A Discourse on Change

Fine snow drifted on the wind, and the sight of it struck me as strangely new.

Time already gone is like sand slipped through the fingers; its measure is hard to take. I could only guess at it from how unfamiliar the flurries beyond the window had become.

Three years.

So much time had passed. I was nineteen.

That evening I shut the book with a clean, satisfying thump. At last I had finished off the algebra text that had tormented me for more than ten months.

Even with Benjamin's instruction to lean on, it was the book that had me clutching my head every night—and now, finally, it was done. Nothing short of a triumph.

I stretched until the stiffness left me, then looked out the window. The sky had gone dim. Winter, yes, when the sun sets early; even so, evening seemed to have arrived.

Sure enough, by the time I started downstairs the kitchen was just beginning to stir. Meals were assigned by rotation, yet whenever we could manage it we prepared them together, and today was no different. As I recalled, the cooking fell to Benjamin—but the one I found in the kitchen, hauling a basket of potatoes, was Dorothy.

I hurried the rest of the way down.

"Dorothy. How far along are you?"

"Potato salad."

"Then I'll take the vegetables."

I said it while rolling up my sleeves, and Dorothy answered with a bright little smile.

With Benjamin I had been easy from the very start, and the years had changed almost nothing between us. Between Dorothy and me, a great deal had changed. After wavering among Lieutenant, sister, and not quite sister, exactly... I had settled, in the end, on simply Dorothy. She who once offered me nothing but a cold stare had taken to smiling—easy, unguarded smiles. Toward Benjamin she remained as sharp as ever.

Set all that aside, and the physical change was greater still. Over three years my height had run away with itself. As if to protest that my once-slight frame had been nothing but a want of nourishment, the moment food grew plentiful I shot up, swift as a haunting, past six feet. I, who once had to tip my chin to meet Dorothy's eyes, could now look down on the crown of her head. Dorothy, for her part, had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to bend her neck to meet my face.

The two of us were in the thick of preparing dinner when Benjamin's voice came down from upstairs.

"Eugene! Come up a moment, will you?"

"You're the one who ought to come down. What are you doing shut up in that back room when dinner is your shift?"

"Particular, aren't you. I need a pair of hands up here as well."

He seemed to have troubles of his own. I caught Dorothy's eye in silent apology and made for his study.

The door creaked.

"There you are."

"Where is the letter from this time?"

"The usual notice from the military—suspected use of magic—and one from the university of magic as well. I've scrawled the gist. Write them out properly for me, would you?"

"All right."

I took the stationery and the fountain pen and sat down at the desk.

By his own mouth he was a quack of a magic scholar, yet he had once held a place at the university. The reputation had not been idly built. Even living as he did far from home, letters still found their way to him now and again. His face looked grave indeed.

The contents were unlikely to be grave. He was only worn out from inventing the ornamental phrases a proper letter required, and at such times he always left the drafting to me. It had begun as practice in Frauvian script. But the work had grown, and once Benjamin started paying for it, correspondence became my charge as a matter of course.

"Let's see..."

I resettled the pen in my hand and wrote on at a brisk scratch.

The first letter. I had received so many of the military's notices of suspected magic that I knew, more or less, how a reply ought to go. I know nothing of the matter. Might there not have been some error? I am sorry to have given you cause for concern. Shuffle those three together, patch the seams however they would hold, and it was done. Dorothy had let me know that the people on the receiving end skimmed them and passed them on in any case.

I set the period in a heartbeat.

"I'll finish quickly. Let's go down and eat."

"Yes, yes. Thank you..."

Did creativity and stamina become yoked together, once a man grew old? Nursing that suspicion, I opened the second letter.

For a moment I forgot even to move the pen, and sank into what I had read.

Maso particles. I had learned of them while studying natural philosophy: the last grains left when every substance in the world is split, and split again. Yet the letter said otherwise. The theory had been denied.

"That can't be."

The books were wrong. More precisely, they were about to become wrong. The moment that theory was accepted, the textbooks of magic would have to strike out hundreds of lines—thousands—and be written anew. A discovery that staggering, and this Professor Müller reported it with perfect calm, as if it were nothing but news.

So far as I could guess—

"......Are discoveries of this magnitude happening all the time in the Federation now?"

It was an age of upheaval. Even from this far country I could feel it: the current of the era gathering speed without pause.

I took up the pen again and set down, in good order, the reply Benjamin had scrawled. For some reason the nib kept catching.

Three years since I had become his student and come to live under one roof with the Oslos—three years in which, across the sea, scholarly shocks arrived one after another. And in the midst of such an age, I was still unripe.

After dinner I returned to my room. Two pound coins lay in my right hand—pocket money Benjamin passed me under the name of payment for the letters.

The flaw in the arrangement was that I had nowhere in particular to spend it. Luxury is a skill one learns by having practiced it, and a man who had lived as a beggar seldom found cause to part with so large a sum. Then as now, when coins were ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠left over, there was only one thing to do with them.

Clink—into the savings.

The tin I had kept since my days beneath the bridge gave a bright note the instant it swallowed the coins. It was no longer the hollow ring of empty air used for a sounding box. Metal met metal in a hard, crowded click. Small wonder.

"Eighty pounds now..."

It was full.

"Eugene. Three years."

Benjamin, come to my room, laid down his opening with a serious face.

"Yes."

"I never thought that in three years you would take in everything others spend ten learning. I knew you had a gift for bookwork, but from the alphabet through to basic algebra in three years... Anyone who knows what that means would covet an absorption like yours."

"Mm. Aren't you praising me a little ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠too highly?"

"Heh heh heh. What—shall I tell you you've still a long way to go?"

Leaning beside the desk, he smiled with a sly, easy humor.

"Ha ha..."

Still a long way to go. Perhaps that was the thing I had wanted to hear more. I scratched at my cheek for no good reason.

Benjamin, too, for all he said aloud, surely knew the truth of it: how long, these past three years, I had been planted at this desk. A genius draws a hundred from ten parts of effort. The result may look the same, yet such a person differs in kind from the ordinary mind that pours in a hundred to draw out a hundred. I was a man who had to pour in two ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hundred to win a hundred.

The humanities. Mathematics. Natural philosophy. Cultivation, and common knowledge—the things a student born and raised in the Federation came by as a matter of course. Simply to catch even the heels of that, I had given the three years over entire. If spending one's years whole upon a goal can itself be called a talent, then certainly, seen that way, I might be a genius after all.

"Setting that aside. What I learned was basic algebra? I thought I'd covered a fair share of what there was to cover—equations, functions of whatever degree."

"Every field of learning has the charm of an onion. Congratulations on peeling away a single skin."

"......So. What brings you to my room? Come to hold a feast for finishing the book?"

I said it, but in truth I already had some sense of the answer. The book Benjamin carried against his chest—the cover of that volume, boasting a formidable thickness, was familiar from somewhere.

"Hm? No."

He set it on the desk. Not a tap. A heavy, solid thud. A deep burgundy cover, title and author's name picked out in gold. I read the Frauvian lettering without a hitch.

"Oh."

So it had come. What I had been waiting for.

Even a beggar, after three years at a professor's knee, learns to recite the wind and the moon. I knew what that word meant. Calculus.

Arms folded, Benjamin flashed a smile of pure satisfaction.

"Time to peel another layer of the onion. Well? This is the very first flower of mathematics."

Ah.

I was beginning, just a little, to be afraid.