“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?”