Nita was silent.
“Now the second option,” Carl said. “You go down there and keep your word—though you’re not happy about it, to say the least. You sing the Song, and when the time comes you dive into that coral or whatever and cut yourself up, and the Master-Shark comes after you and eats you. You experience maybe up to a minute of extreme pain, pain like being hit by a car or burned all over, until you go into shock, or your brain runs out of oxygen, whichever comes first; and you die. Your parents and friends then have to deal with the fact of your death.”
Nita’s tears started again.
“The ‘good’ side to this option,” said Carl, “is that the Song will be successfully completed, millions of people will continue to live their lives untroubled, and the Lone Power will have suffered another severe setback. My estimate is that It couldn’t interfere in any large way with the Sea’s affairs—and, to some extent, with the land’s—for some forty to fifty years thereafter. Possibly more.”
Nita nodded slowly. “So if—”
“Wait. There’s a third option,” Carl said.
“Huh?”
He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t fully decipher. “Sing the Song and make the Sacrifice—but do it willingly. Rather than just doing it because you have to, to keep terrible things from happening.”
“Does it make a difference?”
Carl nodded. “If you can make the Sacrifice willingly, the wizardry will gain such power as you can barely imagine. The Lone One’s power is always based on Its desire to have Its own way in everything. Nothing undermines Its workings faster than power turned toward having something be the way someone else wants it.”
Carl looked hard at her. “I have to make real sure you understand this. I’m not talking about the sort of fakery most people mean when they talk about ‘sacrifice’—none of that ‘unselfishness’ business, which usually has the desire for other people to feel guilty or sad hidden at the bottom of it. No being a ‘martyr.’ That would sabotage a wizardry almost as badly as running out on it. But to willingly give up one’s life for the sake of the joy and well-being of others will instantly destroy whatever power the Lone One has currently amassed.” He glanced away. “That doesn’t mean you couldn’t be afraid and still have it work, by the way.”
“Oh good,” Nita said with a nervous laugh.
“The important thing is that other times when the Sacrifice has been made willingly, there have been fewer wars afterward, less crime, for a long while. The Death of things, of the world as whole, has been slowed...”
Nita thought of people beating and shooting and stealing from each other; she thought of A-bombs and H-bombs, and people starving and poor—and she thought of all that slowed down. But all those troubles and possibilities seemed remote right now compared to her own problem, her own life. “I don’t know if I could do that,” Nita said, scarcely above a whisper.
There was a long pause. “I don’t know if I could either,” said Carl, just as quietly.
She sat still for a long time. “I think—”
“Don’t say it,” Carl said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t possibly have decided already. And even if you have—” He glanced away. “You may change your mind later… and then you’ll be saved the embarrassment of having to justify it to me.”
“Later—” She looked at him in distress and confusion. “You mean you would still talk to me if I—” She stopped. “Wait a minute. If I don’t do it, I won’t know you! And if I do do it—”
“There’s always Timeheart,” Carl said softly.
Nita nodded, silent. She had been there once, in that “place” to which only wizards can find their way while still alive; that terrible and beautiful place where things that are loved are preserved, deathless, perfect, yet still growing and becoming more themselves through moment after timeless moment. “After we— After we’re alive, then—”
“What’s loved,” Carl said, “lives.”
She looked at him in a few moments’ sorrowful wonder. “But sure,” she said. “You’re a Senior. You must go there all the time.”
“No.” He looked out over the sea. “In fact, the higher you’re promoted, when you’re a wizard, the more work you have to do—and the less time you get to spend outside this world, except on business.” He breathed out and shook his head. “I haven’t been to Timeheart for a long time, except in dreams.”
Now it was his turn to sound wistful. Nita reached out and thumped Carl’s shoulder once or twice, hesitantly.
“Yeah,” Carl said. Slowly he stood up and brushed the sand off his towel, then looked down at her. “Nita,” he said—and his voice was not impassive any more, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Call us before you start the song, if you can, okay?” The New York accent was pronounced and raspy, as if Carl’s nose were stuffed.
