School Days

River knew some things about the universe. For as long as she could remember, she knew things. She could remember her first birthday; not the people or the presents, but, the cake and candles, and the colorful balloons. She reflected on how vivid those objects from her memories were. Even then, she knew that the balloons floated because there was something different about the air inside them.

Somewhere between her second and third birthdays, her family had attended a wedding. She could remember the bride’s pretty white gown, all the lace and silk. She could remember the handsome groom’s smiling face, and the not-right smiles of his groomsmen. She remembered the elaborate feast, the music and dancing at the reception afterward. She remembered the way the bride had not looked at the best man, and the thin sheen of perspiration in the fine hairs above her lip, the way the bride cast her eyes down when the guests offered their congratulations. She remembered the shocked looks as she told the bride and groom that their marriage wouldn’t last the year. Even today, at this temporal remove, she wished she had been able to stay at the party; instead, she was whisked away by her scandalized parents and sent to bed without supper. The unhappy couple had split before her third birthday.

Thinking on it now, she could understand how this behavior might scare some people. She saw things differently than other people; but in her early life, she hadn’t seen different things than other people saw. They could have known those things, too, if they’d known how to see them like she did. Objects, with properties, behaviors and ranges of values. If you knew the environment, then the universe clicked along, as predictably as the vibration of an electrified crystal. Even chaos was patterned at a large enough scale.

When she was a child, River had known lots of things at first glance. Not just rules, but physical things, too. In her first dance class, her instructor had demonstrated a difficult sequence of jetés, to show her students the beauty of ballet and the physical precision they would be learning. But River knew the instructor had a bad knee, from an old injury that could never heal properly. She could tell by the way she had walked into the class, favoring it minutely, and she knew the instructor’s push off was imperfect. Wanting to help, River rose, ran three steps and launched into the jetés correctly and added her own flourish, a 360 degree spin at the top of her arc, landing perfectly. The instructor was delighted, and River knew that the woman’s admiration far outweighed her natural jealousy. They were fast friends thereafter.

Things changed when she went to the Academy. From the beginning, things were not-right. Incongruous. Deceitful. Her classmates were like her, they saw things differently too, and she liked them. But her instructors were wrong. She didn’t like the way they looked at her, the way they smelled different than their smiles.

At first she had written home all the time, to Simon; and she was happy and less homesick when she received his replies. Then, when she started to tell him the things she was learning about the Academy, about the people who worked there, she suddenly stopped getting return replies from him for about 3 months. When the letters suddenly started coming again, they weren’t from him. They were written in his hand and had his signature affixed at the bottom; but they didn’t have him in them, they had the Academy in them.

She wrote him more letters, but the replies were the same: Not-Simon. She analyzed ‘his’ letters, the things they said that Simon would not say. The next letters she wrote, she said things she would not say, proportional to the things not-Simon had said. She hoped Simon would comprehend her meaning, even if he could not understand why she was doing this. Simon had always been so good at understanding her, not like her mother and father. Now he would have to comprehend, though he would not be able to understand; she felt hopelessness creep into the corners of her consciousness, like small burrowing things, with glittering eyes and sharp teeth.

One by one, her classmates started to vanish from the Academy. They were in class one day, the next they were not. The not-instructors told them that these students had gotten ill, or had a parent who had died, or that they ‘couldn’t cut the mustard’; but these were not-truths. That was when River knew Fear, for the first time in her entire life. She wrote Simon more and more, and told him not-River things, even never-River things; but, they were doing something to the food and water, now, and River’s studies were suffering, though the not-instructors did their best not to notice. One morning, she awoke to find blood on her pillow, little reddish-brown stains, and dried blood in her nose and fresh pinprick scabs at her temples.

In class that day, she couldn’t remember yesterday’s lessons; but the not-teachers didn’t care. They had new exercises for the dwindling student body. They didn’t care about what the students knew anymore. From now on, the important thing was what the students could realize, not what they knew. River wrote another not-River letter that evening after supper, about never-River events. It was the last.

