III: On the Perturbations of the Measurements of the Arc of a Uniform Body

The next morning, I attended a multidisciplinary symposium led by a young apostle who greeted each attendee graciously at the door.

She glanced down at my gown and back up at my eyes. She was expecting all of her attendees to be wearing, like herself, simple grey monastic robes befitting an apostle of Ae, and mine, while similar in form, were cut of black, and they were festooned with pockets and pouches.

“A… public attendee?”

I mustered up my greatest earnest enthusiasm. “Yes! Interested in the field of physical logos myself.”

“Surely not.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Nobody is interested in calculating the bounding of accumulated perturbations.”

“And… why shouldn’t I be?” I crossed my arms, determined to fool her (or perhaps myself) with this show of polite interest for the subject.

“It’s quite… multidisciplinary, you see. In the most excruciating way. Does the hydrologist really, truly have an interest in the works of the anatomist? In astronomy and in thermology? No. But our study of Ae’s great project demands that all fields must contribute. Or else how will we ever know where the ball shall land when thrown?”

“Throw it,” said the man behind me.

Both of us turned to face him.

What a sight the three of us must have been. Myself, apprentice wizard: an understated (okay, kind of short) young man with the beginnings of a fine beard, wrapped up in the black gown of study. The grey-robed scholar, a lanky junior apostle with a dark complexion and bright eyes that missed nothing. And the newcomer, a fair, strapping lordling in an exemplary travel cloak, craftsmanship so fine it could preserve the air of noble luxury even through months of obvious hard use. His clean-shaven face had a guileless look about it from under his mop of sandy-colored hair.

“What?” he said.

“It’s… a manner of speaking,” I mused.

“A way of saying…” the scholar began, searching for the words.

“The principle of the thing!”

“It’s not really about the one ball…”

The lord’s brow furrowed in deep calculation.

“We wish to understand why the ball travels as it does,” the scholar explained. “Why and how anything travels through the air as it does.”

“Perhaps… it was thrown?” the lord ventured.

We made brief introductions after clearing up the purpose of the symposium a little bit. I, of course, was (and am) Horwendell of Ilianath. The leader of the morning’s symposium was Sister Gena, a junior apostle and librarian who saw herself as something of an omni-scholar, dabbling in this field and that and undertaking the thankless work of bridging disciplines and correlating their ideas. It was a task in some ways alike to the one performed by court wizards, who are educated in a dizzying variety of fields in order to better serve the rulers of the realm. But in other ways it was different: for one thing, her service was only to Ae and her divine project, not to mortal lords. And for that reason, it was delightfully—alluringly—unconstrained by the practical demands of worldly work.

Our new aristocratic friend was Lord Hester, a guest of the college like myself. He clearly did not belong. Whatever his virtues may have been, it was obvious to anyone that academic attainment and erudition were not among them. But he told us that he was sure, deep in his bones, that he needed to be there. It seemed… far-fetched. But seeing as surety was something I sorely lacked in that moment, it felt unkind of me to belittle his own.

Hester and I sat beside each other in the back corner of the auditorium and watched more apostles file into their seats in silence. The two of us were silent, I mean. Apostles are famously chatty. Hester surely hadn’t noticed, and I half suspected he wouldn’t have cared, but I marked that nearly all of the attending apostles, wearing their grey robes with this stole or that sleeve band, were senior to Sister Gena, most by several degrees.

With about forty attendees present, Sister Gena stepped up to the lectern, cleared her throat (which settled the chatter surprisingly quickly), and began.

“May the wisdom of Ae and her justice guide our eyes and hands,” she said.

“May we hear and speak the Word,” we replied in unison.

“We begin with a description of the problem: a ball is thrown in a direction with an imputed speed. We have the logical tools to predict where it lands… roughly. Depending on the speed and additional factors, such as wind, we may be off by greater or lesser spans. Now, we wish to improve our predictions. It stands to reason that each perturbation contributes to the final deviation. But do they all layer in a simple, interchangeable fashion? Or does each perturbation also perturb subsequent perturbations?”

She paused a half-breath, a tiny verbal paragraph break.

