“—there’s a node line,” the other technician said, “running through from small, dark women with large hips to tall fair ones, rather chesty. And from this cross section—that’s about four levels down in the cortex—” She turned up another page and placed a thumb on a muzzy patch of red and orange numbers with trails of decimals behind them—“I would suspect that you must, at one time, have had some quite statistically impressive experience with older women, that was on its way to developing into a preference but, I gather, fell off sharply about ... ten, twelve years ago?” She looked up. “Were you a professional when you were younger?”
“That’s right.”
“Seems to have made you quite sure of yourself on that general score.” She let the pages fall back.
“Just how does his basic configuration map up with the rest of the population?” the man asked. “It’s the majority configuration, isn’t it?”
“There is no majority configuration,” the younger technician said, a little drily. “We live in the same coop,” she explained to Bron. “Sometimes you still have to remind them, or life can get very grim.” She looked back at the pages. “It’s the current male plurality configuration—that is, the base pattern. The preference nodes are entirely individual, and so is any experiential deployment within it. It’s the one that, given our society, is probably still the easiest to adjust to—though practically every other person you meet will argue that the minimal added effort of adjusting to some of the others is more than paid for by the extra satisfaction of doing something minimally difficult. You’re an ordinary, bisexual, female-oriented male—sexually, that is.”
The man said to Bron, “And I am to understand that you would like this configuration changed to ... say, the current plurality female configuration?”
“What is that?” Bron asked.
“Its mathematical interpretation is identical with this, with a reversal of the placement of two—and three-place numbers. In layman’s terms: the ability to function sexually satisfactorily with partners of either sex, with an overwhelming propensity for males.”
“Yes,” Bron said, “then that’s what I want.”
The younger technician frowned. “The current plurality configuration, male or female, is the hardest to change. It’s really extremely stable—”
“And of course preference nodes, once the basic pattern is set, we generally leave to form themselves,” the older technician said, “unless you have a particular preference for the type you’d prefer to have a preference for ... ? If you like, we can leave your desire for women as it is and just activate the desire for men—”
“No,” said Bron. “That’s not my preference.”
“Also, though we can play with the results of past experiences, we can’t expunge the actual experiences—without breaking the law. I mean, your professional experience, for instance, will be something you will still remember as you remember it now, and will still, hopefully, be of benefit. We can, however, imprint certain experientially oriented matrices. Did you have one in mind?”
“Can you make me a virgin?” Bron asked.
The two technicians smiled at one another.
The older one said: “I’m afraid, for your age and experience, that’s just a contradiction in terms—at least within the female plurality configuration. We could make you a virgin, quite content and happy to remain one; or, we could make you a virgin about ready to lose her virginity and go on developing as things came along. But it would be a little difficult for us to make you a virgin who has performed quite adequately with partners of both sexes but who prefers men—even for us.”
“I’ll take the female plurality configuration then—” Bron frowned. “You said it would be difficult though. Are you sure—”
“By difficult,” the older technician said, “we mean that it will take approximately seventeen minutes, with perhaps three or four checkups and maybe another fixation session at three months, to make sure it takes—rather than the standard three minute and forty second session it takes to effect most changes.”
“Excuse me, Ms Helstrom,” the man said, touching Bron’s arm lightly, “but why don’t we take care of your body first?”
The drugs they gave her made her feel like hell. “Walk back home,” they’d suggested, “however uncomfortable it feels,” in order to “freeze in” to her new body. As she ambled in the early morning, among the alleys of the unlicensed sector, Bron passed one, and another, and then another reclamation site. Yellow ropes fenced the damages. The maintainance wagons, the striped, portable toilets (like exotic ego-booster booths) waited for the morning workers. The wreckages kept sending her ill-focused memories of the Mongolian diggings; somehow the phrase “The horrors of war ...” kept playing in her mind, like the chorus of a song whose verses were whatever bit of destruction her drug-dilated pupils managed to focus on behind the gauzy glare.
She went through the underpass—the light-strip had been fixed: the new length was brighter than the old—and came out to squint up at the sensory shield which, here and there across its violet, blushed orange, silver, and blue. The wall of the alley, a palimpsest of political posters and graffiti, had been gravity-damaged. Scaffolding had already been set up. Several workers, in their yellow coveralls, stood around sucking on coffee bulbs.
One looked at her and grinned (But it was a woman worker. You’d think something would have changed) as Bron hurried by. If she looked like she felt, she’d been lucky to get a smile.
The horrors of war passed through her mind for the millionth time. Her legs felt stiff. They had cheerfully assured her that as soon as the anesthetic wore off, she would be as sore as if she had had a moderately difficult natural childbirth. They had assured her about a lot of other things: that her hormones would take care of the fatty redistribution (as well as the bushy eyebrow) in a couple of weeks, all by themselves. She had wanted further cosmetic surgery to remove some of the muscle fiber in her arms; and could they make her wrists thinner? Yes, they could ... but wait, they had told her. See how you feel in a week or so. The body had undergone enough trauma for one six-hour—or rather, one six-hour-and-seventeen-minute—session.
