The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (45 page)

"No," Duke Aelric muttered almost beyond hearing. "Not boring."

Then he was still.

Silently Lisella placed a hand on Wiz's shoulder and guided him away from the bier. Behind him he saw other elves drape the linen over the body.

"It was the key, wasn't it?" Wiz said at last. "That was what those others wanted all along."

"Of course," Lisella said. "You did not realize that it could be used to destroy a World as easily as to close it off?"

"Well, why the Hell didn't he tell me the thing was that dangerous?" Wiz blazed. "We came within an ace of losing it to Craig and Mikey and losing the entire World with it."

She looked at him with amusement. "Would you have dared to use your Mousehole to construct it if you had known?"

"Then why . . . Oh! You can't build one, can you? You can't make a key on your own."

"Not so precisely as to be that powerful, no. Neither could the others. To attempt to make it by magic is to warp the very fabric of the World."

"So you used us," Wiz said dully. "Just like those others were using Craig and Mikey."

"You disapprove, Sparrow?" the elf said coldly. "You find the price high?" She tossed her head in the direction of the still form under the linen draping. "Consider the price
he
knew he would pay."

Wiz gaped. "He knew?"

Lisella cocked a raven eyebrow. "Why do you think he took such an interest in you?"

"But why? I mean if he knew it was going to kill him . . ."

"Because he knew there was a better chance of success with you and your alien magics than working only with the ways of his people. He chose a road of certain destruction because it gave a better chance—not a certainty, only a better chance—that the World would live."

She looked at Wiz oddly. "It must be a strange and wonderful thing to be so attached to a place you would willingly go down to non-existence for it."

Lisella raised her hand and made a gesture in the air. "Go in peace, mortal. Our business is at an end."

And suddenly they were back in the computer room.

For a long time neither of them said anything.

"Well," Wiz said at last, "the prophecy was true. The mightiest among us died and all of us lost."

"Craig lost his life. Danny and June lost the chance for more kids. Mick and Karin lost each other. Glandurg lost his quest. Judith lost months out of her life and we lost . . ." He stopped and swallowed hard, unable to go on.

Moira wiped her eyes. "Not everyone lost, I think. Mikey can be said to have gotten his heart's desire. So the prophecy was truly fulfilled."

Wiz thought about that. "Yeah," he said flatly. "You're right. He did get what he wanted."

Sunlight streamed through the mullioned windows of the Wizard's Keep in golden shafts and painted warm bright patches on the floor. Dust motes danced in the beams.

Mikey looked at the dust, fascinated. He stretched out his hand and tried to catch the dancing specks in his fist. But they would not be caught and he had more important things to do.

Very deliberately he plumped down on the floor and returned to the job of arraying his army. With exaggerated care he added a new tin soldier to the end of the first line of men. Then he took brightly painted wooden blocks from the pile beside him and added a new building to the town behind his men. He rearranged the cutout trees next to the town and leaned back to survey his work.

Looking out at the kingdom of block villages and tiny metal soldiers spread over the floor of his playroom cum prison cell, Mikey the Great beamed and gurgled with joy.

At last he was truly the master of all he surveyed.

 

True, it is nonsense. But it is
important
nonsense.

—Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
On His Life's Work
(Quoted on the title page
of
The Consultants' Handbook
)

"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."

"Well, better keep it away from the wizards," Wiz said. "I'm not sure what they'd make of some of those newsgroups."

"You mean like the
alt.sex
groups?" Danny asked.

"I was thinking more of
comp.language.flames
, but yeah, the
alt.sex
groups too. Especially
alt.sex.gerbils.
duct-tape
."

"That's bogus," Jerry said. "The real name is
alt.sex.
bestiality.hamster.duct-tape
."

It was Danny's turn to look smug. "You mean that's another group. Just because it's not in the official
alt
hierarchy you can't find it."

Wiz wasn't sure whether he was joking or not. The Internet, an international computer network originally built around universities and research institutions, was famous for the depth and breadth of the knowledge contained in its newsgroups. However, even the Internet's staunchest advocates had to admit that not all the newsgroups were research-related—or even serious. Hidden away in various places in the sprawling multi-dimensional message space were some decidedly odd things, including some highly unofficial newsgroups. But you needed to know how to use the net to get to them. Danny's knowledge of the ins and outs of the net was extensive.

Danny was no sooner settled back in his chair than there was a discreet knock at the door. In all the Wizard's Keep there was only one person who knocked so delicately, so discreetly and so exquisitely.

"Come in Wulfram," Wiz called.

"Excuse me, My Lord." The castle seneschal was calm, dignified and more than a little bit stuffy. "But . . ."

Before he could finish the door banged open again and two children and a dragon charged into the room.

"UncaWiz, UncaWiz," shouted Caitlin, the daughter of one of the guardsmen. She was a couple of years older than Danny's son Ian, with dark curly hair, flashing dark eyes and a single black eyebrow stark against her pale, fair skin. She was utterly charming, she knew it and she used it shamelessly.

Right on her heels came Ian. He was barely three and well into the head-down-and-charge stage of childhood locomotion. Without pausing he ran full-tilt across the room and bounced into Danny's lap.

But the real attraction was the third member of the group, who charged into the room just as heedlessly, got his feet tangled up with the rug and his own tail, caromed off a pile of manuscripts and executed a neat bank shot to end up beside Ian and Danny.

Little Red Dragon, or LRD to the programmers, was little only in comparison to the eighty-foot cavalry mounts in the aeries below the castle. He—Wiz thought he was a he—was nearly ten feet long from snout to tail tip. His scales were darkening from scarlet to maroon and the blue edges were going from turquoise toward navy and his combination of exuberance, dragonish temper and size was making him increasingly hard to handle. Dragons do not become intelligent until they are nearly full grown. LRD was a long way from full grown and somewhat further than that from intelligent. But LRD and Ian were inseparable, so the dragon was allowed in the programmers' workroom and their quarters in the Wizard's Keep.