I’m Lizzie Fairlong, and I’m on my way to Minehead. I used to be Aaron Fairlong in a previous gender and that’s all I’m going to say about that. Minehead isn’t a colony any more, for it’s now an independent city of about fifty-four thousand folk on an otherwise empty but independent world, and it wants immigrants badly enough to stand the cost of their passage from Earth and to provide accommodation when they reach their new home. The Minehead Council’s explanation is the ion drive ships recover the cost of the trip with the sale of the transition metal catalysts mined on Minehead, and every adult from the Mayor down does three days a quarter with the building crews, which is the only taxation on Minehead. If more accommodation is needed urgently everyone does an extra day. The catalysts are mostly for the air cleaning plants of the major cities. Parts of Earth are just one big city hundreds of miles across with air that is toxic if left untreated. Most of the persons on Earth are kept quiescent in a perpetual drugged fog, like the masses on soma in Brave New World,(1) and even if they were acceptable to Minehead they wouldn’t wish to go to a place where they would have to get out of bed and go to work.

After the shuttles deposit their loads of catalysts they collect potassium salts, preferably halides, and other metal halides too. Minehead finds it easier and cheaper to import potassium, chlorides, bromides and iodides than to mine the minerals which are scarce there. So scarce we have no salt water oceans, seas or lakes. An economically viable source of fluorides has yet to be discovered on Minehead, and the ships’ factors have been silent to anyone on Earth about just how valuable the fluorides are to them. When the trade has been effected, the shuttles take the colonists that had been interviewed in the mean time up to the mother ship and don’t leave till they have a full load, which is about six hundred folk. It’s far more pleasant living on the mother ships than on Earth, so no one complains even if it’s weeks before the ship leaves for home.

Minehead doesn’t usually take trans persons because they unashamedly admit they want folk capable of adding to their population, which is a polite way of saying breeding stock. However, I’m a DNA artificer with an international reputation and I banked my sperm before my surgery. They wanted me, badly they said. Despite my scientific success, life on Earth had been not much less of a nightmare for me than for any other trans person. My family and friends had rejected me when I came out, so I wasn’t leaving anyone I missed behind who wasn’t trans, but there are some trans friends I know I’ll miss badly.

The powers that be on Earth didn’t want me to leave, they rightly suspected that most of the cutting edge stuff I was working on only existed in my head, so because I was already safely on the Minehead mother ship before they realised I’d gone they tried to claim that as I was no longer a citizen of any nation state on Earth my sperm in the bank no longer belonged to me. Julia the shipboard factor of my new employers, the Minehead Planetary Government, more usually referred to as the Council or the MPG, explained to me that whatever it was that had produced me had to be at least partially genetic and they wanted my sperm available on Minehead. She explained it would remain my property, and I would be the only one who could legally decide with whom it could be used, but come hell or high water my sperm was going back to Minehead with me. Ships’ factors are high ranking persons of great influence and in many ways more powerful than the ambassador. It was nice to be valued like that.

When the next shipment of catalysts from Minehead was three days late arriving the various Earth governments made a fuss about penalty clauses and violation of contracts. The Minehead ambassador was blunt. ‘Hand over our citizen’s sperm in perfect condition or the catalysts won’t be arriving at all.’ They held out for another three days. Once the air quality in the major cities started deteriorating they tried to negotiate, but were told, ‘We want the sperm at the appropriate temperature and in perfect condition first. Our citizen, whom it belongs to, has agreed one of our crew may be impregnated with some and that will be done to check its condition as soon as we have possession. If there’s any thing wrong with it, or our crew member does not become pregnant, we’ll stop shipments altogether. We’ll tear up our contracts with you and get personnel from third world countries if need be leaving you to deal with billions of rioting, choking addicts. The Minehead ambassador was successful. And my successfully used sperm and I are now on our way to our new home with the pregnant junior chef Olga who is doing her penultimate tour because she wishes to have her baby at home with her husband’s support rather than in space. She is expecting a daughter she intends to name Lissabette.

Minehead is a wonderful place. I’ve been here six weeks now, and here I’m just a woman like any other, not a trans woman. Most of the persons here have something to do with the mines, but there’s all kinds of other jobs too. The hospital where I work is a highly advanced research centre for a wide variety of bio-medical issues too. The equipment is state of the art, a lot of it developed and built here, and better by far than anything Earth has. Some of it in my labs is so state of the art we have to have as many instrumentation technicians working with us to iron out the bugs as we do researchers and assistants. Which is where Konstantin comes into my story. Konstantin is a senior technician who was born here, and his exact title is a half dozen word, all with several syllables, monstrosity. He told me he makes sure that the analysis of whatever I find in the DNA I’m studying, be it of what ever kind including mitochondrial, is what I actually see on the screen.

