Chapter 239: Exam Week's Monday

Monday, June 13, 2005

I woke up two and a half hours later and got out of bed, missing the inconvenience of having to climb over a girl. I wouldn't be sleeping with Carol until our parents gave their consent, and Ava would presumably be sleeping at her home during exam week. It was going to feel unpleasantly strange sleeping with either Julia or no one, especially the latter option.

When I wake up between two girls, I now have a way of getting out of bed that doesn't involve any clambering, provided Julia was one of the girls: I could lift Julia up with NP and slide myself underneath her. I didn't think it'd work very well because the covers would prevent her getting high enough, and it'd probably wake her too, but it was amusing to think about. I couldn't help thinking that it was a pity my NP wasn't twice as forceful, then I would've been easily able to fly myself out of bed in a VERY cool way.

I walked downstairs for breakfast on my unexciting - compared to flying - feet, with due regard to the upgraded security system I'd been shown yesterday evening. With Vanessa's absence the fridge was nearly empty, but it could cope with a breakfast.

I'd talked to Sensei a couple of times from Seattle. He could've written his own article on External Ki Projection because he knew everything that needed to be included so other people could learn it, but he felt it was proper to wait for my contribution. I'd told him I'd type up the delayed notes when I got back home, so that was the first thing I did when I got back to the study. I was a simple job, being just a raw dump of most of my thoughts and rationalizations, with a little care required to make sure it only talked about ki abilities equivalent to Sensei's.

It took about twenty minutes, my typing speed fortunately not affected by having had all the fingers of one hand broken and in a cast, and my not having a finger poised to type an "e", "d" or "c". When I'd finished it, I put it on a memory stick to give to Sensei.

Doing the composition and typing had been easy, so while I'd been working on it most of my minds had been working on the wedding vows. There'd been several things we'd thought of and discarded. For example, we noticed there was no phrase about making the vows "in the presence of friends and family." There wasn't a reference to the other girl either, even though 3B's Julia knew there'd be two girls participating in the ceremony. I presumed the vows were intended by the authoring Julia to be a private commitment between a girl and me. 3A's Julia should prefer it that way too, so that's the way I left the existing vows, but I thought it was sufficiently important to add a fourth vow: "Fourth, I Vow to care for and love all of your wives and children to the best of my ability." I'd thought about including more actions, such "support", or "nurture", but decided that "care for and love" was sufficient as everything else should flow from those. Ideally "love" alone should be sufficient, but future new wives might need months to become "in love" with the existing wives - even Julia probably wouldn't be loving Carol in time for the ceremony - but they could "care and love" without being "in love". I wasn't trying to enforce love (a pointless attempt, if ever there was one), but to make clear that a multiplicity of wives was possible so committing to me wasn't a purely one-on-one thing, and that each wife had to do her honest best for everyone else. The new vow belonged in fourth place, as Julia would disagree strongly if I tried to promote it up the list.

The second change I did was to remove everything to do with "The Gift of Love", so my plan for the formal part of our ceremony now had just the four vows and nothing else. When the EKP notes were finished, I typed the vows and printed a copy to give to Julia.

Then, with considerable anticipation, I took full advantage of my very, very expensive study system. My first OSU exam was Calculus 251, so I started with that. On screen #1 I put the first lecture, with subsequent screens starting successive eighths of the total number of lectures through, rounding up slightly all the way so #8 would have fewer lectures than the others because he would be encountering some new material. We made #7 responsible for both being on active duty and maintaining the sight blob, as his reviewing had the most recent material so should take the least mental effort. Then we started reading though all the lectures to make sure we had everything down cold.

We were very impressed by the total amount of work we could power through, even though half of us missed not having the usefully larger 30" Dell screens. Before we'd upgraded this system, we'd googled to see if the Dell 30s existed in this dimension, but they didn't, so we'd just have to get used to the 24" screens.

