by Diane Duane
“Blues!” she said, one sharp happy note, then dived into the cloud of bluefish and krill, and helped herself to lunch.
It was a little while before she’d had enough. It took Nita only a couple of minutes to get used to the way a humpback ate — by straining krill and others of the tiniest ocean creatures, including the smallest of the blues, through the sievelike plates of whalebone, or “baleen,” in her jaws. The swift blue shapes that had been darting frantically in all directions were calming down already as Nita soared out of the whirling cloud of them and headed back over to S’reee and Kit, feeling slightly abashed and that an explanation of some kind was in order for the sudden interruption of their trip. However, there turned out to be no need for one. S’reee had stopped for a snack herself; and Nita realized that Kit had been snacking on fish ever since they left Tiana Beach. A sperm whale was, after all, one of the biggest of the “toothed” whales, and needed a lot of food to keep that great bulk working. Not that he did anything but swallow the fish whole when he caught them; a sperm’s terrible teeth are mostly for defense.
Kit paused only long enough to eat nine or ten of the biggest blues, then drifted down toward the pilings and the objects stacked sloppily among them. “Neets,” he said, “will you take a look at this? It’s cars!”
She glided down beside him. Sure enough, the corroded fins of an old-model Cadillac were jutting out of a great mound of coral. Under the tangled whiteness of the coral, as if under a blanket of snow, she could make out the buried shapes of hoods or doors, or the wheels and axles of wrecks wedged on their sides and choked with weed. Fish, blues and others, darted in and out of broken car windows and crumpled hoods, while in several places crabs crouched in the shells of broken headlights.
“It’s a fish haven,” S’reee said as she glided down beside them. “The land people dump scrap metal on the bottom, and the plants and coral come and make a reef out of it. The fish come to eat the littler fish and krill that live in reefs; and then the boats come and catch the fish. And it works just as well for us as for the fishers who live on land. But we’ve got other business than dinner to attend to, at the moment. And HNii’t, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you surfaced now?”
Nita and Kit looked at one another in shock, then started upward in a hurry, with S’reee following them at a more leisurely pace. “How long have we been down?” Kit whistled.
They surfaced in a rush, all three, and blew. S’reee looked at Kit in some puzzlement; the question apparently meant nothing to her. “Long enough to need to come up again,” she said.
“Neets, look,” Kit said in a rumbly groan, a sperm whale’s sound of surprise. She fluked hard once or twice, using her tail to lift herself out of the swell, and was surprised to see, standing up from the shore half a mile away, a tall brick tower with a pointed, weathered green-bronze top; a red light flashed at the tower’s peak. “Jones Beach already!” she said. “That’s miles and miles from Tiana—“
“We’ve made good time,” S’reee said, “but we’ve a ways to go yet. Let’s put our tails into it. I don’t want to keep the Blue waiting.”
They swam on. Even if the sight of the Jones Beach tower hadn’t convinced Nita they were getting close to New York, she now found that the increasing noise of the environment would have tipped off the whale that she’d become. Back at Tiana Beach, there had been only the single mournful hoot of the Shinnecock horn and the far-off sound of the various buoy bells. But this close to New York Harbor, the peaceful background hiss of the ocean soon turned into an incredible racket. Bells and horns and whistles and gongs shrieked and clunked and whanged in the water as they passed them; no sooner was she out of range of one than another one assaulted her twitching skin.
Singing pained notes at one another, the three ran the gauntlet of sound. It got worse instead of better as they got closer to the harbor entrance, and to the banging and clanging was added the sound of persistent dull engine noise. Their course to Sandy Hook unfortunately crossed all three of the major approaches to New York Harbor. Along all three of them big boats came and went with an endless low throbbing, and small ones passed with a rattling, jarring buzz that reminded Nita of lawn mowers and chain saws.
The three surfaced often to get relief from the sound, until S’reee warned to dive deep for a long underwater run through one of the shipping lanes. Nita was beginning to feel the slow discomfort that was a whale’s experience of shortness of breath before S’reee headed for the surface again.
They broached and blew and looked around them. Not far away stood a huge, black, white-lettered structure on four steel pilings. A white building stood atop the deck, and beside it was a red tower with several flashing lights. A horn on the platform sang one noncommittal note, shortLONG! short-LONG! again and again.
“Ambrose Light,” Kit said.
“The Speaking Tower, yes,” S’reee said. “After this it’ll be quieter — there are fewer markers between here and the Hook. And listen! There’s a friend’s voice.”
Nita went down again to listen, and finally managed to sort out a dolphin’s distant chattering from the background racket. She surfaced again and floated with the others awhile, watching Hotshot come, glittering in the sun like a bright lance hurling itself through the swells. As he came abreast of the Lightship he leaped high out of the water in a spectacular arc and hit the surface with a noise that pierced even all the hooting and dinging going on.
“For Sea’s sake, we hear you!” S’reee sang at the top of her lungs, and then added in annoyed affection, “He’s such a showoff.”
“But most dolphins are,” Kit said, with a note to his song that made it plain he wasn’t sure how he knew that.
