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I woke the next day to a near-crazed scrambling. I sat up and looked to Aidann for interpretation, guidance, assistance. Her blankets had been folded. Her shoes were absent. She was gone.
“Aidann?” I called into the maelstrom of preteen girls swarming about and above me. “Aidann!”
“She's on a run,” said a nearby redhead in her Boston accent. “Make your bed'n wash up before Fleuvbleu catches you.”
“When will she be back?”
“Fleuvbleu? Any second! Move!”
“No! Aidann! When will Aidann be back?”
This girl rolled her eyes and disappeared into the crowd. I stood and began shaking out my blankets when I noticed some fabric folded on the floor between where I now stood and where Aidann had slept. I bent over to inspect and found my own uniform of pants and top and sandals. Looking around, I saw my Naomi-mates changing freely without searching for discreet dressing areas. Self-conscious, I changed into the clothing that had been left for me—what I would learn to call “salawar kameez.” It was comfortable enough, but I had to roll up the cuffs of both the pants and the top.
I crumpled my traveling documents into my bag's carcass and placed it all under my hastily folded blankets. Then I got in line—crowd, rather—behind one of the sinks scattered along the walls of the room. At my turn, I stepped to and stuck my hands under the faucet. No water poured forth.
“The sensor is broken,” I muttered.
“You have to turn the faucet on,” a girl behind me said.
“Newbies,” someone else muttered.
I pulled then twisted the knobs on top of the spigots, and some water trickled out. I splashed it across my face and hands, turned the water off, and wiped dry as best I could with the well-used towel draped to the left of the basin.
Then my day began.
A dissonant tone rang throughout our sleeping area, and the girls formed three lines of graduating length. I stared blankly at this evolution of order from chaos.
“Oy, newbie!” A tall girl called to me. “Newbies're Woahpehs.”
I shook my head in bewilderment at her accent. “Whoppers?”
“Woah-pehs! Ovah theeah!” She shouted, jerking her chin at the shortest line, populated with the smallest of the girls. Not knowing what else to do, I hurried to the back of this line as fast as my sandal-shod feet could carry me. I focused on the black pigtails of the girl in front of me and moved forward with the line, out into the courtyard.
We marched out onto the gravel. Several women, including Mademoiselle Fleuvbleu, clapped their hands, and we quickened our steps. Moving with my line, I looked to the sky. There was no blue, just muggy clouds. Strained sunlight pinched my eyes. I looked away and again noticed the well-secured “vault,” which looked even more curious in daylight. I would have continued wondering at it had my line not continued past it across the courtyard, back into the building, up to the third floor dojo.
Our line was the last to pour into the dojo, the last to place our shoes neatly against the wall. I followed my linemates to the edge of the thick mat covering most of the floor—the mat on which all the older girls were now arranging themselves in the same grid they had formed the previous night, a few spots left empty.
We “woah-pehs” walked shoulder to shoulder and pointed our toes at the mat's edge. Facing Fleuvbleu-san at the front of the room, I copied the other girls' carefully executed bow. Fleuvbleu-san acknowledged with a shallower bow of her own, and we proceeded to step onto the mat. With a chin-jerk, Fleuvbleu pointed me to the position at the far-right end of the very last row. I knelt and bowed my head just like the others.
Fleuvbleu began speaking in Japanese, pacing across the front of the room, slowing each time she passed the picture of Mrs. Brock-Woolthersham. Fleuvbleu droned on for what felt like three days but was probably only forty-five minutes. Since I had no hope of understanding her “guided meditation,” I let my eyes wander. I noticed that the grid space Aidann had taken last night was empty.
My knees began to hurt. I fidgeted, trying to become more comfortable. Fleuvbleu-san narrowed her eyes at me, and I straightened up. Just as she looked ready to snap at me, I noticed that everyone else had their eyes closed. I squeezed my lids shut and dropped my chin to my collarbone. Fleuvbleu nattered on for another span, during which several stomachs in the room, including my own, growled loudly enough to be heard above our sensei's filibustering.
Then, just as I thought my legs would fall into a death-sleep, Fleuvbleu shut up. A tall girl at the front of the room shouted something. All around me remained kneeling and bowed at the waist, foreheads touching the mat. I copied them. Then I stood with them and waited at attention as each line formed once more, mine being the last to leave the tatami, don footwear and march back downstairs into the courtyard.
