quiet, this is a library

[lifes_sake]

Cam's in the library, waiting for Renée. "Waiting" here means "browsing until a quarter hour after ostensible meeting time". Renée is supposed to meet him here - on the way home for both of them, him from high school and her from elementary where she teaches kindergarten - but she is rarely punctual. Her co-workers or stray parents or the principal keep her after and Cam does notebooking, does homework, looks at the contents of shelves. It's a fine arrangement.

Today the contents of shelves don't seem so pleased with the setup, and one attacks him when he stumbles into a stack. Specifically, it tumbles onto his head. That's gonna hurt for a while. He picks it up to tuck it away again.

It says, So You Want To Be A Wizard.

Heh. Mis-shelved. This is a nonfiction row. Or maybe it's about stage magic or something? Cam's not going to find any use in that either, he can just about eat dinner without impaling himself on a fork and certainly shouldn't be handling delicate props, but it could be diverting while he waits for Renée and he wasn't finding anything else. He flips it open.

It's more interesting still than that; it's presenting itself like an actual guide to wizardry. This'll kill a whole afternoon with pleasant escapism. Cam checks it out, then turns around and spots Renée coming down the sidewalk. He bags the book and goes out to meet her.

At home, he takes it out of his backpack. The plastic film on it - it did have some, right? Just like every other library book? - is gone. Maybe it didn't have any. He didn't write it down; he's not sure. It doesn't look like a library book now. But it still says So You Want To Be A Wizard and he still wants to pretend to be a wizard for a bit, kill some time, put off U.S. History homework. He flips it open. He reads.

Comments

[lifes_sake]

It may be that Cam should go visit that housecat sooner than planned.

[pythbox]

The housecat's entry in the listing of nearby wizards is still there, looking just the same.

[lifes_sake]

Cam is not really sure how one goes about visiting a housecat, and at fourteen he doesn't have quite that much freedom of movement around Phoenix. But he copies the address into Grace for later rumination.

And he goes on learning the language.

[pythbox]

Fully half of the manual is now devoted to the Speech; all the non-marked introductory material has been squeezed out until there is barely anything left except the Oath on the very first page and the wizard directory after it, and the subsequent chapters on magic are fairly terse unless Cam asks about something. The manual is definitely taking the hint about his area of focus.

[lifes_sake]

Can he get stuff that has squeezed out back later?

[pythbox]

Of course! He only has to ask.

[lifes_sake]

All right then, this will not alarm him. He makes sure he has a nice meta-index going in Grace, who just contains an unlimited number of pages because she's awesome.

[pythbox]

How resourceful of him!

[lifes_sake]

Cam does that!

This not-sure-if-he-should-trust-the-manual thing is annoying, though. Up in his room, with Renée elsewhere occupied until they're scheduled to go to a movie in an hour, he asks:

"Where does your information come from? It's in English, much of it anyway, and assembled into sentences; that doesn't just happen. Do you write it yourself or are you pulling it from a central source? How do you know it?"

[pythbox]

The contents of wizards' manuals are written partly by other wizards, partly by automatic processes...

...and partly by one of the Powers. In fact, some species rely entirely on the Whisperer to provide their spell frameworks in personal communications, because for one reason or another they are not physiologically suited to literacy.

[lifes_sake]

Cam would like to know more about the Powers, please.

[pythbox]

What more would Cam like to know about the Powers?

[lifes_sake]

Who are they, what do they do, what are their personalities and eponymous powers like, which features of the universe are they credited with as a counterpart to death/entropy/etc.?

[pythbox]

There are not any biographies available.

[lifes_sake]

That's not very friendly of them. Can he complain to the management?

[pythbox]

No.

[lifes_sake]

Hmmmm.

That goes in the long-term project section in Grace's chart, then.

In the meantime, he has a language to learn. This book is not completely untrustworthy; it has successfully taught him to talk to inanimate objects and trees and turn tofu into something edible-tasting.

But he copies anything really important into Grace.

[pythbox]

The manual doesn't seem to be offended about this, or even to particularly notice.

[lifes_sake]

"...How smart are you?" Cam asks the manual.

[pythbox]

It expands the section on how manuals work.

Somewhere, perhaps not a physical somewhere but somewhere all the same, there is a full manual with all the information any wizard could ever conceivably need. Individual wizards' manuals are able to hold small subsets of that store at a time. The primary function of the manual, therefore, is to select the right information at the right time based on its wizard's interests, needs, and level of prior knowledge. That is what manuals are good at. Since Cam talks to his, it can also summarize small pieces of its knowledge verbally, or read itself to him.

And that's it.

His manual is not really conscious or alive in any meaningful sense.

[lifes_sake]

Okay. That's worth knowing.

"Are you conscious?" he asks Grace.

"I think so," she says. "I might be less conscious than you, but I think I'm some conscious. I have a lot of you in me and you're conscious."

"Okay," says Cam. He pats her.

She giggles. "That doesn't mean I have a nervous system."

"Indulge me," snorts Cam.

"Okay," she says cheerfully.