Read 03. Gods at the Well of Souls for Free Online Page A

desires." 
     
    "I beg your pardon. What does that mean, exactly?" 
     
    "Basically, you would be fully capable of performing as a woman, but you would  lack all desire to do so, even in the face of stimulus-response. You would  simply be incapable of arousal. There is a medical term for this, but I do not  know how it would translate. It is physiological frigidity." 
     
    She nodded. "I understand the idea. I would be turned off of sex, as it were."  She thought about it. "Is it- reversible?" 
     
    "I would not recommend attempting a reversal. Changing the changed is always a  hundred times more dangerous, because we would have even less to go on and the  risk of things going terribly wrong would be major. Of course, you could always  take injections or oral hormones to artificially restore it to some degree or  another, but it would be temporary and administered by a clinic like this one,  which could determine and synthesize what was needed." 
     
    "I see." It was in many ways an attractive possibility. "But Doctor, I can add.  You have left almost forty-eight percent unaccounted for." 
     
    "Urn, yes, I was coming to that. The problem is, the same regions of the brain  and the same chemical balances serve more than one function, and without prior  research we can be only so delicate. The nearly equal chance would be to achieve  not a neutral balance but opposition. You would have no arousal or desire to  copulate with males, but you would find yourself attracted to and potentially  aroused by other females. You would not suffer the borderline psychochemically  induced nymphomania that is at the heart of your problem, but you would be  vulnerable, as with most sexual creatures, to stimulus-response." "You mean I would react like a man." 
     
    "No, not precisely. In the sense of stimulus-response to females, yes, but you  would not think of yourself as male or have male responses and desires, in some  races a small percentage of people are born this way. It would solve your  problem, because you would be unlikely in any event to encounter females outside  of Erdom, but not as completely as neutralization, and of course drug and  hormone therapy to restore normalcy would be very unlikely." 
     
    She considered it. Bizarre-that the worst-case scenario would be to wind up  viewing women close to the way Julian Beard was brought up seeing them. But  Beard had always been fully capable of giving up almost anything, even sex, for  very long periods, and certainly, if it couldn't be Lori, she would rather not  ever be tempted, even accidentally, by one of those native men. "How-how soon would I see a difference?" she asked him. 
     
    He shrugged. "Impossible to say for sure. Still, only automatic and  stimulus-response chemical actions in your brain would be affected, so the  change would be quite rapid. The practical effect might be noticed in days,  perhaps hours, although total and permanent change might take a few weeks. We  are dealing here only with a very small reprogramming of an even smaller area.  But the permanence of the process is important to remember; if you wish to have  anything else done, it is best to have it done all at once." 
     
    "Anything else?" She could see his gaze. "Oh, the hands. I thought about that  after what you said, but ... Well, you said it would take away my desire. Would  it do more? Would it make me antichild, for example, or incapable of loving  someone or having other normal emotions?" 
     
    "Again, you'd need an Erdomese physician to fully answer that. It is not like  this has been done before, let alone repeatedly, with someone of your race.  There are bound to be some ancillary changes we can't foresee, but not drastic  ones. I doubt if you will become some sort of emotionless, cold individual or  anything like that. It might even work the other way. You might find that your  emotions in other areas are stronger. There is often that sort