Games Wizards Play

2

Coney Island

THE SOUTH SHORE OF LONG ISLAND can properly be described as starting just east of New York’s Staten Island, where the southern side of Brooklyn meets the Great South Bay at the outward-jutting spit of land called Coney Island.

The nautical charts don’t show it as such, of course. This area is part of the huge, busy expanse of New York Harbor, and the charts are slashed up and down and across the wide white stripes of transit lanes and shipping lanes, and dotted with channel and bottom soundings, with buoy markers, and the little dashed circles that indicate underwater wrecks or danger areas. Only close to shore do things quiet down to a scatter of numbers—the distance to the seafloor in fathoms—with here and there a notation about submerged pilings or obstructions. One of these areas, Coney Island Channel, runs for a mile or so southeastward from the tiny peninsula’s farthest western edge at Norton Point.

Just inshore from the even 20-foot depth of the channel is Coney Island proper. From out on the water, the beachfront amusement park itself is only a small part of the view, the biggest of the thrill rides standing up like an awkward scarlet mushroom near the longest of the piers that stick out into the water. Farther to the west, a double handful of twenty- or thirty-story apartment buildings catch the light reflected off the water on bright afternoons, their windows blindingly afire with gridded squares of Sun.

Nita broke surface and put her head above water, and the glance of that hot white light caught her right in the starboard eye and blinded it.

“Ow,” she said, wincing, and submerged again, or tried to. For a moment nothing happened except that her tail beat the water behind her into foam, which was annoying . . . especially out here. She was no more than three hundred meters from one of the busiest waterways in the whole New York metropolitan area, and she had no particular desire to be run over by some chartered pleasure craft or returning fishing boat because she was having a tail malfunction.

“Dammit,” Nita said under her breath, and stopped thrashing. Then she rolled over on her back to float and think while scratching idly at the barnacles on her belly with one long pectoral fin. “S’reee,” she sang into the water, “this thing’s still not working . . .”

“The same problem as before?” inquired a voice floating up from underneath her. “Or something new?”

“New. It’s the tail this time.”

The voice said something very rude and crass in a long string of squeaks and squeals that sounded like a violin having its neck wrung. “I guess we should be grateful that it keeps failing in different ways each time . . .”

“Speak for yourself,” Nita said in a low, long humpback wail. She flipped both pectoral fins sideways and used their weight to roll over again, putting herself once more belly-down, and one more time tried to flip her tail up. She managed at least to lean in to the nose-downward orientation for beginning a dive, but the tail hung above the water and waved around in utter uselessness. There was a weird jittering feel to the movement, like the kind of thigh-muscle spasm Nita got sometimes after gym period when she’d just done an extra round of the quarter-mile track and pushed herself too hard.

Just hold still, she told the tail, despite her increasing nervousness at hanging there like someone doing a handstand half in and half out of the water. Am I just going to fall over sideways again, or backwards—But the stillness was starting to pay off as Nita slowly and carefully exhaled and let some of her buoyancy go, and she slid farther and farther down until the tail was halfway under, then nearly all the way, then just the flukes sticking out in the air—

Finally she was fully submerged. Nita kept sinking down through the silvery-green water toward where the others were waiting. S’reee was closest to the surface, half rolled over and watching her with concern out of her port-side eye. Hanging more upright just below her, and watching Nita carefully, was one of S’reee’s colleagues, a reticent and routinely cranky right-whale wizard called Uu’tsch, who had the heaviest encrustation of barnacles she’d ever seen on a living being. Farther down, swimming back and forth in a casual and theoretically unconcerned manner, was a third humpback, S’reee’s friend Hwiii’sh. At least “friend” was the best word Nita could find for him at the moment. While the Speech had all kinds of words for relationships, most of the ones Nita had been researching recently were for relationships with other wizards, and Hwiii’sh wasn’t one. He was a food critic—a concept that had confused Nita significantly when she first started getting to grips with it.

She tried working the tail again, and this time it started to respond, though not evenly: she could still feel a jittering in the muscles on the right side, and that bothered her. “Did you have time to run a diagnostic while you were up there?” Uu’tsch said in his creaky voice.

