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 alclass="underline" 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
Y in the cells, it usually doesn’t matter how many X’s you have—and occasionally they double up—the organism is male. Now, the question is, how did this Y chromosome make you a male, back when various cells were dividing and your little balloon of tissue was suffering various Thomian catastrophes and folding in and crumpling up into you?” The man smiled. “But I sap-pose I’m merely recapitulating what you already know ... ? Most of our beneficiaries have done a fair amount of research on their own before they come to