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  To: Rodriguez, Christopher K.

  From: Planetary event coordination (Sol/Sol III/IIIa)

  JD: 2455686.00

  Re: 1241st Interventional Development, Assessment and Adjudication Sessions

  Dear Kit,

  On behalf of the Powers That Be and Their local representatives: cordial greetings!

  This is to inform you that you have been nominated by a regional supervisory steering subcommittee as an assessor- and enabler-candidate for the initial assessment and joint evaluation phase of the upcoming IDAA main session, beginning on JD 2455692.7 and terminating on or about JD 2455713.00.

  This nomination is entirely elective, and you are under no compulsion to participate. However, your errantry history is such that your participation would be extremely welcome, both in terms of the value of your past contributions and the experience which you will be invited to share with the session’s intake of qualifying participants.

  If you do elect to participate, we would ask at this point that you check your schedule to make sure there are no personal event conflicts or other attendance issues during the dates we have blocked for you, and confirm back the open status of your schedule to the appointments and development-assignment committees before JD 2455689.00. Please note that you will not be called to active errantry during your blocked-out dates should you choose to attend and participate. This dispensation will be extended to you through the finals stages should a candidate with whom you are associated be elected into the semis or finals.

  Attendance at the IDAA sessions implies subsidized coverage for all associated necessary intersystem transits, and this subsidy will also be extended to you through the finals stages if necessary due to advisory duties or if you simply wish to attend.

  We look forward to your response to this invitation at your earliest convenience.

  Dai stihó,

  Owen Dalwhinnie

  for Irina Mladen, Planetary Wizard for Sol III/IIIa

  cc: Swale, Thomas B., Romeo, Carl, Callahan,

  Juanita L.—

  Bewildered, Kit scanned on down the note at a very long list of cc’s and attached documents. Looking over Kit’s shoulder, Ronan started to swear, and not in the Speech either; it was something extremely venomous in Irish. At least most of it was Irish, but there were many heartfelt insertions of the F word in between. “What the fecking feck!” Ronan shouted, and stalked away waving his arms, then bounced back, kicking rocks. “How do you even rate? Why do I even bother keeping on breathing! What’s the point of this whole sodding existence? I ask you!”

  Kit looked at Ronan with some concern. “What? What’s your problem?”

  Ronan clutched his head and then waved his arms around some more. “You benighted muppet, has your reading comprehension taken the day off? Is it possible you don’t understand what you’ve got there? It’s only an opt-in for the Invitational, you total twitmuffin!”

  Twitmuffin? Kit got a feeling asking for definitions wouldn’t be a smart move right now, as Ronan was genuinely worked up. “Is this good?” he said, and started reading down the page again, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

  Ronan laughed again, but this time it was a helpless sound, like someone being kind to the intellectually challenged. “Let me explain it to you . . .”

  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. “Di
d 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 tho
ught 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—”