Rick Cook - Wizardry Compiled

"Ace again."

Nancy made a strangled sound.

"What’s wrong?" her husband asked.

"Just keep going," Nancy said, staring at the cards.

Again everyone bet and again Mike flipped a card.

"Another ace… wait a minute!"

There on the table face up were an ace of clubs and ace of diamonds. The last card was the ace of spades.

"What the hell…"

He pulled a card from his hand and threw it face up on the table. An ace of spades.

"That makes seven aces," Nancy said, throwing down her and Judith’s hands.

"No, nine," Karl said, adding his cards to the pile.

"Ten," Mike said bitterly, adding another ace from his hand. "Come on guys, let’s go watch the sunset or something."

Over in the corner Malus and Honorious watched them leave.

"What do you suppose that was all about?"

"Obviously a divination of some sort." He shook his head. "I do not think they like the outcome."

"I wonder what it portends?" said Agricolus coming over to join them.

"Nothing good, I warrant you," said Juvian from his seat near the window. "I thought the Sparrow was bad with his strange magics and alien ways. Now we have near a score of them and they are all more fey than the Sparrow ever was."

"And they left the table and chairs out of place," Honorious snapped, ringing a silver bell to summon a servant to put them back. "Encroaching mushrooms. No manners at all."

"It is a plague! A veritable plague," Agricolus said.

Juvian, Malus and Honorious all nodded in glum agreement.

"Worse than that, perhaps," said Petronus, a wizard with thinning hair and a pronounced widow’s peak, sitting apart from the others. "How much do we know of what these strangers do?"

"They have explained…" Agricolus started.

"Did you understand the explanation?"

"Well…"

"Just so. They labor endlessly in the very citadel of the North and foist us off with explanations none can understand. Meanwhile non-mortals everywhere prepare against us."

"Do you think something is amiss?" asked Malus.

"And you do not? We stand on the brink of a war of extermination that is somehow bound up with the Sparrow and we let his cohorts work in our very midst doing things they will not explain." He slapped his hand on his knee with a sharp crack. "If these strangers are so powerful, let them give us clear proof and reasonable explanations. As members of the Council of the North we should demand it of them."

"That would be a task for the president of the Council," Agricolus said.

"And I mean to talk to him about it. Now." He rose and bowed to his fellows. "My Lords." With that he swept out of the room.

"He does have a point," Honorious said, lowering his voice as the servant came into the Day Room and started moving the furniture back. "They should not hide what they are doing from us."

"I am not sure they are hiding from us," Malus said slowly.

"Do you mean you believe that rubbish, that, that ’spell compiler’?" Honorious snorted. "If so, I have an elixir of Immortality I wish to discuss with you."

The pudgy little wizard frowned. "I did not believe it when there was just the Sparrow and his wild talk. But now? All these newcomers can work magic, all their magic feels like the Sparrow’s."

"They are all from his land," Agricolus pointed out.

"And they all claim that anyone can learn this magic," Malus countered. "Perhaps they are telling the truth."

"If they are telling the truth then why can not any of us grasp the essence of this thing?" Agricolus demanded.

"Perhaps we have not tried hard enough," Malus said. "We can hardly be said to have approached the Sparrow’s magic with the same openness we would apply to learning a new spell from one of the Mighty."

Honorious snorted again.

"Well," the little wizard said, "I do not put it forward as fact, only as speculation." He put both hands on the arms of his chair and levered himself erect. "My Lords, I must return to my own work."

"There may be something in what he says," Agricolus said after a moment.

"Fortuna!" exclaimed Honorious. "Not you too?"

Agricolus shrugged. "I pride myself on having an open mind."

"And I find myself in a world gone mad!" Honorious retorted, ostentatiously picking up the scroll he had laid aside when the conversation began.

"My Lord, I think we have a problem," Moira told Karl when she found him in the Bull Pen the next morning.

"You mean another problem," he said looking up from the stack of wood strips he was pawing through. "What now? Can’t you get us more parchment?"

"No, not that—although that will be a problem if your people don’t start using slates for simple notes. This is more serious, I think."

"Won’t it wait until Jerry gets in, eh? Well, lay it on me."

"Some members of the Council have formally petitioned to have your work stopped until they are satisfied that what you do is safe and effective." She made a face. "Forever, in other words."

"But why?"

"Oh, many reasons. Jealousy is one of them. Some of the Council fears any change. But mostly I think because none of them understand what you do."

"But they must have some idea. I thought Wiz had been teaching classes all along."

"Oh, he was. That is part of the problem. Your magic is so complicated and your ways of thinking so alien none of our wizards were able to learn what Wiz tried to teach them.

"Some of them claim his teaching was a smoke screen, designed to hide the real secret of his magic. But I know that is not so. He struggled hard to teach us and none of us could learn."

Jerry tapped a scroll thoughtfully against his cheek. "Well, programming sure isn’t the easiest thing around, but it’s not near that hard."

"For you perhaps. For us even the simplest things dissolve into confusion."

"Give me an example."

Moira paused and frowned. Very prettily, Karl thought. For the hundredth time he regretted she was taken.

"Well, there are these variables that are named one thing, called another thing and have a value of something else. Wiz must have explained that to me once a moon and I still don’t think I understand it."

"Oh boy, I’m not surprised at that one," Karl told her. "It’s near the trickiest notion in programming and it’s something that confuses a lot of people. But it’s still not that hard for someone who’s got what it takes to be a wizard."

"Very well then," Moira said. "Can you explain it to me?"

Karl sighed. The clearest explanation he had ever seen n the subject started with a quotation from Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland —and the quotation was very apt.

He thought for a minute.

"Okay, look," he said. "You have a true name, right? A name that is uniquely yours and must be kept secret because it identifies you exactly?"

Moira thought for a moment and decided to ignore the rude and prying nature of the question. "I do," she admitted.

"But your true name isn’t ’Moira,’ is it? Moira’s just what people call you?"

"Yes."

"And most people address you as ’Lady’ because you’re a witch. That is, you belong to the class of witches, right?"

"Yes," said Moira, who was beginning to see where this led.

"All right then," Karl said. "You are named one thing, you are called something else and you’re an instantiation of a class called yet another thing." He grinned. "Then you get someone like Wiz, who is Sparrow to most people, Wiz to his friends, is an instantiation of the class of magicians and has a true name. Each of them is different and each of them applies in slightly different circumstances.

"It’s the same in programming. A variable is an instantiation of a class, like integers, and it has its own name that uniquely identifies it, like a true name. At any given time it also has a value, which is what it actually is just then, but which can change with circumstances. Finally, it can also be known by other names in other circumstances and it can be referred to by a pointer, the way ’Moira’ points to you without using your true name. See?"