“Is Ben more… spry these days?” Todd asked Grandmother. The two of them were sitting on the eastern terrace watching most of the Speedwell instructors engage in a game called Croquet. None of them really knew what they were doing. Companion found the game in the Speedwell’s computers. He looked up a lot of games on the computers to entertain the children as they were gathered up from the squares and villages.

  The teachers were just unwinding after another long day with the students. Some of the older students were still milling around the ship, getting more time on the educational machines or in the stick fighting room or in the workshops. The younger students were off to their apartments under the watch of their minders. It was the evening of the fourth day with full students. Grandmother thought this might be the first time she managed to sit down since they picked up the first students at Home Square. She was lucky a tier six didn’t need much sleep.

  “I hit him with a tier five heal on the way back from Mumbai with the students. He was complaining about a back ache on the way into the transport room. He didn’t even notice,” Grandmother admitted.

  “How could he not notice?” Todd asked, thinking about the intense pain a heal caused.

  “His magic is clear,” Irene responded. “Healing him is like healing a child, no pain, no pleasure, any color can heal them.”

  “The one mercy Control grants us,” Todd commented. “I guess I just didn’t think of that in someone who looks so old.”

  “It’s the beard. Alex told him the head of any magic school always has a long white beard. Alex has been reading his myths again,” Grandmother explained.

  “Did you finally tell Ben the academy is his?” Todd asked.

  “No, but I think he is getting a hint. Right now he still thinks he is a figurehead,” Grandmother responded.

  “You're not going to drop this all on him are you?” Todd asked.

  “Of course not,” Grandmother responded. “I’ll be his assistant as long as he needs me. But with my other job, I might have to leave him to watch the shop from time to time.”

  “How is the other job going?” Todd asked.

  “Not bad actually,” Grandmother replied. “I’ve been thinking about Valin’s bind and our fertility implants. I think the binds don’t degrade because they are somehow qualifying as an implant. I didn’t think about it before, but really a heal should expel an implant from the body as a foreign body, like a broken sword tip or arrowhead. The fact that this doesn’t happen means there must be an exception for them. They don’t degrade either. They function perfectly their entire expected lifetime.”

  “That does sound similar,” Todd replied.

  “Now I just need to find that issue on the list,” Grandmother said with a sigh. “On the easier side, the eastern gallery at Chicago is on the list. It is ‘beyond its expiration date.’” Grandmother reported. “I think we can clear that one up by knocking out the guards and dragging them back into the hall inside Chicago. The halls themselves will come up as an error eventually, but not yet. Resource rooms expire faster. There was a rest at the west entrance of Chicago at one time, but sometime during the Wizard's War it was left empty and cleared.”

  “If we ran it from Londontown, we could do it in a day,” Todd observed.

  “I think we need a free day for the students,” Grandmother observed. “Everyone is excited now, but if we keep them working without a break they will burn out. I’m going to schedule it sometime in the next six days. If we survive it, I’ll set up a pattern,” Grandmother observed. “We can slip out to Chicago the night before one of the free days. If we are late getting back, no one should notice.”

  “Sounds good,” Todd responded.

  “Mind if I join you?” Ellen said. She just came out of the ship. One look at the tangle on the lawn and she decided she was too tired to deal with that.

  “Pull up a chair,” Todd said. Ellen brought one from the next set of two and settled in next to Todd. “How is the crafting division doing?” Todd asked.

  “Almost everyone has settled on just one craft, I think,” Ellen responded. “There’s a girl from Bayou who has tried all the introductory lessons. I warned her she needed to pick soon or she wasn’t going to learn any of them in the time she has.”

  “It sounds to me she is a lot like you,” Grandmother observed.

  “Huh,” Ellen responded. “Maybe she is.”

  “Speaking of choices, I finished the classes on magic color today. I am not certain if the village students really understood the danger of heal addiction. On the positive side, they don’t have any prejudice for or against red or blue,” Grandmother observed. During the first six days the school ran the students through introductory classes. Grandmother’s class on magic color was one of them. It was required for every student, even those whose color was already set, since in it Grandmother covered healing addiction and the color matches that could safely heal each other. It also covered the physical weakness and the slower rate of healing outside the structure, the danger of disease and infection, the structure’s methods to get a player to stay inside and the addictive quality of nanobots themselves. Those items weren’t directly related to color, but they were things students from both sides of the boundary needed to know. “I told the students to make their choices by tomorrow.”

