In her impenetrable darkness, Jana was horrified. It didn't happen that way! she cried, trying to break through the barrier of her motionless silence. I did scream! I was in agony! I never learned to enjoy it ... I never did . . .
Had she been able to sob, her feelings of intense despair would have driven it out into the darkness. They're changing me! she wanted to wail, but it went on and on ...
Hu Li-jiang was seventeen. She sat alone in her dorm room at Ulaanbaatar's Reflexive Institute at night, conducting her studies. This place, remote in the relatively backward wastelands of Central Asia, was positively archaic, but she enjoyed the work, enjoyed learning nonetheless. Perhaps she would stay forever. The big observatory at Uliassutai was not the most modern in the world, and was ridiculous in comparison to the off-world- scopes that dominated modern science, but half the time they went unused, having cataloged the entire universe to the limits of man's desire to fund. For all she knew, she might discover something new, something not yet noticed by the pattern-recognizers in the few continuously operating projects.
The Comnet lines had only been run in here a few years ago, had still not gotten to her home in Tibet, but she had learned how to use them quickly and well. Her professors, in considerable difficulty themselves over the new mode of learning, looked upon her as a star pupil. If only the others would leave her alone. Their slimy attentions were unwelcome. They debased her as a person. She thought about her roommate, a tall blonde girl of Russian stock who had grown up in Tannu Tuva
. She was a beautiful young lady, Darya Anni , and the object of every male eye on the campus. In the late evenings Jana sometimes watched her undress, prepare herself for a date or for sleep, and it felt very strange. She admired the woman's large breasts, with their delicate pink nipples, and found herself staring at her bright starburst thatch of pubic hair with some strange, formless sense of regret. What am I becoming? she sometimes wondered. She wanted nothing to do with any of it, most of the time, but the sleek wilderness of the woman's body reached out to her nonetheless. She thought of Klaus, the Volga-German boy who lived two floors up. She had gotten to know him fairly well, and sometimes liked him. He was a good student in the newly named Department of Asterology , land of the star-studiers,second, perhaps, only to her. She felt good when he gave her work his seemingly awestruck compliments.
She sighed. He was known far and wide across the campus as something of a pervert. So far as anyone could tell, he was still a technical virgin, and he seemed to be more or less impotent. No one had even seen him masturbate, or ever seen the telltale tenting evidence of a nocturnal erection, but there were things he liked to do. . . . And he did them well! She had spent a few nights groaning beneath the tireless lash of his tongue, wishing that her desires would just go away. She envied him his apparent inability and wondered why he bothered to perform.
The door suddenly popped open, swinging inward as she looked up. A broad, heavy Mongol face peered in, eyes slitted beneath a particularly massive epicanthic fold. Bayan Joghu from next door. ' Anni in?' he asked in Gwo-yu , the dorm's official language.
She shook her head. 'Too bad,' he said, and retreated. Before the door could swing shut another figure burst through it, a short, slim Japanese boy whose name she could not remember. His fly was down, his long penis dangling out, swaying ludicrously, one of his pockets turned inside out. 'Hey, Hu!' he cried, breathing out the dense fumes of some smoky drug. 'Look! It's a ...'
'. . . one-eared elephant!' she snarled, reaching for the square glass paperweight that she knew she would throw at him, knocking him unconscious and bloodying his brow.
The action went uncompleted. Her hand swung past the object and clutched at his groin. She heard his squawk of surprise and delight as she seized the organ and stuffed it into her eager mouth. A ring of stunned faces appeared in the door, watching what she did with dazed astonishment, with total disbelief.
'Will you look at that!' came an awed whisper.
'The ice queen's blowin' him,' said someone else.
They cheered as she swallowed and her popularity began to ride on the crest of a dramatic upswing. Far in the future, Jana tried to still her rampant horror. I knocked him out, she sighed to herself. I fractured his skulland almost got kicked out of school! I did! I
A melange of memory ... a mosaic of moments. All the times she had known, the cascading changes, flooded through the minutes, the hours, that had known no meaning. Only when it reached a kind of watershed did it pause and enact a painful reliving. Hu Li-jiang was twenty. She had recently been granted an assistantship at the Reflexive Institute and now she had power over some of the students. She had told the girl to meet her on the quad after sunset, it being one of the few good nights of high summer on the Gobi Plateau. She savored the meeting with quick anticipation and felt the flesh loosening between her thighs. Obey Cadre held nothing to the things she could do now. She waited patiently, smiling to herself. The girl wanted a perfect grade, and she was willing to pay for it in an excellent coin. . . . The man appeared. He was tall and thin, a dark-haired Caucasian of Armenian stock, something of a rarity in these parts. He was hawk-handsome and his slickly oiled hair shone in the waning light. She found her gaze riveted upon him by an unaccountable, unfamiliar magnetism. He held out his hand to her and she went to him, molding her body against his alien sleekness. He ran his hand between her legs and she thrilled to his touch.
They strolled away together, arm in arm, leaving the student girl to stare after them, perplexed. She had come prepared to debase herself and felt cheated that this gigolo had stolen away the chance. Li-jiang gave her the grade nonetheless.
