James Gardner: Trapped

The holy sister sniffed with righteous indignation.

My pocket watch said it was one o'clock. In the morning.

Under cloudy black skies, I walked up the drive of Feliss Academy, gravel crunching beneath my boots. Alone, alone, all alone — my drinking companions boarded in rooms off campus, and didn't plan on returning to musty F.A. till the weekend was over. I, however, occupied a don's suite in the school's residence wing… which is why I was still on my feet, trudging a full kilometer past the town limits, when my friends were already snoring in their beds.

Let me list the pluses of don-ship: cleaning staff emptied my wastebaskets, washed my linen, and occasionally removed the dust coyotes that had long ago devoured the dust bunnies under my bed. Let me also list the minuses: long late liquorized limps from the pub, back to a place where I was required to serve as shepherd, mentor, and surrogate father to twenty teenaged boys, all either wealthy brats, wealthy wallflowers, or wealthy nice-kids whose eyes glazed over at the word "geometry."

The academy seemed peaceful as I approached. The calm was due to the season — in the official calendar of the Spark Lords, it was the Month of the Quill, but in the classic calendar still observed by my family, it was Zul-Hijjah: the ash-end of winter, leaving muddy clumps of snow mixed with snowy clumps of mud all over the school's campus. That night, the vernal equinox was a single day away… and while the weather was unlikely to change just because the almanac turned to a new page, I fondly looked forward to the moment I could shout, "Spring, spring, spring!"

Everyone I knew was sick of winter. The students had long ago lost interest in icy midnight frolics (diving naked into snow drifts or stealing trays from the refectory to go tobogganing down the greenhouse hill); every last kid in our dormitory was now a sweaty stick of dynamite, just waiting to explode in spring madness. One breath of warm wind and kaboom, the school grounds would be littered with teenaged bodies, wriggling under every bush, sprawled on the banks of our local creek, or snuggling in more imaginative trysting spots (up a tree, down a storm sewer, on top of the school roof)… but for now, it was still too cold, too muddy, and too much the middle of term. As summer approached — as holiday separations loomed, and, "Who knows if we'll both be back in the fall?" — the antics and romantics would sprout behind every bush, and I would…

I would…

I would seethe with envy at their feverish innocence.

Envy was an occupational hazard of teaching — envy and cynical disdain. Teachers affected by such feelings usually went one of two ways: either they acted like adolescents themselves, or else they viewed youth as a disease that must be cured by heaping doses of tedium. Our academy had plenty of both types in the faculty common room: middle-aged men and women dressed in frowzy imitations of youth fashion sitting cheek by jowl with other middle-aged men and women who ranted about "irresponsible immaturity" and devoted themselves to expunging every particle of teenage joy.

Was I becoming either of those? I fervently hoped not. I'd set my sights on becoming a font of inspiration, guiding young minds and spurring them on to heights of intellectual…

Damn. I wasn't drunk enough to believe my usual diatribe. Lately it had become my habit to wax eloquent about the glories of my career as I tottered home after a session of poisoning my liver. Some drunks weep about the girls they left behind; others rage at the girls they didn't leave behind; still others sing random verses of "The Maiden and the Hungry Pigboy," or tell (for the fortieth time) about the night they saw a Spark Lord battle a headless white alien atop an OldTech skyscraper. When I was drunk, I made speeches to myself: pedantic internal monologues where I tried to find the perfect words to express why I hadn't been wasting my life teaching the same classes, year after year, to kids who'd forget every lesson the moment they graduated.

My goodness, what an important job teaching was! How crucial for students to know someone like me, levelheaded but possessed of a sense of fun, a man of science, a role model! How especially vital it was to enlighten these children, the sons and daughters of privilege, the future leaders of the world!

But I wasn't sufficiently soused tonight to believe my own propaganda. The words I habitually recited to myself kept getting confused with the truth: that I'd fallen into teaching because I had nothing better to do, that I did an acceptable job but not an extraordinary one, and that the whole student body of Feliss Academy consisted of rich second-raters who wouldn't recognize excellence if it bit them on the silk-covered ass.

Take the Caryatid's Freshman 4A. All showed a modest talent for sorcery, but none had the drive and obsession to get into a genuine school of wizardry. Perhaps one among them would surprise us; perhaps some formerly feckless freshman would catch fire (so to speak) and go on to more intense pursuits. The majority, however, would return unchanged to their wealthy families, bearing with them a few cheap parlor tricks, plus a handful of disconnected facts that got lodged in their brains by accident and stayed behind like slivers under the skin. (A former student once wrote me, asking for help on a question that was "driving him wild": he could remember F = mabecause I'd harped on it so much in class, but for the life of him, he couldn't recall what F, m,or awas.)

That was the type of student who came to Feliss… and we teachers weren't much better. To return to Freshman 4A: if the students were dullards, the Caryatid herself was only a step above them on the ladder, a humble drudge compared to any working sorcerer. She grasped the basic principles and could present them in ways a teenager might understand; but she was the first to admit she wasn't moon-mad enough to practice magic for anyone more demanding than Two-Jigger Volantes.

I wasn't moon-mad either. My curse was to have a documentedly high intelligence — back in college, I scored 168 on an OldTech IQ test — but I was utterly devoid of genius. I could get good grades in any academic subject, but apart from answering exam questions, I hadn't a clue what to do with myself.

Music? I could play, compose, and improvise on half a dozen instruments… but I didn't yearn to fill the world with glorious sound, I just futzed about writing funny songs, hoping I might someday impress a good-looking woman out of her petticoats. Poetry? When depressed about the failure of the aforesaid songs to woo the aforesaid women, I could ink up the page with my woes… but they were such humdrum woes: whiny pedestrian bitching, not deep outcries from a passionate heart. (My immune system seems to produce highly effective antibodies against angst.) And science? I never got less than top marks in math, physics, or chemistry, but when it came to original research, my mind went blank. There was nothing I wanted to do, no realm of knowledge I hungered to explore. I digested textbook after textbook, but lacked the drive and vocation to aim my life toward any thought-worthy goal.

Lots of brains but no special calling. All dressed up with no place to go.

So after I got my Ph.D. (on a thesis topic suggested by my tutor, regurgitating an OldTech treatise that applied projective geometry techniques to modeling the asymptotic behavior of relativistic space-times… in other words, sheer mental masturbation), I fell into a job teaching at Feliss Academy. Specifically, I was hired to teach the woefully elementary tidbits of science that were still relevant four hundred years after OldTech civilization had spluttered out, plus a survey course on all the things we couldn't do anymore — computers, rocketry, bioengineering, nuclear fusion, organ transplants, mass production, heavier-than-air flight. Ye Olde Wonders of Earth and Sky. Students approached the subject as a not-very-interesting branch of mythology, barely more credible than Gilgamesh, Sinbad, and the Twelve Labors of Hercules. Thus I spoon-fed teenage drudges the same material, term after term, year after year, while visiting backstreet taverns each weekend in the hope Impervia would start a fight and get my heart beating faster for a minute or two.