Starstuff

by Kaylim

 Starstuff

  Kaylim

  Copyright 2013 Kaylim

  Visit my website at https://www.kaylimwrites.com/

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  Table of Contents

  Start of “Starstuff”

  Endnotes

  In the remote villages, nearly swallowed up by dark brown sand and isolation, the women tell stories. The stories of the stars Ajita knows best. Rasjaurom, the mighty bear of the night, had been a renowned hunter. In his younger years he bounded across the dark depths of the sky and gobbled up all other creatures in his wake. Rasjaurom eventually became so fattened on the carcasses of his prey that he decided to find a safe place to rest. He found a small blue and brown planet and to this day stalks across its sky, a lumbering creature that chases off other hunters like the giant scorpion…but because he is so full, he no longer feeds. People in the village often wonder when the bear will hunt again. Ajita wonders what is inside of the bear and thinks of ways to release the thousands of ancient creatures that must be in the hunter’s belly.

  Ajita’s life is slick and sand-free; the cold tang of metal lives in the back of her throat. She attends School in a large building where she also sleeps and eats. Education, she hears people call it. She doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.

  She never goes outside, but she can see it through windows in the Observation Hall. The world is constantly covered in grey clouds and she wonders if the villages have the sun in the faraway desert. Her skin is the color of the village sand, but she can only see dirt and clay from the Observation Hall. She has never touched the ground near School, but she thinks it’s probably not as soft as sand.

  Students rarely go to the Observation Hall; most of their time is spent in Lessons. Tutoring time is when Ajita struggles most. Her fingers have become adept at tapping over consoles and electronic learning systems, but she has not become as adept at answering questions.

  “Instructor, I do not know the answer,” she says.

  She could not even understand the question. The language that comes out of Instructor’s mouth is difficult to comprehend. The Instructor dismisses her and her wrist tag lights up as she walks through the halls. She has worn the wrist tag for as long as she can remember. It is made of grey metal and encloses tightly upon her wrist; it has no clasps and no looseness to it. Its red flashing light always distracts her. She had asked, once, what it was; “Roll Call” an Instructor had answered back.

  She stands in a long line of grey uniforms as Instructors watch them with flinty faces. When it is her turn at the food dispenser her tag flashes once and out drops a tube and a packet. She consumes the tube filled with gel and the packet which consists of a hard square object. The Diet has always been her least favorite part of School, perhaps because her tongue has vague memories of other substances: thick, fluffy, golden brown crumbles that melted in her mouth and curved red, juicy slices that caused her tongue to burn.

  Tasks are completed after Lessons. Ajita sees others working with bits of wire or tapping numbers into screens, checking lists of long things called calculations. Ajita’s experiences with those sorts of things are limited. She had failed many of the Placement Assessment and had stood in front of three Instructors, all of them looking at each other and not saying a word. After that she was put into the Physical Training Center.

  Little bots buff the floor of the main equipment and training room, and she goes to the room where the scanners rest. It is her job to shine and disinfect the tiny, round scanners using patches and sanitizing solution. The scanners have red eyes that blink as they look at people’s bodies and deliver streams of information to Instructors. Ajita and her classmates had once trained quite often; the little scanners had run their eyes over them as they ran and jumped.

  They train less and less nowadays.

  The scanner room is quiet as usual, the door immediately blinking out of existence when she steps up to it, and then reappearing after she goes inside. There are twelve scanners in all, and they can float and change direction without noise. They always sit quietly in their stations whenever Ajita comes to clean them, but she is afraid that one day she will find them swarming through the air, red eyes staring at her, watching every move.

  She takes her small tray filled with supplies and begins to clean the delicate machines, touching them gently so that they don’t awaken. The scanners gleam as usual. They never seem to actually get dirty.

  Except for today.

  Her hand freezes over scanner two. A giant mark spreads across its sleeping eye and she stares at it for a few moments, wondering how it got there. Reaching for the container of sanitizing liquid, she studies the smudge: it’s large and gray in color with many thin, curvaceous lines. She’s sure she hasn’t seen anything like it before but it seems familiar—

  SPLASH.

  She jumps. The container bounces across the floor, spouting cleaning fluid, and then hits the wall on the opposite side of the room. The sound echoes.

  She looks around. No Instructor comes striding in, no scuttle bot races through the door, and her tag doesn’t flash. The white liquid spreads out and hits her feet. Carefully, she jumps over the puddle. She wrings the plait in her long dark hair as she surveys the mess. The fluid has stopped spreading, and it sits there, rippling, as if to mock her.

  Leaning down, she reaches out with a finger and taps the puddle. Deep ripples shiver over its surface. Balancing her finger against the edge of the spill, she outlines its shape, the solution cool and gentle against her fingertips. A large part of the puddle has branched out and she leans closer until her nose almost touches it. The smell is strong and clean. She swirls the liquid around and makes several other small branches, a hazy memory of the stars guiding her fingers.

