Commitment Hour

SIXTEEN A Dish for the Traitors

I intended to wait five minutes — give Cappie plenty of time to leave, even if she ran into the mayor, or Rashid and Steck. But the atmosphere of the Patriarch's Hall oppressed me: the cloying smell of dust, the pointless faded finery, the picture of the couple swearing their love on the Patriarch's Hand. When I was young, this room seemed full of treasures; now I realized it was a place that adult Tobers sent their children but never went themselves. After only sixty seconds, I fairly ran away from the ominous mementos, as if ghosts were chasing me — down the corridor and out to the wide front steps where Rashid and Steck sat with Embrun in the sunshine.

Steck looked at me quizzically when I arrived, as if she could claim some right to ask what had happened between Cappie and me. She couldn't; by my age, boys didn't confide in their real mothers, let alone Neut strangers. If we had been alone, Steck might have pressed me… but Rashid was interrogating Embrun, and showed no sign of acknowledging my return, let alone allowing the conversation to be diverted to my personal life.

From the sound of it, Embrun's information about Bonnakkut hadn't taken much time to tell. Rashid's questions had already shifted to his real interest, learning more about Birds Home and the Tober sex change process. For that, Embrun could actually be helpful — he had Committed the previous summer, so the memory was still fresh in his head.

"And it's a disembodied voice?" Rashid was saying. "Asking, 'Male, female, or both?' "

"Right you are, master," Embrun replied. He had sprawled himself on the house's cracked concrete steps in an effort to look casual, as if he talked to Spark Lords all the time. I noticed though that he seldom looked in Rashid's direction. It wasn't humility; he was just devoting his attention to Steck, ogling her in that deepcut neckline.

I could have punched him in the nose.

"So," Rashid said, "if it's not too personal, could you tell me why you chose male?"

Embrun glanced at me with the look of someone trying to decide if he can get away with lying. Finally he decided to tell the truth. "I didn't have much choice, did I?" he answered. "My female half got kicked stupid. I couldn't live like that."

He proceeded to tell about the accident and its consequences, embellishing details here and there, because he seldom got a chance to share his story with newcomers. The way I originally heard it, Girl-Embrun had been teasing the horse when it kicked her — poking it with a stick. In the tale Embrun told Rashid, however, his female half's motives were far more noble: trying to pull out a thorn that had speared the horse's rump, making it bleed.

Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of any local vegetation with thorns growing as high as a horse's flank. In fact the stupid animal had nowhere to pick up a thorn at all, unless it decided to sit on the mayor's rose bushes. Still, I couldn't see the harm in letting Embrun glamorize himself, provided he didn't go too far.

Besides, it was interesting to hear him describe what it was like to be… well, brain-damaged. Not that he could remember much from his female years: just moments of emotion, pain at touching a hot stove, or fear and confusion one time when she got lost in the woods. Mostly, those years had just disappeared from his memory, like muddy dreams that are gone when you wake.

As Embrun continued, Rashid took on the expression of a man mulling over a profound revelation. When it was over, he murmured, "You received the injury as a five-year-old girl. You switched to a boy at six and poof, you were fine — except that you couldn't remember much of the past year. Then when you returned to being a girl at seven, you were… disadvantaged again?"

"That's right, master," Embrun nodded enthusiastically. "I'm not lying, am I, Fullin?"

"Not on that," I agreed. "His girl half truly had her brains jarred loose by that kick. Her body kept growing after, but her mind stayed stuck where it was."

"So your female body was damaged, but your male body wasn't," Rashid said. He turned to me. "Is it the same for everyone else in Tober Cove? I mean, injuries to your female body don't affect your male, and vice versa?"

"Of course," I said. Holding out my arm, I pointed to a pale pink scar just above my wrist. "That's a gash I got as a kid, exploring a half-collapsed house on the other side of town — I didn't see a nail sticking out of a board. My male body has the wound, but my female one doesn't."

"This is amazing!" Rashid said.

"Oh, that's nothing, master," Embrun told him. "What about Yailey the Hunter? She's got my head-kick beat."

"Who's Yailey the Hunter?"