We were pleasantly surprised that #7 didn't lose center even once in the half-hour shift he had. Then active duty was assigned to #6 for half an hour (he had a failure), then #5, etc. We were keeping center more easily than we'd thought we would, presumably because the material was very familiar and well understood. We rotated the half-hourly active duty through all our minds, skipping #8 as he was thinking harder than the rest of us. We had five losses of center by the time we had to go wake up Julia, which was a very pleasing average rate of just over one per hour. By the time we'd finished studying, we'd totally finished Calculus and were getting into Algebra.

When Julia and I returned to the study, I gave her the vows' page. I explained, "Here are the vows. I won't bother explaining the rationales behind them and the wordings, such as leaving out 'in the presence of friends and family'. You're very smart about things like this, so I'm sure you'll work out most of my reasons easily.

^-- "I've removed 'The Gift' because I want this document to just be the vows themselves. I'm perfectly happy with you and Carol making a personal statement at the time you make the vows, but it should be personal and not dictated to you by being on this page. If you want to make a statement, I suggest you cooperate to write one you can both recite together, because I want to emphasize your equality and I don't want to risk one of you feeling inferior because she thinks the other girl made a better statement. Having said that, please let Carol do most of the work developing your 'joint' statement if you do one. You can influence it, but please let her think it was mostly her work, because allowing her to contribute to the formal ceremony that way will go a long way toward convincing her that she's a full member of the marriage."

Julia was very happy with my ideas and impressed by me. I was impressed by me too, as I'd gotten rid of the tricky problem of having to compose The Gift by delegating it, and I'd done so in a way that made the delegate happy to have the new job. When 3B's Julia had written "The Gift", it had been her personal statement, but as I was supplying the script this time it truly was better to leave that off, and to let Julia and Carol compose their own. I'm not a genius, but occasionally I do something that seems very smart, from my decidedly average perspective.

Julia wanted to get to her studying, so we didn't discuss the vows any further. I got back into Algebra, continuing to read it between Julia's occasionally asking me questions about tricky bits in those subjects of hers that I could help her with. By breakfast time, I'd reread about half the Algebra lectures, so I'd easily knock it off tomorrow morning, in plenty of time for its exam on Thursday.

Ava had been driving Julia and my sisters to and from school recently. She turned up a few minutes early to catch up with me, and to pass on her parents' appreciation for my paying for their vacation (I'd mailed a check from Seattle). At times like that I could never resist worrying about what had happened in 3B-land: had Katie and Carson gone on their vacation or not? [[In most w-dimensions similar to 3B's, they had, usually after a delay of a couple of weeks. Mom and Dad had insisted on it, and on paying for it, as "It'd been Mark's wish that you go." There were variations - in some dimensions I didn't know the Wests, for example - but it was very rare for the parents not to insist on the West's trip, especially as it'd been Vanessa's idea in the first place.]]

I convoyed with Ava to my home to wish everyone "Good luck."

While there I also reminded Mom, "Don't forget to ask at your work whether you say 'Are you insane' annoyingly often." I wanted her to do that not only for the benefit it'd bring her, but because it'd also increase my credibility. My being able to make pretty lights didn't automatically entitle me to make serious life-affecting decisions about Carol. If this Mom gets the same feedback as 3B's Mom did, it should enhance her opinion of me in ways that'd be helpful.

Mom and Dad had thought of some more questions to ask me about my abilities. I put them off with, "We'll have a big discussion with Prof and Vanessa soon after they get back. It'd be better to save your questions for then, otherwise I'm going to be answering everything twice, and trotting back and forth with anyone's additional thoughts." My real reason was because I wanted a nice, long, impressive discussion with the four adults about my abilities, before we got to the "I want to have sex with Carol" part.

After some last hugs with my sisters, they headed off to school with Ava, while I headed to OSU via a bakery to stock up with a day's supply of food.

It's pretty damned easy to do exams when you've got eight minds on the job, all of which have effectively memorized all my notes and decent chunks of the textbooks. If the question had a right answer, then I almost certainly knew it. If the question was deliberately tricky, one of my minds was almost guaranteed to spot the trick. Even if the question was one of those 'creative' ones, I nearly always had too many ideas to be able to write about all of them, as each of the eight minds had ideas, plus a lot of extra ideas were created when we internally discussed the first ones. I mostly leapfrogged rapidly through the exams, except when held up by long answers that my pen was frantically writing for. My pen almost never stopped writing during all the exams because my minds always had answers ready.

