"Now, your powers aren't what we call 'persistent.' When you go to sleep, they're gone. And a good thing, too, or else you’d be casting spells in your dreams! And you ..."
A hand.
"Yes," I said. This time, I was going to consider whether I’d be better off with letting the kid go to the bathroom, or skipping over him with a flat denial before everyone else tuned out. Sometimes I hate the Internet Age.
"You said there's no app store," said James Wolcznowski, a boy in a red chrome robe with silver slash-patterns running through it. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that pattern: it was a team, or a movie, or a show, I thought. "But you've got a bunch of apps figured out, right? Couldn't we just download yours?"
Powers? I thought. Can they?
Yes, that can be done, said the voice in the back of my mind, which spoke for all its residents who weren’t actually me. Exposure will fascinate and fix spirits which resemble yours, leading to virtual twinning.
Yeahhh, I thought, that’s pretty personal for a student-teacher contact. Maybe not.
Roy (or Rob, or Ron? Three o’clock just was not going to get here) Drachenfutter, in a red cape and boots (the rest being silver, but in a different way from Wolcznowski) raised his hand.
“Just a sec,” I said. “James, you can’t really copy someone else’s spirits: spirits aren’t as complicated as people, but they’re not identical, either. It’s like copying someone’s cat.
“Yeah. Question?” I said to Roy-Rob-Ron.
“How do you fly? Everyone else is flying.”
“Short answer? You associate one of these kinds of Freedom spirits, column I-B or II-B. But they’re transitional, with multiple postures; one’s flying, one’s floating. Getting both postures takes some skill and some depth, which you’re not ready for; otherwise, you wind up flying all the time, and at top speed, to boot.
“So instead,” I went on, “you have to get your air spirits, your sprites and faeries, to resist the gravity inherent in all matter. Best way to do that is to hold the different elementals together, like with like, so they temporarily stop holding onto you. It’s easier than it sounds; the air groups know what to do. You’ve noticed the padding on the roof of the gym, right? We’ll make sure you’re all checked out on flying before you graduate.”
Another guy, with rings floating above his shoulders somehow, raised his hand too. Just as well – I was forgetting the point I had set out to make, and with five minutes left to make it.
“Yes,” said I. “Fourth row. Ah, Bendtler.”
“Liquid metal makes new shapes at the atomic level, right?” he asked. When I nodded, he went on, “So what if I tell it to pull atoms apart, instead of putting them together? Could I –"
POP!
Everyone, myself most definitely included, remembered a flash of violet so bright it was white. Some retained a memory of heat so intense it felt like a slap, a burning that pushed things away by virtue of sheer temperature.
A couple were blinking, hard, trying to rid their eyes of afterimages of a blasted, ruined, smoke-choked craterscape that hadn’t – quite – happened.
“And that’s why we don’t want you out on the street until you know what’s what,” I said smoothly, holding up my hand for attention. “Your powers, and all their tagalongs, are trying to do what you want. They’re bundles of primal forces, not people – they don’t really get it. Say the wrong thing, even think the wrong thing if you’re unlucky, and blammo! Game over.”
“It so happens that breaking atoms apart releases a lot of energy,” I said. “Really quite an astonishing amount. So –”
POP!
Violet flash, so bright it was white. Heat, slap, burning which pushed through sheer temperature. The walls of the room blowing down flat, crisping, curling as they burned. Craterscape.
“You did it again,” I explained. “I don’t know who, but whoever you are—you do, don’t you? Don’t do it again. That’s the kind of thing we need to teach you not to do.
“You ever stand in the middle of a lightning strike? Well –”
SNAP!
I hadn’t seen that one coming. I really did need to put my knack for dramatic comparisons in cold storage for a while, or this lesson wasn’t ever going to get done.
“That was me, Mr. Waldo,” said Wolcznowski.
“What’d you do?” I said patiently. “Explain it to me.”
“I thought of being in a lightning strike …” he said, and tensed, but it didn’t happen this time.
“Good!” I said explosively, influenced by recent events. “You can think it without making it happen. It doesn’t take long to learn to do that with, well, all sorts of things.”
“Mr. Waldo – what happened?” Kelly Sowetska wanted to know. “Why aren’t we dead?”
“We had some time displacement circles standing by,” I told her, “Dancing right over our heads, a couple of seconds ahead of us. When someone drops the ball, they curl us right back to the moment before the big oops, so we can try again. So don’t worry about what you saw – it never happened. Sort of.”
I did want them to worry, but not in a focused or specific way, lest it happen – almost – again. A Kekule ring only has six bonds, three past, three future, and we didn’t have all that many rings in play. We couldn’t keep resetting history indefinitely.
“Now, I want everyone to repeat after me. Not out loud – to your powers. Make them say it with you.
‘Do not split atoms.’ Make ‘em repeat it back. Oh, and ‘do not make antimatter.’ That’s a big one.”
