He leaned his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands and placing them under his chin. His eyes, a silver that matched the suit, were soft.
"Are you afraid I’m going to find something?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"But you’re afraid I’m going to send you back."
"Not everybody likes me," she said. "Not everybody wants me. They said, when they brought me to Earth, that the whole family had to like me, that I had to behave or I’d be sent back."
Is this true? he asked me.
I don’t know. I was shocked. I had known nothing of this.
Does the family dislike her?
She’s new. A disruption. That’ll change.
He glanced at me over her head, but sent nothing else. His look was enough. He didn’t believe they’d change, any more than Echea would.
"Have you behaved?" he asked softly.
She glanced at me. I nodded almost imperceptibly. She looked back at him. "I’ve tried," she said.
He touched her then, his long delicate fingers tucking a strand of her pale hair behind her ear. She leaned into his fingers as if she’d been longing for touch.
She’s more like you, he told me, than any of your own girls.
I did not respond. Kally looked just like me, and Susan and Anne both favored me as well. There was nothing of me in Echea. Only a bond that had formed when I first saw her, all those weeks before.
Reassure her, he sent.
I have been.
Do it again.
"Echea," I said, and she started as if she had forgotten I was there. "Dr. Caro is telling you the truth. You’re just here for an examination. No matter how it turns out, you’ll still be coming home with me. Remember my promise?"
She nodded, eyes wide.
"I always keep my promises," I said.
Do you? Ronald asked. He was staring at me over Echea’s shoulder.
I shivered, wondering what promise I had forgotten.
Always, I told him.
The edge of his lips turned up in a smile, but there was no mirth in it.
"Echea," he said. "It’s my normal practice to work alone with my patient, but I’ll bet you want your mother to stay."
She nodded. I could almost feel the desperation in the move.
"All right," he said. "You’ll have to move to the couch."
He scooted his chair toward it.
"It’s called a fainting couch," he said. "Do you know why?"
She let go of my hand and stood. When he asked the question, she looked at me as if I would supply her with the answer. I shrugged.
"No," she whispered. She followed him hesitantly, not the little girl I knew around the house.
"Because almost two hundred years ago when these were fashionable, women fainted a lot."
"They did not," Echea said.
"Oh, but they did," Ronald said. "And do you know why?"
She shook her small head. With this idle chatter he had managed to ease her passage toward the couch.
"Because they wore undergarments so tight that they often couldn’t breathe right. And if a person can’t breathe right, she’ll faint."
"That’s silly."
"That’s right," he said, as he patted the couch. "Ease yourself up there and see what it was like on one of those things."
I knew his fainting couch wasn’t an antique. His had all sorts of diagnostic equipment built in. I wondered how many other peopl
Certainly not my daughters. They had known the answers to his questions before coming to the office.
"People do a lot of silly things," he said. "Even now. Did you know most people on Earth are linked?"
As he explained the net and its uses, I ignored them. I did some leftover business, made my daily chess move, and tuned into their conversation on occasion.
"-and what’s really silly is that so many people refuse a link. It prevents them from functioning well in our society. From getting jobs, from communicating-"
Echea listened intently while she lay on the couch. And while he talked to her, I knew, he was examining her, seeing what parts of her brain responded to his questions.
"But doesn’t it hurt?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Science makes such things easy. It’s like touching a strand of hair."
And then I smiled. I understood why he had made the tender move earlier. So that he wouldn’t alarm her when he put in the first chip, the beginning of her own link.
"What if it goes wrong?" she asked. "Will everybody-die?"