The Wiz Biz (55 page)
Authors: Rick Cook
“You mean Silicon Valley.”
“That is what I said, is it not? In any event they have been working on your system of magic and making excellent progress—or so they tell me.” He chuckled. “Meanwhile they have been, ah, enlivening things here to no end.”
“I dunno,” Wiz said. “You make me feel superfluous. I’ve been gone and you and Moira have been doing all the work. All I managed to do was get myself kidnapped and chased all over the City of Night.”
“Hardly. Aside from wiping out the remnants of the Dark League, you were the one who approached Duke Aelric with the notion of a treaty.”
“You could have done that.”
Bal-Simba shook his head. “No, Sparrow, I could not. In the first place he never would have talked to me. In the second place, I would not have had the courage to do something so insanely dangerous.”
“Oh,” said Wiz in a very small voice.
“Well, I do not wish to tire you, so we will leave these matters for the morrow.”
“Fine. I’m pretty bushed. I’m going to get a snack and go back to sleep.”
Bal-Simba made no move to leave.
“Is there something else?”
“There are questions we must answer and soon,” he said at last. “Some things yet unclear about what happened to you.”
“For instance?”
“Was your kidnapping connected with the attempts on your life?”
“No. That was someone else. I think I can take care of that.”
“Ahh, I see,” he said and then hesitated again. “I understand Ebrion is dead.”
“Yeah. I was there when it happened.”
The wizard looked closely at him. “Was he involved in your kidnapping?”
Wiz opened his mouth and then stopped. Telling Bal-Simba what had happened would definitely discredit Ebrion’s faction—the people who had been trouble ever since he arrived at the Capital. But discrediting them wouldn’t make them go away. They’d still be here and they’d be even angrier and more frustrated.
Always leave your opponent a line of retreat
—
unless you want a fight to the death.
Wiz realized Bal-Simba was watching him intently.
“Would it do any good if I said Ebrion was involved?” he said at last. “I mean in the long run?”
The giant black wizard considered. “In the long run? No, not really.”
“Then let’s say he died trying to save me and leave it at that.”
“Sparrow, you never cease to amaze me,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “You grow constantly in wisdom.”
Wiz snorted. “Too schoon ye get old und too late schmart.” Then he sobered. “I just hope it really isn’t too late. I made a royal mess of things this time.”
“Things are in an, ah, ‘interesting’ state,” Bal-Simba agreed. “But certainly not beyond hope.”
Twenty-Two: Mending Fences
Good client relations are the key to a successful project.
—consultants’ saying
The Mighty in the Capital gathered in the chantry the next morning in no very good mood. They knew that Wiz had been kidnapped by magic and they knew Ebrion was dead. Some of them, guiltily remembering old conversations and half-dropped hints, suspected very strongly the two events were not unconnected. Most of them didn’t know enough to suspect, but they had an uneasy feeling that someone’s head was on the block.
As the blue-robed men and women took their seats in the carved thronelike chairs around the room they murmured and muttered among themselves. Bal-Simba had commanded this meeting, but obviously the Sparrow was the one who would do the talking.
Wiz stood up as soon as Bal-Simba called them to order.
“This isn’t easy for me to say,” Wiz looked out over the assembled group. “But you were right and I was wrong. I am sorry. No matter how my magic compiler turns out, humans are still going to need your wisdom and your sense of restraint. I was so wrapped up in the technical details I couldn’t see that.
“My blindness has had very serious consequences. Now I can only hope to undo the damage I have done.”
He took a deep breath and went on. “I can’t change the past, none of us can. But we can put it aside and go on from there. I’m asking you to work with me, both with the problems we have right now and in the long run.
“I hope that we can work together in spite of what happened in the past. We need each other.” He paused. “At least, I need you. Thank you for listening.” With that he stepped away from the podium to a smattering of applause.
“What of Ebrion?” someone called from the back of the room. Suddenly there was dead silence. The Mighty froze where they were and everyone looked at Wiz.
Wiz licked his lips. “I am sorry to say Ebrion is dead. He was a good man and he always acted in the way he believed was right. He was killed trying to protect me.”
There was an almost audible sigh from the assembled wizards.
Several of the Mighty crowded around afterwards. The first to reach him was Malus.
“Well, my boy,” Malus said. “Well, well.” Then the fat little wizard hugged Wiz to him.
“The fault was hardly yours alone, Lord,” Juvian said, stepping up to him. “We have had our blindnesses.” Several of the others pressed forward to offer their support as well, and for several minutes Wiz, Moira and the wizards stood making strained small talk.
