Rick Cook: The Wizardry Consulted

"You know one of the nice things about peace?" Wiz Zumwalt remarked to his cubicle mate. "It’s boring."

Jerry Andrews turned away from the glowing letters of golden fire hanging in the air above his desk.

"Are you being sarcastic?"

William Irving Zumwalt, "Wiz" or "Sparrow" to one and all, twisted his wiry frame in his chair and brushed a lock of dark hair off his forehead. Like Jerry he was dressed in the flowing linen shirt, breeches and high, soft boots that were this world’s equivalent of jeans and a T-shirt. In spite of the clothes he still managed to look like a programmer.

"Heck no! I was just thinking how nice it is. No one’s trying to kill me, no one’s trying to destroy the world. No dwarf assassins, no elvish magic. Just peace and quiet. It’s boring, but you know something? I like being bored."

Wiz sighed and looked out the traceried window into the rose garden below. Now that there were only three programmers left in the World, the Stablemaster had reclaimed their old quarters for his cows. In place of the Bull Pen, Danny, Jerry and Wiz had a spacious workroom in the main tower, with windows surrounded by climbing roses, and a view of the rose garden and the western wall of the Wizard’s Keep. Beyond the towers of the west wall, the green hills ran off into the purple distance.

In Wiz’s time in this world peace had been a scarce commodity. His first weeks after being shanghaied here were spent running for his life from the Dark League of the South. What with one thing and another, especially a red-haired hedge witch, he had discovered that the magic in this world could be made to work like a computer program. That led to a hacked-together magic language and a battle of magic that destroyed the Dark League. Then he’d been kidnapped by a remnant of the Dark League and spent weeks dodging wizards in the freezing, deserted City of Night. That was when Jerry, Danny and some other programmers were brought here from San Jose to help him. That in turn led to a couple of computer criminals finding their way to this world and that had ended in another enormous battle. In between there had been the job of teaching this world’s wizards how to program and months of delicate, wearing negotiations with the non-humans of the world who were upset by humans’ new magical powers. It had only been in the last few months that teaching and negotiating had tapered off and Wiz could get back to serious programming.

"Yep," he repeated, taking his eyes away from the landscape. "It’s wonderful."

"You sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself." Jerry sounded amused.

"I’m already convinced," Wiz said firmly. "I’m bored and I like it."

Jerry leaned back in his chair, which squeaked in protest, and put his ham-like hands behind his head. He was several inches taller than Wiz and a lot heavier, although he had dropped perhaps forty pounds since coming to this world a couple of years ago. Even powerful wizards here got more physical exercise than their software counterparts in Cupertino. Like Wiz he was tanned, but unlike his friend, who drew his dark hair back in a shoulder-length ponytail, Jerry’s lighter brown hair was neatly trimmed above his collar. "I’d rather think of it as having enough time to work on interesting projects. Now that we’ve got wizards and apprentices trained in the basics of the magic compiler we’ve got the time for refinements."

"Speaking of which, what is that you’ve been hacking on so furiously?"

"Kind of an experiment," Jerry said, turning back to the code. "I’m trying to see how well the magic compiler works in a more conventional computer language."

"You’re translating the thing into C?"

"Well, no," Jerry said. "I thought I’d try something that was a little less tied to computer architecture. Something more general."

Wiz looked over his shoulder at the lines of luminescent characters suspended in midair. Then he squinted and leaned closer.

The magic compiler was written in a combination of this world’s runes, the English alphabet and various made-up symbols. To the uninitiated a spell listing looked like someone’s graphics card had barfed on the screen. But even compared to that, this listing was strange. In addition to the "normal" symbols, there were tiny squares, triangles, right angles and things that were even less comprehensible. Wiz scanned the display several times, frowning.

"If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that was…"

"Yep," Jerry said proudly. "APL."

Wiz groaned.

"Hey, you’re a fine one to complain. Who wrote the first spell interpreter in a hacked-up version of Forth?"

"That was different," Wiz said with some dignity. "Forth was exceptionally well suited to what I needed to do."

"So is this," Jerry informed him. "APL is an extremely elegant language. You can express a whole series of complex mathematical operations in a single line of code simply, unambiguously and logically."

Wiz tore his eyes away from the mess above Jerry’s desk and poured himself another mug of blackmoss tea. "If you’ve got a computer that can produce hieroglyphics and if you never need to remember what you did."

"Nonsense. It’s no harder to write understandable code in APL than anything else. You can even write incomprehensible code in C."

"I rest my case."

Before Jerry could reply the door banged open and Danny limped in.

"How’s the back?" Wiz asked, grateful for a respite from what promised to be a full-scale language debate.

"Getting better," the young programmer said, plopping himself down in his chair. He leaned forward almost forty-five degrees. "See? No pain."

Considering the extent of his injuries, Danny was lucky to be alive, much less walking around. A blast from a guard’s weapon had nearly burned him in half during the great battle for Caermort almost three years before. Magic had saved him and magic had healed him, but not even the world’s most skillful healers could restore him fully in safety. So for months he had been going to the healers in the Wizard’s Keep for a combination of physical therapy, massage and healing magic. Gradually but steadily he was improving.

The third member of the software development team was several years younger with fresh good looks that made him look younger still. Even before his ordeal he had been slender, but the rigors of his recovery had taken flesh off his bones until he was positively skinny, despite the best efforts of his wife June and the castle cooks to feed him up.

He looked over at the characters above Jerry’s desk. "What’s that?" he asked, levering himself out of the chair and limping over to join them.

"APL," Wiz told him. "He could have been doing something useful and he’s been writing an APL interpreter."

"Well, whatever makes you happy," Danny said with a shrug.

"Like figuring out how to tap into our world’s telephone system, I suppose," Jerry retorted.

"Hey, we needed an Internet connection. We have to keep up with what’s going on back in the real world. Besides," he added, "you’re the one who’s on that thing four hours a night."

"I have a lot of newsgroups I have to keep up with," Jerry said virtuously. "There’s a lot going on there."