The Core of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

of society whose use is limited mainly to serving as a reserve labor force for routine tasks.
    Dear sister!
    Do you remember the tests? There were two of them each year at the little school in Kaanaa.
    We sat side by side at shiny, varnished desks with slanted tops that opened on hinges. The pupils who attended regularly could keep their pencils and notebooks inside.
    The tests were exciting and fun. I got to play princess. I wrote in poor penmanship and purposely forgot my spelling and pretended not to understand the questions. We wrote shopping lists and read them aloud, said the names of plants and mushrooms and fish on classroom charts, remembered what temperature to use to wash wool or cotton. We calculated how to alter a recipe for four to feed six. I’d heard that some elois never learned to read, but they could listen to their recipes on recordings. You were a good learner. You were smart for an eloi. I always thought of those delicate, lively little kittens as I watched you toil over your notebook, writing down the numbers, and sometimes you erased them so many times that you almost wore through the paper. Sometimes I peeked at your paper and copied your mistakes.
    The eloi class had a room where we practiced making beds and washing windows. We boiled potatoes, made gravy, mixed bread dough, scrubbed grass stains out of fabric. We knew how to darn a sock and sew on a button. I was older, so I learned to iron a man’s shirt, too. It wasn’t a skill I particularly needed at Neulapää, but you had to show you could do it to pass the class. The higher levels of education like child care weren’t taught until we were at the eloi college, the National Institute of Home Economics.
    We had both learned the basics of planting, watering, thinning, and weeding the garden; hilling and harvesting potatoes; staking pea vines; and drying onions from Aulikki. Do you remember how little you liked those things? Sometimes when you had to put your hands in the dirt you would hesitate, as if there were dangerous things that could bite under the ground.
    I, on the other hand, enjoyed many of the garden chores, like grafting the apple trees. It was magical to me that one tree could grow several kinds of apples if you wanted it to.
    But school and chores didn’t take up all our time. When Aulikki didn’t need our help in the kitchen or the garden and was sure we knew everything that would be asked on the test, we could use our time as we wished. Do you remember the little porcelain tea set with roses and lilies of the valley on the saucers? You never tired of setting out meals for your dolls on those plates. In the winter we slid down the little hill on our sleds and I built a lantern out of snowballs and Aulikki put a candle inside it in the evening.
    I remember so clearly one fall evening when we were sitting next to each other on the sofa in the living room. Aulikki was sitting in her favorite chair listening to music. She had a small collection of records, mostly classical music and jazz records she’d brought from Sweden. She didn’t care for the state music.
    I was ten. You had just turned eight in August. Aulikki was listening to Mozart’s Requiem.
    I had a heavy encyclopedia in my hands.
    The Concise Encyclopedia was my favorite thing to read, although the books my grandfather had left at Neulapää included plenty of books on individual subjects as well. I was most interested in biology and botany, but I also read about physics, geography, and world history. I muddled through the basics of French and English for fun and learned the table of elements by heart. Aulikki had brought a collection of European and American literature with her to Neulapää, and the worlds it described were as strange to me as the alien cultures in my father’s old science fiction novels.
    I was sitting there with volume M through P of the Concise Encyclopedia in my lap. The pounding, stirring music had