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  HALFWAY HUMAN

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

  Halfway Human copyright © 1998, 2010 Carolyn Ives Gilman. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  Cover illustration by Christos Georghiou. Used under license. You can view more of Christos Georghiou’s art at www.christosgeorghiou.com

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN (Smashwords Edition): 978-1-60450-466-8

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-440-8

  www.PhoenixPick.com

  Great Science Fiction at Great Prices

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

  *****************************

  Prologue

  By night, the enclave of Djenga Shana glittered, and smelled. The palaces of temptation clustered around the waystation, feeding on the nutrient wash of tourists that issued from the wayports, ripe with money and desires. The Worwha Shana, natives of the enclave, made no secret of their wish to eradicate all infidels who didn’t share their odd religion; but they had no intention of doing it by violence. Instead, they provided the deadly vices that allowed the infidels to destroy themselves.

  It had just rained in Djenga Shana. The streets were smeary with neon rivulets, and a steam-haze rose from hot pavement. Down a dark side street, where the walls were plain gray brick, a door opened for a moment, exhaling a hot breath that smelled of stimsmoke and ambergris. The light from the door silhouetted a figure that slipped out, barefoot and wrapped in a raincoat that was sizes too big. In the dim light it was impossible to tell whether it was a boy made up to look like a woman, or a large-boned woman trying to conceal her sex. Pulling the raincoat tighter and cinching the belt, the figure thrust hard fists into the pockets and headed for the street.

  Participarlors, stimulation studios, creep shows, and druggeries showed their wares for the passing crowds. Beneath a patch of translucent pavement, a naked dancer writhed under shifting lights, first scalded red, then skeletal white, jerking like a marionette on piano-wire strings. The wanderer in the raincoat paused to watch, collar turned up high. Then a nearby door opened its moist, fleshy lips, and a feedback buzz of music issued, making the tense body under the coat flinch back. Over the music came a woman’s laugh, sharp as a needle, and the wail of a pocket alarm going off. Then the door pursed shut, choking off the noise.

  Underfoot, the pavement was strewn with discarded things whose pleasure-value had been used up: a fresh corsage, partly crushed; a tangled wad of shorn hair; a lost endorphin-brooch, the kind made to be pinned direct through skin. The barefoot figure stopped to reach out for the brooch, then thrust the outstretched hand into a pocket instead, where it closed over something hard. For an instant the light from a sign that read Every Wish Fulfilled picked out a glint of tousled golden hair as the wanderer turned down a narrow alley.

  The sound of a sharp explosion ricocheted out onto the street. A panhandler paused in midspiel; two drunken students with songbirds tethered to their shoulders peered down the alley. But there was nothing to see, no novelty to lure them, and they turned away. The streetlights cycled through the spectrum, hallucination bright. Their glare hid the trickle of blood mingling with the greasy rain.

  Chapter One

  When the call came, Valerie Endrada was in the bedroom pawing through a jumble of unpacked containers, looking for her daughter’s swimsuit. The mess frustrated her; lately, she had been feeling that her life was full of disorganized corners heaped with things she couldn’t find. Moving had only made it worse. When she heard Max talking to the dinery screen, it was a welcome distraction.

  He had blanked it by the time she looked in. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “For you,” he said. “It’s Joansie.”

  That was Max’s nickname for his mother when she was on a rampage of good works. Activism ran in his family; at the moment, Max was wearing a Freedom of Information shirt, with a red headband around his forehead. He looked ready to defend the barricades.

  “What’s she want?” Val said.

  Max shrugged. “She’s not at home, she’s at the clinic.”

  “Uh-oh,” Val said. It was Allday, and they had planned on a picnic with Max’s parents. Joan was supposed to be at home fixing food.

  “Look, Mama,” Dierdre said cheerfully, plucking a red fruit from her breakfast bowl and holding it out.

  “That looks good, Deedee,” Val said. She had never seen anything like it. It had a vaguely repulsive heart shape, with gaping pores on the surface. To Max she said, “What are you feeding her?”

  “It’s called a strawberry,” Max said, holding out a container of them he was packing for the picnic. “One of those retrogenic things—backbred till it’s healthy again, you know.” Val took one and bit in cautiously. The inside was white and crunchy; the flavor was tart. She tossed the remainder into the compost. “You didn’t pay for them, did you?” she asked.

  “Of course not. It was some sort of promotion.”

  Val went into the studium to take the call.

  Joan looked breathless and scattered, as usual. She always tried to keep her graying hair pulled back in a bun, but it was constantly getting loose. The blue lab coat she was wearing meant she was on duty. She had retired from practice five years ago, but still did volunteer work at a charity clinic in Djenga Shana.

  “Valerie! Good,” she said, all business. “I didn’t know who else to call. I’ve got a very peculiar problem here.”

  “Joan, why are you at the clinic? I thought we were having a picnic.”

