The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  “So your female body was damaged, but your male body wasn’t,” Rashid said. He turned to me. “Is it the same for everyone else in Tober Cove? I mean, injuries to your female body don’t affect your male, and vice versa?”

  “Of course,” I said. Holding out my arm, I pointed to a pale pink scar just above my wrist. “That’s a gash I got as a kid, exploring a half-collapsed house on the other side of town—I didn’t see a nail sticking out of a board. My male body has the wound, but my female one doesn’t.”

  “This is amazing!” Rashid said.

  “Oh, that’s nothing, master,” Embrun told him. “What about Yailey the Hunter? She’s got my head-kick beat.”

  “Who’s Yailey the Hunter?”

  “Eight years ago now,” Embrun answered, “Yailey drowned. He was sixteen—out diving ropeless with a bunch of other boys off some rocks up the coast. Tried some fancy dive he’d read about in an OldTech book, and fucked the…I mean, he made an awful mistake. Hit his head on the way down. And the thing was, he’d gone off a ways from his friends so’s he could practice the dive without them laughing at him. By the time they came to check on him, Yailey was face down and floating.

  “The other boys were in tears as they carried him into town,” Embrun went on. “I remember that much, even if it was one of my dull years. Scared me, all that wailing. Anyhow, the drowning happened in late spring. Then solstice came, the children headed off to Birds Home, and when we came back, guess who was tagging along with us? Girl Yailey.”

  “You mean,” said Rashid, “her male body died, but a female version of her came back at solstice?”

  “That’s what happened,” I assured him. “Yailey herself lit the funeral pyre for her male body. Hakoore delayed the cremation until he found out whether Yailey came back from Birds Home—apparently this has happened before.”

  “Where is this Yailey?” Rashid asked, ablaze with enthusiasm. “I must talk to her.”

  “Sorry, master,” Embrun said, “she’s hard to find. Dying like that upset her—not that she remembered it. Everything went black the moment she hit her head. But it still nettled under her skin.”

  “And knowing Tober Cove,” Steck muttered, “people treated her like a monstrosity.”

  “I don’t remember anyone ragging on her,” Embrun said—untruthfully, because he himself called her names in the schoolyard: Hey, Corpse-girl! Mistress Want! “But Yailey turned more and more edgy as time went on. Especially close to the next solstice.”

  “Hakoore decided to get dogmatic,” I put in, “and declared she’d have to go to Birds Home when the time came.”

  “It wasn’t just Hakoore,” said Embrun. “Yailey was only seventeen; she hadn’t even had her child by Master Crow. A lot of people thought she should go back to Birds Home and do everything right. But Yailey was afraid she’d get there and come back dead…or Neut or something else. On Commitment Eve, she ran off into the forest and she’s been out there since. That’s why they call her Yailey the Hunter. Now and then she sneaks back to her parents’ house to trade meat and furs for things she needs. Officially though, Hakoore has declared her unwelcome in town.”

  Steck snorted. “Because she refused to follow his nasty little orders.”

  Embrun looked surprised at Steck’s anger. “Hakoore just doesn’t want kids thinking they can avoid the proper switchover. Hell, there were sure times I didn’t want to go to Birds Home. When I was boy, thinking how the gods would make me back into a girl with my brain all clotted—some days, I felt like hiding so I’d miss the trip. And the year I knew I’d come back pregnant . . . that terrified me. Not for myself, you understand, but for the baby. My female half couldn’t be a proper mother, could she, master?”

  I doubted that Embrun really worried about the baby more than himself, but he still had a point: switching sexes could be a scary thing. In the weeks before my pregnancy solstice, I considered haring off down-peninsula—becoming a traveling minstrel rather than a mother. The thought of my body harboring some alien little being, like a parasite inside me…and suffering all the pains of pregnancy, the dangers of labor…yes, I contemplated taking the easy way out. The idea must have crossed a lot of people’s minds.

  Maybe Hakoore had a point when he took an inflexible stand against Yailey. The cove’s way of life depended on a tough Patriarch’s Man who ensured that teenagers didn’t dodge their commitments.