“No,” Nita said, “mostly I was trying to make sure I wasn’t going to get run over by something I couldn’t hear coming! Or see real well.” It was a problem in these waters. There was so much low-level sound from the never-ending big ship and small-craft traffic in the main New York Harbor channels that surprisingly large boats could sneak up on you if you were unwary and the conditions were right. And hearing aside, there was still a big spot of sunscorch interfering with her vision: a humpback’s eyes weren’t designed for looking at so concentrated a reflection of sunlight as she’d caught from those apartment-building windows.

Nita tried to just relax and let herself drift farther down through the murky water toward the diagnostic spell circle that S’reee and Uu’tsch had laid out on the sandy bottom. The humpback whaleshape she was wearing was normally one she had little trouble with; she’d become fairly expert at this particular shape-change over time, it being made easier by the blood she’d shared with S’reee back when Nita had first become involved in the Song of the Twelve. However, the shape she was wearing today, though it might superficially have looked the same, was something else entirely. It wasn’t a result of a shape-change spell she’d worked herself. She was wearing a whalesark, and after the last couple of hours’ work it was driving her just about nuts.

Whalesarks were rare—since they could only be made from the donated nervous systems of whales near death—and they required a lot of complicated maintenance. And more complicated yet was the business of building them from scratch. The harvesting alone was a harrowing business, as emotional for the donor and his or her pod as it would have been for any human organ donor and family. And then came the business of mating the sophisticated and incredibly delicate net of preserved bioelectricity and other forces to the wizardry that would stabilize it. Once that was done the sark became a tool that could be used by life forms other than cetacean ones to become a whale for relatively extended periods, while being spared the stresses, dangers, and energy drain of doing a full shape-change oneself.

The business of engineering a whalesark was far beyond Nita’s present competence. Not that it would be that way forever: she was getting interested. And you need something to do when the visionary talent isn’t working, she’d thought. But she’d accidentally stumbled into the troubleshooting and maintenance end of things one afternoon while catching some rays out at the end of the jetty past the old Coast Guard station near Jones Beach and idly chatting with S’reee, who was taking the afternoon off from more serious work. It occurred to them both at more or less the same time, while they were talking over some of the things that had happened years ago during the Song of the Twelve, that—as far as troubleshooting unruly sarks was concerned—in Nita, the local cetacean wizards had the ideal candidate for the job. She knew perfectly well what a whale’s body should feel like, having worked in one repeatedly and under considerable stress. But Nita was also noncetacean by birth, and would be perfectly set up to report on how a sark behaved for a human or other wizard who needed to work inside it.

So over the last year or so, Nita had more or less become the Western Hemisphere’s go-to girl for troubleshooting malfunctioning whalesarks. It was never an easy job, though. And running in a new donation was always challenging, as it wasn’t uncommon for donors to have had physical problems when they died. The neural “memory” of these problems had to be carefully disentangled from the bioelectric structure of the whalesark before it could be mated to the necessary support and control wizardries and commissioned for active service. And then there was always debugging to do after the wizardries were added. You might know how the spell was meant to affect a basic nervous system, but each one was unique, and every one Nita had worked with so far had found a way to pop some new and intriguing problem when it was in the precommissioning stages.

This one, though, was pushing the envelope of new-and-intriguing problems to the point where it was starting to frustrate Nita, because every time they solved one problem, something else came up. “Guys,” she sang to the others as she dropped down toward them, “might be we’ve got a problem with the spell matrix itself. I think something’s going on with the passthrough network that runs your intention through the spell proper and into the virtual neuronal net.”

Under his barnacles, Uu’tsch started to bristle. It was more than just an idiom with him: the skin movement beneath the crust that ran all along his back and halfway down his sides could be seen as a kind of ripple, as if the barnacles were scales. “If you’re suggesting that the underlying structure is faulty—”

“I didn’t hear any suggestions about fault as such,” S’reee said. “But we know the donor was having neurological problems when he moved on. It could be a phantom neurasthenia problem: we’ve seen that before when the nervous system’s shadow wasn’t quite clear yet that it was dead.”

“Yes, well, that’s hardly my fault—”

Here we go, Nita thought. She sighed out a few bubbles and swam away rather cautiously, because her tail was still misbehaving. Today, as in previous sessions, S’reee had been spending more time handling Uu’tsch than she had the whalesark. She’s sounding kind of resigned to it, Nita thought, and wished she were half as good at the resignation thing, because Uu’tsch was starting to get on her nerves. But he’s such a stick, sometimes. So rigid. And always ready to think you’re criticizing him. “Tell me he’s not going to mess up everything you’ve been doing!” came the whisper from just below and behind her.

