You probably won't agree, but this is a story about Mylan Aquila.

  Mylan is the younger brother of the celebrated (if not notorious) Solon Aquila.
Solon himself extricably demands a few words in any dossier: arbitageur,
saboteur extrordanaire, social engineer and a singular detective.  Solon
(today) is about forty-three, with sharp hawk-like features, even sharper
turquoise eyes that crinkled when he smiled and a healthy thatch of
silver-gray hair. His smile is famous, that unique cross of a basilisk and
an imp, and when people saw it they knew big things were about to change. 

  But why all this hoopla about Solon, a man who isn't currently within
thirty-thousand light years of wonderful old Earth?  Because when Solon was
just past seventeen and into his final year of high school, two curious
things happened: his parents discovered they had conceived another child,
and his sociology professor that same week assigned to the class a thesis,
due at the school year's end.

  In his very young years and onward into maturity (well, physical maturity
anyway), a curious trait manifested in Solon's mental abilities.  By some
trick of the universe, Solon began to demonstrate a "phane sense"; a
sensitivity to patterns found in things that otherwise seemed totally
unrelated.  Some time from now, an historian shall dub him the "Dowser of
Anima Mundi", a Bloodhound on the scent of the Soul of the World.  Solon
calls it the "second most flabbergasting epithet I've ever heard."

  Suffice it to say that Solon was quite adept at using this seventh sense. 
Most of his exploits are well documented elsewhere, but there is one minor
adventure he undertook well before his illustrious career ever took off, and
it may very well turn out to be the most far-reaching of them all...and it
concerned both an unborn sibling and a term paper.

                                  ** ** **

  By the end of his mother's eighth month of maternity, Solon started
writing his thesis.  Of course, he had little more than a month until the
deadline, and his ultimate success or failure was, like Solon's seventh
sense during his own gestation, left entirely up to the whim of the
universe.  With luck (and the derivative of luck his synergistic talent
was integrating into the pattern), his baby brother would be born somewhere
between eighty and seventy-two hours before term paper deadline.

  In the months before, he'd run some rather awkward tests on himself in the
school's lab.  His fellow students, curious about why Solon would want
multiplane CAT scans and gas chromatographs of the chemical nature of
seemingly random areas of his parietal lobe, assisted.  Satisfied with the
acculumated data, he borrowed a syndetic maser and a can of gauss paint from
the lab and hauled the stuff home.  Applying the colorless paint to the
floors, doors, walls and ceiling of his parent's bedroom (they were of
course away), he fashioned a Gaussian enclosure sufficient to contain and
cohere the emissions of the maser.  The maser he concealed in a quiet spot
of the room and connected to his portable computer, which in turn was loaded
with the datasets taken of Solon's head. At last, with some fine adjustment
such that the maser harmonic would integrate along the curve of the data,
the tools for his exploring his thesis were in place.

  Solon's brother was born with 74 hours to spare.  With only the conclusion
of his thesis awaiting his prose, Solon quietly performed an extra test on
his newborn brother.  Forty minutes later, Solon was eagerly typing away.

                                  ** ** **

  "It was ultimately determined that by mapping the appropriate areas of
my own brain and amplifying the same areas of the fetal brain, it is
indeed possible to enhance an aptitude based on a hereditary model.  Quo
Est Demonstratum." 

  Solon's professor tossed the bound volume of the thesis onto his desk and
proceeded to stare into space rather thoughtfully.  His reverie was broken
by the creaking of his office door, and Solon's head appeared in the
opening.

  "You wanted to see me, Greg?"  Solon was on a first-name basis with
everyone--peers and professors alike.

  Professor Ehle absently waved Solon on in, looked at the teenager a
moment, then hefted the thesis book up and let it fall with a 'bang!' back
onto the desk.  "Solon, I don't know whether to submit this as a candidiate
for the Nobel Prize or to fail your ass.  This thesis; it...it...hell, I
don't know what to say!  It goes beyond decency! ..and..and yet it is so
damned, well, *neat*!"  Why ever _why_ did you do this?"

  "Have you ever read any of Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories?" countered
Solon.

  "Wha-?  Why, yes, when I was in school myself."  (Actually, this was not
strictly true.  Greg Ehle, as a sophomore high school student in the Phase
IV English Literature class, sneaked past the Doyle reading assignments by
using that bane of all literature courses, Cliff Notes, and thus his Holmes
lore was rather deficient.)

  "Well, remember how Sherlock had a brother, Mycroft?"

  "Ah, yes," Greg lied. "So?"

  "Sherlock possessed an interesting talent for deductive reasoning.  He
turned that talent into a detective science, and was much celebrated during
his career."  Solon not very obviously watched his professor to see if the
man had caught the hint.

  "...and you think your brother will be like the Sherlock character?"

