It was a threat. It was meaningless, but it gave him some slight satisfaction. ?The other Humans here will show you where to gather food,? I said. ?If you need anything else, ask one of us.? I turned to go.
?So goddamn patronizing,? the male muttered.
I turned back without thinking. ?Am I really??
The male frowned, muttered a curse, and went back into the house. I understood then that he was just angry. It bothered me that I sometimes made them angry. I never intended to.
The female stepped to me, touched my face, examined a little of my hair. Humans who hadn?t mated among us never really learned to touch us. At best, they annoyed us by rubbing their hands over sensory spots, and once their hands found the spots they never liked them.
The female jerked her hand back when her fingers discovered the one below my left ear.
?They?re a little like eyes that can?t close to protect themselves,? I said. ?It doesn?t exactly hurt us when you touch them, but we don?t like you to.?
?So what? You have to teach people how to touch you??
I smiled and took her hand between my own. ?Hands are always safe,? I said. I left her standing there, watching me. I could see her through sensory tentacles in my hair. She stood there until the male came out and drew her inside.
2
I went back to Nikanj and sat near it while it took care of family matters, while it met with people from the Oankali homeship, Chkahichdahk, which circled the Earth out beyond the orbit of the moon, while it exchanged information with other ooloi or took biological information from my siblings. We all brought Nikanj bits of fur, flesh, pollen, leaves, seeds, spores, or other living or dead cells from plants or animals that we had questions about or that were new to us.
No one paid any attention to me. There was an odd comfort in that. I could examine them all with my newly sharpened senses, see what I had never seen before, smell what I had never noticed. I suppose I seemed to doze a little. For a time, Aaor, my closest sibling?my Oankali-born sister?came to sit beside me. She was the child of my Oankali mother, and not yet truly female, but I had always thought of her as a sister. She looked so female?or she had looked female before I began to change. Now she
Now it looked the way it always should have. It looked eka in the true meaning of the word?a child too young to have developed sex. That was what we both were?for now. Aaor smelled eka. It could literally go either way, become male or female. I had always known this, of course, about both of us. But now, suddenly, I could no longer even think of Aaor as she. It probably would be female someday, just as I would probably soon become the male I appeared to be. The Human-born rarely change their apparent sex. In my family, only one Human-born had changed from apparent female to actual male. Several Oankali-born had changed, but most knew long before their metamorphosis that they felt more drawn to become the opposite of what they seemed.
Aaor moved close and examined me with a few of its head and body tentacles. ?I think you?re close to metamorphosis,? it said. It has not spoken aloud. Children learned early that it was ill mannered to speak aloud among themselves if others nearby were having ongoing vocal conversations. We spoke through touch signals, signs, and multisensory illusions transmitted through head or body tentacles?direct neural stimulation.
?I am,? I answered silently. ?But I feel
different.?
?Show me.?
I tried to re-create my increased sensory awareness for it, but it drew away.
After a time, it touched me again lightly. In tactile signals only, it said, ?I don?t like it. Something?s wrong. You should show Dichaan.?
I did not want to show Dichaan. That was odd. I hadn?t minded showing Aaor. I felt no aversion to showing Nikanj?except that it would probably send me to my fathers.
?What about me disturbs you?? I asked Aaor.
?I don?t know,? it answered. ?But I don?t like it. I?ve never felt it before. Something is wrong.? It was afraid, and that was odd. New things normally drew its attention. This new thing repelled it.
?It isn?t anything that will hurt you,? I said. ?Don?t worry.?
It got up and went away. It didn?t say anything. It just left. That was out of character. Aaor and I had always been close. It was only three months younger than I was, and we?d been together since it was born. It had never walked away from me before. You only walk away from people you could no longer communicate with.
I went over to Nikanj. It was alone now. One of our neighbors had just left it. It focused a cone of its long head tentacles on me, finally noticing that there was something different about me.
?Metamorphosis, Eka??
?I think so.?
?Let me check. Your scent is
strange.?
The tone of its voice was strange. I had been around when siblings of mine went into metamorphosis. Nikanj had never sounded quite that way.
It wrapped the tip of one sensory arm around my arm and extended its sensory hand. Sensory hands were ooloi appendages. Nikanj did not normally use them to check for metamorphosis. It could have used its head or body tentacles just like anyone else, but it was disturbed enough to want to be more precise, more certain.
I tried to feel the filaments of the sensory hand as they slipped through my flesh. I had never been able to before, but I felt them clearly now. There was no pain, of course. No communication. But I felt as though I had found what I had been looking for. The deep touch of the sensory hand was air after a long, blundering swim
