Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Sometimes Nita thought it had to do with the part she’d played way back when in the Song of the Twelve: the expression of some old pain or discomfort still undischarged after what had admittedly been a very trying experience for a wizard relatively new to wizardry and not entirely prepared for the dangers of the Art as it was practiced in the Sea. But the problem doesn’t have to be the past, she thought. It could as easily be something in the future. Her specialty as a wizard was changing, or rather expanding. The visionary gift had been making itself more obvious in her practice, which had meant that she’d had to start learning to handle it before, as Tom had said, it started handling her. If that’s not what it’s doing already…

The problem is, this predictive stuff— just isn’t predictable! And something about that bothered Nita, even as the phrasing made her laugh. She preferred her spells straightforward and structured: she liked to do a spell and then get a result she’d known she could expect. But the dreams and visions she was now trying to learn to manage were maddeningly fluid—

Nita had to laugh again at her own phrasing: the liquid imagery kept sneaking in. I’ve got water on the brain…

A hundred yards or so off the jetty, the water roiled, then sprayed upward in a noisy blast of spume that caught the Sun in rainbows. A few moments later a dark shape came looming up through the water into visibility, and the massive, gray-skinned, barnacle-spotted body of a humpback whale rose up to loll just under the surface. One eye broke surface to peer up at Nita, a lazy, interested look.

“Dai stihó, O Honored Senior for the Waters of Earth,” Nita said.

S’reee rolled and blew spray at Nita, and Nita couldn’t get any kind of force field up fast enough to ward it away. She got soaked. “No more of that, thank you very much!” S’reee said. “I’ve had it up to my dorsal with titles! And few I’ve been gladder to get rid of than that one, now that things have quieted down.”

Nita snickered. “It just sounds good on you, that’s all.”

“I want nothing to do with it,” the humpback muttered, slapping the water with her tail in annoyed emphasis. “All I want from the Powers is my own waters and my own name, with ‘senior’ added if anyone insists. That’s more than enough honor for me.” She blew again, resting the end of her long long chin on the breakwater’s last stone, and looking up at Nita with one small bright eye. “But what are you doing up so early in the day, hNii’t? Isn’t this supposed to be time off for you? Your learning-place work is almost done for this season, I thought: you were supposed to be relaxing—”

“I am,” Nita said. “This is relaxing.”

S’reee backfinned and rolled over sideways in the water, the apparent smile of the long jaw reflected for the moment in the squeaks and clicks of her voice. “Oh, my, you’ve hit the bad phase of your wizardry already, where you can’t stop working! Middle-aged so soon! I thought I was getting old before my time.”

Nita laughed, for S’reee was younger in humpback terms than Nita was in human ones. “Oh, sure. You’re a real ancient.”

S’reee rolled right over on her back, partly in a gesture of agreement, partly to get a better view of the jetty. “And where’s K!t today?” she said.

When are people going to stop asking me that? Especially when half the time they know the answer! “Where do you think?”

S’reee chuckled, a long string of squeaks and bubbling noises. “Don’t give me that look! It’s not my fault if he’s predictable lately. And taking it all so seriously.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Well, I’ll catch up with him after we talk. But something occurred to me last night. Wait a sec, I’ll come down.”

She clambered down off the rocks and carefully boosted herself down onto the surface of the water. There she stood fairly still until she got her balance, bobbing up and down while she reached around to one specific charm on her bracelet, shaped like a little glass bubble: the ready-made spell she used for underwater work when she wasn’t up for a full shape-change. She pinched it between finger and thumb, whispering the last six words of the spell, the activating sequence.

Around Nita and under her feet, the transparent sphere of air went solid at its outer boundary, then sank. Nita leaned against the front of the bubble, indicating which way she wanted it to go: it began to glide along under the surface, while S’reee finned along beside her. “So what’s it about?” S’reee said.

“Not what we’ve been working on. Something different.”

“Oh?”

“The bombs.”

“Oh yes,” S’reee said. After the end of World War II, the local authorities dumped a considerable number of out-of-date depth charges into the Great South Bay, along the main approach to the New York and New Jersey harbors. For some time wizards had been arguing about what to do with these, as they were becoming increasingly unstable and dangerous with age. “I do wonder sometimes what possessed your people to just dump those there,” S’reee said. “They’ve been on my mind, too. This time of year, some of the trawlers get irresponsible and drop their nets where they might run into some of those charges if they got careless—”

“Well,” Nita said, as they made their way into the green depths out past the shoreside reefs, “something came to me last night. I’d been doing some manual reading before bed, and when I was just falling asleep I got this image of a river flowing over stones, wearing them away—”

The water around the two of them darkened with depth as they made their way down toward the bottom of the Bay, the slope dropping off southward of the old oyster beds. “Well, all the rivers go to the Sea eventually,” S’reee said, “but I’m not sure what that has to do with getting rid of the depth charges.”

“This,” Nita said. “We could dissolve them!”

S’reee looked surprised as they paused over a gravelly, barren spot where several large, lumpy shapes, encrusted with barnacles, lay half-buried in years of silt and sand. “Now, I’ve heard a lot of solutions suggested to this problem,” she said, “but that one’s novel.”

“Well,” Nita said, “the main difficulty with the depth charges right now is the instability of the explosives, right? Physically moving them would be dangerous for the wizards who get close enough to do an intervention. And if one exploded, the natural and artificial reefs around here would suffer. Years of growth gone in a second: we can’t have that. But if we just dissolve the casings off—”

“How?” S’reee said.

Nita shrugged. “I was thinking we could just accelerate the rust. I mean, they’re rusting pretty fast already. Look—”

She leaned against the wall of her air bubble, guiding it to float around the far side of the depth charge in a spot where there were no barnacles. The metal was deeply pockmarked, and Nita leaned close and pointed at one spot where the rust had clearly eaten right through. “No telling what the seawater’s doing to the explosive,” she said. “If we get the casings off and something blows, at least shrapnel won’t get blasted into the reefs. Then we can dissolve the explosive and wash it away by increasing the current. Solve the problem from the inside out rather than the outside in.”

S’reee rolled in the water, considering. “Interesting concept. I’d need to check with our land-based Seniors, too, of course. But I like the sound of this. And it comes at a time when the problem’s been preying on my mind more than usual. Time to do something about it.”

“So when will you decide?” Nita said as the two of them turned and made their way back toward land.