Nita rolled her outboard eye—which took some doing, as whales’ eyes aren’t really built for rolling—and waited for Hwiii’sh to come up on her inboard side. She waved her tail at him in a gesture that among humpbacks was roughly the equivalent of someone patting you reassuringly on the shoulder. “Calm down,” she said. “We’re way past any possible messing-up stage. It’s not like anything’s going to explode.”

Hwiii’sh let out a few bubbles, sort of a sigh of relief. “He’s just so edgy all the time . . .”

“Well,” Nita said, and then spent a moment more thinking about what else to say. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with Hwiii’sh, to some extent; it was more that it didn’t seem smart to let him know that. She’d been surprised to discover how fascinated he was by the wizards S’reee worked with—especially the human ones. And though the business of errantry had occasionally brought her to places where wizards were celebrities, this was the first time she’d ever had someone constantly trying to hang around with her because they thought wizardry made her cool. It was kind of odd.

“It’s just that he’s absolutely dedicated to getting it right,” Nita said finally, since that was true enough. “And he’s got to be feeling some pressure. He’s the one who knows most about how to build the substructure wizardry, and if it doesn’t work right the first time, I think it makes him feel, well, less than effective.”

“That makes sense,” Hwiii’sh said after a pause. “But it’s good of you to be so easy on him when he snapped at you.”

Nita laughed. “If that was snapping, I’ve had way worse,” she said. “It’s okay, we’re good.”

She angled back around toward where the others were examining the complex spell-sphere that they’d anchored to one spot in the water, and was relieved to feel Hwiii’sh hang back as she got closer. “’Ree, I was having a thought,” Nita said, singing quietly so as not to intrude too much on Uu’tsch’s thoughts as he leaned in to examine the inner structures of the spell, nearer the core of the sphere. “The sark started misbehaving worse when I was closer to the surface. In fact, it was having the most trouble when I was out of the water.”

“Not very useful for a life form that breathes air,” S’reee said, as she and Nita swam a little aside. There was a faint glow around S’reee’s fins, indicative of some diagnostic spell of her own that she’d been running; but it was on hold at the moment. “This is so annoying. I thought we had the main-system interleaving handled by now . . .”

Nita tried to shake her head “I don’t know” and found herself wiggling side to side a bit aimlessly, which made her laugh out a big stream of bubbles. It always took her a couple of hours’ steady work to stop trying to do human body-language things with the whale body, whether she was fully shape-changed or just wearing a sark. “Well, this one’s been one big long game of annoy-an-anemone, hasn’t it. Fix one thing, something else pops up.”

S’reee groaned a small laugh herself. Along with some earlier discussions of what went on at Coney Island had come some attempts to explain Whac-A-Mole, and some unlikely undersea versions of the game had been invented. “It’s too true. Poor Uu’tsch’s nerves are in shreds.”

“Noticed that.” Nita turned upside down, thinking. “There’s trouble with the optical circuitry too. Didn’t we build in a filter for bright light already? I don’t remember it giving me so much trouble the last time. But nothing cut in when I was topside.”

“I’d have to check the history-and-error logs, but I’m sure we did.”

“Something to do with the pressure-handling routines, then? We made lots of changes in that last time, just before we had to break up, and I wasn’t sure I understood all the more technical stuff. A little out of my depth there . . .”

S’reee imitated Nita’s bubble of amusement, for all the cetacean versions of the Speech had the idiom. “It’s worth checking. There was definitely a lot of tweaking going on.”

The two of them swam back toward the spell globe. “Uu’tsch,” S’reee said, “hNii’t’s noticed something. All these newer problems get more troublesome near the surface. Could this be—”

“Something bathygenic?” Uu’tsch held quite still, considering, as everyone leaned down to peer more closely at the spell diagram. “We did an awful lot of work on the depth-and-pressure routines last time . . .”

Moments later he had his big nose stuck deep into one of the wizardry’s secondary cores, and the surface of the boundary sphere started sporadically shivering with pale golden light, bright against the wavering blue of the shallows. “All right,” S’reee said, sounding resigned now in an entirely different way, “this is the part where we float around and watch him do things he’s way too excited to explain in real time . . .”