“If you will excuse me, My Lords,” Wiz said at last, “I have to meet with the programming team this afternoon and I want to get something to eat before then.”
Malus followed them out. “I wanted you to see something,” he said once they were alone in the corridor. “Your friend Karl has been teaching us while you were gone.” He shook his head. “It is hard, very hard, this new magic of yours, but I have been practicing and, well . . .
greeting exe.
”
Suddenly, written between them in glowing green letters six inches high was:
HELLO WORLD
“It is my first spell with the new magic,” Malus said shyly. “How do you like it?”
Wiz grinned, Moira hugged the tubby little wizard and kissed him on the cheek.
“I think that’s wonderful, My Lord,” she said, “and I’m sure Wiz does, too.”
“It’s great,” Wiz agreed. “It’s one of the best presents I could have had. Thank you, Malus.”
###
“That speech has to be the hardest thing I ever did,” Wiz said as they made their way back to their chamber.
Moira squeezed his hand more tightly. “Perhaps it was also the bravest.”
He put his arm around her waist and kissed her. Then he opened the door and ushered her back into their apartment.
“The place looks bare with all my notes and stuff gone,” he said, looking over at the table beneath the window.
“They went to a good home,” Moira told him. Personally she thought it was a great improvement, but she wasn’t going to say so now.
“What have we got to eat? I’m starved and it smells wonderful.”
Moira brought the dishes out of the cupboard where they had been magically kept warm. “I had luncheon sent up from the kitchens. Beef barley soup, roast beef, potatoes and bread and cheese.”
“Heaven.”
Wiz ate ravenously, enough for three normal men. Moira contented herself with a cup of soup and watched him pack the food away.
“Well,” he said pushing away from the table at last, “that was wonderful, but I need to go meet the programmers.”
Moira shook out her mane of copper-colored hair. “I was hoping you could spend some time with me this afternoon,” she said softly.
“I’d like to darling, but I’ve got to get up to speed on this.”
Moira put her arms around his neck. “Won’t it keep for a while?”
“Look, I really do need to get to the team meeting.” Moira melted against him and pressed her lips to his for a long, slow kiss.
“Of course,” he said as the kiss ended, “I could always tell them I was held captive by a wicked witch.”
Moira opened her green eyes wide. “Wicked, My Lord?”
Wiz pulled her to him. “Darling, when you get going you’re the wickedest witch that ever was.”
###
As always the Council of the North met in the morning. However this time Wiz was sitting in the center of the long wooden table, next to Bal-Simba and he was anything but bored with the proceedings.
“. . . so that’s it,” he concluded. “Unless we can curb the invasion of the Wild Wood and stop people from using
demon_debug,
we are going to have a war.”
For once there were no objections from Honorious, no sniping from Juvian and no clarifications from Agricolus. Every man and woman at the table looked grave.
Juvian, who oversaw the Council’s dealings with the hedge witches, pursed his lips. “All easier said than done, I fear. The villagers prefer
demon_debug
because it is so effective against magic.”
“
ddt
is just as effective and a lot less harmful to the environment. We’ve got to get them to use it instead of
demon_debug
.”
The sorcerer rubbed a pudgy hand over a jowl. “That will not be easy, Lord. We do not have the authority we once had.”
“They’ll listen to you if they ever want another bit of magic out of me,” Wiz said firmly. “Look, this has got to stop. Unless magic is actively dangerous it is not to be destroyed.”
Juvian shook his head. “I do not know, Lord.”
“Just tell them that if they don’t stop, I’ll come there and start throwing lightning bolts.”
“If you wish it we will, of course, but I do not know if they will listen to us.”
“We have got to
make
them listen.”
“We will do our best Lord, but it will be difficult.”
“Okay,” Wiz sighed, “what about limiting migration then?”
“That is not merely difficult, that is impossible,” Honorious said. “The farms are too small and the soil is too poor. On that the peasants will not listen at all.”
“We don’t have to freeze our boundaries exactly where we are. The part of the Wild Wood closest to the Fringe was human territory once anyway. But we can’t have uncontrolled expansion.”
“Then tell us how to prevent such expansion, Lord.”
“If we don’t prevent it we’ll be at war.”
The old wizard sighed heavily. “Then, Lord, my advice is to prepare for war. For the people will not obey us on this.”
All up and down the table the wizards looked even grimmer. But none of them disagreed with Honorious or offered an alternative.
Twenty-Three: Brainstorm Time
At some point in the project you’re going to have to break down and finally define the problem.
—programmers’ saying
“Okay,” Larry Fox said, “what about
corned_beef
?”
