7: Round Numbers

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Mum had her baby just as I was about to start Textiles, so she was gone for a few days, but came back fine. She was tired but okay; the baby was okay, safe in the orphanage. I never saw it.

Textiles was about what I expected, from talking to Hitan and from what I already knew. Fibres were turned into threads by big machines, and those threads were turned into fabric and rope and stuff. It was important but didn’t seem very interesting because it was just big machines doing it. We were shown special machines that a person could use to spin and weave ‘by hand’, which was interesting, and we were allowed to try them out, but they made stuff really, really slowly and all of us were really bad at using them. They take lots of practice, we were told, hours and hours of practice to get good with them. The jaunt is only two hours a day and we had work to do (though not much, because there weren’t many big textile machines that they would let kids our age close to), so none of us were going to get good at it there, even if we wanted to.

We were told that some people had the hand-spinning and hand-weaving machines at home, and there were also some in the public craft areas, if we wanted to learn. That sounded really silly to me. There’s a lot of stuff that can be done either by hand or by machine, but making textiles by hand was so, so much slower than the machine and would take up so much more time in the day that it just seemed stupid and impractical to waste any time with. But then I realised that people didn’t make cloth by hand as a job; they did it for the same reasons that Auntie Shorin painted or that Auntie Moli liked to garden or play the drums or that Dad played the flute. For fun.

I frowned at the spinning wheel. It didn’t look any fun. But then, neither did gardening.

The most interesting thing to happen during my Textiles jaunt (I wouldn’t be doing a second pass with Textiles, I didn’t think) had nothing to do with the jaunt at all. It was Arai’s seventh birthday. Me and Hitan and some of her other friends went to her house to have a party.

Hitan didn’t go to houses very much, and spent a lot of time staring at everything. For me, Arai’s house looked pretty similar to mine, though not quite the same. There were only two bedrooms, for one, which was very strange; in a harem, each person in the marriage had their own room and there also had to be bedrooms for the kids, so there were a lot of rooms for that, and of course there just tended to be more people in a harem anyway. In a nuclear, there were two or three parents, and usually three children or less (Arai was the only child in her family), and the people in the marriage all had one bedroom that they shared together. (This was a little bit funny to me, because in my house, grown ups got their own bedrooms and kids had to share, and in Arai’s house, she got her own bedroom and all the grown ups had to share.) This also meant that their communal areas were less important because like, every space was almost a communal area anyway, at least for the grown ups. So they didn’t have a fancy garden, just some plants in the common area, which was also the guest area. It felt stifling. Even though Arai probably got way more privacy than I did (with her own room and with only three other people around), it still felt really crowded and less private.

That might just be because it was full of kids for the party, though.

All three of her parents were there, even though her guv is a busy engineer who works longer than most people. I didn’t see Arai’s parents very often but they always seemed nice. Her mother was a friendly woman with a big round face who wore her hair in the same way that my mum and Auntie Shorin did – twisted into dreadlocks with ribbons and beads tied into them. But where Mum used dark brown and black ribbons that blended into the colour of her hair and simple wooden beads, and Auntie Shorin liked to change hers to go with the colours of her clothes, Arai’s mum had all kinds of ribbons tied into her hair that didn’t match at all, just different bright, fun colours and patterns, and beads of bright glass and metal and painted ceramic and even tiny bells that jingled when she moved her head. She wore a pretty purple wrap tied up with a pretty red sash that didn’t match the wrap at all, and had silver and gold bracelets on her wrists that jangled as loud as her bells when she moved her arms, or when she laughed and her whole body shook. She handed out the birthday eggs while Arai’s dad put on music and got things ready for the party games. He dressed a lot like my dad, his patterned wrap closed with a stiff plain belt, and had the same very short beard with his hair held back by a bandana, but he didn’t look like my dad – he was skinny and pointy, and had patterns tattooed on his arms.

Arai’s guv was the quietest person in her household, except maybe for Arai herself. Kes hair was a bit longer than most brennans liked to wear theirs, not styled that way but more like ke just hadn’t got round to cutting it for a while. Ke was still in their work jumpsuit and didn’t talk very much, but watched Arai with a gentle, proud smile while we all sang the birthday song and Arai gently cracked her egg open.

Peeling the birthday eggs was always hard. It’s hard to crack open a ball, especially a ball small enough to fit in one hand and with something soft inside, but Arai did it perfectly; the white sugar cracked and she peeled the pieces off the green jelly inside until it looked like it has always been a see-through green ball with something small in the middle. She used a little knife to cut the gelatin away and pull out the little silver charm, cleaning it off on a cloth before looking at it.