“I call upon Brother Ilin-To, algebraist, to elaborate upon the possibilities.”

It was a brisk introduction to a tangled topic. I was surprised by how abrupt it was. It felt clipped, even. But as I listened to Gena’s brother- and sister- scholars take their turns with the topic, it all began to make sense.

“Perturbations is likely to be a gross oversimplification of the idea,” Ilin-To began his remarks with.

“It is unthinkable that the dictates of physical logic should be perturbed by such things as wind speed,” Brother Ymal declared a few minutes later.

“The simple form of a ball under-specifies the problem,” Sister Ilara sniped, halfway through her speech.

Just about every word Sister Gena had uttered was a handhold for some new bit of scholarly grumbling, academic turf-warring, or just good old-fashioned petty sophistry. The preamble was terse not merely on purpose, but by thorough and exacting design. Had it been any longer, the symposium wouldn’t have stood a chance.

I chanced a glance toward Sister Gena as a philosopher belittled, intrepidly, the very idea of “improving one’s predictions.” The practiced smile on her face and been replaced with a practiced look of contemplation. I knew that look well. It was the look I tried to put on when Magister Montigo was lecturing me about a mistake I already knew how to correct for and when I didn’t want to look pathetic by pleading that I was already trying to do better. And I had learned it, in turn, from Magister Montigo herself, who deployed it when she was being lectured on something she knew far, far better than the lecturer, and as she was preparing to embarrass said lecturer so deeply they would wish that they had sewn their own mouths shut with needle and thread.

Gena’s practiced smile might have been gone, but her eyes, perched over her steepled fingers, continued to perceive all.

I gave a start so sudden that I almost fell backward out of my chair. Hester glanced over at me. “Something wrong?” he whispered.

I shook my head, and he gave a small shrug. Nothing was wrong, per se. But I was surprised with myself. Never before had I caught myself ignoring a lecture to, instead, watch the reactions of those in attendance.

Whatever else it may have meant, it answered the question I had come here to ask. Studies of The Perturbations of the Measurements of the Arc of a Uniform Body were not going to be how I left my mark on the world.

As we descended from the back seats of the auditorium, Hester told me he wanted to speak with Sister Gena.

“Why?” I asked, blankly.

“I have to.”

“Oh.”

Lacking anywhere better to be, I decided to satisfy my curiosity the old fashioned way, by eavesdropping on their conversation. I’m still surprised I even bothered to do this. Eavesdropping on their conversation meant forcing myself to pretend to carry on a conversation of my own I really couldn’t care less about with one of the apostles in attendance. I picked Brother Pemfort, the thermologist, who had seemed much more agreeable than his interdisciplinary counterparts and who had supplied a few reasonable ideas to be integrated into the study’s main focus area. Unfortunately, my theoretical background in thermology was… well, the only word for it is pathetic. Wizards are infamous for filling in the gaps with magic, and we are famous for magic involving combustion, and, yes, where my working knowledge of thermology belonged there was instead a fondness for explosions¹.

So I was in the middle of saying the third or fourth unforgivably dumb thing to a very gracious Brother Pemfort when Sister Gena rolled her eyes and waved me over. “Come on, wizard—”

“Apprentice!” Never let it be said that I claim the prestige for titles that aren’t mine.

“Apprentice wizard. Quit holding Brother Pemfort hostage and come over here.”

“I was not eavesdropping on you.”

“Just come over here.”

“… Fine.”

“Now. Lord Hester?”

Hester chuckled at the proceedings and then carried on. “Right then. Admirable job in there. Tough… simultaneous? Simpleton?”

“Symposium,” I offered.

“Right. Tough simple-sum. But you did well, Sister Gena.”

“Why, thank you. But…” Sister Gena and I shared a glance. “I’m surprised you could tell. The subject matter was fairly dense.”

“Subject matter never bothered me.” (Clearly.) “But anyone could hear their voices and see their faces. Many of them resent you but can’t express it. Aren’t allowed to, I guess.”

