“You really think it’s one out of ... five thousand?”

“What?” Lawrence looked up, frowning.

“About the ... women?”

Lawrence took a breath and began to pick up more pieces. “I could be off by as much as a thousand—in either direction!”

Bron flung the letter on the floor (“Hev, where are you—?” Lawrence called) and bolted into the hall.

He didn’t go into Alfred’s room.

Downstairs at the computer room, half a dozen men waited outside and, when he barged past, tried to explain that there was at least a twenty-minute wait to get any medical diagnostic program.

“I don’t want a diagnosis!” He shoved past. “I know what’s wrong! I want Clinic Information!” He banged into the cubicle. He wasn’t sure if he could get Clinic Information if there was a diagnosis tie-up. But when he punched his request, the address ticked across the screen immediatelv. He pressed the purple button, and it was typed out on a strip of purple-backed flimsy. He ripped it loose from the slit and charged out of the room.

There was a small crowd outside the transport kiosk. Delays? He turned the corner, decides to walk. The address was in the unlicensed sector. Which was typical. Here and there he passed stretches of wreckage. Labor groups were already assembled at some sites. He found himself comparing the shiny yellow coveralls the men and women wore here to the soiled work-clothes of the earthie diggers. (Seventy-five percent ... ?) But it left him with a numb feeling, another irrelevancy, be—

fore his destination. I should pray for them, he thought and tried to recall his mumble; all that came back to him was the ranting of the Beasts—the mutilation of the mind, the mutilation of the body! He hunched his shoulders, squinched his eyes in the dust swirling in the green light—the left-hand light-strip was dead—of the tiled underpass. Walking out onto the darker way, it became apparent that the u-1 had, indeed, been harder hit. Which was, indeed, typical.

Would the clinic be open?

They were.

The blue reception room was empty, except for a woman in a complicated armchair in one corner, a complicated console on one of its arms. Eyes to a set of binocular readers, she tapped an occasional input on the console keys. Bron walked up to her. She swung the reader aside and smiled. “May I help you?”

Bron said: “I want to be a woman.”

“Yes. And what sex are you now?”

Which was not the response he expected. “Well what do I look like?”

She made a small moue. “You could be a male who is partway through one of a number of possible sex-change processes. Or you could be a female who is much further along in a number of other sex change operations: in both those cases, you would be wanting us to complete work already begun. More to the point, you might have begun as a woman, been changed to male, and now want to be changed to—something else. That can be difficult.” But because in a completely different context he had once used such a console for three months, he saw that she had already punched in ‘Male.’”Or,” she concluded, “you could be a woman in very good drag.”

“I’m male.”

She smiled. “Let’s have your identity card—” which he handed her and she fed into the slot at the console’s bottom. “Thank you.”

Bron glanced around at the empty chairs that sat about the waiting room. “There isn’t anyone else here ... ?”

“Well,” the woman said, dryly, “you know we’ve just had a war this afternoon. Things are rather slow. But we’re carrying on ... you just go right through there.”

Bron went through the blue wall into a smaller room, intestinal pink.

The man behind the desk was just removing Bron’s card from the slot on his console. He smiled at it, at Bron, at the pink chair across from him, at the card again. He stood up, extended his hand across the desk.

“Delighted to meet you, Ms Helstrom—”

“I’m male,” Bron said. “I just told your receptionist—”

“But you want to be female,” the man said, took Bron’s hand, shook it, dropped it, and coughed. “We believe in getting started right away, especially with the easy things. Do sit down.”

Bron sat.

The man smiled, sat himself. “Now, once more, Ms Helstrom, can you tell us what you’d like from us?”

Bron tried to relax. “I want you to make me a woman.” Saying it the second time was nowhere as hard as the first.

“I see,” the man said. “You’re from Mars—or possibly Earth, right?”

Bron nodded. “Mars.”

“Thought so. Most of our beneficiaries are. Terrible what happened there this afternoon. Just terrible. But I imagine that doesn’t concern you.” He sucked his teeth. “Still, somehow life under our particular system doesn’t generate that many serious sexually dissatisfied types. Though, if you’ve come here, I suspect you’re the type who’s pretty fed up with people telling you what type you aren’t or are.” The man raised an eyebrow and coughed again quizzically.

Bron was silent.

“So, you want to be a woman.” The man cocked his head. “What kind of a woman do you want to be? Or rather, how much of a woman?”

