Read Online Commitment Hour by James Alan Gardner - Free Book Online Page B

would serve you right,” I said.
    “Don’t grouch,” Rashid chided. “You just said you’re feeling fine. Now tell me more about yourself and Tober Cove. How old are you?”
    “Twenty,” I answered.
    “So you’ll Commit to a permanent sex tomorrow?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And have you really alternated sex every summer since you were born?”
    “They don’t change sex their first summer,” Steck put in. “Mistress Gull is too tenderhearted to separate babies from their families. Infants aren’t taken till after their first birthday.”
    “Fair enough,” Rashid shrugged. Turning back to me, he asked, “Were you born a boy or a girl?”
    “A girl,” I answered.
    “So you became a boy in the summer when you were one year old, a girl when you were two, a boy again when you were three…”
    “That’is how it works,” I said, trying to sound bored. This wasn’t the first time I’d had this conversation. In all the world, our little secluded village was the only place where the gods allowed children to switch sex each year…so whenever I went out of town to play, I could expect questions on the subject several times an evening. Yoskar, the carpenter with whom I had that dalliance—he had asked me again and again. Had I really been male the year before? Would I really be male again after the solstice? When I stopped being a woman, did I stop liking men? Or did I like men all the time, or both men and women, or what?
    I couldn’t decide if such questions were indecent or just trite. No one asks a woman, “Hey, how does it feel to have breasts?” or a man, “Isn’t it weird having a penis?” The questions don’t make sense—you don’t think about yourself on that level. In Tober Cove, only a person’s current gender mattered. Whatever happened before or after was irrelevant.
    On the other hand, Rashid wasn’t the type to stop asking questions just because I showed disinterest. “And,” he continued, “Steck tells me that all residents of Tober Cove bear a child when they’re nineteen or twenty.”
    “In one of their last years before Commitment,” I nodded. “Tomorrow at noon, several male teenagers will go off to Birds Home with Master Crow, and when they come back at sunset, they’ll be female and pregnant. The baby is born five or six months later.”
    “Of course,” Steck put in, “Master Crow is said to be the baby’s father…even though the child often grows to look strikingly like someone else in the village.”
    I glowered at the Neut. As a former Tober, Steck must know that Master Crow made such children resemble other people in the cove so the kids would fit in with their peers. The offspring of Master Crow had enough prestige already, compared to children with human fathers. They didn’t need to look special too.
    But I didn’t have the patience to bandy words with a Neut. I just told Rashid, “Master Crow fathers the babies to make sure every Tober experiences childbirth, nursing and such, before Committing to one sex or the other. We have to know everything about being a woman, and everything about being a man, so we can make the right choice.”
    “You give birth to children…and I assume you’re encouraged to have sexual relationships…”
    “Doesn’t take much encouraging,” Steck snickered.
    I glared. My stomach clenched to hear a Neut talk smut.
    “So every Tober,” Rashid continued, “gets to make love as both a male and a female—”
    “Not every Tober,” Steck interrupted. “Some find they can only get lucky when they’re women…and then only with men who are really hard up.”
    I gave the Neut a curious look.
    “Or it might work the other way around,” Steck added hurriedly.
    “Either way, I can see it’s important information to have,” Rashid said, “when you’re trying to decide how to spend the rest of your life. You must be thankful if you have a strong reason to choose one gender over the other. Like, uhh…if making love is