Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.
"You won't see it again," she said. "I don't want you thinking anymore about shooting me."
The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.
"I wouldn't have shot you," I said. "Not you." She had been taken from my father's flesh when he was my age.
"You could have," she insisted.
"Not you." She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.
"Would you have destroyed yourself?"
I moved carefully, uncomfortably. "I could have done that. I nearly did. That's Qui's `away, I wonder if he knows." "What?"
I did not answer.
"You will live now."
"Yes." Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.
"I'm healthy and young," she said. "I won't leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N'Tlic. I'll take care of you."