  “Are we going to let students try for orange?” Ellen asked.

  “Yes,” Todd replied. “Alex found an inscription not far from the improved rest for the tier zero fast step spell. It’s an enhancement spell so we are going to teach it using the butcher’s foot tap method.”

  “It will be an interesting experiment,” Grandmother responded. “I’d like to get everyone’s color set before the break.”

  “Break?” Ellen asked.

  “I decided to give the students a free day,” Grandmother replied. “After the free day, we will settle down into a standard schedule. Something like three hours on the educational machines, three hours in the workshop, three hours on physical defense every day.”

  “I’ve been talking to Asher,” Ellen commented. “He knows something he calls chemistry that I suspect is a new field of magic. It’s how he lost his fingers.”

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  “A new magic?” Grandmother asked with interest. “We’ll have to look into it on the side. It is too late to add it to the class offerings now. We are going to have a hard time covering all the basic crafts, warrior and wizard skills. I’m going to push teaching enchanting to next year too.”

  “So far we’ve just run classes in and around the Speedwell, since we were waiting for the color choices. When we start running classes in the structure I think we might need more time for transport,” Todd observed.

  “What if we split it by day,” Ellen suggested, “like we talked about for crafting lessons, one day in the structure followed by one out of it. A lot of the crafters aren’t very interested in physical defense, but we have some children coming out of the structure that have very little interest in crafting.”

  “Hmm…” Grandmother murmured as she thought. “I did want to give the students the ability to choose. I think we should draw up a schedule so that the students can sign up for their class choices. We can break the day into three hour blocks, but some classes can be two of the blocks. A dedicated crafting student would take the six hour block of a crafting class, but a scavenger student would only take the three hour block that will concentrate on processing materials into the first storable or saleable state.”

  “Ok,” Todd said, “So we could have a warrior class that runs six hours and a three hour simple defense class for people who are going to spend most of their time in the squares or villages.”

  “Yes, I like that. Incorporating what you said Ellen, when you sign up for a class, you are actually signing up for the two day, in structure, in ship, set. If we repeat the schedule every six days, with a seventh rest day, we can keep class size down by teaching the same content to three separate sets. That would allow someone to take warrior, wizard and crafting, in the large six hour blocks.”

  “We can match, scavenging with hunting or farming, but what are we going to match with wizardry?” Todd asked.

  “Hunting is already a matched set I believe. When I recruited Betty I talked about both magical and non-magical and she was confident she could do both. Wizardry should be matched with engineering or perhaps more fundamentally the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology. I don’t believe any of our students will be successful at those subjects until they can read and have a deeper understanding of math. Perhaps,” Grandmother said suddenly, as the idea came to her, “we should have some classes that aren’t matched. Besides scavenging, hunting and farming, we have cooking and baking. I don’t see a short three hour version of baking, but we could have both class types in cooking.”

  “If we changed the cadence to five days taught and a sixth day off, that would encourage the kids to sign up for two two-day six hour block courses and one single day class. Something like warrior, blacksmithing and farming. They could still take five three hour blocks to go with it, like light cooking,” Ellen commented.

  “Not bad,” Grandmother replied. “I want to require two three hour blocks of reading for those that can’t and one three hour block of mathematics, I’d like to require a three hour block of history too, but I feel maybe I am pushing machine learning too much.” Learning how to access and use the educational machines was also a required course during this first week. Every instructor who was part of the landing generation was pushed into service to do it, since learning to use the machines required a lot more one-on-one interaction with the students than in Grandmother’s color of magic class. Luckily Mary, the old woman Grandmother healed in Londontown during their spell buying trip, signed up to be an instructor on the student selection visit. She possessed a lot more energy since the heal and she was bored. Between Ben, Ava, Mary, Lizzy and Irene, they trained everyone up to a functional level on the machines. Ben hired Ava to teach gardening. She came from Cornhusk, which was one of the eastern villages. The five of them would take turns supervising the lab to offer continued help between other duties.

  “Well machine learning can be done anytime. What if we required nine hours of educational machines and have the machines regulate that the students get reading, writing, math and history. You can set it up that way can’t you?” Todd asked.

