“Different, anyway,” she responded. “I don’t know. I just don’t. Spending the rest of my life in this rotten place.” She looked me straight in the eye. “What makes you so special? What did you do to get here?”
Well, here it was—acid test early on. I decided to take a very mild gamble, but first a proper priming. “You know you aren’t supposed to ask that.”
She was beginning to relax a little now, and moved to get rid of her own wet clothes. “Something you’re ashamed of?” she asked. “Funny. I never thought it mattered.”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
She thought a moment as she dried her hair. “No, not really. I’m Zala Embuay, by the way.”
“Park Lacoch,” I responded, tensing a bit to see if it got any reaction. He—I—was pretty damned notorious.
She let it pass without a glimmer of recognition. Well, that was something, anyway.
“Well, Park Lacoch, weren’t you some sort of criminal?”
“Weren’t we all?”
She shook her head. “No, not me. Fm different. I may be the only person ever sent to the Warden Diamond because I was an innocent victim.”
I was finding it hard to take her seriously. “How’s that?”
She nodded seriously. “You’ve never heard of the Triana family?”
It was my turn to betray ignorance. “Nope.”
“Well, the Trianas are the ranking political family on Takanna. Ever been there?”
“No, can’t say I have,” I admitted.
“Well, you know at least what it’s like to be a ranking political family, don’t you?”
You bet I did—but Lacoch would have been a little more removed. “I understand it, although I’m a frontier man myself. I’ve been to many of the civilized worlds but I’ve never actually lived on one.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re much better equipped for someplace like this.”
“The frontier’s not as wild and primitive as you think,” I told her. “In comparison to the civilized worlds, yes, but it’s nothing at all like this. Believe me, our backgrounds may be very different but they’re much more alike than either of us is to the people who were born here.”
I’m not sure she accepted that truism, but she let it pass. “Well, anyway, I was raised in a government house, had a happy childhood and was being prepared for an administrative slot. Everything was going right when all of a sudden, the Security Service came in one day and arrested my designated mother and me.”
I understood what she meant by that. All people of the civilized world were born in vitro, perfect products of genetic engineering, pre-designed and predestined for their lives and careers. Each career on a civilized world was a Family, and when children were five they were given to a designated member of that Family unit to be raised and educated. “What was the charge?” I asked her, really interested now. I wondered whose territory Takanna was in.
“Well, they charged her with unauthorized genetic manipulation,” she told me. “They claimed I was a special product—product!—illegally created and born.”
I sat up, all ears. This was interesting. “You look perfectly normal to me,” I assured her. “Just what were you supposed to be that you weren’t supposed to be?”
“That’s just it! They wouldn’t tell me! They said it would be better that I didn’t know, and maybe if I didn’t the truth wouldn’t make any difference. That’s what’s so frustrating about it all. How would you like to be told one day that you’re a freak, but not told how or in what way?”
“And you haven’t a clue? Your mother never indicated anything?”
“Nothing. I’ve searched and searched my whole childhood, and I haven’t come up with anything that anyone found odd or unusual. I do admit I found the whole business of administration pretty boring, but a lot of it is boring. And I never saw her after the arrest, so I never got a chance to talk to anybody else who might know and would tell me.” “And for that they shipped you here?”
She nodded. “They told me it was for my own good; that I’d do all right here, that I could never fit into the civilized worlds. Just like that, I’m a convicted criminal—and here I am.”
I studied her face and manner as she spoke and came to a conclusion. The tale was pretty bizarre, but it had a ring of truth to it. It was just the kind of thing the Confederacy would do. It would be interesting to know why she couldn’t have been re-cultured or simply shifted elsewhere. There was no such thing as a criminal gene, of course, but there were hormonal and enzyme causes for a large number of physical and mental tendencies, from violence to anger to schizophrenia. If her story rang true all the way, it meant I might be sharing a room with a ticking bomb. Still, if she ever learned the complete truth about Park Lacoch she might think the same thing—and be wrong.
“Well, if it’s any comfort to you, I’m something of a freak myself, as you can see,” I told her. “You get cases like me out on the frontier, where there’s all sorts of complications in the different planetary conditions—radiation, you name it—and most births are the old-fashioned kind, of mother and father. By ‘like me’ I don’t really mean exactly like me, just—well, unusual.”
“You do look—well, unusual,” she said cautiously. “I mean, most of the frontier people seem to be so big and hairy.”
I chuckled. “Well, not quite, but my small size is only part of it. Tell me, just seeing me in the clothes and now, what do I look like? How old would you say I was?”
She thought a moment. “Well, I know you’re a lot older just by the way you talk, but, well, to be honest, you look like… well…”
“I look like a ten-year-old girl, right?”
She sighed. “Well, yeah. But I know you aren’t. Even your voice is kinda, well, in between, though.”
That was news. My voice sounded like a sharp but definite tenor to me. [I had the advantage of all that information Krega had fed into my fanny, and I was beginning to understand Park Lacoch a little more.
“Well, I’m twenty-seven,” I told her, “and I’ve looked this way since I was twelve. Puberty brought me pubic hair, a slightly deeper voice, and that was it. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, though, that my folks were able to get me to a really good meditech. They found out that I was a mutation, a real freak. A hermaphrodite, they called it”
“A—you mean you’re both sexes?”
“No, not really. I’m a man, but I’m probably the only man you’ll ever meet who’s a man entirely by choice. Inside I have the makings of both, but the psychs and meditechs struck a balance, and that’s the way I’ll stay—because I wanted it. They could have adjusted the other way and, with a minimum amount of surgery, I’d have wound up female.” Poor Lacoch, I’d reflected more than once. Confused totally about his sexual identity, hung up in a limbo not of his own making, permanently small and girlish. No wonder he went nuts. The file said he even masqueraded as a young girl to lure his victims away. I wondered if he’d have been different, perhaps better off, if he’d chosen to be female instead—but he hadn’t, and while seventeen victims was a terrible price, here and now, in his body, I was damned glad to be a man.
“Then, in a way you and I are alike,” Zala said, fascinated. “We’re both genetic freaks. The only difference is, you know what’s wrong. I wish I did.”
I nodded. “Maybe you will now. Or maybe this Warden organism will just wipe out the problem. It’s supposed to do that.”