Steel Beach

Or lingerie! What about lingerie? Transvestism didn't die with sex changing-very little did, because human sexuality is concerned with what gives us a thrill, not what makes sense-and some people with male bodies still prefer to dress up in garter belts and padded bras and short transparent nightgowns. If they enjoy it that's fine with me. But I've always felt it looks awful, simply because it clashes. You may say the only thing it clashes with are my cultural preconceptions, and I'd agree with you. So what else is fashion? Bobbie could tell you that tinkering with a cultural icon is something you do at your own peril, with a few stiff drinks, a brave smile, and a premonition of disaster, because nine times out of ten it just doesn't sell.

Which simply means that as many as half my fellow citizens feel as I do about gender dressing, and if that many feel that way, how bad can it be?

I rest my case.

So I spent a pleasant time fulfilling a gender-based stereotype: shopping. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

When you get the full treatment from Bobbie, no bodily detail is too small. The big, gaudy, obvious things were quickly disposed of. Breasts? What are people wearing this year, Bobbie? As small as that? Well, let's not get ridiculous, dear, I'd like to feel a little bounce, all right? Legs? Sort of… you know… long. Long enough to reach the ground. No knobs on the knees, if you please. Trim ankles. Arms? Well, what can you say about arms? Work your magic, Bobbie. I like a size five shoe and all my best dresses are nines-and thirty years out of date, enough time for some of them to be stylish again-so work around that. Besides, I feel comfortable in a body that size, and height reductions cost out at nearly two thousand per centimeter.

Some people spend most of their time on the face. Not me. I've always preferred to make any facial changes gradually, one feature at a time, so people can recognize me. I settled on my basic face fifty years ago, and see no need to change it for current fashion, beyond a little frill here and there. I told Bobbie not to change the underlying bone structure at all; I feel it's suitable for a male or a female countenance. He suggested a slight fullness to the lips and showed me a new nose I liked, and I went flat-out trendy with the ears, letting him give me his latest design. But when I showed up for work after the Change, everyone would know it was Hildy.

I thought I was through… but what about the toes? Bare feet are quite practical in Luna, and had come back into vogue, so people will be looking at your toes. The current rage was to eliminate them entirely as an evolutionary atavism; Bobbie spent some time trying to sell me on Sockfeet, which look just like they sound. I guess I'm just a toe person. Or if you listen to Bobbie, a Cro-Magnon. I spent half an hour on the toes, and almost as much time on the fingers and hands. There's nothing I hate like sweaty hands.

I put considerable thought into the contemplation of navels. With the nipples and the vulva, the navel is the only punctuation between the chin and the toenails, the only places for the eye to pause in the smooth sweep of the female form I was designing. I did not neglect it. Speaking of the vulva, I once again proved myself a hopeless reactionary. Lately, otherwise conservative women had been indulging the most outrageous flights of fancy when it came to labial architecture, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to be sure what sex you were looking at without a second glance. I preferred more modest, compact arrangements. With me, it is mostly not for public display anyway. I usually wear something below the waist, some sort of skirt or pants, and I didn't want to frighten off a lover when I dropped them.

"You won't frighten anyone with that, Hildy," Bobbie said, looking sourly at the simulation of the genitals I'd just spent so much time elaborating. "I'd say your main problem here is boredom."

"It was good enough for Eve."

"I must have missed her last showing. Can't imagine why. I'm sure it will prove quite useful in the circles you move in, but are you sure I couldn't interest you in-"

"I'm the one that has to use it, and that's what I want. Have a heart, Bobbie. I'm an old-fashioned girl. And didn't I give you a free hand with the skin tones, and the nipples, and the ears and the shoulderblades and the collarbones and the ass and those two fetching little dimples in the small of the back?" I turned at the waist and looked at the full-body simulation that had replaced one of the mirrors, and chewed on a knuckle. "Maybe we should take another look at those dimples…"

He talked me out of changing that, and into a slight alteration of the backs of the hands, and he bitched at me some more and threw up his hands in disgust at every opportunity, but I could tell he was basically pleased. And so was I. I moved around, watching the female I was about to become duplicate all my movements, and it was good. It was the seventh hour: time to rest.

And then a strange thing happened to me. I was taken to the prep room, where the technicians built their mystical elixirs, and I began to suffer a panic attack. I watched the thousand and one brews dripping from the synthesizers into the mixing retorts, cloudy with potential, and my heart started beating wildly and I began to hyperventilate. I also got angry.

I knew what I was afraid of, and anyone would be angry.

Unless you've chosen the most radical of body make-overs, very little of modern sex changing involves actual surgery. In my case, about all the cutting that was pla

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They were assembled by other nanobots at chemical-reaction speeds, and produced in groups seldom smaller than one million units. Injected into the bloodstream, they responded to the conditions they found there, gravitated to their assigned working sites using the same processes whereby hormones and enzymes found their way through the corpus, identified the right spots by using jig-saw-like pieces of these same bodily regulators as both maps and grapplers, attached themselves, and began to boogie. The smaller ones penetrated the individual cell walls and entered the DNA itself, reading the amino acids like rosary beads, making carefully pla