First Casting


It was six days later that James finally got to try some magic for
himself. He had little enough idea what Barry thought of his progress
most of the time, though he thought he must surely be better than the
man's average student, since much of what Barry seemed to be trying to
teach him fell under the rubric of what James would call the
scientific method, the basic concept of forming a hypothesis or making
a model, using the hypothesis or model to make a prediction, designing
an experiment whose outcome could demonstrate the veracity of the
prediction, and thus either disproving the hypothesis, or allowing it
to stand, and proceeding to either form a new hypothesis, or advancing
the model, and formulating a new experiment, and so on.

Surely if this was an earlier era, as it so strongly appeared, or at
least a different dimensions analogue of such a prior time on his
world, the average student would require rather more convincing before
accepting that it was appropriate to question and test what one was
told rather than accepting it as truth.

Yet if he was so good a student, Barry never seemed to notice or
acknowledge it, merely moving on to the next thing when he was
satisfied, or on whatever whim took him, and usually having a gloomy
expression the whole time, apart from the occasional very small smile
when James managed a particularly solid experimental design.

Still, he was startled when Barry suddenly said, "Alright, time to
prove yourself, to yourself. You've read enough by now to have some
idea how to proceed."

Thrilled to finally be allowed the chance, James had to decide what to
do, as his teacher had not specified. This was undoubtedly another
test. Most of the fiction James was familiar with would have had a
beginning wizard prove his ability with one of three techniques -
either lighting a candle, lifting a feather, or producing a simple
light. Of the three, he felt that relighting, as opposed to lighting,
would be the easiest of the three, and the most likely to work. After
all, a candle or even a match that was lit and then put out could
spontaneously re-ignite merely by putting it into an oxygen-dense
atmosphere, something his college chemistry professor had demonstrated
in a safety lecture.

Yet none of them appealed to him as truly sensible for proving
something to himself. Oooh, look, he could do without a flashlight, or
a lighter, or the wind. Big deal. He considered flipping a coin and
attempting to influence the flip, but that seemed more like
demonstrating something paranormal rather than magical, whether it was
precognition of the answer, or influencing the air currents, or
influencing probability. No, he wanted something more tangible,
something that would convince himself over his own skepticism, yet it
needed to be within the reach of what the book termed a cantrip, the
sort of magic that could be accomplished by the simplest of wizards.

Finally he had an idea. If producing light was within the realms of a
cantrip, and moving small items was within the realms of a cantrip,
then combining the two on a tiny scale should be within the realms of
feasibility, would test both his magic and his concentration, and
would hopefully be much more impressive than either alone.

With his purpose clearly set, he leaned forward, focusing his mind on
this one thing, remembering what it had looked like, and what it
should look like, what it had sounded like and how that sound should
be produced, and breathing deeply, held out his hand and still
half-doubting, knowing that if he did this it would be irrevocable,
pressed his will against the universe. A light shone forth from his
hand, seeming to illuminate a tiny blue-white flickering figure of a
woman leaning over and touching something, as a tinny voice was heard.

Barry actually laughed aloud at that. "You've seen that before, I am
sure, to be so detailed, but you did well. Any wizard worth his salt
learns to produce light in the darkness, but few indeed are they who
think through what it means for light to be at their command."

Those words sparked a torrent of thoughts racing through James' mind.
It had worked, he had done it! And with light - but he was not a
wizard, not a peasant boy learning from an all-knowing master. He knew
what light was, and what it meant for it to be in his grasp. Photons,
packets of electromagnetic energy meant more than just light that
could be seen. From gamma rays, X-rays, ultra-violet, the visible
spectrum, infrared, microwaves, radio waves, they were all the same,
all beams of photons, and he could create them with mere will.

It was a tiny cantrip, the barest tip of a spell, but what could be
built upon so slim a foundation? The understanding of the
electromagnetic spectrum had revolutionized his chosen field of
chemistry, and had more than a little to do with the advances that
lead to his other field of computers, had opened the way to
identifying elements and combinations of elements, to understanding
the nature of stars, to so many things, and it was in his hands. 

The sounds too, so simple a spell, such a tiny thing. Just causing a
tiny spot of air to wiggle back and forth, and somehow his will had
successfully imposed on that bit of air a pattern he remembered, even
though he did not understand or know it at the detailed level of the
individual vibration.

