The Brace

Callum looks up from his desk and asks the novitiate to repeat the question.

She is a short, brusque woman some twenty-five years younger than he, in a crisp dress shirt and pleated skirt in various shades of inclement weather. She has swept into the office as part of a wave of new hires over the last three months, the influx generated by the Chancellor’s decree on measured practice, and her commitment to practical efficiency reflects this. She is, in other words, not predisposed to repeating herself. But Callum, truth be told, wasn’t listening; he was looking out his office window, observing the bronze dome of the Sianoi some three kilometers off, its patchwork, frayed appearance, the gaps like broken teeth where the morning light no longer reflects. It is some twenty to twenty-five percent of the way through the disassembly process, and this is the first time the difference has been noticeable from this distance.

The novitiate asks the question again. Its intent is immediately clear: not to clarify, or to solve, but to engineer. She is about to make a decision that will reflect poorly on him, and she has come to him under the guise of information gathering in order to bind the decision to him in a way that will leave him no recourse in dodging the fallout. But Callum does not mind this maneuver, because he will be delivering his resignation in 48 hours, after Resolution 22 has passed the council. The novitiate does not know this, and nor, regrettably, does her boss. She and Callum had a warm working relationship, once, but that was before the concept of measured practice was even conceived, much less drafted into statute.

The novitiate nods and turns away, barely containing her satisfaction as she bustles off to report to her contacts at the judiciary.

The office used to be smarter than this, Callum thinks. But the years since that time are a number that elicits small, reflexive breaths from him whenever it returns to him.

***

On the morning of his academic commencement, some 31 years prior, Callum broke the bone at the base of his ring finger attempting to conduct a pattern ritual. He didn’t even make it so far as to place the reagents; he was trying to retrieve a brass whisper bowl from the cabinet over his desk, the only meager storage available in his student quarters, and managed to dislodge a massive votive candle from the dense assortment of items packed onto the shelf. It fell with the weight of a hammer, pinning the finger against the rim of his quill tray, and he could not discern whether the miniscule snap he felt was real. Possibly he fabricated a memory of it to match the pain he carried with him for the rest of the day. There wasn’t time to visit a campus healer, the ceremony being less than ninety minutes out, and so he fashioned a brace from half of a quill capsule and some binding ribbon, and left for the wash hall.

Standing in line, ten minutes before walking, his friend Manam, who would die at 29 from a rare complication of the bile duct, pointed to the brace and asked him, “Evidence of a debaucherous night?”

Callum smiled, embarrassed. “Just a dumb accident this morning.”

“Ah, a debaucherous morning, then. What a scoundrel you are.”

“I knocked a candle on it trying to fit a ritual in before I left.”

Manam nodded, letting the explanation wither in the air a moment, and then said, “I understand you are not debaucherous, my friend. This is only teasing, which—”

“I know, I kn—”

“Which I would like to be able to subject you to without solemn clarification—”

“Yes, I know. I’m just…” He shook his hand out, wincing at at. “Fighting through the pain is all.”

“Of course. My sympathies. What was so urgent it required a ritual mere hours before your commencement?”

This was a question he had expected but nevertheless would have preferred not to answer. He took in a deep breath, surveying the bobbing heads of the four hundred and thirty fellow students up and down the long line. They swiveled their heads and gestured to one another like nervous birds, reaching up often to correct the tall, ornate caps they wore as they slipped down their temples and threatened to fall. “It’s a little ridiculous,” he said, somewhat more to himself.

“I will press you until you answer. Save us some time.”

He shook the hand again. It was radiating pain, like ripples in his bloodstream. He could still feel the impact of the candle, the sensation of its tiny fracture (real or otherwise). “I was… hm.” Lies and evasions failed him. He only shrugged, tipped his head back, and said, “It was a pattern ritual. For—achievement.”

“Achievement?” Manam let out a belly laugh that turned the heads of those closest to them in either direction. Callum shut his eyes and attempted to cease being present. “Enoiush ye! Surely your seven years of schooling are sufficient to gain you this advantage without beseeching the elements.”

“Yeah, well, can’t be too careful, can you.”

His friend shook their head, smiling in the sort of indulgent way that a parent would at the beaded bracelet their child had crafted to ward off monsters. “Callum. You are brilliant. I also am brilliant. The sky is cloudless and blue as a cut gem. We are about to become titled practitioners. The future contains misfortunes, but to enter into it need not be one of them.”

“Sure. I keep telling myself that.”

