and patpatpat they’re standing in the spill.
“I…I see them in my dreams. Star bears. People.”
There’s a rush of breath from Yallie, and her eyes are lit up in a special way, calculating and disbelieving and in shock, but full of illumination.
“That’s it,” the blonde breathes, carefully and slowly.
She looks like she might faint.
“It shouldn’t be possible. It’s impossible,” she says.
Ajita has no idea what she is talking about, but she reaches forward, as if to grab her arm, her hand. Yallie lets her take it.
“We have to be careful,” Yallie mutters.
She steps back suddenly and then continues in a monotone voice, “Student, you have passed the Assessment. You are a free to go to your bunk.”
She gestures her out and Ajita’s head is spinning, but she meets Yallie’s eyes and sees the light in them, the reflections of stars, and turns to the door. As it opens with a chink, she chances a look back and sees Yallie pressing something on each of the scanners, making their eyes flicker. A cold shiver goes down Ajita’s spine; she always feels uneasy going to clean the scanners, always hoping they will be sleeping and not flying around, going wild, watching her with their wide-awake eyes. Now she wonders if perhaps they had never been sleeping after all.
Ajita waits in the hallway because it feels like something she is supposed to do, and doesn’t go to her bunk at all. Her instinct is correct when Yallie comes striding out of the room minutes later, agitated and short on breath. With a sharp flick of her hand, she indicates that Ajita should follow her. They don’t go down the familiar dull grey corridors. Instead Yallie veers off into a side hallway, something small and full of automatized machines. Ajita’s tag doesn’t flash.
“You must sneak around a lot,” Ajita observes.
Yallie glances over her shoulder, an abrupt laugh on her lips, “All because of you.”
Ajita startles at the sound of the laugh, but says nothing as they leave the grey corridor. Yallie looks down every turn; they are in blue hallways and Ajita likes the color. She is pulled into a room with a science kiosk and Yallie’s hands fly over the controls.
“We have to hurry or they’ll notice you are missing,” she murmurs to herself.
Ajita freezes, “Are we hiding from the Instructors?”
“And the Trainees,” Yallie laughs again, a little wild, a little crazy.
“What are we doing?” Ajita asks.
She has never been in serious trouble before, and doesn’t want to find out what punishment is like.
“Assessing you,” she answers, lips curving toothily.
“I thought we just did that,” Ajita says weakly, confused, “And I thought I passed.”
“I thought you did too,” Yallie says cheerfully, “and then, at the last minute, you failed.”
Ajita’s mouth drops open in shock, and she’s not sure if she should feel insulted or not. Before she can decide, Yallie continues speaking.
“That’s all right. Failure shows you where you have room for improvement.”
“And what exactly am I supposed to improve?”
“Your memory.”
Ajita has no idea how to answer that. As far as she knows, she hasn’t forgotten anything. Perhaps her memorization skills are not up to par? She has always had trouble with the matching game, where she had to clear the screen by matching pairs of images. She also has trouble memorizing equations.
“Here,” Yallie says breathlessly.
Grrrrrr…chills streak down Ajita’s spine as a strange, grumbled sound emits from the station.
“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.
“Was that another Assessment?” she asks.
Yallie nods, and then quickly brings up images of bears. Ajita could never imagine a bear being so…furry.
“Nothing?” Yallie asks.
Ajita shakes her head. She isn’t sure what Yallie is asking her for. Clickclickclick, Yallie is busy with the pointer again. Diagrams, curious black and white things, begin to pop up as the kiosk empties out its knowledge, going into the depths of its memory banks; a male’s voice, deep and croaky, begins to narrate, and various recordings run over each other as each equation starts to play some sort of explanation.
Then the room bursts with color.
Beautiful prickly spiral shapes spin out of each equation, expanding so that the texts, the diagrams, the numbers, fade into nothingness. The clickclickclick stops, the narrator’s voice gradually peters off, and they’re left in a room with luminous shapes, shapes that start large, and then curl in on themselves, creating delicate, impossibly infinite edges. They come in vibrant shades of so many colors, from green to purple to red. They don’t have the texture the drawings did, but she wants to call them art anyway. She’s never seen anything like them.
The different types of fractals morph then, turning into leaves, clouds, snowflakes, ocean waves, bolts of lightning, blood vessels, and DNA. Things Ajita has only briefly studied or dreamed of. They fade, going black, and she and Yallie are left in the dark…until sparkling galaxies grow out of the gloom, exploding in size and shape and flowing over Ajita’s body. She holds out her hands and watches as the galaxies ripple over her. The images slow down and Ajita and Yallie look over at each other in the same moment.
They’re covered in stars.
Ajita’s lips curve upwards, and she wonders how long she must have been doing it, and if she can remember doing it before. Yallie’s expression mirrors her own.
Gradually the fractals fade, the lights come back on, and Yallie looks at her hopefully, expectantly, and Ajita wonders if this goes beyond just an Assessment. If it’s something personal, because no one has ever looked at her the way Yallie is looking her now.
