lacking only the merest shard of light to be full lifted swollen and amber through the surface haze; northward, the bright and dark and bright again of Ambrose Light glittered on the uneasily shifting waves, with the opening and closing red eyes of Manhattan skyscraper lights low beyond it; and southward, gazing back at them, the red-orange glow of Arcturus sparkled above the water, here and there striking an answering spark off the crest or hollow of some wave. Nita lay there gasping in the wavewash and let the water rock her. Heaven knows, she thought, I need somebody to do it.
Beside her Kit surfaced in a great wash of water and blew spectacularly— slightly forward, as sperms do. “Neets—“
“Hi,” she said. She knew it was inane, but she could think of no other way to keep Kit from starting what he was going to start, except by saying dumb things.
“Neets,” he said, “we’re out of time. They’re going to start the descent as soon as everybody’s had a chance to rest a little and the protective spells are set.”
“Right,” she said, misunderstanding him on purpose. “We better get going, then—“ She tilted her head down and started to dive.
“Neets.” Suddenly Nita found that she was trying to dive through a forty-foot thickness of sperm whale. Nita blew in annoyance and let herself float back to the surface again. Kit bobbed up beside her — and, with great suddenness and a slam of air, threw off the whalesark. He dogpaddled there in the water, abruptly tiny beside her bulk. “Neets, get out of that for a minute.”
“Huh? Oh—“
It was a moment’s work to drop the whaleshape; then she was reduced to dogpaddling too. Kit was treading water a few feet from her, his hair slicked down with the water. He looked strange — tight, somehow, as if he were holding onto some idea or feeling very hard. “Neets,” he said, “I’m not buying this.”
Nita stared at him. “Kit,” she said finally, “look, there’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve bought it. Literally.”
“No,” Kit said. The word was not an argument, not even defiance; just a simple statement of fact. “Look, Neets — you’re the best wizard I’ve ever worked with—“
“I’m the only wizard you’ve ever worked with,” Nita said with a lopsided grin.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Kit said — and regretted it instantly.
“No need,” Nita said. “Kit — why don’t you just admit that this time I’ve got myself into something I can’t get out of.”
“Unless another wizard gets you out of it.”
She stared at him. “You loon, you can’t—“
“I know. And it hurts! I feel like I should volunteer, but I just can’t—“
“Good. ‘Cause you do and
“That won’t work either.” He made her own crooked grin back at her.
“ ‘All for one,’ remember? We both have to come out of this alive.” he looked away.
”Let’s go for both,” Nita said.
Silence.
She took a deep breath. “Look, even if we don’t both get out of this, I think it’s gonna be all right. Really —“
“No,” Kit said again, and that was that.
Nita just looked at him. “Okay,” she said. “Be that way.” And she meant it. This was the Kit she was used to working with: stubborn, absolutely sure of himself — most of the time; the person with that size-twelve courage packed into his size-ten self, a courage that would spend a few minutes trembling and then take on anything that got in its way — from the Lone Power to her father. If I’ve got to go, Nita thought in sudden irrational determination, that sheer guts has got to survive — and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to make sure he does.
“Look,” she said, “what’re you gonna tell my folks when you get back?”
“I’m gonna tell them we’re hungry,” Kit said, “and that you’ll fill ‘em in on the details while I eat.”
I did tell him to be that way… “Right,” Nita said.
For a long time they stayed where they were, treading water, watching the Moon inch its way up the sky, listening to the Ambrose fog signal hooting the minutes away. A mile or so off, a tanker making for New York Harbor went by, its green portside running lights toward them, and let off a low groaning blast of horn to warn local traffic. From under the surface, after a pause, came a much deeper note that held and then scaled downward out of human hearing range, becoming nothing but a vibration in the water.
“They’re ready to leave,” Kit said.
Nita nodded, slipped into whaleshape again, and looked one last time with all her heart at the sunset towers of Manhattan, until Kit had finished his change. Then they dived.
The Song of the Twelve
Hudson Channel begins its seaward course some twenty miles south of Ambrose Light — trending first due south, parallel to the Jersey shore, then turning gradually toward the southeast and the open sea as it deepens. Down its length, scattered over the channel’s bottom as it slowly turns from gray-green mud to gray-black sand to naked, striated stone, are the broken remnants of four hundred years’ seafaring in these waters and the refuse of three hundred years of human urban life, mixed randomly together. There are new, almost whole-bodied wrecks lying dead on their sides atop old ones long since gone to rot and rust; great dumps of incinerated wood and ash, chemical drums and lumps of coal and jagged piles of junk metal; sunken, abandoned buoys, old cable spindles, unexploded ordnance and bombs and torpedoes; all commingled with and nested in a thick ooze of untreated, settled sewage — the garbage of millions of busy lives, thrown where they won’t have to look at it.
The rugged bed of the channel starts out shallow, barely a fathom deeper than the seabed that surrounds it. It was much deeper once, especially where it begins; but the ooze has filled it thickly, and for some miles it is now hard to tell that any channel at all lies under the rotting trash, under the ancient faded beer cans and the hubcaps red with rust. Slowly, though, some twenty miles down the channel from its head, an indentation becomes apparent — a sort of crooked rut worn by the primordial Hudson River into the ocean floor, a mile wide at the rut’s deepest, five miles wide from edge to edge. This far down — forty fathoms under the surface and some sixty feet below the surrounding ocean bed, between a great wide U of walls — the dark sludge of human waste lies even thicker. The city has not been dumping here for some years, but all the old years’ sewage has not gone away. Every stone in the deepening rut, every pressure-flattened pile of junk on the steadily downward-sloping seabed around the channel, is coated thick and black. Bottom-feeding fish are few here: There is nothing for them to eat. Krill do not live here: The water is too foul to support the microscopic creatures they eat, and even of a summer night the thick olive color of the sea is unchanged.
The channel’s walls begin to grow less and less in height, as if the ocean is growing tired of concealing the scar in its side. Gradually the rut flattens out to a broad shallow depression like a thousand other valleys in the Sea. A whale hanging above the approximate end of the channel, some one hundred thirty miles southeast of New York Harbor, has little to see on looking back up the channel’s length — just an upward-sloping scatter of dark-slimed rocks and mud and scraps of garbage, drab even in the slate-green twilight that is all this bottom ever sees of noon. But looking downward, southward, where its course would run if the channel went any farther— the abyss. Suddenly the thinning muck, and the gentle swellings and dippings of the sea bed, simply stop at the edge of a great steep semicircular cliff, two miles from side to side. And beyond the cliff, beyond the edge of the Continental Shelf, curving away to northeast and southwest — nothing. Nothing anywhere but the vague glow of the ocean’s surface three hundred feet above; and below, beyond the semicircle, the deadly stillness of the great deeps, and a blackness one can hear on the skin like a dirge. Icy cold, and the dark.
“I warn you all,” S’reee said as the eleven gathered Celebrants and Kit hung there, looking down into that darkness at the head of Hudson Canyon. “Remember the length of this dive; take your own breathing needs carefully into consideration, and tell me now if you think you may need more air than our spells will be taking with us. Remember that, at the great pressures in the Below, you’ll need more oxygen than you usually do — and work will make you burn more fuel. If you feel you need to revise the breathing figures on the group spell upward, this is
