Bal-Simba smiled "Ah, they are still as roiled as ants whose hill has been kicked over. From the ditherings of the Council you would think it was the Capital which had been destroyed, not the City of Night." Then he sobered.
"But that is not why I am here, Lord. I came to tell you that with the Dark League’s power broken, we may be able to send you home again."
Wiz frowned. "I thought that was impossible."
"With the League in ruins many things are possible. Their wizards are scattered and cannot interfere if the Mighty band together for a Great Summoning. I have consulted the Council and we are willing to perform a Great Summoning to return you to your world."
Wiz felt Moira’s hand tighten in his and caught his breath.
Home! A place with pizza, books, movies, records and music. A place where someone or something wasn’t trying to kill him all the time. A place where he didn’t have to be dirty or cold or frightened. And computers again.
But a place with no Moira. He saw she was staring intently at the table top. Was all the rest of it worth that?
There was something else too. He could help people here. Back home it didn’t matter if he worked on a project or not, not really anyway. There were other programmers who could do what he did, although maybe not as well. Here he did matter. He could make a big difference. And that was worth a lot.
"I will not lie to you, Sparrow," Bal-Simba said. "There will be an element of danger. It will be hard to locate your world out of the multitude and even with all of us working together we are not sure we can send you back. But we believe the chances are very good."
"I don’t think I want to go," he said firmly and drew Moira to him. "Not now." The hedge-witch came close, but he could still feel the tension in her body.
Bal-Simba grinned. "I thought that would be your answer. But I had to make the offer. And remember Sparrow, you can change your mind. The North owes you a great debt."
"You owe a greater debt to Patrius," Wiz said. "It was his idea."
The wizard nodded. "I wish Patrius had been here to see it."
"I wish he had too," Wiz said gravely. "He should have been here to see it. It really was his victory. Besides, I would liked to have known him."
"But you made it happen," Moira insisted. "You did the work. And Patrius made a mistake. He said you were not a wizard."
Wiz sighed. "You still don’t get it, do you? I’m not a wizard. Most likely I never will be."
"There are those among the League who would dispute that—were they still alive to do so," Bal-Simba said, showing all his pointed teeth.
"They’d be wrong." Wiz sighed again. "As wrong as you are. Look, you still don’t appreciate what Patrius did. It wasn’t that he found me and brought me here—and I’m not unique, by the way. In fact I was probably a poor choice if things had gone as Partrius intended them. But he wasn’t looking for a wizard at all."
"I did not know you had added necromancy to your talents, Sparrow."
"No magic, just logic. Although I didn’t work it out until everything was all over." Wiz took his arm from around Moira’s waist and leaned both elbows on the table.
"Your real problem was that you had a magical problem that couldn’t be solved by magic. Every great spell was vulnerable to an even greater counterspell and as the League waxed you inevitably waned. Individually, the League’s magicians were stronger than the Council’s, they had to be because they didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. Patrius knew that a conventional solution, a bigger magician, would only make matters worse in a generation or so when the League learned the techniques."
"That is common knowledge in the council," Bal-Simba rumbled. "Indeed one of the reasons it was so easy to get agreement to attempt to return you is there is a strong faction which wishes to be rid of you. Go on, Sparrow."
"Okay, take it one step further. Patrius must have. He realized what you needed was a completely new approach. He had the genius to see that despite everything you believed, everything your experience showed you, somewhere behind all your magic there had to be some kind of regular structure. He realized that if he could find that formalism you could control magic."
"Eh?" said Bal-Simba. "Forgive a fat old wizard, but I was under the impression that we do control magic."
"No," Wiz said emphatically and then caught himself. "Forgive me Lord, but it is true. Each magician can use the spells or demons he or she stumbles upon and masters, but none of you—Council or League—controls magic. You don’t deal with magic as a whole. You have no coherent theory of magic and you usually can’t generalize from what you do know to what you don’t. That was the root of your problem. The League and the Wild Wood were just symptoms."
Wiz could see Bal-Simba rolling that idea around in his mind. Obviously he didn’t like it, but he was not going to reject it out of hand. "Go on," he said neutrally.
"In my world we have a saying that Man is a creature who controls his environment. You’re in trouble because there’s an important part of your environment you can’t controclass="underline" magic. Patrius didn’t go looking for a wizard to beat the League. He wanted someone who understood abstract formalisms and how to apply them to complex problems in the hope he could learn to control magic. He needed a computer programmer or a mathematician. Magical ability wasn’t in the job description."
"It appears that he got more than he bargained for," Bal-Simba said.
Wiz shook his head. "No. He got exactly what he bargained for. I’m not a magician in the way you mean.
"I’ve told you about computers, the non-living thinking machines I used to work with? Well, back when they were very new we worked with them the way you work your spells. Every new program was written by cut-and-try and every program was unique. Anyone who wanted to use a computer had to be an expert and it took years of work and study to master a machine.
"Later we realized it didn’t have to be that way. We found the computer could do a lot of the work. We could write programs that would take care of the tiresome, repetitive parts and we could design programs whose parts could be used over and over in many different programs.
"Finally we figured out that you didn’t even have to have a programmer for every computer. You could write programs that anyone could use to do common jobs like word processing or accounting.
"So today anyone can use a computer. Even children use them regularly. You still need programmers, but we work at a higher level, on more difficult or unusual problems—or on writing the programs that those children use."
Bal-Simba frowned. "Well and good for your world, Sparrow, but I am not sure I see what use it is to us."
"Patrius did," Wiz told him. "He hoped he could do the same thing with magic we do with computers. And he was right.
"In the long run the important thing wasn’t that I beat the League with magic. It wasn’t even that I was able to rescue Moira." Although I’ll be damned if I’ll take that long a view, he thought. "The important thing was programs—ah, the ’structure’—I had to build to do it." He leaned forward intensely.
"Don’t you see? With my system you don’t need to be a wizard to work spells. You need programmer-wizards to create the spells, but once they are set up anyone can use them. All you have to do is understand how those spells work and anyone can make magic. Good, controllable magic."
"Magic in the wrong hands is dangerous," Bal-Simba said dubiously.
Wiz smiled. "Don’t worry. Where I come from we have a lot of experience in keeping our systems secure and users’ fingers out of the gears. If the spells are properly designed just about anyone can use them safely.