Chương 273: Deflect

So the negotiations broke down, and I'm not going to get a chance to be Ryichsur's TA during this school year. Regrettable, but unsurprising. The fact that "prove you can be reliable" happened immediately before a full week of unplanned absences just really shot those chances down. But I'm finding the upside to this: for one thing, being an official TA would preclude me from periodically taking an hour off to go run my own errands. Sometimes those were very important to me.

I've got way too projects going on, in too many locations, in an era with no phones. We're still a long ways off from telegram lines between cities. So, slipping away to teleport off, attend to some issue either trivial or tragic, that was a big asset to me. And, just because I'm not officially the teaching assistant to this class does not mean that I cannot operate in the role of a teaching assistant, since I'm not really called on to do any real work in this class.

I'm moving around now, to people I've barely acknowledged for the first month of class. I need to start learning names, getting used to their idiosyncrasies. And there will be idiosyncrasies- it's a cardinal rule of games that anyone who is exceptionally talented is going to be weird. The people in this room, most of them are one-in-a-million intellects. Despite being only seventeen or eighteen years old, they've reached this room, with the genius prodigy teacher and the most cutting-edge curriculum in the world.

The ideas that we toss around in here are beyond baffling to the average citizen of the kingdom. This is not a specialized science course, we don't separate mechanical physics from astrophysics, or chemistry from biology. It's all in together, and what it all has in common is that it's so far advanced from what the average person in this world knows that it might as well be a new branch of magic. It's basically the class for everyone who is "too smart for your own good".

The next generation of wackos who are going to electrocute themselves for immortality. I move around and gather information- which one always answers a question with a question, which one can't take notes and listen at the same time. Who's got too much caffeine, and who wears the same scarf every day no matter what. Later, I'll try fusing them into a community, forging them into a company.

But for this week, I'm starting at the beginning, and that means setting aside time and energy to get them used to speaking with me. Obviously I'm glad that we didn't start this year with "Interrogate Natalie Fucking Harigold" like last time. That whole debacle honestly alienated me so much from everyone in that class that I barely spoke to anyone for the rest of the year. I avoided them all, really. It made things uncomfortable for everyone. But this time I'm getting a much more honest and unvarnished reaction.

I had first started breaking open the known bounds of science a dozen years ago. The information propagated surprisingly quickly, books written and published to select collections and tutors, exchanges at conferences, a new wave of experiments performed by the general community to reproduce or disprove my information. This is not a culture that quickly adapts to change, and the infrastructure was not there for rapidly disseminating new information.

So the context is that all of this is new, a radical change from what people had known all their lives. There were people who had worked half their lives to master all of modern natural philosophy, and had come to this Academy so that they could get into a room with me and explain to me in person how wrong I am about the oxygen-carbon reaction in plants. There were others, early adopters who had gotten early editions of Quethron's books, who had spent half their lives dreaming of the day they might meet me.

In all cases, I am a pivotal and influential figure. Not all of it is hero-worship. Some of it is grudging antagonism, some of it is wide-eyed wonder, some is a visceral hunger for more information. Some of it borders on actual worship, hold the "hero". Laying the groundwork, I'm gonna get that workshop full of big bright brains that can take my half-remembered high school experience and process that into life-changing inventions. Electronic components. Batteries. Industrialization processes. Gunpowder. Rubber.

Radio. I need smart people who will work hard, but that's not the hard part. I need people who have been the smartest person in every room since they were toddlers, and I need them to learn to work with each other in repetitive jobs that require their skills and abilities but do not make them feel special and unique. Part of that is to create a workshop that is so prestigious that truly great minds would compete for the lowliest jobs there.

And part of it is to get to know these people and use my status as their idol to start drawing them in early. Honestly though, the single skillset that helps the most with this is some of the early etiquette training my parents put me through. Wonderful lessons in how to hold a polite and satisfying conversation without ever answering questions. By and large when I talk with Ryichsur's students I'm as forthright as I possibly can be. I am trying to foster a very genuine trust here.

But when one of these people with their keen and methodical intellects looks at me and asks for an explanation of some aspect of my innovations, asking me something that I definitely should know if I discovered these principles? Deflect. Deflect like it's the smiling man who wants to know when you're going to be all alone. Deflect like it's the gossip aunt who is already figuring out how to misconstrue your words to all your other relatives.

Deflect like they're the business competitor looking for clues to your supply contracts. I can show them how lenses and airfoils and gyroscopes work. But why does the light bend? Why does fast-moving air become low-pressure air? How can both centrifugal and centripetal force be real things at the same time? I can't just say Man, I don't know, if any of this was actually covered in my sophomore Phys Sci class, I've just forgotten it.

Because I'm not supposed to be remembering someone else's work, I'm supposed to be smart enough to work it out on my own. Or, blessed with divine knowledge directly to understand the world in ways nobody else does. I've definitely implied both generally. And several times I've confirmed one or the other to smaller audiences. But on the whole I've still got some wiggle room on that issue. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

In any case, I should definitely know why the longer-wavelength bands of the spectrum are wider than the high-frequency bands, right? I can never admit to ignorance. Gotta keep up the act, keep up the mystique.

"You don't have to do that you know," said a voice from behind and above.

