Katie Kincaid Candidate: Katie Kincaid One Page 5

  "That's a neat way of thinking about it. Thanks."

  "So why are you here? Billy spreading rumors? You see Tretyak yet?" Sam asked.

  "Haven't heard any rumors or even a peep from Billy and his Dad," Katie replied. "I went and saw the Commander yesterday afternoon. He's not such an ogre. He's set me a task. I've got to take a condensed version of Miss Ping's class, pass and get a good report from her. Calvin's going to help, but I thought you might have some insights."

  "Miss Ping?" he asked. "She's still around? Never much for school myself, and don't have kids, but customers and some of my buddies have mentioned her."

  "And?"

  "And apparently she's the single biggest obstacle to the future happiness of Ceres' young people there is," Sam replied. "Kid wants to go to higher Ed on Mars or Earth, they've got to pass her course and she doesn't make it easy. How is it you don't know this?"

  "My parents never wanted me to go away to college," Katie said. "I figured I'd have another couple of years to take all the needed courses. Only I went and accidentally tested out on the standard exams. I didn't know that was possible."

  "I'm sure it's rare," Sam said dryly. He stared through her for a second. "I hate to suggest anyone ever do less than their absolute best at anything, you know that?"

  "Yep, it's one of the things I really like about you. Everybody else is always telling me to dial it back," Katie replied.

  Sam sighed. "You do seem to have a tendency to break systems designed for more, ah, standard people," he said. "It might be an idea to learn to anticipate that problem. Go around it or manage to color within the lines, even if it otherwise doesn't make sense. I mean if you have a badly written computer program you don't insist on feeding it input it's going to blow up on do you?"

  "I find another program," Katie said. "Write a new one myself if I have to."

  "Sometimes that may not be an option," Sam said. "Anyhow I do have advice regards Miss Ping and her course. Most of her students have a problem with the sheer volume of information she gives them to memorize. That's not going to be your problem. Make sure you memorize all the facts she wants you to, but don't stop there. You need to make a point of understanding her interpretation of those facts and working within that interpretation. "

  "Okay, huge amount to commit to memory," Katie said. "I'm sure Calvin will help though. I love to play with the different interpretations you can place on the same facts."

  Sam stifled another sigh. He'd never been a mopey emo kid, he didn't plan to morph into one in his old age. "It'd be better if you didn't indulge that love in Miss Ping's class, I think," he said. "A lot of people get very attached to their particular interpretation of facts. To the point of ignoring new facts that don't fit. They don't like it when you bring those interpretations into doubt. Not even if it's only by suggesting alternative interpretations in a playful way."

  Katie looked at Sam skeptically. "Seriously?"

  "Yes, surely you've noticed how some of your bright ideas have disturbed your teachers in the past?"

  "They never said anything. I thought maybe I was just getting ahead of the rest of the students and confusing them."

  "Maybe that too, but although people don't like having their ideas challenged they also don't like admitting they're not more open minded."

  "Wow."

  "Nobody expects, or even wants, fifteen-year-olds to be worldly, but you have to start paying attention, Katie," Sam said. "You can't keep treating people as momentary distractions or easily bemused and buffaloed like your parents. Some people you're going to have to learn to live with. Take the time to understand them."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Look, it's like this lock here," Sam said resorting to an impromptu metaphor. "The thick plate is all the facts you need to know. Not unimportant, but don't get distracted by it. The theories you need to understand are like how the mechanism is delicate and needs some respect. The fact you oughtn't antagonize Miss Ping is like the fact that you can open the lock by just cutting the power to it. The power supply is almost never adequately protected. That's the most important yet least obvious fact. Understand?"

  "I think so," Katie said, frowning. Her tone wasn't entirely convincing.

  "Learn what Miss Ping wants you to," Sam said. "Learn the facts. Learn her theories about them. Don't challenge them. Don't invent a bunch of your own. Be respectful. Make her happy. Understood."

  "Yes, sir. Not going to be easy."

  "Suck it up, buttercup."

  * * *

  "Thanks a lot, Calvin," Katie said. "You've been a great help. I mostly read old classics my parents got on sale. Miss Ping's reading list is way different. Thanks."

  Calvin stood awkwardly in the door, seeming uncertain about something. Poor boy probably wasn't used to being praised. "That's great," he said, his tone less certain than the words. "Miss Ping is tough enough normally I can't imagine what the condensed version of her course is going to be like."

  "Yeah, even Commander Tretyak didn't pretend it was going to be easy," Katie replied. "I'd better get some sleep while I can."

  "Yeah right, see ya," Calvin said, giving her a limp hand wave and finally moving off.

  Katie closed the door to her room after him, observing the click of the lock mechanism as she did so. It was designed to lock from the inside. It was intended to keep people out rather than in. Most of the locks she seen so far were designed that way. She'd been inspecting every lock she came across since her talk with Sam earlier in the day.

  She'd never paid them much attention before. Now she was and noticing things that had never occurred to her to pay attention to before.

  For instance, although her door was designed to lock from the inside giving her privacy and some protection from intruders she'd learned by inspecting the part of the mechanism in the door frame that it could be unlocked remotely.