  It made me wince. I was making excuses for Hakoore. I was arguing for the necessity of the Patriarch’s Man.

  Who was secretly forced to marry the Mocking Priestess. To become hers.

  Why was everything so complicated all of a sudden?

  Rashid declared he had run out of questions for Embrun. “Stay here,” he told Steck and me. “I’ll just walk our friend a little way back to town.”

  He and Embrun started across the parking lot, Rashid’s boots making more sticky sounds on the hot pavement. As soon as they were out of earshot, I asked Steck, “What’s Rashid up to?”

  “He plans to give Embrun some money,” Steck replied, “and he doesn’t want to do it where the mayor or I can see. He’s afraid we’ll think he’s a sucker for paying off such an obvious little worm…and he’s right.”

  “So Embrun didn’t have any real evidence about Bonnakkut’s murder?”

  Steck shook her head. “Just that his dog had some kind of barking fit about the time Bonnakkut was killed.”

  “Embrun’s dog has barking fits five times a day,” I told her. “The poor animal liked female Embrun a lot more than the male version; it’s missed her dreadfully since Embrun Committed.”

  “Speaking of Commitment,” Steck said, “how did it go with Cappie?”

  I should have expected the question—Steck trying to play the attentive mother. “Cappie and I have our troubles,” I muttered.

  “Would it help if you talked to Zephram?” Steck asked. “I know we agreed you’d stay with me, but if you wanted to talk to…your father…if you wanted to talk to him alone…”

  “It wouldn’t help,” I said, mostly out of stubborn pride. “Thanks for the offer though.”

  “If you need to talk to anyone…” Steck didn’t finish the sentence. “When you face Commitment Hour, it’s best not to have conflicts weighing on your mind.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “I made a choice,” Steck said. “That’s all. A choice to be new.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She glanced at me but looked away again quickly. “Zephram said he told you how we got together: in the Silence of Mistress Snow. Did he tell you that no one else in town chose to visit me?”

  I nodded.

  Steck shrugged. “There were reasons for that—reasons I was living alone in my final year before Commitment. I hadn’t gone out of my way to make myself popular. Things were better when I was with Zephram, but I couldn’t imagine he’d stay with me long. I convinced myself his feelings were…oh, just his way of mourning, I guess. He was vulnerable because he missed his wife. Once he got past the worst of his grief, he wouldn’t need me anymore—that’s what I thought. That he’d wake one day and wonder why he was spending time with a girl who couldn’t give…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “You couldn’t have been that bad,” I said. “Leeta wanted you as her apprentice.”

  “Leeta only took me because I badgered her,” Steck replied. “I’d got the idea that if I became priestess I’d suddenly mean something. It’s hard to feel worthwhile when you’re a teenager with no friends…girl or boy, it made no difference. Leeta accepted me out of pity; or maybe she thought she could mold me into a real person somehow. Either way, she didn’t like me. I wasn’t likable, male or female. And on Commitment Day, I thought maybe if I picked the third option, things would be different.”

  “You thought people would like you more as a Neut?” I asked. “Not in Tober Cove.”

  “I thought maybe I’d like myself more. A new body, a n
ew personality. Leaving behind all the stubborn habits that made me…difficult. I wanted things to change for me. Inside.”

  “But you knew you’d be banished!”

  “Did I care? What was so attractive about Tober Cove?”

  “Me.”

  She sighed. “I know, Fullin. But I thought I could take you with me. I’d leave Tober Cove with my baby…and Zephram would go with me, back to the South…where he told me Neuts and normal people could live as husband and wife…” She shook her head. “And I’d be a new person. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. I’d stop being…oh, the kind of woman Zephram would hate as soon as he came to his senses.”

  Women say such things for only one reason: to have a man tell them they’re mistaken. No, no, I was supposed to say, Zephram loved you for yourself. And I think he did; when he spoke to me at breakfast, his voice had been full of fondness, not “What was I thinking?” embarrassment. Still, it was hard for me to treat this Neut, my mother, as a normal woman who wanted reassurance. A wall of awkwardness loomed between us…and before I could speak, Rashid reappeared at the far end of the pavement.

