A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet (8 page)

Her life assumed, for the first time, a Routine. Home from school—a quick wash—a meal of some tinned food and bread and tea and perhaps some fruit (whatever she had managed to lift that morning or the day before)—a domestic chore or two, if necessary—then long hours with a book until it fell from her long, lax fingers and she slept.

She ignored the insults of her colleagues and the ostracization of the others with bland, Olympian indifference; she tolerated Mr. Grun’s attempts to civilize her. Though he had singled her out for particular attention, scrutinizing her work for the least imperfection upon which he could hang a punishment or reprimand, she knew he could do her little real harm so long as she did her work and was careful not to be overly contemptuous of his rules or puritanism; besides, Grun’s rigorous attention to her performance really had the beneficial result of only improving her work.

She would have been perfectly happy with this program and had it been allowed to run its course would have assuredly and inexorably led her to her goal. Her marks were excellent—even the parsimonious Mr. Grun could not begrudge her that—and she kept her behavior, at least during school hours, safely within tolerable limits. She had no reason to believe she would not do equally well when the annual Space Patrol entrance exams were held. If her marks were high enough she would be considered for the Academy—as it was bound to do by law—which was the one thing she wanted more than anything else she could imagine. Unfortunately, two things happened instead.

The first, upon which the second was more or less dependant, was that she fell in love.

The boy’s name was Rhys, and, like Judikha, he was fifteen and a half years old and not a native-born inhabitant of the Transmoltus. He, too, had come from the country. Unlike the girl, however, he had arrived only recently and with a mother, a father and a brother younger by one year: a dreadful little brat named Pomfret. The family had lost home and farm to an unexpected expansion of the Strabane lava lake and had come to the city because the father had luckily gotten a job, through his brother-in-law, running a heckling machine.

Rhys was a tall, almost willowy lad with fine-boned features, dreamy, intelligent eyes and delicate hands. His hair was as black and thick and glossy as molten tar. He was invariably courteous, friendly, well-groomed, as neatly dressed as his circumstances allowed and he took his studies seriously, a quality so unusual among Judikha’s classmates that it alone was sufficient to attract her to him. He wrote fine stories and well-reasoned essays and turgidly earnest poems that Judikha thought equaled anything in her library; he excelled in the art classes, at which Judikha was hopeless. Although he smiled often, exposing gleaming teeth, and enjoyed games, he shunned the roughhousing in which the other boys indulged—she never once saw him fight. Indeed, she often—with a kind of awe—observed him turn away an opponent with a few well-spoken words. In only a moment he would be laughing and joking with a boy who but a heartbeat before had insulted him cruelly or who had promised him a bloodied nose, if not worse. In a word, he was much of what Judikha herself wanted to be.

Pomfret, on the other hand, was a weasel.

While few of the boys particularly cared for the fastidious and rather self-righteous Rhys, they at least respected him to the degree that they treated him with indifference. Pomfret was immediately accepted if for no other reason than that he gave them little other choice. An accomplished sycophant, Pomfret’s obsequious, fawning nature found him ready friends among the several gangs, between which he wandered with unaligned impunity. But Pomfret’s unctuous personality did not at all reflect a weak psyche.

Unlike his older brother, Pomfret was physically unprepossessing. Short, thin to the point of emaciation, with a disproportionately large head that was always cocked to one side or the other as though it were too heavy for his long, flexible neck. His hair was fine and dust-colored, his sore-looking eyes were small and wet, with pink sclera. His nasal voice was whining as he snuffled back the glutinous products of a perpetually running nose. However, and this was not at all obvious, he was by far the more intelligent of the two brothers.

His small size and wheedling hero-worship found ready acceptance among boys who were too unsophisticated to recognize the patent insincerity. It was not long at all before they were eagerly listening to his suggestions and ideas with slack jawed admiration. The seesaw of hero worship had tipped and they’d never realized it.

