The first blow all but tore Akin loose. It hurt him more than he had ever been hurt, and he could not help passing some of his pain on to Tate.
Yet he managed not to poison her. He did not know when she began to scream. He continued automatically to hold her. That and the fact that he was stronger than the larger Gabe enabled him to withdraw from Tate?s nervous system and then from her body without being badly injured?and without killing. Later he was amazed that he had done this. His teacher had warned him that males did not have the control to do such things. Oankali males and females avoided healing not only because they were not needed as healers but because they were more likely than ooloi to kill by accident. They could be driven to kill unintentionally by interruptions and even by their subjects if things went wrong. Even Gabe should have been in danger. Akin should have struck at him blindly, reflexively.
Yet he did not.
His body coiled into a painfully tight fetal knot and lay vulnerable and more completely unconscious than it had ever been.
4
When Akin became able to perceive the world around him again he discovered that he could not move or speak. He lay frozen, aware that sometimes there were Humans around him. They looked at him, sat with him sometimes, but did not touch him. For some time he did not know who they were?or where he was. Later, he compared this period with his earliest infancy. It was a time he remembered but took no part in. But even as an infant, he had been fed and washed and held. Now no hand touched him.
He slowly became aware that two people did talk to him. Two females, both Human, one small and yellow- haired and pale. One slightly larger, dark-haired, and sun-browned.
He was glad when they were with him.
He dreaded their coming.
They aroused him. Their scents reached deep into him and drew him to them. Yet he could not move. He lay, being drawn and drawn and utterly still. It was torment, but he preferred it to solitude.
The females talked to him. After a while, he came to know that they were Tate and Yori. And he remembered all that he knew of Tate and Yori.
Tate sat close to him and said his name. She told him how well she felt and how her crops were growing and what different people in the settlement were doing. She did her sewing and her writing while sitting with Akin. She kept a journal.
Yori kept one, too. Yori?s became a study of him. She told him so. He was in metamorphosis, she said. She had never seen metamorphosis before, but she had heard it described. Already there were small, new sensory tentacles on his back, on his head, on his legs. His skin was gray now, and he was losing his hair. She said he must find a way to tell them if he wished to be touched. She said Tate was all right, and Akin must find a way to communicate. She said anything he asked would be done for him. She would see to it. She said he must not worry about being alone because she would see that someone was always with him.
This comforted him more than she could know. People in metamorphosis had little tolerance for solitude.
Gabe sat with him. Gabe and the two women had lifted the bench he lay on and carried it and him into a small sunlit room.
Sometimes Gabe tempted him with food or water. He could not know that the scent of the women tempted Akin more strongly than anything Gabe could place near him. He would have wanted food before he fell asleep if he had gone into metamorphosis normally. He would have eaten, then slept. He had heard that ooloi did not sleep straight through much of their second metamorphosis. Lilith had told him that Nikanj slept most of the time, but woke up now and then to eat and talk. Eventually it would fall into another deep sleep. Males and females slept through most of their one metamorphosis. They did not eat, drink, urinate, or defecate. The women stirred Akin, focused his attention, but the smells of food and water did not interest him. He noticed them because they were intermittent. They were environmental changes that he could not fail to notice.
Gabe brought him plants, and he realized after a while that the plants were some of those that he had enjoyed eating when he was younger, upon which Gabe had seen him grazing. The man remembered. That pleased him and eased the sudden shock when, one day, Gabe touched him.
There was no warning. As Gabe had decided to come into the room and separate Akin and Tate, he now decided to do one of the things Yori had told him and Tate not to do.
He simply placed his hand on Akin?s back and shook Akin.
After a moment, Akin shuddered. His small, new sensory tentacles moved for the first time, elongating reflexively toward the touching hand.
Gabe jerked his hand away. He would not have been hurt, but he did not know that, and Akin could not tell him. Gabe did not touch him again.
Pilar and Mateo Leal took their turns sitting with Akin. Tino?s parents. Mateo had killed people Akin had cared for very much. For a time, his presence made Akin intensely uncomfortable. Then, because he had no choice, Akin adjusted.
Kolina Wilton sat with him sometimes but never spoke to him. One day, to his surprise, Macy Wilton sat with him. So the man was not always lying drunk in the street.
Macy came back several times. He carved things of wood while he sat with Akin, and the smells of his woods were an announcement of his coming. He began to talk to Akin?to speculate about what had happened to Amma and Shkaht, to speculate about children he might someday father, to speculate about Mars.
This told Akin for the first time that Gabe and Tate had spread the story, the hope that he had brought.
Mars.
?Not everyone wants to go,? Macy said. ?I think they?re crazy if they stay here. I?d give anything to see homo sap have another chance. Lina and I will go. And don?t you worry about those others!?
At once, Akin began to worry. There was no way to hurry metamorphosis. Bringing it on so traumatically had nearly killed him. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Wait and know that when Humans disagreed, they sometimes fought, and when they fought, all too often they killed one another.