  “They called me in because they were short-staffed. And I’m calling you in now. I need your expertise.”

  “Professional or personal?” Val asked.

  “Professional. As an exoethnologist. I’ve got a crazy alien on my hands.”

  That was not terribly surprising, considering that Djenga Shana attracted some of the most indigent recent arrivals from the Twenty Planets.

  “Where’s your alien from?” Val asked.

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know. The patient’s got no ID, and isn’t very coherent.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a suicide case. It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen one of those, our prevention programs are so good.”

  “Why don’t you call a mentationist?” Val said.

  “I will, as soon as I know how to describe this patient. Val, this isn’t a him or a her.”

  “A himher?” Val said. That was an easy riddle to solve.

  “No,” Joan said a little crossly. “I know a Gyne when I see one. This isn’t an androgyne. It isn’t anything. No sexual characteristics at all—like one of those prudish children’s dolls. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  Val hesitated a moment. It went against the grain to give away information she could get paid for; but Joansie wa
s family, and it was in a good cause. At last she said, “I have, but you couldn’t have one in your clinic.”

  “I do,” Joan maintained.

  “No. What I mean is, there is only one documented case of true, natural asexuals—on Gammadis, the closed planet. No native has ever left it, and only about forty Capellans have ever seen it. What you have must be some sort of surgical construct, or a mutation.”

  “I wish you would come here and look for yourself. I’ve got a hunch something strange is going on. You’ll know what I mean when you get here. If you can make it by 9.50, we’ll still have plenty of time to get to the beach.”

  Val hit the time key to look up the university time. It was 8.90. A little over half an hour to get to the other side of the world. That was just like Joan. She swept people up in her crusades like a small, determined hurricane. “No peripheral vision,” Max sometimes said of her. But the fact was, Max had gone and married someone very like his mother.

  “I can’t, Joan,” Val said, even though resistance was futile. “Max would kill me. I promised to be in charge of Deedee today. He’s had to do it all week.”

  “Never mind that,” Joan said breezily. “I’ll call E.G. and tell him to give Max a hand.”

  The last time Max’s father had baby-sat Dierdre, she had come home calling people she didn’t like “infomongers.” Max had been more amused than Val.

  “I don’t know, Joan...” Val said.

  “Don’t try to fool me, you want to come. I’ll be expecting you.” Joan cut the connection.

  Val sat staring at the screen, which had reverted to clock mode. She clicked her thumbnail against her front tooth, a habit that made Max crazy. Actually, Joan had been right; Val was curious. She had gone into xenology dreaming of expeditions to new planets; but those days were long gone. No one could afford exploration any more. Magisters minor like herself might spend whole careers just going over dog-eared records from old expeditions, trying to extract from them one more monograph, never seeing any culture but Capella Two’s, never discovering anything new. Val was restless for distraction.

  “What was it?” Max said when she came out. The dinery table was heaped with picnic food; Dierdre had disappeared into her room.

  “Your mother wants me to come to the clinic for a while,” Val said. “She’s got an interesting case. We’ll have to meet you at the beach.”

  “Does that mean I’m taking Deedee?” Max said, his voice ominously neutral. “Wait until The Boss hears.”

  Deedee came racing in with a flexup toy in the shape of a fanciful alien. “Look what I’m taking, Mama,” she said. “Papa said I could.”

  Val knelt to be at her level. “Listen, sweetie,” she said, “Mama’s got to go somewhere for a while. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Do I have to go with Papa?” Deedee said, disappointed.

  “Yes. Don’t eat all the sawberries before I get there.”

  “Strawberries,” Max said.

  “I always have to go with Papa,” Deedee protested. “You never want to take me.”

  Val wondered if children were genetically programmed to pull their parents’ guilt-strings. She hesitated, and all was lost. Deedee brightened at the look on her face.

  “Go dress, and maybe you can come,” Val said. There had never been a more useless “maybe.”

  Joyously, Deedee raced off to her room. Max said, “To the clinic? Val, are you crazy? Have you ever been there?”

  “She needs to be exposed to other ways of life,” Val rationalized valiantly.

  Max looked beseechingly heavenward. “Well, don’t blame me if she comes home asking what ‘venereal disease’ means.”

  Val kissed him on the cheek and went to the bedroom to find her pack and university scarf.

  On the pumice path to the waystation, Val tried to ignore the bite of disappointment at their new, low-rent neighborhood. As Deedee ran ahead down the hill, Val looked out at the bone-gray moonscape, and told herself it wasn’t so bad. The subsidized copartment was perched high on the slope of a crater, and the enclave nestled below like some monster bird’s nest, a clutch of domed buildings, eggshell white. In the west the huge limb of Gomb spanned half the horizon, its colors bleached to pink by the rising sun. Everything seemed bright and clear-cut in the dry air—all but Val’s thoughts. They felt like a messy room, too small for all the piles of neglected problems.

