“I’m a metalogician,” Bron said. “I define and redefine the relation between P and Not-P five hours a day, four days a week. Women don’t understand. Faggots don’t understand either.”
Lawrence hefted up the vlet case, leaned against the wall, and raised an eyebrow. “Do explain.”
Bron hunched his shoulders. “Look, I ...” He straightened them. “It was something to do with, I don’t know, maybe a kind of bravery—”
“Bravery is just making a big thing about doing what’s best for the largest number of people. The only problem is that the same process by which we make a big thing out of it usually blinds us to seeing the num—
ber of people as large enough to be really worthwhile—”
“If you’re just going to stand there and say stupid things intended to be clever—” Bron was angry.
“You’re angry.” Lawrence hefted the case once more. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
Bron looked at his meshed fingers, the gold-and-black edging between them. “You know, Sam’s trip to Earth was basically a political mission. You can be glad you didn’t go. During it, some of us were captured. Some of us were killed. I got off easy. I was just tortured. They held me without food. I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom. They stuck prongs in me. They beat me up, all the time asking the same questions again and again ... I know, it could have been worse. No bones broken; and, hell, I’m alive. But some of us ... aren’t. It wasn’t pleasant. The thing that really made it bad was that we weren’t even allowed to talk about any of it—by our side, either—to each other or to anyone else. Anything we might have said could have gotten one or all of us killed, just like that! And that’s when I ran into this—” He held up the crumpled letter, looked at his fist, let it drop—“woman. Of course, you’re right. She didn’t exist. The day after I got out, I took her out to dinner. It was so funny, sitting there in this incredibly expensive restaurant, where they still use money, that she’d wanted to go to—some friends of hers had been there already, and she was on her ear to try it out—and realize that a single word from me about any of what had just happened to me might have meant my death, or the death of a dozen others, or even hers, while all she was concerned with was that she’d bowed to the proper fashion—you’d have liked it; it’s one of those places where bare feet are de rigeur, but, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered—or that she was making the right impression on the waiters and the maiordomo, as a charming and naive innocent—that’s when she wamt prattling on about how marvelous this or that love affair had been. I mean, not that I should have been surprised. You know, I’d met her a few times before, here in Tethys. We’d even had sex a few times, casually and—well, I thought very successfullv. But fust an example: the first time I met her, I told her about you, said that she ought to meet you. She got very huffy about that; apparently she doesn’t like homosexuals. Doesn’t approve of them or something. She’s still going on about that in here—” Bron held up the letter. “Took great offence that I should think she would have anything to do with anyone who was. I mean, can you imagine? In this day and age—? Not that she isn’t above engaging in a little herself from time to time, and quite happily, or so she claims, when she lets her hair down. But, apparently, thafs different. Really, a logically consistent position is iust beyond her—though, like you, she talks about logic enough. Really, the only reason she gives for not wanting to know you is because I happened to mention you were gay! Take a look—” Bron held out the crumpled letter.
Lawrence raised his chin. “Really, you’re succeeding in making her sound like someone in whom I could not have the least interest—and certainly not in her scurrilous correspondence.”
Bron relocked his hands between his knees. “Well, that’s the type she is. Anyway, there we were, at the restaurant. It had been really rough on me, with the arrest and the interrogation. And I just felt I needed something—not sex; something more than that, some sort of ... I don’t know: support, friendship, warmth, compassion—though, believe me, once she got the slightest inkling I did want something more than sex, she decided sex was out as well. From then on it was just a big flat nothing. I mean, I couldn’t talk about what had happened to me, what I’d been through; it was just too dangerous. But she didn’t even have a clue that anything was even wrong. There was just no understanding at all ... They don’t understand. They can’t understand. Men just have to go through it alone.”
“You were saying something about bravery?” Lawrence hefted the case again.