Our lines threaded themselves through a new door, this one leading into the refectory. Inside the threshold, a short, stout woman with nut-brown skin and black hair stood at a small table. On the table was a tall aluminum pot filled with faintly steaming slop. In turn, the woman took one of the crockery bowls stacked at her right, dipped it into the pot and handed it to the next girl in line.
I will never forget the scent that emanated from that first bowl, for it was a smell with which I was to become well acquainted over the next decade. Have you ever found an ashtray that has been sitting through the five hot, humid days following a rainstorm? That's what breakfast smelled like. My stomach growled anyway, long since having processed Bhenji Nealingson's flatbread from the previous night.
Grimacing, I took my bowl and followed the “Woah-pahs” to the corner of the room closest to the hearth, where the cooking fire further burnt a second pot of slop. We sat on the floor, but the teachers had chairs and a slab table at the front of the room, in a position reminiscent of where Mrs. Brock-Woolthersham's picture had hung in the dojo. There were no windows, so no ventilation or natural light. A single magnesium-cell bulb installed in the low ceiling provided what illumination was not shed by the kitchen fire.
I observed the girls around me and noticed that no one was eating, so I waited, too. Two middle-sized girls wobbled up to the teachers' table and served tea. Completion of this courtesy gave the rest of us implicit permission to eat.
Following the lead of those around me, I stopped waiting for a spoon and started to lift the foul-smelling bowl to my lips. I nearly gagged at the odor, but my stomach clamored for some kind of nutrition. Pinching my nostrils shut with one hand and holding the bowl with the other, I took a sip. This gruel was thin, murky, barely warm anymore, and contained grains of the skinniest rice I'd ever seen, lacking the rich ivory color I'd come to expect from exotic “foreign” rice. I swallowed. It tasted like stale tar.
“Eugh!” One of the older girls cried, “Bugs again!”
This was followed by miserable groans from the students and half-hearted scoldings from only three of the teachers; the rest were busy turning up their own noses. I poked at my own bowl. At sight of the first scaly carcass, my appetite finally turned.
The end of “breakfast time,” if it could be called such, was signaled when the teachers stood from their tables and began to gather us girls. I watched Fleuvbleu, afraid she would approach our group, but she did not, instead going to the oldest girls. “Runners!” she called them, snapping them to attention and marching them outside.
“Crypters!” another teacher cried, clapping her hands together smartly. The middle-sized girls stood and followed her out of the refectory.
“Warpers!” Another woman shouted, and I turned to where she stood at the end of the table farthest from where I sat. This teacher had frizzled blond hair and dirt-blushed cheeks. “Let's go!”
I stood with my tablemates and followed her—Bhenji Roth the girls called her—through a door that led out of the dining room into a deeper part of the building. We marched down a dark, oppressive stairwell into a basement room, junked wall to wall with behemoths of wood and wire. Racks of spools and bolts of thread were heaped all along the room's perimeter, which could not have been more than sixteen feet per side.
“What are those?” I asked of no one in particular.
“Looms,” said the girl in front of me, her gray eyes wide and luminous in the dim light, somehow made brighter in contrast to her deep brown skin. “Warpers first. Crypters next.”
Warpers, crypters, runners. I did not have a chance to try to make sense of this, because Bhenji Roth was beckoning me over to her, to an empty loom. She sat me at its bench. “American?” she asked.
Still American. I thought of Aidann and nodded.
Bhenji Roth pointed me through the anatomy of the loom. “Treadles. Harnesses. These wire things—heddles. Beater. Reed. You don't pick your reed, a crypter tells you what rez to use. Castle. Warp beam. Back beam. Brake release—be careful with this, or you'll be sorry. This thing's a shuttle, but you won't be using this for a few days.”
The lesson went on while the noise in the room became a hushed, intense tapping, whooshing and beating, as all the other warpers set upon their looms to begin work left from yesterday.
Bhenji Roth put me in front of a pegboard and told me to wind warp for a twenty-five by twenty-five inch plainweave with a sixteen ends-per-inch resolution. When I stared at the pegboard in bewilderment for thirty seconds, Bhenji Roth grumbled something, wiped the sweat off of her forehead with her sleeve, then sat me down at a little table in the corner by a spool of flax about my height. She pulled a beaten-up HandRight from the purse that hung by her side and began to show me how to calculate warp length (taking into account the extra five centimeters at each end needed to tie down each warp), and how many passes of the pegboard I would need to make.
