Fighting Gravity (4 page)

As with everything, there was a system of seating based on rank and seniority, the two roughly equivalent at the IIC. The seating wasn’t so much assigned as enforced with the weight of tradition. There was a head table with seating for twenty set up on a small rise on the far side of the room. Spreading out from there were the oldest of us down to the youngest.

For the forty of us who were still full-time students, there were four tables, two for the previous group Selected and two for us. We were directed there and instructed to stand in place as the director entered.

He said the blessing, the same as on the transport. There was food in quantities and varieties that still surprised me. And succeeded in distracting me, at least for the rest of the evening, from the cold fear that had settled in my stomach the moment I realized Director Kagawa meant to be rid of me, and the humiliation of the medical exam.

Back in my room, I took Carrie’s drawing out of my pocket and smoothed it onto the adhesive surface above my desk, careful not to tear or wrinkle it. I sat down to record a message. When I entered Ma’s citID I got an error:

Access denied.

I stared at it in disbelief. I tried again.

Access denied.

I entered Carrie’s.

Access denied.

I dashed out of my room and over to Chuck’s. He came to the door in pajamas, his head cocked to the side.

“What’s wrong?”

“I got access denied! For Carrie too.”

He made out the meaning of that breathless jumble and gave me a sad little smile, patting my arm.

“You didn’t know?”

“Know what?”

“We don’t have families anymore,” he said, with a calm matter-of-factness.

“
What
?”

“We’ve got an important job here, gotta have focus and dedication. No distractions. Once we’re adults we can contact them if we want.”

“But I didn’t even get to say goodbye!”

His mouth twisted in good-natured sympathy.

“Yeah. That’s rough.”

I stumbled back to my room without another word, too stunned for anything else.

fg
4

I was awakened in the morning by the bell, and rolled out of my bed and into the shower. Having my own bathroom was a heady luxury, and later as I made my way to the dining hall with the other children I found myself feeling light and carefree in a way I didn’t expect. I found Kirti and, though I didn’t ask her about it, I could see that she’d had a better night.

In the school building, we were grouped by age: the eight, nine, and ten-year-olds in one class, the older children in the other. I would have a lot of catching up to do. Not only because I was the youngest, but because my education so far had been marginal at best.

Dr. Hammond made it clear I was to catch up and keep up in the expected time frame. To do otherwise would result in serious repercussions. I bit my tongue and said nothing.

In truth, I didn’t need to be told to apply myself; it was my enthusiasm that got me into trouble. For the first time in my life, I had teachers who knew more than I did, teachers who could answer any question I could ask. And ask I did. For my trouble, the teachers labeled me disruptive, undisciplined, and hopelessly behind. Some managed to take insult, as if I were questioning their ability to teach.

Some of those things were true, of course. I
was
undisciplined. My questions were disruptive in their frequency and their tendency to wander off on tangents. I wasn’t as far behind the other children as they believed. Oh, I was very behind, but more than once my questions were answered with much more basic information than I’d asked for. They had formed their opinions of me and my level of knowledge and didn’t choose to see past that.

Dr. Frozt, the literature teacher, got fed up that first day and I got three licks of the cane from her. I kept more of my questions to myself after that, but not all of them. My craving for knowledge was far too potent to be squelched by a mere three stripes.

That night, in my room, sitting at my desk, which made my stomach flutter with happiness every time I looked at it, I gorged myself on answers to all the questions I’d come up with that day and then some. I was nodding off when I realized I hadn’t completed my homework, having gone off point far too many times. I struggled through the rest of it and fell into an exhausted, blissful sleep.

I was bleary eyed in the morning, but no less eager. The second day went better than the first. I managed to better channel and focus my thoughts, and to save most of my tangents to research later.

In spite of my efforts, the teachers saw what they wanted to see. I went over the desk three times in the first five days. It was frustrating, infuriating, and of course painful. But there was nothing to be done about it except endure.

It took little effort on my part to carry out my resolve to be an exemplary student, simply because there couldn’t have been a student more eager and appreciative than I was. Still they managed to see and punish every mistake I made and many I didn’t.

I bit my tongue, took my stripes in silence, and moved on.

Kirti was more affected by my undeserved infamy than I was. She cried every time I was punished. I did my best to reassure her that it wasn’t as bad as she thought, but it was quite some time before she was able to bear my punishments in white-faced silence.

In truth, the prejudice, my anger and resentment, were just minor annoyances. The experience of such schooling was like nothing I’d ever known. The only thing I had to compare it to was the stolen hours in a library booth, wallowing in text after text, chasing facts and ideas like butterflies in a field of wildflowers.

This was entirely different, though. Directed, focused, and challenging, with stimulating raw knowledge laid out before me, and answers to questions I hadn’t even thought to ask.

My bottom became very intimate with the cane. But I wouldn’t have given it up for all the universe.

-

If Kirti suffered for me in silence, Chuck seemed to take pride in the way I endured it. But what he accepted as unavoidable from the adults, he wouldn’t stand for among us. It was this attitude that led to the first of our many fights with Sasha.

I suppose the first fight was inevitable. In light of the director’s public opinion of me, Sasha set about goading me at every opportunity. He was easy to ignore at first; I was so absorbed in my experience of the place and my new education that I barely noticed him. But after a couple of weeks it came to a head.

Kirti and I were walking together to our next class when Sasha stepped in front of me and stopped me with a hand on my chest.

“You don’t belong here,” he said. “Why don’t you leave?”

I tried to step around him, seething but highly motivated to avoid trouble. He stepped with me. “Are you deaf too, freak? Besides being stupid?”

“Drop it, Sasha,” Chuck said from behind me. “Leave him alone. If you hate him so much, just avoid him. He didn’t do anything to you.”

