The Wizard Test

by Bell, Hilari

“What about my project?” wailed Lisette.

  “It’s logical that with her background she’d sympathize with animals,” Ivan pointed out. “She probably doesn’t—”

  “It’s better to care about animals than to have a computer crystal for a heart,” Imina hissed at him.

  “Better that than a brain that stopped in the Stone Age,” said Ivan coolly.

  “She’s a thief,” said Lisette.

  “Be quiet,” Dr. Sandoval snapped. “I’m sick to death of the three of you bickering.

  “Annis, since you and Ivan have so little understanding of each other’s point of view, I’m going to have you switch science projects. Annis, I want you to do Ivan’s project. He’s studying the effects of the earth’s magnetic fields on whale migration.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “If you don’t understand his work, then you’ll have to ask his help, won’t you? What are you working on?”

  Imina opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “Whales.” She hated copying Ivan, but it was the only thing she could think of.

  “Good, you’ll have some common ground. What about whales? Their repopulation? Their physiology?”

  “Intelligence,” said Imina. “They’re probably as smart as we are.”

  “There is no evidence of that,” said Ivan.

  “My people know a lot more about whales than—”

  “Then Ivan will need your help, too,” Dr. Sandoval interrupted firmly, “and maybe you can reach some understanding.”

  “But what about me?” Lisette looked smug. “All I did was make a simple mistake, and she—”

  “Simple-minded,” muttered Ivan.

  Lisette glared at him. “She ruined—”

  “You will write a full report on rapid decompression and its effects on mammals,” said Dr. Sandoval. The smug look vanished from Lisette’s face. “And I want the lot of you to talk with Dr. Kent about the need for cooperation in an enclosed environment. Annis, you can go now. I’ll comm her office and make sure she’s free.”

  “You know, Annis, sooner or later you’ll have to make peace with the other kids. Have you considered that?”

  Imina shrugged.

  Dr. Kent was one of the few people in the habitat who’d taken the trouble to paint her office walls — a warm, soothing cream. Her hair, black as Imina’s, was caught up in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her skin was almost the same shade of honey-gold. But Dr. Kent’s face was a sculpture of oval lines that made even Lisette look plain. And the psychiatrist was as smart as she was beautiful, which Imina considered almost as unfair as it was dangerous.

  Now Dr. Kent sighed. “What would you like to do about your problems with Lisette?”

  “Put the evil eye on her,” said Imina.

  The psychiatrist’s brows snapped together. “Really?”

  “Of course not,” said Imina hastily. “I know there’s no such thing as magic. I was only joking.”

  Dr. Kent’s lovely face was still neutral, and a chill ran down Imina’s spine. Dr. Kent was so gentle, Imina sometimes forgot she was the enemy.

  “You don’t joke much, Annis. Didn’t you tell me magic was your favorite pretend game when you were young?”

  Sometimes Dr. Kent could be distracted by another subject, if Imina introduced it right. “You know, I really hate being called Annis,” she said with heartfelt sincerity.

  A flicker of interest crossed Dr. Kent’s face. “What would you rather be called?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Imina shrugged. “I just hate my name.”

  “That’s not what you said,” said Dr. Kent. “You said you didn’t like being called Annis.” She let the statement lie, but Imina was used to that strategy. She could be silent longer than Dr. Kent could.

  You want to be called Imina, tell people to call you Imina, her grandmother had said. It’s only a name. But to her it meant more than that. Imina was an Inuit name, a shaman’s name. And Imina wasn’t a shaman, for the spirits hadn’t chosen her — yet. Somehow, she couldn’t let people call her Imina unless she was sure she deserved it. And there was no one left to teach her magic now that Grandma Ata was gone.

  “All right.” Dr. Kent gave in. “Let’s talk about Lisette. You know how important the habitat is, Annis. In an enclosed environment like this, tension between people can become unbearable. Why do you dislike Lisette so much?”

  “She’s a twit.” Imina scowled. “I mean, she wants to be a model, of all the stupid things.”

  “She probably doesn’t know what she wants to be yet. Not everyone has your strong sense of personal identity.”