(FLASH WITHOUT SOUND)
The city didn’t explode, again. This time it didn’t explode bigger, and the damage wasn’t way more extensive. The mushroom cloud didn’t flatten out against the edge of the atmosphere, twenty miles up.
“Thanks, dancers in the angles of Time,” I said. “Thanks, Maker. Clearly you want us to succeed.
“Okay! Someone’s powers didn’t get the message. Or more likely, they didn’t understand. They want to help you – they’re your powers. They need to know you really, really need this. Okay?
“Everyone try again – I know you think you did it right, but it’s hard to tell sometimes. Spirits, right?”
I raised my hand. They looked at it.
“I will not … come on, everyone together … I will NOT .. make antimatter.”
This time the city didn’t explode. It was a more definite non-explosion than before.
“Okay! We’re making some progress on Lesson One: You Are A Loaded Gun. We’re not always gonna have a time circle handy, so get that straight. You’re gonna do a world of good for this world, and the whole macrocosmic Creation, up to and Beyond, so long as they’re still alive to be served and protected.”
This one was going better than the other sessions I’d hosted. Pretty soon, at this rate, I’d have all the seniors in CritLim briefed, checked out and safe to let loose on the population. Well, as safe as anyone else. They were still going to have free will, and there were always going to be –
POP!
Well, not everyone gets it the first time. It didn’t mean they weren’t trying …
POP POP POP SNAP!
(FLASH WITHOUT SOUND. DARKNESS.)
The whirling flames flickered into visibility, just over our heads. They were tiring, nearing exhaustion. Soon they would die.
I strode to the back of the classroom, went up on my toes, and took hold of the hourglass.
It weighed a ton. But all I had to do was tip it over.
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 confin
ed 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.
“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.”
I’m a teacher, and as the Asymptote approaches, I feel like I always will be …
Steven G. Johnson has been writing since high school in the fantasy, science fiction and crime genres. He teaches high school chemistry and history in Virginia. He has also taught French, German, math, biology, physics, theater, and military science. Many of the near-fatal actions and statements of the students in this story have actually happened in his classroom. Before taking up teaching, Steve was a newspaper reporter, pineapple butcher, insurance claims processor, comic book journalist, immigration correspondence analyst, e-healthcare researcher and chemical waste disposal technician. He just barely qualifies to wear a blue shirt on Star Trek.
Practical Exercise
George Phillies
Adara Triskittenion has attained her dream. She’s enrolled at Dorrance Academy, home of the Great Library and (moribund) research institution of the Commonality of the Timeless. Some fellow students are serious scholars; others want a Gentleman’s C and a good time. She wants to study the basis of all magic. On her first day, she rescues a fellow student from a group of bullies, one of whom makes deadly plans against her. Her routine combat magic placement exam, the practical exercise, becomes a deadly trap with no escape.
Practical Exercise
Because Academic Warfare is Deadlier Than the Real Thing.
My first view of Dorrance Academy was in the early morning. The rising sun was still low above the horizon. Dawn’s rays painted the grass and trees in gorgeous shades of green-gold. The Academy’s buildings were tinged with burnished bronze and faded copper. It must have rained last night; you could see sparkling raindrops hanging from spring flowers. The air was spring-chill, but the sun was warm against my cloak.
I’d waited a decade and a half for this day, a decade and a half in which I knew this was what I wanted to do. There had been the day, a decade ago, in which I first came into my magic, meaning I could don the agelessness spell that held me unaging as a young adult. Of course, someday I would finish here, put aside that spell, and age into a grownup, but that was an unclear time in the future, after I’d established myself as a scholar.
I’d arrived on a rise, several hundred feet above the sloping plain on which the Academy waited. My older brothers, Heath and Moore, had preceded me here by two decades. Now I, their kid sister Adara, would follow in their footsteps. The ground where I stood was entirely flat, paved with a single slab of flawless white marble. I did remember to check the seal. Carved into the stone and filled with gold, it read “53” in numbers two feet across. Yes, I’d come to my assigned arrival point. My two trunks hovered behind me.
Relative to my luggage, the arrival point was enormous. Was it used for something else? I summoned from memory a campus map. No, the freight arrival points were sensibly down on the plain. Arriving up here is what you did as a student, preferably about this time of day. Some students just had a lot of luggage.
I heard a high-pitched whistle to my left. At the rear of the next entry point, someone was opening a deep gate. A deep gate was surely an effective way to get here in a whole hurry from far away, as opposed to what I did, taking a long series of shorter walks across the Purple Sea. The deep gate’s surface was black, shot through with fluorescent clouds and bursts of particolored lightning. Through it walked someone close to my own age, well, physical age. He came through first, so he had to have opened the gate himself. Yes, I do know how to open a deep gate. That’s one of the things you learn to do to support really high-power spells. However, I am definitely not stupid enough to walk through one. Deep gates take you into the Void, which at my age is definitely a bad place to be. OK, some boys think they are invincible and indestructible.
