"Your loss," I said.
"True," Steck agreed. "My loss. Who wouldn't like to believe benevolent deities took an interest in the world? But the only ones at work in Birds Home were busybodies from the stars who treated the people of Tober Cove like lab rats. There aren't even people here anymore — it's all run by machines. But we lab rats are still running through the maze."
"How do you know?" I demanded. "Have you talked to the gods? Have you been to Birds Home before?"
To be honest, I didn't care about her answers. But I wanted to get her talking. She would try to justify herself; she would try to explain, and as she did, I would slowly reach for the gun tucked in at my back.
"No, I haven't talked to the gods," Steck admitted. "And I haven't been to Birds Home since my own Commitment Hour. But I've thought about this, Fullin. I've thought about it every day for the past twenty years. It took a while to learn enough science to figure out the tricks, but I deduced it all before I got here, and I've seen enough in Birds Home to confirm my guesses."
My hand touched the butt of the pistol. The metal was warm from lying against my skin.
"You want to know what's really going on?" Steck continued. "How the tricks work? It starts with the Gift of Blood and Bone that's taken from every baby. When those tissue samples are delivered to Birds Home, some very clever machines go to work extracting the DNA — the seeds that eventually grow into a human being. The machines give those seeds a little twist: swap an X chromosome with a Y, change a girl seed into a boy seed, or vice versa. And since they take the replacement chromosome from someone else rather than deriving it from your own chromosomes… no, never mind, I'm just showing off. I've spent twenty years accumulating the knowledge to understand Tober Cove, and you're the only people I may ever be able to tell. I have to do this right. The machines made a seed for boy Fullin by starting with the seeds of girl Fullin and adding a tiny boy-bit from some other person. Which is why your boy self doesn't look exactly like your girl self."
"My sister Olimbarg looks the same, boy or girl," Cappie said.
"The wonders of genetics," Steck answered. "Flukes happen. But the people who made Birds Home had a lot more control over genes than the OldTechs did. The machines here can work with the tissue samples taken at a baby's first solstice, and by the next summer produce a child of the opposite sex who looks a year and a half old. Don't ask me how they accelerate the growth — there's a laboratory next door, but I don't understand a tenth of the equipment."
I had my fingers wrapped around the pistol grip now. Slowly, I eased the gun out of my belt. It made a soft sticky sound as it slipped away from my sweat-damp back.
"And cloning isn't the only trick," Steck went on. "There's also the memory transfer. When your son Waggett arrived here, Fullin, there was a female version of him waiting, constructed from the tissue sample taken the previous year. But the girl-Waggett was a blank slate; her whole life she'd been dormant under glass, so she had an empty brain. No, that's going too far; her brain wasn't completely empty. Some time in the past year, the machines had placed a communications implant in her head… and as soon as the original Waggett arrived, they put a similar implant in his."
The muzzle of the gun was free of my belt. I kept my eyes on Steck, as if I had nothing on my mind but listening.
"I watched that implant process," she said, "and you wouldn't have liked it, Fullin. A robot feeds a tiny wire through the back of the baby's neck and straight up into the brain. The wire goes through the hole made by the Gift of Blood and Bone, so there won't be a second scar. Isn't that clever? I always wondered why they took the damned tissue sample from the spine instead of someplace less gruesome; the OldTechs could get DNA just by swabbing the inside of your mouth. But the scar at the back of the neck gives a camouflaged entry point for injecting nano-transmitters."
Slowly, I eased my other hand behind my back. The next part would be difficult, especially to do without looking. The safety mechanism was a sort of slide that had to be moved to the right position before the gun would shoot. Steck herself had demonstrated how it worked last night, as Bonnakkut and I watched. Bonnakkut had practiced a few times; I had never done it before.
"Once the transmitters are implanted," Steck said, "they download — copy — everything from the original Waggett's brain into the clean-slate clone. I watched that happen too, Fullin; the lab next door has video displays to monitor the copying process. Bit by bit, I saw the little girl Waggett clone acquire all the original Waggett's thoughts and personality."
"Before you killed her," I said. I was blindly pushing and pulling parts of the pistol behind my back, but nothing wanted to slide.
"Before I killed that particular body," Steck corrected. "But Waggett is still alive in a Neut body… because the machines make hermaphrodite copies of children as well as opposite sex bodies. The child in that coffin," Steck waved in the direction of Neut-Waggett, "may look different from your son, but in his head, he's everything the original Waggett was. A perfect mental copy."
"And what about later?" my sister self asked. "My male half got copied from my brain," she said, pointing to me, "but that was when we were one year old. We've stayed connected for years."
Steck nodded. "After the first body switch, you have three copies of the same person, all with communication implants in their heads. The implants are like a million tiny radios in your brain — although they're biological, powered by your own metabolisms. Remember Rashid picking up radio waves from your head, Fullin? Every second of every day, you broadcast low-powered encodings of your mental state. The signals get picked up by relay stations like that one in the car's engine… and there must be hidden relays all over the peninsula to cover you whenever you leave home. The relays transfer your broadcasts to that antenna on Patriarch Hill, which transmits everything up here to Birds Home. Moment by moment, the two dormant bodies receive transmissions from the body that's walking around in Tober Cove… so the sleeping versions experience everything the active version does."
"So this past year," I said, "I was the sender…"
"And I was the receiver," my sister finished. She gave me a veiled look. Of course, she was receiving even now — that's why she could pick up my thoughts and feelings. She must know exactly what I was doing with the gun.
Did Steck know we were still linked?
"How come it sometimes reverses?" I asked Steck. "How could my sister get into my head when she was asleep up here?"
Suddenly I felt a part of the pistol begin to slide under my hand. I had to force myself not to smile.
"That's part of the grand design of the star-siders who set up this experiment," Steck answered. "From what I've seen in the lab, the communication implants make it possible to override one personality with the other. Basically, they set the male Fullin to receive, then set the female Fullin to transmit… and turn up the volume so loud that the female drowns out the original male. I think this happens on Commitment Day so that both personalities can have input into the final decision. Other times, the reversal only kicks in under extreme stress. For all I know, it could be some kind of overload — one personality goes into shock and the communication system goes out of whack. I don't know if it's intentional or not."
"The gods arrange it so that one soul can help the other," I said.
"Oh come on, Fullin," my sister suddenly snapped, "the gods? Haven't you been listening? The gods have nothing to do with this. Traitors from the stars made Birds Home. It's all an experiment… except they got bored and walked away when we stopped being amusing."