Halfway Human Page 5

  “What happens if someone finds us down here?” I asked uneasily.

  “Oh, the blands go crazy,” Seldom said.

  “Really?” Litch said, perking up. “Let’s go scare them.”

  “Not now,” Seldom said. “We’ve got more important things to do.”

  At that moment we heard the sound of a cart approaching down the hall, its wheels rumbling on the cracked floor. Seldom set off running away from it, and we followed. Our leader skidded to a halt by another graydoor, and we all dived through. We found ourselves at the head of another staircase leading down into an even dimmer level.

  The walls in this level were old square blocks of poured stone with crumbling mortar. There was a dank, musty smell. “This is where the neuters’ roundroom is,” Seldom said. “You want to see it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” Litch said.

  We sneaked down the corridor to an open door. Inside was a locker room, but not like ours. Where ours was bright and clean, this one was dim and dingy. The old metal lockers were scratched and worn. Beyond this room was a shower room, but instead of shiny ceramic tile there was a poured-stone floor and walls stained with rust and hard water deposits. One of the showerheads dripped loudly as we tiptoed through. We stuck our heads through the next doorway. The blands’ roundroom was threadbare and dim. There were rips in the cloth covering the walls.

  “Look at the neuter-sweat,” Litch said with distaste. The center of the floor, where they slept, was stained with the mark of decades of bodies resting there. “This is disgusting,” Litch said, holding its nose.

  We escaped gratefully out into the hall again. Now Seldom led us to another door. This one had been padlocked, but the screws on the hasp had worked loose, so that it only looked secure. Before opening the door, Seldom looked at us and said, “Are you really brave?”

  We nodded our heads.

  “You’ve got to go the next part of the way in the dark. Okay?”

  Litch and I exchanged a look, but we both nodded. Seldom opened the door and we slipped through. When the older proto came in and closed the door behind it, the darkness was absolute.

  “Put your hands on the railing and feel your way down the steps,” Seldom whispered. “The light switch is at the bottom.”

  I groped and found Litch’s hand in the dark. Hanging onto each other, we edged our way down the steps. At last my feet touched stone instead of metal, and I said, “Seldom?” For a panicky moment I wondered if the older proto had lured us here in order to escape and leave us in the dark. But I heard Seldom right behind me, feeling for the light switch. At last there was a click, and a sickly yellow light came on—a dusty bulb hanging from a cord. It would have seemed very dim, had our eyes not adjusted to the darkness.

  On this level, the walls were not even poured-stone—they were raw limestone, cut from the bedrock itself. Curving away on either side was another corridor heaped with old junk. There were rusty garden tools and filing cabinets, broken furniture, and old machines. Litch and I ventured timidly out into the narrow walkway in the center, feeling dwarfed by the heaps on either side. I stopped to stare at a rusty machine of cast iron with a massive gear on one side. “How old is this stuff?” I said.

  “This is the oldest level of the creche,” Seldom said. “It was built back in the Machine Age.”

  We had all learned of the Machine Age, when people had built so many machines, and controlled them so poorly, that they had nearly destroyed life on Taramond. In those days, people had no respect for life or love for their world. To feed the machines’ voracious appetites for power, they had poisoned the air and water, altered the climate, leveled the forests, and squandered the soil. In the end, millions had died, and whole species had gone extinct. An aura of evil hung over these machines. They had been used for diabolical purposes. “Is the creche that old?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t a creche then,” Seldom said.

  “I bet it was a rocket factory,” Litch said. “I bet they built spaceships here.” The Machine Age was also when we last had contact with the stars, before what Capellans call the Dire Years.

  Seeing how I recoiled from the machines, Seldom said, “Don’t worry, these machines couldn’t do much harm. They’re too little.”

  The one with the gears was taller than I.

  Seldom led us down the hall. It was lit by occasional bulbs, and in between them the shadows gathered. My back was crawling, and I kept looking behind us. Only dust was there.

  At last Seldom turned down a passage that led inward like the spoke of a wheel. This hall was lined with cobwebby machines in gray metal casings, full of faded dials calibrated in characters I didn’t even recognize. I felt a thousand miles—or a thousand years—away from the creche. Here, everything was alien.

  The hall ended in a rough stone archway opening into darkness. A breeze blew in from it, smelling of wet rock. On one wall was a metal box, which Seldom opened. It was full of switches. “Ready?” it said, looking at us. Without waiting for a reply, it pushed one of the switches. There was a faraway clunk, and the lights beyond the doorway came on, faltered, then came on again.

  We edged through. Beyond the door lay a domed cavern carved from the rock. We found ourselves on a balcony that ran around the perimeter, edged with a metal railing. In the center of the space, squatting there like an immense, poisonous toad, was a single machine the size of a house. It was rounded on top, and had a forest of pipes feeding into it.

  “This is the kind of machine that poisoned the world,” Seldom said in a whisper.

  It radiated evil. I backed away, terrified that we would waken it, and it would start up again. “What’s it doing here?” I said. “Why didn’t they destroy it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Seldom.

  “I want to go back,” I said.

