Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  “You wouldn’t have,” I assured her. “They come later. Advanced level. So, what did you do?”

  “I turned round and came back.”

  I smiled. I was feeling really rather pleased with myself. “There you are, you see,” I said. “You did it. You can swim.”

  “Yes, but how did I—?”

  “Don’t ask,” I cut her off. “No, really, don’t ask. Don’t even think about it, not till you’ve got used to it. Just tell yourself, I can do this, because I’ve already done it once. That’s all.”

  She grabbed her cup and drank some of the disgusting strong liquor, which she hadn’t touched before. “All right,” she said quietly. “But what did I do?”

  “You went into the First room,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Curiously, I didn’t feel quite so tired. “The First room is pretty straightforward,” I said. “We use it for simple things, like moving from place to place instantaneously, disappearing, moving objects. As you saw for yourself, it’s empty, you only find what you’ve brought yourself. It’s worth bothering with because when you’re in the First room, you can open a door back to anywhere you like; where you just came from, or somewhere completely different. So, if I wanted to nip back to the Studium to look something up, I’d just go into the First room, then open a door back into Long Cloister, and I’d be looking straight at the Library gates.”

  Her mouth had dropped open. “That’s—”

  “A piece of cake,” I said. “In actual fact there’s slightly more to it than that. There are restrictions and limitations, which you’ll need to know eventually. But don’t even think about them now, or you’ll lose confidence. For the time being, just assume you can go anywhere you like. And that’s just the First room,” I couldn’t resist adding. “Really, the First’s only important because it leads to the others.”

  Well. I said it because that’s what my teacher said to me, when I was a kid; an unusually talented and promising kid, who had the misfortune to grow up to be me. All my teachers had to do was engage my enthusiasm.

  The trouble with me is, when I get interested, I get impatient. “Come on,” I said, “I’ll come with you this time.”

  “You want me to go there again?”

  “Sure. It won’t hurt, I promise.”

  Imagine you were born and brought up on Temple Street, or in a cottage on the slopes of Mons Tonans. To you, it’s familiar, it’s just home, no big deal. To the people who sail across the sea and walk a hundred miles just to see it, it’s the most amazing thing ever. But you never even bother to look. I guess that’s me and the rooms. By the time I was seven years old I’d already made it to the Third room; I used to go exploring, and not tell anybody. And somehow, I always knew exactly what I had to do. I’m prepared to bet that if room time was real time, I’ve spent more of my life in rooms than I have here.

  It’s easy to forget that other people aren’t like you.

  Before she could start arguing, I opened a door. I left it open behind me. A moment later, she followed me in.

  “Is this how it looked the first time?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Maybe not quite so filthy,” she said.

  I looked down. There was dust on the floor. I tried to remember if that was normal, but I couldn’t. I tend not to look at floors much. “This is how it should look,” I said. “Remember, nothing but what you bring with you.”

  She looked round. “Is this is?”

  Blasé already. “It’s a transit point,” I said. “Like I told you. We can use it for getting where we want to go in our room, or we can move on.” I smiled at her, trying to be reassuring. She just looked mildly disappointed. “Which would you prefer?”

  “Whichever’s easiest.”

  Sensible attitude. But I’m not exactly famous for being sensible. “Just for that,” I said—I was so full of myself I was dripping out of my own ear—“we’ll move on. Door,” I said (though of course it’s not necessary. I just wanted to impress) and a door appeared in the opposite wall. “Second room,” I said. “Come on.”

  You know, there’s a reason why adepts in our profession are required to be celibate. I’ve given the matter a degree of thought over the years, and I don’t believe it’s to preserve us from the distractions of worldly affection or bodily pleasure. It’s because when we’re around women, we can’t help showing off. Whether that’s cause or effect I can’t rightly say, but in any event it makes us a danger to ourselves and others.

  I opened the door and asked, “What do you see?”

  “A staircase,” she replied.

  “Yes?”

  “Just a staircase. All right,” she went on, after I’d frowned at her. “It’s painted white, the paint’s a bit chipped in places. It could do with a good washing-down.”

  Something nagged at the back of my mind, but I was too busy showing off to care. “Very good,” I said. “Up the stairs to the Second room. Would you like me to go first?”

  “All right,” she said. “But don’t get too far ahead of me.”

  I ran up the stairs two at a time. I can do that, in the Second room, and not arrive at the top gasping for breath. I waited for her to join me. She took her time.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  The Second room isn’t like the others. It’s above and to the side; in other words, you can’t get directly back to normality from it, you need to go back to the First or on into the Third. Researchers and academics spend a certain amount of time there. The whole of one wall is covered with bookshelves, and the shelves are crammed with books. Men have gone mad trying to figure out how to read them. There are long, polished tables lined with fascinating instruments, with dials and pointers and scales; they measure something, or record changes, or register variations or fluctuations. There are things that look and work like clocks, and things with lenses and eyepieces; there are miniature furnaces, and wheels that spin round when you touch them, with compartments for the placing of samples. There’s a rack of small, fine tools, but no one has any idea what they’re for. Also, if you try tossing a coin in the Second room, it always comes down tails. Sometimes there’s a big glass tank full of water, with small, brightly-coloured birds flying in it. We assume that’s an experiment being conducted by scientists from somewhere else. We’ve never met them, of course. The best thing you can do in the Second room is pass through it as quickly as you can.

