Triton

Then Pry

And Pry

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 Pry

Pry

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 ca