The Wiz Biz

by Rick Cook

Danny continued to jerk back and forward.

  “Exe, My Lord,” Moira said frantically. “You must end with exe.”

  “Oh, right. reset exe”

  Suddenly Danny flopped forward and hit the table with a thump.

  Moira and Jerry gently raised him up and leaned him back in the chair.

  “Are you okay?” Jerry asked as the teenaged programmer gasped for breath.

  “ ’S alright,” he slurred as he lifted his head off his chest. “I’ll be alright.” Jerry saw he was white and shaking but he was breathing more normally. “What happened?” Danny mumbled.

  Moira pressed a cup of wine into his hands. “You were entrapped by the spell you created, My Lord,” she told him. “The spell repeated endlessly and you could not get out.”

  “In other words, you were stuck in a DO loop,” Jerry explained.

  Danny raised the cup in both hands and drained it in a gulp.

  “Jesus. I was in there and it started and it just kept going over and over. Like a live wire you can’t let go.” He lowered the cup and it slipped from his numbed grasp to clatter on the table. “Jesus!”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  “Well, I was flipping through the manual and I figured I’d try it out. So I set up a simple little hack, only when it started it just kept going. I didn’t think I’d ever get out.”

  “That was a dumb-ass stunt,” Jerry told him. “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

  “How the hell was I supposed to know?” Danny snapped. “I didn’t think—”

  “You sure as hell didn’t,” Jerry cut him off. “And you’d better start thinking before you do a damn fool thing like that again!”

  Danny muttered something but Jerry ignored him.

  “Okay,” Jerry said. “From now on nobody practices this stuff alone.”

  ###

  Wiz was feeling almost jaunty as he made his way up the street with the broken halberd over his shoulder. He was still cold, but on a day as bright as this he could almost ignore that. Besides, the cold was easier to bear when you weren’t hungry all the time.

  The halberd made a big difference in Wiz’s standard of living. There turned out to be a lot more food left in the City of Night than he had realized. But almost all of what remained was locked behind doors or in cupboards or chests. In the last few days he had gotten very good at using the halberd’s axe blade and the heavy spike behind to pry, chop and smash things open. Finding food was a full-time job, but it wasn’t quite the hopeless one it had been.

  Today, he was well-fed on magically preserved meat and bread so dry and bricklike he had to soak it in water before he could eat it. The meat had an odd taste and the water he soaked the bread in hadn’t been very clean, but his stomach was still pleasantly full.

  And now this neighborhood looked promising. The street was lined with smaller buildings, two and three stories. A number of small buildings, shops or houses, were more likely to yield food than a few big ones. Best of all, the doors and window shutters on nearly every house on the street were intact. That meant they had not been systematically looted and larger scavengers had been kept out.

  The weather added to his mood. There was not a trace of the clouds that usually hung low and gray over the Southern Lands. The only thing in the pale-blue sky was the sun and it was almost at its zenith. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in it, but there was a certain amount of cheer.

  A motion above the buildings caught his eye. Wiz turned his head just in time to see a black-robed wizard drift lazily over the rooftops. The man’s robe fluttered about his ankles and his head moved constantly as he scanned the city.

  Wiz shrank back against the wall. But he knew he stood out sharply against the dark volcanic rock of the street and buildings. There wasn’t even a shadow to hide in and the wizard was floating in his direction. He was as exposed as an ant on a griddle and he would be fried like one as soon as the wizard spotted him.

  Wiz bit his lip and silently cursed the bright sun and the shuttered houses. He looked up and down the street frantically, but there was not an open door or window to be seen.

  There was a storm sewer opposite. It didn’t look big enough to take him and it was covered with an iron grate, but it was the only chance he had. Wiz dashed across the street and levered up the grate with a quick jerk of his halberd. Then, heedless of how deep the hole might be, he thrust himself through.

