"You want the truth?" Rashid asked. "You really want it?"

"Yes," I said.

We were standing outside the fence, watching the section of chain-link that Rashid had cut out and pushed down onto the ground. The chain metal had lost its solidity; it had turned into a gooey black liquid as thickly viscous as molasses. Slowly, very slowly, the liquid was flowing across the dirt.

How could such a thing happen? Not that I wanted an explanation of the science or magic that could turn steel into this tarry fluid; how could this fence and this antenna, perched on Patriarch Hill my entire lifetime and for centuries before I was born, be made of such otherworldly stuff?

Tober Cove was my home. I thought I understood it.

"What's going on?" I asked… and for some reason I turned to Steck. "Is this just some trick you've set up to scare me?"

She closed her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. "Sorry, Fullin," she murmured. "I know it's hard when you realize things aren't the way you thought." She opened her eyes again. "It really might be best if we walk back to the town square and pretend you haven't seen a thing."

The black chain-link fluid had pooled into an oily puddle directly under the rest of the fence. Now the liquid began to flow straight upward, like a waterfall in slow reverse, inching up to fill the hole Rashid had cut.

"I want to know," I said. "Please."

Steck turned to Rashid. He shrugged. "All right. You know why OldTech civilization collapsed?" he asked me.

"Because demons came from beyond the stars—"

"Not demons," he interrupted. "Aliens. Extraterrestrials. The League of Peoples."

"Inhuman creatures," I said. "And they offered exotic riches to anybody who wanted to leave Earth. Enough people went with them that things fell apart."

"Close enough," Rashid said. "And then?"

"Then the Sparks restored order and organized the planet into the Spark Protectorate."

"Don't make it sound like it happened overnight," Rashid chided. "When the League of Peoples came to Earth with their proposal, the only humans who accepted were those with nothing to lose: people facing starvation or war, not to mention patients with terminal diseases who thought they could be saved by League medicine. They went off; then they came back two years later looking healthy and driving FTL starships, saying no, there really weren't any strings attached to the League's offer. A few more people left… then a few more, and a few more, with each wave coming back to tell friends and family, it's wonderful, we have a clean new home planet, we have unbelievable high-tech gadgets, we have peace. There were plenty of doubters, but there were also plenty of people who decided to take the plunge."

"Traitors," I said.

"You don't know how terrible things were in the twenty-first century," Rashid replied. "Toward the end of OldTech times, most of the human race was poor and hungry. The planet was damaged — the air, the water, the soil — and there were so many conflicting factions claiming they knew how to solve the world's problems that no one could rally enough support to get any recovery plan started. Twenty years after the League's first offer, more than seventy percent of the Earth's human population had decided it was better to start over than stay on a sinking ship."

"Traitors," I repeated.

"So speaks the descendant of someone who stayed home… and in a part of the world that was affluent and not too polluted. Anyway, so many people left that OldTech culture couldn't sustain itself… and it took forty more years before my Spark ancestors managed to reestablish equilibrium. You know what happened in those forty years?"

"High Queen Gloriana of Spark battled the star demons into subjugation and forced them to pay her tribute." Why was he asking me this? Every child on Earth learned history.

"Well," Rashid answered with a wry look on his face, "it's more accurate to say that Gloriana came to an accommodation with the League of Peoples. In exchange for certain, uh, considerations from my family, the League granted us sovereignty over the planet… as well as a supply of high-tech goodies that would help us convince the struggling dregs of humanity to accept us as their rulers."

"The word 'puppet' was never used," Steck put in.

Rashid glared at her. "You know nothing about the League," he snapped. "They didn't need Earth as a vassal; they just felt bad for disrupting Terran society so badly. The League decided Gloriana was the best bet for ending decades of violent anarchy."

"What does this have to do with the antenna?" I asked. "And the fence." The tarry fluid had climbed to the height of my knees now — like a paper-thin black curtain stretched across the hole. Second by second, it continued to climb. I wanted to touch it; I didn't dare.

Maybe it would feel greasy like butter. Maybe the slightest touch would burn like a spider bite.

"This antenna," Rashid said, "almost certainly dates back to the forty years between the OldTech collapse and Gloriana's hands-off treaty with the League. During that time, Earth was officially a free zone — open to any League members who cared to drop by. Nonhumans mostly weren't interested, but humans… they'd got their hands on all kinds of nifty technology from the League, and they were itching to play god with the poor benighted barbarians who'd stayed back on Earth."

I didn't like his choice of phrase: "play god." My face must have shown my resentment. "I'm sorry, Fullin," Rashid said, "but that's what they did. Certain humans from the stars returned to Earth to set up experiments. They treated their old home planet as one big laboratory filled with guinea pigs who had chosen to be backward… who had irrationally refused to go into space. So the star-siders came back to test their lovely new gadgetry on us. Brain/machine interlinks. Clever tricks to work on genes. Nanotech…"

He gestured toward the fence. The black sheet of goo had risen to cover the hole completely now. There was no more fluid on the ground; it had all seeped upward to bond with the rest of the chain-link.

"They usually set up their experiments in abandoned towns," Rashid said. "Often, they built societies from the ground up — starting with infants they kidnapped from elsewhere on Earth, or even with baby clones of themselves. They'd invent religions, customs, ways of life, all carefully taught to the kids… because these projects were meant to be demonstrations, Fullin. Demonstrations of social theories. Nice little rustic Utopias. And they thought they were doing us a favor; they really did. To them, life here on Earth was a violent, ignorant hell. Forcibly imposing new social structures on us was nothing more than kindness."

"And that's what you think Tober Cove is?" I asked. "Some project built by traitors who came back from the stars?"

Rashid nodded. "The OldTechs were obsessed with gender differences, Fullin: which traits were innate, which were just a result of training. In the years after OldTech civilization collapsed, it's not hard to believe that some of the star-siders set up a research program here — to see what happened when people had the chance to be both male and female…"

"Or both," Steck added.

"Indeed," Rashid said. "An experiment to see what differences persisted even when people saw both sides of the gender gap… and could straddle the middle if they wanted."

The sheet of blackness covering the gap in the fence was beginning to tatter. Holes opened in the goo as other regions began to thicken — a crisscross pattern congealing slowly into the familiar diamonds of chain-link. Red specks appeared on the black surface: simulated dots of rust. The underlying black changed color too, fading to metallic steel gray.

It had only taken a few minutes. Rashid had cut out a section of fence… and the fence had healed itself. I couldn't even see where the cuts had been made.