Free Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 by Diane Duane Page B

a human being any more, or forget how. Wizards have been lost that way before, and there’s no breaking the spell from outside; once you re stuck inside the change-shape, no one but you can break out again. If you start finding your own memories difficult to recall, it’s time to get out of the whaleshape, before it becomes you permanently.”
    “Right,” Nita said. She wasn’t very worried. Being a humpback was delightful, but she had no desire to spend her life that way.
    “Your problem’s different, though, K!t. Your change is powered more by the spell resident in the whalesark than by anything you’re doing yourself. And all the sark’s done is confuse your own body into thinking it’s a whale’s body, for the time being. That confusion can be broken by several different kinds of distraction. The commonest is when your own mind—which is stronger than the whale-mind left in the sark—starts to override the instructions the whalesark is giving your body.”
    “Huh?”
    “Kit,” S’reee said very gently, finning upward to avoid the weedy, barnacled wreck of a fishing boat, “suppose we were—oh, say several hundred humpback-lengths down, in the Crushing Dark—and suddenly your whale-body started trying to behave like a human’s body. Human breathing rate, human pulse and thought and movement patterns, human response to pressures and the temperature of the water—“
    “Uh,” Kit said, as the picture sank in.
    “So you see the problem. Spend too much time in the sark, and the part of your brain responsible for handling your breathing and so forth will begin to overpower the ‘dead’ brain preserved in the sark. Your warning signs are nearly the opposite of HNii’t’s. Language is the first thing to go. If you find yourself losing whalesong, you must surface and get out of the sark immediately. Ignore the warning— The best that can happen is that the whalesark will probably be so damaged it can never be used again. The worst thing—“ She didn’t say it. The worry in her voice was warning enough.
    No one said much of anything for a while, as the three of them swam onward, south and west. The silence, uneasy at first, became less so as they went along. S’reee, to whom this area was as commonplace as Kit’s or Nita’s home streets might have been, simply cruised along without any great interest in the surroundings. But Nita found the seascape endlessly fascinating, and suspected Kit did too—he was looking around him with the kind of fascination he rarely lent anything but old cars and his z-gauge train set.
    Nita had rarely thought of what the seascape off the coast of the island would look like. From being at the beach she had a rather dull and sketchy picture of bare sand with a lot of water on top of it; shells buried in it, as they were on the beach, and there had to be weed beds; the seaweed washed up from somewhere. But all the nature movies had given her no idea of the richness of the place.
    Coral, for example; it didn’t come in the bright colors it did in tropical waters, but it was there in great quantity—huge groves and forests of it, the white or beige or yellow branches twisting and writhing together in tight-choked abstract patterns. And shells, yes—but the shells still had creatures inside them; Nita saw Kit start in amazement, then swim down for a closer look at a scallop shell that was hopping over the surface of a brain coral, going about its business.
    They passed great patches of weed, kinds that Nita didn’t know the names of—until they started coming to her as if she had always known them: red-bladder, kelp, agar, their long dark leaves or flat ribbons rippling as silkily in the offshore current as wheat in a landborn wind.
    And the fish! Nita hadn’t taken much notice of them at first; they’d all looked alike to her—little and silver. But something had changed. They passed by a place where piles had been driven into the sea floor, close together, and