Halfway Human Read online

  Now I really felt fear. “You made a mistake!” I said. “I’m not a bland. I’m human.”

  She rolled her eyes as if she’d heard it a hundred times. “Just be good and put it on.”

  “No!” I shrieked. I had to escape, and find someone who would set this all straight. I bolted for the door I’d come in through, but it was locked. There was another door on the other end of the room. I ran to it, and pulled it open. Beyond it was a poured-stone corridor with exposed lights. Grayspace. Terrified, I slammed the door and backed away from it. It was the only way out. I was trapped.

  The woman at the desk was placing a call, asking someone else to come to the room. “Bring a tranquilizer,” she said.

  I looked around, desperate for some alternative. The locked door back into the world opened, and an invigilator came through. I ran to her. “This is wrong,” I pleaded. “They’ve made a mistake. Ask Proctor Givern. I’m not a bland.”

  Her voice was calm and authoritative. “There isn’t any mistake, child. No one is forcing this on you. Your own body made the decision. It’s your nature; you can’t be any other way.”

  The air was pressing in around me; I could barely breathe. The full horror of my situation was coming clear. Everything was constricting: the world, my life, the future. I began to cry. “It’s someone else who’s the bland,” I said. “It’s not me. I’m a person.”

  She said gently, “You’ll be happier this way. We’ll find a place where they’ll take care of you. You’ll be with others of your own kind.”

  “I don’t want to be with neuters!” I shrieked.

  She took out a hypodermic needle and said to the other woman, “Come help me.”

  “No! I’ll be good,” I said. But the other woman had already come up behind me. She took me in a lock-hold from behind, pinning my arms at my sides while the invigilator gave me the injection. They both walked away then, indifferent. The invigilator left. The other woman tossed the uniform across the room at me. “Put it on,” she said. It fell at my feet.

  I stood there naked, with no alternative. It came to me then: My life was over. I was shut off from the world forever, behind a locked door of gender. I sank to the floor and began to cry bitterly.

  But gradually, as the drug took effect, my thoughts stopped whirling, and my panic dulled. I looked down at the uniform and thought there was no help for it, I might as well put it on. I didn’t feel sleepy or dizzy, just indifferent. I could still think, but somehow the thoughts seemed sluggish and calm. This is how blands feel all the time, I thought. I am thinking like a bland.

  I pulled the uniform on and went to the door. As I stepped into grayspace I knew that somewhere, back in my real mind, I was screaming in protest—but it was like a faraway voice I could barely hear. It simply didn’t matter.

  The corridor turned a corner, then led into a large waiting room with stained, peeling walls and a scuffed tile floor. It was crowded with protos in gray uniforms, all sitting on the floor or leaning against the walls. Some of them were crying; others looked frightened, or simply stunned and indifferent, like me. The room smelled of fear. I chose a spot as far away from any others as I could get. They were blands. I wanted nothing to do with them.

  We all waited there for several hours as more neuters joined us. The room became so crowded we couldn’t help but touch one another. Across the room there was some scuffling where one neuter refused to let any others get near it; it had cleared a space around it with its fists, and was threatening anyone who got too close. “Filthy pubers,” it kept saying. “Touch me and you’ll regret it.” I finally stood to stretch my legs, and was shocked to see that the pugnacious bland was Bigger. I couldn’t imagine Bigger as a neuter—it had been so obviously male. As I watched, Bigger seized the hand of someone who had gotten too near it, and bent back the fingers till the victim screamed in pain. Everyone else surged away like a frightened flock of animals, and I was crushed back against the wall by bodies.

  A door opened and two adults appeared. Bigger began to yell obscenities at them. With quick, practiced movements they seized its arms and shoved its face against the wall, then checked its number. “Let’s take it straight to surgery,” one of them said. As Bigger struggled and swore at them, they dragged it out and closed the door.

