Commitment Hour

'And that's what you think Tober Cove is?' I asked. 'Some project built by traitors who came back from the stars?'

Rashid nodded. 'The OldTechs were obsessed with gender differences, Fullin: which traits were innate, which were just a result of training. In the years after OldTech civilization collapsed, it's not hard to believe that some of the star-siders set up a research program here — to see what happened when people had the chance to be both male and female…'

'Or both,' Steck added.

'Indeed,' Rashid said. 'An experiment to see what differences persisted even when people saw both sides of the gender gap… and could straddle the middle if they wanted.'

The sheet of blackness covering the gap in the fence was beginning to tatter. Holes opened in the goo as other regions began to thicken — a crisscross pattern congealing slowly into the familiar diamonds of chain-link. Red specks appeared on the black surface: simulated dots of rust. The underlying black changed color too, fading to metallic steel gray.

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.

'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.'