"Eight years ago now," Embrun answered, "Yailey drowned. He was sixteen — out diving ropeless with a bunch of other boys off some rocks up the coast. Tried some fancy dive he'd read about in an OldTech book, and fucked the… I mean, he made an awful mistake. Hit his head on the way down. And the thing was, he'd gone off a ways from his friends so's he could practice the dive without them laughing at him. By the time they came to check on him, Yailey was face down and floating.

"The other boys were in tears as they carried him into town," Embrun went on. "I remember that much, even if it was one of my dull years. Scared me, all that wailing. Anyhow, the drowning happened in late spring. Then solstice came, the children headed off to Birds Home, and when we came back, guess who was tagging along with us? Girl Yailey."

"You mean," said Rashid, "her male body died, but a female version of her came back at solstice?"

"That's what happened," I assured him. "Yailey herself lit the funeral pyre for her male body. Hakoore delayed the cremation until he found out whether Yailey came back from Birds Home — apparently this has happened before."

"Where is this Yailey?" Rashid asked, ablaze with enthusiasm. "I must talk to her."

"Sorry, master," Embrun said, "she's hard to find. Dying like that upset her — not that she remembered it. Everything went black the moment she hit her head. But it still nettled under her skin."

"And knowing Tober Cove," Steck muttered, "people treated her like a monstrosity."

"I don't remember anyone ragging on her," Embrun said — untruthfully, because he himself called her names in the schoolyard: Hey, Corpse-girl! Mistress Want! "But Yailey turned more and more edgy as time went on. Especially close to the next solstice."

"Hakoore decided to get dogmatic," I put in, "and declared she'd have to go to Birds Home when the time came."

"It wasn't just Hakoore," said Embrun. "Yailey was only seventeen; she hadn't even had her child by Master Crow. A lot of people thought she should go back to Birds Home and do everything right. But Yailey was afraid she'd get there and come back dead… or Neut or something else. On Commitment Eve, she ran off into the forest and she's been out there since. That's why they call her Yailey the Hunter. Now and then she sneaks back to her parents' house to trade meat and furs for things she needs. Officially though, Hakoore has declared her unwelcome in town."

Steck snorted. "Because she refused to follow his nasty little orders."

Embrun looked surprised at Steck's anger. "Hakoore just doesn't want kids thinking they can avoid the proper switchover. Hell, there were sure times I didn't want to go to Birds Home. When I was boy, thinking how the gods would make me back into a girl with my brain all clotted — some days, I felt like hiding so I'd miss the trip. And the year I knew I'd come back pregnant… that terrified me. Not for myself, you understand, but for the baby. My female half couldn't be a proper mother, could she, master?"

I doubted that Embrun really worried about the baby more than himself, but he still had a point: switching sexes could be a scary thing. In the weeks before my pregnancy solstice, I considered haring off down-peninsula — becoming a traveling minstrel rather than a mother. The thought of my body harboring some alien little being, like a parasite inside me… and suffering all the pains of pregnancy, the dangers of labor… yes, I contemplated taking the easy way out. The idea must have crossed a lot of people's minds.

Maybe Hakoore had a point when he took an inflexible stand against Yailey. The cove's way of life depended on a tough Patriarch's Man who ensured that teenagers didn't dodge their commitments.

It made me wince. I was making excuses for Hakoore. I was arguing for the necessity of the Patriarch's Man.

Who was secretly forced to marry the Mocking Priestess. To become hers.

Why was everything so complicated all of a sudden?

Rashid declared he had run out of questions for Embrun. "Stay here," he told Steck and me. "I'll just walk our friend a little way back to town."

He and Embrun started across the parking lot, Rashid's boots making more sticky sounds on the hot pavement. As soon as they were out of earshot, I asked Steck, "What's Rashid up to?"

"He plans to give Embrun some money," Steck replied, "and he doesn't want to do it where the mayor or I can see. He's afraid we'll think he's a sucker for paying off such an obvious little worm… and he's right."

"So Embrun didn't have any real evidence about Bonnakkut's murder?"

Steck shook her head. "Just that his dog had some kind of barking fit about the time Bonnakkut was killed."

"Embrun's dog has barking fits five times a day," I told her. "The poor animal liked female Embrun a lot more than the male version; it's missed her dreadfully since Embrun Committed."

"Speaking of Commitment," Steck said, "how did it go with Cappie?"