  It was perhaps eight feet from the street to the trickle of freezing slime that ran through the bottom of the sewer. The shock and the slippery bottom forced him to his hands and knees before he regained his balance. He looked up just in time to see the wizard float down the street housetop high.

  Wiz dared not breathe as the man passed over the grating. The sorcerer looked directly down at his hiding place, but floated on by majestically. Apparently the shadows in the hole hid Wiz from him.

  Once the man passed out of Wiz’s field of vision, he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he froze again. There was something moving in the tunnel behind him. Something big.

  The tunnel was as black as the inside of midnight, but Wiz heard a splash-scrape sound as if something too large to move quietly was trying to do so. He listened more intently. Again the splash-scrape, nearer this time.

  Wiz realized he was trapped. He couldn’t see the flying wizard, but he could not have gone far. Leaving the shelter of the sewer meant exposing himself to his enemies. On the other hand, whatever he was sharing this tunnel with was getting closer by the second.

  For some reason it stuck in his mind that he had found no bodies in the ruins. Not even bones.

  He listened again. There was no further sound from the tunnel except the drip, drip of water. The lack of sound reminded him of a cat getting ready to pounce.

  With one motion he twisted around and lashed upward with the halberd. The spike caught on the edge of the hole and he swung himself up to grab the coping with his other hand.

  Behind him came a furious splashing. He swung his leg up and rolled free of the sewer just as a huge pair of jaws snapped shut where he had been. Wiz had a confused impression of a mouth full of ripping teeth and a single evil eye before he rolled away from the opening.

  Gasping, Wiz gained his feet and flattened against the building. There was no sign of the flying wizard and the creature in the sewer showed no sign of coming after him.

  Muddy, chilled and thoroughly frightened, Wiz ran off down the street, looking for a place to hide.

  ###

  “Well,” said Jerry Andrews, “what have we got?” The team was crowded into the Wizard’s Day Room, which they were using as a temporary office while the last renovations were completed on the cow barn.

  For the last two days, the programmers had torn into Wiz’s spell compiler and the material he had left behind. By ones and twos, they had pored over the Dragon Book and Wiz’s notes and conducted small and carefully controlled experiments.

  Now Jerry had called a meeting to sum up, compare notes and plan strategy. He had set it for late afternoon, so most of the programmers were awake and functional. They had pushed the tables in the Day Room together to make a long table in the middle of the room and, heedless of tradition, pulled chairs from their accustomed spots up around it.

  “Does the phrase ‘bloody mess’ do anything for you?” a lean woman with short black hair and piercing dark eyes asked from halfway down the table. “This thing is written in something that looks like a bastard version of Forth crossed with LISP and some features from C and Modula 2 thrown in for grins.”

  “When do we get to meet this guy, anyway?” someone else asked. “I’d like to shake him warmly by the throat.”

  “There may be a problem with that, My Lord,” Moira said from her place next to Jerry. “He went off alone into the Wild Wood and we have not yet found him.”

  “We’re going to need him,” Nancy said. “Someone has got to explain this mess. Some of this code is literally crawling with bugs.”

 
; “You mean ‘figuratively’,” Jerry corrected.

  “I said literally and I mean literally,” she retorted. “I tried to run one routine and I got a swarm of electric blue cockroaches.” She made a face. “Four-inch-long electric blue cockroaches.”

  “Actually, the basic concept of the system is rather elegant and seems to be surprisingly powerful,” Karl said.

  Nancy snorted.

  “No, really. The basic structure is solid. There are a lot of kludges and some real squinky hacks, but at bottom this thing is very good.”

  “I’ll give you another piece of good news,” Jerry told them. “Besides the Dragon Book, Wiz left notes with a lot of systems analysis and design. Apparently he had a pretty good handle on what he needed to do, he just didn’t have the time to do it. I think we can use most of what he left us with only a minimal review.”

  “Okay, so far we’ve just been nibbling around the edges to get the taste of the thing. Now we’ve got to get down to serious work.”

