Commitment Hour

by James Alan Gardner

  I glared at her. My anger felt powerful—the gun was ready to fire. “I love Waggett,” I said, spitting the words at her. “I love whatever he is. And I hate you for taking away his choices.”

  “I’m giving the cove back its choices,” Steck replied. “Everyone will spend time with Neuts; eveiyone will see they aren’t innately evil. The next generation will know that Committing Neut is just as good as male or female.”

  “The next generation?” Cappie asked. “Are children really going to visit Birds Home again? You’ve smashed up the place—”

  “The machines repair themselves,” Steck interrupted. “By this time next year—by the time your daughter Pona is ready to come here—Birds Home will be back in business. I’ve had time to look at the control room next door. The equipment is already gearing up to replace the broken coffins. And Pona’s tissue samples are turning into a male Pona, even as we speak.”

  “You see?” Female-Me said to the rest of us. “It isn’t as bad as you think. The children are still alive…one version of them anyway, which is all that ever survives. And Birds Home will continue the same as ever.”

  “Why are you apologizing for Steck?” I demanded. She knew I had the gun ready; she was linked to my mind. Yet she was suddenly sticking up for…

  “Our mother,” my female self snapped. “Our mother was just trying to help. To open our eyes.” Female-Me turned back to Steck. “What about the Neut version of us? There must have been a Neut Fullin. Where is he?”

  “It,” I said.

  “We’ve really got to get some new pronouns,” Cappie muttered.

  “Where’s Neut Fullin?” Female-Me asked again.

  Steck looked at her, then at me. Finally, she said, “I killed him.”

  “You what?”

  She sighed, then let her hands fall to her side. The violin, still in her left hand, made a light four-stringed twang as it tinked against her armor.

  “I killed him,” she said. “My Neut child.” Steck closed her eyes as if she could see it all in her mind. “I opened his coffin, said, “Wake up, it’s all right!”…and the stupid bastard attacked me. Just screamed and came at me with his bare hands. Must have been picking up someone else’s hate.”

  She looked at me as if she expected me to confess something. I didn’t; I tightened my grip on the gun. “So,” Steck went on, “the idiot hurled himself at my throat…even though he must have known about the force field. If I could have stopped the damned field from turning itself on I would have—he couldn’t have hurt me, not through this armor.”

  Steck shook her head sadly. “But the armor has a mind of its own. It realized that he wanted to hurt me and reacted accordingly. The force field came up; Fullin burned. I could smell him: his flesh cooking, his hair in flames. His hands were on fire and he just kept after me, trying to get his fingers around my throat. By the time he passed out from pain, he was so burnt…his arms, his face, all down his bare chest…” She squeezed her eyes tight shut. “I had to shoot him with the laser: drill a hole through his brain. He was charred completely black.”

  I glared at her, wondering whether to believe her story. If a copy of me had died, wouldn’t I have felt it? No. All three of us Fullins had radios in our heads, but I was the only one transmitting. My poor Neut self spent Its entire life in a glass coffin, passively receiving my sister and me.

  “Where’s the body?” I asked.

  “One of the bird-servants took it,” Steck answered. “How do you think I learned that unneeded bodies are broken down into nutrients? I saw my own burnt child dumped into a vat and slowly turned to mush….” She inhaled raggedly. “Soon there was nothing left but the smell of charcoal in the air. My own child.”

  “No,” Female-Me said softly, “I’m your own child.” She moved forward. “I’m the original, aren’t I? The others are just copies.”

  “Stop this!” I cried to my sister. “Don’t give her sympathy! She’s Steck! The Neut who killed Waggett—who cut Waggett’s throat!”

  “There’s one version of Waggett still alive,” my sister replied. “He’s not gone. None of them are gone.”

  “She cut his throat in cold blood!”

  “Drastic times require drastic measures.”