Wiz had spent most of the previous afternoon and a good part of the morning meeting the team and reviewing what they had done. Now he was beginning to tackle the problems Jerry had dumped in his lap—literally—two days before. All the stalls in the Bull Pen were taken so they had wedged a table in down by the whiteboard and tea urn. He and Larry had spent hours going over obscure bits of code and untangling particularly strange demons.
“
corned_beef
is a hashing routine, obviously,” Wiz told him between bites of his third sandwich of the afternoon. “It’s a fast way to search for a demon—a routine—by name.”
“But where’s the rest of it? We figured out that it was doing a hashed look up, but we couldn’t see how you searched the entries.”
“Mmmf,” said Wiz around his mouthful of sandwich. He shook his head and swallowed hard. “It’s a perfect hash. One item per entry, always.” He took another big bite of sandwich. “You take the first characters of the demon’s name, multiply that by a magic number. That gives you the number that serves as a subscript to the array. If you pick your numbers right you always get a unique entry for each item.”
“That’s weird!”
Wiz shrugged. “It works.”
“One more question. Why do you divide by 65,353?”
“Because you’ve got to divide by a prime number, preferably one at least twice as large as the number of entries you want in the hash table. 65,353 is a Mersinne Prime and it was the largest prime I could remember.”
Larry frowned. “Are you sure 65,353 is prime? I don’t think it is.”
Wiz shrugged and took another bite. “It worked.”
“Okay,” Larry said, “I’ll clear the rest of these changes with Jerry or Karl and get right to work on them.”
“No need for that. I intended to fix those other points anyway and it’s in the language specification.”
Larry hesitated. “I’d still better clear them.”
Wiz started to object and then stopped. It really wasn’t his project any more, he realized. The original specification might be his, but even that had been modified in the process of development. Now it was a team project and Jerry Andrews was the team leader. It hurt to recognize that, but fighting it would only damage the project.
“Fine,” he sighed. “Let me know what Jerry wants to do about it.”
###
The next afternoon the entire team gathered in the Bull Pen. One of the long trestle tables had been cleared and stools and benches were pulled up around it. Wiz sat at one end of the table with Moira and Jerry by his side. In the center was the new version of the Dragon Book, with the small red dragon curled peacefully asleep atop it.
“The news from the Council isn’t good,” Wiz told them. “I was hoping they could solve their immediate problems by traditional methods once they understood what the problem was. They’ve been pushing for us to wave a magic wand,” he smiled wryly at the phrase, “and make them go away. Well, as of this morning, it is definite. There is simply no way they can do it. We’ve got to come up with a magical means to head off a war.”
“Not much to ask, is it?” Nancy said.
“Okay,” Wiz said. “We’ve got two problems here. One of them is the hacked version of that protection spell. The second one is we’ve got to keep people from penetrating further into the Wild Wood until we get things straightened out.”
“What’s the main problem?” Judith asked.
“The spell, I think. That’s what seems to be doing the most damage right now. We’ve got to either neutralize it or keep people from using it.”
“Can you not neutralize their magic as you did at the City of Night?” Moira asked.
“The worms? That’s too non-specific.” He shook his head. “No, we can’t afford to soak up all the available magic. That would leave the humans right back where they were before we started. We need something more subtle.”
“But we have to have it quickly,” the redheaded witch said. “We cannot afford to waste time in pursuit of the ‘elegance’ you keep talking about.”
“So we’re gonna need something quick and dirty.” He held up a hand. “But not
too
dirty. Does anyone have any ideas?”
“Sounds like a job for a virus,” Nancy said.
“Naw, as soon as they see the program is infected, they’ll switch back to the old one.”
“A birthday virus!” Danny shouted suddenly.
“A what?” Wiz asked.
“A virus that doesn’t trigger until a specific event occurs. We set the magic event far enough in the future that the program will have had time to spread everywhere. Then it triggers,” he waved his hands. “Poof! The spell doesn’t work anymore.”
“You know,” Jerry said suspiciously, “you talk like you’ve had a lot of experience at this.”
The other shrugged. “It’s, you know, been a special interest of mine.”
Jerry snorted. “When we get back, remind me never to use any software you had anything to do with.”
Wiz ignored the byplay. “Okay, what keeps them from going back to the old spell?”
There was silence down the table.
“We can’t just wipe it out of their memories, can we?” Jerry sighed.
“Even if we could, there are sure to be written copies around. When the new program self-destructs, they’ll just go back to the old one.”
“Can we come up with a spell to attach itself to
demon_debug
and destroy it?”
Wiz thought hard. “I did something like that against the Dark League. The problem is, when it destroyed the spell it took out everything for about thirty yards around in a humongous blast. We don’t want to kill them and it would be a big job to weaken the effect.”
