"I haven't had one," he said. I made note of that, in case I ever got into a fight with him.

"Then there's the question of stamina in males," I went on. "Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could consistently get an erection more than three or four times a day. And it usually didn't last very long. And men didn't have multiple orgasms. They just weren't as sexually capable as women."

"That's horrible," Brenda said. I looked at her; she was genuinely shocked.

"That's an improvement, I'll have to admit," Walter said.

"And there's the entire phenomenon of menstruation," I added.

"What's menstruation?"

We both looked at her. She wasn't joking. Walter and I looked at each other and I could read his thoughts.

"Anyway," I said, "you just pointed out the challenge. Lots of people get altered in one way or another. Some, like you, stay almost natural. Some of the alterations aren't compatible with others. Not all of them involve penetration of one person by another, for instance. What these newsex people are saying is, if we're going to tamper, why not come up with a system that is so much better than the others that everyone will want to be that way? Why should the sensations we associate with 'sexual pleasure' be always and forever the result of friction between mucous membranes? It's the same sort of urge people had about languages back on Earth, back when there were hundreds of languages, or about weights and measures. The metric system caught on, but Esperanto didn't. Today we have a few dozen languages still in use, and more types of sexual orientation than that."

I settled back in my chair, feeling foolish. But I'd done my part. Now Walter could get on with whatever he had in mind. I glanced at Brenda, and she was staring at me with the wide-eyed look of an acolyte to a guru.

Walter took another drag on his cheroot, exhaled, and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.

"You know what today is?" he asked.

"Thursday," Brenda supplied. Walter glanced at her, but didn't bother to reply. He took another drag.

"It's the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of the Planet Earth."

"Remind me to light a candle and say a novena."

"You think it's funny."

"Nothing funny about it," I said. "I just wonder what it has to do with me."

Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor.

"How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the last week? The week leading up to this anniversary?"

I was willing to play along.

"Let's see. Counting the stuff in the Straight Shit, the items in the Lunarian and the K.C. News, that incisive series in Lunatime, and of course our own voluminous coverage . . . none. Not a single story."

"That's right. I think it's time somebody did something about that."

"While we're at it, let's do a big spread on the Battle of Agincourt, and the first manned landing on Mars."