by John Varley
That had been over twenty-five years ago, when I had my last previous sex change. In that time, Crazy Bob had come up in the world. He had invented some body frill or other-I can't even recall what it was now, these things come and go so quickly they make mayflies seem elderly-that was "discovered" by slumming socialites. He was elevated overnight into the new guru of secondary sexual attributes. Fashion writers now attended his openings and wrote knowingly about the new season's whimsy. Body styling would probably never be as big or influential as the rag trade, but a few practitioners to the hi-thrust set had carved themselves a niche in the world of fashion.
And Crazy Bob had spent the last ten years trying to make people forget about the little cock shop next door to the Jalapen~o Heaven.
Change Alley is a ridiculous name for the place, but it does branch off of the five-kilometer gulch of glitz known as Hadleyplatz. For fifty years the Platz, as everyone knew it, had been the inheritor of such places as Saville Row, Fifth Avenue, Kimberly Road, and Chimki Prospekt. It was the place to go if you were looking for solid gold toenail clippers, not so great for annual white sales. They didn't offer credit on the Platz, E-Z or otherwise. If the door didn't have your gencode in its memory banks along with an up-to-the-millisecond analysis of your pocketbook, it simply didn't open for you. There were no painted signs to be seen, and almost no holosigns. Advertising on the Platz ran to small logos in the bottom corners of plate glass windows, or brilliantly-buffed gold plaques mounted at eye level.
The Alley branched away from the main promenade at a sharp angle and dead-ended about a hundred meters later in a cluster of exclusive restaurants. Along the way were a handful of small storefronts operated by the handful of very tasteful hucksters who could persuade their clientele to part with ten times the going rate for a body make-over so they could have "Body By So-and-so" engraved on the nail of their pinky finger.
There were holosigns in the Alley shops, showing each designer's ideas of what the fashionable man or woman was being these days. The tastemongers back on the main drag liked to say the Alley was off the Platz, but not of the Platz. Still, it was all a far cry from the tattoo templates filling the windows of the Budget Barber.
I wondered if I ought to go in. I wondered if I could go in. Bob and I had been drinking buddies for a while, but we'd lost contact after his move. I pressed my hand to the identiplate, felt the tiny pressure as a probe scraped away a minuscule amount of dead skin. The machine seemed to hesitate; perhaps I'd be sent around to the tradesmen's entrance. Then it swung open. There should have been a flourish of trumpets, I thought, but that would have been too demonstrative for the Alley.
"Hildy! Enchanting, enchanting old boy. So good to see you." He had come out of some concealed back room and covered the distance to me in three long strides. He pumped my hand enthusiastically, looking me up and down and adopting a dubious air. "Good heavens, am I responsible for that? You came just in time, my friend. Not a moment too soon. But don't worry, I can fix it, cousin Bobbie will take care of everything. Just put yourself in my hands."
I suddenly wondered if I wanted to be in his hands. I thought he was laying it on a trifle thick, but it had been a while since I'd seen him, and I'm sure he had appearances to maintain. The gushing, the mincing, all were nods toward tradition, something practiced by many in his line of work, just as lawyers tried to develop a sober facade suitable for the weighty matters they dealt in. Back before Changing, the fashion world had been dominated by homosexual men. Sexuality being as complicated as it is, with hundreds of identified orientations-not to mention ULTRA-Tingle-it was impossible to know much about anyone else's preferences without talking it over and spelling it out. Bob, or perhaps I should say Darling, was hetero-oriented, male born and male leaning, which meant that, left to his own choice, would be male most of the time with occasional excursions into a female body, and no matter his current sex would prefer the company of the opposite.
But his profession almost demanded that he Change four or five times a year, just as the rag merchants had better wear their own designs. Today he was male, and didn't look any different from when I had know him. At least he didn't at first. When I looked more closely, I saw there were a thousand subtle alterations, none of them radical enough so his friends wouldn't recognize him on the street.