After twenty minutes of many math mistakes on my part, and much agony for poor Bhenji Roth, I finally was winding the thread from the big spool onto the twists and turns of a pegboard. When she had me pull the warp onto the sley-sticks, I told her they reminded me of chopsticks picking up lo-mein. Unamused, Bhenji Roth pushed me to an empty loom, and before I knew it I was sleying the reed: poking countless little threads through countless little dents in what looked like a metal comb with all its teeth capped between two wooden sticks.
“Tie-up,” Bhenji Roth said, and she began showing me how to thread the warp through the heddles, in what she called a “1-2-3-4.” First thread goes through a heddle on harness number one, second thread through harness two, and so on, repeating until each thread has been pushed through the appropriate heddle. “Standard,” Bhenji Roth explained. “Newbies always start with standard tie-up.”
Between tie-up and tie-down, my brain was starting to feel like how my breakfast had looked. The lack of ventilation and light was no help. My new outfit was now soaked with sweat, and my mouth was becoming drier than the cheapest soyberry bar.
“Why aren't there any windows in this place?” I asked Bhenji Roth.
She blinked blank-faced at my question. “For the confidentiality of our customers, of course.”
“What customers?”
She tapped impatiently on the loom's castle. “That warp isn't going to tie itself!”
After I pushed the rest of the ends through the correct heddles, one two three four, one two three four, she showed me how to secure the ends to the warp beam anchor threads with larkshead knots.
“I need to check the others' work now,” Roth told me. She tapped the shoulder of the girl at the loom in front of me. “Pam, help wind.”
Pam rose from her bench and took the crank at the back beam. She was a full head taller than me, had short mousy hair and buckteeth. With her lisp and thick New York accent, she coached me through rolling thin scrap fabric over the warp to keep it from tangling and to keep the tension even.
Just as she was kneeling in the dirt, showing me how to hook the treadles to the harnesses, the door at the top of the stairs opened, puffing in some cooler air from above. A collective sigh of relief issued from my classmates. I followed Pam and all the others in a noisy horde up the stairs, through the hall and out into the courtyard. We immediately scurried over to the well I had seen the night before, but apparently we were in the middle of a Naomi-wide class-change, because the biggest girls, the runners, blocked our access.
The other warpers began fighting towards the water. I remembered Aidann's advice about elbows and began jabbing at the rib cages that stood between fresh water and me. I took advantage of my lack of stature, alternately jabbing, ducking and crawling through the crust of runners formed around the well, until at last I was chin-up against the well stones, climbing them to reach for the bucket being passed around from mouth to thirsty mouth. I forgot about sanitation as my hands grasped the gray plastic bucket, lifting it to my lips, taking several deep gulps before it was torn from me.
Then someone indignantly shouted, “Newbie!” I was grabbed by the shoulders and thrown high in the air, landing hard with an “ooph!” in the dirt outside the crowd. I decided that next time I would need another method to get through the older girls, since their strength was so much greater than mine.
I would begin learning just such methods at my next stop as a warper—the dojo. By this time I knew to remove my footwear upon entry, to bow to Fleuvbleu-san for permission to take my place at the back of the room, kneeling, head bowed, eyes closed. What followed was to be the most grueling workout I'd ever experienced—nothing like square dancing in Mr. Rohm's gym class.
Fleuvbleu-san had us stretching every muscle and tendon we had and some we didn't. I could not keep up with their exercises. I could just manage to touch my toes while bending forward at the waist, much less touch my toes to the back of my head! By the end of this session, not only was I terribly thirsty and sweaty again, but I felt as if I were an elastic band that had been pulled past its limits until its fibers broke and lost all retractile abilities.
When Fleuvbleu-san dismissed us for a well break, my legs seemed to flop back and forth with each step down the stairs, and my arms felt apeishly long. We warpers had the well to ourselves, and after this brief respite, we were sent to wash the breakfast dishes. After that, we returned to the dojo.
I then learned how to fall.
“Remember water, girls,” Fleuvbleu-san said in English, presumably for my benefit, “Water is the weakest thing in nature, but think of how it wears away even the stone with its gentleness and persistence. Recall how it feeds rich and poor alike. Ukemi—fall. Kaiten—roll. Water falls and rolls and never resists. We must be as fresh and pure as water, little sisters. No matter how much you fight with it, even when washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, nothing can hurt water.”
