Halfway Human Read online

  I had spent the day in Crafts, working on my wreath, and by evening my neck was stiff from bending over. When I woke the next morning, I could barely move my head, and I felt lethargic and nauseous. One of the postulants noticed me moping around in the dressing room after all the other excited children had lined up for refectory, and she got me to confess what was wrong. After feeling my temperature, she quickly hurried me off to the clinic.

  Ordinarily, being in clinic was no hardship, since you got to miss classes and sleep in a bed of your own, like an adult. But that day there were no classes, and I felt mightily abused to be incarcerated, missing all the fun. But as the day progressed, I began to vomit and developed a headache that felt as if my brain were in a vise. No matter which way I lay, I couldn’t get comfortable.

  The next morning I realized how worried they were when the Matron came down to see me. She asked me some questions, felt my forehead, then went into the next room to talk to the clinician. At last she came back to my bedside and said, “Tedla, we are calling an aircar to take you to the curatory at Tapis Convergence, so you can get better fast. You’ll have to get dressed now. Once you’re there, they will take good care of you.”

  Now I am certain they suspected meningitis, which must strike fear into every gestagogue. The way we children lived gave free rein to any contagion we couldn’t be vaccinated against. Fortunately, those were few.

  One of the proctors helped me dress in coveralls and coat, then led me up to the top floor. It seemed cold and deserted. In the corridor leading to the entryway, we found Joby waiting, dressed in a coat. It looked terribly anxious. The proctor gave my hand to Joby and said, “Wait in the cloakroom till the aircar arrives. Stay with Joby, Tedla.”

  As if I were likely to run off. We waited a long time. I lay down on one of the benches, my head pillowed on Joby’s lap. The neuter stroked my hair. I had drifted off into an uneasy doze when at last the proctor came in and told us the aircar was here. “They had some trouble getting through,” he said. Out in the corridor, blands were carrying in some boxes of medicine, supervised by the clinician. They were tracking wet snow onto the floor, and I felt a groggy surprise that no one was scolding them. When the clinician saw me she squeezed my hand and said, “You’ll be all right as soon as you get there.”

  “Are you coming with me?” I asked.

  “No, Joby will go with you in the aircar. Someone will meet you when you get to the curatory.”

  Outside, the world seemed wild and alien. Every familiar thing was buried under a layer of snow almost as tall as I was. The sky was gray and forbidding; the wind slung a stinging handful of snow into my face as I tried to look around. The blands had cut a path through the drifts to the playfield, where the aircar had landed at an odd angle, its legs sunk deep into snow. Even in the path the snow was deep, and it was exhausting work plowing through it. When Joby saw I was having trouble, it turned and picked me up. I was astonished at the bland’s strength; it looked so puny. I laid my head on its shoulder, my arms around its neck, and let it toil through the snow for me.

  The pilot—a gruff, bearded man who looked displeased to be out in such weather—lifted me up into one of the two passenger seats and told me how to belt myself in. I looked out the open door to where Joby was still standing in the snow, looking into the aircar. It looked terrified. I said, “Don’t be scared, Joby. You’ll be all right.”

  Impatiently, the pilot said, “Get in if you’re going to.”

  Visibly steeling itself, Joby clambered up into the seat beside me, and the pilot slammed the door. I showed Joby how to work the buckles. The engine started with a deafening roar, and Joby clutched my hand. I felt the panic in its body, so I squeezed its hand and leaned against its shoulder.

  We rose into the air with a sickening swoop, then banked. Joby’s eyes were closed tight. I don’t know why I felt so little fear—trust of the adults, perhaps. Or perhaps it was Joby acting like a bland that made me feel the obligation to act more human. At any rate, I stared out the window, trying to keep track of the horizon. Soon we rose into clouds, and there was nothing to see but grayness. Still the turbulent wind buffeted us; the ride was rough as a groundcar on a bad road. Joby and I were flung to either side, or nearly lifted out of our seats when the car dropped into a pocket of air. The pilot was talking to someone on his headset. He said nothing to us.

