Triton

by Samuel Delany

  Bron tried to relax. “I want you to make me a woman.” Saying it the second time was nowhere as hard as the first.

  “I see,” the man said. “You’re from Mars—or possibly Earth, right?”

  Bron nodded. “Mars.”

  “Thought so. Most of our beneficiaries are. Terrible what happened there this afternoon. Just terrible. But I imagine that doesn’t concern you.” He sucked his teeth. “Still, somehow life under our particular system doesn’t generate that many serious sexually dissatisfied types. Though, if you’ve come here, I suspect you’re the type who’s pretty fed up with people telling you what type you aren’t or are.” The man raised an eyebrow and coughed again quizzically.

  Bron was silent.

  “So, you want to be a woman.” The man cocked his head. “What kind of a woman do you want to be? Or rather, how much of a woman?”

  Bron frowned.

  “Do you simply want what essentially could be called cosmetic surgery—we can do quite a fine job; and quite a functional one. We can give you a functional vagina, functional clitoris, even a functional womb in which you can bear a baby to term and deliver it, and functional breasts with which you can suckle the infant once it is born. More than that, however, and we have to leave the realm of the cosmetic and enter the radical.”

  Bron’s frown deepened. “What is there beyond that you can do?”

  “Well.” The man lay his hands on the table. “In every one of your cells—Well, not all: notable exceptions are the red blood cells—there are forty-six chromosomes, long DNA chains, each of which can be considered two, giant, intertwined molocules, in which four nucleotides—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and gui-nene—are strung along, to be read sequentially in groups of three: the order of these groups determines the order of the amino acids along the polypeptide chains that make up the proteins and enzymes which, once formed, proceed to interact with each other and the environment in such a way that, after time and replenishment ... Well, the process is far too complicated to subsume under a single verb: let us simply say there they were, and here you are! I say forty-six: this would be completely true if you were a woman. But what made you a man is the half-length chromosome called Y, which is paired with a full-length chromosome called X. In women, there are two of these X’s and no

  Y at all. And, oddly, as long as you have at least one

  Y in the cells, it usually doesn’t matter how many X’s you have—and occasionally they double up—the organism is male. Now, the question is, how did this Y chromosome make you a male, back when various cells were dividing and your little balloon of tissue was suffering various Thomian catastrophes and folding in and crumpling up into you?” The man smiled. “But I sap-pose I’m merely recapitulating what you already know ... ? Most of our beneficiaries have done a fair amount of research on their own before they come to

  “I haven’t,” Bron said. “I just made up my mind about ... maybe an hour ago.”

  “Then again,” the men went on, “some do make their decisions quickly. And it might interest you to know that many among these are our most successful cases—if they’re the proper type.” He smiled, nodded. “Now, as I was saying: How does the Y chromosome do it?”

  “It has the blue prints on it of the amino acid order for the male sex hormones?” Bron asked.

  “Now, you must get the whole idea of ‘blue-printing’ out of your mind. The chromosomes don’t describe anything directly about the body. They prescribe, which is a different process entirely. Also, that Y chromosome is, for all practical purposes, just the tail end of an X chromosome. No, it’s more complicated than that. One way that chromosomes work is that an enzyme created by one length will activate, so to speak, the protein created by another length, either on the same chromosome or on a different one entirely. Or, sometimes, they will inactivate another product from another length. If you want to use the rather clumsy concept of genes—and, really, the concept of gene is just an abstraction, because there are no marked-out genes, there are just strings of nucleotides; they’re not framed at all, and starting to read the triplets at the proper point can be a real problem—we can say that certain genes turn on, or activate, other genes, while certain other genes inhibit the activity of others. There is a complicated interchain of turning-off’s and turning-on’s back and forth between the X and Y—for instance, a cell with multiple Y chromosomes and no X’s can’t do this and just dies—which leaves various genes on both the X and Y active which in turn activate genes all through the forty-six that prescribe male characteristics, while genes that would prescribe certain female characteristics are not activated (or in other cases specifically inactivated). The interchange that would occur between two X chromosomes would leave different genes activated all over the X chromosomes that would in turn activate those female prescription genes and inactivate the male ones throughout the rest of the forty-four. For instance, there’s a gene that is activated on the Y that activates the production of androgen—actually parts of the androgen itself are designed along a section of the X chromosome—while another gene, which Y activates on the X, causes another gene, somewhere else entirely, to get the body up so it can respond to the androgen. If this gene, somehow, isn’t activated, as occasionally happens, then you get what’s called testicular feminization. Male sex harmones are produced, but the body can’t respond to them, so in that case you have a Y and a woman’s body anyway. This situation between the X and Y makes it logically moot whether we consider the man an incomplete woman or the woman an incomplete man. The arrangement in birds and lizards, for example, is such that the half-length chromosome is carried by the females and the full-length is carried by the males: the males are X-X and the females are X-Y. At any rate, one of the things we can do for a man is infect him with a special virus-like substance related to something called an episome, which will actually carry in an extra length of X and deposit it in all his cells so that the Y is, so to speak, completed and all those cells that were X-Y will now be, in effect, X-X.”

