by Lev Grossman
Much more than when he was a goose or a fox or a polar bear Quentin felt like himself as a whale. He had a big fat brain that was capable of running most of his personality software at the same speed he was used to. But he wasn’t the same Quentin, not exactly. Whale-Quentin was a calm, wise, contented Quentin. He was colossal, planetary, moving through the blue gloom unthreatened by anything and requiring nothing more than air through his blowhole and krill through his mouth. Drake Passage was about five hundred miles across, and it would take them two or three days to swim it, but time was an idea that he was having an increasingly hard time being interested in. Time was defined by change, and very little changed for a blue whale.
He noticed everything but was concerned with nothing. Drake Passage had the worst weather in the world, literally, but all that meant was that when he surfaced for a breath, once every fifteen minutes or so, the waves broke a little harder against his wide, slick back. He and Plum were great blue gods, flying wingtip to wingtip, and everything around them paid homage to them. Fish, jellyfish, shrimp, sharks; once he spotted a great white, swaggering along by itself through the depths with its permanent shit-eating grin. It had so many teeth it looked like it had braces. Nature’s perfect killing machine! Go on with your bad self. No, really. It’s cute.
And then the ocean floor began sloping up to meet them. He’d almost forgotten what they were doing here, fumbled it away and allowed his mind to disappear forever into the endless blue whaleness of it all. But no: they were here for a reason.
This was always going to be the worst part. They were going to have to deliberately beach themselves, hopefully on nice soft sand, but more likely on some rocky shale, or worse. They just had to hope their skins were thick enough, and the terrain gentle enough, that their delicately flanged stomachs didn’t get shredded in the process. They moaned a bit at each other, as one does, then they aimed themselves at the Antarctic coastline.
As they got closer emergency calls came in from some distant pod, warning them off, urging them to turn back for deeper water. Look out! Don’t do it! It was surprisingly hard to ignore them—he felt like he was the pilot of a falling 747 and the air traffic controllers were begging him to for God’s sake pull up, pull up! But they stayed the course, churning with their tails, pouring on speed, their massive bodies bulling through the water. If they’d had teeth they would have gritted them.
Then Quentin was lying facedown on black stones under a white sky, naked, with the weak surf of the Southern Ocean washing fiery-cold over his bare legs, which were already going numb. It felt like being born must feel, being spat out of the warm, enveloping, sustaining sea and up into the bright searing cold world. In short it sucked.
Quentin did the one thing he knew would feel good: he shut his eyes for the first time in three days and kept them shut for a good minute. He’d missed his eyelids.
Plum was lying next to him. A minute ago he wouldn’t have had to turn his head to look at her, but now he swiveled his small, pale nub of a human head in her direction. She looked back at him, pale and shivering.
“Final leg,” he said thickly.
Huh: lips and teeth. What a concept. He pushed at them clumsily with his tongue.
“Final leg,” she said.
Quentin levered himself up off the shale and immediately fell over. Gravity, my old enemy. What a stupid way to locomote. Standing up felt like trying to balance a telephone pole on one end.
They were on a narrow curving beach, black pebbles and gray sand; it was just about the least tropical beach in the world. They were both naked, and there might have been a time when, as a human male, he was at least notionally interested in the sight of Plum without her clothes on, but he was still mentally more than half cetacean, and the relative nakedness or clothed-ness of a human of either sex really could not have been more beside the point to him. He could barely remember what they were doing here.
Fortunately they’d talked through what would happen next, drilled it into their brains, which they knew would not be functioning at full capacity. They both began searching through the rocks and tide marks, heads down. This had to be done quickly, before hypothermia set in. Quentin reeled like a drunk, cutting his strange, unbearably soft yellow-pink feet on the unsympathetic rocks, until—there. A feather. White flecked with gray. He plucked it out of a mass of sticky, smelly sea-trash. No time to be picky. Basically anything but a penguin would do.
It was coming back to him, the purpose of all this. He waited, bouncing on his toes, hands clumped under his armpits to keep his fingers warm, getting increasingly self-conscious about being naked, until Plum found hers. Then he clamped the feather between his chattering teeth, and they did the spells at the same time.
This time the change was bad, and he threw up when it was done, though granted throwing up isn’t as big a deal to a bird as it is to a human. He made a neat, hygienic job of it—business as usual. After its brief reunion with humanity his brain went animal again, this time having to endure the insult of being squeezed into the tablespoon volume of a seabird’s skull. He got oriented in time to watch Plum dwindle into the shape of a seabird twenty yards away, her pale body feathering over and collapsing in on itself into—he didn’t even know what kind of bird she was. Or for that matter what he was.
He was whatever kind of bird that feather had belonged to. A moment of contact with Plum’s turmeric-yellow, perfectly circular eye, then they both took flight.
Onward and upward.
CHAPTER 10
Quentin had never heard of anybody going to Brakebills South in the gap between fall and spring semesters, which this was, and he wasn’t even a hundred percent positive they could get in. They might find the building shut down, Mayakovsky gone or in hiding, the whole place sealed off. If that happened they’d have to reassess pretty fast and make a break for one of the non-magical research stations on the coast, where their arrival would be hard to explain at best.
