Commitment Hour

TWENTY-ONE A Coffin for Fullin

Beyond the open door lay a corridor sloping slightly downward. There were no lights — only the glow spilling from the hangar area behind me. After a time, I tucked the gun into my belt at the small of my back and walked with one hand brushing the wall. The stone was cold and weepy with moisture.

My moccasins whispered on the floor — not quite as silently as Dorr could move, but even with echoing rock walls, the sound wouldn't travel far. If I could catch Steck while she was busy with something…

But what would she be busy with? What did she want to do? She must have been planning this for twenty years — somehow meeting the Knowledge-Lord, persuading him to come here at this particular moment, lying to him about the "knock-out gas" so he wouldn't interfere with whatever she intended…

I just couldn't imagine what she wanted. Even wearing Rashid's armor, what could she do against gods?

But the gods used machines as tools — machines like the bird-servant, with wires dangling from its severed head. She had dealt with that machine easily enough.

Sacrilege didn't stop Steck for a second. I wondered what would.

As the light from the hangar faded behind me, I became aware of a glow far ahead. Good — I'd been worried that the gods and their servants didn't bother with lights because they could see in the dark.

Soon I could tell I was heading for a large chamber, lit to dim melancholy by gray-blue electric light-tubes. Holding my breath, I pressed tight against the corridor wall in case someone in the chamber might see me; but there was no motion out there, no sound. After a minute of listening, I moved forward cautiously.

The room was at least as big as Tober Cove's town square… and like the square it contained bodies. Bodies in glass coffins.

Every coffin was smashed and every body was dead.

I moved to the closest. Tears stung my eyes — Urgho, poor Urgho. It looked like he had been sleeping peacefully inside the coffin; then someone had hammered against the glass until it broke. Before the boy could wake, the killer sliced Urgho's throat with one of the broken glass shards: up, across, down. Urgho's blood had sprayed in gushers against the inside of the coffin until the flow gurgled to a stop.

Steck had done this. My mother. Then she went on to the next.

The next was Thorn, one of the noisy neighbors living in the cabin next to Cappie and me. She had been female over the past year, but this was her male body — dead, killed like Urgho, blood running down the walls of the glass casket and pooling in the bottom.

I moved on: Chum, Thorn's lover. Chum's male body, dead.

And in the next coffin…

The next coffin…

"Oh, Cappie," I whispered.

Cappie, the brooding male Cappie, drenched in his own blood.

She was supposed to Commit male, I thought. Her hands were burnt, so she was supposed to Commit male. But that half of her was dead.

I reached through the broken glass and laid my hand on his cheek. It occurred to me I had never touched her this way, male me, male her. "Cappie," I whispered.

The corpse was beginning to cool.

I forced myself to pull away. There was nothing I could do here — nothing but look, memorize why Steck had to die.

Cappie had been sleeping: the way all our souls slept in Birds Home when they weren't needed. His body was naked… and as I looked more closely, I saw tiny tubes and wires stretched out from the bottom of the coffin, reaching into Cappie's body from head to toe. Feeders, I thought. A mother bird brings food to her nestlings; and here in Birds Home, the gods supplied Tobers with food too, as we slept. Food, water, whatever care a body needs…

But these coffins were too frail to stand up to deliberate homicide. I could picture Steck in Rashid's armor, slamming her mailed fist against the glass, reaching in to cut a throat — Cappie's throat.

I moved to another coffin. The room contained dozens of the glass caskets, laid out in rows: first row, the oldest of our generation, Cappie and the nineteen-year-olds; next row, the eighteen-year-olds, all their male bodies; next row, the seventeen-year-olds…

Oh god…

I began to run, past the teenagers, past the children, to the coffins at the far end of the chamber. The youngest, the infants.

Waggett. His first time at Birds Home.

His last time at Birds Home.

Steck had killed him like all the rest — her own grandson. She had smashed through to his defenseless little body and cut him, spattered his blood.

I seized the Beretta and crashed its butt down on the coffin, bashing again and again until I had battered a big enough hole to pull out my son's body. He was so limp. I cradled him in my arms and he just lay there, his little hands floppy, his face slack.

The last time I had seen him alive, he had been happily making sheep sounds. "Baaaaaa!"

I lowered my head to his bare stomach and wept.

After a while, I laid him back in his coffin. There was no better place to put him.

I took the time to check every other coffin in the room. Perhaps Steck had slipped up with someone; perhaps she hadn't cut deep enough and one of the children was still alive.

But they were all dead — the male selves of every child in Tober Cove, slaughtered. Olimbarg. Cappie's other brothers. Even the male half of Ivis, throat cut just as her father's throat had been cut by Dorr.

All dead.

I took a ragged breath. Of my whole generation, I was the only male that Steck had allowed to live. Such love for her baby boy… but it didn't extend to Waggett.

Damn her, I prayed. All you gods, damn her.

Nothing happened. Here, in the home of the gods, they allowed such a thing to happen, and did nothing.

