“Where’s Windy?”
The Spike shrugged.
“Well—” Bron smiled—“I must admit he struck me as the roving kind.”
“He’s probably dead,” the Spike said. “The whole company left Lahesh the same day you did, but Windy was going to stay behind on Earth for another six days. Windy was born on Earth, you know. He’d planned to hitchhike somewhere or other to see one of his families, and then join us later. Only the war ...” She looked about the street. “Eighty-eight percent of the population at last report ... The confusion there is still supposed to be horrible. They’ve said not to expect any reliable information from the place for at least another year. Then there’re those who say there’ll never be anything there again to have any reliable information about.”
“I saw a public-channel coverage of the cannibalism going on in both the Americas.” Bron felt welling distress. “And that was only a month ago ... ?”
The Spike took a deep breath. “So that means the chances are—what? Four out of five that he’s dead? Or, by this time, nine out of ten.”
The only response to come to Bron was a tasteless joke about the chances of Windy’s having been eaten. “Then you’re not really involved with anybody anymore—” And the distress was still growing; her heart began to knock again. What is this? she wondered. It certainly couldn’t be sex! Was it the terror, or the embarrassment, of death? But she’d hardly known Windy; and his death was a probability, not a certainty, anyway. Then, astonishing herself, Bron said: “Spike, let me come with you. All the rest is ridiculous.” She looked at the pavement. “I’ll give up everything I have, go wherever you like, do whatever you want. You’ve had women lovers. Love me. I’ll have a refixation, tonight. I want you. I love you. I didn’t even know it, but seeing you again—”
“Oh, Bron ...” The Spike touched Bron’s shoulder.
Bron felt something inside reel about her chest, staggering at the touch. “Feeling like this ... I’ve never felt like this about ... anyone before. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” the Spike said. “I do.”
“Then why can’t you—?”
“First of all, I am involved with someone else. Second of all, I’m touched, I’m complimented ... even now: But I’m not interested.”
“Who are you ... with ... ?” Despair built behind Bron’s face like a solid slab of metal that began to heat, to burn, to melt and run across her eyes. She wasn’t crying. But water rolled down one cheek.
The Spike dropped her hand. “You’ve met him, actually—though you probably don’t remember ... Fred?
I believe the first time you saw him, he’d just punched me in the jaw.”
“Him ... ?” Bron looked up, blinking. “I hope he’s taken a bath since I ... !”
The Spike laughed. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think he has. I’m always on the verge of trouble with the University over him—another reason I’ll be glad to get out of teaching and back to work. I took him to one of my lectures .... on a chain—I had some of the students throw raw meat—he likes that. It was just for the theater. But I’m afraid most of the University types have simply never encountered anything quite like Fred before. I mean up close. They don’t know what to do with him. It’s too bad you never got a chance to talk with him—though, of course, a lot of his ideas have developed since we first met.”
“But what in the world do the two of you—?”
“Fred is into some rather strange things—sexually, that is. And no, I haven’t decided whether they’re really me, yet. Frankly, it’s not exactly my concept of the ideal sexualizationship but it’s the one I currently care about the most and—Look—let’s not talk about it, all right?” She looked at Bron and sighed.
“Does he want another woman?” Bron asked. “I’ll go with him. I’ll do anything he wants, as long as you’re with him too; and I can be near you, talk to you—”
“Bron, you don’t get the point,” the Spike said. “Whether he might want you or not has nothing to do with it. / don’t want you. Now let’s call it a day. The transport’s up there. You go on. I’ve got other things to do.”
“You don’t believe you’re the only person I’ve ever felt like this about?”
“I told you: I do believe it.”
“I’ve felt this way about you from the moment I first saw you. I’ve felt this way about you all along. I know now that I’ll always feel this way, no matter what.”
“And I happen to believe you’ll feel rather differently three minutes—if not thirty seconds—after I’ve left.”