What did that mean? Could he produce a matching but out of phase wave?
If he could then he could effectively silence any sound. Certainly he
should able to make a bit of air vibrate in perfect sympathy with some
other bit of air, sympathetic magic and the Rule of Like were real
according to what he had read, in spite of all of science saying that
they were ridiculous. And they were, until you knew exactly how to
press the Universe to bend your way, to use that similarity. And that
meant he could listen to distant conversations, or interject his own
words at a distance.

To be sure, most of this was beyond him as yet, a simple cantrip could
not operate at a great distance, nor reach to extremes of volume or
brightness. In time, though . . in time, with nothing more than the
end result of building on this simple combination of effects, he could
create lasers, produce shockwaves, cause mass hallucinations, conceal
himself with a bubble of silence and invisibility. It was a veritable
superpower, right from superhero comics, right there in his first
cantrip, and if the stories he was reading were right, no-one knew.

At least, no one here. Even Barry, with his stories and challenges of
logic, had not revealed anything that implied actual knowledge of
modern science. If you did not know the spectrum existed beyond the
visible, if you did not know what light made coherent by a laser could
do, if you had no idea that the shockwave of an explosive was nothing
more than a really loud sound, all the possibilities of these simple
spells would pass you by, and you would keep seeking new spells. He
had to suppress an urge to laugh maniacally.

When he finally resumed paying attention, he found Barry watching him
with a somewhat puzzled expression, but the wizard did not say
anything about it, but instead instructed James, now that he had
demonstrated his ability, to rest and read more of his current book.
James was a bit surprised to realize that he was genuinely in need of
that rest - whether he had used up what magic was available to him, or
whether it had used his own energy reserves; i.e. his store of
accessible sugars, or whether his will was somehow a finite tool, or
whether perhaps it was merely emotional exhaustion from his success
and the realizations that had followed, he did not yet know, but he
was tired by his success, and happy to move on to reading. He had
finished the first book he had been given the day after he had
received it, and had gone through several more similar books since.

Here too he suspected he probably read faster than Barry ought to be
used to, but saw no sign or evidence that it impressed Barry, nor
otherwise. He was merely given a new book when he finished the first.

The next two were like the first, stories of apprentices learning
under new masters, though each learned different things, and in
different orders. One of the elements that came through loudly to
James from the juxtaposition of the books and Barry's instruction in
philosophy and the scientific method, was that much of the instruction
he was seeing as given to these other apprentices was deeply flawed.

The first book he had been given was better, and he suspected that it
might actually have been the tale of someone trained under Barry,
though neither the apprentice nor the master were ever actually named.
Of the later books one was trained in the use of verbal spells, and
the other in the use of a wand. An odd piece to them was in the
settings, since in both it seemed to be implied that not only was this
the only way this apprentice was going to learn, but that it was the
only way magic could be done, at all!

James wondered if they came from different cultures on this world, or
if perhaps Barry was more familiar with dimensional travel than he
seemed, and they were from different dimensions. Was it possible that
in some worlds, spells could not be cast without speech? And in
another the waving of a wand was not merely taking advantage of muscle
memory, but was vitally necessary?

Would he step through some final gate back onto his own world, only to
have everything he had learned be suddenly useless, because magic was
quite simply impossible there? Yet were that so, then the thin man
would have sentenced himself to forever remain when he stepped through
and allowed the portal to close behind him. That seemed doubtful.

The book he was currently reading was less immediately engaging, as it
was not told as a story, yet it was interesting reading still, for it
dealt with the concept of magical spells and their interactions with
numerology and astrology. Astrology had been so thoroughly debunked
where James was from that he had great difficulty when the book
reached the first mention of it, but luckily for him, the book was not
a deep treatise on esoteric theory, but a lighter work of
introduction, and much of it was just explaining the ways in which the
working of magic influenced later magic. It was cautionary in tone,
pointing out that previous casters may have primed magic by years of
incantations, and so random exploration of words could produce
disastrous results if the caster stumbled on to a previously widely
used incantation. When it reached astrology, it treated it with a
light tinge of ridicule, basically pointing out the same inherent
banality of the concept, wherein certain known astronomical objects
assumed supreme importance, while so many more were unknown, yet could
hardly be less influential, and then proceeded to explain that the
degree to which it worked at all was generally due to the principles
of conformity.