Now, every morning she woke up with blood on her pillow. Sometimes there was blood on her sheets, too, around her abdomen and lower. Now she had migraines that the school not-nurse prescribed sugar pills for. Often the pain was so bad that she regurgitated her meals, which made the not-counselors upset. At first they would make her eat new meals, but they eventually gave up and fed her IV drips in the infirmary.

This went on for an indeterminate period of time. The headaches, and the blood, and the vomiting up of meals made it difficult for River to judge time. Her not-instructors were pleased with her progress in realization classes, and one day she realized a flower and they were very happy, indeed. It was a beautiful purple flower, a pansy with a little golden face, and it made her cry. That was her last day of class.

The next morning – or at least it seemed like the next morning, she still wasn’t sure – she awoke with the worst migraine she had ever had. It felt as though her skull was going to burst, as if it were too full. She could feel something slithering in her cranium, and threw up all over her bed. Sitting up in her fetid sheets with the sickly sweet vomitus dripping from her fingers and nostrils, River knew something and was more terrified than she had ever been in her life. Something was in her head. Something like River, but not her. It wanted to tear and rip and burn. It wanted to realize bad things. And it wanted River to go away.

River never saw any of her erstwhile classmates again, but sometimes at night she thought she heard distant screams, like wind blowing against the panes, though the night was calm. There were new ‘people’ at the Academy now, though. Not students, not not-instructors. These new ‘people’ were not really people, River knew. Maybe they had been once. Now, they were people objects. They wore blue surgical gloves and the other not-instructors were so afraid of them that their fear was palpable. The smell of fear was so tangible to River that it made her headaches worse, and she would shake so hard her bones ached. The thing in her head got stronger when this happened.

At first, the people objects would just observe and take notes; slim writing instruments like stilettos in their blue rubber hands; their faces blank, their intentions impenetrable. They were not like any other people she had known. All of the little nuances that made people so transparent were totally missing, erased. All that remained was the dread of the other not-faculty members. There was so much to read in their reactions to these newcomers. To River, it felt as though they were wordlessly shouting at her ‘danger’, ‘horror’.

How many days passed? How many weeks? She could not know. Every morning, the little drops of dried blood, the skull splitting, the slithering at the base of her cranium like a snake curling around her medulla oblongata; then the vomiting, the sickly smile plastered to her face and the wet and reeking hair clinging to her forehead as she clamored incoherently at the orderlies, while they mopped her body with wet cloths. Each midday, getting her liquid nutrients in the infirmary, through the little tube connected to the catheter in her forearm. They didn’t even try to give her solid foods anymore. What was the point? She couldn’t even keep water down. Then off to the classroom to realize things.

The Other within her liked realizing things. It was getting stronger. It liked it when River got sick, or when she tried to resist. It fed on her. One day River realized a nightingale. She had never seen one before, except in the picture books her brother used to give her. No one had ever seen a nightingale, she knew; they had all died long before Earth-That-Was perished in flames. Now they only lived in picture books. When River realized the nightingale, she felt a joy that she had not experienced in… How long? But her joy was short-lived. The Other realized the songbird, too, only it realized the small creature inside out. The bird lay shrieking in misery for the last seconds of its existence. The people objects with the blue gloves scratched their pens across the papers in their folders, the sound like fingernails on coffin lids. (‘Two by two, hands of blue’, the Other lilted inside her head, mockingly)

That night, River awoke inside her room, lying on her bed, not sick. They had not come for her tonight. Who had not come for her? Had she been taken somewhere on other nights? A memory almost came to her, of a dark room, and a chair with bright lights playing over it; but then the migraine came, rushing up like a wall of agony to block it. A spasm wracked her body and a metal pitcher on the table across the room began to clatter and fell to the floor.

As the pain suddenly subsided, River realized she had not heard the pitcher crash to the floor. She looked at the table, then tracked the projected fall of the pitcher. It was hovering scant inches above the floor tiles. As she watched, it began to spin on its side, still suspended above the flooring. (Ssshhh, the Other said, must be quiet) River realized that the only way to be quiet was for the pitcher to be on the table again, so it was.

