Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  So—

  As required by procedure, I considered abandoning the attempt and getting out. This would, of course, mean the boy would die; you can’t go back in twice, that’s an absolute. I’d be within my rights, faced with an enigma on this scale. The failure would be noted on my record, of course, but there’d be an annotation, no blame attaches, and it wouldn’t be the first time, not by a long way. The kid would die; not my problem. I’d have done my best, and that’s all you have to do.

  Or I could think of something. Such as what?

  They tell you; be wise, don’t improvise. If in doubt, get out. Making stuff up as you go along is mightily frowned on, in much the same way as you’re not encouraged to fry eggs in a fireworks factory. There’s no knowing what you might invent, and outside controlled conditions, invention could lead to the Cartographic Commission having to redraw the maps for a whole county. Or you could make a hole in a wall, which is the worst thing anybody can do. At the very least, I’d be sure to end up in front of a Board, facing charges of unauthorised innovation and divergence. Saving the life of some farm kid would be an excuse, but not a very good one.

  I could think of something. Such as—

  There’s no such thing as magic. Instead, there’s the science we don’t properly understand, not yet. There are effects that work, and we have no idea why. One of these is spes aeternitatis, a wretchedly inconsistent, entirely inexplicable conjuring trick that no self-respecting Father would condescend to use. That’s because they can’t get it to work reliably.

  I can.

  Spes aeternitatis is an appearances-adjuster. You can use it to find hidden objects, or translate lies, or tell if a slice of cake or a glass of wine’s got poison in it. I do it by visualising everything that’s wrong in light blue. It’s a tiny little scrap of talent that I’ve got and practically everybody else hasn’t; it’s like being double-jointed, or wiggling your nostrils like a rabbit.

  I closed my eyes and opened them again, and saw a light blue room. Everything light blue. Everything false.

  Oh, I thought; then, one-oh-five, seventy five, and I started lining up diagonals for my escape. But that wasn’t to be, unfortunately. The room blurred and reappeared, and it was all different. It was my room; the room I slept in until I was fifteen years old.

  He was sitting on the end of the bed; a slight man, almost completely bald, with a small nose and a soft chin, small hands, short, thin legs. I’d put him at about fifty years old. His skin was purple, like a grape.

  “You were wrong,” he said, looking up at me. “The talent survives death.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “How did you get in here?”

  He smiled. “You practically invited me in,” he said. “When I heard that fool behind me, with the axe, I looked at you. You felt sorry for me. You thought; is he not a man and a Brother, or words to that effect. I used Stilicho’s transport, and here I am.”

  I nodded. “I should’ve put up wards.”

  “You should. Careless. Attention to detail isn’t your strongest suit.”

  “The boy,” I said.

  He shrugged. “In there somewhere, I dare say. But we aren’t in his head, we’re in yours. I’ve made myself at home, as you can see.”

  I looked round quickly. The apple-box with the bottom knocked out, where I used to keep my books; it was where it should be, but the books were different. They were new and beautifully bound in tooled calf, and the alphabet their titles were written in was strange to me.

  “My memories,” I said.

  He waved his hand. “Well rid of them,” he said. “Misery and failure, a life wasted, a talent dissipated. You’ll be better off.”

  I nodded. “With yours.”

  “Quite. Oh, they’re not pleasant reading,” he said, with a scowl. “Bitter, angry; memories of bigotry and spite, relentless bad luck, a life of constant setbacks and reverses, a talent misunderstood. You’ll see that I failed the exam the second time because, sitting there in Great School, I suddenly hit on a much better way of achieving unam sanctam; quicker, safer, ruthlessly efficient. I tried it out as soon as the exam was over, and it worked. But I got no marks, so they failed me. I ask you, where’s the sense in that?”

  “You failed the retake,” I said. “What about the first time?”

  He laughed. “I had the flu,” he said. “I was practically delirious, could barely remember my name. Would they listen? No. Rules. You see what I mean. Bad luck and spite at every turn.”

