The Wizard's Dilemma Read online

  Kit felt uneasy agreeing with her. "Well," he said, "if it doesn't work, it won't matter how elegant it is. Let's get set up."

  He started laying out the spell for real. It contained a simplified version of one of the circles he and Nita had been arguing about two days before—there was no point in wasting a perfectly good section of diagram that could be tied into the revision. Kit drew a finger through the water, and the graceful curves and curlings of the written Speech followed after as he drifted around in a circle about twenty yards across, reinstating the first circle as he'd held it in memory.

  "Is this how the second great circle looks?" S'reee said, describing the circle with a long slow motion of body and tail. Fire filled the water, following her gesture, writing itself in pulsing curls and swirls of light — all the power statements and the conditionals that were secondary parts of the spell.

  "You've got it," Kit said. "One thing, though..." He looked ruefully at the place where Nita's name was written. Carefully he reached out and detached the long string of characters in the Speech that represented Nita's wizardly power and personality, and let it float away into the water for the time being. A wizard doesn't just casually erase another wizard's name, any more than you would casually look down the barrel of a gun, even when you were sure that the chamber was empty. Changing a name written in the Speech could change the one named. Erasing a name could be more dangerous still.

  "You'll need to knit that circle in a little tighter to compensate," S'reee said. "Taking care of that now."

  It took only a few moments to finish tightening the structure. Kit looked it over one more time; S'reee did the same. Then they looked at each other. "Well?" Kit said.

  "Let's see what happens," said S'reee. Together they began to recite—Kit in the human, prose-inflected form of the Speech; S'reee in the sung form that whale-wizards prefer. Kit stumbled a couple of times until he got the rhythm right—though the pace was quicker than that at which whales sing their more formal and ritual wizardries, it was still fairly slow by human standards. One word at a time, he thought, resorting to humming the last syllables when he needed to let S'reee catch up with him; and as they spoke together and fed power to it, the wizardry began to light up around them like a complex, many-colored neon sculpture in the water, a hollow sphere of curvatures and traceries, at the center of which they hung, waiting for the sense of the presence they were summoning.

  And slowly, as the wizardry came alive around them, the presence was there, making itself felt more strongly each passing moment as Kit and S'reee worked together toward the last verse—the wizard's knot, in this case a triple-stranded braid, which would seal together three great circles' worth of spell. The pressure came down around them, the weight of tons of water and millions of years of time, hard to bear; but Kit hunched himself down a little, got his shoulders under the weight and bore it up. The water went from the normal dusky green of these depths to a flaring bluegreen, like a liquid set on fire. All around them, if it was possible for water to feel wetter than water already was, it did. The personality of the local ocean, partly aware, washed through both Kit and S'reee, intent on washing away resistance over time, as it always had.

  Kit had no intention of being washed anywhere. Slowly and carefully he and S'reee started to put their case, defining a specific area on which they desired to operate, telling the ocean what they wanted to do and why it was going to be a good thing.

  They were reminding the ocean how things had once been: a long discussion, setting aside for the moment its outrage over having been systematically polluted. But then the local waters were a different issue from the greater, world-girdling Sea, which was a whole living thing, a Power in its own right and the conduit through which the whales' own version of wizardry came to them.

  The Sea stood in the same relationship to the ocean as the soul stood to the body, and the ocean, merely physical as it was, had its own ideas about the creatures that had come over the long ages to populate it. To the ancient body of water, which had suddenly found itself playing host to the first and simplest organisms, everything biological looked suspiciously like pollution. The merely physical ocean, remembering that most ancient, blood-saline water, had for a long time resisted the idea of anything living in it. Many times life had tried to get started as the seas cooled, and many times it had failed before the one fateful lightning strike finally lanced down and stirred the reluctant waters to life.

