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.