The tenth class arrived in winter.
Thirty-one students from twenty-three territories.
He didn't sit in on the first session.
Not because it wasn't worth attending — it was. But because the school had been running for long enough that his presence in the back of the room changed the quality of the session in ways that weren't always useful. The students oriented toward him. Calla oriented toward him. The room organized itself around the blank multiplier at the back rather than around the work at the front.
He stayed out.
Calla ran the session.
Afterward he asked her how it went.
"Different without you there," she said. "Better in specific ways." She paused. "The students found the work faster. Nobody was waiting to see what you would say about what they said." She paused. "The room's gravity was — in the room."
He noted this.
The school's gravity should be in the school.
Not in whoever had established it.
The correct functioning of the thing he had built.