With one hand on the green and red, stained-glass door of Serpent’s House, a conviction arrived, with drug-hazed joy which slid her toward tears: “I don’t belong here,” and which finished, like a couplet she expected to rhyme, “despite the horrors of war,” but didn’t.
Walking down the corridor, she realized, with a sort of secondary amusement, she didn’t know where she belonged. All ahead was adventure—she awaited a small thrill of fear—like taking off from Mars for the Outer Satellites, among three thousand others; she had been afraid then ... There was no fear, though. Only a general muzzy pleasure, along with the incipient physical discomfort, which kept getting mixed up with one another.
In the room, she took off all her clothes, opened out the bed, lay down on it, and collapsed into sleep—
“Hello, I saw your door open and the light on so I—” Lawrence, halfway through the door, stopped, frowned.
Bron pushed up on one elbow and squinted.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought ... Bron?”
“What is it?”
“Bron, what in heavens have you ... Oh, no—You haven’t gone and ...” Lawrence stepped all the way in. “What got into you? I mean, why—?”
Bron lay her head back on the pillow. “I had to, Lawrence. There are certain things that have to be done. And when you come to them, if you’re a man ...” The drugs were making her laugh—“you just have to do them.”
“What things?” Lawrence asked. “Really, you’re going to have to do some explaining, young ... young lady!”
Bron’s eyes closed. “I guess it was something you said, Lawrence—about only one woman in five thousand still being around. Well, if you were right about the percentages of men too, one woman in five thousand isn’t enough.” Bron closed her eyes tightly, then tried to relax. “I told you, that crazy
Christian was right; at least about the woman not understanding. Well, I can. Because I’m—I used to be a man. So, you see, I can understand. The loneliness I was talking about, it’s too important. I’ll know how to leave it alone enough not to destroy it, and at the same time to know what I can do. I’ve had the first-hand experience, don’t you see?”
“You’re drugged,” Lawrence said. “You must have some sort of real reasons for doing this. When you’ve slept off the anesthetic, perhaps you’ll be so good as to explain.”
Bron’s eyes opened. “I have explained. I ... the horrors of war. Lawrence, they brought home something to me. We call the race ... what? Humanity. When we went to rescue the kids, at Audri’s co-op ... to save those children and their mothers? I really thought I was doing it to save humanity—I certainly wasn’t doing it for myself. I was uncomfortable, I kept wanting to turn away, to leave them there, to quit—but I didn’t ... ! Humanity. They used to call it ‘mankind’. And I remember reading once that some women objected to that as too exclusive. Basically, though, it wasn’t exclusive enough! Lawrence, regardless of the human race, what gives the species the only value it has are men, and particularly those men who can do what I did.”
“Change sex?”
“What I did before ... before, when I was a man. I’m not a man any more, so I don’t need to be modest about it What I’ve been through in the war, and the torture and terror leading up to it, the bravery demanded there, because of it. That showed me what real manhood was.
“And it’s the most important thing the species has going for it. Oh, I know, to a lot of you, it’s all silly. Yes, Alfred’s dead. So is that crazy Christian. And that’s terribly tragic—both of them. It’s tragic when men die; it’s that simple. But even in the face of such tragedy, though you can’t think of any logical necessity to go out and save a house full of children and their mothers, there are metalogical ones: reasons, they’re called. I guess my doing that or keeping my mouth shut under torture probably looks very dumb to you. But I swear to you, Lawrence, I know the way I know that here is my own hand—with every subjective atom of my being—it isn’t dumb; and it’s the only thing that isn’t. And in the same way, I know that only the people who know it like I know it, real men (because there’s no other way to have it; that’s part of what I know), really deserve more than second-class member—
ship in the species ...” Bron sighed. “And the species is dying out.” Her mouth felt dry and the ghost of a cramp pulsed between her legs. “I also know that that kind of man can’t be happy with an ordinary woman, the kind that’s around today. When I was a man, I tried. It can’t be done.” She shook her head. “One out of five thousand isn’t enough ... Why did I do it?” Bron opened her eyes again and frowned at the frowning Lawrence. “I did it to preserve the species.”
“Well, I must say, my dear, you have the courage of your convictions! But didn’t it occur to you that—?”
“Lawrence, I’m tired. Go away. Shall I be cruel? All right. I’m just not interested in doddering, old homosexuals. I never was, and I’m particularly not interested in them now.”
“That’s not cruel. In your position, it’s just silly. Well, I’ve never thought your sense of personal tact was anything but a disaster zone. That obviously hasn’t changed. Nevertheless, I am still your friend. You know of course, you won’t be able to stay here now. I mean, except as a guest. I’ll register you as mine as soon as I leave. I’m sure they’ll let you keep the room for a while, but if they get another application from some guy, you’ll have to move out. If that happens and you haven’t found a place by then, you can bunk in with me—till one or the other of us threatens murder. It’s been a while since I slept chastely beside a fair young thing, but then, I’ve never—”
“Lawrence, please.”
Lawrence clucked out the door, ducked back. “As I said, I’ll be back in to talk to you again when you’ve slept it off.”