  “What will this accomplish?”

  “Astonishingly little, actually. But it makes people feel better about it. Many of these things have to come into play at certain times in the development of the body to have noticeable effect. For instance the brain, left to its own devices, develops a monthly cyclic hormone discharge which then excites the ovaries, in a woman, at monthly intervals, to produce the female harmones which cause them to ovulate. The introduction of androgen, however, makes that part of the brain stem develop differently and the monthly cycle is damped way down. The brain stem is visibly different during dissection—in women, the brain stem is noticeably thicker than in men. But the point is, once this development has occurred and the monthly cycle is surpassed, even if the androgen is discontinued, the brain doesn’t revert back. Things of this sort are very difficult to reverse. They take ten or twelve minutes of bubble—

  micro-surgery. But that’s the way we do most of what we do. We try to use clones of your own tissue for whatever has to be enlarged—the uterus masculinus for your uterus; and we take actual germ plasm from your testes and grow-cum-sculpt ovaries from them—which is quite a feat. Have yow ever considered the difference between your reproductive equipment and hers—? Hers is much more efficient. At birth she’s already formed about five hundred thousand eggs, which, through a comparatively nonviolent absorption and generation process, reduces to about two hundred thousand by puberty, each waiting to proceed down into the womb—you know, practically ninety-nine percent of the data about what’s going to happen to ‘you,’ once the father’s genes meet up with the mother’s, is contained in the rest of the egg that’s nonchromosomal. That’s why the egg, compared to the sperm, is so big. You, on the other hand, produce about three hundred million sperm every day, out of which, if you’re prime breeding material, perhaps a hundred or so can actually fertilize anything. The other two hundred million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand and nine hundred are lethal mutations, pure wasted effo
rt, against which the female has an antibody system (fortunately) that weeds the bad ones out like germs. In fact, stimulating this anti-body system further—you have it too—is the basis of our birth control system.” He coughed. “Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently. But we begin by completing your X chromosomes. I say completing—you mustn’t think I’m catering to some supposed prejudice on your part where, because you want to be a woman, I’m assuming you think men inferior creatures and I’m buttering you up by downgrading—”

  “I don’t think men are inferior,” Bron said. “I just want to be a woman. I suppose you’ll tell me that’s a type too.”

  The man’s smile drew in just a little. “Yes, Ms Hel-strom, I’m afraid it is. But then, it’s not my place to judge. I’m only here to inform and council. Childbirth is only one of the things that can make a woman’s life more complicated than a man’s—but of course four out of five women today choose not to have children; does childbirth particularly interest you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, at least you’ll know you’re free to change your mind. Basically, however, you’ll be getting a much better designed, more complicated body. Treat it well, and all will go well with it. Treat it poorly, and, I’m afraid, because it is more complicated, there are more things that can go wrong with it. This can be a problem, especially to an inexperienced woman, a woman like you, Ms Helstrom, who is—how shall I put it? Not to the method born.”

  Bron wondered how many times a day he put it exactly like that.

  “But I hope you’ll accept the help I can give you, if only the information about the purely biological possibilities.” The man took a breath. “Of course, other methods have been devised for female-to-male transex-uals. But that probably doesn’t interest you ... ?”

  “I had a friend,” Bron said. “He ... she ... well, he used to be a woman. Now he’s got a family, and at least one child. How did that come about?”

  “Oh, there are quite a number of possibilities.” The man touched fingertips and nodded. “The simplest one, of course, is adoption. Then, there is a complicated process in which the germ plasm is induced to form all-X sperm, similar to the male bird or lizard. Was the child a daughter?”

  Bron nodded.

  “Then it’s quite possible. But we were talking about you. What would vou like us to do?”

  “The whole thing.”

  The man drew another breath. “I see.” But he was smiling.

  “I want to be genetically, hormonally, physically a woman ...” He found his hands clutching each other. He released them and said, more softly: “Don’t you want to know my reasons?”

  If there were a scale of smiles, the one in front of Bron would have dropped a minor second. “Ms Helstrom, we are counselors here—not judges. We assume you have your reasons, that you have worked them out logically to your own satisfaction. I only have information, most of it biological: if this fits with your reasons, fine. If it makes you uncertain about them, by all means take as much time to reconsider as you need; five minutes, five days, five years—if you think it’s necessary.” The man suddenly leaned forward. “Ms Helstrom, it would be completely fatuous of me to pretend I was unaware that, even in this day and age, such a decision as you have made may cause some consternation among one’s co-operative, if not communal, colleagues. It’s hard not to find such consternation upsetting—not to mention those nameless social attitudes that one internalized during a less enlightened youth on a world with a different culture, that are, very often, the same attitudes the dissatisfaction with which prompted one to the decision confronting us now. And while we have our own emotional commitment to bolster us, these external prejudices assail us nevertheless, invariably presenting themselves in the guise of logic. Let me try and offer you some support, Ms Helstrom. Are you by any chance familiar with a current area of computer mathematics called metalogic?”

  Bron raised his real eyebrow. “As a matter of fact I am.”