  I nodded. “What happens to me?”

  He looked at me. “You’ll be better off,” he repeated.

  “I’ll stop existing. I’ll be dead.”

  “Not physically,” he said mildly. “Your body, my mind. Your fully-qualified licensed-practitioner’s body, and a mind that saw how to improve unam sanctam in a half-second flash of intuition.”

  It says a lot about my self-esteem that I actually considered it, though not for very long. Half a second, maybe. “What happens now?” I asked. “Do we fight, or—?”

  He shrugged.”If you like,” he said, and extended his arm. It was ten feet long, thick as a gatepost. He gripped my throat like a man holding a mouse, and crushed me.

  I guess I was about seventy per cent dead when I remembered; I know what to do. I drew a rather shaky second ward; he closed his fingers on thin air, and I was standing behind him.

  He swung round, roaring like a bull. He had bull’s horns sticking out of his forehead. I tried second ward again, but he got there before I did, grabbed my head and smashed my face into the wall.

  Just in time, I remembered; there is no pain. I used Small Mercies, softening the wall into felt, and slipped through his fingers. I was smoke. I hung above him in a cloud. He laughed, and fetched me back with vis mentis. The back of my head hit the floor, which gave way like a mattress. I became a spear, and buried myself in his chest. He used second ward and was the other side of the room.

  “You fight like a first-year,” he said.

  Which was true. I clenched my mind like a fist; the walls closed in on him, squashing him like a spider under a boot. I felt him, like a nail right through the sole. Back to first ward, and we stood glowering at each other, in opposite corners of the room.

  “You can’t beat me,” he said. “I’ll wear you down and you’ll simply fade away. Face it, what the hell have you got to live for?”

  Valid point. “All right, then,” I said.

  His eyes opened wide. “I win?”

  “You win,” I said.

  He was pleased; very pleased. He grinned at me and raised his hand, just as I got my fingers round the handle of the door and twisted as hard as I could.

  He saw that and opened his mouth to scream. But the door flew open, knocking me back. I closed my eyes. The door was, of course, the intersection of two lines drawn diagonally across the room, at 105 and 75 degrees precisely.

  I opened my eyes. He’d gone. I was in the boy’s room, the room upstairs. The boy was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, hands under his chin. He looked up at me.

  “Well, come on,” I snapped at him. “I haven’t got all day.”

  They were pathetically grateful. Mother in floods of tears, father clinging to my arm, how can we ever thank you, it’s a miracle, you’re a miracle-worker. I wasn’t in the mood. The boy, lying on the kitchen table under a pile of blankets, looked up at me and frowned, as though something about me wasn’t quite right. A quiet, analytical stare; it bothered the hell out of me. I refused food and drink and made father get out the pony and trap and take me out to the crossroads. But the mail won’t be arriving for six hours, he objected; it’s cold and dark, you’ll catch your death.

  I didn’t feel cold.

  At the crossroads, huddling under the smelly old hat father insisted on giving me, I tried to search my mind, to see if he’d really gone. There was, of course, no way he could have survived. I’d opened the door (Rule One; never open the door) and he’d been sucked out of my h
ead out into the open, where there was no talented mind to receive him. Even if he was as strong as he’d claimed to be, there was no way he could have lasted more than three seconds before he broke up and dissipated into the air. There was absolutely nothing he could have done, no way he could have survived.

  The coach arrived. I got on it, and slept all the way. At the inn, I got a lamp and a mirror, and examined myself all over. Just when I thought I was all clear, I found a patch of purple skin, about the size of a crab-apple, on the calf of my left leg. I told myself it was just a bruise.

  (That was a year ago. It’s still there.)

  The rest of the round was just straightforward stuff; a possession, a small rift, a couple of incursions, which I sealed with a strong closure and duly reported when I got back. Since then, I’ve volunteered for a screening, been to see a couple of counsellors, bought a pair of full-length mirrors. And I’ve been promoted; field officer, superior grade. They’re quite pleased with me, and no wonder. I seem to be getting better at the job all the time. And I’m writing a paper, would you believe; modifications to unam sanctam. Quicker, safer, much more efficient. So blindingly obvious, I’m surprised no-one’s ever thought of it before.