  Now, Kit was suggesting—with S'reee, a recently native form of "pollution," to back him up—a possible compromise. Here in this one place, at least, the ocean had an opportunity to return to that old purity, to water in which any chemical except salt was foreign. Maybe in other places this same intervention could be brought about, with wizards to power it and the ocean's permission. But first they had to get this initial permission granted.

  It was a long argument, one which the ocean was reluctant to let anyone else win, even though it stood to benefit. Kit knew from his research in the manual and from a number of conferences with S'reee that there was always difficulty of this kind with oceanic wizardries. The waters themselves, far from being fluid and pliant to a wizard's wishes, could be as rigid as berg ice or as hostile as hot pillow lava to action from "outside." The discussion had to be most diplomatic.

  But Kit and S'reee had done their homework, and they didn't have to hurry. They just kept patiently putting their case in the Speech, taking their time. And Kit thought he started to feel a shift— I think it's starting to listen! S'reee said privately to Kit.

  Kit swallowed and didn't respond...just kept his mind on the argument. But now he was becoming certain that she was right. Just this once, persistence was winning out. They'd both been hoping for this, for though the waters had flinched under those early lashes of lightning, they also had conceived a certain sneaking fascination for the wild proliferation of life that had broken loose in them over a mere few thousand millennia. Now, as Kit and S'reee hung in the center of the spell sphere they had constructed, they saw the light of the Sea around them start slowly, slowly to shift in color and quality as it began to accept the spell.

  The shimmer of the wizardry's outer shell began to dissolve into splashes of green and gold brilliance, the catalytic reactions that would make the pollutants snow down as inert salts onto the ocean bottom as fast as they built up. That inert "garbage" would still have to be cleaned up, but the Sea itself had routines for that, older than human wizardry and just as effective for this particular job.

  Kit and S'reee watched the wizardry spread away in great ribbony tentacles, diffusing itself, dissolving slowly into the water—one long current drifting away southward, another running up the channel, with the rising flood tide, toward the inland waters and the main sources of the pollution. After three or four minutes there was nothing left to be seen but the most subtle shimmer, a radiance like diluted moonlight.

  Then even that was gone, leaving the waters nearly dark, but someone sensitive to the power they had released could still have felt it, a tingle and prickle on the skin, the feel of advice taken and being acted upon. The silence faded away, leaving Kit and S'reee listening to the wet-clappered bonk, bonk of the nun buoy half a mile away, the chain-saw ratchet of motorboat propellers chopping at the water as they passed through Jones Inlet.

  Kit, hovering in the water, looked over at S'reee. The dimly seen humpback hung there for a long moment, just finning the water around her, then dropped her jaw and took a long gulp of the water, closing her mouth again and straining it back out through the thousands of plates of baleen.

  "Well?" Kit said.

  She waved her flukes from side to side, a gesture of slow satisfaction. "It tastes better already," she said. "It worked!"

  S'reee laughed at him. "Come on, Kit, a spell always works. You know that."

  "If you mean a spell always does something, sure! It's getting it to do what you originally had in mind that's the problem."

  "Well, this one did. It
certainly discharged itself properly. If it hadn't, the structure of it would still be hanging here, complaining," S'reee said. "But I think we've done a nice clean intervention." She chuckled, a long scratchy whistle, and finned her way over to Kit, turning a couple of times in a leisurely victory roll.

  Kit high-fived one of her ventral fins as it waved past him, but the gesture brought him around briefly to where he saw Nita's name, detached from the spell, still hanging there, waving like a weed in the water and glowing faintly. Kit sighed and grabbed the string of symbols, wound them a few times around one hand, and stuffed them into his "pocket," then grabbed hold of that ventral fin again and let S'reee tow him back to the surface.

  They floated there for a few minutes in the twilight, getting their breath again as the reaction to the wizardry began to kick in. "How long was that?" Kit said, looking at the shore, where all the streetlights down the parkway had come on and the floodlights shone on the brick red of the Jones Beach water tower and picked out its bronze-green pyramidal top.