I had 11th grade English in the afternoon, which caused me to scratch my head a few times. My 'favorite' question (using the word with the maximum possible sarcasm) was: "'Beauty without Truth is of little social relevance.' Discuss for 30%." What the fuck can you do with that! Especially when the 30% mark indicates it's worth nearly an hour's work. I resisted the temptation to answer, "Questions without Precision are of no educational relevance." Instead I made up some crap, because it was pretty obvious that they wanted crap; it was English after all. I had no choice but to make up crap, because it seems to me that the only things that have "social relevance" in mainstream America are money, sex and religion. Politics is a subset of money, and I have suspicions about religion not being as distinct from the other two as it should be. None of which have anything to do with truth, let alone "Truth", whatever the hell the capitalization means!

After the last exam, I drove to the jewelry store that 3B's Julia had one day casually pointed out as being the place she'd bought the rings. I told the guy there what I wanted. It was easier and less expensive than I imagined, but I'd been right in thinking that it'd take him a few days, so I ordered the rings now. Even if the parents refused, I'd need the rings sooner or later. Later might be when Carol turned eighteen, but it would come. I left my watch with him so he could get a female to match the colors EXACTLY, and he lent me a set of sizing rings so I could get Julia's and Carol's ring finger sizes.

Then I drove to the dojo to give Sensei the memory stick with the EKP document on it. He wasn't in a class, so after the usual "How are your injuries?" and the like, he was able to load it onto his office computer and give me the stick back.

He was impressed by how much I'd typed, which I dismissed as unimportant. Then he started talking about my checking the changes he'd make, so I interrupted him, "Don't bother getting me to check it, Sensei. Write whatever you want and then submit it. You understand the technique and you know what needs to be said and how to say it; whereas I've never read an Aikido magazine. Just get an extra copy of the magazine it gets printed in please, so I can give it to my mother. Mothers get all proud about things like that."

He verbally checked some of the things he was intending to put in the article, and they were all perfectly fine with me. I added, "You've been teaching Aikido for decades, and you certainly know how to present the information far better than I do. All I did was have the idea first, which doesn't make me suitable for writing the article. You understand the technique and its implications better than I do, so just write whatever you think best.

^-- "One thing: it would amuse me if you titled the article 'Student's Ki Distribution' and gave the author's name as 'A Student'."

"I will do whatever you wish, but why those?"

I explained my joke to him, but he didn't see any humor in it. He's English.

I told him I hoped to have the casts off on Friday, so I'd be back at training the following Monday, and I'd send him a text message to let him know as soon as I did. I definitely didn't want the casts to stay on once we were officially on summer vacation, and I was very sure I'd be fully healed by Friday, so I was going to ask Dad to cut them off. The main uncertainty about that happening was whether Mom would refuse to let Dad do it. It was too soon to let the hospital X-ray me as they'd see that I'd healed too rapidly, so it was either Dad on Friday or another couple of weeks of hobbling around.

Because Sensei was teaching me the physical forms starting from the very beginning of the syllabus, we'd been doing them in very physical ways. That'd made it difficult for him to realize how strong my ki was. When we resumed training, I'll have about twenty times more ki than him, and we'll be training more like the advanced class - using less physical effort and more ki - so he'll be getting a substantial surprise. As he'd know anyway, I told him, "I haven't been able to do much else for the last three weeks, so I've been doing a lot of ki training. I think you'll find that my ki is noticeably stronger when we resume training."

Sensei's eyebrows rose with the surprise. He was a reserved English gentleman, so that was the equivalent of his running around yelling "Yahoo!" He said, "Your ki was already exceptionally strong, so our next class should be interesting."

