Starstuff, Page 2

dark hum, follows her in. Ajita can feel its vibrations in her feet.

  Thunk. A new bottle of cleaner appears by her elbow. There’s a soft touch, fleeting, as the stranger’s arm gently brushes against hers. Turning her head, she catches the gaze of the blue-eyed woman before she turns away. While her hands automatically prepare the patch with the cleaning fluid, Ajita watches the blonde as she inspects one of the scanners.

  “You are wearing a blue uniform,” Ajita says, “What are you, if not an Instructor?”

  The blonde drops the scanner back into place with a heavy clunk, “I was under the impression that Students are supposed to be seen and not heard.”

  “How are Students supposed to learn if they do not ask questions?”

  “They observe.”

  Ajita scoffs and the blonde goes back to fiddling with the scanners. Ajita, with a rough motion, wipes the patch across the scanner’s eye, removing the smudges. She cleans the rest of the scanners in silence and as she moves to each scanner, the blonde moves as well, so that they are always equidistant from each other, even when Ajita tries to close the gap by moving faster.

  When she is done she collects her things and nods respectfully to the blonde, who spares her a glance.

  Ajita sticks her tongue in her cheek for a second and then says, “Try not to destroy the scanners. I just cleaned them.”

  The blonde whips around with both eyebrows raised and Ajita can’t help but feel her face flame.

  “Do you talk to your Instructors in this manner?” the blonde asks, cocking a hip against the counter.

  Ajita chokes on her reply, feeling her blush stretch all the way down her neck. The blonde makes a dismissive gesture before turning away and activating a scanner. She watches the other woman for a moment, the scanner twirling around her, and then steps out the door.

  Most Students sleep on their stomachs, laying with heads turned to the door, unmoving in their grey stretchy sleepwear. After the lights go out, Ajita turns and goes to sleep on her back so that she faces the ceiling. Beyond the ceiling lay the stormy clouds, and beyond the clouds…are the twinkling stars. She has a top bunk and has always had one, since the Students never change bunks. She’s slept in the same room and same bed for years.

  The bunk room is huge, a long rectangular structure that contains every Student in Ajita’s class. The atmosphere is never unpleasant; it is as unchanging and consistent as the rest of the climate in School. Sometimes, because of her dreams, Ajita will feel very cold or wake up in a sweat. She has only her sleepwear to shield her from dreams, as their beds are bare and very flat.

  It is always quiet at bedtime; her classmates settle down and fall asleep, their breathing the only disturbance. When Ajita finally closes her eyes, she slips into dreams. They come in flashes, fast and blurred, screams in different languages sliding through her subconscious. Beings with obscure faces and limbs hiss at her, and at first scared her. But that is how she learned what to call herself.

  When she was young Ajita is what the brown people would tell her. Their almond eyes were like her own and they whispered to her stories of huts huddled in dark sands and the stories of the bright stars in the sky.

  Nowadays other people, people who do not look like her, visit her dreams. They talk to her in languages she can never remember upon waking, and show her places that linger behind her eyelids for days. And in the few moments between waking and sleeping, she can hear their rattling breaths uttering hushed chants and prayers of the dead.

  Ajita keeps her dreams to herself; she has no one to tell them to anyway. At the start of the day, when the bell rings and the Instructor comes to watch them get out of bed, she stands in line just as quietly as the others, and never asks any of her classmates if they too have dreams.

  The next morning is no different; the tag on her wrist flashes as she gets out of bed and steps up to the dispenser, where a fresh uniform is given to her. She changes next to her bed, placing her sleepwear in a dispenser on her way out, and gives a respectful nod to the Instructor.

  Ajita waits in line and once all of her classmates have joined her, the Instructor walks them to the food dispensers. Then they break up into pods and go to their Lessons. Ajita’s pod works on the kiosk most days, where they sit down in front of a large screen that feeds material to them. There is always an Introduction first, and then they are quizzed on the concepts from the Introduction in the Exam portion of the Lesson.

  The other Students work quickly, and once they are done they sit and stare at their screens, waiting for Ajita to finish. She always finishes last and is always placed at the end of the long row of Students. She struggles to formulate answers as the Instructor paces up and down the aisle, waiting for her as well. She is having a hard time giving an answer, trying to explain the concept behind the equation xk+1 = fr(xk).

