^{Chapter One}

 

When the call came, Valerie Endrada was in the bedroom pawing through a jumble of unpacked containers, looking for her daughter’s swimsuit. The mess frustrated her; lately, she had been feeling that her life was full of disorganized corners heaped with things she couldn’t find. Moving had only made it worse. When she heard Max talking to the dinery screen, it was a welcome distraction.

He had blanked it by the time she looked in. “Who is it?” she asked.

“For you,” he said. “It’s Joansie.”

That was Max’s nickname for his mother when she was on a rampage of good works. Activism ran in his family; at the moment, Max was wearing a Freedom of Information shirt, with a red headband around his forehead. He looked ready to defend the barricades.

“What’s she want?” Val said.

Max shrugged. “She’s not at home, she’s at the clinic.”

“Uh-oh,” Val said. It was Allday, and they had planned on a picnic with Max’s parents. Joan was supposed to be at home fixing food.

“Look, Mama,” Dierdre said cheerfully, plucking a red fruit from her breakfast bowl and holding it out.

“That looks good, Deedee,” Val said. She had never seen anything like it. It had a vaguely repulsive heart shape, with gaping pores on the surface. To Max she said, “What are you feeding her?”

“It’s called a strawberry,” Max said, holding out a container of them he was packing for the picnic. “One of those retrogenic things—backbred till it’s healthy again, you know.” Val took one and bit in cautiously. The inside was white and crunchy; the flavor was tart. She tossed the remainder into the compost. “You didn’t pay for them, did you?” she asked.

“Of course not. It was some sort of promotion.”

Val went into the studium to take the call.

Joan looked breathless and scattered, as usual. She always tried to keep her graying hair pulled back in a bun, but it was constantly getting loose. The blue lab coat she was wearing meant she was on duty. She had retired from practice five years ago, but still did volunteer work at a charity clinic in Djenga Shana.

“Valerie! Good,” she said, all business. “I didn’t know who else to call. I’ve got a very peculiar problem here.”

“Joan, why are you at the clinic? I thought we were having a picnic.”

“They called me in because they were short-staffed. And I’m calling you in now. I need your expertise.”

“Professional or personal?” Val asked.

“Professional. As an exoethnologist. I’ve got a crazy alien on my hands.”

That was not terribly surprising, considering that Djenga Shana attracted some of the most indigent recent arrivals from the Twenty Planets.

“Where’s your alien from?” Val asked.

“That’s the problem. I don’t know. The patient’s got no ID, and isn’t very coherent.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a suicide case. It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen one of those, our prevention programs are so good.”

“Why don’t you call a mentationist?” Val said.

“I will, as soon as I know how to describe this patient. Val, this isn’t a him or a her.”

“A himher?” Val said. That was an easy riddle to solve.

“No,” Joan said a little crossly. “I know a Gyne when I see one. This isn’t an androgyne. It isn’t anything. No sexual characteristics at all—like one of those prudish children’s dolls. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Val hesitated a moment. It went against the grain to give away information she could get paid for; but Joansie was family, and it was in a good cause. At last she said, “I have, but you couldn’t have one in your clinic.”

“I do,” Joan maintained.

“No. What I mean is, there is only one documented case of true, natural asexuals—on Gammadis, the closed planet. No native has ever left it, and only about forty Capellans have ever seen it. What you have must be some sort of surgical construct, or a mutation.”

“I wish you would come here and look for yourself. I’ve got a hunch something strange is going on. You’ll know what I mean when you get here. If you can make it by 9.50, we’ll still have plenty of time to get to the beach.”

Val hit the time key to look up the university time. It was 8.90. A little over half an hour to get to the other side of the world. That was just like Joan. She swept people up in her crusades like a small, determined hurricane. “No peripheral vision,” Max sometimes said of her. But the fact was, Max had gone and married someone very like his mother.