Raw power isn't the only issue. The first few times I do a technique, I can't use my ki even as efficiently as Sensei's much weaker ki, because he's had decades of practice in using it as well as possible. But my being able to 'see' my and his ki means I can VERY quickly copy him, and then learn how to improve on what he does, usually by being more precise, as that's difficult for him without being able to sense his ki's effects. After a few practices with each technique, I'll be more powerful AND more efficient than Sensei; and he'll be surprised and impressed.

There'd been a text message from Julia on my phone when I'd finished my last exam, telling me that Alexis, Lily and Pat would like to have a quick dinner with me tonight, with Ava and Carol invited too, so I headed home to give myself plenty of time to wash. I wasn't supposed to get the casts wet, but with my left leg and right hand in casts it was tricky to wash. It was a pity I couldn't ask Carol or even Donna to help me, but I wouldn't want Mom or Dad to come home to that.

I found Carol and Donna studying in their room. I asked them, "How did your exams go?"

They both made "Fine" noises. Carol was much more interested in eagerly asking, "I had a talk with Julia afterward. Can we talk about that in your room, so we don't disturb Donna?"

"Sure." I didn't have to worry about Carol's opinion of the vows, as excited happiness was all over her face.

As soon as we were in my room Carol pushed the door shut and put her arms around me, in a big and apparently never-ending hug.

It was unusually demonstrative of her, but perfectly fine with me. Still holding her I asked, "I take it that you approve of the vows?"

Carol answered, "I'm AMAZED by them. They're so extreme I'd think they were a joke, only I know you and Julia are totally serious. Mom's going to freak when she hears them, especially the part about my sacrificing my life to protect yours."

"Yeah, I know. I find that quite funny in one way. If we accused Mom of being sexist she'd get very indignant about denying it. If we had a ceremony in which I promised to sacrifice my life to protect yours or Julia's, Mom wouldn't think twice about it because that's what a guy is supposed to do, but making the girls promise that about me is going to rattle her cage. More important than Mom, are YOU willing to make vows like that?"

"I'll make ANY vows you want. Julia told me off for not taking them seriously enough, but I'll agree to anything to be able to live with you and Julia. She thinks I'm agreeing too quickly, but I don't care."

Nor, I must admit, did I. The current situation was mostly irrelevant anyway. My reasons were dishonest because it was the future Carol rather than the current one that I wanted as my wife. Carol's reasons were dishonest because whatever she thought her reasons were, they were mostly that she was reveling in the attention from me and Julia, and mostly because she respected us so much. In a couple of months she'd be strong enough not to crave respect. Only then would she and I start having honest reasons for being married, and her vows would start being true. On the topic of that dishonesty, Mom's and Dad's consents (fingers crossed) would be based on a dishonest belief about genetics, so there wasn't much Truthful "social relevance" in the Anderson household!

"Good girl. Is there a real reason you lured me into being alone with you, or is hugging a good enough reason?"

"Hugging is pretty good, but mostly I just wanted to tell you how happy I am. I can't understand why you want me when you can have so many better girls from ... Oww!" (I'd smacked her on the ass).

I said, "How dare you insult my good taste by implying I've chosen an inferior girl! You really do want to be put over my knees and spanked, don't you?"

"{Giggle}. That'd be fun. Shall we do that?"

"Yes, but not until after the exams. Try these sizing rings on your ring finger." I passed them over.

"Why?"

"Either because I'm going to buy you a wedding ring or a jet propelled elephant. Can you guess which?"

"Haha. What sort of ring?"

"Hopefully one the right size." I got her to find what that was, then I said, "Let's get you back to your studies before your mood gets too non-academic."

"Aww, spoilsport."

"Don't worry. You'll soon be having so much 'sport' you'll be walking funny." I probably shouldn't have said that, as it wasn't exactly going to help keep her mind on her studies.

"Oh." Carol was struggling to find what else to say, but I solved her problem by pushing her out of the room.

I pushed her all the way into her room so I could say, "Donna, I've got a few minutes spare. Do you want to goof around for a little while?" Mostly I asked because I was already feeling guilty that I'd be spending much more time with Carol than Donna in the future. Plus Donna can't study for long without needing to get up and burn some energy off.