“But I—”
“Bron, there’s a certain point in meaningless communication after which you just have to—” Suddenly the Spike stopped, made an angry face, started to turn away, then hesitated: “Look, there’s the transport. Use it. I’m going down this way. And if you try to follow me, I’ll kick you in the balls.”
Which, as Bron watched the Spike stalk down the street, naked back moving away between other pedestrians, seemed so absurd she didn’t even try to run after her.
The burning behind her face continued: under its heat she could feel her eyes drying, almost painful. Suddenly she turned and started toward the station kiosk. Feel differently in thirty seconds! Shaking with rage and embarrassment, Bron thought: How could a woman like that know what anyone felt! About anything! I must be crazy (she passed a kiosk, stepped onto the moving ramp, and kept walking), completely crazy! What could possess me to want a woman like that? And it hadn’t been sex! For all the fear, the heart pounding, the sickness unto death, there had been none of the muzzy warmth in the loins, or even the muzzy expectation of it, that she had felt enough times just walking along the street, looking at some transport attendant, perhaps some worker from another office, or even the occasional e-girl. If anything, it was sex’s certain absence that had made the whole thing more distressing. Crazy! she thought again. There I was, about to throw over all I believe in, my work, my ideals, everything I want, everything I’ve become, for some leftover reaction that doesn’t even have the excuse of pleasure about it, unless it’s just a memory of sex—and what else are emotions anyway? An idea that had haunted her for the whole half year returned: Somehow she was now more at the mercy of her emotions than she had been.
Where the hell am I? she suddenly thought, and stepped off at the corner. She was at another kiosk, but which station? She looked up at the green street coordinate, took a breath, and started down the ramp.
Brian, she thought. Yes, Brian, her counselor ...
It would be her third counseling session, the first op—
tional one. She wished desperately that this whole depressing encounter had not taken place just then. It made the whole counseling thing seem too necessary.
Bron’s distressing reveries completely enclosed her till she reached her co-op.
Across the commons, two older women were bent over a game; younger ones stood silently, watching. Bron had been planning to go straight to her room, but now she looked toward the table.
Between the players, on a flat board checkered black and red, carved figures stood.
Years ago on Mars, Bron had read something about such a game ... She’d even known its name, once. But that was the past; she didn’t like to think about the past. Besides, it was much too abstract and complicated. As she recalled, each piece (unlike vlet) had a fixed and definite way to move: Why hadn’t Lawrence come to visit her recently? (One player, her fingers full of bright-stoned rings, moved a piece and said, softly: “Check.”) Bron turned away. She hadn’t seen Lawrence in months. Of course, she could always visit him. Putting it that way, however, she realized she didn’t want to see him. Which, after all, may have been why he hadn’t come to see her.
Then Prynn, the really obnoxious fifteen-year-old who had taken to confiding (endlessly) to Bron (not so much because Bron encouraged her, but because she hadn’t figured out yet how to discourage) stamped into the room and announced to everyone: “Do you know w
hat my social worker did? Do you know? Do you know!” The last you went more or less to Bron, who looked around, surprised: Rough black hair in a stubbly braid stood out at one side of Prynn’s head. Her face had not quite enough blotches to suggest anything cosmetic ‘ “Uh .’.. no,” Bron said. “What?”
And Prynn, almost quivering, turned and fled the room.
One of the other women looked up from her reader, caught Bron’s eye, and shrugged.
