He stopped glaring at me and looked uncertainly at Russell.
Russell said, “What do his opinions of humans have to do with the deaths of your families?”
“Humans were used as the killer’s surrogates,” I said. “What do you think of using them that way?”
“Me?” Russell asked.
“You,” I said.
“Have you finished questioning Alan, then?”
“I haven’t. But you did jump in and it’s my time to ask questions. You’ve had yours. If you would like, though, I will question you as soon as I finish with Alan.”
He looked both confused and annoyed. Since he didn’t seem to know what to say, I returned my attention to Alan.
“Are humans tools, then? Should we be free to use them according to our needs?”
“Of course not!”
“Is it wrong to send humans out to kill Ina and their symbionts?”
“Of course it’s wrong!”
“Do you know anyone who has ever done that?”
“No!” He almost shouted the word. The sound of his own voice magnified by the microphone seemed to startle him, and he was silent for a moment. Then he repeated, “No. Of course not. No.”
Every one of his responses to my questions about humans were lies. I suspected that his brothers lied when I questioned them. I wanted to believe they were lying. But my senses told me that Alan, with his little twitches and his false outrage … Alan was definitely lying.
If I could see it, anyone on the Council could see it.
Twenty-seven
When the second night of the Council ended, I was exhausted and yet restless. I wasn’t hungry, and I couldn’t have slept. I needed to run. I thought if I circled the community, running as fast as I could, I might burn off some of my tension.
I got up from my table and joined my symbionts. I walked outside with them, and we headed back toward the guest house.
“What’s to stop Katharine Dahlman from escaping?” Wright asked. “She could decide to join her symbiont in Texas or wherever he is.”
“She won’t run,” Joel said. “She’s got too much pride. She won’t shame herself or her family by running. Besides …” He paused. I glanced back at him. “Besides,” he said to me, “she might believe that she has a better chance of surviving if she stays here and takes her punishment.”
I said nothing. I only looked at him.
He shrugged.
At the guest house, the four of them went straight to the kitchen. While they were preparing themselves a meal, I went out to run. I didn’t begin to feel right until I’d had done not one, but three laps around the community. I was the only one running. Everyone else, Ina and human, had trudged back to their meals and their beds.
When I came in, I avoided the kitchen and dining room where I could hear all four of my symbionts and the six Rappaport symbionts moving around, talking, eating. I went upstairs and took a shower. I was planning to spend the night with Joel. My custom was that I could taste anyone anytime—a small delight for me and for my symbionts, a pleasure greater than a kiss, but not as intense as feeding or making love. I made sure, though, that I took a complete meal from each of them only every fifth night.
Now it would have to be every fourth. I would soon have to-get more symbionts, but how could I think about doing that now?
Dry and dressed in one of Wright’s T-shirts, I somehow wound up in Theodora’s room. I wasn’t thinking. Her scent drew me. I sat down on her bed, then stretched out on it, surrounded by her scent. I closed my eyes, and it was as though she would come through the door any minute and see me there and look at me in her sidelong way and come onto the bed with me, laughing.
A couple of nights after she arrived, she had found me reading one of Hayden’s books written in Ina, and I’d read parts of it to her, first in Ina, then in English. She had been fascinated and wanted me to teach her to read and speak Ina. She said that if she was going to have a longer life span than she had expected, she might as well do something with it. I liked the idea of teaching her because it would force me to go back to the basics of the language, and I hoped that might help me remember a little about the person I had been when I learned it.
I lay there and got lost in Theodora’s scent and in grief.
I must have stayed lost for some time, lying on the bed, twisted in the bedding.
Then Joel was there with me, taking the bedding from around me, raising me to my feet, taking me to his room. I looked around the room, then at Joel. He put me on the bed, then got in beside me.