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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 = ma because I'd harped on it so much in class, but for the life of him, he couldn't recall what F, m, or a was.)
    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 Volantés.
    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