“Right.”
He turned away, then paused and looked back at her. And everything suddenly became too much for Nita. She went to Carl in a rush, threw her arms around him at about waist height, and began to bawl. “Oh, honey,” Carl said, and got down on one knee and held Nita tight, which was what she needed. But the helpless expression on his face, when she finally got some control over herself and looked up, almost hurt her more than her own pain.
After a while she pushed him away. Carl resisted her for a moment. “Nita,” he said. “If you— If you do...” He paused. “Thank you,” he finally said, looking at her hard. “Thank you. For the ten million lives that’ll keep on living. They’ll never know. But the wizards will. And we won’t ever forget.”
“A lot of good that’d do me!” Nita said, caught between desperate laughter and tears.
“Sweetheart,” Carl said, “if you’re in this world for comfort, you’ve come to the wrong place, whether you’re a wizard or just plain mortal. And if you’re doing what you’re doing because of the way other people will feel about it—you’re definitely in the wrong business. What you do has to be done because of how you’ll feel about you: the way you did it last night, with your folks.” His voice was rueful. “There are no other rewards ; if only because no matter what you do, no one will ever think the things about you that you want them to think. Not even the Powers.”
“Right,” Nita said again.
They let go of each other. “So,” Carl said. “Whatever happens… dai stihó.”
“Dai stihó,” Nita said.
Carl turned and walked away quickly. The air slammed itself shut behind him, and he was gone.
Nita walked back to the house.
***
She kept her good-byes brief. “We may be back tonight,” she said to her mother and father as they stood together on the beach, “or we may not. S’reee says it’ll depend on how much of the rehearsal we get finished.”
“Rehearsal—” Her mother looked at her curiously.
“Uh-huh. It’s like I told you,” Kit said. “Everyone who sings has his own part—but there’s some ensemble singing, and it has to be done right.”
“Kit, we’re late,” Nita said. “Mom—” She grabbed her mother and hugged her hard. “Don’t worry if we don’t come back tonight, Mom, please,” she said. “We may just go straight into the Song—and that’s a day and a half by itself. Look for us Monday morning.” Us! her mind screamed, but she ignored it. “Dad—” She turned to him, hugged him too, and saw, out of the corner of her eye, her mother hugging Kit.
Nita glanced up and down the beach. “It’s all clear, Kit,” she said. She shrugged out of the towel wrapped around her, leaving it with her mother, then sprinted for the water. A few fast hops over several breakers, and there was depth enough to dive and stroke out to twenty-foot water. Nita leaped into the whaleshape as if it was an escape rather than a trap from which she might never return. Once a humpback, she felt normal again—and felt a twinge of nervousness; there was something S’reee had said about that…
No matter. Nita surfaced a
nd blew good-bye at her mother and father, then turned for Kit, who was treading water beside her, to take her dorsal fin and be towed out to depth.
Out in the fifty-foot water Kit wrapped the whalesark about him and made the change with a swiftness that was almost savage. The sperm whale that appeared in his place had a bitter, angry look to its movements when it began to swim away from shore.
“Kit,” Nita said as they went, “you okay?”
It was some time before he answered. “No,” he said. “Why should I be? When you’re going to—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Kit, look—”
“No, you look. Don’t you see there’s nothing I can do about all this? And I don’t like it!” His song was another of the scraping sperm-whale battlecries, soft but very heartfelt, and the rage in it chattered right down Nita’s skin like nails down a blackboard.
“There’s not much I can do about it myself,” she said, “and I don’t like it either. Please, let’s not talk about it for now! My brain still hurts enough from last night.” Not to mention this morning.
“Neets,” he said, “we’ve got to talk about it sometime. Tomorrow’s it.”
“Fine. Before tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’ve got today to worry about. Are we even going the right way?”
He laughed at her then, a painful sound. “Boy, are you preoccupied,” Kit said. “Clean your ears out and listen!”
