“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 . . .”