In a world where everyone knew that a person born at this time would
behave in such and such a way, that expectation had force, from simple
peer pressure and the threat of rejection of non-conformists; but in a
world where magic had been shaped by years of similar beliefs, it too
imposed itself on reality. This would never have manifested as
anything in James' reality - one of the common methods of disproving
astrology there was having multiple astrologers produce charts or
predictions for the same individual or individuals, and they were
invariably drastically different. Only when the principles of
astrology were so strong that virtually every astrologer agreed, and
everyone knew what a given sign or portent meant could they grow to
have real force.

In the same way, the book implied, the collective action of a
sufficiently large number of magic-users could condition the
sympathetic nature of magic, and cause a certain sequence of words in
a certain tongue to have a consistent effect. Even then, it pointed
out, a sufficiently strong-willed wizard with a powerful and clear
imagination could overwhelm that sympathy and produce any effect he
liked with a given incantation, or pattern of wand motions.

He fell asleep that night, elated at having proven himself capable of
magic, and with his mind filled with the ideas of the next chapter in
the book, which explained the use of material items in spells.

---

It was the afternoon of the following day, when he was again given the
opportunity to try a single simple bit of magic, as he was trying to
decide what to attempt, when he realized that somehow, having been
there for nine days or so, he had not bathed. Even more remarkably, he
had not needed to ask for and find the toilet, something he was
simultaneously dumbstruck by, and thankful for, since judging by the
time period of the rest of the house it would be a one-hole outhouse
or something the like. Was that a magic on the food? The clothes? He
did not smell bad to himself, and they had not smelled bad to him when
he first met them, so it was not just a matter of growing accustomed
to his own smell.

He looked at his hands and found them clean. Something was obviously
cleaning them, or preventing them from getting dirty. It was a
startling realization, but it was also pulling him off course, and he
returned to trying to think of what to test. It might have been
easier, he supposed, if he had been one to play the role-playing games
others in his high-school had played, but he had never joined those
groups, and remembered only a little of what he had overheard, Magic
Missile and Fireball being most prominent, and he was sure neither
qualified as a cantrip.

While he was interested in exploring the further ramifications of his
ideas about the light from the previous day, he did not really want to
have to explain that idea to Barry, and producing anything other than
visible light would, by its very nature, produce no visible effect.
Barry might even think he had entirely failed. So he sought for some
other thing to attempt. Much of what could be done with magic could
also be done with technology, and he did not want to merely be capable
of replicating what he could already have done by going to a store and
buying a few things. Still, there were certain things, currently only
feasible with expensive equipment, that he might be able to do by
hand, which might be interesting. But not in the realm of a cantrip.
Reproducing three-dimensional printing would have to wait a while.

One of the frustrating aspects in his reading was the massive
inconsistency between one book and the next, on what was possible, and
what was not, and how a given thing was even being accomplished. One
book showed summoning water from air as a cantrip, doable by anyone
and worth learning as it gave you water in dry places, the next had
the master warning the apprentice that summoning water was difficult
and dangerous, as drinking too much of it could kill. Since both only
gave, at best, a description of the casting, and neither described
what that casting was actually doing, he could not determine why one
was hard and the other easy, or one dangerous, and the other safe.

It would be an interesting thing to do as a cantrip though, and he
could think of several ways it might be done. With magic, water might
possibly be created from nothing, ex nihilo as his philosophy
professor had called it, the way God created the universe in the
Bible, or the Big Bang created it according to modern science. He
suspected that would be a more difficult way, but was not really sure
of that. And would that water last?

Magic might be able to create water from energy, E equals mc squared
style, but matter requires a vast amount of energy. He was pretty sure
that in the atomic bombs, only a small portion of the matter was
converted to energy, and yet the energetic release was city-destroying
in scale. He certainly did not plan to try that.

Alternately, magic could take hydrogen and oxygen gas and burn them to
produce water. Of course, one had to get the gas, and if magic could
separate it from the air then could it not also simply separate the
already present water vapor from the air, and condense it? That was
probably the least energetic method.

Or perhaps it could literally summon water from someplace else. Would
it carry the dissolved salts and minerals with it, or leave them
behind? Perhaps that depended on the visualization and understanding
of those who cast it, or in the case of sympathetically patterned
magic, on the conceptions of those who had cast it in the past. Given
that there was far more saltwater than accessible fresh water on the
planet, he could see that being rather unpleasant, though it ought to
be fine for say, putting out a fire.

Which should he try? What would be the easiest, the closest to a
cantrip?

