The Practice Effect

by David Brin

  He got up to dress. Kremer was bringing together all the burghers and guildmasters tonight, to show off his new wizard. Dennis would have to put on a good show.

  Dvarah came over and began unbuttoning his shirt.

  The first few times it had happened, Dennis had stammered and pushed her away. But that only seemed to hurt the girl’s feelings—not to mention her professional pride. When in Rome he realized at last, and learned to relax while having things done for him.

  Actually, it was rather pleasant once he got used to it. Dvarah smelled nice. And over the past few days she had apparently become quite devoted to him. It seemed her duties included considerably more than he had taken advantage of as yet. His politeness toward her, and his reluctance to assert those privileges without considerable further thought, seemed to surprise and please her.

  Dvarah was straightening his cravat as a knock came on the door.

  “Come in!” Dennis called.

  Arth stuck his head in. “Ready, Dennizz? Come on! We gotta get the brandy set up for the party!”

  “Okay, Arth. Just a sec.”

  Dvarah stepped back and smiled approvingly at her master’s elegance. Dennis gave her a wink and followed Arth out into the hall.

  Along with two of the ever-present guards, there waited four burly men with a heavy cask on two rails. As the guards turned to lead the way, the bearers heaved and lifted the cask on their shoulders, following behind.

  Dennis had considered inventing something to make their task easier. Then, on thinking about it, he decided to hold off for a while. The wheel was too much of an ace to play just yet.

  “I got a message from th’ missus …” Arth whispered to Dennis as they walked down the elegant hallway.

  Dennis walked steadily ahead, without missing a step. He asked, softly, “Are the others all right?”

  Arth nodded. “Mostly. Guards caught two o’ my men … and Maggin found out what happened to Perth.” He spat the name as if it were something vile.

  “Did Mishwa …” Dennis let the question hang.

  “Yeah. He took care of the rat, all right! Just before they conked him. Perth never got a chance to give away th’ exact location o’ the warehouse, so Stivyung an’ Gath were able to—”

  Arth shut up as the grand doors to the ballroom swung wide before them. But Dennis got the general idea.

  He was relieved his friends were all right. Perhaps in weeks, or months, he would have enough influence over Kremer to intercede for other prisoners. For now, though, he would rather not test it. Gath and Stivyung deserved a chance to make their own escape.

  Dennis could only describe the party as a sort of quasi potlatch, with a dash of Louis XIV’s Sun King court thrown in.

  The local elite were out in force, in a sea of elegant finery, but there was less dancing and socializing than there would be at a party on Earth. Instead, there appeared to be a whole lot of ceremonious exchanging of gifts. The rituals bemused Dennis. Here, it seemed, there was a complicated way in which status was maintained by giving things away. The more practiced the donated items were, the better.

  Dennis was reminded of similar rites he had read of in preatomic New Guinea and in the Pacific Northwest. The gift-giving had little generosity to it but rather an aggressive bragging overtone heavily dependent upon status.

  He saw the recipient of a particularly frilly, silky, useless-looking garment briefly blanche and stare in horror at what she had been given, before hurriedly putting on a casual expression and thanking the giver through her teeth.

  Yes, it was very much like an ancient Earthly potlatch. But Dennis soon saw that the Practice Effect had twisted the ritual in strange ways.

  It cost many man-hours to maintain a tool or an object at its peak of perfection, for instance. So unlike similar social arrangements on Earth, the gifts could be stockpiled in advance only at great cost to the giver. Their number was limited by the overall ability of a magnate’s servants and bondsmen to use things … and just before one of these parties the serfs must be run ragged practicing their masters’ best gifts.

  Dennis moved about the grand hall, casually watching the rich people bow and make convoluted compliments to each other. They traded their gifts with elegant gestures of surprise and feigned spontaneity.

  Arth had explained it to him. The receiver of gifts was caught in a bind. Covetousness was counterbalanced against caution. A rich man might desire a beautiful, ancient thing but fear the investment of man-hours it would take to maintain it. A gift received had to be displayed later, and any deterioration would bring terrible shame.