  In fact, it had turned out to be easily dismantled given the right tools. Ones she carried with her as a matter of habit because she was constantly doing maintenance while on the Dawn Threader. Looked like it was a fail safe mechanism too. The door would automatically cease to be locked if it lost power. Suggested the designer was more worried about a first responder being unable to give assistance in an emergency than stopping intruders in such a case. It fitted with Belters being more worried about threats from accidents than deliberate attacks by other people.

  During the period she'd be studying, the nineteenth through twenty-second centuries mainly on Earth, it seemed like the biggest threat to people had been other people. One of the many pictures she'd flipped through with Calvin had been of a door to the domicile of a late twentieth century urban dweller. The edge of the door had been lined with a whole array of large locks, deadbolts, and chains.

  It'd been fear of intruders incarnate.

  It'd also been silly theater to some extent. A flimsy pair of hinges secured the other side of the door. The door itself looked like wood.

  Yesterday it'd not have registered on her. This was what she loved about new ideas. They made familiar things new.

  At the same time, she could understand the other thing Sam had been trying to tell her. That wasn't true for most people. For a lot of people she realized now thinking about seeing old familiar things in a new light wasn't delightful it was threatening and eerie. Finally she understood some of those horror movies Calvin and other friends were always telling her were so great.

  Thinking in broad historical terms. She was going to have to get used to doing so. Thinking in those terms, life had been on a knife's edge for most people for most of history. In those circumstances, it made sense that any change would be interpreted as a potential threat. An indication of something that needed to be treated with caution and the utmost suspicion.

  It was an odd and disconcerting idea. Still, she could see the logic.

  She needed to understand people better. If this was the way most people thought, even if they didn't like to admit it, then she needed to understand
and allow for that.

  Particularly when dealing with Miss Ping.

  It wasn't going to be easy to restrain herself. She did love novel ideas and challenging received fact.

  She'd rein it in all the same.

  * * *

  So Katie was studying with Calvin in her room again. It'd been less than a week since the fight with Billy. Only five days by the calendar. It felt much longer. It felt like centuries. They'd started with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century and worked all the way up to the founding of the first settlements on Mars and Ceres in the middle of the twenty-first.

  Katie intended to do everything she could to prepare before the actual start of Miss Ping's course. Calvin had pledged to help her. He hadn't said as much, but Katie could tell he didn't think she understood the enormity of the task she was taking on. He underestimated just how much energy Katie had. As witness his current bleary eyed state of stunned wiped out exhaustion from the long day of study they'd put in. In contrast, Katie had plenty of energy left.

  She also thought he underestimated her ability to memorize large amounts of material other people found too dry to be digestible.

  Katie had cut her teeth on books of safety regulations and technical manuals as a pre-schooler.

  Her parents, her mother in particular, had been delighted when she'd learned to read not too long after learning to walk and being potty trained. Katie had been a happy kid and had been delighted in turn to please her mother. At first safety and technical manuals had been all there'd been to read besides her mother's romances. Katie hadn't been planned, and they'd not thought to pack kid's books when they'd emigrated from Earth. Katie hadn't understood what the romances were about and her mother had been at pains to direct her to other reading matter. Later they'd picked up all sorts of old classics in the public domain and therefore cheap. Most of the history Katie knew came from books written in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth.

  Katie had learned early on that most people weren't interested in how voracious a reader she was and from what an early age. Katie was even less inclined to bother them with two other facts about her pertinent to the current problem.

  Her mother had also been delighted to let her young child to "play" at maintenance tasks like cleaning all the various filters for air, water, fuel, hydraulic fluid, and every other gas or fluid you could think of. Katie now realized that this amounted to criminal negligence on the part of her parents, but at the time she'd been happy to play at anything that pleased her mother. When a couple of years later she'd realized to her horror just how wide the gap was between the maintenance and upkeep recommended in the manuals and what her parents were prepared to understand and do she'd resolved to fill the gap herself.

  She'd started by resolving to memorize all the manuals in question. She'd been too young to know how insane that was.

  The first step, of course, had been to read books on memorizing. She'd learned to her surprise that reading wasn't natural and memorizing facts as standalone individual printed items was not something the human mind was designed for or good at.

  No, the human mind craved the concrete that could be seen, smelled, felt and touched. Ideally, heard too. And not just any old things that could be seen, heard, touched and maybe tasted too, but ones that stood out for some reason. People naturally loved, or at least paid attention, to the unusual, the exaggerated and surprising. They also remembered what they associated with other things, the more things and the more those things invoked strong emotions, the more likely they'd be remembered.

  Turned out people had only recently been born on space ships, where doing tasks outlined in printed manuals were what they did to stay alive.

  For most of people's existence, the books explained, people had lived in the wilderness threatened by wild animals and competing with both them and other people for the resources, both food and water, to stay alive.

  The key to memorizing things in books, the books explained, was quickly imagining concrete things that were colorful and surprising. Then associating the words or numbers in the books with them. Then situating them within concrete structures like a landscape or a building. They'd given many specific examples of how to do this.