“Well, yeah. I mean I don’t want to make a big thing of it; but, well, when I wanted to come back here, to check out you, and Audri and the kids, first I
had to break through an enforcement cordon. It wasn’t really that hard; I just mixed in with a crowd of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name. Years ago I used to attend their instruction, so I could fake a mantra—well enough to got by, anyway. And I got through like that. I’m not saying it took a lot of ingenuity; but it took some. And in a time of social crisis, somebody’s got to have that kind of ingenuity, if just to protect the species, the women, the children—yes, even the aged. And that ingenuity comes out of the aloneness, that particular male aloneness. It’s not even conscious. I mean I wasn’t even trying that hard. But in time of crisis, some things just have to be done. Sometimes it’s keeping your mouth shut, or not doing something you want to that’ll endanger others. Sometimes it’s doing something you wouldn’t do normally, like breaking through an enforcement cordon, or a window, or even through somebody’s really dumb ideas.” Bron laughed. “I’m just trying to imagine that crazed bitch I was out to dinner with, with all that stuff about this lover or that—they included the two she had at the present—keeping her mouth shut about anything] A matter of life or death? That wouldn’t have stopped her! Or picking her way through the debris in the street out there. She’d have to spend a day deciding whether or not she had on the proper hiking clothes. Oh, I’m not saying women can’t be courageous. But it’s a different sort of—Well, I just guess women, or people with large female components to their personalities, are too social to have that necessary aloneness to act outside society. But as long as we have social crisis—whether they’re man-made ones like this war, or even natural ones like an ice-quake—despite what it says in the ice-operas, v/e need that particularly male aloneness, if only for the ingenuity it breeds, so that the rest of the species can survive. I suppose, in one sense, women are society. I mean, they Teptoduce it, don’t they? Or seventy percent of ft, today, anyway. Not that I begrudge them what, like you say, in the last hundred and seventy-five years they’ve been given—”
The vlet case slipped from Lawrence’s hands, crashed to the floor, and fell open. Two of the side drawers flew out, scattering over the rug cards, dice, and red and green figures.
Bron stood up.
Lawrence, with a small cry, fell to his knees, muttering, “Oh, really ...” and, “For crying out ...”, and went scrabbling after the pieces, looking more and more upset.
“Hey,” Bron said, after a moment, “don’t get so .. • Here, I’ll help you get—”
“You’re a fool,” Lawrence said, suddenly and hoarsely. “And I’m tired. I’m tired of it, that’s all there is. I’m tired.”
“Huh?”
Lawrence clacked two dice back in place, reached for a third—
“Hey ...” Bron heard the hostility in the clack and tried to retrace what he’d said to that point where it had been generated. “Oh, hey; when I said faggots didn’t understand, I was just being—I don’t know: bitchy. Look, whatever you like to screw or get screwed by, you’re still a man. You’ve been alone. After all, you live in this place, don’t you? You did just as much as I did to make sure Audri and the kids were all right. I mean it was really your idea to—”
Lawrence sat back; pale, wrinkled hands dragged against dark, wrinkled genitals. “You’re a fool! You’re a foolf You’re a fool! You’re going to talk to me about b
ravery?” One hand snapped up and pointed out the door. “There’s your bravery. There’s your ingenuity. Right across the hall, in Alfred’s room—no, they haven’t cleaned them out yet. The people who did that to them, busily doing what must be done for the survival of the species, and so efficientlv! Without the loss of a single soldier. On either side.” Lawrence’s hand fell back to the floor among the pieces. “What I came in here to tell you in the first nlace ...” Lawrence took a breath, let it go. His shoulders fell. “The war is over. They just announced it over the public channels. Apparently, we’ve won it—whatever that means. Lux on Iapetus has no survivors. Five million people—all dead. Sabotage was completely effective there. They lost all gravity and atmosphere. Loss of life was under eight percent on Europa and Callisto. G-City’s figures from Ganymede aren’t in yet, which may be good or bad. Triton, the last in, apparently got off lightest. On the other hand, we’ve charred eighteen percent of Earth’s land-surface area. Eighty-two hours after Triton joined the war, all stops were pulled out by both sides. Mars officially surrendered, with casualties under a million, mostly in smaller urban Holds outside Bel-lona.” Lawrence picked up a red Witch, looked at it, let it drop from his fingers into his palm, let his fist fall again to the floor. “There’s apparently no official communication from Earth, but we’re taking that as surrender: Everybody who could do it officially is dead. They’re already showing aerial pictures of some of the sections we hit: mostlv in North and South Africa, Central America, and East Asia. Though they tried to stay away from major population centers, they estimate that sixty to seventy-five percent of the Earth’s population is either dead already or—as they so quaintly put it—will be dead within the next seventy-two hours. Because of the resultant ‘confusion’—they called it.” Lawrence shook his head. “Confusion ... ! Bravery in time of crisis!” He looked at Bron. “I was horn in South Africa. I didn’t like it. I left it. I had no intention of going back. But that doesn’t give them the right to go and just burn it all up! Oh, I know one isn’t supposed to talk about embarrassing things like where one comes from. I sound like some political crazy over in the u-1, talking about my origins. They still don’t have the right!” He leaned forward and swiped about at scattered pieces. “They still don’t ... ! Seventy-five percent! You were just on Earth ... Didn’t you, sometime, somewhere, meet one—just one person there that you liked, that you had some feeling for—negative or positive, it doesn’t matter. The chances are now three out of four that that person, in the next seventy-two hours, win die. In the confusion. And when they have died, they will be just as dead as those two children across the hall—No, don’t bother with these! I can get them myself. You go across the hall and just check how dead they are!”