“You will worry like this all your years? When you are gray, and the mornings give you pain? Still you will wish for the extra help, to lift you where you cannot lift yourself?”

Callum turned his hands up, then instantly lifted one to catch his cap as it slid. “I’d prefer to leave as little to chance as possible.”

“Then perhaps you do need aid, as uncertainty is, in fact, a basic principle of the work you are shortly graduating into.”

“Are we agreeing with each other? It feels that way.”

Manam shrugged. “I so often cannot tell.”

Only minutes later the walk began, very suddenly, considering how near to the back they were: all at once the students just ahead began to move, and Callum’s heart picked up speed as he felt the hard press of cobblestone against his heel. With no fanfare, they were off. The limbs of the oversized maple trees that lined the bricked path from Iowan Hall to the Kuldera Center passed overhead, blinking clear sunlight down on him. His arms felt slick beneath the fabric of his robe, and in noticing this, he returned again to the ache of his finger.

“Leave it,” Manam whispered to him, pressing a hand against his wrist to lower it. “Your dreams are coming true right now.”

Callum offered him a little laugh, shook his head, and obeyed.

Graduates of the Sianoi were, in that time, some of the most acclaimed in the country, and the occasion of their commencement was such a cause for pageantry and ostentation that it often drew crowds from the lay world. Men and women from the surrounding district, some of whom Callum recognized as the proprietors of bookstores and cafes and late-night bars, vendors of newspapers and mineral powders and Themish cakes, crowded the sidewalks on either side of them, and it was difficult not to feel like returning soldiers, or newly elected officials, the types of people he had once looked on with awe.

But the most significant presence in the gathered audience was the faculty, who occupied positions of prominence right at the edge of the path. These, the teachers and mentors and erstwhile antagonists of the graduates, formed a sort of human colonnade through which the procession made its giddy way, beaming and applauding, vibrant in their own extravagant gowns. Some were the royal purple of the Sianoi’s research wing; others were the pale blue of elder members who had survived the Year of Burning some six decades earlier. All were present, since for time out of mind absence from the ceremony would be construed as an act of disapproval or malicious feeling. But it was clear, from the way they raised their arms in salute or hooted through cupped hands, that the choice to attend had been made with genuine affection and pride.

Most of this Callum failed to notice or experience in any meaningful way, such was his distraction and his anxiety about falling or otherwise humiliating himself in front of so many onlookers, and for the rest of his life he would be mildly annoyed with himself for failing to capture it all in his memory. The injury to his finger would be remedied by the end of the day, but the gaps in the images of it that he kept with him were irreparable. There was one moment, however, that would live in almost total clarity in his mind’s eye at any moment he chose to conjure it, and that was the sight of Doctor Therese Wemmerov, Practical Research Lead, Chair of the Department of Aerosystemics, perhaps the most revered figure among a host of the revered, standing just in front of the massive gateway into the South Quad, searching for his eye as they passed, and, on finding it, winking at him.

Wemmerov had been the reason that Callum wanted to enroll in the Sianoi, and he had told her as much, years into her mentorship, when it felt safe and a little less mortifying to do so. She was quite stunned, in fact, to find this out, because her reputation was such that most students went a good sight out of their way to avoid working with her. She had a reputation for being exacting, frank, a brutal evaluator, and by most accounts a generally unpleasant person in all circumstances. But Callum had a gut instinct that, like him, she would come into focus through the eyes of a like-minded individual. He sought out frankness and brutality; he found these to be the only reliable markers of the distance between himself and his many hopes for the future. And Wemmerov, in turn, had been relieved to find a student who did not wither in the face of harsh criticism, but responded in kind, with earnest endeavor and an endlessly persistent sense of the value of the work.

Although Callum had experienced numerous interactions with faculty of all kinds, and appreciated each one in its own way, being taken under the wing of the most notable aerosystemic practitioner in the country fulfilled him in precisely the ways he had imagined it would, as an applicant and a hopelessly dreamy adolescent. He had grown into a notable practitioner in his own right, and he had heard, through the whispered intelligence of his friends in and around the department, that it was expected he would find an impressive placement and rise rapidly within it. The years of his life appeared to be sliding into place like knives in a block. He believed that much of that future was the result of his hard work and devotion to craft—but mostly, he knew that Dr. Wemmerov’s contributions were the catapult. His gratitude to her was bottomless, his admiration set to an indefinite scale.

