A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet by Ron Miller Page 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