Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  I know. I agree. But it started a long time ago, back when serious people seriously believed in all that stuff. Apparently, four hundred years ago or thereabouts, Apoina and the neighbouring countryside was afflicted by an outbreak of the dancing plague. There hasn’t been a case in I don’t know how long, but it’s a recognised disease, properly documented. The symptoms are uncontrollable shaking, groaning, thrashing about, inability to keep still, eventually leading to a rather horrible death from mental and physical exhaustion. The Apoina outbreak finally burnt itself out, but not before close on a hundred people had died. The city fathers ordered an enquiry, and the examiners came to the conclusion that the plague had been caused by a demon or malign spirit, who’d entered the country from Razo inside the body or mind of a hunting dog. Hence the requirement (city statute D&K47, 106(ii)) which is still very much in force, even though the plague’s never been back and not one demonically possessed dog has been impounded in all that time. Of course, the Apoinans say the plague’s never returned precisely because of the inspections, and the evil spirits don’t even try to sneak in that way because they know they’ll be detected and cast out. They’re a quaint, old-fashioned lot in Apoina, and their national dish is pigs’ feet on a bed of pickled cabbage.

  Now perhaps you can see the true evil of the pit that had been dug for me. Under normal circumstances, I’d have spent my two weeks’ secondment daydreaming, surreptitiously reading or writing a paper for one of the learned journals. No chance, because I’d also be mentoring. Pitiful though it may seem, I was actually going to have to see into the tiny minds of thousands of dogs, so that my temporary apprentice could watch me and learn how it’s done. In other words, I was going to have to take this awful job seriously, or else risk being informed on by a credit-hungry student.

  The shed was huge, about fifty yards long, and bitterly cold. Outside dog season it was where they penned up sheep waiting to be sold at market. The whole of the back end was divided up with hurdles, against which the dogs jumped and pawed and scrabbled, barking all the damn time; I tried ouden menei to lay down an invisible barrier in the hope it’d keep the sound out, but it didn’t work so I gave up. Meanwhile, the owners led their wares past me, one at a time, while I executed the pointless, demeaning but really rather difficult form that allows you to climb inside the mind of another living creature.

  It’s really just epoiesen noon scaled down and differently keyed, without a verbal access-point. You need to climb in though the third Room, but if you’re doing hundreds of subjects in a single day, obviously you can’t move from there to here and back again every single time, you’d boil your brain trying. So you have to do it in Separation, which in theory is less demanding, but I find that more than an hour in Separation gives me the most appalling headache. Of course, most practitioners who do these forms are working with humans, dangerously ill, in comas. They go in, find the problem, fix it and lead the patient out; five minutes perceived time, practically instantaneous in real time, and then a lie-down being crooned over and abjectly thanked by a grateful family, until you’re feeling strong enough to write a receipt for your four-figure fee. Actually, I think dogs are harder than people. True, all you do is poke your head round the door, so to speak, to make sure nobody’s home who shouldn’t be. But the dog mind is so wretchedly small. It’s like crawling into a house up the coal-shute rather than walking in through the front door.

  I was on my own for the first day, which was a relief; the young hopeful hadn’t shown up (they muttered something about bad roads and flooding) so at least I was able to flounder about getting the hang of it unobserved. Just as well. It had been a long time since I’d done anything even remotely similar, and needless to say I made a lot of stupid mistakes before I managed to figure out a reliable and efficient way of doing the job. Even then it was a hell of a strain. I was so determined not to show myself up in front of the kid the next day that I actually did a proper examination on every single dog, and there were hundreds. When they eventually let me go, I crawled off to the quarters they’d prepared for me (three sacks stuffed with straw and a horse-blanket in a mostly-swept-out feed store) and collapsed, my head full of dog, too tired to face the stale bread and crumbly cheese they’d so thoughtfully provided for my evening meal. I seem to remember turning round three times before finally settling down to sleep.

  I woke up with a growl and found myself looking at a pair of shoes.

  Let me tell you something about them. If I close my eyes, I can picture them still. For a start, they were red, sort of half-way between blood and a good apple. They shone; not like gold or burnished steel, it was a warmer, deeper glow, such as comes from the application of wax and a great deal of work. The toes were quite savagely pointed, and they arched, like a cat stretching, on account of the three-inch heels. They were quite small, and they did up on one side with a row of tiny silver buttons.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice, “but are you Master Chrysodorus Alexicacus, from the Studium?”

  Hadn’t been called that in a long time. These days it’s Manuo, which is what my father called me, usually coupled with an unflatteringly apt epithet. The use of my academic name, together with the shoes, made me wonder if I was still asleep and dreaming.

  “Mm,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Comitissa Aureliana,” the voice said. “I think you’re supposed to be mentoring me.”

