I had decided that Zo? was the most beautiful Ina I had ever seen. Her age—over three hundred—didn’t seem to matter. She was tall, lean, and blond like most Ina but was a striking, memorable woman. When she arrived, I had asked Wright what he thought of her. He said, “Sculpted. Perfect, like one of those Greek statues. If she had boobs, I’d say she was the best-looking woman I’ve ever seen.”
Poor Wright. Maybe one of the Braithwaite symbionts would have large breasts.
“Shori Matthews has told us the trúth,” Zo? said. “I have not once caught her in a lie. Either she has been very careful or she is exactly what she seems to be. My impression is that she is exactly what she appears to be—a child, deeply wronged by both the Silk family and Katharine Dahlman. Members of the Silk family, on the other hand, have lied again and again. And Katharine Dahlman has lied. It seems that all this killing was done because Shori’s families were experimenting with ways of using human DNA to enable us to walk in daylight. And it seems that no legal methods of questioning or stopping the experiments were even attempted.” She took a deep breath. “I stand with Shori against both the Silks and Katharine Dahlman.”
“Joan Braithwaite?” Preston said.
“Shori told the truth, and Katharine and the Silks lied,” Joan said. “That’s all that matters. I must stand with Shori against both.”
“Alexander Svoboda?”
“I stand with Shori against Katharine Dahlman,” he said. “But I must stand with the Silks against Shori. Shori has told the truth, as far as she knows, as far as she is able to understand with her damaged memory, but I can’t condemn the Silks as a family because of what one child, one seriously impaired child, believes.”
And yet, every Silk who had spoken to the Council had lied about what he had done, about what he knew, or both. How could Katharine Dahlman be punished for killing one symbiont and the Silks let off for killing twelve Ina and nearly a hundred symbionts? But that was Alexander’s less than courageous decision.
“Peter Marcu?” Preston said.
“I stand with Shori,” Peter Marcu said. “I don’t want to. My family has been friends with the Silks for four generations. There was even a time when we got along well with the Dahlmans. But Shori has been telling the truth all along, and the others have been lying. Whatever their reasons are for what they’ve done, they did do it, and for the sake of the rest of our people and all our symbionts, we cannot allow this to go unpunished.”
“Ana Morariu?”
“I stand with the Silks and with Katharine Dahlman,” Ana said. “Shori Matthews is much too impaired to be permitted to speak against other Ina. How can we destroy people’s lives, even kill them on the word of a child whose mind has been all but destroyed and who, even if she were healthy, is barely Ina at all? It is a tragedy that the Petrescu and Matthews families are dead. We shouldn’t deepen the tragedy by killing or disrupting other families.”
She was the one who had said Katharine Dahlman might be telling the truth. Now she seemed to be saying that my families had simply been unlucky and had, for some unknown reason, died, and that it would be wrong to punish anyone for that. Nothing wrong, she seemed to think, with letting your friends get away with mass murder.
“Alice Rappaport?”
“I stand with Shori,” Alice said. “Katharine and the Silks are liars, people who use murder but never think to use the law. They know better than anyone here that we can’t let them go unpunished. And what about the rest of you? Do you want to return to a world of lawless family feuds and mass killing?”
“Harold Westfall?”
“I stand with Shori,” Harold said. “To let this go would be to endanger us all in the long run. Both the Silks and Katharine must be punished for what we all know they’ve done.”
He glanced at me unhappily. I got the impression he didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to stand with me. I suspected he didn’t even like me much. But he was doing his duty and trying to do it as honestly as he could. I respected that and was grateful for it.
“Kira Nicolau.”
“I stand with Shori as far as Katharine is concerned,” Kira said. “What Katharine did was completely wrong, and I have no doubt that she did it. I don’t believe she even meant to convince us otherwise; it just didn’t seem very important to her. But as to the other problem, I must stand with the Silks. I don’t believe Shori’s memories and accusations should be trusted. I’m not convinced that Shori understands the situation as well as she believes she does. She believes what she says, that’s clear. In that sense, she is telling the truth. But like Alexander, I’m not willing to disrupt or destroy the Silk family on the word of someone as disabled as Shori Matthews clearly is.”