Triton (Trouble on Triton) (38 page)

The room was mottled green, octagonal: pastel lumias glowed in guilt frames around the walls. It was apparently a much larger and busier department: war or no, a dozen men and women were waiting to be seen.

But though it was a different department, there was enough connection so that, coming in with his

“counselor,” Bron was taken right away into an ivory cubicle with two technicians and several banks of equipment.

“Could you do a quick fixation grid of this gentleman’s” (Bron noted the restoration of his gender)

“sexual deployment template? Just for my own curiosity—dispense with the interview part. I just want to see the figures.”

“For you, sweetheart,” the younger woman techni—

cian said, “anything,” and sat Bron in a chair, put a helmet over his head that covered his eyes with dark pads and (at a switch he heard click somewhere) grew, inside it, gentle but firm restraining clamps.

“Try to relax and don’t think of anything—if you’ve ever done any alpha-wave meditation, try to come as close to that state as you can ... yes, there you go. Beautiful ... beautiful ... hold that mental state ... yes, hold it. Don’t think. There! Fine!” and when the helmet hummed up on its twin arms, he saw the two technicians and the counselor who had brought him looking at several large sheets of—Bron stood up, stepped up behind them—numbers, printed over large paper grids: the numbers were different hues, making clouds of color, here interpenetrating, there intermixing, like a numerically analyzed sensory shield. The console rolled out a final sheet from its plastic lips.

“Well, what do you think?”

“What do they mean?” Bron asked.

The younger woman, with pursed lips, flipped through the other four sheets. “Ignore the yellow numbers and the ones around the edge of the configurations; they map the connections of your sexuality with other areas of your person ... which, indeed, looks rather stunningly ordinary. The basic blue, red, and violet configurations—now this is just from an eye-check of the color overlap of one-place numbers over three-place numbers and a quick glance at the odd-versus-even deployment of three-place figures—but it looks as if you have performed quite adequately with partners of both genders, with an overwhelming preference for female partners—”

“—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—”