“Up and at’em, grems!” the sergeant said, throwing the door open with the crash of metal on metal.
“Speak of the devil.” I muttered.
“I wanted to congratulate you all on not dying yesterday and taking the first step toward earning back your rights as citizens.” The sergeant’s appearance flickered and was replaced by a robed old man with a long salt and pepper beard. “My name is Magnus. And I am very pleased to be able to address you in a gentler fashion from the point forward. You, all of you, met with rather unfortunate fates before coming here. The loss of bodily integrity. The loss of faith in your way of life. The loss of loved ones.” On that last sentence he looked directly at me with a level stare, neither pitying nor indifferent. “In order to break past your denial, I had to push you. But now that you’ve consciously opened your territory and used it, I can begin to teach you how and why to use your gifts.”
“Does this mean you’ll answer questions without punching me?” I asked.
“Yes, but always bear in mind your situation. And that I can be Sergeant Magnus again whenever the need arises. The young and ignorant need a firm hand, after all.”
“Duly noted.”
He answered a few questions from each of us, mostly how we got here and what our options were now. It boiled down to some kind of detection, and teleportation magic blanketed over the southeastern US, and a mandatory four years being soldiers for the government in order to combat foreign mages and whatever mischief they might be up to. After that, we could either stay with the military or return to civilian life, with a number of restrictions on how we could use our magic and an older Magus keeping an eye on us like a magical parole officer.
When Magnus deemed question time over, we were brought outside, which had taken on the appearance of a college campus with three large red-brick buildings. Each had a large bronze plate on it with a pictograph indicating its function. A book meant library, bed meant dormitory, and sword meant gymnasium. Magnus led us on a brief tour of the buildings, showing each of us our rooms and explaining that, once we had the necessary control, we could reshape the buildings to our own needs. Which, he took pleasure in telling us, should only take about six months of disciplined mental exercise.
Later that evening, after dismissing everyone else, Magnus walked me over to the library. “Emotional instability is very useful for breaking in new mages to their power but very bad in the long run. To that end, I think you should make yourself a familiar.”
“Like a demon summoning thing?”
“No, demon summoning is always a poor choice. Dealing with creatures of faerie is also tricky but usually far less damaging to the soul. But, to be on the safe side, you’ll be making a familiar rather than summoning one.”
“Which I do, how exactly?”
“It’s quite simple. First, you make a vessel to be its physical form. Then you breathe magic and life into it. A friend of mine once used this rudimentary technique to empower a large clay statue to kill Nazis. But that is neither here nor there. I recommend a much less potentially violent form for this familiar.” Magnus touched his thumb to his lower lip for a moment, then waved a hand and produced a small stuffed rabbit. It reminded me of something I’d bought a year ago when I’d thought life was really looking up. Now, I could hardly stand to look at it.
“I’m not sure this is what I want.”
“Then produce your own vessel. Open your territory, visualize your desired object, and command that it appear.”
It sounded easy when he said it like that. I took a deep breath and tried to replicate the feeling from yesterday. It was surprisingly easy to do, like turning on the light in a room. Then I imagined something a bit less painful to look at.
“Cait Sith.” I muttered, the image coming clear into my mind. A black cat with a white chest and green eyes. And then, I was holding it. I can’t say it looked particularly well made, but at least it was basically what I had been trying for.
“A good first try. Now, give something of yourself to it. Breathe.”
I did as he said, and I felt my head go fuzzy when I did. Light danced in front of my eyes, little sparks of purple and blue. They sank into the toy, and as they did, the fake fur began to look more real. The toy began to jerk around in my hands, and I dropped it to the floor. The limbs, which had been sewn to the chest, pulled free and began to move. The toy jerked violently once then began to stretch itself like a genuine living cat.
“Wow,” I breathed, unable to look away from what I had made.
“Wow? Is that how you greet someone? I think we’ll need to work on your manners first,” the cat said.
I could have sworn my brain began making a grinding noise as gears misaligned because that was the moment my world really changed. Magic was real. I could make things from thin air. I could make a toy come to life. Tears filled my eyes and something I’d kept bottled up began to boil over inside me. My daughter would have loved this. My wife would have completely lost it. They would have, if they hadn’t died in a freak storm six months ago.
The dam broke, and I started weeping for them for the first time since the funeral. Without Mary and little Stephy, I hadn’t been able to see a point to life anymore. But, seeing Cait Sith, a toy from my childhood come to life, made me think there might be a reason to go on after all.
Aaron Van Treeck is making his writing debut in this anthology. He has a Master of Arts in Political Science and an (imaginary) Ph.D. in fantasy world-building. He's currently working as a number cruncher for whatever business is willing to pay the bills but aspires to be more than just his day job. He is supported by his parents, brother, and beautiful fiancee, Alison, to whom he would like to dedicate this story.