I should have expected the question — Steck trying to play the attentive mother. "Cappie and I have our troubles," I muttered.

"Would it help if you talked to Zephram?" Steck asked. "I know we agreed you'd stay with me, but if you wanted to talk to… your father… if you wanted to talk to him alone…"

"It wouldn't help," I said, mostly out of stubborn pride. "Thanks for the offer though."

"If you need to talk to anyone…" Steck didn't finish the sentence. "When you face Commitment Hour, it's best not to have conflicts weighing on your mind."

"Is that what happened to you?"

"I made a choice," Steck said. "That's all. A choice to be new."

"What do you mean by that?"

She glanced at me but looked away again quickly. "Zephram said he told you how we got together: in the Silence of Mistress Snow. Did he tell you that no one else in town chose to visit me?"

I nodded.

Steck shrugged. "There were reasons for that — reasons I was living alone in my final year before Commitment. I hadn't gone out of my way to make myself popular. Things were better when I was with Zephram, but I couldn't imagine he'd stay with me long. I convinced myself his feelings were… oh, just his way of mourning, I guess. He was vulnerable because he missed his wife. Once he got past the worst of his grief, he wouldn't need me anymore — that's what I thought. That he'd wake one day and wonder why he was spending time with a girl who couldn't give…"

Her voice trailed off.

"You couldn't have been that bad," I said. "Leeta wanted you as her apprentice."

"Leeta only took me because I badgered her," Steck replied. "I'd got the idea that if I became priestess I'd suddenly mean something. It's hard to feel worthwhile when you're a teenager with no friends… girl or boy, it made no difference. Leeta accepted me out of pity; or maybe she thought she could mold me into a real person somehow. Either way, she didn't like me. I wasn't likable, male or female. And on Commitment Day, I thought maybe if I picked the third option, things would be different."

"You thought people would like you more as a Neut?" I asked. "Not in Tober Cove."

"I thought maybe I'd like myself more. A new body, a new personality. Leaving behind all the stubborn habits that made me… difficult. I wanted things to change for me. Inside."

"But you knew you'd be banished!"

"Did I care? What was so attractive about Tober Cove?"

"Me."

She sighed. "I know, Fullin. But I thought I could take you with me. I'd leave Tober Cove with my baby… and Zephram would go with me, back to the South… where he told me Neuts and normal people could live as husband and wife…" She shook her head. "And I'd be a new person. I wouldn't make the same mistakes. I'd stop being… oh, the kind of woman Zephram would hate as soon as he came to his senses."

Women say such things for only one reason: to have a man tell them they're mistaken. No, no, I was supposed to say, Zephram loved you for yourself. And I think he did; when he spoke to me at breakfast, his voice had been full of fondness, not "What was I thinking?" embarrassment. Still, it was hard for me to treat this Neut, my mother, as a normal woman who wanted reassurance. A wall of awkwardness loomed between us… and before I could speak, Rashid reappeared at the far end of the pavement.

As before, he stopped at the rusting OldTech cart. For a moment, he leaned into the engine again, presumably to look at the black radio box. Then he suddenly straightened up, and lifted his eyes to the hill behind Mayoralty House. His face broke into a jubilant smile.

"Damn," Steck whispered.

"What?" I asked.

"He's figured it out. He's figured it all out."

She suddenly flinched, as if she hadn't intended to speak those words aloud. Before I could ask what she meant, Rashid started running toward us.

Rashid's feet slapped the pavement like waves clapping against a boat's hull. His smile gleamed with excitement. Long before he reached us, he called out, "On top of the hill… that antenna…"

"It's an OldTech radio tower," I told him.

"The hell it is," he answered. "Have you had a good look at that dish assembly on top? The OldTechs never built anything close." He stopped in front of me, panting lightly. "Quickly, O Native Guide — show us the fastest route up the hill."

Steck put on an irritable expression as she got to her feet. "What's this all about?" she asked.

"Radio relay," Rashid panted, pointing back to the rusted cart. His finger swiveled around to point to the antenna on the hill. "Main receiving station. That's got to be the answer."

"What answer?" I asked.

"Take me up the hill and I'll show you."

