A Wizard Of Mars

Nita rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”

“I might,” Nelaid said. “I had a younger brother once. He should have been Sunlord when our father left the body. But others had different plans for him. And my father, and me.”

In the précis on Wellakh, Nita had seen references to the political instability of the world: but the phrase “frequent assassinations” can sound merely remotely troubling until you find yourself discussing the reality of it with one of the targets. Not certain how to respond, Nita kept quiet.

“She reminds me of him,” Nelaid said, looking at the simulation of the Wellakhit homestar as it gently rotated. As they watched, a single loop of prominence arched up out of the leftward limb of the star, strained away from it, snapped in two; the ends frayed away and the separate jets fell back to the sun’s surface in a splash of plasma.

“Of your brother?” Nita said.

Nelaid closed his eyes again. When they opened, Nita was sorry she’d said anything: the grief and pain in Nelaid’s eyes flared as the prominence had, brief and fierce. Then the look was swallowed back into that look of carefully controlled irony, and might never have been there at all. “Is she in difficulty at home?” Nelaid said.

“Some. It’ll be okay when we get back. Our dad just needs to know what Dairine’s doing.”

And then the idea hit her. “I wonder—” Nita said, and stopped. Where do I go from here? There are too many ways this can go wrong—

Too late: Nelaid was waiting. “It might make our father happier,” Nita said, “if he knew for sure that she had someone keeping an eye on her. Someone—”

“Older?” Nelaid said. “More responsible?” He smiled. Again there was pain in the smile, but it was distant enough, Nita thought, that Nelaid could now also find it funny.

“A father figure?” Nita said, taking the chance.

After a long moment’s stillness, Nelaid nodded. “Perhaps, when the present problem is settled, he and I might speak. At his convenience.”

Nita bowed to Nelaid, and not one of those all-purpose half-bows, either. In the middle of it, the air went bang! behind her as Dairine reappeared. “You drop something?” her sister said.

Nita straightened, catching a glint of humor in Nelaid’s eyes, but this hid itself as quickly as the pain had. “No. Where’s Spot?”

Spot popped out of the air between the two of them, dropped to the ground. Nelaid looked over Nita’s head and said to Dairine, “You did moderately well with the last exercise, but you have much work to do yet before it’s perfect, and perfection is what’s required. Let me know when you’re at liberty to deal with the situation.”

Dairine bowed, too: a somewhat cursory gesture, but more than most entities would get from her, no matter how many planets they virtually ruled. Nita pulled the transit circle out of her charm bracelet, dropped it to the floor, nodded goodbye to Nelaid, and activated the spell.

A few blinks later they were standing in their backyard. The long afternoon shadows were not too far along from where Nita had left them. “Go upstairs and sort yourself out,” Nita said as they headed toward the house. “Be quiet about it. Then come down. Don’t make him come up after you. Okay?”

“Will you cut it out? It’s not like I don’t know how to handle him!”

Nita caught her sister by the shoulder. “Handling’s not what he needs right now. Just play it straight, so we can both get back to business. Please?”

Dairine gave her a quick look of rebellion— but that was all, a moment’s indulgence of habit— and vanished.

Nita sighed and headed through the gate, up the driveway, and into the house. Her dad was still at the dining room table, working on another cup of coffee: he looked surprised to see Nita come in the door. “She’ll be down in a minute,” Nita said, and flopped into a chair.

Her dad blinked. “Just like that?”

Nita shrugged.

Her dad stared down into his cup, looked up again after a few moments. “You think I was a little abrupt with you before?”

Nita said nothing, just gave him back one of his favorite expressions, a wide-eyed look with the eyebrows right up.

Her dad laughed, a brief, embarrassed sound. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay.”

He was looking at the table again, a little unfocused. “Roshaun,” her father said, sounding reluctant. “Just what happened with him up there on the Moon?”

Nita shook her head, wishing she had more clarity on the subject. “He vanished.”

“But wizards vanish all the time.”

“Not like this,” Nita said. “It was a lot more …final.”

“But not final enough for Dairine.”

“No. Dad—” There was no way to say this that wasn’t going to pain both of them, so she just said it. “Even for humans, there’s dead, and then there’s dead dead. Other species handle mortality other ways. They have to. Their souls are different shapes from ours. But no matter what shape your soul is, when you’re a wizard, weird things can happen to change the way things work…” She shook her head. “The only thing I’m sure of is that Roshaun’s not dead the way we think about dead.”

“And so Dairine actually has some chance of finding him?”

Nita nodded. “If anyone can, yeah. But he’s still lost. And all this time she’s been spending on his home planet… I think she feels like she owes a debt to his mom and dad. Like she got Roshaun involved with our planet …and then Nelaid and Miril lost their son because of what she did.”

Her dad sat silent for a moment. “It’s honorable, what she’s doing,” he said at last. “But at the same time— Nita, she’s just thirteen!”

“And I was how old when I started?”

Her father rolled his eyes. “She needs way more watching than you ever did.”

“So that’s just what you’ll be doing, whenever you want,” Nita said. “And she’s going to explain everything you see. It’ll be the next best thing to standing over her shoulder, watching.” And Nita grinned. “Might be more data than you want.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” her dad said. But as he leaned back in the chair, he looked more relaxed.

Nita stood up. “So am I off the hook?”

Her dad’s look was meant to be stern, but Nita wasn’t fooled. “For the moment. We’ll see how this works out.”

Nita went over and hugged and kissed him, because he was really being very good. Then she headed for the back door before he changed his mind. “By the way—”

In the kitchen doorway, hearing the stairs creak as Dairine came down them, Nita paused. “Yeah?”

“I keep meaning to ask you. What is on Mars?”

“Besides a rock with your cell phone number carved on it?” Nita grinned. “We’re not sure. But we’re gonna find out.”

“Well, all right. But don’t get us invaded, now.”

“Daddy!”

He gave her a mischievous look. “Well, you can’t blame me. It’s kind of the first thing that comes to mind, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.” And she vanished.

5: Nili Patera

It was dark. Kit found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling, his eyes wide open. He was wide awake, but he couldn’t think why.

He lay there on his back under the covers for a few seconds, listening to the house. It was still, devoid of any of the little middle-of-the-night sounds that it made as the weather got warmer. And one other sound was missing, from the braided rug by the side of his bed: a small, faint whistling snore.

Kit sighed. Ponch, he thought. But his dog’s midnight snore was a sound he would not hear again. He turned his head on the pillow, fumbled for his smartphone and peered at the digital clock on its display. 3:38.

Which is what time on Mars? He closed his eyes again for a moment, trying to do the math for the time at Nili Patera. But math was no match for the image of the green-brown sandy soil under his knees, and the strange shining blue-green superegg in his lap. He could just feel the faint sense of some quiet power running under the surface of it, mute, waiting.

That was it, he thought, pushing himself up on his elbows. It wasn’t ready. It was waiting for something.

And what if it’s ready now?

Kit sat up in the quiet, gazing into the darkness, his heart pounding as if he’d been running somewhere. It was weird. Then, No, it’s not, he thought. Kit had had a lot of trouble getting to sleep when he’d finally gotten home and turned in. He’d been as wired as if he was seven years old and the next day was going to be Christmas. Well, what do I expect? I was on Mars. I actually touched an alien artifact that someone left there. I felt that it was alive—

And waiting.

He looked again at the phone. Mamvish said we should do some analysis first, Kit thought. Irina said, take your time…

Kit sat there for a few moments, listening to his heart pound. Then he threw the covers off, got up, and went to the desk by the window.

The manual was there where he usually left it when he was home. Analysis… Kit thought. He flipped the manual’s cover open and paged through to the Mars project section, then tapped the open pages so they’d glow in the dark.

The only new things on the main project page were the manual-generated précis of what the group who went up to Mars yesterday had found, and beside it, a few “read, noted” symbols from research team members who’d flagged the entry to let other team members know they’d seen it. Kit shook his head, unbelieving. Twenty-six other wizards working on this project and nobody has anything interesting to say? Kit thought, frowning. Even just ‘Hey, wow’? Come on, people…!

He let out a frustrated breath and flipped on through to the part of the master directory he’d bookmarked. I wonder, is Mamvish around?

He found her name halfway down the page, as usual, with that astonishing power level noted next to it— a four-digit level, when even the most powerful wizards on Earth usually only went as high as three. Even Irina’s level wasn’t as high. Yet at the same time, the level of respect Mamvish had been showing Irina suggested that, at the more elevated levels of practice, sheer power wasn’t everything. Even if you could blow up a whole planet all by yourself…

It was a creepy thought. Wizardry was usually about keeping things alive, or at least in one piece. And why would the Powers That Be want someone to blow a planet up? Kit thought. Especially their own? A sudden image came to him of Irina, standing alone in some desert place, terrible power building around her, while her face held still and cold, and her eyes—

Kit shivered. Now, where’d that come from? he thought. Catching something from Neets, maybe. He shook his head, glanced down at Mamvish’s listing again. Next to the short version of her name flashed a small knotted symbol that was Speech-shorthand for Occupied: on assignment. Next to it was a long string of symbols indicating that Mamvish wasn’t anywhere near this solar system, since the light-years-from your-location symbol had a tens-of-thousands augmentor suffix on it. Halfway across the galaxy, it looks like. And busy. Dammit…

Kit leaned back in his chair, tipping it back on its back legs and rocking for a moment in thought: then sat forward and turned some more pages in the manual. It’s quarter of nine where Ronan is, he thought. He must be up by now!But the “status” part of Ronan’s listing, when he came to it, was grayed out, a sign that the person was unavailable for some routine reason, usually sleep. I can’t believe it. How can any sane person sleep late after what we were doing yesterday?

Kit folded his arms on top of his manual and put his head down sideways on them, frustrated. Again he found himself gazing at the oval braided rug where Ponch could always be found between bedtime and morning, lying on his back, snoring, waiting for Kit to get up and feed him. I wish he was here, Kit thought. I’d just say, ‘Come on, Ponch, let’s go to Mars!’ And he’d jump up and spin around a few times and run out the door, ready to go…

Then Kit let out a long breath. He was a wizard, not a magician: and in a wizard’s world, there was no use wasting your time wishing for things you couldn’t have. You went on to the next option— by getting up off your butt and doing the necessary work. Even if there’s no one else to do it with.

Kit stood up, glancing down at the manual. Neets… But he could just imagine what she’d say if he woke her up at four in the morning, especially after the afternoon and evening she’d had. Kit flipped over to the fast-messaging area in the back of the manual and had another look at the terse message she’d left him about the results of the phone call from her father, and her annoyance on coming back to Mars when everything was settled to find that everyone else had left. Talk to you tomorrow AFTER LUNCH, the note ended. He could practically see her scowling.

Well, she’ll be over it after she’s had some breakfast and some time to relax. Kit straightened up, shivering: it was a while since the central heating had been on, and the room was chilly. I’ll jump up to my usual spot, then go check on the superegg from there. It’ll take less energy than doing a whole new custom transit.

Very quietly he pulled clothes on— jeans, sweatshirt, down vest— and then the hiking boots his pop had given him for his last birthday, when the family had driven upstate for the weekend and walked the Appalachian Trail through Bear Mountain State Park. Those boots had been getting more than Earth dirt on them the last few weeks, and the abrasive sand and dust of the much-eroded Martian surface was in the process of wearing the leather down to a nice beat-up patina.

Kit finished lacing up the right-hand boot, rubbing the leather thoughtfully: it was dry. Even though Kit always took enough air with him to Mars for a given visit, plus twenty percent in case of emergencies, that air tended to get very dried out while it was there. So did anything else inside the air bubble with him. Better find the neat’s-foot oil and leather wax for these things when I get back. Don’t want them to start cracking.

He picked up the manual and paged through it again, then whispered the thirty-eight words of a spell macro he used when he wanted to get in and out of the house quietly: one small subroutine that put an inch-thick layer of hardened air between him and the stairs, as a cushion for his footsteps, and another subroutine to ask the downstairs back door if it would please unlock itself in absolute silence.

Kit made his way quietly downstairs, through the living room and into the kitchen. Just a faint line of light showed by the back door where it had eased itself open— a little crack showing Kit that the dimness outside was paling toward dawn. There, just behind the door, Kit paused for a moment, looking at something hanging on one of the coat hooks behind the door— a long, slim, faintly blue-glowing cord with a loop at each end, dangling down half-hidden behind one of Kit’s winter jackets. It was a spell made of fishes’ breath and other hard-to-source ingredients: Ponch’s wizardly leash, the only leash that had been able to stay on his dog and keep whoever was walking him connected to him when he’d started walking between universes. I really should roll that up and put it away… But he hadn’t been able to do that just yet. It would have been an admission of how completely his dog was gone. Kit sighed, touched the doorknob. Thanks, he said to the door and its locks.

No problem, they said in chorus. Know when you’re coming back?

“Not just yet,” Kit said in the Speech. “Go ahead, lock up again, but real quiet.” He stepped out, pulled the door closed behind him; both locks snicked back into place.

Kit went down the stairs into the carport and paused by his dad’s pet project, the ancient Edsel Pacer that he’d been restoring forever. Part of the problem was that parts for a car made in 1958 were getting hard to come by. But more to the point, Kit’s pop was in the habit of taking a lot of overtime at work so that the family could afford things he thought they needed to have, like the new entertainment center; so mostly the Edsel sat here waiting patiently for him to summon up the energy to work on it. Every now and then his pop came out and waxed it, or oiled whatever metal was exposed so that it wouldn’t suffer, or installed some long-sought part that had finally come in from somewhere around the country. The relationship was becoming a guilty one on Kit’s pop’s side, no matter how often Kit explained to his pop that the Edsel didn’t really mind.

