by Diane Duane
S’reee blew, a sober sound. “It’s the usual confusion about time,” she said. “All the great Powers exist outside it, and all we usually see of Them are the places and moments where and when They dip into the timeflow we’re inhabiting. This world has always been an annoyance to the Lone One. Its gets frustrated here a lot — so It visits often, in many forms. From inside our timeflow, it can look as if the Lone Power is bound in one place-time and free in another… and both appearances are true.” S’reee rolled and stretched in the water. “Meanwhile, outside the timeflow, where things don’t have to happen one after another, the Lone One is eternally rebelling and eternally defeated—“
“We gave It a chance to do something else, when we fought last,” Nita said. “We offered It the option to stop being a dark power—“
“And it worked,” S’reee said, sounding very pleased. “Didn’t you know? It’s also eternally redeemed. But meantime we have to keep fighting the battles, even though the war’s decided. The Lone One’s going to take a long while to complete Its choice, and if we get lazy or sloppy about handling Its thrashing around, a lot of people are going to die.”
“The sea floor,” Nita said, “has been shaken up a lot lately.”
“That’s one symptom that tells us the Twelve Song needs to be reenacted,” S’reee said. “We do the Song at intervals anyway, to make sure the story’s never forgotten. But when the Lone Power gets troublesome — as It seems to be doing now — we reenact the Song, and bind It quiet again.”
“Where do you do this stuff?” Kit said.
“Down the coast a ways,” S’reee said, “off the edge of the plateau, in the Great Deep past the Gates of the Sea. Ae’mhnuu was getting ready to call the Ten together for a Song in three days or so. He was training me for the Singer’s part — before they blew him in two pieces and boiled him down for oil.”
Her song went bitter, acquiring a rasp that hurt Nita’s ears. “Now I’m stuck handling it all myself. It’s not easy: You have to pick each whale wizard carefully for each part. I don’t know who he had in mind to do what. Now I have to work it out myself — and I need help, from wizards who can handle trouble if it comes up.” She looked up at them. “You two can obviously manage that. And the Ten will listen to you, they’ll respect you, after what you went through up in the High and Dry. You’ve fought the Lone Power yourselves and gotten off—“
“It was luck,” Kit muttered. Nita elbowed him.
“Singing, huh,” Nita said, smiling slightly. “I don’t have much of a singing voice. Maybe I’d better take the Silent One’s part.”
S’reee looked at Nita in amazement. “Would you?”
“Why not?”
“Not me,” Kit said. “I’m even worse than she is. But I’ll come along for the ride. The swim, I mean.”
S’reee looked from Kit to Nita. “You two are enough to make me doubt all the stories I’ve heard about humans,” she said. “HNii’t, best check that book’thing and make sure this is something you’re suited for. The temperaments of the singers have to match the parts they sing — but I think this might suit you. And the original Silent Lord was a humpback. The shapechange would come easily to you, since we’ve shared blood—“
“Wait a minute! Shapechange?” Nita cried. “You mean me be a whale?”
Kit laughed. “Why not, Neets? You have been putting on a little weight lately…”
She elbowed him again, harder. “Oh, you’d shapechange too, Kit,” S’reee said. “We couldn’t take you down in the Great Deeps otherwise. — Look, you two, there’s too much to tell, and some of it’s going to have to be handled as we go along. We’ve got three days to get everyone together for the Song, so that it happens when the Moon’s round. Otherwise it won’t keep the sea bottom quiet—“
Kit looked suddenly at Nita. “Did you see that thing on the news the other night? About the volcano?”
“The what?”
“There was some scientist on. He said that hot-water vents had been opening up all of a sudden off the Continental Shelf. And he said that if those little tremors we’ve been having keep getting worse, it could open the bottom right up and there’d be a volcano. The least it’d do would be to boil the water for miles. But it could also break Long Island in two. The beaches would go right under water. And Manhattan skyscrapers aren’t built for earthquakes.” Kit was quiet for a moment, then said, “The rocks remembered. That’s why they were upset…”
Nita wasn’t thinking about rocks, or Manhattan. She was thinking that her folks were planning to be there for another week and a half at least — and she saw a very clear picture of a tidal wave of dirty, boiling water crashing down on the beach house and smashing it to driftwood.
