Commitment Hour

coordination just before changeover and would repeat the same games when the children came home again.

The kids checked themselves out just as thoroughly after each change. You just couldn't help staring at yourself. A whole year had passed since you had occupied your other self, and even if the body had just been sleeping in Birds Home, it had still been growing — changing — while your eyes and brain had been living elsewhere.

You heard a different voice echoing in your head.

So you marveled at your arms: they had hair or they didn't, and all the moles and freckles you'd been used to were now replaced by a different set, ones you vaguely remembered from a year ago but which seemed darker or bigger… more noticeable anyway, and you thought all the other kids would gawk at these strange marks on your skin.

And my oh my, your skin… especially once you hit puberty. You couldn't help touching your skin. It was skin exactly like the skin you lusted after just days before. I don't know why my skin had such an effect on me. Of course, there were also the overtly sexual body parts, and yes, a lot of teenagers (including yours truly) held solitary Orgasm Derbies every day for a week after each gender swap; but for me, having different skin was always the most arousing change. Male in a male body, I might find myself remembering how my female half had longed to stroke a boy's chest or thighs, to feel muscles close beneath the skin, the hard warmth… and female in a female body, I still recalled the pure lust that boiled in my brother self at the sight of a mere bare shoulder…

You felt sexy. That's the simple truth. You looked at your skin, your legs, your body, and you knew you were sexy. You knew how the opposite sex burned in your presence. And for a few weeks, until you got caught up in your own new burning, you knew you were wonderfully, powerfully desirable.

In those few weeks, lovemaking was always lazily relaxed — enthusiastic to be sure, because you'd slept for a year and were juiced up now with the urge to take your newly regained equipment for a ride. But for a while, you never asked, 'Does he like me? Does she want me?' You possessed a comfortable confidence, knowing you had what your bedpartner craved.

Doubt only surfaced later: when the sweat-sheen dried and the whispers in the dark strayed into topics beyond, 'Isn't this great!' When you had to deal with each other as people instead of bodies. When, 'Of course he wants me!' gained the tag, 'But does he want me the right way?' When your sweetheart wanted to set a definite time to get together and you preferred to play it by ear.

When being who you were stopped being a delicious novelty, and settled back into a snarled tangle of normal humanity.

Suddenly, the realization struck me: after today, I'd never experience that golden self-wonder again. I'd be myself, day after day, locked into a single identity till I died.

Feeling that, I knew the real reason why parents came out into the streets to play Catch with their children: to remember when they thought they'd never stop being new.

Hakoore and Dorr lived in a house of gray flagstone, meticulously preserved since OldTech times. No doubt it had taken a few tumbles in the four hundred years since OldTech civilization committed suicide… but when a flagstone wall collapses, you can just stack the stones again, using fresh mortar and timber framing. Wood houses rot, and bricks erode one pock at a time; Master Stone, however, gives his children a chilly permanence, so they can last to see the Great Arrival at the culmination of all things.

Dorr came out even before we had set foot on the porch. I don't know what she had been trying to do with her hair — mere minutes ago in front of the Council Hall, it had been combed to ignorable anonymity. Now one side was clumped like a haymow, while the other was frazzled to the consistency of a bird's nest that's been gale-whacked out of its tree. It was the kind of mess a seven-year-old girl makes when she discovers the principle of 'teasing,' then loses her patience halfway through. Surely Dorr was past that stage… although now that I considered it, I couldn't remember her ever coifing herself beyond the minimal limits of neatness. Most of the time she let her hair go about its independent business, as if she were loath to burden it with her own expectations; I wondered what had sparked this sudden change.

Did she want to impress Lord Rashid? But here she was now, meeting him nose-to-nose on the porch steps of her house without a flicker of emotion crossing her face.

She said nothing, waiting for Rashid to speak first. Rumor whispered that Hakoore once told her she had an ugly voice, and she'd used it sparingly ever since; but sometimes I wondered if Dorr had started the rumor herself so people would hate her father. Whatever the cause for her silence, I'd seldom heard her talk over the past years… even during that odd period when Dorr just happened to be lingering outside our house every time I headed to the marsh for violin practice.

Rashid eventually realized Dorr would not bubble out effusive welcomes, so he accepted the conversational duties himself. 'Hello. We're looking for the Patriarch's Man.' He spoke slower and enunciated more clearly than usual. Perhaps he thought Dorr was wrong in the head… not an unnatural conclusion for anyone looking at her semi-threshed hair.

'We have to see Hakoore,' I told her. 'You could say it's official.'

Dorr raised an eyebrow.

'Nothing to do with his visiting me in the marsh,' I said hastily. 'Something else that's come up.'

She shrugged and held out her hand. To me. The gesture was surprising enough that I put my hand in hers without thinking. She closed her fingers carefully, as if worried about causing me pain — evidence that she must know what Hakoore did to me in the marsh — but after a moment, she gripped me warmly and pulled me forward up the stairs.