“Hey, guy,” Kit said, leaning against the right front fender and looking down into the headlight on that side. “You doing okay?”

I’m fine. Any news on the replacement taillights yet?

The car’s resigned tone made Kit grin. “I hear they actually shipped,” he said, walking around to the far side of the car and carefully opening the front door. He slipped in and sat down on the broad bench-style front seat, bracing the door so that it would fall closed quietly. “Should be here next week.”

Great! Where you going today?

“The usual place,” Kit said. He reached out and punched one of the radio buttons on the Edsel’s dashboard. In immediate response, the transit spell he’d installed inside the car a couple of months back came alive around him, a glowing tracery of Speech-characters seemingly shining up from just underneath the surface of the seat’s leather. The closed environment of the car did a good job of muffling the air-implosion noise that went with a teleport, and it was hard enough to see into the Edsel that Kit felt comfortable vanishing in there without adding the energy outlay of an invisibility spell on top of the transit. “We all clear?”

He could feel the Edsel looking around it, though as with most inanimate objects, Kit wasn’t sure what it was using to do the looking. All clear. Be careful!

“All the time,” Kit said. He reached down to the glowing lines of the transit spell, braced himself, and said the word to activate it.

The next moment was never entirely comfortable. No one travels a hundred fifty million miles in a breath without his or her body complaining about the stresses and strains of bypassing lightspeed and numerous other natural laws. Kit felt, as usual, as if he was being squeezed unbearably tight on all sides, and the pressure got worse and worse— until all the pressure abruptly went away, and almost all the breath whooshed out of his lungs. That too was typical for a private transit to Mars. It took a fraction of a second for his life-support wizardry to analyze its new coordinates, recognize them, and kick in.

Kit swallowed and opened his eyes, starting to gasp as the usual reaction to doing a biggish spell set in. He was right where he was supposed to be, sitting on his usual “landing rock,” perched on the rim of the ancient caldera-crater of the extinct volcano Elysium Mons. Kit sat there waiting for the breathlessness to pass, and concentrated on blinking until his eyes worked right again.

He’d originally chosen this spot for its spectacular view. Though not as high or huge as its more famous cousin Olympus Mons, Elysium Mons stood up steep and splendidly isolated in the northern hemisphere lowland plains of Elysium Planitia. The cone of the old volcano alone was taller than Mount Everest. But underneath the mountain proper lay a great uplift plateau that ancient stresses had pushed some three kilometers up out of the crust; so the spot where Kit now sat towered at least forty thousand feet above the dark-sanded plain.

Off to his left, twenty miles south and east at the edge of the pedestal, the little crater-topped mountain Albor Tholus rose up, its concave top whitened with dry-ice snow. Beyond it, the underlying uplift pedestal fell away in dark narrow rilles to the surrounding plain, charcoal-colored in the night. Away into the dark distance the plains stretched to a horizon just faintly hazed on their southwest edge with a thin line of silver light: the last remnant of sunset. Between Kit and that distant, shadowy edge of the world, craters dotted the ashy darkness, here and there shining pale at their bottoms with thin gleaming skins of starlit water ice or carbon dioxide frost.

It was clear tonight—a frigid pre-winter midnight in Mars’s northern hemisphere, through which stars unimpeded by the thin atmosphere burned fierce and still. Kit shivered. Even with an aggressive force field and in a hemisphere where it was summer, Mars wasn’t somewhere you wanted to spend much time at night. And in the winter— Has to be a hundred below, Kit thought. Maybe a hundred fifty. He glanced down around the low boulder where he sat, then bent over and picked up a little stone about the size of a golf ball. Even though it had soaked up some considerable heat from the bubble of air his life-support spell was holding in place around him, the stone was still so cold it burned his hand. Kit had to juggle it to keep it from sticking to his skin. “How cold, fella?” he said in the Speech.

The rock took a moment about answering. Things made of stone tended not to understand the idea that cold and heat might be different: it was all just temperature to them. A hundred and twenty-three point five degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Kit nodded and kept tossing the rock gently in his hand until it came up to a more bearable temperature. After a few moments he was able to hold on to it. He rubbed it gently between finger and thumb: charcoal-colored grit came off on his fingers as Kit looked south toward that acutely curved, silver-edged horizon. For a long time now, whenever he’d felt the need for a little quiet in his life, or a little mystery, he’d come here to sit and look out at this silent, uncommunicative terrain in perplexed wonder—for it was rare for a planet’s landscape to have so little to say to a wizard. Wherever life had been for any length of time, the structure of the world tended to remember, and to be willing enough to “talk” about it. Here the ground seemed only to know its own strictly geological history. Yet there was also a strange sense of something being withheld: as if some dark tide of silence and secrecy had risen, submerging everything, and never receded…

“What about it?” Kit said to the rock. In this starlit midnight, it was dark matte-gray, with here and there a fleck of mica embedded in its gritty sandstone. “What do you know about the world? Who’s been here?”

No one but you and her, the rock said, the other one. I know day, and night. Water snow and gas snow. That’s about it.

Kit nodded and put the rock down where he’d found it. As he did, the landscape around him lightened ever so slightly, a change he’d never have noticed on Earth: but here, now that his eyes were used to the dark, it made a difference. He looked up and saw the little moon Deimos rising, a planet-bright moving spark against the stars, about as bright as the International Space Station could have been at home when it went over. Deimos, though, moved quicker, almost imperceptibly changing the dark charcoal of the surrounding sands to a lighter shade as it climbed the sky, shifting the angle of the dim shadows in the craters below.

Kit stood up, dusted his pants off, and flipped his manual open to the Mars master project précis. He ran one finger down the entry there, pinpointing the spot where he and Mamvish and the others had been earlier in the day, then tapped the page so the coordinates would load into the on-planet transit spell he already had bookmarked. Another flip of pages brought Kit to the transit spell, its characters glowing under the page and ready to go. He began to read.

Even in this empty silence, you could hear the universe leaning in around you to listen: and for some reason, the listening seemed to Kit unusually acute. He finished reading. The breath went out of his lungs again as things went totally black—

—then lightened again, but not much. Once again, starlight, a clear night, no dust in the upper atmosphere: two in the morning at Syrtis Major. Kit stood in the shadow of that towering black dune and shivered again, though not from the cold. The surroundings were noticing him, watching him… with what underlying reaction, Kit couldn’t tell. All of a sudden Kit began to wish he hadn’t come alone. The watchfulness of the surroundings was feeling increasingly creepy.

He grimaced. Come on, what’s the matter with me? I’ve been here in the dark before. Nothing’s going to happen! Yet he thought of the dust devil earlier. That had taken even Mamvish and Irina by surprise. There’d just been something about the way that whirlwind came straight at them—

Kit shrugged. Just the planet noticing us, like Irina said. It does that all the time. In fact, it probably just noticed us harder because there was such a crowd there. Not to mention a Planetary …Kit glanced around, determined to get down to business and shake the absurd feeling that he had stepped into an early scene of a monster movie.

He went closer to the dune. This hasn’t moved. At least I don’t think it has. The dune’s face looked as it had the afternoon before: but as Kit glanced around, he saw with some disquiet that all the investigative party’s footprints had disappeared— even Mamvish’s. Did somebody clean up? But it seemed unlikely. On Mars, where the wind blew a lot of the time, tidying up evidence of your presence on the surface wasn’t as vital as it was on the Moon, where there was neither wind nor erosion and your sneaker’s footprint would last forever. The wind did it. Or another dust devil…

That moment at its heart had been astonishing. Yet now Kit found himself really unwilling to see another one of those bearing down on him. Why do I keep letting myself get the creeps about it? he thought. Let’s find that egg…

He flipped through the manual again to the detector routine that Síle and Markus had designed. It was a longish spell and hadn’t been set to execute automatically, but reading the whole thing would still take Kit less time than digging around in the dune in the hopes that the stony outcropping concealing the superegg would be easily found.This dune might have moved, after all. Let’s see.

Kit read the spell through—four long sentences in the Speech—and stood gasping again with the exertion, waiting for the spell to take. Gradually a wireframe of glowing lines superimposed itself across one spot on the dune low down and to the right, describing the outcropping’s humped-up appearance. Kit went over and checked the spell’s glowing Speech-symbols to see how deeply the outcropping was buried. Only a couple of feet. I was right; the dune hasn’t moved—

Yet still the uneasiness wouldn’t leave him. Kit shook his head and hunkered down in front of the slope of near-black sand, whispering the syllables of the Mason’s Word as he’d done the afternoon before. Then he reached in through the surface of the dune, then the surface of the stone, until he felt the odd smooth coolness under his hands again. He made sure of his hold on it, and pulled.

This time there was less resistance. Seconds later the cold stars above Kit were gleaming on the superegg’s dark surface, their reflections trembling in its mirrory sheen: and the tremor’s source was Kit. He stood up with the superegg in his hands, shivering all over with the utter strangeness of where he was and what he held. The age of this thing. Here it’s been for five hundred thousand years. And not by accident. Who left you? Why won’t you open up and let us find out what you’re meant to tell us?

He tried to stop his hands from shaking, and couldn’t. But after a few seconds, Kit realized that it wasn’t just his hands that were shivering. It was the egg.

In the first shock of realization, he almost dropped it— then stopped himself just in time. Who knows what a hard bounce could do to it, even in this gravity? And if I break it, I’m going to be in so much trouble—! The memory of Mamvish’s eye cocked at him flashed before Kit as he tried to steady the vibrating superegg: he thought of Irina’s level gaze as she eyed him like someone wondering if he was really as trustworthy as she’d been told. And I’m not. I shouldn’t be doing this. Why did I do this when I knew that I— Whoa!

Kit braced the shaking superegg against his chest, trying to steady it, but to no effect. Now it was lurching from side to side in his grasp, more and more violently every moment, until the thing actually vibrated right out of his grip and into the air. Kit clutched at the egg and just managed to get hold of it again before it gave one shake more violent than anything that had preceded it—

And split in three. Kit tried to keep hold of all the wedge-shaped pieces, but they struggled out of his hands like live things desperate to escape, bobbling up into the air in front of him. He made a grab at one, caught it, and pinned it under his arm while reaching for the second. But he couldn’t get a good grip on that wedge because of the way hugging the first one between arm and body was limiting his movement. The second wedge wrenched itself out of his one-handed grip and into the air again. The third wedge hit the ground, bounced in a puff of dark dust, and rebounded into the second—

And stuck to it. Kit stared as the two adhering wedges began, from the edges inward, to shred apart in midair, shattering into shining fragments that thinned to ribbons, then started tangling together like a nest of snakes. The third wedge tore itself away from Kit, leaped into the air, and shattered like its counterparts, then began stretching itself into ribbons and tangling itself up with the others. Seconds later they were melding together again, writhing and changing in a shimmer of consolidating metal—

The shrinking shape was still amorphous, like a bubble of water floating and wobbling in weightlessness. Then it put out projections, hurriedly, one after another—and fell. When it came down on the surface in another cloud of dust, it stretched itself out, long and sinuous, went flat like a steamrollered snake—

Now what?! Kit thought, panicked. The long, shining shape moved, twitched, and all at once sprouted from its sides what he initially mistook for long tufts of fur. The fur moved, though, waving, writhing—and the hair stood up all over Kit as the long, flat, blunt-ended shape stood up and slowly started moving toward him on entirely too many legs.

Kit backed away a step. Though he’d long since conquered his childhood nightmares about being attacked by giant bugs under his bed, he still wasn’t wild about them, especially when he met them all alone in the dark on other planets. It’s not really a bug, he thought, taking another step backward as the shining thing kept moving toward him.It’s not alive. It’s some kind of machine. A weird, alien machine, yeah, but machines are a lot of what I do. I really should be able to—

Kit lost the thought as little round, pebbly eyes suddenly bumped their way up out of the bug’s blunt head. They were opaque, featureless… but they were all looking at him. And then the back end of the bug lengthened out, got long and sharp, and curved up over its back.

Oh, no. Not a bug.

It was a scorpion.

At least it doesn’t have claws yet, Kit thought, still backing up. And then the creature reared up, starlight sheening down it, and the many legs consolidated, getting thicker, sharper, more angular. Six legs, three and three, in the back: four legs, two and two, in the front, upraised, each of these splitting down the middle near the ends, the razory vee of newly created claws starting to scissor together. The clawed forelegs lifted, pointing at him as the claws worked against each other. Those eyes fixed on Kit more determinedly as the scorpion-thing came at him, faster now, on the point of breaking into a run—

Kit tried to gulp, and failed, dry-mouthed. “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” he said, probably a lot more loudly than he needed to. Still backing up, he reached behind him to zip open his otherspace pocket. He’d taken to keeping a little surprise in there if he ran into a situation like this.

Barely six feet away, the metal scorpion stopped short. The unsettling gaze of all those little eyes was still fixed on Kit, and it suddenly seemed as if the creature or machine was waiting for something specific from him, or not seeing something it expected. Kit, too, froze. What does it want? What am I supposed to—?