  Cappie made a disgusted sound. “There’s nothing drastic about these times…or there wasn’t until Rashid and Steck came along. Maybe it was unfair what Tober Cove did to Neuts, but we could have changed that without killing babies. With me as priestess and Fullin as Patriarch’s Man…I mean the male Fullin…”

  Her voice trailed off. She looked down at herself—the unfamiliar Neut body that would never be priestess now.

  “Would you really be able to change things?” Female-Me asked. “Would you have thought it was worth the effort? No,” she shook her head, “I know you and I know my brother. Mumbly good intentions, but no real commitment. Not like Steck. Do you think this was easy on her? Killing all those children? Her own grandson? But she did it to break the Patriarch’s curse on Tober Cove. And she succeeded. The next generation will be free.” She turned and walked toward Steck with open arms. “Thank you, Mother. At least one of us knows you did the right thing.”

  That was when I whipped the gun from behind my back and fired at my female self.

  Maybe I was just too angry to shoot straight…but then, it was the first time I’d ever pulled the trigger and my sister had moved most of the way across the room. The gun kicked in my hands. A bullet ricocheted off a rock wall and zinged who knows where as the boom of the shot echoed through all of Birds Home.

  Cappie dove to the ground, screaming, “Stop, you’ll hit the children!” She was right—I had to get close enough so I wouldn’t miss again. I started running; don’t ask me whether I intended to shoot my sister or mother, but one of them was going to die.

  Female-Me dashed toward Steck, shouting, “Help me, Mother!” Steck spread her arms wide in a welcoming embrace. My sister threw herself forward, the way Waggett sometimes threw himself into my own arms, diving toward sanctuary. She collided with Steck’s armored chest, and pressed in tight, hugging the green plastic. I fired, and by now I was close enough that the bullet was right on target…

  Violet light erupted at the point of impact, bright as staring into the sun. It left a scorched hole in my vision; but around the edges I could see my traitor female half nestled snugly against Steck, both of them safe within the crackling violet protection.

  “Put the gun down,” Steck yelled at me. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” I answered. I fired at my sister half again.

  “Stupid!” Steck cried as another burst of violet blazed the bullet to slag.

  “You almost hit the violin!” Female-Me shouted in indignation. She reached out and lightly pulled the instrument out of Steck’s hand, then hugged it to her own chest for protection. As an afterthought, she took the bow too…as if she might actually decide to play a ballad while I was shooting at her.

  I fired. Point-blank range. Violet flame burnt the bullet to smoke.

  “This is futile,” Steck growled. “You can’t get through the force field.”

  “True,” my sister said in a hard, quiet voice. “But I’m already inside.”

  And she rammed the point of the violin bow into Steck’s unprotected eye.

  The point was not very sharp; but it was sharp enough.

  My sister had gripped the bow in her fist, with four inches of the tip end showing. All four inches speared into Steck’s eye and on into her brain, driven by the force of sheer hatred…driven by the gods and the souls of dead children. Steck gave nothing more than a surprised grunt; then she was falling, dragging my sister with her as Steck’s arms spasmed and locked Female-Me in a bear hug.

  When they hit the floor, the force field was still active. Violet flame broke against the rock underfoot, a flash explosion that seared an armor-sized patch of granite into a sheen of smoking lava. The explosion had enough
force to bounce Steck and my sister partway up again; then they fell once more, bounced, fell, bounced, like a fiery violet ball taking its time to settle.

  When they finally came to rest, the force field continued to burn, smelting its way into a trench in the bare rock floor. Steck’s legs jerked with dying convulsions. My sister, still holding the bow, pushed it deeper into Steck’s brain, as blood spilled out of the eye socket and onto her hands. Steck gave one last shaking shudder…and then the breath sighed out of her for the last time.

  Gradually, the violet flame subsided. The suit was smart enough to realize it was fighting a lost cause.

  Cappie and I helped my sister up, making sure she didn’t step on the red hot rock that surrounded the fallen armor. “I thought you had turned traitor,” I mumbled to my female self.

  “You should know better,” she answered. “I’m you, aren’t I?” She looked at me, then Cappie. “Steck had to die, didn’t she? She had to.”