  It was like watching an elegant pavane. Several more times Dennis saw unmistakable chagrin on the face of a recipient who had made a false move, and received too much.

  At the station being manned by Arth, the brandy cask had just been opened. Servants were circulating small goblets of amber-colored fluid. A chain of gasps and coughing exclamations rippled across the crowd, just behind the waiters.

  Dennis looked for Linnora. Maybe here, at the party, he would have a chance to explain to her that he was not from a land of monsters. He had to convince her that by playing a waiting game he could become so necessary to Kremer that one L’Toff prisoner would be meaningless to him in comparison. Dennis was certain he could win Linnora’s release within a few months.

  But there was no sign of the Princess in the crowd. Perhaps later, he hoped.

  The minor nobles and guildmasters—most of them sons and grandsons of men who had helped Kremer’s father seize power—moved about with their wives, followed by personal servants who modeled the gifts their masters had been given. It was like watching a crowd filled with sets of almost identical twins, only the sibling apparently bearing more riches always walked behind the less heavily laden, and the one wearing all the flashy junk never partook of food or drink.

  Dennis had managed to beg off being assigned a “tail,” as the accompanying servants were called. It was bad enough knowing that someone, somewhere, was spending hours practicing Dennis’s formal outfits for him. He didn’t want to have to force another fellow to take on such a disgusting role, no matter how well accepted it was here.

  Anyway, it helped establish Dennis as an anomaly. By now everyone knew he was a foreign wizard. The more conventions he broke, Dennis figured, the better the precedent and the less likely they’d try to hold him to other tribal stupidities.

  Not stupidities, he reminded himself—adaptations! The patterns of behavior all fit when one thought of combining feudalism with the Practice Effect. One might not like them, but the rituals did make a certain amount of brutal sense.

  “Wizard!”

  Dennis turned and saw that Kremer himself was motioning him over.

  Nearby stood Deacon Hoss’k in his bright red robes, and a crowd of local dignitaries. Dennis approached as he was bid and gave Kremer a calculatedly respectful nod.

  “So this is the magician who has shown us how to practice wine into … brandy.” A richly dressed magnate held up his goblet in admiration. “Tell me, Wizard, since you seem to have found a way to practice consumable items, will you now teach us to turn cornmeal into rickel steak?”

  The fellow laughed loudly, accompanied by several of those around him. He had obviously already had a fair sampling of Dennis’s first product.

  Baron Kremer smiled. “Wizard, let me introduce you to Kappun Thsee, magnate of the stonechoppers’ guild, and Zuslik’s selectman for the Assembly of our Lord, King Hymiel.”

  Dennis bowed just a little. “Honored.”

  Thsee nodded slightly. He tossed back the brandy in his glass and motioned to a servant for more.

  “You did not answer my question, Wizard.”

  Dennis didn’t know what to say. These people had a fixed way of looking at things, and any explanation he gave would involve new assumptions the Coylian aristocrats were ill prepared to hear.

  Anyway, at that moment he saw Princess Linnora enter the room, accompanied by
a servant.

  The crowd near the entrance parted for her. When she nodded and spoke to someone, the response was almost always an exaggerated, nervous smile. In her wake people frankly stared. She stood out brilliantly in the sea of flushed, anxious faces, cool and reserved as her mountain people were reputed to be.

  “I am afraid that is not the way of it, my dear Kappun Thsee.”

  Dennis turned quickly and saw that it was the scholar Hoss’k who had spoken, filling the long pause in the conversation. Dennis had had a brief illusion that it had been Professor Marcel Flaster, somehow transported directly from Earth, beginning one of his infamous, ponderous lectures.

  “You see,” Hoss’k expanded. “The wizard has not improved wine into brandy. He has used wine much as your stonechoppers use flint nodules. He makes brandy by infusing it with new essence.”

