Perny was sipping a dark bitter beer, when Wizard
Prang came home. He was two days late. She jumped up, hugged him,
installed him in a chair, and made for the wine and water.
'Whatever happened?' She sat on the floor on her usual cushion.
'Didn't you get there?' 'Oh yes, I'll say I got there. That's the
whole point. I couldn't get out. I got arrested.' 'Arrested? What
for?' 'Impersonation.' 'I don't understand,' wailed Perny.
'Who were you supposed to be impersonating?' 'Whom,' corrected the
wizard. 'Who's he?' Oh no! Perny had got the point. More patiently
she asked: 'Whom were you supposed to be impersonating?' 'The
Wizard Prang. It was there, on the Charge Sheet.' 'But you are the
Wizard Prang.' He looked at her witheringly. 'I know that. I'm not
quite senile yet.' 'Oh sorry,' Perny said, 'I didn't mean it like
that. Didn't you have any means of Identification with you? I'm always
telling you....' 'I know you are,' the wizard said drily. 'And of
course I did.'
He pulled some papers out of a voluminous pocket in his gown, and
tossed them in Perny's lap. She ruffled through them.
'Well then,' she yelled triumphantly, 'these show conclusively that
you are Wizard Prang.' 'What would anyone expect them to say, that
I am the Duke of Clarence? They prove nothing.' Perny put her head
in her hands. 'You mean the papers go with the appearance, don't you?'
He nodded. 'They are all appearance. The 'I' cannot be identified
objectively. If you had been there, you could have alleged that I am
myself. If you had, I should have denied it, just to emphasize for you
how tenuous these things are.'
Perny played for time in her usual way. She got up and refilled his
glass. He said thank you, and waited to see whether she would question
whether the homecomer were actually he. She did not; but he reflected
sadly that she would not be able to explain why she did not. There was no
need, but she couldn't prove it. Some other time. She was still
overwrought.
'But you can't be arrested for impersonating yourself,' she insisted.
'On the contrary,' he said. 'I was.' 'Well, how did you get out?'
'I got out on bail on my own recognizance.'
When Perny asked how much, the wizard said "a bottle of Malmsey wine."
When she asked where he got it, he said that he had "rustled it up". He
always had a bottle of white wine and water in his pocket, so it hadn't
been much of a change to make.
'It was the Duke of Clarence who drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine,
wasn't it?' 'That's right,' answered Wizard Prang. 'And that of
course was why I proposed the wine as bail. It had the right echoes for
them, you see.' 'I'm not getting this,' Perny shook her head. 'You
said the bail was made on your own recognizance. What has the Wizard
Prang got to do with Malmsey wine?' 'Nothing at all,' he said.
'You're being a bit slow tonight. They didn't believe I was myself,
right? So I must be someone else.' 'Who did you say you were?'
'For Heaven's sake, Shishya, I said I was the Duke of Clarence.'
'And they believed it?' 'Why not? Someone had to be impersonating
me, so long as it were not myself. They do not have the time to prove
that you are not everyone else in turn.'
Perny sank into a bit of a trance, wondering if this were logically the
equivalent of being unable to prove a negative, until she found another
bitter being pressed into her hand.
'So what have you been doing apart from worrying about me?' The
wizard's voice was gentle. 'Yesterday I ran in to Pam Mee in town,
so we went to the Black Lion for lunch,' she replied. 'She wanted to
know what you are working on just now. I mentioned a few things, such as
the project to observe the effects of using a ring of paintings of
spells in place of doing a casting.' 'No, no,' Pam had said. 'I'm
thinking of some contraption he apparently intends to build. He asked me
to look out for a cogwheel with pedals attached. It's not the sort of
thing I have around very much. Why me?' said Pam Mee. 'I told her
she could forget it,' Perny went on. 'After all, there's just the thing
rusting away on the back path. I'll clean the cogwheel up and store it
away in the glory hole.'
Wizard Prang felt miserable; he had no idea what was going on. He
wondered again about filing systems for bits of paper. There are so many
alternatives available. So how do you file filing systems? That problem is
recursive, he thought. You can get recursive software which is fine if you
have a computer. "I haven't," he reminded himself. Then he reminded
himself why this was not odd, despite the fact that everyone he knew
insisted that it was odd, especially Perny. She did have a computer,
and was trying to do the more simple spells on it. They were prone to go
wrong, and the experts put that down to static in the air. Wizard Prang
stifled a giggle as to that and mustered some show of enthusiasm for the
cogwheel. Perny went off, glad to get some air, not knowing about
the wizard's reflections about her PEARL. Had she known, she would have
guessed that he knew exactly what the program could do, without being able
to remember that the acronym stood for Perny's Easy Access Recursive
Logic. She would have found that fact odd as well.
'Dammit, No,' Wizard Prang decided.
Give her his bits of paper to be ingested by that twittering machine?
(its noises were like mice behind the wainscoting.) Whatever next. Soon
she would know as much as he did.
'That's not what apprentices are for,' he harrumphed to himself.
The wizard calmed himself, realized what apprentices are for, and
decided not to consider the matter any longer. He conjured a brief toning
up spell, and wandered off. Perny was waiting for him as dusk fell.
He arrived, but his feet were obviously in trouble. She noticed that they
did not always meet the ground a sure sign of his pain. Perny sat
the wizard down, massaged his feet, and fetched him water and wine but not
exactly in that order. She never hesitated about the right order in which
such things should be done, and he asked her if she realized this.
'When you start planning,' he said, 'you get into a lot of confusion,
start doing something else before finishing the first thing, and end up
with half a dozen things on the go none of which gets done properly
before the time available runs out. When you don't think, plan, debate
with yourself but simply ad, your action is always impeccable.'
'Is that all right?' Perny asked dubiously. 'Of course. It is the
essence of our study together. You are too intellectual about your own
life, as I was and still tend to be. We strain to see beyond all the
arguments, which rapidly turn into a fish stew of rationalizations, to
right action. The action doesn't follow knowing it. It is part of
knowing it.'
Perny thought for a bit.
'I saw a pretty cynical quotation can't remember who said it: All
action is premature until it's too late.'
The wizard guffawed, and slapped his thigh, as he was prone to do.
'Oh, excellent,' he said. 'Most amusing.' He got his breath back 'All
good jokes embody truth,' he finally said. 'Don't you see that if
knowledge and correct action are simultaneous and Instantaneous, then
you can't describe them as cause and effect on a time-scale. What else
is both at once premature and too late, but NOW this instant?'
While Perny was thinking this through, Wizard Prang gazed at her with
love. His shishya was also a mudra a knowledge woman. Blodwyn was too,
although of a different sort. Perny stopped her massage and sat
back.
'There is a difficulty about abandoning oneself to the cosmos. Too
many learned inhibitions, I reckon.'
Perny got up, walked over to the window, leaned her elbows on the sill,
and looked at the twilight.
After a time: 'is change possible? No, wait a minute. You are saying
that change is the knowing. But I can't separate what I know from what
you tell me.'
Both apprentices often tried to separate what the wizard showed them
without teaching, which is step one, from what they knew without even
being shown, which is step two.
'Same thing, of course.' Wizard Prang threw the line away.
It's all right analysis, if you believe in steps. If you believe in
womanhood, the answer is different. Perny and Blodwyn never
discussed that between themselves. They never discussed anything. |