However infatuated she might have been with Rhys, Judikha was realistic—or at least believed she was. There was a large number of female students in all the grades, almost any of whom would be more desirable to a boy than she. Judikha, the pragmatist, had carefully established three categories into which she divided the school’s females: the physically attractive, the physically repulsive, and herself. She did not think herself ugly by any means, but she also believed that she was not pretty. She had observed what sort of girls the boys found most interesting and which sort they avoided. It was easy to see that there was a catalog of characteristics the members of the former category shared in common—all of them of the most blatantly physical type, which surprised her not. Taking their average, Judikha decided that a small girl, with pronounced curves, soft to the verge of pudginess; breasts as large as adolescent hormones could generate; a round, smooth, dimpled face capable only of expressing a kind of dumb admiration; fat, pouting lips; no nose to speak of; preternatuarally large eyes so clearly blue that they may as well have been holes bored through the empty head and as much blonde hair as she could carry and still stand erect stood about as much chance of remaining a virgin as Judikha, who possessed not one of these qualities, did not. On the other hand, boys had always treated Judikha with a kind of neutral indifference, with neither the deference shown the attractive girls, the evasion shown the ugly ones nor the complete acceptance she would have enjoyed had she been a fellow male. She was effectively sexless. Those of her own station recognized and even respected her as an accomplished thief, while some others appreciated her earthy sense of humor and her formidable athletic abilities. Certainly none of the other girls were ever invited or expected to take part in the rougher games and escapades, where Judikha’s strength, endurance, quick wits and inventiveness were very much appreciated. But
afterwards
the boys went their own way—usually with another girl altogether attached: there was a distinct line Judikha was not allowed to cross.

With one exception the girls shunned her entirely. Those who had grown up in the streets as Judikha had done looked upon her as an apostate, a renegade who thought she was better than she ought to be. The girls who considered themselves respectable—however baselessly—looked upon Judikha with ill-concealed contempt.

She had always accepted this; she gave it little thought. She was at heart a misanthrope and, while she did not want to do entirely without human company, companionship or friends, neither she did want these forced upon her. Neither did she accept overtures of friendship nor did she solicit them. Her only friend within the school was, strangely enough given all this, another girl.

Bettina Henlopen possessed that same plump, round-eyed cheeriness usually reserved for the plastic dolls won by knocking over milk bottles in a carnival. She was the only one of all the girls who seemed to genuinely enjoy Judikha’s company, with neither condescension nor any understanding of what Judikha thought or said. Bettina was truly sweet, generous and almost entirely brainless. She was very popular with the boys, as one might imagine, whom she favored equally, showing neither prejudice nor discrimination. She was, outwardly, a seemingly unlikely choice for a friend, but Judikha found her naïvete, honesty, trust and simplicity comforting. She could tell Bettina anything, however intimate, and know it would be received with honest compassion, empathy and genuine interest—yet would be forgotten by the next day, possibly even within the hour, as though Judikha had emptied her heart into a leaky barrel; there was never any need to swear Bettina to secrecy: her brain, as smooth as a billiard ball, precluded any need for oaths. And more than anything else Judikha appreciated more than even she realized that her friend accepted her wholeheartedly, with neither prejudice or preconception.

Judikha was by and large satisfied with herself and her life until Rhys arrived. Afterward, she was confused, distressed and not a little annoyed to find herself under the control of internal forces whose lurking existence she had never suspected and over which she evidently had no power. Her coldly rational, practical, pragmatic self abdicated entirely when Rhys happened to be in the same room, as though an experienced bus driver decided to turn over the wheel of his speeding vehicle to an irresponsible eight-year-old. Her will was abandoned to mindless chemical processes designed ten million years earlier for rutting reptiles and lemurs. Thanks to her biology classes she was aware of the existence and function of the various glands, of primal urges and instincts—but only as abstracts. She never thought that the slippery little chemical factories that bubbled and percolated inside the neat, opaque envelope of her skin had any real existence. Who, after all, really enjoys admitting to all of the slimy, gelatinous, rubbery, shapeless bags, bulbs, tubes and lumps with which his or her body is filled? Certainly no one is willing to admit that the temporal distance that separates them from their instinct-driven animal ancestors—let alone from the blue-green algae from which we have all descended, for that matter—is not even measurable on a geologic scale. Judikha felt like the puzzled man lying crumpled under the wheels of the careless delivery van: something had just occurred with blinding suddenness that was only supposed to happen to other, less careful people. The sanguine, calculating operator that had smoothly controlled her thoughts and actions for more than fifteen years was appalled to find itself usurped, shouldered aside in a kind of biological mutiny. A primeval reptile, the existence of which she had been entirely, blissfully and ignorantly unaware, had wrested away the controls. She was unquestionably that high-powered steam omnibus, its boiler supercharged, its safety valve tied down, whose wheel was now in the irresponsible grasp of a selfish, willful and amoral child.