Opposite the door I'd come from was a second door… or rather an open entryway leading into another unlit corridor. Part of me was afraid of going there — I already suspected what I would find next. But the alternative was staying where I was in that silent bloody room, with Cappie at one end and Waggett at the other.

No. Forward.

The new corridor wasn't as long as the first. As soon as I entered it, I could see what was at the other end: another large chamber, similar to the first, filled with more glass coffins. I willed myself forward, though I knew what I would find: our female halves.

Our dead female halves.

Again, Urgho was closest to the entrance — a husky female Urgho, all freckles on creamy skin… except that the freckles were now mingled with blood flecks spattered from her throat.

One of Urgho's limp hands lay across her bare belly: a belly just starting to swell with the first signs of Master Crow's child. The child would never be born now. Urgho had wasted his time, "getting a little practice" by taking care of Waggett.

Poor Urgho. Poor Waggett.

This time, I went straight to the far side of the room, to the coffin in the same position as the one that had held my son. This one contained a little girl: a perfect little girl, with perfect baby skin and soft brown curls that had never been cut. There was nothing to indicate this was Waggett's female self, but I knew it was — a parent knows. I reached through the broken glass to smooth the hair off her forehead.

Just one touch. I wanted that. But I let her lie peacefully.

She was dead. Quite dead.

I moved methodically back through the room, checking for signs of life. The one-year-olds, the two-year-olds… all dead. I had seen them all so recently on the dock in Tober Cove. Ivis, Olimbarg, all the rest.

Cappie…

Cappie too. Her thin familiar body… the body I had made love with so often… the spring when I was fifteen, she had taken my female virginity, and later that summer, I had taken hers…

But her hands were seared to charcoal, and I had betrayed her many times. I don't know why those seemed part of the same thing.

I wanted to bend in and kiss her, but it would mean breaking more glass. Anyway, I wasn't sure I had the right to kiss her anymore.

Placed alongside Cappie was one extra coffin, one where there had been no coffin in the other room.

This coffin's lid was intact. Inside I saw myself.

I was still breathing.

My female half was alive. Steck couldn't bring herself to kill me.

Wielding the pistol butt again, I knocked in the glass — carefully, carefully, so I wouldn't cut her. First came a hole just above her feet, tapped out delicately, crack by crack. Then I worked upward, rapping the glass hard enough to star it without breaking through, then levering my hand underneath and lifting up so that the glass pushed out instead of in. I had to force myself not to speed up or cut corners; but at last I had cleared away the whole top, enough so I could reach in without fear of cutting myself.

"Wake up now." I gave her a light touch on the cheek. Her skin was warm and soft — I remembered how often I had been intoxicated by the feel of my own skin. For a strange moment, I looked down at her, my own naked body, my own breasts, and hips, and legs…

"This is sick," I muttered. With a mental slap to myself, I placed both hands on her shoulders (warm, bare shoulders) and gave her a gentle shake. "Wake up. Come on, wake up."

Her eyes fluttered, then opened. She smiled thinly, then reached up and touched a finger to my lips. "Cappie's right," she said. "You do look obvious."

Wires and tubes pulled away from her body as she sat up in the coffin. They left no mark.

"Good," she said.

I didn't understand. "Good what?"

"Good that they didn't leave any marks. I can hear what you're thinking."

"I can't hear you."

"So it's a puzzle," she shrugged. "Maybe Rashid can explain it."

"Rashid's out cold."

"I know. I know everything that's happened." She looked grimly toward Cappie's body. "I suppose it's like always — while I'm sleeping in Birds Home, the gods send me your thoughts. It's like I'm seeing it all in a dream."

"You aren't sleeping now."

"No, but I'm still… receiving. It's strange — as if I'm looking out my own eyes, but I can still see ghosts of what you're seeing too. And feel ghosts of what you're feeling." She slipped her leg over the side of the coffin and heaved herself out. "Give me your shirt."

"Why?"

"Because looking at my body is distracting you, and that distracts me. It's hard enough to concentrate as it is."

I wanted to protest; but before the words were even out of my mouth, she gave me a look that said I was wasting breath. They say you can't lie to yourself. With a sigh of resignation, I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it to her. She shinnied into it, then smoothed out the wrinkles. It was long enough to reach halfway down her thighs, covering her most "distracting" parts.

She caught my eye and winked. "I'd better be careful — I know how much you like women in men's clothing."

"This is unfair," I protested. "If you keep ragging on me because you know what's in my mind… we're supposed to be on the same side, aren't we?"

"We are," she replied. "On most things anyway. Like Steck."

"Right." The thought sobered me. "Steck."

"I don't suppose you'd let a mere woman carry the pistol?"

I shook my head.

She said, "You know bullets won't go through the armor's force field."

"I know. But I want to try anyway."

She nodded, then gestured toward the door at the far end of the room. "Let's go."

