Starstuff

by Kaylim

her own limitations.

  “I can’t do it,” Yallie confesses, a sob that is ripped from her.

  Ajita comes around her back, presses her cheek against the back of Yallie’s neck, and whispers, “Why are we assessed?”

  Yallie’s grip almost falters, but she regroups quickly, “What?”

  “Why are we assessed?”

  “To show what we know,” Yallie grunts, “so that we know where we belong.”

  That’s why Ajita hates this kind of assessing. It places people in Tasks and lives designated only by their limitations.

  “No,” Ajita says, right into Yallie’s ear, “it’s to show you where you can improve.”

  Yallie laughs, strangled and breathy all at once because she still hasn’t let go of that bar.

  “When you were first assessed,” Ajita says, rough and fast, trying to make Yallie get it, “you weren’t placed with the ships. You failed that part of the Assessment.”

  She hears Yallie gnash her teeth at the bitter reminder.

  “So you continued to train on your own, because you knew the Assessments only showed you where you had to improve.”

  “It’s my body,” Yallie hisses, “it is weak and fragile.”

  “And able to be improved.”

  “You call this improvement?”

  Ajita’s eyes flick to the escalating numbers and she pushes her face forward to press a long kiss against the side of Yallie’s mouth.

  She whispers, “Yes.”

  And when Yallie finally manages to lift the bar above her head, it doesn’t just feel like improvement, it feels like victory. It feels like freedom and creativity and though they didn’t create a painting, she feels like they created something just as a beautiful and powerful and inspired.

  It’s the first time Ajita ever kisses someone goodbye, and she enjoys it in the moments before they leave the training room. She thinks of it, sweet on her lips, as she lies down for sleep. Yallie’s sweat is still on her fingers, on her mouth, the scent of her training and success on her clothes, and she curls up in it. It makes her drift to sleep soundly, but the feeling of comfort and satisfaction is dashed with the first bloom of fire.

  It streaks across the bleak, smoky atmosphere of her dreams. Tall buildings, once shiny and proud, are reduced to crumbling shells; people strolling down clean walkways now run, smeared with blood and terror. The stars, once bright and visible, are now covered by thick clouds and dark smoke and ashes. Then beside her, in space, looking down upon the grey and black planet, is a massive cylinder. A machine. And behind it…several more. She remembers the man floating beside the cylindrical machine, how peaceful, how serene, and now these machines are monstrous. They destroy each other and with long, fiery shots, cause spots on the world to bloom into a dark, smoky haze.

  She flies over cities and towns, deserted and torn to pieces, with dead people and molted people and people hiding out in shelters and ripping poisoned food from each other’s hands. She struggles to understand.

  The villages are destroyed. The colorful cities are no more. The mud buildings, the chapel, the caves and the space cylinders born from collaboration are gone. Razor sharp machines with weapons rule the atmosphere and destroy the ground and water and people, and she wonders when one step turned into this. She watches as another machine loads a projectile, and as it hits the Earth, she feels like Rasjaurom, struck by an arrow, falling and falling and falling.

  She wakes, face wet with tears and her own sweat, and the words incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi fall into her mind, heavy in the darkness with flashes of destruction still lingering on her inner-eye.

  As she walks to Lessons, she wonders, for the first time, how this all came to be: the School, the Instructors, the Students, the ships and the Trainees. She hasn’t been in the Observation Hall in a while, but she remembers how outside looked: dead. This must be Earth. They are on Earth, the planet of her dreams. She’s never had a name for where she lives; she logically knows she is on a planet, but she has never had a name, not until her dreams. So what came after the destruction, she wonders. How did they all come to be here? Who organized this system of existence?

  As she sits at her kiosk, she concludes that the databases must have the answers. The databases knew about bears and paintings, all the things that existed before the destruction. Perhaps she and Yallie can do more research. During Lessons she is called away again, and she is not even surprised this time to find herself in the same room with the same three Instructors.

  The woman pulls up her drawings, all the ones she did last time, plus the one of the handprints, which is now on the screen. Ajita wonders where the original went, and fear winds through her body like slime, because it might be the last painting on Earth.

  “Student,” the woman says, “we have studied your…paintings. We would like to know more about them.”

  Ajita doesn’t react and they bring up the one of the seven stars.

  “We are aware that you have briefly studied star charts in your Lessons before, and have never seen the night sky due to the climate. We are curious to know why you picked these stars. We are aware you have attempted to draw them before, even before you knew what a constellation was.”

  Yallie must have told them everything, Ajita realizes, told them about every single drawing and all of their research.

  “Is it a part of your history?” the woman asks delicately.

  Ajita stares at her, long and hard, “History is not a part of Lessons.”

