“They used to think the male sex hormones made your muscles stronger, didn’t they?”
“Testosterone makes the membrane of the muscle cell less permeable,” Brian said, “which means, given two muscles, developed to equal strength, the one without testosterone clogging it up, so to speak, can function at peak efficiency marginally longer because it can diffuse fatigue products out through the cell wall marginally faster.”
Bron sighed. “It’s so strange, the way we picture the past in a place full of injustice, inequity, disease, and confusion, yet still, somehow, things were ... simpler. Sometimes I wish we did live in the past. Sometimes I wish men were all strong and women were all weak, even if you did it by not picking them up and cuddling them enough when they were babies, or not giving them strong female figures to identify with psychologically and socially; because, somehow, it would be simpler that way just to justify ...” But she could not say what it would justify. Also, she could not remember ever thinking those thoughts before, even as a child. She wondered why she said she had. Thinking it now, it seemed bizarre, uncomfortable, unnatural.
“You know,” Brian said suddenly, “the only reason we can even have this conversation is because we’re both Martians—and not even Martian roaring girls with cutaway veils and silver eyelids, but Martian ladies at that! Anyone out here listening to this would think we were out of our minds, the both of us.” Her eyelids (which were silver! ... but it was just paint) had lowered, projecting faint anger in that typically Martian way. “I know it’s the height of rudeness, but really, talking to you always makes me remember how glad I am I left Mars. I’m going to be blunt.” Brian cocked her head. “I said before, you were a woman made by a man. You are also a woman made for a man. Just considering who you are, I suspect you’d be a lot happier if you got a man. After all, you’re an attractive and intelligent woman, with a normal woman’s urges. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having a man; in your own quiet way, you act as though there were.”
The knees of Bron’s slacks were pressed together, She slid her hands over them and felt very vulnerable before the older and wiser Brian. “Only ...” she said at last, “the man I want wouldn’t be very happy with me if I came looking for him.”
“Well, then,” Brian said, “you might consider making do with what’s available until perfection comes along.”
A month later (it took her that long to decide), Bron felt like a perfect fool asking Prynn to suggest a place to go. The possibility, however, of being recognized in the places she herself had visited before, from month to month, made her uncomfortable. After all, the Spike—someone practically a perfect stranger—had recognized her just standing on a transport platform. Not that she’d gone to such places so often that anyone would recognize her had she been male. Nevertheless ...
And of course Prynn couldn’t simply suggest a few names and let it go. No, Prynn had to spend the next week “... asking around ...” Bron tried to picture the requests: “Hey, I know this kinky sex-change, see, who’s about ready to—” I am too old, Bron decided, to be embarrassed: which basically meant forgetting about it, thinking of other things.
One of the things she thought about was why she had not told Brian about meeting the Spike. But it was only a counseling hour, not some tell-all, hon-esty-or-nothing, archaic-style therapy session. And hadn’t Lawrence once said (How was Lawrence, she wondered; he had not been over to see her forever) the only way to deal with a woman like the Spike was to treat her as if she didn’t exist? And anyway, Brian’s suggestion (slightly modified: Bron would not make do; but she might put herself in the way of what she wanted) would answer there as well. If she was tempted to fling over everything just like that, it might be a bit more reasonable to make sure that the next person who asked her to was at least the proper sex.
Prynn opened the door without knocking and said: “Okay, I’ve figured out where I’m going to take you.” Then she looked up at the ceiling, made a very unpleasant sound (supposed to express the ultimate in so—
phisticated boredom), and fell back against the wall. The cabinet door joggled.
“Now what’s the matter?” Bron pushed back the reader (but let her hand stay on the skimmer knob). A strip of light from the edge of the case lay across her wrist. “You know, you really don’t have to go with me. I’d understand: you’re into older men. I doubt whether there’ll be too many at the sort of place you’d take me—”
“My social worker,” Prynn said, “says that anything, to the exclusion of everything else, is a perversion. So, once every six weeks, I go do something different. Just to prove I’m normal. This place is just swarming with twenty-year-old and thirty-year-old and forty-year-old men. I’ll feel like a damn child molester. But you’ll love it. Come on, get your clothes on. I swear, you take longer to get dressed than any five people I’ve ever known put together.”
“You get out of here,” Bron said. “I’ll see you down in the commons.”
The place they arrived at was pleasantly plasticky (which meant there was no attempt to make the plastic look like either stone, ice or wood), with a decent-enough-looking clientele, who, Bron decided, probably liked to get things settled early. (The places Bron had used back when she had been living at the men’s co-op tended to be places where people drank long and lingered late.) It was a collection of reasonably happy men and women—
“This is the active side of the bar, i.e., if you want to check out the beauties languishing on that side, without being bothered,” Prynn explained. “That side if you want to be approached by someone who’s made up their mind from this side. And that there is free-range territory. Nobody’s really hard and fast about any of the rules here—which is why I come. But I’m just telling you what it says in the monthly newsletter.”