“Don’t leave me here alone. Please. Come back.”
“I will.”
When she entered the observation room, Magister Gossup was sitting there, staring through the window, a terribly pensive look on his face. When Val sat down beside him, he said slowly, “This is much more complicated than I anticipated.”
“You’re telling me,” Val said.
***
She called Max to let him know she wouldn’t be home any time soon. He wanted to know what was going on. “I can’t tell you now,” she said.
“You mean can’t” he probed, “or don’t want to?”
“Can’t,” she said.
He understood. “Joansie called,” he said. “I told her what I knew.”
“Be careful,” she said, not wanting to get into it.
When Val returned to Tedla’s room, the neuter was dressed again, but still looked horribly uneasy. “It’s this place, this room,” it whispered. “It reminds me of things.”
“What sort of things?” Val said, but Tedla wouldn’t answer.
If they were still in Connuic, Val thought, it would be near dawn outside; but in this windowless place, there was no telling. The lights in the corridor were beginning to dim for evening shift. There was a screen and terminal in the room, so she asked if Tedla wanted to watch a show, but it shook its head. She sat down at the terminal anyway and accessed her home console. “Would you like to talk to Deedee?” she said.
“Not from here,” Tedla said.
Val set the terminal to record and transmit a copy to her home. The red light blinked; she cleared the screen and went to sit in the chair beside Tedla’s.
“What does it remind you of?” she said quietly.
Hesitantly, Tedla said, “I’ve never told anyone this, not even Magister Galele. But if the treatment is going to make me forget it, someone needs to know.”
“I think you’re right,” Val said.
Leaning forward so Val could hear, Tedla began to tell her.
Chapter Four
The last year I spent at the creche was very different from the previous twelve. My age mates and I moved to the top floor and began the intensive training that would lead to our matriculation, and finally to humanity.
Our curriculum changed. Social responsibility classes took up more time. We learned about the hormonal changes that would soon be transforming our bodies. But most of all we learned things to prepare us for life as spiritual beings.
One day an invigilator came from the matriculatory, dressed in the teal tabard of her order. She talked to us about the terrible burden of guilt humans bear for their past, when they caused a holocaust among other lifeforms on the planet. Because they thought that life and procreation were their rights, the ancients overburdened the world with their numbers and their greedy use of resources. In their blind rapaciousness, they nearly brought about the end of all life. Only because mutations arose to limit their numbers did they and the planet survive.
“Humankind is the worst disaster ever to befall this planet,” the invigilator told us. “With everything we do, we continue to destroy it, a little bit every day. In order to justify our presence here, and our use of space and resources, we must continually earn the favor of existence.”
Life, we learned, was a privilege, not a right. After matriculation, we would inherit the duty of justification. Every year we would be obliged to search our hearts to see if we had made a contribution to nature, culture, or humanity. If so, we could grant ourselves another year. If not—if we had truly become a burden on the world—it was our responsibility to end our unproductive lives. It was the only honorable course open to us.
We were terribly frightened by this, but the invigilator assured us that there were many ways of making a contribution. Merely doing well at our jobs, learning something useful, or planting a garden were sufficient to justify life. Even so, that night in the roundroom we looked at each other grimly, wondering if any of us had ever done anything to justify our existence. It made us look back on our blameless, irresponsible life as protos with new eyes. None of us had dreamed that being a human would be so hard.
Perhaps I took the invigilator’s strictures too seriously. The others in my roundroom certainly thought so; that winter they teased me for having grown too grave and quiet. My mind was already dwelling on the future, when life would be nothing but choices and responsibilities. I would have to be the actor, not the acted-upon. More than ever, I wanted time to freeze in its tracks.
But of course, it didn’t. Like it or not, the spring of our matriculation grew nearer. The snowdrifts melted, and the chapel dome became beaded with water instead of frost. The smell of mud and leaves rose from the ground, and the chatter of geese filled the valley again. Soon the day was upon us.
The night before we left the creche forever, all the gestagogues gathered to eat butterberry buns and say good-bye to us. It was supposed to be a joyous time, but over all of us hung the thought of never seeing those loving, devoted people again. Other children would take our places in their lives. When I went to shake Proctor Givern’s hand like the adult I was going to become, he gave me a bear hug, and before I knew it I was crying on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Tedla,” he said. “The world is full of good people and exciting places. You’ll never want to come back.”
“Yes, I will,” I said. And I was right.
We were supposed to spend our last night in the roundroom seriously, thinking about the past and future, but instead we were wild and rowdy, trying to enjoy our last moment of childhood before the great change. We all joined in a bouncing dance and shouted out the dirtiest songs we knew, afraid to sleep. There was panic in our gaiety.
The next morning we were not wakened by our own familiar proctors, but by an invigilator, his face masklike as he passed out the blue uniforms we would wear for the next two days. Each uniform had a number stencilled on it; we were supposed to memorize our numbers and answer to them. Once out of our own creche, we would no longer have names.