  At last I felt the stomach-numbing sense of falling as we began a steep descent. At the very last moment we broke out of the clouds, and I saw a lighted landing pad below us. The snow was not so deep here, or the wind had swept it away. We settled down with a last bump. Without even stopping the engines, the pilot shoved open the door. Eager to be out, Joby unfastened its straps and clambered down, turning to lift me to the pavement. Then it looked around, trying to figure out what to do. “Where do we go?” it asked the pilot. He pointed and said, “Entry’s over there. Clear out, I’ve got another run.”

  Joby took my hand and started off across the pad. Behind us the aircar door slammed shut and the engines began to roar. We headed down a ramp that led underground. When we passed through the door into a clean, tubular hallway, the silence was stunning.

  No one was there to meet us. We stood looking around, bewildered.

  “Maybe we should wait,” I said.

  But there was no place to sit, so Joby steeled itself and chose a direction to go. Presently we came to a more frequented area. People in curatorial tabards were going about their business. Though several times Joby stopped to ask a question, people kept passing us as though we were invisible, and Joby was too timid to stop them.

  At last we came to a circular lounge area with a counter in the middle, where a woman sat. Joby went up to her. She ignored us at first, but Joby stood there patiently, and at last she looked up. “What do you want?”

  “Someone was supposed to meet us,” Joby said in a faint voice.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  Anxiously, Joby said, “We came from the creche. Tedla’s sick. Someone’s supposed to tell us what to do.”

  “What creche?” she said.

  Joby and I looked at each other. It had never occurred to me that of course there was more than one, and ours must have a name. At last Joby, thinking feverishly, said, “Cliffside.”

  The woman looked at me. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s sick,” Joby said.

  “I gathered that,” she said drily. Before Joby could summon the courage to say more, she said, “Never mind,” and punched a number on her terminal. When someone answered, she said, “I’ve got a proto out here from Cliffside Creche. Do you have any record about this?” She listened for a while, then turned back to us. “Sit down over there.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Joby said, grateful to be told what to do at last.

  We settled down to wait on a couch. The excitement of the ride had given me an adrenaline-powered energy that now began to take its toll. I felt uncomfortably hot, and taking my coat off didn’t help much. My headache was radiating down my neck, and making me feel sick again, though I had eaten nothing for over a day. I slumped against Joby, and it put an arm around me.

  The lounge was very busy; people were constantly coming in, talking to the woman at the desk, sitting down to wait, and being directed into the many halls that radiated out from the hub where we were. Everyone but us seemed to know where they were and what they were doing. I watched them with a growing conviction that we were in the wrong place. We were lost, and no one cared. At last I couldn’t sit up any longer, and so I lay down, my head on Joby’s lap. It rubbed my back comfortingly. Joby was the only familiar, trustworthy thing in this place; I felt safe as long as it was near, though I knew it was as frightened as I.

  After a long time Joby started to get up, and I clutched at it. “Don’t go away,” I said.

  “I’m just going to talk to the lady. I’ll be right back,” it said.

  From the couch I watched another fruitless exchange.
Joby turned back to join me, its shoulders slumped in dejection. We didn’t say anything to each other, but I hugged it, and it kissed my cheek. “They’ll do something soon,” Joby promised.

  Of course, they didn’t. As I drifted in and out of a feverish doze, I noticed that the woman at the desk had changed, and soon Joby had to go over and explain the whole situation again, from the beginning. After that I lost track of time. My mouth was parched, but I didn’t even have the energy to ask Joby to fetch me some water. It hurt to move, it hurt even to open my eyes.

  I was roused from my torpor by the sound of shouting. The scene I saw then was surreal as a hallucination. Joby was standing at the counter, its face red with anger, its voice raised, the woman looking at it in utter astonishment. “Hours—hours!—that child has been lying there sick, with you ignoring it,” Joby shouted passionately. “What are you going to do, wait for it to die before you pay attention?”