We were split into small groups of three and four to practice. Zenpo kaiten. Mae ukemi. Yoko ukemi. I hit the tatami stiffly with each fall, compounding the bruises I'd received earlier when thrown from the well by the runners. I was grateful when Fleuvbleu-san shouted something in Japanese, and my classmates returned to stand at their places on the tatami. Our sensei led us through a cool-down, and with a final rei, we were dismissed again.
Back down the stairs, back to the well long enough to get another drink and to notice that the sun had slipped far from its zenith. Then we stampeded back upstairs, this time to the second floor. There I came upon the first room I'd entered that day that resembled a classroom from back home. There were three major differences, though.
First: again, no windows.
Second: there was no pressboard at the front of the room on which the teacher would write our lessons and assignments. Instead, the front of the room was adorned with a rainbow-stained dry erase board older than Mrs. Van Deer.
Third, the school desks did not have slatescreen tops like back in California, no spaces underneath for students' HandRights. On the contrary, their pitched, rickety plastic tops held thin white sheets of pressed wood pulp—paper, I realized, stacked into inch-high piles, primly topped with odd styluses that looked familiar. These were yellow on the outside, bare wood at the very top and tipped with a black point. A tiny metal cuff at the opposite end presented a nub of pink rubber.
I'd seen those things before in history class acties, namely Cold War School Child Experience.
“Pencils?” I whispered to myself.
“Take your seats, little sisters,” Bhenji Nealingson said, smiling like an imp. “I have a surprise for all of you.”
Someone hopeful shouted, “Food?”
Our teacher's smile all but gave it away. “It may be, if you will take your seats as asked.”
The mere thought of food was enough to make my belly ripple in hope. We all darted for the chairs. I took one at the back.
“When I returned from my meeting this morning,” she said, “I heard that this morning's breakfast had been a challenge.”
Bhenji Nealingson reached behind her desk and produced a bag of glorious red apples. It could have been chocolate bars, from the collective squeal of joy we scholars gave.
Our headmistress mock-scowled. “Any girl not sitting with her hands folded on her desk will not receive an apple.”
Oh, how quickly we obeyed. By some miracle of kindness, Bhenji Nealingson brought the bag to the absolute back of the room and began her distribution by giving me the very first apple, thus winning my undying devotion. The apples were shared out evenly, the extras put aside for the teachers and any runners who might return that evening.
Next, Bhenji Nealingson issued an assignment to the other girls in a language I would learn later, and then she motioned me to join her at her desk. I thought I was in trouble, but she smiled at me, offering me her seat. She knelt by my side and pulled a thick piece of roughly woven wool out of a desk drawer.
“Jane, tell me,” she asked in English, her voice hushed so as not to disturb the other students, “do you know what binary numbers are?”
I fidgeted in the too-big chair, feet dangling. “I read about them in my encyclopedia at—” Even that young, I stopped myself from saying “home.” “I didn't understand it, though, so I don't know how to use them.”
Bhenji Nealingson smiled. “Excellent.”
My jaw dropped. “But I just told you I don't know anything!”
“Not at all,” she said, shaking her head so her glossy black braid slid over her shoulder. “You just told me that you're smart enough to know what you don't know.”
I could see she was trying to make me feel better, but still I was nervous. On a guilty whisper, I admitted, “Clint says girls aren't good at math.”
My teacher frowned. “Who is Clint?” Before I could answer, though, she said, “Never mind. If that's Clint's attitude, we don't need to spare even a second speaking of him—Clint was a boy, yes?”
I nodded.
Pursing her lips in annoyance, she sighed through her nose. “He is male, and we are female. Think of it this way: generations of humans have learned speech simply by sitting at the feet of their mothers.”
Then how did I learn to talk? I almost asked, but I didn't want to interrupt and thus anger my only present ally.
“We are hardwired for communication,” she continued, absently fingering the piece of cloth she'd brought forth, “and numbers are just another language.”
That's when I learned that if we students did not want to continue working in Bhenji Nealingson's class, we just needed to suggest a discussion on world cultures. Then, bits and sums, memory and code drills would fade in the face of the fascinating commonalties between the Thai “wai” and the “namaste” she and Aidann used.