  “There’s one issue we’ve got to settle first,” Nancy said. “Catching errors.”

  “What’s the matter, don’t you like electric blue cockroaches?” Danny asked.

  “Cockroaches I can live with. They glow in the dark and that makes them easy to squash. I’m more concerned about HMC- or EOI-type errors.”

  “HMC and EOI?”

  “Halt, Melt and Catch fire or Execute Operator Immediately.”

  “One thing this system has is a heck of an error-trapping system,” said Jerry.

  “That is because the consequences of a mistake in a spell can be terrible,” Moira told him. “Remember, a spell is not a computer which will simply crash if you make an error.”

  The people up and down the table looked serious, even Danny.

  “Desk check your programs, people,” Jerry said.

  “That’s not going to be good enough. There are always bugs, and bugs in this stuff can bite—hard. We need a better system for catching major errors.”

  “There is one way,” Judith said thoughtfully.

  “How?”

  “Redundancy with voting. We use three different processors—demons—and they have to all agree. If they don’t the spell is aborted.”

  “Fine, so suppose there’s a bug in your algorithm?”

  “You use three different algorithms. Then you code each primitive three different ways. Say one demon acts like a RISC processor, another is a CISC processor and the third is something like a stack machine. We split up into three teams and each team designs its own demon without talking to any of the others.”

  “That just tripled the work,” someone said.

  “Yeah, but it gives us some margin for error.”

  “I think we’ve got to go for the maximum safety,” Jerry Andrews said finally. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have no desire to see what a crash looks like from inside the system.”

  ###

  “My Lord, you seem to have made remarkable progress,” Moira said as Jerry showed her through the programmers’ new quarters.

  The team had settled in quickly. Each programmer got his or her own stall and trestle tables filled the center aisle. The stalls were full of men and women hunched over their trestle table desks or leafing through stacks of material. At the far end of the room Judith and another programmer were sketching a diagram in charcoal on the whitewashed barn wall.

  “Once you get used to giving verbal commands to an Emac instead of using a keyboard and reading the result in glowing letters in the air, programming spells isn’t all that different from programming computers,” Jerry told her. “We’d be a lot further along if Wiz were available, but we’re not doing badly.”

  Moira’s brow wrinkled. “I wish he was here too. But we cannot even get a message to him, try as we might.” She shook the mood off. “It must be very hard to work with spells without having the magician who made them to guide you.”

  “It’s not as bad as it might be,” Jerry told her. “Probably our biggest advantage is that we know all the code was written by one person and I’m very familiar with Wiz’s programming style. Look, a lot of this business is like playing a guessing game with someone. The more you know about the person and the way that person thinks, the more successful you are likely to be.”

  He sighed. “Still, it would be nice not to have to guess at all. Besides, Wiz is good. He’d be a real asset.”

  “We are doing everything we can to locate him,” Moira said. “Meanwhile, is there anything else you need?”

  “A couple of things. First, is there any way to get cold cuts and sandwich fixings brought in? My people tend to miss meals.”

  “Certainly. Anything else?”

  “Well, you don’t have coffee, tea or cola here, so I guess not.”

  “Wiz used to drink black moss tea,” Moira told him, “but that is terrible stuff.”

  “Can we try some?” Jerry asked.

  Moira rang for a servant and while they waited for the tea, she and Jerry chatted about the work.

  “We call the new operating system ‘WIZ-DOS’—that’s the Wiz Zumwalt Demon Operating System.”

  “If this thing has a 640K memory limit, I quit!” someone put in from one of the stalls.

  “As far as we know there’s no limit at all on memory,” Jerry said. “It’s just that addressing it is kind of convoluted.”

  Moira didn’t understand the last part, but her experience with Wiz had taught her the best thing to do was to ignore the parts she didn’t understand. To do otherwise invited an even more incomprehensible “explanation.”

