Was she relieved?
“Can I get that for you?”
She looked up, startled, and saw a man in a flight harness, flapping like crazy to remain stationary. Those contraptions required an amazing amount of energy, and this fellow showed it, with bulging biceps and huge thigh muscles and a chest big as a barrel. The metal wings glittered and the leather straps creaked and the sweat poured off him.
“No thanks,” she said, then she smiled at him. “But I'd be proud to make you a drink.”
He smiled back, asked her apartment number, and flapped off toward the nearest landing platform. Bach looked down, but the paper with Charlie's face on it was already gone, vanished in the vast spaces of Mozartplatz.
Bach finished her drink, then went to answer the knock on her door.
INTRODUCTION TO
“Options”
When I was thinking about what society might be like in the Eight Worlds, naturally I was influenced by the social and political ferment that was all around me at the time. I grew up in Texas in the 1950s, where there were segregated restrooms and drinking fountains. In my life I have gone from referring to a certain minority group as something we now call “The N-word,” which I didn't even know was pejorative, to Negroes, to “spades” when that was fashionable in the Haight-Ashbury, to Afro-Americans, to black people, to people of color, to the current usage of African-American. My racism was of the unconscious, liberal variety. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was praised from the pulpit of my Lutheran church for the work he was doing in the South, but nobody in the pews, or in the pulpit for that matter, would have wanted him to marry their daughter.
When I began writing, we were in the most exciting years of the feminist movement. A few women somewhere burned a few bras as a lark, someone took a picture of it, and people started calling feminists bra-burners. That, or women's-libbers, lesbians, ball-busters, or harpies. A favorite word to describe them was “strident.” I read a lot of the literature, saw their point, and did my best to shake off my sexism as I had shed myself of racism.
The gay rights movement was just getting started, hadn't really made a lot of noise yet. No need to go through the terms that were thrown around at
them.
We have come such a long way. Consider, in this day and age when
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
is a big hit on television, that in my high school days it would have been about the deadliest insult you could hurl. Fightin' words. Now it is a word of pride. Sure, there are still toothless rednecks who feel themselves superior to Nelson Mandela because they are white. There are those who love to beat the crap out of people because of who they choose to go to bed with. There are those like a certain big fat lying hypocritical junkie crybaby felon who calls progressive women “feminazis.” There is much still to do and I don't know where it will all end up, but compare today
in America to 1955 in Texas, like I do, and you will know there has been much progress.
Back when I started writing, everyone was exploring sex roles, redefining what it was to be a man or a woman, of whatever orientation. Nature or nurture? Is testosterone or estrogen all-powerful? Is a man gay because his mother made him wear dresses, or was he born that way? I spent a long time thinking about sex, and came to the conclusion that there is not
one statement
you can make about
all
men or about
all
women that is valid. People are now seeking equal rights for “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered.” I'm not even sure if that includes hermaphrodites, or the small minority of people who just plain don't have any interest in sex at all. Neuters.
So what would things be like in . . . two or three hundred years? (I was always deliberately vague about dates in the Eight Worlds stories.) With the Earth subjugated by aliens who, if they weren't actually God, could pinch-hit for him?
If you take a jump that far ahead in the world of science fiction, you can postulate absolutely anything you want. Just look what has happened in fifty years in the field of electronics. Not a single one of the great technological writers came anywhere near imagining the computers we have now, not Asimov, not Clarke, not Heinlein. (They imagined plenty of things we don't have, like 3D television.)
I decided that the advances in biology would be far beyond what we could imagine in 1974. We're well on our way there thirty years later. The human genome has been mapped; nanotechnology is still in its infancy but presents stunning possibilities in medicine. What could all this mean to that great engine that drives all human endeavors, the primal urge of sex?
