Halfway Human Page 6

  The gestagogues tried their best to prepare us, but as the metamorphosis came closer, it loomed over all our thoughts, a wall beyond which we could not see. In the roundroom we talked endlessly about whether it was better to be a man or a woman, despite the adults’ best efforts to convince us there was no advantage either way. Some protos had strong opinions. Women were better because they could make lots of money having babies. Men were better because they were strong and adventurous. I could never decide. All sexual organs seemed like grotesque deformities to me. In the shower, when I thought no one was looking, I would run my hands over the places on my body where the breasts or the penis would grow. My body, the thing in the world most familiar to me, was about to turn into something alien.

  Rumors and legends proliferated in the roundroom, taking up where the instructionaries left off. There were rhymes: Eating beans will produce male genes, the bite of a needletail will make you female. There were diagnostic tests: If you looked at your fingernails palm up rather than palm down, you were sure to be a man. Looking over your shoulder to see the sole of your foot was a sure sign of a woman.

  The instructionaries never breathed a hint that there was any third alternative. That knowledge was passed along the way we learned most frightful and unpleasant things, in the whispered roundroom talk at night. One night a group of us was gathered around an older proto named Little Bit, who often knew secrets the rest of us admired it for, even when they were false. This night, it had an especially grave look on its face. We all had to lean close to hear as it whispered, “You know, any one of us could turn into a neuter.”

  “That’s not true!” an argumentative child named Axel said. “They wouldn’t be teaching us all this stuff if we were just going to turn into pubers.” It was a filthy word. Axel resented Bit’s prestige and was trying to win our admiration by obscenity. It only made most of us uncomfortable.

  “They don’t know, you see,” Bit maintained. “They can’t predict who will be a neuter any more than they can predict who will be male or female. So they have to educate everyone, even though some of us will forget it all.”

  Bit looked at the frightened faces surrounding it. By now everyone in the roundroom had come over to hear. “Any one of us,” Bit said in a spooky voice. We all looked around, and most eyes came to rest on Pitter, a fat and sulky proto who was unpopular because it had been a bed wetter, which never gains you points in a roundroom. Someone whispered, “I bet it’s Pitter who’s the puber.”

  The phrase sounded so funny that we began to chant it, driving Pitter into a frenzy. Its face got red and it shouted, “Stop it, you creeps! It’s not even true. Bit’s full of crap.”

  “You’d better watch out not to touch them too much,” Bit said. “Neuter hormones can go right through your skin, and if you touch your eyes or your mouth after touching a neuter, well, that’s it.”

  We were silent, since we had all touched neuters quite unwarily up to that point.

  “There’s another thing,” Bit said. “If you touch yourself down here, you’re sure to turn into a neuter.”

  No one said a word. I expect we had all done that, too.

  After that, there was a marked change in our behavior. We became more distant, even hostile and contemptuous, to the blands. Before, we had viewed them with neutrality or pity, since they weren’t really our concern—merely unfortunates who could not help what they were. Now, we took them personally. They were reminders of our own vulnerability, the flaw we ourselves might hide, and so we hated them. We were learning to act like humans.

  Around that time, my best friend was a proto named Zelly. It was a terribly worried child, afraid and anxious about everything. Zelly found safety in rules—knew them all, obeyed each one to the letter, and was sure to warn the rest of us when we were falling dangerously short. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—I took a perverse pleasure in persuading Zelly to do things that would have terrified it without me—and a few things that should have terrified me.

  One midsummer day Zelly and I snuck away from supervised recreation to go exploring in the river bluffs behind the creche. There was a spot where the limestone cliff was eroded in steplike layers, which made for easy scrambling. Zelly followed me a little way, then stopped. “We’re not supposed to climb the cliff,” it said. “There are rattletails and sucker beetles.”

  There were hazards everywhere for Zelly. I said, “I’ll go first and scare away the rattlers. You know what to do if you hear one?”

  Zelly froze in place. “That’s right,” I said. We were sure the snakes could only see motion, and so we would turn invisible if we kept still.