But Bron had not started to kneel. Looking at the crumpled letter still in his fist, an image of the Spike, on Earth, ‘in the confusion’, had hit him as vividly as a scene returned by chance odor: he had staggered. His heart knocked back and forth around his ribs. The thoughts flooding into his mind were too violent to be called thinking (at least that thought was clear); he watched Lawrence pick among the pieces. Finally—was it a minute? Was it five?—he asked, hoarsely:
“You really think it’s one out of ... five thousand?”
“What?” Lawrence looked up, frowning.
“About the ... women?”
Lawrence took a breath and began to pick up more pieces. “I could be off by as much as a thousand—in either direction!”
Bron flung the letter on the floor (“Hev, where are you—?” Lawrence called) and bolted into the hall.
He didn’t go into Alfred’s room.
Downstairs at the computer room, half a dozen men waited outside and, when he barged past, tried to explain that there was at least a twenty-minute wait to get any medical diagnostic program.
“I don’t want a diagnosis!” He shoved past. “I know what’s wrong! I want Clinic Information!” He banged into the cubicle. He wasn’t sure if he could get Clinic Information if there was a diagnosis tie-up. But when he punched his request, the address ticked across the screen immediatelv. He pressed the purple button, and it was typed out on a strip of purple-backed flimsy. He ripped it loose from the slit and charged out of the room.
There was a small crowd outside the transport kiosk. Delays? He turned the corner, decides to walk. The address was in the unlicensed sector. Which was typical. Here and there he passed stretches of wreckage. Labor groups were already assembled at some sites. He found himself comparing the shiny yellow coveralls the men and women wore here to the soiled work-clothes of the earthie diggers. (Seventy-five percent ... ?) But it left him with a numb feeling, another irrelevancy, be—
fore his destination. I should pray for them, he thought and tried to recall his mumble; all that came back to him was the ranting of the Beasts—the mutilation of the mind, the mutilation of the body! He hunched his shoulders, squinched his eyes in the dust swirling in the green light—the left-hand light-strip was dead—of the tiled underpass. Walking out onto the darker way, it became apparent that the u-1 had, indeed, been harder hit. Which was, indeed, typical.
Would the clinic be open?
They were.
The blue reception room was empty, except for a woman in a complicated armchair in one corner, a complicated console on one of its arms. Eyes to a set of binocular readers, she tapped an occasional input on the console keys. Bron walked up to her. She swung the reader aside and smiled. “May I help you?”
Bron said: “I want to be a woman.”
“Yes. And what sex are you now?”
Which was not the response he expected. “Well what do I look like?”
She made a small moue. “You could be a male who is partway through one of a number of possible sex-change processes. Or you could be a female who is much further along in a number of other sex change operations: in both those cases, you would be wanting us to complete work already begun. More to the point, you might have begun as a woman, been changed to male, and now want to be changed to—something else. That can be difficult.” But because in a completely different context he had once used such a console for three months, he saw that she had already punched in ‘Male.’”Or,” she concluded, “you could be a woman in very good drag.”
“I’m male.”
She smiled. “Let’s have your identity card—” which he handed her and she fed into the slot at the console’s bottom. “Thank you.”
Bron glanced around at the empty chairs that sat about the waiting room. “There isn’t anyone else here ... ?”
“Well,” the woman said, dryly, “you know we’ve just had a war this afternoon. Things are rather slow. But we’re carrying on ... you just go right through there.”
Bron went through the blue wall into a smaller room, intestinal pink.
The man behind the desk was just removing Bron’s card from the slot on his console. He smiled at it, at Bron, at the pink chair across from him, at the card again. He stood up, extended his hand across the desk.
“Delighted to meet you, Ms Helstrom—”
“I’m male,” Bron said. “I just told your receptionist—”
“But you want to be female,” the man said, took Bron’s hand, shook it, dropped it, and coughed. “We believe in getting started right away, especially with the easy things. Do sit down.”
Bron sat.
The man smiled, sat himself. “Now, once more, Ms Helstrom, can you tell us what you’d like from us?”
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