"You don't have to take the blame," I told him, as he took my elbow and guided me toward something he called a "Counseling Suite." "Maybe you don't remember, but I brought in all the specs myself. You never had a chance to practice your craft."
"I remember it quite well, dear boy, and perhaps it was the will of Allah. I was still learning my art,-please heed the stress on the word, Hildy-and I probably would have made a botch of it. But I do recall being quite cross."
"No, Darling, in those days you didn't get cross, you got pissed-off."
He made a weird sort of smirk, acknowledging the jibe but not letting the tinkerbell mask slip a millimeter. I glanced around the suite, and had to stifle a laugh. This was girl heaven. The walls were mirrors, creating a crowd of Hildys and Bobbies. Most everything else was pink, and had lace on it. The lace had lace on it. It was fabulously overdone, but I liked it. I was in the mood for this sort of thing. I sank gratefully into a pink and white lacy settee and felt the anxiety wash away from me. This had been a good idea after all.
A female assistant or whatever entered with a silver bucket of champagne on ice, set it up near me, poured some into a tall glass. It was a measure of my alienation from my current somatotype that I watched these operations with complete disinterest. A week before… well, before Scarpa Island, however that interval should be measured, I would have been attracted to the woman. Just at the moment I was effectively neuter. Robert didn't interest me either. Actually, he probably wouldn't interest me after the change, simply because he was not my "type," a word simply dripping with meaning in the age of gender selection.
Like my host, I am hetero oriented. Which is not to say I have never engaged in sex with a partner of my current sex; hasn't everybody? Can anyone remain truly heteroist when they have been both male and female? I suppose anything's possible, but I've never encountered it. What I find is that sex for me is always better when there is a man and a woman involved. Twice in my life I have met people I wanted to become more deeply attached to when both of us were of the same sex. In both cases, one of us Changed.
I don't know how to explain it. I don't believe anyone can really explain reasons behind their sexual preferences, unless they're based on prejudice: i.e., this or that practice is unnatural, against God's law, perverted, disgusting, and so forth. There's still some of that around, a bit of it in Bob's old neighborhood, in fact, where he twice had windows smashed and once had truly repulsive Christian slogans painted over his sign. But sexual preference seems to be something that happens to you, not something you elect. The fact is, when I'm a boy I'm intensely interested in girls, and have little or no interest in other boys, and vice versa when I'm a girl. I have friends who are precisely the opposite, who are homo-oriented in both sexes. So be it. I know people who cover the whole spectrum between these two positions, from the dedicated males and females, homo and hetero, to the pan-sexuals who only require you to be warm and would be willing to overlook it if you weren't, to the dysfunctionals who aren't happy in either sex, to the true neuters, who identify with neither sex, have all external and internal attributes removed and are quite glad to be shut of the whole confusing, inconvenient, superfluous, messy business.
As to type, neither Robert or Darling was mine. When female, I'm not as much concerned with physical beauty in a partner as when I'm male, though it's only a matter of degree, since when beauty can be purchased at will it becomes a rather common and quite unremarkable quality. Rob/Bob's lanky Ichabod Cranish physique and long narrow physysiognomy didn't set my girlish heart to beating, but that wouldn't put me off if the personality traits compensated. They didn't. He was fine as a buddy, but as a lover he would be enti
rely too needy. He had insecurities science has not yet found a name for.
"Did we remember to bring our little specs with us, Hildy?" he asked. I had, and handed them to him. He leafed through the pages quickly, sniffed, but not in a judgmental way, just as if to say he couldn't be bothered with the technicalities. He handed the genetic specifications to his aide, and clapped his hands. "Now, let's flutter out of those charming togs, can't create without a bare bodkin, chop, chop." I stripped and he took the clothing, looking as though he wished for sterilized forceps. "Where did you find these things. Why, it's been years… we'll of course have them cleaned and folded."
"I found them in my closet, and you can donate them to the poor."
"Hildy, I don't think there is anyone that poor."
"Then throw them away."
"Oh, thank you." He handed the clothing to the woman, who left the room with them. "That was a truly humanitarian gesture, old friend, an act that shows a great deal of caring for the fashion environment."
