The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  “Right,” Steck said grimly. “Committing to one version of yourself means killing the other two. Killing. I’ve been to the lab next door—there are machines getting ready to render the rejected bodies down to basic nutrients. Feed for the other bodies.

  “If I hadn’t intervened,” Steck went on, “one of you two Fullins would be dead by now. You’re both healthy, you both could live long lives, but the machines would dispassionately stop one of your hearts. That’s the dirty secret of Birds Home. That’s how much the gods of Tober Cove really love you.”

  Cappie let go of my hand. Slowly, deliberately, she climbed out of the coffin and picked up a long glass splinter from the litter that had fallen to the floor. She held the splinter like a knife. “Steck, I’d rather believe in the gods than you.”

  “Careful with that,” Steck pointed to the sliver. “If you attack me while I’m in this armor, you’ll bum your hands again. And this time, you’ve run out of replacement selves.”

  “I never had any replacement selves,” Cappie said. “I’m a single person, that’s all.”

  “Like Fullin?” Steck asked, pointing the violin bow toward me. “Or the other Fullin?” Steck shook her head. “Cappie, I thought the same as you once. I thought the gods could work miracles. And every summer solstice, Master Crow waved his wings to reshape my body by magic—boy shimmering into girl, girl shimmering into boy. But then I was exiled. I went to the friendless South, where freaks get beaten, or raped, or shunned to the point of starvation. It was sheer luck that I stumbled into an enclave of scientists who were willing to feed me and teach me what they knew in exchange for studying my anatomy. Eventually, word about me spread from the enclave to the Science-Lord…and by the time Rashid came to see the astounding hermaphrodite for himself, I’d learned enough about science that I didn’t believe in magic anymore. Or gods.”

  “Your loss,” I said.

  “True,” Steck agreed. “My loss. Who wouldn’t like to believe benevolent deities took an interest in the world? But the only ones at work in Birds Home were busybodies from the stars who treated the people of Tober Cove like lab rats. There aren’t even people here anymore—it’s all run by machines. But we lab rats are still running through the maze.”

  “How do you know?” I demanded. “Have you talked to the gods? Have you been to Birds Home before?”

  To be honest, I didn’t care about her answers. But I wanted to get her talking. She would try to justify herself; she would try to explain, and as she did, I would slowly reach for the gun tucked in at my back.

  “No, I haven’t talked to the gods,” Steck admitted. “And I haven’t been to Birds Home since my own Commitment Hour. But I’ve thought about this, Fullin. I’ve thought about it every day for the past twenty years. It took a while to learn enough science to figure out the tricks, but I deduced it all before I got here, and I’ve seen enough in Birds Home to confirm my guesses.”

  My hand touched the butt of the pistol. The metal was warm from lying against my skin.

  “You want to know what’s really going on?” Steck continued. “How the tricks work? It starts with the Gift of Blood and Bone that’s taken from every baby. When those tissue samples are delivered to Birds Home, some very clever machines go to work extracting the DNA—the seeds that eventually grow into a human being. The machines give those seeds a little twist: swap an X chromosome with a Y, change a girl seed into a boy seed, or vice versa. And since they take the replacement chromosome from someone else rather than deriving it from your own chromosomes…no, never mind, I’m just showing off. I’ve spent twenty years accumulating the knowledge to understand Tober Cove, and you’re the only people I may ever be able to tell. I have to do this right. The machines made a seed for boy Fullin by starting with the seeds of girl Fullin and adding a tiny boy-bit from some other person. Which is why your boy self doesn’t look exactly like your girl self.”

  “My sister Olimbarg looks the same, boy or girl,” Cappie said.

  “The wonders of genetics,” Steck answered. “Flukes happen. But the people who made Birds Home had a lot more control over genes than the OldTechs did. The machines here can work with the tissue samples taken at a baby’s first solstice, and by the next summer produce a child of the opposite sex who looks a year and a half old. Don’t ask me how they accelerate the growth— there’s a laboratory next door, but I don’t understand a tenth of the equipment.”

  I had my fingers wrapped around the pistol grip now. Slowly, I eased the gun out of my belt. It made a soft sticky sound as it slipped away from my sweat-damp back.

  “And cloning isn’t the only trick,” Steck went on. “There’s also the memory transfer. When your son Waggett arrived here, Fullin, there was a female version of him waiting, constructed from the tissue sample taken the previous year. But the girl-Waggett was a blank slate; her whole life she’d been dormant under glass, so she had an empty brain. No, that’s going too far; her brain wasn’t completely empty. Some time in the past year, the machines had placed a communications implant in her head…and as soon as the original Waggett arrived, they put a similar implant in his.”

  The muzzle of the gun was free of my belt. I kept my eyes on Steck, as if I had nothing on my mind but listening.

  “I watched that implant process,” she said, “and you wouldn’t have liked it, Fullin. A robot feeds a tiny wire through the back of the baby’s neck and straight up into the brain. The wire goes through the hole made by the Gift of Blood and Bone, so there won’t be a second scar. Isn’t that clever? I always wondered why they took the damned tissue sample from the spine instead of someplace less gruesome; the OldTechs could get DNA just by swabbing the inside of your mouth. But the scar at the back of the neck gives a camouflaged entry point for injecting nano-transmitters.”

  Slowly, I eased my other hand behind my back. The next part would be difficult, especially to do without looking. The safety mechanism was a sort of slide that had to be moved to the right position before the gun would shoot. Steck herself had demonstrated how it worked last night, as Bonnakkut and I watched. Bonnakkut had practiced a few times; I had never done it before.