  Well, it’s not unheard of. Every now and then, you get a female with the talent. In my time, I may have come across half a dozen—and very competent practitioners they were too, though limited in the range of their abilities, as most of us are. Five of them were exclusively healers, and the sixth was the best water-diviner I’ve ever worked with. Women can do the job, no question about that, if they happen to have the gift. It’s just that very few of them do; the same way that not many women have genuine moustaches. Also, in women it tends to surface much later, usually around puberty. Compared to men, that’s very late, which means that by the time a woman’s finished her training, even assuming she hasn’t had to repeat a year or do retakes, she’s likely to be in her late twenties or early thirties, by which time her male contemporaries should (unless they’re no-hopers like me) be three or even four grades up the ladder. By and large, the few women we do have in the profession have a pretty rough time of it, though I can’t say I’ve lost too much sleep because of it over the years.

  Comitissa Aureliana, though; that was a hell of a name. I looked up.

  You know what students tend to look like. There’s a general rule-of-thumb formula, quite reliable in my experience, which states that if you add together the age of the student and the age of his coat, you get exactly one hundred. The Lady Aureliana was definitely an exception. An awful lot of time, money and wool had gone into making her coat, and I have to say, there were worse things you could have done with all three. As well as the coat, there was a hat and a skirt, both constructed on the same principles. Holding the components of all this splendour together was a thin-faced woman, about thirty-five, of the kind that my mother used to describe as being prettier than she looks. Not, of course, that stuff like that had any relevance to me, given the nature and requirements of my calling. But you can’t help noticing.

  “You’re it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Afraid so,” she replied. “I’m in my second year at the Lusso academy. We have to do a two months’ practical before we take our diploma.”

  Once the surprise had worn off a bit, I came to the conclusion that it could have been a lot worse. I’d been expecting a seventeen-year-old with roughly equal numbers of hairs on his chin and spots on his face. A grown-up was a much more appealing proposition. You can talk to grown-ups, for one thing. Female and a member of the aristocracy weren’t aspects I’d have chosen myself, but I’m not exactly opposed on principle to either. Live and let live, I always say.

  I hauled myself to my feet, making a nominal effort to brush bits of hay off my
coat. “You just got here,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “My coach got stuck trying to cross the river at Ferabrune. Flooding.”

  I nodded. “Andra moi ennepe,” I said. “To modulate and reduce a flow of water. Or haven’t you done that yet?”

  “Elemental and environmental is next year,” she replied. “I have actually read it up in the book, but I didn’t want to try it before I’d covered it in class, in case it went wrong.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. I tried to put out a house fire in my second year, using proelthe. Put the fire out, flattened half the street. “Very sensible,” I said. “Come on, we’d better make a move.”

  “What exactly is it that we’ll be doing?”

  They hadn’t told her. Well, why should they? Nobody ever told me anything when I was a student; expected me to find out for myself, or know by light of nature. Which was entirely appropriate for seventeen-year-olds who, as everybody knows, thrive on humiliation the way roses grow in horseshit. But a grown-up deserves more respect, surely.

  How to phrase it, though. “Do you like dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to have a ball,” I said. “This way.”

  Some people are born teachers. I’m not one of them. I get impatient if I have to tell someone something more than once. I tend to forget how many times I had to do various simple procedures before I got the hang of them. When I’m teaching someone and they don’t get it right first time, I assume they’re stupid, or being dense on purpose, or not listening to me, or else for some reason they don’t believe me when I tell them something.

  But the Lady Comitissa would have tried the patience of the most skilled and dedicated teacher—like the ones who taught me, for instance. She had the ability, she wasn’t stupid and she wanted to learn, but things just didn’t sink in. She shrugged off new knowledge the way oilskin repels water. I could tell she was no happier about this than I was, and she did her best to keep her temper, remember what we were there for and that we were both on the same side, etcetera. But after the first hour it was obvious to me that she’d been brought up in a world where she was never wrong, simply because of who her father and grandfather had been, and it took her an exceptional amount of effort and application to get past that. The aristocracy are like that. They’re comfortable with the idea that it’s easier and more fitting to change the world rather than change themselves. Of course, that very quality stands them in good stead in our profession; but only once they’ve learned the basics and qualified. Not the most helpful mindset for a trainee. Of course, if she’d been a man, she’d have done all this stuff in her teens, when the mind (even the aristocratic version) is so much more pliable. At her time of life, trying to teach her was like trying to file hardened steel.

  And meanwhile, there were dogs. They came along every few minutes, on the ends of ropes, with grim-looking Razoans holding the other end and scowling at me as though it was all my fault. If you think I’m making a fuss about nothing, you try it: a Third room examination of an animal, in Separation, in under three minutes real time, while simultaneously trying to explain what you’re doing to an increasingly short-tempered noblewoman who just can’t seem to get it. Now I look back on it, I reckon it must’ve been one of the best days’ work I’ve ever put in, and all for next to nothing.

  Finally, just when I knew I couldn’t take any more, the flow of dogs dried up. We sat there for a while, me just absorbed in the sheer golden joy of having stopped, until the foreman came by and asked us to leave so his men could start clearing up the mess.