"{Giggle}, how can you goof off with a broken leg?"

"I bet I can still beat the pants off you at basketball, even though I'll have a crutch."

#7: <We should probably get out of the habit of beating Donna's pants off her. It might give her ideas of taking it literally.>

She readily agreed to a game of basketball, under the usual rules she and I play with.

I added, "Loser has to wash the winner's car."

"I don't have a car."

"Doesn't matter, because you're gonna lose anyway. No way a sissy girl like you can beat even a poor, crippled brother." Donna loves being competitive, and a couple of taunts always raises her excitement level.

Donna's not the sharpest axe in the woodpile. When she was about to shoot, I stood under the hoop and poked my crutch up through the middle of it.

"Argh! Not fair!"

"You did agree that I could use my crutch. Do you want to wash my car now, or should we play baseball for a while instead?" That would be a better way of getting her to run around than basketball, as I could hit some balls without having to move around much.

She knew I was joking about the car wash, but she played safe by throwing the basketball away, declaring, "Okay, but the bet's off now."

We got the baseball gear and I gave her a great deal of fun catching my high hits. She was AMAZED that I could hit the ball so far virtually straight up. Having 99 pounds of NP force can REALLY make a baseball move! I 'hit' them very, very high; so high that Donna found catching them seriously nerve-racking. It also gave her plenty of exercise running back and forth around the yard trying to guess where the ball was going to land, especially because I gave them slight nudges on the way down ("Must be windy up there"). Donna thought it was great fun.

She'd burned off enough energy after twenty minutes, so we headed back inside so I could wash.

In their room, Donna raved to Carol, "You WOULDN'T BELIEVE how high Mark can hit a baseball. He didn't even swing the bat hard, but the ball went so high I couldn't see it. I mean REALLY, REALLY high! It was REALLY scary trying to catch them!"

When I got a chance I said, "Carol, I forgot to ask you before, but Julia told you that we're going out for a quick dinner with the Liaison girls, didn't she?"

"Yes, but how come I'm invited?" No doubt she'd asked the same question of Julia, and no doubt Julia had told her why.

Reassurance needs frequent applications, so I said, "We always make the most beautiful person pay, but those girls keep voting for me. This time there'll be no doubt that you should pay." A confusing compliment, but the best I could quickly think of saying in front of Donna.

"I'm not beautiful."

"In my opinion you are, and I've spent YEARS looking at beautiful girls. There's no point in our debating it, because it'll be decided by vote shortly. I just wanted to make sure you knew you were coming. I'll leave you to your studies until then."

I left them to their studies. In Carol's case that didn't mean the relatively unimportant exam. It meant studying her closet to decide what to wear to dinner.

By the time I got out of the bathroom, Mom and Dad were home.

Mom sheepishly confessed, "You were right, Mark. Everyone confirmed that I yell, 'Are you insane' or something similar far too often. It was rather embarrassing how happy they were to be able to tell me about it. It's obviously been something that's been annoying them for too long. How did you know I did that at work?"

"I've seen you do it often and thoughtlessly, so it was obviously a habit. I would have been surprised if you didn't do it at work. You're going to try to break the habit now?"

"Definitely. It was insulting and annoying everyone."

"I hope another of your expressions is incorrect then."

"Oh?"

"The one about not being able to teach old dogs new tricks."

That cured her sheepishness very successfully, and earned me a swat on the bottom. I added, "Would it help if I gave you lots of practice controlling yourself by doing lots of insane things from now on?"

"Just carry on doing what you normally do, and that'll be practice enough. How were your exams today?"

"Fine. I'm not going to have problems with any of these exams. Although there was a 30% question in the 11th grade English exam: 'Discuss Beauty without Truth is of little social relevance.' What sort of question is that!"

"Hmm, that's very imaginative. You could have written some interesting points about that." I could only assume that Mom's ancestry unrealistically distorts her view of English.

