by Diane Duane
“Surely. HNii’t, are you all right?” S’reee said.
“Yes, fine, let’s do it!” Nita said.
“So begin!” said S’reee, and began singing to herself as she waited.
Nita paddled for a moment in the water, adjusting to not having her bathing suit on. Saying “Begin to what?” especially with Kit listening, seemed incredibly stupid, so she just hung there in the water for a few moments and considered being a whale. I don’t have the faintest idea what this is supposed to feel like, she thought desperately. But I should be able to come up with something. I am a wizard, after all.
Nita got an idea. She took a deep breath, held it, and slowly began to relax into the sound. Her arms, as she let them go limp, no longer supported her; she sank, eyes open, into salty greenness. It’s all right, she thought. The air’s right above me if I need it. She hung weightless in the green, thinking of nothing in particular.
Down there in the water, S’reee’s note seemed louder, fuller; it vibrated against the ears, against the skin, inside the lungs, filling everything. And there was something familiar about it. Cousin, S’reee had called her; and We have blood in common, she had said. So it should be easy. A matter of remembering, not what you have been… but what, somewhere else, you are. Simply allow what is, somewhere else, to be what is here — and the change is done, effortless. Nita shut her eyes on the greenness and trusted to the wizardry inside her. That was it. “Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart.” Not the kind of will that meant gritted teeth, resisting something else, like your own disbelief, that was trying to undermine you — not “willpower”—but the will that was desire, the will so strong that it couldn’t be resisted by all the powers of normality…
Where am I getting all this? Nita didn’t know, didn’t care. To be a whale, she thought. To float like this all the time, to be weightless, like an astronaut. But space is green, and wet, and warm, and there are voices in it, and things growing. Freedom: no walls, no doors. And the songs in the water… Her arms were feeling heavy, her legs felt odd when she kicked; but none of it mattered. Something was utterly right, something was working. Nita began to feel short of air. It hadn’t worked all the way, that was all. She would get it right the next time. She stroked for the surface, broke it, opened her eyes to the light— and found it different. First and oddest — so that Nita tried to shake her head in disbelief, and failed, since she suddenly had no neck — the world was split in two, as if with an axe. Trying to look straight ahead of her didn’t work. The area in front of her had become a hazy uncertainty comprised of two sets of peripheral vision. And where the corners of her eyes should have been, she now had two perfectly clear sets of sideways vision that nonetheless felt like “forward.” She was seeing in colors she had no names for, and many she had names for were gone. Hands she still seemed to have, but her fingers hung down oddly long and heavy, her elbows were glued to her sides, and her sides themselves went on for what seemed years. Her legs were gone; a tail and graceful flukes were all she had left. Her nose seemed to be on the top of her head, and her mouth somewhere south of her chin; and she resolved to ask S’reee, well out of Kit’s hearing, what had happened to some other parts of her. “S’reee,” Nita said, and was amazed to hear it come out of the middle of her head, in a whistle instead of words, “it was easy!”
“Come on, HNii’t,” S’reee said. “You’re well along in wizardry at this point; you should know by now that it’s not the magic that’s exciting — its what you do with it afterward.”
More amazement yet. Nita wanted to simply roll over and lie back in the water at the sheer richness of the sound of S’reee’s words. She had done the usual experiments in school that proved water was a more efficient conductor of sound than air. But she hadn’t dreamed of what that effect would be like when one was a whale, submerged in the conducting medium and wearing a hundred square feet of skin that was a more effective hearing organ than any human ear. Suddenly sound was a thing that stroked the body, sensuous as a touch, indistinguishable from the liquid one swam in.
More, Nita could hear echoes coming back from what she and S’reee had said to each other; and the returning sound told her, with astonishing precision, the size and position of everything in the area — rocks on the bottom, weed three hundred meters away, schools of fish. She didn’t need to see them. She could feel their textures on her skin as if they touched her; yet she could also distinctly perceive their distance from her, more accurately than she could have told it with mere sight. Fascinated, she swam a couple of circles around the platform, making random noises and getting the feel of the terrain.