“And even in each language,” Bhenji Nealingson said, dreamily perching on the edge of her desk, “the same function—a greeting, let's say—usually has different meaning. 'Connotations' they are called in English. Just as each mathematical base has its own world, each culture has its own world as well. Greetings, for example. Rwandans greet each other with 'Muraho,' meaning 'It's been a while.' The standard Filipino greeting is 'Kumain ka na ba?' Translation: 'Have you eaten?' They sound different from your English 'Hi,' but all perform the same function...”
She then noticed that I was still holding the square of cloth, and she clasped her hands together with purpose before kneeling beside me once more.
“I remember,” I said, hoping to impress her, “from the encyclopedia, that a regular number can be turned into a bunch of ones and zeroes.”
“See? You already know much after all! Now, look at the fabric you're holding. Hold up the right side—the more colorful side.” I obeyed, and she began tracing the thick threads with her fingernail. “The threads that run east-west are called 'weft.' Those that run north-south are 'warp,' as I'm sure Bhenji Roth taught you already. Can you feel with your fingers how the weft threads go up, down, up, down?”
I could, of course.
“Now, then,” she continued, “instead of thinking 'up, down, up, down,' think 'one, zero, one, zero.”
“The threads mean numbers?”
“Yes, excellent!” Her eyes sparkled with approval. “The threads mean numbers, the numbers mean letters, the letters mean words, and the words mean messages.”
“But why don't we just write the messages?” I asked.
Here, my teacher's expression grew distant, just for a moment, in such a way that I felt both sadness for her and a chill for myself.
“Girls,” Bhenji Nealingson called to the class.
Every girl looked up from her work.
“Why do we weave messages instead of writing them?”
Taking the cue from our teacher to use English again for my yet uneducated benefit, every girl answered in well-practiced, rhythmic monotone:
“For the confidentiality of our customers, of course.”
When the class change tone sounded, two of the girls began “to collect the papers,” carrying all the scraps we had used in our calculations out of the classroom in a pair of reed baskets. Then Bhenji Nealingson dismissed us for the evening meal. As we reentered the refectory, I saw our papers being fed into the hearth's gaping maw.
“Why?” I, pointing, whispered to a girl next to me.
“For the confidentiality of our customers, of course,” she answered in a tone meant for a perfect idiot.
Dinner, of course, consisted of leftover slop, now colder, more burnt, and no less infested.
“Many cultures eat insects,” Bhenji Nealingson announced to strengthen our spirits. “They are excellent sources of protein.”
Everyone groaned at this, even the other teachers. But desperation is a potent seasoning, and we ate our slop under the room's stingy light. Then we were led sleepily back up to the dojo for evening meditation. This night, Bhenji Roth was our leader. To a collective sigh of relief, she declared time for silent contemplation.
I looked around the room several times to see if Aidann had returned. She had not. As the third girl began to snore, Bhenji Roth closed the HandRight from which she had been reading and dismissed us. With one last rie to our teachers, we left the tatami, re-shoed our feet, and returned to the huge sleeping room. We fought each other for sink time, changed into the nightclothes given each of us by the Naomi Foundation, then fell into our beds for exhausted and dreamless sleep.
The days to follow were so much the same that they lost their names and dates. I did suffer some initial adjustment problems, the worst of which included a few days of digestive distress caused by the water, the meals we were fed, or both. On the bright side, that was the best way to learn all the compound's bathroom locations.
I soon fell into the routine of the Naomi warpers: wake, dress, wash, meditate, eat (or go hungry, depending on the desperation level), warp, drink, chores/dojo/chores in the dojo, drink, class, eat (or not), meditate, collapse. I was still young enough that, with careful listening (doubly prodded by the need to communicate in order to survive), I absorbed the languages being used around me: Punjabi, Japanese, French, Mandarin, German, smatterings of Portugese. In Bhenji Nealingson's class I learned memory games, cultures, languages, and how to turn numbers into language. In the dojo, I learned how to fall, to roll, to fight by not fighting—what Naomi called musumegokoro-do. In the basement sweatshop, I learned how to turn messages into numbers into cloth. My first fabric scroll was the one thing all Naomi girls must learn to weave: my ASCII name. Such was my first Naomi scroll, in a variety of patterns and colors: a sampler of low-tech, harmless-looking, easily transportable, undetectable-by-skyport-security-archwire, practically non-phreakable data transfer.