“The logs’ll catch the details,” Nita said. She was getting a sense that this mantra went a long way toward keeping S’reee calm, especially when so much of her own composure was being sacrificed to keep the participants in this exercise tranquil. “So tell me.” She leaned sideways to go skin-to-skin to S’reee, so she could discuss things with her so softly as not to be heard by anyone else in the nearby water. “Hwiii’sh hasn’t missed a single one of these sessions, has he? Most rational beings who’re not wizards would be bored out of their skulls by now.”

S’reee produced a tiny moan of amusement. “Well. Rationality is relative . . .”

This was a thought that had already occurred to Nita. S’reee is way smarter than Hwiii’sh, she’d thought more than once, no matter how complex it is to analyze regional backflavors in krill. There is something about this I’m not getting . . . “And you’d have sent him on his way a long while back if him being here bothered you. So what’s the attraction?”

S’reee blew some ruminative bubbles. “Well, it’s not just that he’s very handsome. Or that he has a nice personality. There’s more to it than that . . .”

“Or that he has the hots for you because you’re a wizard.”

S’reee gave Nita an ironic look. “Okay, it might have started that way. But there’s more going on.”

“You’re just not sure what.”

“No, and I’m giving it some time. This kind of thing—if you try taking it apart to see what makes it go—”

“Or not go—” Nita said, casting an eye toward Uu’tsch.

“—then you might not be able to get it back together again. Or once you did, it might not work the same way. Or at all.”

“Mmm,” Nita said. Funny that those are thoughts I’ve been having lately, too . . . S’reee had been seeing Hwiii’sh for some months now. But to Nita’s way of thinking the “seeing” was sounding suspiciously like dating, and she suspected that S’reee and Hwiii’sh were thinking seriously about starting a pod. And where do they go with that once they get the two of them sorted out? A pod’s usually three. Do they go around auditioning third parties, or do they . . .

Nita stopped herself, suddenly feeling strongly that whale sex wasn’t something she wanted to get into just now. The issue of human sex was entirely too much on her mind as it was: not exactly in her mental backyard yet, but nonetheless looming on the horizon. “‘Ree,” Nita said after a moment, because she wasn’t sure how well this subject was going to cross the species boundary, “is there any chance you’ve noticed—”

“Aha!” Uu’tsch howled, and S’reee and Nita spasmed a couple meters away from each other with the sheer volume and shock of the noise.

“We’ll hope that’s a solution,” S’reee said, exchanging a glance of mutual annoyance with Nita. The two of them turned and swam back to the spell globe, where one part of one of the secondary cores was flaring brighter as Uu’tsch teased a long string of words in the Speech out of it.

“Just as I thought,” Uu’tsch said as they swam up. He’d already turned his attention to the long drift of Speech glowing faintly golden in the water. Sparks of light swelled here and there on the strand, like the air-bladder nodes on a strand of kelp, and pulsed gently at slightly different rhythms. “The pressure differential routines had a conflict with the virtual blood chemistry regimen, the part that serves the virtual ADP in the musculature and the—”

“Complicated parts of the sark, yes,” S’reee said in some haste. “That’s a nice piece of analysis, Uu’tsch.”

“—and so of course that means there was nothing wrong with the spell matrix at all, that’s just fine, nothing worse than a connectivity issue between it and the depth management routines.” He threw Nita a look—literally a side eye, from way down deep in the crust of barnacles on that side. “Won’t take more than a few days to troubleshoot.”

It’s just magic the way without saying a word he makes his wonderfulness somehow still be my fault, Nita thought. Powers That Be but I am done with this guy. Isn’t it wonderful that I’m going to be working with him for the immediate forever? Still, somehow she managed to keep herself from bubbling in exasperation. “That’s great. When do you think you might be ready for me to take this out for a run again?”

Everyone got the inturned expression that meant they were communing with the Sea in order to have a look at their schedules. Nita closed her eyes and did the same, as the sark had a manual-emulation routine built into it so that wizards wearing it could use the Sea as a manual the way a cetacean wizard did.

Then Nita exhaled in quiet annoyance, as all she was getting was a huge vague roar of data with a sort of edge of excitement around the boundaries of it. One more thing that still needs work, and no point in mentioning it to Uu’tsch right now, he’ll just get cranky . . . “You guys mind if I get out of this?” she said. “I know my own system better . . .”

