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He put down the small pie that he had not offered to share with her
and came over to her. "You know they expect you to say no," he said.
"They brought you here so you could say it and they could be sure all
over again that they were right about you." He stood tall and broad,
too close to her, too intense. She realized unhappily that she was
afraid of him. "Surprise them," he continued softly. "Don't do what
they expect-just for once. Don't let them play you like a puppet."
He had put his hands on her shoulders. When she drew back
reflexively, he held on to her in a grip that was almost painful.
She sat still and stared at him. Her mother had looked at her the way
she was looking at him now. She had caught herself giving her son the
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same look when she thought he was doing something he knew was
wrong. How much of Titus was still fourteen, still the boy the Oankali
had awakened and impressed and enticed and inducted into their own
ranks?
He let her go. "You could be safe here," he said softly. "Down on
Earth... how long will you live? How long will you want to live? Even if
you don't forget what you know, other people will forget. Some of
them will want to be cavemen-drag you around, put you in a harem,
beat the shit out of you." He shook his head. "Tell me I'm wrong. Sit
there and tell me I'm wrong."
She looked away from him, realizing that he was probably right. What
was waiting for her on Earth? Misery? Subjugation? Death? Of course
there were people who would toss aside civilized restraint. Not at
first, perhaps, but eventually-as soon as they realized they could get
away with it.
He took her by the shoulders again and this time tried awkwardly to
kiss her. It was like what she could recall of being kissed by an eager
boy. That didn't bother her. And she caught herself responding to him
in spite of her fear. But there was more to this than grabbing a few
minutes of pleasure.
"Look," she said when he drew back, "I'm not interested in putting on
a show for the Oankali."
"What difference do they make? It's not like human beings were
watching us."
"It is to me."
"Lilith," he said, shaking his head, "they will always be watching."
"The other thing I'm not interested in doing is giving them a human
child to tamper with."
"You probably already have."
Surprise and sudden fear kept her silent, but her hand moved to her
abdomen where her jacket concealed her scar.
"They didn't have enough of us for what they call a normal trade," he
said. "Most of the ones they have will be Dinso-people who want to go
back to Earth. They didn't have enough for the Toaht. They had to
make more."
"While we slept? Somehow they-?"
"Somehow!" he hissed. "Anyhow! They took stuff from men and
women who didn't even know each other and put it together and
made babies in women who never knew the mother or the father of
their kid-and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they
grew the baby in another kind of animal. They have animals they can
adjust to-to incubate human fetuses, as they say. Or maybe they don't
even worry about men and women. Maybe they just scrape some skin
from one person and make babies out of it- cloning, you know. Or
maybe they use one of their prints- and don't ask me what a print is.
But if they've got one of you, they can use it to make another you even
if you've been dead for a hundred years and they haven't got anything
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at all left of your body. And that's just the start. They can make people
in ways I don't even know how to talk about. Only thing they can't do,
it seems, is let us alone. Let us do it our own way."
His hands were almost gentle on her. "At least they haven't until
now." He shook her abruptly. "You know how many kids I got? They
say, 'Your genetic material has been used in over seventy children.'
And I've never even seen a woman in all the time I've been here."
He stared at her for several seconds and she feared him and pitied
him and longed to be away from him. The first human being she had
seen in years and all she could do was long to be away from him.
Yet it would do no good to fight him physically. She was tall, had
always thought of herself as strong, but he was much bigger-six-four,
six-five, and stocky.
"They've had two hundred and fifty years to fool around with us," she
said. "Maybe we can't stop them, but we don't have to help them."
"The hell with them." He tried to unfasten her jacket.
"No!" she shouted, deliberately startling him. "Animals get treated
like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send
them back to their owners. What do they care? They're just animals!"
He tore her jacket off then fumbled with her pants. She threw her
weight against him suddenly and managed to shove him away.
He stumbled backward for several steps, caught himself, came at her
again.
Screaming at him, she swung her legs over the platform she had been
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