  “I’m sure Wiz would be honored to have this named after him,” she said.

  The tea arrived already brewed. Moira, who had used it when she was standing vigil as part of her training, thought it smelled nasty. Jerry didn’t seem to notice.

  Moira poured out a small amount of the swamp-water-brown brew. Dubiously, she extended the cup. Jerry sniffed it, then sipped. Then he drained the cup and smacked his lips. “Not bad,” he said appraisingly. “A little weak, but not bad. Can we arrange to have a big pot of this stuff in the Bull Pen while we’re working?”

  “Of course, My Lord. I’ll have the kitchen send up a pot.”

  “I mean a big pot,” Jerry said. “Say thirty or sixty cups.”

  Moira, remembering the effect that even a cup of black moss tea had on her, stared at him.

  “Well, there are more than a dozen of us,” he said apologetically.

  Moira nodded, wondering if there was enough black moss in the castle to supply this crew for even a week.

  Fifteen: War Warning

  A jump gone awry is one of the hardest bugs to locate.

  —programmers’ saying

  Bal-Simba was walking in the castle garden when his deputy found him.

  “Lord,” Arianne said strangely. “Someone wishes to speak to you.”

  “Who?” the black wizard asked, catching her mood.

  “Aelric, the elf duke.”

  Duke Aelric, or rather his image, was waiting for him in the Watcher’s room. The Watchers, who kept magical watch on the entire world, shifted uneasily at their communications crystals in the elf’s presence.

  Bal-Simba studied the apparition as he mounted the dais overlooking the sunken floor where the Watchers worked. The elf duke was wearing a simple tunic of dark-brown velvet that set off his milk-white complexion. His long hair was caught back in a golden filet set with small yellow gems at his temples. His face was serene and untroubled, not that that meant anything. Elves were inhumanly good at hiding their feelings and in any event their emotions were not those of mortals.

  Bal-Simba had heard Wiz and Moira’s story of their rescue by Duke Aelric and their dinner with him, but this was the first time Bal-Simba had ever seen him. Come to that, it is the first time I have ever seen any elf this close, he thought as he seated himself in his chair.

  Duke Aelric seemed not to notice Bal-Simba until he was properly
settled to receive his guest.

  “I seek the Sparrow, but I am told he is not available,” Aelric said.

  “He is not here.”

  “Do you know when he will return?”

  Bal-Simba considered the question before answering. “I do not. He is off in the Wild Wood, I believe.”

  Aelric raised a silver eyebrow. “Indeed? Forgive me if I pry, but when did he leave?”

  “Forgive my curiosity, but why do you wish to know?”

  “Because he was on business of some urgency when he left my hold to return to your city a fortnight hence,” Aelric said.

  Bal-Simba frowned mightily. “He was coming straight back?”

  Aelric waved a hand. “That was his plan. He left upon the Wizard’s Way to return here immediately.” He looked sharply at the black Wizard.

  “I swear to you he did not arrive here,” Bal-Simba told him. He struck his chest. “Upon my life I swear it.”

  “I believe you, oath or no,” the image said.

  “I will also tell you that we have been trying to contact him for several days without success. Frankly, we are becoming worried.”

  Elf and wizard fell silent, contemplating the implications.

  “It occurs to me,” the elf duke said slowly, “that someone may have transgressed upon my hospitality. I do not appreciate interference with those traveling to and from my abode.”

  “It occurs to me that Wiz may be in dire danger,” Bal-Simba said, a trifle sharply.

  “I hope not,” Aelric told him. “For all our sakes.”

  It was Bal-Simba’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “A matter of forestalling a war between humans and other users of magic, I think,” Duke Aelric explained.

  “War?”

  “Did you expect your drive to exterminate magical creatures along the Fringe would go unremarked? Or that your expansion deep into the Wild Wood would pass unnoticed?”

  “I think that there is a great deal going on out on the Fringe that I and the Council are unaware of.”