  Katie had mastered them all.

  When most people thought of safety manuals, they thought of dry tomes full of musty boring words it was hard to focus on.

  When Katie thought of safety manuals, she thought of a vast collection of graveyards full of tombstones under each of which lay an undead creature that had to be placated in the name of the great God Murphy if they were not to rise and threaten your very continued existence.

  The graveyards were each body of safety regulations. The tombstone each regulation. Each one, as the preface to one manual had said, related to some problem that taken lives or threatened them in the past. Each tombstone was engraved with a regulation aimed at keeping the problem, the undead monster, lying below in its grave where it belonged.

  Thought of that way safety regulations were much easier to remember.

  So Katie had a great memory based on exercising a set of techniques she'd spent her whole life refining.

  When in classes teachers insisted on repeating a set of facts over and over again so that other students by some chance might manage to absorb them long enough to pass the mid-terms or finals, Katie was bored out of her tree. Something she'd learned to try to hide from both her teachers and fellow students.

  Including Calvin.

  "I'd forgotten how crazy this was," he was saying. Katie knew she'd missed something more he'd been saying while she'd been lost in her own thoughts. She felt too guilty about that to ask him to repeat it.

  "How so?" she said, pretending she'd been listening.

  "To start with she wants you to remember every person, she deems important for three centuries," he said. "Every major state's leader for every year of that period. Half the time she wants you to remember who their foreign minister and finance minister was. Then she throws in a few generals, economists, scientists, and special cases like this Kissinger guy. That's only the people. Then you're supposed to remember a bunch of important dates and why. Then a bunch of places. And you're supposed to be able to connect them all together. It's like some game show you can't win. I don't know how any of us ever managed to pass this."

  "I find making connections helps," Katie ventured.

  "More facts to remember," Calvin said. "Wait until you get into class and she starts talking about them as long-lost friends. Expects you to know them too. Like it was today's gossip. These guys are all dead and gone. I bet even their grand children don't remember who half of them were."

  Katie remembered a quote. "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." She didn't say it aloud. No point confusing things. She wondered who was right, who'd ever said that, Faulkner maybe, or Calvin. She also noted that connections didn't place facts in context for Calvin, that they instead multiplied the individual things to memorize for him. She wondered how common that was. "You think so?" she said. "There must be a point to this course, right?"

  "It's a hoop to jump through in order to get into a good school," Calvin said. "Something easier for rich kids with plenty of time and whose parents can afford tutors for them. Then when they get to their fancy school, they can trade quotes to show who really belongs."

  "Well, I guess I'm their performing dog then," Katie said. "I intend to jump through all the hoops I need to. Anyhow, we've covered almost up to the present day."

  "Yeah, we looked at it all once," Calvin said. "My head hurts."

  "It'll help," Katie said. "I'm good at memorizing facts. Sam said I need to do more than that. Said Ping not only wants you to memorize a bunch of stuff but to interpret it in a particular way."

  Calvin looked around at the piles of books, papers, print outs, and several screens filled with data. "I'd forgotten what a nightmare this was," he said. "Yeah, there was a ton of economics and stuff on tech advances too. Pin
g has this fascination with class divisions based on economics. She claims tech and finance let them kick the can down the road. Fancy way of saying putting stuff off. Anyhow she'd start ranting about bread and circuses, and Rome, which is not even in the period, and how space exploration has delayed the revolution. I'd put it all out of mind. It was one long bad dream."

  "Okay, so it's going to be tough," Katie said. "Any hints how I can absorb all these ideas and make Ping happy?"

  "I don't know, Katie," Calvin said, running his hands through his hair in distress at the memories. "I just studied, and studied, until I was dreaming about the stuff when ever I could get some sleep. I wrote the essays she wanted in a daze. I regurgitated everything I could remember on the final. I barely passed. I'd forgotten all of it until you asked."

  "I guess we're both tired," she said. "Maybe you should go home and get some sleep. Thanks for doing this. I'm sorry to work you so hard, but I really want to pass this thing and get into the Academy."

  "You sure it's worth it?" Calvin asked. "You sure you wouldn't be happier staying here?"

  "I'm sure," Katie answered.

  She thought about that after she'd ushered him out.

  Yes, she was sure she wanted to do it.

  She wasn't sure how she'd manage to please Miss Ping. She could memorize facts. She could avoid contradicting the woman or spit balling ideas on her. It wasn't a wholly satisfactory plan.

  It'd have to do.

  4: Katie Gets Schooled

  The last week had passed in a daze of dates.

  Katie didn't know how the rest of her classmates were managing it. She was having trouble keeping up. With no false modesty, that must mean the rest of them were drowning.

  She barely had time to eat and sleep. The rest was all study. If she hadn't already committed a strong basic framework of facts to memory, she'd have been lost.

  Miss Ping lived up to and exceeded her reputation. She really wasn't that old. She was early, late middle age, maybe. She must have started teaching on Ceres very young. Katie knew there had to be a story there. She couldn't bring herself to care currently.