  Litch was braver than I. It crept forward to the railing. “Look,” it said with a horrified fascination. “There are ladders to get down.”

  “Of course,” Seldom said. “People had to tend the machine.”

  I imagined a crew enslaved to the machine, working in chains. In my mind, they were blands. I couldn’t imagine people doing it.

  “See over there?” Seldom pointed to another opening in the wall opposite the one where we stood. It was pitchy black. “You know where that leads?”

  I didn’t want to know, but Litch said, “Where?”

  “There’s a whole ’nother creche that was abandoned and walled up,” Seldom said. “That’s the only way into it now. And you know what? The bodies of the protos who were in that creche are still there. They’re just skeletons now.”

  “Let’s go back,” I pleaded. At last Litch seemed to agree with me. It backed away from the railing. This place was too evil to be in.

  We went back into the spoke-corridor and waited while Seldom opened the box to turn off the lights. It hesitated over the rows of switches. “Maybe I should punch a few others, just to see what they’ll do,” it said.

  “No!” I pleaded, terrified.

  Seldom relented and shut off the lights. We hurried back down the hallway to the bottom of the stairs. “Ready?” Seldom said, poised to switch off the lights.

  I turned to race up the steps while the lights were still on. I only got about three steps up when Seldom threw the switch. Hanging onto the railing, I made it all the way up, and felt for the door. Suddenly, Seldom was there, blocking the way.

  “Listen,” it said. “You two have got to swear not to tell anyone you were down here, or what you saw. Not another proto, not a grown-up, not even a bland. If I find you’ve told anyone, I’ll bring you down here and lock you up till you’re just another skeleton. Do you swear?”

  “I swear,” we both said.

  Seldom let us out then. We managed to sneak back up without anyone seeing.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking how, directly below our roundroom, that machine lay in the dark, waiting for someone to start it going again. I kep
t waking up, heart pounding, thinking I heard it going, feeling imaginary tremors in the floor and a deep-buried growling that would signal the return of an ancient evil. As I would begin to drift off to sleep, I would think how, just above the machine, the blands were sleeping in that dirty roundroom, huddled together naked as we were. Everything horrible seemed like a mirror image of everything good. Nothing was secure any more.

  It was a month later that the aliens came out of the sky.

  ***

  On Gammadis, we joke about how everyone remembers exactly what they were doing when the aliens landed. I am no exception. I was in Language Arts class with my favorite teacher, Docent Mercady. She was young and pretty and gentle, and I worshipped her. We were taking a spelling test when one of the proctors came to the door. He whispered to her, and she stepped out of the room. For a minute we were silent, concentrating on the test. Then, inevitably, Bigger started to make farting noises. Bigger was always doing stupid things to get attention. Some of the other protos started to giggle, then someone else started to burp. Pretty soon, mayhem had spread across the room.

  Docent Mercady stepped back in. Her face looked so strained and worried that we instantly became quiet. She said, “Class, I want you to put your pencils down and line up very quietly. We are going to Assembly.”

  We knew something big was up then.

  The Assembly room was awash in whispers, and Litch said in my ear, “Possit says that space aliens have landed.” Since Litch was always talking about space and aliens, I said, “Don’t be stupid.”

  We had barely settled down, cross-legged on the floor, when the Matron came to the front of the room. We did not see her often—only on grave occasions. She always looked serious, but never more so than this day. She said, “Children, we have received news of an important event at Magnus Convergence. The mattergraves and electors have been contacted by a delegation from one of our star colonies founded long ago in the Machine Age. We have never known if any of them survived. Now, they have come back across space to visit us.”

  There was a hum of talk all across the room. I was stunned. So Litch had been right, in a way.

  The Matron raised her voice to make us quiet. “Since this is an important event, I want you to learn all about it. We are going to watch some news broadcasts.” She gave a signal to one of the proctors, and the screen came on.

  We sat there for the next several hours, mesmerized by the viewscreen. The aliens had sent a message from their orbiting ship, politely requesting permission to land. We watched as their atmospheric shuttle came down, not unlike one of our aircars. We waited, breathless, as the vehicle sat there for what seemed like an eternity, motionless. Then at last the door opened, and we saw our first aliens. They looked like little squashed brown people to me. (Please don’t be offended; I expect we look strange to you, too.) Across the landing pad, the people sent to meet them waited. They were not electors or mattergraves themselves—that had been deemed too dangerous. Nevertheless, their faces became familiar as those first images were shown over and over. A pair of people—one factor and one patternist—walked forward to greet the approaching aliens. The patternist welcomed the “Members of the Community of Humanity” back to the homeworld. The aliens replied in accented but perfectly comprehensible Argot, saying they came in “brotherhood,” an antique term I scarcely recognized, and their purpose was to learn from us. This seemed like either charming humility or deep subterfuge to us, considering that they were the spacefarers. We had no idea at the time that Capellans live to learn, and it was simply the truth.

