“But I—”
“Bron, there’s a certain point in meaningless communication after which you just have to—” Suddenly the Spike stopped, made an angry face, started to turn away, then hesitated: “Look, there’s the transport. Use it. I’m going down this way. And if you try to follow me, I’ll kick you in the balls.”
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.”