Starstuff

by Kaylim

Yallie says.

  “It’s a fractal,” Ajita clarifies.

  “I didn’t know art could do that,” Yallie says faintly.

  Ajita looks up from the pattern and meets Yallie’s eyes. Their lips curl upwards at the same time.

  After the mess has been cleaned up and their supplies are disposed of, they stand at the doorway of the scanner room, and Ajita is not exactly sure what comes next.

  “May I watch you train?” she asks.

  Yallie raises her chin, “Don’t you have to finish your Task?”

  “No.”

  “Then you should report to the bunk room.”

  “I still have some time.”

  Yallie’s eyes flick to the side and back, “You wouldn’t want to watch me train. It’s boring.”

  Ajita huffs, “Why is it that you sought me out? You didn’t have to arrive early and bring painting supplies.”

  Yallie folds her arms behind her back and takes a breath, “Did you not like being disturbed?”

  Ajita rocks back on her feet and sticks her tongue in her cheek. What a ridiculous question.

  “You can’t answer a question with a question.”

  “Of course I can.”

  Ajita rolls her eyes, and then wonders where she learned that expression from. No Instructor had ever rolled their eyes at her, just as they had never curved their lips.

  “Other Students and Instructors have never talked about art or Rasjaurom or humming. Why are you interested?”

  Yallie presses her lips together and shrugs, “It is as you said. No one else knows about such things. When I walked in and saw you with that puddle…I was curious. You knew things that only the databases had knowledge of. I wanted to learn as well.”

  Ajita rocks forward on her feet and can’t stop the feeling in her chest, something that feels like a burn, a pleasant smolder, and it makes her reach forward and flick that blonde curl. It swishes against Yallie’s forehead and her blue eyes snap open and her mouth is frozen in shock. Ajita resists the urge to hum, and instead leans back to give Yallie some more room.

  “And that is exactly why I wish to watch you train,” Ajita says, “there is no one else quite like you.”

  Yallie’s lips curve again, but this time it falters and doesn’t stay too long, “Very well.”

  Watching Yallie train is like watching her learn from the kiosk. Ajita could never imagine being so focused on such a task, but Yallie runs and jogs and jumps and scrutinizes the numbers on the display screen and judges them with a shake of her head. Ajita wonders what she is trying to achieve.

  Her blonde hair is dark with sweat, and it streaks down her face and drips off of her chin. She doesn’t try to wipe it away, doesn’t seem to mind the texture. Ajita has never trained to the point of sweating, where it comes down on her face like the rain she sees and feels in her dreams. She licks her lips. She likes the taste of rain.

  Yallie holds a bar with two hands and tries to raise it, the numbers on the screen steadily increasing, and the bar gets heavier and heavier. Muscles twitch and fight against her skin, and her bones seem to tremble as she clenches her teeth, loud puffs of breath coming from her mouth. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she raises the bar higher and higher…past her elbows and past her shoulders and Ajita thinks she might actually get the bar into the air, over her head, but in a fraction of a second…her arms collapse.

  The bar falls to the ground and her hands are on her knees, and the display screen turns blank. With a ferocious kick, she sends the now weightless bar rolling across the floor, and it spins rapidly into the wall with a CLANG. Ajita jumps at the sound.

  Yallie paces in a circle, flexing her hands, issuing short almost silent grunts. Ajita leaves her spot by the wall, where she had curled up comfortably, and walks to the bar slowly. Yallie doesn’t notice her movement. She picks up the colorless bar, and inspects it when she notices something familiar. Various grayish smudges wrap around the bar, and she rolls it over to follow the continuous curvaceous lines. She places her hands over Yallie’s prints, and turns back to the Trainee.

  She walks up to her, stopping short of her circle of pacing. Yallie looks up, back hunched and a snarl on her lips. Ajita tries not to flinch, but Yallie’s face is not serene or blank or playful. It is a mess of frowns and sneers and her eyes, for a moment, don’t look blue and round and familiar. They seem alien. Ajita shifts from foot to foot, a little nervous, because she doesn’t understand this abrupt facial and attitude change.

  When Yallie seems to relax, at least by the slightest margin, Ajita holds out the bar. Yallie lets out a long, hard breath as she views it, and then takes it from her with a strong, sharp tug. But when she has it in her hands she slumps and sighs, running a hand through her messy curly bangs. She is no longer angry, but simply defeated, like Ajita was when she couldn’t replicate the delicate nature of Yallie’s curls. Ajita braves a question.

  “Why do you Train like this?”

  “What’s the point of Training if you don’t push yourself?”

  “No, I mean, why do you Train after hours?”

  Yallie turns her back to her, rolling the bar in her fingers distractedly.

  Ajita suddenly wonders if she is not the only one who has a hard time during Lessons, “Is this like Tutoring time for you?”

  Yallie’s back stiffens.

  Ajita walks around to Yallie’s front. Her face is ducked and she stares at the ground.

  “I need practice with Lessons and numbers. The Instructors gave up, and rarely offer me Tutoring. I never sought out answers on my own before, tried to Tutor myself…until I met you.”

  Yallie places her hands on her hips, purses her lips, and meets her eyes.