  The whole room fell silent, shocked to inaction by the sight of a bland stressed beyond its limit, shouting—actually shouting—at a person. Never in my life had I seen such a thing, and even in my condition I felt a pang of fear for Joby. Recovering from her paralysis, the woman at the counter stabbed at her console and said, “Could you send a curator down here immediately?”

  “Joby!” I cried out, afraid they would clap it in chains and haul it away, and I would be left all alone. At the sound of my voice, Joby whirled around and came flying back to me. There were tears in its eyes. “Hush, Tedla, it’s all right, it’s all right,” it said, still so distraught its hands shook.

  Seconds later, it seemed, a sweet-smelling, gray-haired woman in a curator’s tabard was leaning over me, asking questions that Joby stumbled to answer between its tears. Soon a rolling cot arrived, and they lifted me onto it. I wouldn’t let go of Joby’s hand, though the postulants tried to make me. The curator said, “Let the bland go, too.”

  Joby stayed by my side through the tests that followed. It stayed when they transferred me to a bed. All through the restless, painful night that followed, every time I woke up, there Joby was, sometimes slumped over asleep but always in sight.

  I was very sick for three or four days. When I was finally well enough to sit up and eat something, the curator looked very pleased. “I think you’re going to be all right, Tedla,” she said warmly, then added, “now maybe your bland can get some rest.”

  I was trying to sort out my memories, so I asked uncertainly, “Why didn’t anyone meet us?”

  “The pilot delivered you to the wrong curatory.”

  “Did Joby really make a scene?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, laughing, then bent close to whisper, “your bland loves you very much.”

  When she was gone, I looked over at Joby, who was standing there like the picture of exhaustion. “I love you too, Joby,” I said shyly.

  It came over to my bedside and took my hand. “Hush, don’t say things like that,” it said, its eyes downcast.

  “Why not?” I said. “It’s true.”

  It put a finger on my lips to silence me. “You’re meant for better things than I,” it said.

  I didn’t understand then what that had to do with love, but I do now.

  ***

  For a while after coming back, I enjoyed some romantic notoriety at the creche as The Proto That Almost Died. I did not enjoy it. Once my physical stamina started to return, I slid gratefully into anonymity again.

  The most lasting result of the episode was my relationship with Joby. Whenever we met in the hallway, Joby’s face would break out in a sunny smile, and I would rush into its arms. It would twirl me around till my feet left the floor. I sneaked it treats from refectory, thinking the blands didn’t get treats—though of course they finished up whatever food we didn’t eat. This went on for several years, till the older protos started whispering, “Neuter-lover!” when I passed, and I learned not to be so open about my affections.

  We kept a great many traditions and holidays in the creche—more than they do in the outside world. I suppose it was to give us a sense of cultural identity. My favorite holiday was Tumbleturn Day, which came in the spring at a time when the snow was still melting in slushy heaps and the ground was too wet to play on, but spring fever had set in, making us seriously restless. We planned for weeks in advance what we were going to be on Tumbleturn Day, but kept it a secret from all but our truly special friends, so everyone would be surprised—or at least pretend to be.

  We always woke early and excited that morning, because it was the one day of the year when confusion reigned, and all roles were reversed. We rushed from the roundroom to our lockers, where we had secreted costumes or insignia to show what we were supposed to be. There were always huge arguments about whether it was better to be a patternist or factor. I generally chose the former.

  “Patternists are sly and sneaky,” said Bigger, a chunky proto who would have been the bully of our roundroom if anyone had let it get away with such antisocial behavior.

  “Well, factors are dumb and greedy,” I retorted.

  Those were the stereotypes, at any rate. Of course, we all lived up to the stereotypes when we played at being adults. It never occurred to us that our own gestagogues were patternists, since we trusted them implicitly.

