Fic(s): Where_No_Woman drabbles, all rated PG or below
I realized recently that I only ever transferred one of these to my journal. They're not drabbles, per se, in that they're all longer than 100 words, but I liked writing them, and they were part of drabblefests.
(Please be aware that the first one, "Pressure and Heat", contains a brief description of attempted rape.)
Pressure and Heat
Prompt: "Please God, make me a stone"
Warning: violence, attempted rape
She is twelve the first time she sees the courtyards of the palace; twelve and gawky, with a hint of grace. She is strong, flat-bellied and flat-chested, but she is twelve and she cannot stop the noise of admiration that escapes from her lips, just as she cannot stop the slap that follows it.
Discretion, Gaila. It is not seemly to be too easily-impressed. When you make a noise, do it for effect.
She nods, and agrees, and looks straight ahead, but she drinks it in anyway - the Courtyard of the Courtesans, where there are statues of the mistresses of kings, carved of marble and accented with gold and obsidian. The sun lights them in reds and ambers. Gaila studies them from the corner of her eye as she follows her teacher to the hall where she will be presented, and echoes their posture.
***
She is fifteen the second time she sees the courtyard; her face is painted, and the earrings and necklace she wears are like those adorning the statue of Konu, mistress to Tet the Second. Her teacher believes that like Konu, Gaila is destined for great things. Gaila has studied the life of Konu, and hopes her teacher is correct.
For the last time, her teacher takes her by the chin and studies the angles of her face, and then nods once, sharply, and abandons her beneath the statue of the woman whose jewelry she is wearing, with several other girls her own age. Throughout the courtyard, similar scenes are taking place - some of the girls are weeping quietly, but Gaila knows it is important to be in control.
Men come and talk with her, and she repeats what she has been told to say. This one is Gaila, she says. I am a dancer, and I can make kah'la beer, and I have been instructed in other arts, though I have not yet practiced them. They nod and look at her appraisingly, and assess her physically. Her breasts are bruised by the time one of them nods twice and makes the appropriate signal. That night, she practices the arts.
***
Gaila is sixteen, and sixteen, and sixteen again when she crosses the courtyard to dance at the festivals of the palace; the man who chose her is a member of the nobility, and likes to show off his things. He likes to share them, too, and the days after, dancing is much more difficult.
It is an honourable thing, to be so prized, but the statue of Konu does not appear to be stiff, and has no bruises. From the courtyard, a few stars can be seen, unhindered by the glow of the lights. She keeps her head lowered properly, but she can see them through her lashes.
***
Gaila is seventeen when her man, still generous, lends her to a friend who has been bemoaning how lonely he will be while he is away from Orion. She is perplexed - it has never been for so long before, and she will miss her sisters in the women's quarters. The friend's craft is small, and she sits in the cockpit with him, in the only other chair, and listens attentively as he describes the many great beasts he has killed, and she makes noises of admiration. He seems to be pleased by this.
She is weary of his stories by the time they land. She offers him beer, and suggests that they retire, as she knows that he will want to give his all to the hunt tomorrow.
He grabs her.
She is on the ground before she knows it, and lets slip a protest - there is no art in this, will he not allow her to perform for him? He cuts her off with his fist - there is blood in her mouth, and something hard rolling around on her tongue, and dimly she realizes that it is one of her teeth. He is scrabbling at her clothes, confused by an unfamiliar fastening, and her hand finds a stone and clenches around it, and with all of her dancer's strength she drives it into his temple. He falls atop her and does not move again.
She runs for the ship. She cannot go back to Orion. The ship's voice speaks to her, and she asks it for somewhere far, and the helm complies. She is nearly out of air when the Vulcans find her, but she still nearly takes the captain's head off with the stone.
Fernweh (Winona)
Prompt: The Germans have a word to describe the chronic affliction many of us suffer from, that insistent urge to be somewhere out there and not here: "Fernweh". It's the opposite of being homesick; instead, it's a pining to be not-home, to be away, way away, because that's where you feel at home.
--Joe Robinson
Her mother always said she had itchy feet, when she came home late and covered in mud, soaked to the skin and grinning like a wild thing. Itchy feet, and not enough sense to come in out of the rain. That's not right, Winona always thought, It's not just my feet. My feet are fine.
The next day, there would be another tree, another stream, another street.