  Father Prior is surprised but pleased. I don’t know what’s got into you, he said.

  Amor Vincit Omnia

  Usually, the problem was getting the witnesses to talk.

  …He just walked down the street looking at buildings and they caught fire. No, he didn’t do anything, like wave his arms about or stuff like that, he just, I don’t know, looked at them…

  This time, the problem was getting them to shut up.

  …Stared at this old guy and his head just sort of crumpled, you know, like a piece of paper when you screw it into a ball? Just stared at him, sort of annoyed, really, like the guy had trodden on his foot, and then his head just…

  As he listened, the observer made notes; Usque Ad Peric; Unam Sanc (twice); ?Mundus Verg ??variant. He also nodded his head and made vague noises of sympathy and regret, and tried not to let his distaste show. But the smell bothered him; burnt flesh, which unfortunately smells just a bit like roasted meat (pork, actually), which was a nuisance because he’d missed lunch; burnt bone, which is just revolting. His moustache would smell of smoke for two days, no matter how carefully he washed it. He stopped to query a point; when he made the old woman vanish, was there a brief glow of light, or—? No? No, that’s fine. And he jotted down; Choris Anthrop, but no light; ?Strachylides?

  The witness was still talking, but he’d closed his eyes; and then Thraso from the mill came up behind him and shot him in the back, and nothing happened, and then he turned around real slow and he pointed at Thraso, and Thraso just—

  He frowned, stopped the witness with a raised hand. “He didn’t know—”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t know he was there. This man—” Always hopeless at names. “The miller. He didn’t know the miller was there.”

  “No, Thraso crept up on him real quiet. Shot him in the back at ten paces. Arrow should’ve gone right through him and out the other side. And then he turned round, like I just said, and—”

  “You’re sure about that. He didn’t hear him, or look round.”

  “He was busy,” the witness said. “He was making Cartusia’s head come off, just by looking at it. And that’s when Thraso—”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The witness carried on talking about stuff that clearly mattered to him, but which didn’t really add anything. He tuned out the voice, and tried to write the word, but it was surprisingly difficult to make himself do it. Eventually, when he succeeded, it came out scrawled and barely legible, as though he’d written it with his left hand;

  Lorica?

  “Unam Sanctam,” the Precentor said (and Gennasius was leaning back in his chair, hands folded on belly, his I’ve-got-better-things-to-do pose) “is, of course, commonly used by the untrained, since the verbal formula is indefinite and, indeed, often varies from adept to adept. Usque ad Periculum, by the same token, is frequently encountered in these cases, for much the same reason. They are, of course, basic intuitive expressions of frustration and rage, strong emotions which—”

  “It says here,” Poteidanius interrupted, “he also did Mundus Verg. That’s not verbal-indefinite.”

  The Precentor glanced down at the notes on the table in front of him. “You’ll note,” he said, “that our observer was of the opinion that a variant was used, not Mundus Vergens itself. The variants, of which Licinianus lists twenty-six, include some forms which have been recorded as indefinite. The same would seem to apply to Choris Anthropou.”

  “Quite,” said the very old man at the end, whose name he could never remember. “Strachylides’ eight variants, three of which have been recorded as occurring spontaneously.” So there, he thought, as Poteidanius shrugged ungraciously. “I remember a case back in ’Fifty-Six. Chap was a striker in a blacksmith’s shop, didn’t know a single word of Parol. But he could do five variants of Choris in the vernacular.”

  “Our observer,” the Precentor said, “specifically asked if there was an aureola, and the witness was quite adamant.”

  “The third variant,” Gennasius said. “Suggests an untrained of more than usual capacity, or else a man with a really deep-seated grudge. I still don’t see why you had to drag us all out here. Surely your department can deal with this sort of thing without a full enclave.”

