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  The neuter looked away indifferently.

  The sedative had clearly taken effect—too much effect, perhaps. Val itched to ask outright if Tedla were telling the truth about its name and origins, but something warned her an adversarial approach would only make things worse. She needed to establish an atmosphere of trust.

  “All right, let me tell you a little bit about myself,” she said. Without much plan, she began to talk at random about the new copartment, and Max, and Deedee, and the picnic they were planning. When she next paused for breath, Tedla was watching her closely.

  “You have a child?” it said.

  “Yes, Dierdre, but we call her Deedee. She’s really a good kid, even though she can be a terrible pain.”

  “I’ve never known a Capellan child,” Tedla said.

  “Would you like to see her picture?”

  “Yes.” At last, Val thought she saw a flicker of interest in the neuter’s face. She went over to the wall screen and accessed her home file, picking out her favorite picture—an impish Deedee looking over her shoulder at the camera. Tedla came to her side, gazing at it in fascination.

  “She’s a little fiend,” Val said.

  Tedla looked fixedly at her, obviously uncertain what to say, and somewhat troubled. Choosing its words carefully, it said, “You don’t like her, then?”

  Val laughed. “Don’t be silly, Tedla. Of course I like her.”

  “But...fiend means something horrible.”

  “I just know her, Tedla. Children are nasty little brutes, you know. And we love them anyway.”

  “I see,” Tedla said, as if it didn’t.

  “You’ll understand if you ever...” She remembered too late that the person at her side could never have children, and finished, “...get to know any children well.”

  Tedla appeared not to have noticed her slip; in fact, it was preoccupied with some hidden thought “You love them, even if they do perfectly horrible things? Even if they betray you and hurt you?”

  The question was obviously more than theoretical. “Yes,” Val said seriously. She watched Tedla’s face, and saw the motion of memories across it. She was getting somewhere now.

  “Would you like to meet her?” Val said.

  “She’s here?”

  “Yes. Just a second, let me go find her.”

  When she poked her head out the door, Joan was coming down the hall looking for her. She said, “Joan, go call Deedee. I want Tedla to meet her.”

  Joan didn’t move. “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “Humor me. I’ve got a hunch,” Val said.

  Deedee appeared from a doorway down the hall, saw Val, and came racing toward her, bubbling with news. Val said to Joan, “Make sure the recorder is running.” Then, to Deedee, “I want you to meet someone, Dee. Pretend to be good, okay?” Then she ushered her daughter into the mad alien’s room.

  Deedee stood inside the door, staring at Tedla, who had retreated behind the chair and now stared back, both disconcerted and fascinated.

  “This is Tedla, Deedee,” Val said. “Tedla comes from another planet—a planet so far away it takes fifty years to make the trip.”

  Deedee didn’t react. She turned to Val and said, “Mama, did you know that people die here?

  “No,” Val said, startled.

  “Mandy showed me. They have a bin for stiffs.”

  Good Lord, Val thought, what an introduction. She looked apologetically at Tedla. “I warned you.”

  Deedee spied the bed, and dashed over to it. “Mama, did you know these beds move?” Before Val could react, she clambered up onto the formable bed and pressed one of the controls. Nothing happened. “Oops,” she said, performing now. She pressed another square, and the bed rose to mold itself around her body. She froze it, then scrambled up to look at the impression she had made. Both Val and Tedla moved forward instinctively to catch her as she came close to tumbling backward off the bed. “See?” she said.

  “Yes, I see. Now put it back, Deedee. That’s Tedla’s bed.”

  Deedee turned around and stared at Tedla again. “Do you know how to play Scratcher?”

  “No,” Tedla said.

  “What will you pay me if I teach you?”

  “Not now, Deedee,” Val said to her budding infocapitalist. “Come sit down with us.”

  Deedee allowed Val to lead her to a chair, and all three of them sat. The child was now looking at Tedla fixedly. She said suddenly, “Are you a man or a lady?”

  Val was ready to jump in, but Tedla said, “Neither. On the planet I come from, there are three sexes, not just two.”

