“/ 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.”