“When should we start, S’reee?” she said.
“Dawn tomorrow. There’s little time to waste. Hotshot will be going with us — he’ll be singing the Fourth Lord, the Wanderer, in the Song.”
“Dawn—“ Nita chewed her lip. “Could it be a little later? We’ve got to have breakfast with my parents or they’ll freak out.”
“Parents?” S’reee looked from Nita to Kit in shock. “You’re still calves, is that what you’re telling me? And you went outworld into a Dark Place and came back! I’d thought you were much older—“
“We wished we were,” Nita said under her breath.
“Oh, well. No matter. Three hours after dawn be all right? The same place? Good enough. Let me take you back. I have something to fetch so that you can swim with us, Kit. And, look—“ She gazed at them for some time from that small, worried, gentle eye; but longer at Nita. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
“Think nothing of it,” Kit said grandly, slipping into the water and patting S’reee on one big ribbed flank.
Nita slid into the water, took hold of S’reee’s dorsal fin, and thought something of it all the way home.
Seniors’ Song
The alarm clock went off right above Nita’s head, a painful blasting buzz like a dentist’s drill. “Aaagh,” she said, reluctantly putting one arm out from under the covers and fumbling around on the bedside table for the noisy thing.
It went quiet without her having touched it. Nita squinted up through the morning brightness and found herself looking at Dairine. Her little sister was standing by the bedside table with the alarm clock in her hands, wearing Star Wars pajamas and an annoyed look.
“And where are we going at six in the morning?” Dairine said, too sweetly.
“We are not going anywhere,” Nita said, swinging herself out of bed with a groan. “Go play with your Barbie dolls, Einstein.”
“Only if you give them back,” Dairine said, unperturbed. “Anyway, there are better things to play with. Kit, for example—“
“Dairine, you’re pushing it.” Nita stood up, rubbed her eyes until they started working properly, and then pulled a dresser drawer open and began pawing through it for a T-shirt.
“What’re you doing, then — getting up so early all the time, staying out late? You think Mom and Dad aren’t noticing? — Oh, don’t wear that,” Dairine said at the sight of Nita’s favorite sweatshirt. It featured numerous holes made by Ponch’s teeth and the words WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS. “Oh, really, Neets, don’t, it’s incredibly tacky—“
“That sounds real weird,” Nita said, “coming from someone with little Yodas all over her pajamas.”
“Oh, stuff it, Nita,” Dairine said. Nita turned her head and smiled, thinking that Dairine had become easier to tease since she’d decided to be a Jedi Knight when she grew up. Still, Nita went easy on her sister. It wasn’t fair for a wizard to make fun of someone who wanted to do magic, of whatever brand. “Same to you, runt. When’re Mom and Dad getting up, did they say?”
“They’re up now.”
“What for?”
“They’re going fishing. We’re going with them.”
Nita blanched. “Oh, no! Dair, I can’t—“
Dai
rine cocked her head at Nita. “They wanted to surprise us.”
“They did,” Nita said, in shock. “I can’t go—“
“Got a hot date, huh?”
“Dairine! I told you—“
“Where were you two going?”
“Swimming.” That was the truth.
“Neets, you can swim any time,” Dairine said, imitating their mother’s tone of voice. Nita zipped up her jeans and sat down on the bed with a thump. “What were you gonna be doing, anyway?”
“I told you, swimming!” Nita got up, went to the window, and looked out, thinking of S’reee and the summoning and the Song of the Twelve and the rest of the business of being on active status, which was now looking ridiculously complicated. And it looked so simple yesterday…
“You could tell them something—“
Nita made a face at that. She had recently come to dislike lying to her parents. For one thing, she valued their trust. For another, a wizard, whose business is making things happen by the power of the spoken word, learns early on not to say things out loud that aren’t true or that he doesn’t want to happen.