  Imina grinned. “You mean Lisette has a weak identity?”

  Dr. Kent shook her head ruefully. “Annis, what would your grandmother have said to you about Lisette?”

  Imina thought for moment, then grimaced. “She would have said that she was too petty to worry about, and that if I couldn’t live in harmony with her, I should just ignore her.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think her identity’s so weak, she can’t stand to have anyone around who doesn’t squirm for her. And I’ll bet that before I came, she tried to flirt with Ivan and he ignored her, so she really doesn’t like him. Am I right?”

  Dr. Kent smiled and shook her head. “Maybe you and Ivan should form an alliance.”

  “But he’s a technocrat,” Imina protested. “He talks about nothing but quarks and equations.”

  “Then maybe… Annis, is there someone, anyone here, whom you trust?”

  Imina nodded, trying frantically to come up with a name Dr. Kent would believe. But the psychiatrist surprised her. “Then why don’t you go to that person, right now if you can, and tell him or her your problems, and let that person help you.”

  “Thanks.” Imina rose slowly. “That’s a good idea. I think I will.”

  Imina fastened the pouch that held her grandmother’s shaman belt to her waist. She settled the rim of her full-face diving mask carefully behind her jaw, so the seal wouldn’t open when she spoke, and tightened the strap so the cuff rested comfortably behind her ears. She decided not to turn the sonocom on — she didn’t want to talk to anyone. She plunged through the open access into the sea. The vibration behind her right ear told her that the miniaturized gill was at work, extracting oxygen from the water around her, releasing the carbon dioxide and recirculating the nitrogen and helium.

  The water of the Scotia ridge ran bitterly cold over her hands and through her hair, but when she was just swimming around the habitat, Imina didn’t like to bother with hood and gloves. The environmental sensors that adjusted the temperature in her skin suit kept her warm enough for short distances.

  Imina swam rapidly past the clusters of spheres that made up different sections of the habitat. She hoped no one was looking out, but as long as she avoided the beam lights that lit the area outside the habitat’s windows, there wouldn’t be enough ambient light to identify her. She would be just another diver, anonymous in mask and skin suit, heading for the open access at the lower level of maintenance.

  The sea life usually gathered around the lights, like moths did on the surface, so Imina was startled when the huge fish rammed into her side. “Stupid!” she exclaimed in disgust. “Get out of here, Stupid. I don’t want you.”

  The big grouper butted her again, and Imina pushed him away. He swam off about five feet and hovered behind her as she went on. “Other people train dolphins to follow them around, and what do I get? A big, ugly, stupid fish!”

  Stupid had attached himself to Imina soon after she’d arrived at the habitat. He followed her on most of her dives. He found her bedroom window and banged against the glass at night until she got up and pulled down the blinds. She dreaded the day he found the windows of the classroom.

  Maybe he wouldn’t — he really was stupid. Graceful, though. All things in the sea were graceful.

  As she swam into the ring of lights that circled the big sphere, the living carpet covering the s
ea floor became visible in all its color and variety. Imina hadn’t wanted to live in the habitat, and she still found the mazelike jumble of round rooms and corridors sterile and unnatural. But from the first, she had loved the sea — the world where the fingerless goddess Sedna lived, with crabs in her drifting hair. Some people felt like they were trespassing when they swam the ocean floor, but for Imina, it felt right. Inuit shamans had been making spirit journeys to Sedna’s world for thousands of years; diving gear just made it possible for the body to go along.

  A tingle swept over her skin as she swam through the force net. It kept small particles from drifting into the water intakes that supplied the artificial gills that gave the habitat oxygen. The huge, curved wall of the central sphere appeared before her, and Imina swam down beside it and into the vertical tube that led to the lowest open access in maintenance. From there it was only three ladders down to the very bottom of the complex.

  Imina pulled herself out of the sea, took off her mask and squeezed the water from her hair. Some people disliked the oil and hot plastic smell of machines, but she liked it — it reminded her of her father.

