78: Literacy

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The next day, I checked to see if anyone had accidentally sent me any local messages while I was away. They hadn’t. I had received a few new messages since getting home, though. Hitan wanted to hang out with me and Arai so we could catch up. Plia wanted to know if I was settling back in at home okay. Yamin sent me a message congratulating me on getting home safely and saying he looks forward to talking when I’m eleven, which I listened to twelve times trying to find any hidden messages or anything before finally deciding that he just wanted to reassure me that he hadn’t lost interest in the apprenticeship. And someone from Administration wanted me to take some reading and math and knowledge tests so that they could put me back into the right Education classes, which made sense. I booked a projector room, took the tests, and a few hours later, was climbing the Big Spiderweb with my friends.

“Cheating!” I gasped up at Hitan, high above me. “I haven’t done this in nearly a year!”

“Sounds like a sore loser!” he called back down with a laugh.

“”He has been practising a lot recently,” Arai told me. She was just about keeping pace with me, but I couldn’t help but notice that she was less out of breath than I was and didn’t slip as often. She was holding back. I resolved to practice more, and trounce him.

But we were getting a bit too large for the Big Spiderweb. It had been our favourite thing in the playground when we were six, but now the ropes were a bit too close together and sagged a bit too much under our weight. Maybe I should practice a lot at the bigger equipment, and beat Hitan at that.

Once the others were out of breath enough that calling for a rest wasn’t embarrassing, I called one and we sagged onto a bench together.

“I would so beat you at markball,” I told Hitan.

“What’s markball?”

“It’s this zero-pull ball game. You have to be really careful about how you move and throw the ball so you don’t launch yourself into a wall or something. You’d love it and you’d get so, so injured.”

“Zero pull movement is so interesting,” Arai said. “I’m jealous. I want to go to a zero pull ship on my jaunt; which one would you recommend?”

“The zero pull ships I went to are all a bit further out than most Courageous jaunts,” I said. “But wherever you go, you’ll probably get there by one of the smaller transports like the Vanguard, and they’re usually zero pull, or very low pull. My tyber works on the Vanguard now, so.

“Laisor? I was wondering where ke went.”

“Yeah. I bet ke’s having a terrible time. They do not like Jessies there. Though maybe ke’s just hanging out with people old enough to suck up to us.”

“What are Jessies?”

“Us. People from good ships. They’re jealous, I think.”

“Why?” Arai asked, frowning. “We’re nice to them. We give the Vanguard so much work and resources and connections, shouldn’t they like us?”

“I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,” I said.

“Did we do something to betray them?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just how they are. I think being nice makes them mad somehow.”

They both stared at me, uncomprehending.

“Anyway,” I said, “how was stuff here when I was gone?”

“Great!” Arai said. “There’s a new type of hair braid that people are doing, I’ll show you how to later. Your braids are out of style now.”

“I learned lots of new braids while I was away.”

Arai wrinkled her nose. “They would be even less in style! Do you want to look like a tourist?”

“Education is getting really interesting,” Hitan said. “We’ve been learning more science and stuff. You probably learned it all on that science ship you went on, though, so it might be boring for you.”

“I just had to retake a bunch of Education tests,” I said, “so if I did learn it, they’ll know and put me up a level to learn even more interesting stuff.”

“We’ve been learning physics,” Hitan said. “They keep saying it’s going to get way harder and more complicated but they can’t teach us too much until our mathematics is better or we won’t understand it. So now I have to learn more math if I want to get to the interesting stuff.”

“Hitan’s considering getting into engineering,” Arai said.

“I’m not sure yet, though,” he said. “I have to see how I do with the math first. And I can’t even do that part of the jaunt for a couple more years anyway.”

“Maybe you can,” Arai said. “We’re not supposed to do the other ships this young, but Taya did.”

“All I need is an older sister who can teach me engineering,” Hitan said. He smiled at me like it was a joke, but there was some jealousy in the smile. I pretended not to notice.

Two days later, I got my placement test results back. I still had a couple of months of other jaunts before I could fit into an Education class, but it was good to know early where I’d be. I figured that all the stuff I’d learned about science would move me up in those areas, at least.

I checked my results.

Math: average for my age. Average? I’d never been average at these kinds of skills before! I mean, if we were still on the Stalwart, sure; those people were supposed to be smarter than me. But average for the Courageous?!

Literacy: well below average.

What? Well below average? I asked the treegrave to repeat the message three times, then thought about how the fact that I was asking for verbal messages instead of reading it myself might be part of the problem. I’d been above average before I’d left! I’d been gone for less than a year! How much learning could possibly have happened when I was gone?

I knew that I was going to fall a bit behind – that is, be less ahead – when I left. I’d planned for it. Every ship we were going to used our language and our writing system, and I’d planned on studying, on teaching myself, on having the historians teach me. And then I just… hadn’t ever gotten started. I’d moped around and played games and learned markball and watched the historians argue with each other and listened to Ella talk about plants. I’d gone swimming and gotten massages. I’d been lazy, and now I wasn’t just stupider than Arai, not even just stupider than Hitan. I was stupider than most nine year olds on the ship. I was well below average.

I should never have left.

I was crying in the family garden when I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder, and looked up at Aunt Shorin. There was paint smeared on one of her cheeks, and concern in her eyes. With her hands, she asked how I was.

It had been a while since I’d needed to use Aunt Shorin’s hand signs, but I was relieved to find that I remembered them perfectly, just like speaking words. I explained the problem, and she sat on the bench next to me and gave me a hug.

She explained that I couldn’t be as far behind as I thought; I had been gone for less than a year. That meant that with a bit of extra work, I should be able to catch up.

