Commitment Hour lop-2

by James Alan Gardner

  It had only taken a few minutes. Rashid had cut out a section of fence… and the fence had healed itself. I couldn't even see where the cuts had been made.

  "This is just some sort of machine?" I asked.

  "Actually millions of tiny machines," Rashid said. "Bonded together to look like a fence. Same with the antenna."

  "All just machines."

  I thought of the Patriarch's Hand — another machine. And Hakoore had slyly told me, "Maybe the hand is older than the Patriarch, dating back to the founding of the cove." Another high-tech toy, brought to Earth by those who created this fence. I could imagine how traitors from the stars would love to give such a gift to their priesthood: a lie detector for keeping the rabble in line.

  "So if Tober Cove is an experiment," I murmured, "or a demonstration… are they still watching us now?"

  "No," Rashid said. "When the Sparks signed their treaty with the League, the star-siders were all obliged to leave. Since Master Crow and Mistress Gull still show up every year, I assume the whole process is mechanized. Computer-controlled, continuing to run itself on autopilot—"

  "Wait a second," I interrupted. "You think that Master Crow and Mistress Gull are part of this too?"

  "It's all the same package," he replied. "Master Crow and Mistress Gull are just airplanes, aren't they? Robot-driven planes that pick the Tober children…"

  I let out a sigh of relief. Airplanes. The airplane argument. That familiar old refrain.

  It put everything else in perspective.

  Listen: Tobers know about airplanes. We've seen their pictures in OldTech books. And when someone from down-peninsula says, "Hey, your gods are just planes," it's hardly the complete refutation of all our beliefs that outsiders seem to think.

  Yes, Tober children flew to Birds Home in airplanes. Mundane aircraft. Machines.

  But why should that matter? Everything belonged to the gods. Machines were no less god-given than a stone or a leaf. And the planes weren't the real Master Crow or Mistress Gull — they were just tools held by divine hands. The real gods wore the planes' metal and machinery like unimportant clothing.

  If that was true for the planes, why not for everything else? For machines like the Patriarch's Hand, the self-healing fence, and everything. Why not even the star-siders who might have founded Tober Cove? The gods could use people just as easily as they used machines. They could send a duck to tell whether they wanted you to Commit male or female, and they could send traitors from space to set up a town where people could live sane lives.

  If the gods were behind it, who cared about the apparent physical cause? Getting distracted by such issues was just Hakoore's materialism, wasn't it? Thinking that the gods weren't in the picture just because the cove had a surface explanation. But the gods were in the picture; I refused to doubt them.

  Damn, I hated when Hakoore was right.

  "Lord Rashid," I said, "the Patriarch once preached that a scientist will cut a gull into pieces, then be astonished none of the pieces can fly. That's what you're doing here. You may be happy you've cut all this to pieces, but you haven't got the truth of Tober Cove. You haven't seen a drop of it."

  The Spark Lord looked at me curiously. "You're all right with this? The fence, the antenna…"

  "Why should I care about the antenna?" I asked. "It's just a big tall thing up on a hill. You haven't even suggested it has a purpose."

  "It's a collector," he answered, watching me to see my reaction. "This whole peninsula must be covered with radio relays like the one hidden back in that car's engine. The relays gather low-powered local radio transmissions, and forward them to the array on this tower. This antenna amplifies the signals and sends them on a tight beam to another site—"

  "Wait," I interrupted. I was actually smiling, even if I didn't understand half of what he said. "What local radio transmissions? No one has a radio in Tober Cove."

  "Oh. That."

  Rashid reached into a belt pouch and pulled out his little plastic radio receiver. When he turned it on, it made the same waves-on-gravel sound it had made before.

  "More static," Steck muttered.

  "No," Rashid told her. "Just a type of transmission that's too complicated for my receiver to decode. And guess where it's coming from."

  He touched the receiver to my forehead. The noise of the static went wild.

  "See?" Rashid said. "Radio Fullin is on the air."

  SEVENTEEN

  A Barrel for the Bereaved

  Rashid offered no explanations. "You don't like me speaking like a scientist," he said.