Changing the subject to something that had relevance in the real world, I said, "You know Carol and I are going out for dinner tonight?"

"Yeah, Carol told me. It's nice of you to take Carol with you."

Mom was digging, so I pretended to be thick. "No problem. She gets along very well with Julia and Ava."

Mom asked, "You never did get around to explaining why you and Carol have been so close recently?"

"My memory is good enough to remember that it was only yesterday I said I'd give you a week to get your head around the implications of the special stuff I showed you. I know you haven't done that yet, or there'd be certain types of unobvious questions that you'd be asking me."

#4: <Oh, what?>

#7: <Buggered if I know. It sounds good though.>

#3: <What sort of expression is "buggered"? Doesn't that mean being fucked in the ass?>

#7: <I think so, but it's just an expression. It's used the same as "Damned if I know" and no one cares about their literal meanings. Doesn't 3A use it?>

It turned out that none of 3A used it, and neither had most of 3B until #7 (as he's called now) had brought it to their attention. #'s 5, 6 and 8 had picked it up when they'd each merged with #7. An unimportant little dimensional difference that no one had bothered to comment on until now.

^

[Because it contrasts nicely with the trivial "buggered" difference, I'll mention a couple more profound things we discovered soon, in our near-future déjà vu's (they were occurring every 1.5 weeks, on average).

We had a déjà vu with a Mark that only had four minds. In his dimension they hadn't played roulette in Binion's. They'd never heard of that name, and were still actively looking for a way to get rich. We strongly suggested they avoid Binion's and roulette, but in case they were stupid enough to try, we gave them the kidnappers' names, the approximate address 3B had died in, and suggested they install some hidden security in the two homes so they'd be woken up if anyone broke in. Then we wished them luck, before the link broke. We'd never yet met the same minds again twice, so we'd probably never know what happened. [["Probably" turned out to be not a very accurate guess. We did meet them again, and their dimension's Binion's had turned into a Harrah's that didn't accept big bets.]]

A few déjà vu's later, we linked with a Mark who'd heard a story from one his earlier links, who'd heard it through one of his yet earlier, etc., of a third merge in which the "No Glass" Mark had died so quickly after stopping his heart that the merge happened before the receiving Mark had stopped his heart. In other words, merging almost certainly didn't require the receiving Mark to be in the process of dying, as that Mark had been a day or more away from death, which we doubted very much would count. This knowledge was interesting, but we hoped it would be of use to us ONLY if another Mark wanted to merge into our life, because sure as shit, we didn't want to leave again!]

^

Mom gave up on her fishing expedition.

I went to my room to muck around for a while to kill time until Ava and Julia arrived. I got a bit bored, and decided this would be a good time to approach Dad about something - while I hoped Mom was still feeling impressed by my predicting her insane work misbehavior - so I wandered out to find him. They were already having dinner (just Mom, Dad and Donna). It felt wrong not to join in, so I got to eat their leftovers before they were technically classifiable as such. Mom, bless her, always cooks more than is immediately needed these days.

Hobbling around was a nuisance, so I asked, "Dad, would you be able to get a tool from work that could cut my casts off on Friday afternoon please?"

"What!" jumped in Mom. "It's best to leave that to the doctors, Mark."

Donna's presence meant I didn't want to say "The doctors would be suspicious about my healing supernaturally fast." Instead I asked, "Would you like to apologize now or on Friday, Mom?"

Mom's brain finally caught up to her mouth, "Ahh, I might have spoken too quickly again. Do you know that your bones have healed?"

"I believe so. And if they haven't, then I'll be making a fool of myself and it'll be my responsibility. You need to start letting me take responsibility for my decisions, especially about issues that I know a great deal more about than you do, like my own body."

"I understand, it's just taking me some time to get used to it."

"I'll give you till Friday." That was an easy joke to end the argument with. I turned to Dad, "The whole thing's moot if you can't get something to cut the casts off?"

"The one on your hand will be easy; I could do that with my own tin snips. It'd be best if I borrowed something from work for your leg though. It'd be easier to get permission if we do it on a week night?"