I changed as little as possible. Redistributed body weight, altered hormones—

All this time—

Yes.

You could have told me—

No. My, my change had to be complete. No looking back.

Then that’s why you couldn’t have children. And I thought—

Yes.

My God, I don’t think I can—

But the surge of emotion that came into her cut off the words. Robert felt the same tidal rhythm grasp him and did not fight against it. The heat and harsh cries of decades before seized them both. It went on for unendurably long moments bringing him to a fevered, shuttering, simulated climax.

In the silence afterward the images dwindled, the tingling sensations drained away. They were left, two people in the glossy chairs, the cables dangling from them.

They said nothing as Robert paid off the man and got into the taxi for the hotel.

“It’s revolting,” Helen said. “To learn this way …”

“The practice is common now.”

“Not among the people we know, not—” She stopped.

“I had to conceal it. I moved away afterward, to Chile, where no one knew I had the Change.”

“What, what was your name?”

“Susan.”

“I see,” she said stiffly.

What did she expect, he thought bitterly. That I changed Roberta to Robert, like some cheap joke?

“So you were the sort of woman who makes things like that senso.”

“For him, yes, I was.”

“He was repulsive.”

“He was hypnotic. I see that now.”

“He must have been, to make you do degrading things like—”

“Is it more degrading to do them, or to need their help?”

Her face tightened and he regretted saying it. She said bitterly, “I’m not the one who needs help, remember. And no wonder—you’re not really what everyone’s thought, are you?”

He ignored her tone. “I’ve done well enough. You had no complaints at the beginning, as I remember.”

She sat silently. The taxi whistled through dimly lit streets. “You’ve betrayed me.”

“It all happened long before I met you.”

“If I’d known you were so, so unbalanced as—”

“It was a decision I made. I had to.”

“For what? That man must have—”

“He—” Robert stopped himself. “I loved him.”

“What became of him, then?”

“He went away. Left me.”

“I’m not surprised. Any woman who would—” She shuddered, and conflicting emotions flickered across her face.

The taxi drew up to the hotel. Beggars came limping out of the shadows, calling. Robert brushed them away. The two walked to their room without a word. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the old tile corridors. Inside, he took off his coat and noticed that his heart was pounding.

She turned to him decisively. “I want to, to know what it was like. Why you—”

He cut her off with, “The process was crude then. Manuel had left me. I thought then that he had fallen out of love with me, but looking back, feeling that tonight—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he had just gotten tired of me.”

“But something made you …”

“Yes. It’s all gotten so distant now, I can’t he sure of what I felt. It’s as though there’s a fog between me and that senso.”

“You didn’t recognize it until …?”

“No, I didn’t. I went through two years of drugs, depression, therapy, tap-ins. I forgot so much. The strains on my body—”

“I still don’t—maybe that man, he was so oily, he must have done things to you, to make you want to change—”

Robert shook his head. He turned abruptly and went into the bathroom. He stayed there a long time, taking a shower and letting the hot water wash away the evening and turn his skin pink. He looked down at himself and thought of what the years had done to the muscles and skin. This body felt heavy, bulky, and oddly like a machine. He wondered what it would have been like if that dimly remembered girl had not …

When he returned to the bedroom the lights were out.

He went to the bed slowly, uncertain, and heard the crisp rustle of sheets.

“Come here,” she said.

She reached for him. “You … you have been a good man to me.” A tentative touch. “I suppose I can’t … blame you for a past you had … erased, even before we …”

He kissed her. She murmured, “You were weaker then, you know. I thought it was just being young, inexperienced. But you got strong, in the years afterward. I was surprised, I remember.”

He saw where she was headed and said, “Because of you.”

And it was true. She was starting to realize that it was she, and the glorious first years of their marriage, that had made him truly into a man. And this realization was pulling her free of her confused swirl of emotions.

She tried the things she had done so many times before. To his surprise there was some response. The deep feelings of the senso had perhaps reached into him and found some reservoir.

A moist heat grew rapidly in her and he went along, making the old moves he knew would do the job. She quickened further. Some part of him kept up a lukewarm interest, enough to make the performance convincing. She gasped, and gasped again. Something in tonight had made her swirl of emotions condense into this act, some titillation had come out of the senso and the shock. Now she responded to him as if he were some exotic thing.

Robert suddenly remembered Manuel. God, I hope he’s dead now. It would be better if the possibility of him was gone from life forever. The therapy had smothered and blotted out Manuel. The therapists had been very sure that was for the best.

Helen moved energetically under him, trying to provoke a passion he could no longer feel. Christ, he thought. He felt a new empathy for her, for what help she would find in this.

Suddenly he sensed himself above the tangled bodies that labored in the bed. He saw the passion from a high but not disparaging perspective, a double vision of himself. It was like the multiple layers of sensation one had in the senso, the sense of being several people at once. But stranger, and deeper.

He saw that the simple event of coupling was surrounded with an aura, a different halo of associations for each sex. An act of essential self-definition. It truly was difficult to express how profound the difference was.

A surge came in him and he thought again of Manuel. That bright, trusting girl back there—she had wanted Manuel so badly. And when he left, the only way to hold on to him was to try, in a strange way, to flee from herself, and become what she wanted to hold.

Helen groaned and clutched at him, as if for shelter in this private storm, and gave an abrupt, piercing cry. He stroked her and wept and for the first time in many years he saw truly again, in Helen and in that girl of long ago, the other side of a wide mute river he could never cross again.

Four

Nigel shivered. The drama had been intense, close, more intimate than anything artificial he had ever experienced. They had obviously selected a drama tuned to his age, his sex—and then pulled the rug from under him, jolted his expectations.

He wasn’t that rather tired, dulled man, and yet, yet—there was something … Even the man’s dialogue was slightly British, like one who had lived abroad for decades, just as Nigel had. Yes, it was a damned finely tuned bit of business. And not at all amusing.

But amusement was not the aim. With a blurring sense of movement everything shifted, melted, reformed—

And he was the gaunt little man, spotting his mark on the dingy Berkeley street. Nigel felt himself swept along as he approached the heavyset, distracted figure and said, “Something?”

From there the drama proceeded as before, giving Nigel a rather distant view of the events, letting emotions seep away—

Another swirling, blurred transition. Nigel became Helen.