“You should notice,” he said, “that what you probably see as hair isn’t hair at all. “It’s wrong to assume that I must be a sex you’re familiar with,” it said, “but as it happens, I’m male.”

“I don’t mean any offense,” she said, “but are you male or female?” Lilith glanced at the humanoid body, wondering how humanlike it really was. The island of throat hair seemed to move slightly, and it occurred to her “that might be where the creature breathed-a kind of natural tracheostomy.

Above, it joined the eye hair, and below and behind, it joined the head hair. The long, profuse ear hair seemed to grow out of the ears as well as around them. There was so much hair across the eyes that she wondered how the creature could see. The hair grew down around its eyes and ears and at its throat. It was gray all over-pale gray skin, darker gray hair on its head. The lights brightened as she had supposed they would, and what had seemed to be a tall, slender man was still humanoid, but it had no nose-no bulge, no nostrils-just flat, gray skin. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. She made this one wait for several minutes, and not only was it silent, it never moved a muscle. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. RELATED: 10 Octavia Butler Quotes to Live By These things, whatever they were, were incredibly good at waiting. It stood utterly still in its corner, and she knew from her many Awakenings that it would not speak to her again until she did what it wished-until she said she was ready to look at it, then, in brighter light, took the obligatory look. The other possibilities seemed marginally less ridiculous.”

“Along with the possibility that I might be in prison, in an insane asylum, in the hands of the FBI, the CIA, or the KGB. You’re one of the few English speakers who never considered that she might be in the hands of extraterrestrials.” Since she was looking at him-it-she frowned. She moved back against the bed, but did not sit down. She jumped because that was what she had almost said. She took a step closer to him, then stopped. RELATED: Black Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors You Need to Read Now she stood up, staring hard at him, wishing for more light.

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