We filed out into the predawn chill. The river bluffs and grass were covered with a coating of frost, and the air seemed hushed and expectant. A huge gray aircar was waiting on the playing field. Zelly, Litch, and I gravitated together. We clambered into the aircar and crowded onto the same bench seat. Bigger was right behind us, but had to sit somewhere else. We didn’t want Bigger near us; for several months it had begun to have an abnormally male look, as if it were differentiating early. There was even a suspicious bulge at its crotch. We were repulsed by it; no one had wanted to sleep next to it in the roundroom, so it had become a kind of pariah.
As the aircar took off, I pressed my forehead to the cold window to see the last of the creche. It looked very small and vulnerable, surrounded by the hugeness of the world. I looked off over the river valley, and as we rose I saw the landscape spread out in muted, misty colors, fields and roads and forest, a larger view than I’d ever seen before. Then we entered the clouds, and I saw no more.
It seemed like a long flight. The sun had risen and the clouds cleared away by the time we began to descend, and as the aircar circled we could see the matriculatory below us. It was an immense, aboveground edifice shaped like a six-armed star. Litch, Zelly, and I crowded at the window to catch a glimpse of the birthpool, where our matriculation would culminate in two days. It lay at the center of the building, blue and open to the sky. Soon, we knew, we would enter that pool as protos and emerge as human beings.
The aircar set down on a pad at the tip of one of the building’s arms, and we disembarked into a scene of noisy mayhem. Mobs of protos were disgorging from the vehicles of a hundred different gestatories, milling around in colored uniforms. The invigilators were trying to control the crowd and move it forward into the building in an orderly flow. My friends and I were determined to stick together, but when the tide of protos pushed us to the front of the line, the invigilator brought his staff down between us and directed us to different entrances. I found myself i
n a crowd of protos I had never seen before.
The first day was taken up by tests to determine our suitability for humanity. We moved like a noisy river from the tip of the star-arm toward the center. First we were free to flow forward, then we would be dammed into a pool, then allowed to spill over in little rivulets or a great cascade. At each stage we passed a new hurdle.
First they took our numbers, prints, and pictures, then passed us along swiftly to the curators who took our blood and urine samples, looked in our eyes, ears, and mouths, listened to our hearts and lungs, then gave us each an injection and stamped our hands with a clean bill of health. A few of the protos were weeded out and sent off for more elaborate tests. I had had a touch of asthma and worried that they would discover it, but they noticed nothing.
After our bodies, they turned attention to our minds. We entered a part of the building that was divided up like a maze, into chains of small testing rooms; as we completed each test they directed us to different rooms depending on the results. No one told us how we were doing. They tested dozens of different types of aptitude: memory, logic, music, creativity, speed reasoning. Some of the tests were like games; others were terribly hard. As we passed through, we accumulated codes that indicated our aptitudes, though what they meant we didn’t know. I was an E6-Yellow.
Once they had exhausted our minds, they still kept testing: physical aptitudes, this time. We performed tasks to quantify coordination, strength, endurance, dexterity. My excitement of that morning had drained off, and I was so tired I could barely pay attention any more.
At the end of the day we all gathered to eat in a huge refectory halfway down the star-arm. I wandered down lines of tables, looking for someone I knew, and finally spotted Bigger sitting by itself. I didn’t want it to see me, so I turned away.
“Tedla!” I heard. It was Axel, waving at me. Grateful to see a familiar face, I went over to sit with it.
“Have you seen anyone else from the creche?” I asked.
“Bigger’s over there.”
“I know. What about Zelly or Litch?”
Axel shook its head. “Some of the protes say they’re weeding the group. This can’t be everyone that came in this morning.”
I looked around the room; it still seemed like a huge crowd to me. “They can’t be weeding, or Bigger wouldn’t be here,” I said. “There must be another refectory.”
That night we all slept in a huge roundroom. It wasn’t the great sleep, the one that would end our childhood, but it still seemed significant. Too tired and keyed up to settle down, we gathered in groups to talk. I found Zelly in one group; we greeted each other as if we’d been parted for years.
Some of the other protos seemed to know more about what was going on than I did. Three of them were talking about the ruby drink we would be offered the next night to help us sleep. “I won’t take it,” one said. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“You can’t feel it,” another said. “You don’t turn human overnight, you know. It takes months.”
“Then how do they gender-type you?”
“Blood tests. They can tell if it’s estrogens or androgens in your bloodstream.”
“You know what Gimmy said?” one proto whispered. “It said those shots they gave us this morning were the hormones that stimulate the pineal to start secretions. It takes two days. We’re already turning.”
This news made me horribly uneasy. Something alien was inside me, transforming me, like a secret parasite. I couldn’t trust my body any more.
I slept fitfully that night. Once, I was wakened by a grotesque dream: I got up to go to the birthpool and found I had huge dangling breasts and a penis that dragged on the ground so that I could barely walk, and had to carry it in front of me. I lay awake, sweaty and tense, wishing nature could have found a less disfiguring way to make us into adults.