Over a period of a day or two, Judikha collected every mirror or scrap of reflecting surface she could find, assembling them into a kind of bright mosaic on the one vertical wall she possessed. She stood before the makeshift looking glass, critically, trying to be objective about the fragmented images that glared back at her like the disinterested eye of an enormous insect. If she were a boy, how would she regard what she saw? She tilted her head back and squinted through her long eyes. What she saw was a kind of haphazard jigsaw picture of a tall, rather rangy young man in knee-length heavily-patched corduroy trousers, rope sandals, rumpled flannel shirt and patched jacket
. Young man, indeed! Well,
that’d
certainly get a boy’s pulse racing
was her cynical conclusion. She’d seen her own image a hundred times before, of course, but never particularly critically and certainly, absolutely, never sexually.
It’s no wonder boys don’t treat me as a girl if even
I
can’t tell that I’m looking at one.
All right then, how do I look as a girl?
She dropped her trousers and kicked them aside, shucked her jacket and shirt and stood again before the compound gaze. Well, nothing wrong with
that
, she decided, turning first this way and then that, though the image was nothing even remotely like the plump, curvilinear topography that boys seemed to prefer over brains and ability. The jigsaw figure in the mirrors had the elongated, hydrodynamic lines of an eel or racing sloop. More than half its length was a pair of legs each as long and graceful as a stream of honey being poured from a pitcher. It had a bottle-shaped torso with narrow hips and even narrower waist, stomach like a flagstone and neat, cup-shaped breasts. The face was molded by its bones the way geologic strata shape a landscape. It was dominated by a pair of extraordinary eyes: dark as old teak and slanting perhaps a half degree or so. She liked her body—it seemed to her as efficient and streamlined as a rocket. So she was surprised at the vague and inexplicable dissatisfaction she felt; was it only an artifact, the subliminal influence of her adolescent, hormone-driven classmates? Was it in fact a good body in a larger, more objective sense? Was it like a fine painting by an old master mistakenly hung in the local five-and-ten-pfennig store? She certainly had no illusions about the earthy taste possessed by most of the inhabitants of the Transmoltus, the taste that caused thousands of homes to be decorated with paintings of unlikely-looking horses and wide-eyed moppets rendered in violent colors on black velvet; that kept tens of thousands of eyes entranced by telephonophoted game shows and inane comedies; that had half the households hoarding a few pfennigs from weekly budgets in order to save enough to send away for the latest mass-produced limited edition collector’s plate.

She’d seen the calendars that hung in every workshop, the biologically frank posters outside the music halls, the luridly illustrated papers and the sort of girls who inspired the most uninhibited speculations from the boys. She could discern a coarse and obvious continuity that, taken item by item, excluded her from the competition with depressing thoroughness. She did not have blonde hair—nor was she willing to have blonde hair—she was neither small nor cute, she did not have soft, plump limbs, she did not have an ingratiating, fawning personality—far from it!—she certainly did not have an adorably turned-up pug nose and she just as certainly did not have breasts as large as her head.

But she knew, because she was curious and observant, that there might be finer standards by which she might be judged. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was very much aware that the Transmoltus was only a nanocosm and that its tastes and mores could not in any way be considered representative of the world or universe at large, thank Musrum. She, alone of her classmates, had taken a genuine interest in the study of art—probably for the very reason that it represented a glimpse into that heretofore forbidden outer world—and was fascinated by chromolithographic reproductions from the collections of galleries both in Blavek and abroad. She had immediately realized that there was a great difference between the crudely obvious drawings, paintings and lithographs that were reprinted in the popular calendars, magazines and posters and the wonderful pictures that hung in the great galleries, though she would have been hard put to analyze let alone verbalize that difference. She now wondered, as she stood in front of her fragmented mirror, if there might not be the same dichotomy in the aesthetics of the human body. How would she and, say, Bettina be received by genteel Blavek society were each of them cleaned and dressed and polished with equal care? Would her friend, the most desirable girl in the school, appear coarse, gross and uncouth? Would Judikha, not remotely considered a sexual objective by her male classmates, let alone attractive, overwhelm them all with her lissome beauty, grace and charm?