  Steck wouldn't clarify things for me either. She contended she didn't see the significance of what Rashid had discovered. He refused to believe it. "I've taught you enough science," he told her. "You can figure out the whole setup. If I were a suspicious man, I'd say you knew how Tober Cove worked long ago. You only pretended it was a great mystery because you wanted me to bring you here for Fullin's Commitment."

  She wrapped her arms around him. "What's wrong with caring about my son?"

  "Nothing. But you could have told me the truth. Did you think I wouldn't find out when we got here?"

  Steck shrugged. She looked like a woman preparing for lovey-dovey apologies and kiss-kiss "Ooo, don't hate me!" manipulations. That was something I did not want to see… partly because she was my mother, partly because she was a Neut, and partly because I didn't want to know that a Spark Lord could be taken in by such obvious sugar-spreading.

  "Were we going to leave?" I asked loudly.

  They looked at me. Rashid gave Steck a lurid wink. "We'd better cool off," he said. "No hanky-panky in front of the kids."

  She laughed.

  I spun away from them and stormed down the hill.

  By the time I reached the town square, Rashid and Steck were walking beside me… and I made sure to keep between them so they wouldn't be tempted to hold hands.

  I wouldn't be the first son in history to shove himself in as his mother's chaperon.

  As we rounded the Council Hall building, I saw Kaeomi, Stallor and Mintz rolling a black-painted water barrel toward the center of the square. The paint was fresh — as the barrel rolled across the council lawn, its sticky surface accumulated a litter of grass cuttings, pebbles, and even an unlucky worm flattened to a gooey ribbon by the barrel's great weight.

  I'd seen black barrels often enough. This one told me Bonnakkut's body had been put on display under the branches of Little Oak. All our dead spent a day on a bier at the base of the tree; and when people came to pay their respects, they dipped a cup of water out of the black barrel and shared a last drink with the deceased. Most people just lifted the cup in a toast before drinking… but a few would place the cup to the corpse's lips and spill a little there before taking their own sip.

  Doctor Gorallin made sure that people all drank from separate cups.

  A group of Tobers had already gathered around the body — an outer ring of onlookers, plus an inner ring with Hakoore and Leeta accompanied by Bonnakkut's immediate family: his daughter Ivis and his mother Kenna. Dorr was there too, her arm in a sling that seemed very white against her tanned skin. She was the only one of the inner circle who looked in our direction as we approached. Hakoore and Leeta supervised the three warriors as they manhandled the barrel closer to the corpse. Ivis and Kenna did nothing. They both wore lost, slightly ashamed expressions on their faces, as if they felt they ought to be helping in some way but couldn't figure out how to contribute.

  The mother's eyes had the reddened look of recent crying. The daughter's didn't. At six years old, she should have had some understanding of death, but the blankness on her face said she was too full of shocked confusion for any other emotion to surface.

  As we approached, Ivis decided to be scared at the sight of strangers. She ran to her grandmother and wrapped her arms around Kenna's waist. Kenna hugged the girl's shoulder while Leeta hurried up to Rashid. "Do you have to be here?" she asked in a low voice.

&n
bsp; "Is there a problem?" Rashid replied.

  "Bonnakkut's dead!" Leeta snapped. "Murdered because of that gun you gave him."

  "How do you know that's the reason?"

  "The gun is missing, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Rashid admitted, "but that doesn't mean the killing was purely because of the pistol. Someone may have wanted Bonnakkut dead for some other reason. I got the impression from Fullin that—" He broke off with a glance at Ivis and Kenna, then lowered his voice. "The deceased was not the most popular man in the village."

  Leeta's soft old eyes took on a hard edge. "And it's just coincidence he stayed healthy for twenty-five years, then died twelve hours after you arrived?"

  "Yes," said Dorr, "it's just coincidence."

  I hadn't even heard her coming up behind me — living in Hakoore's house, she had learned to move without making noises that might disturb the old snake. Dorr said, "Bonnakkut's death had nothing to do with the outsiders."

