Warnings: wounded animal, description of injury Themes:
Memory One You are hovering on the deck of a rather fantasy-looking airship, surrounded by a group of mostly humans. As you break through the clouds, you see a futuristic complex of buildings below with a banner hanging from the entrance: “Welcome Home, Victors of Light!” A crowd of people — humans, a group of tiny winged furry people,a humanoid fish-man, and others are gathered on the lawn. Someone spots the airships and suddenly everyone on the ground is cheering and waving. People around you start waving back.
You incline your head towards the person you're standing next to, a sort of humanoid frog. “We did it, Ace.”
“You all did it,” the frog replied in a lisping voice. “The resht of ush were jusht helping you.”
You bob a bit in a shrug. “That still counts. I’m going to miss you.”
“Are you shtaying for the party?”
“Of course. And I need to say my goodbyes. But I miss being in my home waters. It’ll be good to see everyone again for real.”
Memory Two It takes you and Kit a few minutes more to reach the spot, due south of Point Lookout, where the two of you and Nita have been contemplating anchoring the wizardry once you've settled on what it's going to be. Here the tides come 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 comes 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,” you say, as you pause 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 pulls out his manual, turns to the workbook section, and instructs it to replicate the structure of the proposed spell in the water, where they can see it. A few seconds later you and him are looking together at the faintly glowing schematic, a series of concentric and intersecting circles full of the “argument” of the wizardry.
You swim slowly around it, examining it. “I have to confess,” you say 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?”
You swing your tail thoughtfully. “Let’s find out,” you say. “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 feels uneasy agreeing with you. “Well,” he says, “if it doesn’t work, it won’t matter how elegant it is. Let’s get set up.”
He starts laying out the spell for real. He draws a finger through the water, and the graceful curves and curlings of the written Speech follow after as he drifts around in a circle about twenty yards across, reinstating the first circle as he's held it in memory.
“Is this how the second great circle looks?” you say, describing the circle with a long slow motion of body and tail. Fire fills the water, following your gesture, writing itself in pulsing curls and swirls of light — all the power statements and the conditionals that are secondary parts of the spell.
“You’ve got it,” Kit says. “One thing, though…” He looks ruefully at the place where Nita’s name is written. Carefully he reaches out and detaches the long string of characters in the Speech that represented Nita’s wizardly power and personality, and lets it float away into the water for the time being.
“You’ll need to knit that circle in a little tighter to compensate,” you say.
“Taking care of that now.”
It takes only a few moments to finish tightening the structure. Kit looks it over one more time; you do the same. Then you look at each other. “Well?” Kit says.
“Let’s see what happens,” you say.
Together you begin to recite—Kit in the human, prose-inflected form of the Speech; you in the sung form that whale-wizards prefer. Kit stumbles a couple of times until he gets the rhythm right—though the pace is quicker than that at which whales sing their more formal and ritual wizardries, it is still fairly slow by human standards. One word at a time, he thinks, resorting to humming the last syllables when he needs to let you catch up with him; and as you speak together and feed power to it, the wizardry begins 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 hang, waiting for the sense of the presence they are summoning.
And slowly, as the wizardry comes alive around them, the presence is there, making itself feels more strongly each passing moment as you and Kit work together toward the last verse—the wizard’s knot, in this case a triple-stranded braid, which will seal together three great circles’ worth of spell. The pressure comes down around them, the weight of tons of water and millions of years of time, hard to bear. The water goes from the normal dusky green of these depths to a flaring blue-green, like liquid set on fire. All around them, if it is possible for water to feel wetter than water already is, it does. The personality of the local ocean, partly aware, washes through both of you, intent on washing away resistance over time, as it always has.
Slowly and carefully you and Kit start to put your case, defining a specific area on which you desire to operate, telling the ocean what you want to do and why it is going to be a good thing.
You are reminding the ocean how things had once been: a long discussion, setting aside for the moment its outrage over having been systematically polluted.
The ocean, merely physical though it might be, has its own ideas about the creatures that have come over the long ages to populate it. To the ancient body of water that had suddenly found itself playing host to the first and simplest organisms, everything biological looks suspiciously like pollution.
Now, Kit is suggesting—with you, a recently native form of “pollution,” to back him up—a possible compromise. Here in this one place, at least, the ocean has an opportunity to return to that old purity, to water in which any chemical except salt is foreign. Maybe in other places this same intervention could be brought about, with wizards to power it and the ocean’s permission. But first they have to get this initial permission granted.
