read,â Zainal said and gave it a little shove with one large and very dirty thumb.
âPlease wash up, dinnerâs nearly ready,â she said, because she really couldnât tell Zainal not to handle the bookâwhich might be the only one of its kindâwith his dirty hands.
âI learn to read,â he said and gave it another, almost angry push.
âYou?â
Zainal scowled and Zane, who was seated in the high-seated chair his adoptive father had made for him, began to whimper in apprehension. He was very quick to sense moods. Immediately Zainal turned a smiling face and diverted the child by tickling his feet until he was hilarious with tickle laughter.
âI need to read to use computers.â
Kris blinked in surprise, having forgotten for the moment that Botany now possessed working computersâ¦whichwere being put to all kinds of good use. There had been several uninterrupted sessions to develop adapters for the units to run on solar power.
âOh, yes, of course you would,â Kris said. âDead easy for a man with your smarts.â
Zainal turned his smiling face from Zane and gave the little book a dark scowl. âNot when all thoseâ¦squigglesâ¦make no sense at all.â
âAre there manyââ and Kris thought swiftly for a less insulting description than âkidsâ booksâââprimer books in what we got?â She hadnât had occasion to look in that section of the hastily assembled âlibrary.â
âThis was given me. I wash my handsâ¦and Zaneâs feetâ¦â he added pointing to the oily smears now marking the childâs bare feet.
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
ONCE ZANE WAS IN BED, SHE TOOK, NOT THE book, but a pad and pencil and wrote out the alphabet in upper and lower case, as large as she could lengthwise across the page.
âBut I brought the book to readâ¦â he said, pulling it toward him with now clean hands.
âFirst you must know theâ¦squiggles that spell the words we use. Too bad we didnât have a book on English for second-language speakersâ¦although come to think of it, that wouldnât do
you
much good. Now, this is the first letter of the alphabetâ¦âay.â Which can also be pronounced âahââ¦just to confuse you. It is a vowel. B, which is usually just âbeeâ is the second letter and a consonant.â
He had repeated âvowelâ and now spoke âconsonant.â Zainal had no trouble committing the sequence of the alphabet to memoryânor of naming any of them when Kris drilled him. His concentration was incredible. He kept her going until even such words as âSpotâ and âJaneâ were blurring her eyes. He had also read through the book nine times and had it memorized.
âNo Spot and Jane on the computers,â he said.
âWeâll work on computer language tomorrow,â she said, rising stiffly from the chair in which his need to learn had pinned her for hours. She yawned.
âI work more now,â he said, looking at her expectantly.
âOkay, see how many words you already know that rhyme with Spotâ¦like dot, and tot, and Scottâ¦or with Jane, like maneâ¦no not drainâ¦ah, try run, fun, gun, stunâ¦â
âOh,â he said, delighted at such an exercise.
She went to bed. When Zane woke her in false dark, hungry, Zainal had filled pages of similarly sounding words, not all of which were spelled properly but she had to give him an A for effort. Spelling would come later. What did astonish her as she fed Zane by candlelight was the computer manual she found under a pile of his laboriously hand-printed sheets. He had underlined all the un-wordsâ¦ctrl, del, esc, Pgdn, Pgup, num, menu.
âHe canât have read the manual,â she murmured and smothered a laugh. âHe may be one of the few who ever did before they turned on a
Back in the Saddle (v5.0)