Commitment Hour

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 active 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