  Suddenly, the footsteps cease and she feels a presence by her side. Cringing slightly, she looks up at the Instructor who stands behind her. His face is impassive, a blank stretch of white, and he gestures for her to stand. She eases out of her chair, painfully aware of the empty answer space on the kiosk, but he doesn’t look at her screen.

  “Follow me,” is all he says.

  Holding her hands tightly behind her back she follows him through the grey corridors of School, silently passing through doors, her tag flashing every time she does so. They encounter no other Instructors or Students, until they eventually leave the grey corridors behind and enter ones that are blue. Voices mutter from behind invisible rooms, and shadows of people cross in distant halls. She has never been down this way before.

  Finally the Instructor stops at a wall; a section of it disappears and they step through the doorway. The room they enter smells like the fluid Ajita uses to clean the scanners; it is a square room with a science kiosk in the middle.

  “Ah,” says the occupant of the room as she steps around the kiosk, “sit please.”

  Ajita looks behind her, but the Instructor has already left. Turning back, she sees a very familiar face with blue eyes. She walks to the other woman’s side, sitting down next to her.

  The blonde nods encouragingly and then, with a pointer, opens up a screen on the kiosk.

  “Here,” she says, “we have star charts.”

  A dimensional screen pops up and revolves in front of them, a dark blur filled with a skeleton array of white dots, each dot labeled with a Numerical Designation and a list of spectral characteristics. The star chart is more detailed and advanced than the kind she had studied in Lessons, but it looks nothing like the stars Ajita sees in her dreams. The blonde takes the pointer and clicks a star, and then rotates the screen to show Ajita different perspectives.

  “I want you to show me where you saw that bear,” the woman says, “and then I want you to tell me how you came to know of bears.”

  Ajita’s mouth falls open, but as usual no words came out. Flashes appear before her eyes, streaks of long green grass and a massive brown hulk in the background, prowling between dark trees. She shakes her head, clearing the image, and reaches for the pointer. The blonde relinquishes it, and with a trembling touch, Ajita clicks a star.

  She zooms in and out, attempting to find the closest thing to a dark-brown-sand-and-village view that she can. But from where she can see the stars in her dreams, she can see perceive no depth; the stars are always laid out on a flat plane. This star chart is not flat and none of the stars seem to line up into the well-known patterns.

  Eventually her hand stills, and the fake stars stare at her like the blank answer screen on the Lesson kiosk.

  Soft skin slides across hers and she looks into the stranger’s eyes, made bright with the fake light from the star chart. The stars flicker in her eyes, little white dots that skitter across an expanse of blue. Slowly, the blonde eases the pointer from her hand. Ajita cannot hold her gaze.

  “Bears,” the blonde starts, “do not exist here and they are not covered in the biology Lessons. How do you know of them?”

&n
bsp; Ajita licks her lips, tasting the Diet packet from earlier. She plays with the end of the plait in her hair and out of the corner of her eye she sees the star chart disappear as the blonde fiddles with options.

  Grrrrrr…chills streak down Ajita’s arms as a strange, grumbled sound emits from the kiosk. It grows louder and Ajita shies away, the noise intimidating and unfamiliar. The other woman reaches forward and stops the sound.

  “That is the sound of a bear,” she says.

  Ajita swallows and nods, the low gravelly noise replaying in her ears again and again.

  “Where can one find bears, if not here?”

  Yallie gives her an odd look, “Nowhere.”

  “But...they must exist somewhere, if we have their sound.”

  “They lived a long time ago.”

  “They do not exist now?”

  “No.”

  Ajita gulps and looks down at her fingers. The blonde sighs and sets down the pointer, sitting back in her seat as they linger in silence. Ajita looks askance at the other woman, her blonde curls dangling around her nose, and something about them makes her want to tighten the curls around her finger.

  “I do not yet know what you are called,” Ajita says, watching the curls sway as the blonde looks up at her.

  “My Numerical Designation is 1821108.”

  Ajita nods, conversation drying up as quickly as it had sprouted.

  The blonde scoffs, stretching out her legs, “And your Designation is 1618033.”