One of the key postulates of the Eight Worlds was that it would be possible to jump over the divide of gender, to see how the other 50 percent experiences the world. I wasn't talking about sex-reassignment surgery, which merely rearranges some skin and I'm sure is a great comfort to those who feel they were born in the wrong body, but does nothing at the genetic level. And you can't go back next week and tell the doctor it was all a big mistake, I hate being female and I want my penis back. I was considering a quick, painless, and totally reversible procedure so complete that someone who had once been male would now be able to bear a child. How would that affect society?
(How would this be done? I haven't got a clue, any more than Robert Heinlein had a clue about silicon chips, which were on the horizon, or Larry Niven has about hyperspace, which may or may not be in the future. In science fiction you usually just skip over all that hard stuffâhow it was developed, how it worksâand simply say, “Beam me up, Scotty!”)
I wrote several stories exploring these possibilities, including my very first sale,
“Picnic on Nearside.” I must say I had considerable trepidation about how these stories might be received. Trepidation? I was scared stiff. Would I be seen as some sort of pervert? Would people call me a queer? (I'll admit, that still would have hurt me back then. Hey, it was
the worst thing
you could say about a guy.)
To my relief, they were well received. There were even a few people who, reading some of the stories, wondered if I was a woman writing under a pen name, as “James Tiptree Jr.” turned out to be. I took this as flattering. I took it as meaning that I got it right, or at least as right as a male could.
Over the years I have posed the question to many people, on panels and in discussions. If you could change sex, easily, painlessly, and most of all, reversibly, would you buy a ticket on that particular weekend cruise? The answers have been almost unanimous: sign me up.
Now, I know science fiction readers are an adventurous crew, I know there are millions and millions of others who would be scandalized by the very idea, would sooner cut off their own legs with a hacksaw . . . but what if it was a technology that had been around for a hundred years? Except for oddball religious cults, like Christinanity or Islam, I don't think there would be many left who wouldn't try it for a day or two, like teenagers sneaking their first beer or cigarette if for no other reason.
Â
Terry Carr had reprinted a few of these stories in his Best of the Year collections, and one day he posed me a question. I like these stories, he said, but they all happen in a time when sex changing is as accepted as boarding a jet plane and flying to Miami. What I'd like to know is, how do we get from
here
to
there?
What was it like when this was a new technology? What would it do to society, and particularly, to the family? Write me a story like that, he said.
I did, and this is it. I sent it to him for publication in his anthology of original stories,
Universe.
He liked it, and handed it to his wife, Carol, for a second opinion. She read it, Terry told me, smiling from time to time. Then she came to the last line and let out a shriek. “That last line is
awful,
” she said. “It
completely
undercuts everything he was saying about gender roles.”
In my defense, Terry hadn't gotten it, either, but when Carol was through blistering his ears, he sure did. He pointed it out to me, and when I saw what she was talking about I wanted to sink through the floor. I saw what she meant. It was more than awful, it was stupid.
It was the work of five minutes to write a new last line, and Carol smiled again.
Maybe you want to know what that original last line was.
No way in hell.
OPTIONS
CLEO HATED BREAKFAST. Her energy level was lowest in the morning, but not so the children's. There was always some school crisis, something that had to be located at the last minute, some argument that had to be settled.
This morning it was a bowl of cereal spilled in Lilli's lap. Cleo hadn't seen it happen; her attention had been diverted momentarily by Feather, her youngest.
And of course it had to happen
after
Lilli was dressed.
“Mom, this was the
last
outfit I
had.
”
“Well, if you wouldn't use them so hard they might last more than three days, and if you didn't . . .” She stopped before she lost her temper. “Just take it off and go as you are.”
“But Mom, nobody goes to school naked.
No
body
.
Give me some money and I'll stop at the store onâ”
Cleo raised her voice, something she tried never to do. “Child, I know there are kids in your class whose parents can't afford to buy clothes at all.”
“All right, so the poor kids don'tâ”
“That's enough. You're late already. Get going.”
Lilli stalked from the room. Cleo heard the door slam.
