"01 - Wizard's Bane (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Rick)

They camped where dusk found them, spreading their cloaks against a fallen log. Moira would not allow a fire, so their dinner consisted of some bits of jerked meat and a handful of leathery dried fruit. Normally Wiz didn't eat red meat, but things were decidedly not normal and he gnawed gratefully on the pieces Moira placed in his hand.
As the twilight faded Moira took a stick and drew a design around them and their resting place.
"The circle will offer us some small protection," she told him. "Do not leave it tonight for anything."
"Not even for . . . ?"
"Not for anything," she repeated firmly.
Without another word Moira rolled herself in her cloak and turned away from Wiz. He sat with his back to the log staring up at the unfamiliar stars.
"This is soooo weird," Wiz said, more to himself than Moira.
"Sleeping outdoors is not what I am used to either," she said.
"No, I mean this whole business. Dragons. The magic and all. It's just not like anything I'm used to."
Moira rolled over to face him. "You mean you really do not have magic where you come from?"
"The closest I ever came to magic was working with Unix wizards," said Wiz.
"Eunuchs wizards? Did they do that to themselves to gain power?"
"Huh? No. Not Eunuchs, Unix. Spelled . . ." Wiz realized he couldn't spell the word. He recognized the shapes of the letters, but they twisted and crawled in his mind and no meaning attached to them. When he tried to sound the word out only runes appeared in his head.
"Never mind, but it's not that at all. It's an operating system."
"Operating system?" Moira said frowning.
"An operating system is a program which organizes the resources of a computer and virtualizes their interfaces," Wiz quoted.
"A computer? One who thinks?"
For the thousandth time in his life, Wiz wished he were better at making explanations. "Well, kind of. But it is a machine, not alive."
"A machine is some kind of non-living thing then. But this machine thinks?"
"Well, it doesn't really think. It follows preprogrammed instructions. The programmer can make it act like it is thinking."
"Is it a demon of some kind?"
"Uh, no. A demon's something else. It's a program that does something automatically when called. Unless of course it's a daemon, then it's active all the time."
Moira wrinkled her brow. "Let us go back a bit. What do you have to do with these creatures?"
"They're not creatures, really."
"These demons, then."
"I told you, they're not demons. A demon is something else."
"Never mind all that," Moira said impatiently. "Just tell me what you do."
"Well, I do a lot of things, but basically I'm a systems-level programmer. That means I write programs that help applications programsЧthose are the things people want doneЧto run. ''
"What is a program?"
Wiz sighed. "A program is a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do."
"You command these beings then?"
"I told you, they're not . . ."
"All right. These creatures, or not-demons or whatever they are. You command them?"
"Well, kind of."
"But you have no magic!"
Wiz grinned. "You don't need magic. Just training, skill, discipline and a mind that works in the right way."
"The qualities of a magician," Moira said firmly. "And with these qualities you master theseЧthings."
"Well, you try to. Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you."
"There are bears involved too?"
"No, look, that's just an expression. What I mean is that sometimes it's easy to get the computer to do what you want and sometimes it isn't."
"Powerful entities are often hard to control," Moira nodded. "So you are the master of theseЧwhatever they are."
"Well, not exactly the master. I work under a section chief, of course, and over him there's a department head. Then there's the DP Administrator . . ."
"These entities tell you what to do?"
"They aren't entities, they're people."
"But you do not master these, what did you call them?"
"The section chief, the department head . . ."
"No, I mean the other things, the non-living ones."
"Oh, the computers."
"You master the computers."
"Well, no. But I program them according to the tasks assigned me."