  There was a silence after they left. I felt chilled even through the drug-haze. There was only one conclusion I could draw: Some neuters might be natural, but others were created. Someone had spotted Bigger’s abnormality, and had decided it could not be allowed to reproduce.

  Presently the door opened again, and two men in the uniform of bland supervisors began calling out numbers. “Come to the door when you hear your number,” they said loudly. The blands around me listened eagerly, hoping to hear their numbers called. I was indifferent. All that could possibly lie ahead was a life of mindless labor. Waiting in this room was not so much worse than that.

  However, my number was one of the early ones called. I pushed forward through the press of unsexed bodies, feeling dirtied by them but unable to be revolted. When I got to the door, the supervisor directed a group of six of us down a hallway to where another supervisor met us and checked us off one by one on a list. This time he asked for our names, and entered them beside our numbers. I realized then that I would never have a real name. I would always be just Tedla.

  “You’re lucky blands,” the supervisor said. “You’ll be going to Brice’s.”

  A plain freight aircar waited to ferry us to our new home. It had no seats or windows, since we were just cargo now. I didn’t mind. A window might have given me a view of the birthpool, where my crechemates would be celebrating their new humanity. I hoped they wouldn’t be looking for me, or even remember my name. I wanted no one to guess what had happened to me.

  It was a very long flight. When at last we landed and the metal door rumbled back on its tracks, a chill, humid air gusted in along with the dull, gray light of late day. Outside, our new supervisor was waiting: a massive man with an egg-shaped head, broad on the bottom and narrow on the top, with a brush of black hair and eyebrows that made a straight horizontal line across his face. He directed us down a path toward a stand of tall pine trees, their tops hidden in mist. We walked, saying nothing to each other, till we came to a ramp that led down into the ground. When we passed through the door at the bottom we found ourselves in a large, poured-stone room stacked with crates and boxes of supplies. In the center was a cleared space where a group of about twenty neuters our age already waited.

  The supervisor came in after us, walking in a brisk, authoritative way that contrasted with our own uncertain amble. Immediately the room focused on him. He climbed onto a wooden pallet with a slate, and began to call our names, scrutinizing us one by one as if to memorize our faces. When he looked at me, I felt completely naked, as if there were no secrets he couldn’t uncover.

  When he had accounted for everyone, he began to talk in a voice that wasn’t raised, but still carried through the room. “All right, you blands. I know what’s in every one of your minds, so let’s get it out of the way right now. You all think there’s been some mistake, that you’re not really a neuter. Maybe some of you think the matriculators are going to find out their mistake and come get you. Every neuter that’s ever come here has thought the same. Well, let me tell you, they don’t make mistakes. I’ve seen thousands of you come and go, every one of you thinking you were really human, and not once has it been true.” He turned to someone in the front row. “You. Tell me what you really are.”

  The bland didn’t know what he wanted, so it just stared at him. He said, “Come on, say it.”

  “I’m a neuter?” the child stammered.

  “Shout it,” the supervisor ordered.

  “I’m a neuter!”

  “You.” He turned to the next one.

  “I’m a neuter!”

  He went through the group, one by one, and we all shouted the hated words. I’m lying, I thought inside, even as I said
it.

  “All right,” he said. “Now, you’re all really lucky to have been sent here. We’re going to train you to do jobs most blands never get a chance to do. People all over the world have heard of Brice’s Blands, and they compete to get ’em. Some day it’ll be a real feather in your cap, to be able to say to the other blands, ‘I’m from Brice’s.’ We’ll treat you well here. You’ll get plenty to eat, and the work isn’t dangerous. But let me tell you something. If you goof off, we’ll ship you out of here so fast you won’t know what happened till you wake up working in a trap mine somewhere. What do I mean by goofing off?” He began to raise thick fingers. “Laziness. Disrespect for your supervisors. Disobedience. Uncooperativeness. You stay away from those things, and you’ll do just fine here. Okay?” He scanned all our faces again. “My name’s Motivator Jockety. If your supervisors have any trouble with you, I’m the one you’ll get sent to. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  “No, sir,” several blands mumbled.

