I have to, and they feed me. They’re free to hold jobs away from the community, even live elsewhere part time, and sometimes they do. But at least three of them are always here. They work out a schedule among themselves.”
We went through a door at the end of the hallway and out onto a broad lawn. I stopped in the middle of the lawn. “Do they mind?” I asked.
“Mind?”
“That you need eight. That none of them can be your only one.” I paused. “Because I think Wright is going to mind.”
“When he understands that you have to have others?” “Yes.”
“He’ll mind. I can see that he’s very possessive of you—and very protective.” He paused, then said, “Let him mind, Shori. Talk to him. Help him. Reassure him. Stop violence. But let him feel what he feels and settle his feelings his own way.”
“All right.”
“I suspect this kind of thing needs to be said more to my sons than to you, but you should hear it, at least once: treat your people well, Shori. Let them see that you trust them and let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions. Do that and they will willingly commit their lives to you. Bully them, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, and after a while, you’ll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, and stifling their resentment. Do you understand?”
“I do, yes. I’ve made him do things but only to keep him safe—mostly to keep him safe from me—especially when Raleigh Curtis shot me.”
He nodded. “That sort of thing is necessary whether they understand or not. How many do you have other than Wright?”
“I’ve drunk from five others, but Wright doesn’t know about any of them.” I paused, then looked at him. “I don’t know whether they’ve come to need me. How will I be able to tell about the others? Will you look at them and tell me?”
“It isn’t sight,” he said, “it’s scent. Did you notice Brook’s scent?” “She smelled of you.”
“And Wright smells of you—unmistakably. The scent won’t wash away or wear away. It’s part of them now. That should give you some idea of how we hold them.”
“Something, some chemical, in our saliva?”
“Exactly. We addict them to a substance in our saliva—in our venom—that floods our mouths when we feed. I’ve heard it called a powerful hypnotic drug. It makes them highly suggestible and deeply attached to the source of the substance. They come to need it. Brook and Wright both need it. Brook knows, and by now, Wright probably knows, too.”
“And they die if they can’t have it?”
“They die if they’re taken from us or if we die, but their death is caused by another component of the venom. They die of strokes or heart attacks because we aren’t there to take the extra red blood cells that our venom encourages their bodies to make. Their doctors can help them if they understand the problem quickly enough. But their psychological addiction tends to prevent them from going to a doctor. They
hunt for their Ina—or any Ina until it’s too late.” “Until they die or until they’re badly disabled.”
“Yes. And even if they find an Ina not their own, they might not survive. They die unless another of us is able to take them over. That doesn’t always work. Their bodies detect individual differences in our venom, and those differences make them sick when they have to adapt to a new Ina. They’re addicted to their particular Ina and no other. And yet we always try to save their lives if their Ina symbiont has died. When I realized what had happened to your mothers’ community, I told my people to look for wounded human symbionts as well as for you. I knew my mates were dead. I . . . found the places where they
died, found their scents and small fragments of charred flesh . . .”
I gave him a moment to remember the dead and to deal with his obvious pain. I found that I almost envied his pain. He hurt because he remembered. After a while, I said, “You didn’t find anyone?”
“We didn’t find anyone alive. Hugh Tang, the man you killed, found you, but we didn’t know that.” “All dead,” I whispered. “And for me, it’s as though they never existed.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t even pretend to understand what it’s like for you to be missing so much of your memory. I want to help you recover as much of it as possible. That’s why we need to get you moved into my house and dealing with people who know you.” He hesitated. “To do that, we need to clear away the remnants of the life you’ve been living with Wright. So think. Which of the humans you’ve been feeding from has begun to smell as much like you as Wright does?”
I carefully reviewed my last contact with each of the humans who had fed me. “None of them,” I said. “But there’s one ... she’s older—too old to have children—but I like her. I want her.”
He gave me a long sad look. “Your attentions will keep her healthy and help her live longer than she would otherwise, but with such a late start, she won’t live much past one hundred, and it’s going to be really painful for you when she dies. It’s always hard to lose them.”
“Can she stay here?”
“Of course. There’s a large guest wing on the side of the great room opposite my family rooms. You and yours can live there in comfort and privacy until we get your house built.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll need more than two humans.”
“I don’t like the others that I’ve been using. I needed them, but I don’t want to keep them.”
He nodded. “It goes that way sometimes. I’ll introduce you to others. I know adult children of our symbionts who have been waiting and hoping to join an Ina child. Some of them can’t wait to join us; others can’t wait to leave us. But before you meet them, you’ll have to spend the next week going once more to each of the ones you don’t want. You’ll have to talk to them, tell them to forget you, and become just a romantic dream to them. Otherwise, chances are they’ll look for you. They don’t need you, but they’ll want you. They might waste their lives looking for you.”
“All right.”
We began to walk again. He said, “I’m taking you to see your youngest brother, Stefan, because you were close to him. You spent the first twenty-five years of your life with him at your mothers’community. The two of you were always phoning each other after Stefan moved here. While you’re with him, though, don’t mention Hugh Tang.”
“All right.”
“Did you kill Hugh because you’d gone mad with hunger? Did you eat him?” “... yes.”
“I thought so. He was Stefan’s symbiont. He had met you several times, and Stefan chose him to be part of the search party because he knew Hugh would recognize you. I’ll tell your brother what happened later.”
We entered one of the smaller houses through the back door. In the kitchen, we found three women working. One was stirring and seasoning something in a pot on the stove, one was searching through a huge, double-doored refrigerator, and one was mixing things in a large bowl.
“Esther, Celia, Daryl,” Iosif said, gesturing toward each of them as he said their names so that I would know who was who. Two of them, Esther and Celia, had skin as dark as mine, and I looked at them with interest. They were the first black people I remembered meeting. And yet the genes for my dark skin had to have come from someone like these women. The women turned to look at us, saw me, and Esther whispered my name.