Fledgling(68)

This was obvious so I looked at him and waited for him to say something that wasn’t obvious.

“I mean, your venom. If one of us had bitten him instead of you, I think he’d be dead now.”

I nodded, interested. That was something I hadn’t known.

“And that means that if the Silks do get him again somehow and question him, he won’t survive. There may be female relatives of the Silks—sisters or daughters—with venom that’s as strong as yours. They could question him, but chances are, they won’t. And he wouldn’t survive being questioned by males. Their venom would make it necessary for him to answer but not really possible. The dilemma would kill him. He’d probably die of a stroke or a heart attack as soon as they began.”

I looked at Victor and sighed. “Is there anything we can do to keep him safe?”

“No,” Preston said. “It really isn’t likely that the Silks will pick him up again. He’ll probably be all right. But unless one of us wants to adopt him as a symbiont, we can’t keep him safe. Daniel only wanted you to know … everything.” I heard disapproval in his voice, and I didn’t understand it. I decided to ignore it, at least for now.

I looked at Daniel and thought he looked a little embarrassed, that he was staring past me rather than at me. “Thank you,” I said. “So much of my memory is gone that I’m grateful for any knowledge. I need to know the consequences of what I do.”

Daniel got up and left the room.

I looked after him, surprised, then looked at Preston. “When should Victor be ready to go?”

“A couple of nights from now. After we’ve questioned the others.”

“All right,” I paused. “Can one of you take him? I don’t want him back at the guest house.”

Preston glanced at the doorway Daniel had gone through. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll take care of him.”

“Thank you,” I said with relief. Then I changed the subject and asked a question I had been wanting to ask since I arrived. “Are there … do you have Ina books, histories I could read to learn more about our people? I hate my ignorance. As things stand now, I don’t even know what questions to ask to begin to understand things.”

It was Hayden who answered, smiling. “I’ll bring you a few books. I should have thought of it before. Do you read Ina?”

I sighed and shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We’ll find out.”





Eighteen

To my surprise, I did read and speak Ina.

Hayden brought me three books and sat with me while I read aloud from the first in a language that I could not recall having heard or seen. And yet as soon as I opened the book, the language seemed to click into place with an oddly comfortable shifting of mental gears. I suppose I had spoken English from the time I met Wright because he and everyone else had spoken English to me. If I had heard only Ina since leaving the cave, I might not know yet that I spoke English.

I shook my head and switched back to English. “I wonder what else I’ll remember if someone prods me.”

“Do you understand what you’ve read, Shori?” Hayden asked.

I glanced at the symbols—clusters of straight lines of different lengths, inclined in every possible direction, and often crossed at some point by one or more S-shaped lines. They told the Ina creation myth. “Iosif told me a little about this,” I said. “It’s an Ina myth or legend. The goddess who made us sent us here so that we could grow strong and wise, then prove ourselves by finding our way back home to her.”

“Back to paradise or back to another planet,” Hayden said. “There was a time when Ina believed that paradise was elsewhere in this world, on some hidden island or lost continent. Now that this world has been so thoroughly explored, believers look outward either to the supernatural or to rather questionable science.”

“People truly believe this?” I frowned. “I thought the story was like one of the Greek or Norse myths.” I had run across these in Wright’s books.

“There was a time when those were believed, too. A great many of us still believe in the old stories, interpreted one way or another. What you’re holding could be called the first volume of our bible. Your parents believed the stories were metaphors and mythologized history. We do, too. None of us are much interested in things mystical. I don’t believe you were either before, but now I suppose you’ll have to read the books, talk to believers as well as nonbelievers, and make up your mind all over again.”

“How old is this book?” I asked.

“We believe that its oldest chapters were originally written on clay tablets about ten thousand years ago. Before that, they had been part of our oral tradition. How long before that had they been told among us? I don’t know. No one knows.”

“So old? Are there human things ten thousand years old?”

“Writings, you mean? No. There were wandering family bands, villages of human farmers, and there were nomadic human herders. They left behind remnants of their lives—stone tools, carved stone figurines, pottery, woven matting, stone and wood dwellings, some carving on bone and stone, painting on cave or cliff walls, that sort of thing.”

I nodded, interested. “What signs did we leave?”