  Kappun Thsee’s eyes shone with ill-concealed greed. “The guild that gains the license to this art—”

  Baron Kremer laughed out loud. “And why should this wonderful new secret be given to any of the present guilds? What, my friend, does chopping stone have to do with creating liquor with the flavor of fire?”

  Kappun Thsee flushed.

  Dennis had been trying to keep track of Linnora’s progress through the crowd. He quickly turned back as Kremer put his arm over his shoulder.

  “No, magnate Thsee,” Kremer said, grinning. “The new essences brought to us by our wizard might be divided up among the present guilds. Then again, perhaps each should have its own, new guild. And who better to be guildmaster than he who brought these secrets to us?”

  One of the women gasped. The other aristocrats stared.

  In the silent moment Dennis suddenly saw with perfect clarity what was going on.

  Kremer was manipulating them beautifully! Holding out the possibility of access to a whole set of new “essences,” he was accompanying the carrot with an implied stick. He already had the monopolistic guilds on his side. Now they’d positively be baying to do his will.

  At the same time, Dennis realized that Kremer had just offered him more wealth and power than he had ever imagined.

  He saw that even the ebullient Hoss’k was subdued, as if he were seeing Dennis in a new light—less as his own personal discovery and more, perhaps, as a dangerous rival.

  That suited Dennis fine. The man had been the direct cause of stranding him on this crazy world. He had already promised himself to teach Hoss’k a lesson.

  Dennis noticed that Linnora had come closer but was avoiding approaching the area where the baron stood. He turned to Kremer. “Your Grace, some may think that my brandy is nothing but a more potent form of wine. May I perform a demonstration to prove that it is, indeed, something truly different?”

  Kremer nodded, betraying a faint smile.

  Dennis called for a brandy-filled goblet and a small table to lay it on. Then he reached into the folds of one of his fancy sleeves and pulled out a bundle of small sticks, each painted at one end with a blob of crusty paste.

  It had taken him days to hunt down and purify the right materials to perform this demonstration. It would be just the sort of thing to solidify his reputation.

  “Baron Kremer spoke of the flavor of fire. From the way some of our local notables are weaving about the hall, it certainly seems that the blood in their veins has grown more than a little warm.”

  The crowd laughed. Indeed, several magnates had already become tipsy, falling prey to other players of the gift-giving game. Their servants were stumbling under quantities of fine, ancient things that would ruin their masters in expensive practice time.

  Dennis noticed that Linnora watched from a nearby pillar. She had smiled at the reference to the foolish guildsmasters.

  Encouraged, Dennis went on.

  “In this evening of marvelous gift-giving, I, a poor wizard, have little to offer. But to Baron Kremer I now offer the essence of … fire!”

  He struck two of the little sticks together. At once the two ends erupted into flame.

  The crowd moaned and pulled back in awe. They were rather crude matches, smoking and stinking of sulfur and nitrates, but that only made the display more impressive.

  Dennis had seen the firemakers they used here. They were efficient but used that ancient principle of a rotating friction stick. Nothing in Coylia could do what he had just done.

  “And now,” he added dramatically, waving the matches for effect, “the flavor of fire!”

  He brought one of the matches down to the goblet.

  A flickering blue flame popped audibly into place to meet it. The onlookers sighed. There was a long, stunned silence.

  “The essence of fire … captured in a drink?” Dennis turned and saw that Hoss’k was goggle-eyed.

  “A marvelous feat,” Kremer agreed, quite calmly. “It is akin, perhaps, to the fashion in which the wizard’s people enslave those tiny creatures within his little boxes. They have found a way to trap fire as well, it would seem. Wonderful.”

  “But … but …” Hoss’k spluttered. “Fire is one of the life essences! Even the followers of the Old Belief agree with that. It is reserved for the gods who make and practice men! We may release the essence of fire from that which once lived … but we cannot trap it!”

  Dennis couldn’t help it. He laughed. Hoss’k was nervously licking his lips, and seeing the deacon squirm gave Dennis a moment’s satisfaction. Here, at last, was some repayment for what the fellow had done to him.