For the confidentiality of our customers, of course.
One night after I had been at Naomi for about three months, as dinner was winding down, Bhenji Nealingson stood to make an announcement.
“I spoke with Dr. Woolthersham today—”
“Exams?” squeaked one of the more easily excitable warpers. Anticipation rippled through the room.
Bhenji Nealingson continued, “Dr. Woolthersham himself will be here in five days. At that time, he will conduct exams for any girls interested in advancing a level. Warpers who have been here for more than six weeks are eligible to take the crypters exam. Crypters who have been here for more than one year can take the runners exam. Runners over the age of eighteen can request outside work. This evening after meditation, the teachers and I will discuss recommending students for exams. The list will be posted sometime tomorrow morning after meditation.”
As we readied for sleep that night, we were all abuzz. Who would be on the list? Definitely that crypter Lynn, who had just made blue belt and could flip Fleuvbleu like a grouchy omelet. And Deena, whose loom was three south and two east from mine in the sweatshop, was a shoo-in; she'd failed the last exam six months ago, but she'd been drilling her memory tables, much to the praise of Bhenji Nealingson.
And me? The other warpers seemed divided as to whether or not I'd be on the list. Only Chiara was newer than I, but already I was the fastest warp in the sweatshop. Then again, if I had a thousand perks units for every time Fleuvbleu-san reminded me to be like water, not rock, I could have bought my way out of Naomi.
Sleep that night was anxious and light. The next morning, poor Bhenji Roth had her hands full with getting us to focus on our looms. At class-change, we bolted up the stairs, nearly crushing each other in our eagerness. Only the least hopeful of our numbers stopped at the well, but Bhenji Roth shouted at us in her hoarse voice to take our drinks, or Bhenji Fleuvbleu would let us waste away—just punishment for dehydrating ourselves. We fought with the runners for water, unsuccessfully tried to get spoilers for the list from them, and then dashed up to the dojo.
I was not the fastest, so I was towards the back of the crowd around the list, a banner woven in thick, coarse twine for easy reading. This was done on purpose: if you can't read Naomi code, you can't read the list. But I knew more than just my ASCII signature. I wrestled my way through the alternately rejoicing or disappointed girls to reach for the list. I touched the fabric and digested the translation. There, third row from the top, the warp and weft clearly read: E JANE
At first I was elated. I'd made it! The teachers thought that highly of my progress, and so early in my stay, too. Then, panic struck. I pulled a more experienced girl aside, demanding, “What's the exam like?”
Her eyes were wide and luminous with test anxiety. “Woolthersham makes you weave a contract.”
“A contract? What contract?”
“Like the contracts the crypters weave for the customers. He doesn't use real contracts for exam, duh. No collateral or anything. Pretty short and simple. Exam just shows you know your translations and warp. But you gotta know your tables, see?”
She meant translation tables, memory tables—we had to have good memories. But before I could ask more questions, Fleuvbleu-san arrived, inquiring in her wire-sharp voice as to why we were dawdling like giggling water buffalo when there was work to be done. She hurried us, shouting, “Jirijiri!”
ˆˇˆˇˆˇˆ
Bhenji Nealingson did drill us warpers late at night after meditation, crowding the six of us into her office, serving us steaming cups of sweet chai. Evening was the only time she could give us: she took cultural nuances, obscure languages and geographical minutiae with the crypters before breakfast. She skipped dinner to help the runners prepare for their own exams.
As day five dawned, Bhenji Nealingson arrived at breakfast with thick shadows beneath her eyes. Still, her braid had a cheerful gloss, and her aqua salawar kameez was fresh and flowing as an ocean breeze. Here she gave a word of encouragement to a trembling warper, there she shared a joke about potatoes with a nervous Russian runner.
After breakfast we began our usual schedule. Trinetta, the first of my group to descend the sweatshop stairs, gasped as if someone had shot her. “Namaste, Dr. Woolthersham-ji,” she mumbled, and I felt anxious, curious, desperate to please.
“Namaste, Dr. Woolthersham-ji,” each of us said, infusing as much respect into our greetings as possible when we reached the bottom of the steps and saw the tall, pinched and pointy man in the flesh.