It lifted its claws. Too late! Kit thought, pushing his hand into the otherspace pocket and gripping the small, fizzing wizardry that lay there, ready and waiting—

The claws angled up and out, not at Kit, but in four different directions, and light burst up from them— not true beams of light, but curving arcs of a thin, pale blue-green radiance. They leaped into the air fluidly, like water from a fountain, curving in to twist together high above the motionless scorpion. There they knotted together, then separated and streaked toward the dark horizon, sending Kit’s and the scorpion’s shadows reeling and stretching across the dark sand. Kit spun around, trying to see where all the streaks of light were going.

He had only enough time to make out general directions before the streaks faded and were gone. The scorpion lowered its claws, folding them across its front in a strange gesture, almost formal. The eyes dissolved back into the creature’s blunt head. It rolled up, the long, curved spine of the tail vanishing, the legs slipping into the body; the whole shape collapsed into itself, smoothed, solidified—

The superegg lay rocking gently on the sand, and finally came to rest on one end, perfectly still in the starlight.

Kit went over to the egg, knelt down beside it, almost scared to touch it. Finally he swore at his own nervousness, reached out and put one hand on the superegg. Nothing happened. The sense of latent energy within it was completely gone.

The sweat that had broken out on Kit was going cold: he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his life-support spell, and his breath was smoking as the air around him chilled down. Kit more or less collapsed onto the dark sand and sat there trying to recover, staring at the egg. Okay, he thought, I’ve broken it. And I’m now in the most trouble I’ve ever been in my life. But there’s no point in freezing myself solid.

Kit picked up his manual, flipped through it to check some spell syntax, and then spoke to the life support spell’s parameters, telling them to pull some energy from under the planet’s crust, where a little residual heat lay stored. Then Kit rubbed his face, flinching at the grit, which as usual was getting everyplace, and stared at the egg. Those were signals. But to what, or who—?

He flipped pages in the manual, turning to the place where local changes in the environment would have been logged. “What were those signals about?” he said to the manual. “Where were they headed?”

A long spill of characters in the Speech appeared all down the glowing page, filling it: the technical description of what the scorpion had done. Kit read down it, turned the page, and found it filling up with description, too— a bewildering amount of it. “Whoa, whoa! Save that. And just give me a graphic for now, okay?”

The page dimmed the Speech-charactery down to near invisibility and drew him a simple outline map of the Martian surface in a cylindrical projection, a wide rectangle. Four glowing arcs drew themselves outward from Kit’s location in Nili Patera, each a slightly different curve heading in a different direction: northeast, northwest, southeast, and much more deeply south. At each arc’s end, the map labeled itself with the English-language names of the targeted features and their equivalents in the Speech.

“All craters,” Kit said under his breath, noting their names: Stokes, Cassini, de Vaucouleurs, and Hutton. “Any response from anything there?”

The page blanked. Then a single character appeared, the Speech-symbol that could stand for either the number zero or a null response.

Kit let out a breath: his manual wasn’t normally so terse. “Okay,” he said. “Alert me if anything comes up…”

He closed the manual and put it aside, looking down at the superegg. “Might as well put you back…” Once more he hunkered down in front of the outcropping where it had been secreted. There was no point in leaving this out where one of the satellites orbiting Mars could see it.

What I’m really wishing, Kit thought as he put a hand out to the egg again, is that there was some way to cover what I just did. Or some really good excuse for it. But this wasn’t one of those situations where you could just tell the local authority figure the equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” and expect to get away with it. And as he thought that, a small pain struck Kit somewhere in his midsection. It’s not like I can claim my dog is eating much of anything anymore…

Kit made an unhappy face. His manual had been open and logging when this happened. Hiding anything of what had happened would be impossible. I just wish I wasn’t about to get yelled at for doing something wrong, and maybe get kicked off the whole project—

It then occurred to Kit that telling just one aspect of the truth might be enough to keep him out of trouble. All he’d have to say would be that something had made him do this: some urge he couldn’t resist had come over him. And that was true, Kit thought. Or at least it kind of feels like it was true—

But wait. Am I just talking myself into this because I don’t want to look stupid? And no matter how thoroughly he talked himself into believing this irresistible urge thing, one of the other wizards associated with this— Mamvish, Irina— might be able to tell him that the urge hadn’t been all that overwhelming: that he could’ve resisted if he’d really wanted to…

Then I wind up looking twice as dumb as I am already. And besides… The Speech, the most important part of wizardry, was about describing the universe as it really was. If you started taking liberties with that concept, you were doing the Lone Power’s work for it. And when working with the Speech, trying to describe things the way they weren’t could get very fatal.

Kit picked up the superegg, muttered the necessary syllables of the Mason’s Word, and shoved the egg back into the stone. Never mind. I’m gonna call Mamvish, come clean, and get the yelling over with.

He stood up and flipped the manual open to the contacts section, put a finger on Mamvish’s entry. He had to stop and try to swallow before he could speak: his mouth had gone dry again. “Page her,” he said to his manual. “Ask if she’s got a moment.”

Mamvish’s name dimmed, then blazed again. Under it a one-line phrase traced itself out in the curving characters of the Speech: Unavailable: on intervention. No availability estimate at this time. If the matter is urgent, please leave a message.

Kit stared at the words: somehow they were the last thing he’d expected. Urgent. Is this urgent? How do I tell? And what if it’s not, really? “Uh,” he said. “Mamvish, it’s Kit. I’m on Mars. There’s been a development. The egg went through, I don’t know, some kind of metamorphosis, and it sent out signals. Nothing else has happened yet.” He stopped, tried to think what else he should add that both he knew to be strictly true and wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot. No, just quit while you’re ahead. “Uh, that’s all. I’ll call you back later. Dai stihó.”

Mamvish’s name flashed, confirmation that the message had been saved. A link to a copy of Kit’s message, with a time stamp, appeared down the page.

Kit sighed and slapped the manual shut. The sudden feeling of reprieve was tremendous… And dumb, since I haven’t gotten out of anything yet! Still, she’ll know I tried to call her. That has to count for something.

Kit became aware that his heart was pounding. He glanced around at the silent sands, the dark dune towering over him. Off to the northwest, Deimos was diving toward the horizon. So now what?

He stood watching Deimos’s downward arc while his pulse slowed. Well, now that you’ve got some new data out of this crazy thing you did, do something useful with it. Find out why those signals were sent to those spots! And this time, don’t do it alone.

Deimos twinkled through the atmosphere near the horizon while Kit wondered where that idea had come from. Am I just trying to have someone around to share the blame with if something else goes wrong? A depressing thought. But company would be good for keeping me from screwing up again.

That thought was nearly as depressing. I’m gonna go home and get some breakfast. Maybe Neets—

But she’ll still be asleep. And she said to wait till after lunch to call her…

Well, never mind! Who wants people getting the idea that you can’t do anything without having her along? Or that you can’t handle something unusual by yourself?

Kit glanced back at the outcropping. That strange feeling of the surroundings watching him was gone now. It went away when the egg opened. But why wouldn’t it do that before?

Unless it was waiting for something. And, outrageously, the idea came to him:

It was waiting for me.

After a moment Kit shook his head at the crazy idea. Mamvish had mentioned in the past that some of these “bottles” had timing wizardries attached, routines meant to give the wizardries time to see what conditions in the world around them were like before popping open. Its timer probably just went off after it finished taking its readings. Then it started calling to its buddies. But why aren’t they answering?

In forlorn hope Kit flipped his manual open to the page where those four craters were marked. But there was no sign of anything happening there: no movement, no heat, no unusual energy artifact.

Then again, it was how long before this egg hatched, after we took it out the first time? Eight hours? Maybe the other eggs, or whatever it was signaling to, have time delays set, too. The thought of another eight hours of waiting for something to happen seemed almost unbearable. But wait. If there’s going to be a delay, that’s okay: it gives us time to put extra monitoring wizardries in place nearby.

“Us.” This time he felt better about the idea of someone else being there with him. And a little weird, wasn’t it, to be wanting to keep this all to myself? Where was that coming from? Kit shrugged. Probably the suddenness of the egg’s hatching had freaked him out.

He reached sideways, unzipped the air, and started to stick the manual into his otherspace pocket— then paused. Better deactivate my last-defense gadget first.

With care Kit reached into the pocket, felt for the single thread of characters in the Speech hanging out of the compact little wizardry— its tripwire— and pinched it. The wizardry went inactive like a stick of cartoon dynamite that had had its burning fuse pinched out.

Kit tucked the manual into the pocket, zipped it closed, and glanced west, seeing Deimos’s dimming spark vanish below the horizon: then looked the other way. Blue, bright, growing stronger and brighter by the moment, Earth rose in the east—Mars’s northern hemisphere morning star, this time of year, the herald of the dawn.

Kit’s stomach growled. He grinned. Home, he thought, and vanished.

***

The next two hours were torture for Kit. He forced himself to have breakfast, though his insides were roiling with excitement and anxiety. But every minute that his manual didn’t start flashing with an annoyed message from Mamvish, or worse, Irina, felt like a small triumph. Eventually, as the Sun started coming in the dining room windows around seven, Kit began feeling as if maybe he wasn’t in incredible trouble after all.

His attention was presently divided evenly between two pages in the directory. He had a paper napkin stuck in each one, and he flipped back and forth between them about once every minute as the dining room filled with sunlight. What surprised him was on which one the gray print of unavailability first flashed dark.

Kit pushed his third bowl of cornflakes aside and pounced on the page. “How soon can you be ready to go out?”

There was a pause. “Am I allowed to eat first?” Darryl’s voice said from the page.

Kit grinned. “No.”

“You’re cruel to me, you know that?” Darryl said. “Gonna stunt my growth. Don’t you think I have enough brain issues going on without you messing with my metabolism, too?”

Kit snickered. The only thing wrong with Darryl’s metabolism was that it seemed bent on getting ahead of everyone else’s. The way he ate and drank, Kit routinely expected to see Darryl turn up at a meeting three feet taller than at the last one.

“I am going to sit right here for the next fifteen minutes and finish eating my chocolate-frosted sugar bombs” Darryl said. “Part of my nutritious breakfast. And no, I’m not gonna go sugar-hyper on you, that’s nothing I’ve ever had trouble with and I can just hear you thinking, so don’t start! And then I’m going to put some clothes on, if that’s okay with you. Not gonna go running around Mars in my bathrobe!”

“Okay, okay!” Kit said. “As soon as you can.”

“Fine. Thank you.” There was a pause filled with noisy crunching. “And what’re you doing up so early? Thought I was the only one who liked this time of day.”

Kit wondered how to start explaining. He might as well have saved the effort. “Uh-oh,” Darryl said, “you were up there messing, weren’t you? What did you do, Kit-boy? You broke something, didn’t you.”

Kit rolled his eyes. Darryl could be annoyingly acute, and could hear more about what was going on with you in a moment’s silence than some people could hear in a whole paragraph. “Seriously, you should be kept in a cage,” Darryl said. “Never mind, I’m not gonna make you all bad and wrong for whatever you did. At least not till I help you clean it up.”

“Thanks a heap,” Kit said. “Finish being nutritious and then get your butt over here.” He glanced down at the directory and saw another name go dark. “Aha. Later.”

He touched Ronan’s name; it glowed under his finger. “Hey,” Kit said, “good morning.”

“Oh, listen, Rodriguez attempts to score on irony,” Ronan’s voice came back. He yawned. “But no! It bounces off the goalpost! What a shame.”

“Why is it always sports with you?” Kit said. “Football, rugby, that thing with the weird sticks—”

“Hurling.”

“Yeah, the only sport with a mandatory body count.” Kit had seen the game played once and was glad he didn’t go to school in Ireland: hurling came across like lacrosse on crack, but Ronan loved it and would blather about it for hours. “Forget the playing field for now, okay? We need to go to Mars.”

“Oh, really. What have you blown up now?”

Kit was tempted to bang his head on the table. “Nothing blew up!”

You don’t fool me,” Ronan said. “You went off to be with your friend the superegg in the middle of the night.” He laughed. “The Martian night! You know, some day you may want to reproduce, but you’re never gonna do it if you freeze off your—”

“Ronan,” Kit said. “I can either shoot you a précis from my manual, or you can force me to embarrass myself directly…”

“Always much more fun,” Ronan said, and yawned. “Go.”

Kit spent five minutes or so describing what had happened. Ronan stayed quiet during the explanation, then simply said, “Creepy.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “But that thing’s yelled for its friends. I don’t think we’re gonna have to wait for long before something happens up there.”

“And when it does,” Ronan said, “it makes sense for there to be wizards there. Okay, sit tight and I’ll have a word with my ride.”

Kit’s eyebrows went up. Irish wizards were restricted from casual long-distance transport due to the buildup of ancient spell residue on the island. Normally they had to go a considerable distance to get to a city-based rapid-transit worldgate, unless they were on active errantry and entitled to a personal transport dispensation. “What kind of ride?”

“Five minutes.”

Ronan’s listing in the manual faded down to gray again, while beside it an annotation came up: In consultation; please wait. Kit pushed his chair back and got up to take his bowl and spoon into the kitchen.

While he was putting them in the dishwasher, he heard someone coming down the stairs. Moments later Carmela wandered in, wearing one of her super-long striped nightshirts. She made for the refrigerator, stuck her head in, and just stood there yawning.

Kit shut the dishwasher and looked with mild interest at his sister, who was still contemplating the fridge’s interior— morosely, he thought. “Looking for something?”

Carmela yawned again and straightened up. “Just thinking that this is the last morning for the next two weeks when I can be sure that if I leave a strawberry smoothie in here when I go to bed, it’ll still be there the next morning.”

