lot of rags, bones and old
iron onto himself, go through some impromptu mummery, and set up as
shoonoo? Well, he can't. The shoonoon are a hereditary caste. A shoonoo
father will begin teaching his son as soon as he can walk and talk, and
he keeps on teaching him till he's the age-equivalent of a graduate M.D.
or a science Ph. D."

"Well, what all is there to learn--?"

"The theoretical basis and practical applications of sympathetic magic.
Action-at-a-distance by one object upon another. Homeopathic magic: the
principle that things which resemble one another will interact. For
instance, there's an animal the natives call a shynph. It has an
excrescence of horn on its brow like an arrowhead, and it arches its
back like a bow when it jumps. Therefore, a shynph is equal to a bow and
arrow, and for that reason the Kwanns made their bowstrings out of
shynph-gut. Now they use tensilon because it won't break as easily or
get wet and stretch. So they have to turn the tensilon into shynph-gut.
They used to do that by drawing a picture of a shynph on the spool, and
then the traders began labeling the spools with pictures of shynph. I
think my father was one of the first to do that.

"Then, there's contagious magic. Anything that's been part of anything
else or come in contact with it will interact permanently with it. I
wish I had a sol for every time I've seen a Kwann pull the wad out of a
shot-shell, pick up a pinch of dirt from the footprint of some animal
he's tracking, put it in among the buckshot, and then crimp the wad in
again.

"Everything a Kwann does has some sort of magical implications. It's
the shoonoo's business to know all this; to be able to tell just what
magical influences have to be produced, and what influences must be
avoided. And there are circumstances in which magic simply will not
work, even in theory. The reason is that there is some powerful
counter-influence at work. He has to know when he can't use magic, and
he has to be able to explain why. And when he's theoretically able to do
something by magic, he has to have a plausible explanation why it won't
produce results--just as any highly civilized and ethical Terran M.D.
has to be able to explain his failures to the satisfaction of his late
patient's relatives. Only a shoonoo doesn't get sued for malpractice; he
gets a spear stuck in him. Under those circumstances, a caste of
hereditary magicians is literally bred for quick thinking. These old