Commitment Hour lop-2

by James Alan Gardner

  "You aren't sleeping now."

  "No, but I'm still… receiving. It's strange — as if I'm looking out my own eyes, but I can still see ghosts of what you're seeing too. And feel ghosts of what you're feeling." She slipped her leg over the side of the coffin and heaved herself out. "Give me your shirt."

  "Why?"

  "Because looking at my body is distracting you, and that distracts me. It's hard enough to concentrate as it is."

  I wanted to protest; but before the words were even out of my mouth, she gave me a look that said I was wasting breath. They say you can't lie to yourself. With a sigh of resignation, I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it to her. She shinnied into it, then smoothed out the wrinkles. It was long enough to reach halfway down her thighs, covering her most "distracting" parts.

  She caught my eye and winked. "I'd better be careful — I know how much you like women in men's clothing."

  "This is unfair," I protested. "If you keep ragging on me because you know what's in my mind… we're supposed to be on the same side, aren't we?"

  "We are," she replied. "On most things anyway. Like Steck."

  "Right." The thought sobered me. "Steck."

  "I don't suppose you'd let a mere woman carry the pistol?"

  I shook my head.

  She said, "You know bullets won't go through the armor's force field."

  "I know. But I want to try anyway."

  She nodded, then gestured toward the door at the far end of the room. "Let's go."

  Another corridor led further into Birds Home. We walked it together, my sister self and I. Part way along, she slipped her hand into mine. I didn't even know I'd been longing for that, for a little human contact in the face of so much death… but she knew.

  I suppose she felt the same need. We were the same person, weren't we?

  Ahead lay a third chamber, with more glass coffins. As before, we stopped to listen before entering… but this room was as silent as the first two. Wherever Steck was, she must have gone deeper into the stone reaches of Birds Home. My sister and I exchanged a look, then moved forward to the first coffin.

  Urgho again — a Neut version. Hairless face and womanly breasts. Penis and testicles. And just behind the scrotal sac, delicate labial lips.

  The coffin's glass was intact. The Neut Urgho was alive.

  "I'll check Waggett," my female self cried. She ran, and I was right on her heels. We crossed the room and skidded to a stop beside a coffin containing a pink-skinned Neut infant. It wasn't exactly like Waggett, either the boy or girl version of him, but the Neut's face was similar, like a brother-sister.

  The child's chest rose and fell with slow, healthy breathing.

  "It's got your nose," I said to my female self. I didn't want to cry in front of a woman.

  She didn't care. She put her hands against the coffin lid, as if she could touch our baby through the glass; and tears streamed down her face.

  We agreed to leave Waggett where he was. ("He," not "it.") As far as we could tell, he was safe and well cared for inside the coffin; better to leave him there until we had settled the score with Steck.

  There was yet another corridor leading forward… but before we moved on, we made a circuit of the room to check the other coffins.

  Neut versions of everyone else, all alive.

  Strangely, we found no Neut version of me — the coffin was missing. But there was a Neut Cappie, breathing, asleep. The Neut's body was slim like the female Cappie, but taller, beefier around the shoulders.

  The face was not so bad. You could get used to a woman with that face.

  "Not a bad face for a man either," my female half put in, though I hadn't said anything aloud. "Are we going to fight over him?"

  "Her," I answered.

  We both smiled.

  "He deserves a shot at Steck too," Female-Me said. "Steck killed his male body."

  "They all deserve a shot," I replied. "Urgho, Chum, Thorn… they'd all help us."

  "Help us how? Throw themselves bare-handed at the armor's force field?" She shook her head. "Anyway, they don't know what's been going on. Cappie does."

  I nodded, as if I agreed with her logic. Of course, Cappie couldn't help us against the force field any more than anyone else. But I wanted her here with me, to make sure she was all right, to have her support…

  "To show her how manly you are when you kill Steck?" Female-Me suggested.

  "Will you stop doing that?" I asked.

  She pointed to Cappie's coffin. "Just break the glass."

  Cappie woke groggily. When she saw what she was, she screamed.