  I looked at her. She seemed fine. I was surprised, and impressed. The length of time (subjective time, naturally) you can stay in the Second room is directly connected to the strength of your ability. You can learn how to extend that time, a bit, in the same way you can train yourself to hold your breath. I can manage an hour, on my day. Novices are usually gasping for breath in a couple of minutes. Some quite experienced and talented adepts have to get through the Second room at a run.

  She was standing there looking about, like a country woman in the Museum.

  “Like it?” I asked.

  “What on earth is all this junk?” she asked.

  For some reason, I felt like I should take that personally. But I remembered; I was the guide, not the proprietor. “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “What? Oh, fine.” She touched one of the instruments, a brass thing with four spring-loaded arms and a dial. The needle quivered and moved a few degrees on the scale. “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Would you like to go on to the Third room?”

  She shook her head. “I want to go back,” she said. “This is all a bit—”

  I nodded. “Fine,” I said. “You’ve done really well for a—”

  She wasn’t listening. She was staring at something over my shoulder. Ah, I thought. “It’s all right,” I said, and turned round.

  I’ve seen worse. It had a human body (the arms were unnaturally long) with a pig’s head; very long, curled-over fingernails, like the sad people you see sleeping in door
ways. “Don’t worry,” I said. It opened its mouth; rows of teeth, like bent needles. Elthe chelidon sorted it out in two seconds flat. All that was left was a little fine ash.

  She was frozen. I had to make an effort not to laugh. But the first time, it can be really scary.

  “Nothing to worry about,” I told her. “They aren’t even alive. It’s just a bit of—well, something, we brought in with us.”

  She looked at me as if I was mad. “Something?”

  I shrugged. “Anything,” I said. “It can be a stray thought, a memory, a little rush of emotion, even toothache. In the rooms, they sort of gather matter. Elthe chelidon is all you need, like you just saw. Really, I should’ve let you do it, and then you’d know it’s no big deal.”

  She was looking at the place where it had been. “You’re sure about that?”

  I laughed. “Absolutely,” I said. “Anything weird or strange-looking you meet in the rooms is nothing to worry about, so long as it’s moving, acting like it’s alive. In fact, the weirder they are, the better. It’s only the ones who look exactly like ordinary people you need to worry about.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “What if I meet one of them?”

  “Run,” I said. “But you won’t. They’re incredibly rare. And if you do, chances are it’ll have six fingers on one hand or a stub of a tail, in which case it’s nothing. Better not to stick around and find out, though.”

  She gave me a nasty look. “I really want to go back now,” she said.

  We repeated the exercise the next morning, just before I was due to start work. I was really pleased with how quickly she’d taken to it; she was quietly ecstatic, I could tell. “I really do appreciate this,” she told me, when we’d come back. “You’ve no idea how ashamed of myself I was. I mean, everyone else in my year can do it, and they’re just kids.”

  “My pleasure,” I replied, truthfully. After all, for years I reckoned I was a hopeless teacher. I think I was as relieved as she was. For one thing, there’s steady work in teaching. “Anyhow,” I went on, “I don’t think you’ll have any problems now. In fact, you’re doing really well. Most people—”

  “You’re very kind,” she said. “I expect I’m pretty hopeless really. But I do feel much better about it.”

  I didn’t labour the point in case it made her over-confident, which would have been doing her no favours. “At least there’ll be some purpose to this exercise,” I said. “Now at least you’ll be able to watch what I’m doing. You might even learn something.”

  Admiration is a wonderful thing. I like it in the same way I like hundred-year-old brandy, and both of them come my way about as frequently. The other similarity is the way it goes to my head.

  “It’s amazing,” she said. “I don’t know how you can do that.”

  God help me, I simpered. “It’s not like it’s difficult or anything,” I told her. “Just a lot of work.”

  Which it is, of course. Every time they confronted me with a new dog, I had to open a door, go through the First room, up the stairs, through the Second room (elthe chelidon-ing any nasties that might happen to pop out at me; and of course, the more tired and hacked off I got as the day progressed, the more nasties there inevitably were) and into the Third, from which I could use a projection to take a quick glance inside the mutt’s head to make sure there wasn’t anything in there that shouldn’t be. Then all the way back again, to nod to the dog-handlers so they could take it away. You don’t get tired running up and down the stairs in rooms, of course, but although your brain knows that, your body doesn’t. It thinks it ought to be tired, so that’s how you feel. And all in Separation, remember, which really doesn’t help. Even so; it’s hard work, but it’s simple and straightforward, the kind of work the sort of person who just scrapes a pass in Finals can be relied on to handle. For a talented chronic under-achiever like myself, a piece of cake.

  She started to say something, then decided against it. “What?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t go all female on me. What is it?”

  She laughed. “I was going to ask you if I thought I could have a go. But obviously I can’t.”