  He took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. “If you’d care to look at paragraph four of the report,” he said, trying to keep his voice level and reasonably pleasant, “you’ll see that—”

  “Oh, that.” Gennasius was shaking his head in that singularly irritating way. “Another suspected instance of Lorica. If I had half an angel for every time some graduate observer’s thought he’s found an untrained who’s cracked Lorica—”

  “I have interviewed the observer myself,” the Precentor said—trying to do gravitas, but it just came out pompous. “He is an intelligent young man with considerable field experience,” he went on, “not the kind to imagine the impossible or to jump to far-fetched conclusions on the basis of inadequate evidence. Gentlemen, I would ask you to put aside your quite reasonable scepticism for one moment and simply look at the evidence with an open mind. If this really is Lorica—”

  “It doesn’t exist.” Gennasius snapped out the words with a degree of passion the Precentor wouldn’t have believed him capable of. “It’s a legend. A fairy tale. There are some things that simply aren’t possible. Lorica’s one of them.”

  There was a short, rather painful silence. Raw emotion, like raw chicken, upset elderly gentlemen of regular habits. Then the Preceptor said gently, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred human beings would say exactly the same thing about magic.” He allowed himself to dwell on the word, because Gennasius hated it so. “And of course, they would be right. There is no such thing as magic. Instead, there is a branch of natural philosophy of which we are adepts and the rest of the world is blissfully ignorant. Gentlemen, think about it, please. It may well not be Lorica. But if it is, if there’s the slightest chance it could be, we have to do something about it. Now.”

  “I’m sorry,” the young man said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  The Precentor smiled. “Of course you haven’t.” He half-filled two of his notoriously small glasses with wine and handed one to the young man, who took it as if the stem was red-hot. “For one thing, it doesn’t exist.”

  The young man looked at him unhappily. “Ah,” he said.

  “At least,” the Precentor went on, “we believe it doesn’t exist. We hope like hell it doesn’t exist. If it does—” He produced a synthetic shudder of horror that actually became a real one.

  The young man put his glass down carefully on the table. “Is it some kind of weapon?”

  The Precentor couldn’t help smiling. “Quite the reverse,” he said. “That’s the whol
e point. Lorica’s completely harmless, you might say. It’s a defence.”

  “Ah.”

  “A total defence.” The Preceptor paused and watched. He’d chosen young Framea for his intelligence and perceptiveness. This could be a test for him.

  He passed. “A total defence,” he said. “Against everything? All known forms?”

  The Preceptor nodded slowly. “All known forms. And physical weapons too. And fire, water, death by suffocation and falling from a great height. Possibly some diseases too, we don’t know.”

  “That would be—” Framea frowned, and the Preceptor imagined a great swelling cloud of implications filling the young man’s mind. He didn’t envy him that. “That could be bad,” he said.

  “Extremely. An individual we couldn’t harm or kill; therefore outside our control. Even if he was a mediocre adept with limited power, knowledge of the basic offensive forms together with absolute invulnerability, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Even if his intentions were benign to begin with, the mere possession of such power would inevitably turn him into a monster. Hence,” he added gently, “our concern.”

  “But I still don’t quite—” Framea looked at him, reminding him vaguely of a sheep. “If it doesn’t exist—”

  “Ah.” The Preceptor held up a hand. “That’s the question, isn’t it? All we know is that it could exist. Blemmyes, a hundred and seventy years ago, proved that it could exist; his reasoning and his mathematics have been rigorously examined and found to be perfect. There is a potential for such a form. Of course, nobody has yet been able to produce it—”

  “You mean people have tried?”

  The Preceptor nodded slowly. “Unofficially, you might say, but yes. Well, you can imagine, the temptation would be irresistible. Some of the finest minds—But, thankfully, none of them succeeded. Several of them, indeed, wrote papers outlining their researches, basically arguing that if they couldn’t do it, nobody could—flawed logic, you’ll agree, but when you’re dealing with men of such exceptional vanity—”