“No, no, go right ahead,” Uu’tsch said, vague, paying no particular attention to Nita. S’reee simply shrugged her fins at Nita, an amused gesture.

Nita said the brief spell that brought her preprogrammed force field bubble into being around the whale-body, and got the get-rid-of-the-water routine ready. Then she tugged the loose spell-thread that hung out of the whalesark’s wizardry, saying the single very long and involved word that undid it—as complicated a construct as might have been expected when you wanted to make absolutely sure it wasn’t something you could say accidentally. The whale-shape around her collapsed in a brief storm of light as it released some of the unused wizardly power that had been keeping it online, and as it did the water-expulsion wizardry instantly came up and teleported the water inside Nita’s force bubble outside of it, replacing it with the air that was normally stored in the force field’s own onboard claudication. A second later she was standing in her bathing suit at the bottom of her force field sphere, dripping a little, with the decommissioned whalesark draped over one arm like a shawl of sea-blue glows and glitters.

She threw the weightless thing over one shoulder so as to have her hands free, reached sideways in the air to unzip the between-spaces claudication that followed her around when she was on active errantry, and reached into it to dig out her wizard’s manual. The usual brief fumbling and feeling around ensued—a claudication has something of a gift for filling up with stuff—in this case pens and thumb drives and a couple of paperbacks and a half-eaten roll of LifeSavers that had gotten in there somehow. Now, where has it—it should be within reach, oh wait, is this where my hairbrush went? Well, that’s a relief—

Aha. Finally Nita felt the familiar shape and pulled her manual out. The scheduling pages in the back were highlighted at the edges: she riffled through to them. “Okay,” she said. “What are we talking about here? Next Tuesday?”

And she stopped, because some page edges farther along were blinking. “Wait, what the—” She hastily flipped pages to that section. “Oh, now what?” she muttered in the general direction of whoever among the Powers That Be might have been listening. “Can’t you see I’m busy here? I swear, every time I start getting settled into some kind of schedule, it’s ‘Oh no, we’d better get Nita in here to fix everything up.’ Aren’t there like half a billion other wizards on the planet who you could . . .”

She trailed off. “What?” S’reee said, peering through Nita’s force bubble.

Nita turned around and waved her manual at S’reee. “Do you know anything about this?”

“This what?”

“Whatever an ‘Invitational’ is,” Nita said, irritated. “I honestly don’t need another work thing right now!”

S’reee stared, then burst out laughing at her. “h’Niiit, you’re kidding me, surely?” She waved her flukes around in a bemused way. At least that was how Nita was reading it. She was no specialist yet in whale body language, and being in a sperm-whalesark when you were trying to read humpback kinesics didn’t confer any particular advantages.

“Not on purpose,” Nita said. “What is it, some kind of meeting?”

“Honestly, I have to wonder whether you and K!t have been kept way too busy, that you don’t know about this! Never mind, one thing at a time. Next Tuesday?”

Nita paged back again. “No, I’ve got class,” she said. Her school had recently gone split-scheduled, and she was still having trouble getting used to being in class only in the mornings on some days and only in the afternoons on others. “Mmmm . . . Thursday? Some time in the morning be okay?”

The others agreed; even Uu’tsch didn’t sound too put out. They settled on ten a.m., which was early enough for Nita on a day when there wasn’t some urgent reason to be up earlier, and the group broke up, Nita passing the shut-down whalesark back to Uu’tsch through her force bubble. “You go on ahead, Hwii’ish,” S’reee said to her companion as the others left. “I’ll find you by sound in a bit. Look for me about halfway down Third Isle.”

“Sure,” he said. “Swim well, hNii’t!”

“You too, big guy.”

“You’ve got a fan there,” S’reee said, very low, as Hwii’ish made his way off eastward through the water and finally disappeared from view.

“Yeah, I’ve been noticing that. Look, let’s go up top,” Nita said. “I’ll dump the bubble and go whale.”

S’reee snorted out her blowhole. “You’re such a poet,” she said, and headed for the surface.

Nita reached out to the surface of her force bubble and told it through touch to float itself up to the surface. As the two of them bobbed up together, Nita dismissed the force shield—which left her in nothing but a one-piece bathing suit, well out into the Great South Bay, in weather that could only be described as “springlike” with great generosity. “Oooh, bad-idea-bad-idea-bad-idea!” she gasped.