Kit headed back for the dining room. “Why? I don’t like your smoothies.”

“I know,” Carmela said. “But Helena does.”

Kit stopped right where he was and stared at her.

“Kit?” said Ronan’s voice from the dining room table. “We’re all set.”

Carmela’s head snapped around. “Is that who I think it is?” She pushed past Kit into the dining room.

“No, wait a minute! I mean, yeah—” Kit went after her. “Carmela, wait! What do you mean, ‘Helena does’? She’s not going to be here until next week!”

Carmela was leaning over his wizard’s manual. “Hiiiii, Ronaaaaaan!”

There was a pause at the other end. “Uh. Carmela, hi. Kit?”

“Yeah, give me a minute! What did your ride say? When can you get here?”

“Whenever you want. I’m in Baldwin now.”

“What? Already?”

“Yeah. Darryl fetched me over. How long do you need?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Right. Cheers.”

“Byeeeeeee!!” Carmela shouted at the manual as Kit slapped it shut. “Hey, that was rude. I wasn’t done!”

“You can go all gooey over him when he gets here,” Kit muttered, pushing past her to get his vest and jacket off one of the dining room chairs. “It was supposed to be Wednesday she was coming! When did everything get changed?”

“Last night,” Carmela said. “You were asleep. Helena e-mailed Pop: the airline screwed up her flights. She had to either fly today or wait another week. She’ll be here this afternoon.”

Kit groaned as he zipped up his vest. “I do not need this right now!”

Carmela leaned on the chair opposite. “Kit, give her a chance. You’ve talked to her on the phone lately. You’ve heard her. She’s a lot mellower.”

“You mean she no longer comes right out and says she thinks I sold my soul to the devil?” Kit said. He laughed. “Forgive me if I’m not convinced.” He put on his jacket. “If I’m lucky, she’ll be too busy running around socializing with her old friends to want to spend much time thinking about her weird little brother.”

“Ooh, bitter…”

Kit sighed and picked up the manual, eyeing Carmela’s nightshirt. “You plan to be wearing that when Ronan shows up?”

Her eyes went wide. “Ohmigosh,” Carmela said, and fled upstairs.

Kit leaned against the chair at the end of the table and sighed. When he’d realized he had to tell his mama and pop that he was a wizard, they hadn’t had incredible trouble coping with the concept— at least after they got over the initial shock. Carmela had actually been delighted. But Helena had been horrified, and as upset by the rest of the family’s relatively ready acceptance as by the idea that Kit could do wizardry in the first place.

Though the whole family was churchgoing, Helena had always struck Kit as more religious than all the rest of them put together; and until she started getting used to the situation, Kit had been really annoyed by the scared or worried looks Helena gave him every time their paths crossed. When she finally went off to college and put some time and distance between herself and what her little brother had become, Helena had calmed down a little… or so Kit had thought.Oh, please, don’t let her get all freaked out all over again, he said to the universe in general. The stuff that’s going on right now is so important. It’d be a nuisance to have to sneak around and hide what’s happening so she won’t drive everyone crazy—

Ronan appeared at the other end of the table in a muted bang! of displaced air that rattled the dining room’s venetian blinds. Like that kind of thing, for example, Kit thought. I was being discreet about wizardry when Helena was getting all nuts. What’s she going to do when stuff like this happens out in the open?

Ronan was all in black, as usual: though this morning the black was heavy black jeans and hiking boots, and a black parka better suited to January than June. He glanced around, then pulled a chair out and flopped down on it. “Where’s the Mouth that Roared? Thought she’d be right here.”

“She was. I told her to go put on some clothes.”

“Thanks for that,” Ronan said. He sounded actively grateful: but he gave Kit a peculiar look. “You okay? You look pale.”

“I believe you.” Kit laughed, rueful. “Family stuff. My older sister’s coming home for a few weeks. She’s not so clear about who we work for.”

“Uh oh. Going to lie low? Or try to talk sense to her?”

“No idea. Depends on how she is.”

“And you’re not eager to find out.”

Kit shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. As sisters go, she’s okay. More than okay. But as soon as she found out about wizardry…” He shrugged a helpless shrug. “It’s like… I don’t know. Not just that she thought it was a bad thing. Almost as if my being a wizard embarrassed her.”

“Best reason to keep it quiet,” Ronan said. “I feel for you. Glad I don’t have to deal with that stuff.”

“You never told your family?”

Ronan shook his head. “Tried it once or twice,” he said. “It never felt right. Might have been something to do with the classified stuff the Champion was up to when he was stuck in my head. But now that he’s gone, I’m not sure I want to rock the boat…”

Bang! Darryl appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing loose savannah-camo baggies, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and one of those many-pocketed vests favored by photographers. “Sorry I kept you waiting,” he said. “I had to feed my turtle.”

Ronan eyed him with amusement. “Looks more like you were feeding the lions. What, are we going on safari? I should get you a pith helmet and an elephant gun.”

“Stop envying my style,” Darryl said.

“Envying?” Ronan snorted. “It is to laugh.”

“You’re not fooling anybody.” Darryl grinned at Kit, then looked around. “We all set? Where’s Miss Neets?”

Despite how eager he was to see her, this kind of question from the others was beginning to grate on Kit’s nerves. “Sleeping in,” he said. “She had a long day dealing with her dad. And she was muttering about something she was doing with Carmela, probably some girl thing…”

Darryl’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Kit, don’t let her hear you say stuff like that! She’ll pull your head right off and beat you over the shoulders with it.”

Ronan rolled his eyes in agreement. “Miss Tough-Mouth Neets doing girly stuff?” he said. “Not usually on her program.”

“Can we worry less about her program and more about ours?” Kit said.

“Right away, O mighty one,” Darryl said, wandering over to the bowl of fruit off to one side and picking up an apple. “Hey, these look nice—” He glanced at Kit.

“Go ahead. Why should a little errantry keep you from eating?”

“I assume you’ve got a plan ready,” Ronan said.

Kit nodded. “Darryl, did he tell you about the signals to the other craters?”

Already three bites into the apple, Darryl paused long enough to give Kit a look. “I read your précis between the second and third bowls of sugar bombs,” he said. “You want to keep up with me, Your Kitness, ‘cause I may be autistic but I’m not dyslexic. You have a preferred target we should investigate first, or should we just flip for it?”

“If there’s any flipping-for to be done,” said a voice from the living room, “it’s going to be by Ronan over me.”

All heads turned as Carmela walked in. She was wearing a short blue dress with a peach-colored tank top underneath it, leggings, and little high heels of the kind Kit had heard her call “kitten heels.” The clothes were the same kind of thing you might see a lot of girls her age wearing somewhere casually, say to the mall. But there was nothing casual about the way Carmela wore any of her clothes anymore—not since last year, when she suddenly discovered she had a figure. The pigtails of ten minutes ago were gone. She had pulled her long hair off to one side, so that it flowed down in a raven sweep over one shoulder, and she carried herself with the gracious queenly condescension of a supermodel who had descended for a time from her usual starry height to walk among the lowly paparazzi. What Kit found strange was that this lofty carriage didn’t look preposterous on her. “Good morning, Darryl,” Carmela said, smiling sweetly at him; then turned her head. “And Ronannnn…”

Kit could only roll his eyes as Carmela stalked over to Ronan with that smile turned right up. It’s got to be an act,was all he could think. She’s just messing with him because he thinks he’s hot—! For Kit had seen her pull this stunt with egotistical alien royalty in the past. After he worked out what was being done to him, the prince in question had eventually recovered sufficiently to take nourishment and walk around. For a while…

“Carmela,” Ronan said in what Kit was beginning to think of as the Tone of Great Forbearance, “don’t you think I’m a little— old for you?”

His tone of voice suggested that Ronan expected no answer but “yes.” Carmela, however, just looked at him brightly and said, “That’s okay. In ten years you won’t be.”

Ronan opened his mouth and closed it again.

Kit didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But right now the laughter was threatening to win. “Ronan, don’t we have places to be?”

“Oh,” Ronan said, “uh, yes.”

Carmela just smiled. “Nice save, Kit,” she said, “but it’s just temporary.” She waved the fingers of one hand at them in a toodle-oo gesture as she wandered back into the living room.

Kit watched her go with slight relief. Then again, why am I relieved? She’s got a worldgate in her closet. The sooner we’re out of here, the better. “Let’s go out back,” Kit said. “It’s shielded there; the neighbors won’t see us.”

They headed out the back door together. Under his breath, Ronan said, “Your sister—” He shook his head. “We have a word for her where I come from—”

“Maybe I don’t want to hear it,” Kit said. “She is my sister.” Not that Kit wasn’t finding it peculiar to suddenly be concerned about how Carmela dressed or acted around other people. He wasn’t used to thinking about how girls looked in their clothes— except what about Janie Lowell in chemistry the other day? said one eager and interested part of his brain from the background. That skirt she was wearing, it hardly even covered her—

Kit made a face. Other girls were a different matter. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be seeing his sister that way, and he wasn’t sure he wanted anybody else seeing her that way, either. And just a few months ago, I wouldn’t have cared one way or another. This is so weird…

Ronan was shaking his head as they headed into the backyard. “Leaving words about her out of it,” Darryl said to Ronan, “they have any words where you come from for the expression on your face when she said that?”

“Probably they do,” Ronan said as they made their way down through the yard. “‘Gobsmacked’ would be one. Carmela”— Ronan shook his head— “is a whole bucket of gobsmack.”

Kit grinned. “Cousin, I hear you there!”

“When’s she going away to college?” said Darryl as they came to the weedy, tree-screened rear of Kit’s backyard.

“Not a second too soon for me,” Kit said. “No— that’s not true. I don’t know…” He and Carmela had always gotten along better than he and Helena did. And it wasn’t just that Carmela hadn’t completely blown a gasket when she found out he was a wizard, or that later she’d started indepedently picking up the Speech. There’s something else going on. Maybe we’re just closer in age…

In among the trees, Kit had a spell circle laid into the ground under the carpet of leaf mold. “I need to make a couple of changes to this before we go,” he said to the others. “I don’t want her tracking us.”

“We don’t need that,” Darryl said. “I’ll transit us the way I brought Ronan in from Dublin. I doubt she can track my kind of transit: it’s real atypical.”

“If you can go transatlantic on a personal transit without even breaking a sweat,” Kit said, “‘atypical’ would be the word.”

“It’s to do with that bilocation stunt I stumbled onto during my Ordeal,” Darryl said. “Seems I don’t need the usual spells to gate around in the neighborhood. I can go a long way without needing a spell, as long as I leave one of me on Earth and have coordinates to work with.” He rolled his eyes. “Tom said he didn’t understand it, and shoved me off on Carl. Carl gave me five different theories and then wound up saying he thinks I’m bypassing string-structure issues by selectively shredding the interstitial structure of local space-time.” Darryl grinned. “Whatever that means! I don’t think he understands it, either. Shredding—” He shrugged. “He wants to call it that, it’s fine by me.”

“Okay, shred-guy,” Kit said. “Does the ground suit?” It was the question you asked another wizard when he or she was going to be responsible for a spell.

Darryl glanced around. “Yeah, it’s fine. Where on Mars are we going, exactly?”

Kit flipped opened his manual. “A little crater called Stokes.”

“Show me. Carl says I need to be careful about coordinates while I’m still getting the hang of this.”

Kit nodded, thinking that Tom and Carl were wisely covering all the angles with Darryl. While they wanted him to be cautious about what he was doing, they also didn’t want him thinking too hard about whether his ability to do it might be unusual. Making it sound like something normal is smart…

Kit found his marked map and tapped on it to bring it into higher definition, zooming in on the spot he wanted. “Right there.”

Darryl studied the map. “Okay. And about— one second from now,” he said. “They said I needed to specify temporal coordinates, too. Guess they’re nervous I might overshoot.”

“Probably something to do with you just being hot off your Ordeal,” Ronan said. “You young superpowered hotshots, you want keeping an eye on until you settle down into more realistic power levels…”

Darryl nodded as he took a last look at the map. Kit shot Ronan a quick approving look over Darryl’s head. Ronan raised an eyebrow in response, eyed the map in turn. “Not far from the north pole. We need to bring any extra heat with us?”

“No, I factored plenty into the spell,” Kit said.

“Okay,” Darryl said, “we’re good to go. You guys ready? Life support’s set? Don’t make me come all the way back here for more air, now. It’s fifty-four million miles to Mars…”

“We’ve got air for three people for four hours,” Kit said, “and a heavy-duty force-field bubble.”

Ronan suddenly got a wicked look on his face. “And since it’s got to be dark there somewhere…” He pulled out a pair of black-lensed aviator sunglasses and put them on.

Darryl snickered. “Some of us,” he said, “have been watching too many old movies.”

“Old? That movie was young when I was!”

“So were the dinosaurs. Ready to shred?” And Darryl reached up and put a hand each on Kit’s and Ronan’s shoulders.

“Hit it,” Ronan said.

Between one blink and the next, Earth went away.

6: Arsia Mons

Nita was standing near the edge of a gigantic lake, looking out across the still water, waiting for someone.

Where is he? she thought. He’s so late.

The strange many-legged creature sitting off to one side on the gravelly red ground at her feet looked up at her.You’ve always known he might be someday, it said.

