Humanity, Evolution, and Genetics Theme Analysis

ALIVE!

Still alive.

Alive … again.

Awakening was hard, as always. The ultimate disappointment. It was a struggle to take in enough air to drive off nightmare sensations of asphyxiation. Lilith Iyapo lay gasping, shaking with the force of her effort. Her heart beat too fast, too loud. She curled around it, fetal, helpless. Circulation began to return to her arms and legs in flurries of minute, exquisite pains.

“You shouldn’t have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another.”

“My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.”

“I wouldn’t call it a talent. A curse, maybe. But how could your relative know about that from just … observing.”

“You said we had two incompatible characteristics. What were they?”

Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to come from his mouth or throat. “You are intelligent,” he said. “That’s the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we’ve found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics.”

“What’s the second characteristic?”

“You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic.”

He wrapped the many fingers of one hand around her arm. “Can you hold your breath, Lilith? Can you hold it by an act of will until you die?”

“Hold my—?”

“We are as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done—to the rebirth of your people and mine.”

“No!” she shouted. “A rebirth for us can only happen if you let us alone! Let us begin again on our own.”

“Before we found these plants,” Kahguyaht said, “they used to capture living animals and keep them alive for a long while, using their carbon dioxide and supplying them with oxygen while slowly digesting nonessential parts of their bodies: limbs, skin, sensory organs. The plants even passed some of their own substance through their prey to nourish the prey and keep it alive as long as possible. And the plants were enriched by the prey’s waste products. They gave a very, very long death.

Lilith swallowed. “Did the prey feel what was being done to it?”

“No. That would have hastened death. The prey … slept.”

When the group broke up, Tediin came over to Lilith, took both Lilith’s arms. “It has been good having you with us,” she said in Oankali. “I’ve learned from you. It’s been a good trade.”

“I’ve learned too,” Lilith said honestly. “I wish I could stay here.” Rather than go with strangers. Rather than be sent to teach a lot of frightened, suspicious humans.

“No,” Tediin said. “Nikanj must go. You would not like to be separated from it.”

She had nothing to say to that. It was true. Everyone, even Paul Titus inadvertently, had pushed her toward Nikanj. They had succeeded.

“I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will.”

“Anthropology,” Tate said disparagingly. “Why did you want to snoop through other people’s cultures? Couldn’t you find what you wanted in your own?”

Lilith smiled and noticed that Tate frowned as though this were the beginning of a wrong answer. “I started out wanting to do exactly that,” Lilith said. “Snoop. Seek. It seemed to me that my culture—ours—was running headlong over a cliff. And, of course, as it turned out, it was. I thought there must be saner ways of life.”

“Find any?”

“Didn’t have much of a chance. It wouldn’t have mattered much anyway. It was the cultures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that counted.”

“Let them row their boats to the walls and back. There’s no way out for them except the way we offer: to learn to feed and shelter themselves in this environment—to become self-sustaining. When they’ve done that, we’ll take them to Earth and let them go.”

“I don’t believe he meant to kill anyone,” Nikanj said. “He was angry and afraid and in pain. Joseph had injured him when he hit you. Then he saw Joseph healing, saw the flesh mending itself before his eyes. He screamed. I’ve never heard a human scream that way. Then he … used his ax.”

Lilith watched them enviously. They didn’t lie often to humans because their sensory language had left them with no habit of lying—only of withholding information, refusing contact.

Humans, on the other hand, lied easily and often. They could not trust one another. They could not trust one of their own who seemed too close to aliens, who stripped off her clothing and lay down on the ground to help her jailer.

“I have made you pregnant with Joseph’s child. I wouldn’t have done it so soon, but I wanted to use his seed, not a print. I could not make you closely enough related to a child mixed from a print. And there’s a limit to how long I can keep sperm alive.”

She was staring at it, speechless. It was speaking as casually as though discussing the weather. She got up, would have backed away from it, but it caught her by both wrists.

She considered resisting, making it drug her and carry her back. But that seemed a pointless gesture. At least she would get another chance with a human group. A chance to teach them … but not a chance to be one of them. Never that. Never?

Another chance to say, “Learn and run!”

She would have more information for them this time. And they would have long, healthy lives ahead of them. Perhaps they could find an answer to what the Oankali had done to them. And perhaps the Oankali were not perfect. A few fertile people might slip through and find one another. Perhaps. Learn and run! If she were lost, others did not have to be. Humanity did not have to be.

She let Nikanj lead her into the dark forest and to one of the concealed dry exits.