  “All right. Now you go eat and sleep, and you’ll start your training in the morning.”

  He exited the room through a raw-wood door. When he opened it, I glimpsed through it the soft curves of a lignis hallway decorated with woven hangings. Human space. There was a clunk, and a bland opened a gray metal door for us, leading into a cinderblock hallway. We crowded through it and soon came to a refectory like the one in the creche, except that there was not a color in it and the tables were all bare metal. It seemed big enough to seat only about sixty at once. Either there weren’t many blands here, or they ate in shifts.

  I watched the others in my group a little suspiciously as I ate. They seemed like perfectly normal protos. There was none of the blankness in their eyes I associated with blands, nor the sluggish indifference. I wondered when it would start to show. Some of them were talking with each other, telling which gestatories they came from, speculating on what we would be asked to do. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

  The drug must have been wearing off, because when we were herded into the shower room and I could throw my gray uniform into the laundry I felt a surge of hatred for it, and beat it against the wall a few times first. Showering, I fantasized that I could wash away all the neuterness. When we all filed into the roundroom, it came to me that I would never sleep in a bed as long as I lived. I would never eat in a cafe. I would never enter human space again, except as an intruder. My world—my place—would be one of dingy gray service corridors. Worst of all, I would soon cease to care. Soon, my brain would start to dull from the natural acuity of childhood into the vacancy of the adult bland. I looked down at my body, till today so normal and so right. Now I knew the truth: I was a mistake of nature.

  Feeling the sharp bite of despair, I sat down with my back to the wall and drew my legs up with my arms around them. I laid my head down on my knees, to block out all sight of what was around me. I tried to remember the multiplication tables, thinking that if I kept my mind going, maybe it wouldn’t get neuterish, even with all these neuters around me.

  Someone touched my shoulder, and I looked up. A new group had come into the roundroom. They were only a little older than us, but unlike us, you could tell they were blands. I had never seen an adult bland naked before, and I stared. They looked just like old children.

  One of them was kneeling in front of me. It said, “Come sleep with us. You’ll feel better.”

  “No,” I said.

  It didn’t press the point, merely shrugged and went off to the center of the room where they were all settling down in a tangled blandball on the cushiony floor. I turned my face to the wall and laid down with my back to them all. I slept that way all night.

  ***

  The next morning, I began to learn how to be a bland.

  We woke early when the automatic lights came on in the roundroom. The routine after that was much like being at the creche: we went through hygiene, crowded around to get new uniforms from the bin, then went into the refectory for breakfast. After that, the “newbies,” as they called us, gathered in a room where a human supervisor came to talk to us.

  “Here at Brice’s, you won’t get to say, ‘I’m just a bland, I can’t do that,’” she told us. “We’ve got a lot to teach you, and we’ve got to do it in the next nine months, before you start going dumb on us. So you’re going to have to pay close attention every day, no excuses. There’s nothing we teach that’s so hard a bland can’t do it. We know, because we’ve trained thousands of you. If any of you start lagging behind, we figure you’ve decided not to cooperate, and you’ll be shipped out. Got it?” She looked around, but no one said they hadn’t got it.

  She divided us up into small groups then, and gave us our assignments. I was with four others assigned to the kitchen. When we came in, there were already five older blands working there with a supervisor. The supervisor told us our jobs. Mine was to help wash up the dishes from breakfast. When I saw the mountain they formed on the counters, I thought there was no chance I could get it done before lunch. An older bland was already at work on them, moving sluggishly. As soon as the supervisor went off, it winked at me and said, “I’m Hyper.”

  “You are?” I stared, thinking it had to move faster than that to convince me.

  “That’s my name, stupid,” it said.

  “Oh. I’m Tedla.”

  “You ever done this before?” it said. I shook my head. “Well, never mind, I’ll teach you.”