Five minutes later, when Bron, after lingering in the commons to flip through the new tapes that had come in that afternoon—half of them (probably all the good ones) were already out on loan—came up into the corridor where her room was, she saw Prynn sitting on the floor beside the door, chin on her knees, one arm locked around the floppy cuffs of her patchy black pants (there was something very wrong with one of Prynn’s toenails), the other hand lying limp beside her. As Bron walked up, Prynn said, without looking: “You said you wanted to know:—you sure took your time getting here.” Which was the beginning of an evening-long recount of fancied insults, misunderstandings and general abuse from the Social Guidance Department, which, since Prynn had left her remaining parent at Lux (on Titan) and come to Triton’s Tethys, had been overseeing her education. The comparison with Alfred had been inevitable—and had, inevitably, broken down. Prynn’s sexual pursuits had none of Alfred’s hysterical futility; they went on, however, just as doggedly. Once a week she went to an establishment that catered to under-sixteen-year-old girls and fifty-five-year-plus men. Unfailingly Prynn would return with one, two or, on occasions, three such gentlemen, who would stay the night. But, from her unflinching accounts of their goings-on, the mechanics of these encounters usually went off to everyone’s satisfaction. Alfred was from a moon of Uranus. Prynn was from a moon of Saturn. Alfred had been going on eighteen. Prynn was just fifteen ... In the midst of one of these recountings, Bron had once let slip her own early profession, and then, to make it make sense, had had to reveal her previous sex. Both facts Prynn had found completely uninteresting—which was probably one reason why the relation continued. “But they never come back to see me here,” Prynn had said (and was saying again now; somehow, while Bron’s mind had wandered, so had Prynn’s monologue). “I tell them to. But they won’t. The fuckers!” It apparently made her quite miserable. Prynn began to explain just exactly how miserable. During her first months, Bron had said (to herself) that her sexual activity was about equal to what it had been before the operation, i.e., infrequent. But now, she had to admit (to Prynn) that it had been, actually, nil—plurality female sexual deployment or no; which Prynn interrupted her own recounting long enough to say was kinky, then launched into more monologues anent the unfeeling Universe: from time to time, images of Bron’s encounter with the Spike that afternoon returned to blot out the harangue—which was suddenly over.
Prynn had just closed the door, loudly, after her.
It is too much, Bron thought. I will call for a social guidance appointment. Tomorrow. I’ve got to get some advice.
“Do you think it could be hormones?”
“Which,” Brian asked, from her large, deep, green-plush chair, “of the various things you’ve just gone over do you mean?” Brian was slim, fiftyish, silver-coiffed and silver-nailed, and had told Bron in their first meeting that she was (yes, they were in the u-1) from Mars. Indeed, Brian was what many of the Martian ladies Bron had once hired out to, fifteen years before, had aspired to be, and what those who could afford to keep themselves in such good shape occasionally approached. (Bron remembered their endless, motherly advice. Now, of course, Bron was the client: but otherwise—and both Bron and Brian had commented on, and rather enjoyed, the irony for the first half hour of the first counseling session—little had changed.)
“I don’t know,” Bron said. “Perhaps it is psychological. But I just don’t feel like a woman. I mean all the time, every minute, a complete and whole woman. Of course, when I think about it, or some guy makes a pass at me, then I remember. But most of the time I just feel like an ordinary, normal ...” Bron shrugged, turned in her own chair, as large, as deep, as plush, but yellow.
Brian said: “When you were a man, were you aware of being a man every second of the day? What makes you think that most women feel like women every—”
“But I don’t want to be like most women—” and then wished she hadn’t said it because Brian’s basic counseling technique was not to respond to things un-respondable to—which meant frequent silences. For a while Bron had tried to enjoy them, as she might have, once, if they had occurred in any ordinary conversation. But, somehow during the tenth or so such silence, she had realized that they betokened nobody’s embarrassment but her own. “Maybe more hormones—” she said at last. “Or maybe they should have doctored up a few more X chromosomes in a few more cells. I mean, perhaps they didn’t infect enough of them.”