Asymptote at Three O’Clock
Steven G. Johnson
The old superstition that looking at the clock causes the period to last longer has now been established as a scientific fact …
Asymptote at Three O’Clock
It might be three-fifteen, or two-thirty. Even eleven-thirty on a half-day. But there’s a moment when School turns to Not, and everybody knows it. As the moment approaches, it gathers attention from more and more of the class, and as that weight of longing piles up on the minute hand, it drags slower and slower and slow-w-er-r …
It is a progression that approaches the Not but, moving less for each increment of time passed, never seems to quite get there. A sort of infinity confined between everything that has ever been and a hard limit perpetually out of reach. In math, it’s called an asymptote. In Critical Limits, it’s just three o’clock.
I’m a teacher, and as the Asymptote approaches, I feel like I always will be …
“Twenty minutes,” I said, as someone started to turn around in his seat to see the hourglass. “We have twenty minutes left in class. Let’s not waste them looking at the glass; the more you look, the more time seems to be left.”
There were thirty names on my CritLim roll for the last period of the day, but all thirty-six seats were filled. Five of those were because Walter Konevalov had found out how to make copies of himself, or had someone show him how to do it; that was easy to spot, because they all sat together. And of course, Rugitas took up two seats, with a thick board spanning the space between them, because they grow them big wherever he comes from.
Heavy, too. That board was stressed, bowing downward in a curve that missed being a parabola by just that slightest tick of flatness at the bottom. Well, wood isn’t infinitely flexible, unlike the laws of nature.
I tapped them with my pointer, hanging on the wall next to the periodic table of elementals.
“The Maker loves creativity, which should be obvious, since he made an extremely wide variety of things. And he loves us, his creations, which when you add up all the unlikely conditions required for us to exist at all, should also be obvious. But in case it isn’t obvious, I am kindly reminding you now.
“Yes,’ I interrupted myself, nodding at Tim Schlemmer. Somehow I thought point
ing at a person with the stick, the way I pointed at maps and objects in the classroom, was insulting. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I wanted to insult Schlemmer right at this moment, though it wasn’t zero percent, either. Not every teacher has favorites, indeed we resist having them, but we all certainly develop the converse. Show me a kid who doesn’t have any rough edges which get old, if not precisely annoying, over time, and I’ll show you a kid who probably doesn’t need a teacher.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” he said innocently. Lack of any involvement, plus or minus, with what is happening around himself is a form of innocence.
“Sure,” I said automatically, and then had to cover without contradicting myself. You don’t want to outright say you never make a mistake, but it’s a nice impression to create indirectly, if you can.
“While you’re gone, which will be long enough to repair all six moving parts of the bathroom equipment you’ll be using, if not quite enough time to mine, smelt, forge and machine those parts from raw ore, I’ll be explaining how you can avoid killing yourself and everyone around you with the magic you already possess, right now. Never mind what you’ll have a year from now, or even in the next few months before winter break. Right now at this moment, you have the power to wipe yourself off the face of reality – not just the Earth, but reality itself – by making a few simple mistakes.
“We’ll be listing those on the board. If you miss ‘em, you might not make it back. Ever. So I guess the question you have to ask yourself is, ‘How bad do I need to go?’ “
He sat.
“As we’ve seen, the Maker loves creativity and he loves us. So it’s the most natural thing in Creation that he’d want us to enjoy creativity, also. Which is why there are a few solid, baseline rules we can’t break, but everything else is up for modification.”
The chair under Rugitas’ left buttock rocketed sideways. I snapped out my left index finger, the one which usually curled around the pointing stick, and jerked it back to where I wanted the chair to remain. The aerogel ring on that finger sparkled slightly.
It took me a long time to get used to wearing jewelry, especially in class, but it was completely worth it. From high in the corner of the room, over the sky-globe, a sprite, one of the air-spirits from column VIII of the periodic table, pounced from where it had been invisibly, impatiently, waiting for something to happen. Day after day, it kept its mind glued to that pale blue translucent ring on my left hand, hoping that this was the minute I’d finally point at something and release it like an arrow from a bow, to rip aside the sluggish gases of the atmosphere and knock something over. Unlike their cousins from column I, the halogenies are like two-year-olds trying really really hard to stand still; they’re still going a mile a minute, just oscillating in place until the command.
Thump-whack! The chair slammed back into place, popping the board back into the parallel and slightly swaying Rugitas’ mineral bulk. Now the two chairs were touching, which meant he overlapped their combined surfaces on the left. I tapped the air, once, and the chair slid back to a more balanced position, scraping the floor like a chalkboard being sledded down a hillside of fingernails.
I closed my hand around the pointer once more, and the sprite flew back, slamming into the corner with an audible thump to take up its quivering, fanatical vigil. Until the next time.
I didn’t think anyone had deliberately tried to dump Rugitas on his backside. He was too calm, for all his potentially scary bulk and strength, for anyone to really want to see him humbled. Then, too, for all you hear about wicked bullies and virtuous, long-suffering nerds, no one ever seemed to actually want to tweak the big boys’ noses, not for real. Even the weak preferred to pick on the weak.