She stopped everything but the ticks and clicks a humpback uses to find its way, and listened—and was tempted to laugh herself. The sea had a racket hidden in it. From the southwest, an insane assortment of long, odd, wild sounds was coming. Sweet high flutings that cut sharply through the intervening distance; clear horncalls, as if someone hunted under the waves; outer-spacy whistles and warbles like the electronic cries of orbiting satellites; deep bass scrapes and rumbles, lawn-mower buzzes and halftone moans and soulful sighs. And many of those sounds, sooner or later, came back to the same main theme—a series of long wistful notes, slowly ascending into pitches too high and keen for human ears, then whispering away, lost in the quiet breathing of the water.
Nita had never heard that main theme before, but she recognized it instantly from her reading and her wizard’s sense of the Sea. It was the loss / gain / sorrow motif that ran all through the Song of the Twelve. What she heard now, attenuated by distance but otherwise clear, was the sound of its singers, tuning up for the performance in which that mournful phrase would become not just a motif but a reality.
“Kit,” Nita said with a shiver, “that’s a lot more than ten whales! Who are all those other voices?”
He bubbled, a shrug. “Let’s find out.”
She whistled agreement and struck off after Kit, due west, away from the south shore of the island and out across the Atlantic-to-Ambrose shipping approaches once more. Song echoed more and more loudly in the sunlit shallows through which they swam; but underneath them Nita and Kit were very aware of the depths from which no echo returned—the abyss of Hudson Canyon, far below them, waiting.
“This is it,” Kit said at last, practically in Nita’s ear, as they came to the fringes of the area S’reee’s instructions had mentioned—fifteen miles east-northeast of Barnegat, New Jersey, right over the remains of an old sunken tanker six fathoms down in the water. And floating, soaring, or slowly fluking through the diffuse green-golden radiance of the water, were the whales.
Nita had to gulp once to find her composure. Hundreds of whales had gathered and were milling about, whales of every kind—minke whales, sei whales, sperm whales, dolphins of more kinds than she knew existed, in a profusion of shapes and colors, flashing through the water; several blues, grave-voiced, gliding with huge slow grace; fin whales, hardly smaller than the blues, bowhead whales and pygmy rights and humpbacks, many of them; gray whales and pygmy sperms and narwhals with their long single spiral teeth, like unicorn horns; belugas and killers and scamperdowns and bottle-nosed whales— “Kit,” Nita sang, faint-voiced, “S’reee didn’t tell me there were going to be people here!”
“Me either. I guess spectators at the rehearsal are so common, she forgot...” Kit sounded unconcerned.
Easy for you, Nita thought. You like crowds! She sang a few notes of sonar, trying nervously to hear some familiar shape. One shape at least Nita recognized, accompanied by the slow, calm, downscaling note of the Blue, as Aroooon passed by, a gold-tinged shadow in the background of greenness and the confusion of bodies. And there was Hotshot’s high chatter, some ways off, accompanied by several other dolphin voices very like his—members of his pod.
Stillness swept over the spectators as she approached with Kit, and they recognized who she was. And a single note began to go up from them, starting at the fringes of the circle, working its way inward even to the Celebrants, until she heard even Aroooon’s giant voice taking it up. One note, held in every range from the dolphins’ dog-whistle trilling to the water-shaking thunder of the blues. One thought, one concept in the Speech, trumpeting through the water with such force that Nita began to shake at the sound of it. Praise. They knew she was the Silent One. They knew what she was going to do for them. They were thanking her.
Stunned, Nita forgot to swim—just drifted there in painful joy.
From behind, as the note slowly ebbed away, Kit nudged her. “Get the lead out, Neets,” he sang, just for her hearing. “You’re the star of this show. So start acting like it! Go in there and let them know you’re here.”
She swam slowly through the spectator whales, into the clear water in the center of their great circle, where the Celebrants were gathered.
One by one, as she circled above the weed-covered remnant of the trawler Nita quickly identified the whales she knew. Aroooon, yes, swimming on more or less by himself to tideward, singing his deep scrape of notes with the absent concentration of a perfectionist who has the time to hunt perfection; Hotshot, doing barrel rolls near the surface and chattering through the quick bright harmonies of some part of the Wanderer’s song; Areinnye, aloof from both Wanderer and Blue, running again and again over a phrase of the Gray Lord’s song and paying no further attention to Nita after a quick glance.