The top of Patriarch Hill was a patchwork of bare limestone ledges alternating with scrubby clumps of brush and buttercups. Paper birch and poplar ringed the area, like hair around a man's bald patch; the trees even had a distinct lean to them, as if the prevailing westerlies had tried to comb them over to hide the bareness.

The antenna squatted on limestone in the center of the open area, with three wrist-thick guy wires strung out and anchored into other sections of rock. Kids occasionally climbed a short way up those wires, going hand over hand until they got high enough to scare themselves; but I couldn't remember anyone climbing the antenna itself. Its base was enclosed by a rusty chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and big signs showing pictures of lightning bolts. That meant you'd get hit by lightning if you touched the tower itself… and heaven knows, the antenna must have had enough lightning to discharge because it got hit a dozen times in every summer thunderstorm.

Neither the fence nor the signs fazed Rashid. In fact, he gave the chain-link a quick look-over, then turned back to me with a gloating expression on his face. "When you were a young boy, didn't you ever go places you weren't supposed to?"

"Sure," I answered, "there was one time we found this garbage dump—"

"But," the Spark Lord interrupted, "I've never seen an OldTech fence in this perfect condition." He threaded his fingers through the links and gave a yank; the fence barely yielded. "With any other fence," Rashid said, "local kids would have pulled up the bottom to crawl under, or made dents crawling over."

I pointed to the nearest lightning sign. "We didn't want to get zapped."

"Come on," Rashid scoffed. "In four hundred years, kids never dared each other to give it a try? And what about wild animals? You'd think a bear would have pushed in a section while using it as a scratching post, or maybe a big deer hit the fence in the dark."

"Tober Cove prides itself on its hunting," Steck told him. "Bear and deer know better than to come this close to town."

"Still," Rashid answered, "OldTech fences don't survive this well." He gave it another tug; no response but a small rattle. "Proof it's not OldTech at all."

"If it isn't OldTech," I said, "what is it? We Tobers didn't build it."

"No," Rashid agreed, craning his neck back to stare at the arrangement of gadgets high up the aerial. "You probably don't need a maser array that can squirt several hundred terabits of data every millisecond." He waved his hand to stop me before I could ask what he meant. "The details aren't important. Just trust me: the OldTechs never reached the technical sophistication of those dishes up there. They've got more bandwidth for sending and receiving than the communication systems for an entire OldTech city."

I turned to Steck and whispered, "Bandwidth?"

She patted my arm soothingly. "Most of this is going over my head too."

I didn't believe her. Rashid shouldn't have either, but he was too excited to pay attention. "We won't learn anything standing out here. In we go."

He reached toward the hip of his armor. As he did, a section of the green plastic slid back and a small holster pushed out of the armor's thigh. The holster held a green plastic pistol: very flat and compact, with none of the chunky menace of the Beretta he'd given to Bonnakkut.

"Laser," Rashid said, drawing the gun.

"Heat ray," Steck explained, pulling me away from the line of fire.

Rashid aimed the gun's muzzle at the fence and made an easy sweeping motion, starting high, ending low. The air filled with the tangy smell of metal, and billows of smoke drifted up into the hot summer day. Rashid put his glove against the chain-link to give it a tentative push; when he did, a whole section moved inward, severed from the adjoining links along a sharp-cut line. "At least the wire's not laser-proof," he muttered. The gun swept across the fencing two more times, shooting no visible bullets or beams… but when Rashid planted his foot against the wire and shoved, a door-shaped section of chain-link fell away, sliced off precisely where the gun had pointed.

He turned back to Steck. "After you, my dear." Steck gave a mock curtsy and slipped through the gap. A moment later, Rashid and I followed.

Rashid bent in close to examine the antenna's metal frame. It looked like normal rusted steel, with red-orange corrosion dusted like thick powder over every metal strut. After a moment, the Spark Lord huffed out a single heavy breath, the way you do when you want to fog a mirror. He watched the metal a few more seconds, then murmured, "Very convincing."

"Why do you keep talking like the tower's not real?" I asked.

"Oh, it's real," Rashid replied. He tapped one of the tower's struts with his gloved finger; the metal tink-tinked exactly the way you'd expect. "It's just not what it appears to be."