  We all turned to look at her. She reached to her belt and pulled out the knife from her hip-sheath: the knife I had seen her holding in Cypress Marsh, when she had just cut off a wad of dye plants. In the marsh, the blade had been clean except for a gleam of sap from the reeds. Now the metal was splashed with rusty brown stains.

  "Dorr…" Steck began.

  "Quiet!" Dorr snapped. It was the first time in years I'd heard her raise her voice; and the voice was deep, unwomanly. "This is my time," she told Steck. Then she lifted the knife above her head, blade pointing to the sky. "See?" she shouted. "Everybody see? I killed him!"

  With a fierce motion, she swung down the knife and rammed it deep into the wood of the black barrel.

  No one moved. It wasn't shock or surprise; we were frozen with embarrassment, as if Dorr was an unliked little girl who was telling lies to get attention. Even with blood on her knife, no one took her seriously. This was Dorr, granddaughter of the Patriarch's Man. She wasn't a killer, she was just crazy and desperate.

  Dorr looked around at our faces; she must have seen our pitying disbelief. "I really did it!" she said angrily. "Because he was a pig."

  "Dorr…" Steck began again, at the same time Leeta said, "Shush, Dorr! His family's here."

  "My granddaughter is out of her mind," Hakoore declared loudly. He jabbed a bony finger in her direction. "Go home, woman."

  "You know I'm not a woman," Dorr said. And reaching down with her good arm, she pulled her simple cotton dress high above her waist.

  She was wearing underwear — a tight white girdle at crotch level, probably intended to smooth the outline of her groin… binding the bulge of penis and testicles. Under a dress, the camouflage worked, but exposed now in the bright summer sunlight, the tell-tale contours were plain for all to see.

  Hakoore made a choking sound. Leeta looked toward him, concern filling her eyes. They really are lovers, I thought. Hakoore must have told Leeta about Dorr long ago. Now our priestess was more worried about the old snake than about his crazy granddaughter.

  Dorr let go of her dress. It fell haphazardly about her thighs, and she made no effort to smooth it.

  "Bonnakkut knew about me," Dorr told the crowd. "He came to our house now and then to discuss law with my grandfather. He must have seen something about me that made him suspicious."

  Sure, I thought. Just by chance. I could imagine Dorr tormenting her grandfather whenever Bonnakkut came over… dropping veiled hints about her true gender just to give the old man shudders. She might have "accidentally" sat with her knees a little too open, or maybe scratched herself like a man, and eventually Bonnakkut caught on.

  "He didn't do anything right away," Dorr said, "but when Lord Rashid and his Bozzle arrived… something about their presence infuriated Bonnakkut. He decided to take it out on me."

  I looked at Steck. Her face was stricken with dismay… and rightly so, I thought. Bonnakkut was just the sort to boil with rage over a Neut he couldn't fight; so he turned his anger on Dorr, a Neut who didn't have a Spark Lord for protector.

  "He followed me into the woods and grabbed me," Dorr went on. "He said he'd tell everyone my secret unless I…" She stopped; her gaze moved to Ivis, who was listening in mute bewilderment, as if this had nothing to do with her father. "He threatened me," Dorr said in a lower voice. "And I got very very angry. Bonnakkut must not have known how angry I could get — he actually turned his back on me while we were talking. That was when I…"

  She reached toward the knife, still stabbed deep into the lid of the barrel. Her fingers stroked its hilt.

  "And you took his gun?" Rashid asked.

  Dorr looked at him, silent for a moment. "Yes. I took his gun."

  "What did you do with it?"

  "I threw it away."

  "Where?"

  "Just away." She turned back to the knife. "Tober Cove doesn't need guns."

  Rashid gave an unreadable look to Steck; Steck didn't return it. My mother's eyes were downcast, guilty. One Neut precipitating the ruin of another.

  The Spark Lord turned back to Dorr. "So you killed Bonnakkut because he threatened to expose you. But here you are, only an hour later, voluntarily telling the whole village… when no one has accused you, or even questioned you about the murder."

  She looked at him, then shrugged. "The truth would come out eventually. I didn't feel like waiting."

  "So you're saying you killed him," Mintz suddenly said.

  "I slit his throat like a hog."