Nita scowled. Not that way, she said in her mind. Not funny… She peered out across the lake, shading her eyes from the low sun and the pinkish glitter dancing on the water in the crater. I don’t like the way that looks, she said as the speed of the ripples out on the water increased. There has to be a lot more of that coming—

The creature sitting next to her shrugged. He won’t notice it where he is, it said. The water would have to rise a lot higher to bother him there.

The usual place? Nita said.

The creature nodded. Up on his mountain.

Nita turned and walked a few steps over to the transit circle she had left ready to go, blazing on the ground. What about the other one you were supposed to be meeting here? said the creature that still sat by the lake’s edge, unmoving, gazing back at her with ironic golden eyes.

Can’t wait, Nita said. Come on, let’s go.

She stepped into the circle. It blazed up around her; the transit was instantaneous. Nita emerged barely a blink later from a flicker of darkness to a spot near the edge of the broad, dish-shaped depression on top of that ancient volcano. The view was amazing; she could understand why Kit loved this place so much. But she looked all around the crater and couldn’t see him anywhere. There was no question of Kit being hidden behind anything. There were no big boulders, large objects, or outcroppings: just pebbles, sand, fist-sized stones, and cracks and crevasses caused by the contrast between the day’s relative warmth and the night’s ferocious cold.

Nita transited across the crater a couple more times, effortlessly, the way she’d seen Darryl do, but found no trace of Kit. The transits, though, were enjoyable for their own sake. Pity this is a dream, she thought. It’d be great to be able to do this without having to do a spell and pay the price. The third time, she came out near the ridge at the crater’s edge, where the dust and sand still held some trace of someone’s sneaker prints. She dropped to one knee, touched one print, then reached over beside it to pick up a little stone that lay there. What about it, guy? she said. Who’s been up here recently?

Nobody, the stone said. Just him, and her. The other one.

Nita blinked at that, confused. Well, rocks tended to think of time in the geological sense; they could get confused about shorter periods. I haven’t been up here, though. This is the first time.

No, the rock said. But the last time you came, he had been thinking of her; and he didn’t want to stay. He ran away. And so did you…

Nita shook her head, uncertain what to make of this. An odd feeling of dread was beginning to gather at the back of her mind. Uncertain, she dropped the stone gently to the sandy ground and climbed further up the ridge.

There on the crater’s edge, Nita paused, looking out across the dusty red afternoon toward where the low sun swung. At the edge of that sharply curved, foreshortened horizon, something moved and glittered. You did say you didn’t like the look of that, said the creature crouching at her feet.

Oh, it can’t possibly— Nita said. But then she noticed that the silvery tremor out at the edge of things was getting brighter. It actually seemed to be humping up against the horizon— higher than the hills of the Southern Highlands, impossible though that was. Fear began to rise in Nita, growing more pronounced as a thin, distant sound began to reach her: the rush and roar of water.

There’s no way I can hear that all this way up here, she thought. Her pulse began racing. She stared all around her in growing panic. Where was Kit? He was supposed to be here. But he couldn’t be here. If he was here, and he didn’t get away soon, he’d get caught in this—

All the southern horizon was awash now. Nita could see the foaming onrush of the initial waves, running northward toward her in a flood of ever-increasing speed, over the hills and down into the craters of the lowlands, splashing up around highland hills and making islands of them, rushing inexorably at the mountain where she stood.

The new islands were swiftly drowned as the water raced toward Nita. She stood rooted in horror as the incoming wavefront, hundreds of feet higher in this gravity than an Earth-based tsunami could ever be, came plunging through the southern highlands and down over the edge of their plateau, pouring down into the vast cratery basin of the lowlands at her feet and rushing, uncheckable, toward the mountain where she stood. Within what seemed only moments, the water flowed around her on all sides, splashing up over the immense mesa on which the mountain stood. It drowned it in a matter of a few breaths, began to climb the sides of the mountain—

Nita gulped with fear. She had to get away, fast, before the onrushing water changed the nature of the land where she was standing and made it impossible for her to use her already prepared spell to escape. She raised her hands, the summoning gesture for the transit spell she was carrying.

But no light erupted around her feet. The Speech-characters she was expecting didn’t materialize. Nita began hurriedly speaking the words of an emergency transit spell— and then, shocked, stopped, realizing the words made no sense. I don’t understand! It has to work! It’s a spell! A spell always works—

I told you not to wait so long, said the creature crouching at her feet.

That’s a lot of help now! Nita turned southward again, afraid of what she’d see.

Between her and the pale, pinky sun, something rose up to filter and dim the sky. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, now taller than the mountain, leaning over Nita, leaning farther out. The great sparkling arch of it stretched out over the top of the mountain-crater like a vast, downward-curving, smoked glass roof. The distant sun, caught in it, flickered and struggled to shine.

It was no use. The thickness of the water was putting it out. And Nita couldn’t transit. She was trapped unless she found the right words to say, figured out what to do. But she was never going to figure it out. There wasn’t going to be time. The wave arched, curved more deeply above her, then finally and immensely broke—

Nita had what felt like a lifetime’s leisure to watch the water fall slowly toward her in a massive, incompressible, high-curved slab. Gravity or no gravity, when that wave came down on her, its mass would crush her just as flat as if it was stone and not water. Too much mass at this speed, some dry and terrified part of her brain said in the background, didactic to the end. After all, g equals G times the mass of Mars over the square of the radius, so that would be at least three hundred seventy-two centimeters per second squared, and that means—

The roaring and the blackness smashed down onto Nita.

The world ended.

Nita sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath. It took some moments for her to register, as she stared around her, that everything was all right, that she was in her bedroom and all the usual safe, sane, familiar things were there. The posters on the wall, the library books piled up on the desk, the magazines stacked on her dresser, the shopping voucher plaques for the Crossings that Carmela had given her, saying, “I’ve only got about sixty of them; let me know when you need more…”

Nita worked on slowing her breathing down. After that, her first somewhat panicked impulse was to try to completely forget what she’d just seen and try to go back to sleep. But then she thought What, and find myself back in that dream again? Not a chance!

She got up, pulled down her nightdress, and went over to the desk, where she flipped her manual open. “Bobo,” she said, “boy, have I got one for the dream journal today!”

The manual’s pages riffled under her hands, laying themselves open to the section into which she dictated her dreams. General theme? said the voice in the back of her head.

Nita shook her head, sighed. “Water again.” You’ve been getting a lot of that lately.

Nita shrugged. “Probably something to do with the project at hand.” But an echo of an old memory said, Fear death by water…

She shook her head. Picchu had just been quoting some poet at the time. And that had been such a long while ago.Yet Peach’s prophecies were always reliable. Who knows how long they might have been good for?

Unfortunately, prophecy rarely came stamped with a sell-by date. Nita took the manual back to the bed, sat down cross-legged on top of the covers, and hurriedly dictated everything she could remember about the dream. “…And the wave,” she said at last. “I can’t believe I was standing there working out the acceleration of a falling mass on Mars.” She laughed. “And that all mixed up with the water… Kit’s thing is starting to get to me.”

Well, after yesterday, possibly that’s understandable.

“Might be right,” Nita said. She stretched and glanced at the clock. “Where is he?”

Where do you think?

Nita laughed. “Don’t know why I even bother asking.” She got up, tossing the manual to one side. “Did he leave me any messages?”

Just a routine notification of where he was going.

She let out a breath and pulled a dresser drawer open, pulling out a big sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. These Nita held up against her, looking down to check the length, then paused: the act brought back that strange image of the transit circle that wouldn’t flame to life. She let out a perplexed breath. Wizardry, she thought, not working…

That’s something that’s happened recently, the peridexis said.

Nita pulled the pants on. “Yeah. But I’ve dreamed that before.” She considered as she finished dressing. “Maybe it’s the wizard’s version of those horrible dreams people have where you forgot to study and there’s a test. Then you wake up in a cold sweat and find there’s nothing to it…”

The peridexis offered no opinion. Nita shrugged and headed downstairs.

Her dad was sitting at the dining room table, staring at the screen of his cell phone. “Morning,” Nita said, heading into the kitchen to make some tea.

“Fresh pot’s on the counter,” her dad said.

“Thank you.” Nita poured a cup, got a spoon and the sugar bowl from the counter, and put what were probably too many sugars in the tea, then left it there while she went rooting through one of the cupboards over the counter for cereal. “You playing around with your address book again?”

“No,” her dad said from the dining room, “it’s Dairine’s information coming through on the phone. The live feed of what she’s doing today. What was it you called it? A spinoff?”

“Secondary spin,” Nita said, reaching into the fridge for milk. “At least that’s what it’s called when we’re just excerpting nonwizardly stuff that’s also in the manual. We might need to invent another word for this.”

She brought in a bowl and a spoon and the cornflakes box, and sat down by her dad. “She’s gone already?”

“Yup,” her father said. He looked more resigned than annoyed. “She did her chores first, though.”

“Good.” Nita poured cereal into the bowl, reached for the milk, and then realized her tea was still in the kitchen. “Oops…”

She went back for it. When she came back, her dad was fiddling with the little joystick under the phone’s screen. “What are you getting?” Nita said. “Text, or—” She looked over his shoulder. “Oh, no, there she is! Hey, that’s pretty good.”

The screen wasn’t the best for this kind of work, but it showed clearly enough an image of the simulator hall in the palace at Wellakh, with Dairine standing in front of the slowly rotating Thahit-mirroring sunglobe. “Where are they, exactly?” her dad said.

Nita squinted at the screen. “See that icon over there on the left? If you hit that, it’ll bring up subtitles. There you go. It’s Roshaun’s home planet, Daddy. About twenty-three thousand light-years from here.”

Another figure moved into view on the phone’s screen. “And that’s— who? His dad?”

Nita nodded as she sat down and poured milk on her cereal. “Nelaid ke Seriv.”

Her dad studied Nelaid for a moment. “Tall guy.”

“Yeah, Wellakhit usually are. Their gravity’s a little less than ours, so their bones grow longer…”

Nita ate some cereal, then paused. “Oh, yeah— he wants to talk to you. At your convenience, he said. About Dairine.”

Her dad glanced up. “She’s not making some kind of trouble for him, is she?”

“Oh, no! I think—” Nita munched for a moment more. “I think he considers her a challenge. His family’s big on that kind of thing.” She wondered how much of the political situation it would be safe to get into with her dad, then decided to leave that to Nelaid. “I think he just wants to talk dad-to-dad stuff with you. To let you know he’s keeping an eye on her.”

Her father looked concerned. “Is fatherhood on other planets really that much like fatherhood here?”

“Some places, no. But in this case, yeah. Hominid species can have a lot in common, depending on how their biologies work. There are always cultural variations, but—” Nita held out her hand for the phone, took it, and played briefly with the joystick, then handed the phone back. “Go through that section, and you can get a species-to-species and culture-to-culture values comparison. Have it generate you a matching-features chart.”

“Like one of those compare-before-you-buy websites?”

Nita grinned. “Close. But let me know when you’re ready to talk to Nelaid, and I’ll send him word.” She went back to her cereal, eating faster so it wouldn’t have a chance to go soggy. “He was real gracious about this. Which he doesn’t have to be: he’s sort of a king. He’s used to having people jump when he says, not the other way around.”

Her dad nodded, went back to watching Dairine and Nelaid while Nita finished her cereal. Shortly he said, “What exactly are they doing?”

“It’s complicated,” Nita said. “Nelaid’s family are responsible for keeping their planet’s star from acting up. It’s not the kind of wizardry it’s easy to do from a distance. Sometimes you have to get in there under the hood and fix things.”

“‘Get in’?” her dad said. “Into a sun?”

Nita nodded, eating the last of the cereal, then reaching for the mug of tea. “It’s pretty specialized work. Roshaun did it for our Sun while he was here.”

“And she was there for that?”

Nita nodded. “She had to be. I mean, it’s our star. It wouldn’t have mattered if Roshaun’d been a specialist at the galactic level: he still would’ve needed a local rep on hand to explain things to the star. A system’s primary has a really deep connection with creatures born in its system. If an alien wizard tried to do anything significant to the Sun without an Earth-born wizard there, the star might think somebody was trying to tamper with it who didn’t have permission.” Nita shook her head. “Could’ve gotten real ugly.”

Her father gave Nita a slightly cockeyed look. “The star might think?”

Nita sighed. “Daddy, I know how it sounds, but believe me, sometimes it’s safer to treat inanimate things as if they were animate! Awareness levels in matter can be real situational. Anyway, I think Nelaid’s teaching Dairine how to get into a relationship with stars besides her own. Seems like a good addition to her skill set. She always did like the high-powered stuff.” And the way her power levels have been dropping off, she may start needing finesse to keep doing that work. She’s not going to have brute new-wizard strength to fall back on now… Nita got up to put her bowl in the kitchen.

“So you’re going off, too, now?” her dad said. “Whereabouts? Mars?”

“What, just because you think Kit’s there?”

“Well, that’d be the normal assumption, wouldn’t it?”

Nita had to laugh. Even her dad knew the score.

“Yeah, I’d say.” She washed her bowl and put it in the dish drainer. “Well, guess what? Unlike just about every other wizard you know, I’m actually doing something close to home. Got to go to the beach and talk to S’reee. I had an idea last night before I went to sleep about something we’ve been talking about for a while.” She came back into the dining room, bent down, and kissed her dad on the cheek. “You okay with this now?” She glanced at the phone.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Good. I’ll be back later.”

“Before you go to Mars, or afterwards?”