“I don’t believe it,” someone said above Nita, in a curious, flat voice with no echoes about it. Is that how we sound? Nita thought, and surfaced to look at Kit out of first one eye, then the other. He looked no different from the way he usually did, but something about him struck Nita as utterly hilarious, though at first she couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it occurred to her. He had legs.
“You’re next, Kit,” S’reee said. “Get in the water.” Nita held her head out of water and stared at Kit for a moment. He didn’t say anything, and after a few seconds of watching him get so red she could see it through his sunburn, Nita submerged, laughing like anything — a sound exactly like oatmeal boiling hard.
Nita felt the splash of his jump all over her. Then Kit was paddling in the water beside her, looking at her curiously. “You’ve got barnacles,” he said.
“That’s as may be, Kit,” S’reee said, laughing herself. “Look at what I brought for you.”
Kit put his head under the water for a moment to see what she was talking about. For the first time, Nita noticed that S’reee was holding something delicately in her mouth, at the very tip-end of her jaw. If spiders lived in the Sea, what S’reee held might have been a fragment torn from one of their webs. It was a filmy, delicate, irregular meshwork, its strands knotted into a net some six feet square. The knotting was an illusion, as Nita found when she glided closer to it. Each “knot” was a round swelling or bulb where several threads joined. Flashes of green-white light rippled along the net whenever it moved, and all Nita’s senses, those of whale and wizard alike, prickled with the electric feeling of a live spell, tangled in the mesh and imPatient to be used.
“You must be careful with this, Kit,” S’reee said. “This is a whalesark, and a rare thing. A sark can only be made when a whale dies, and the magic involved is considerable.”
“What is it?” Kit said, when he’d surfaced again.
“It’s a sort of shadow of a whale’s nervous system, made by wizardry. At the whale’s death, before the lifelightning’s gone, a spell-constructed energy duplicate of the whale’s brain and nerves is made from the pattern laid down by the living nerves and brain. The duplicate then has an ‘assisted shapechange’ spell woven into it. When the work’s done properly, contact with the sark is enough to change the wearer into whatever kind of whale the donor was.”
S’reee tossed her head. Shimmering, the sark billowed fully open, like a curtain in the wind. “This is a sperm-whalesark, like Aivaaan who donated it. He was a wizard who worked these waters several thousand full Moons ago, and something of a seer; so that when he died, instead of leaving himself wholly to the Sea, Aivaaan said that we should make a sark of him, because there would be some need. Come try it on for size, Kit.”
Kit didn’t move for a moment. “S’reee — is what’s his name, Aivaaan, in there? Am I going to be him, is that it?”
S’reee looked surprised. “No, how did you get that idea?”
“You said this was made from his brain,” Nita said.
“Oh. His under-brain, yes — the part of the brain that runs breathing and blood flow and such. As for the rest of Aivaaan, his mind — I don’t think so. Not that I’m any too sure where ‘mind’ is in a person. But you should still be K!t, by what the Sea tells me. Come on, time’s swimming.”
“What do I do with it?”
>
“Just put it around you and wrap it tight. Don’t be afraid to handle it roughly. It’s stronger than it looks.” She let go of the sark. It floated in the water, undulating gently in the current. Kit took another breath, submerged, reached down, and drew the sark around him.
“Get back, HNii’t,” S’reee said. Nita backfinned several times her own length away from Kit, not wanting to take her eyes off him. He was exhaling, slowly sinking feet-first, and with true Rodriguez insouciance he swirled the sark around him like Zorro putting on a new cape. Kit’s face grew surprised, though, as the “cape” continued the motion, swirling itself tighter and tighter around him, binding his arms to his sides.
Alarmed, Kit struggled, still sinking, bubbles rising from him as he went down. The struggling did him no good, and it suddenly became hard to see him as the wizardry in the whalesark came fully alive, and light danced around Kit and the sark. Nita had a last glimpse of Kit’s eyes going wide in panic as he and the whalesark became nothing more than a sinking, swirling storm of glitter.