  “Once the transmitters are implanted,” Steck said, “they download—copy—everything from the original Waggett’s brain into the clean-slate clone. I watched that happen too, Fullin; the lab next door has video displays to monitor the copying process. Bit by bit, I saw the little girl Waggett clone acquire all the original Waggett’s thoughts and personality.”

  “Before you killed her,” I said. I was blindly pushing and pulling parts of the pistol behind my back, but nothing wanted to slide.

  “Before I killed that particular body,” Steck corrected. “But Waggett is still alive in a Neut body…because the machines make hermaphrodite copies of children as well as opposite sex bodies. The child in that coffin,” Steck waved in the direction of Neut-Waggett, “may look different from your son, but in his head, he’s everything the original Waggett was. A perfect mental copy.”

  “And what about later?” my sister self asked. “My male half got copied from my brain,” she said, pointing to me, “but that was when we were one year old. We’ve stayed connected for years.”

  Steck nodded. “After the first body switch, you have three copies of the same person, all with communication implants in their heads. The implants are like a million tiny radios in your brain—although they’re biological, powered by your own metabolisms. Remember Rashid picking up radio waves from your head, Fullin? Every second of every day, you broadcast low-powered encodings of your mental state. The signals get picked up by relay stations like that one in the car’s engine…and there must be hidden relays all over the peninsula to cover you whenever you leave home. The relays transfer your broadcasts to that antenna on Patriarch Hill, which transmits everything up here to Birds Home. Moment by moment, the two dormant bodies receive transmissions from the body that’s walking around in Tober Cove…so the sleeping versions experience everything the act
ive version does.”

  “So this past year,” I said, “I was the sender…”

  “And I was the receiver,” my sister finished. She gave me a veiled look. Of course, she was receiving even now—that’s why she could pick up my thoughts and feelings. She must know exactly what I was doing with the gun.

  Did Steck know we were still linked?

  “How come it sometimes reverses?” I asked Steck. “How could my sister get into my head when she was asleep up here?”

  Suddenly I felt a part of the pistol begin to slide under my hand. I had to force myself not to smile.

  “That’s part of the grand design of the star-siders who set up this experiment,” Steck answered. “From what I’ve seen in the lab, the communication implants make it possible to override one personality with the other. Basically, they set the male Fullin to receive, then set the female Fullin to transmit…and turn up the volume so loud that the female drowns out the original male. I think this happens on Commitment Day so that both personalities can have input into the final decision. Other times, the reversal only kicks in under extreme stress. For all I know, it could be some kind of overload—one personality goes into shock and the communication system goes out of whack. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not.”

  “The gods arrange it so that one soul can help the other,” I said.

  “Oh come on, Fullin,” my sister suddenly snapped, “the gods? Haven’t you been listening? The gods have nothing to do with this. Traitors from the stars made Birds Home. It’s all an experiment…except they got bored and walked away when we stopped being amusing.”

  I stared at her in shock. My hand froze on the gun, the safety slide only partly moved to the right position.

  “Well it’s true, isn’t it?” my sister self said to Steck. “They had some notion about men and women getting along better if we knew how the other half lived?”

  “Yes,” Steck nodded. “It was an experiment. Although I don’t know if it was just about men and women. Remember that everyone has a Neut version too. I think the designers considered hermaphrodite the best choice: combining male and female in one body.”

  “You would believe that was best,” Cappie said bitterly.

  “But think about it,” Steck told her. “Your Neut self slept through the male and female years of your childhood. That makes the Neut more impartial than the other two. When you’re male, your female life seems distant and secondhand; when you’re female, your male life is the dream. But the Neut sees both halves as childhood ghosts; the Neut can wake at the age of twenty, and start life in equilibrium.”

  “Is that why you killed the male and female children?” I asked. “Because you thought being Neut was a gift?”

  I yelled the word “gift.” My voice covered the click as I slid the safety catch all the way.

  Steck sighed. “Before the Patriarch came along, Neuts were accepted. But like all tyrants, the Patriarch had to demonize someone and he could only get so much mileage out of scientists. He taught everyone that Neuts were devils; he even burned them as blasphemies against the gods. We aren’t blasphemies, Fullin. We’re just people. Aren’t we, Cappie?”

  Cappie’s eyes narrowed. She was squeezing the glass splinter so tightly, a bead of blood trickled out where the sharp edges had begun to cut her palm. “I never had a problem with Neuts like Dorr,” she said. “You’re another story.”

  “Neuts like Dorr,” Steck repeated. “Poor, crazy Dorr. Committing Neut was an act of desperation for her…or defiance, I don’t know which. It shouldn’t have to be that way. People should be able to choose Neut because it’s right for them. Healthy. It oughtn’t to be some forbidden attraction…some last resort of lonely people who can’t stand a normal existence. What’s wrong with deciding you want to be whole? Not stuck in the rut of one gender or the other, but free?”

  “And that’s why you killed the boys and girls,” my sister self said. “You want Neuts to be accepted again, and you think when the Neut children go home, Tober Cove will be forced to take them in.”

  “Exactly!” Steck answered. “The cove will be faced with an entire Neut generation—their own beloved children. Hakoore may hiss and howl, but even he can’t force parents to exile their babies. You tell me, Fullin: how do you feel about a Neut Waggett?”

  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; everyone 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.