They spiraled in from above, balancing on their aching wings, steeling themselves for the moment when their webbed seabird feet would skip off the surface of some hard invisible dome—but the moment never came. Apparently Mayakovsky considered five hundred miles of Antarctic no-man’s-land enough of a defense against home invasion. They alighted on the flat roof of one of the towers and became human again.
Quentin figured it was better to let Mayakovsky find them rather than the other way around—he didn’t want to startle the old magician into some lethal display of defensive magic—so they made as much noise as possible coming down the stairs. First stop was the laundry, where they secured some Brakebills South robes: the nakedness issue was starting to feel urgent again.
The place felt off-limits, out of bounds. It was like they were hunting a minotaur in its maze. Quentin trailed one hand idly along a wall, and the smooth stone was cool and sticky with condensed moisture, something about the heating spells—it gave off a damp basement smell that brought back memories of the last time he’d been here, when they were all studying eighteen hours a day under Mayakovsky’s rule of silence. There was something he didn’t have to worry about at Brakebills South: nostalgia.
He was too hungry to feel anything anyway. They wound up in the kitchen, where they stuffed themselves on anything they could find that might possibly get the taste of bird beak out of their mouths. Quentin was keenly aware that Mayakovsky had no real reason to help them, even assuming he could. He’d always known he wouldn’t have much to offer by way of compensation, aside from an intellectually interesting problem and some shameless flattery and, he supposed, the strictly—strictly—platonic presence of a smart and pretty young woman. But somehow it had all been more convincing when they were first setting out.
They never heard Mayakovsky coming, he just appeared in the doorway, silent as a ghost, looking grim and hungover and unbathed. His stubble was slightly frostier, his gut more prominent, his nails yellower, bu
t otherwise he was perfectly preserved. It was like Antarctica had freeze-dried him.
He didn’t kill them.
“Saw you coming,” he growled. “Miles away.”
He had on a dressing gown, unbelted, a white button-down shirt badly in need of bleach and a pair of very short, very un-professorial shorts.
“Professor Mayakovsky.” Quentin stood up brightly. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy like this, but we’re working on an interesting problem, and we could use your help with it.”
Mayakovsky sawed the end off a stale loaf of bread with an unwashed knife, spread about an inch of soft, unrefrigerated butter on it and began to eat standing up. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to throw the ball back, so Quentin kept going: he explained about incorporate bonds, and what they were trying to do, and why he, Mayakovsky, alone among all practitioners of the arts invisible, could give them the assistance they so desperately needed. Mayakovsky chewed steadily and noisily, gazing into the distance with watery, rapidly blinking eyes.
When Quentin was done Mayakovsky swallowed, sighed, his round shoulders rising and then falling under his robe, and left the room. He came back with a piece of paper and a blunt pencil. He swept some crumbs onto the floor and put them down in front of Quentin.
“Write eet down,” he said. He pointed at Plum. “You. Make coffee.”
Plum made a monster face at him behind his back. Quentin turned up his palms: what are you gonna do? She made a monster face at him too.
“Fine,” he said. “You draw. I’ll make the coffee.”
While Plum produced a crude approximation of their original flow chart, Quentin made coffee in a battered Soviet-era espresso maker. Mayakovsky came back for both the drawing and the coffee—he didn’t bother to pour, he just took the whole machine—and left again. It was just as well, Quentin was getting tired. He hadn’t slept for four days; there had been no breaks during the flight from the coast, and whales didn’t really sleep at all. He found his way to the dormitory wing by memory and lay down on a cot in one of the empty cells and fell asleep in the milky white Antarctic light.
He had no idea how long he’d slept, but when he came back down to the dining hall matters had progressed. Mayakovsky was back, now wearing glasses with heavy black frames, sitting at a table talking heatedly at Plum and waving his arms. The flow chart was on the table in front of them; it looked like it had been repeatedly folded into two-inch squares and then unfolded again. Most of the white space was now full of annotations and calculations in Mayakovsky’s tiny blocky handwriting, a jumble of numbers and letters, Roman and Cyrillic, and more obscure symbols.
Quentin pulled up a chair. Mayakovsky’s body odor was sharp as cheese.
“It is crazy, what you are doing.” Mayakovsky shook his head with Slavic melancholy, as if their sheer incompetence saddened him. “A valid exploit, yes. All right. Crude—this, here, totally unnecessary. Totally.” He tapped the paper heavily. “And this, you transpose—it is working against your secondary effects, here and here. Spell is fighting itself. You understand? But the rest is not so terrible.”
It was better than Quentin expected. Listening to him crisply parse their tangled, fudged work, he knew they’d been right to come to him, however much it had cost them and might still cost them.
“Thees, though, no.” It was a round, resonant, definitive Russian no. He indicated one of the later stages of the spell with the back of his hand, like he didn’t even want to touch it, it was that far beneath his contempt. “It is impossible. Waste of time. You need more power, much more. Is a simple matter of scale. You are—I don’t know. You are trying to dig through a mountain using a toothpick.”
Professor Mayakovsky shook his head again. His mood was darkening visibly, heading for black.