Sasha laughed. “Freak’s got a champion.” He towered over Chuck.

Chuck’s punch was too unexpected to be avoided. Sasha staggered back a step but then came barreling toward Chuck, his fist flying. Chuck dodged it but took the next punch in the gut, doubling over. As Sasha went to swing at Chuck again, I crashed my fist into his face. Dr. Laan came rushing out into the hallway and hauled us apart. He dragged Sasha and me to the director’s office by the scruff of our necks, ordering Chuck to follow.

We stood before Director Kagawa’s desk and endured a long, loud scolding. Even when the truth of the story came out, corroborated by Dr. Laan according to what the other children had told him, I was still singled out as the source of the trouble. So when the three of us went over the desk, pants and undershorts around our ankles, I took twice the punishment the other two did. I endured in silence as always. Chuck grunted through clenched teeth after every blow. Sasha blubbered from almost the very first. That alone made the stripes worth taking.

That was not the first of such scenes. Even when the fight stayed between Chuck and Sasha alone, I was still punished alongside them. I hated that Chuck had to defend me when I was quite capable of defending myself. But my hands were tied; my fear—not of the bully or the fight, but of giving Director Kagawa what he needed—was stronger than the guilt.

For Chuck, it was much simpler. I was his friend, He defended his friends. No more complicated than that. I tried to talk him out of it, once, after he’d yet again been caned for fighting my battle. He looked at me as if I’d insisted the atom had never been split.

The trips to the director’s office after a fight weren’t the only times I found myself before—or over—his desk. He requested regular reports from my teachers and when he had a large enough collection of infractions, I would be summoned to his office to be scolded for a list of things I usually hadn’t even done.

“Cheating on a math test,” he said from behind his desk.

“But I wasn’t cheating. I don’t even know why she thought I was.”

“A liar as well,” he said to himself, shaking his head as he looked down at his list again. I bit hard on the inside of my cheek and glared at the floor.

“Calling Sasha names during your exercise period in order to provoke him.”

“But I didn’t say a word to him! He called
me
names.”

He scoffed.

“Late for curfew.”

“That was the night we did the lab in the observatory. We didn’t start until after dark. Most of us were late for curfew.”

He laid his tablet down and placed his hands on the desk in front of him, one over the other.

“Do you know why the unclass exist?” he said.

“No sir.”

“Do you know why, in an empire that has spread peace and justice throughout the galaxy, poverty and lawlessness persist?”

I knew where this was going. “No sir.”

“It is because of you. All of the unclass, each and every one. You live in poverty and squalor because you can’t be bothered to work or to better yourselves. You suffer from crimes and violence because you yourselves commit them. You treat the laws of civilized society as if they were as worthless as you are.”

I shoved my fists into my pockets.

“No unclass has ever been brought to the IIC. Not one in three hundred years. Your intellect may be a genetic anomaly, but it doesn’t change what you are. The proof of that is clear in your sociological scores: propensity to anger and violence, no concept of self-sacrifice and the greater good. All of which is borne out in your behavior here.

“This institution is a shining beacon of all that is good in the Empire. Your presence here is an outrage. You are a stain on our perfection, poison in our well. And until the Committee agrees with me, perhaps I can beat enough wickedness out of you to mitigate your effect on the rest of us.

“Take down your shorts.”

I hated the man with a passion, but each punishment only made me more determined, and more confident. If he had sufficient data to prove his hypothesis, I would already be gone. So no matter how many stripes I carried away from his office, or what insults still rang in my ears, I always left happier than when I had entered. Because I’d won again.

fg
5

Three weeks after we’d arrived, I was sitting in math class. The class before had been physics. Not only were these two of my favorite subjects, but the juxtaposition was exhilarating. The concepts from each subject fed off of the other, inspiring me with questions and ideas.

I was making notes and sketches on my tablet, so lost in the equations flowing across the screen like a music score, interweaving the complex harmonies that had been running through my mind since physics class, that I didn’t even hear Dr. Noh approach. The tablet disappeared from under my hand.

“What is this, Mr. Dawes?” Dr. Noh demanded.

I dropped my head. “Just an idea I had. I was making some notes.”

“Are these the problems you’ve been given to work on?”

I wanted to protest that I
was
paying attention. That’s where I’d gotten the idea to begin with! But instead I answered, “No, ma’am.”

“Get up to the desk, then.”

I shuffled up to her desk, took my three, and went back to my seat. But the real blow, the worst of the punishment, was that my tablet was blank when she handed it back. All my work had been wiped away. I slumped down in my seat and began the problems I’d been assigned.

Determined to do nothing else worthy of censure, I focused on my assignments that night and diverted no time to recreating the work that Dr. Noh had destroyed. Still, it played through my dreams all night and was foremost in my mind all the next day. I wouldn’t allow myself to put down on tablet any of my ideas or questions, afraid of getting caught again, but I saved, collected, and catalogued ideas in my mind.

That evening, I was ordered to report to Dr. Okoro after dinner. Kirti and Chuck looked at me, but I shrugged.

Dr. Okoro was a physics fellow. I found him in his study in the physics wing.

The room only qualified as a study by the very loosest definition. It had the requisite features: a couch and two overstuffed armchairs, a desk and chair, almost none of which were being used for their intended purposes.

On the desk were several large pyrometers, with smaller ones in the chair behind. One armchair held a squat tokamak that was vibrating. The other, set at an angle to the first, was occupied by a vid showing a slide under a microscope, though the slide was empty. A blanket was crumpled up in one corner of the couch. At the other end, a large particle accelerator tilted at a precarious angle into the soft cushion.

There were two long lab tables shoved up against the far wall, covered from end to end with experiments in various stages. Dr. Okoro was seated in front of a table on a tall stool, his back to the door.