  Imina had been looking for him when she found this place. There were no windows in maintenance. The only reason she’d known she was at the bottom was that the floor curved up slightly all around her. The conduit-covered ceiling was too low for her to stand. Sitting in the hollow of the lowest point in the habitat, Imina had pressed her hands to the floor and felt earth beneath it, not the environmental control machinery that took up the bottom third of all the other spheres.

  With earth beneath her and the sea above, Imina had realized that this was the place to work magic. A place where the spirits might come. For ultimately, no matter how hard you studied and tried, it was up to the spirits to choose a shaman.

  When Grandma Ata had been called, the fever, the visions, had lasted almost two days, and dozens of spirits had come to her, offering their aid and power.

  The spirits hadn’t offered Imina the time of day.

  Yet.

  Her wet skin suit slipped on the smooth floor, but Imina had learned the hard way that you couldn’t climb down through all the levels of maintenance without some techy grown-up demanding to know what you were doing there.

  No one ever came this low. Imina pulled off her belt light and switched it from beam to glow.

  Settling into the hollow in the center of the floor, she pulled out her grandmother’s belt. The worn white caribou hide was softer than flower petals. The carved horn and bone of the amulets clicked quietly. Sometimes Imina thought she felt her grandmother’s presence when she handled the belt. She knew it was there. She had chanted for her grandmother, in that cold hospital room, lending her power for her final spell. “It’s right for the conscious part of the spirit to pass on,” her grandmother had said, her strong voice so frail that Imina had blinked back tears, “whether you want to go or not. And it’s right for the other half of the spirit to be drawn to a new life, bound with your name. But my knowledge, my power, are still needed here.”

  She had bound both parts of her spirit to this world. But when Imina had tried to summon her spirit, she had always failed. Perhaps now… No. No doubts.

  Imina took a deep breath and let it go.

  “Aja-ja aja-ja,” she chanted. “Aja-ja aja-ja.”

  When Grandma Ata had learned to go into the deep trance, the elders of the tribe had chanted for her. When Imina was learning, Grandma Ata had chanted. Now the machine’s whispered chant encompassed the rhythm of hers, so the machines chanted for her, and her heart beat a steady counterpoint to the pulse of the machines.

  Her spirit was a core of light, drifting loosely in the darkness of her body, needing only a push of will to separate the two. But a spirit journey was not what Imina sought now. She wanted another’s spirit to come to her.

  She remembered her grandmother. Sewing, singing, teaching. Her face laughing. Her face severe with concentration. Her face dirty gray with the approach of death. My task is yet undone. I bind both parts of my spirit to my name, that my power will remain whole after my death. I bind my name to my belt, so it does not stray into other paths. I bind my spirit to my name. I bind my name to my belt. Then the soft mechanical beep that monitored her heart had become a single-toned cry, and Grandma Ata’s spirit was gone.

  Now Imina wrapped the power of the trance around the shaman belt and let her grief and loneliness and need well up in a single summoning call.

  “Grandmother!”

  In the stillness of her spirit, she listened. Nothing. The weary chill of failure spread from her heart into her flesh. If she were a shaman, she could do it. When Grandma Ata summoned ghosts, they thronged about her, so thick Imina had almost been able to touch them. But she had died before she taught Imina to summon the spirits of the dead, and now there was no one to teach her.

  The spirits wouldn’t choose her. She would never be a shaman. She would learn to call herself Annis, and the part of her that could speak to the minds of mice would die and leave her wandering through the world half-souled. An untrained shaman who could never hear the whispers of the spirit world.

  But she did hear something. An unfamiliar song tugging at the edges of the trance. Grandma? No. The odd, irregular rhythm was like no spell she had ever heard. A machine? Imina opened her senses and let the song flow through her. It held will and a fierce intent — will, binding itself with magic. No machine. This was a spell being cast by shamans. But what spell? The words were just beginning to come clear when the song ceased.

  Her eyes flew open, and the trance fell away with a suddenness that left her heart thudding. No, not a machine at all. Someone was making magic in the habitat.

  To get your copy ofSongs of Power go to hilaribell.com/songs-of-power