He pointed his green pistol at the strut he'd just tapped. With two quick pulls of his trigger finger, he sliced out a small section of metal, leaving a gap about as wide as my thumb. "Now watch," he said. "See if this is an ordinary OldTech tower."

I waited a few seconds. "I don't see anything."

"Patience," he said. He bent and picked up a small twig that had blown off one of the nearby trees. Carefully, Rashid slipped the twig into the gap he'd just cut in the steel.

The process was almost too slow to see; but gradually, the gap in the metal began to narrow… as if the two freshly-cut ends were steel teeth closing in on the twig. Soon Rashid could let go of the little stick — the gap had closed enough to clamp the twig in place. As I watched, the teeth continued to bite into the wood. The twig bent… then broke… then dropped in two pieces as the antenna completely closed over the cut Rashid made.

"The metal is self-repairing," he said. "And it would have to be, wouldn't it, to survive four centuries."

"I don't understand," I told him, trying not to sound unsettled by what I'd just seen.

"This antenna isn't OldTech steel," Rashid replied. "The whole damned tower must be solid nano. Smart metal camouflaged to look rusty."

I stared at him blankly.

"Think of it as a machine," he answered with the air of a man who doesn't want to explain himself to a country bumpkin. "Solar powered. Probably can store energy from lightning strikes too… or get power beamed down from orbital collectors. It must need a lot of juice."

He glanced back over his shoulder. "The fence must be nano too. That's why it's still in such good shape. Let's leave before our way out seals itself shut."

Steck looked up at the collection of dishes on top of the tower. "Don't you want to check out the transmitter array?"

"How?" Rashid asked. "If we try to climb this tower, I bet it has defenses… like struts that break off while we're standing on them. It may even get mad at us for just hanging around here. We'd better leave."

He gave my shoulder a nudge to start me moving toward the gap in the fence. I rolled away from him. "No."

"No? No, what?"

"No, I'm not leaving until you explain what's going on." I reached out and grabbed one of the metal struts, just to let him know I wouldn't be moved.

With a cry, Steck leapt forward and knocked my hand clear of the tower. "Don't touch that, you idiot!"

I looked at her in astonishment. Rashid gave a thin smile. "Fullin," he said, "I think your mother has a better understanding of this antenna than she'd like to let on."

"If it's nano, it's dangerous," Steck said sullenly. "I don't know any more about the tower than you do."

"Will someone please explain…" I started.

"Yes," Rashid interrupted. "Once we're safe. Come on."

"You want the truth?" Rashid asked. "You really want it?"

"Yes," I said.

We were standing outside the fence, watching the section of chain-link that Rashid had cut out and pushed down onto the ground. The chain metal had lost its solidity; it had turned into a gooey black liquid as thickly viscous as molasses. Slowly, very slowly, the liquid was flowing across the dirt.

How could such a thing happen? Not that I wanted an explanation of the science or magic that could turn steel into this tarry fluid; how could this fence and this antenna, perched on Patriarch Hill my entire lifetime and for centuries before I was born, be made of such otherworldly stuff?

Tober Cove was my home. I thought I understood it.

"What's going on?" I asked… and for some reason I turned to Steck. "Is this just some trick you've set up to scare me?"

She closed her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. "Sorry, Fullin," she murmured. "I know it's hard when you realize things aren't the way you thought." She opened her eyes again. "It really might be best if we walk back to the town square and pretend you haven't seen a thing."

The black chain-link fluid had pooled into an oily puddle directly under the rest of the fence. Now the liquid began to flow straight upward, like a waterfall in slow reverse, inching up to fill the hole Rashid had cut.

"I want to know," I said. "Please."

Steck turned to Rashid. He shrugged. "All right. You know why OldTech civilization collapsed?" he asked me.

"Because demons came from beyond the stars—"

"Not demons," he interrupted. "Aliens. Extraterrestrials. The League of Peoples."

"Inhuman creatures," I said. "And they offered exotic riches to anybody who wanted to leave Earth. Enough people went with them that things fell apart."

"Close enough," Rashid said. "And then?"

"Then the Sparks restored order and organized the planet into the Spark Protectorate."

