Triton (Trouble on Triton) (41 page)

Which, as Bron watched the Spike stalk down the street, naked back moving away between other pedestrians, seemed so absurd she didn’t even try to run after her.

The burning behind her face continued: under its heat she could feel her eyes drying, almost painful. Suddenly she turned and started toward the station kiosk. Feel differently in thirty seconds! Shaking with rage and embarrassment, Bron thought: How could a woman like
that
know what
anyone
felt! About anything! I must be crazy (she passed a kiosk, stepped onto the moving ramp, and kept walking), completely crazy! What could possess me to want a woman like that? And it
hadn’t
been sex! For all the fear, the heart pounding, the sickness unto death, there had been none of the muzzy warmth in the loins, or even the muzzy expectation of it, that she had felt enough times just walking along the street, looking at some transport attendant, perhaps some worker from another office, or even the occasional e-girl. If anything, it was sex’s certain absence that had made the whole thing more distressing. Crazy!

she thought again. There I was, about to throw over all I believe in, my work, my ideals, everything I want, everything I’ve become, for some leftover reaction that doesn’t even have the excuse of pleasure about it, unless it’s just a memory of sex—and what else are emotions anyway? An idea that had haunted her for the whole half year returned: Somehow she was now more at the mercy of her emotions than she had been.

Where the hell am I? she suddenly thought, and stepped off at the corner. She was at another kiosk, but which station? She looked up at the green street coordinate, took a breath, and started down the ramp.

Brian, she thought. Yes, Brian, her counselor ...

It would be her third counseling session, the first op—

tional one. She wished desperately that this whole depressing encounter had not taken place just then. It made the whole counseling thing seem too necessary.

Bron’s distressing reveries completely enclosed her till she reached her co-op. Across the commons, two older women were bent over a game; younger ones stood silently, watching. Bron had been planning to go straight to her room, but now she looked toward the table. Between the players, on a flat board checkered black and red, carved figures stood. Years ago on Mars, Bron had read something about such a game ... She’d even known its name, once. But that was the past; she didn’t like to think about the past. Besides, it was much too abstract and complicated. As she recalled, each piece (unlike vlet) had a fixed and definite way to move: Why
hadn’t
Lawrence come to visit her recently? (One player, her fingers full of bright-stoned rings, moved a piece and said, softly: “Check.”) Bron turned away. She hadn’t seen Lawrence in months. Of course, she could always visit him. Putting it that way, however, she realized she didn’t
want
to see him. Which, after all, may have been why he hadn’t come to see her.

Then Prynn, the really obnoxious fifteen-year-old who had taken to confiding (endlessly) to Bron (not so much because Bron encouraged her, but because she hadn’t figured out yet how to discourage) stamped into the room and announced to everyone: “Do you know what my social worker did? Do you
know?
Do
you
know!” The last
you
went more or less to Bron, who looked around, surprised: Rough black hair in a stubbly braid stood out at one side of Prynn’s head. Her face had not quite enough blotches to suggest anything cosmetic ‘ “Uh .’.. no,” Bron said. “What?”

And Prynn, almost quivering, turned and fled the room.

One of the other women looked up from her reader, caught Bron’s eye, and shrugged. Five minutes later, when Bron, after lingering in the commons to flip through the new tapes that had come in that afternoon—half of them (probably all the good ones) were already out on loan—came up into the corridor where her room was, she saw Prynn sitting on the floor beside the door, chin on her knees, one arm locked around the floppy cuffs of her patchy black pants (there was something very wrong with one of Prynn’s toenails), the other hand lying limp beside her. As Bron walked up, Prynn said, without looking: “You
said
you wanted to know:—you sure took your time getting here.” Which was the beginning of an evening-long recount of fancied insults, misunderstandings and general abuse from the Social Guidance Department, which, since Prynn had left her remaining parent at Lux (on Titan) and come to Triton’s Tethys, had been overseeing her education. The comparison with Alfred had been inevitable—and had, inevitably, broken down. Prynn’s sexual pursuits had none of Alfred’s hysterical futility; they went on, however, just as doggedly. Once a week she went to an establishment that catered to under-sixteen-year-old girls and fifty-five-year-plus men. Unfailingly Prynn would return with one, two or, on occasions, three such gentlemen, who would stay the night. But, from her unflinching accounts of their goings-on, the mechanics of these encounters usually went off to everyone’s satisfaction. Alfred was from a moon of Uranus. Prynn was from a moon of Saturn. Alfred had been going on eighteen. Prynn was just fifteen ... In the midst of one of these recountings, Bron had once let slip her own early profession, and then, to make it make sense, had had to reveal her previous sex. Both facts Prynn had found completely uninteresting—which was probably one reason why the relation continued. “But they never come back to see me here,” Prynn had said (and was saying again now; somehow, while Bron’s mind had wandered, so had Prynn’s monologue). “I tell them to. But they won’t. The fuckers!” It apparently made her quite miserable. Prynn began to explain just exactly how miserable. During her first months, Bron had said (to herself) that her sexual activity was about equal to what it had been before the operation, i.e., infrequent. But now, she had to admit (to Prynn) that it had been, actually, nil—plurality female sexual deployment or no; which Prynn interrupted her own recounting long enough to say was kinky, then launched into more monologues anent the unfeeling Universe: from time to time, images of Bron’s encounter with the Spike that afternoon returned to blot out the harangue—which was suddenly over.