  The delegates ushered the three aliens into a groundcar, and whisked them off. Nothing else happened that day, but that did not stop the commentators from filling the screen with speculation. Why had no one detected the orbiting spaceship? (We later learned that it was specially designed to be invisible to our technology.) How did the aliens know our language? (We learned that they had been studying it, and us, from space for months.) Why were there only three of them? (Magister Galele later told me they were specialists called the First Contact team. The main body of researchers had not even arrived at that time.) What were their true motives in coming here? (No one believed that they had already told us.)

  Then, because they had no answers, the commentators began discussing what effect this would have on the delicate balance of power in our own society. As the discussion wore on, I found it boring and irrelevant. How could they talk about politics at a time like this? Couldn’t they see that everything had changed?

  From where I sat there on the floor of my creche, it seemed as if the world was suddenly vulnerable, like a building with its top blown off, exposed to the sky. We no longer enjoyed the pleasant security of our isolation. No matter what happened, we had lost control. Just weeks before, I had discovered the threats we ourselves had created; now there was an external one. Nothing was safe. I moved closer to Docent Mercady, and she, sensing my fear, put an arm around me. I whispered to her, “Will the aliens start up the machines again?” She kissed me and said, “No. We won’t let them do that. Don’t worry, Tedla. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  For the first time in my life, I wondered if she, or any adult, had the power to make good on such a promise.

  In recreation that day, Litch and I played at being aliens. It was our way of robbing the event of strangeness, by acting it out. While most of the others played rocketball, we constructed a spaceship from gym equipment and imagination, and greeted everyone who came by, telling them we came in brotherhood.

  After that first day, reports on the aliens became a regular part of our classes. We went on a night expedition outside to look at their home star, Capella Two, through a telescope built by the top roundroom in science class. We learned that their ship had set out hundreds of years ago, but the aliens themselves had only arrived recently by a magically advanced system of transport that made them into lightbeams. Docent Gambrel showed us the spectrum, so we could see the particular frequency of light they had been. Since we were all fascinated by the aliens, and would listen to anything about them, the docents learned to incorporate them in all our lessons. “You’ll need to know this if you ever meet an alien,” became a frequent refrain.

  The strangest thing we learned about them was that they had no childhoods. That is how we interpreted it. They were born adults, fully differentiated, male and female. We would look at each others’ naked bodies in the roundroom, and imagine them with sexual organs. It seemed repulsive. The corollary fact that the aliens still had families raised many questions in socialization class, since the docents had always told us that only primitives lived that way, in tribalism, and true civilized amity was impossible as long as the bonds of biology were allowed to coexist with those of community. We discussed it, and I, at least, concluded that the aliens must be more socially primitive than we, despite their technological cleverness. I began to think of them as people who had never outgrown their own Machine Age.

  The original sense of community we felt toward them cooled when they claimed not to be descendents of our own colonies. They traced their origin back to a place called Earth, and gently insisted that we had originated there, too, in unspeakably ancient times. Our own questionaries debated this hotly.

  However, we soon grew used to seeing the three aliens’ gnomish faces on screen. They were endlessly available to answer questions, seemingly quite open with their information, up to a point. Certain questions, especially those about technology, they evaded. They explained that they would share their knowledge when they understood us well enough to know that it would not do us any harm. Having lived on Capella Two, I know this was not strictly true. They would share nothing; they intended to sell it.

  After awhile I grew a little bored with the aliens. I became used to their presence on screen, and on our planet. They became oddities, not threats. I never dreamed that I would become more entangled with them than anyone else on Taramond.

  ***

  As we grew older, t
he gestagogues allowed us more freedom to explore the landscape outside the creche on our own.

  I loved the outdoors. It seemed as if my senses were more alive there, and I eagerly sampled all the sensations, from the smell of river mud to the stroke of wind on my face. I was feeling everything for the first time; all my emotions were sharp, unblunted by use, like coffee or herbs fresh out of the package. At times I indulged in them so extravagantly that they strained me to the limits. In those days, a melody could pierce to the bone, a sunset could bring tears of painful joy. And an unkindness could gnaw like cancer.

  ***

  Tedla broke off suddenly, looking at Val. “I wonder if humans retain some of that freshness of perception. They told us neuters don’t—that everything in a bland’s brain becomes blunted and dull, even pain. I know it’s true I can’t sense things like I did then. It makes me wonder if I’m seeing the world muted, if there is a pitch of sensation closed to me. I wonder if everything I feel is a lesser emotion than humans do.”

  “I think that’s unlikely,” Val said, thinking she had hardly ever met a person whose emotions were so close to the surface. Capellans learned to hide their minds much better. “It sounds like they told you a lot of things about neuters that aren’t true.”

  “Yes, but it was all woven in with things that are true.”

  “If you don’t feel the way you did then, it may have more to do with growing up than with being a neuter. I don’t feel the way I did as a child, either.”

  “But how can I tell whether you sense things I don’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Val said. “It’s the one thing we can never know about each other.”

  ***

  For you, puberty is a process. To us, it is a precipice. In a single day we pass from the social state of childhood to adulthood. Physically, the transformation takes longer, but it is still abrupt by your standards. At age twelve, we are immature, undifferentiated proto-humans. At fourteen, we are fully functioning sexual beings.