  “The polite word is ‘asexual,’ Deedee,” Val said.

  Val expected more questions, but Deedee was pondering the explanation. Val said awkwardly, “Tedla, which should we call you—‘he’ or ‘she’?”

  “Actually, your word ‘it’ is closest to the pronoun we use on my planet,” Tedla said. “We even use the same word to refer to animals and inanimate objects, like you do.”

  “I don’t know. ‘It’ seems slightly...derogatory.”

  “Well then, that’s an accurate translation, too.”

  Deedee said, “I live with both my mama and papa.” She had just been learning that not all children did.

  “I never knew my mama or papa,” Tedla told her. “No one on my planet does, except the really poor people who live like savages.”

  “Did you know your gramma?” Deedee asked.

  “No. I was brought up in a creche with lots and lots of other children. We had docents and proctors and postulants instead of mamas and papas.”

  Deedee’s nose wrinkled. “I would hate that.”

  Tedla leaned forward, looking relaxed for the first time. “No, you wouldn’t. We had lots of fun. We didn’t sleep in beds; we had a roundroom. It’s a big, circular room with a domed ceiling. The floor is cushiony, and you can bounce really high on it. All the walls are soft, so no one can get hurt. No grown-ups ever came into our roundroom.”

  “How high could you bounce?” Deedee said.

  “Almost to the ceiling.”

  Deedee stood up on the chair and held up her arms. “This high?”

  “No, higher than that.”

  Deedee bounced on the cushion. “This high?”

  Val made her stop. “You’re not in a roundroom, Deedee. You’re in a grown-up place, and you have to act like a grown-up here.”

  Deedee settled down discontentedly. Val took her hand and said, “Come on, I think it’s time for you to go see gramma again.”

  When Val had taken Deedee out into the hall and returned, she found Tedla sitting with its head in its hands, as if in the grip of dejection.

  “Tedla? Are you all right?” Val said, a little alarmed.

  Tedla looked up at her. Its face was not desperate, as before, but achingly sad. “It’s all coming back to me. Things I haven’t thought about in years. Seeing her reminds me of what it was like.”

  Val sat down facing Tedla. “Are they good memories, or bad?”

  “They are all intertwined, good and bad.”

  “Tell me,” Val said softly. “Tell me everything.”

  Tedla looked down at its hands. Val glanced over at the terminal to make sure it was recording. The red light blinked yes. Then, very softly, the alien began to speak.

  Chapter Two

  When I think of home, I see myself as a child, fitting my toes in the bark-crevices of a knotty old aiken tree, trying to climb high enough to look out over the autumn-colored river valley where I grew up. There was a spot on the third tier of branches where I could rest, legs dangling, and see all the broad floodplain, densely wooded with deciduous trees, a calico of gold and umber. The river seemed impossibly far away, a sinuous streak down in the bottomland, sometimes hidden with mist, sometimes shining like metal, sometimes chocolate-colored with mud. On still days I could hear the boat-horns echoing across the valley in the moist air.

  Gammadis is a very beautiful planet. Everything
there seems old. The plants, the insects, all fit. Here on Capella Two, the terraforming seems thin and ill at ease. The trees look like house plants, or museum pieces—on display, aware of their uniqueness. There, you pick up a handful of soil and it smells of eons of germlife permeating the planet. The river valley looks as if it formed of its own accord, not like an invention with vegetation veneered over it. There were even fossils in the limestone cliffs.

  We don’t call it Gammadis, as you do—we call it Taramond. Once, when I stupidly corrected Magister Galele on this, he laughed and said, “Yes, and my homeworld is called Earth. The natives of Baker’s Knot call their home Eden.” Only later did I learn what he meant—that every planet is named after the origin world of mankind. As a child, I didn’t even know there was such a place. Or I thought my homeworld was it.

