Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

He spun back around and waved at the light show above his desk. "Ninety percent of this sort of project is getting inside the other guy’s head. Eventually you’ve got to be able to see the code through his eyes, to understand a little of how he thinks. Only here, no matter how hard I try, I can’t make any sense of what I’m seeing. Some of this stuff is truly elegant, some of it is a triumph of development over design, some of it is awfully crude and some of it is pigeon droppings. And there’s no sense to any of it, no rhyme or reason, no overriding structure."

"Well, Wiz always said you start with what you know."

Jerry spun back to her. "I know enough to know I’m out of my depth on this. We need help, heavy-duty help from our world."

"Another programming team?"

Jerry shook his head. "Not that simple. We need someone who can get his mind around this thing."

"Another wizard programmer?"

"No, we need someone even more powerful. We need a programming legend, a code demigod"

"Do you have anyone in mind?"

Jerry thought for a minute. That’s a problem. You can’t very well go up to someone like Ken Thompson and ask him to take a sabbatical from Bell Labs to go off to another world to solve a problem involving an evil magician."

"You mean he might not believe you?"

"I mean the paperwork would be a little excessive. People of this caliber don’t grow on trees and a lot of them are key figures at their companies, teaching at the university level or in jail for getting cute with someone else’s computer. In any event they’re not available."

"Are there some who are not occupied?"

"Yeah, a few." He thought for a minute. "Well, Tom Digby isn’t available right now, so the best is probably Taj."

"Taj?"

"E.T. Tajikawa, the Tajmanian Devil. The guy spends most of his time surfing the far, far end of the bell curve, out three sigmas west of Strange." Moira didn’t know what that meant but it sounded powerful. So she concentrated on the part she thought she understood.

"E.T. Is that like the movie Wiz likes so much?" Moira asked.

"No, it’s E.T. as in Elvis Twitty." Jerry shrugged. "His mom was Korean. She didn’t speak English real good but she loved country music and she wanted to give her son an American name.

"Taj used to teach an extension class in debugging down in the Valley. I learned a hell of a lot from him, but for the first four weeks I thought I’d wandered into a ’Kung Fu’ episode. He started us off with Tai Chi exercises and quotes from Bugs Bunny cartoons. We ended with five minutes of meditation while he rang this little bell. And crazy as it sounds, it all tied together."

Moira, who didn’t know what Tai Chi was and to whom a lot of programming was a mystery anyway, was willing to take his word for it.

"His power isn’t in his techniques. It’s in the way he sees."

"That sounds like Patrius," Moira said.

"The wizard who brought Wiz here in the first place?

Yeah, from what I’ve heard of him he would have liked Taj."

"What would it take to get him?"

"Mostly you’d have to catch his interest. But that’s hard to do. Last I heard he was hip-deep in a six-figure design project for a gaming company."

"Would it hurt to ask him?"

"No," Jerry said slowly. "No, it wouldn’t hurt." He brightened. "Thanks, Moira, you’re a genius."

Moira took the compliment without comment. "You had best ask Bal-Simba before you talk about bringing another through from your world."

"Right. I’m sure he won’t have any problem with it."

In a matter of minutes Bal-Simba was summoned and he listened carefully, if somewhat sleepily, to Jerry’s proposal.

"If you think it will aid us, by all means ask this person to come here," he said when Jerry finally wound down.

"Even if he can’t physically come to us we can probably do a lot over the Internet. But it would be better if he can get free for a while." He looked at Bal-Simba. "Can we still do a Great Summoning to bring someone over from our world?"

"Almost certainly. The shadows do not seem able to block that path."

"Well, let’s find out then." Jerry picked up the telephone sitting incongruously on his desk and began punching in the number. "I’ll put it on the speaker. I hope it’s late enough in the day that he’s up."

"Hallo," came a female voice with a hint of Scandinavian accent. In the background he heard the steady click of computer keys.

"Is Taj there? This is Jerry Andrews, jerry thekeep.org, I’m kind of a friend of his."

The keystrokes didn’t even slow. "Oh yah, I remember you, I think. From alt.comp.lang.theory.wild_blue. This is Sigurd, you know,

Sig Tniskatonic.frodo.org."

Jerry remembered Tajikawa’s girlfriend/soulmate/companion/secretary/keeper. "Hi, Sigurd. Is Taj there?"

"He’s at Comdex. He’s not gonna be back until, like, a week from Sunday."

"Oh. Well, is there any way to reach him?"

"I don’t think so. He said he was gonna beg crash space off a friend. Didn’t say who and I don’t think he knew himself."

"Didn’t he take a celluar phone?"

"Well, kinda. He’s got a loaner from MMCC-you know, the

Mini-Microcell-Communications Consortium-that’s running a demonstration network at the show. They’re setting up stations at all the major hotels. Only, one of their crates got lost in transit, then they had a problem with some weird connectors and had to have replacements airfreighted from Taiwan. Plus their directory software apparently has some kind of suicide pact with their hard drives and:"

"So their phones aren’t working," Jerry cut in.

"I understand the hotel books are giving eight to three that they won’t have them working before the show ends."

"Well, what about e-mail? Is he going to be on-line?"

"Well, he took his laptop but I don’t think he’s got the modem working. It’s a new machine with a Type III PC Card modem, only the card services for Linux are, like, flatlined. He was going to hack a driver but he didn’t have time before he left."

"That’s too bad. Look, do you know who’s he’s going to be seeing? It’s really important that I reach him."

"He wanted to check out some scientific visualization software, but other than that he didn’t say. I’m sorry."

"If he does check in have him contact me. It really is a matter of life and death. Have him send to jerry thekeep.org."

"Okay, let me open a window here." There was a brief pause then more clicking of keys as she took the address. "If I hear from him I’ll sure give him the message."

"Shit," said Jerry as he broke the connection.

"What now?’ Bal-Simba asked. " Will another serve?"

There aren’t any others in Taj’s class, " Jerry said, " at least none that I know of who are available."

"Is there any other way to contact him?"

"We can put out the word on the Net, but I’m not sure how long that will take and we’ll probably get a lot of bogus reports. Taj is pretty famous." He thought. "Comdex only lasts a week so he should be home next Monday at the latest."

Bal-Simba considered. "I am not sure we can wait that long. These things press us relentlessly and ever closer despite our efforts."

"Can we hide Moira somewhere?"