  Cappie stared down at the body. “In her own mind, Steck had done nothing wrong. As she said, the children are all alive—Neut versions of them anyway. And the way things work in Birds Home, two versions of each person die anyway. Steck didn’t do anything that wouldn’t have happened eventually…but yes, she had to die. Even if it all balances out, some things can’t be forgiven.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  A Prayer for Us All

  When Rashid arrived, I was debating whether to pull the violin bow out of Steck’s eye. I didn’t want to touch it, but as the heat of the moment cooled, I began to hate the sight of my mother, disfigured by the protruding murder weapon. My sister self may have been having the same thoughts—she was me, wasn’t she?—but she didn’t reach for the bow either.

  Cappie stood in shadow farther down the unlit corridor. Now that the excitement was over, I think she’d become painfully aware of her nakedness…or painfully ashamed of her Neutness.

  “Hello,” Rashid said to the three of us. “Where’s Steck?”

  My sister and I pointed to the floor. Rashid’s mouth tightened. He came forward far enough that he could see past the glass coffins to the corpse.

  “Dead?” he asked.

  We all nodded.

  He lowered his head and let his breath out slowly. “I suppose I should thank you-—if you hadn’t killed her, I would have been forced to do it myself.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Family policy: no one walks away from betraying a Spark.” He looked down at Steck’s bloody face. “Stupid rule.” He took a deep breath. “But if I didn’t enforce it, my brothers and sisters would. Steck was the one who killed those children in the other rooms?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at the corpse again. “Sometimes you can’t tell if a person is Iago or Desdemona.” He sighed. “With Steck, it always had to be both.”

  After a while, Rashid asked, “Did Steck have a reason? Did she tell you why she did everything?”

  We explained as best we could. It took all three of us, Cappie, sister Fullin and I, to piece together everything Steck said about the workings of Birds Home. Even then, Rashid had questions we couldn’t answer: questions about technical details that Steck hadn’t mentioned, either because she thought we were too stupid to understand, or because she didn’t understand them herself. Rashid might have continued the talk about chromo-this and DN-that until the rest of us dropped from brain fatigue…but he was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Cappie, farther up the corridor than the rest of us, spun immediately to face whatever was coming. She still held the glass splinter; now she raised it like a dagger, and waited…then lowered it again. “Just a bird-servant,” she said.

  A moment later, I could see the figure for myself—the bird-servant colored like a cardinal, although its brilliant red was muted to charcoal gray in the shadowy corridor. It passed Cappie without a glance and stepped coolly over Steck’s corpse.

  “Not interested in us,” Cappie observed.

  “Not programmed to be,” Rashid replied.

  The cardinal went straight to the nearest coffin…which happened to hold Waggett. My sister and I tensed as the lid of the coffin swung open. The bird-thing reached in and lifted out my son with expert care: supporting the head, snuggling the child’s small body in red plastic arms. I took a step forward, but Rashid caught me by the shoulder. “Easy. Let it do its job.”

  The bird adjusted Waggett’s weight until my son was securely cradled against the creature’s chest. Then it turned and walked back the way it came, ignoring all of us as if we were part of the stone walls.

  “Where is it taking him?” my sister demanded.

  “Back to the hangar,” Rashid answered. “On a normal Commitment Day, the children wake up near the plane in Master Crow’s nest, right? The bird-servants must carry them there.”

  Even as he spoke, four more bird-creatures strode out of the darkness: a hawk, a goose, the jay, and a mallard. Their movements were unnaturally smooth, every step measured like honey. Silently, they gathered four more children and carried them out of the room.

  “This is a good sign,” Rashid said. He kept his voice low, as if he didn’t want to disturb the birds as they passed. “Despite all the damage,” he went on, “the machines have obviously figured out what to do—send the Neut children back to Tober Cove, because they’re the only ones left alive. It’s nice to know the programming for Birds Home is smart enough to deal with this situation.”