  As before, he stopped at the rusting OldTech cart. For a moment, he leaned into the engine again, presumably to look at the black radio box. Then he suddenly straightened up, and lifted his eyes to the hill behind Mayoralty House. His face broke into a jubilant smile.

  “Damn,” Steck whispered.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He’s figured it out. He’s figured it all out”

  She suddenly flinched, as if she hadn’t intended to speak those words aloud. Before I could ask what she meant Rashid started running toward us.

  Rashid’s feet slapped the pavement like waves clapping against a boat’s hull. His smile gleamed with excitement. Long before he reached us, he called out, “On top of the hill…that antenna…”

  “It’s an OldTech radio tower,” I told him.

  “The hell it is,” he answered. “Have you had a good look at that dish assembly on top? The OldTechs never built anything close.” He stopped in front of me, panting lightly. “Quickly, O Native Guide—show us the fastest route up the hill.”

  Steck put on an irritable expression as she got to her feet. “What’s this all about?” she asked.

  “Radio relay,” Rashid panted, pointing back to the rusted cart. His finger swiveled around to point to the antenna on the hill. “Main receiving station. That’s got to be the answer.”

  “What answer?” I asked.

  “Take me up the hill and I’ll show you.”

  The top of Patriarch Hill was a patchwork of bare limestone ledges alternating with scrubby clumps of brush and buttercups. Paper birch and poplar ringed the area, like hair around a man’s bald patch; the trees even had a distinct lean to them, as if the prevailing westerlies had tried to comb them over to hide the bareness.

  The antenna squatted on limestone in the center of the open area, with three wrist-thick guy wires strung out and anchored into other sections of rock. Kids occasionally climbed a short way up those wires, going hand over hand until they got high enough to scare themselves; but I couldn’t remember anyone climbing the antenna itself. Its base was enclosed by a rusty chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and big signs showing pictures of lightning bolts. That meant you’d get hit by lightning if you touched the tower itself…and heaven knows, the antenna must have had enough lightning to discharge because it got hit a dozen times in every summer thunderstorm.

  Neither the fence nor the signs fazed Rashid. In fact, he gave the chain-link a quick look-over, then turned back to me with a gloating expression on his face. “When you were a young boy, didn’t you ever go places you weren’t supposed to?”

  “Sure,” I answered, “there was one time we found this garbage dump—”

  “But,” the Spark Lord interrupted, “I’ve never seen an OldTech fence in this perfect condition.” He threaded his fingers through the links and gave a yank; the fence barely yielded. “With any other fence,” Rashid said, “local kids would have pulled up the bottom to crawl under, or made dents crawling over.”

  I pointed to the nearest lightning sign. “We didn’t want to get zapped.”

  “Come on,” Rashid scoffed. “In four hundred years, kids never dared each other to give it a try? And what about wild animals? You’d think a bear would have pushed in a section while using it as a scratching post, or maybe a big deer hit the fence in the dark.”

  “Tober Cove prides itself on its hunting,” Steck told him. “Bear and deer know better than to come this close to town.”

  “Still,” Rashid answered, “OldTech fences don’t survive this well.” He gave it another tug; no response but a small rattle. “Proof it’s not OldTech at all.”

  “If it isn’t OldTech,” I said, “what is it? We Tobers didn’t build it.”

  “No,” Rashid agreed, craning his neck back to stare at the arrangement of gadgets high up the aerial. “You probably don’t need a maser array that can squirt several hundred terabits of data every millisecond.” He waved his hand to stop me before I could ask what he meant. “The details aren’t important. Just trust me: the OldTechs never reached the technical sophistication of those dishes up there. They’ve got more bandwidth for sending and receiving than the communication systems for an entire OldTech city.”

  I turned to Steck and whispered, “Bandwidth?”

  She patted my arm soothingly. “Most of this is going over my head too.”