When Winona finally learned to drive and got her license, she spent the money she'd been saving since she was twelve on a car. It was old and the repulsor field didn't always work right, back left corner jouncing constantly, but it was hers and the discomfort was all worth it, to go tearing down back roads, to be able to get up and go further than she'd gone before, all the trees and streams and town streets well-travelled, well-explored, mapped forever like invisible wires on her skin, squeezing. She didn't need to ask her mother anymore when she needed to go. It was glorious.
When she was eighteen, she stood in a geography classroom and gazed at the wall-map of the Earth in modified Mercator projection she'd been staring at all year. It's so big, she thought. Then she turned to the other wall, covered in a centuries-old photograph of the Earth taken from near where Serenity Colony would be, taken by an astronaut whose name escaped her. It's so small, she thought, and the next day she shook off her mother's hand and walked into the Starfleet recruitment office, and told them she was going places.
The day she set foot aboard her first berth, and into the Stellar Cartography lab with its giant window on the stars, she knew she was home. Except when she was on leave, she never had to wake up in the same place twice again. The wires on her skin loosened a little, and the itch beneath it lessened. The ship itself was old, and didn't gleam, but she loved it with every cell of her.
George always understood. He loved their home, and loved his roots, but he loved her and understood that to love a wild thing is to never quite be able to keep it.
Winona loved the open spaceways. She loved her son, and wanted to share them with him when he was old enough; but she'd come home, and he'd misbehaved again, and how could she reward that? Every time before the shuttle landed in Iowa, she'd close her eyes and think, Please, Jimmy, please give me a reason to reward you, but then he'd have failed in school, not showing up for an entire month, or stolen a car, and her heart broke a little, and when leave was over she'd kiss him and get back on the shuttle alone.
The Talent of Women (Uhura)
Prompt: Practically from the moment she'd been able to talk she'd been taught how to listen.
This, says Grandmother, is the talent of women. The girl-child opens her mouth to ask a question, but shuts it at her grandmother's raised eyebrow, and subsides back to her cross-legged position on the floor. Grandmother, she thinks, is very beautiful, with her brightly-coloured necklace and earrings made of shells. Surely Grandmother never wiggles. The girl-child arranges the arch of her neck in imitation of Grandmother's tall carriage. And this, Grandmother continues, is the story of that talent.
A long time ago, when there was no city, when all around here was grasslands and the baobab, Anansi went a-walking. Now, Mistress Anansi was angry with him for he had spilled the soup she had been making for his supper, and put the fire out with it, and Anansi, he'd been told to go away!
Child, if you are about to ask why she didn't replicate more, remember, this was a long time ago. Longer ago than the Egyptian mummies, yes, longer ago than that.
Anansi walked, and he walked, and Nyame the sky-god his father took pity on him and sent rain so that he was not thirsty, and sun so that he was not cold, but the loneliness crawled into Anansi's belly and blew it up tight like a drum. One day, he spied a little girl, just a bit older than you are now, under the tree where Monkey and his family were living. Aha! thought Anansi, I will take this little girl as a wife. Mistress Anansi does not love me anymore, and I will not tell her anyway.
Anasi was clever and tricky. He knew that if he went up to her, she would run. So Anansi, he laid himself down in the grasslands, and he moaned! Oh, he moaned, it hurts! He carried on, saying Oh, I am surely dying! The little girl heard him, and her soft heart made her go to him. Mister Spider, she said, what is wrong?
Oh, said Anansi, I am sick! I have been poisoned, and I need someone to take me to my home and look after me. And he ran up her arm to sit on her shoulder. The little girl, being kind, said that of course she would take him to his home and look after him. But remember, Anansi was tricky. He told her that his home was a secret, and that she would have to wear a cloth tied over her eyes so that she would not see the way, and that he would whisper to her where to go, and so when after days of walking they arrived at one of Anansi's huts, the child did not know where she was.
She looked after Anansi, and Anasi did not spill the soup, and for a time they were happy. But the little girl was after all only a little girl, and she grew to miss her family, her mother and her father and her sisters. They were far away, and she did not know where, and she grew sad.
She told Anansi, and he said that she would get lost if she left.
So the little girl went out before the sunrise, and cried. Nyame saw her crying, and made wind for her. The wind from the North was strong, and carried with it sounds. The little girl listened, and in the wind she heard nothing. Nyame did this twice more, until in the wind from the East the little girl heard the yelling of Monkey and his family greeting the day, and so she set out, following the sound of the wind.
