Triton

“What about the ... well, my work inefficiency.”

“I don’t think that’s hormones—or would be helped by them.”

“Why, then?”

“It’s possible you just may be somebody who believes that women are less efficient. So you’re just living up to your own image.”

“But that’s ridiculous.” Bron sat up in her chair. “I don’t think any such thing. And I never have.”

“Inefficiency, like efficiency, is another interface.” Brian moved one hand to her lap. “Let me put it this way. You think women are different in many ‘subtle’ ways—more emotional perhaps, probably less objective, possibly more self-centered. Frankly, it would just be very hard to be more emotional—”

“But I don’t think women are necessarily more emotional than men—”

“—more emotional than you when you were a man, less objective than you, and more self-centered than you, without becoming less efficient at your work.” Brian sighed. “I’ve looked over all your deployment grids, sexual and otherwise. It’s all written out very clearly; and all so desperately Martian. You say you don’t want to be like most other women. Don’t worry: you aren’t. It’s putting it a little brutally; but, frankly, that’s something you’ll never have to worry about—

unless you want to work rather hard at it. In one sense, though you are as real a woman as possible, in another sense you are a woman created by a man—specifically by the man you were.”

When Bron was silent thirty seconds, Brian asked: “What are you thinking?”

“When I was a child—” Bron was thinking about the Spike—“I remember once I found an old book, full of old pictures. Of couples. In the pictures, the women were all shorter than the men. It looked very fu

“From what we know,” Brian said, “there were.”

“Well, yes. Of course later I learned it was more complicated than that. But I’ve always wondered if, perhaps, back then, women really weren’t smaller; perhaps there’s been some sort of evolutionary change in humanity since then that’s increased women’s size. I mean, if there had been, how would we know?”

“Frankly,” Brian said, “we wouldn’t. The human chromosomes weren’t completely mapped until well into the twenty-first century. You know about the one-two-two-one dominant/hybrid/recessive ratio for inherited characteristics?”

Bron nodded.

“Well, something seldom considered in the natural selection theory of evolution, but that has a great deal to do with it is simply that: For a recessive trait to be bred permanently into the species, it has to give an extreme edge on survival to those who show it—a survival edge, that, at least over a period of time, must equal a three-to-one chance of reaching breeding age over those who lack it. But for a dominant trait, it’s a rather different story. For a dominant trait not to spread throughout the population, it has to be extremely an-tisurvival—in fact, it must be antisurvival enough to give the bearer, over a given period of time, a three-to-one chance against reaching breeding age. And any dominant trait less antisurvival than that is still going to grow, subtly and inexorably. And if a dominant trait is at all weighted toward survival, even the slightest bit, it will simply race through the species. You know, the human race has done more real, honest to goodness evolving since the begi

“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.”