  Click. Clack.

  Ajita yanks her head back, but cannot stand up fast enough. An Instructor already stands in the doorway. Ajita remains on the floor, painfully aware that she has no way to excuse this. The Instructor surveys the mess, a small frown forming on her brow. She folds her hands behind her black uniform – no, blue uniform. A blue training suit. This isn’t an Instructor.

  Ajita forces herself to speak up in a small voice, “Are you supposed to be using the training facilities?”

  After she cleans the scanners, no one ever uses the training facilities until the next day.

  “Yes,” the newcomer nods, blonde curls dangling in her eyes.

  She’s frail in form, with white skin and yellow springy curls that frame her face. The rest of her hair is pulled back into a short ponytail, high on her head.

  She takes a step into the room, “Student, what is your Numerical Designation?”

  “Ajita,” she answers.

  “That is not a Numerical Designation.”

  “No, it is what I call myself.”

  “Everyone is given a Numerical Designation.”

  “Yes, but I call myself Ajita.”

  The intruder merely cocks her head to the side, as if considering it. She takes another couple steps closer and studies the puddle like it is a specimen in the science labs. Ajita blushes guiltily; messes aren’t common at School. The last time Ajita had seen one was when she was little and had wet the bed after a dream. Only Ajita seems to create messes, though the dreams no longer bother her.

  Click. Clack. Click. Clack. The blonde paces around the puddle, around Ajita’s form, and stops right behind her. Ajita’s shoulders twitch.

  “You are manipulating the shape of the
spill with your finger. Why?”

  Ajita tilts her head back, blinking rapidly in the bright light, to glance at the intruder.

  “It does not seem to serve a purpose. It does not help clean the mess, contain it, or return it to the bottle.”

  Ajita gestures to the floor, “Here.”

  The other woman slowly raises an eyebrow. Ajita waves her down again and then there is the rustle of fabric and the intruder smoothly slips into a kneeling position beside her.

  With her index finger Ajita begins to round out the braches she made, “I am creating a star pattern.”

  “A star pattern…do you mean a star chart?”

  Ajita shrugs, not answering yes or no.

  “That is not a star chart. Star charts are accurate representations of the way the stars are dispersed throughout the known Universe.”

  Ajita can’t figure out how to respond. She has seen star charts only a few times before, when the Students occasionally had an astronomy Lesson. She had never truly understood them.

  “Where are the individual stars and their Numerical Designations? Where is the grid?”

  “This is a different star chart.”

  “Clearly. But why the difference? Its purpose I cannot discern.”

  “The shape it makes resembles the forms one can visualize out of stars. This is the Great Bear Rasjaurom.”

  “Bears do not exist in the sky,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Not real bears,” Ajita answers.

  They turn slowly to look at each other.

  The reflections of the ceiling lights create patterns in the stranger’s blue eyes. Her iris is bright, like lightning, contained by a dark blue limbal ring.

  “No of course not,” the blonde says, her eyes narrowing, “how do you know of these shapes in the sky? The world is always in covered in clouds. How have you seen the stars?”

  Ajita closes her eyes and just for a moment, she sees a small hamlet of clay houses and a sky that glitters when the sun goes to rest.

  “The bear is not yet finished,” Ajita says instead, “when I complete it, maybe then you will recognize it.”

  She smoothes out the muzzle, giving him the strength of jaw to crush a thousand foes, and then she rounds out his tail before giving the bear paws that suit the ferocity of a hunter. After she finishes her sweeping gestures, the smell strong upon her fingers, she leans back and wipes her brow with the back of her wrist. The stranger beside her hasn’t moved in the slightest.

  “I see it now. It resembles the likeness of a bear, a shaded outline. I still do not understand how you find shapes of bears in the stars. The stars form no patterns, and there is no purpose to creating one with sanitizing solution.”

  “I had spilled it by accident.”

  The stranger stands up and so Ajita does as well, and abruptly realizes that the stranger, though frail-looking, is taller than her.

  “I will send a bot to clean it up then.”

  Of course. She should have thought to summon one of the bots.

  “You are dismissed.”

  “I have to finish cleaning the scanners. It is my Task.”

  The other woman nods sharply and leaves. Ajita steps around Rasjaurom, a mighty misty figure prowling the floor. She does not feel so afraid to handle the scanners with Rasjaurom in the room; she’s not even afraid of the one with the smudge. She picks up scanner two and turns it over in her palm. The lines are still there, spreading out over the surface of the eye like…she glances down at Rasjaurom quickly. Like ripples.

  Gently, she presses her thumb to the smudge on the eye. Removing her hand, she stares at the new lines crisscrossing over the old ones.

  The door makes a tiny metallic clink that signifies a person is entering, and she holds still as she hears the Click. Clack. Click. of the stranger’s shoes. Vrrrmmmm. A bot, with its low