Triton (Trouble on Triton) (36 page)

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 bravery?” 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?”

Bron tried to relax. “I want you to make me a woman.” Saying it the second time was nowhere as hard as the first.

“I see,” the man said. “You’re from Mars—or possibly Earth, right?”

Bron nodded. “Mars.”

“Thought so. Most of our beneficiaries are. Terrible what happened there this afternoon. Just terrible. But I imagine that doesn’t concern you.” He sucked his teeth. “Still, somehow life under our particular system doesn’t generate that many serious sexually dissatisfied types. Though, if you’ve come here, I suspect you’re the type who’s pretty fed up with people telling you what type you aren’t or are.” The man raised an eyebrow and coughed again quizzically.

Bron was silent.

“So, you want to be a woman.” The man cocked his head. “What kind of a woman do you want to be? Or rather, how much of a woman?”

Bron frowned.

“Do you simply want what essentially could be called cosmetic surgery—we can do quite a fine job; and quite a functional one. We can give you a functional vagina, functional clitoris, even a functional womb in which you can bear a baby to term and deliver it, and functional breasts with which you can suckle the infant once it is born. More than that, however, and we have to leave the realm of the cosmetic and enter the radical.”

Bron’s frown deepened. “What is there beyond that you can do?”

“Well.” The man lay his hands on the table. “In every one of your cells—Well, not all: notable exceptions are the red blood cells—there are forty-six chromosomes, long DNA chains, each of which can be considered two, giant, intertwined molocules, in which four nucleotides—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and gui-nene—are strung along, to be read sequentially in groups of three: the order of these groups determines the order of the amino acids along the polypeptide chains that make up the proteins and enzymes which, once formed, proceed to interact with each other and the environment in such a way that, after time and replenishment ... Well, the process is far too complicated to subsume under a single verb: let us simply say
there
they were, and
here
you are! I say forty-six: this would be completely true if you were a woman. But what made you a man is the half-length chromosome called Y, which is paired with a full-length chromosome called X. In women, there are two of these X’s and no Y at all. And, oddly, as long as you have at least one