“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 . . .”