Through it all Jules was an island of calm at the other end of the table, his nose in his newspad, sipping his second cup of coffee. Cleo glanced at her own bacon and eggs cooling on the plate, poured herself a first cup of coffee, then had to get up and help Paul find his other shoe.
By then Feather was wet again, so she put her on the table and peeled off the sopping diaper.
“Hey, listen to this,” Jules said.“âThe City Council today passed without objection an ordinance requiringâ'”
“Jules, aren't you a little behind schedule?”
He glanced at his thumbnail. “You're right. Thanks.” He finished his coffee, folded his newspad and tucked it under his arm, bent over to kiss her, then frowned.
“You really ought to eat more, honey,” he said, indicating the untouched eggs. “Eating for two, you know.'Bye now.”
“Good-bye,” Cleo said, through clenched teeth. “And if I hear that âeating for two' business again, I'll . . .” But he was gone.
She had time to scorch her lip on the coffee, then was out the door, hurrying to catch the train.
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There were seats on the sun car, but of course Feather was with her and the UV wasn't good for her tender skin. After a longing look at the passengers reclining with the dark cups strapped over their eyesâand a rueful glance down at her own pale skinâCleo boarded the next car and found a seat by a large man wearing a hardhat. She settled down in the cushions, adjusted the straps on the carrier slung in front of her, and let Feather have a nipple. She unfolded her newspad and spread it out in her lap.
“Cute,” the man said. “How old is he?”
“She,” Cleo said, without looking up. “Eleven days.” And five hours and thirty-six minutes . . .
She shifted in the seat, pointedly turning her shoulder to him, and made a show of activating her newspad and scanning the day's contents. She did not glance up as the train left the underground tunnel and emerged on the gently rolling, airless plain of Mendeleev. There was little enough out there to interest her, considering she made the forty-minute commute to Hartman Crater twice a day. They had discussed moving to Hartman, but Jules liked living in King City near his work, and of course the kids would have missed all their school friends.
There wasn't much in the news storage that morning. When the red light flashed, she queried for an update. The pad printed some routine city business. Three sentences into the story she punched the reject key.
There was an Invasion Centennial parade listed for 1900 hours that evening. Parades bored her, and so did the Centennial. If you've heard one speech about how liberation of Earth is just around the corner if we all pull together, you've heard them all. Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high.
She glanced wistfully at sports, noting that the J Sector jumpball team was doing poorly without her in the intracity tournament. Cleo's small stature and powerful legs had served her well as a starting sprint-wing in her playing days, but it just didn't seem possible to make practices anymore.
As a last resort, she called up the articles, digests, and analysis listings, the newspad's
Sunday Supplement
and Op-Ed department. A title caught her eye, and she punched it up.
CHANGING: THE REVOLUTION IN SEX ROLES
(Or, Who's on Top?)
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Twenty years ago, when cheap and easy sex changes first became available to the general public, it was seen as the beginning of a revolution that would change the shape of human society in ways impossible to foresee. Sexual equality is one thing, the sociologists pointed out, but certain residual inequitiesâbased on biological imperatives or on upbringing, depending on your politicsâhave proved impossible to weed out. Changing was going to end all that. Men and women would be able to see what it was like from the other side of the barrier that divides humanity. How could sex roles survive that?
Ten years later the answer is obvious. Changing had appealed only to a tiny minority. It was soon seen as a harmless aberration, practiced by only 1 percent of the population. Everyone promptly forgot about the tumbling of barriers.
But in the intervening ten years a quieter revolution has been building. Almost unnoticed on the broad scale because it is an invisible phenomenon (how do you know the next woman you meet was not a man last week?), changing has been gaining growing, matter-of-fact acceptance among the children of the generation that rejected it. The chances are now better than even that you know someone who has had at least one sex change. The chances are better than one out of fifteen that you yourself have changed; if you are under twenty, the chance is one in three.