I told her that even if I tried to, everyone else would be learning while I was learning, so I might never learn fast enough to get back to where I was.

She said that she knew I was smart and that I would, but that even if I didn’t, that wouldn’t matter. She’d seen plenty of people less literate than me and they’d done just fine. Gamma-ma had barely been able to read better than me when she died, and I still had years and years to learn. She told me that Rose was in special extra Education because she seemed to have trouble with reading, and she would probably be below average her whole life, and it didn’t matter; that’s what auditory messages and pictures and friends who could read better and the treegrave were all for. The standards were way higher for our generation than they usually were because everyone thought that literacy was super important for building colonies, and it was, but not everyone had to be really literate. I would catch up, she said; she knew me and knew that I could do it. But even if I decided not to, or something went wrong, that would still be fine.

I told her that I wasn’t Rose and I wasn’t Gamma-ma. Rose was a beacon of light that made every room better by being in it. Gamma-ma had been wise and kind and always been there to make everyone feel good and safe. And I was supposed to be the smart one.

With firm, clear gestures, Aunt Shorin told me that I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to be anything. I was supposed to be Taya, and whoever Taya was was up to me, not up to what my parents or teachers or friends told me that I should be with their hints and praise and smiles. But if I did choose to become above average at reading again, then she would help me. Then she left.

She came back a few minutes later with a pencil and her sketch pad. She flipped past pages and pages of smooth, machine-produced paper covered in sketches of body parts and poses until she got to a blank page, and then… she started drawing letters.

Now, obviously, words can be drawn by hand. People paint signs or embroider words into clothing all the time. I’ve seen Mum make tallies of things we need to replace, and Aunt Lia label little diagrams of new chip designs with rough, wobbly, half-sketched glyphs. I’ve even repainted signs myself in the workshops on the Stalwart, tracing over the faded glyphs to make brighter, more visible ones.

But I have never seen anybody draw words the way that Aunt Shorin did.

Glyph by glyph, in light, precise strokes, like she was hatching in the shading on rose leaves and petals, the glyphs appeared, quarter by quarter, to make each word; the words appeared, one by one, in a line across the page. It was like watching somebody type with a pencil. I’d written these words myself, on a keyboard in Education, but seeing it done without a computer was like magic.

Which was stupid, because again, people took tallies and stuff all the time. I’d seen pictures of hand-written lists and things from Earth, before we even had keyboards, though none of them were in a language I could read. It shouldn’t be as awe-inspiring as it was.

She tore the message out of her sketchbook and handed it to me. It was very short, leaving plenty of room on the page. It read, “Hello, Taya. How was your day?”

Then she handed me her pencil, and left the garden.

Drawing my reply was hard.

I know how to draw. I’m not great at it, but I’m pretty good, because I have so much practice helping Aunt Shorin. But there’s nothing like drawing glyphs to tell you that you don’t know what glyphs even look like. I could read the basic ones just fine; I could see them and recognise them without any problems. But as I tried to draw out a very simple reply from memory, I realised that half of what I put down looked wrong. I was missing strokes all over the place, or doing them backwards. It was also really messy because I wasn’t used to drawing those types of tiny shapes, but more than that, drawing them made me realise I didn’t know exactly what they looked like. I could read them, I could type them on a keyboard. I couldn’t copy the shapes from memory.

I was able to book a projector room. It was short notice, so I couldn’t get one very close; I had to walk a ways down the hall to get to it. But I found one. I types out my reply, “My day was good,” on the keyboard used to search for media, and copied it down onto the paper. Then I went home, and gave it to Aunt Shorin. And she smiled, and hugged me.

And that became our game. Every morning, I would wake up to a short message from Aunt Shorin. I’d take a pencil and a piece of paper with me throughout the day, and at some point I would write a reply and hand it back. I got better at drawing the glyphs with practice, and I got better at remembering all the little lines with practice, until I needed to copy off keyboards less and less. Sometimes I had to look up how to write new words to say what I wanted to say. Sometimes, I asked Gamma-ma. But I didn’t like talking to her for too long. It was too easy to trigger something that made it obvious that I wasn’t really talking to her. Eventually, I learned how to talk to the treegrave in ways that didn’t pull up any of her at all, and that was easier.

Aunt Shorin’s questions became more complicated and more specific, and sometimes I had to look up words in them, too. My answers became longer and deeper, and a lot faster to write, until I could put down simple answers right after breakfast and only needed to put more work in if I wanted to say something complicated or something with rarer words. When I got bored on my jaunt while someone droned on about stocktaking ship supplies or repairing clothes or whatever, I thought about what I should write.

As my tenth birthday came and went, and my eleventh birthday got closer, I barely even noticed that I was well above average in literacy Education classes until I found myself shuffled into classes with much older kids. This caused a bit of an upset since I was still average at math and just a bit above average in most other knowledge topics, so I was bouncing back and forth depending on what the Education shift was focused on (and there were a lot of Education jaunt shifts as I got closer to eleven, it was more than a third of all jaunt shifts). But that was fine. Aunt Shorin and I were writing each other a quarter of a page each day by then, just talking about random stuff, because there wasn’t that much to say about how our days had gone. I ended up trying to remember stuff from my trip to other ships just so I’d have new things to talk about.

In the back of my mind, of course, was the certainty that we were all in danger from something behind us. Talking about the other ships reminded me of it; I’d gone on that journey to figure it out, and failed.

So I was surprised, relieved, and also kind of annoyed when I figured it out on a perfectly normal jaunt shift on the Courageous. I could’ve just stayed home.

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