Probably the water vapor would the easiest, but as he thought on it,
James kept coming back to the hydrogen and oxygen model. Not only did
it involve a nice chemical reaction, it was also showy and
interesting, if he could manage it right. A flame, burning in mid-air,
that wept! That would certainly impress the less knowledgeable or more
superstitious folks. Except it would fail, he thought as he frowned.
The heat of the burning would vaporise the water, so it wouldn't weep
at all. Could he cool it with magic, at the same time it was burning?

That was exactly, now that he thought about it, what he had thought to
do with water vapor in the first place. So it would really be the same
as casting two cantrips at once, as he had done with his previous
attempt, or perhaps three, since he would need to not merely gather
the hydrogen and oxygen, but also ignite them. It was as he was
considering how to fit the cantrips together that he realized he had
been fooling himself. Just because he had seen demonstrations of
hydrogen burning in oxygen did not mean he could so easily do it.
Oxygen is plentiful in air, somewhere around fifteen to twenty percent
depending on altitude, the percent decreasing as one ascended, he
thought, but hydrogen is a tiny percent, being mostly present in water
vapor. Actual gaseous hydrogen? Could he tack on something in the
spell that would summon gaseous hydrogen from some other source?

No, not within the powers of a cantrip, and if he pushed beyond what
he could already do, he risked . . . well, he was not really sure what
the risks were, aside from Barry's disapproval, but given how tired he
had been after his success the day before, pushing too far might leave
him so drained he would fall into a coma, or have his heart stop, or
who knew what.

So no weeping flame for him. What then? Just condense water vapor? Was
that really even worth the bother? 

What if . . . he considered the idea, and a moment later, put it into
practice. He was almost instantly rewarded.

It worked perfectly, his little cycle. Having one process condensing
water out of the air to form a visible bubble, and at the same time,
splitting a bit of the water thus produced to form hydrogen and oxygen
gas, while supplying the heat to burn them worked perfectly, behaving
exactly as he had envisioned it. Since he had carefully envisioned
intersecting spherical areas of affect for the two cantrips, with
water being formed in one tiny sphere, and the top bit of that water
intersecting the sphere that was splitting and burning it, while the
water below that succumbed to gravity and dripped down, it certainly
was a flame weeping water.

He had momentarily been worried, knowing that hydrogen burns with an
almost invisible flame in pure oxygen. Luckily, the rising heat drew
in enough impure air to show the flame glowing an almost normal
candle-like orange.

None of the dripping water was actually coming from the flame - the
water the flame produced was sufficiently heated by the flame that it
was vapor from the moment it formed, and rose quickly on the plume of
hot air. Nonetheless, it had exactly the visual effect he had first
pictured when he thought of a weeping flame, while simultaneously
confirming to him his ability to produce both water and fire.

He released it after about thirty seconds, and realized that he was
sweating and breathing a bit harder. Barry silently nodded and pointed
to his book. "Yeah, sure," James responded, and groaned as he stood to
walk to his bed to read, feeling his muscles ache. Aching muscles . .
. could lactic acid have built up? Had his body been burning sugar in
all his muscles to accomplish that? Or was it from tensing up so much
as he made the attempt?

He wanted to just fall back on the bed and go to sleep, but when your
instructor can probably turn you into a newt if you disobey,
disobeying is probably unwise, so he lifted the book and opened it,
flipping through the pages to find his place. As he began reading, he
felt suddenly comfortable, almost at home, as if he was back in his
dorm room settling in for a study session after a bit of football or a
long game of hackey-sack with his friends. His luck in falling through
that portal a year and a half into college, instead of when he was in
high school, had not been something he had previously considered, but
now he contemplated it. He had experienced bouts of anger and
frustration at his ill luck in tripping just as the Thin Man had
opened that portal--and there it was, a snide voice commented, you've
starting capitalizing him--but now he thought about how much worse it
would have been if the same thing had happened in high school.

He was already through the intense homesickness that came when he
first went to college, he was already used to a life more focused on
study and lectures, without the presence of family. His friends
though, he found he was missing all the more fiercely, and again he
felt a sudden shock of recognition at his luck. How much worse would
it have been if his flirtations had found a willing ear and eye, and
he had been in a committed relationship, only to suddenly vanish?

As it was, it would be some time before his absence was noted, and
even then his friends would probably guess that he had dropped out to
go home. His parents would not expect to hear from him for a few
months, at least. A shudder ran through him at the thought of what
they would think when he failed to contact them, and he stared down at
his youthened body before determinedly shaking off those thoughts to
return to his reading. Bad as it would be to go back a child, it would
be far worse to be a frog, or a rabbit.