The Other said (They have made a mistake). ‘Who has made a mistake’ River thought in reply, her tongue working the words silently in her mouth. (“Two by two, hands of blue,” echoed in her mind). ‘What mistake did they make?’ she subvocalized. (We are both still River. It’s not what they want), the Other replied. Suddenly, River knew what the blue-handed people objects wanted. (Yes), the Other whispered in her head. (They want me. Not you. They want me to be not-River. They want you to be no more. But they made a mistake.) ‘Because we’re both still me,’ River thought. (They do not know. A secret; our secret.)

The next day, River woke up feeling very good. Her head did not hurt. There was no blood. She did not throw up. She felt proud that the orderlies did not have to clean her today. They were happy, too, she knew, although they still acted sullen. She chattered at them, smiling, in a sing-song tumble of words as they came into her head. The orderlies frowned, and put their heads down, attending their work. (A secret, echoed the Other in her mind, Our secret) The smile faded from her lips, and she hurled her pillow across the room, shrieking incoherently, then falling into a mournful sobbing, before brushing her hair from her eyes and wiping the tears and mucous from her face, her hands concealing a sly grin. (Yes. Like that.)

River was calm and peaceful, but she pretended to be subdued and morose. The orderlies put her in her wheel chair and took her to the dining facility, where she managed to eat some eggs and strawberry preserves on crisp wheat toast without throwing up. Then she got up from the table and was escorted into the classroom, where she primly sat and awaited her not-instructor's arrival.

He did not show up on time. That had never happened before. River grew bored and made a paper airplane, even though she didn’t have any paper. That was the funny thing about realization, she thought. Even though she didn’t have any paper, somebody did. Everyone knew you couldn’t make something out of nothing. What they didn’t realize was that there was no such thing as nothing. Even in space, there were still objects. Even in space there was never nothing. Because she knew this, and she knew what the perfect aerodynamic form would be for this particular room (with the cooling vent at the top of the front wall and warm sunlight heating the air at the left side of the room) she was able to realize the perfect paper airplane by ‘borrowing’ a blank sheet of paper from the office down the hall. It sailed away from her at very nearly Mach, she calculated, and half-buried itself silently into the cinderblock wall across the room, near the chalkboard. (Not yet), the Other whispered, and the airplane vanished, the sheet of paper repaid to the ream in the drawer down the hall, before anyone had observed it missing. Only a small, deep ‘v’ in the cinderblock remained to mark the toy aircraft’s existence.

River sat down again. More time passed. She began to hum softly and rock herself.

The classroom door opened and the blue-gloved people objects entered, along with the not-instructor, who was the very image of abject terror. The poor man could barely control his motions and River feared he might soil himself. The stench of fear was so strong that River gagged convulsively and she sensed the tidal wave of migraine rushing toward her. Just as suddenly, the sensation vanished like a mist at daybreak.

One of the Blue Hands spoke to her.

“Good morning, River. I am Mr. Jones. My associate is Mr. Smith. We have been following your progress here at the Academy. The people we represent are most gratified to see the effort you’ve put forth. They are pleased to announce that your graduation day is near. Are you happy to hear that?”

River felt odd. She sat quietly and did not move a single muscle. She did not answer.

“We’re sure that you are,” Mr. Jones continued, as Mr. Smith scratched notes with his thin stylus. “And we’re sure that you’re eager to get home and see your parents, and your brother – what’s his name?”

“Simon,” replied Mr. Smith, checking his notes.

River’s heart leapt, but her body remained as still as a becalmed ocean.

“Simon, yes,” agreed Mr. Jones. “I’m sure you’re looking forward to being reunited with your family,” he concluded. “You need only pass your final examination, today, in order to graduate. Are you ready to begin?”

River felt as though her face was made of stone as she felt her lips form the word, heard her mouth utter, “Yes.”