“I can’t, Joan,” Val said, even though resistance was futile. “Max would kill me. I promised to be in charge of Deedee today. He’s had to do it all week.”

“Never mind that,” Joan said breezily. “I’ll call E.G. and tell him to give Max a hand.”

The last time Max’s father had baby-sat Dierdre, she had come home calling people she didn’t like “infomongers.” Max had been more amused than Val.

“I don’t know, Joan...” Val said.

“Don’t try to fool me, you want to come. I’ll be expecting you.” Joan cut the connection.

Val sat staring at the screen, which had reverted to clock mode. She clicked her thumbnail against her front tooth, a habit that made Max crazy. Actually, Joan had been right; Val was curious. She had gone into xenology dreaming of expeditions to new planets; but those days were long gone. No one could afford exploration any more. Magisters minor like herself might spend whole careers just going over dog-eared records from old expeditions, trying to extract from them one more monograph, never seeing any culture but Capella Two’s, never discovering anything new. Val was restless for distraction.

“What was it?” Max said when she came out. The dinery table was heaped with picnic food; Dierdre had disappeared into her room.

“Your mother wants me to come to the clinic for a while,” Val said. “She’s got an interesting case. We’ll have to meet you at the beach.”

“Does that mean I’m taking Deedee?” Max said, his voice ominously neutral. “Wait until The Boss hears.”

Deedee came racing in with a flexup toy in the shape of a fanciful alien. “Look what I’m taking, Mama,” she said. “Papa said I could.”

Val knelt to be at her level. “Listen, sweetie,” she said, “Mama’s got to go somewhere for a while. I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Do I have to go with Papa?” Deedee said, disappointed.

“Yes. Don’t eat all the sawberries before I get there.”

“Strawberries,” Max said.

“I always have to go with Papa,” Deedee protested. “You never want to take me.”

Val wondered if children were genetically programmed to pull their parents’ guilt-strings. She hesitated, and all was lost. Deedee brightened at the look on her face.

“Go dress, and maybe you can come,” Val said. There had never been a more useless “maybe.”

Joyously, Deedee raced off to her room. Max said, “To the clinic? Val, are you crazy? Have you ever been there?”

“She needs to be exposed to other ways of life,” Val rationalized valiantly.

Max looked beseechingly heavenward. “Well, don’t blame me if she comes home asking what ‘venereal disease’ means.”

Val kissed him on the cheek and went to the bedroom to find her pack and university scarf.

On the pumice path to the waystation, Val tried to ignore the bite of disappointment at their new, low-rent neighborhood. As Deedee ran ahead down the hill, Val looked out at the bone-gray moonscape, and told herself it wasn’t so bad. The subsidized copartment was perched high on the slope of a crater, and the enclave nestled below like some monster bird’s nest, a clutch of domed buildings, eggshell white. In the west the huge limb of Gomb spanned half the horizon, its colors bleached to pink by the rising sun. Everything seemed bright and clear-cut in the dry air—all but Val’s thoughts. They felt like a messy room, too small for all the piles of neglected problems.

In their student days, she and Max had shared a jaunty contempt for the power structure, because then they could afford it. Val had been succeeding then—honors graduate, scholarship to study under a magister prime—and it had not seemed far-fetched to aim at a career as an independent contractor in the knowledge business. But the years since graduation had brought only frustration. The market was flooded with young magisters, each hawking an obscure expertise. One by one, her friends were giving up and signing life contracts with the big infocompanies, yielding all their future copyrights and patents for secure employment. So far, she had resisted that irrevocable step, hoping she only needed to repackage her knowledge to make it a more appealing commodity.

“Presentation, that’s what I need to work on,” she would say to Max. He only rolled his eyes. He had supported her loyally, even though it meant staying home with Deedee because they couldn’t afford to send her to school. But Val’s enormous education debts were coming due. For a while last month their infoservice had gotten disconnected for nonpayment. Val had grown intensely guilty, knowing it was her fault, for putting independence before responsibility.