“Looms!” Bhenji Roth commanded, shooing us to our places with fluttering fingers.
When the last preteen bum found the last bench, Dr. Woolthersham began to pace in front of the room, wearing a path between us and the equipment lining the wall. Bhenji Roth stood in a corner, wringing her hands.
I examined Dr. Woolthersham. He was wearing the same slick, pinchcollared suit he had worn during that call in Mrs. VanDeer's living room. And if his projection alone had seemed imposingly tall across miles of optics, in real life he seemed even taller. Sitting near the back of the sweatshop, I still had to crane my neck to see his narrow, disdainful eyes peering at us over his inverted Space Needle of a nose. When Dr. Woolthersham spoke, it sent a shockwave through the student body, absorbed by the insulation of thread and wood hung against the clay basement walls.
“Examinees,” he thundered, “come forward.”
Taking a blink of time to master our fears, the six of us stood and shuddered our way to the front of the room. I looked to Bhenji Roth for the kind of encouraging smile that, had she been here with us, Bhenji Nealingson would have provided. Instead, Bhenji Roth trembled at Dr. Woolthersham.
“You,” Woolthersham said, rudely pointing a knotty finger.
“Yes, Doctor-ji,” the first girl answered, bobbing her head over folded hands.
Woolthersham then pronounced her assignment, the details of which I could not hear over the white noise of dread against my eardrums. The same thing happened when Woolthersham barked specs to the next girl, who looked like she was about to use her kameeze for a restroom.
“You!” Woolthersham said, his finger training on me.
I took another step forward. “Yes, Doctor-ji.”
“Resolution: sixty-four EPI. Herringbone. Sixteen inches square. Matching warp and weft, neutral shade. Done in one hour. Go.”
Sixty-four EPI? That dense in only one hour? But only sixteen inches, and no crypting to speak of. Tough, but not impossible—not for the fastest warp in the sweatshop. I ran for the wall, searching for the right thread. I found a nice, light-gauge ecru, gathered the spool in my arms, dashed for the nearest pegboard, and—
The whole room behind me gasped in horror.
What had I done? I turned, arms still wrapped around the spool. Dr. Woolthersham was closing in on me like a hawk on a mouse. Another girl stood back in his wake, openmouthed that her exam assignment had been cut off by my mistake. I clutched the spool and faced Dr. Woolthersham.
He reached down and ripped the spool from my grip. The spool tumbled to the floor, rolling loose in the dust.
“WHAT COLOR THREAD DID I TELL YOU TO USE?” Woolthersham screamed at me.
“A neutral color, sir!” My voice quaked. “That's why I picked beige thread, sir!”
“Beige thread?” he asked, incredulous, whirling about to kick the spool with the sharp-tipped toe of his boot. “BEIGE THREAD! You mean to tell me that you think this obviously pink filament is the NEUTRAL color I requested?”
I looked from Woolthersham to the unraveling yarn; it was beige, wasn't it? I then looked back to Woolthersham, speechless. I didn't know what to say. What was wrong with me?
Dr. Woolthersham's eyes narrowed at me, like the sights of a binocular flamethrower fixing on a target. “You're that upstart from California, aren't you? That unclaimed embryo. The one who never should have been born?”
I could not even nod.
I didn't think his eyes could narrow any further, but Dr. Woolthersham surprised me once more. Still glaring at me, he ordered all the other girls, “Upstairs, to the courtyard.” When his command was answered by confused silence, he barked, “NOW!”
In a flurry of benches scraping back, sandals slapping against clay, they made for the stairs. Over this static, Dr. Woolthersham shouted to their retreating backs, “And assemble the rest of the girls in the courtyard as well!”
His hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I cried out in fright. He bent close to my ear. “You. Come with me.”
Woolthersham dragged me up the stairs, yanking me along at the heels of the last warpers fleeing the sweatshop. We emerged in the squint-inducing light of another Punjabi midmorning. Woolthersham pulled me along until we reached the well. There, he flung me face-first into the courtyard dirt.
I wiped the grime from my mouth with my sleeve. Bhenji Nealingson had just arrived, leading the crypters from her classroom into the courtyard. The runners, led by Fleuvbleu, were right behind them. All the Naomi girls gathered around, whispering to each other in apprehensive curiosity.
“Nealingson!” Woolthersham snapped.
