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.”
“/ 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.”