He had been closer to her when they were on the run, Wiz thought miserably. About the only time he could count on seeing her was when they sat down to dinner.
But the worst thing of all was that there were no computers. Because of the magical changes that let him speak the local language, Wiz couldn’t even write out programs. He took to running over algorithms mentally, or sitting and sorting piles of things algorithmatically. At night his dreams of Moira alternated with dreams of working at a keyboard again and watching the glowing golden lines of ASCII characters march across the screen.
One morning Moira found him sitting at the table in the hall practicing with broomstraws.
“What are you doing, Sparrow?” she asked, eyeing the row of different length straws on the table before him.
“I’m working a variation on the shell sort.”
“Those aren’t shells,” Moira pointed out.
“No, the algorithm—the method—was named for the man who invented it. His name was Shell.”
“Is this magic?” she demanded.
“No. It’s just a procedure for sorting things. You see, you set up two empty piles . . .”
“How can piles be empty?”
“Well, actually you establish storage space for two empty piles. then you . . .”
“Wait a minute. Why don’t you just put things in order?”
“This is a way of putting them in order.”
“You don’t need two piles to lay out straws in order.”
“No, look. Suppose you needed to tell someone to lay out straws in order.”
“Then I would just tell them to lay them out in order. I don’t need two piles for that either.”
“Yeah, but suppose the person didn’t know how to order something.”
“Sparrow, I don’t think anyone is that stupid.”
“Well, just suppose, okay?”
She sighed. “All right, I am working with someone who is very stupid. Now what?”
“Well, you want a method, a recipe, that you can give this person that will let them sort things no matter how many there are to be sorted. It should be simple, fast and infallible.
“Now suppose the person who is going to be doing the sorting can compare straws and say that one is longer than another one, okay?”
“Hold on,” Moira cut in. “You want to do this as quickly as possible, correct?”
“Right.”
“And your very-stupid person can tell when one straw is longer than another one, correct?”
“Right.”
“Then why not just lay the straws down on the table one by one and put them in the right order as you do so? Look at the straws and put each one in its proper place.”
“Because you can’t always do that,” Wiz said a little desperately. “You can only compare one pair of straws at a time.”
“That’s stupid! You can see all the straws on the table can’t you?”
“You just don’t understand,” Wiz said despairingly.
“You’re right,” the red-headed witch agreed. “I don’t understand why a grown man would waste his time on this foolishness. Or why you would want to sort straws at all.” With that she turned away and went about her business.
“It’s not foolishness,” Wiz said to her back. “It’s . . .”Oh hell, maybe it is foolishness here. He slumped back in the chair. After all, what good is an algorithm without a computer to execute it on?
But dammit, these people were so damn literal-minded! It wasn’t that Moira didn’t understand the algorithm—although that was a big part of it, he admitted. To Moira the method was just a way to sort straws. She didn’t seem to generalize, to see the universality of the technique.
Come to that, most of the people here didn’t generalize the way he did. They didn’t think mathematically and they almost never went looking for underlying common factors or processes. This is what it must have been like back in the Middle Ages, before the rise of mathematics revolutionized Western thought.
Well,
he thought, looking around the great hall with its fireplace and tapestries, this isn’t exactly Cupertino. This is the Middle Ages, pretty much.
So here I am, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Full of all kinds of modern knowledge. And that and a quarter—or whatever they use here for quarters—will get me a cup of coffee—or whatever they drink here for coffee.