  I still dream about that river valley where my creche was. But in my dreams the valley has changed. Some transformation has come over it—the water has risen and flooded the valley rim to rim, and it is full of mysterious islands—or all the land is built on, full of drab composite houses like Capella Two. I don’t like those dreams. I don’t want the valley to change. But there is nothing I can do about it, because it’s me that has changed, and all I hold in memory has changed with me. Not even in myself does that place exist any more, because the person I was then doesn’t exist, and that child was part of the place, as surely as the whiskered mudfish in the river. That child is gone forever.

  The creche where I grew up was, of course, underground. The Capellan investigators who came to my planet kept asking why all the civilized societies lived underground, and all we could say was that it is the natural way for people to live. I could not imagine anyone but the poorest vagrant or the bravest frontier sappers living on the surface. When I came here, it took years before I felt easy sleeping in your flimsy houses perched right on the surface. I kept having an irrational feeling that somehow gravity would fail and we would all be flung off into space.

  The creche had eight levels, one for every stage of a child’s life. We started out as infants on the lowest level, the nursery. When we learned to walk we graduated to the next level, and kept moving up at every developmental phase thereafter. On the highest level lived the protos preparing for matriculation. They were on the threshold of humanity. We feared and envied them at the same time. They seemed more alien than the adults, because they were at the nexus of transformation.

  The rooms were all round, like bubbles, which in fact they were: Our buildings are not so much constructed as inflated, like bottles, from lignis, which hardens into a lovely, warm substance like wood, only stronger. Some bubbles were large, like the refectory where we all ate in shifts, or the assembly hall on level three. The rest were classrooms, recreatories, hygiene stations, labs, and offices for the gestagogues. Each level was laid out in a circle, ranged around a central axis. At the center was the roundroom for that level. At night the proctors would turn us all loose in our roundroom, the place that was ours alone. We would come pouring in, bouncing as high as we could on the cushiony floor, pushing each other into the soft walls. The only furnishings were pillows, and we had some mighty pillow wars before we would fall asleep, naked bodies all tangled together in the middle of the floor. The roundroom was the center of childhood. It was where we traded secrets, learned songs and stories, and sometimes fought out our rivalries safe from adult intervention.

  I say there were eight levels, but in fact there were several below the ones we lived in. Those were grayspace: the territory of the blands. We knew nothing about it. Our food appeared from those levels, as did our linen and all the equipment used to clean our classes and playrooms; but we gave it no more thought than the electrical wiring. I learned later that there was an entire parallel building we never saw, made up of service corridors meant to keep the neuter staff invisible and out of mind. In a creche, that was futile.

  The docents and proctors were all human, but as infants we were largely raised by neuters. I can see this surprises you, but it seemed quite natural to us. Blands were perfect for the tedious chores of infant care—nighttime feedings, diaper changes, the constant vigilance against harm. Both parties throve on it. As babies we quieted to a neuter’s touch as we never would to a human’s, and as toddlers we loved them for their patience and dumb devotion. Then we grew older and learned to despise them for the same reasons.

  We have no families on Gammadis, as you do: at least, not ones based on biological relationships. Capellans tend to assume this means that our children lead loveless lives. It isn’t true. On the contrary, we cherish our children as if they were human.

  ***

  “Just a second,” Val interrupted. She had been trying to keep quiet, despite several hundred questions in her mind, but this was too much. “Could you explain? Your children aren’t human?”

  “No,” Tedla said. “We are biologically different from you. Our children are not miniature adults, as yours are. They are born sexually undifferentiated. Our bodies don’t change until puberty, when sexual characteristics appear. Until then, there is no way of knowing whether a child will become male or female—or whether it will be one of the minority who never mature, and remain in a childlike, asexual state forever.”

  “So children are neuters?” Val asked.

  Tedla seemed shocked. “No, certainly not. They are proto-humans. They may look like neuters, but they have the potential for humanity.”

  “I see. You have to forgive my stupidity, Tedla. I don’t know much about Gammadis.”

  Tedla looked at her uneasily. “This probably offends your Cappellan sensibilities. To you, children are already human. On Gammadis, we think of the years before puberty as an extended gestation period. That’s why learned people will call a creche a ‘gestatory.’ The fetal body and mind take that long to mature.”