  In the year I am thinking of, my good friend Litch and I had conspired together to be vestigators, since we could torment the docents by asking them questions. Litch was a small, remarkably ugly proto with protruding teeth and a face that looked like someone had taken it by the ears and pulled out to either side. Litch compensated with comedy. We made such a peculiar-looking pair—me like an angel, Litch like a demon—that people tended to break out laughing just seeing us. Litch had wanted to spend Tumbleturn Day as a beet, since that would really be a turnaround; but I balked at being a vegetable.

  Our vestigator costumes consisted of long lab coats filched from the dietician and hygienist, notepads, and huge cardboard spectacles. The sleeves of my coat came down several inches over my hands and I kept tripping on the hem, but this only made everyone laugh harder, so I didn’t mind.

  When we got to refectory, the adults were all eating there as if they were us, dressed not in their gestatorial uniforms but in the bright, color-coded coveralls we always wore, but inside-out and backwards. One middle-aged proctor whom we had never suspected of humor was dressed as an infant in a sleeper, with the diapers on the outside. We shrieked in laughter to see him. The food line was reversed—we had to go through it backwards—and the blands served our food on upside-down plates. Eating got messy, but we knew the blands wouldn’t mind cleaning up.

  There was a pretense of classes, but of course we all held our books upside down and wrote the words backwards. The docents pretended that this was all perfectly normal, and acted puzzled if anyone said anything the right way. Halfway through the morning, Litch and I set off to do research, as vestigators are supposed to. We had a list of nonsense questions we tried to ask everyone.

  There was an older proto named Seldom who was also dressed as a vestigator that day. We didn’t know Seldom very well; it hung out with a creative, nonconformist group of protos who had actually written and presented a play the year before. Just before lunch it saw us in the hallway and said, “Do you protes want to discover something really strange?”

  Flattered by its attention, we nodded. Seldom’s voice got low and mysterious then. “I know where there’s something hidden from ancient times. If you want to see it, you’re going to have to go on an expedition.”

  “Okay,” Litch said.

  “Come on, let’s get some supplies,” Seldom said, and headed for the refectory.

  The blands were instructed never to hand out food except at mealtimes, but everything was so topsy-turvy that day that we managed to wheedle snacks out of them. “Ready?” Seldom said, viewing us critically. It had a pointer from one of the classrooms that it used as a walking stick.

  “Lead on, Chief,” Litch said saucily.
/>   We headed down the stairs. On the lower levels things were functioning more normally, since the truly little children didn’t know enough about what was normal to appreciate Tumbleturn Day. We passed the toddlers’ playroom, running crouched over so the blands wouldn’t see us through the window. Then we descended to the infants’ level. I hadn’t been there in years, and it looked small and low-ceilinged. Through an open door we glimpsed the nursery where the babies’ cribs stood, ranged in circles. All but the tiniest babies were off in their exercise room; only a lone bland tended the nursery, slowly gathering laundry.

  Seldom stopped by one of the plain gray doors that only blands used, and turned to us. It whispered, “We’ve got to go through grayspace to get there. Are you ready?”

  No one had ever ordered us not to pass through the graydoors. We had learned to avoid them purely through the adults’ unspoken example. I was not particularly frightened, but I was repulsed and uneasy. Seldom was watching us appraisingly, so I tried not to show it.

  When we passed through the door, the contrast left us in no doubt where we were. Here, the walls were not warm lignis but rough, colorless poured-stone. Bare light fixtures hung from the ceiling, and all around us the pipes and ducts were exposed. It was like seeing the guts of an organism—the parts that make everything run, but no one was meant to know about.

  We stood at the top of a metal staircase with open mesh treads. As we descended, our steps echoed loudly against the bare walls, and Seldom warned us to be more quiet. At the bottom, we found ourselves in a long, curving corridor that ran around the circumference of the creche. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. From a doorway ahead, a loud mechanical humming came. I was relieved when Seldom gestured us away from it. “That’s the laundry,” it whispered. “The kitchen’s on the other side. That’s why you have to do this at mealtimes. All the blands are busy preparing the meal.”