“True enough. He’s worse than some, though. No question that he’s one of the best of the young wizards, and a talented singer. I love him dearly. But what this business of being Wanderer is going to do to his precious ego—“ She broke off as Hotshot came within hearing range. “Did you find him?”
“He’s feeding off the Hook,” Hotshot said, arrowing through the water toward them and executing a couple of playful and utterly unnecessary barrel rolls as he came. Nita began to wonder if S’reee might be right about him. “He’s worried about something, though he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Said it was just as well you were coming; he would’ve come looking for you if you hadn’t.”
The four of them started swimming again immediately; that last sentence was by itself most startling news. Blue whales did not do things, Nita realized, in the sudden-memory way that meant the information was the Sea s gift. Blue whales were, that was all. Action was for other, swifter species except in the Song of the Twelve, where the Blue briefly became a power to be reckoned with. The Song, as Tom had warned, had a way of changing the ones who sang it… sometimes even before they started.
“Are you ready for the Oath?” S’reee was saying to the dolphin. “Any last thoughts?”
“Only that this is going to be one more Song like any other,” Hotshot said ”even if it is your first time. Don’t worry, Ree; if you have any problems, I’ll help you out.”
Nita privately thought that this was a little on the braggy side, coming from a junior wizard. The thought of talking to an Advisory or Senior that way. — Tom, say — shocked her. Nevertheless, she kept her mouth shut, for it seemed like Hotshot and S’reee had known one another for a while.
“And how are our fry doing here?” Hotshot said, swimming careless rings around Nita as he sang. “Getting used to the fins all right?”
“Pretty much,” Nita said. Hotshot did one last loop around her and then headed off in Kit’s direction. “How about you, Minnow — eeeech!”
The huge jaw of a sperm whale abruptly opened right in front of Hotshot and closed before he could react — so that a moment later the dolphin was keeping quite still, while Kit held him with great delicacy in his huge fangs. Kit’s eyes looked angry, but the tone of his song was casual enough. “Hotshot,” he said, no
t stopping, just swimming along with casual deliberateness, “I’m probably singing too. And even if I’m not, I am a sperm whale. Don’t push your luck.”
Hotshot said nothing. Kit swam a few more of his own lengths, then opened his mouth and let the dolphin loose. “Hey,” he said then, “no hard feelings.”
“Of course not,” Hotshot said in his usual recklessly merry voice. But Nita noticed that the dolphin made his reply from a safe distance. “No problem, Mi”—Kit looked at Hotshot, silent—“ah, Kit.”
“Minnow it is,” Kit said, sounding casual himself. The four of them swam on; Nita dropped back a few lengths and put her head up beside Kit’s so that she could sing her quietest and not be heard too far off.
“What was that all about?”
“I’m not sure,” Kit said — and now that only Nita was listening, he sounded a bit shaken. “S’reee might have been right when she said this body doesn’t actually have what’s-his-voice’s—“
“Aivaaan.”
“His memories, yeah. But the body has its own memories. What it’s like to be a sperm. What it means to be a sperm, I guess. You don’t make fun of us — of them.” He paused, looking even more shaken. “Neets — don’t let me get lost!”
“Huh?”
“Me. I don’t beat people up, that’s not my style!”
“You didn’t beat him up—“
“No. I just did the ocean equivalent of pinning him up against the wall and scaring him a good one. Neets, I got into being a wizard because I wanted other people not to do that kind of stuff to me! And now—“
“I’ll keep an eye on you,” Nita said, as they began to come up on another foghorn, a loud one. And there was something odd about that foghorn. Its note was incredibly deep. That has to be almost too deep for people to hear at all. What kind of—
The note sounded again, and Nita shot Kit an amazed look as she felt the water all around her, and even the air in her lungs, vibrate in response to it. One note, the lowest note she could possibly imagine, held and held until a merely human singer would have collapsed trying to sing it… and then slurred slowly down through another note, and another, and holding on a last one of such profound depth that the water shook as if with thunder.
S’reee slowed her pace and answered the note in kind, the courtesy of one species of whale to another on meeting or parting — singing the same slow, somber sequence, several octaves higher. There was a pause; then she was answered with a humpback’s graceful fluting, but sung in a bottom-shaking baritone.
“Come on,” S’reee said, and dived.
The waters around Sandy Hook boil with krill in the spring and summer, so that by night the krill’s swarming luminescence defines every current and finstroke in a blaze of blue-green light; and by day the sun slants through the water, brown with millions of tiny bodies, as thickly as through the air in a dusty room. As the group dived, they began to make out a great dark shape in the cloudy water, moving so slowly it barely did more than drift. A last brown-red curtain of water parted before them in a swirl of current, and Nita found herself staring down at her first blue whale.
He was hardly even blue in this light, more a sort of slaty maroon; and the faint dapples on his sides were almost invisible. But his color was not what impressed Nita particularly. Neither was his size, though blues are the biggest of all whales; this one was perhaps a hundred twenty feet from nose to tail, and Kit, large for a sperm, was almost as big. That voice, that stately, leisurely, sober, sorrowful voice that sounded like a storm in mourning, that mattered to her; and so did the tiny eye, the size of a tennis ball, which looked at her from the immense bulk of the head. That eye was wise. There was understanding in it, and tolerance, and sadness: and most of all, great age.