The waystation jutted up from among the egg-domes like a shard of broken glass on edge. When Val stopped at the navigator, she found that getting to Djenga Shana was complex; with a twinge of guilt she paid for a printout of the shortest route. The station was crowded with holiday travelers. Holding Deedee’s hand, she dodged noisy families in bathing suits and hiking gear, lined up at the ports to the vacation spots. Her own destination port was almost deserted.

Deedee wanted to go through the wayport first, so Val stood and watched as her daughter disappeared in the flash of a lightbeam, leaving only a wisp of steam. The sight always gave her a twinge of panic. Quickly, she paid her own fare, stepped in, felt the familiar tingle, then stepped out of an identical port in a waystation a thousand miles away. Deedee was there, studying some dried gum on the tile floor. Val took her hand again, then looked around for the next port on their route.

Almost as soon as she stepped from the wayport at Djenga Shana, Val regretted bringing Deedee. She paused to rearrange the scarf that gave her academic immunity here, then took her daughter’s hand firmly. It was near noon, and the street was shuttered and empty. The garish signs looked faded and peeling, naked without the glamor of night and light. There was a pervasive smell of spilled beer cooking in the sun.

“Mama,” Deedee protested, “don’t hold my hand so tight.”

“I’m sorry, chick,” she said. She dreaded any questions.

Outside a fetish shop, a Worwha Shana gbinja stood, wrapped in the gray tubular garment he had donned at puberty and would not remove until he died. It was ragged and stained around the hem and sleeves, but the tough fiber looked like it would outlast the man. He glared at Val with loathing from under a mass of unshorn hair, doubtless wishing her to Worwha hell. There was a story in the xenology department at UIC about a researcher who had lived with the Worwha Shana for four years, and when he left, his Worwha family still called him “heathen garbage.”

When Val entered the clinic, two wan, barely dressed teenage girls were sleeping in the waiting room. Roused by her entrance, one of them eyed her suspiciously. Val knocked at the battered lexan reception window. The clinic was like an unarmed fort, constantly under siege by drug-seekers.

Joan herself came bustling out to open the locked door. Deedee cried out, “Gramma! We came to visit you.”

“Deedee!” Joan said, startled. Then, to Val, a whispered, “Why did you bring her here?”

“Temporary insanity,” Val said.

As they passed down the hall, Joan said, “Go on and help yourself to coffee. I’ll get Mandy to look after Deedee. Come with me, chickpea.”

When Joan returned alone, she poured a cup from the coffee urn and stood sipping it, leaning against the wall as if a little too tired to support her own weight. “It was a pretty standard clientele last night,” she said. “A couple of mugged tourists, the usual overdoses and nerve burns, some sexually transmitted diseases. Then about 1.50 Cannie Annie—one of our local characters—came staggering in saying there’d been a murder. You can’t trust what she says, so we didn’t call the law. I went out to check.”

“Joan! You promised us you wouldn’t go out of the clinic at night.”

“Well, I’m not going to let someone die,” Joan said crossly. “Besides, Bart was with me. Annie led us to an alley, and there we found our visitor from another planet, lying in a pool of blood, wearing a raincoat and nothing else. It had tried to blow its brains out with an explosive gun.”

“How horrible,” Val said softly.

“It hadn’t done a very good job. Not even close. We brought it back, patched it up, checked it over. That’s when we found it was an ‘it.’ I’ve been checking the medical nets, Val, and I can’t find a record of any mutation like this. There could be a surgical explanation—god knows we see some strange body alterations here—but if so they did it without leaving a trace. And why would anyone choose to eradicate their sex?”

“Maybe it wasn’t voluntary,” Val said. Here, she would believe anything. “Have you been able to ask the patient?”

