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the breasts would sag and be encumbrances, you'd probably get extremely fat,
there might be some long-term problems with bone integrity and the like, and
your energy levels would tend to be down, at the very least."
"I like myself as I am. I think I would rather try going for the one problem
rather than something that radical."
He shrugged. "Well, there are drugs that might work, but they would have to be
specially formulated for your species-we wouldn't exactly be expected to stock
Erdomese materials-or brought from Erdom via Zone, and either would be
expensive and require that they be taken regularly over decades, judging from
your apparent physical age. If you are wealthy, well connected, and will be
in one spot, like this city, it would work. Otherwise.... And if you came off
them, particularly suddenly and dramatically, your system might go wild.
There would be a danger of losing all control, of becoming little more than
an animal in heat, and how long this would go on until you came back to
present levels is impossible to say."
Alowi was feeling less and less like she had any way out.
"There is a third way," the doctor went on, thinking. "Radical and somewhat
costly up front, although possibly not, depending on how much work is actually
involved."
"Yes?"
"Before going further, I must tell you that it is not approved medicine.
Strictly experimental, although we have had tremendous successes with it and
few failures. I am quite certain that it would work in your case. It has come
out of our own research work here."
"Go on."
"The process is complex, but basically it is rewriting your genetic code,
rather rapidly. Do you understand what that means?"
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She was shocked at the idea that they had such abilities, but she nodded.
"Yes, I do, at least in its implications. Can you really do it?"
Drinh sat back. "We can do more than you ever dreamed with it. We take only a
few cells, and we alter the code. Then the mathematics of the coding is fed
into tiny semiorganic devices, machines if you will, but on a scale so small,
they could be seen with only the finest microscopes. They replicate
themselves with astonishing speed, enter every cell in your body, and rewrite
the code.
Then they die and are passed out in the normal way or allow themselves to be
consumed by the body's defenses. The process is quite rapid. The cells quite
literally become other cells. Major changes can cause a great deal of
temporary discomfort and disorientation, but relatively minor ones such as we
are talking about might well not be noticed, or no more than catching a minor
virus at the worst." "You can really do this?"
"We do it regularly. Of course, there are limits. I could not, for example,
turn you from being an Erdomese into one of my own race. At some point you
would be neither one nor the other, and the stress would kill you. But if you
merely wanted to look like an Agonite, that I could do. Of course, we are
talking far less than that here."
She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Look like an Agonite? The process
is that
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comprehensive?"
"Oh, yes." He seemed somewhat uncomfortable all of a sudden, though, as if
he'd already said more than he had intended.
She had a sudden thought. "You could not turn me into a man, could you? An
Erdomese man?"
"Alas, no," the doctor sighed, and seemed to relax a bit. "The reverse, yes,
because in your race and many others the male contains only half the genetic
makeup; the other half is female, coming from the mother. But you have two
sets of female genes, so there is nothing there to edit. If you were male, I
could remove the male chromosomes, duplicate the female ones, alter them
somewhat, and recombine them so you would turn into a perfect, fully
functioning female. But the other way-
well, one must have something to work with, and your race is even more
peculiar than most bisexual races in that you have no male hormones or male
psychochemicals at all. Disappointed?"
"No, not really," she answered, realizing that what she was saying was true.
"But what could you do to me?"
"Oh, a lot of things. The possibilities are vast. To address the immediate
problem, it would be a matter of finding the triggers and dampening them down.
The work is complex because it is subtle, exacting, and challenging. It must
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