It was the teenage boy, Chang-chen, who lived a few doors down the hall from her family. He was about fourteen and quite handsome, tall, with unusually shiny dark hair and large eyes. He grinned at her with doglike white teeth as he sat her on the toilet seat, seeming to ignore her state of disarray. "What's all this now, little one?" He picked up the little mirror and fingered it delightedly. "Trying to have a little look-see, find out what all the uproar is about?"
She nodded dumbly, unable to think in her shame and terror. He laughed again, seeming hugely pleased. He picked her up and sat down, holding her on his lap. She squirmed, but he held her fast.
"Now, now," he said. "You just hold still and I'll tell you all about it." She gasped as he placed his hand over her mons veneris, squeezing it lightly. "This," he said, "is what makes every woman worth a thousand men. And this"—he stuck his index finger into her vagina, making her whimper at a thin, strange stab of pain—"is the place where all men long to be." He ran his finger slowly in and out. "You like that?" She shook her head frantically, but he didn't seem to notice. "Well, remember what I say and you'll rule the world!" It went on and on, his fingerings and pinchings and touchings. Time disappeared into a haze of pain and confusion. Later on he held her up in the air and began licking between her legs. That felt very funny, strange, and it almost tickled, but the vileness of what was happening made her sick and she threw up down his back. That made him very angry and she carried the bruises with her for days.
Jana considered the ancient memory. As she recalled, the boy had grown up to be a powerful canton official in Tibet,then had killed himself over some scandal or another. Something to do with the star of a visiting South American soccer team.
Damn! A painful pins-and-needles sensation dug at her, racking the centers of her brain as if with a return of circulation. What was happening? She remembered being in the car, far out on the ocellus , and then being trapped outside with a damaged thermocouple. Oh, God! she cried silently. I thought freezing to death was supposed to be painless! She remembered all the old myths about how a dying man's life was supposed to flash before his eyes as he drifted beneath the surface of the sea for the last time, or fell past the walls of a building, counting the stories as he dropped toward certain doom. How strange that it should all turn out to be true, but not as one died, as one was reborn . . . Somewhere, far away, a little voice told her that it was not true. I'm still dead, she realized. I've been dead for a very long time, centuries, in fact. I am a mausoleum, a tourist attraction in the remote future. See the funny ancient statue these humans from the dawn age left here on Ocypete's ice!
What can be happening to me? Is one of the old religions really true? Nonsense! She pushed the absurd idea away.
Something else was coming now, something tainted with alienness, but it seemed to be her memory nonetheless. She waited for it patiently, and it came upon her with a roar.
Li-Jiang was eleven and Obey Cadre was in full swing. She still remembered it as having been among the worst and most repulsive things she had ever done in her life, but it all seemed changed now. Why?
She had some of the littler boys and girls trapped in a closet with her, and she was doing things to them. It hadn't originally been her idea; other generations of older bullies had started Obey Cadre long before she came on the scene, but she was the best at it. She controlled them all, bent them to her forming will with exquisite precision. Sometimes she liked to whip them with her belt, listen to them squeal, but that wasn't all.
She made them disrobe and lie on the floor. She grinned asshe took down her warm, quilted trousers and laid them carefully to one side. Had she been a Caucasian, she would have had the silken beginnings of pubic hair by now, but she was Chinese and it had yet to begin. Her covering would always remain sparse.
She squatted over little An-qing, chuckling as evilly as she could manage, trying to make the play-acting part of it as real as possible. He stared, horrified, for a moment, and then squeezed his eyes shut, as if able to anticipate what was about to happen to him. She began to urinate in his face and he spluttered, trying to turn away from the thin, hot stream.
She giggled at him. Yes, this was more like it! Maybe I can pee up his nose, she thought. She took her penis in hand, trying to direct it a little higher and . . .
The world froze suddenly, becoming crystalline and still, the very atoms pausing in the courses. She and the boy became a tableau, two inanimate beings connected by a bright stream of urine that had glittered in the dim light, still shone of its own accord.
Her penis?
Had she been able to, Li-jiangwould have screamed and, screaming, have carried the terror to the Jana who lay in her vast, roving future.
What was going on here? Something alien had entered into her dying dreams. The visions of what had been were somehow altered, as if some strange change were being thrust upon her. She felt resentment at the fact that these last fleeting moments of consciousness were being spoiled, then remorse at this perception of the way she had been. How did I suddenly turn into a boy? she wondered and . . .
Li-jiang was thirteen. This memory was the one that she cherished the most, the thing she recalled when she wanted to feel warm and wonderful, to feel the things that had put her life on so special a course.
She stood above the high plateau, sequestered among the jagged peaks that had once known only the wanderings of barbaric tribes and mad, mountaineering Englishmen, the mountains that were now filled with bold, sad Chinese. Shewas out on a school expedition, left alone in the summery hills above Lhasa and its temples. It was a test, to see if she were made of the stern stuff that the Enclave required. She would be coming of age soon, she knew with a shudder of disgust, and the Eugenics Council would want to know if she had anything worth passing on to the generations of unborn. The stars lay above her in glorious polar array, millions of them, it seemed, all nameless and wonderful, sparkling like diamonds in a field of black felt. She watched them and they made her feel good. They seemed untouchable, remote, far from the defiling things of mankind that made the world such a hard thing to bear.
Her eyes followed the patterns that they made as her mind carried her toward gentle sleep. The patterns made pictures in the sky, she knew, but she hadn't learned them yet, in fact, didn't really want to. It was enough that the stars were there for her on nights like these.
She followed the lines, tracing out constellations of her own devising against the night, growing muzzy and vague as tiredness overcame her. Her vision focused on a big, bright V shape in the sky. It seemed like a restful shape, but hard and angular. They drifted away to another place nearby. Li-jiang gasped and came fully awake with a start. Why . . . What was that one? It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen! It was a little grouping of bright jewels off to one side of the V, a cluster of tiny stars that seemed to be embedded in a dim, fiery haze. I wonder what it's really called? she wondered. When I get home I'll have to find out. It held her enraptured for half the night. She wanted to stay up longer and watch the little asterism fade, but sleepiness overwhelmed her at last, carrying her off into a dreamless land where nothing could ever intrude. Her last waking thought was, I'll really have to find out what they call it ...
Li-jiang was fifteen and going to be with a man, truly, for the first time in her life. She was terrified and disgusted with herself for doing it, yet pathetically anxious to please him. He was Deng-yuan, a boy from the Astronomy Club, tall and very handsome, with pale skin, the blackest of hair, and the nicest,deepest eyes she had ever seen. He was always kind and spoke to her as if to an equal, though he was two years older and a world of experience wiser. She knew he was trying to be gentle with her, but it still hurt. He stroked at her for the longest time, breathing quietly on the side of her face, waiting for her to be ready, but somehow she never was. He kissed her from time to time and whispered sweet delicatenesses into her ear. He licked into it and let his hot breath flow after the moisture, thinking to excite her in a traditional manner.