I watched as he pulled more and more of his trunks through the gate. He wasn’t keeping that good control of his gate, enough so that the wards around my arrival point, the wards around my trunks, and finally my personal wards began to flicker into activity. I’ve opened larger deep gates, with people standing there to intervene if needed (it wasn’t), but my deep gates were rock solid and completely under my control. His gate was unstable. Before the matter got too serious, he pulled the last of his trunks through the deep gate and closed it.
I turned away to look at the Academy. The view was beautiful the Academy plain stepping slowly down toward the Pelnir Sea. The beaches were golden yellow. Several large-scale enchantments meant that the water for a fair distance out from shore was pleasantly warm and absolutely clean. Across the harbor, I could make out through the morning haze the New School, its single vast building capped with domes and towers.
Academy buildings were an eclectic range of every known style. That’s every style known to us, the Timeless Ones, the Hidden Masters of such part of creation as we choose to rule. The One Library was a vast slab of golden granite and glass brick. Even from here, well up on a rise and a mile away, I could see the shimmer of its wards, spellwork that protected it from fire, flood, and every other imaginable disaster. The School of Theology building was architecturally unique. It started with limestone columns and slabs, fused at one end to brickwork of rococo ornateness, merged into a mass of silver and glass, finally reaching an open court surrounded by topless columns and four quartz towers, those being the personal and staff offices of the Four Patriarchs when they were in residence.
Entering student interviews were in Ellwood Hall, just this side of the Campus Martius. Campus Martius? We are, divine beings help us, expected to study the combat arts. As an heir of House Triskittenion, I’d been expected to master martial sorcery. Already. I’d tried. My occasional tutor grumbled that I relied too much on speed and brute force rather than subtlety. He warned me that would often work poorly, given that I’m a young adult, not a grown-up. Grandfather Worrow was more tolerant, not to mention more demanding. For my first single-person hunt, I brought back the heads of three night terrors. Back at home, their skulls decorate the walls of my bedroom. After my first hunt, my tutor grumbled less.
Over my back, under my cape and cloak, I wore a gnothdiar, a spellcaster sword, one of whose other purposes was to be extremely sharp. It was the same weapon that I’d used to kill the night terrors. I suppose I could have locked it in one of my trunks, but its enchantments were sufficiently heavy that it was safer worn close to my body.
The fellow to my left was doing something that rearranged his trunks into a line suitable for towing. He could wait. I tapped my lead trunk once to get the attention of its spellwork. It dutifully followed me, puppy-like, as I started down the hill. School housing, unless I wanted a proper house, was off to the left, so I would need to walk the trunks there, sign for keys, lock up my trunks, and then walk all the way across campus to be interviewed. It was good exercise.
“Look out where you’re going, you idiot!” That shout was the boy on the next entrance point. He’d started after I had, was moving faster than I’d say was sensible for someone with that long a train of trunks behind him, and obviously thought that I was in his way. “I’m a man of House Fourbridge, soon to be a great combat sorcerer, so you get to wait while I pass.” He made a crude hand gesture, a gesture a bit too close to a mantric form for my comfort.
Fourbridge appeared to be something of an idiot. Supposedly students did get into fights – a massively stupid behavior, in my opinion—but if he wanted to start one, I would do my best to finish it. I pushed my hood back and reached behind me, my left hand tapping my trunks to stop them. Pushing back my hood meant I had my right hand almost at the hilt of my gnothdiar, while my left hand was out of his sight where I used it to cast a shielding ward.
>
“Nice to meet you,” I answered cheerily.
“I am Harold Fourbridge. You may walk behind me, like all my other girlfriends.” He marched on by.
I decline to believe that a Dorrance student, a young adult, is old enough to have real girlfriends. However, he was much taller than I am. He might be one of those boys who was so full of themselves that he had tampered with his agelessness spells. He appeared to be growing toward adult height and build well before he should. I muttered several impolite words under my breath. Given his control, or rather lack thereof, of his trunks, I was entirely happy to have him downhill from me.
Student quarters proved to be the promised line of solidly-built well-maintained town houses, each with a walk-in basement, a properly arranged open shaft for levitating trunks to the living levels, and living space, bedroom, bath, and study on three floors above. I’d registered early and paid extra for an end house, so my third-floor study had views in three directions. Now that I’d seen it, I could say that the price was clearly worth it. The furniture included several chairs, a reasonable desk, a small bookcase, and a circular table, all of ironwood. The study had a food preserver whose spell work clearly needed some retuning. A note on the desk note indicated that I could rent a bed from stores, but that I would have to buy a mattress. One of my trunks already held a carefully-folded low bed.
The unman in the front office had been happy to make clear: The buildings might be called ‘temporary’, but some students stayed for a decade while finishing their academic work. I’d have to see what the situation was before I signed something permanent. He was apologetic that other students already here had reserved the services of all the porters, so I would be expected to do my own housecleaning.
“Just like home,” I said. “Mom demanded I scrub the kitchen floor. Every week. By hand.”
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