Ashley considered his conversation with his mom to have gone well, but his dad was a far different story. Ashley's father was one of the original space colonists, now out on a long journey to a newly discovered earth-like planet ten light-years away. The colonists were all under suspended animation, so the message would only be received ten years after it was sent, assuming that it was received at all--whether the signal could maintain its integrity over that long a distance was yet to be established.
Ashley's father was an engineer and a long-time enthusiast of space travel and colonization who had volunteered for the first deep-space colonization. Ashley remembered how happy his father had been to be accepted into the program, but there was a catch. In order for the colony to build its population quickly, ninety percent of the colonists had to be fertile women. For men who were going and wanted to remain male there was a lottery, and Ashley's dad wasn't one of the winners. He decided to go anyway, and was regressed into a twenty-year-old female.
The changed men spent their last six months on earth as women, getting used to their new bodies so they wouldn't have to adjust to a new gender at the same time they were adjusting to a new planet. Ashley remembered it as one of the best times she had had with her father, who had become the kid sister she never had. Dealing with first-period freakouts (the program insisted that the changed women go through periods, as the numerous ways of avoiding them in the twenty-sixth century might not be available on the new planet), watching Robisa--the name the new woman had chosen--realize and then come to terms with her growing attraction to men, going on a few crazy double dates, it had all made the two of them closer than ever.
And then Robisa got on the spaceship, and the two knew they would never see each other again. So should Ashley let his father know that his daughter was now a son, while Robisa herself would spend her life as a female? (As much as Robisa had come to terms with her destiny, Ashley knew that if she had been offered the opportunity to have the transformation reversed and still go on the expedition as a male, his father would have taken it in a heartbeat.) How would she take it? Or did it matter at all? Didn't Robisa have enough to deal with? But if the two of them were going to maintain a relationship, wouldn't concealing the truth about something this important be as bad as a lie?