“Well, that’s the problem. Medically, the patient’s not in bad shape, aside from being a little low on blood. But mentally—well, at first it was completely unresponsive, almost catatonic. I gave it a standard antidepressant, and it got quite agitated and incoherent. The drugs ought to be wearing off now; maybe we’ll have better luck. Let’s take a look first.”

She led the way into a small observation room. She closed the door, touched the switch, and the wall became a one-way window into the adjoining room.

The patient was crouched in a chair in hospital pajamas, knees drawn up to its chest. Val stared, fascinated. The person beyond the glass fit none of her half-formed expectations. She had pictured something eunuchlike and faintly repulsive, but the neuter’s face instead had an androgynous, Greek-sculpture beauty: classic bone structure, long lashes, dark brows under curly golden hair. But now the hair was darkened and matted, the eyes swollen. There was a bandage on the left temple, and the hair around it was singed.

“It used a gun?” she said softly. She was no mentationist, but to her the violence of the method meant something—a particular hatred of the self, a desire to inflict damage and pain. An attempt to match inner violence with outer, perhaps.

“Yes,” Joan said. “Good thing its aim was so poor. It could have done real damage to that beautiful face.”

Val said, “How old is...I feel strange saying ‘it.’”

“What else can you say? No other word is accurate. If this were one of us, I’d say it’s in its mid-twenties.”

“Really? That old?” The patient looked younger, but perhaps that was only because Val associated the lack of obvious sexual characteristics with adolescence. “What do you want me to do?”

“First, I’d like you to talk to it and get me some information. You know what a mentationist is going to want. He’ll take a scan and want to start altering the patient’s mental template. But how can we do that in good conscience when we don’t know what’s normal for this patient? We need to do a little research before jumping in.”

Val felt a little bubble of excitement rising through her chest. Whatever the thing in the next room was, it clearly represented an unstudied aspect of someone’s culture. This was an opportunity for discovery, maybe even a profitable one.

In the next room, the figure had moved; now it was pressing its knuckles to its forehead as if to hold in some terrible thought. Val felt a surge of sympathy and alarm invading her scientific detachment. She had never seen a suicidal person before, and the reality dispelled any romantic fantasies she might have had. There was nothing pretty about this. The person in the next room looked to be in almost unendurable pain.

“I’d feel better if there were a mentationist present,” she said. “What if I do something wrong?”

“I’ll be here, watching. Bart’s on standby. Don’t worry, Val. You’re a trained interviewer. What can you do wrong?”

She didn’t dare let Joan know how unprepared she felt.

“You don’t mind if we record the interview?” Joan said. “We may need to study it.”

Val restrained herself from asking about copyright. The recording was unlikely to be valuable.

Joan opened the door to usher Val into the corridor. She took out an access card and slid it into the slot. The door clicked open; Val took a long breath and stepped through.

As she entered, the patient rose quickly to face her, keeping the chair between them, as suspicious and edgy as a trapped animal. For a moment the two of them stood motionless, staring at each other. Val forced her voice into a friendly tone to say slowly, “Hello. My name is Valerie Endrada. You can call me Val.”

“Are you here to drug me?” the neuter asked. Its voice was somewhere between alto and tenor, and full of strain. But what struck Val was the incongruous accent: not just a plain Capellan accent, but the cultivated accent of the intellectual elite, the kind of people you called “magister.” She felt a moment of disorientation. Was she talking to someone found half-dead in a squalid alley, or to a colleague?

“No,” she said. “I’m not a mentationist.”

“Tell them I don’t want any more drugs,” the neuter said. “I can’t think when I’m drugged. I’ve got to be able to think.” One hand rose to its forehead, then flinched away when it touched the bandage. The evidence of what it had done seemed to repulse it.

Val heard her voice drop into the cadence she used with Deedee. “The drugs are only to make you feel better.”

“Why do they have to give me drugs at all?” the patient said in a low, agitated voice. “What use is it, forcing me to feel this way? Are they just trying different psychoactives to see how I’ll react? Is this an experiment?”

