There was no point. She was just tired. And Joseph was not there.
9
People avoided Lilith. She suspected they saw her either as a traitor or as a ticking bomb.
She was content to be let alone. Ahajas and Dichaan asked her if she wanted to go home with them when they left, but she declined the offer. She wanted to stay in an Earthlike setting until she went to Earth. She wanted to stay with human beings even though for a time, she did not love them.
She chopped wood for the fire, gathered wild fruits for meals or casual eating, even caught fish by trying a method she remembered reading about. She spent hours binding together strong grass stems and slivers of split cane, fashioning them into a long, loose cone that small fish could swim into, but not out of. She fished the small streams that flowed into the river and eventually provided most of the fish the group ate. She experimented with smoking it and had surprisingly good results. No one refused the fish because she had caught it. On the other hand, no one asked how she made her fish traps-so she did not tell them. She did no more teaching unless people came to her and asked questions. This was more punishing to her than to the Oankali since she had discovered that she liked teaching. But she found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.
Eventually people did begin to come to her. A few people. Allison, Wray and Leah, Victor. . . . She shared her knowledge of fish traps with Wray finally. Tate avoided her-perhaps to please Gabriel, perhaps because she had adopted Gabriel's way of thinking. Tate had been a friend. Lilith missed her, but somehow could not manage any bitterness against her. There was no other close friend to take Tate's place. Even the people who came to her with questions did not trust her. There was only Nikanj.
Nikanj never tried to make her change her behavior. She had the feeling it would not object to anything she did unless she began hurting people. She lay with it and its mates at night and it pleasured her as it had before she met Joseph. She did not want this at first, but she came to appreciate it.
Then she realized she was able to touch a man again and find pleasure in it.
'Are you so eager to match me with someone else?' she asked Nikanj. That day she had handed Victor an armload of cassava cuttings for planting and she had been surprised, briefly pleased at the feel of his hand, as warm as her own.
'You're free to find another mate,' Nikanj told her. 'We'll be Awakening other humans soon. I wanted you to be free to choose whether or not to mate.'
'You said we would be put down on Earth soon.'
'You stopped teaching here. People are learning more slowly. But I think they'll be ready soon.' Before she could question it further, other ooloi called it away to swim with them. That probably meant it was leaving the training room for a while. Ooloi liked to use the underwater exits whenever they could. Whenever they were not guiding humans.
Lilith looked around the camp, saw nothing that she wanted to do that day. She wrapped smoked fish and baked cassava banana leaf and put it into one of her baskets with a few bananas. She would wander. Later, she would probably come back with something useful.
It was late when she headed back, her basket filled with bean pods that provided an almost candy-sweet pulp and palm fruit that she had been able to cut from a small tree with her machete. The bean pods-inga, they were called-would be a treat for everyone. Lilith did not like this particular kind of palm fruit as much, but others did.
She walked quickly, not wanting to be caught in the forest after dark. She thought she could probably find her way home in the dark, but she did not want to have to. The Oankali had made this jungle too real. Only they were invulnerable to the things whose bite or sting or sharp spines were deadly.
It was almost too dark to see under the canopy when she arrived back at the settlement.
Yet at the settlement, there was only one fire. This was a time for cooking and talking and working on baskets, nets, and other small things that could be done mindlessly while people enjoyed one another's company. But there was only one fire-and only one person near it.
As she reached the fire, the person stood up, and she saw that it was Nikanj. There was no sign of anyone else.
Lilith dropped her basket and ran the last few steps into camp. 'Where are they?' she demanded. 'Why didn't someone come to find me?'
'Your friend Tate says she's sorry for the way she behaved,' Nikanj told her. 'She wanted to talk to you, says she would have done it within the next few days. As it happened, she didn't have a few more days here.'
'Where is she?'
'Kahguyaht has enhanced her memory as I have yours. It thinks that will help her survive on Earth and help the other humans.'
'But. . .' She stepped closer to it, shaking her head. 'But what about me? I did all you asked. I didn't hurt anyone. Why am I still here!'
'To save your life.' It took her hand. 'I was called away today to hear the threats that had been made against you. I had already heard most of them. Lilith, you would have wound up like Joseph.'
She shook her head. No one had threatened her directly. Most people were afraid of her.
'You would have died,' Nikanj repeated. 'Because they can't kill us, they would have killed you.'
She cursed it, refusing to believe, yet on another level, believing, knowing. She blamed it and hated it and wept.
'You could have waited!' she said finally. 'You could have called me back before they left.'
'I'm sorry,' it said.
'Why didn't you call me? Why?'
It knotted its head and body tentacles in distress. 'You could have reacted very badly. With your strength, you could have injured or killed someone. You could have earned a place alongside Curt.' It relaxed the knots and let its tentacles hang limp. 'Joseph is gone. I didn't want to risk losing you too.'
And she could not go on hating it. Its words reminded her too much of her own thoughts when she lay down to
