Halfway Human Read online

  It turned out there were three partnerships among the four people: Gambion and Auri, Gambion and Bors, and Bors and Linna. So the men were maintaining two relationships at once, one homosexual and one heterosexual. I asked the women if they also had other partners, but they laughed and said they didn’t have the energy. They seemed quite amused that I found it odd.

  “Don’t people pair off where you come from?” Linna asked.

  I replied, “If we want more than one partner, we do it serially, not all at once. Though it doesn’t always work out that way.”

  I also learned that Auri, Gambion, and Bors—a three-generation triad—all had taken the same honorific, “Tappany.” What they have created is, in fact, a pseudo-family based on a chain of teacher-student (or sponsor-protégé) relationships rather than blood. Linna, being outside the “family,” had the slight formality of an in-law.

  Since no one seemed at all secretive or self-conscious, I ventured to ask, “Are same-sex partnerships as common as cross-sex ones?”

  They disagreed—Auri holding they were not, Gambion holding they were, Bors siding with Gambion, Linna tactfully abstaining. From the discussion, I gathered that sexuality is seen as a spectrum, with bisexuality the “normal” state, and strict homo- and heterosexuality the rare extremes at either end. However, value judgments are not attached; the attitude is very much chacun à son goût.

  Either the conversation or the drinks were making me a little overheated, and I was glad when Gambion suggested we repair to the pool. Everyone picked up their drinks and went to the back door, which opened on a large, domed common area. It was brightly lit with piped sunlight, and full of growing plants—even small trees—that formed secluded little glades where people could sit privately. Streams of water ran in stony beds to an irregularly shaped pool in the center.

  We chose a place near the edge of the pool, where there were chairs and a table to set our drinks on. Then my companions proceeded, without the slightest self-consciousness, to strip naked for their swim. I could not escape it—I began to do likewise—but at the last I could not bring myself to take off my briefs. They all looked at me curiously—I expect they had been hoping to see if Capellans were made the same as Gammadians—but no one said a word. They dived in, all but Auri, who said she didn’t want to get her hair wet, so merely dabbled her feet in the water. Since the rule seemed to be “no clothing in the pool,” I sat down at the table.

  Presently Linna came back and stretched out on a nearby stone ledge to dry in the “sunlight.” I didn’t want to appear standoffish, but couldn’t think of a single topic of conversation to broach with a pair of stark naked women. Fortunately, Linna and Auri were looking at a fortyish woman across the pool from us, standing on the edge playing some game with a man in the water (she was naked, of course).

  “She says she’s not ever going to do her duty,” Linna said resentfully.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Auri said, her voice sharp with disapproval. “Why should she? Her fortune’s made.” She looked at Linna appraisingly. “Have you applied for a license?”

  The subject seemed to fill Linna with gloom. “Yes. I’m waiting for the test results. It’s not a good time, but then, when is? I might as well get it over with, and I need the money.”

  I couldn’t imagine what they were talking about.

  “It’s not so bad,” Auri said. “You shouldn’t believe all the stories people tell. Some women do it again and again, just for the money.”

  Linna looked faintly disgusted.

  “What are you talking about?” I finally said.

  “Procreation,” Auri said.

  “You mean, pregnancy?” The two women nodded glumly. “You don’t want it?”

  “No, why should I?” Linna said a little defensively.

  I thought about it. The reward of pregnancy is to have the baby; but children here are raised in creches, apart from their parents. “Do you ever get to see the child?” I asked.

  “You can if you really want to, for the first two weeks,” Auri said. “They counsel against it, because you get emotionally involved. I didn’t choose to see mine.”

  “Then what’s the reward?” I said.

  “Money,” they both said simultaneously.

  We got into quite a discussion then. Linna’s attitude, it seems, is quite widespread. And why not? They have reduced motherhood to mere babymaking. As a result, to keep the population up, the orders and communities have to bribe women to reproduce. The financial rewards are substantial, enough to pay off the debts all young people incur to their communities for training. It is, they assured me, one reason women are often more well-to-do than men. There is no penalty for the woman who chooses not to reproduce, other than the censure and gossip of other women. But I think I detected in Auri’s and Linna’s condemnation a thread of private envy.

  “Do you get to choose the father?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Linna said, “assuming your genetics are compatible.”

  “And who decides that?”

  “The Order of Matriculators.”

  “They are the ones who issue the licenses?” Both women nodded. “They guard the genetic pool,” Auri said. It struck me then that something of the sort is needed. Since no one knows who they may be related to, involuntary incest is a real possibility.

  At that point, the two men came back, and the women immediately changed the subject. I wondered whether pregnancy was an improper topic to discuss in front of men, and if so why the women had been so open with me. Perhaps they didn’t quite consider me a man. I was an alien first, male second. My inability to disrobe in front of them might have been fortunate after all. Preserved at least some of my magnetic mystery. (Ha!)