  We held her hands. After a while, the scream faded to a whimper.

  "Fullin," she breathed, "I didn't choose this!" Tears streamed down her face. "I didn't make any choice! I didn't!"

  "I know," my sister and I answered in unison.

  "They said I'd hear a voice, 'Male, female, or both.' But I didn't get to make a decision!"

  "Shh." Female Fullin and I stood on opposite sides of Cappie's coffin. We reached out together to caress Cappie's cheek.

  "Why are there two of you?" Cappie asked. She looked back and forth between my sister and me. "How can you both be here at once?"

  "It's hard to explain," I began… but I stopped, lifted my head, listened.

  Music came playing from the entryway in front of us… soft violin music. The tune was "Don't Make Me Choose": the song Steck had played in Cypress Marsh.

  Calmly she emerged from the unlit corridor — wearing Rashid's armor, but with the helmet off so she could tuck the violin under her chin. As soon as she saw us, she stopped and lowered the bow. "Well," she said, "so this is it. Commitment Hour at last. And here I can see all three choices: male, female, and both. Two Fullins and a Cappie?"

  If I'd been holding the Beretta, I would have shot her without a moment's hesitation; but I was holding Cappie's hand, with the pistol once again stuck in my belt at the small of my back. Cappie's grip had tightened unconsciously when she heard the music… and rather than free myself from her, I decided to let her hold me, draw whatever strength she needed.

  Now was not the time for shooting anyway. I'd never fired a gun before. Books said they were hard to aim, unless you were standing at point-blank range. Did I want to start the bullets flying with so many children in glass coffins between me and Steck?

  And Steck didn't know I had the Beretta with me. If I shot now and missed, I'd lose the element of surprise. Better to wait until my target was closer.

  Female-Me nodded silent agreement with my decision. She turned toward Steck. "So your hands are steady enough to play," she said, "after killing a hundred children in cold blood."

  "I didn't do anything that wouldn't have happened anyway," Steck answered. "You've seen the other rooms: male, female, and Neut versions of every child in Tober Cove. Think about what happens when you Commit. You, Fullin," she pointed toward me with the violin bow, "let's say you Commit male. What happens to your female half?" Steck turned to my sister self. "What happens to you… my pretty baby girl?"

  She waited for us to answer: anyone, Male-Me, Female-Me, Neut-Cappie. Finally, it was my sister who spoke. "If he chose male, I suppose I never would have left my coffin."

  "Right," Steck said grimly. "Committing to one version of yourself means killing the other two. Killing. I've been to the lab next door — there are machines getting ready to render the rejected bodies down to basic nutrients. Feed for the other bodies.

  "If I hadn't intervened," Steck went on, "one of you two Fullins would be dead by now. You're both healthy, you both could live long lives, but the machines would dispassionately stop one of your hearts. That's the dirty secret of Birds Home. That's how much the gods of Tober Cove really love you."

  Cappie let go of my hand. Slowly, deliberately, she climbed out of the coffin and picked up a long glass splinter from the litter that had fallen to the floor. She held the splinter like a knife. "Steck, I'd rather believe in the gods than you."


  "Careful with that," Steck pointed to the sliver. "If you attack me while I'm in this armor, you'll burn your hands again. And this time, you've run out of replacement selves."

  "I never had any replacement selves," Cappie said. "I'm a single person, that's all."

  "Like Fullin?" Steck asked, pointing the violin bow toward me. "Or the other Fullin?" Steck shook her head. "Cappie, I thought the same as you once. I thought the gods could work miracles. And every summer solstice, Master Crow waved his wings to reshape my body by magic — boy shimmering into girl, girl shimmering into boy. But then I was exiled. I went to the friendless South, where freaks get beaten, or raped, or shunned to the point of starvation. It was sheer luck that I stumbled into an enclave of scientists who were willing to feed me and teach me what they knew in exchange for studying my anatomy. Eventually, word about me spread from the enclave to the Science-Lord… and by the time Rashid came to see the astounding hermaphrodite for himself, I'd learned enough about science that I didn't believe in magic anymore. Or gods."