  “What’s to learn?” I said disdainfully.

  It drew itself up, doing a perfect imitation of the pompous tone of the supervisors. “Maybe some places there’s no technique to washing dishes. Here at Brice’s we’ve got standards.”

  I glanced nervously over my shoulder at the supervisor. But Hyper had judged her distance perfectly; she couldn’t hear.

  “Here, you scrape and rinse,” Hyper said, giving me a long-handled brush. “I’ll bring the dishes to you.”

  With the supervisor out of sight, Hyper earned its name. It kept up a steady stream of advice to me—what leftover food to put in the garbage can, what could be washed down the drain; how to set a pot aside to soak; how to load the dishes in the machine; what soaps to use for what purpose. Its tone was alternately teasing and bossy. “Don’t be so conscientious,” it said, after having nagged me a thousand ways to do it right. “You’ve got to let the machine do some work. The essence of this job is knowing the capacities of your machine.”

  “Did they send you to dishwashing school or something?” I grumbled.

  “This is it, kid,” Hyper said. “You’re learning from the expert.”

  The supervisor happened by then, and Hyper’s attitude suddenly changed. It became silent, sullen, and slow. She watched us work for a few seconds, then said, “You learning your lesson, Hyper?”

  It mumbled, “Yes, ma’am.”

  When she went off I glanced at my companion, wondering what that had been about. Hyper whispered, “I don’t normally work down here. I’m here as punishment for sassing.”

  “You sassed a supervisor?” I asked, surprised.

  “Are you crazy? If I’d sassed a human, I’d be digging ditches in the Lower Beyond. I sassed another bland.”

  “That I believe,” I said ruefully.

  “Are you being impertinent?” it said officiously.

  “What are you going to do, make me wash dishes for it?”

  The supervisor called out, “Cut the chatter, you two, and do your job.”

  We worked in silence for a while. I could overhear the supervisor teaching the blands who were cooking lunch for the humans. They were discussing how to make a sauce of the exact right consistency—smooth, translucent, neither runny nor sticky. It sounded very complicated. I wondered if they would ever expect me to learn that. Our own lunch was already cooking in big boiling pots—a root vegetable we call groundnut, if I could judge by the smell.

  The humans had separate dishes that we had to load in a special machine. I had never seen
fine china before, and I admired it as I was rinsing. The plates were light blue, painted with delicate designs of cherry blossoms. They were so pretty, they looked out of place down in this rough, industrial kitchen. I felt sorry for them.

  “Never use the harsh soaps on the good china,” Hyper instructed as we loaded the human dishes. “And make sure not to use any soap with sulphur compounds on the silver, or you’ll be up reshining it all night.”

  “How do I know if the soap’s got sulphur?” I said.

  “Read the label. You can read, can’t you?”

  “Of course I can.” It had just never occurred to me that blands would have to.

  There had been over sixty of the plain stoneware bland-plates; there were only a dozen of the china. “Is that how many humans are here?” I said.

  Hyper glanced over its shoulder to locate the supervisor. “Right.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They train us.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Well, they have to eat a lot and get massages and pedicures so we’ll know how to do it.”

  “Is that the only reason this place exists? To train blands?”

  “That’s right,” Hyper said.

  I managed to learn more as we unloaded the clean dishes and stacked them ready to use again. Brice’s was set up like one of the elite private houses in a convergence. Until that moment I hadn’t known there was such a thing—I had thought everyone lived in the community and order houses. “Only the most powerful mattergraves and electors have private houses,” Hyper explained, “and they’re not really private, of course—they belong to the community. But they’re where the community heads live, and do their entertaining and business.”

  “Is that the kind of place we’re going to?” I said, impressed.

  Hyper nodded. “The ones who graduate are.”

  No wonder they were training us specially. The mattergraves and electors needed better blands than the run-of-the-mill person. I began to think it wasn’t just a cruel hypocrisy, the way everyone kept telling us how lucky we were.