This was strange behavior, even for Dorr. Yes, she'd had that crush-smush on me when I was fourteen, but that had vanished as uneventfully as it first arose. These days when I played violin for weddings and such, I still noticed her watching me with glittering intensity… but Dorr was glittering and intense about everything she did.

Besides, I was used to people ogling me as I performed. The price of talent.

Had Dorr been oiling a torch for me all this time? Maybe letting it flare brighter, now that Cappie and I weren't cooing with domestic bliss? Had she made an effort to gussy up her hair to catch my eye — one last kick at the can on the day I would choose a sex for the rest of my life?

And had she thought of this on her own, or had Hakoore put her up to it?

Oooo. Ugh.

I could just imagine the old snake whipping into his daughter, hissing about her duty to the Patriarch. 'Granddaughter, go influence that young weasel.' Dorr would diligently set about prettifying her hair, and just as diligently sabotage the whole effort in submerged protest against Grandpa's dictatorial ways. It had nothing to do with me — she might still find me attractive, even as she beat her hair with a whisk to scare me off. Somewhere in the quirks of her mind (maybe the same place where her unsettling quilt designs got hatched), she might even be drawn by the idea of submitting herself to her granddad's disciple, the same way she submitted to Hakoore himself.

The Patriarch's Man was forbidden to marry, but he was definitely allowed to dally. Way back when, the Patriarch had supposedly sampled all the women in the village — with their flattered permission, of course. Hakoore was now too old for fleshly urges — at least I hoped he was, because the idea of him tangling sheets with a woman made my stomach churn gravel — but in his day (I had it on good authority), he besported himself in accordance with the Patriarch's outreach-to-the-masses example.

Would that be my life if I became Hakoore's disciple? And was Dorr now holding my hand because the idea baited some hook in her mind? Maybe Hakoore didn't need to pressure her more than a nudge… not if she'd been waiting all her life for an excuse to approach me.

Or maybe I was reading too much into simple hand-holding. This might just have been her unschooled attempt at being a good hostess… or perhaps sympathy for how her grandfather had bruised my knuckles at dawn.

Sometimes I wish the gods had given us the ability to read each other's minds. Alternating genitalia each year is nice, but there are questions it doesn't begin to answer.

The interior of Hakoore's house smelled of Dorr's dyes: dampish plants from onions to bloodwort, some fresh, some crinkling their way into the late stages of decomposition. I knew she kept her mixings in the basement — during my female years, I sometimes bought dyes here rather than make my own — but the odors barged their way out of the cellar with the determination of a drunkard, settling thickly into the cloth oversheets that covered all the furniture.

Those oversheets were densely embroidered: a few with Dorr's work (slanted horses stretched like taffy, winged spirits burying their faces in leaves), but mostly with the work of her mother. Dorr's mother had been a meticulous needleworker; or more accurately, an obsessed one. From dawn to dusk, she filled her days with French knots, lazy daisies, and countless cross-stitches… literally filled the day, with no time spent on cooking, cleaning, or even getting dressed.

No one ever told me what caused the mother's compulsion — whether a friend had betrayed her, a lover died, or the gods spoke to her in voices that drowned out the rest of the world. Perhaps Hakoore had traumatized her with the Patriarch's Hand, crushing her under its grip whenever she misbehaved. Whatever the reason, Dorr's mother simply stitched with all her strength until the day Dorr turned twelve; then the mother went to the basement, drank a jugful of her most poisonous dyes, and choked her life away with smeary rainbow vomit. ('She must have dreamed of that death for years,' Zephram told me. 'She must have dragged it along like a weight tied to her ankle, until it started dragging her.')

All of this may explain why Dorr seldom spoke, why she made the quilts she did, and why she passively submitted to her grandfather's will… but I'm suspicious of glib hindsight analysis. It was too easy to say Dorr had slipped helplessly into her mad mother's shoes. Dorr was not buffeted by irresistible winds in her mind; she just liked the role of someone shadowed by insanity. It shielded her. It excused her from small talk, and from her Great-Aunt Veen dropping hints that she wasn't getting any younger. When Dorr's baby by Master Crow died in a four-month miscarriage, Tober Cove accepted the death as the sort of bad luck that happened to Dorr.

(Cappie actually slapped me when I whispered Dorr might have tried a sip of the plant dyes too. Tobers aren't supposed to know there are vegetable extracts which can spill a fetus out of the womb before its time.)

With all these thoughts running through my head, I found myself staring at Dorr more intently than I intended… and suddenly she turned, meeting my gaze with hers. She studied me for a moment, as if debating whether to break her silence and ask that most female of questions, 'What are you thinking?' I saw no madness under that mad hair — simply a woman of deep and silent privacy, in the world, but not of it. Her lips parted and she took a breath to speak; but at that moment, a cough sounded across the room and Hakoore shuffled in through the doorway.