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?”