  Greg hadn't caught the hint. "No," Solon said, "I'm the one who is like
that.  I see glimpses of my own career in the pattern. I will be, uh, well
known.  I don't want my brother to live miserably trying to be half
as..'interesting' as the Solon Aquila you'll see ten years from
now.  So I decided to try and make my brother _better_ than me."

  Greg was nonplussed. "Better?  In what way?"

  "Like Mycroft was to Sherlock.  Mycroft's deductive talent was better than
Sherlock's, but in many other ways the two brothers were very different. 
Each became famous, in their own ways, and not all fame is measured by the
number of mouths who can speak your name.  The two brothers didn't have to
live up to each other's achievements; they were balanced.  The difference of
intensity in their mutual exceptional aptitude is what actually made things
work."

  "..and you proposed to have 'balanced' the nature of yourself and your
brother?

  "Well, I gave the scales a well-meaning push," Solon mused.  "All that
stuff with my brain and the maser--thats my experiment to see if I could
amplify an aptitude my brother would have had anyway--for hereditary
reasons.  Or so at least my peeks at the pediatrician's file on my brother
seemed to indicate.  They keep workmanlike data."

  "But what is this aptitude?  Not even your report mentions it."

  "Oh," he said, "That's one of the three items I didn't write in the book."

  "Those being?"

  "I think I multiplied the single aptitude by itself into a kind of
quadratic X-square.  I won't know for years, and the thesis was due last
week," Solon grinned.

  Greg didn't grin back. "What was this aptitude?"

  "Synergy."

  "What!"

  "Cooperative action of discrete agencies such that the total effect is
greater than the sum of the effects taken independently."

  "Solon, don't you dare quote any more Webster at me!"

  "But you seemed to not understand."

  "What I don't understand is how you arrive at synergy being an aptitude!"

  It was at the point Solon deduced Greg hadn't really read all the Doyle he
affronted.  "Why not?  Recognizing patterns in things that outwardly have no
relation seems to be a skill to me.  I should know--I do it all the time.  I
really should get going, professor."

  "OK, OK...what was the last item?"

  Solon paused at the door. "My parents let me name my newborn brother over
  the weekend."

  "And?"

  "I decided on Mylan.  Rather fitting, don't you think?"  Solon bowed
slightly, grinned his basilisk grin, and sauntered out.

  A short while later Professor Ehle caught himself talking out loud.  "Only
here--only at this school--would a teenager dabble in psychohereditary
experiments and get away with it.  God help us when his brother gets here."

                                  ** ** **

  Some dozen years later Solon disappeared.  Not from life, but certainly
from the Earth.  He wrote an account of the adventure in his later years,
and stuffed it into one of his many books.  Of course, Solon had this
devilish habit of writing chapters of autobiography and even pure fiction
into his nonfiction reference works; in reading books on arbitrage,
sociology, etc. one might suddenly find all discussion of the subject matter
pulled to a dead stop as Solon recounted/invented an adventure or two. 
People always asked him why he did this, and he always replied "because
otherwise the books would be so goddamn BORING!"  You can only learn if you
enjoy the learning, and boring people to death isn't teaching."

  Mylan Aquila grew up just like Solon wanted, out from under a brotherly
shadow.  As it was never Solon's intention to hide from Mylan the secret of
the X-squared skill, Solon told him all about it, even to the point of
letting the ten year-old read his old thesis.  As an adult, Mylan perhaps
would have felt manipulated, but as a becoming adolescent, he felt
liberated.  If only such forthcoming truths were offered by all men!

  Mylan acquired the hawkish features and silver-grey hair of his family
lineage, but his eyes was a rather unexpected surprise. They were a
deep green, in contrast to the usual azure blue.  He stood about an
inch taller than his father and brother, and (doubtless a spillover effect
of the X-square) was quite ambidexterous.

  Mylan Aquila not only graduated from his brother's alma mater, but, nine
years later, came back to teach.  The thing is, he teaches a class in
everything (he even calls it Everything 101).  He refuses to teach anything
else, countering with "er, well after Ev101, what would be the point?"
Eventually the board of regents relented and let Mylan do as he would.

  Only two other points need be mentioned; everything else can be found out
by taking the man's class.

  For one, Mylan did like to play at physical sports, something his brother
never seemed to care much about.  He would even get into games with the
students for the love of sport.  Alaways refused to coach, however.

  And lastly:

  Everything 101 is taken by each student at least one semester of every
year during their high school career.  Freshman and seniors alike sit in the
same classroom trying to learn never the same thing twice.  It might be
noted that Mylan almost never gives anyone an "A" in his class.  He freely
admits he wants to, but there is a curious rite of passage to earning that
"A". In fact, Mylan says he will immediately change the final grades of
prior semesters to "A"s if that student finds the answer.  Go into the
classroom, look on the corner of his desk at the small signboard everyone in
the class can see. It will read:

  "oo (infinity) = (equals) _______ (blank)"

  And below that:

  "..and you have to BELIEVE in it!"

/**/