“Maybe before. It’s not like he doesn’t deserve his own private time up there.”

“‘Boys are from Mars,’ huh?”

Nita snorted. “Believe me, I’ve been starting to wonder.”

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

Nita headed for the stairs again, smiling slightly. This is working pretty well so far, she thought. If I’m real lucky, he won’t get the bright idea that it’d be fun to watch me the same way he’s watching Dairine.

Well, you know, the peridexis said in the back of her mind, if it came to that, you could always tell him I refused to do it.

She snickered as she headed up the stairs. “Bobo,” she said, “I know I can count on you. But let’s not worry about it right now.”

“You say something, sweetie?” her dad said from down in the dining room.

“Just talking to my invisible friend, Daddy…”

There was a pause. “Why do I even bother asking anymore?”

Nita laughed under her breath. She went into her room, threw some things into her backpack— a magazine or two, an extra sweater. Then she put out a hand and whistled for her wizard’s manual.

You’re really going to bring that with you? Such a crutch.

“We’ve had this discussion before, Bobo,” Nita said, opening it and paging through to the messaging area to see what Kit might have left in response to her note of the previous day. “I kept my little blue baby-blankie for a real long time, too…”

The peridexis fell silent, possibly confused. Nita grinned and looked at the messaging pages. The note she’d left Kit the previous day was grayed out: his response was underneath.

Headed out to check things out with Darryl and Ronan. Didn’t want to bother you so early. Probably back around the middle of the afternoon. Take a look at my précis when you have a moment. K.

Nita raised her eyebrows as she closed the manual. Kind of terse for him, she thought. Maybe he’s realized how annoyed I was about him dumping me yesterday, and now he’s feeling guilty? Good. But I’ll take a look at the précis as soon as S’reee and I handle business, and then go see what he’s up to. No point in making him suffer all day if he’s learned his lesson.

She shoved the manual into her backpack, then slipped one strap over her shoulder and pulled a preset transit circle out of her charm bracelet. Nita dropped it to the floor, where it came alive in the proper blaze of fiery characters in the Speech. Nita looked at it with unnecessary relief. Just a dream, before, Nita thought. Just a dream…

She stepped through the circle.

***

The boulder-built breakwater jetty that sticks out into the water on the east side of Jones Inlet once had a U.S. Coast Guard station associated with it. The station was gone now, the old low building at the jetty’s landward end demolished: no structure remained but the tower at the bayside end that still held the light and horn. The horn was silent, since the morning was bright and clear. The light blinked as usual, making a faint tink, tink, tink noise that could be heard by anyone within twenty feet of the tower, even over the wash and rush of water where it ran up against the stones of the jetty’s base.

Nita came out under eye level, from the landward point of view, on one of the big guano-streaked stones nearest to the end of the jetty. She had a low-energy visual shield-spell around her—a simple wizardly cloaking surface that redirected the images of objects behind her so that they appeared in front of her, making it seem as if she wasn’t there. Nita held the slide-around cloaking spell in place while she glanced around to make sure no one in the area could see her. Fishing boats came in and out of the Inlet all the time, so this was something of an issue: but at this time of morning, the commercial boats were already out in the bay, and the small casual boats— charters that took parties of game fishermen out after sailfin and swordfish— were either well away or not yet ready to go to sea.

No person or craft was anywhere near enough to see her even with binoculars. Nita killed the shield-spell, then sat down on the stone and stared down into the murky water, where long, silky green weed attached to the big gray-black rocks swayed and rippled rhythmically as the water washed and splashed against the jetty. The image from her dream, that impossibly high wave with the pale struggling sun caught in it, rose before her mind’s eye again.Water, water everywhere, Nita thought. Why does it keep turning up in my dreams? But not even the koi had any answers to that question.

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.

“Over the next week or so. It shouldn’t take more than that to do the necessary consulting and work out the actual process for dissolving the explosives. Nothing mechanical, though.”

“Something chemical makes more sense. We can build a spell to neutralize the byproducts.”

“And then the increased current takes those away, too? Makes sense.” S’reee blew briefly, a cetacean chuckle. “It sounds like something Pellegrino would have thought of.”

“I got the idea after I was reading about her,” Nita said. Angelina Pellegrino had been a great wizard of the previous century, a specialist in working with water who had single-handedly designed a way to cleanse the western Mediterranean of that period’s increasing pollution. That spell, the so-called Gibraltar Passthrough Intervention, was still reckoned by historians of wizardry as one of the greatest achievements of that period by any wizard working alone. “But this wouldn’t have to be anything like that big.”

“Which is good,” S’reee said as they made for the surface, “as hydromages are few and far between. And to move a lot of water, you need a lot of power…”

They broke surface a few hundred yards out from the jetty: Nita kept her bubble level with the surface until they were close enough that she wouldn’t be seen climbing out of the water. “You know, you should have a word with Arooon about her,” S’reee said.

“What, our guy who sang the Blue in the Song of the Twelve?”

“The same. He told me once that his father knew Pellegrino. I seem to remember him saying that when she got started, she was just a human farm girl who noticed that water acted strangely around her. You know the saying, that wizards who have the earliest Ordeals— and the latest ones— produce the biggest results? Angelina was one of those very late hatchers: almost out of latency when her Ordeal came along. She lived in the island down at the bottom of that long peninsula where the people lived who had that empire. You know the one, it was all around the edges of the Mediterranean—”

“The Romans. You mean Sicily?”

“That’s the place. She went swimming on the evening she took the Oath, and the Lone One met her in some kind of demon shape and tried to drown her.” S’reee snorted, a very wet blowhole-laugh that just missed drenching Nita again, though this time not on purpose. “Kind of an error of judgment on Its part! The fight between them threw her straight into sync with the whole element of water, right across the Med. For something like the whole year after, every wizard on Earth who met the Lone One physically on Ordeal reported that It turned up dripping.”

Nita snickered at the image. “She didn’t just do the water stuff, though, did she? She got to be a Planetary for a while.”

“So she did,” S’reee said. “But something else was going on with her, too, which meant she spent less time as Planetary than she might have.” S’reee rolled over, stretching those huge fins into the air. “In your reading, have you come across references to a manifestation of wizardry called infra-affinity?”

Nita considered. “Don’t know. I might have.”

“It’s one of the so-called ‘inner talents,’” S’reee said. “It’s not a spell you design, or something you do, but something you are. Lots of wizards have affinities to one or more of the classic elements or states of matter. But this state implies such a profound connection to one state of matter or another that a wizard can go into complete union with it, then come out of the unified state without showing any ill effects. Infra-affinity tends to turn up in very new wizards as an Ordeal exploit, like the water mastery your friend Ronan manifested on his Ordeal. But it takes an incredible toll if you keep it up.”

S’reee looked thoughtful. “Arooon thought that Pellegrino’s taking on the role of Planetary Wizard might have been why she died so young. A Planetary has to sync with the whole planet, and it’s possible that the required affinities to earth and air and the Earth’s interior fire started conflicting with Pellegrino’s infra-affinity to water.” S’reee let her tail fall over into the water in a sideways slap, a cetacean shrug. “No way to tell at this end of time…”

Nita sat thinking about that for a moment. “I wonder,” she said. “About Dairine …you think she might have an elemental affinity? She was always big on fire when she was little. I can’t think how many times Dad had to stop her from playing with the barbecue. She was always getting burned. And now here she is starting to play around with stars…”

“Plasma’s a whole different element,” S’reee said, “but you might be onto something there. It could explain the connection to your colleague Roshaun as well. Like does call to like sometimes.”

“I wonder if I’m developing something like that for water.”

S’reee waved a fin in agreement that this could be a possibility. “Could be. It might explain why you took to underwater wizardry so readily, and did so well in the Song. But it’s a tendency, not a restriction. It doesn’t have to dominate your practice.”

Nita nodded and leaned against the rocks. “Something else to research…”

S’reee bubbled with laughter again. “The story of all our lives,” she said. “Though I’d try to put the research aside for a little. We do have to make sure we have other things going on in our lives than just wizardry, or what good are we to the Powers?”

There was an amused quality to S’reee’s voice, something almost secretive. Curious, Nita stretched out on the rock to get a better look at S’reee’s eye on that side. “Oh, really? What’s this all about?”

“Well, there are other reasons to go out singing than just errantry,” S’reee said.

That was when Nita remembered that “out singing” had more than one meaning for a whale. “Whoa, wait a minute! ’Ree, are you seeing somebody? You are! You’re finning around with someone!” Nita reached down and pounded S’reee on the flank in a congratulatory way. “Who’s the lucky bull?”

“Someone I met out on errantry—”

“Hey, great! Another wizard?”

“Oh, no, not at all. We can’t all date wizards, hNii’t! I met Hwiii’sh a few weeks ago up by the Grand Banks when I was on a meal break in the middle of a team wizardry. You know how it is, there are always tourists around who’re all itchy to see wizards doing what they do…”

Nita smiled ironically, letting the “dating” reference go by. She was so used to hearing this kind of thing from kids at school that she’d stopped protesting, since it just made everybody sure they were right. With luck, they’ll stop eventually. “Well, tourists aren’t a problem I have all that much,” Nita said. “So tell me all about him! What does he sing?” That being what you generally asked whales instead of “What do you do?”

“He sings aouih’hweioooiuh’hhaii!t.”

Nita had to listen to the word in the Speech to make anything of it. “Am I getting that right? He’s a food critic?”

“And very stuck up about it, too,” S’reee said, blowing a big wet laugh. “You should hear him going on about Arctic krill, and South Cape squid, and all the rest of it! Fortunately he thinks it’s a big deal that I’m a wizard, so I don’t have trouble holding my own when his ego starts to run riot…”

Nita leaned against the jetty and relaxed while S’reee talked, enjoying the fact that for once she had time to kick back and laugh at the concept of a whale who did nothing but share news about the presence and quality of food with other whales. But then lately it seemed rare for Nita to have “quality time” like this— time without school or schoolwork hanging over her head, or some terrifyingly heavy piece of wizardry that needed her attention. More of this, please, and enough saving the world for this year! Nita said silently to the One. Actually having the summer off, like a normal person, would be very, very nice! Not that she could ever be precisely normal again: wizardry kind of precluded that.

Up behind her on the jetty, Nita heard an odd sort of strangled pop. She scrambled around and peered up, one hand on her charm bracelet again, ready to wake up the light-diverting cloaking spell so she could pull it down over her and S’reee if need be. But there wasn’t any need. Halfway down the jetty, Carmela had just walked out of the air and was heading toward them down the rough stony path on the jetty’s top.

Nita let out a breath of mild exasperation. “Mela,” she said as Carmela got down near them, “you can not just go appearing out of nothing around here! People could notice.”

“But they don’t, mostly,” Carmela said, clambering down among the rocks to perch on top of one of the biggest ones near the waterline, dangling her legs over the edge. “Isn’t that one of the weird things about wizardry on Earth? Everybody says they want magic in their lives, and when it happens right in front of them, usually they don’t believe it. ‘Oh, she must have been there a moment before and I just didn’t see her,’ they’re all probably saying.” Then she paused and looked around. “Except, listen to me: who’s all saying? There’s nobody here. You’re just being paranoid. Loosen up! Good morning, Miss S’reee…”

S’reee, half-submerged except for one big eye, was bubbling in amusement. “And dai stihó to you, K!aarmii’lha. What brings you down here?”

“Well, my main project for the day is to go shopping,” Carmela said, “and this time Nita is finally coming with me.Aren’t you, Miss Neets?”

Carmela scowled a very overstated scowl at Nita. Nita laughed, glancing at S’reee. “She’s the only one I know who can make a shopping trip sound like a death sentence.”

“Well, depending on where you shop at the Crossings, it could happen,” S’reee said, rolling over in the water. “Some of the boutiques there are very species-specific: you’d have to watch what you bought. Sea’s Name, even some of the restroom facilities there could be fatal if you walked in the wrong door.”

“S’reee, it’s hardly about the toilets. We know all about which ones not to go into!” Carmela said.

“And if we didn’t, we could always ask Dairine,” Nita said under her breath, with a smile.

“Never mind the restrooms,” Carmela said, “it’s the stores that are interesting, S’reee. The clothes stores, especially. We’ve got to get Neets out of all those these floppy sweatshirts and jeans! I’ve asked her to come with me at least six times now.” Carmela bent down toward the amused S’reee in a most confiding way. “But she just keeps handing me these lame excuses. ‘Sorry, saving the universe, can’t go shopping today!’ So help me talk her out of this morning’s one! Which I’m sure she will now provide for us.” And Carmela turned expectantly to Nita.

A wave splashed higher than others had— the tide was coming in— and Nita paused to wipe spray off her face. “I was going to go up to Mars first.”

Carmela covered her eyes theatrically. “Knew it, S’reee,” she said. “It had to happen. She’s finally come down with Kit’s Mars bug!”

“Well,” S’reee said, adopting a fairly diplomatic tone, “you have to admit, it is hard not to find it exciting—”

“Especially when he’s up there with Ronan and Darryl,” Nita said.

“I know,” Carmela said. “That was going to be my first stop before I hit the Crossings. I was hoping Neets would come along with me so we could give them a good joint tease before moving on to more interesting things.”

“No way, Mela!” Nita said. “Not a good idea! All the signs point to this being some obscure boy thing. The note Kit left me had ‘Keep Out, Male-Bonding Road Trip’ stamped all over it.”

“All the more reason to crash the party!”

