'They ate it.' Allison smiled. 'And while they were cooking it and eating it, the Oankali kept away from them.'
Wray grinned broadly. 'You don't see any of them around this fire either, do you?'
'I'm not sure,' Gabriel answered.
Silence.
Lilith sighed. 'Okay, Gabe, what have you got? Questions, accusations or condemnations?'
'Maybe all three.'
'Well?'
'You didn't fight. You chose to stand with the Oankali!'
'Against you?'
Angry silence.
'Where were you standing when Curt hacked Joseph to death?'
Tate laid her hand on Lilith's arm. 'Curt just went crazy,' she said. She spoke very softly. 'No one thought he would do anything like that.'
'He did it,' Lilith said. 'And you all watched.'
They picked at their food silently for a while, no longer enjoying the fish, sharing it with people from other fires who came offering Brazil nuts, pieces of fruit or baked cassava.
'Why did you take your clothes off?' Wray demanded suddenly. 'Why did you lie down on the ground with an ooloi in the middle of the fighting?'
'The fighting was over,' Lilith said. 'You know that. And the ooloi I lay down with was Nikanj. Curt had all but severed one of its sensory arms. I think you know that, too. I let it use my body to heal itself.'
'But why should you want to help it?' Gabriel whispered harshly. 'Why didn't you just let it die?' Every Oankali in the area must have heard him.
'What good would that do?' she demanded. 'I've known Nikanj since it was a child. Why should I let it die, then be stuck with some stranger? How would that help me or you or anyone here?'
He drew back from her. 'You've always got an answer. And it never quite rings true.'
She went over in her mind the things she could have said to him about his own tendency not to ring true. Ignoring them all, she asked, 'What is it, Gabe? What do you believe I can do or could have done to set you free on Earth one minute sooner?'
He did not answer, but he remained stubbornly angry. He was helpless and in a situation he found intolerable. Someone must be to blame.
Lilith saw Tate reach out to him, take his hand. For a few seconds they clung to the tips of one another's fingers, reminding Lilith of nothing so much as a very squeamish person suddenly given a snake to hold. They managed to let one another go without seeming to recoil in revulsion, but everyone knew what they felt. Everyone had seen. That was something else Lilith had to answer for, no doubt.
'What about that!' Tate demanded bitterly. She shook the hand Gabriel had touched as though to shake it clean of something. 'What do we do about that?'
Lilith let her shoulders slump. 'I don't know. It was the same for Joseph and me. I never got around to asking Nikanj what it had done to us. I suggest you ask Kahguyaht.'
Gabriel shook his head. 'I don't want to see him. . . it, let alone ask it anything.'
'Really?' asked Allison. Her voice was so full of honest questioning that Gabriel only glared at her.
'No,' Lilith said. 'Not really. He wishes he hated Kahguyaht. He tries to hate it. But in the fighting, it was Nikanj he tried to kill. And here, now, it's me he blames and distrusts. Hell, the Oankali set me up to be the focus of blame and distrust, but I don't hate Nikanj. Maybe I can't. We're all a little bit co-opted, at least as far as our individual ooloi are concerned.'
Gabriel stood up. He loomed over Lilith, glaring down. The camp had gone quiet, everyone watching him.
'I don't give a shit what you feel!' he said. 'You're talking about your feelings, not mine. Strip and screw your Nikanj right here for everyone to see, why don't you. We know you're their whore! Everybody here knows!'
She looked at him, abruptly tired, fed up. 'And what are you when you spend your nights with Kahguyaht?'
She believed for a moment that he would attack her. And, for a moment, she wanted him to.
Instead, he turned and stalked away toward the shelters. Tate glared at Lilith for a moment, then went after him.
Kahguyaht left the Oankali fire and came over to Lilith. 'You could have avoided that,' it said softly.
She did not look up at it. 'I'm tired,' she said. 'I resign.'
'What?''
'I quit! No more scapegoating for you; no more being seen as a Judas goat by my own people. I don't deserve any of this.'
It stood over her for a moment longer, then went after Gabriel and Tate. Lilith looked after it, shook her head, and laughed bitterly. She thought of Joseph, seemed to feel him beside her, hear him telling her to be careful, asking her what was the point in turning both peoples against her.