  No one moved to put their clothes back on till after we had eaten dinner, and I eventually grew accustomed to the sight of breasts bobbing in front of me. It is, perhaps, a good thing that the treatments on Capella seem to have killed my libido. I felt not the slightest stir of sexual interest the whole evening.

  ***

  “Why don’t I ever see the people who clean my room?” I asked Annika the next day.

  “There aren’t any people who clean your room,” she said impatiently. She was already upset with me because I had tried to draw her out on the subject of pregnancy. “Can’t you ever talk about anything important?” she had said. Perhaps the subject is a tender one with her.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I thought you said the blands clean my room.”

  “That’s right,” she said. Then, when I still looked perplexed, she explained as to a child, “Blands aren’t people.”

  At first I thought it was a linguistic problem. “I thought ‘bland’ was your name for a neuter worker,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Neuters aren’t people?” I was dumbfounded.

  She looked as if I were a hopeless imbecile.

  “What are they, then?”

  “They’re...unfortunates. Children who never matured.”

  I was beginning to understand. “Are they mentally handicapped?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re slow and childlike. They need looking after.”

  “I would like to see one.”

  She had barely been containing her frustration with me, and now it boiled over, hissing. “Why are you so interested in all the dirty, disgusting things? I thought you were going to want to know about our art and our thoughts and our culture. All you care about is what’s gross and indecent.”

  I was perplexed and a little worried by this reaction. First, I had no notion how I had provoked it. The only subjects I had broached that morning were pregnancy and neuters. Neither one seemed particularly dirty or indecent to me; obviously, I was missing something. Second, I could sense another negative report on its way to Ovide. That in itself I could deal with, as long as it went no further. What I didn’t want was for anything negative to get back to the First Contact team. My credibility isn’t the best with them, and I
don’t want my chain jerked for no reason. So I opted for conciliation.

  “I’m sorry, Annika. You’ve got to remember I’m still new here. I don’t know a lot of things you take for granted. If I’m saying something offensive, you’ve got to tell me.”

  “Well, I did,” she said, a little embarrassed now at her outburst.

  “Thank you. And I do care about your art and thoughts and culture. At Magnus I went to an opera that taught me a lot. Maybe you can take me to some more.”

  “All right,” she said, immediately brightening.

  This led to an entire week of relentlessly high culture. It wasn’t entirely useless. Art—representational art, at any rate—can be extremely informative, since it thrives on the clashes and inconsistencies that throw all custom into high relief.

  Yet Annika was almost comically unable to relate the plays we saw to reality. To her, these were sources of cultural pride, not actual depictions of society. When I would question her about the actions of a character, she would say, “Those things didn’t really happen.”

  “But they could have happened, couldn’t they?”

  “That’s not the point. They’re symbolic.”

  “What do they symbolize?”

  “The greatness of our culture.”

  The girl is a dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist.

  One day I managed to escape the clutches of Annika’s cultural hegemony tour and made my way to the coffee house alone. The proprietor is a bustling, busy woman who is very friendly & curious about me. I managed to strike up a conversation with her. Seems she is not a patternist, but “factor” of a community that manages establishments of entertainment all over the convergence on a kind of franchise system. I.e. the restaurant actually belongs to her community, but she manages it and trains postulants (young people not yet firmly attached to an order or community) in the business. I asked her if the postulants did the washing up and cooking, and she laughed heartily. “No, the blands do the dirty work,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen one here,” I said with interest.

  “Good,” she said, smiling a little nervously. “I don’t want the customers losing their appetites.”

  Apparently the mere sight of a bland is enough to put one off one’s feed. Now I was really curious. “But they do the cooking? Does everyone know that?”

  “I expect so,” she said a little reluctantly. “We’re not a fancy place that can afford human chefs. People know, they just don’t want their noses rubbed in it. But I keep my blands clean, let me tell you.”

  Since she had said “my blands,” I asked, “Do they belong to you?”

  “Of course not.” I could tell she was on the edge of being offended, and was making allowances for my outlandish ignorance, “They belong to my community, same as I do.”

  “Could I see them?”

  Now she definitely turned frosty, “I don’t think so,” she said. “They’re scared of you. If I let you in their space, I wouldn’t get a lick of work out of them the rest of the day.”

  “They know I’m here, and where I’m from?” I asked. She nodded. This might explain a great deal. “Why are they scared?”

  “Don’t ask me,” she said, giving an exaggerated shrug. “Who knows what notions get into their heads.”

  I was going to ask something else, but she rose and said, “I’ve got to get back to work.” Her manner had cooled considerably. Apparently I am fated to offend everyone here without knowing what I’ve done.

  Since the damage was already done, though, I chanced one last question, “Annika, my guide, says the blands clean my rooms, but I’ve never seen them, either in the room or in the hallways. Why is that?”

