face, when she finally got some control over herself and looked up, almost hurt her more than her own pain.
After a while she pushed him away. Carl resisted her for a moment. “Nita,” he said. “If you— If you do…” He paused. “… Thank you,” he finally said, looking at her hard. “Thank you. For the ten million lives that’ll keep on living. They’ll never know. But the wizards will… and won’t ever forget.”
“A lot of good that’d do me!” Nita said, caught between desperate laughter and tears.
“Sweetheart,” Carl said, “if you’re in this world for comfort, you’ve come to the wrong place… whether you’re wizard or just plain mortal. And if you’re doing what you’re doing because of the way other people will feel about it — you’re definitely in the wrong business. What you do has to be done because of how you’ll feel about you… the way you did it last night, with your folks.” His voice was rueful. “There are no other rewards… if only because no matter what you do, no one will ever think the things about you that you want them to think. Not even the Powers.”
“Right,” Nita said again.
They let go of each other. Carl turned and walked away quickly. The air slammed itself shut behind him, and he was gone.
Nita walked back to the house.
She kept her good-byes brief. “We may be back tonight,” she said to her mother and father as they stood together on the beach, “or we may not. S’reee says it’ll depend on how much of the rehearsal we get finished.”
“Rehearsal—“ Her mother looked at her curiously.
“Uh-huh. It’s like I told you,” Kit said. “Everyone who sings has his own part — but there’s some ensemble singing, and it has to be done right.”
“Kit, we’re late,” Nita said. “Mom—“ She grabbed her mother and hugged her hard. “Don’t worry if we don’t come back tonight, Mom, please,” she said. “We may just go straight into the Song — and that’s a day and a half by itself. Look for us Monday morning.” Us! her mind screamed, but she ignored it. “Dad—“ She turned to him, hugged him too, and saw, out of the corner of her eye, her mother hugging Kit.
Nita glanced up and down the beach. “It’s all clear, Kit,” she said. She shrugged out of the towel wrapped around her, leaving it with her mother, then sprinted for the water. A few fast hops over several breakers, and there was depth enough to dive and stroke out to twenty-foot water. Nita leaped into the whaleshape as if it were an escape rather than a trap from which she might never return. Once a humpback, she felt normal again — and felt a twinge of nervousness; there was something S’reee had warned her about that…
No matter. Nita surfaced and blew good-bye at her mother and father, then turned for Kit, who was treading water beside her, to take her dorsal fin and be towed out to depth.
Out in the fifty-foot water Kit wrapped the whalesark about him and made the change with a swiftness that was almost savage. The sperm whale that appeared in his place had a bitter, angry look to its movements when it began to swim away from shore.
“Kit,” Nita said as they went, “you okay?”
It was some time before he answered. “No,” he said. “Why should I be? When you’re going to—“ He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Kit, look—“
“No, you look. Don’t you see that there’s nothing I can do about all this? And I don’t like it!” His song was another of the scraping sperm-whale battlecries, soft but very heartfelt, and the rage in it chattered right down Nita’s skin like nails down a blackboard.
“There’s not much I can do about it myself,” she said, “and I don’t like it either. Let’s not talk about it for now, please! My brain still hurts enough from last night.”
“Neets,” he said, “we’ve got to talk about it sometime. Tomorrow’s it.”
“Fine. Before tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’ve got today to worry about. Are we even going the right way?”
He laughed at her then, a painful sound. “Boy, are you preoccupied,” Kit said. “Clean your ears out and listen!”
She stopped everything but the ticks and clicks a humpback uses to find its way, and listened — and was tempted to laugh herself. The sea had a racket hidden in it. From the southwest was coming an insane assortment of long, odd, wild sounds. Sweet high flutings that cut sharply through the intervening distance; clear horncalls, as if someone hunted under the waves; outer-spacy whistles and warbles like the electronic cries of orbiting satellites; deep bass scrapes and rumbles, lawn-mower buzzes and halftone moans and soulful sighs. And many of those sounds, sooner or later, came back to the same main theme — a series of long wistful notes, slowly ascending into pitches too high and keen for human ears, then whispering away, lost in the quiet breathing of the water.