“They’re giving you drugs because you tried to kill yourself,” Val said.

For a moment it stared at her, as if shocked to hear the news. Then some thought or memory crossed its face and it looked upward, teeth clenched, drawing a ragged breath. Softly, almost to itself, it said, “Why does anyone care about that? What can it matter, one dead bland more or less? Wouldn’t it just be simpler to get rid of me?” It turned away then, and with its back to her wiped the tears from its eyes with its hands. After a moment, it looked back and saw Val’s dismayed expression; then another emotion swept across its face—guilt, this time. Quickly it said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Please don’t listen. It’s the drugs, they make me babble. I barely know what I’m saying.”

“That’s all right, you can’t offend me,” Val said. She took a step closer, wishing she could do something. Watching this was agonizing. But the neuter only retreated, hidden behind the wall of paranoia again.

“Are you here to study me, then?” it said. “Are you a xenologist?”

Val hesitated, then decided lying was no way to gain a person’s trust. “Yes,” she said. “Now you know my name and who I am, and I don’t know the first thing about you.”

“You Capellans,” the alien said softly. “You’ve always got to know.”

“If we’re going to make you feel better, we have to know something about you.”

“Then you’re not writing your dissertation about me, or something like that?”

“No.”

As if barely daring to hope, it said, “You’re not recording this? There are no cameras, or anyone watching?”

Val felt her face giving her away. The alien’s expression showed betrayal. Desperately, Val said, “It’s not my choice. I’m not in charge. Please believe me, all we want is to help you.”

“Then why do you watch me like a peep show?” It was barely a whisper.

“Oh God, what a mess,” Val said, mostly to the watching wall. She was in fathoms over her head. “I’m sorry, this is all wrong. Please forgive me.” She turned to leave.

“No! Don’t leave me!” the neuter cried out. She turned in time to see the desperation on its face, quickly hidden. It began to pace, talking fast, its hands moving nervously, as if it didn’t know what to do with them. “I shouldn’t be bothered, really. I...I’m not naive, like I used to be. You know, once I had the opportunity to use Epco’s proprietary database, and I did a search for my own name. There were over two hundred articles written about me, all classified, Epco’s property. Two hundred! Even I don’t know enough about me to write that much. Every step I took, every word I said, was being studied, and had been since I got here. You know, it never even occurred to me why they took all those scans and samples every time I went to the clinic for some virus I had no immunity to. Can you believe that? I didn’t even know I was in a zoo. Please don’t think I resent it; I just need to get used to the way you Capellans are. It’s your nature. You don’t mean any harm.”

The nervous avalanche of words came to a halt. Val was very curious by now. She didn’t want to disturb the alien’s train of thought, so she said, “It would drive me crazy.”

“Well, you were raised with the expectation of privacy. I don’t have that excuse. The way I grew up, we were never alone. We saw everything about each other. There was no ethic of modesty; that is all a product of sexuality. If I were living back on Gammadis, I would be sleeping every night in a roundroom with dozens of other blands, all in a pile, like mice. I would have all that physical closeness, without any taint of sexuality—just plain humanity. I would fall asleep to the sound of their breath, the feel of their skin against mine. Do you realize, I’ve barely been able to touch another person in innocence for twelve years? On my planet, they believe that neuters need to be with their own kind, or they go crazy. Maybe it’s true.”

During this speech, Val had drawn a little closer. Now she stood, hands at her sides, and said very quietly, “Would you like me to give you a hug?”

A complex look crossed the alien’s face—part fear, part longing. “No,” it said, drawing back tensely. “Please don’t be offended. It’s not you.”

“What is it?” she said. She was so close she couldn’t help but notice again the alien’s striking beauty. In some ways, its vulnerability only heightened the effect. She wanted to hold it as she would Deedee, to lay its head on her shoulder and stroke its hair, to feel the panic subside.