Prynn had just closed the door, loudly, after her.

It
is
too much, Bron thought. I
will
call for a social guidance appointment. Tomorrow. I’ve got to get some advice.

“Do you think it could be hormones?”

“Which,” Brian asked, from her large, deep, green-plush chair, “of the various things you’ve just gone over do you mean?” Brian was slim, fiftyish, silver-coiffed and silver-nailed, and had told Bron in their first meeting that she was (yes, they
were
in the u-1) from Mars. Indeed, Brian was what many of the Martian ladies Bron had once hired out to, fifteen years before, had aspired to be, and what those who could afford to keep themselves in such good shape occasionally approached. (Bron remembered their endless, motherly advice. Now, of course, Bron was the client: but otherwise—and both Bron and Brian had commented on, and rather enjoyed, the irony for the first half hour of the first counseling session—little had changed.)

“I don’t know,” Bron said. “Perhaps it
is
psychological. But I just don’t
feel
like a woman. I mean
all
the time, every minute, a complete and whole woman. Of course, when I think about it, or some guy makes a pass at me, then I remember. But most of the time I just feel like an ordinary, normal ...” Bron shrugged, turned in her own chair, as large, as deep, as plush, but yellow.

Brian said: “When you were a man, were you aware of being a man every second of the day? What makes you think that most women
feel
like women every—”

“But I don’t want to
be
like most women—” and then wished she hadn’t said it because Brian’s basic counseling technique was not to respond to things un-respondable to—which meant frequent silences. For a while Bron had tried to enjoy them, as she might have, once, if they had occurred in any ordinary conversation. But, somehow during the tenth or so such silence, she had realized that they betokened nobody’s embarrassment but her own. “Maybe more hormones—” she said at last. “Or maybe they should have doctored up a few more X chromosomes in a few more cells. I mean, perhaps they didn’t infect
enough
of them.”

“/ think in terms of the chromosome business,” Brian said, “there are a few things you will just have to come to terms with. A hundred and fifty years ago, some geneticists found a terribly inbred town in the Appalachian mountains, where all the women had perfect teeth; there was all sorts of talk about having discovered an important, sex-linked gene for dental perfection. The point is, however, any little string of nucleotides they might isolate is really only a section of a very complicated interface, both internal and external. Consider: having the proper set of nucleotides for perfect teeth isn’t going to do you much good if you happen to be missing the set that prescribes, say, your jawbone. You may have the nucleotides that order the amino acids in the blue protein that colors the iris of your eyes, but if you don’t happen to have the string that orders the amino acids of the white protein for the body of the eye itself, blue eyes you will not have. In other words, it’s a little silly to say you have the string for blue eyes if you don’t have the string for eyes at all. The external part of the interface, which goes on at the same time, also has to be borne in mind: the string that gives you perfect teeth, assuming all the other strings are properly arranged around it,
still
only gives you perfect teeth
within
a particular environment—that is, with certain elements plentifully available, and others fairly absent. The strings of nucleotides don’t
make
the calcium that goes into your teeth; a good number of strings are involved in building various parts of ttve machinery by which that calcium is extracted from the environment and formed into the proper lattice crystalline structure in the proper place in your jawbone so that it extrudes upward and downward in a form we then
recognize

as perfect teeth. But no matter what the order of your nucleotides, those perfect teeth can be marred by anything from a lack of calcium in the diet to a high acid/bacteria ratio in the mouth to a lead pipe across the jaw. By the same token,
being
a woman is also a complicated genetic interface. It means having that body of yours from birth, and growing up in the world, learning to do whatever you do—psychological counseling in my case, or metalogics in yours—with and within that body. That body has to be yours, and yours all your life. In that sense, you never will be a ‘complete’ woman. We can do a lot here; we can make you a woman from a given time on. We cannot make you have been a woman for all the time you were a man.”

“What about the ... well, my work inefficiency.”

“I don’t think that’s hormones—or would be helped by them.”

“Why, then?”

“It’s possible you just may be somebody who believes that women
are
less efficient. So you’re just living up to your own image.”

“But that’s ridiculous.” Bron sat up in her chair. “I don’t think any such thing. And I never have.”

“Inefficiency, like efficiency, is another interface.” Brian moved one hand to her lap. “Let me put it this way. You think women are different in many ‘subtle’ ways—more emotional perhaps, probably less objective, possibly more self-centered. Frankly, it would just be very hard to
be
more emotional—”

“But I
don’t
think women are necessarily more emotional than men—”

“—more emotional than
you
when you
were a
man, less objective than you, and more self-centered than you,
without
becoming less efficient at your work.” Brian sighed. “I’ve looked over all your deployment grids, sexual and otherwise. It’s all written out very clearly; and all so desperately Martian. You say you
don’t
want to be like most other women. Don’t worry: you aren’t. It’s putting it a little brutally; but, frankly,
that’s
something you’ll never have to worry about—

unless you want to work rather hard at it. In one sense, though you are as real a woman as possible, in another sense you are a woman created
by
a man—specifically by the man you were.”