  “But I am called Ajita.”

  “Why?”

  “It is what I call myself.”

  “But what is Ajita? It is not a Designation.”

  Ajita thinks back to her dream, sees the shape of the word on the brown people’s lips, “It is my name.”

  “A name is?”

  “Like the creature we just listened to. It has a name.”

  “‘Bear’ is not its name. ‘Bear’ is a labeling, an identifier used in old, colloquial language. The creature has a Designation now: 2118191131101518.”

  “No, its name is not bear. Its name is Rasjaurom, hunter and protector.”

  The blonde opens her mouth, closes it, and then scoots closer, “How does one have a name? I do not understand the significance. With Designations, it is easy and simple. Organized. Names do not seem to follow a pattern or have a purpose.”

  “I can give you a name,” Ajita says, voice tinged with the surprise of her abrupt idea.

  The blonde gives her another raised eyebrow, but her gaze does not shift away. Remembering the stars floating across the blonde’s eyes, the way they shined against her pupils, a word pops into Ajita’s head, familiar as if she is drawing it from a dream.

  “Wuji,” she suggests.

  “No.”

  Ajita rubs her lips together, as if tasting a name, trying it out before saying it. Something else is forming in her mind: a unique creation.

  “Yallie?”

  The blonde pauses and then nods, a fast and succinct gesture, “Yes.”

  The corner of Ajita’s lips curves.

  After their session, Ajita is led by an Instructor back to the grey corridors, where it is time for her to do her Task. The scanners sleep peacefully in their stations, appearing to be flawless even before she cleans them. She inspects scanner two extra carefully, but the smudge is completely gone, leaving nothing but a gleaming surface. When she is finished cleaning, she steps up against the wall near the door. She flattens herself against the wall, eyes trained on the entryway until, in a blink of an eye, the door vanishes. At the threshold…stands Yallie.

  She walks in without noticing Ajita, goes to one of the stations, and starts up a scanner. It is only when she turns around to leave that she spots her.

  Yallie stops abruptly, the scanner slowing to a halt by her head. Ajita swallows before lifting herself off of the wall and stepping closer. Yallie’s mouth tightens.

  “I thought you were finished cleaning,” she says.

  “Why do you come to the Center after it is closed?”

  A muscle twitches in Yallie’s cheek, and the scanner gently bumps into her head, “The Center is never closed to Trainees.”

  “Is that what you are? A Trainee?”

  The little scanner begins to buzz, as they often do when left for too long in the air without instructions.

  “Is that what you become once you graduate from being a Student?” Ajita asks.

  Yallie snatches the scanner out of the air, abruptly silencing it, “I have work to do. If you’ve finished your Tasks, you should leave.”

  “Will I be seeing you again?”

  Yallie stalks past her, and Ajita spins around to follow at her heels as she goes to the main training room. She snaps open a wall panel and begins to key in different instructions, which Ajita knows brings out various machines and exercise environments.

  “Why did you want to see me today?” Ajita asks as she tries to catch the blonde’s eyes.

  Yallie’s hand falls from the panel. She turns around and leans against the wall. “Do you usually draw with your cleaning supplies?”

  “Draw?”

  “Yes. I did some more research; it took a while to find a word to describe your behavior.”

  Ajita falls back against the wall as well and studies Yallie’s profile.

  “What is the definition of the word?”

  “To draw is to produce a likeness of something; the drawing apparently doesn’t have to accurately represent the subject you are drawing.”

  “Because it is impossible to draw real life with perfect accuracy?”

  Yallie shrugs one shoulder, “Possibly.”

  “Puzzling.”

  “Most,” Yallie flicks her gaze towards her, “why is it that you draw, if you cannot capture reality perfectly and precisely?”

  “The shape of the spill already resembled a bear. I decided to complete it.”

  “It was the shape then that convinced you to transform it? To perfect an imperfection?”

  Ajita frowns at the floor, “I could just see it being a bear in my head.”

  “Why a bear?”

  Ajita crosses her arms over her chest, “For a Trainee you sure ask a lot of questions.”

  “It is my job,” Yallie slides closer, “did you know that there used to be many types of drawings? Some of them were called art.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Art is something created with one’s imagination that typically takes a visual form.”