  Ajita’s lips curve, “It is very impressive that you do extra Training on your own.”

  “I shouldn’t have to need it,” Yallie snaps.

  “It is bothersome that we have to work extra hard to be good at things others are naturally good at,” Ajita concedes, “but it is either that, or be left behind and disappoint ourselves.”

  Yallie huffs again, but this time her tension has eased, and she glances up self-deprecatingly, “When did you start having all the answers?”

  “Since you motivated me to find them.”

  Yallie takes the bar back from her. She doesn’t manage to raise the bar all the way, but for the rest of the session, she doesn’t stop trying either.

  It’s a muggy night, and her skin feels wet as she stares at a ceiling. This one is dark and rocky, like the one in her last dream. A cave, the words pop up in her head. She raises her hand, reaching for the eleven stenciled hands on the ceiling. They’re dark red and brown in outline, each decorated with a different design, linked together to emulate the shape of a tree. She places her hand next to the others, and when she lifts it away, an outline of her fingers is left behind, joined with the other hands for thousands of years to come.

  “Student,” the Instructor intones, face schooled in polite disinterest.

  Ajita nods, scuffing a foot against the floor as she resists the urge to slump down in her seat.

  “Let us go over your last assignment,” the Instructor brings up a screen and she can see her filled-in answer box.

  “This is your response to the question regarding the Chaos Game formula. You were asked to explain the purpose of the equation,” the Instructor continues.

  “Aren’t we supposed to go over questions I don’t know, rather than the ones I do?” Ajita attempts to sound courteous.

  The Instructor goes on, “I will read aloud your answer. You said ‘this equation replicates the fractals found in nature. It is our way of copying and explaining the patterns we observe in the waves, lightening and the Universe itself. This equation expresses the art found in the natural world’.”

  Ajita nods again and fidgets with the end of her plait, foot tapping against the floor. She has never liked Tutoring time less, now that she is expecting to see Yallie soon, during her Task. Tutoring time now seems t
o last far longer than it really is.

  “Your answer is not entirely correct,” the Instructor explains.

  Ajita raises her head sharply, letting go of her plait. Her foot-tapping ceases.

  “You are correct that the equation correlates with fractals, however you did not explain any of the variables, or how the equation is used. You did not explain the concept of an attractor or how to use this equation to find it. Without that, you cannot create a fractal and the point is moot. Additionally, parts of your answer seem to originate from outside and unverified sources. The presence of fractals in lightening and waves is unverified information, it was not in the Introduction and I am unsure how you concluded upon such a hypothesis. The word ‘art’ is also incongruous with the question being asked. That word is has not been used in any Lessons thus far as it has nothing to do with what is being taught.”

  The Instructor then erases her answer. He says he will give her another chance to answer the question, to explain what an attractor is and how it works.

  Ajita sits there blankly, slowly deciphering the Instructor’s words. What she thought she had understood perfectly is now being thrown into question. The Instructor thinks she is wrong. She feels as if she is in a fractal now, spinning down infinite loops, caught in some repetitious environment where no matter how she turns or twists, she always ends up right back where she started. The blank answer box hovers before her. The equation xk+1 = fr(xk) blinkblinkblinks.

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

  And thus her Tutoring session ends.

  She stalks into the scanner room and snaps the scanners out of their holsters one by one. Roughly swiping the sanitization patches across each of them, she scrubs the scanners until they gleam like they’ve never gleamed before. Clink. She continues to clean the scanners even when the clickclackclickclack of Yallie’s shoes turns into Click. Clack…Click.

  “It is good to see you applying yourself to your Task with such dedication,” Yallie says, and Ajita imagines that her lips must be curved, but she doesn’t turn around to check.

  She instead moves onto the next scanner.

  “Will you be cleaning the scanners the entire time?” Yallie asks, and she doesn’t sound so amused anymore.

  Ajita throws the patch onto the table, “Does it matter?”

  “I brought some more painting supplies.”

  “Why? Art isn’t relevant to School,” she slams her hands down on the counter, “it has no discernible purpose and is incongruent with our Lessons and Tasks.”

  There is a short silence, and she can hear Yallie’s sharp little intake of breath.

  “If you no longer desire to continue our explorations of database knowledge, then I suppose we are done here,” the blonde says stiffly.

  Click. Clack. Click.

  She picks up the patch and twists it in her hands.

  “Wait,” Ajita’s voice cracks. With a breath, she turns around.

  Yallie is frozen by the door, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  Ajita slumps against the counter and lets the patch fall to the floor, “What did you bring?”

  Yallie turns around and reveals the large container in her arms, filled with paint supplies and sheets of plastic.

  “Scrap,” she explains.

  Ajita nods and Yallie cautiously approaches and sets it down on the floor. Ajita walks over, slowly, to kneel beside it as well. They’re carefully avoiding each other’s eyes.

  “Art is usually done on something called a canvas, which can be stored or put on a wall for viewing,” Yallie continues and holds up a plastic sheet to demonstrate, “I figured we could use these instead of the floor or the tray.”

  They would no longer have to wash their art away, Ajita realizes. They could keep it forever. The art could live on, like the hands on the cave walls, existing for thousands of years. The image sticks in her mind and her hands automatically start creating the