“I’m sorry,” the alien said. “You’ve got to understand how hard it is for me, to live in a gendered world. I have to be so careful. Sexuality is always present, with you. It never leaves your minds. It’s as if you exist in a cloud of pheromones I can’t sense, but only guess at. I have to be on my guard all the time, thinking of hidden meanings, body language, and innuendoes. I can never assume I understand you, never take anything at face value. It all has to go through a gender-filter in my brain. I wish I could get away from it, just be able to relax, be in a completely nonsexual situation, just for a day. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to, for the rest of my life....You don’t want to know all this. These drugs make me babble.”

Once more, Val had the disorienting feeling that she was talking to another magister, or at least to someone of formidable—though currently scrambled—intelligence. “I do want to know,” Val said. “But please tell me something first. You’re from Gammadis?”

“Yes. How did you know?” As soon as the words were out of its mouth, the neuter shook its head. “Of course you know. You only have to look at me to know.”

“I know because you said so,” Val said calmly. “It surprises me, because that planet has been off-limits to Capellans for sixty-three years.”

“I came here before that.”

Val smiled skeptically. “You don’t look that old.”

“It’s a fifty-one light-year trip.”

That, at least, rang true. Any lightbeam traveler would not have aged during the journey. “You must have been very young when you set out,” she said.

“I was seventeen.”

“What’s your name?”

The alien’s eyes fell to the ground, as if in shame. “Tedla Galele,” it said indistinctly.

“I’m glad to meet you, Tedla.” Val held out her hand. The alien’s arms were crossed protectively; it hesitated, then finally held out a hand. They shook formally. After touching her, Tedla turned away and walked numbly across the room till stopped by the wall, then stood leaning against it, cheek resting on the cool ceramoplast.

“Can you get me out of here?” it asked. “I hate this room. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Not unless you have somewhere to go. Do you have any family, or someone we could contact?”

Tedla stared at its feet. “No. I’m the only one.”

“Where have you been living?”

“Out there,” the neuter gestured vaguely. “The money’s all gone, you know.” A current of agitation welled up again, and it said, “I wasn’t supposed to have to protect myself, or make decisions, or compete with you. That was the promise. People were going to take care of me. Now I have to act human, but I can never be human. If only I could go back! If I were at home I would know exactly what was expected of me. I could live my life surrounded by others of my own kind. Here, I’m nothing...Oh god, why can’t I shut up?”

Its hands had begun to shake. It clasped them tightly together, making a visible effort to gain control.

On an impulse, Val reached out and took the neuter’s hands in hers. She half expected it to pull away, but instead it grasped her hands tightly. Its eyes were closed now. In a whisper, it said, “I feel like there is something I ought to be doing, only I don’t know what it is, and I probably wouldn’t be able to do it anyway. But if I don’t, something terrible is going to happen, but it’s hopeless, I can’t prevent it. It’s already happened, it’s who I am. There’s nothing I can do, absolutely nothing.”

“Shh,” Val said, stroking its hands. She could feel the tension in them, the stretched tendons and knotty bones. “It’s all right, Tedla. Everything is going to be all right.”

“There’s nothing out there for me, nothing,” Tedla said. “No home, no life that fits me. I’m a piece from a different puzzle. I don’t fit anywhere.”

“We’ll make a place for you,” Val said. “Don’t worry.”

Behind her, the door clicked open. Joan entered, carrying a transdermal.

“No,” Tedla whispered.

“Tedla doesn’t want any more drugs,” Val said.

“It’s just a sedative,” Joan said to Tedla, “to calm you down. That’s all, I promise.”

The neuter just looked at her in terror.

“Don’t you want to feel a little calmer, Tedla?” Val asked. “Come on, it’ll help you think.”

Slowly, Tedla held out its arm. With a quick, practiced motion Joan pressed the hypo against the vein. “Why don’t you sit down now?” she said in an encouraging, doctor-to-patient voice. She gave Val a significant look, and nodded toward the door.