“/ think in terms of the chromosome business,” Brian said, “there are a few things you will just have to come to terms with. A hundred and fifty years ago, some geneticists found a terribly inbred town in the Appalachian mountains, where all the women had perfect teeth; there was all sorts of talk about having discovered an important, sex-linked gene for dental perfection. The point is, however, any little string of nucleotides they might isolate is really only a section of a very complicated interface, both internal and external. Consider: having the proper set of nucleotides for perfect teeth isn’t going to do you much good if you happen to be missing the set that prescribes, say, your jawbone. You may have the nucleotides that order the amino acids in the blue protein that colors the iris of your eyes, but if you don’t happen to have the string that orders the amino acids of the white protein for the body of the eye itself, blue eyes you will not have. In other words, it’s a little silly to say you have the string for blue eyes if you don’t have the string for eyes at all. The external part of the interface, which goes on at the same time, also has to be borne in mind: the string that gives you perfect teeth, assuming all the other strings are properly arranged around it, still only gives you perfect teeth within a particular environment—that is, with certain elements plentifully available, and others fairly absent. The strings of nucleotides don’t make the calcium that goes into your teeth; a good number of strings are involved in building various parts of ttve machinery by which that calcium is extracted from the environment and formed into the proper lattice crystalline structure in the proper place in your jawbone so that it extrudes upward and downward in a form we then recognize as perfect teeth. But no matter what the order of your nucleotides, those perfect teeth can be marred by anything from a lack of calcium in the diet to a high acid/bacteria ratio in the mouth to a lead pipe across the jaw. By the same token, being a woman is also a complicated genetic interface. It means having that body of yours from birth, and growing up in the world, learning to do whatever you do—psychological counseling in my case, or metalogics in yours—with and within that body. That body has to be yours, and yours all your life. In that sense, you never will be a ‘complete’ woman. We can do a lot here; we can make you a woman from a given time on. We cannot make you have been a woman for all the time you were a man.”
“What about the ... well, my work inefficiency.”
“I don’t think that’s hormones—or would be helped by them.”
“Why, then?”
“It’s possible you just may be somebody who believes that women are less efficient. So you’re just living up to your own image.”
“But that’s ridiculous.” Bron sat up in her chair. “I don’t think any such thing. And I never have.”
“Inefficiency, like efficiency, is another interface.” Brian moved one hand to her lap. “Let me put it this way. You think women are different in many ‘subtle’ ways—more emotional perhaps, probably less objective, possibly more self-centered. Frankly, it would just be very hard to be more emotional—”
“But I don’t think women are necessarily more emotional than me
n—”
“—more emotional than you when you were a man, less objective than you, and more self-centered than you, without becoming less efficient at your work.” Brian sighed. “I’ve looked over all your deployment grids, sexual and otherwise. It’s all written out very clearly; and all so desperately Martian. You say you don’t want to be like most other women. Don’t worry: you aren’t. It’s putting it a little brutally; but, frankly, that’s something you’ll never have to worry about—
unless you want to work rather hard at it. In one sense, though you are as real a woman as possible, in another sense you are a woman created by a man—specifically by the man you were.”
When Bron was silent thirty seconds, Brian asked: “What are you thinking?”
“When I was a child—” Bron was thinking about the Spike—“I remember once I found an old book, full of old pictures. Of couples. In the pictures, the women were all shorter than the men. It looked very funny, to have all the women in all the pictures midgets. I said something about it to the tutor for my study-group aide. He told me that hundreds of years ago, on Earth, everybody used to think that women really were shorter than men, because all the men would only go around with women who were shorter than they were and all the women would only go around with men who were taller than they were. I remember I wondered about it even then, because I figured if that were really the case, there would be a lot of very unhappy tall women and a lot of very unhappy short men.”
“From what we know,” Brian said, “there were.”
“Well, yes. Of course later I learned it was more complicated than that. But I’ve always wondered if, perhaps, back then, women really weren’t smaller; perhaps there’s been some sort of evolutionary change in humanity since then that’s increased women’s size. I mean, if there had been, how would we know?”
“Frankly,” Brian said, “we wouldn’t. The human chromosomes weren’t completely mapped until well into the twenty-first century. You know about the one-two-two-one dominant/hybrid/recessive ratio for inherited characteristics?”
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