S’reee was throwing Nita an amused look even as Nita felt around in her head for the shape-change spell that had become so second nature for her since she and S’reee had shared blood all that while back. “You feel water temperatures like a cetid even when you’re primate-skinned,” S’reee said. “My fault, I guess . . .”

Nita’s teeth were chattering so hard she had to stop twice to clamp down on her jaw muscles so she could get the words of the spell out right. But as the last word slid out, suddenly everything smoothed itself over, the water was warm, and Nita’s nose was ten feet in front of her eyes again, where it belonged. In this shape, anyway . . .

She let out a long moan of a sigh. “Better,” Nita said. “‘Third Isle?’ What’s that, Fire Island?”

“That’s right. Over by—” S’reee briefly went quiet, correlating her own internal mapping against human conventions via the Sea. “Sunken Forest, you call it.”

“That’s a pretty good ways from here,” Nita said as she got her fins working again. After you’d spent an afternoon in a whalesark, it took a while sometimes to remind yourself about how your own whaleshape normally worked. It was like the way your gait changed after you switched out of highish heels back into sneakers.

S’reee waved a fin in a shrug as they started eastward. “Hwii’ish likes to swim fast,” she said.

“You mean he likes to think you can’t catch up with him if he swims fast.” Nita snickered a string of bubbles as they submerged together.

“Well,” S’reee said, under her breath, but not correcting Nita.

“And you like letting him think you can’t.”

S’reee rolled her starboard-side eye at Nita. “Every now and then,” she said, “I disabuse him of the notion.”

Nita laughed. “I just bet you do.”

She concentrated on sinking deeper, bathing herself in the restful dark green of the near-shore Bay and listening to the sounds of the near-offshore waters; the buzz of distant pleasure-boat motors, the soft groans and clicks and whistles of various marine life drifting up from the ocean floor some forty feet below them, the distant calls of other whales, like murmurs half heard across a busy room. “Look,” Nita said, “now that we’re out of singing distance . . .”

“You’re going to ask me what’s going on with Uu’tsch and his personal hygiene problem.”

“Oh God.” Nita went hot all over with embarrassment. “Did he know I was thinking that? I’ll die right here.”

“I can think of better reasons for dying,” S’reee said, sounding a bit dry again, and Nita had to laugh; genuine death had been a lot closer to both of them, when they were first working together years back, for reasons much more worthwhile than embarrassment. “But no, I doubt it. He’s no expert on human thought or body language. The truth is, he doesn’t see much of anything but himself and wizardry. The rest of us are just a nuisance to him, and as for the barnacles, I’m not even sure he notices them. I don’t ask. He’s a genius at what he does. Everybody who works with him just lets him get on with it.” She chuckled. “Which is why no one makes a big deal of us going well into the Busy Water and halfway to Barnegat to consult him. He’s the talent: need goes where the talent is . . .”

“Okay. I was just trying not to stare.”

“Just what we all do. But I’m not sure he even notices us doing it, frankly. He’s so wrapped up in himself and his work.”

Nita felt a lot better. “Fine. Now what is this Invitational thing? Last time I saw something like this, Dairine had signed me up for an interplanetary student exchange . . .”

“Your excursus, that’s right. No, that was just a working holiday! This is completely different. Not about work as such. In fact it’s an honor.”

“Oh, no,” Nita said immediately.

S’reee bubbled a laugh into the water. “All right, and kind of a challenge too! But you can turn it down if you want to.”

Nita had her own thoughts about that, even though she’d hardly heard anything yet. The Powers had a sneaky way of getting you to do things for them even when you’d sworn you absolutely weren’t going to. “Okay,” she said as they slipped into the barrier-island waters just east of Coney Island, “what’s it about?”

“Well. You know that not everything one hears from the Sea, or that you get from your manuals, comes straight from the Powers That Be.”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Wizards contribute lots of spells and raw data. General knowledge, reports on local conditions . . .”

“Of course. Well, it’s important that such contributions don’t just happen by accident, or under stress. Wizards have a responsibility to further the Art, and part of that is making sure the new up-and-coming talent is getting the support it needs.”

“At wizardry in general? That’s what the Advisory- and Senior-level wizards were for, I thought.”