"If you're grateful," I said, "then you could stop spreading the pixie dust. We're alone now. This is me, Darling."
He looked around conspiratorially. All I saw were thousands upon thousands of Hildy's and a like number of whoever he was. He sat in a chair facing me and relaxed a little.
"How about you call me Bobbie? It's not quite so pretentious as Darling, and not so dreadful and reminiscent as Robert. And to tell you the truth, Hildy, I'm finding it harder every day to drop the pose. I'm beginning to wonder if it is a pose. I haven't got pissed off in years, but I get cross practically all the time. And there's a big difference, as you reminded me."
"We all pose, Bobbie. Maybe the old pose wasn't the proper one for you."
"I'm still hetero, if you were wondering."
"I wasn't, but I'd be astonished if you weren't. Polarity switches are pretty rare, according to what I've read."
"They happen. There's precious little I don't see in this business. So how have you been? Still writing trash?"
Before I could answer he started off on the first of a series of tangents. He thanked me effusively for the good coverage he'd always had from the Nipple. He must have been aware that I didn't work on the fashion page, but maybe he thought I'd put in a good word for him. Seeing as how he was about to design a new body for me, I saw no reason to disillusion him.
There were many more things discussed, many glasses of champagne put away, some aromatic and mildly intoxicating smokes inhaled. It all kept coming back to Topic A: when were "they" going to discover he was a fraud?
I was conversant with that feeling myself. It's common to people who are good at something they have no particular love for. In fact, it's common among all but the most self-assured-say, Callie, for instance. Robbie had a bad case of it, and I could hardly blame him. Not that I thought him an utter charlatan. I don't have much of an eye for such things, but from what I gathered he actually was quite talented. But in the world he inhabited, talent often had very little to do with anything. Taste is fickle. In the world of design, you're only as good as your last season. The back alleys and taprooms of Bedrock are strewn with the still-breathing corpses of people who used to be somebody. Some of them had shops right here in the Alley.
After a while I began to be a little alarmed. I knew Robbie, and I knew he would always be this way, frightened that the success he'd never really adjusted to because he'd never understood where it came from would be snatched away from him. That's just the way he was. But from the amount of time he seemed willing to spend with me, he was either in deep trouble or I should feel extremely flattered. I'd counted on having ten or fifteen minutes with The Master while he penciled in the broad strokes, then turned me over to aides to do the actual design work. Didn't he have more important clients waiting somewhere?
"Saw you on telly," he said, after winding down from his increasingly tiresome lament. "With that dreadful… what's her name? I forget. More on that incredibly boring David Earth story. I'm afraid I switched off. I don't care if I never hear his name again."
"I felt that way three hours into the first day. But you were fascinated for at least twenty-four hours, you couldn't get enough news about it."
"Sorry to disappoint you. It was boring."
"I doubt it. Think back to when you first read about it. You were dying to hear more. It was boring later, after you'd seen the film three or four times."
He frowned, then nodded. "You're right. My eyes were glued to the newspad. How did you know?"
"It's true of almost everybody. You in particular. If everyone's talking about something, you can't afford not to have an opinion, a snide comment, a worldly sigh… something. To not have heard of it would be unthinkable."
"We're in the same business, aren't we?"
"We're cousins, anyway. Maybe the difference is, in my business we can afford to run something into the ground. We use up news. By the time we're through with it, there is nothing quite so boring as what fascinated you twenty-four hours ago. Then we move on to the next sensation."
"Whereas I must always watch for that magic moment a few seconds before something becomes as pass as your taste in clothing."
"Exactly."
He sighed. "It's wearing me down, Hildy."
"I don't envy you-except for the money."
"Which I am investing most sensibly. No hi-thrust vacations to the Uranian moons for me. No summer homes on Mercury. Strictly blue chips. I'm not going to ever have to scrape for my air money. What I wonder is, will the hunger for lost acclaim emaciate my soul?" He raised an eyebrow and gave me a jaundiced look. "I assume those specs you gave Kiki outline a plan as stodgy as what you're currently walking around in?"