It is a long argument, one which the ocean is reluctant to let anyone else win, even though it stands to benefit. Kit knows from his research in the manual and from a number of conferences with you that there is always difficulty of this kind with oceanic wizardries.
But you and Kit have done your homework, and you don’t have to hurry. You just keep patiently putting your case in the Speech, taking your time. And Kit thinks he starts to feel a shift…
I think it’s starting to listen! You say privately to Kit.
Kit swallows and doesn’t respond, just keeps his mind on the argument. But he is starting to think you are right. Just this once, persistence is winning out. You've both been hoping for this, for though the waters have flinched under those early lashes of lightning, they also have conceived a certain sneaking fascination for the wild proliferation of life that has broken loose in them over a mere few thousand millennia. Now, as you and Kit hang in the center of the spell-sphere you've constructed, you see the light of the waters around you start slowly, slowly to shift in color and quality as the ocean begins to accept the spell.
The shimmer of the wizardry’s outer shell begins to dissolve into splashes of green and gold brilliance, the catalytic reactions that will make the pollutants snow down as inert salts onto the ocean bottom as fast as they build up. That inert “garbage” will still have to be cleaned up, but the Sea itself has routines for that, older than human wizardry and just as effective for this particular job.
You and Kit watch the wizardry spread away in great ribbony tentacles, diffusing itself, dissolving slowly into the water—one long current drifting away southward, another running up the channel, with the rising flood tide, toward the inland waters and the main sources of the pollution. After three or four minutes there is nothing left to be seen but the most subtle shimmer, a radiance like diluted moonlight.
Then even that is gone, leaving the waters nearly dark. The silence fades away, leaving you and Kit listening to the wet-clappered bonk, bonk of the nun buoy floating above you half a mile away, and the chain-saw ratchet of motorboat propellers chopping at the water as they pass over and through Jones Inlet.
Kit, hovering in the water, looked over at you. You hang there for a long moment, just finning the water around you, then drop your jaw and take a long gulp of the water, closing your mouth again and straining it back out through the thousands of plates of baleen. “Well?” Kit says.
You wave your flukes from side to side, a gesture of slow satisfaction. “It tastes better already,” you say.
“It worked!”
You laugh at him. “Come on, Kit, a spell always works. You know that.”
“If you mean a spell always does something, sure! It’s getting it to do what you originally had in mind that’s the problem.”
“Well, this one did. It certainly discharged itself properly. If it hadn’t, the structure of it would still be hanging here, complaining,” you say. “But I think we’ve done a nice clean intervention.” You chuckle, a long scratchy whistle, and fin your way over to Kit, turning a couple of times in a leisurely victory roll.
Kit high-fives one of your ventral fins as it waves past him, but the gesture brings him around briefly to where he sees Nita’s name, detached from the spell, still hanging there, waving like a weed in the water and glowing faintly. Kit sighs and grabs the string of symbols, winds them a few times around one hand, and stuffs them into his “pocket,” then grabs hold of that ventral fin again and lets you tow him back to the surface.
Memory Three The dark bulk of the injured whale heaved up and down with her breathing, while small weak whistling noises went in and out. The whale’s skin was marked with rope burns and little pits and ragged gashes of shark bites. The greatest wound, though, the one still leaking blood, was too large for any shark to have made. It was a crater in the whale’s left side, behind the long swimming fin; a crater easily three feet wide, ragged with ripped flesh. The whale’s one visible eye, turned up to the moonlight, watched Kit and Nita dully as they came.
“What happened?” Kit said, looking at the biggest wound with disbelief and horror. “It looks like somebody bombed you.”
“Someone did,” the whale said in a long pained whistle. Nita came up beside the whale’s head and laid a hand on the black skin behind her eye. It was very hot. “One of the new killing spears the whalers use,” the whale said to Nita, “the blasting kind. Never mind that now. What did you do with the sharks?”
“Sank them. They’re lying on the bottom, ‘frozen’.”
“But if they don’t swim, they can’t breathe—they’ll die!” The concern in the whale’s voice astonished Nita. “Cousins, quick, you have to kill the spell! We’re going to need their goodwill later.”
Nita glanced at Kit, who was still staring at the wound with a tight, angry look on his face. He glanced up at her. “What? Okay, but better put up a forcewall first, so that the dolphins can get back in the water without getting attacked again.”
“Right.” Nita got her manual out and riffled through pages to the appropriate spell. She said the spell and felt it take hold, then sagged back against the whale and closed her eyes till the dizziness went away. Off to one side she heard Kit saying the words that released the freeze.
