Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  Allogloss is worse than that. You make it using a form I don’t know and don’t wish to learn. What you write changes; it disguises itself. A non-adept looks at it and just sees nonsense. It’s like a code, but it’s truly unbreakable, unless you know the appropriate form, moi aeide. Once you use the form, allogloss wakes up. The words (more to the point, a little bit of the mind that wrote the words) can talk to you. Ten people reading a page of allogloss will read ten very different texts—the meaning is exactly the same, but the phraseology, even the language it’s in—will be completely different. Allogloss is not a toy. It’s toxic.

  Nothing wholesome was ever written in allogloss; nothing anyone ever wanted to read. There’s a school of thought, to which I’m tempted to adhere, that says the only place for allogloss texts is the back of a lit grate.

  Sadly, I had no choice. She was going to have to copy it out, and I was going to have to read it. What fun.

  The first passage went something like this; or at least, this was the sort of thing I heard in my head. I’m not sure to this day how much of it’s him and how much is me. I’ve tried to make it sound like him, but pretty soon you reach a point where the distinction gets blurred, and believe me, that’s not an experience I’d wish on anyone.

  Read on. Enjoy.

  I met her when I was thirty-three years old and she was, what, seventeen, eighteen. She was a classic case of late onset, but fiercely talented. Her name was

  I really do believe that talented women should be treated properly, given genuine opportunities. We make all sorts of excuses, we abuse and exaggerate the evidence—sure, some of it’s perfectly true; their talent’s more fragile than ours, so what? That means we should help them more, not less. Wherever it occurs, the talent is precious and wonderful, and someone who’s got it is special. Someone with as much of it as she had is a miracle, an extraordinary gift to the world. Any other attitude is simply barbaric.

  To begin with, she came to me for mechanics, logic and theory of displacement. I’ve never met someone who learned so fast. It’s the difference between watering a plant and watching it slowly grow, and pouring water into a glass. I barely had to explain anything; it was more like I was reminding her of things she already knew. She covered the entire first year syllabus in one term. Amazing. I had to resit logic three times, and then I only just scraped through.

  They wanted to send her to Palaeologus for forms, but I talked to Father Prior. He gave me a few odd looks, but he knew me well enough to realise that if I was so certain about a student, I was probably right. So I got her for forms, levels one to three, and I persuaded Father Prior to let her skip her scriptorium year, on account of the lateness of her onset. It’d be a wicked waste, I told him, and he had to agree.

  Ask anyone; I’m not a natural teacher. I go too fast, I get impatient if the student doesn’t share my enthusiasm, doesn’t want to learn as much as I do. Teaching her was extraordinary. I don’t really know how to describe it; except that once, many years ago, I took a clock to pieces, to see how it worked, and then I put it back together again. I remember how perfectly each component fitted into its carefully-prepared place in the mechanism, how each cog spindle clipped neatly into a hole drilled in exactly the right place, how the teeth came together, exactly spaced and timed, how each stratum of the design supported and anticipated the rest. Teaching her was like that; each new theory and form slotting into place, as though her mind had been machined to receive them, slots, holes, lugs, keyways, dovetails, as if I was building it according to a preordained design; as though I was reassembling inside her head something that belonged there, but which had been removed at some point for maintenance and repair. Lambanus, wasn’t it, who believed that education is simply reminding us of things we knew in a previous incarnation. I’d always laughed at that. I still don’t believe it, but I can see how, under certain circumstances, a rational man might formulate the theory.

  Correction; not Lambanus. The reincarnation theory was actually my sainted grandfather, though he thought better of it and cut it out of General Principles; he must have told Lambanus about it in a letter, and that fool stole it and passed it off as his own.

  (I blinked three times when I read that. See my AUC 1744 lecture to the Fifth Ethical Congress, “Lambanus and the Relearned Memory Hypothesis”, in which I proved that the source for Lambanus’ theory was a deleted section from Saloninus. I was rather brilliant back then, before my brain got rusty. My sainted grandfather? Dear God.)

  But then, Grandfather wasn’t writing for the record, was he? You can’t blame someone for chance remarks taken out of context. I need to remember that. Nobody else’s fault. Mine alone.

  After all that, my hard work, my obsession, she got a decent but unremarkable lower second in Moderations and was certified for ancillary field work. I wasn’t having that. I went straight to Father Prior, who said it was out of his hands—he’s a coward—and referred me to Chapter. Fine. I raised a formal petition, argued the case at a full hearing, got her upgraded to an upper second and assigned to me as a research assistant. Naturally they asked me what my research was going to be. I told them, aspects of traumatic ability loss; which was partly true.

  You must remember, I must remember, we must remember that I was deeply, wildly, passionately in love with—

  —and then three pages of astronomical observations, carefully arranged and meticulously recorded. What?

  “Did you miss out a bit?” I asked her.

  “No, of course not.” She looked up and frowned at me. The insides of her fingers were black with ink. “Why would I want to do something like that?”

  “I thought maybe there were some illegible pages.”