“You are needing more power, much more. See? Khxere. And khxere.” He indicated two points on their flow chart; like a lot of Russians Mayakovsky had mastered many arcane points of higher mathematics but not the English letter h. “Between khxere and kxere.”
“I said that!” Plum said. “Remember? That’s basically exactly what I said!”
“I remember.” Quentin stared at the chart. His confidence was flagging. It all seemed very inadequate now. “How much more power?”
“Much. Orders of magnitude.” Megnitude. “You want to break the bond with these?” He grabbed Quentin’s fingers in one pawlike hand and shook them in front of Quentin’s face. “These little things? Waste of time. Would take one hundred years! Or one hundred Quentins!”
“Or a hundred Plums,” Plum said.
“Feefty Plums,” Mayakovsky said gallantly, with a quick yellow grin. “But you are nowhere near it. Nowhere near. Waste of time.”
He crumpled up the diagram and threw it at the wall.
Quentin watched it roll to a stop under a table. He would have liked to take a few minutes to go back through the spell in a patient, civil, collegial fashion, looking for areas of flexibility, places where the multipliers could be tweaked, maybe, to make up the difference. But Mayakovsky rolled over him, frog-marching him briskly through the math of it, brutally multiplying three and four digits in his head as he went. It was all Quentin could do to keep up. There was nothing that Mayakovsky didn’t know about incorporate bonds, apparently; it was like he’d studied up on them specifically in anticipation of their arrival. He understood their spell far better than they did.
Quentin wondered what Mayakovsky’s own work looked like, if he did any. He was alone out here half the year every year. What the hell did he do with himself? With a mind like his there was no limit to what he might have accomplished, if he wanted to. But Quentin had no idea what Mayakovsky wanted.
Quentin closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He could picture the whole spell in his head, and he could follow what Mayakovsky was saying, just, but he couldn’t see an answer. There had to be a way through. He was damned if he was going to go back empty-handed.
“Maybe I could store it up,” he said. “Build up the power over time. Construct a kind of containment device—I could cast the spell a hundred times, store it up, release it all at once.”
“And you stabilize how? ‘Store’ how? What is storage matrix?”
“I don’t know. A gem, a coin, something like that.”
Mayakovsky made a rude noise.
“Bad magic. Dangerous magic.”
“Or,” Quentin said, “I could get a hundred magicians together. We’ll cast it all at once.”
“I think you will not be telling one hundred magicians about this little project.”
Fair point. “Probably not.”
“It would be very risky.”
“True.”
“I do not know why you want to break an incorporate bond, but whatever it is is not legal, I don’t think. Even me you should not have told.”
Mayakovsky was studying him across the table. Quentin studied him back. His stolid face was impossible to read. Plum watched the exchange alertly.
If he’s bluffing, call it. If he’s not, what the hell are you going to do about it?
“Maybe you should turn us in,” Quentin said. “I mean, if it comes out that we were here, you could lose your job.”
“Maybe I should.”
Mayakovsky stood up and went to a cabinet and rummaged through it. He took out a bottle of something clear, without a label.
“I want you out of my house,” he said. “I will make a portal.”
—
But then, instead of throwing them out, Mayakovsky lapsed into a funk. He sat back down at a table in the corner and started drinking. After a few minutes he offered the bottle to Plum.
“Dreenk.”
Plum sniffed, took a sip, coughed, wiped her mouth and handed Quentin the bottle.
“Dreenk,” Plum said.
It smelled like radiator fl
uid.
“Christ,” he said. “What is this?”
That got a rare laugh from Mayakovsky.
“Antarctic moonshine.”
It wasn’t a very reassuring answer. What could possibly grow here that you could even ferment? Lichens? He hoped it was lichens. The alternatives seemed even worse.
Mayakovsky lapsed back into silence. He seemed to feel no need to even acknowledge their presence anymore, though Quentin noticed he didn’t leave them alone either. He and Plum exchanged flummoxed looks. Mayakovsky didn’t seem to want to talk about incorporate bonds. They tried to engage him in small talk about life at Brakebills South, but he was impervious to banter.
“Are you related to the poet?” Plum asked him.
“Nyet.”
Mayakovsky added something snarly in Russian, probably about poets.
So Quentin and Plum compared notes about their experiences as blue whales, gossiping about the various pods they could remember, while Mayakovsky stared at the wall and drank steadily and mechanically. He brought out a loaf of dark bread and some pickles but he didn’t eat, just picked the loaf up every few minutes and sniffed it and put it back down. How long was he going to let this go on? Well, Quentin wasn’t going to help him. He was going to drag this out as long as he had to, to the bitter end. He wasn’t going to give up, not until Mayakovsky made him.
The Antarctic light outside was like an interrogator’s lamp, steady and without mercy. It felt like they were the last three human beings on earth.
As much as he openly despised them, Mayakovsky couldn’t seem to bring himself to banish them either. Maybe he was lonelier than he let on. Eventually he got out a chess set, with one pawn replaced by a knob from a cabinet. First he destroyed Quentin, then he beat Plum twice, the first time with some difficulty, the second time after three quarters of an hour and by the narrowest of margins. Quentin suspected Plum of pulling her punches.