“That’s only part of it. Because when you’re a younger wizard, who wants to be listening to Advisories all the time? They’re so old.”

Nita burst out laughing at that. “Oh, yeah, look at you! Who was a Senior just now, oh ancient one?”

“As if I didn’t get rid of that title as fast as I could!” S’reee said. “And good riddance. But even among cetaceans, when it comes to long-term learning, we tend to retain better what we learn either by ourselves or from others our own age. Or close to it, anyway.”

“So they want us to—what? Start teaching other wizards stuff?”

“Not so much teaching. Well, yes, to a certain extent . . . but it’s a mentoring program at heart. Just because someone’s incredibly talented doesn’t necessarily mean they know what to do with it.”

“Please,” Nita moaned. “Dairine.”

S’reee bubbled with amusement. “I wasn’t going to mention . . .”

The image of a whole crowd of Dairines gathered together in one place was already making Nita twitch. “Anyway,” S’reee said, “an Invitational is probably the biggest gathering of wizards you’re ever likely to see on a regular basis. Certainly the biggest noncrisis gathering. Once every eleven years the new intake of wizardly talent comes together to show what they can do.”

“What, to do spells?”

“Oh, among other things, yes. But not wizardries that’ve been around for a while. This is as much about new spell design as anything else. The participating wizards display new ways they’ve found to exploit the forces and elements of the universe. And the Speech, of course.”

“Huh,” Nita said. “Sounds like some kind of science fair.”

S’reee briefly looked puzzled. “I’m not getting a meaningful translation into the Speech on that phrase.”

Nita frowned, because she wasn’t sure how much of what was involved in a science fair would make sense to a whale even if she found a way to just put it into S’reee’s dialect of humpback, let alone the Speech. “It’s an educational thing. You do projects that demonstrate some scientific principle. Or else you show how you’d solve a problem using science. The best projects get a prize, usually.”

“Oh,” S’reee said. “All right, this could be like that. Except while you’re doing your demonstration, it’s okay to rewrite the laws of science a little bit . . .”

“Well, fine. But why am I getting invited to this thing? Is it because of Kit? I see he got an invite too.”

“Isn’t it obvious? They want you to come in and mentor.”

“What?” Nita stared down at that little eye. “Why me?”

“I keep talking to you, hNii’t, about not going so unconscious about your own credentials,” said S’reee. “You dealt with the Lone Power one-on-one, on Its own turf, on your Ordeal. You survived the Song of the Twelve, which isn’t exactly a given for any of the participants. Not to mention various other minor skirmishes. Mars, just now. Alaalu. The Hesper business.”

“We were lucky!”

“You were smart,” S’reee said. “The research kind of smart, the preparedness kind of smart. Smart is six-tenths of luck. And you played to your strengths, and you took your chances where you could find them. You weren’t afraid to improvise, or go for broke.”

“I also have a partner,” Nita said, “who knows how to be smart for two when my smarts break down.”

“So there you are,” S’reee said. “You understand it. Individually and as a team, the two of you have data and experience worth passing on, wouldn’t you say? You could make the difference between some other wizards living or dying because you knew how to help someone hammer the rough edges off the spell that someday was going to help them, or somebody else, survive.”

Nita sighed as they turned left and passed slowly by Point Lookout, heading inshore toward the northern side of the waters running inside the Fire Island barrier. “This is a ‘pay it forward’ thing, isn’t it.”

“Of course it is. What isn’t?”

She could see the low roofs of Freeport and Bay Shore jutting up against the afternoon sky ahead of them. A lot of things have started out like this, Nita thought, really innocently . . . and then turned into something way different before they were done. Yet she had to admit there was no guarantee that this was going to be one of them. “Well, what do I do now?”

“I’d guess you want to make sure your transport allowance is properly implemented, and check out the apps they’ve set up for you. Take a few minutes to talk to your Advisories, of course: Sea knows they’ll have been down this road before. In fact they probably recommended you for this, so you may want to talk to them about that.”

“Take a baseball bat to them, you mean!”

S’reee whistled with amusement as the two of them headed as close toward shore as it was wise for S’reee to go. “And then shove everything else you’ve got going on into a claudication and forget about it for a while, because you’re about to be the busiest you’ve ever been when you weren’t actually saving the universe.”