  “So I imagined a bear in my head and drew one,” Ajita shrugs in acceptance.

  “No one else draws.”

  Ajita doesn’t know how to respond so she shies away. She is used to being different, used to not being able to answer questions, but it is beginning to get tiring.

  Yallie suddenly steps in front of her, and Ajita dares to look in her eyes.

  “What made you decide to draw?”

  She thinks back to the stars, shining in the darkness of her dreams, and the stories from times and worlds unknown to her, from people she has never met and never will. She thinks of the stars dancing across the blue of Yallie’s eyes.

  “Do you like the stars?” Ajita asks.

  Yallie blinks and rocks back on her feet, “They are there. Is there a reason to like them or not?”

  “The stars make me want to draw.”

  The blonde stops rocking, “All right.”

  “All right?” Ajita mocks, “That’s it? Aren’t you going to ask how celestial bodies have control over my physical actions?”

  Crinkles appear at the corner of Yallie’s eyes, a sort of expression none of the Instructors or Students ever wear. Ajita finds herself mirroring it, her lips beginning to curve. Yallie steps closer so that their noses nearly touch. Ajita’s head hits against the wall, her heart thumping at the unfamiliar closeness.

  “There was another word I came across in my research.”

  She has never been so close to another person before. Yallie’s
pupil flexes, appearing as an inky dot in a sea of blue. Ajita’s face is reflected back to her on the surface of Yallie’s eyes.

  “What word was that?” Ajita asks quietly, trying not to exhale.

  “Inspiration.”

  Yallie reaches up, hits a panel button, and the door behind Ajita suddenly opens. She stumbles back and Yallie, with raised eyebrows, shuts the door in her face.

  At night she sees the brown people again, but this time they are not in the village. They walk in crowds amongst tall buildings, many of which are colorful and crumbling. Wires loop from tall poles and connect to various structures. The air is grey, but the sun still shines through, and the people greet one another as the day begins. The women wear sparkling clothes that she knows are scarves and skirts, though she has never worn them herself. Moving carts with black wheels and mirrors emit smoke and loud noises. They honk like the elegant swan in the stars.

  Her view shifts, revealing tiny alleyways and thin lines that hold wet clothes, and then there are mountains, arid landscapes that make her shiver. On these high plateaus are nine buildings with walls of mud. And inside one of these temples…violent colors and gentle figures shine on every surface, intricate detail in gold and red. They are guarded over by a tall figure made of hardened sand, with a headdress that crowns him.

  Seven bright lights begin to shine on the figure, and the rest of the room dims, leaving behind the bright lights to glow like stars in the sky. The stars hum, resembling a deep chant of an old language. The stars are like sages, and then the hum turns into a growl, a mighty roar. The seven stars of Rasjaurom pulse brightly, before extinguishing.

  She awakes to the darkness of the bunk room, cold.

  The next day, after Lessons, she finishes her Task slower than usual, dallying with each scanner; she waits and waits as long as she dares, with one eye on the door. She waits until she is sure an Instructor will come by to find her, but when the door opens, it reveals a blue uniform. Her posture relaxes as Yallie enters, the Trainee’s expression turning distinctly sour.

  “You are not yet finished with your Task?” she asks.

  “The scanners were especially dirty today.”

  Yallie’s expression doesn’t shift.

  Ajita shrugs and begins to clean scanner seven.

  “Either that or you are especially slow today.”

  Ajita raises scanner eight and inspects it, “No, they are very dirty.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Well, someone keeps using them after hours.”

  Yallie has no response to that. Ajita hums to herself as she moves onto scanner nine.

  “What is that noise you are making?”

  Ajita stops, “The hum?”

  “What is a hum?”

  “It is a noise you make with your mouth.”

  “That much is obvious; what is its purpose?”

  Ajita shrugs because she really doesn’t know; she only learned of humming last night, “Something else for you to research, I suppose.”

  Yallie’s heels snap against the floor, “Let me know when you are done.”

  Ajita turns to watch her exit, and then quickly cleans scanners ten, eleven and twelve. She takes the last one carefully and goes to the door. It disappears and she silently watches as Yallie sets up different pieces of equipment.