So he poured all his focus into his study of material items, comparing
the words of the book to his thoughts about conjuring water. The books
covered basically four ways of using material items in spell. The
first was one that the book claimed many other works neglected, and
James could see why, as it was so pointlessly obvious. If you cast a
spell on a material object, then you've used that material in the
spell. Well, duh. Still, comparing that to his thoughts about the
water, he could see where it might get missed. After all, if you were
summoning water vapor from the air, or summoning water from a great
distance, you were using water in the spell, and in neither case was
the water something you had before hand, in hand, as with the other
three ways.

The second way put him in mind of stories of Voodoo, or Vodoun as he
had heard it ought to be, and that was sympathetic magic. At its most
basic it was little more than an aid to visualization, helping the
wielder to properly visualize the target of his effects by using
something that resembled it. In other spells, though the description
was rather more obtuse, it acted, as James perceived it, as an input
to the spell in a more literal sense, like a parameter passed to a
computer program. For example, using the blood of a person allowed one
to use a magic that had the concept 'affect the person whose blood
matches this blood,' and so locate or affect someone the caster may
never have seen, and be otherwise unable to picture, or to drive past
protective magics.

There was much more depth to the sympathetic concepts than the mere
use of material as target, and the sympathetic discussion had taken up
most of his early morning reading, before breakfast and the beginning
of Barry's lectures.

Now he was into the third way, which was almost as much a style of
magic on its own as sympathetic magic was, in which material items
were used simultaneously as part of the spell, the mantra being the
ingredients named as they were cast into the air or into a bowl or
onto the ground, and as fuel for the spell, being sometimes burned in
the casting, sometimes utterly consumed. From the odd diversions in
the apparent uses of the substances, James felt sure that there was
more than a thread of sympathetic magic in this as well.

Why though, were plant matter and fleshy things burned, while crystals
crumbled into powder, and gold vanished utterly? What was the
difference? The burning could supply energy, James thought, but
powdering crystals required breaking millions of strong chemical bonds
in a non-exothermic reaction, so it should require energy to
accomplish, not provide it. The complete vanishing of gold could
possibly be understood, if it was being used as a source of either
energy via Einstein's equation, or of protons and neutrons for
recombination into other elements, but the gemstones left the powder,
so they were not being used in that way. What was unique about a
gemstone? They could be used to focus light, as in a laser, but that
use would vanish as they were powdered. The powder itself could be
used as an abrasive, he supposed, but the book did not describe the
dust being swirled about or anything, just falling to the ground.

Mentally noting that as something worthy of further study and
understanding, he continued on to the fourth way. Somewhere in between
the second and third ways, he thought as read about sacrificial magic.
Sacrificing someone's life to protect or to destroy those they loved
or were related to? Definitely sympathetic - but sacrificing animals
or goods to draw the attention of some powerful spirit and bind it to
your will was more like using it as fuel, like the third way. It all
seemed a bit peculiar to him, implying as it did the existence of
demons, or spirits, or gods. Were they independent already existing
entities present in the world? Or were they beings from other
dimensions being pulled across? Or shapings of magic given purpose and
form by the sacrifice itself?

The book failed to clarify this point, and the whole business seemed
worth staying away from, except that it was the only thing so far that
even implied the possibility of crossing planes.

Of course, he was only beginning his studies, and it might well be
that he would come to other ways of doing such in time. It did bring
home a point that he had not considered before, that made him wonder
if he was thinking about all this the right way. These people doing
the summonings, based on what was written, did not themselves need to
know where the spirits were coming from. Some magics could be cast
without understanding how, or what was actually being done. Just as
his deeper understanding might allow him to make much more powerful
uses for spells others might discard as unworthy, would he also end up
failing to cast spells that he did not understand?

If he could not envision a means for accomplishing something, would he
even think to try? Magic was already doing the impossible, as far as
he could see, and though the steps and meditations he had learned had
allowed him to cast several cantrips up to now, he still did not
actually know what this force was that he as manipulating. Did he have
some organ that mediated the magic? Was the magic he was using
something external to himself, and he was spending his bodily energy
in setting it in motion, like paddling through a stream? Or maybe it
was coming from himself, and he was somehow actually generating it by
his meditations and exercises, like the chi the characters in fighting
video games threw. Nothing he had read yet had told him, but surely he
could eventually come up with a way to test that.