“S’reee!” Nita said, getting alarmed.
With a sound like muffled thunder and a blow like a nearby lightning-strike, displaced water hit Nita and bowled her sideways and backward. She fluked madly, trying to regain her balance enough to tell what was going on. The water was full of stirred-up sand, tatters of weed, small confused fish darting in every direction. And a bulk, a massive form that had not been there before—
Nita watched the great gray shape rise toward her and understood why S’reee had insisted on Kit’s change being in deep water. Her own size had surprised her at first — though a humpback looks small and trim, even the littlest males tend to be fifty feet long. But Kit was twice that, easily. He did not have the torpedolike grace of a humpback, but what he lacked in streamlining he made up in sheer mass. The sperm is the kind that most people think of when they hear the word whale, the kind made famous by most whaling movies. Nita realized that all her life she had mostly taken the whale’s shape for granted, not considering what it would actually be like up close to one.
But here came Kit, stroking slowly and uncertainly at first with that immense tail, and getting surer by the second; looking up at her with the tiny eyes set in the huge domed head, and with his jaw working a bit, exposing the terrible teeth that could crunch a whaling boat in two. Nita felt the size of him, the weight, and somehow the danger — and kept her movements slow and respectful. He was still Kit — but something had been added.
He glanced at S’reee and Nita, saying nothing, as he rose past them and broke surface to breathe. They followed. He spouted once or twice, apparently to get the feel of it, and then said to S’reee in a rather rueful tone of song, “I wish you’d warned me!”
His voice ranged into a deeper register than a humpback’s and had a sharper sound to it — more clicks and buzzes. It was not entirely comfortable on the skin. “I couldn’t,” S’reee said, “or you might have fought it even harder than you did, and the change might have refused to take. That would’ve been trouble for us; if a whalesark once rejects a person, it’ll never work for him at all. After this it’ll be easier for you. Which in itself will make some problems. Right now, though, let’s get going. Take a long breath; I want to get out of the bay without attracting too much attention.”
They took breath together and dived deep, S’reee in the lead and swimming south by west, Nita and Kit following. The surroundings — thick, lazily waving kelp beds and colonies of bright polyps and anemones, stitched through with the brief silver flash of passing fish — fascinated Nita. But she couldn’t give the landscape, or seascape, her whole attention; she had other concerns. (Kit,) she tried to say in the Speech’s silent form, for privacy’s sake — then found that it wasn’t working; she wasn’t getting the sort of mental “echo” that told her she was sending successfully. Probably it had something to do with the shapechange spell. “Hey,” she said aloud, “you okay?”
The question came out of her as such a long, mournful moan that Kit laughed — a sound more like boiling lava than boiling oatmeal: huge hisses and bubblings mixed together. “Now I am,” he said, “or I will be as soon as I can get used to this bit with the eyes—“
“Yeah, it’s weird. But kind of nice too. Feeling things, instead of seeing them…”
“Yeah. Even the voices have feelings. S’reee’s is kind of twitchy—“
“Yeah. You’ve got sharp edges—“
“You’ve got fur.”
“I do not!”
“Oh, yes you do. It’s soft, your voice. Not like your usual one—“
Nita was unsure whether to take this as a compliment, so she let it lie. The moment had abruptly turned into one of those times when she had no idea just what to say to Kit, the sort of sudden silence that was acutely painful to Nita, though Kit never seemed to notice it at all. Nita couldn’t think of anything to do about the problem, which was the worst part of the whole business. She wasn’t about to mention the problem to her mom, and on this subject the wizards’ manual was hugely unhelpful.
The silence was well along toward becoming interminable when S’reee said, “That’s the primary way we have for knowing one another, down here. We haven’t the sort of physical variations you have — differences in head shape and so forth — and even if we did, what good would a distinction be if you had to come right up to someone to make it? By voice, we can tell how far away a friend is, how he’s feeling, practically what he’s thinking. Though the closer a friend is to you, usually, the harder it is to tell what’s on his mind with any accuracy.”
Nita started to sing something, then caught herself back to silence. “Is the change settling in, Kit?” S’reee said.
