Steel Beach (22 page)

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 physiognomy 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 entirely 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 Hildys 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…  
some
thing. 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 passé 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 with 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.

Or lingerie! What about lingerie? Transvestitism didn’t die with sex changing—very little did, because human sexuality is concerned with what gives us a thrill, not what makes sense—and some people with male bodies still prefer to dress up in garter belts and padded bras and short transparent nightgowns. If they enjoy it that’s fine with me. But I’ve always felt it looks awful, simply because it
clashes
. You may say the only thing it clashes with are my cultural preconceptions, and I’d agree with you. So what else is fashion? Bobbie could tell you that tinkering with a cultural icon is something you do at your own peril, with a few stiff drinks, a brave smile, and a premonition of disaster, because nine times out of ten it just doesn’t sell.

Which simply means that as many as half my fellow citizens feel as I do about gender dressing, and if that many feel that way, how bad can it be?

I rest my case.

So I spent a pleasant time fulfilling a gender based stereotype: shopping. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

When you get the full treatment from Bobbie, no bodily detail is too small. The big, gaudy, obvious things were quickly disposed of. Breasts? What are people wearing this year, Bobbie? As small as that? Well, let’s not get ridiculous, dear, I’d like to feel a little bounce, all right? Legs? Sort of…  you know…  long. Long enough to reach the ground. No knobs on the knees, if you please. Trim ankles. Arms? Well, what can you say about arms? Work your magic, Bobbie. I like a size five shoe and all my best dresses are nines—and thirty years out of date, enough time for some of them to be stylish again—so work around that. Besides, I feel comfortable in a body that size, and height reductions cost out at nearly two thousand per centimeter.

Some people spend most of their time on the face. Not me. I’ve always preferred to make any facial changes gradually, one feature at a time, so people can recognize me. I settled on my basic face fifty years ago, and see no need to change it for current fashion, beyond a little frill here and there. I told Bobbie not to change the underlying bone structure at all; I feel it’s suitable for a male or a female countenance. He suggested a slight fullness to the lips and showed me a new nose I liked, and I went flat-out trendy with the ears, letting him give me his latest design. But when I showed up for work after the Change, everyone would know it was Hildy.

I thought I was through…  but what about the toes? Bare feet are quite practical in Luna, and had come back into vogue, so people will be looking at your toes. The current rage was to eliminate them entirely as an evolutionary atavism.

Bobbie spent some time trying to sell me on Sockfeet, which look just like they sound. I guess I’m just a toe person. Or if you listen to Bobbie, a Cro-Magnon. I spent half an hour on the toes, and almost as much time on the fingers and hands. There’s nothing I hate like sweaty hands.

I put considerable thought into the contemplation of navels. With the nipples and the vulva, the navel is the only punctuation between the chin and the toenails, the only places for the eye to pause in the smooth sweep of the female form I was designing. I did not neglect it. Speaking of the vulva, I once again proved myself a hopeless reactionary. Lately, otherwise conservative women had been indulging the most outrageous flights of fancy when it came to labial architecture, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to be sure what sex you were looking at without a second glance. I preferred more modest, compact arrangements. With me, it is mostly not for public display anyway. I usually wear something below the waist, some sort of skirt or pants, and I didn’t want to frighten off a lover when I dropped them.