Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

Whalesarks were rare—since they could only be made from the donated nervous systems of whales near death—and they required a lot of complicated maintenance. And more complicated yet was the business of building them from scratch. The harvesting alone was a harrowing business, as emotional for the donor and his or her pod as it would have been for any human organ donor and family. And then came the business of mating the sophisticated and incredibly delicate net of preserved bioelectricity and other forces to the wizardry that would stabilize it. Once that was done the sark became a tool that could be used by life forms other than cetacean ones to become a whale for relatively extended periods, while being spared the stresses, dangers, and energy drain of doing a full shape-change oneself.

The business of engineering a whalesark was far beyond Nita’s present competence. Not that it would be that way forever: she was getting interested. And you need something to do when the visionary talent isn’t working , she’d thought. But she’d accidentally stumbled into the troubleshooting and maintenance end of things one afternoon while catching some rays out at the end of the jetty past the old Coast Guard station near Jones Beach and idly chatting with S’reee, who was taking the afternoon off from more serious work. It occurred to them both at more or less the same time, while they were talking over some of the things that had happened years ago during the Song of the Twelve, that—as far as troubleshooting unruly sarks was concerned—in Nita, the local cetacean wizards had the ideal candidate for the job. She knew perfectly well what a whale’s body should feel like, having worked in one repeatedly and under considerable stress. But Nita was also noncetacean by birth, and would be perfectly set up to report on how a sark behaved for a human or other wizard who needed to work inside it.

So over the last year or so, Nita had more or less become the Western Hemisphere’s go-to girl for troubleshooting malfunctioning whalesarks. It was never an easy job, though. And running in a new donation was always challenging, as it wasn’t uncommon for donors to have had physical problems when they died. The neural “memory” of these problems had to be carefully disentangled from the bioelectric structure of the whalesark before it could be mated to the necessary support and control wizardries and commissioned for active service. And then there was always debugging to do after the wizardries were added. You might know how the spell was meant to affect a basic nervous system, but each one was unique, and every one Nita had worked with so far had found a way to pop some new and intriguing problem when it was in the precommissioning stages.

This one, though, was pushing the envelope of new-and-intriguing problems to the point where it was starting to frustrate Nita, because every time they solved one problem, something else came up. “Guys,” she sang to the others as she dropped down toward them, “might be we’ve got a problem with the spell matrix itself. I think something’s going on with the passthrough network that runs your intention through the spell proper and into the virtual neuronal net.”

Under his barnacles, Uu’tsch started to bristle. It was more than just an idiom with him: the skin movement beneath the crust that ran all along his back and halfway down his sides could be seen as a kind of ripple, as if the barnacles were scales. “If you’re suggesting that the underlying structure is faulty—”

“I didn’t hear any suggestions about fault as such,” S’reee said. “But we know the donor was having neurological problems when he moved on. It could be a phantom neurasthenia problem: we’ve seen that before when the nervous system’s shadow wasn’t quite clear yet that it was dead.”

“Yes, well, that’s hardly my fault—”

Here we go, Nita thought. She sighed out a few bubbles and swam away rather cautiously, because her tail was still misbehaving. Today, as in previous sessions, S’reee had been spending more time handling Uu’tsch than she had the whalesark. She’s sounding kind of resigned to it , Nita thought, and wished she were half as good at the resignation thing, because Uu’tsch was starting to get on her nerves. But he’s such a stick, sometimes. So rigid. And always ready to think you’re criticizing him. “Tell me he’s not going to mess up everything you’ve been doing!” came the whisper from just below and behind her.

Nita rolled her outboard eye—which took some doing, as whales’ eyes aren’t really built for rolling—and waited for Hwiii’sh to come up on her inboard side. She waved her tail at him in a gesture that among humpbacks was roughly the equivalent of someone patting you reassuringly on the shoulder. “Calm down,” she said. “We’re way past any possible messing-up stage. It’s not like anything’s going to explode.”

Hwiii’sh let out a few bubbles, sort of a sigh of relief. “He’s just so edgy all the time . . .”

“Well,” Nita said, and then spent a moment more thinking about what else to say. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with Hwiii’sh, to some extent; it was more that it didn’t seem smart to let him know that. She’d been surprised to discover how fascinated he was by the wizards S’reee worked with—especially the human ones. And though the business of errantry had occasionally brought her to places where wizards were celebrities, this was the first time she’d ever had someone constantly trying to hang around with her because they thought wizardry made her cool. It was kind of odd.

“It’s just that he’s absolutely dedicated to getting it right,” Nita said finally, since that was true enough. “And he’s got to be feeling some pressure. He’s the one who knows most about how to build the substructure wizardry, and if it doesn’t work right the first time, I think it makes him feel, well, less than effective.”

“That makes sense,” Hwiii’sh said after a pause. “But it’s good of you to be so easy on him when he snapped at you.”

Nita laughed. “If that was snapping, I’ve had way worse,” she said. “It’s okay, we’re good.”

She angled back around toward where the others were examining the complex spell-sphere that they’d anchored to one spot in the water, and was relieved to feel Hwiii’sh hang back as she got closer. “’Ree, I was having a thought,” Nita said, singing quietly so as not to intrude too much on Uu’tsch’s thoughts as he leaned in to examine the inner structures of the spell, nearer the core of the sphere. “The sark started misbehaving worse when I was closer to the surface. In fact, it was having the most trouble when I was out of the water.”

“Not very useful for a life form that breathes air,” S’reee said, as she and Nita swam a little aside. There was a faint glow around S’reee’s fins, indicative of some diagnostic spell of her own that she’d been running; but it was on hold at the moment. “This is so annoying. I thought we had the main-system interleaving handled by now . . .”

Nita tried to shake her head “I don’t know” and found herself wiggling side to side a bit aimlessly, which made her laugh out a big stream of bubbles. It always took her a couple of hours’ steady work to stop trying to do human body-language things with the whale body, whether she was fully shape-changed or just wearing a sark. “Well, this one’s been one big long game of annoy-an-anemone, hasn’t it. Fix one thing, something else pops up.”

S’reee groaned a small laugh herself. Along with some earlier discussions of what went on at Coney Island had come some attempts to explain Whac-A-Mole, and some unlikely undersea versions of the game had been invented. “It’s too true. Poor Uu’tsch’s nerves are in shreds.”