“I think I’m failing this Assessment,” Ajita whispers.
Yallie looks broken all over, and she squeezes her eyes shut, hand over her face in frustration. Then she lets out a big breath and begins working on the kiosk again. Images begin to fill the air, and Ajita has to think to place them. She remembers vaguely, from a Lesson long ago….
“Star charts?” she sounds unsure to her own ears.
Yallie whips towards her and Ajita cringes backwards, “I remember them from a Lesson.”
The blonde purses her lips and begins to bring up more. Some of the star charts are dark blue, with various sized dots and rigid white lines; others are done on a white surface, with bulky black dots and lines. A few are colorful and contain figures of people and animals. None of them are multi-dimensional like their star charts; they are simply flat. Unchangeable. Most of the symbols and writing are unfamiliar to her, but she can still recognize the stars.
“What are the lines connecting the stars?” she asks.
“Try to remember.”
Ajita wonders how much she must have forgotten. She doesn’t remember forgetting anything, but would a person remember if they’ve forgotten something? If they’ve forgotten something, was it like it never happened, so they knew nothing was missing? Or would there be a blank space in their memory? Ajita thinks back and senses no holes in her memory, no large spaces of empty time, but her mind seems to be hazy anyway.
Yallie brings up several star charts that look the same.
“Can you see the bear??
??
Yallie sounds a little desperate to her ears. Ajita is agitated, nervous about Yallie’s expectations and the fact that she’s failing them, but all she can see are…seven stars.
“That’s Rasjaurom!” she shouts.
Yallie doesn’t even shush her. She looks like she might shout too.
The night from the village flashes through her mind, the woman telling her the star story, and pointing out the star pattern. Yallie goes through the images, positioning them so she can see Rasjaurom, the star bear. He looks mighty and beautiful in all of them, even on charts that don’t outline his figure or draw lines connecting the stars. She tries to memorize the seven stars, and wishes she could see them with her own two eyes. Yallie flips to another image…and Ajita grabs her hand.
She stares at the eerily familiar star chart. Rasjaurom looks over his shoulder at three stars behind him, which are depicted as three men who carry various items: a bow and arrow, a pot, and a pile of firewood.
She backs up in her seat and looks away from the image. The space behind her ears aches, and she scratches it, wondering why she has a sudden headache. Fear imprisons her stomach, causing it to clench.
“Would you like to see Rasjaurom on our kind of star chart?” Yallie asks.
Ajita stills the shaking in her hands and nods. Yallie cocks her head to the side and Ajita does her best to shrug off her queasiness. Yallie clears the images and text and clicks through settings on the kiosk. Soon the entire room is filled with a dark blue hue and the rest of the lights dim. Ajita relaxes as it grows dark. With another click, stars fill the room, growing brighter as they hover in the gloom. Their numbers float beside their forms. Once they are surrounded by stars, Ajita stands up.
“So the lines connecting the stars form patterns…constellations,” she says.
Yallie beams and Ajita feels her lips curve. It feels good when she gets questions right.
“That’s what you were trying to see in the puddle. A pattern. A shape. But why of Rasjaurom?”
“Because you saw Rasjaurom everywhere,” Yallie says.
As if to prove her point, with a bright spark, lines start forming between the stars, spreading from one to the other. Ajita spins, trying to see all of the stars that fly over her body. She spreads her arms out, opens her eyes wide, and thinks of drifting among the stars. The phrase feels right, rings true in her mind.
A laugh disturbs her from her fantasy, and she turns around to find Yallie by her side. Stars dot Yallie’s body and gleam in her eyes.
Ajita reaches up with a finger and touches one of the stars that rest on Yallie’s cheek. Yallie doesn’t look so good.
“Are you all right?” Ajita asks.
“Fine,” Yallie says, and Ajita doesn’t believe her.
But Yallie takes her finger, the one on her cheek, and clasps it. Then with a tug, Yallie spins them through the stars.
“You are so strange,” Ajita exclaims.
“So are you,” Yallie replies.
They continue to rotate through the spinning constellations, and the stars spin across Yallie’s cheeks, fall from her eyes.
“I’ll be living among the stars soon,” Yallie says, voice thick.
Ajita blinks curiously, but says nothing.
“I passed my Assessment. I made the cut,” she elaborates.
Their spinning slows and Yallie leans in close as if divulging a secret, “But it means nothing if you don’t remember.”
“What should I be remembering?”
Ajita’s a little scared, doesn’t know what this stranger wants from her, and doesn’t know why she’s giving her Assessments if she is not an Instructor.
“That you want to be there with me. That you got me there in the first place!”
“Look where we are,” Ajita replies, and this time she’s the one guiding the spin.
Yallie’s eyes are bright with something other than stars, more liquid and shiny and Ajita wishes she could memorize them, immortalize them, and her fingers itch for something, yearn to do something, but she doesn’t know what.
“We’re a part of the stars,”