Which was about seven o’clock that evening. Bron woke up feeling like her insides would fall out if she stood up.
Fifteen minutes later, Lawrence came in, announcing: “We’re going to move you this evening. Now don’t complain. I’ll brook no protests. I’ve been running around all afternoon, and I’ve got a room for you in the women’s house of detention—forgive me, that’s my pet name for it—that’s Cheetah, the women’s co-op right behind us. Then I’m going to dip into my geriatric widow’s mite and take you out to a quiet, calm dinner, on my credit. Now don’t start putting up a fuss. I want you to know I have nursed three people through this operation before and you all say the craziest things under the anesthetic—though Lord knows, their reasons seemed a lot more sensible than yours. Really, it’s just like having a baby, only the baby—as one of my more articulate friends commented, when in your situation not twenty years ago—is you. You’ve got to get into walking and exercising as much as you can take as quickly as possible, or there’ll be hell to pay. Come on, up and at ’em. Lean on me if you want to.”
She didn’t want to.
But protest was as painful as compliance. And besides—she figured this out only when they were seated in a dining-booth (two other places they’d tried were closed: because of the war) behind a stained-glass partition in a restaurant Bron had never known was thirty yards from the Snake Pit’s door (but then, four-fifths of the patrons were Lawrence’s age or over, and nudity seemed to be de rigeur)—despite his age and predilections, after all, Lawrence was a man. And a real woman had to relinquish certain rights. Wasn’t that, she told herself silently, the one thing that, from her life before, she now, honestly knew?
Dinner was simple, unpretentious, and vegetarian. And, despite the soreness, with Lawrence’s gentle chatter it was pleasanter than any meal she’d had on Earth.
7. Tiresias Descending, Or Trouble On Triton
Coming across it thus again, in the light of what we had to do to render it acceptable, we see that our journey was, in its preconception, unnecessary, although its formal course, once we had set out upon it, was inevitable.
—G. Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form
Her first minutes back at work, Bron was very nervous. She had considered the all-black outfit. But no, that would only be delaying things. The previous afternoon, she and Lawrence had gone to Lawrence’s(I) design-rental house and spent an amusing two hours during which Lawrence had had the house make up (among other things) a pair of his-and-hers breast bangles, glittering crimson with dozens of tiny mirrors on wriggly antennae. “Lawrence,” she had protested, “I’m just not the type to wear anything like this!” Lawrence had countered: “But I am, dear. At least in the privacy of my own room. They’re cunning!” She had taken hers home and put them in the cupboard as a memento of the day. Save the short gray shoulder cloak, she had rented no new clothing with her new image in mind.
Bron wore the cloak to work.
She had been in her office about an hour when Audri came by to prop herself, with one elbow, on the doorjamb. “Hey, Bron, could you ...” Audri stopped, frowned. “Bron ... ?”
“Yes?” She looked up nervously.
Audri began to grin. “You are kidding me—?”
“About what?”
Audri laughed. “And it looks good, too! Hey—” She came in—“what I wanted to get was that information about Day Star minus.” She stepped around the corner of the desk, put a folder down. “Oh, did you see that memo from the Art Department—?” which Bron finally found on the floor beside her desk. Some sculptor had arrived in the cafeteria that morning with a pile of large, thin, polished, metal plates, demanding to build a sculpture, floor to ceiling, then and there. The Art Department had sent around its memo, which included an incomprehensible statement by the artist, explaining how the plates would be moved within the sculptural space on small motors, according to an arcane series of mystical numbers. The whole was intended as some sort of war memorial. And could you please let us have a yes or no response before ten-thirty, as the artist w
ished to have the work completed by lunch.
“I suppose I’m feeling positively disposed to change today,” Bron told Audri, and sent the Art Department a yes on the console—though she had always felt a mild distrust of mystical art. Back at the desk, with Audri, she ran over more logical/topological specifications.
At the door, about to leave, Audri halted, looked back, grinned again, and said: “Congratulations, I guess,” winked and departed, bumping her shoulder on the jamb.
Bron smiled, relieved. But then, she’d always liked Audri.
Lunch?
She debated whether or not to go, right up to the minute. Staying away, of course, would only be putting things off. Just then, the console began to chatter and flash.
Another Art Department memo:
As the sculpture had been completed, three artists from a rival school, masked in turquoise but otherwise nudey had rushed into the cafeteria and, with flamers, destroyed the work, charring and melting the plates. The memo contained a statement from the marauders even more incomprehensible than the artist’s had been. (Basically, they seemed to be attacking the first artist’s math.) The sculptor, who was eighty-two, had suffered a psychotic episode (the memo went on) and been hospitalized, where she might well remain for several years, it appeared, from the initial diagnosis. Chances for her eventual return to art, however, were hopeful. The remains of the work would be on view through lunch, after which it would be removed to the hegemony’s museum, over the cafeteria, where it would stay on permanent exhibit. The memo closed with a flurry of apologies and was signed (typically) by Iseult, with a parenthetical note saying that Tristan dissented from the proposed suggestion and if enough alternates were put forward before closing, there would be a vote among them tomorrow.
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