"What?" I asked, turning back to the professor, lurking behind me like a lurker. He jutted his chin to indicate a direction, and we walked to the front of the room, out of earshot from the busy-bee students. He settled back against a wall, arms crossed, leaving me some space. I've seen him do this before when he's feeling particularly therapist-like.

"You don't actually need to have an answer for everything, is what I'm saying," he said in a low voice.

"It's a very common occupational hazard, I think most of the people in this room are allergic to the words 'I don't know'. But they're valuable. They're very freeing, really."

"I don't follow you," I said, cocking my head to the side. He nodded.

"That's part way there. But it sort of implies that the problem is the person who failed to explain."

"You have failed to explain. What are you talking about?"

"The deflections, the misdirects, the subtle phrasing. Justifications," he said gesturing out at the students I had been chatting with.

"Look, I was a genius for natural philosophy growing up. Awards, recognized across the duchy. I didn't create any advances, but I knew anything that someone else knew. Well, until your old professor started publishing your findings. I got the second printing, the one where you were credited. And I devoured them. Understood most of them, too. So obviously every adult I ran across would give me a patronizing, indulgent look and quiz me.

Thirty-two feet per second per second, baleen whales, entropy always increases in a closed system, all that stuff. And they were so impressed when I could answer. But I did not feel like I was impressing people. I felt like I was on a gallows. Every time, I had to fight to prove that I wasn't a fraud. Like if I ever made a mistake, then someone would run out into the street yelling 'hey everyone, Jogan Ryichsur is a fraud! He got one wrong!'

and then for the rest of my life I'd be remembered as the failure that tried to trick people into thinking he's smart." Clearly he thinks this is relevant to me. He paused, gusted out a long breath.

"Just tons of stress, all the time. And that did not improve significantly when I became a young man. By fifteen, things shifted. When you're little, people ask you these things like they're asking a pet to do a trick. Roll over, play dead, recite pi to forty digits. By the time you're tall enough that they can look across at you instead of down, the whole dynamic shifts. It's not about performing your trick correctly on command anymore. The questions get trickier. Rote memorization isn't good enough any more.

This becomes adult questions about application, progression. You ask the child what they know, you ask the grown man why and how. And I hit a limit. Anyone would. And anyone with a normal upbringing would learn the value of 'I don't know'. I on the other hand, I was still on the gallows." Ah. I'm starting to see how this connects.

"And so the terms changed," he said, smoothing a hand over his hair.

"Before, I had to strive every day to never make a mistake. After, I had to strive every day to never admit to a mistake. I had to know everything, all the time, and never admit otherwise. I got good at controlling conversations, and deflecting questions. I got good at making other people's questions about their failings. I got really good at leaving a conversation with the last word." I glanced away.

"I'm pretty good at getting the last word. Dropping into a blinding portal on command lets me end any conversation exactly where I want."

"At sixteen I might have actually killed to get the power to make such a dramatic exit on command," the professor admitted.

"I'm just saying: they don't think you're a fraud, and they don't think you've got every answer. When they ask you how or why something, it's not an attack. They've got a curiosity, and they think that you are the most likely source for an answer, that's all. Here's the big tip that saved my life: 'I don't know' is not an apology. It's not admission of weakness. It's an opportunity. And it doesn't need to be all that overt, either.

When Marloe asked you about the spectrum bands, your options are not to choose between deflecting and begging forgiveness for ignorance."

"I feel like you're making this into something it isn't," I pointed out. It's a feeling I sometimes get around him. I wish Thyler Ghite was still working, but apparently this city does not have a single good therapist in it, and I'm stuck with my teacher who thinks my rotten personality is his problem to solve. I blew out a frustrated sigh.

"I'm actually very comfortable with admitting ignorance."

"About natural philosophy?" he prompted me.

"Or about horseback riding?" I talk too damn much. I flushed, but it was subtle. He went on.

"You're really good at partitioning the world into things you're good at, and things you're not good at. Falconry, penmanship, lying, tapestries, all things that you are comfortable being bad at. You've mentioned that you can't be amazing at everything. But, the things you have declared yourself good at? You allow no compromise. Have to be the best ever. Sorcery, politics, composing, scripting, and natural philosophy- for them, you really don't ever admit to any fault at all, do you?"

"All the time," I shot back.

"Those specific examples that you listed. My gaps as a sorceress are something I rarely stop complaining about. I have only gotten as far as I have in political maneuvering because I knew how to ask for help. I've chatted with conventional composers and learned how much I don't know yet, and the editors that go through my scripts are perfectly ruthless. So, I believe you are way off-base." He raised his hands palms-out, surrender.

"All right, as you say. Maybe I just took my own experiences and made too many assumptions, and if so I am sorry."

"Besides," I said, "I'm pretty sure the deal with width of spectrum bands has nothing to do with physics, because wavelengths don't know what color they are. I believe that answer comes down to biology, either of the eye or the brain, and how it interprets those wavelengths." Still... maybe something to take away with me. There are graceful ways to admit a gap of knowledge, and I should practice those. His core assertion may have been very correct, even if he did a crap job of explaining it.

Weirdly, that's a recurring theme with this guy. He never seems to really hit the mark, but he often gets close enough for me to finish the job for myself. And, it's actually not a bad teaching method.