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  “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.”