He looked uncomfortable. “Could you tell us,” he said, “about anything at all that you’ve been able to remember of your life before you were injured.”
“I recall nothing of my past before the cave,” I said, as though I hadn’t said it a dozen times the night before.
“Does this trouble you?” he asked.
“Of course it does.”
“What is your answer to it, then? Do you simply accept your memory loss?”
“I have no choice. I am relearning the things that I should know about myself and my people.”
“Do you feel yourself to be a different person because of your loss?”
I had an almost overwhelming impulse to scream at him. Instead, I kept silent until I could manage my voice. Then I spoke carefully into the microphone. “My childhood is gone. My families are gone. My first symbionts are gone. Most of my education is gone. The first fifty-three years of my life are gone. Is that what you mean by ‘a different person’？”
He hesitated.
Russell Silk said, “It isn’t yet your time to question. Answer the symbiont’s question.”
I ignored him and spoke to the doctor. “Have I answered your question?”
He did not move, but now he looked very uncomfortable. He did not meet my gaze. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you have.”
The doctor went on to ask several more questions that I had already answered in one way or another. By the time he ran out of questions, I thought he looked more than a little ashamed of himself. His manner seemed mildly apologetic, and I was feeling sorry for him again. How had he happened to wind up in one of the Silk households?
“Is the doctor boring you, Shori?” Russell asked, surprising me. He didn’t like addressing me directly. It was a family trait.
I said, “I’m sure he’s doing exactly what you’ve instructed him to do.”
“I have no more questions,” the doctor said. He was a neurologist, Carmen told me later, a doctor who specializes in diseases and disorders of the central nervous system. No wonder he had been so interested in my injuries. I wondered whether he hated the Silks.
Finally, it was my turn to ask questions. I used my turn to call Russell’s sons and their unmated young-adult sons to the microphone for questioning. I asked each of them whether they had known that anyone in their family was arranging to kill the Petrescu and Matthews families.
Alan Silk, one of the younger sons of Russell and his brothers, was my best subject—a good-looking, 180-year-old male who hadn’t learned much so far about lying successfully but who insisted on lying.
“I know nothing about the killing of those families,” he said in response to my question. “My family had nothing to do with any of that. We would never take part in such things.”
I ignored this. “Did you help other members of your family collect humans in Los Angeles or in Pasadena, humans who were later used to kill the Matthews and the Petrescus?”
“I did not! None of us did. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that your male and female families destroyed each other.”
Russell winced, but Alan didn’t see it because he was glaring at me.
“Is that what you believe?” I asked. “Do you believe that my mothers and sisters and my father and brothers killed one another?”
He began to look uncomfortable. “Maybe,” he muttered. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what you believe?”
He glared at me. “I believe my family had nothing to do with what happened, that’s what I believe. My family is honorable and it’s Ina!”
“Do you believe that my families killed each other?”
He looked around angrily, glancing at his new advocate, Ion Andrei, who had apparently decided not to get into this particular foolish argument. “I don’t know what they did,” he muttered angrily. He held his hands in front of him, one clutching the other.
I sighed. “All right,” I said. “Let’s see what you believe about something else. Several humans were used to kill my families. How do you feel about that? Are humans just tools for us to use whenever we find a use for them?”
“No!” he said. “Of course not.” He looked at me with contempt. “No true Ina could even ask such a question.” He suddenly swung his arms at his sides, then held them in front of him again, as though he didn’t know what to do with them.
“What are human, then. What are they to you?”