"Don't make it sound like it happened overnight," Rashid chided. "When the League of Peoples came to Earth with their proposal, the only humans who accepted were those with nothing to lose: people facing starvation or war, not to mention patients with terminal diseases who thought they could be saved by League medicine. They went off; then they came back two years later looking healthy and driving FTL starships, saying no, there really weren't any strings attached to the League's offer. A few more people left… then a few more, and a few more, with each wave coming back to tell friends and family, it's wonderful, we have a clean new home planet, we have unbelievable high-tech gadgets, we have peace. There were plenty of doubters, but there were also plenty of people who decided to take the plunge."

"Traitors," I said.

"You don't know how terrible things were in the twenty-first century," Rashid replied. "Toward the end of OldTech times, most of the human race was poor and hungry. The planet was damaged — the air, the water, the soil — and there were so many conflicting factions claiming they knew how to solve the world's problems that no one could rally enough support to get any recovery plan started. Twenty years after the League's first offer, more than seventy percent of the Earth's human population had decided it was better to start over than stay on a sinking ship."

"Traitors," I repeated.

"So speaks the descendant of someone who stayed home… and in a part of the world that was affluent and not too polluted. Anyway, so many people left that OldTech culture couldn't sustain itself… and it took forty more years before my Spark ancestors managed to reestablish equilibrium. You know what happened in those forty years?"

"High Queen Gloriana of Spark battled the star demons into subjugation and forced them to pay her tribute." Why was he asking me this? Every child on Earth learned history.

"Well," Rashid answered with a wry look on his face, "it's more accurate to say that Gloriana came to an accommodation with the League of Peoples. In exchange for certain, uh, considerations from my family, the League granted us sovereignty over the planet… as well as a supply of high-tech goodies that would help us convince the struggling dregs of humanity to accept us as their rulers."

"The word 'puppet' was never used," Steck put in.

Rashid glared at her. "You know nothing about the League," he snapped. "They didn't need Earth as a vassal; they just felt bad for disrupting Terran society so badly. The League decided Gloriana was the best bet for ending decades of violent anarchy."

"What does this have to do with the antenna?" I asked. "And the fence." The tarry fluid had climbed to the height of my knees now — like a paper-thin black curtain stretched across the hole. Second by second, it continued to climb. I wanted to touch it; I didn't dare.

Maybe it would feel greasy like butter. Maybe the slightest touch would burn like a spider bite.

"This antenna," Rashid said, "almost certainly dates back to the forty years between the OldTech collapse and Gloriana's hands-off treaty with the League. During that time, Earth was officially a free zone — open to any League members who cared to drop by. Nonhumans mostly weren't interested, but humans… they'd got their hands on all kinds of nifty technology from the League, and they were itching to play god with the poor benighted barbarians who'd stayed back on Earth."

I didn't like his choice of phrase: "play god." My face must have shown my resentment. "I'm sorry, Fullin," Rashid said, "but that's what they did. Certain humans from the stars returned to Earth to set up experiments. They treated their old home planet as one big laboratory filled with guinea pigs who had chosen to be backward… who had irrationally refused to go into space. So the star-siders came back to test their lovely new gadgetry on us. Brain/machine interlinks. Clever tricks to work on genes. Nanotech…"

He gestured toward the fence. The black sheet of goo had risen to cover the hole completely now. There was no more fluid on the ground; it had all seeped upward to bond with the rest of the chain-link.

"They usually set up their experiments in abandoned towns," Rashid said. "Often, they built societies from the ground up — starting with infants they kidnapped from elsewhere on Earth, or even with baby clones of themselves. They'd invent religions, customs, ways of life, all carefully taught to the kids… because these projects were meant to be demonstrations, Fullin. Demonstrations of social theories. Nice little rustic Utopias. And they thought they were doing us a favor; they really did. To them, life here on Earth was a violent, ignorant hell. Forcibly imposing new social structures on us was nothing more than kindness."

"And that's what you think Tober Cove is?" I asked. "Some project built by traitors who came back from the stars?"

Rashid nodded. "The OldTechs were obsessed with gender differences, Fullin: which traits were innate, which were just a result of training. In the years after OldTech civilization collapsed, it's not hard to believe that some of the star-siders set up a research program here — to see what happened when people had the chance to be both male and female…"

"Or both," Steck added.