Another corridor led further into Birds Home. We walked it together, my sister self and I. Part way along, she slipped her hand into mine. I didn't even know I'd been longing for that, for a little human contact in the face of so much death… but she knew.

I suppose she felt the same need. We were the same person, weren't we?

Ahead lay a third chamber, with more glass coffins. As before, we stopped to listen before entering… but this room was as silent as the first two. Wherever Steck was, she must have gone deeper into the stone reaches of Birds Home. My sister and I exchanged a look, then moved forward to the first coffin.

Urgho again — a Neut version. Hairless face and womanly breasts. Penis and testicles. And just behind the scrotal sac, delicate labial lips.

The coffin's glass was intact. The Neut Urgho was alive.

"I'll check Waggett," my female self cried. She ran, and I was right on her heels. We crossed the room and skidded to a stop beside a coffin containing a pink-skinned Neut infant. It wasn't exactly like Waggett, either the boy or girl version of him, but the Neut's face was similar, like a brother-sister.

The child's chest rose and fell with slow, healthy breathing.

"It's got your nose," I said to my female self. I didn't want to cry in front of a woman.

She didn't care. She put her hands against the coffin lid, as if she could touch our baby through the glass; and tears streamed down her face.

We agreed to leave Waggett where he was. ("He," not "it.") As far as we could tell, he was safe and well cared for inside the coffin; better to leave him there until we had settled the score with Steck.

There was yet another corridor leading forward… but before we moved on, we made a circuit of the room to check the other coffins.

Neut versions of everyone else, all alive.

Strangely, we found no Neut version of me — the coffin was missing. But there was a Neut Cappie, breathing, asleep. The Neut's body was slim like the female Cappie, but taller, beefier around the shoulders.

The face was not so bad. You could get used to a woman with that face.

"Not a bad face for a man either," my female half put in, though I hadn't said anything aloud. "Are we going to fight over him?"

"Her," I answered.

We both smiled.

"He deserves a shot at Steck too," Female-Me said. "Steck killed his male body."

"They all deserve a shot," I replied. "Urgho, Chum, Thorn… they'd all help us."

"Help us how? Throw themselves bare-handed at the armor's force field?" She shook her head. "Anyway, they don't know what's been going on. Cappie does."

I nodded, as if I agreed with her logic. Of course, Cappie couldn't help us against the force field any more than anyone else. But I wanted her here with me, to make sure she was all right, to have her support…

"To show her how manly you are when you kill Steck?" Female-Me suggested.

"Will you stop doing that?" I asked.

She pointed to Cappie's coffin. "Just break the glass."

Cappie woke groggily. When she saw what she was, she screamed.

We held her hands. After a while, the scream faded to a whimper.

"Fullin," she breathed, "I didn't choose this!" Tears streamed down her face. "I didn't make any choice! I didn't!"

"I know," my sister and I answered in unison.

"They said I'd hear a voice, 'Male, female, or both.' But I didn't get to make a decision!"

"Shh." Female Fullin and I stood on opposite sides of Cappie's coffin. We reached out together to caress Cappie's cheek.

"Why are there two of you?" Cappie asked. She looked back and forth between my sister and me. "How can you both be here at once?"

"It's hard to explain," I began… but I stopped, lifted my head, listened.

Music came playing from the entryway in front of us… soft violin music. The tune was "Don't Make Me Choose": the song Steck had played in Cypress Marsh.

Calmly she emerged from the unlit corridor — wearing Rashid's armor, but with the helmet off so she could tuck the violin under her chin. As soon as she saw us, she stopped and lowered the bow. "Well," she said, "so this is it. Commitment Hour at last. And here I can see all three choices: male, female, and both. Two Fullins and a Cappie?"

If I'd been holding the Beretta, I would have shot her without a moment's hesitation; but I was holding Cappie's hand, with the pistol once again stuck in my belt at the small of my back. Cappie's grip had tightened unconsciously when she heard the music… and rather than free myself from her, I decided to let her hold me, draw whatever strength she needed.

Now was not the time for shooting anyway. I'd never fired a gun before. Books said they were hard to aim, unless you were standing at point-blank range. Did I want to start the bullets flying with so many children in glass coffins between me and Steck?

And Steck didn't know I had the Beretta with me. If I shot now and missed, I'd lose the element of surprise. Better to wait until my target was closer.

Female-Me nodded silent agreement with my decision. She turned toward Steck. "So your hands are steady enough to play," she said, "after killing a hundred children in cold blood."

"I didn't do anything that wouldn't have happened anyway," Steck answered. "You've seen the other rooms: male, female, and Neut versions of every child in Tober Cove. Think about what happens when you Commit. You, Fullin," she pointed toward me with the violin bow, "let's say you Commit male. What happens to your female half?" Steck turned to my sister self. "What happens to you… my pretty baby girl?"

She waited for us to answer: anyone, Male-Me, Female-Me, Neut-Cappie. Finally, it was my sister who spoke. "If he chose male, I suppose I never would have left my coffin."

"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 burn 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 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 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."