  She shook her head. “Actually, it’s pretty bad but after a while you get used to it. I find I can sort of guess just by looking at it. Does that make sense?”

  Oh yes. “Sorry,” I said. “Only it reads like there’s a chunk missing here.”

  She laughed. “Is there really any point to this? The poor man was obviously deranged. It’s all just—”

  “Quite.” I gave her a thin smile, best I could do. “Never mind. Onwards.”

  “Can we have something to eat now? I’m starving.”

  “Sure.” I paused, and thought about what she’d just said. “You did remember to bring some food, didn’t you?”

  Scientific method [this is the next bit of allogloss narrative]. It’s the rock I cling to. Scientific method, no matter what.

  Therefore—

  You have seen, haven’t you, that I’ve proved beyond doubt that loss of virginity and frequent sexual intercourse do not necessarily deprive a female adept of her talent. I have conceded that her talent was exceptionally strong, and that the usual power level found in female adepts may well be insufficient to survive such experiences. The data, however, speaks for itself. To cite one example, picked at random from my records; on 17/5/1802AUC, in the early hours of the morning, we engaged in full-scale sexual activity for forty-seven minutes. One hour later, she was able to perform a fifth-level form (lux dardaniae) and a third-room dislocation. No detectable sign of accelerated heartbeat or respiratory activity. I have thirty-seven similar documented experiments, with full case notes.

  More than that. As yet I have insufficient data to prove it, but I’m convinced that her abilities are actually increasing. Unthinkable! But how else am I to account for her ability to perform decus et gloria, unaided and without an interval?

  My fault; not having anticipated such a possibility, I neglected to make a control study before taking her virginity. What I should have done was get her to attempt a range of sixth and seventh level forms &c, so as to be in a position to compare results. As it is, I only have her performance in levels one to three to go on, these being the forms she was trained in as part of her normal education, and no dislocations at all. Until another subject of similar aptitude can be found, I’m precluded from making a meaningful comparison, which is intensely frustrating; I have no w
ay of knowing whether she would’ve been able to do sixth level and above beforehand, or whether it’s my work that has augmented her abilities. I have only myself to blame for this, of course.

  Since there doesn’t seem to be any way for me to move forward in this area, I shall now turn to the next—

  “That’s it,” she said.

  I looked up. “What?”

  “That’s all the parchment used up. If you want me to copy any more out, you’ll need to clean off some more pages.”

  I groaned. My right hand was a mess. I’d used all the healing forms I knew—not many, I’m afraid, and I’ve never been much good at them—but they didn’t seem to have worked, because the skin was still raw and deeply cracked. Trouble is, you can’t get a decent finish if you rub the brick dust on with a cloth. It has to be your hand if you want a surface you can write on.

  “How far have you got?” I asked.

  She skimmed the pages. “I’d say about two-thirds,” she said. She hesitated, then added, “They’ve got heaps and heaps of paper back at the Studium, and then you wouldn’t have to—”

  I scowled at her. “Here’s two angels,” I said. “Go down to the village and buy some food.”

  “What? It’s an eight-hour round trip.”

  I shrugged. “Fine. That’s about how long it’ll take me to clean off the rest of these pages.”

  Curious look on her face; rage at being ordered about, deep distress at the thought of all that riding, sincere compassion and concern about my hand and what I was proposing to do to it. And more rage because I wouldn’t give up and go back home. “If you insist,” she said. “But I still think—”

  “Splendid,” I said. “See you later.”

  I’ve never [he went on] invented a form before. It’s extraordinary.

  They say the words choose themselves, but it’s not true. You have a choice (another myth exploded). When I opened the agent parameters, I realised, it was up to me. My choice. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.

  In the end I opted for verbum scripsi rather than verba scripsi or scripsimus, simply because I liked the sound of it better. Strange thought; generations of practitioners will use those words, believing them to be immutable and—well—magical, and all because, at a given moment in time, I made a decision, based on preference, whim. Anyway, verbum scripsi it is. I have this mental image of an endless succession of students muttering “verbum scripsi” over and over under their breath as they file into the examination halls. I hope it’ll be easy to remember, and that they won’t lose marks if they get it slightly wrong, verba or scripsimus, because either of those will do just as well. But I won’t be there to speak up for them, of course.

  An endless succession. Communication divorced from the presence of the communicator. The dead speak to us, and through us to others yet unborn. And you can perform this miracle by scratching obscenities on a wall, if nobody can be bothered to clear it off.

  I didn’t tell her, of course. Risk of observer bias. Instead, I waited till she was asleep, then put her deep under with dormienda. Then I set to work.

  I enjoyed my two years in the scriptorium, mostly because I was so good at it. I’ve always loved being good at things. It was a loss to the profession, they told me, when my time was up. I was the youngest ever illuminator of capitals; they let me do five-colour initials in my first year, and by the time I left I was doing gold leaf. Best of all, though, they told me, was my basic cursive script; in other words, my handwriting, would you believe. The clearest, best spaced, most classically formed letters they’d ever seen.

  That was then, of course; many years ago. But, apparently, there are some things you don’t forget.