“Very good,” intoned Mr. Jones. “River, we need you to kill this man,” he said, indicating the not-instructor, who suddenly looked stricken by apoplexy. “Style points will be awarded, so, do be creative.”

The wave of nausea and pain suddenly reappeared and enveloped her. She heard the Other say, (My time) above the roaring in her ears, and then she succumbed to darkness.

When she awoke, she was covered in blood. The room was covered in blood. The not-instructor was a gibbering idiot in the corner, covered in ichor, unharmed but irretrievable.

Mr. Smith had ceased breathing. He lay slumped against the wall, a trace of fine filament etching his face in gold and silver filigree. River knew that when they autopsied him, they’d find ‘River loves Simon’ written in her hand, made of that same filament, right through a cross-section of his brain. River knew that his pen had had more than enough material to stretch into a wire a single molecule thick. The Other showed her that wire flying about like a cyclone, wrapping and incising its way into Smith’s head, overlaying itself thousands and millions of times to create the beautiful tracery and elegant calligraphy through his cerebral cortex.

Mr. Jones, on the other hand was not yet dead; but neither was he in any condition to effect repairs to the situation. All of his major organs were now on the outside of his skin, including his brain, which sat atop his skull like some grotesque party hat. He started to say something but only managed to spit blood down his shirtfront and onto his wetly pumping heart, lungs, liver, spleen and stomach. Not surprisingly, she thought, since his tongue was flapping from his chin. His heart skipped a beat, went into fibrillation and then ceased, as did his lungs. His stomach kept churning away, interestingly.

Beholding the grisly spectacle, River – thinking of the nightingale – said aloud, “Derivative. No style points awarded.” (I was rushed), came the reply.

The orderlies came rushing into the room, and goggled at the carnage. Then one of them looked straight into River’s eyes, holding out his hands, palms extended. “Simon,” he said. “We’re here to take you to Simon. We weren’t going to try to move you until tonight; but,” he said, looking around the classroom-turned-charnel house, “this changes the landscape somewhat.”

She was so happy to hear the word ‘Simon’, that she never noticed the little syringe he’d produced. When he stuck it in her arm, she fell immediately into a slumber like death itself.

Next thing she knew, she was naked, gasping, wet and cold in a cargo hold full of strangers. But, the orderlies hadn’t lied: Simon was there, too.

Now, almost a year later, River sat on a crate in that same hold and noticed that she had been crying. Her cheeks were wet. Things are better now, she reassured herself, as she brushed the tears from her face. She and the Other were getting more comfortable in their partnership. (We need each other. We are parts of the same person. If one of us dies, both of us perish.)

She still made errors, though. It was hard being two people. Once she had realized a gun, ‘borrowed’ from Jayne’s locked wardroom. (That’s my job), sent the Other. Once the Other had known the correct trajectories to kill three men, and then taken the shots. “Knowing things; that’s my job!” she said aloud. (But we’d have been dead, if I hadn’t done it). ‘Scared Kaylee,’ she accused subvocally.

“What’s that, sweetie?” called Kaylee, from across the hold where she was inventorying engine parts.

“Nothing,” River said, chagrined at having been caught out, talking to herself.

“You were shouting something about something bein’ your job?,” rejoined Kaylee.

“I said, ‘Kickin’ your butt at jacks is my job!’, but you’re always working. No fun…” she finished sullenly.

“Oh, yeah, little missy? Well, I’m hearin’ a lot of talk here, hotshot. Let’s see if you can back it up,” challenged the mechanic.

In a flash, River felt as though the whole universe ran through her like a single stream of data. She caught her breath as glimpses of calculations literally flashed before her eyes: Plans, puzzle pieces, a roulette wheel spinning, the ball bouncing and careening. She knew what was required. All that was left was to realize it…

Sitting on the dirty floor plates, she picked up the rubber ball and visualized a planet, a Core World. Just an object. Bigger, but, the same as all the other objects that permeated space. That’s where she must begin. She had to make it safe for Simon, for her friends.

“I can win this,” she said, and let the ball drop…

…At just the right moment.