  Mintz's spear lay near him on the ground. He snatched it up and leveled it at her; but Rashid moved quickly in front of Dorr, blocking any attack with his armored body. "Let's not do anything hasty," he said. "Tobers believe in fair trials, don't they?"

  "For Neuts?" Dorr laughed as if the idea was genuinely funny. "Neuts get beaten and banished merely for existing. When one has actually committed murder…"

  She looked at Mintz and the other warriors expectantly, but they showed no stomach for tangling with a Spark Lord twice in one day. Mintz let the tip of his spear sink until it touched the ground.

  "Good," Rashid nodded. "We'll all be smart about this."

  "Too bad," Dorr said to the warriors. "You had your chance."

  Her free hand darted into the sling wrapped around her other arm. She pulled out a wineskin, its top already open, and squirted a stream of brown fluid into her mouth. Steck leapt forward, but Dorr had already swallowed.

  She smiled as if she was pleased with herself.

  Steck grabbed Dorr under the armpits and kicked her legs out from under her; Dorr's eyes widened in surprise, but her mouth stayed closed as Steck set her down roughly onto the grass. "Open up!" Steck yelled, trying to force her fingers past Dorr's lips. "Open your mouth!"

  Dorr shook her head, teeth clenched tight.

  "What goes down can come up again," Steck replied. "If you don't let me stick my finger down your throat, I'll punch you in the stomach."

  Dorr tried to cover her mouth with her hand.

  "Fullin!" Steck snapped. "Help me."

  I knelt and held Dorr's head steady as Steck tried to pry her jaw open. Dorr was still smiling, even as she resisted. Her eyes glittered, as if she were laughing at us.

  "Don't hurt her!" Hakoore cried. "You're hurting her."

  "Not her," Mintz sneered, "It."

  Steck glared at him in fury, then suddenly slammed the heel of her palm into Dorr's belly. Dorr gasped; her jaw loosened for a split second, and I got my fingers into her mouth. Her teeth clamped down on me… not hard, but enough to show she could do damage if she wanted. The look in her eyes was easy to read — if I didn't pull my hand out, she'd bite with all her strength.

  Carefully, I drew my hand away. She actually gave a coy lick to my fingers as they slid out.

  I remembered her kissing me.

  "Yes," Dorr murmured, her old half whisper. Perhaps only Steck and I heard. "Your father would never forgive me if I hurt you… your violinist's hands."

  "Let us help you, Dorr!" Steck cried. "This is s
uch a waste."

  Dorr lifted her hand and cupped Steck's cheek. "Take good care of him. You've always been…"

  She suddenly gagged, as if she were going to throw up without our help. The sound turned into a cough, then a convulsion. I found myself holding her with all my strength, somehow believing she would be all right if I could stop her shaking.

  Rashid leaned over me. "Can you guess what she took?"

  I shook my head. "She knew a lot about vegetable extracts. She learned from her mother."

  Hakoore groaned. Leeta stood beside him, holding his hand.

  Dorr lasted another twenty minutes. Eventually, we did make her vomit… after she was too weak to fight us. By then, her convulsions were coming every few seconds: long, shuddering spasms with all her muscles tightening, bucking, nearly bending her double.

  It was not an easy death.

  Toward the end, someone pulled me away from her body: Veen, Hakoore's sister, stone-faced as she watched her grandniece die. "There's nothing you can do," Veen said. "And you don't want to become her death-husband, do you?"

  I didn't know if a Neut could have a death-husband. But for Dorr's sake, I hoped one of the gods would accept her.

  EIGHTEEN

  A Chicken Foot for Zephram

  Rashid carried Dorr's body into the Council Hall where the last rites would have some privacy. He said he didn't worry about touching the corpse; his armor would protect him.

  Hakoore and Leeta went to conduct the rites together. From the look on their faces, they didn't want spectators. Rashid, Steck and I quietly slipped out the side door.

  The sunlight outside was bright enough to make your eyes tear up.

  Steck let out a long breath. "Shit," she said.

  "Shit indeed," Rashid nodded. "Hands up, anyone who believed that woman's confession."