Fledgling(106)

Preston did not smile, did not change expression at all, but I got the impression he was pleased with me. “There is,” he said. “If you believed I were doing something to the detriment of the Ina, something that was not exactly against law, but that you seriously believed was harmful, you could ask for a Council of the Goddess.”

Russell snatched up his microphone and protested. “Council of the … That hasn’t been done for at least twenty-five hundred years.”

“You are aware of it, then?” I asked him.

“It wouldn’t have been taken seriously. No one’s done it for two thousand—”

“Did you try?”

“Your families made no secret of the fact that they didn’t even believe in the Goddess!”

From the hypothetical to the real. Careless of him. “Would that have mattered?” I asked. “Could my family have ignored a call to take part in a Council of the Goddess?”

Russell said nothing. Perhaps he had remembered where he was and exactly what was being argued.

“Preston, would it have mattered?”

“The rule of seven would apply,” Preston answered. “If the rule of seven is satisfied and the accused family refuses to attend, the Council would be carried on regardless of its absence. The family would be bound by any vote of the Council, as though it had been present. If the family were ordered to stop whatever they were doing, and they refused to stop, they would be punished.”

I stared across at Russell. “Preston, has the Silk family ever tried to assemble a Council of the Goddess to discuss or warn against the genetic work of my eldermothers?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Preston said. “Russell?”

Again, Russell said nothing. It didn’t matter. Surely he had already said enough. I sat down and put my microphone back in its place.

“Does any Council member have questions?” Preston asked. No one spoke.

“All right,” he said. “Council members, I ask you now to count yourselves. Is the Silk family guilty of having made human beings their tools and sent those human tools to kill the Petrescu and the Matthews families? Are the Silks also guilty of sending their tools to burn the Petrescu guest house where Shori Matthews and her symbionts were staying? Are the Silks guilty of sending their tools to attack the Gordon family here at Punta Nublada? And also, was Katharine Dahlman, the Silks’ first advocate, guilty of sending one of her symbionts, Jack Roan, to kill one of Shori Matthews’s symbionts, Theodora Harden?” He paused, then said, “Zo? Fotopoulos?”

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.”