The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (3 page)

“Tell me about it,” Kit said in a tone that struck Nita as a lot more ironic than it needed to be.

And after all the work I did!
she thought. Nonetheless she tried to calm down. “Okay. What do
you
think we should do?”

“Maybe,” Kit said, and paused, “maybe it would be good if we let S’reee take a look at both versions. If she thinks—”

Nita’s eyes widened. “Since when do we need a third opinion on something this straightforward? Kit, it’ll either do what it’s supposed to or it won’t. Let’s test it and find out!”

He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I can tell already, it’s not going to do what we need.”

She stared at Kit, not knowing what to say, and then after a moment she got up and stared down at him, trying to keep from clenching her fists. “Well, if you’re so sure you’re right, why don’t you just do it yourself? Since my advice plainly isn’t worth jack to you.”

“It’s not that it’s not worth anything, it’s that—”

“Oh,
now
you apologize.”

“I wasn’t apologizing.”

“Well, maybe you need to!”

“Neets,” Kit said, also frowning now, “what do you want me to do? Tell you that I think it’s gonna be fine, when I don’t really think so?”

Nita flushed. When you were working with the Speech, in which what you described would come to pass, lying could be fatal … and you quickly learned that even talking
about
spells less than honestly was dangerous.

“Energy’s precious,” Kit said. “Neither of us can just throw it around the way we used to a couple years ago. It’s a nuisance, but it’s something we have to consider.”

“Do you think I wasn’t considering it? I took my time over that. I didn’t even put it through the spell checker. I checked all the syntax, all the balances, by hand. It took me forever, but—”

“Maybe the ‘forever’ was a hint, Neets,” Kit said.

She had been trying to hang on to her temper, but now Nita got so furious that her eyes felt hot. “Fine,” she said tightly. “Then you go right ahead and handle this yourself. And just leave me out of it until you find something you feel is simplistic enough to involve me in, okay?”

Kit’s expression was shocked, and Nita didn’t care.
Who needs this
? she thought.
No matter what I try to do, it’s not good enough! So maybe it’s time I stopped trying. Let him work it out himself, if he can.

Nita turned and made her way back down the jetty, her eyes narrowed in annoyance as she slapped her claudication open and pulled out the rowan wand. In one angry, economical gesture, she whipped the wand around her, dropping her most frequently used transit circle to the stones, the one that would take her home. It was a little harder to speak the spell than usual. Nita’s throat was tight, but not so much so that she couldn’t say the words that would get her out of there. In a clap of imploding air, she was gone, and spray from a wave that crashed against the jetty went through the place where she’d been.

Kit Rodriguez just sat there on the concrete platform at the bottom of the Jones Inlet light tower for some minutes, looking at the spot where Nita had vanished, listening to the hiss of the surf, and trying to work out what the heck had just happened.

What did I say
? Kit went over their conversation a couple of times in his head and couldn’t find any reason for her to have gotten so upset.
What is her
problem
these days? It can’t be school. Nobody bothers her anymore; she does okay.

It was a puzzle, and one he’d been having no luck solving. Maybe it was because he’d been so busy… and not just during the last couple of months, either. Granted, lately he’d been spending a lot of time on the bottom of the Great South Bay. And over the past couple of years, he’d visited spots on or near most of the planets in the solar system, though only on the way to places much farther out, including some places that weren’t exactly planets. Europe had more or less registered as an afterthought in the wake of the outer solar system: and even Kit’s mother, who’d initially been really nervous about his wizardry, had admitted that all the travel was proving educational, and might actually be making him, if not smarter, at least more mature. But Kit was beginning to have his doubts. For the past few weeks, any time he hadn’t been in school, in bed, or a few hundred feet deep in water, he’d been spending a lot of his spare time sitting on a particular rock in the Lunar Carpathians, looking down on the green-blue gem that was Earth from three hundred thousand kilometers out, and coming back again and again to the question,
Are girls another species?

The first time the thought had occurred to him, he’d felt embarrassed. He had been in places where members of other species had been present in their hundreds—sometimes in their thousands—tentacles and oozy bits and all. None of them had at the time struck him as all that alien; they were, when you got right down to it, just people. And though their differences from human beings were tremendous, sometimes making them completely incomprehensible, that still didn’t undermine his affection for them. He
liked
the aliens he met, even when they were weird.
Come to think of it, I like them
because
they’re weird.
But Nita, who theoretically was just as human as Kit was, had been pushing the weirdness-and-incomprehensibility envelope pretty hard lately. Her behavior was hard to understand, from someone who was usually so rational—

Something dark broke the dazzle of the water about a quarter mile away. Kit cocked an ear and heard a long high whistle, slightly muffled, and after that first shape—a short stumpy barnacle-pocked dorsal fin—came the sleek dark shining shape of the back of a humpback whale, rolling in the water as she breached and blew. One small eye set way down at the end of the long, long jaw regarded Kit as S’reee slid toward the jetty, back-finning expertly to keep from coming to grief on the rocks. “
Dai stihó,
K!t,” she whistled and clicked in the Speech. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic…”

Uneasy as he was, Kit had to chuckle. “I know. I can hear it even up here.” The main approaches to New York Harbor ran straight through this part of the Great South Bay, and for a whale, keeping clear of the ever-increasing number of ships—not so much the ships themselves but the inescapable sound of their engines and machinery, always a nuisance for a creature that worked extensively with sonar—was a problem and made getting around quickly a lot more trouble than it used to be. Noise pollution in the bay was as much a problem for the many species who lived there as was the sewage, and would probably be a much tougher one to solve. It was one of a number of projects S’reee had been forced to tackle since her abrupt promotion to the position of senior cetacean wizard for these waters.