“Doctor Woolthersham-ji, what a pleasure to—”
“No formalities, Nealingson. Have your girls set this runt on the well wall so everyone can see her.”
After a stunned millisecond, Bhenji Nealingson nodded to two of the tallest, strongest runners, who came forth and lifted me to the edge of the well. I tottered there for a second, and my heart contracted at the thought that Woolthersham meant to push me in, there to drown, as a lesson to warn the other against... against what?
Woolthersham paced before me, his skinny shoulders caved forward at sharp angles. The Naomi girls' anticipatory murmuring only waxed as Woolthersham composed his thoughts.
Then he turned on the crowd. “SILENCE!”
Eyes widened and mouths shut.
Pacing, shaking his finger at me, Woolthersham began to preach. “Girls, I want you to study this. I want this to be a reminder to you. Every time you see her, I want you to think of what I am about to tell you. This girl, we have just discovered, is—I can barely bring myself to say it...”
Woolthersham trailed off, and pressed an ice-white handkerchief to his sweating brow. I looked to Bhenji Nealingson. She was frowning, anxious. I swallowed and straightened my spine, spreading my feet a few inches apart for better balance.
“This girl,” Woolthersham said when he was able to continue, “this girl—is—COLORBLIND!”
The last word rang out in the quiet of the courtyard like a bullet striking a window. The other girls exchanged confused looks.
“Most of you don't even know what colorblindness is,” Woolthersham said. “Today, such defects have been eradicated in all but the most backward societies. But I know there is a reason this has a last vestige of hereditary imperfection.
“One day, if you live long enough, all you girls will be women. Each of you has the choice whether or not to bring life into this world. And I want this thing here to be a reminder to consider your choices carefully. More importantly, consider the power you have to keep mistakes like this from being inflicted upon our already troubled world.
“This was a mistake. She never should have been born. She was left behind, an unclaimed embryo, most likely because her biological parents realized what a failure it is to reproduce capriciously. If her mother had been less selfish and had kept this mistake from happening, then none of you ever would have heard of the tragedy called 'colorblindness.'“
Woolthersham stopped pacing the dust. He lowered his gaze at me but continued addressing his audience. “I want this reminder to remain here until sunset. Then, each time you come to this well to satisfy one biological urge, you may think of the dangers of another.”
The man would have done better to have me beaten with clubs and thrown out into the vacuum of space. Again, I searched Bhenji Nealingson's face for assistance, for hope. Her delicate eyebrows formed two straight, angry lines, and her mouth was set like cement. Her eyes first shone at me with pity. Then she glared at Woolthersham, standing straight and tall as he approached her.
He grumbled at her just loudly enough for me to hear: “And don't let her down until that sun sets. I have my ways of watching, you know. There's nothing to stop me from making them all suffer if you baby this one.”
Pulling his coat around his craggy steel tower of a frame, Dr. Woolthersham pivoted on his heel and strode out of the courtyard toward the streetside exit. Over his shoulder he said, “You can also thank Jane E for canceling your exams.”
A burble of disappointed protest rose at Woolthersham's farewell, but Bhenji Nealingson cut it off with a sharp gesture. She lifted her ear to listen for the doctor's definite departure, as I scanned the crowd for their reaction. All their eyes were fixed on me, burning with hatred. Tears stung my cheeks, and my breath came in gasps.
Far inside the Naomi building, we heard the front door slam shut. Bhenji Nealingson looked at me with apology in her eyes before she lowered her glance to her watch.
In spite of the hushed mumbles of the others, she approached me and held her hand out to me. “He said you had to stay here,” she said, “but he did not say you had to stand.”
I placed my icy hand in hers, and she helped me set my feet on the ground. She turned to the assembly. “It is time for the next class, little sisters. Take your drinks and go.”
Then all the girls were about me, crushing me against the wall, jabbing me with their elbows and stepping on my toes—ostensibly to get a drink, but this also served their cathartic purposes, seeing how my defectiveness had ruined everyone's hopes for the next who knew how many months. This went on for several minutes before the teachers ordered them to hurry, time was wasting, did they want to ruin the rest of the day?
The courtyard cleared. Quiet prevailed. Bruised, humiliated and dejected, I sank to the ground and let the tears roll and fall. Ukemi, kaiten, my weakness poured out of me. Musumegokoro-do: the way of girlish innocence.