Age was evident elsewhere too. The blue’s flukes were tattered and his steering fins showed scars and punctures, mementos of hungry sharks. Far down his tail, the broken stump of a harpoon protruded, the wood of it rotting, the metal crumbling with rust; yet though the tail moved slowly, it moved with strength. This creature had been through pain and danger in his long life, and though he had learned sadness, it had not made him bitter or weak.
Nita turned her attention back to the others, noticing that Kit was holding as still as she was, though at more of a distance; and even Hotshot was holding himself down to a slow glide. “Eldest Blue about the Gates,” S’reee sang, sounding more formal than Nita had ever heard her, “I greet you.”
“Senior for the Gatewaters,” said the Blue in his deep voice, with slow dignity, “I greet you also.”
“Then you’ve heard, Aroooon.”
“I have heard that the Sea has taken Ae’mhnuu to its Heart,” said the Blue, “leaving you Senior in his place, and distressed at a time when there’s distress enough. Leaving you also to organize a TwelveSong on very short notice.”
“That’s so.”
“Then you had best be about it,” said the Blue, “while time still remains for singing, and the bottom is still firm under us. First, though, tell me who comes here with you. Swift-Fire-In-The-Water I know already—“
Hotshot made the closest sound Nita could imagine to an embarrassed delphine cough. She smiled to herself; now she knew now what to tease him with if he got on her case.
“Land wizards, Aroooon,” S’reee said. “HNii’t—“ Nita wasn’t sure what to do, so she inclined the whole front of her body in the water in an approximation of a bow. “—and K!t.” Kit followed Nita’s suit. “They were the ones who went into the Dark High-And-Dry after the Naming of Lights— “
To Nita’s utter astonishment, Aroooon inclined his own body at them, additionally curling his flukes under him in what she abruptly recognized as a gesture of congratulation. “They’re calves,” S’reee added, as if not wanting to leave anything out.
“With all due respects, Senior, they are not,” Aroooon said. “They came back from that place. That is no calf’s deed. Many who were older than they did not come back — You will sing with us then? What parts?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Kit said. “S’reee needs to see if all her people come in.”
“The Silent Lord,” Nita said.
“Indeed.” Aroooon looked at her for several long moments. “You are a good age for it,” he said. “And you are learning the song—“
“I got most of the details from my manual,” she said. She had been up studying late the night before, though not as late as Kit had; a lot of exertion in salt air always left her drained, and she’d put the book aside after several hours, to finish the fine details of her research later. “The Sea will give me the rest, S’reee says, as we go along.”
“So it will. But I would have you be careful of how you enact your part, young HNii’t.” Aroooon drifted a bit closer to her, and that small, thoughtful eye regarded her carefully. “There is old trouble, and old power, about you and your friend… as if blood hung in the water where you swim. The Lone Power apparently knows your names. It will not have forgotten the disservice you did It recently. You are greatly daring to draw Its attention to you again. Even the Heart of the Sea — Timeheart as your kind calls it — will not be quiet for one who has freely attracted the Lone One’s enmity. Beware what you do. And do what you say; nowhere does the Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word.”
“Sir,” Nita said, rather unnerved, “I’ll be careful.”
“That is well.” Aroooon looked for a moment at Kit before speaking. “It js a whalesark, is it not?”
“Yes, sir,” Kit said in the same respectful tone Nita had heard him use on his father.
“Have a care of it, then, should you find yourself in one of the more combative parts of the Song,” said Aroooon. “Sperm whales were fighters before they were singers, and though their songs are often the fairest in the sea, the old blood rises too often and chokes those songs off before they can be sung. Keep your mouth closed, you were best, and you’ll do well enough.”
“Thank you, sir
.”
“Enough politeness, young wizard,” Aroooon said, for the first time sounding slightly crusty. “If size is honor, you have as much as I; and as for years, just keep breathing long enough and you’ll have as many of those as I do. — S’reee, you travel more widely now than I, so I put you a question. Are the shakings in the depths worse these days than they ought to be at this time of year and tide of Moon?”
“Much worse, Eldest. That was why Ae’mhnuu originally wanted to convene the Song. And I don’t know if the Song will be in time to save the fishing grounds to the east and north, around Nantucket and the Races. Hot water has been coming up close to there, farther east and south. The Shelf is changing.”
“Then let us get started,” Aroooon said. “I assume you came to ask me to call in some of the Celebrants, time being as limited as it is.”
“Yes, Aroooon. If you would. Though as the rite requires, I will be visiting the Pale One tomorrow, in company with HNii’t and Kit. The meeting place for the Song is to be ten thousand lengths north-northeast of the shoals at Barnegat, three days from now. A fast rehearsal — then right down the channel and through the Gates of the Sea, to the place appointed.”
“Well enough. Now administer me the Celebrant’s Oath, Senior, so that I may lawfully call the others.”
“Very well.” S’reee swam up close to Aroooon, so that she was looking him straight in one eye with one of hers; and when she began to sing, it was in a tone even more formal and careful than that in which she had greeted him.