Moments later fins began appearing again out on the water, circling inward toward the sandbar, then sliding away as if bumping into something, and circling in again.
“The water will take the blood away soon enough,” the whale said. “They’ll go away and not even remember why they were here…” The whale’s eye fixed on Nita again, anguished but intent. “Thanks for coming so quickly, cousins.”
“It took us longer than we wanted. I’m Nita. That’s Kit.”
“I’m S’reee,” the whale said.
Kit left the wound and came up to join Nita. “It was one of those explosive harpoons, all right,” he said.
“But I thought those were supposed to be powerful enough to blow even big whales in two.”
“They are. Ae’mhnuu died that way, this morning.” S’reee’s whistle was bitter. “He was the Senior Wizard for this whole region of the Plateau. I was studying with him—I was going to be promoted to Advisory soon. We were out past the offshore limit and we were in the middle of a complicated wizardry. We heard the ship come but we were too distracted by the spell to realize in time what kind it was—”
Nita and Kit looked at each other. They’d found out for themselves that a wizard can be at his most vulnerable when exercising his strength. “He died right away,” S’reee said. “I took a spear too. But it didn’t explode right away; and the sharks smelled Ae’mhnuu’s blood and a great pack of them showed up to eat. They went into feeding frenzy and bit the spear right out of me. Then one of them started chewing on the spear, and the blasting part of it went off. It killed a lot of them and blew this hole in me. They got so busy eating each other and Ae’mhnuu that I had time to get away. But I was leaving bloodtrail, and they followed it. No surprise there…”
S’reee was wheezing now with the effort of speech. “Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing. I can’t die now, there’s too much to do!”
“Healing’s part of my specialty,” Nita said, and was quiet for a moment. She’d become adept, as Kit had, at fixing the minor hurts Ponch kept picking—up bee stings and cat bites and so forth. But this was going to be different.
She stepped away from S’reee’s head and went back to look the wound over, keeping tight control of her stomach. “I can seal this up,” she said. “But you’re gonna have a huge scar. And I don’t know how long it’ll take the muscles underneath to grow back. I’m not real good at this yet.”
“Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that’ll be enough for me,” S’reee said.
S'reee | Stareyes
Themes:
Memory One You are hovering on the deck of a rather fantasy-looking airship, surrounded by a group of mostly humans. As you break through the clouds, you see a futuristic complex of buildings below with a banner hanging from the entrance: “Welcome Home, Victors of Light!” A crowd of people — humans, a group of tiny winged furry people,a humanoid fish-man, and others are gathered on the lawn. Someone spots the airships and suddenly everyone on the ground is cheering and waving. People around you start waving back.
You incline your head towards the person you're standing next to, a sort of humanoid frog. “We did it, Ace.”
“You all did it,” the frog replied in a lisping voice. “The resht of ush were jusht helping you.”
You bob a bit in a shrug. “That still counts. I’m going to miss you.”
“Are you shtaying for the party?”
“Of course. And I need to say my goodbyes. But I miss being in my home waters. It’ll be good to see everyone again for real.”
Memory Two It takes you and Kit a few minutes more to reach the spot, due south of Point Lookout, where the two of you and Nita have been contemplating anchoring the wizardry once you've settled on what it's going to be. Here the tides come 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 comes 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,” you say, as you pause 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 pulls out his manual, turns to the workbook section, and instructs it to replicate the structure of the proposed spell in the water, where they can see it. A few seconds later you and him are looking together at the faintly glowing schematic, a series of concentric and intersecting circles full of the “argument” of the wizardry.
You swim slowly around it, examining it. “I have to confess,” you say 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?”
You swing your tail thoughtfully. “Let’s find out,” you say. “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 feels uneasy agreeing with you. “Well,” he says, “if it doesn’t work, it won’t matter how elegant it is. Let’s get set up.”
He starts laying out the spell for real. He draws a finger through the water, and the graceful curves and curlings of the written Speech follow after as he drifts around in a circle about twenty yards across, reinstating the first circle as he's held it in memory.
“Is this how the second great circle looks?” you say, describing the circle with a long slow motion of body and tail. Fire fills the water, following your gesture, writing itself in pulsing curls and swirls of light — all the power statements and the conditionals that are secondary parts of the spell.
“You’ve got it,” Kit says. “One thing, though…” He looks ruefully at the place where Nita’s name is written. Carefully he reaches out and detaches the long string of characters in the Speech that represented Nita’s wizardly power and personality, and lets it float away into the water for the time being.