When Bron was silent thirty seconds, Brian asked: “What are you thinking?”

“When I was a child—” Bron was thinking about the Spike—“I remember once I found an old book, full of old pictures. Of couples. In the pictures, the women were all shorter than the men. It looked very funny, to have all the women in all the pictures midgets. I said something about it to the tutor for my study-group aide. He told me that hundreds of years ago, on Earth, everybody used to think that women really were shorter than men, because all the men would only go around with women who were shorter than they were and all the women would only go around with men who were taller than they were. I remember I wondered about it even then, because I figured if that were really the case, there would be a lot of very unhappy tall women and a lot of very unhappy short men.”

“From what we know,” Brian said, “there were.”

“Well, yes. Of course later I learned it was more complicated than that. But I’ve always wondered if, perhaps, back then, women really
weren’t
smaller; perhaps there’s been some sort of evolutionary change in humanity since then that’s increased women’s size. I mean, if there
had
been, how would we know?”

“Frankly,” Brian said, “we wouldn’t. The human chromosomes weren’t completely mapped until well into the twenty-first century. You know about the one-two-two-one dominant/hybrid/recessive ratio for inherited characteristics?”

Bron nodded.

“Well, something seldom considered in the natural selection theory of evolution, but that has a great deal to do with it is simply that: For a recessive trait to be bred permanently into the species, it has to give an extreme edge on survival to those who show it—a survival edge, that, at least over a period of time, must equal a three-to-one chance of reaching breeding age over those who lack it. But for a dominant trait, it’s a rather different story. For a dominant trait
not
to spread throughout the population, it has to be extremely an-tisurvival—in fact, it must be antisurvival enough to give the bearer, over a given period of time, a three-to-one chance
against
reaching breeding age. And any dominant trait
less
antisurvival than that is still going to grow, subtly and inexorably. And if a dominant trait is at all weighted
toward
survival, even the slightest bit, it will simply race through the species. You know, the human race has done more real, honest to goodness evolving since the beginning of the twentieth century than probably at any other time in the previous ten thousand years. There used to be a dental anomaly called Carabelli’s cusp, that manifested itself as a tendency for the third-from-the-rear molars to have a vestigial lug on the inside. It was universal throughout the species at the beginning of the twentieth century, evident in Africans and Scandinavians and Asians—it was particularly pronounced among Malaysians, where it accounted for a good many tooth problems, because the extra lug was not well supplied with
live
tooth tissue. Apparently a dominant mutation began, sometime in the early part of the century, that obliterated Carabelli’s cusp entirely and made the back molars completely regular. By the twenty-first century, Carabelli’s cusp had gone the way of the Neanderthal brow ridge and the three-toed hoof of eohippos. The human race no longer possesses it. The ability to fold the tongue muscles laterally as well as ventrally swept the species even faster, over the same period. And left-handedness, which is definitely a recessive inherited trait (and what survival trait it’s linked to we still can’t figure out), has grown from five percent of the population to an even fifty. For that matter, up until nineteen fifty-nine, all biology texts said that human beings had forty-eight chromosomes—whereupon someone counted again and discovered it was only forty-six. Traditionally, this has been explained away as simply a gross, scientific mistake—however, it’s just possible that humanity was simply finishing up an evolutionary change from a forty-eight to a forty-six chromosome species, and some of the early counts just happened to have been done on the last of the vanishing forty-eight chromosome types. So it’s certainly possible that some sex-linked mutation has occurred increasing the size of women. But the other factors, however, are so overwhelming, it isn’t likely. We have studies done in the same decade in which two men first walked on the surface of the moon, which show that a female infant of that time, during her first year of life, could expect to get less than half the physical contact with her parents that a male infant would. We know from painful experience what the effect of physical contact in infancy has on everything from future strength to psychological autonomy. We have studies from those years that show the middle-class North American father spent, on average, less than twenty-five seconds a
day
playing with his less-than-year-old infant, and the middle-class European father even less—so that the cross-sexual identification necessary for what we consider social maturity, no matter what the adolescent sexual proclivities eventually fixate on, hardly ever occurred except by accident. Fight after World War Two, there was a rampant superstition that children should only have one close adult attachment during their first three years. But statistics show this just produced some very jealous, possessive individuals—with schizoid mothers. Our current superstition—and it seems to work, out here—is that a child should have available at least five close adult attachments—that’s living, loving, feeding, and diaper-changing attachments—preferably with five different sexes. Mutation is possible, but the evening-out in the social valuation between men and women, once colonization of Luna and Mars really began, is certainly the easiest explanation of the fact that today men and women seem to be equals in size and physical strength; and with the records of the Interworld Olympics for the last sixty years, no one could really question it.”