Butler, Octavia - Dawn

Joseph only stared at it.

"And yet I pleased you. I pleased you very much."

"Illusion!"

"Interpretation. Electrochemical stimulation of certain nerves, certain parts of your brain... What happened was real. Your body knows how real it was. Your interpretations were illusion. The sensations were entirely real. You can have them again-or you can have others."

"No!"

"And all that you have, you can share with Lilith."

Silence.

"All that she feels, she'll share with you." It reached out and caught his hand in a coil of sensory arm. "I won't hurt you. And I offer a oneness that your people strive for, dream of, but can't truly attain alone."

He pulled his arm free. "You said I could choose. I've made my choice!"

"You have, yes." It opened his jacket with its many-fingered true hands and stripped the garment from him. When he would have backed away, it held him. It managed to lie down on the bed with him without seeming to force him down. "You see. Your body has made a different choice."

He struggled violently for several seconds, then stopped. "Why are you doing this?" he demanded.

"Close your eyes."

"What?"

"Lie here with me for a while and close your eyes."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing. Close your eyes."

"I don't believe you."

"You're not afraid of me. Close your eyes."

Silence.

After a long while, he closed his eyes and the two of them lay together. Joseph held his body rigid at first, but slowly, as nothing happened, he began to relax. Sometime later his breathing evened and he seemed to be asleep.

Lilith sat on the table, waiting, watching. She was patient and interested. This might be her only chance ever to watch close up as an ooloi seduced someone. She thought it should have bothered her that the "someone" in this case was Joseph. She knew more than she wanted to about the wildly conflicting feelings he was subject to now.

Yet, in this matter, she trusted Nikanj completely. It was enjoying itself with Joseph. It would not spoil its enjoyment by hurting him or rushing him. In a perverse way, Joseph too was probably enjoying himself, though he could not have said so.

Lilith was dozing when Nikanj stroked Joseph's shoulders, rousing him. His voice roused her.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

"Waking you."

"I wasn't asleep!"

Silence.

"My god," he said after a while. "I did fall asleep, didn't I? You must have drugged me."

"No."

He rubbed his eyes, but made no effort to get up.

"Why didn't you. . . just do it?"

"I told you. This time you can choose."

"I've chosen! You ignored me."

"Your body said one thing. Your words said another." It moved a sensory arm to the back of his neck, looping one coil loosely around his neck. "This is the position," it said. "I'll stop now if you like."

There was a moment of silence, then Joseph gave a long sigh. "I can't give you-or myself-permission," he said. "No matter what I feel, I can't."

Nikanj's head and body became mirror smooth. The change was so dramatic that Joseph jumped and drew back. "Does that . . . amuse you somehow?" he asked bitterly.

"It pleases me. It's what I expected."

"So. . . what happens now?"

"You are very strong-willed. You can hurt yourself as badly as you think necessary to achieve a goal or hold to a conviction."

"Let go of me."

It smoothed its tentacles again. "Be grateful, Joe. I'm not going to let go of you."

Lilith saw Joseph's body stiffen, struggle, then relax, and she knew Nikanj had read him correctly. He neither struggled nor argued as Nikanj positioned him more comfortably against its body. Lilith saw that he had closed his eyes again, his face peaceful. Now he was ready to accept what he had wanted from the beginning.

Silently, Lilith got up, stripped off her jacket, and went to the bed. She stood over it, looking down. For a moment, she saw Nikanj as she had once seen Jdahya-as a totally alien being, grotesque, repellant beyond mere ugliness with its night crawler body tentacles, its snake head tentacles, and its tendency to keep both moving, signaling attention and emotion.

She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away.

The moment passed, left her almost gasping. She jumped when Nikanj touched her with the tip of a sensory arm. She stared at it for a moment longer wondering how she had lost her horror of such a being.

Then she lay down, perversely eager for what it could give her. She positioned herself against it, and was not content until she felt the deceptively light touch of the sensory hand and felt the ooloi body tremble against her.

13

Humans were kept drugged for days-drugged, and guarded, each individual or pair by an ooloi.

"Imprinting is the best word for what they're doing," Nikanj told Joseph. "Imprinting, chemical and social."

"What you're doing to me!" Joseph accused.

"What I'm doing to you, what I've done to Lilith. It has to be done. No one will be returned to Earth without it."

"How long will they be drugged?"

"Some are not heavily drugged now. Tate Marah isn't. Gabriel Rinaldi is." It focused on Joseph. "You aren't. You know."

Joseph looked away. "No one should be."

"In the end, no one will be. We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves. We teach you more pleasant things to do."

"That's not enough!"

"It's a beginning."

14

Peter's ooloi proved that ooloi were not infallable. Drugged, Peter was a different man. For perhaps the first time since his Awakening, he was at peace, not fighting even with himself, not trying to prove anything, joking with Jean and their ooloi about his arm and the fighting.

Lilith, hearing this later, wondered what there was to laugh at in that incident. But the ooloi-produced drugs could be potent. Under their influence, Peter might have laughed at anything. Under their influence, he accepted union and pleasure. When that influence was allowed to wane and Peter began to think, he apparently decided he had been humiliated and enslaved. The drug seemed to him to be not a less painful way of getting used to frightening nonhumans, but a way of turning him against himself, causing him to demean himself in alien perversions. His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.

Peter's ooloi should have noticed that at some point what Peter said and the expression he assumed ceased to agree with what his body told it. Perhaps it did not know enough about human beings to handle someone like Peter. It was older than Nikanj-more a contemporary of Kahguyaht. But it was not as perceptive as either of them-and perhaps not as bright.

Sealed in Peter's room, alone with Peter, it allowed itself to be attacked, pounded by Peter's bare fists. Unfortunately for Peter, he hit a sensitive spot with his first hammering blow, and triggered the ooloi's defensive reflexes. It gave him a lethal sting before it could regain control of itself and he collapsed in convulsions. His own contracting muscles broke several of his bones, then he went into shock.

The ooloi tried to help him once it had recovered from the worst of its own pain, but it was too late. He was dead. The ooloi sat down beside his body, its head and body tentacles drawn into hard lumps. It did not move or speak. Its cool flesh grew even cooler, and it seemed to be as dead as the human it was apparently mourning.

There were no Oankali on watch above. Peter might have been saved if there had been. But the great room was full of ooloi. Where was the need to keep watch?

By the time one of these ooloi noticed Jean sitting alone and forlorn outside the sealed room, it was too late. There was nothing to do but take Peter's body out and send for the ooloi's mates. The ooloi remained catatonic.