Bron frowned.

“Do you simply want what essentially could be called cosmetic surgery—we can do quite a fine job; and quite a functional one. We can give you a functional vagina, functional clitoris, even a functional womb in which you can bear a baby to term and deliver it, and functional breasts with which you can suckle the infant once it is born. More than that, however, and we have to leave the realm of the cosmetic and enter the radical.”

Bron’s frown deepened. “What is there beyond that you can do?”

“Well.” The man lay his hands on the table. “In every one of your cells—Well, not all: notable exceptions are the red blood cells—there are forty-six chromosomes, long DNA chains, each of which can be considered two, giant, intertwined molocules, in which four nucleotides—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and gui-nene—are strung along, to be read sequentially in groups of three: the order of these groups determines the order of the amino acids along the polypeptide chains that make up the proteins and enzymes which, once formed, proceed to interact with each other and the environment in such a way that, after time and replenishment ... Well, the process is far too complicated to subsume under a single verb: let us simply say there they were, and here you are! I say forty-six: this would be completely true if you were a woman. But what made you a man is the half-length chromosome called Y, which is paired with a full-length chromosome called X. In women, there are two of these X’s and no

Y at all. And, oddly, as long as you have at least one

Y in the cells, it usually doesn’t matter how many X’s you have—and occasionally they double up—the organism is male. Now, the question is, how did this Y chromosome make you a male, back when various cells were dividing and your little balloon of tissue was suffering various Thomian catastrophes and folding in and crumpling up into you?” The man smiled. “But I sap-pose I’m merely recapitulating what you already know ... ? Most of our beneficiaries have done a fair amount of research on their own before they come to

“I haven’t,” Bron said. “I just made up my mind about ... maybe an hour ago.”

“Then again,” the men went on, “some do make their decisions quickly. And it might interest you to know that many among these are our most successful cases—if they’re the proper type.” He smiled, nodded. “Now, as I was saying: How does the Y chromosome do it?”

“It has the blue prints on it of the amino acid order for the male sex hormones?” Bron asked.

“Now, you must get the whole idea of ‘blue-printing’ out of your mind. The chromosomes don’t describe anything directly about the body. They prescribe, which is a different process entirely. Also, that Y chromosome is, for all practical purposes, just the tail end of an X chromosome. No, it’s more complicated than that. One way that chromosomes work is that an enzyme created by one length will activate, so to speak, the protein created by another length, either on the same chromosome or on a different one entirely. Or, sometimes, they will inactivate another product from another length. If you want to use the rather clumsy concept of genes—and, really, the concept of gene is just an abstraction, because there are no marked-out genes, there are just strings of nucleotides; they’re not framed at all, and starting to read the triplets at the proper point can be a real problem—we can say that certain genes turn on, or activate, other genes, while certain other genes inhibit the activity of others. There is a complicated interchain of turning-off’s and turning-on’s back and forth between the X and Y—for instance, a cell with multiple Y chromosomes and no X’s can’t do this and just dies—which leaves various genes on both the X and Y active which in turn activate genes all through the forty-six that prescribe male characteristics, while genes that would prescribe certain female characteristics are not activated (or in other cases specifically inactivated). The interchange that would occur between two X chromosomes would leave different genes activated all over the X chromosomes that would in turn activate those female prescription genes and inactivate the male ones throughout the rest of the forty-four. For instance, there’s a gene that is activated on the Y that activates the production of androgen—actually parts of the androgen itself are designed along a section of the X chromosome—while another gene, which Y activates on the X, causes another gene, somewhere else entirely, to get the body up so it can respond to the androgen. If this gene, somehow, isn’t activated, as occasionally happens, then you get what’s called testicular feminization. Male sex harmones are produced, but the body can’t respond to them, so in that case you have a Y and a woman’s body anyway. This situation between the X and Y makes it logically moot whether we consider the man an incomplete woman or the woman an incomplete man. The arrangement in birds and lizards, for example, is such that the half-length chromosome is carried by the females and the full-length is carried by the males: the males are X-X and the females are X-Y. At any rate, one of the things we can do for a man is infect him with a special virus-like substance related to something called an episome, which will actually carry in an extra length of X and deposit it in all his cells so that the Y is, so to speak, completed and all those cells that were X-Y will now be, in effect, X-X.”