“I’ll be back in a second, Tedla,” Val said, and followed Joan out.

In the hall, Joan turned to say, “Good work, Val. All we need now is to find someone looking for a missing Gammadian.”

For a brief moment, Val hoped there wasn’t anyone. She wanted this find all to herself. Her conscience immediately censored the thought. “Of course,” she said. “This shouldn’t be hard. There are probably ‘missing’ notices all over X-O Net.”

Joan’s office was a tiny cubbyhole cluttered with printouts and mementoes of former patients. Val had to restrain herself from wiping the dust from the screen as she sat down at the terminal.

After tapping into X-O Net, she ran a search for anything posted in the last five days with the key words “Tedla Galele,” then sat back to wait. When the terminal beeped, she was surprised to see it had turned up nothing.

“That’s odd,” she said.

“Expand the search,” Joan suggested.

She did, but with no better results.

“What about all those articles in the Epco files?” Joan said.

“If they’re proprietary, we’d need to pay a fortune. But some of them must have leaked out into public domain. I’ll check.” This time, the screen responded with two citations to articles on Gammadian physiology, both ten years old. “Well, at least now we know Tedla really exists,” Val said, and hit the key to access the first one. The screen responded, “Classified proprietary: Western Alliance Corporation. Please input access code.” Val tried Joan’s number, then her own, but both were rejected. She went back and tried the second article, with the same result.

“Did it say WAC?” Joan asked, looking over her shoulder.

“Yes. Not Epco. Maybe Tedla was confused about which infocompany.”

“Or maybe they both have buckets of classified information.”

Val clicked her thumbnail against her teeth, thinking. “Actually, WAC makes more sense than Epco,” she said. “I think the original expedition to Gammadis was sponsored by WAC. It would make sense if they were keeping tabs on Tedla.”

“Should we ask them?”

Val shook her head. “They don’t give out anything cheap. Let’s try the public-service sources first. Isn’t there some sort of missing persons list?” So Val embarked on a search. But as time passed, she came to dead end after dead end. No one of Tedla’s name or description had been reported missing. Tedla had no listed number or address anywhere on Capella Two. No one of that name had ever registered to vote, or owned taxable property. It had no professional license, no credit history, and no infonet account. They turned up a variety of other Galeles, including one with a criminal record and another who had been expelled from UIC, but no trace of Tedla.

“We’ve got an invisible person,” Val said.

“Or someone who’s been hidden,” Joan said suspiciously.

Val thought briefly of posting a Found notice, but decided it would violate Tedla’s privacy. The fact was, she wasn’t entirely disappointed by her failure: The longer it took to track down where the alien belonged, the longer she would have with it.

From down the hall, she heard Deedee’s voice raised in play. She checked the time, and groaned. “We were supposed to be at the beach half an hour ago.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll call E.G. and tell him we’re hung up. Keep working on it, Val. I can’t keep Tedla here much longer. Legally, I have to transfer every client home or to a curatory within twenty-five hours. I’d rather not put this patient at the mercy of the public health system. That’s hard enough to negotiate if you know how.”

Joan left the room, and Val sat thinking. There was something here that didn’t add up. The disastrous end to the Gammadian expedition had happened a dozen years ago. She had been in her teens, but still could remember the near-universal outrage when the explorers had returned from their fifty-one-year trek back, expelled by the rulers of Gammadis for their attempt to interfere in the local culture. Already then, Val had wanted to be an explorer herself. She hadn’t been able to imagine how they had squandered the opportunity, the only one in two centuries.

But she could not remember any whisper of a Gammadian having come back with them.

Abruptly, she got up and went back down the hall to Tedla’s room.

Tedla was crouched in the chair, the way Val had first seen it; but this time the Gammadian didn’t stir at her entrance, merely followed her with its eyes. She sat down facing it.

“Tedla, I need to know more about you,” she said.

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.