“Aw, they’d get the message after the first couple of explosions,” Danny said.
“No,” Wiz said firmly.
“Well . . .” The young programmer’s face lit up. “Hey wait a minute! Suppose they get the idea the spell’s no good?”
“The problem is that it
is
good against magic. Too good.”
Danny smiled an evil smile. “Not if we’re the ones making the magic.”
Wiz looked at Danny and then at Jerry. “Now that’s got possibilities. Suppose we cook up something
demon_debug
doesn’t
work against?”
“Yeah,” Jerry said slowly. “Something that will convince them they don’t ever want to mess with
demon_debug
again. Danny, stick around after the meeting, will you? I think I know how we can put that arcade game mind of yours to work.”
Wiz made a check mark on the slate in front of him. “Okay, that gives us a handle on one problem. Now for the other one, keeping humans out of the Wild Wood.”
“I don’t suppose we can just make a law?” Jerry asked hopefully.
Moira snorted and shook her head so violently her copper curls flew in front of her face. “That is what the Council has been trying. The hunger for land is deep in our farmers and the soil within the Fringe is thin and poor.” She reached up and brushed a strand of hair off her upper lip. “Besides, I think you misread the relation between the Mighty and the people. The Mighty are guardians and protectors, not governors.”
“And right now the Council’s influence with the people is at an all-time low,” Wiz said grimly.
Thanks in part to my meddling.
“So we’re going to need a barrier,” Judith said. “A wall.”
“They would climb a simple wall,” Moira told her. “Or else batter breaches in it.”
“What about your basic wall of fire?” Karl asked.
“How do you keep from burning down the Wild Wood?”
“We could do a line of death,” someone else suggested.
“We don’t want to kill them, just keep them in,” Wiz said.
“An electrified fence?”
“That’s a thought.”
“Yeah,” Danny said, “with mine fields and guard towers!”
“That is
not
a thought,” Wiz said firmly.
Again everyone at the table fell silent. The little red dragon
whuffed
in his sleep and scuffled the papers beneath him with tiny running motions as he chased a dream mouse.
“Okay,” Cindy said slowly. “What about making them not
want
to go beyond a certain point?”
“A geas?” Moira shook her head. “You cannot lay geas on an entire people, including ones you have never seen.”
“But
ddt
does essentially that for magical creatures,” Cindy said.
“That isn’t a geas,” Wiz told her. “That’s a repulsion spell. Different animal.”
“Well, how about a repulsion spell then?”
“Repulsion spells attach to specific objects,” Moira explained. “You would have to put the spell on every rock, every tree and every finger-length of soil along the line.”
“That’s not a problem—in theory,” Jerry said. “We can write a program that will do it. It would take a lot of demons . . . No, wait a minute! We could use the principle of similarity. Mark the line on a map.”
“Yeah, fine,” said Nancy. “Where are we going to get a map accurate enough to make a spell like that stick? Have you seen what these people call a map?”
“Okay so we make our own map,” Wiz said.
“How are we going to do that?” asked Karl. “You can’t just sketch it from dragon back.”
“If we have to mark everything individually, it will take years to get the barrier up,” Jerry said. “I don’t think we’ve got years.”
“We will be fortunate if we have weeks,” Moira told him.
“Wait a minute!” Wiz put in. “We can use a modified version of my searching spell. Generate thousands of mapping units. We’ll have our data in a couple of days.”
“Searching spell? You mean that R-squared D-squared thing?”
“No, the three-layer search system. You’ve used it, haven’t you?”
“That is the spell I was telling you about, Lord,” Moira said to Jerry. “The one we could not find.”
Wiz frowned. “There was a copy in my notes. Well, it doesn’t matter. It won’t take long to rewrite it and I’d want to translate it to run under the latest version of the compiler anyway.”
Wiz made another mark on his slate. “That’s it then. Okay people, split into your teams and let’s get cracking. We’ve got a lot of work to do here.”
###
“Are you sure this will work?” Bal-Simba asked dubiously as Wiz, Jerry and Moira showed him the team’s latest creation.
“It will if they try to use
demon_debug
on it,” Wiz assured him. “The basic spell is a modification of the one I used to create the watchers against the Dark League.”
“And it will harm no one?” the giant black sorcerer pressed.
“It can’t do physical damage to anyone, Lord,” Jerry said confidently. “Of course, what it can do to their mental state . . .”
“Amazing,” Bal-Simba said as he studied the creature on the table before him. “Where did you get the idea for these things?”
“Where I get all my best ideas,” Wiz said jauntily. “I stole it.”
