Academic Exercises (38 page)

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 way 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.