When Anansi woke and found himself alone, he went home to Mistress Anansi, who made him soup for supper and forgave him.
The girl-child recrossed her legs and frowned, and asked what happened to the little girl. Ah, said Grandmother, she grew up, and had children, and taught them to listen. They did many great things, but that is a story for another time.
***
Nyota keeps a file on her personal PADD. It has the sounds of the street outside a little girl's window: the roar of cars, the trumpet of the jazz musician who plays on the street corner, the clinking of glasses from the bar that lies across the way, front windows non-existent, the babble of the neighbour's television, the wind in the skyscrapers at four in the morning when the rest is quiet.
Later, she adds things: the sound of solar wind, the babble of humanity's voice broadcasts.
Gaila finds it and looks puzzled, and asks what it is for.
Nyota says, So I never get lost.
Snow and Raspberries (Madeline)
Prompt: I come from a country without snow and without raspberries.
When Madeline (not actually her name, but as she'd yet to encounter anyone outside of her people who could pronounce her name without choking and turning strange colours, she'd chosen Madeline for now) came to Earth, she knew what to expect. Back in the creche, she had been taught about other cultures, other planets, and she had known on an intellectual level what sort of planet this was. But to be confronted with it! Its people slept in seperate dwellings, and made little to no use of the comforts of bedrock apartments, far from the sun. How lonely to have no clan caverns, to sleep without the touch of one's family on all sides! How exposed!
Earth's sun, she remembered then, was what the humans referred to as a G-type star - small and yellow, with a gentle light. Her first sight of the planet itself confirmed it - there was soil, and forest, and, First Sac be blessed, open water! The images she had seen in creche did not do it justice. The sunlight, even at this distance, made it shine, and it was a colour - blue, she told herself, the word in English is "blue" - that she'd only seen before, faintly, in the light of her own massive sun, so much hotter, so much brighter than this one.
When she landed in San Francisco, she was taken aback by how dim the world seemed, and understood why humans had eyes such as they did, that absorbed all possible light rather than reflecting it safely. They even seemed to use their eyes inside, rather than their noses and ears like the First Queen had intended for her people.
Madeline learned. She learned that her human roommate did not appreciate the pungent bundle of a small root vegetable she had found at a market and thought perfect for hanging inside their room for orientation purposes. She learned, when the humans said that it was winter, that not all places on Earth had this snow she'd heard so much about - imagine, frozen water! - and was bitterly disappointed until her roommate, garlic misunderstanding long resolved, suggested they go and try something called "skiing" in the mountains.
Madeline learned she was not very good at skiing, and that her body, evolved on a sun-blasted rock to dissipate heat, did not adapt well to cold even under many layers of clothing. She learned she liked "hot chocolate" very much, and that the mountains of Colorado finally had air that was not stiflingly thick.
Mostly, though, Madeline learned that vegetable matter on Earth contained water, and was good to eat.
"Look!" she said one day to a startled first-year cadet in with Medical insignia, who was standing next to her at the supermarket. "There's even a way to spread raspberries on BREAD! Do you think it would be good with ice cream?"
"Darlin'," he said, "have you tried a peach pie?"
Guide (Amanda)
Prompt: Make it clear that I am the guide for both worlds.
Amanda is a teacher. She comes by it honestly; her mother was a teacher, and her mother's mother, and both of her uncles. Her aunt is not a teacher; Charlotte was never meant to explain, only to understand, and is frustrated that knowledge does not simply flow into other people's heads like water when she pours it. Amanda knows that, like water, understanding moves through channels, aqueducts constructed brick by brick and given strong foundations, built by teachers who care enough to dig through unstable soil to find bedrock. Only then can it reach its goal, only then can it pour out, splashing and sparkling like fountains in sunlight.
Vulcan is such a dry planet. There are no fountains in its cities. Water flows underground in well-regulated insulated piping, hidden until needed.
Sarek takes her to visit the school where the son who she cannot even feel yet will learn. It is dark and quiet, with puddles of light containing children. Facts, questions, answers, logical progressions all stream across the viewscreens in the studycells - this, then this, then this. She spies Vulcan and English abecedariums with tiny children standing spellbound before them, a soundproofed cell where an older child is performing calculus on a harp, and she feels a little more at home. This is not so different. It lacks something, though, and she tells herself that she will teach her son that A is for apple, and she will teach him that the chaos of Dylan or Anderson is as beautiful and great as the elegant equations governing Bach; she will teach him to fling light around like droplets of water caught midair.