“You’ll need to knit that circle in a little tighter to compensate,” you say.
“Taking care of that now.”
It takes only a few moments to finish tightening the structure. Kit looks it over one more time; you do the same. Then you look at each other. “Well?” Kit says.
“Let’s see what happens,” you say.
Together you begin to recite—Kit in the human, prose-inflected form of the Speech; you in the sung form that whale-wizards prefer. Kit stumbles a couple of times until he gets the rhythm right—though the pace is quicker than that at which whales sing their more formal and ritual wizardries, it is still fairly slow by human standards. One word at a time, he thinks, resorting to humming the last syllables when he needs to let you catch up with him; and as you speak together and feed power to it, the wizardry begins 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 hang, waiting for the sense of the presence they are summoning.
And slowly, as the wizardry comes alive around them, the presence is there, making itself feels more strongly each passing moment as you and Kit work together toward the last verse—the wizard’s knot, in this case a triple-stranded braid, which will seal together three great circles’ worth of spell. The pressure comes down around them, the weight of tons of water and millions of years of time, hard to bear. The water goes from the normal dusky green of these depths to a flaring blue-green, like liquid set on fire. All around them, if it is possible for water to feel wetter than water already is, it does. The personality of the local ocean, partly aware, washes through both of you, intent on washing away resistance over time, as it always has.
Slowly and carefully you and Kit start to put your case, defining a specific area on which you desire to operate, telling the ocean what you want to do and why it is going to be a good thing.
You are reminding the ocean how things had once been: a long discussion, setting aside for the moment its outrage over having been systematically polluted.
The ocean, merely physical though it might be, has its own ideas about the creatures that have come over the long ages to populate it. To the ancient body of water that had suddenly found itself playing host to the first and simplest organisms, everything biological looks suspiciously like pollution.
Now, Kit is suggesting—with you, a recently native form of “pollution,” to back him up—a possible compromise. Here in this one place, at least, the ocean has an opportunity to return to that old purity, to water in which any chemical except salt is foreign. Maybe in other places this same intervention could be brought about, with wizards to power it and the ocean’s permission. But first they have to get this initial permission granted.
It is a long argument, one which the ocean is reluctant to let anyone else win, even though it stands to benefit. Kit knows from his research in the manual and from a number of conferences with you that there is always difficulty of this kind with oceanic wizardries.
But you and Kit have done your homework, and you don’t have to hurry. You just keep patiently putting your case in the Speech, taking your time. And Kit thinks he starts to feel a shift…
I think it’s starting to listen! You say privately to Kit.
Kit swallows and doesn’t respond, just keeps his mind on the argument. But he is starting to think you are right. Just this once, persistence is winning out. You've both been hoping for this, for though the waters have flinched under those early lashes of lightning, they also have conceived a certain sneaking fascination for the wild proliferation of life that has broken loose in them over a mere few thousand millennia. Now, as you and Kit hang in the center of the spell-sphere you've constructed, you see the light of the waters around you start slowly, slowly to shift in color and quality as the ocean begins to accept the spell.
The shimmer of the wizardry’s outer shell begins to dissolve into splashes of green and gold brilliance, the catalytic reactions that will make the pollutants snow down as inert salts onto the ocean bottom as fast as they build up. That inert “garbage” will still have to be cleaned up, but the Sea itself has routines for that, older than human wizardry and just as effective for this particular job.
You and Kit watch the wizardry spread away in great ribbony tentacles, diffusing itself, dissolving slowly into the water—one long current drifting away southward, another running up the channel, with the rising flood tide, toward the inland waters and the main sources of the pollution. After three or four minutes there is nothing left to be seen but the most subtle shimmer, a radiance like diluted moonlight.
Then even that is gone, leaving the waters nearly dark. The silence fades away, leaving you and Kit listening to the wet-clappered bonk, bonk of the nun buoy floating above you half a mile away, and the chain-saw ratchet of motorboat propellers chopping at the water as they pass over and through Jones Inlet.
Kit, hovering in the water, looked over at you. You hang there for a long moment, just finning the water around you, then drop your jaw and take a long gulp of the water, closing your mouth again and straining it back out through the thousands of plates of baleen. “Well?” Kit says.
You wave your flukes from side to side, a gesture of slow satisfaction. “It tastes better already,” you say.
“It worked!”
You laugh at him. “Come on, Kit, a spell always works. You know that.”