  “I can,” Grandmother responded.

  “A student could choose to do some of their machine learning during a six hour block, giving them four three-hour blocks to pick for themselves. Do they need four? Do we need short versions of anything besides defense, cooking and crafting? I can’t see a student taking both the short version of defense and crafting. They should be taking one of those for the main blocks.” Todd stated.

  “Well a short version of crafting might still be a two day pair,” Ellen offered. “As well as the short version of defense.”

  “Hmm…” Grandmother commented. “Or we could split them. You don’t actually have to take both, but we could offer them. I think we need a short version of scavenging that is just about finding and collecting edible plants. Or is that a short version of hunting? Or farming?”

  “I’d call that gathering,” Ellen suggested.

  “I want to offer a class on events since the landing in a three hour block along with the User Manual. We’ll call that one structure special topics. Of course you can take a lot more subjects on the educational machines than just reading, math and history.”

  “So they should be able to fill four three-hour blocks easily,” Todd concluded.

  “Let’s hope,” Grandmother said. “I’ll plug all that into the computer and see what it comes up with. I’ll talk to Ava and see if she can teach gathering outside the structure and Betty if she can teach it for inside. Although Betty clearly told me once she didn’t dig up tubers, she was a hunter. One of us might have to cover that.”

  “Just give it to whoever is teaching scavenging,” Todd said.

  “And who is teaching scavenging?” Grandmother asked.

  “Alex and Companion?” Todd said in a very questioning voice. “Or maybe Muriel?”

  “I am starting to think we really should have been asking these questions a month ago,” Grandmother commented. “Wait, is Muirel still around?”

  “She’s hanging out with Betty. I gave her a composting plant seed. The two of them are looking for a hunter’s rest near either of our two entrances,” Todd explained.

  “The hunter’s rest!” Grandmother exclaimed. “I promised Betty I’d build her one outside Control’s influence, with heat and water. I don’t like the idea of her staying out in the cold all winter. I wonder if there’s a way to make a hot rock?”

  “If Sarah doesn’t know, Enchanter will,” Ellen offered.

  “Maybe,” Grandmother countered. “The selkie really hate heat. I bet Enchanter knows how to make a cold rock. Hopefully Sarah can infer from it how to make a hot one. Which reminds me, I suggested that Alex teach song and Sarah teach art. I still think those are worthy subjects. Both on their own and as introductions to singing spells, speaking and writing selkie and enchanting. I’ll add them into the three hour classes for now.” Grandmother pulled her glass slate out of her uniform pocket and started tapping away on it.

  “What is that anyway?” Ellen asked. “You never used it before the village student pickups.”

  “Oh,” Grandmother said, “It is the captain's remote access for the Speedwell. The robots found it in the captain's quarters when they cleared out all the apartments and refurbished them. It is sort of like your personal interface, only for the ship. I thought of it when I realized I needed the names of all the pre-registered students in the villages. It only works within the Speedwell’s wireless network, so it won’t work in the structure. Luckily Agatha hacked the database and added my name to command level access. I don’t know why she never mentioned to me that she did it.”

  “So I can’t have one?” Todd asked, teasing Grandmother.

  “You can. We didn’t have them during the flight, most of them broke along the way. It wasn’t until thirty years after the landing that the manufactory was advanced enough to make them again. They are available for purchase from the warehouse, but a new one won’t have command access. Actually Alex might really like one, you can pull up all the Earth fiction books on one without any access level at all,” Grandmother paused. “There are all kinds of open positions in the system for the Speedwell command team. I should assign everyone to one.”

  “No, no, no,” Todd said suddenly, surprising Ellen. “We are not going there. I’m not ending up Captain of the Speedwell.”

  “Actually,” Grandmother said, “I was thinking about Benjamin. I put the team in as engineering associates years ago. That’s how you get paid for your maintenance work.” Todd relaxed. He knew how much Grandmother valued engineering. The Wildkin girl was the most well outfitted of all the students because her sister called Grandmother the Engineer. Todd was certain the girl's warehouse account wasn’t debited enough either. Grandmother would never demote any of them to something as lowly as captain.

  Todd wondered suddenly if Ellen’s girl from Bayou was the same Wildkin child.