  "Your loss," I said.

  "True," Steck agreed. "My loss. Who wouldn't like to believe benevolent deities took an interest in the world? But the only ones at work in Birds Home were busybodies from the stars who treated the people of Tober Cove like lab rats. There aren't even people here anymore — it's all run by machines. But we lab rats are still running through the maze."

  "How do you know?" I demanded. "Have you talked to the gods? Have you been to Birds Home before?"

  To be honest, I didn't care about her answers. But I wanted to get her talking. She would try to justify herself; she would try to explain, and as she did, I would slowly reach for the gun tucked in at my back.

  "No, I haven't talked to the gods," Steck admitted. "And I haven't been to Birds Home since my own Commitment Hour. But I've thought about this, Fullin. I've thought about it every day for the past twenty years. It took a while to learn enough science to figure out the tricks, but I deduced it all before I got here, and I've seen enough in Birds Home to confirm my guesses."

  My hand touched the butt of the pistol. The metal was warm from lying against my skin.

  "You want to know what's really going on?" Steck continued. "How the tricks work? It starts with the Gift of Blood and Bone that's taken from every baby. When those tissue samples are delivered to Birds Home, some very clever machines go to work extracting the DNA — the seeds that eventually grow into a human being. The machines give those seeds a little twist: swap an X chromosome with a Y, change a girl seed into a boy seed, or vice versa. And since they take the replacement chromosome from someone else rather than deriving it from your own chromosomes… no, never mind, I'm just showing off. I've spent twenty years accumulating the knowledge to understand Tober Cove, and you're the only people I may ever be able to tell. I have to do this right. The machines made a seed for boy Fullin by starting with the seeds of girl Fullin and adding a tiny boy-bit from some other person. Which is why your boy self doesn't look exactly like your girl self."

  "My sister Olimbarg looks the same, boy or girl," Cappie said.

  "The wonders of genetics," Steck answered. "Flukes happen. But the people who made Birds Home had a lot more control over genes than the OldTechs did. The machines here can work with the tissue samples taken at a baby's first solstice, and by the next summer produce a child of the opposite sex who looks a year and a half old. Don't ask me how they accelerate the growth — there's a laboratory next door, but I don't understand a tenth of the equipment."

  I had my fingers wrapped around the pistol grip now. Slowly, I eased the gun out of my belt. It made a soft sticky sound as it slipped away from my sweat-damp back.

  "And cloning isn't the only trick," Steck went on. "There's also the memory transfer. When your son Waggett arrived here, Fullin, there was a female version of him waiting, constructed from the tissue sample taken the previous year. But the girl-Waggett was a blank slate; her whole life she'd been dormant under glass, so she had an empty brain. No, that's going too far; her brain wasn't completely empty. Some time in the past year, the machines had placed a communications implant in her head… and as soon as the original Waggett arrived, they put a similar implant in his."

  The muzzle of the gun was free of my belt. I kept my eyes on Steck, as if I had nothing on my mind but listening.

  "I watched that implant process," she said, "and you wouldn't have liked it, Fullin. A robot feeds a tiny wire through the back of the baby's neck and straight up into the brain. The wire goes through the hole made by the Gift of Blood and Bone, so there won't be a second scar. Isn't that clever? I always wondered why they took the damned tissue sample from the spine instead of someplace less gruesome; the OldTechs could get DNA just by swabbing the inside of your mouth. But the scar at the back of the neck gives a camouflaged entry point for injecting nano-transmitters."

  Slowly, I eased my other hand behind my back. The next part would be difficult, especially to do without looking. The safety mechanism was a sort of slide that had to be moved to the right position before the gun would shoot. Steck herself had demonstrated how it worked last night, as Bonnakkut and I watched. Bonnakkut had practiced a few times; I had never done it before.