There were also five other whales whom Nita didn’t know, exactly as Kit had pegged them. A beluga, dolphin-sized but whale-shaped, lazing near the surface and singing some longing phrase from the Gazer’s song; a pilot whale, long and slim and gray, silent for the moment and looking at Nita with interest; a right whale, with its huge, strange, bent-out-of-shape baleen mouth, listening to the beluga; a killer whale, the sharp blacks and whites of its hide a contrast to the grays and quiet mottlings of most of the others.
And—thank Heaven!—S’reee, swimming toward Nita from beside the killer. Nita had been shaken by the sight of the orca—killer whales being one of a humpback’s most persistent natural enemies—but just now her composure was so unraveled, there wasn’t much more damage that could be done to it. As S’reee came up to greet her, Nita managed to sing in something like a calm voice, and as if she were actually in charge, “Well, we’re late. Should we get started?”
“Good idea,” said S’reee, brushing skin briefly and reassuringly with Nita. “Introductions first, though.”
“Yes, please.”
S’reee led Nita off to the north, where several of the singers were working together. “We’ve been through the first part of the Song already this morning,” said S’reee, “the name-songs and so forth. I’ve heard you do yours, so there was no need for you to be here till late. We’re up to the division now, the ‘temptation’ part. These are the people singing the Undecided group—”
“Hi, Hotshot,” Nita sang as she and S’reee soared into the heart of the group. The dolphin chattered a greeting back and busied himself with his singing again, continuing his spirals near the surface, above the heads of the right whale and a whale whose song Nita hadn’t heard on the way in, a Sowerby’s beaked whale. She immediately suspected why she hadn’t heard it; the whale, undoubtedly there
to celebrate the Forager’s part, was busy eating—ripping up the long kelp and redweed stirring around the shattered deck-plates of the wreck. It didn’t even look up as she and S’reee approached. The right whale was less preoccupied; it swam toward Nita and S’reee at a slow pace that might have been either courtesy or caution.
“HNii’t, this is T!h!ki,” said S’reee. Nita clicked his name back at him in greeting, swimming forward to brush skin politely with him. “He’s singing the Listener.”
T!h!ki rolled away from Nita and came about, looking at her curiously. When he spoke, his song revealed both great surprise and some unease. “S’reee—this is a human!”
“T!h!ki,” Nita said, wry-voiced, with a look at S’reee, “are you going to be mad at me for things I haven’t done too?”
The right whale looked at her with that cockeyed upward stare that rights have—their eyes being placed high in their flat-topped heads. “Oh,” he said, sounding wry himself, “you’ve run afoul of Areinnye, have you. No fear, Silent Lord—hNii’t, was it? No fear.” T!h!ki’s song put her instantly at ease. It had an amiable and intelligent sound to it, the song of a mind that didn’t tend toward blind animosities. “If you’re going to do the Sea such a service as you’re doing, I could hardly do less than treat you with honor. For Sea’s sake don’t think Areinnye is typical.”
T!h!ki paused, gazing down at the calmly feeding beaked whale. “However,” he said, “some of us practically have to have a bite taken out of us to get us to start honoring and stop eating.” He drifted down a fathom or so and bumped nose-first into the beaked whale. “Roots! Heads up, you bottom-grubber, here comes the Master-Shark!”
“Huh? Where? Where?” the shocked song came drifting up from the bottom. The kelp was thrashed about by frantic fluking, and through it rose the beaked whale, its mouth full of weed, streamers of which trailed back and whipped around in all directions as the whale tried to tell where the shark was coming from. “Where—what— Oh,” the beaked whale said after a moment, as the echoes from its initial excited squeaking came back and told it that the Master-Shark was nowhere in the area. “’Ki,” it said slowly, “I’m going to get you for that.”