  “And yet you explained you knew what history was in our previous meetings. Your handprints represented history.”

  “Personal history.”

  “And how did the stars come to be a component of your personal history? How can you know something that has never been taught? Something that you had never seen?”

  “I have seen the stars in Lessons before.”

  “You had seen them in star charts, yes, but not as constellations. No other Student makes shapes out of stars. You made a pattern of a bear: a creature that does not exist here, a creature you have never learned about. This constellation bear had previously been created by ancient navigators.”

  “Perhaps genius can be replicated,” Ajita says with false politeness, “a great idea can occur twice.”

  “If you had made a star pattern of a bed or a scanner it would been odd, but still logical. You made a pattern out of a creature you had no idea existed. How did you come to know of bears, a creature of ancient past?”

  “The same way you came to know of bears, I suspect.”

  They trade quick glances among the three of them.

  “Bears have come to our knowledge only recently,” the woman answers.

  Ajita breathes out slowly, through her nose, and tries to stay calm. Yallie told them everything, everythingeverythingeverything.

  “We are asking how you learned about bears,” the woman’s look is pointed, “without access, authorized or unauthorized, to the databases previous to your first painting.”

  Ajita’s shoulders twitch and she feels hounded. The three Instructors lean forward, like the three hunters crashing through the grass, weapons held aloft.

  “I have always known about bears,” is all she can say.

  She knows she has been backed against the trees, and she won’t give away her dreams, she won’t, but she is still trapped and with that arrow pointed dead at her heart.

  The Instructors decide to give her a different kind of Assessment. The woman had been full of victory, a cold steely kind of victory while the two male Instructors had looked on in shock. She had never seen so much expression on their faces before, or on the face of any other Instructor. She is led down grey halls; everything familiar passes in a blur, and she lets herself get lost in the bright lights on the ceiling.

  They sit her down in a chair, and something is placed behind her ears. Screens show up, displaying the scan of her brain, and she wonders if it’s possible for them to read her mind. Then she c
loses her eyes, and her dreams flash by, all sorts of people and sounds and colors and forms, all the things inside her, all the knowledge she has consumed, all that her dreams have shown her. Then it all winks out, as if being smothered by smoky clouds, and she wakes up in a bunk and wonders where she is.

  The second thing she thinks is that her life is very slick and clean. She attends School in a large building where she also sleeps and eats. She thinks nothing of it, because everything feels routine, she must have done it a thousand times. She must have been doing it for forever. She ponders her complexion: skin a dark brown, hair darker than that. There are others like her, and others that are pale with bright hair. Somehow she feels like that is familiar too, but isn’t everything?

  After departing from her bunk with her peers, she stands in a long line of grey uniforms. When it is her turn at the dispenser her tag flashes once and out drops several tubes and tiny packets. She consumes them and thinks nothing of the various colors.

  Then they break up into pods and go to their Lessons. Her 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 tested on the concepts from the Introduction in the Exam portion of the Lesson.

  The other Students work quickly, and she struggles to formulate answers as the Instructor paces up and down the aisle, waiting for her to finish. She is having a hard time giving an answer, trying to explain the concept behind the equation xk+1 = fr(xk).

  The answer boxes remain empty and her fingers hover uselessly and she sits back.

  “Are you not going to answer today?”

  She jumps and looks to her side. Another Student, with short dark hair and a spot on her dainty chin, peers at her expectantly. She fingers the end of her plait because this does not feel routine, and this Student does not look familiar even though she must have sat beside her thousands of times.

  “I do not know the answers,” she says.

  “Do you feel like that is a bad thing?” the Student persists, “Do you think that knowing the answers is a priority?”

  “I have never known the answers,” she says, uneasy; she can’t remember ever talking to Students before.

  “Do you think that knowing the answers implies correctness?”

  “Answering the questions correct means they are correct; answering them wrongly means that you are incorrect; not answering them at all means that you do not know the correct or incorrect answer or understand the question.”

  The Student nods, “And what would be the point in answering them correctly?”

  “Correctness implies one is learning.”

  “What is the point of learning?”

  She opens her mouth, automatically, but says nothing.

  “You don’t know either?” the Student asks.

  She shakes her head.

  “Then we really should ask, or not be doing it,” the Student concludes, “why would you do something you could not discern the purpose of?”

  “Student, finish your Lesson. Answer the questions,” says an Instructor from behind them.

  Ajita quickly turns away from the other Student, relieved. She misses the look the Instructor gives the other Student, features full of nervousness, perhaps fear.

  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 these things are limited. She had failed many of the Placement Assessments and had once stood in front of several Instructors, all of them looking at each other and not saying a word. After that she was then put into the Physical Training Center, with the Task to clean the equipment.

  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 scanners,