S’reee rolled idly in the water, looking down the jetty. “It’s my fault; I should have left the Narrows earlier. But never mind. Where’s hNii’t?”

“I don’t think she’s going to be with us today,” Kit said.

S’reee didn’t reply immediately, but that thoughtful little eye dwelt on Kit. As whales went, S’reee wasn’t that much older than Kit or Nita, but the increased responsibilities she’d been pushed into had been making her perceptive—maybe more perceptive than Kit exactly cared for right now, especially since he still wasn’t sure that he hadn’t misstepped somehow.

“Well,” S’reee said after a moment, “is that a problem? Can we manage, or should we reschedule?”

Kit thought about that. “I’ve got something that might be worth looking at,” he said. “We might as well lay it out in place, have a look at it.”

“All right.”

Kit reached into the pocket of his jeans, which was also the way into his own otherspace storage pocket, and came out with a little ball of light, a spell in compacted form, which he dropped to the concrete he was standing on. As the compaction routine came loose and let the spell expand, Kit shoved his manual down into the otherspace pocket, then picked up the spell and shook it out.

It was a webwork of interconnected statements in the Speech, all of which briefly flared bright and then, dimming, settled and spread themselves into a form that could have been mistaken for a cloak made of plastic wrap. Kit whirled it around him, then held still while the spell sealed itself shut all about him and completed its access to its air supply, also tucked away in the spatiotemporal claudication in his pocket. Normally this spell was used as a simple space suit, for occasions when moving or working in a large “bubble” of air wasn’t desirable, but Kit had adapted it for use as a wet suit. He glanced back at the beach to make sure no one was watching—the last thing he wanted was for someone to think some kid out here was suicidal—and jumped well away from the rocks, into the water next to S’reee.

The two of them submerged. Kit took a moment to adjust the wizardry he was wearing, adding virtual mass as necessary so that it would counteract the buoyancy of the air in the wet suit and his lungs. Then he took hold of S’reee’s dorsal fin, and she towed him away from the jetty, southward.

The waters were getting murky this time of year, but not murky enough to hide something that Kit was beginning to get tired of looking at: an irregular cluster of humped, sinister shapes, half buried in sludge, not far from where the sewerage outfall from Tobay Beach tailed off. Half a century ago, some ship had dropped or dumped a cargo of mines on the bottom, in about fifty fathoms of water. But as far as Kit was concerned, that wasn’t half deep enough.

“We have
got
to do something about that,” Kit said, glancing at the mines as they passed them by. “Somebody seriously exceeded their recommended stupidity levels the day they dumped
those
here.”

“I wouldn’t argue the point,” S’reee said as they headed out to the point where they had been preparing to anchor their wizardry. “But one thing at a time, cousin. Do you really think you have a solution for our present problem?”

“I’ve got
something,”
Kit said. “You tell me.”

“Shortly.”

It took them a few minutes more to reach the spot, due south of Point Lookout, where the three of them had been contemplating anchoring the wizardry once they’d settled on what it was going to be. Here the tides came out of Jones Inlet with most force, helping keep the dredged part of the ship channel clean; but here also the pollution from inside the barrier islands came out in its most concentrated form, and this, Kit and Nita had thought, would be a good place to stop it. “The day before yesterday, I spent a little while checking the currents here,” S’reee said, as she paused to let Kit slip off, “and I’d say you two were right about the location. Also, the bottom’s pretty bare. There isn’t too much life to be inconvenienced by tethering a spell here, and what there is won’t mind being relocated. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Kit pulled out his manual, turned to the workbook section, and instructed it to replicate the structure of the proposed spell in the water, where they could see it. A few seconds later he and S’reee were looking together at the faintly glowing schematic, a series of concentric and intersecting circles full of the “argument” of the wizardry.

S’reee swam slowly around it, examining it. “I have to confess,” she said at last, “this makes more sense than what the three of us were looking at earlier. All those complex chemical-reaction subroutines… they’d have taken us weeks to set up, and exhausted us when we tried to fuel them. Besides, it was too much of a brute-force solution. It’s no good shouting at the Sea, as our people say; you won’t hear what it has to say to you, and it won’t listen until you do.”

“You think it’ll listen to this?”

S’reee swung her tail thoughtfully. “Let’s find out,” she said. “If nothing else, it’s going to be quicker to test to destruction, if it fails at all. And between you and me—and I hate to say it—it’s a more elegant solution than what Nita was proposing.”

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.