Kyoto 2135
"No!"
Whack!
The cane landed in the little gap between the ends of the black keys and the beginning of Hoshi's fingers. Hoshi yelped, and then began to cough violently as some saliva went down the wrong way.
At most subjects she did fine, at some- all the languages - she did brilliantly, even music theory was fine. But somewhere between her brain and her fingers, the music leaked out of her as though she had sprung a leak.
And failure was not permitted here. The fact that it missed her fingers was probably more good luck than good management.
"Again!"
So she stumbled again through the opening of the Wagnerian piano sonata, and this time the cane did not miss.
The pain came a few seconds after the sound. Then the whimper, then the tears.
"Nurse!"
So Hoshi, clutching her injured fingers to her chest, slinked out the door, crept along the very edge of the school's wide corridors, and down the rickety stairs.
Arriving in the converted root cellar- relic of World War III- she edged carefully around the dirty khaki-canvas sling cots in search of the nurse.
She didn't find the woman she expected.
Instead, she pulled up short at the sight of her replacement, an alien.
"Nurse?" she asked hesitantly in Denobulan.
The man scowled. "Doctor!" he replied cuttingly in a way which corrected both her misidentification and her phoneme pronunciation.
Hoshi lowered her eyes, made an awkward gesture of deference and apology, and held out her aching, shaking hand.
"You have broken fingers," the doctor observed flatly, speaking this time in Japanese. From his accent he had not learned it here in Kyoto. It must have been in Tokyo, or perhaps even further away. "How much would you say that hurts, on a scale of 1 to 12?"
"Eight," Hoshi wheezed.
"Really? You might want to work on your pain tolerance, young lady. I doubt that will be the last set of broken bones this school supplies you with."
"Certainly not with Old man Hihi as a tutor," came a drawling voice from the door. Hoshi spun around to see a senior girl standing in the door frame, flanked by two friends. THE senior girl, really. Masayo. She was still eight months from graduating and already there were several senators bidding to be her patron. "He drills a core through his canes and feeds a lead rod through them. WHACK!"
Hoshi flinched.
The doctor did not. "And how can I help you? You don't appear injured."
Masayo pursed her lips. "I got injured in the Advanced Class."
The doctor's face remained blank. "Injured how?"
Masayo narrowed her eyes. "An Advanced Class Injury," she repeated, at an insultingly slow pace.
Despite her aching hand, Hoshi listened carefully. There was a great deal of curiosity among the junior girls regarding exactly what the Advanced Classes entailed, but the senior girls were notoriously close-lipped regarding them, and the staff beat them in response to any inquiry about them. All they'd really been able to glean was that the skills they would learn in Advanced Classes would be more important for pleasing patrons than all the language, art history and music classes combined.
And what happened next was fascinating- although not quite in the way Hoshi hoped - because in the face of this strange doctor's disinterested bafflement, Masayo - Ice Queen- lowered her eyes, lowered her voice, developed a very slight tremble in her lips. "I... I tore, okay? I'm bleeding. A lot I think. Are you going to help me or not?"
The doctor studied her closely, then turned to Hoshi. "I think perhaps you'd better wait," he said flatly, before directing her to a chair, drawing a curtain in her face, and leaving her waiting in agony for 20 minutes while he tended to Masayo.
Hoshi spent the time staring at her reflection in a shiny kidney bowl, working as well as she could with her distorted reflection to copy the faces Masayo had just made. The faces that had let Masayo jump ahead of Hoshi in the queue.
At long last, it was her turn and her fingers were set and knitted together. Only after he was done squeezing and pulling at her fingers did the doctor finally give her something for the pain - a small amount of tea coloured liquid from a brown dropper bottle.
"I suggest," he said. "That you avoid disappointing this Mr Hihi in future, young lady."
Hoshi frowned. "His name is Mr Hara, not Hihi. The senior girls just call him that because he's so old."
"Is that so?"
"Yes," Hoshi replied sharply, and because she was angry at being made to wait while Masayo pushed in, she added, "And I'm sure they will call you an even more unflattering name."
The doctor only shrugged. "And society will call THEM an even less flattering name than that. And you also, when your turn comes. So the world turns. Long live the Emperor"
"And long live the Empire," Hoshi parroted in response. She didn't what he had meant so she hurried away without replying, less she appear foolish.