  We’d been working for five hours. Three hundred dogs. Six hundred traverses of the staircase. “I don’t see why not,” I said.

  “But I haven’t even been in the Third room yet. And I don’t know how to do a projection—”

  “Easy,” I told her. “You just look. Visualise. The door between rooms is a projection. Think of it as opening a window into the dog’s head.”

  “And I wouldn’t know what I was looking for, anyway,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s not a problem,” I replied. “If there’s something nasty in there, you’ll know it when you see it. Trust me on that.”

  She looked doubtful. So did the two men with a dog, who were waiting for us to stop chattering. Just as well they couldn’t have had a clue what we were talking about. “I don’t know,” she said. I could tell she was wavering. “What’s the Third room like, anyhow?”

  “Come with me,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  On the stairs up to the Second room, I said; “Third room’s not scary or anything, but you do need to take care.” Just then, a nasty reared up right in front of her. She blew it apart without a moment’s hesitation, like she’d been doing it for years. “You can run into—well, awkward stuff.”

  “Awkward?”

  I nodded. “It’s like—well, you know when you’re walking after it’s been raining, and sometimes you glimpse your reflection in puddles?”

  We were at the top of the stairs. I had to wait for her. “Yes?”

  “Well,” I said. “The Third room is principally used for looking inside people’s minds. In a place like that, a mirror can be a real nuisance.”

  She got the point. “Are there mirrors in there?”

  “Define mirrors,” I replied, pushing open the door. A nasty tried to stop me; I dealt with it. “A mirror in the real world is a shiny thing that reflects light. In the Third room, there are various objects that reflect thought.”

  “I see what you mean,” she said. “How do I—?”

  “Just concentrate on what you’re there for,” I said. “You’ll be fine. And it’s not dangerous, even if you do bump into a mirror. It can just be—well, uncomfortable, all right? So be careful.”

  Second room was dark, lit by a long row of candles on the table. It’s like that sometimes. Nobody knows why.

  “What do I do?” she asked. “Just open a door, same as usual?”

  For a moment, I felt really proud of her. Open a door, same as usual. This from the woman who’d sworn blind she’d never be able to do it, less than twenty-four hours earlier. “Go ahead,” I replied.

  “Um, which wall?”

  I laughed. Valid point. All the walls in Second room are covered in stuff—bookshelves, paintings (did I mention them? Really strange, some of them), tapestries, ornamental trophies of weapons. “Just go ahead,” I said. “The stuff gets out of the way.”

  I’ve known people to have real difficulty with that; but she opened a door right in the middle of a shelf of books, no trouble at all. “That’s amazing,” she said, as the door swung open. “I just—”

  “Go on in,” I said.

  This is going to sound completely stupid, but never mind. I’d never been in the Third room with anyone before. Accordingly, I wasn’t prepared.

  I followed her through the open door, and stopped dead. Stunned, confused. I’d been in there just a moment ago, and hundreds of times before that, since breakfast. But it was all different.

  Well, of course it was. Everybody’s Third room is different; and because she went in ahead of me, what I walked into was her version of it. Took me a minute to figure that out, of course.

  My Third room is basically a study; the sort of study I always thought I’d have one day, when I’m Regent professor at a high-class provincial academy somewhere. In my Third roo
m, there are two chairs. There’s mine, a beautiful old carved number that belonged to all my predecessors back through five hundred years (it creaks when you sit on it, but it’s really comfortable, and you can put your feet up on the crossbar under the desk), and there’s another plain, old, rosewood, straight-backed, for the few select students I condescend to teach when I’m not engrossed in my research. The walls are all book-lined—there’s a long shelf, just above my head where I sit, that’s all the books I’ve written; it stretches from wall to wall. There’s piles of books on the floor, too, with five or six bookmarks in each one, and a small round table with crystal decanters. It has a drawer in its side, into which over the years all the commendations and medals of honour I’ve been awarded have been stuffed any old how, because of course that sort of thing doesn’t really matter to me. And there’s a window, looking down into the main quad, except when it’s pointed into somebody’s, or some dog’s, head.

  Spot the difference. Her Third room was—

  Empty. Nothing. I had to look quite hard before I could see floorboards on the floor, instead of a light brown blur. Three bare walls and ceiling. The fourth wall was a frameless window. I peered over her shoulder at it, and was marginally reassured. That was a dog’s mind, all right.

  “What should I be looking for?” she said.

  “It’ll be in colour,” I replied.

  (Well, obvious. Dogs don’t see colours like we do, just an infinite variety of shades of grey. Any stowaways show up coloured, you can spot them at a glance.)

  “I’m colour-blind,” she said.

  Oh. “Doesn’t matter,” I replied. “Anything not moving.”

  Images streamed past in the window, intermittent. I saw my own face, huge, as I moved my head slightly. When I held still, I vanished. I saw one of the dog-handlers scratching his chin. Fine. Nothing here. “That’s all there is to it,” I said. “We’d better go back.”

  “How do you get to the Fourth room?” she said.

  I’d already turned my back on her. “Same basic idea,” I said, not looking round. “So I understand. Never been there myself.”