(Please be aware that the first one, "Pressure and Heat", contains a brief description of attempted rape.)
Pressure and Heat
Prompt: "Please God, make me a stone"
Warning: violence, attempted rape
She is twelve the first time she sees the courtyards of the palace; twelve and gawky, with a hint of grace. She is strong, flat-bellied and flat-chested, but she is twelve and she cannot stop the noise of admiration that escapes from her lips, just as she cannot stop the slap that follows it.
Discretion, Gaila. It is not seemly to be too easily-impressed. When you make a noise, do it for effect.
She nods, and agrees, and looks straight ahead, but she drinks it in anyway - the Courtyard of the Courtesans, where there are statues of the mistresses of kings, carved of marble and accented with gold and obsidian. The sun lights them in reds and ambers. Gaila studies them from the corner of her eye as she follows her teacher to the hall where she will be presented, and echoes their posture.
***
She is fifteen the second time she sees the courtyard; her face is painted, and the earrings and necklace she wears are like those adorning the statue of Konu, mistress to Tet the Second. Her teacher believes that like Konu, Gaila is destined for great things. Gaila has studied the life of Konu, and hopes her teacher is correct.
For the last time, her teacher takes her by the chin and studies the angles of her face, and then nods once, sharply, and abandons her beneath the statue of the woman whose jewelry she is wearing, with several other girls her own age. Throughout the courtyard, similar scenes are taking place - some of the girls are weeping quietly, but Gaila knows it is important to be in control.
Men come and talk with her, and she repeats what she has been told to say. This one is Gaila, she says. I am a dancer, and I can make kah'la beer, and I have been instructed in other arts, though I have not yet practiced them. They nod and look at her appraisingly, and assess her physically. Her breasts are bruised by the time one of them nods twice and makes the appropriate signal. That night, she practices the arts.
***
Gaila is sixteen, and sixteen, and sixteen again when she crosses the courtyard to dance at the festivals of the palace; the man who chose her is a member of the nobility, and likes to show off his things. He likes to share them, too, and the days after, dancing is much more difficult.
It is an honourable thing, to be so prized, but the statue of Konu does not appear to be stiff, and has no bruises. From the courtyard, a few stars can be seen, unhindered by the glow of the lights. She keeps her head lowered properly, but she can see them through her lashes.
***
Gaila is seventeen when her man, still generous, lends her to a friend who has been bemoaning how lonely he will be while he is away from Orion. She is perplexed - it has never been for so long before, and she will miss her sisters in the women's quarters. The friend's craft is small, and she sits in the cockpit with him, in the only other chair, and listens attentively as he describes the many great beasts he has killed, and she makes noises of admiration. He seems to be pleased by this.
She is weary of his stories by the time they land. She offers him beer, and suggests that they retire, as she knows that he will want to give his all to the hunt tomorrow.
He grabs her.
She is on the ground before she knows it, and lets slip a protest - there is no art in this, will he not allow her to perform for him? He cuts her off with his fist - there is blood in her mouth, and something hard rolling around on her tongue, and dimly she realizes that it is one of her teeth. He is scrabbling at her clothes, confused by an unfamiliar fastening, and her hand finds a stone and clenches around it, and with all of her dancer's strength she drives it into his temple. He falls atop her and does not move again.
She runs for the ship. She cannot go back to Orion. The ship's voice speaks to her, and she asks it for somewhere far, and the helm complies. She is nearly out of air when the Vulcans find her, but she still nearly takes the captain's head off with the stone.
Fernweh (Winona)
Prompt: The Germans have a word to describe the chronic affliction many of us suffer from, that insistent urge to be somewhere out there and not here: "Fernweh". It's the opposite of being homesick; instead, it's a pining to be not-home, to be away, way away, because that's where you feel at home.
--Joe Robinson
Her mother always said she had itchy feet, when she came home late and covered in mud, soaked to the skin and grinning like a wild thing. Itchy feet, and not enough sense to come in out of the rain. That's not right, Winona always thought, It's not just my feet. My feet are fine.
The next day, there would be another tree, another stream, another street.