"Indeed," Rashid said. "An experiment to see what differences persisted even when people saw both sides of the gender gap… and could straddle the middle if they wanted."

The sheet of blackness covering the gap in the fence was beginning to tatter. Holes opened in the goo as other regions began to thicken — a crisscross pattern congealing slowly into the familiar diamonds of chain-link. Red specks appeared on the black surface: simulated dots of rust. The underlying black changed color too, fading to metallic steel gray.

It had only taken a few minutes. Rashid had cut out a section of fence… and the fence had healed itself. I couldn't even see where the cuts had been made.

"This is just some sort of machine?" I asked.

"Actually millions of tiny machines," Rashid said. "Bonded together to look like a fence. Same with the antenna."

"All just machines."

I thought of the Patriarch's Hand — another machine. And Hakoore had slyly told me, "Maybe the hand is older than the Patriarch, dating back to the founding of the cove." Another high-tech toy, brought to Earth by those who created this fence. I could imagine how traitors from the stars would love to give such a gift to their priesthood: a lie detector for keeping the rabble in line.

"So if Tober Cove is an experiment," I murmured, "or a demonstration… are they still watching us now?"

"No," Rashid said. "When the Sparks signed their treaty with the League, the star-siders were all obliged to leave. Since Master Crow and Mistress Gull still show up every year, I assume the whole process is mechanized. Computer-controlled, continuing to run itself on autopilot—"

"Wait a second," I interrupted. "You think that Master Crow and Mistress Gull are part of this too?"

"It's all the same package," he replied. "Master Crow and Mistress Gull are just airplanes, aren't they? Robot-driven planes that pick the Tober children…"

I let out a sigh of relief. Airplanes. The airplane argument. That familiar old refrain.

It put everything else in perspective.

Listen: Tobers know about airplanes. We've seen their pictures in OldTech books. And when someone from down-peninsula says, "Hey, your gods are just planes," it's hardly the complete refutation of all our beliefs that outsiders seem to think.

Yes, Tober children flew to Birds Home in airplanes. Mundane aircraft. Machines.

But why should that matter? Everything belonged to the gods. Machines were no less god-given than a stone or a leaf. And the planes weren't the real Master Crow or Mistress Gull — they were just tools held by divine hands. The real gods wore the planes' metal and machinery like unimportant clothing.

If that was true for the planes, why not for everything else? For machines like the Patriarch's Hand, the self-healing fence, and everything. Why not even the star-siders who might have founded Tober Cove? The gods could use people just as easily as they used machines. They could send a duck to tell whether they wanted you to Commit male or female, and they could send traitors from space to set up a town where people could live sane lives.

If the gods were behind it, who cared about the apparent physical cause? Getting distracted by such issues was just Hakoore's materialism, wasn't it? Thinking that the gods weren't in the picture just because the cove had a surface explanation. But the gods were in the picture; I refused to doubt them.

Damn, I hated when Hakoore was right.

"Lord Rashid," I said, "the Patriarch once preached that a scientist will cut a gull into pieces, then be astonished none of the pieces can fly. That's what you're doing here. You may be happy you've cut all this to pieces, but you haven't got the truth of Tober Cove. You haven't seen a drop of it."

The Spark Lord looked at me curiously. "You're all right with this? The fence, the antenna…"

"Why should I care about the antenna?" I asked. "It's just a big tall thing up on a hill. You haven't even suggested it has a purpose."

"It's a collector," he answered, watching me to see my reaction. "This whole peninsula must be covered with radio relays like the one hidden back in that car's engine. The relays gather low-powered local radio transmissions, and forward them to the array on this tower. This antenna amplifies the signals and sends them on a tight beam to another site—"

"Wait," I interrupted. I was actually smiling, even if I didn't understand half of what he said. "What local radio transmissions? No one has a radio in Tober Cove."

"Oh. That."

Rashid reached into a belt pouch and pulled out his little plastic radio receiver. When he turned it on, it made the same waves-on-gravel sound it had made before.

"More static," Steck muttered.

"No," Rashid told her. "Just a type of transmission that's too complicated for my receiver to decode. And guess where it's coming from."

He touched the receiver to my forehead. The noise of the static went wild.

"See?" Rashid said. "Radio Fullin is on the air."