"Why would you assume that? Would I come here if I wanted something I could get in any local barber shop? I want Body By Bobbie."
"But I thought…"
"That was female to male. The reverse is a whore of a different color."
***
I decided to make a note to myself. Send flowers to the fashion editor of the Nipple. There was no other way to account for the royal treatment Bobbie lavished on me during the next four hours. Oh, sure, my money was as good as anyone else's, and I didn't want to think too hard about the bill for all this. But neither friendship nor idleness could explain Bobbie's behavior. I concluded he was looking for a good review.
Can you call something a quirk when you share it was a large minority of your fellow citizens? I'm not sure, but perhaps it is. I've never understood the roots of this peculiarity, any more than I understand why I don't care to go to bed with men when I am a man. But the fact is, as a man I am fairly indifferent to how I look and dress. Clean and neat, sure, and ugly is something I can certainly do without. But fashions don't concern me. My wardrobe consists of the sort of thing Bobbie threw away when I arrived, or worse. I usually put on shorts, a comfortable shirt, soft shoes, a purse: standard men's wear, suitable for all but formal occasions. I don't pay much attention to colors or cut. I ignore make-up completely and use only the blandest of scents. When I'm feeling festive I might put on a colorful skirt, more of a sarong, really, and never fret about the hemline. But most of what I wear wouldn't have raised eyebrows if I had gone back in time and walked the streets in the years before sex changing.
The fact is, I feel that while a woman can wear just about anything, there are whole categories of clothing a man looks silly in.
Case in point: the body-length, form-fitting gown, the kind that reaches down to the ankles, maybe with a slit up one side to the knee. Put it on a man's body and the penis will produce a flaw in the smooth line unless it is strapped down tight-and the whole point of wearing something like that, to my mind, is to feel slinky, not bound up. That particular garment was designed to show the lines of a woman's body, curves instead of angles. Another is the plunging neckline, both the sort that conceal and the kind that push up and display the breasts. A man can certainly get away with a deep neckline, but the purpose and the engineering of
it are different.
Before you start your letter to the editor, I know these are not laws of nature. There's no reason a man can't have feminine legs, for instance, or breasts, if he wants them. Then he'd look good in those clothes, to my eye, but precisely because he had feminine attributes. I am much more of a traditionalist when it comes to somatotypes. If I have the breasts and the hips and the legs, I want the whole package. I'm not a mixer. I feel there are boy things and girl things. The basic differences in body types are easy to define. The differences in clothing types is tougher, and the line moves, but can be summarized by saying that women's clothing is more apt to emphasize and define secondary sexual characteristics, and to be more colorful and varied.
And I can name a thousand exceptions through history, from the court of Louis the Sun King to the chador of Islamic women. I realize that western women didn't wear pants until the twentieth century, and men didn't wear skirts-Scotland and the South Seas notwithstanding-until the twenty-first. I know about peacocks and parrots and mandrill baboons. When you start talking about sex and the way you think it should be, you're bound to get into trouble. There are very few statements you can make about sex that won't have an exception somewhere.
I guess this is something of a hobby-horse with me. It's in reaction to the militant unisexers who believe all gender-identified clothing should be eliminated, that we should all pick our clothing randomly, and sneer at you publicly when you dress too feminine or masculine. Or even worse, the uniformists, those people who want us all to wear formal job-identified clothing at all times, or a standardized outfit-wait a minute, I've got one right here, just let me show you, you'll love it!-usually some drearily practical People's Jumpsuit with a high neck and lots of pockets, comes in three bilious colors. Those people would have us all running about looking like some dreadful twentieth century "futuristic" film, when they thought the people of 1960 or 2000 would all want to dress alike, with meter-wide shelves on their shoulders or plastic bubbles over their heads or togas or the ubiquitous jumpsuit with no visible zipper, and leave you wondering how did those people make water. These folks would be amusing if they didn't introduce legislation every year aimed at making everyone behave like them.