Alien Child by Pamela Sargent

and the mind had begun to fail before. Someday the lights might not shine so readily; the cafeteria’s slots might not be filled with food by the synthesizer. She might have to leave the Institute then, and she had no idea of how to survive. Even Llipel and her ship might be of little help to her. That was another reason to reach out to the boy; she and Sven might have to depend on each other someday.
    The door opened. The lobby had disappeared; she gazed into a large room that seemed to be another cafeteria. A red carpet covered the floor; the glass- topped tables had silvery metal legs, while the chairs were covered with red cushioning. Slots lined the wall to her left.
    Sven was sitting at a table near the room’s wide windows. He lifted his head as she approached. “I didn’t think you’d follow me,” he said.
    “The lift scared me a little,” she admitted.
    “There’s a stairway, you know.” He looked away. “I was going to come down to the lobby, and then I was afraid you might have left.”
    She sat down across from him. “I didn’t mean to say what I did.”
    He kept his eyes lowered, refusing to look at her. “When I saw you,” he said, “all these feelings came to me. I was glad, but I was afraid, too. I thought—” He raised his head. “I wanted to say everything to you I could, all at once, and then I was afraid to say anything at all.”
    “I felt the same way.” She leaned back in her chair. “What I don’t understand is why Llipel and Llare didn’t tell us about each other.”
    Sven rubbed at the tabletop with one finger. “They don’t think the way we do. I notice that more now. You’d think they’d seem more familiar, but Llare seems stranger instead. They came here from somewhere else, they can’t eat our food, they don’t look like us, and they don’t see things the way we do.”
    “They might have thought it wasn’t a time for us to be together,” she said, “but they still could have told us. We could have spoken to each other over the screens, even if it wasn’t a time to meet.”
    He frowned. “I’ve been in the library. I know what our people were like. Llare knows—he can’t read, but he could listen and watch some of the visual records. I think he was afraid of what we might do if we met.”
    She thought of the time Beate had explained sex to her and to Llipel. Had their guardians feared that she and Sven might perform such acts, and that a child might result from them? But she could not have had a child before her body began to change, and the implants Beate had mentioned could prevent a pregnancy.
    Sven was a boy; could that get in the way of their becoming friends? She did not see how; surely they could still be companions. Whenever she had imagined meeting those of her own kind, she had seen faces and bodies as varied as the ones the screen showed, but it hadn’t seemed to matter whether they were women or men. They would, after all, be people. Sven was like her; he was probably as puzzled by their kind’s way of showing love as she was.
    Thinking of this was not making her any more comfortable in the boy’s presence. “It sounds strange to hear you call Llare a ‘he,’” she said quickly. “I always thought of Llipel and Llare as females.”
    “Why?”
    “Maybe because Llipel’s more like the female images than the male ones. Her voice is more like theirs.”
    “I think of Llare as a male,” he said, “but that’s probably because I’m one myself. I used to think that, when I was older, I’d be more like him. I told myself that we were both intelligent beings, so we should think the same way, but—” He was silent for a moment. “He’s always been kind, in his own way. I don’t think his people would have done the things ours did.”
    “Why do you keep saying those things about our kind?”
    He rested his arms on the table. “The library has records about some things our people did. Llare didn’t want me to see them, but he knew