  I didn’t believe her. Rashid shouldn’t have either, but he was too excited to pay attention. “We won’t learn anything standing out here. In we go.”

  He reached toward the hip of his armor. As he did, a section of the green plastic slid back and a small holster pushed out of the armor’s thigh. The holster held a green plastic pistol: very flat and compact, with none of the chunky menace of the Beretta he’d given to Bonnakkut.

  “Laser,” Rashid said, drawing the gun.

  “Heat ray,” Steck explained, pulling me away from the line of fire.

  Rashid aimed the gun’s muzzle at the fence and made an easy sweeping motion, starting high, ending low. The air filled with the tangy smell of metal, and billows of smoke drifted up into the hot summer day. Rashid put his glove against the chain-link to give it a tentative push; when he did, a whole section moved inward, severed from the adjoining links along a sharp-cut line. “At least the wire’s not laser-proof,” he muttered. The gun swept across the fencing two more times, shooting no visible bullets or beams…but when Rashid planted his foot against the wire and shoved, a door-shaped section of chain-link fell away, sliced off precisely where the gun had pointed.

  He turned back to Steck. “After you, my dear.”

  Steck gave a mock curtsy and slipped through the gap. A moment later, Rashid and I followed.

  Rashid bent in close to examine the antenna’s metal frame. It looked like normal rusted steel, with red-orange corrosion dusted like thick powder over every metal strut. After a moment, the Spark Lord huffed out a single heavy breath, the way you do when you want to fog a mirror. He watched the metal a few more seconds, then murmured, “Very convincing.”

  “Why do you keep talking like the tower’s not real?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s real,” Rashid replied. He tapped one of the tower’s struts with his gloved finger; the metal tink-tinked exactly the way you’d expect. “It’s just not what it appears to be.”

  He pointed his green pistol at the strut he’d just tapped. With two quick pulls of his trigger finger, he sliced out a small section of metal, leaving a gap about as wide as my thumb. “Now watch,” he said. “See if this is an ordinary OldTech tower.”

  I waited a few seconds. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Patience,” he said. He bent and picked up a small twig that had blown off one of the nearby trees. Carefully, Rashid slipped the twig into the gap he’d just cut in the steel.

  The process was almost too slow to see; but gra
dually, the gap in the metal began to narrow…as if the two freshly-cut ends were steel teeth closing in on the twig. Soon Rashid could let go of the little stick—the gap had closed enough to clamp the twig in place. As I watched, the teeth continued to bite into the wood. The twig bent…then broke…then dropped in two pieces as the antenna completely closed over the cut Rashid made,

  “The metal is self-repairing,” he said. “And it would have to be, wouldn’t it, to survive four centuries.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told him, trying not to sound unsettled by what I’d just seen.

  “This antenna isn’t OldTech steel,” Rashid replied. “The whole damned tower must be solid nano. Smart metal camouflaged to look rusty.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  “Think of it as a machine,” he answered with the air of a man who doesn’t want to explain himself to a country bumpkin. “Solar powered. Probably can store energy from lightning strikes too…or get power beamed down from orbital collectors. It must need a lot of juice.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder. “The fence must be nano too. That’s why it’s still in such good shape. Let’s leave before our way out seals itself shut.”

  Steck looked up at the collection of dishes on top of the tower. “Don’t you want to check out the transmitter array?”

  “How?” Rashid asked. “If we try to climb this tower, I bet it has defenses…like struts that break off while we’re standing on them. It may even get mad at us for just hanging around here. We’d better leave.”

  He gave my shoulder a nudge to start me moving toward the gap in the fence. I rolled away from him. “No.”

  “No? No, what?”

  “No, I’m not leaving until you explain what’s going on.” I reached out and grabbed one of the metal struts, just to let him know I wouldn’t be moved.

  With a cry, Steck leapt forward and knocked my hand clear of the tower. “Don’t touch that, you idiot!”

  I looked at her in astonishment. Rashid gave a thin smile. “Fullin,” he said, “I think your mother has abetter understanding of this antenna than she’d like to let on.”