The next day we entered a new phase of matriculation. The architecture of the building changed. The first day, we had seen only the familiar, modern curves of blown lignis. Now, after hygiene and breakfast, we filed into a hall made from stone, on a monumental scale. The place had obviously been erected at a time when hundreds of thousands of protos had made their journeys to humanity at once; our group, which had seemed so populous the day before, was dwarfed by the spaces we passed through. Our voices and footsteps echoed harshly off the hard, square walls, and the ceiling loomed high above us. It was as if the ancients were there, watching. All their other monuments were mere rubble by now; only the matriculatory survived, unspeakably old.
This day, all the testers and curators were gone, along with the busy hubbub of activity. We were under the sway of the mysterious Order of Matriculators now. It was more than our bodies and minds under scrutiny this day: it was our souls.
The morning was taken up by tests of psychostability, social adaptation, and moral development. At every step, the tests were interwoven with instruction on the duties and privileges of humanity. As the day went on, the spiritual began to overshadow the intellectual. Our groups grew smaller and smaller, till at the end of the day I was ushered alone into a room with a robed invigilator who told me to sit down and tell her anything about my childhood I wanted to leave behind me, so that I could enter my new life unburdened. I thought of telling her about Joby, but guilt stopped me. Instead, I mentioned some less damning things. For each confession she gave me a flower, and told me to drop it in the chapel pool, and the memory of my guilt with it.
When I entered the chapel I found it was night outside, and the dome above was dark; but all the pathways were lit by candles. It was a huge chapel, with a whole landscape of trails and streams and pools in it, so that we could wander quite privately, praying and thinking of our futures. I dropped my flowers into a mossy stream just above a waterfall, and watched them drift over the edge, then down the channel till they reached the quiet of the central pool.
Out of the stillness a sweet bell rang, summoning us to the center. There, invigilators holding torches stood on either side of a cave mouth gated with an ornate wrought-iron grill. It was the entrance to the matrix hall. We stood silently as a matriculator spoke in a soft but penetrating voice.
“Birth is a natural process,” she said. “Learn to accept it. Cling neither to the past nor to some imagined future. Your childhood is now behind you; let it stay there, and not hinder your passage. Hoarding the past is the most self-destructive form of covetousness. Do not burden yourself with any memories or ambitions as you enter life. Strive to be born as clean as rainwater or falling snow.”
Another bell rang, and the gates to the matrix hall opened. As we filed in—no longer protos, but applicants for humanity now—the invigilators gave us our cups of ruby drink. No one turned it down.
The matrix hall was round, and far larger than our group. We passed through rows of pillars and saw the concentric circles of beds ranged at the very center, where we were to spend the great sleep. We took our places silently, subdued. The invigilators passed around the circle, taking a vial of blood from each of us. I was quiet as I watched my blood run into the clear tube, wondering which hormones they would find in it. My invigilator patted me on the shoulder when she was done. That little kindness in the midst of all the strangeness of the day made tears start to my eyes. I laid back against the pillow and fell almost at once into a deep sleep.
***
I was wakened by someone shaking my shoulder. At first, sleep tugged at my brain, trying to pull me back down. Then it came to me: It was the most important morning of my life, the morning of my birth. I sat up, struggling to make myself alert. This of all mornings I wanted to experience to the full.
The sun was coming through a skylight at the center of the hall. There were empty beds all around me, where protos had already been led out to the birthpool; in other beds, protos still slumbered. Silent invigilators with electronic slates were passing along the rows, matching our numbers to their records. I waited till one came by. Seeing I was awake, he punched my
number in, then gestured for me to follow him. He didn’t smile or speak.
He led me through a raw-wood door and down a stone hallway to a small room where a clerk was working at a desk. The clerk asked for my number, then called up my records. He scanned my thumbprint, then opened a drawer and took out a metal tag on a chain. “Put that around your neck and keep it there,” he said. Puzzled, I obeyed. To the invigilator who had brought me in, he said, “I thought the rate was supposed to be going down.”
“Not today it isn’t,” the invigilator said.
The clerk jerked his thumb at a door. “Through there,” he said to me.
Their casual attitude clashed with my mood of anticipation. Didn’t they know how magical this day was for me? Had the miracle of birth grown so stale for them they couldn’t even pretend a joyous attitude?
I went through the door. As I had expected, a dressing room lay beyond. I had heard that they gave you a white robe to leave at the edge of the birthpool; once you emerged they dressed you in red and gave you your real name. There were no other candidates in the room, just a fat older woman at a desk, looking annoyed at her assignment. She told me to clean up and throw my uniform in a laundry chute. I followed her instructions, then came back, shivering a little with excitement as well as cold. She was working on her slate, and didn’t look up at first, so I said, “Do I get a robe to go to the birthpool?”
She looked up at me, then gave a short laugh. “You’re not going to the birthpool,” she said. She reached into a bin beside her and shoved a folded garment across the desk toward me. I was reaching out to pick it up when I realized it was the gray uniform of a bland.
I pulled my hand back. “What’s that?” I said, revolted.
“Put it on,” she said. “It’s yours.”
It was as if she had reached inside me and twisted my stomach around. “No!” I cried out. “That’s some filthy neuter’s clothes. I’m not putting it on. What do you think I am?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” the woman said. There was a note of disgust in her voice.
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