The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

I swore that when I got back to the cove, I would buy a different instrument. I would never so much as touch the bow that had belonged to Steck.

  “And you took the wrong thing, Mother,” I said aloud. “You should have taken the Chicken Box.”

  I opened the box. The Beretta still lay inside. I checked; it was fully loaded.

  “Mother,” I whispered, “watch out.”

  Then I headed into Birds Home to find her.

  TWENTY-ONE

  A Coffin for Fullin

  Beyond the open door lay a corridor sloping slightly downward. There were no lights— only the glow spilling from the hangar area behind me. After a time, I tucked the gun into my belt at the small of my back and walked with one hand brushing the wall. The stone was cold and weepy with moisture.

  My moccasins whispered on the floor—not quite as silently as Dorr could move, but even with echoing rock walls, the sound wouldn’t travel far. If I could catch Steck while she was busy with something…

  But what would she be busy with? What did she want to do? She must have been planning this for twenty years—somehow meeting the Knowledge-Lord, persuading him to come here at this particular moment, lying to him about the “knock-out gas” so he wouldn’t interfere with whatever she intended…

  I just couldn’t imagine what she wanted. Even wearing Rashid’s armor, what could she do against gods?

  But the gods used machines as tools—machines like the bird-servant, with wires dangling from its severed head. She had dealt with that machine easily enough.

  Sacrilege didn’t stop Steck for a second. I wondered what would.

  As the light from the hangar faded behind me, I became aware of a glow far ahead. Good—I’d been worried that the gods and their servants didn’t bother with lights because they could see in the dark.

  Soon I could tell I was heading for a large chamber, lit to dim melancholy by gray-blue electric light-tubes. Holding my breath, I pressed tight against the corridor wall in case someone in the chamber might see me; but there was no motion out there, no sound. After a minute of listening, I moved forward cautiously.

  The room was at least as big as Tober Cove’s town square…and like the square it contained bodies. Bodies in glass coffins.

  Every coffin was smashed and every body was dead.

  I moved to the closest. Tears stung my eyes—Urgho, poor Urgho. It looked like he had been sleeping peacefully inside the coffin; then someone had hammered against the glass until it broke. Before the boy could wake, the killer sliced Urgho’s throat with one of the broken glass shards: up, across, down. Urgho’s blood had sprayed in gushers against the inside of the coffin until the flow gurgled to a stop.

  Steck had done this. My mother. Then she went on to the next.

  The next was Thorn, one of the noisy neighbors living in the cabin next to Cappie and me. She had been female over the past year, but this was her male body—dead, killed like Urgho, blood running down the walls of the glass casket and pooling in the bottom.

  I moved on: Chum, Thorn’s lover. Chum’s male body, dead.

  And in the next coffin…

  The next coffin…

  “Oh, Cappie,” I whispered.

  Cappie, the brooding male Cappie, drenched in his own blood.

  She was supposed to Commit male, I thought. Her hands were burnt, so she was supposed to Commit male. But that half of her was dead.

  I reached through the broken glass and laid my hand on his cheek. It occurred to me I had never touched her this way, male me, male her. “Cappie,” I whispered.

  The corpse was beginning to cool.

  I forced myself to pull away. There was nothing I could do here—nothing but look, memorize why Steck had to die.

  Cappie had been sleeping: the way all our souls slept in Birds Home when they weren’t needed. His body was naked…and as I looked more closely, I saw tiny tubes and wires stretched out from the bottom of the coffin, reaching into Cappie’s body from head to toe. Feeders, I thought. A mother bird brings food to her nestlings; and here in Birds Home, the gods supplied Tobers with food too, as we slept. Food, water, whatever care a body needs…

  But these coffins were too frail to stand up to deliberate homicide. I could picture Steck in Rashid’s armor, slamming her mailed fist against the glass, reaching in to cut a throat—Cappie’s throat.

  I moved to another coffin. The room contained dozens of the glass caskets, laid out in rows: first row, the oldest of our generation, Cappie and the nineteen-year-olds; next row, the eighteen-year-olds, all their male bodies; next row, the seventeen-year-olds…

  Oh god…

  I began to run, past the teenagers, past the children, to the coffins at the far end of the chamber. The youngest, the infants.

  Waggett. His first time at Birds Home.

  His last time at Birds Home.

  Steck had killed him like all the rest—her own grandson. She had smashed through to his defenseless little body and cut him, spattered his blood.

  I seized the Beretta and crashed its butt down on the coffin, bashing again and again until I had battered a big enough hole to pull out my son’s body. He was so limp. I cradled him in my arms and he just lay there, his little hands floppy, his face slack.