Nita began to sweat, realizing how much aggravation she was going to catch from Kit if she turned up on Mars with Carmela in tow. “No, seriously. You’re right about how many times you’ve asked me to go. Why don’t we let them get on with it and go shopping instead?”

“Too late, Neets,” Carmela said, and stood up. “I’ll go without you.”

“To Mars??” Nita said, now becoming seriously concerned.

Carmela smiled slightly and reached into one deep pocket of her jumpsuit. From it she pulled not the curling-ironish laser dissociator that Nita was expecting but a TV remote. This she flipped expertly in the air and caught.

“I had a word with my closet,” Carmela said. “Actually, I had a word with the TV remote that Kit did his magic tweaking on, and it had a word with my closet. And then, so I could have control of the worldgate in the closet when I’m away from home, the remote talked to Dairine’s sweet little Spot, and cloned itself for me. Took no time at all.” She smiled delightedly.

“Wait,” S’reee said. “‘Your closet’? Is that inside a house here?”

“Yup. It’s in my bedroom.”

S’reee looked puzzled. “You have a worldgate in your house? What does it run on? Besides wizardry, I mean. The necessary ‘hard’ power outlay would be considerable.”

“I’m told I have a parasitic virtual catenary conduit from one of the nondenominated gates at the Crossings,” Carmela said, and laughed. “Whatever that means! Sker’ret’s got it plugged into something or other; that’s all that matters. My closet even has a Crossings gate number, though it’s unlisted. Like a real classy Zip code.” Carmela juggled the remote from hand to hand. “So now I don’t need to bother anybody else to give me rides …and if I want to go to Mars, the boys can’t stop me. Come to think of it,” and she grinned at Nita, “you can’t stop me! Because you don’t really want to. Do you?”

“Uh—”

“Oh, Juanita Louise, don’t look so stricken!”

Nita clutched her head. “Carmela. Do …not …say …the L word!”

Carmela laughed. After a moment, to Nita’s horror, so did S’reee. “hNii’t,” S’reee said, “I think she’s got us both in the drift net at the moment. We may as well give in gracefully.”

“‘Us’? You want to go, too?”

“Why not? I’m not all that busy this morning. If she’s supplying free transport—”

“Not free,” Carmela said promptly. “This interspatial transport is supplied to you on a promotional basis courtesy of the Planetary Government of Rirhath B and Crossings Properties HyperIncorporated.” She produced a very prim and proper expression. “Because I know that in wizardry there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Then Carmela grinned. “But I can take as many people as I like whenever I like to, because Sker’ret said I could… and what the Stationmaster of Rirhath B says, goes.”

Nita sighed. “She’s got us there.”

“So it’s settled then. Where exactly on Mars are we going?”

Nita pulled out her manual. “Wait a sec, ’cause I have no idea exactly what he’s been up to—”

After a few moments Nita found the spot where Kit had filed his précis. “Uh-oh.”

“What?” S’reee and Carmela said in unison, but Carmela with much more relish.

Nita tsk-tsked softly. “He just couldn’t leave that egg alone,” she said. “Looks like it hatched! And sent out some signals.”

S’reee, partially submerged again, listened to what the Sea had to tell her about this. “Odd. Four signals went out from the artifact. But I’m seeing five hot spots on Mars where wizardry is either working or waiting to start.”

Carmela looked confused. “So where are the guys?”

Nita paged back to Kit’s précis, found the map he’d labeled with the signal targets, and tapped the page: it updated. “Looks like the northernmost of the targets. Some crater called Stokes. Yeah, there are their life signs— S’reee, you seeing this?”

S’reee’s eyes were unfocused. “Yes. There’s no missing Darryl’s life sign, in particular; it’s unique.” She flipped a fin, looked up at Nita.

Nita nodded, not looking up from the manual: there was something strange about the diagram she was examining. Not knowing what to make of it, she flipped back to the messaging page and touched Kit’s note to bring the contact up to live status. “Hey,” she said in the Speech. “What’s going on up there?” And she waited.

Nothing.

She looked up. Carmela was giving her an odd look. “Is there a delay?” she said. “Mars is a long way off.”

Nita shook her head. “Lightspeed isn’t an issue for the manuals.” She turned back to the map on Kit’s précis page, scrutinized it. “I don’t like this. The manual says we can’t go there.”

“What?” S’reee said.

“The manual says the sites are ‘Unavailable, blocked by previous declaration, investigation ongoing, comm functions blocked during evaluation.’”

“Whose previous declaration?” Carmela said, “and whose investigation? Blocked by who? And what—?” The rest of what she was saying got lost in the splash of S’reee submerging again.

“What?” Carmela said. “Did I say something wrong? What freaked her?”

Nita shook her head. “She’s looking it up in detail. She gets her wizardry data from the Sea. She’s more senior than me— she may be able to find out more.”

Some moments later, S’reee surfaced and blew. “All I get is what you’re getting,” she said to Nita. “Definitely something to do with the superegg’s transmission this morning— there are multiple delayed wizardries working. But don’t ask me what they’re doing, I can’t get an analysis. Because what I’m getting makes no sense. The Sea can’t give me enough context for a translation.”

“Alien wizardry,” Nita said, getting more unnerved by the second. “Dangerous, you think?”

“No telling. But that fifth site isn’t blocked. There’s some kind of wizardry there that’s alive and running, but not doing anything …just waiting.”

“And transit’s not prevented?” Carmela said.

Nita shook her head, showed Carmela the manual page. “There. Get the coordinates and do the honors. We can have a look at that hot spot: and when we’re actually on the planet, we might be able to reach the guys. Or get a better idea of what’s going on with them.”

Carmela looked at the manual page and spent a moment tapping numbers into the remote. Nita was surprised to hear it make a little series of electronic beeps, at which Carmela’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, you can do that?” she said in the Speech. “Sorry.” She pointed the remote at the manual, pressed a button.

The remote chirped; Carmela looked up at Nita. “It can take a scan. I didn’t realize.”

“hNii’t,” S’reee said, “you had a cloaking routine ready? Putting it up around us might be good. About a twenty-meter radius—”

Nita tucked the manual away, pulled the spell out of the charm bracelet, and said the words that kicked the spell into action. As she did, S’reee levitated gracefully out of the water, keeping just an inch-thick shell of it around her so her skin wouldn’t dry out. “I’ve got all the air we’ll need. K!aarmii’lha?”

Carmela raised the remote, hit what would normally be the channel-change button.

They vanished.

***

It was mid-afternoon on the red-brown southern slopes of the Martian volcano where two girls and a humpback whale appeared a second later. Away to the east, under the thin, filmy clouds of a windy day, the vast shadows and chasms of the westernmost end of Valles Marineris cut away from them in dust and haze toward the edge of the world, where a thin veil of pink-tinted sky hid the canyon’s far end.

Carmela looked at the long, gentle slope of the worn old mountain behind them. “You know what you could build here? The universe’s biggest ski jump. What’s this place called, anyway?”

Nita had to smile as she and S’reee looked around. “Arsia Mons.”

Carmela snickered. “Sounds like one of Ronan’s rude Irish words…”

“Not this time,” Nita said, pulling out her manual to cross-reference between the map and the downslope terrain. “In the old days, people saw this was a bright spot that got dark sometimes. They couldn’t see the cause— this big spiral of dust that updrafts from the volcano’s side every winter.” She looked up the long, shallow curve of the volcano’s slope, where many dark-colored rocks were whitened on top by the last winter’s dustfall. “But the astronomers back then thought maybe there were trees here, growing leaves and losing them again. So they called it Arsia Silva, the Arsine Forest, after someplace in Italy. Later when the telescopes were better they got rid of the word for forest and put in ‘mons’ for mountain, but they kept the ‘Arsia.’”

Carmela stared at Nita. “Have you been secretly studying this stuff?”

Nita laughed. “I have been not so secretly listening to Kit’s lectures on Martian stuff every five minutes! For months! So some of it I remember.” She shook her head. “That pillar of dust is famous: it gets twenty miles high, sometimes. These, though… these got found later.” They looked down at the side of the volcano, all spotted with deep black holes.

“They call them skylights,” Nita said, bouncing down toward the closest of them. “Don’t ask me why, but they gave them all girls’ names. Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Nikki—” She stopped. “Can’t remember the others.”

Abbey and Jeanne, said Bobo.

Nita nodded. “Seven of them, anyway.”

“But there’s another one,” Carmela said. “Is that where we’re going?”

Nita looked at the manual, looked at S’reee, nodded. “That’s the one.”

“I shall call it Louise,” Carmela said, and bounced off that way as if everything was settled.

Nita made a strangled growling noise.

The more you do that, Bobo said, the more she’s going to keep saying it. I’d let it pass, if I were you.

Nita went after Carmela. S’reee glided along beside her. “What’s the problem with the name, hNii’t?” she said.

Nita shook her head. “Long story. It’ll keep.” She pulled the atmosphere spell out of her charm bracelet to make sure it would hold up under the extra distance that Carmela had bounced ahead.

“My air shell’s much bigger than yours,” S’reee said. “Don’t worry; it’ll cover us all.”

They caught up with Carmela at the edge of the further skylight. All three paused to look down into the darkness. “Deep,” S’reee said. “Thirty or forty of my lengths…”

“At least,” Nita said. She unzipped her otherspace pocket and pulled out one of the little wizard-lights she carried for such circumstances— just a long sentence in the Speech made virtually physical, then rolled up and compressed to about the size of a pea.

She pinched it and said the trigger word. The spell came alive in her hand, a clear white light about as bright at the moment as a sixty-watt bulb. This she dropped down into the cave. It floated down about as fast as a large leaf might fall from a tree.

“Look at the top level of that,” S’reee said, peering down into the darkness. “It’s almost perfectly spherical.”

“Like a bubble,” Nita said. “You think that’s what happened here? Some old volcanic eruption. The gases built up in the lava; a bubble formed real near the surface. Then cooled off really fast—”

“And then the top blew off it,” Carmela said. She kicked gently at the stone at the very edge of the skylight. A fragment flew off, fell gently down into the huge hole after the wizard-light. “Yeah. Look how thin that was. If you had a bubble half a mile wide…”

Nita nodded. She and Carmela stood, and S’reee hung, watching the light drift downward. “It looks a lot lighter down at the bottom,” Carmela said after a few moments.

“That’s dust, I think,” Nita said as the light came to rest in a little halo of its own reflected glow, far down at the bottom of that huge empty space. “Let’s go down. ‘Ree, is it safe to spell inside your air bubble?”

“Absolutely—the spell structure’s on the outside.”

Nita spoke a few words to the air inside S’reee’s bubble. From where she and Carmela stood, a near-transparent stairway of hardened air, like glass, built itself down into the darkness. Nita reached into her backpack for the latest in a long series of rowan wands. As she stepped down into the darkness, the wand began to glow with its charge of absorbed moonlight, lighting the stairway. “Just walk down behind me,” Nita said to Carmela. “This’ll build itself in front of us and unbuild behind.”

“And if we need to run away in a hurry,” Carmela said, sounding for the first time slightly nervous, “we’re going to have to run upstairs??”

Nita snorted. “If we have to get out that fast, I won’t waste time skywalking! And neither should you. If there’s trouble, just transport out.”

They walked down to Nita’s little light-spell. It was a long walk. Beside them, S’reee drifted down through the huge, dark, empty space, fins hanging motionless: but Nita noticed that there was a faint glow about them and about S’reee’s tail, some wizardry in abeyance but ready to use in a hurry.

“I forgot to ask you,” Carmela said, walking in sync with Nita. “Where’s Dairine? I thought she’d be here, too. She was the one who was all hot for Mars, originally.”

“Just on the first day of her Ordeal,” Nita said. “This was a pit stop. She wanted to see Olympus Mons. Such a tourist destination.” She smiled. “This morning she headed for Wellakh first thing. Our dad’s watching her— he’s got his own Dairine Cam.”

Carmela’s smile had a sad edge to it. “She’s been out on the High Road a lot, hasn’t she?” She used the Speech-word allaire-nai for the concept; it implied that the person being described wasn’t just offplanet, but well away from one’s usual mindset or psychology.

Nita nodded. “And treating the house like a bed-and- breakfast, my dad’s been saying.”

“But always looking for Roshaun…”

“Yeah.”

Carmela nodded. “I can understand that. I may have given him a hard time, but I’d never want him to vanish forever.”

“If anyone can find him,” Nita said, “I’m betting she can.”

At floor level, the last of Nita’s hardened-air steps vanished behind her as she and Carmela came down to bounce on the slightly curved floor. Puffs of pale dust rose. Nita held the rowan wand up, and she and S’reee and Carmela looked around.

“There’s another room through there,” Carmela said, pointing off to their left. “See it? Like another bubble bumped into this one.”

They moved forward. It was warmer down here than up on the surface, but still plenty cold enough. The next chamber was indeed another bubble, smaller than the last: out of it opened numerous other circular portals, leading into more huge stone bubbles, each full of darkness.

“Look at that,” Carmela said, peering away into the dark as they moved into yet another spherical chamber. “They just go on and on. Probably for miles…”

“The whole volcano must be honeycombed with these,” Nita said, listening nervously to the way her voice echoed in the present chamber, which was small enough for S’reee’s air bubble to reach right to the edges. The cold, the dark around them were unnerving. Yet Nita found that she didn’t feel precisely afraid or as if something was going to jump out of the shadows at her. There was just a growing sense of being—

“Not in the wrong place,” she said aloud. “Just in a place no one was really expecting us to be.”