  "Two hours, I'd guess," S'reee said. "As usual it seems like less when you're in the middle of it. Maybe you should get yourself back onto land, though, Kit. I'm starting to feel a little wobbly already."

  Kit nodded. "I'll go in a few minutes," he said, and looked around them. They were about three miles off Jones Beach. He looked eastward, to where a practiced eye could just make out the takeoff lights of planes angling up and away from Kennedy Airport. "I wonder, how soon could we expand the range of this closer to the city? There's a whole lot of dirty water coming from up there. Even though they don't dump raw sewage in the water anymore, the treatment plants still don't do as good a job as they should."

  "You're right, of course," S'reee said. "But maybe we should leave the wizardry as it is for a while, and see how it behaves. After that, well, there's no arguing that the water around here can still use a lot more work. But we've made a good start."

  "Yeah, the oysters should be happy, that's for sure," Kit said. There hadn't been shellfish living off the south shore of Long Island for many years now. After this piece of work, that would have a chance to change. Certainly the oystermen would be happy in ten or twenty years, and the fish who ate oysters would be, too, a lot sooner.

  "True. Well, I don't see that we can do much more with this at this point," S'reee said, "except to say, well done, cousin!"

  "Couldn't have done it alone," Kit said. But something in the back of his mind said, But you did do it alone. Or not with the usual help...

  "Come on," S'reee said, "you've got to be feeling the reaction. We're both going to need a rest after that. I'll swim you back."

  As they got close to the jetty, Kit said, "We should have another look at the wizardry again.. .When, do you think?"

  "A week or so is soon enough," S'reee said, standing on her head in the water and waving her flukes meditatively in the air as Kit let go of her and clambered up out of the water onto the lowest rocks. "No point in checking the fueling routines any sooner; they're too charged up just now."

  "Okay, next Friday, then. And I want to think about what we can do about those explosives down there, too."

  "You're on, cousin. Dai stiho. And when you see hNii't'..." S'reee paused a moment, then just said, "Tell her we all have off days; it's no big deal."

  "I will," Kit said. "Dai, S'reee."

  The humpback slid under the water without so much as a splash. Kit spent a moment listening to the high raspy whistle of S'reee's radar-ranging song dwindling away as she navigated out of the shallows, heading for the waters off Sandy Hook. Then, in the flashing crimson light of the jetty's warning beacon, he unsealed the wet-suit spell, shook it out, wrapped it up tight, and shoved it back into his pocket along with Nita's written name and his manual. He shivered then, feeling a little clammy. It's the interior humidity of the suit, he thought, frowning. / forgot to adjust the spell after I noticed the problem the last time.

  Kit grimaced, toying with the idea of doing a wizardry to dry his clothes out, and then thought, Probably by the time I get home they'll be dry from my body heat already. No point in wasting power.

  He reached into the back of his mind and felt around behind him for his own preset version of what he referred to as the beam-me-up spell, found the one that was set for home, and pulled it into reality, shook it out in one hand, like a whip: a six-foot chain of multicolored light, a single long sentence in the Speech, complete except for the wizard's knot at the end that would set it going. He said that one word, and the wizardry came alive in his hand, bit its own tail. Kit dropped the chain of fire on the worn wooden decking of the fishing platform and stepped into it— The blaze of the working spell and the pressure-and-noise whoomp! of displaced air blinded him briefly, but it was a result Kit was used to now. He opened his eyes again and saw streetlight-lit sidewalk instead of planking. Kit bent over, picked up the wizardry again, undid the knot and shook it out, then coiled it up and stuffed it into his pocket, and down still farther into the pocket in his mind, while simultaneously bracing himself for what he knew was going to hit him in a few seconds. Wobbly as he, too, was starting to feel now, he might not be able to keep it from knocking him over...

  But nothing happened. Kit glanced around and then thought, Whoops! Wrong destination, for he was standing not outside his own house but two and a half blocks away. It was Nita's house he was looking at: He had grabbed the wrong spell, the only other one in his mind that got as much use as the take-mehome one. Nita's house's porch light was off; there were lights in the front windows, but the curtains were drawn.

