Free Sword of the Bright Lady by M.C. Planck Page A

didn’t give him a chance.
    â€œThank you, Pater,” Karl said after the prayer.
    â€œHow many times can you do that?” Christopher asked. “More to the point, how many times can I do it?” If he could heal himself during his duel, that could turn the tide of battle.
    â€œAll will be made clear.” Svengusta took a pair of heavy leather-bound books out his bag. “Though I need to wet my whistle before starting. It has been a while since I was expected to lecture to novices.”
    Christopher picked up one of the books and was not surprised to see that he could read the words without difficulty even while he recognized it was in a different language. He was so engrossed that it took him a minute to notice that Svengusta was staring at him.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou can read?” Svengusta said.
    They accepted magic and superhuman endurance as normal, but literacy made them stare?
    â€œNo common soldier, then.” Karl spoke neutrally; nonetheless Christopher thought to detect the faintest tincture of acid in his tone.
    â€œWell, then.” Svengusta handed him the other book. “Read as much of this as you can before dinner. Then we will see.”

    He swam through the books, taking pleasure in the simple act of reading. It had been days since he had even seen writing. Or paper.
    The text was small, handprinted, and dense. One book was in the common tongue, and it taught him that the name of the prayer language was Celestial; the other was written completely in elaborate glyphs of Celestial. Disconcertingly, the glyphs were different every time he looked at them, although they kept the same meaning.
    Some of the content was the basics of a liberal education: analysis, logic, problem solving. Some of it was general wisdom: self-­discipline, ethics, diplomacy. At forty, with a black belt in a martial art and a college degree, Christopher felt comfortable with those topics.
    But what lost him was the context. He could relate to the rituals, like he could relate kata to the art of kendo. He could understand the effects of magic, having experienced it firsthand. But what he couldn’t make any sense of was how it all worked. The underlying basics seemed to be missing. There was no discussion of fundamental forces or principles. He couldn’t find any reference to a Newton, with his mathematical expressions, or even a Euclid and geometry. All the rules were semantic and contextual, instead of syntactic and formal. This whole attitude, of expecting you to either not care or already know about the underlying mechanics, was the kind of crap he expected from computer manuals, not scientific papers.
    Computer manuals. That’s exactly what he was reading. How to interface with an incredibly complex system that was largely the product of arbitrary decisions. But not completely artificial: it wasn’t law or philosophy. There were inflexible, if incomprehensible, rules that had to be followed.
    The rituals were like passwords and procedures, to run specific programs. Each program did its own thing, and in fact was often unrelated to the other programs, as if each one had been written by a programmer with little knowledge of or less concern for what others had done before.
    And tael—tael was bandwidth. Tael was how much giga-whack you could get from central computing before they cut you off for the day. The ability to instantly heal some damage was just a side benefit.
    Global dissemination, expensive bandwidth, no user-interface standards, and chaos for organization. He’d traveled God-knew-how-many miles from home and found the damn Internet all over again.
    There was a ritual for readying the rituals, which turned out to be meditation again. He was alone in the chapel at the moment, everyone else having retreated to the kitchen. Watching him read was apparently not as interesting as watching Helga wash dishes.
    He forced the noise of the kitchen out of his head,