No, what I figured was that someone had wondered what it would be like if Rugitas took a tumble out of his chairs. That’s all, just a daydream as the day stubbornly continued not to end. But I hadn’t just been killing time when I told them they were dangerous. At this age, with some really powerful drives starting to form, they were about to be able – if they weren’t already – to make some minor things happen without necessarily Intending them. Intention is a powerful concept – it’s the difference between Error and Sin, for one thing – but beyond a child’s ability to distinguish from Want or Whim. And they were still, in many ways, children.
If they weren’t, I wouldn’t have had to let my sprite off the chain, would I?
Hey, that was a way to vary the message. I tried it out:
“You’re not children any more,” I exaggerated. “The powers that watch over the cute and helpless aren’t as interested in keeping you safe any more. The spirits that think it’s fascinating to watch us embodied types jump around, like cats, though, those spirits are beginning to find you very interesting.”
“The Lust and Envy phyla, for example,” I said, flicking the pointer at the Kingdoms of Creation tree, “you’re not just studying them any more, like you did in tenth grade Daimonology, remember? Now they’re studying you.”
“Wrath, you think you’re familiar with. Kids get mad, crazy mad. But adult minds can form much deeper, much drier, much, much darker folds for the Red Runners to nest in. They give your powers strength, but they’re not much interested in aiming that strength. Not much.”
I got a couple of chuckles from the back right of the room, which is where most of the kids who paid attention sat. I’d gotten stuck on the word “much,” and rather than veer off, I’d taken it further, turning it into a self-parody. They liked that; I was acknowledging imperfection. Some kids didn’t mind imperfection as much as long as you didn’t try to deny it.
And I had a good capper for the bit, too:
“That was much too much much, wasn’t it?” I said. “I promise to stop using ‘much’ so much just as soon as you stop using ‘very’ as half the word count of your essays.”
A smile, a shake of the head, a serious nod of agreement from Agora, the boy with no play in his soul. Even some of the time-servers were listening, now. I was as ready as I was ever going to be to tell them something important.
“You are in this school because you have powers,” I announced, and most of the room heard me. “Not very focused, yet, but not very bounded, either. Of all the forces that might hook up with you along your life, just about all of them are still potentially interested. Lightning, Fire, Love, Wind, Fear, Wrath, Glory, Charm ...” I ticked them off on my fingers, running down the mnemonics that were all up on the walls in front of me, anyway.
“But these forces can hurt people, including you if you use them wrong. They may like you and want to do what you say, but they’re not people and they don’t really understand their effect on us.
“That’s right, I said us. I’m right there in the same boat with you.”
I indicated my aerogel ring.
“You think this little sprite knows what broken means? It’s a gas! Gases can’t break, or bend, or get stuck. I can think all day long, 'Hey, buddy – don’t break that chair' but I might as well be Charlie Brown’s teacher at that point. What he hears is 'mwop mwop mwop, mwop mwop … chair.'”
Rugitas’ chair jumped upward sharply, once.
“One of you did that, just now,” I pointed out. “You had a spirit interested in you, it saw in your mind that you’d like to see that chair jump, and pow! It happened.”
It certainly did. Both chairs jumped, spun, and jittered. Rugitas looked uneasy.
“Knock it off,” I said, gesturing the sprite back into action. Something invisible and highly contentious happened beneath the board, and the jittering stopped. But I had to move their attention off the site, or it was just going to start again.
"You know how, when you're a baby, you can't see right away?" I said. That got them; a lot of them had baby brothers and sisters. The chairs stayed quiet.
"Why can’t you? Your eyes work; your brain works. But your brain hasn't yet learned what these things called eyes are saying, or how to relate them into a map of where everyth
ing is. That takes time. Your brain has to figure that out all on its own, and until then, you're blind. Basically blind; there are images, but they don’t help you yet.
“Then, later, your brain has to figure out how to walk, how to talk, and everything else you know. It has to learn how to learn."
"That's you, now, again. Your powers are awakening, after a long childhood nap. All those spirits tagging along behind you? They’re looking for a master to tell them what to do. They want to follow a leader. But there isn't one, not at first, because your mind is taken up with objects in space, and memories in time, and words and numbers and school and home and church and brothers and sisters … none of which makes any sense to a bodiless spirit with no past, no volume, no mass, no family and no future. It’s watching you to see what game you’re gonna play now, and you’re talking to yourself in a language it doesn’t know.
“Kind of like we are, right now, isn’t it? You want me to get to the good stuff so you know what you’re supposed to do for the next, uh, seven minutes.”
That was a mistake. Now they were reminded there was something beyond this class.
"Everybody with me?" I asked. The eyes on me ranged from sullen to eager, but none of them had that bored, "I already know this," look, so I'd have to conclude no, they didn't get it yet.
"It's like a brand-new spellphone," I said, trying another tack. "You have to download some apparitions before you can do stuff. Except unlike a phone, your mind doesn't come with any, and there isn't an app store you can visit. You gotta wait for your powers to write their own apps."
I admit it: I had been a late, very late, adopter of smartphones, and never used them in any way that would justify the tag 'smart.' And now, of course, I didn't need one, not with all the single-trick spirits I’d adopted. But I hoped this metaphor was working a little better.
Fantastic Schools: Volume One (Fantastic Schools Anthologies Book 1) Page 7