“Now it is. I had a weird feeling, though, like something besides me, my mind I mean — like something besides that was fighting the change. But it’s gone now.”
“Only for the moment,” S’reee said. “See, it’s the old rule: no wizardry without its price, or its dangers. Though the dangers are different for each of you, since you changed by different methods. As I said, HNii’t, you have to beware pretending too hard — thinking so much like a whale that you don’t want to be a human being any more, or forget how. Wizards have been lost that way before, and there’s no breaking the spell from outside; once you re stuck inside the change-shape, no one but you can break out again. If you start finding your own memories difficult to recall, it’s time to get out of the whaleshape, before it becomes you permanently.”
“Right,” Nita said. She wasn’t very worried. Being a humpback was delightful, but she had no desire to spend her life that way.
“Your problem’s different, though, K!t. Your change is powered more by the spell resident in the whalesark than by anything you’re doing yourself. And all the sark’s done is confuse your own body into thinking it’s a whale’s body, for the time being. That confusion can be broken by several different kinds of distraction. The commonest is when your own mind — which is stronger than the whale-mind left in the sark — starts to override the instructions the whalesark is giving your body.”
“Huh?”
“Kit,” S’reee said very gently, finning upward to avoid the weedy, barnacled wreck of a fishing boat, “suppose we were — oh, say several hundred humpback-lengths down, in the Crushing Dark — and suddenly your whale-body started trying to behave like a human’s body. Human breathing rate, human pulse and thought and movement patterns, human response to pressures and the temperature of the water—“
“Uh,” Kit said, as the picture sank in.
“So you see the problem. Spend too much time in the sark, and the part of your brain responsible for handling your breathing and so forth will begin to overpower the ‘dead’ brain preserved in the sark. Your warning signs are nearly the opposite of HNii’t’s. Language is the first thing to go. If you find yourself losing whalesong, you must surface and get out of the sark immediately. Ignore the warning— The best that can happen is that the whale
sark will probably be so damaged it can never be used again. The worst thing—“ She didn’t say it. The worry in her voice was warning enough.
No one said much of anything for a while, as the three of them swam onward, south and west. The silence, uneasy at first, became less so as they went along. S’reee, to whom this area was as commonplace as Kit’s or Nita’s home streets might have been, simply cruised along without any great interest in the surroundings. But Nita found the seascape endlessly fascinating, and suspected Kit did too — he was looking around him with the kind of fascination he rarely lent anything but old cars and his z-gauge train set.
Nita had rarely thought of what the seascape off the coast of the island would look like. From being at the beach she had a rather dull and sketchy picture of bare sand with a lot of water on top of it; shells buried in it, as they were on the beach, and there had to be weed beds; the seaweed washed up from somewhere. But all the nature movies had given her no idea of the richness of the place.
Coral, for example; it didn’t come in the bright colors it did in tropical waters, but it was there in great quantity — huge groves and forests of it, the white or beige or yellow branches twisting and writhing together in tight-choked abstract patterns. And shells, yes — but the shells still had creatures inside them; Nita saw Kit start in amazement, then swim down for a closer look at a scallop shell that was hopping over the surface of a brain coral, going about its business.
They passed great patches of weed, kinds that Nita didn’t know the names of — until they started coming to her as if she had always known them: red-bladder, kelp, agar, their long dark leaves or flat ribbons rippling as silkily in the offshore current as wheat in a landborn wind.
And the fish! Nita hadn’t taken much notice of them at first; they’d all looked alike to her — little and silver. But something had changed. They passed by a place where piles had been driven into the sea floor, close together, and great odd-shaped lumps of rusty metal had been dumped among them. Weed and coral had seized on the spot, wrapping the metal and the piles; and the little life that frequented such places, tiny shrimp and krill, swam everywhere. So did thousands of iridescent, silvery-indigo fish, ranging from fingerling size to about a foot long, eating the krill and fry as if there were no tomorrow. For some of the smallest of them there wasn’t going to be one, Nita realized, as she also realized how hungry she was.