The odd thing was that until he’d met and fallen in love with Dajeil, Genar-Hofoen had been firmly of the latter opinion. He’d decided twenty years earlier, before he was even fully sexually mature and really knew his own mind about most things, that he was going to stay male all his life. He could see that being able to change sex was useful and that some people would even find it exciting, but he thought it was weak, somehow.
But then Dajeil had changed Byr’s mind.
They had met aboard the General Contact Unit Recent Convert.
She was approaching the end of a twenty-five-year Contact career, he just starting a ten-year commitment which he might or might not request to extend when the time came. He had been the rake, she the unavailable older woman. He had decided when he’d joined Contact that he’d try to bed as many women as possible, and from the first had set about doing just that with a single-minded determination and dedication many women found highly fetching just by itself.
Then on the Recent Convert he cut his usual swathe through the female half of the ship’s human crew, but was brought to a sudden stop by Dajeil Gelian.
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t sleep with him – there had been lots of women he’d asked who’d refused him, for a variety of reasons, and he’d never felt any resentment towards them or been any less likely to eventually count them as friends than the women he had made love to – it was that she told him she did find him attractive and ordinarily would have invited him to her bed, but wasn’t going to because he was so promiscuous. He’d found this a slightly preposterous reason, but had just shrugged and got on with life.
They became friends; good friends. They got on brilliantly; she became his best friend. He kept expecting that this friendship would as a matter of course include sex – even if it was just once – but it didn’t. It seemed so obvious to him, so natural and normal and right that it should. Not falling into bed together after some wonderfully enjoyable social occasion or sports session or just a night’s drinking seemed positively perverse to him.
She told him he was destroying himself with his licentiousness. He didn’t understand her. She was destroying him, in a way; he was still seeing other women but he was spending so much time with her – because they were such friends, but also because she had become a challenge and he had decided he would win her, whatever it took – that his usual packed schedule of seductions, affairs and relationships had suffered terribly; he wasn’t able to concentrate properly on all these other women who were, or ought to be demanding his attention.
She told him he spread himself too thinly. He wasn’t really destroying himself, he was stopping himself from developing. He was still in a sort of childish state, a boy-like phase where numbers mattered more than anything, where obsessive collecting, taking, enumerating, cataloguing all spoke of a basic immaturity. He could never grow and develop as a human being until he went beyond this infantile obsession with penetration and possession.
He told her he didn’t want to get beyond this stage; he loved it. Anyway, even though he loved it and wouldn’t care if he remained promiscuous until he was too old to do it at all, the chances were that he would change, sometime, eventually, over the course of the next three centuries or so of life which he could expect… There was plenty of time to do all this damned growing and developing. It would take care of itself. He wasn’t going to try and force the pace. If all this sexual activity was something he had to get out of his system before he could properly mature, then she had a moral duty to help him get rid of it as quickly as possible, starting right now…
She pushed him away, as ever. He didn’t understand, she told him. It wasn’t a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth. She was the still point in his life he needed, or at least a still point; he would probably need many more in his life, she had no illusions about that. But, for now, she was it. She was the rock the river of his turbulent passion had to break around. She was his lesson.
They both specialised in the same area; exobiology. He listened to her talk sometimes and wondered whether it was possible to feel more truly alien towards another being than it was to someone of one’s own species who ought to think in an at least vaguely similar way, but instead thought utterly differently. He could learn about an alien species, study them, get under their skin, under their carapaces, inside their spines or their membranes or whatever else you had to penetrate (ha!) to get to know them, get to understand them, and he could always, eventually, do that; he could start to think like them, start to feel things the way they would, anticipate their reactions to things, make a decent guess at what they were thinking at any given moment. It was an ability he was proud of.
Just by being so different from the creature you were studying you started out at a sufficiently great angle, it seemed to him, to be able to make that penetration and get inside their minds. With somebody who was ninety-nine per cent the same as you, you were too close sometimes. You couldn’t draw far enough away from them to come in at a steep enough angle; you just slid off, every time in a succession of glancing contacts. No getting through. Frustration upon frustration.
Then a post had come up on a world called Telaturier. A long-term situation, spending anything up to five years with an aquatic species called the ‘Ktik which the Culture wanted to help develop. It was the sort of non-ship-based Contact post people were often offered at the end of their career; Dajeil was regarded as a natural for it. It would mean one, maybe two people staying on the planet, otherwise alone save for the ‘Ktik, for all that time. There would be the occasional visit from others, but little time off and no extended holidays; the whole point was to establish a long-term personal relationship with ‘Ktik individuals. It wasn’t something to be entered into lightly; it would mean commitment. Dajeil asked to be considered for the post and was accepted.
Byr couldn’t believe Dajeil was leaving the Recent Convert. He told her she was doing it to annoy him. She told him he was being ridiculous. And unbelievably self-centred. She was doing it because it was an important job and it was something she felt she’d be good at. It was also something she was ready for now; she had done her bit scudding round the galaxy in GCUs and enjoyed every moment, but now she had changed and it was time to take on something more long-term. She would miss him, and she hoped he would miss her – though he certainly wouldn’t miss her for as long as he claimed he would, or even as long as he thought he would – but it was time to move on, time to do something different. She was sorry she hadn’t been able to stick around longer, being his still point, but that was just the way it was, and this was too great an opportunity to miss.
Later, he could never remember exactly when he’d made the decision to go with her, but he did. Perhaps he had started to believe some of the things she’d been telling him, but he too just felt that it was time to do something different, even if he had only been in Contact for a short while.
It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, harder than any seduction (with the possible exception of hers). To start with, he had to convince her it was a good idea. She wasn’t even initially flattered, not for a second. It was a terrible idea, she told him. He was too young, too inexperienced, it was far, far too early in his Contact stint. He wasn’t impressing her; he was being stupid. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t sensible, it wasn’t flattering, it wasn’t practical, it was just idiotic. And if by some miracle they did let him go along with her, he needn’t assume that just making this great commitment would ensure she’d sleep with him.
This didn’t prove anything except that he was as foolish as he was vain.
III
The General Contact Unit Grey Area didn’t hold with avatars; it spoke through a slaved drone. ‘Young lady-‘