ceive it. But I gather ...” The eyebrows gathered—“you don’t?”
“No.” And after the man said nothing for practically half a minute, Bron said: “You do do sexual re-fixations and things like that, here, in this clinic, don’t you?”
“Yes, we—” The man coughed again and Bron realized it was an honest cold, not a purposefully snide punctuation (another religious fanatic, more than likely. Bron sighed)—“Well, downstairs, in the west wing. Yes, we do. But ...” Now he laughed. “Well, so seldom do the two departments have to work on the same case that—well, there isn’t even a door from our office to theirs. I mean, they deal with an entirely different type of case: friends, of whatever sex, who want to introduce a sexual element into their relationships because one, or both of them, are having difficulty doing it naturally; various functional problems; people who just want to try something new; or people who just want the sexual element completely suppressed, often for religious reasons.” The laughter broke again. “I’m afraid to avail yourself of their services, you literally have to go outside and come in all over again. Here—it’s been a slow day. Let me come with you.” The man pushed back his chair, stood.
The room was mottled green, octagonaclass="underline" pastel lumias glowed in guilt frames around the walls. It was apparently a much larger and busier department: war or no, a dozen men and women were waiting to be seen.
But though it was a different department, there was enough connection so that, coming in with his “counselor,” Bron was taken right away into an ivory cubicle with two technicians and several banks of equipment.
“Could you do a quick fixation grid of this gentleman’s” (Bron noted the restoration of his gender) “sexual deployment template? Just for my own curiosity—dispense with the interview part. I just want to see the figures.”
“For you, sweetheart,” the younger woman techni—
cian said, “anything,” and sat Bron in a chair, put a helmet over his head that covered his eyes with dark pads and (at a switch he heard click somewhere) grew, inside it, gentle but firm restraining clamps. “Try to relax and don’t think of anything—if you’ve ever done any alpha-wave meditation, try to come as close to that state as you can ... yes, there you go. Beautiful ... beautiful ... hold that mental state ... yes, hold it. Don’t think. There! Fine!” and when the helmet hummed up on its twin arms, he saw the two technicians and the counselor who had brought him looking at several large sheets of—Bron stood up, stepped up behind them—numbers, printed over large paper grids: the numbers were different hues, making clouds of color, here interpenetrating, there intermixing, like a numerically analyzed sensory shield. The console rolled out a final sheet from its plastic lips.
“Well, what do you think?”
“What do they mean?” Bron asked.
The younger woman, with pursed lips, flipped through the other four sheets. “Ignore the yellow numbers and the ones around the edge of the configurations; they map the connections of your sexuality with other areas of your person ... which, indeed, looks rather stunningly ordinary. The basic blue, red, and violet configurations—now this is just from an eye-check of the color overlap of one-place numbers over three-place numbers and a quick glance at the odd-versus-even deployment of three-place figures—but it looks as if you have performed quite adequately with partners of both genders, with an overwhelming preference for female partners—”
“—there’s a node line,” the other technician said, “running through from small, dark women with large hips to tall fair ones, rather chesty. And from this cross section—that’s about four levels down in the cortex—” She turned up another page and placed a thumb on a muzzy patch of red and orange numbers with trails of decimals behind them—“I would suspect that you must, at one time, have had some quite statistically impressive experience with older women, that was on its way to developing into a preference but, I gather, fell off sharply about ... ten, twelve years ago?” She looked up. “Were you a professional when you were younger?”
“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.”