Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Twenty-Two

Continuing the serial release of The Plainsrunner under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license – (CC-BY-SA).

Sage surprises a lot of people.

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Chapter Twenty-Two – Work

Professor Tailor got his cleaner, and Sage got her education. During the day she cleaned, and the laboratory had never looked so good. She didn’t stint. Even after she had been doing it long enough for it all to become routine, she never did it perfunctorily. She got the grit out of the cracks in the floor. She dusted everywhere, even the places that would never be seen. She removed the cobwebs from the highest corners of the ceiling. The high windows at the back of the lab, over the narrow alley between the building and the wall, she polished so thoroughly that the glass seemed to disappear. The only thing she didn’t clean was any area where the Professor was running an experiment.

She didn’t confine her activities to the lab. The foyer, with its big windows and beautiful wooden floor, was polished up to showroom standards. She wanted everyone who entered to get a good impression. In his office she was more circumspect. Although the room got the same attention as the rest of the place, she didn’t touch his desk. She knew that he always had things on the go, works in progress that he left out until he was finished them, so she didn’t disturb anything.

Upstairs was the same. Even though she was the only one who went up there, she kept it to the same level of perfection as the rest. She remembered how the wood and the fittings shone and gleamed the first time she saw them, and she tried to make it even better.

She even went outside once a week to do the outsides of the windows. The lower ones were fine. She could put her front hooves on the sill and reach the top corners that way. It was the upper windows that were the problem. She had to get the Professor’s help to find the scaffolding that would get her up that high. At first the workers – the same ones who had brought her chest of drawers – refused. They said it was their job and they would do it, but after a few weeks of her badgering them to get it done, they gave her access so she could get the scaffold herself. She also set it up in the narrow alley at the back so she could do the lab windows.

While she was working outside she naturally interacted with people walking by on the sidewalk, and the occasional professor on the grass. Of the students, some were friendly, some were shy, and some were scornful. She soon learned to identify the ones on scholarship. They were sometimes friendly and sometimes shy, but never rude. And they didn’t carry the air of entitlement that came with so many of the others. Of the professors, most ignored her, but a few spoke to her. Most of those had only polite comments, but a few would joke about how she could do their place when she was finished here. Some of them ended up hiring her when she took them up on it.

All in all, other than some annoyed maintenance staff, some cleaning contractors whose work she took, and the inevitable umbrage of some of the privileged students, she got on with people well. The staff stopped snickering behind their hands whenever they crossed paths. In part it was because their manager talked to them after the Professor talked to him. When Sage asked him why they were always grinning at her, he was outraged. In part it was for her sake, but in part it was because it implied impropriety on his part. So they were chastened, but they were also learning a grudging respect for her. They were impressed by her work ethic, and they also heard hints and rumors about how she got there. Maybe she was an unsophisticated primitive from the back country, but she was a strong and brave and industrious one. Most gratifying for Sage was the change in Derrick, the Professor’s pupil, who overcame his prejudice and became her friend.

At night and on the weekends she pursued her education. The Professor got her enrolled in official courses that would get her a standard education. There may have been a few smirks among the other students when they learned she couldn’t even read, but by the end of the first year she was helping them with their studies. It was soon obvious that, in addition to her diligence, she had a powerful innate intelligence. By the end of the second year she was ready to take the qualification examinations.

She did well enough to qualify for a scholarship. In fact, she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile of everyone who had ever taken the exams. She showed that she was deserving, but the university was reluctant to admit her. They were worried that it would diminish their reputation if a mere country girl could so easily get in. They were prepared to give the seat to yet another boy from a monied family. Then the Professor explained that there were other universities that would gladly take her, and her artifact, and him, and his artifact. Reminded of the prestige they would lose, they made a great show of welcoming this girl from the north country, and establishing their progressive, merit-based, egalitarian reputation.

At last Sage could join the Professor in his work, although by then it wasn’t much of a change. During the two years it took her to get the qualifications necessary to act as a lab assistant, she had already performed most of the duties of one. Since she was cleaning the glassware anyway, she might as well set it up for the experiment. Knowing where everything was, it was logical for her to order supplies. Once she learned how to read and write, why shouldn’t she keep his notebook for him? The only thing she didn’t do was actually participate in the experiments. At least not directly.

Being there while he was working, she was naturally privy to his thoughts. It was only a matter of time, and not long at that, before he started talking to her. Social chatter at first, but inevitably it turned to his work, either the work at hand or anything else that was on his mind. It didn’t take him long to see that she was getting it. Once she had an idea of what he was talking about, and some understanding of the jargon, she could converse reasonably on anything he brought up. He was continually impressed by her agile mind, and continually reminded that he had done the right thing by sponsoring her.

Her talents made her a valuable partner in the laboratory. First she was just a sounding board for his ideas. Then she was asking acute questions that helped illuminate the problem. Finally she was making insightful contributions to the solutions. All the while she was busy with mop or broom or rag. No matter how deeply she got involved with his work, she never forgot her work. Not only did she have high standards for herself, she also kept in mind that she was there as a cleaner, and she owed it to the Professor to not overstep her position.

Sage didn’t confine her learning to the classroom and the lab. Once she knew how to read she began to practice on the books in her room. The advanced physics was still a little beyond her at that time, but the astronomy, leaving aside the mathematics, was fascinating. She learned that she was living on a planet orbiting an orange dwarf star. Her planet was the third one out from the star, and the next one in, roughly the same size, was also in something called the habitable zone of the star. What a revelation! She hadn’t thought of stars as having planets before now, much less habitable zones. And the idea that there was another planet in her star’s zone was intoxicating.

She asked the Professor about it. Could there be life there? Could there be people there? Were the legends true? Did the people of this planet once fly up there and go to the other planet? And now, after a great catastrophe that brought down the people’s prideful ways and kept them in darkness for those ages, could the people on the other planet be sending these artifacts as messages?

The Professor smiled with proud indulgence at her bright flame of curiosity. He told her that many great minds had asked these questions, and so far they had no definitive answers. But, he said, there were tantalizing clues. Archeologists were finding evidence of massive structures that were much older, and buried much deeper than the more recent ones they had been studying. There were rare artifacts, mere fragments, that seemed to indicate a time of high culture and technology much farther in the past than anyone had thought possible. No one could say for sure, but the legends of great deeds and a long fall in the deep past might contain a germ of truth.

Her curiosity was fully inflamed now. Before she became an official lab assistant, she devoured every book in her room, then the rest of the Professor’s books, then she started in on the university’s library. She found out that the city had a library too, so she started going there. That’s where she found the more speculative ideas, including an entire genre devoted to aliens from other stars who had come here and brought down destruction on their heads.

She had been experiencing many things these past two years that she would never have imagined in her previous life, but she still stopped now and then to marvel at it. Here she was, a simple country girl, finding herself involved in some of the grandest inquiries of the smartest and most important people in the world. It seemed to her that that might be even bigger than killing a day flier.