Free Celebrant by Michael Cisco

astonishingly diverse, so that each generation expressed a wild sampling of phenotypy. Because of this great diversity, early human children only rarely resembled their parents. Children normally looked nothing like either parent.
    However, as humanity grew more numerous and dispersed, and as certain human societies began to place emphasis — with mounting insistence — on demonstrable familial continuity (in particular where the transmission of hereditary privileges and property were concerned), and in the dividing up of family groups and so on, parents began to reject and abandon — and even to kill — children who did not resemble them, sparing only those children who did. It was this that brought about the current state of affairs, in which children all tend to resemble their parents closely. Unaware of their history, people invented stories that stood the truth on its head, insisting that all humanity began with basically identical individuals and only became differentiated later. Being the same was made to seem the more natural thing, when that sameness was actually the consequence of deliberate and willful intervention.
    The whrounims had not gone that route. They continue as various as ever, and traits and qualities long vanished in all other human populations (with the occasional atavistic exception) are said to persist among them, and to be distributed surgically.
    So what does a whrounim look like? (deKlend asks)
    Everybody, I suppose, (Nardac answers)
    By now they’re passing along a gravel drive. As they watch the brown sky thickening with the onset of artificial night, brought on as the whrounims dim their distant city lights, a convoy of silent trucks with shimmying metal tanks on their beds goes lumbering by. A sound of crying babies is plainly audible, coming from the tanks.
    Those are full of babies, (Nardac explains pensively)
    What on earth for? (deKlend asks, his large eyes widening in astonishment)
    Whrounims don’t tax in money, but in male offspring. The firstborn from each couple.
    — They don’t eat them (she adds after a moment, grinning sadly) I think they make them into soldiers, something like that.
    The real problem is the girls. Since the parents have to give up at least one male child, and since they value boys more than girls, they get rid of baby girls. They don’t keep them. I think they regard girls as a luxury, or a waste of time and of food. They keep trying to have boys and, when they get girls instead, they get rid of them. They leave them out for the birds, or throw them into deep gullies, or pools. Some they tie to kites or balloons and let loose on the wind. And no one, anywhere, talks about it. A girl’s birth they call a ‘false pregnancy.’
    The subject seems to depress her, and she wanders off in silence, without saying goodbye.
    deKlend returns alone. The halls of the school are deserted. No quarters have been found for him yet and he will have to sleep a second night on that narrow sofa in the lounge. A dish of bread and fruit has been set out for him, though.
    Lying in the dark, he listens deep into the silent fabric of the school. In one of its secret rooms a receiver is tuned to the wandering signal of Black Radio of Votu. Its squelched, whirring voice says:
     
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    Listening to that sourceless voice, travelling through the walls from somewhere, he experiences the floating anticipation he gets from listening to songs, when a verse ends and the next one begins while the music doesn’t change. It’s like a soft blow, or something yielding inside. The murmur goes on, a steady tone