooth the way her fingernails were and perbaps as tough as a fingernail.
'Is it hard for you to stay like this?' she asked.
'Not hard. Unnatural. A muffling of the senses.'
'Why did you do it-before I asked you to, I mean.'
'It's an expression of pleasure or amusement.'
'You were pleased a minute ago?'
'With you. You wanted your time back-the time we've taken from you. You didn't want to die.'
She stared at him, shocked that he had read her so clearly. And he must have known of humans who did want to die even after hearing promises of long life, health, and lasting youth. Why? Maybe they'd heard the part she hadn't been told about yet: the reason for all this. The price.
'So far,' she said, 'only boredom and isolation have driven me to want to die.'
'Those are past. And you've never tried to kill yourself, even then.'
'...no.'
'Your desire to live is stronger than you realize.'
She sighed. 'You're going to test that, aren't you? That's why you haven't told me yet what your people want of us.'
'Yes,' he admitted, alarming her.
'Tell me!'
Silence.
'If you knew anything at all about the human imagination, you'd know you were doing exactly the wrong thing,' she said.
'Once you're able to leave this room with me, I'll answer your questions,' he told her.
She stared at him for several seconds. 'Let's work on that, then,' she said grimly. 'Relax from your unnatural position and let's see what happens.'
