A Mentalist's Morning

Emdeng awoke, as he usually did, to the sounds of the bells of Open Hand Demesne chiming the time. Despite advancements in timekeeping technology over the centuries, the bells were still rung at sunrise rather than at fourth bell, which according to his own clock wasn't for another few chimes yet.

For a moment, he just lay there on his cot, his brain fuzzy from having just been kicked out of sleep. Then he took a deep breath and cleared his mind. Magic filled him as air filled his lungs, and he began the cyclical breathing technique he'd practiced every day since coming here. He took magic in and flowed along his nerves, energizing the thoughts flowing along them from his brain.

Emdeng sat up, feeling lighter, less heavy, less awkward, his casual breaths of air enough to give his body the magic it needed to move with grace and precision. He put on his shoes against the cold stone floor, and got dressed, pulling on the tough linen trousers and tunic over his underwear, securing them in place with a cloth belt from which hung his day pouch. Pushing aside the curtain that served as the door to his bedroom, Emdeng stepped into his office.

It was a small room, only twice as big as his bedroom, and was the usual perpetual mess it always was. There were shelves built into the walls full of books, papers, journals published by the other sects in Open Hand, and a few foreign journals from other demesnes. Loose papers were held down by reference books from the library he needed to return—his memory helpfully recalled five books that were due that day and two that were overdue—which he'd have to do by midmorning's sixth bell, or else the librarians would come for him.

He didn't want the librarians coming for him. That route lay valuable time lost to punishment detail he could be using for something more productive, like drawing flowers!

Gathering the books to be returned, Emdeng wrapped them in a carry cloth, pulling the corners tight so it wouldn't shift in his grip as he knotted the cloth together to secure it and make a handle for him to grip. He did one last check in the room's gloom, patting himself down to make sure he was presentable, and then finally opened the door.

Daylight and the driving, near-constant mountain wind of Open Hand Demesne entered his room as Emdeng stepped out into the hall of his sect's bachelors' dorm rooms. Outside, other bachelors of the Life Sciences sect were busy doing morning chores. Some were pounding out their mattresses, airing their rooms, taking their clothes and sheets to wash at the laundry, walking to the baths carrying their bathing things, sweeping out dust from their rooms and into the wind… the usual things scholars had to do to keep their rooms and offices from being a compost pit.

Others were doing stretches, calisthenics, drills, thought exercises, and other ways of passive-aggressively rubbing in the fact their rooms were clean and their studies were on track. Or just keeping their bodies as fit as their mind, one or the other. A group of the more senior bachelors—they would likely be raised to Masters in a few months—chatted in a knot in front of one room, partially blocking the hallway. Another bachelor, hurrying and preoccupied, wasn't able to dodge around them sufficiently, clipping his shoulder on one of them and falling to the floor, his papers going everywhere. He let out a cry of despair as the papers were caught by the wind.

"Good morning, Emd," his neighbor to his right, Aando, said cheerfully as the knot of seniors leapt into action, grabbing the papers, launching themselves from each other's shoulder to catch ones lifted high into the air, or simply using thought force to grab the errant sheets like boring people. "Heading to the library?"

"Aando," Emdeng said, nodding in acknowledgement even as he felt a prickle behind him and he stepped out of the way of another bachelor who'd obviously been doing nocturnal studies, carrying an unlit lamp and a notebook and walking with eyes closed to his room. Emdeng doubted he was using his thought for anything but the muscle memory to get there blind. "Where are you off to?" he asked as the seniors plucked the rest of the papers from the wind. One of them helped the fallen bachelor up, obviously chiding him to be more aware. Another lent him a carry cloth.

"The Dean of Bachelors asked me to help some fresh students get oriented," Aando said as he did some simple morning stretches to wake up his muscles. Even after all these centuries, kinesiologists still argued about whether stretches had any effects or where just physical placeboes. "You know, show them where the libraries are, mention the rules, best places to hide from the librarians if they're overdue, tell them to hide from the librarians if they're overdue, that sort of thing. You?"

"Library," Emdeng said as the bachelor bowed in thanks to his seniors, who sent him off with a laugh as they continued their conversation. "I should be fine as long as I get there before cutoff. Then I'll go down to the fields for work credit. Need to get out of the office, you know?"

"Well, be careful," Aando said. "I hear the Young Scholar is in a foul mood."

"Did she lose at something?" Emdeng said with a frown. The Young Scholar of the Life Sciences sect was usually such a pleasant young woman. Much more sensible than the Young Scholar of the Art Studies sect. Art was barely a proper science!