  I led the way up the cliff. Soon we could see over the tops of the aikens, and then we were at the grassy, windswept crest. Below us lay the creche, and the other protos playing on the broad natural terrace. Beyond them the valley fell away in ledges, and off in the blue distance were the river bluffs on the eastern side. To see the creche from outside, in its setting, gave me a feeling of discovery, like seeing a map of a place you knew only from ground level. It gave Zelly a feeling of acrophobia. “Come away from the edge, Tedla!” it pleaded. “You’re going to fall.”

  It sounded like a neuter, and a few months before I would have told it so, teasingly; but now we knew the jibe might be true, and I stayed quiet. All the same, a moment of doubt invaded my day, like the smell of distant poison. I quickly put it out of my mind; I couldn’t think such a thing of Zelly. Besides, I told myself, if it were that easy to tell, the adults would have figured it out long ago.

  A path ran along the cliff edge, and we followed it single file till we came to a spot where the gray faces of an old ruin stuck up out of the grass.

  Gammadis is simply peppered with ruins, mostly of a material we call poured-stone. They are so common that no one pays much attention to any but the most lavish and well preserved. This one was neither—merely a square outline enclosing a depression of hard-packed dirt, where, it was obvious, generations of children from the creche had played. Nevertheless, it looked wondrous in our eyes.

  As we explored it, we wove elaborate speculations about what the building had been. We decided it was a fort erected to guard the river valley against invading armies—since we knew from our history lessons that people in the olden days did very little but war with each other and destroy things. Soon it was a place where a pair of freedom fighters had been killed. Since this led to the conclusion that their bones would be buried inside, we got some sticks and began to dig.

  “Tedla!” Zelly shrieked, leaping up from its knees. “I found it! I found a skull!”

  Eagerly, I came over to look. There it was—a curved, gray-white shard protruding from the soil. One side had a shiny glaze on it. I dug around it with my stick as Zelly peered over my shoulder, and soon wrenched it free.

  “It’s a piece of a dish!” I said, only a little disappointed it wasn’t more macabre. “Maybe it’s valuable.”

  “Maybe it’s got a curse on it,” Zelly said in a low, thrilling voice.

  We looked at each other in fascination and fear. Then we turned back to dig even harder.

  Soon we had excavated some bits of rusty metal, a piece of melted red plastic, and a mysterious round glass object with raised marks we imagined to be writing. We laid them out to study.

  “You know, you can get diseases from old things in the dirt,” Zelly said.

  “Then I guess we’re going to die,” I said.

  “We’ll die friends, won’t we, Tedla?” Zelly said. There was something earnest and anxious in its face, so I took its dirty hand in an improvised secret handshake.

  “We’ll be friends forever,” I said.

  We had created quite a satisfactory pile of loose dirt, and Zelly now said, “We ought to make some ammunition to defend ourselves against attack.”

  There was an old square pit behind the ruins where some scummy water had collected, so now we used it to wet down our dirt and form cannonballs. As we were thus occupie
d, we heard someone coming up the cliff toward us. Zelly said, “An invader! Quick, Tedla, make more mud-bombs so we can hold them off.”

  When the invader emerged onto the cliffside path, we saw it was just Joby, walking slowly as if winded by the climb. It came toward us, calling, “Tedla! Zelly! You’re supposed to come down.”

  Obviously, some proctor had noticed our absence and sent Joby to fetch us. At my side, Zelly said in a low, venomous voice, “Filthy puber.”

  The hatred in Zelly’s voice startled and frightened me. The emotion was too virulent for Zelly—cautious Zelly!—but I quickly adjusted. My friend was older, closer to being human, and had to know better than I. Besides, there was something that felt right about disobeying Joby. I was going to be human. Humans didn’t let neuters order them around. I was different from Joby. I was going to grow up, as it never would. I shouted out, “We don’t have to take orders from you!”

  Emboldened, Zelly shouted, “Filthy puber! Don’t come any closer!”