  The last time I had seen him alive, he had been happily making sheep sounds. “Baaaaaa!”

  I lowered my head to his bare stomach and wept.

  After a while, I laid him back in his coffin. There was no better place to put him.

  I took the time to check every other coffin in the room. Perhaps Steck had slipped up with someone; perhaps she hadn’t cut deep enough and one of the children was still alive.

  But they were all dead—the male selves of every child in Tober Cove, slaughtered. Olimbarg. Cappie’s other brothers. Even the male half of Ivis, throat cut just as her father’s throat had been cut by Dorr.

  All dead.

  I took a ragged breath. Of my whole generation, I was the only male that Steck had allowed to live. Such love for her baby boy . . . but it didn’t extend to Waggett.

  Damn her, I prayed. All you gods, damn her.

  Nothing happened. Here, in the home of the gods, they allowed such a thing to happen, and did nothing.

  Opposite the door I’d come from was a second door…or rather an open entry way leading into another unlit corridor. Part of me was afraid of going there—I already suspected what I would find next. But the alternative was staying where I was in that silent bloody room, with Cappie at one end and Waggett at the other.

  No. Forward.

  The new corridor wasn’t as long as the first. As soon as I entered it, I could see what was at the other end: another large chamber, similar to the first, filled with more glass coffins. I willed myself forward, though I knew what I would find: our female halves.

  Our dead female halves.

  Again, Urgho was closest to the entrance—a husky female Urgho, all freckles on creamy skin…except that the freckles were now mingled with blood flecks spattered from her throat.

  One of Urgho’s limp hands lay across her bare belly: a belly just starting to swell with the first signs of Master Crow’s child. The child would never be born now. Urgho had wasted his time, “getting a little practice” by taking care of Waggett.

  Poor Urgho. Poor Waggett.

  This time, I went straight to the far side of the room, to the coffin in the same position as the one that had held my son. This one contained a little girl: a perfect little girl, with perfect baby skin and soft brown curls that had never been cut. There was nothing to indicate this was Waggett’s female self, but I knew it was—a parent knows. I reached through the broken glass to smooth the hair off her forehead.

  Just one touch. I wanted that. But I let her lie peacefully.

  She was dead. Quite dead.

  I moved methodically back through the room, checking for signs of life. The one-year-olds, the two-year-olds…all dead. I had seen them all so recently on the dock in Tober Cove. Ivis
, Olimbarg, all the rest.

  Cappie…

  Cappie too. Her thin familiar body…the body I had made love with so often…the spring when I was fifteen, she had taken my female virginity, and later that summer, I had taken hers…

  But her hands were seared to charcoal, and I had betrayed her many times. I don’t know why those seemed part of the same thing.

  I wanted to bend in and kiss her, but it would mean breaking more glass. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I had the right to kiss her anymore.

  Placed alongside Cappie was one extra coffin, one where there had been no coffin in the other room.

  This coffin’s lid was intact. Inside I saw myself.

  I was still breathing.

  My female half was alive. Steck couldn’t bring herself to kill me.

  Wielding the pistol butt again, I knocked in the glass—carefully, carefully, so I wouldn’t cut her. First came a hole just above her feet, tapped out delicately, crack by crack. Then I worked upward, rapping the glass hard enough to star it without breaking through, then levering my hand underneath and lifting up so that the glass pushed out instead of in. I had to force myself not to speed up or cut corners; but at last I had cleared away the whole top, enough so I could reach in without fear of cutting myself.

  “Wake up now.” I gave her a light touch on the cheek. Her skin was warm and soft—I remembered how often I had been intoxicated by the feel of my own skin. For a strange moment, I looked down at her, my own naked body, my own breasts, and hips, and legs…

  “This is sick,” I muttered. With a mental slap to myself, I placed both hands on her shoulders (warm, bare shoulders) and gave her a gentle shake. “Wake up. Come on, wake up.”

  Her eyes fluttered, then opened. She smiled thinly, then reached up and touched a finger to my lips, “Cappie’s right,” she said. “You do look obvious.”

  Wires and tubes pulled away from her body as she sat up in the coffin. They left no mark.

  “Good,” she said.

  I didn’t understand. “Good what?”

  “Good that they didn’t leave any marks. I can hear what you’re thinking.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “So it’s a puzzle,” she shrugged. “Maybe Rashid can explain it.”

  “Rashid’s out cold.”

  “I know. I know everything that’s happened.” She looked grimly toward Cappie’s body. “I suppose it’s like always—while I’m sleeping in Birds Home, the gods send me your thoughts. It’s like I’m seeing it all in a dream.”

  “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 expl
ain,” 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.”