'What then?'
'I'll tell you later. Maybe I'll just let it stand at a firm 'You'll see.' ' They turned to the machinery a final time, switched things on, and it began.
The scanners did their work well. They began searching among the rubble that was all that remained of the personality of Jana Li Hu, Hu Li-jiang. All the neurons of her brain had been ruptured by the growing ice crystals, all her interconnections broken asunder. There was much to be found among the destroyed circuitry of her soul. Still, the machines probed. The data were there, waiting to be interpreted. Most of what had called itself 'me' in her had been concentrated into a thin cortical layer in the frontal lobes of her brain, a small amount more in the associative areas to either side. Like most other human beings, Jana was just a small packet of intense cognitive drivers and a bundle of language skills. It was easy to pluck out.
Because most of the brain was given over to switchingcenters and data processing and retrieval devices, extreme miniaturization processes had been invoked by nature. Like a primitive computer from the dawn of electronics, most of what made up a person was just keyboard and plastic, and macroplugs . The part that did all the work was far less than one percent of the whole. There weren't enough nerves packed into those few cubic inches to make up a thinking, self-aware being, so it had all been done on a molecular level. Endless trails, endless arrays . . . the electrical patterns were still there, preserved, after a fashion, in the sea of frozen slush.
At the moment of death, or so it seemed now, she had heard her father's voice growling out of a dim Tibetan night: 'I don't care what's in her mind, Pi Ling! The parts of a woman I'm interested in could be covered by a few square centimeters of silk! And that's what they ought to be, when I'm not embedded in 'em, by Mao!'
His cronies roared with appreciative laughter, their breath foul with a mixture of kumiss and rice wine, and the sound of it echoed down the corridors of time, waking her from a deep, dark, endless sleep which had been blessedly without dreams.
Li-jiangwas seven years old. She squatted in the dark corners of the apartment building's community toilet, crouching inside a stall. She had her pants down and was holding a little oval mirror she'd found, looking at herself. She was pushing it down between her legs, trying to see all the places she went to the bathroom from. She remembered standing on her father's bed, trying to see her backside in the dresser mirror, and remembered his laughter. It was all funny-looking down there. Unlike everywhere else on her body, things were mushy and unsymmetrical. Her anus she understood, a simple sphincter to open and close tightly. But what was all this other nonsense for? She fingered the thick lips aside and squinted, bending down, trying to get a better look in the dim light. Why was the little hole she peed through mounted on that weird floppy structure? And what was that other hole for? It was unclosed, and nothing ever came out. . . . Shepushed a finger inside a little way and felt its moistness, but the action scared her, so she stopped.
Suddenly the door of the toilet banged open. Li-jianggasped, horrified at the prospect of being discovered at these evil deeds, and tried to escape. She leaped to her feet, panicky, and tried to run, but she tripped over her trousers, which were down around her ankles, and fell on her face to the floor. The newcomer was laughing as he helped her up.
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