“Yes,” Sister Gena muttered. “Many of them see the effort as beneath them, beneath their time. And since I’m responsible for the effort…”

“Are they not all scholars?” I picked up the thread of conversation as she trailed off. “Shabby sort of scholars that can’t appreciate the pursuit of a new cache of knowledge. A new domain, even.”

“Stuff it, wizard.” (“Apprentice.”) “I saw you falling asleep in the back.”

“I wasn’t falling asleep! The subject matter was difficult! Why were you looking back there?” I never got to use any excuses on Magister Montigo. Being in the position to deploy excuses was thrilling to me, apparently.

Gena sighed. “Look, will you two tell me why you’re here?”

The three of us fell silent for a beat. Then Lord Hester lifted his chin almost imperceptibly, looked Sister Gena in the eyes, and said:

“I’m on a mission from Ae.”

There was a brief silence, and then Gena and I both spoke at once.

“Ae?” I asked.

“You?” Gena asked.

“Yes, of course. And yes,” replied Hester, matter-of-factly. He noted that we were gathering a few odd stares from passerby, although it was hard to tell whether that was because anyone heard or because we simply looked odd in company. “Maybe we can talk somewhere else.”

I thought to myself: why not? This would probably be a quick diversion. The great and ponderous works of the research library would still be there, awaiting my moping company. They could wait a bit longer.

“I’m busy,” Gena replied, rather tartly.

“No, you’re not,” said Hester.

Gena, her arms still crossed, lifted her eyebrows skeptically in reply.

“I can tell when you’re lying,” said Hester.

“Fitting, for a man on a mission from our goddess, don’t you think?” I asked, probably smirking. Hester nodded solemnly.

Gena sighed. “Fine. There was supposed to be a question-and-answer section as a matter of formality, but there’s not much need to direct questions to myself about that topic. So… come with me.”

Sister Gena took us down the east hall and to the kitchens, where we procured some sweet beet stew from a terrifyingly large, jolly, and be-aproned brother-apostle. Rather than taking it in the refectory for an afternoon snack or early supper, we set out for the nearest cloister, where we sat in the clear, chilly highland spring afternoon.

Gena led us in a short prayer, and then not half a minute passed before Hester had finished slurping down his stew. And not a spot of it on his gorgeous cloak. He waited politely for us to finish, watching the infinite blue with a serene look on his face.

“No, no.” Gena mumbled through a mouthful. “Go on. I need to hear about it now.”

“Very well,” Hester nodded. “Have you heard of the Library Doctor Temple?”

“… What?”

“The Library Doctor Temple.” Hester’s brow knitted in a familiar fashion.

“No.”

“Wait,” I said. “Is it a book?”

“A tome,” replied Hester.

“Book… liber, sister.”

Sister Gina made that motion one makes with their head and neck when they’re trying not to spit out or choke on their food in surprise. “Liber!”

“Doctor… Temple?” repeated Hester.

“Liber doct… hmm.” Gena considered. “Liber doctrina. Liber Doctrina Tempestas.”

“That.”

Gena, having safely swallowed her food, laughed. “The Doctrina Tempestas. One of Ae’s Great Works. And your mission is…?”

“Yes, that sounds right. I have been sent to reclaim it.”

“The library has it. The library I work at here has it, and about a half dozen copies,” Sister Gena replied.

“Then I wouldn’t have been sent to reclaim it,” Lord Hester declared. “It is missing, I know this.”

“You’re kidding me, right? Who put you up to this? What do you really want?”

“This is my mission. It came to me in a dream. The… the tome is missing, and it is my holy mission to reclaim it. Perhaps our holy mission. I saw the auditorium and you speaking in it. I was called to you, perhaps…”

“Nonsense.”

“Oh, won’t you humor him, Sister Gena?” I said. I must have been feeling mischievous or bored or maybe even a little taken with the seeming earnestness of the lordling. “You have another half hour left in your Q&A session, anyhow.”

Gena shook her head in disbelief. “You too? And what stake do you have in this?”

“None, really, which is why I shall encourage it.” I smiled. “But really. Lord Hester doesn’t seem like the lying type. What harm could it do?”

What harm indeed.

“Ugh. Fine.” Gena stacked her empty bowl onto mine. “Come on.”

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