  / should go see if she wants to talk, he thought.

  But her mood had been so grim, earlier... and now he'd found that he'd underestimated the dampness of his clothes. They were chilly, and he was getting still chillier standing here.

  / really don't feel like it, Kit thought. Let it wait until tomorrow. She'll be in a better mood then.

  He walked away into the dusk.

  Friday Evening

  KIT WALKED A COUPLE of blocks down Conlon Avenue to his own house, the usual kind of twostory frame house typical of this area. It was strange that he and Nita had lived so close together for so long and had never run into each other before becoming wizards; just one of those things, Kit guessed. Or maybe there was some reason behind it. But the Powers That Be were notoriously closemouthed about Their reasons. Whatever. We both know where we are now. Then Kit breathed out, amused. Or at least most of the time we do...

  As Kit headed up the driveway to his house, he heard the usual thump, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham of paws against the back door, and he grinned and stopped. CRASH went the screen door, flying open, and a bolt of black lightning—or something moving nearly as fast as lightning might if it had four legs and fur—came hurtling out, leaped over the steps

  to the driveway without touching them, hit the ground with all legs working at once, like something out of a cartoon, and launched itself down the driveway at Kit. He had just enough time to brace himself before Ponch hit him about chest high, barking.

  Kit laughed and tried to hold Ponch's face away from his, but it didn't work; it never worked. He got well slobbered, as Ponch jumped up and down on his hind legs and scrabbled at Kit's chest with his forepaws. The barking was as deafening as always, but there was, of course, more to it than that. Anyone who knew the Speech could have heard Kit's dog shouting, "You're late! You're late! Where were you? You're late!"

  "Okay, so I'm late," Kit said. "What're you complaining about? Didn't anyone feed you?" You smell like fish, Ponch said inside his head, and licked Kit's face some more. "I just bet I do," Kit said. "Don't avoid the question, big guy."

  I'm hungry!

  Kit snickered as he pushed the dog down. Ponch was very doggy in some ways—loyal, and (as far as he knew how to be) truthful. He was also devious, full of plots and tricks to get people to feed him as many times a day as possible. / should be grateful that that's as devious as he gets, Kit thought as he made
his way to the back door. "Come on, you," he said, and pulled open the screen door.

  Inside was a big comfortable combined kitchen and dining room, where his mama and pop usually could be found this time of night. The only thing that happened in the living room at Kit's house was TV watching and the entertainment of family friends and guests— when that didn't drift into the kitchen as well. There was a big couch off to one side, under the front windows, with a couple of little tables on either side, one of which had a small portable TV that was blaring the local news; in the middle of the room was the big oval dining table, and on the other side of the room were the cooking island and, beyond it, the fridge and sink and oven and cupboards. On the cooking island was a pot, boiling, but as Kit went by he peered into it and saw nothing but water. He chucked his book bag over the back of one of the dining-room chairs and sidestepped neatly as Ponch, running in the slowly closing screen door after him, hit the tiled floor and skidded halfway across it, almost to the door that led to the living room. "Hey, Mama," Kit called, "I'm home. What's for dinner?"

  "Spaghetti," his mother called from somewhere at the back of the house. "It would have been meatballs as well, but we didn't know which planet you were on."

  Kit let out a small breath of relief, for spaghetti was not one of the things his mother could ruin, at least not without being badly distracted. She was one of those people who do a few dishes really well—her arroz con polio was one of the great accomplishments of civilization on Earth, as far as Kit was concerned—but beyond those limits, his mama often got in trouble, and there were times when Kit was incredibly relieved to find his pop cooking. Especially since it means I don't have to interfere... He smiled ruefully. The last time he tried using wizardry to thicken one of his mama's failed gravy recipes had been memorable. These days he stuck to flour.