Sexuality and Gender Theme Analysis

“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!”

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.

He sat down next to her. “She’s telling people you’re a man. She says only a man can fight that way.”

Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them tireless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.

He breathed deeply. “Let’s go then.” But he did not move. He still stood watching her. “Is it … like a drug?” he asked.

“You mean am I addicted?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so. I was happy with you. I didn’t want Nikanj here.”

“I don’t want him here again.”

“Nikanj isn’t male—and I doubt whether it really cares what either of us wants.”

“Don’t let him touch you! If you have a choice, keep away from him!”

The refusal to accept Nikanj’s sex frightened her because it reminded her of Paul Titus. She did not want to see Paul Titus in Joseph.

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.

“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.