Sudakis scatologized again. The Listener will go back on duty any minute now. I can't put it out two times running; the magic doesn't work. I hate doing it even once: too much magic loose here as is. That's why I don't wear a fancy watch like yours. Mechanicals are all right. When one gets bollixed, I just buy another one: no need to worry about rites or anything like that"

I shrugged; it wasn't my business. But I have as little to do with mechanicals as I can. If the Other Side weren't as real as this one, they might be all right. But as Atheling the Wise put it, though, most forces are also Persons, and mechanicals have no Personalities of their own to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - to say nothing of outraged (or sometimes just mischievous) Forces. That's why you'll never see lodestone levitation under an alkahest pool. Sometimes, when I'm in the mood for Utopian flights of fancy, I think about how smoothly the world would run if all natural forces were as inanimate as the ones that let mechanicals operate. We'd never have to screen against megasalamanders launched on the wings of supersylphs to incinerate cities anywhere in the world. Neither of the Sorcerous Wars that devastated whole countries could have happened. For that matter, I wouldn't have had to worry about toxic spell dumps or the ever-growing pollution of the environment. Things would be simpler all around.

Yeah, I know it's a dream from the gate of ivory. Without magic, the world would probably have fanners, maybe towns, but surely not the great civilization we know. Can you imagine mass production without the law of similarity, or any kind of communications network without the law of contagion?

And medicine? I shiver to think of it. Without ectoplasmic beings to see and reach inside the body, how would medicine be possible at all? If you got sick, you'd bloody well the, just like one of Tony Sudalds' cheap watches when magic touched its works.