“Sure,” she said in bitter sarcasm. “Why don’t I just tell them that we’re on a secret mission? Or that we’re busy saving Long Island and the greater metropolitan area from a fate worse than death? Or maybe I could tell them that Kit and I have an appointment to go out and get turned into whales, how about that?”
Even without turning around, Nita could feel her sister staring at her back. Finally the quiet made Nita twitchy. She turned around, but Dairine was already heading out of the room. “Go on and eat,” Dairine said quietly, over her shoulder. “Sound happy.” And she was gone.
Under her breath, Nita said a word her father would have frowned at, and then sighed and headed for breakfast, plastering onto her face the most sincere smile she could manage. At first it felt hopelessly unnatural, but in a few seconds it was beginning to stick. At the dining-room door, where her father came around the corner from the kitchen and nearly ran her over, Nita took one look at him — in his faded lumberjack shirt and his hat stuck full of fish hooks — and wondered why she had ever been worried about getting out of the fishing trip. It was going to be all right.
Her dad looked surprised. “Oh! You’re up. Did Dairine—“
“She told me,” Nita said. “Is there time to eat something?”
“Sure. I guess she told Kit too then — I just looked in his room, but he wasn’t there. The bed was made; I guess he’s ready—“
Nita cheerfully allowed her father to draw his own conclusions, especially since they were the wrong ones. “He’s probably down at the beach killing time,” she said. “I’ll go get him after I eat.”
She made a hurried commando raid on the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove for her mother, who was browsing through the science section of The New York Times and was ready for another cup of tea. Nita’s mother looked up at her from the paper and said, “Neets, where’s your sister? She hasn’t had breakfast.”
That was when her sister came thumping into the dining room. Nita saw her mom look at Dairine and develop a peculiar expression. “Dari,” her mother said, “are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah!” said Dairine in an offended tone. Nita turned in her chair to look at her. Her sister looked flushed, and she wasn’t moving at her normal breakneck speed. “C’mere, baby,” Nita’s mother said. “Let me feel your forehead.”
“Mom!”
“Dairine,” her father said.
“Yeah, right.” Dairine went over to her mother and had her forehead felt, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “You’re hot, sweetie,” Nita’s mother said in alarm. “Harry, I told you she was in the water too long yesterday. Feel her.”
Nita’s dad looked slightly bored, but he checked Dairine’s forehead and then frowned. “Well…”
“No ‘wells.’ Dari, I think you’d better sit this one out.”
“Oh, Mom!”
“Cork it, little one. You can come fishing with us in a day or two.” Nita’s mother turned to her. “Neets, will you stick around and keep an eye on your sister?”
“Mom, I don’t need a babysitter!”
“Enough, Dairine,” her mom said. “Up to bed with you. Nita, we’ll take you and Kit with us the next time; but your dad really wants to get out today.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Nita said, dropping what was left of the smile (though it now really wanted to stay on). “I’ll keep an eye on the runt.”
“Don’t call me a runt!”
“Dairine,” her father said again. Nita’s little sister made a face and left, again at half the usual speed.
As soon as she could, Nita slipped into Dairine’s room. Her sister was lying on top of the bed, reading her way through a pile of X-Men comics; she looked flushed. “Not bad, huh?” she said in a low voice as Nita came in.
“How did you do that?” Nita whispered.
“I used the Force,” Dairine said, flashing a wicked look at Nita.
“Dair! Spill it!”
“I turned Dad’s electric blanket up high and spent a few minutes under it. Then I drank about a quart of hot water to make sure I stayed too warm.” Dairine turned a page in her comic book, looking blase about the whole thing. “Mom did the rest.”
Nita shook her head in admiration. “Runt, I owe you one.”
Dairine looked up from her comic at Nita. “Yeah,” Dairine said, “you do.”
Nita felt a chill. “Right,” she said. “I’ll hang out here till they leave. Then I have to find Kit—“
“He went down to the general store just before you got up,” Dairine said. “I think he was going to call somebody.”
“Right,” Nita said again.
