I looked up at him, surprised that I understood him, too. “Why don’t you want to learn from the other immigrants?” I asked.
“Oh, I do,” he said and grinned at me. “Of course I do. But right now, I want to learn from the Martians themselves.”
“You want to see how the Council works.”
“Exactly.”
“So do I, although I wish I were doing it as just an interested spectator.” We finished our part of the preparation—bringing trays with covered pitchers of water and plastic cups to the storage building. We distributed them among the front tables for the Council members and put some on the tables next to the wall in the back for everyone else. Then we chose seats in the first row. I thought I should be in the front so that I could stand and speak when necessary, and I wanted Joel and Wright beside me since they’d chosen to stay.
“Have you ever been to one of these Council meetings?” Wright asked Joel, surprising me. With me encouraging them, giving them small commands, they had recently begun to speak to one another beyond what was absolutely necessary.
“I never have,” Joel said. “There’s never been one here during my lifetime, not while I was at home, anyway.”
There was something comforting about having them on either side of me. They eased the stress I had been feeling without their doing anything at all.
Ina and some symbionts had begun to come in and choose seats. This first night of the Council was to begin at nine and run until five the next morning.
There was no special clothing worn by members of the Council or by audience members except for the many jackets and coats. The building was unheated, and the symbionts seemed to need extra clothing over their jeans and sweatshirts, their casual dresses, or their party clothing. Several symbionts came in from their parties, apparently deciding that they preferred to watch the proceedings of the Council to eating, drinking, and dancing. Earlier that evening, just after it was fully dark, Joel and I had wandered into the noisiest party—the one at William’s house—for a few moments to see, as Joel said, what was going on. It was the first time I could remember seeing people dance to music that was being played on a stereo.
“It looks like fun,” I said.
Joel smiled. “It is fun. Want to learn?”
“I do,” I said. “But not now. Not tonight.” And we had gone back to help with the preparations. I looked back, though, liking the joy and the sweat and the easy sexiness of it all, wishing I could have stayed and let him teach me.
Twenty-two
Ironically, the oldest person present was Milo Silk. He was 541 years old—ancient even for an Ina. According to the world history I had been reading, when he was born, there were no Europeans in the Americas or Australia. Ferdinand and Isabella, who would someday send Christopher Columbus out exploring, were not yet even married. All Ina were in Europe and the Middle East, traveling with Gypsies, blending as best they could into more stationary populations or even finding their ways into this or that aristocracy or royal court. That world was Mars to me, and if Milo Silk were anyone else, I would have wanted very much to spend time with him and hear any stories he would tell about the worlds of his childhood and youth.
As things were, though, I had avoided him and his family until now. And yet, he was asked to bless the opening of Council proceedings. I thought they should have changed the custom and invited an elder who was less involved in causing suffering and death to speak what Preston had told me should be words of unity and peace. But everyone seemed to expect Milo to do it. After all, he hadn’t been judged guilty of anything—yet.
Milo Silk stood up in his place directly across from where I had eventually been told to sit. He and I were at opposite ends of a broad arc of cloth-draped, metal-framed tables. Twelve members of the Council sat two to a table. The odd Council member, Peter Marcu, had a table to himself, as did Milo Silk and I and Preston Gordon, who sat at the center of the arc and who was moderating and representing the host family.
The Gordon symbionts had set up a sound system. They’d scattered speakers along the length of the big room and put on each of the tables a slender, flexible microphone for each person. There was also a standalone microphone centered between the two prongs of the arc of tables.
Martin Harrison had shown me how to use my microphone—how to turn it on or off, how to take it from its stand and hold it if I wanted to, how close to it I should be when I spoke into it. Wright and Joel had watched all this, looking around as the other Council members and Milo were seated. Then Wright kissed me on the forehead and said, confusingly, “Break a leg.” Then he’d gone back to his seat in the front row where he had left his jacket holding his chair and sat there alone.