  “Thought you might be.” The man’s smile rose a perfect fifth. “Logic can only tell us about the possible relations of elements that are already known. It gives us no tools to analyze any of those elements into more basic knowns or unknowns. It gives us no way to extrapolate about elements outside what we know. Analysis and extrapolation are both accomplished by reasoning—of which logic is only a very incomplete part. The point is, with life enclosed between two vast parentheses of nonbeing and straited on either side by inevitable suffering, there is no logical reason ever to try to improve any situation. There are, however, many reasons of other types for making as many inprovements as you reasonably can. Any reasoning process, as it deviates from strict, deductive logic, is a metalogical one. There is no logical way that you can even know that I am sitting here on the other side of the desk from you, or even that ... well, that there is your own hand. Both could be illusions: we have the technology—downstairs, in the west wing—to produce illusions, involving both belief and knowledge of those beliefs as true, far more complicated than either, by working directly on the brain. What are your social responsibilities when you have a technology like that available? The answer that the satellites seem to have come up with is to try and make the subjective reality of each of its citizens as politically inviolable as possible, to the point of destructive distress—and the destruction must be complained about by another citizen; and you must complain about the distress. Indeed, there are those who believe, down to the bottom of their subjective hearts, that the war we just ...” He coughed: “—won this afternoon was fought to preserve that inviolability. Soldiers or not, I don’t. But basically our culture allows, supports, and encourages behavior that, simply in the streets of both unlicensed and licensed sectors, would have produced some encounter with some restraining institution if they were indulged in on Earth a hundred years ago.” He cocked an eyebrow, let it uncock. “The situation of your life in the world is such that you think it would be better if you were a woman.”

  “Yes,” Bron said.

  “Very well.” The man sat back, pulling his hands to the edge of the desk. “We can get started anytime you like.”

  “And the psychological part?”

  The smile dropped an octave, which left it hovering at the threshold of a frown. “I beg your pardon?”

  “What about the psychological part?”

  The man sat forward again, the smile recovering. “I don’t quite under ... ? You want to be converted physically into a woman. And you ...” And fell again. “You don’t mean in terms of ... well—” He coughed again. “Actually, Ms Helstrom, you have just presented a situation that really is unusual. Most of our ... out male clients want the physical operation because, in one way or another, they feel they already are, in some sense, psychologically more suited to a female body and the female situation, however they per—

  ceive it. But I gather ...” The eyebrows gathered—“you don’t?”

  “No.” And after the man said nothing for practically half a minute, Bron said: “You do do sexual re-fixations and things like that, here, in this clinic, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we—” The man coughed again and Bron realized it was an honest cold, not a purposefully snide punctuation (another religious fanatic, more than likely. Bron sighed)—“Well, downstairs, in the west wing. Yes, we do. But ...” Now he laughed. “Well, so seldom do the two departments have to work on the same case that—well, there isn’t even a door from our office to theirs. I mean, they deal with an entirely different type of case: friends, of whatever sex, who want to introduce a sexual element into their relationships because one, or both of them, are having difficulty doing it naturally; various functional problems; people who just want to try something new; or people who just want the sexual element completely suppressed, often for religious reasons.” The laughter broke again. “I’m afraid to avail yourself of their services, you literally have to go outside and come
in all over again. Here—it’s been a slow day. Let me come with you.” The man pushed back his chair, stood.

  The room was mottled green, octagonal: pastel lumias glowed in guilt frames around the walls. It was apparently a much larger and busier department: war or no, a dozen men and women were waiting to be seen.

  But though it was a different department, there was enough connection so that, coming in with his “counselor,” Bron was taken right away into an ivory cubicle with two technicians and several banks of equipment.

  “Could you do a quick fixation grid of this gentleman’s” (Bron noted the restoration of his gender) “sexual deployment template? Just for my own curiosity—dispense with the interview part. I just want to see the figures.”

  “For you, sweetheart,” the younger woman techni—

  cian said, “anything,” and sat Bron in a chair, put a helmet over his head that covered his eyes with dark pads and (at a switch he heard click somewhere) grew, inside it, gentle but firm restraining clamps. “Try to relax and don’t think of anything—if you’ve ever done any alpha-wave meditation, try to come as close to that state as you can ... yes, there you go. Beautiful ... beautiful ... hold that mental state ... yes, hold it. Don’t think. There! Fine!” and when the helmet hummed up on its twin arms, he saw the two technicians and the counselor who had brought him looking at several large sheets of—Bron stood up, stepped up behind them—numbers, printed over large paper grids: the numbers were different hues, making clouds of color, here interpenetrating, there intermixing, like a numerically analyzed sensory shield. The console rolled out a final sheet from its plastic lips.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “What do they mean?” Bron asked.

  The younger woman, with pursed lips, flipped through the other four sheets. “Ignore the yellow numbers and the ones around the edge of the configurations; they map the connections of your sexuality with other areas of your person ... which, indeed, looks rather stunningly ordinary. The basic blue, red, and violet configurations—now this is just from an eye-check of the color overlap of one-place numbers over three-place numbers and a quick glance at the odd-versus-even deployment of three-place figures—but it looks as if you have performed quite adequately with partners of both genders, with an overwhelming preference for female partners—”