Alien Child by Pamela Sargent Page B

one to come for us except Llare and Llipel. We shouldn’t have been revived at all. Maybe it’s a good thing no one will come for the others.”
    Nita bowed her head, horrified at her people’s deeds. She understood Sven’s moodiness now, and the shame and despair he must have felt when he first learned about what their people had done. She longed to reassure him, but what could she say?
    “Did the library tell you all of this?” she managed to ask.
    “It didn’t say that was why the Institute was built, but I could figure that out from the records, once I knew about wars. The mind doesn’t remember much about the last war, only that it came just before it lost contact with everything outside. Our people had a lot of reasons for their wars, reasons for making them seem necessary. They had fine-sounding reasons for the Institute, too—probably didn’t want to admit the real ones. They were like that—saying things they didn’t mean or that weren’t true, breaking promises, hiding their real feelings with talk.”
    The sky was growing lighter. She stood up and walked unsteadily to the windows. The Institute’s east and west wings stretched toward the windowless expanse that held the cold place; the garden was below. A forest surrounded the structure, which was bordered by a grassy space kept trimmed by the mowers and weeded by the gardeners. A wall surrounded a large courtyard next to the west wing; with its flowers and shrubs, the courtyard was another garden.
    In the moments before dawn, the forest seemed peaceful. The creatures that lived there were free of her kind now.
    She thought then of the first time Dusky had killed a bird in the garden. She had cried even after Ismail explained that cats had such instincts, could not act in any other way; the instincts ran too deep. Her kind had killed other animals for food, but Nita had assumed, from what Ismail told her, that material synthesizers such as the one in the cafeteria had freed them of that need.
    She could understand killing animals for food, cruel as it seemed, if there was no other way to survive. Even Llipel had speculated that her own kind might once have done so and that her sharp claws might be a relic of such a time. But wars could not have had such a purpose. Her people had feared death, yet had risked it to bring death to others.
    She made her way back to the table. “Why did they do it?” she said as she sank into her chair. “Why?”
    “Maybe they couldn’t help themselves. Wars meant a lot to them. They set down a lot of writings about wars. The library doesn’t have many of them, but some of the records listed others. They wrote about courage and bravery and winning and warriors—people who made wars—as if they were wonderful things. Sometimes they set down arguments against wars, but that was probably when it wasn’t their time for fighting.”
    “We mustn’t fight,” she said. “We can think, we can know what fighting brings. We don’t have to be like that.”
    “Maybe we won’t have any choice,” he responded. “That time might come when we’re older.”
    “No. I won’t let it.” She clung to that hope, however futile it was. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gone to the library. If we didn’t know this—”
    “It’s better to know. This way, we’ll know what’s happening to us if that time ever comes, and maybe we can do something about it.”
    “We could stay separated.” She nearly choked on the words. Had she
found one of her people only to be separated from him again? “We couldn’t fight, then.”
    Sven raised his head. “I thought of that. I worried about whether I should talk to you at all, but then I convinced myself it was our time to meet. I told myself that you should know what I do, that it wasn’t right to keep it to myself, and that you might discover it for yourself, anyway, later. But now—” He brushed back his hair awkwardly with one hand. “You looked so happy in the lobby when you