  She drew closer, apparently fearing the other customers would hear my question, and said in a low, hurried voice, “I daresay you have a graydoor in your quarters.” When I shook my head, she added, “Yes, you do,” and left.

  When I got home I searched carefully. I found it in the kitchen—a small, gray metal door I had taken for some kind of utility access panel. It had no knob or latch, and fit flush with the metal frame. I got a knife from one of the drawers and slid it into the crack to see if I could trip a latch or something. At that moment I heard a short exclamation behind me and turned to see Annika standing there, looking as horrified as if she’d discovered me butchering puppies.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  It was perfectly obvious what I was doing, so I said, “Seeing if I can open this door.”

  “That’s the graydoor!” she said, in a tone of utter disgust.

  “I know,” I said.

  A variety of emotions crossed her face—horror, fear, repulsion. At last she burst out, “You are such a disgusting little man!” and stormed out of my quarters.

  I was perplexed. I sat down in my lounge, still holding the knife, my self-image a little bruised by her description of me. I had clearly violated a behavioral code—one was apparently supposed to ignore the fact that neuters existed. But the intense emotion of her reaction seemed out of proportion.

  I was almost relieved when Ovide sent a message calling me into her office. She offered me tea, then sat looking at me a little sadly, like a grandmother regarding an errant child. “I’m afraid I am going to have to replace Annika as your guide,” she said.

  “I swear I don’t know what I did,” I said. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t deliberate. I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t any one thing,” Ovide said. “She just found the assignment too challenging to her notions of good behavior and good taste.”

  Meaning, of course, that I had behaved neither well nor tastefully. “Someone’s got to explain these things to me,” I said.

  Ovide paused, then set her teacup down with care. “There are a lot of people here—Annika is one—who don’t like to think about ugly or negative things. It’s a quirk we have. Annika said that was all you ever wanted to talk about—the bad side.”

  I thought about it. In a way, she was right. “I like to look at conflicts and contradictions, because they illuminate so much about a culture,” I said. “Where a culture is most itself is not in the areas where it is complacent, but where it’s under attack either from outside or in. The boundaries where it has to defend itself and so define itself.”

  “Our culture is not under attack,” Ovide said, then added deliberately, “unless it is from you.”

  “No!” I said at once. “Absolutely not. We have no desire to change you or meddle in any way. We only want to learn. What I’m saying, Ovide, is that every society has self-contradictions and seeds of instability in itself. I’m beginning to understand where a few of yours might lie.”

  She looked at me very seriously and said, “We have a lot to learn from you, Magister. But remember, it’s a dangerous thing you’re doing, trying to probe beyond peoples’ self-deceptions.”

  It was a remarkably perceptive thing for her to say, considering how little she’d known me. I said, “I spent a long, hard time coming to understand my own self-deceptions.”

  “Are you the better for it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was not a very good person, once.”

  “Well,” she said, “only we can decide what is good or bad for us, or what delusions we want to keep.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Only my ignorance has gotten me into trouble. As soon as I understand you, I swear I’ll be a model citizen.”

  She smiled then, and I felt the screws loosening. She wasn’t going to report me. We parted on good terms.

  I think I have learned something important from Annika. Her reaction is more honest than anyone else’s. I hit a nerve with her, one of those sensitive spots that reveal a tension point. But what is it?

  I must be more on my guard.

  Chapter Six

  That evening after Deedee had gone to bed, Val joined Tedla in the studium. All day she had been half expecting WAC to show up, but there had not even been a call.

  Tedla was sitting on the bed, leg
s drawn up. When Val sat down, the neuter gave her a fleeting smile. “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  “The people from my planet,” Tedla answered. “When do you think I can see them?”

  “In a week, maybe,” Val said. Less than four days were left for her. The passage of time made her anxious.

  “Why so long?” Tedla said.

  “You really want to see them, don’t you?”

  “Why does everyone doubt that? You’ve never been an exile. You don’t know what it’s like. I never thought I would hear my own language again, or talk to someone who knows...well, what to think of me.”

  Gently, Val said, “But Tedla, what they think is that you’re not human.”

  “Yes, that’s the point. I’m not. It’s not that I dislike the way you are. You’re just fine, for you. But I’m not like you.”

  “If you’re not human, you sure do a damned good imitation of it.”

  “Yes, I know,” Tedla said, leaning forward to look at her seriously. “That’s just it. It’s an imitation. I’ve spent twelve years learning to pass as one of you. Learning how you talk, how you think. I can imitate you well by now. But that’s all it is.”

  Val felt some misgivings. “Would you go back if you had the chance?”

  It looked poised on a knife-edge. “You think I could?”

  “It depends on the negotiations, I suppose. But if they reopen contact...it would be up to you and them, then.”

  Tedla let out a breath. It looked keyed up, expectant. “Of course I’d go back! For twelve years I haven’t even dared to hope it could happen.”