I can see why Minehead wanted me. The work I’d already done on cell regeneration back on Earth gets used if not every day certainly three times a week in the hospital. It only takes twenty four hours to repair broken bones and associated tissue damage, including bruising, using my techniques, but I’m still glad I’m not a miner, a construction worker or a farmer, and only have to do my three days a quarter with the building crews. I usually end up painting. Georgia a young woman who drives a mine dump truck has been in three times with broken bones whilst I’ve been here. She’s a cheerful soul and last time she was in as she was leaving she told me, “You’re the most popular bod on Minehead, Doc. This would have cost me at least six weeks salary before you came, now it’s two days tops. Tot ziens!” There are a lot of Dutch folk on Minehead and a lot of their vocabulary was creeping into a new lingua franca that many suggested would eventually become the official language of Minehead. Tot ziens means goodbye. More worrying were those who left saying ‘Tot volgende keer!’ Which means till next time, but it was infectious and I’d started talking like that too.

There’s an upside down kind of logic to the Dutch being here. There’s plenty of fresh water on Minehead, billions of cubic kilometres of it in the lakes that surround the polar ice caps, but the productive mines and hence the centres of population are thousands of miles away from the lakes. The ore bearing mountains more or less girdle the equator and the farms that feed the population are on the lower slopes and plains. A huge volume of water has to be brought from the lakes to the farms and the settlements, and the Dutch are used to dealing with water on that scale. I’m told that moving water on that scale is not a significantly different problem from preventing it from moving, because the pressures and resultant forces are the same. The Dutch came up with the idea of the huge canals as not merely water conveyancers but as major transport links for the future too. Nowadays a lot of folk use them them for recreation, sailing, swimming and general holiday purposes. There are hostels built every hundred kilometres [sixty miles] or so, originally for the canal workers, that are now used by all and any. The small settlements at the lakes don’t grow much for themselves and are supplied from the equatorial farms via the canals.

I was functioning so much of the time as a medic that I had little time for research, so I talked to the department heads, and I’m now training a class of thirteen to take over the routine medics’ work. I love working here, no bad attitudes to deal with, everyone does what they can especially if there’s a bad mine accident. Then there’s no such thing as that’s not my job, if necessary we all work till we drop. I didn’t know it was possible to have as many friends as I have now. The last mother ship that returned had six hundred and fifty-two children, all under twelve, on it. The shuttles had cleared some orphanages, most in Eastern Europe but some in the States too. The mother ship psychology staff had done a good job with the children on their passage to their new home and within a day of their landing all had found new parents and homes and started to make friends with other children not from the ship.

Petra a psychologist who works at the hospital and manages immigrant children told me, “They’ve had enough trauma in their lives. They certainly don’t need me giving them any more. We know who their parents are and the names they boarded with. That will do to be going on with. I’ll give them at least a month to settle in to their homes, schools and friends before I start on the formal acceptance procedures, even though they are trivial. That will involve you DNA sampling them to detect anything that will need correcting for their long term health and my staff recording whatever they have chosen as their new names. We’ll go over the journals their parents have kept in case there’re any issues we need to address, but usually there are few with children. We’re not interested in their history unless it affects their health or well being. Minehead is a new start for all, as you are personally aware, and they don’t need an official record of horrors that they are trying to put behind them.”

Konstantin and I had been seeing each other a month or so when I invited him back to my rooms for a coffee after we’d watched a screening of a hilarious, really old sci-fi movie called ‘Buck Rogers in the 25th Century’ at the Minehead Odeon. He knew I was trans but not that I was a virgin. This is not a kiss and tell story and certainly not a pornographic one, so let’s just say it was fun and when we had breakfast I wasn’t a virgin any more and let it go at that, though walking was a little difficult for a few hours. When it was remarked on at work I said I’d pulled a muscle in the gym half an hour before. I’ve no idea if I were believed, probably not because no one said any more about it.

Konstantin had a suite of rooms that was big enough for the two of us but we decided to apply for a family suite with a view to adopting children. We had a choice of several and chose the suite with nearest access to the countryside rather than the school. After all an extra five minutes walking to school was nothing compared with an extra five minutes tree climbing or swimming. Marriage on Minehead was a private affair, but parentage was not. Even if you gave birth yourself you had to be recorded as the adult responsible for the care of that child. Our first child was a two possibly three month old baby girl, and we were duly and proudly both recorded as Amelia’s mum and dad. It had long been known how to induce lactation in any female and almost as long ago discovered how to induce it in a male, so Amelia was only bottle fed for two days, but my moderate sized breasts which had been hormone grown became rather impressive. Well they impressed Konstantin.