Nita had never heard that main theme before, but she recognized it instantly from her reading and her wizard’s-sense of the Sea. It was the loss/ gain/sorrow motif that ran all through the Song of the Twelve; and what she heard now, attenuated by distance but otherwise clear, was the sound of its singers, tuning up for the performance in which that mournful phrase would become not just a motif but a reality.
“Kit,” Nita said with a shiver, “that’s a lot more than ten whales! Who are all those other voices?”
He bubbled, a shrug. “Let’s find out.”
She whistled agreement and struck off after Kit, due west, away from the south shore of the island and out across the Atlantic-to-Ambrose shipping approaches once more. Song echoed more and more loudly in the sunlit shallows through which they swam; but underneath them Nita and Kit were very aware of the depths from which no echo returned — the abyss of Hudson Canyon, far below them, waiting.
“This is it,” Kit said at last, practically in Nita’s ear, as they came to the fringes of the area S’reee’s instructions had mentioned — fifteen miles east-northeast of Barnegat, New Jersey, right over the remains of an old sunken tanker six fathoms down in the water. And floating, soaring, or slowly fluking through the diffuse green- golden radiance of the water, were the whales.
Nita had to gulp once to find her composure. Hundreds of whales had gathered and were milling about, whales of every kind — minke whales, sei whales, sperm whales, dolphins of more kinds than she knew existed, in a profusion of shapes and colors, flashing through the water; several blues, grave-voiced, gliding with huge slow grace; fin whales, hardly smaller than the blues, bowhead whales and pygmy rights and humpbacks, many of them; gray whales and pygmy sperms and narwhals with their long single spiral teeth, like unicorn horns; belugas and killers and scamperdowns and bottle-nosed whales— “Kit,” Nita sang, faint-voiced, “S’reee didn’t tell me there were going to be people here!”
“Me either. I guess spectators at the rehearsal are so common, she forgot…” Kit sounded unconcerned.
Easy for you, Nita thought. You like crowds! She sang a few notes of sonar, trying nervously to hear some familiar shape. One shape at least Nita recognized, accompanied by the slow, calm, downscaling note of the Blue, as Aroooon passed by, a gold-tinged shadow in the background of greenness and the confusion of bodies. And there was Hotshot’s high chatter, some ways off, accompanied by several other dolphin voices very like his — members of his pod.
Stillness swept over the spectators as she approached with Kit, and they recognized who she was. And a single note began to go up from them, starting at the fringes of the circle, working its way inward even to the Celebrants, until she heard even Aroooon’s giant voice taking it up. One note, held in every range from the dolphins’ dog-whistle trilling to the water-shaking thunder of the blues. One thought, one concept in the Speech, trumpeting through the water with such force that Nita began to shake at the sound of it. Praise. They knew she was the Silent One. They knew what she was going to do for them. They were thanking her.
Stunned, Nita forgot to swim — just drifted there in painful joy.
From behind, as the note slowly ebbed away, Kit nudged her. “Get the lead out, Neets,” he sang, just for her hearing. “You’re the star of this show-So start acting like it! Go in there and let them know you’re here.”
She swam slowly through the spectator whales, into the clear water in the center of their great circle, where the Celebrants were gathered.
One by one, as she circled above the weed-covered remnant of the trawler, Nita quickly identified the whales she knew. Aroooon, yes, swimming on more or less by himself to tideward, singing his deep scrape of notes with the absent concentration of a perfectionist who has time to hunt perfection; Hotshot, doing barrel rolls near the surface and chattering through the quick bright harmonies of some part of the Wanderer’s song; Areinnye, aloof from both Wanderer and Blue, running again and again over a phrase of the Gray Lord’s song and paying no further attention to Nita after a quick glance.