  Joby stopped in its tracks, a complicated expression on its face. I couldn’t tell what that expression meant, but my companion recognized it right away. “It’s afraid!” Zelly said gleefully, feeling power over another being for the first time.

  “Come on, you two,” Joby said. “You’ll get in trouble. Proctor Givern wants you to come down now.”

  A human would have ordered us, not wheedled. Zelly stood up, a mudball in one hand. “Get away, you defective, or you’ll regret it.”

  Joby hesitated, then said, “Tedla? Are you coming?”

  In answer, Zelly let the mudball fly. Joby saw it coming and turned away to shield its face; the bomb hit it on the shoulder with a thunk, spraying dirt into the bland’s thinning hair.

  “Right on target!” Zelly whooped, then snatched up an armload of mudballs. “Come on, Tedla. We’ve got it on the run!”

  Something had come over my friend. There was a wildness in Zelly’s face—a desperate, frightened aggression. I was awed, and caught up in it. I seized a mudball and threw it. When Joby saw that, it turned to flee.

  “Sortie!” Zelly called, and leaped past the ruined walls of our fort to chase the retreating bland. I seized up some mudballs and followed. Ahead, Joby started to scramble down the steep cliff path. But the bland was old, and couldn’t move fast. We came to the clifftop above it, and began to pelt it with mudballs as it clung to the cliff, slowly trying to move farther down into shelter.

  “Mutant! Spado!” Zelly shrieked.

  “Puber!” I joined in. In that moment Joby wasn’t an individual; it was a symbol for all neuters, all we feared most. And we had power over it.

  Zelly finally ran out of mudballs, but didn’t want to stop. It picked up a rock from the path and threw it. The rock hit Joby on the side of the head, and its footing slipped. It slid several feet down the cliff before catching a handhold again. We saw blood on its face.

  That brought us to our senses. We looked at each other, and suddenly we were ourselves again. Without exchanging a word, we dashed back to the fort.

  “What do I care? It’s just a bland,” Zelly said as we sat there, debating what to do. “They don’t even feel pain like we do.”

  “Let’s go back down now,” I said. “Then if Joby tells on us, we can just say it’s lying, and we were never even up here.”

  But Zelly was too afraid of punishment to go back, and I wasn’t going to go by myself. Before we could decide anything, we heard someone coming up the cliff. When we crept to the edge, we saw the lanky form of Proctor Givern, with Joby close behind him.

  “Let’s hide,” Zelly said, eyes wide with fear.

  But Proctor Givern knew exactly where to look. “Tedla. Zelly. Come out of there,” he said in a voice that told us we had never been in trouble like we were in now. When we stood quaking before him, he looked us over with disgust. “Do you think this is funny?” he said, gesturing at Joby. The neuter stood a little behind him. Its face and hair were still crusty with mud, and the trickle of blood from its cut ear was drying on its face. Its coveralls were dirty. Its eyes were cast down—shamed, I thought, for having to fetch a human to defend it from two children.

  “We were just playing,” Zelly said sulkily.

  “Throwing rocks isn’t playing,” Proctor Givern said harshly. “You could have hurt Joby. Would hurting a bland make you feel proud?” He stared at us, but we couldn’t answer. “Only a coward would hurt a bland. They can’t fight back; they don’t know how. Real humans protect blands. Real humans are kind to them. What do you think that says about you?”

  There was a long, horrible silence. At last Proctor Givern said, “Zelly, go down to the creche. Wait in my office till I get there. Tedla, stay here.”

  Released, Zelly raced away down the path. I watched it go, longing to be with it.

  Proctor Givern said, “I really thought better of you, Tedla.”

  “Zelly started it,” I said defensively.

  “Zelly never started anything in its life. You’re the one I expected to know right from wrong. You’ve disappointed me.”

  I stared at the ground, shamed and angry.

  “All right. This is your punishment. You are going to spend twenty hours in the chapel in the next ten days, thinking about what you did and why you did it. If you want to talk to me about it, come to my office. Now tell me you’re sorry.”