When Winona finally learned to drive and got her license, she spent the money she'd been saving since she was twelve on a car. It was old and the repulsor field didn't always work right, back left corner jouncing constantly, but it was hers and the discomfort was all worth it, to go tearing down back roads, to be able to get up and go further than she'd gone before, all the trees and streams and town streets well-travelled, well-explored, mapped forever like invisible wires on her skin, squeezing. She didn't need to ask her mother anymore when she needed to go. It was glorious.
When she was eighteen, she stood in a geography classroom and gazed at the wall-map of the Earth in modified Mercator projection she'd been staring at all year. It's so big, she thought. Then she turned to the other wall, covered in a centuries-old photograph of the Earth taken from near where Serenity Colony would be, taken by an astronaut whose name escaped her. It's so small, she thought, and the next day she shook off her mother's hand and walked into the Starfleet recruitment office, and told them she was going places.
The day she set foot aboard her first berth, and into the Stellar Cartography lab with its giant window on the stars, she knew she was home. Except when she was on leave, she never had to wake up in the same place twice again. The wires on her skin loosened a little, and the itch beneath it lessened. The ship itself was old, and didn't gleam, but she loved it with every cell of her.
George always understood. He loved their home, and loved his roots, but he loved her and understood that to love a wild thing is to never quite be able to keep it.
Winona loved the open spaceways. She loved her son, and wanted to share them with him when he was old enough; but she'd come home, and he'd misbehaved again, and how could she reward that? Every time before the shuttle landed in Iowa, she'd close her eyes and think, Please, Jimmy, please give me a reason to reward you, but then he'd have failed in school, not showing up for an entire month, or stolen a car, and her heart broke a little, and when leave was over she'd kiss him and get back on the shuttle alone.
The Talent of Women (Uhura)
Prompt: Practically from the moment she'd been able to talk she'd been taught how to listen.
This, says Grandmother, is the talent of women. The girl-child opens her mouth to ask a question, but shuts it at her grandmother's raised eyebrow, and subsides back to her cross-legged position on the floor. Grandmother, she thinks, is very beautiful, with her brightly-coloured necklace and earrings made of shells. Surely Grandmother never wiggles. The girl-child arranges the arch of her neck in imitation of Grandmother's tall carriage. And this, Grandmother continues, is the story of that talent.
A long time ago, when there was no city, when all around here was grasslands and the baobab, Anansi went a-walking. Now, Mistress Anansi was angry with him for he had spilled the soup she had been making for his supper, and put the fire out with it, and Anansi, he'd been told to go away!
Child, if you are about to ask why she didn't replicate more, remember, this was a long time ago. Longer ago than the Egyptian mummies, yes, longer ago than that.
Anansi walked, and he walked, and Nyame the sky-god his father took pity on him and sent rain so that he was not thirsty, and sun so that he was not cold, but the loneliness crawled into Anansi's belly and blew it up tight like a drum. One day, he spied a little girl, just a bit older than you are now, under the tree where Monkey and his family were living. Aha! thought Anansi, I will take this little girl as a wife. Mistress Anansi does not love me anymore, and I will not tell her anyway.
Anasi was clever and tricky. He knew that if he went up to her, she would run. So Anansi, he laid himself down in the grasslands, and he moaned! Oh, he moaned, it hurts! He carried on, saying Oh, I am surely dying! The little girl heard him, and her soft heart made her go to him. Mister Spider, she said, what is wrong?
Oh, said Anansi, I am sick! I have been poisoned, and I need someone to take me to my home and look after me. And he ran up her arm to sit on her shoulder. The little girl, being kind, said that of course she would take him to his home and look after him. But remember, Anansi was tricky. He told her that his home was a secret, and that she would have to wear a cloth tied over her eyes so that she would not see the way, and that he would whisper to her where to go, and so when after days of walking they arrived at one of Anansi's huts, the child did not know where she was.
She looked after Anansi, and Anasi did not spill the soup, and for a time they were happy. But the little girl was after all only a little girl, and she grew to miss her family, her mother and her father and her sisters. They were far away, and she did not know where, and she grew sad.
She told Anansi, and he said that she would get lost if she left.
So the little girl went out before the sunrise, and cried. Nyame saw her crying, and made wind for her. The wind from the North was strong, and carried with it sounds. The little girl listened, and in the wind she heard nothing. Nyame did this twice more, until in the wind from the East the little girl heard the yelling of Monkey and his family greeting the day, and so she set out, following the sound of the wind.
When Anansi woke and found himself alone, he went home to Mistress Anansi, who made him soup for supper and forgave him.