  In their student days, she and Max had shared a jaunty contempt for the power structure, because then they could afford it. Val had been succeeding then—honors graduate, scholarship to study under a magister prime—and it had not seemed far-fetched to aim at a career as an independent contractor in the knowledge business. But the years since graduation had brought only frustration. The market was flooded with young magisters, each hawking an obscure expertise. One by one, her friends were giving up and signing life contracts with the big infocompanies, yielding all their future copyrights and patents for secure employment. So far, she had resisted that irrevocable step, hoping she only needed to repackage her knowledge to make it a more appealing commodity.

  “Presentation, that’s what I need to work on,” she would say to Max. He only rolled his eyes. He had supported her loyally, even though it meant staying home with Deedee because they couldn’t afford to send her to school. But Val’s enormous education debts were coming due. For a while last month their infoservice had gotten disconnected for nonpayment. Val had grown intensely guilty, knowing it was her fault, for putting independence before responsibility.

  The waystation jutted up from among the egg-domes like a shard of broken glass on edge. When Val stopped at the navigator, she found that getting to Djenga Shana was complex; with a twinge of guilt she paid for a printout of the shortest route. The station was crowded with holiday travelers. Holding Deedee’s hand, she dodged noisy families in bathing suits and hiking gear, lined up at the ports to the vacation spots. Her own destination port was almost deserted.

  Deedee wanted to go through the wayport first, so Val stood and watched as her daughter disappeared in the flash of a lightbeam, leaving only a wisp of steam. The sight always gave her a twinge of panic. Quickly, she paid her own fare, stepped in, felt the familiar tingle, then

  stepped out of an identical port in a waystation a thousand miles away. Deedee was there, studying some dried gum on the tile floor. Val took her hand again, then looked around for the next port on their route.

  Almost as soon as she stepped from the wayport at Djenga Shana, Val regretted bringing Deedee. She paused to rearrange the scarf that gave her academic immunity here, then took her daughter’s hand firmly. It was near noon, and the street was shuttered and empty. The garish signs looked faded and peeling, naked without the glamor of night and light. There was a pervasive smell of spilled beer cooking in the sun.

  “Mama,” Deedee protested, “don’t hold my hand so tight.”

  “I’m sorry, chick,” she said. She dreaded any questions.

  Outside a fetish shop, a Worwha Shana gbinja stood, wrapped in the gray tubular garment he had donned at puberty and would not remove until he died. It was ragged and stained around the hem and sleeves, but the tough fiber looked like it would outlast the man. He glared at Val with loathing from under a mass of unshorn hair, doubtless wishing her to Worwha hell. There was a story in the xenology department at UIC about a researcher who had lived with the Worwha Shana for four years, and when he left, his Worwha family still called him “heathen garbage.”

  When Val entered the clinic, two wan, barely dressed teenage girls were sleeping in the waiting room. Roused by her entrance, one of them eyed her suspiciously. Val knocked at the battered lexan reception window. The clinic was like an unarmed fort, constantly under siege by drug-seekers.

  Joan herself came bustling out to open the locked door. Deedee cried out, “Gramma! We came to visit you.”

  “Deedee!” Joan said, startled. Then, to Val, a whispered, “Why did you bring her here?”

&nb
sp; “Temporary insanity,” Val said.

  As they passed down the hall, Joan said, “Go on and help yourself to coffee. I’ll get Mandy to look after Deedee. Come with me, chickpea.”

  When Joan returned alone, she poured a cup from the coffee urn and stood sipping it, leaning against the wall as if a little too tired to support her own weight. “It was a pretty standard clientele last night,” she said. “A couple of mugged tourists, the usual overdoses and nerve burns, some sexually transmitted diseases. Then about 1.50 Cannie Annie—one of our local characters—came staggering in saying there’d been a murder. You can’t trust what she says, so we didn’t call the law. I went out to check.”

  “Joan! You promised us you wouldn’t go out of the clinic at night.”

  “Well, I’m not going to let someone die,” Joan said crossly. “Besides, Bart was with me. Annie led us to an alley, and there we found our visitor from another planet, lying in a pool of blood, wearing a raincoat and nothing else. It had tried to blow its brains out with an explosive gun.”

  “How horrible,” Val said softly.

  “It hadn’t done a very good job. Not even close. We brought it back, patched it up, checked it over. That’s when we found it was an ‘it.’ I’ve been checking the medical nets, Val, and I can’t find a record of any mutation like this. There could be a surgical explanation—god knows we see some strange body alterations here—but if so they did it without leaving a trace. And why would anyone choose to eradicate their sex?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t voluntary,” Val said. Here, she would believe anything. “Have you been able to ask the patient?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. Medically, the patient’s not in bad shape, aside from being a little low on blood. But mentally—well, at first it was completely unresponsive, almost catatonic. I gave it a standard antidepressant, and it got quite agitated and incoherent. The drugs ought to be wearing off now; maybe we’ll have better luck. Let’s take a look first.”