  I wrote out verbum scripsi in full on her face as she slept, using oak-gall and soot in a thin alcohol base. I covered her forehead and both cheeks. Then I got rid of the mirror and covered up all the reflective surfaces in the room, and waited to see what would happen.

  For the record; verbum scripsi is a ninth-level form enabling the user to take control of the subject’s mind and body. In order to be effective, it must be written on the subject’s skin. The subject need not be conscious. So far, I have made no tests to ascertain whether the effect is diminished if the subject is aware of what is being done. Given the nature of the form, however, I doubt whether this will make much difference in practice.

  The next step, logically, will be to

  Which was as far as she’d got.

  Food for thought there, all right. For example; I sent her down to the village to buy food. Actually, there were three days’ rations in my saddlebags, something I neglected to mention, because I wanted her out of the way, because I needed to think. See? I imposed my will on her with a command—verbal, in this instance, but you can give orders just as well in writing. Giving orders, controlling, commanding, is easy. You don’t even have to be there. You don’t even have to be alive.

  Grandson of the immortal Saloninus; thirty years to a generation, so round about AUC 1790; ninety years ago. Practically certain both of them were dead by now. Ninety years since the tower was last occupied? Hardly. Five; ten at most. And the reports said, activity here within the last eighteen months. Our orders (written and verbal) were, simply, investigate. Fine. An open-ended remit like that suggested that something nasty was suspected, but nobody knew what, and couldn’t be bothered to find out. Entirely possible, therefore, that the book and the allogloss texts were nothing to do with the problem we’d been sent to deal with. Sometimes I wonder what they do all day in General Situations. Whatever it is, it can’t be their jobs. They wouldn’t last a day in the private sector.

  I needed a breath of fresh air, so I went outside. The sun was shining, so bright that the tower shone white against a rich blue sky. I thought about that for a moment, then went back inside and got the journal. With light this bright, maybe I’d be able to read it for myself.

  Needless to say—

  [The voice in my head was different, somehow]

  Needless to say, he’d got it completely wrong. The form he’d invented worked all right, but it didn’t do what he thought it did.

  Many women are arrogant; a great many women are stupid. But that special blend of stupidity and arrogance; my unique insight allows me to be quite categorical on this point. I don’t see how a woman could be capable of it. Quite simply that. It came as a terrible shock to me. I actually felt guilty about it, though of course it wasn’t my fault.

  For the record; the form verbum scripsi, which I have recorded here and which I sincerely hope nobody will ever be stupid enough to use ever again, comprises a verbal component (the magic words, if you will) and the act of writing on the skin of another person. The effect of the form is to transfer to the person written on (the inscribed? The writee?) an intuitive summary of the writer’s consciousness at the time of writing. When I woke up, I knew everything, as though his memories had been put into my head. I knew what he’d done; put me to sleep with dormienda, concocted a form which he thought gave him the power to control my mind, planned an extensive and meticulous program of research into the way in which women gain, use and lose the talent (with me as his research tool, his subject, his raw material). I had his motivation; to improve the standing of talented women with a view, eventually, to seeing them recognised as men’s equals, provided that our biological frailties—his delightful expression—could be overcome by training and artificial assistance. I also knew, with summer-sunlight clarity, how he was prepared to sacrifice my talent and my life to further his sublime aim. Oh, and I could now fully participate in his obsession with me—intellectual admiration, a fierce collector’s desire to possess an exceptionally rare specimen, and lots and lots of straightforward physical lust. And something else, of course.

  I am reminded of that fine old excuse, I don’t know what got into me. Except; I do. Unfortunately, knowledge is no antidote. A person can know all about the disease that’s killing her, but that doesn’t cure it. So; again for the record
, and I do hope someone reads this; before he wrote on me, I was perfectly sane and rational. I had a perfectly functional moral compass and a proper, if conventional, respect for human life.

  I’m telling the page this, and I hope the page will tell someone else. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me. Not my insanity, but his. Not murder, but—what, suicide? I think we need a new category of homicide. Is there a lawyer in the house?

  I stopped reading and went back inside. I wasn’t feeling too good.

  My hands had been hurting for some time; a sort of dull throbbing, which suggested to me (though I wasn’t in the mood to listen) that scraped-off parchment flakes and brick dust had got into the cuts and cracks in my hand and turned septic. Not too good; you can get blood poisoning that way, and die. That’s a problem with reading allogloss, of course. It starts to become an obsession, as though the narrator’s will to be heard grows stronger than your own. Probably, now I come to think of it, why I’d refused to take the book back to the Studium. He’d been talking to me, after all. He was mine, just as I was his.

  Hers, now. And I knew what had happened.

  She came back just before dusk with bread, bacon, sausage and a jar of that revolting pickled cabbage that the country people seem to live on, though it always gives me the most appalling heartburn. I was outside, waiting for her.

  “Is that you?” I called out.

  “No, it’s the Supreme Archimandrite. Who do you think it is?”

  Made me laugh. Questions of identity and all that. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping right there,” I said. “I don’t think you should come any closer.”