A Rarefied View At Dawn by David Farland (ereader with android .TXT) 📗

careening toward them on its single wheel. The droid had a body of carbon polymers, but wore a helmet to give it a human shape. Lasers inside the helmet projected an image on the inner surface of the visor--a gray-haired matriarch whose stern features clashed with her caring voice.

"Please, citizen," the Valkyrie warned Bann. "Do not push her."

Bann held Maya's shoulder, afraid that she might slip and fall if he did not hang on. Maya reached up and with her right hand and touched his left. "He'd never do that. He's my friend."

The Valkyrie was just as stern with Maya. "Do not let your legs dangle over the wall."

"It feels good," Maya said.

The Valkyrie drew near, close enough to snake out a mechanical clamp if Maya tried to jump.

"You have received a demerit," the droid notified her. "It will appear in your daily logs. Your mother and your muysafed will also be warned that you have been using thermal air currents to engage in vaginal stimulation, and that you did so in the presence of a male. Although these acts in themselves are not illegal, it will be noted that you are pubescent, and need extra guidance and monitoring."

The droid rolled forward, placing its bulk between Bann and Maya, pushing Bann back. He didn't understand what the droid was saying--using words like pubescent and vaginal, but Bann knew that it wanted him to leave.

He took a step backward. Maya swung her legs toward him and dropped onto the wall-walk.

"Come on," she told him, taking his hand and casting a defiant look at the droid. They raced along the wall, leaving the Valkyrie behind.

*****

Class that morning was held in the dome. The midwinter sun would hardly climb above the horizon, and so the children would not have to flee into the caverns to avoid the heat.

Instead, twelve young girls and one boy basked in a garden-like atmosphere, the grow-lights glowing like small suns above them, willow trees in a small grove arching overhead, their white-robed teacher looking proudly down at her treasure--a handful of baby chicks that trundled about, some still wet from the shell. His teacher was called the muysafed, the white hair, out of respect. But actually she had dark hair and braids, though rumor said that she was over two hundred years old.

Bann studied his chicken. It was like nothing that he had ever seen, and not quite what he had imagined. He'd once seen a holo of a bird from old Earth, a sea eagle in flight. And so he knew of feathers and wings.

But this creature seemed to have neither. Instead, of wings, it had stubby malformed stumps. Instead of feathers, it had a covering that looked like the yellowed balls of cotton that grew in the fields atop the highest hills of the sanctuary.

Its eyes were nothing like human eyes--dark little pools that blinked too much. And its tiny talons were the kind of thing that would give a child nightmares. Yet as he held it, Bann was delighted to feel its tiny heart kicking like a cricket within its chest, and to enjoy cool warmth. It was so like a human--nothing like the wild oily "geckoes" that sometimes climbed over the sanctuary walls upon their sticky pseudopeds.

Bann decided that he liked his chicken. The little creature pecked at grain when Bann held it in his hand. He named it Yusaf.

"Today," the muysafed said in a loud voice, "we are going to perform an experiment upon these chickens." She was staring right at Bann as she said it, as if to see his reaction. "Chickens are much like humans," she added. "As you can see, they have eyes like ours, and feet, and hearts that beat."

"And lungs, too," Bann added.

The muysafed smiled at him. Bann knew that he was one of the brightest children in the class. He felt proud to have recognized the bird's lungs.

And wings. They have wings, and it was birds that showed mankind how to fly.

He wanted to say that, too, but was just waiting for the appropriate moment.

"And lungs," the muysafed admitted. "And chickens respond to some chemicals in exactly the way that we do," the teacher said. "One such chemical is a hormone called testosterone. Does anyone know what testosterone does? Amayah, the oldest girl in the class, more of a young woman really, raised her hand and said, "It's what makes a man a man."

One girl behind Bann snickered, and others moved away from him, just barely. Only Maya drew closer, holding his hand, reassuring him.

Talking about men was discomforting. It was men who had destroyed the old world, Earth, with their wars and violence, forcing the Three Thousand sisters to flee in their starships. Men were frightening things, evil, and were kept outside the sanctuary walls. Bann had never actually seen one. Two other boys lived within Kara Kune, but they were younger than Bann, mere toddlers. Rarely did a woman choose to conceive a boy. Usually she merely cloned herself, or mixed her seed with that of another woman.

Still, there were men who lived outside the sanctuary, small tribes of wild men who rode the Floater ships. There were pirates, too, who sometimes stole women from the sanctuaries if the Valkyries couldn't stop them. And in some way that Bann didn't understand, these men forced women to make babies for them.

As his teacher talked, Bann could feel blood rising to his face, and his stomach tightening, making him sick.

"Correct," the muysafed said. "It is testosterone that turns boys into men. Among people, boys turn to men slowly. But with these chickens, we will speed the process by giving some of them large amounts of synthetic testosterone, so you can better witness the reaction."

She drew out a syringe and injected three chicks. One got a little testosterone. Maya's got three times as much, and Bann's got ten times more than Maya's. At the end of the day, Bann got to take his chick home.

*****

That evening, when Bann