  “Why is it that you exercise?”

  Yallie barely looks up, “I’m a Trainee. I train.”

  “For what?”

  “What are you a Student for?”

  Ajita is silent because she doesn’t know.

  “None of the other Trainees come here after hours. Why do you?” she asks instead.

  “Extra practice.”

  “Oh,” Ajita says, and makes a face, because she could use extra practice in Lessons, but she could never imagine going through with it.

  “You’re finished?” Yallie asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Leave.”

  “Why didn’t you ask to see me today?”

  “Why? Were you waiting?” Yallie raises her eyebrow.

  “You do that a lot, that motion with your eyebrow.”

  Yallie’s eyebrow immediately falls flat and she gestures to the door, “Leave or else I will be forced to call an Instructor.”

  Ajita glares at her and discreetly smears a big fat thumbprint over the scanner’s eye as she turns it over in her hands. She walks over to Yallie and holds out the scanner.

  “Here, you can use this one.”

  “Thank you,” Yallie says in a short tone.

  Ajita leaves, wondering why she is not allowed to ask questions about Training, but Yallie is allowed to ask questions about drawing and humming.

  During Lessons next day, Ajita ignores the kiosk and turns to the Instructor.

  “Instructor?” she calls to him.

  He pauses in his pacing and then comes to stand behind her, “Student? You have not yet completed the assignment.”

  “I have a question.”

  He is quiet like Aber is when she doesn’t know how to answer.

  “What is a Trainee and what do they train for?” she continues.

  “That is two questions.”

  “That much is obvious,” she says, perfecting a drawl.

  The Instructor blinks rapidly, and his mouth quirks up and down, as if he doesn’t know what to say next. For once she is not the one without the answers.

  But he quickly recovers, “That does not have to do with the assignment. Please continue to answer the designated questions on your kiosk.”

  “So you don’t know the answer?”

  “Again, Student, you must focus on what you are doing,” he walks away quickly.

  He doesn’t pace up and down the aisle for the rest of the Lesson; instead, he stays in a corner on the other side of the room. The other Students pretend not to look at her.

  Yallie doesn’t meet with her during this Lesson either...not even to tell her about humming.

  Ajita enters the room and observes the twelve pristine scanners. She sets her tray down on the counter. Grabs the cleaning fluid. Sloshes it around. With a twist, the cap pops off and she smells the liquid, clean and sharp.

  She tosses the bottle to the floor, watching it bounce and then roll.

  Glup, glup, glup, the cleaning solution pours out of the bottle. She waits until the very last drop is gone, and then steps onto the spill with a patter. With feet and hands, she kicks and spreads the fluid and then kneels over it, perfecting details and tiny characteristics, until before her is a massive star pattern: Rasjaurom with his many sharp teeth, the swan with his majestic beak, and the scorpion with his deadly stinger.

  She leaves the room, scanners untouched, and goes to report that her Task is done. She smells of sanitation, her fingers are sticky, and her shoes leave wet prints behind her as she walks, creating a mess in the hallway. But at least it is a clean mess, she thinks dryly. The Students pretend not to smell her as she changes for sleep.

  Tonight she is in an unfamiliar place. Not in the village, not in the crowded streets, not even in the mud buildings. A domed ceiling spins above her, and she stands in the middle of a stream of people, her gaze riveted to the ceiling as the masses pass by, avoiding her as if she were mist. Drawings bedazzle the chapel, the walls and the ceiling covered with delicate and bright brushes of color. Pale and olive-skinned people pose mid-action, a repertoire of benevolent and menacing beings. And out of all the nine scenes on the ceiling so high, but one captures her attention. It’s the simple brush of two finger tips, an intimate caress that contains the universe.

  She blinks, and the sound crashes down upon her, and she can feel the warmth from the crowd as people stand unerringly close to her. Within a single breath, the candles go out, and as she resurfaces, gasping, to the darkness of the bunk room, she can still hear the whispers of incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.

  The strange words from last night still roll around in her head, and she can�
��t stop thinking about the drawings on the walls. What makes those kinds of colors? What could have such thick texture? If the cleaning fluid came in different colors, could she make drawings like those? She examines her fingers, wondering if they are