“These things sound like hard taskmasters.”
“Sure, sometimes. But it was rewarding too. There were always new things to discover and new ways to apply what you knew. Someone was always coming up with a new hack or a user would find some kind of obscure bug—ah, problem.”
“And you devoted your life to this. To the exclusion of everything else?”
“Yeah, I guess I did. Oh, I had friends. I was even engaged to be married once. But mostly it was computers. From when I was fourteen years old and my school got its first time-sharing terminal.” He smiled. “I used to spend hours with that thing, trying to make it do stuff the designers never thought of.”
“This girl you were promised to, what happened?”
Wiz shrugged. “We broke up. She had kind of a bad temper and I think she resented the time I spent with the machines.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Hey, don’t be. She married someone else and the last I heard they were happy together.”
“I meant for you.”
Wiz shrugged again. “Don’t be,” he repeated. “I wouldn’t have been a very good husband and I had the computers.” He turned to face her, away from the forest and the setting sun.
“You know the worst thing about this business? It’s not being jerked out of my own world and plopped down here. It’s not being chased by a bunch of monsters out of the Brothers Grimm’s nightmares. It’s that there are no computers. It’s that I’ll never again be able to do the thing I spent all my life learning to do. The thing I love most doesn’t exist here at all. I can’t have it ever again.”
“I know, Sparrow,” said Shiara the Silver softly, looking out toward the sunset with unseeing eyes. “Oh I know.”
“I’m sorry Lady,” said Wiz contritely. “I’ve been thinking of my own problems.”
“We each of us dwell on our own lot,” Shiara said briskly, “sometimes too much. The real question is what do we do to go beyond it.”
They were silent for a bit as the clouds darkened from orange to purple and the shadows crept deeper across the yard below. The swallows were fewer now and a lone brave bat fluttered around the battlements, seeking the insects that had attracted the birds.
“Lady, may I ask you a kind of personal question?”
“You may ask,” said Shiara in a tone that implied it might not be answered.
“How do you go about rebuilding a life? I mean I can’t work with computers here and that’s all I know. How do I become something else?”
“The same way you became a—ah, hacker? Yes, hacker. One day at a time. You learn and you try to grow.” She smiled. “You will find compensation, I think.”
Bal-Simba left them that evening, walking the Wizard’s Wary back to the Capital. For several days Wiz remained sunk in black depression, dividing his time between the battlements and his room and only coming down to eat a hasty and silent evening meal. Ugo took over the woodcutting chores again.
Finally, on the fifth day, Shiara asked for his help.
“We have many things ripening in the garden,” she explained. “Moira is busy in the kitchen preserving what she has picked, Ugo has so much else to do and I,” she spread her hands helplessly, “I am not much good at harvesting, I am afraid.”
Moira looked askance at Wiz when Shiara brought him to the kitchen for directions. But he had been so genuinely miserable since Bal-Simba’s visit that she kept her reservations to herself. Anything to get him out of himself, she thought, even if it means ruining half the crop.
So Wiz took a large basket and set to work picking beans. He worked his way down the rows without thought, examining every vine methodically. The beans had been trained to tripods of sticks, making rows of leafy green tents. As instructed, he took only those pods which were tan and dry, meaning the beans within were fully ripe.
He filled the basket and two more like it before the afternoon was over. Then he sat down outside the kitchen and carefully shelled the beans he had picked.