All of this, the many years of harmonious labor and growth, the countless conversations and debates, and even the occasion of his bashfully admitting that he had come into the university as her biggest fan—it passed between them in the moment that she winked at him. She had not, thus far, really been the winking type, and Callum was so taken aback that he nearly said something to Manam. But Manam was busy waving to their aunt and their boyfriend, grinning like a child halfway down the length of a playground slide, and he did not wish to spoil that moment. Instead, he only gave Wemmerov an enormous, sun-warm smile, and tipped his cap to her. She folded her hands behind her back and bowed, deeply, as he has seen professors to do one another at formal dinners and speaking engagements, and although he would, only twenty minutes later, be inducted into the ranks of the Sianoi alumni, the brightest of the bright stars in the practitioners’ sphere, although the university president would speak at length about the power and responsibility that would define every day of the rest of his life, it was this—a wink, a bow—that startled him with the realization that he was now grown, and the world had at last opened up to him. He had both the desire and the ability to give and take with it, as he had dreamed since he was a boy. His fears about the future, for a moment, retreated like the tide, and he thought about what Manam had said. To allow the future to contain misfortune without treating it as a misfortune itself.

Manam, as though sensing where their friend’s thoughts had landed, wrapped an arm around his shoulder and shook him hard. “We have at last arrived!” they shouted into Callum’s ear. “From a walk to a run. Footsteps to the horizon. Tell me you are happy, and not afraid, as I have come to expect from you.”

Callum shook his head, but he was smiling still. He turned and lifted his own arm, wrapping Manam in a half-hug that clearly took them aback. “I’m an expert on systemics,” he shouted over the din of the crowd, the sounds of palms slapping and throats wrung hoarse. “Not happiness. But if this is what it feels like, I won’t turn it away.”

“On the contrary,” Manam replied, “I suggest you make a place for it. I suspect it will be a long companion to you.”

***

It is barely an hour before the close of the business day when the novitiate’s boss, his onetime ally and confidant, enters Callum’s office.

Callum has barely accomplished anything today. Although he has no plans to remain in the office beyond two days from now, there is nevertheless a long list of tasks to be completed or set into motion before he leaves for the last time. To deny the request of the novitiate this morning would have been to further constrict the time in which to do so, but to allow it will present its own limitations, as well. He has been meandering back and forth between musings about how to make the best of the time still left to him, and continuously glancing back out at the skeletal frame of the Sianoi dome, decaying before his eyes, traveling backwards in time to the point of its nonexistence. He greets the novitiate’s boss, and apologizes for the messy array of papers, offering to remove them from one of the chairs that faces his desk.

The novitiate’s boss says that this will not be necessary. And the manner in which she says it stills him.

Her explanation is swift, mercifully so. He can hear the catch of shame in her voice, the reluctance with which she delivers the news. And it touches him, in some small way. Her capitulation to the forces that have destroyed them, the intellectual barbarians at their gates, is a crime he does not know how to forgive, but still. Her care, her acknowledgment of the wrongness of all of this, does not go unnoted. Which is why, when he accepts, he does so without accusation or even resistance. This, he knows, is simply one of the misfortunes the future held on to as it waited for him to arrive. No need for unpleasantness; it will hurt him far more than anyone else.

He asks about Resolution 22. She gives him the answer he anticipated.

He is granted leave to finish out this day, and to conclude any outstanding short-term business the following one. And he will: he will come into this office tomorrow morning, sit down in the same chair he bought for himself at 34, and continue to work until he is all but barred from entering again. Because although he is, as of last year, older now than Dr. Wemmerov was when they first met, she once instilled in him the limitless value of commitment, of a deeply internalized sense of duty, and no amount of aging can undo that lesson, or any others.

Outside, the disassembly has halted for the evening. The dome still stands, its arcing silhouette and its sixty-meter flag pole at the summit still visible. But it has been hollowed out, like an animal carcass. Plates of bronze with their beautiful ancient patina lie like severed limbs on the stones of the courtyard. The world is growing smaller, and more frightening. The sky seems to swing down like the door of a vast museum display case. Once, he would have turned to Dr. Wemmerov, or to Manam, to quell his reiterative fears. But they’re gone now, and only he, and the work of his two hands, continues on.

He sits in his chair, breathing in the scent of paper and ink, of common room incense and the lingering perfume of the novitiate’s boss. He feels the seat of his chair, old leather and splintered wood. Despite his vigilance, the future became present, and shortly, very shortly, it will transform finally into irretrievable past. So he sits there, in stillness, and combs over it carefully, slipping the details into memory. There they can greet him on his many returns, in perfect clarity, and remind him that what is gone is still good, and what remains lives in the shadow of a well-built hope.