There was the briefest pause. Then: “Whales, huh?” Dairine said, very softly.
Nita got out of there in a great hurry.
The sign on top of the building merely said, in big, square, black letters, TIANA BEACH. “ Tiana Beach’ what?” people typically said, and it was a fair question. From a distance there was no telling what the place was, except a one-story structure with peeling white paint.
The building stood off the main road, at the end of a spur road that ran down to the water. On one side of it was its small parking lot, a black patch of heat-heaved asphalt always littered with pieces of clamshells, which the gulls liked to drop and crack open there. On the other side was a dock for people who came shopping in their boats.
The dock was in superb repair. The store was less so. Its large multipaned front windows, for example, were clean enough outside, but inside they were either covered by stacked-up boxes or with grime; nothing was visible through them except spastically flashing old neon signs that said “Pabst Blue Ribbon” or “Cerveza BUDWEISER.” Beachgrass and aggressive weeds grew next to (and in places, through) the building’s cracked concrete steps-The rough little U.S. Post Office sign above the front door had a sparrow’s nest behind it.
Nita headed for the open door. It was always open, whether Mr. Friedman the storekeeper was there or not; “On the off chance,” as Mr. Friedmam usually said, “that someone might need something at three in the morning… or the afternoon…” Nita walked into the dark, brown-smelling store, past the haphazard shelves of canned goods and cereal and the racks of plastic earthworms and nylon surf-casting line. By the cereal and the crackers, she met the reason that Mr. Friedman’s store was safe day and night. The reason’s name was Dog: a whitish, curlyish, terrierish mutt, with eyes like something out of Disney and teeth like something out of Transylvania. Dog could smell attempted theft for miles; and when not biting people in the line of business, he would do it on his own time, for no reason whatever — perhaps just to keep his fangs in.
“Hi, Dog,” Nita said, being careful not to get too close.
Dog showed Nita his teeth. “Go chew dry bones,” he said in a growl.
“Same to you,” Nita said pleasantly, and made a wide detour around him, headi
ng for the phone booth in the rear of the store.
“Right,” Kit was saying, his voice slightly muffled by being in the booth. “Something about ‘the Gates of the Sea.’ I tried looking in the manual, but all I could find was one of those ‘restrictEd’ notices and a footnote that said to see the local Senior for more details—“
Kit looked up, saw Nita coming, and pointed at the phone, mouthing the words “Tom and Carl.” She nodded and squeezed into the booth with him; Kit tipped the hearing part of the receiver toward her, and they put their heads together. “Hi, it’s Nita—“
“Well, hi there yourself,” Tom Swale’s voice came back. He would doubtless have gone on with more of the same if someone else, farther away from his end of the line, hadn’t begun screaming “Hel-LOOOOOOO! HEL-lo!” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounded as if Tom were keeping his insane grandmother chained up in the living room. This, Nita knew, was Tom and Carl’s intractable macaw Machu Picchu, or Peach for short. Wizards’ pets tended to get a bit strange as their masters grew more adept in wizardry, but Peach was stranger than most, and more trying. Even a pair of Senior wizards must have wondered what to do with a creature that would at one moment deliver the evening news a day early, in a flawless imitation of any major newscaster you pleased, and then a second later start ripping up the couch for the fun of it.
Cut that out!” Nita heard another voice saying in the background, one with a more New Yorkish sound to it: That was Carl. “Look out! — She’s on the stove. Get her — oh, Lord. There go the eggs. You little cannibal!—“
“It’s business as usual around here, as you can tell,” Tom said. “Not where you are, though, to judge from how early Kit called… and from what he tells me. Kit, hang on a minute: Carl’s getting the information released for you Evidently the Powers That Be don’t want it distributed without a Senior s supervision. The area must be sensitive right now.”
Nita made small talk with Tom for a few minutes while, in the back-ground, Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irritably at the macaw, who was shouting “Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” at them — or possibly at Carl. Nita could imagine the scene very well — the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a “flagship” station of one of the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of time — say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad to know them.
