When it was gone, he felt better. He wiped his hands on the
breechclout. Whatever the material in the cloth, it had stood the sun's
heat almost as well as he had.
Then he paused as his hand found a lump under the cloth. He drew out the
apprentice magician's book. The poor devil had never achieved his twenty
lifetimes, and this was probably all that was left of him. Hanson stared
at it, reading the title in some surprise.
_Applied Semantics._
He propped himself up and began to scan it, wondering what it had to do
with magic. He'd had a course of semantics in college and could see no
relationship. But he soon found that there were differences.
This book began with the axiomatic statement that the symbol is the
thing. From that it developed in great detail the fact that any part of
a whole bearing similarity to the whole was also the whole; that each
seven was the class of all sevens; and other details of the science of
magical similarity followed quite logically from the single axiom.
Hanson was surprised to find that there was a highly developed logic to
it. Once he accepted the axiom--and he was no longer prepared to doubt
it here--he could follow the book far better than he'd been able to
follow his own course in semantics. Apparently this was supposed to be a
difficult subject, from the constant efforts of the writer to make his
point clear.
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