But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. She would take my hand if I touched her now. I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. "Not for anything,"T'Gatoi said, stroking my mother's shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair. "Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?" "Nothing can buy him from me."Sober, she would not have permitted herself to refer to such things. Now T'Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor."Go on, Gan,"she said."Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me,"Take care of her."And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people.
She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve - why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Her people wanted more of us made available. "I like being able to come here,"T'Gatoi said."This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won't take care of yourself" "It's good,"she whispered."Sometimes I forget how good it is." There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face. Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. "The eggs are for the children,"my mother said. "Lien, I would like you to have what's left of Gan's egg." She looked at my mother, and my mother, her face lined and old looking, turned away. T'Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her body off the couch as though she were sitting up. "He's still too thin,"my mother said sharply.
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Thinness is dangerous."The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. "You're better,"she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs."You're gaining weight finally. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. T'Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother's life, and T'Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. It was an honor to have T'Gatoi in the family, but it was hardly a novelty. I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was lying about. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family.
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When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T'Gato - how to be respectful and always obedient because T'Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. T'Gatoi liked our body heat and took advantage of it whenever she could. I saw her turn away as several of T'Gatoi's limbs secured me closer. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.īut my mother seemed content to age before she had to. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. I lay against T'Gatoi's long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. T'Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. T'Gatoi's sister had given us two sterile eggs.
My last night of childhood began with a visit home.
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