  “Did I not say it?” Kremer’s laughter boomed. “Dennis Nuel knows how to trap anything within a tool! What wonders might we expect if he is but given our full support?”

  The crowd applauded dutifully, but Dennis could tell they were cowed. Their faces were touched with superstition and uncertainty.

  Dennis glanced to his left, still grinning over giving Hoss’k the shock of his life. Then he saw Linnora, her face a mask of concern and fear.

  The Princess favored Dennis with a withering glance, then swept about in a flourish to leave the hall, followed by her maid.

  Now he recalled what Hoss’k had said about “the Old Belief.” Apparently his little demonstration had reawakened her fear of those who abused life essences. Dennis cursed softly. Was there anything he could do here that wouldn’t be misinterpreted by her?

  It had been the Baron who declaimed on what Dennis had done, he realized, at last. Kremer had put his actions in a light that boxed him in a corner, insuring that Linnora would misunderstand.

  He was outclassed by the man. He could not oppose that kind of manipulative skill. How could there be any choice but to go along?

  He only hoped that someday Linnora, too, would understand.

  6

  A bit foggyheaded from the party, Arth and Dennis were late reporting to the still the next morning. When they arrived, they found that the crew had had a celebration of their own and left the still a shambles in the process.

  The prisoners groveled, terrified of the wizard’s wrath.

  Dennis just sighed, “Aw hell,” and set the men to work fixing the damage. Keeping busy helped him not think about his overall situation.

  He had made progress in his plan to win influence over the warlord, Kremer. He still thought it the most logical plan—best for himself, for his friends, for Linnora, and even for the people of this land.

  Yet the episode last night left him with a sour feeling. He worked hard, and tried to drive the memory away.

  A little after noon, a bugle cried out from the front gate. The call was answered by trumpets on the castle tower. Troops in the yard hurried to fall into formation along a corridor from gate to castle.

  Dennis looked at Arth, who shrugged. The little thief-cum-moonshiner had no idea what was happening.

  Down a ramp from the keep came Baron Kremer and his entourage, their bright, centuries-old robes almost painful to look at in the sunshine. The tall plumed helm of Kremer’s cousin, Lord Hern, stood out in the crowd of courtiers.

 
They halted at a dais overlooking the massed companies and watched as the outer gate swung back.

  In rode a small procession on horseback.

  “It’s th’ embassy from th’ L’Toff!” Arth breathed.

  They had been told such a party was coming. The L’Toff were searching for their missing Princess and no doubt suspected she was being kept here.

  The rumors must have spread far and wide since the jailbreak, and especially since Zuslik’s aristocracy were let in on it, Kremer was publicly feigning innocence until it suited his purposes to do otherwise. But apparently he was no longer worried about suspicions.

  For all of his apparent good favor with the warlord, Dennis had not been invited to attend the meeting of the welcoming committee. It was another sign of Kremer’s masterful insight into people. He clearly knew the foreign wizard was not trustworthy on the subject of the L’Toff Princess.

  Dennis looked up at the third-level parapet, where he had often seen Linnora walk. She wasn’t in sight, of course. Her guards would keep her well secluded during the brief visit by her kinfolk.

  He walked over to the low fence enclosing his work area and put a foot up on one of the rough wooden rails. He and Arth watched the embassy pass the arrayed soldiers to approach Baron Kremer’s platform.

  There were five riders, all wearing soft cloaks in muted colors. They looked normal enough to Dennis’s eyes, though all five wore beards, unfashionable among Coylians. They seemed a trifle more slender than the people of Zuslik, or Kremer’s northmen. The five rode looking straight ahead, ignoring the xenophobic stares of the troops, until they came within a dozen yards of the dais where Kremer waited.

  Two L’Toff held reins for the others as they dismounted and saluted the Baron.

  Dennis could see Kremer’s face better than he could the emissaries’. He couldn’t hear what was said, but Kremer’s answer was obvious. The warlord smiled with unctuous sympathy. He raised his hands and shook his head.