The girl-child recrossed her legs and frowned, and asked what happened to the little girl. Ah, said Grandmother, she grew up, and had children, and taught them to listen. They did many great things, but that is a story for another time.
***
Nyota keeps a file on her personal PADD. It has the sounds of the street outside a little girl's window: the roar of cars, the trumpet of the jazz musician who plays on the street corner, the clinking of glasses from the bar that lies across the way, front windows non-existent, the babble of the neighbour's television, the wind in the skyscrapers at four in the morning when the rest is quiet.
Later, she adds things: the sound of solar wind, the babble of humanity's voice broadcasts.
Gaila finds it and looks puzzled, and asks what it is for.
Nyota says, So I never get lost.
Snow and Raspberries (Madeline)
Prompt: I come from a country without snow and without raspberries.
When Madeline (not actually her name, but as she'd yet to encounter anyone outside of her people who could pronounce her name without choking and turning strange colours, she'd chosen Madeline for now) came to Earth, she knew what to expect. Back in the creche, she had been taught about other cultures, other planets, and she had known on an intellectual level what sort of planet this was. But to be confronted with it! Its people slept in seperate dwellings, and made little to no use of the comforts of bedrock apartments, far from the sun. How lonely to have no clan caverns, to sleep without the touch of one's family on all sides! How exposed!
Earth's sun, she remembered then, was what the humans referred to as a G-type star - small and yellow, with a gentle light. Her first sight of the planet itself confirmed it - there was soil, and forest, and, First Sac be blessed, open water! The images she had seen in creche did not do it justice. The sunlight, even at this distance, made it shine, and it was a colour - blue, she told herself, the word in English is "blue" - that she'd only seen before, faintly, in the light of her own massive sun, so much hotter, so much brighter than this one.
When she landed in San Francisco, she was taken aback by how dim the world seemed, and understood why humans had eyes such as they did, that absorbed all possible light rather than reflecting it safely. They even seemed to use their eyes inside, rather than their noses and ears like the First Queen had intended for her people.
Madeline learned. She learned that her human roommate did not appreciate the pungent bundle of a small root vegetable she had found at a market and thought perfect for hanging inside their room for orientation purposes. She learned, when the humans said that it was winter, that not all places on Earth had this snow she'd heard so much about - imagine, frozen water! - and was bitterly disappointed until her roommate, garlic misunderstanding long resolved, suggested they go and try something called "skiing" in the mountains.
Madeline learned she was not very good at skiing, and that her body, evolved on a sun-blasted rock to dissipate heat, did not adapt well to cold even under many layers of clothing. She learned she liked "hot chocolate" very much, and that the mountains of Colorado finally had air that was not stiflingly thick.
Mostly, though, Madeline learned that vegetable matter on Earth contained water, and was good to eat.
"Look!" she said one day to a startled first-year cadet in with Medical insignia, who was standing next to her at the supermarket. "There's even a way to spread raspberries on BREAD! Do you think it would be good with ice cream?"
"Darlin'," he said, "have you tried a peach pie?"
Guide (Amanda)
Prompt: Make it clear that I am the guide for both worlds.
Amanda is a teacher. She comes by it honestly; her mother was a teacher, and her mother's mother, and both of her uncles. Her aunt is not a teacher; Charlotte was never meant to explain, only to understand, and is frustrated that knowledge does not simply flow into other people's heads like water when she pours it. Amanda knows that, like water, understanding moves through channels, aqueducts constructed brick by brick and given strong foundations, built by teachers who care enough to dig through unstable soil to find bedrock. Only then can it reach its goal, only then can it pour out, splashing and sparkling like fountains in sunlight.
Vulcan is such a dry planet. There are no fountains in its cities. Water flows underground in well-regulated insulated piping, hidden until needed.
Sarek takes her to visit the school where the son who she cannot even feel yet will learn. It is dark and quiet, with puddles of light containing children. Facts, questions, answers, logical progressions all stream across the viewscreens in the studycells - this, then this, then this. She spies Vulcan and English abecedariums with tiny children standing spellbound before them, a soundproofed cell where an older child is performing calculus on a harp, and she feels a little more at home. This is not so different. It lacks something, though, and she tells herself that she will teach her son that A is for apple, and she will teach him that the chaos of Dylan or Anderson is as beautiful and great as the elegant equations governing Bach; she will teach him to fling light around like droplets of water caught midair.