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 whalesark 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.
“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