  Aperesia Apoina has many places where you can buy strong drink. I marched her to the nearest one, ordered a quart jug of whatever was cheapest, and ordered her to shut up, sit still and listen. I think the only reason I’m still alive is that she was too frazzled to argue.

  “I don’t see what your problem is,” I said. Whatever-was-cheapest tasted horrible and didn’t do anything to cure my headache, but after a long pull at the stuff I really didn’t care. “All you’ve got to do is cross into the Third room—”

  I stopped short. She was looking at me. “I’ve got a confession to make,” she said. “I can’t do rooms.”

  It was a bit like walking into a wall you hadn’t noticed was there. “But you’re in second year,” I said. “Surely—”

  “I can’t do rooms,” she repeated. “I just can’t. Luckily I’m really good at forms, so my marks sort of balance out. Next year, of course, it’s all bloody rooms, and they’ll realise I can’t do them and throw me out. And that’ll be two years of my life completely wasted.”

  Can’t do rooms…Like someone admitting to you that they’ve lived for thirty-odd years and never managed to learn how to breathe. “But they’re easy,” I said. “And if you can do forms—”

  She sighed. It came from deep down. “That’s what everybody keeps telling me,” she said. “But—” She shook her head. “It’s all a bit ridiculous, really. When we first did them I didn’t understand, not a word of it, but everybody else did, and I didn’t want to stick my hand up and confess, because I didn’t want to look totally stupid. Doesn’t help that I’m old enough to be my classmates’ mother. Anyway, it snowballed from there. Everything in the course is predicated on understanding the basics, and I didn’t. The longer I left it, the worse it got, till I reached the point where I gave up. Guess I thought I’d be able to get by on my forms work. Stupid.”

  I took a while to get a grip. Stunned is putting it mildly. Rooms are easy. But then I thought: correction, I find rooms easy. She doesn’t. I took a deep breath, and tried to imagine what I’d do in this situation if I was an ordinary decent, compassionate human being.

  “It’s like this,” I said. “Imagine the universe is an old, neglected house. The family’s fallen on hard times, so they only use one of the rooms. The rest are all boarded up and dust-sheeted. With me so far?”

  She actually smiled. “I’ve got cousins like that.”

  “Fine. Imagine your cousins, in their one room. That room is the world that anybody can see: people without the gift, normal people. Now imagine they’ve been living in that one room so long that their kids and grandkids have grown up there, and don’t even realise there are any other rooms. That’s how it is for the untalented.”

  She pulled a face. “And me.”

  “Not anymore,” I said firmly. “Now, obviously, what you need to get from one room to another is a door. Untalenteds only ever see two doors, birth and death, and generally speaking they have no control over when they encounter them or go through. We’re different. We can make doors, any time we choose.”

  Little scowl. “Speak for yourself.”

  “No, listen,” I said. “It’s so simple. Provided you’ve got the gift, of course, otherwise you can’t do it at all. But you can. If you can do forms—”

  “Forms are completely different.”

  I let her have a moment before I contradicted her. “My old teacher used to say, forms are just tools we bring back from other rooms. If you can do forms, trust me, you can do rooms. Come on,” I added, as she shot me that I-don’t-think-so look. “It’s like swimming. For ages and ages you’re convinced you’ll never be able to, and then suddenly something clicks into place and suddenly you’re doing it. Rooms are like that. You just need to—”

  “I can’t swim, either,” she said.

  I’m really proud of the way I didn’t hit her at that point. “Fine,” I said. “You can’t swim. But you can do rooms. No, really,” I added, as she opened her mouth. “You can. You’re going to do it right now. Understood?”

  The best time for anything, according to my old and much-loved copy of The Art of War, is when the enemy is tired. “All right,” she snapped at me. “So, what do I do?”

  I gave her a big, warm smile I hadn’t realised I had. “Just look at that wall over there,” I said, “and imagine a door.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Try it.”
/>   She decided to humour me, presumably as her best shot at getting me to shut up and leave her alone. She turned her head, held it for a second or so and closed her eyes. And then it happened.

  Untalenteds say things like, “I saw him flicker” or “there was a flash of light.” Sometimes they hear noises, or feel a slipstream. Pure imagination. There’s nothing to see, hear or feel because nothing’s happened. Someone who was there a millionth of a second ago is still there. Big deal.

  She looked at me. Her eyes were huge. “There was a door,” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Really. It was there. You do believe me, don’t you?”

  I restrained myself, and just rolled my eyes instead. “So,” I said, “what did you do?”

  She frowned. “Well, I suppose I must’ve opened it, but I don’t remember standing up or walking across the room—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said quickly. “You were by the door. You opened it. Did you go through?”

  She nodded. “The door swung open, so I went in.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was just—” She looked helpless for a moment. “Well, just a room, really.”

  “Hence the name,” I said. “Did you recognise it?”

  “No, of course not. It was just—well, a room. Empty. Plain floorboards, no furniture. I don’t remember seeing any windows—”