  My sister self continued to stare into the darkness, watching the bird-servants disappear. “We should follow them,” she murmured.

  “The robots won’t harm the children,” Rashid told her.

  “But the children will soon wake up, won’t they? And when they see what they’ve become, someone should be there to calm them. To tell them it’s okay.”

  “The new priestess,” Cappie said. “You.”

  My sister met Cappie’s gaze. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Female-Me said, “I’m ready to be priestess if you don’t want the job. But you have first claim to it”

  Cappie shook her head. “A Neut priestess? The cove has enough to swallow already. They’ll accept the Neut children because they have to; but given a choice between a Neut and a true woman, I know which would make Tobers more comfortable. Isn’t that a big part of the priestess’s job—comforting people?”

  “All right,” my sister said. “But we’ll do what we discussed last night—work as a team. Even if I’m the official priestess, we’ll make our decisions together and…”

  “No,” Cappie interrupted. “I’m not going back to the cove. Not right away.”

  “What?” I blurted. “Not going home?”

  “Someone has to stay here,” she said. “Make sure that Birds Home really can repair itself.”

  “I’ll do that,” Rashid answered immediately. “I owe you that much, considering I was the one who brought Steck here. And there’s so much I can learn in a place like this. I want to understand the cloning process…the exact way thoughts are transferred…”

  “While you’re doing that,” Cappie said, “could you use a second pair of hands?”

  “Probably,” Rashid nodded. “It so happens I have an immediate opening for a new Bozzle…and there’s a precedent of filling the position with a person of dual gendership.”

  Cappie glared at him with steely eyes. “If you think you’re going to start up with me the way you were with Steck…”

  “No!” Rashid said sharply. It was the first time his self-control had broken since he found Steck dead: the first time he sounded like a man instead of a Spark Lord. “I’m standing here with a corpse at my feet—her corpse! Do you think I’m so inhuman I can just…” His voice choked off. “No,” he said with a catch in his throat, “I’m really just looking for an assistant, Cappie: a second pair of hands, as you put it. It’ll be a long time before I…never mind. You help me here in Birds Home, and after that, I’ll see you get back to Tober Cove. If th
at’s what you want.”

  She looked at him for a moment more, then nodded. “It’s a deal.” Cappie turned back to my sister self. “Can you take care of Pona for a while?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll be back when I’m ready,” Cappie added hurriedly. “I promise. It’s just…I knew who I was when I was male and when I was female. Now that I’m neither one…” She shrugged.

  “So you’re trying to find yourself,” I said. “But why can’t you do that in Tober Cove? We need you there.”

  “Why? So you Fullins can fight over me?”

  “We won’t fight over you,” I protested.

  “In a few weeks, you might be fighting over who gets stuck with me. I know,” she said quickly, “that’s unfair. But it was just a few hours ago that you couldn’t give yourself to me; not the way I needed. Has anything changed? Have you suddenly fallen in love with me because I’m a Neut? Not likely.” She gave us die ghost of a smile, trying to take the sting from her words. “You may feel fond and sentimental about me right now, but that’s not enough. There’s too much pity in it—pity because I’m not male or female, and you think that’s a tragic loss. Maybe it is, I don’t know. But I need time to decide for myself.”

  “Then take die time,” Female-Me told her. “Pona will be all right. And when you’re ready to come back, I guarantee Tober Cove won’t have a law about banishing Neuts.”

  “To make changes like that, you’ll need help.” Cappie smiled. “You’ll need help from the Patriarch’s Man.”

  She turned to me. “How about it? Will you say yes to Hakoore? For the good of the cove?”

  “Patriarch’s Man?” When I said it, the title sounded so sadly pompous—a relic of some long-dead tyrant, one more thing that should have gone on that junk heap in Mayoralty House. The Patriarch’s Man was a self-deceiving fool with a book of laws and a machine that looked like a severed hand. “I don’t know if I believe in the position,” I said. “After everything that’s happened in Birds Home…”