Over the next two years we adopted, ten year old Robin, six year old Carol and three year old William. Robin was a tearaway, a wild, lovable boy who had a history of abuse, but he settled in and put it behind him quickly. He was Konstantin’s pride and joy, and both lived for a sunny afternoon’s fishing on the lake with Konstantin’s dad, Vladimir, who had a boat. He said he was going to be a fisherman when he grew up to provide some variety in the food, and his granddad said they could probably get a grant from the Council for a bigger boat, but they’d have to make their nets themselves, so they may as well start straight away. However Robin had a knack of finding everything possible to hurt himself with. He was cheerful about it, and his opening remark to the medical centre staff was invariably, “Hi. I’m back.” His best friend was twelve year old, Minehead born Vanessa who unbeknownst to him clearly had designs on his body which was amusing to her parents and us. That sort of thing was approved of and supported on Minehead. We thought she was a lovely girl who would suit Robin well.

Carol was a pretty, giggly, girly little soul who spent a lot of time with Konstantin’s mother, Ivana, cooking. She had a lot of friends from school who lived nearby and a busy social life. William was a loner and liked to take a book and read somewhere. He enjoyed going to work with me or his dad and soaked up information. Claire his teacher said he was years in front of his peers. Baby Amelia was a sweetie and my guess was she and her sister were going to be a pair of heart breakers. They were already close and enjoyed each other’s company.

I’m not going to be needing my sperm now, so it is now on the list for women to use should they chose. The list identifies me as the donor, and I suspect at the rate it is being used there won’t be any left soon, for many women here want an intelligent father for their children. Some couples have preferred to use my sperm rather than the husband’s.

But back to the beginnings. My employers had some how heard of my interest in nerve regeneration which was of interest to them because their mining operations on which a lot of Minehead’s development depended was, as I’ve already alluded to, a high risk industry. Their safety records were excellent, but when accidents did happen they tended to produce tragic life changing consequences, and they understood if my ideas were successful para- and quadriplegia would be concerns of the past. Starting with the bone and soft tissue regeneration techniques we finally managed to get a handle on nerve regeneration. Eventually, after five years, we succeeded in repairing the spinal cord damage of every para- and quadriplegic on Minehead. It was based on my work, but without my two dozen brilliant and highly skilled colleagues it could never have been accomplished. Eventually it became a routine procedure managed by the medical centre, and I started working on my dreams.

My dreams were the ideas in my head that I’d left Earth before mentioning to anyone there. They were twofold. One, how to grow in vitro human organs for transplanting into hosts needing them. For entirely obvious reasons, I was especially interested in growing female reproductive systems for transplanting into trans women. Two, how to manipulate the DNA of the in vitro grown organ to be a universal donor so it didn’t trigger rejection in anyone who hosted it which of course had implications for a whole number of auto immune issues which were not my field. Others were dreaming of and working on brain tissue repair using a combination of our nerve regeneration technology and my in vitro organ growth work.

Other than the brain tissue repair issue, which is looking hopeful, we are there. I’m six months pregnant. However the repercussions are profound. Minehead is still desperate for immigrants and still does not want any from the drugged and mindless masses. You may think a relatively small number of men could provide all the sperm required for a large number of women. That is true, but does not lead to a balanced society, and it narrows the bottleneck of genetic diversity as would reliance on sperm produced from our existing population’s diploid genetic material, though the latter technique means there is no limit to the amount of sperm or the number of eggs that can be obtained from any individual. Also even though on Minehead there is not the separation of professions and trades by sex that there is on Earth, there are still professions and trades which are dominated by one sex or the other, but it no longer matters that every immigrant has to be able to father or bear children.

The trans can be described as many things but drugged and mindless are not two of them. It requires effort and thought to be trans and stay alive in most places on Earth. I suspect it always did. There are far more male to female than female to male trans persons, but now both can be given appropriate reproductive systems they are considered to be very desirable immigrants. Eighteen mother ships set off last week for Earth with nigh to every psychologist on the planet to assist in convincing the trans to relocate. It is planned to keep sending ships for at least the next twenty years. I’m hoping to meet some old friends soon.

1 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley published in 1932