  "Once the transmitters are implanted," Steck said, "they download — copy — everything from the original Waggett's brain into the clean-slate clone. I watched that happen too, Fullin; the lab next door has video displays to monitor the copying process. Bit by bit, I saw the little girl Waggett clone acquire all the original Waggett's thoughts and personality."

  "Before you killed her," I said. I was blindly pushing and pulling parts of the pistol behind my back, but nothing wanted to slide.

  "Before I killed that particular body," Steck corrected. "But Waggett is still alive in a Neut body… because the machines make hermaphrodite copies of children as well as opposite sex bodies. The child in that coffin," Steck waved in the direction of Neut-Waggett, "may look different from your son, but in his head, he's everything the original Waggett was. A perfect mental copy."

  "And what about later?" my sister self asked. "My male half got copied from my brain," she said, pointing to me, "but that was when we were one year old. We've stayed connected for years."

  Steck nodded. "After the first body switch, you have three copies of the same person, all with communication implants in their heads. The implants are like a million tiny radios in your brain — although they're biological, powered by your own metabolisms. Remember Rashid picking up radio waves from your head, Fullin? Every second of every day, you broadcast low-powered encodings of your mental state. The signals get picked up by relay stations like that one in the car's engine… and there must be hidden relays all over the peninsula to cover you whenever you leave home. The relays transfer your broadcasts to that antenna on Patriarch Hill, which transmits everything up here to Birds Home. Moment by moment, the two dormant bodies receive transmissions from the body that's walking around in Tober Cove… so the sleeping versions experience everything the active version does."

  "So this past year," I said, "I was the sender…"

  "And I was the receiver," my sister finished. She gave me a veiled look. Of course, she was receiving even now — that's why she could pick up my thoughts and feelings. She must know exactly what I was doing with the gun.

  Did Steck know we were still linked?

  "How come it sometimes reverses?" I asked Steck. "How could my sister get into my head when she was asleep up here?"

  Suddenly I felt a part of the pistol begin to slide under my hand. I had to force myself not to smile.

  "That's part of the grand design of the star-siders who set up this experiment," Steck answered. "From what I've seen in the lab, the communication implants make it possible to override one personality with the other. Basically, they set the male Fullin to receive, then set the female Fullin to transmit… and turn up the volume so loud that the female drowns out the original male. I think this happens on Commitm
ent Day so that both personalities can have input into the final decision. Other times, the reversal only kicks in under extreme stress. For all I know, it could be some kind of overload — one personality goes into shock and the communication system goes out of whack. I don't know if it's intentional or not."

  "The gods arrange it so that one soul can help the other," I said.

  "Oh come on, Fullin," my sister suddenly snapped, "the gods? Haven't you been listening? The gods have nothing to do with this. Traitors from the stars made Birds Home. It's all an experiment… except they got bored and walked away when we stopped being amusing."

  I stared at her in shock. My hand froze on the gun, the safety slide only partly moved to the right position.

  "Well it's true, isn't it?" my sister self said to Steck. "They had some notion about men and women getting along better if we knew how the other half lived?"

  "Yes," Steck nodded. "It was an experiment. Although I don't know if it was just about men and women. Remember that everyone has a Neut version too. I think the designers considered hermaphrodite the best choice: combining male and female in one body."

  "You would believe that was best," Cappie said bitterly.

  "But think about it," Steck told her. "Your Neut self slept through the male and female years of your childhood. That makes the Neut more impartial than the other two. When you're male, your female life seems distant and secondhand; when you're female, your male life is the dream. But the Neut sees both halves as childhood ghosts; the Neut can wake at the age of twenty, and start life in equilibrium."

  "Is that why you killed the male and female children?" I asked. "Because you thought being Neut was a gift?"

  I yelled the word "gift." My voice covered the click as I slid the safety catch all the way.

  Steck sighed. "Before the Patriarch came along, Neuts were accepted. But like all tyrants, the Patriarch had to demonize someone and he could only get so much mileage out of scientists. He taught everyone that Neuts were devils; he even burned them as blasphemies against the gods. We aren't blasphemies, Fullin. We're just people. Aren't we, Cappie?"