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Of course! He only has to ask.

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All right then, this will not alarm him. He makes sure he has a nice meta-index going in Grace, who just contains an unlimited number of pages because she's awesome.

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How resourceful of him!

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Cam does that!

This not-sure-if-he-should-trust-the-manual thing is annoying, though. Up in his room, with Renée elsewhere occupied until they're scheduled to go to a movie in an hour, he asks:

"Where does your information come from? It's in English, much of it anyway, and assembled into sentences; that doesn't just happen. Do you write it yourself or are you pulling it from a central source? How do you know it?"
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The contents of wizards' manuals are written partly by other wizards, partly by automatic processes...

...and partly by one of the Powers. In fact, some species rely entirely on the Whisperer to provide their spell frameworks in personal communications, because for one reason or another they are not physiologically suited to literacy.
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Cam would like to know more about the Powers, please.

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What more would Cam like to know about the Powers?

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Who are they, what do they do, what are their personalities and eponymous powers like, which features of the universe are they credited with as a counterpart to death/entropy/etc.?

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There are not any biographies available.

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That's not very friendly of them. Can he complain to the management?

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Hmmmm.

That goes in the long-term project section in Grace's chart, then.

In the meantime, he has a language to learn. This book is not completely untrustworthy; it has successfully taught him to talk to inanimate objects and trees and turn tofu into something edible-tasting.

But he copies anything really important into Grace.
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The manual doesn't seem to be offended about this, or even to particularly notice.

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"...How smart are you?" Cam asks the manual.

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It expands the section on how manuals work.

Somewhere, perhaps not a physical somewhere but somewhere all the same, there is a full manual with all the information any wizard could ever conceivably need. Individual wizards' manuals are able to hold small subsets of that store at a time. The primary function of the manual, therefore, is to select the right information at the right time based on its wizard's interests, needs, and level of prior knowledge. That is what manuals are good at. Since Cam talks to his, it can also summarize small pieces of its knowledge verbally, or read itself to him.

And that's it.

His manual is not really conscious or alive in any meaningful sense.
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Okay. That's worth knowing.

"Are you conscious?" he asks Grace.

"I think so," she says. "I might be less conscious than you, but I think I'm some conscious. I have a lot of you in me and you're conscious."

"Okay," says Cam. He pats her.

She giggles. "That doesn't mean I have a nervous system."

"Indulge me," snorts Cam.

"Okay," she says cheerfully.
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