  “Unless they never do.”

  “That’s right.”

  When Tedla resumed the story, it seemed thoughtful.

  ***

  Often I have searched my memories for any clue, any warning, of what I was going to become. I don’t know at what point my fate was decided. Perhaps it was at conception, or with some roll of random adrenal dice at puberty. Or—and this is what it’s hard not to dwell on—was it something I did? If only I could spot it.

  I don’t know how I got my nickname, Tedla. Often it was obvious how a child got its nickname, like Moptop or Fidget, because it described the child’s looks or temperament. Other times, names are just nonsense words, or some whim of an adult. They don’t mean much, as a rule. They are only placeholders, a little better than “You There.” We all looked forward to receiving our real names at puberty.

  I was a perfectly average child—neither very clever nor remarkably stupid, not especially talented athletically or artistically, but always able to hold my own. The only thing that made me stand out was looks—I was a pretty child. Though the gestagogues tried hard not to have favorites, I got more affection from the adults than the less attractive protos—it was only natural. Good looks counted for less among my peers. I wasn’t a natural leader like the brighter and more talented protos, but at least I was never rejected or excluded. When we would form up teams for games, I would be chosen in the very middle.

  Virtually none of our learning was competitive, not even the sports. We were never ranked against each other. Often we had to complete assignments in groups, and we were evaluated for cooperation as well as achievement. As a result, I truly have no notion where I stood in my class, as Capellan children do. But I expect I was right in the middle.

  Our classes were the usual academic ones—reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and so on—but we also had sociability training and morality classes, since we had no families to teach us those things. Every day we had meditation to nourish the infant souls growing inside us, and on the seventh day we visited the chapel. The chapel was the only part of the creche that was above ground, and it resembled an indoor garden—gla
ss roof open to the sky, contemplative paths to stroll on, little groves and grottoes where you could sit, with gates to close if you wanted to be private. We never used it, as some sects do, for communal worship. At our creche, religion was a solitary matter, something between a person and his or her own god.

  My earliest memories are of the second level. We played in a soft, bubble-shaped room with bright lighting and marvelous, though well-worn, toys: chutes and clamber-frames and ball pools. Many of the toys took more than one to operate, so that we were forced to cooperate with other children, or else enlist one of the blands to help us. I can still see the soft, vein-roped hands of the neuters that used to watch over the playroom. There was one in particular, named Joby, who never tired of playing games, no matter how repetitive or banal. Everyone in the creche thought of Joby as childlike itself, as if its brain had regressed to an infantile state. Later, I learned that all blands have their particular tactics for survival—protective coloration that helps them blend into the background. Joby’s sweet, childlike nature was what protected it from harm. The adults taught us to speak to Joby, and others like it, in a firm and gentle tone, slowly, and to use simple words.

  One of my most vivid early memories concerns Joby. It happened in the winter of my seventh year. The weather was very severe that year. Drifts of snow nearly buried the chapel and all the familiar landscape around the creche. When we went up for worship, the dome above was covered by a gray layer of snow, and in the odd twilight we could hear the wind pushing against it, trying to get in. Down in the creche, of course, we were quite safe and cozy, a self-sufficient little community, even though cut off from the rest of the world.

  We protos were caught up in the preparations for Leastday, our main festival for that time of year. We were decorating the assembly hall for the climactic event of the season, the lighting of the Summer Candle. The candle tree was set up and strung with paper flowers. Fluffweed wreaths and treeshell garlands adorned the hallways. Everything was fragrant with the smell of glue, candle wax, and butterberry cakes cooking in the kitchens down below. Even though the cakes were meant for the celebration, a postulant would sometimes bring one up warm from the oven, and we would crowd around to get a piece, the adults admonishing us to share. On the day before the candle ceremony, the younger proctors got together and made an expedition out into the blizzard to gather evergreen boughs. We thought they were heroes. We hung up the boughs, getting our hands sticky with sap, and then the air was full of the tang of needletrees.