It was shaped like a star. That meant that she would have a very lucky year. We all cheered for her.

Then, while Arai ate her egg, we opened our own. I tried to crack mine neatly like Arai, but ended up squishing the gelatin inside. Hitan just smacked his against the bench to crack it a little and then but into it, spitting his charm into his hand after a couple of bites. My own charm was a hand, which would have meant that I would have an industrious year if this was my birthday, but it wasn’t. Still, the charms were fun to collect.

My own birthday would be pretty soon. Maybe I’d get another hand then. Or a heart, which would mean I’d have a fun year. I would like a fun year.

I put the charm in my pocket, and noticed that Hitan was dabbing at his mouth. He’d cut his gum open on the hard sugar shell.

We played games, we gave gifts (I gave her a sash made from a leaf-patterned fabric that she’d seen in Textiles and really liked), we had fun. I went home feeling a bit strange, because one of my best friends was seven now and I was still six. But that was a silly thing to feel strange about. We were still on the same jaunt and still doing all the same things, and I’d be seven soon, anyway.

After Textiles was a month of Education, and Hitan and I had that together without Arai, but that wasn’t because she was seven and we were six; it was because she was a higher math and reading level than us. Arai’s class had to know twenty five main glyphs and ours only had to know fifteen. I knew twenty two, so I was kind of annoyed at not quite making it, but they had to do math that was too complicated for me anyway so I probably still wouldn’t get in if I knew more glyphs.

For Education we were taught by a man named Ross, who I already knew because he taught us our last month of education, before the jaunt started. He was friendly and quite old, old enough that all of his hair was white. He never had a beard; I didn’t know if he was depilated, or made sure to shave really often, or if he just never grew chin hair. He stood in front of the projection wall in the projector room and looked over the twelve of us at our desks and grinned a big, toothy smile, like he was really happy to see us.

“So!” he said in a big, booming voice. “You’ve all started your jaunts! How is it? Are you all having fun?”

Some people gave vague, halfhearted ‘yes’es.

“Great! Remember, you’re just learning about how different things work on the ship. People will try to tell you to make big decisions about your careers, but you don’t have to! Not yet! It’s not just about what work you want to do, you can change your minds about that at any time. It’s about understanding how all the systems on a ship, or even in a whole fleet, fit together. It’s about being able to see how you’re a part of everything, and about celebrating just how much there is to discover and how many options you have for building a life that’s right for you! So there’s no need to be worried or stressed, and even if parts of this first pass are boring, that’s good, because it teaches you that you don’t want to do that and makes choosing what to do a second pass through easier! You should all have as much fun as you can and figure out what makes you happy on the jaunt!”

Some people gave vague, halfhearted ‘okay’s.

“But for now! A break from all of that to learn things that will be really useful for you, no matter what future you choose. Who here can count to twelve?”

We all put our hands up. You have to be able to count to twelve to get into this class.

“And who can count to one hundred and forty four?”

We all put our hands up again. You don’t have to count that high to get into this class, but it’s really easy to learn once you know up to twelve.

“And who… can count to one thousand, seven hundred and twenty eight?”

Everyone, of course. Once you can count to one hundred and forty four, you know the pattern. And then you can count to every number.

“Great! So you all know how counting works. That’s very clever for your age.” He wrote numbers on the projector wall in one of the special markers that teachers used, the ones that could write on the wall and clean off it really easily. He wrote all the way up to thirty six, then had us take out some counting blocks and asked us some questions. If I have seven ribbons and give three to my friend, how many do I have left? If there are twelve white buns and four kids who want to share them fairly, how many buns does each kid get? If I have to look after some flowers for twelve days, and they get watered every fourth day, how many times will I have to water them? (Do you see how the flower question and the bun question are the same?) If there are four kids and each get three buns, how many buns does Kitchens have to cook for them? (Do you see how this is the opposite of the other bun question?)

Some of it was very easy and some of it was very hard. The idea that “every fourth day” and “shared among four kids” were solved the same way was confusing, but Ross said that that was okay, we weren’t expected to totally understand that yet. “Think of that like your jaunt,” he said. “You don’t understand exactly what all the big machines and stuff you see the workers using do yet, do you? But it helps to know that they exist, and what sorts of things they’re used for. You don’t have to totally understand multiplication and division yet, it just helps to know what you will understand later. Right now, we’re just getting used to solving problems with number blocks.”

I frowned at the blocks. I’d rather understand. But if that was going to take time, I was just going to have to be patient and work hard.

There were a lot of things I didn’t understand.

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