  I looked up, and the words stuck in my throat. But not because of Proctor Givern. From behind him, Joby was looking at me with the expression of someone watching a child it had cherished mature into a viper. In that moment I hated myself as I had never done before. I had forfeited Joby’s love, the only pure and simple love I had ever known, a love without reservations or judgments. I would never know that kind of love again. At the thought, tears sprang into my eyes. I was sorry, so sorry it hurt, but I still couldn’t say so, because I wasn’t sorry for Proctor Givern—I was sorry for Joby, and Joby was only a bland.

  The proctor didn’t force the matter. Watching my face, he said, “All right, you can go now.”

  I climbed recklessly down that cliff, blinded by tears.

  Twenty hours is a long time to spend thinking about yourself and why you did something shameful, and I cannot say I used the first ten very profitably. I walked along the quiet, leafy paths, or sat in the grottoes listening to the trickle of water, or watched the fish turn lazily under the lily pads. Whenever I tried to think about myself, as I was supposed to, my mind shied away. By the end of the first day I had constructed a thousand self-justifications and defenses, with corresponding resentments against everyone else. I left the chapel angrier and less repentant than I had walked in. The second day I spent thinking about anyone but myself, cataloging every casual cruelty I had seen adults commit, in order to convince myself that I was being held to a higher standard than humans themselves could meet. By the third day I was miserable again, blaming myself for stupidity, for not thinking ahead, for letting Zelly lead me into trouble.

  As I daydreamed on the fourth day, a thought occurred to me: What if there were a drug I could take that would let me live the whole year over again without getting any older? Then, immediately: What if I could just stay twelve forever, and never have to grow up? The thought was so entrancing that I sat there on the stone bench under the ferns, dreaming about it. Then a horrible realization struck me: What I was wishing for was what actually happened to neuters. They never matured. I had been wishing to be like a neuter.

  The idea was so horrifying that I stood up, shaking all over, terrified that the mere thought would make it so. I had to talk to someone.

  Proctor Givern was in his office. When I came in, he said, “What’s wrong, Tedla?”

  “Proctor, how can I be sure I’m going to be human?” I said.

  “Is that what all this is about?” he asked, as if seeing the light.

  “No!” I said. It was so much more complicated. “I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want to not grow up. I just want to be me. Why do I
have to change? It’s not fair.”

  He saw how distressed I was, and said, “Come here, Tedla.” When I came, he gave me a long hug. Then he sat me down in a chair facing his, still holding my hands. “Tedla, everyone your age is afraid of growing up,” he said. “I was. It’s a scary thing. But once it happens, it’ll feel like the rightest thing in the world. You’ll be really glad you grew up, and you’ll never want to go back to being a proto again.”

  His unquestioning assumption that I was going to grow up calmed me. He obviously saw something about me that I didn’t see. Even so, I ventured, “Are blands happy they’re blands?”

  “Yes,” he said, “because that’s what they were meant to be. If we tried to make them act like humans, they’d be miserable.”

  “Can you get neuter hormones by touching them?”

  “Who told you that?” he asked, frowning.

  “Little Bit did.”

  “Well, Little Bit’s wrong. There is absolutely nothing you can do to determine your sex. It’s all a matter of biology. Neuters can’t help what they are. They didn’t do anything to get that way. The way we show we’re human is to treat them kindly and take care of them. It’s like a test of how worthy of humanity we are.”

  Again, that assurance. It was as good as a guarantee to me.

  Proctor Givern said, “Now I want you to go back to the chapel and think about what all this has to do with how you acted the other day.”

  I went back reluctantly. By now I knew that Zelly’s punishment had been twenty hours of cleanup work—dirty and humiliating, but at least it was mindless. I had started out thinking my punishment was easier, but now I envied Zelly.

  The tenor of my thoughts changed after that. The expression on Joby’s face kept coming back to me, and every time it made me more uncomfortable with myself. I was ashamed that I’d hurt Joby, but I was also ashamed to care that I’d hurt Joby. It was only a neuter. Why had that look pierced me through? At last I went back to Proctor Givern.