Long-term relationships in a society where people generally lived for at least three and a half centuries were necessarily of a different nature from those in the more primitive civilisations which had provided the Culture's original blood-stock. Life-long monogamy was not utterly unknown, but it was exceptionally unusual. A couple staying together for the duration of an offspring's entire childhood and adolescence was a more common occurrence, but still not the norm. The average Culture child was close to its mother and almost certainly knew who its father was (assuming it was not in effect a clone of its mother, or had in place of a father's genes surrogated material which the mother had effectively manufactured), but it would probably be closer to the aunts and uncles who lived in the same extended familial grouping; usually in the same house, extended apartment or estate.
There were partnerships which were intended to last, however, and one of the ways that certain couples chose to emphasise their co-dependence was by synchronising their sex-changes and at different points playing both parts in the sexual act. A couple would have a child, then the man would become female and the woman would become male, and they would have another child. A more sophisticated version of this was possible due to the amount of control over one's reproductive system which still further historic genetic tinkering had made possible.
It was possible for a Culture female to become pregnant, but then, before the fertilised egg had transferred from her ovary to the womb, begin the slow change to become a man. The fertilised egg did not develop any further, but neither was it necessarily flushed away or reabsorbed. It could be held, contained, put into a kind of suspended animation so that it did not divide any further, but waited, still inside the ovary. That ovary, of course, became a testicle, but — with a bit of cellular finessing and some intricate plumbing — the fertilised egg could remain safe, viable and unchanging in the testicle while that organ did its bit in inseminating the woman who had been a man and whose sperm had done the original fertilising. The man who had been a woman then changed back again. If the woman who had been a man also delayed the development of her fertilised egg, then it was possible to synchronise the growth of the two fetuses and the birth of the babies.
To some people in the Culture this — admittedly rather long-winded and time-consuming — process was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect way for two people to express their love for one another. To others it was slightly gross and, well, tacky.
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.