“If you mean a spell always does something, sure! It’s getting it to do what you originally had in mind that’s the problem.”
“Well, this one did. It certainly discharged itself properly. If it hadn’t, the structure of it would still be hanging here, complaining,” you say. “But I think we’ve done a nice clean intervention.” You chuckle, a long scratchy whistle, and fin your way over to Kit, turning a couple of times in a leisurely victory roll.
Kit high-fives one of your ventral fins as it waves past him, but the gesture brings him around briefly to where he sees Nita’s name, detached from the spell, still hanging there, waving like a weed in the water and glowing faintly. Kit sighs and grabs the string of symbols, winds them a few times around one hand, and stuffs them into his “pocket,” then grabs hold of that ventral fin again and lets you tow him back to the surface.
Memory Three
The dark bulk of the injured whale heaved up and down with her breathing, while small weak whistling noises went in and out. The whale’s skin was marked with rope burns and little pits and ragged gashes of shark bites. The greatest wound, though, the one still leaking blood, was too large for any shark to have made. It was a crater in the whale’s left side, behind the long swimming fin; a crater easily three feet wide, ragged with ripped flesh. The whale’s one visible eye, turned up to the moonlight, watched Kit and Nita dully as they came.
“What happened?” Kit said, looking at the biggest wound with disbelief and horror. “It looks like somebody bombed you.”
“Someone did,” the whale said in a long pained whistle. Nita came up beside the whale’s head and laid a hand on the black skin behind her eye. It was very hot. “One of the new killing spears the whalers use,” the whale said to Nita, “the blasting kind. Never mind that now. What did you do with the sharks?”
“Sank them. They’re lying on the bottom, ‘frozen’.”
“But if they don’t swim, they can’t breathe—they’ll die!” The concern in the whale’s voice astonished Nita. “Cousins, quick, you have to kill the spell! We’re going to need their goodwill later.”
Nita glanced at Kit, who was still staring at the wound with a tight, angry look on his face. He glanced up at her. “What? Okay, but better put up a forcewall first, so that the dolphins can get back in the water without getting attacked again.”
“Right.” Nita got her manual out and riffled through pages to the appropriate spell. She said the spell and felt it take hold, then sagged back against the whale and closed her eyes till the dizziness went away. Off to one side she heard Kit saying the words that released the freeze.
Moments later fins began appearing again out on the water, circling inward toward the sandbar, then sliding away as if bumping into something, and circling in again.
“The water will take the blood away soon enough,” the whale said. “They’ll go away and not even remember why they were here…” The whale’s eye fixed on Nita again, anguished but intent. “Thanks for coming so quickly, cousins.”
“It took us longer than we wanted. I’m Nita. That’s Kit.”
“I’m S’reee,” the whale said.
Kit left the wound and came up to join Nita. “It was one of those explosive harpoons, all right,” he said.
“But I thought those were supposed to be powerful enough to blow even big whales in two.”
“They are. Ae’mhnuu died that way, this morning.” S’reee’s whistle was bitter. “He was the Senior Wizard for this whole region of the Plateau. I was studying with him—I was going to be promoted to Advisory soon. We were out past the offshore limit and we were in the middle of a complicated wizardry. We heard the ship come but we were too distracted by the spell to realize in time what kind it was—”
Nita and Kit looked at each other. They’d found out for themselves that a wizard can be at his most vulnerable when exercising his strength. “He died right away,” S’reee said. “I took a spear too. But it didn’t explode right away; and the sharks smelled Ae’mhnuu’s blood and a great pack of them showed up to eat. They went into feeding frenzy and bit the spear right out of me. Then one of them started chewing on the spear, and the blasting part of it went off. It killed a lot of them and blew this hole in me. They got so busy eating each other and Ae’mhnuu that I had time to get away. But I was leaving bloodtrail, and they followed it. No surprise there…”
S’reee was wheezing now with the effort of speech. “Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing. I can’t die now, there’s too much to do!”
“Healing’s part of my specialty,” Nita said, and was quiet for a moment. She’d become adept, as Kit had, at fixing the minor hurts Ponch kept picking—up bee stings and cat bites and so forth. But this was going to be different.
She stepped away from S’reee’s head and went back to look the wound over, keeping tight control of her stomach. “I can seal this up,” she said. “But you’re gonna have a huge scar. And I don’t know how long it’ll take the muscles underneath to grow back. I’m not real good at this yet.”
“Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that’ll be enough for me,” S’reee said.