"One of the young male fursh got into the tanks where she kept her control and experimental groups for that heredity study she's doing, you know, trying to breed longer fursh? The buck impregnated who knows how many of the females, it's a whole mess," Aando said. "She's going to have a Deadspeaker fursh specialist double check, but from what her interns say, nearly the whole batch got impregnated. It's going to set her research back by a whole season."

Emdeng whistled, shifting his books. "Colors, that's hard to hear. Was it anyone's fault?"

"Apparently the male was just that determined to stick it in something and made it out of this pen by following the mating calls," Aando said. "So yeah, she's in a bad mood. Don't make eye contact unless you want a rant about lesser creatures that only think with their genitals or a sudden peer review."

"Rant against the random chaos of the universe, got it," Emdeng said. "Thanks for the warning."

It was a painful lesson, if it could be a lesson at all, but one every Mentalist at Open Hand Demesne—every Mentalist who was part of a sect, at any rate—had to learn: you can't predict the universe perfectly. Whether that was in precautions, experimental variables, setup, or just having the reference book you needed not being available, you needed to learn to roll with the impact so you didn't break something.

Of course, that was the purpose of the Mysteries of Alknowledge, which many people in Open Hand Demesne followed: to study and quantify the world, to eventually make a working predictive model of all of existence. The reasons for why varied: some wanted to know the future so they could control their own fate, or avert catastrophe. Some wanted to know how the world worked so they could build a new world (those who believed this never specified how they'd do it, but always claimed they'd know how once they actually knew enough to build a new world). Some believed it could someday be done, others thought that it was an impossibly infinite pursuit that was worthy by itself.

The morning air was cold, and the wind near-constant given their altitude and the intentionally low roofline of the architecture. Emdeng walked with casual balance, fluidity and efficiency that came naturally to any Mentalist who honed their body as assiduously as they did their mind, nodding to people he knew, his weak casual sense of the thoughts around him letting him know when he had to step out of the way in amusement as people with books even more overdue than his rushed past him at a dead run, clutching their books to their chests as they tried to reach the library before the librarians got them.

He passed people doing stretches in the hall talking about biology, kinesiology, botany, toxicology, nutrition, and whether old Sanmig's beer was still as good as it used to be, or if one of the younger brewers had managed to make up something with a more interesting flavor profile. He passed Master Sanni, who was overseeing mental acceleration practice. The man was calling out corrections even as the wooden balls seemed to simply launch themselves at the group, telling one to make his breathing more cyclical, for another to bend his knees more and relax his shoulders, chiding another to step out of line and do some more stretching exercises first, they clearly weren't limber enough. Currents of lightning flowed along the walls, carried by copper wires wrapped in thick plant latex for insulation.

Emdeng reached the stairs, the wind changing direction and strength as he made his way down from the slope to where the main buildings were. In front of him, the five fingerlike pillars of stone that gave Open Hand Demesne its name rose over the rest of the Demesne, the fortified bulwark with its massive doors leading into the Dungeon built beneath it like some sort of charm on a bracelet. As he descended, he could see the rest of Open Hand. Over there were the Mathematics and Engineering sect, smoke and steam already rising from their chimneys, their buildings always looking new and orderly, placed in a precise grid despite the fact they were on a mountainside, the work of generations of neurotic engineers and architects that liked their right angles and triangles. There was the, ugh, Art Studies sect, a terrible waste of space and funding though obviously not everyone thought so. Well, they were entitled to their wrong opinion.

The Physical Sciences sect was the largest of the sects, sprawling so much they almost reached the woods of the low foothills and many of their buildings went deep into the mountain itself. In the distance, at ground level, next to the towns that provided Open Hand with meat and other foods that were too difficult of them to grow efficiently because of the altitude, was the Political Sciences sect, guarding the wide, ancient approach up to the rest of the sects, its mechanical and bound tool lifts powered by the core itself, with their entry fees, tariffs, immigration offices, embassies and the standing army of militia.

In the center of all this were the libraries. General libraries for most introductory and elementary level subjects, sect-specialized libraries for more intermediate subjects, and more specialized subjects according to fields for those doing focused research. The libraries were all run by the Librarian sect, who had split off from the Accounting sect a long time ago.

There was also the Support Infrastructure sect, who ran the agricultural towns around Open Hand, as well as the on-site fields were Open Hand grew some of its own food, interspersed where there was room. They planted the fruit trees for shade in courtyards, cultivated bushes of vegetables around pathways, ran the cafeterias, directed Mathematics and Engineering in maintaining buildings, kept the water flowing in the pipes and the currents in the wires, performed tri-monthly sanitation inspections of quarters, and generally kept the sects from all starving to death or getting sick from wearing the same dirty clothes for weeks on end.