“Oh, he’s entertaining,” Mick said quietly.
“But you don’t like him?”
“Let’s say our styles are different. We have another saying. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots. Charlie’s one of the, ah, boldest pilots I’ve ever met.”
“He is not young either,” Karin pointed out.
“He’s lucky then. But luck runs out, especially if you push it”
The programmers’ workroom was as warm and cheery as the tavern, but there were only two inhabitants. Moira had long since excused herself and now only Taj and Jerry remained. Jerry was hoarse from talking and beginning to fade around the edges, but Taj was as eager and alert as a beagle on the trail of a rabbit. There were no less than eight “screens” hanging above Jerry’s desk, most tiled with several windows, as Jerry led Tajikawa through the basics of the magic compiler and how to write software for magic. Taj already had a pile of scrolls beside him to read later and he was pushing Jerry hard on subtle points of the system.
“Well, then there’s this for example.” Taj pointed to a section of the compiler code written in glowing letters in thin air. “It’s in here but you don’t seem to use ft.”
“Oh, that’s an indeterminate instruction,” Jerry told him. “You’ve heard of the DWIM instruction, Do What I Mean? That’s kinda an ‘IDAIDWP.’“
Taj cocked an eyebrow. “Ida id wip?”
“I’ll Do As I Damn Well Please. You can’t be sure what it will do from one time to the next”
“Cute, but why’d you write it that way?”
“We didn’t. Remember, the bottom layer of the compiler, the elements we built the rest of it from, are tiny spells that exist here naturally. But we only use a subset of what’s available. Some we don’t use because they’re redundant, as far as we can tell. But some of them, like this one, don’t produce reliable results. We think it’s something analogous to a quantum uncertainty effect operating on a gross level”
He pointed to the fiery letters again. “This one was particularly tricky. Most of the time it works consistently, which is why it made it into a beta of the compiler. But about one time in a hundred it does something else. Which is why we didn’t use it.”
“Have you got a list of those things?” Taj asked.
“The indeterminate instructions? Some of them. Mostly we didn’t bother. Why?”
“I want to play with them a little.”
“Be careful. Some of those things are damn dangerous and we don’t know all the dangerous ones. Why mess with them?”
“Because,” the Tajmanian Devil said, “you learn the most about a system by observing it when it becomes unstable.”
“Yeah, well just remember that around here when the system becomes unstable you can get caught in a system crash. It nearly happened to us once and it wasn’t fun.” He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “Look, I’m about done in. How about we continue this tomorrow?
“You go on. I want to go on with this stuff a little.”
Jerry hesitated. “What did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking I’d just take the docs and dive right in.”
Jerry frowned “That’s not a real good idea. Danny tried that when he first got here and ended up stuck in a DO loop.”
“So? That happens.”
Jerry shook his head. “You don’t understand. When I say he got stuck in a DO loop, I mean he got stuck In a DO loop, repeating the same action over and over. Someone like had to get him out of it.”
Taj looked serious. “I take your point. But I still want to keep going.”
The big programmer considered. “Probably the best thing to do is start you out with some simple little nothing spells so you can get the feel of things. He glanced around and spotted some pieces of wood on Wiz’s desk. “Wait a minute, here’s something.” He picked up a stack of slats with writing on them and handed them to Taj. “Study these and the docs tonight and we’ll take a crack at them tomorrow.”