“Expecting,” S’reee said. “You have a foresight about this, hNii’t?”

Nita shook her head. “Even hindsight would make me happy right now,” she said. “How much further in do you make the hot spot where the wizardry’s live?”

“Maybe five of my lengths,” S’reee said. “Not far.”

Carmela craned her neck back to try to see the ceiling of the next chamber they entered, a much larger one. “Honeycombed isn’t the word,” she said. “It’s froth. A million bubbles, big ones, little ones, that all got stuck in the lava, way back when…”

They continued across that chamber, toward the dimly seen entrance to the next. “Neets,” Carmela said, “the floor in here—”

For some reason she was whispering. “What?” Nita whispered back.

“It’s clean. But there was a lot of dust, back where we came in— stuff that must have come down through the skylight from the winter dust storm. Why wouldn’t there be some in here? There should have been some air movement down here. Enough to blow at least some dust in over the years—”

S’reee stopped her glide forward. Nita and Carmela looked at her.

“What?” Nita whispered.

When S’reee answered, she didn’t do it vocally. Did you hear that?

Hear what? Nita said, as silently.

Something moved—

Something about S’reee’s tone of thought left Nita more nervous than before. She held still, listening.

Carmela quietly reached into her jumpsuit pocket and came out with what could have been mistaken, by the uninitiated, for a curling iron. She glanced over at Nita.

Nita swallowed and held up the rowan wand, looking toward S’reee. The whale’s attention was on something that moved and gleamed in the shadows of the doorway into the next chamber. As Nita followed S’reee’s glance, the thing she was watching moved into the light.

The wand’s silver fire gleamed and slid down skin like green metal as the creature moved forward. It looked very like a scorpion: but it was almost the size of a Shetland pony. It had entirely too many legs and claws, and blank, cold polished-jade eyes.

The scorpion moved slowly out of the darkness toward the three of them, the front two pairs of its claws lifted. Pouring along behind it out of the shadows came about fifty more like it, all their front claws scissoring together softly, making a grating, echoing whisper in the room of stone.

“We are on errantry,” Nita said, trying to keep any tremor out of her voice, “and we greet you!”

The scorpions did not pause, did not slow: they came on, cold-eyed, claws working.

Nita lifted the wand…

7: Stokes

Kit, Ronan, and Darryl came out of transit to find themselves standing at the dark far edge of a distant blue dawn. In a gauzy wrapping of atmosphere just above the edge of the world, a blue-white Sun hung still and small under a dome of pale blue haze, not yet too bright to be dangerous to look at. All around, under a sky only a few shades of violet from black, lay the flat, dark rock-scattered surface of the little crater called Stokes. Away to the east, the shadow of the crater’s rim lay in a sharp black crescent between the three of them and the morning; and from every least rock and pebble, a pointed finger of cold, dark shadow lay long against the ground.

First Darryl, then Ronan, stepped to the edge of the force-field bubble that surrounded them and gazed out, not speaking. Kit knew why. Full day on Mars can seem matter-of-fact once you get used to it; just another panorama full of beige-brown sand and rubble, just another dusty amber sky, sunlight seeming as dimmed by the blowing dust as by a Sun that’s fifty million miles farther away and twenty percent dimmer than it ought to be. But there was no making the same mistake at dawn or sunset, when because of the dust and lack of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere the light went blue instead of red. Then the surroundings became both bleak and beautiful in a way that was possible only here. That faint, thin hiss of wind, hardly to be heard; that sense of absolute, pristine barrenness, empty, but not in any of the usual ways— it all got under your skin, made you hold still and listen for some hint of the secret that was hiding from you, the real reason why this landscape seemed so studiedly unconcerned about your presence. It seemed to be saying, “This isn’t your place: you have no business here. Do whatever you like. It doesn’t matter.” But it does. It does. All we have to do now is find out why…

Ronan turned away from the sunrise and looked toward the northwestern horizon, where the crater wall was closer and the cracks and ravines running down it glowed a dull dusty cyan in the blue fire of dawn. He glanced back at Kit, the sunglasses gleaming indigo. “Like it’s whispering to itself about us,” Ronan said. “Not so easy to hear when there are a lot of other people around—”

“Yeah,” Kit said.

Ronan looked over at Darryl, who was still gazing at the brightening dawn. “As for you, don’t know how you’re doing that.”

Darryl looked at him. “What?”

“Being completely normal,” Ronan said. Kit had to agree. Darryl might as well have still been standing in Kit’s backyard for all the exertion the transit seemed to have cost him. “Every wizardry’s supposed to have a price. And here you just hauled yourself and two other people fifty million miles without breaking a sweat! Seems like cheating.”

“I am not cheating!” Darryl said, looking injured. “It’s not a transport: it’s a bilocation. Why should I pay some big price for going fifty million miles from Earth when I’m still there?” He brushed dun-colored dust off him. “You’re just jealous because you can’t pull the same stunt. Waste of time, if you ask me, because I may not be able to do this forever! So right now I plan to enjoy it. And so should you, because you’re riding free.”

“Okay, fine, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”

“Well, you do. But I forgive you, ’cause I’m nice that way.” Darryl grinned, turned to Kit. “Where’s the spot the first signal went to?”

“Over there.” Kit pointed to the northeast. “A few hundred yards.”

The three of them headed for the spot using the half-bounce, half-walk that worked best in this gravity. Ronan was humming under his breath as he bounced along, and after a few bounces, he started to fill in the lyrics. “Oh, the chances of anything coming from Mars… are a million to one, he said…”

“So how come you got up so late this morning?” Kit said.

Ronan threw him a sideways look. “Because I was out late last night, nosy boy.” And he snickered. “While you’re at it, you might look into trying some kind of social life for size! I had a date to go clubbing with my mates. Why would I dump them just because something admittedly exciting happened up here? You start acting that way all the time, pretty soon no one invites you out anymore.” And Ronan turned his attention back to the landscape. “Oh, the chances of anything coming from Mars… are a million to one… but still they come …!”

“Okay, message received,” Kit muttered after Ronan, “but you didn’t have to jump down my throat about it.”

“Yes, he did. Dirty job, but somebody has to do it,” Darryl said, bouncing briefly higher to get a better view of where they were headed. “Everybody heard Miss Neets’s reaction to how you just dumped her yesterday. When she’s pissed off, her voice kind of carries—”

Kit flushed red. “I thought we said we were going to leave her out of this.”

“Heh,” Darryl said. He bounced high again. “How far now?”

Kit checked his manual. “A hundred yards—”

Darryl came down. “No outcroppings here. If there’s another egg, it’ll be underground.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. The crater wall was two miles away. The rest of the impact area was the usual rubble-strewn Martian landscape— sandy ground littered with rocks of all sizes, shattered by the summertime contrast between bitter cold and surprising warmth, and wind-worn afterward. Kit kept an eye on his manual, where the spot was highlighted on the map now showing their approach vector. Finally their path and the target’s location converged. “Right here,” Kit said, and stopped.

Darryl and Ronan stopped, too, staring at the ground under Kit’s feet—just sand, a scatter of pebbles, a few fist-size rocks. “Okay,” Darryl said, “dig we must. But not just on a hunch. We need ground radar.”

“Now, it’s funny you should mention that,” Ronan said, and held his hands out in front of him, starting to speak softly in the Speech.

“Ooh, magic gestures,” Darryl said, nudging Kit. “This should be cool.”

Ronan threw Darryl a withering look. “It’s to help me target, you plank,” he said. “Now shut your tiny gob and watch an expert at work.”

Kit and Darryl watched as Ronan started reciting his spell again. Within seconds, the ground faded to transparency under their feet. It was like standing on a bumpy glass floor, the “glass” apparently about a hundred feet thick beneath them, full of shadowy flaws and striations illuminated sourcelessly by the spell itself. “Look at that,” Ronan said, sounding abstracted as the wizardry penetrated the surface more deeply and he peered down into it. “See how those layers are piled up? Looks like there was water here once.”

“A lot of places,” Kit said, as Ronan walked slowly around the spot where Darryl and Kit were standing. “There’s enough water ice at the south pole to flood the whole planet thirty feet deep. But how it got down there, and when…” He shook his head. “You need me to split this air bubble for you so you can walk further out?”

“Not yet,” Ronan said. He kept walking. Everywhere he moved, for about ten feet in front of him and to the sides, the ground went transparent. The Sun had climbed higher as they’d come, and the light continued getting better as the blue dawn shaded into the pale amber of early morning; but there was nothing unusual to be seen under the ground. Finally Ronan paused. “How accurate was your tracking on the spot that signal targeted?”

“Within a meter,” Kit said. “At least that’s what the manual said.”

“Might be something else going on,” Ronan said. “Maybe something cloaking whatever’s down there? I tweaked this scan so it includes the detection routine that Síle and Markus came up with. However—” He peered down into the unrevealing depths. “If whatever’s here was alerted by the egg that the cloaking routine it was using had been broken—”

“Could be,” Darryl said, pulling out his WizPod and touching it into manual function. “Let’s see if any other wizardries are working around here. Maybe with different cloaking routines. I’ll tell it—” and he pulled a glowing page out of the body of the Pod, stretching it out on the air and writing on it in the Speech with one finger— “to look around for the material the egg was made of.”

A few moments later Darryl stood back, leaving the Pod and its stretched-out manual page hanging in midair, and started whispering the words he’d written. The world went quiet around them as the spell “took” with unusual speed.But he really is still pretty close to his Ordeal, Kit thought. His power levels are way above either of ours. And on top of that, he’s an abdal: practically a living power conduit. No telling what he could do now if he wanted to. Assuming, like the rest of us, he can get enough of what he needs out of the manual to figure out how.

Far down in that abnormal clarity of Martian soil, Kit could suddenly see a green light glowing. He gulped, recognizing the color. “Got some action here, all right!” Darryl said, as under their feet the glow rose and spread like a slowly rising tide of liquid light. “Something’s awake! There are elements in this energy flow that’re part of the transmission from the egg in Nili Patera—”

“Is this wizardry hooked to anything physical down there?” Kit said.

Darryl shook his head. “Nope. It’s just linked to the terrain. Uh-oh—”

“Uh-oh” wasn’t something Kit liked hearing another wizard say. He was about to ask what was wrong when that green light boiled up from the depths, bursting against the ground under their feet like blood under skin, and then flowed lightning-quick away from them in all directions. The rush of light left itself burning in every rock and pebble it passed as it flash-flooded out across the crater’s bottom. Within seconds it washed up against the crater’s rim, flooded up it on all sides, splashed over the ragged crest, and vanished over the side—

Kit and Ronan and Darryl stood looking across the crater in three different directions. Darryl said, “Okay… now what?”

Ronan shook his head. “Maybe nothing. It’s fading.”

Kit looked around them. Right across the crater that light was already growing paler—not just because the Sun was higher and brighter in the amber sky. “So what was that? Another signal? Or just some kind of acknowledgment that we followed up on the first one?”

Darryl was looking at the manual page he’d extracted from his WizPod. “It was a limited-run wizardry. It triggered right when Ronan did his see-into-the-ground routine. The triggered spell blew all its energy in one big spike. The energy’s dropping right off the scale again.” Darryl shook his head. “It was a big spike, though. And there was something funny about the time stamp—”

Kit looked across the crater for any sign of life or movement. There was nothing. “Analysis,” he muttered. “Mamvish warned us we’d probably wind up doing a lot of it…” He pulled out his manual and opened it to the log pages for this trip. Among several charts showing what wizardries the three of them were carrying or utilizing, Kit saw the diagram that showed what wizardly energy was associated with this specific spot. Darryl hadn’t been overstating the size of the spike associated with their arrival. The graph had had to stretch itself to the top of the manual page to accommodate it. “What was the problem with the time stamp on the spike?” Kit said. “It looks okay to me.”

“Not the spike itself,” Darryl said. “The indicator showing when the spell was actually installed here. It looked earlier than the egg’s installation date—” Then Darryl made a little hiss of annoyance as the indicator vanished from the page. Kit shook his head. “Can you get that back?”

“I’ll let you know when I understand why it went away!” Darryl said. “Here—” But Kit was now distracted by his manual: its pages were flushing pink. He glanced up.

Atmospheric conditions could sometimes get very odd on Mars, but in all the times he’d been there, Kit had never seen anything like this. From where the three of them stood to the horizon, it was as if the Red Planet had suddenly taken the sobriquet personally and decided that for a change today it was going to get really, really red: not just rusty-colored, but positively crimson. Everything was turning that color— the ground, the sky— as if Kit was wearing red glasses.

“This could give you a headache after a while,” Ronan said. He sounded uneasy.

Darryl looked up and around. “Sky’s clear. Not a dust storm, then.”

“This is that new wizardry working,” Kit said. He started flipping through his manual to the defensive spells.

“But what’s it doing?” Ronan said, taking the sunglasses off to stare at the horizon. “I mean, if something’s going to…”

He trailed off. “Going to what?” Darryl said.

Ronan pointed and shook his head. Maybe a quarter mile away from them across the crimson sands, teetering unevenly along in their general direction, was something with four long legs and some kind of body hung in the middle.

They stared. “What is that?” Kit said. “A giant spider?”

Ronan squinted at it. “The legs look more, I don’t know, crabby. Look, they’ve got webs or something between the joints.” He paused. “Sorry, maybe I need to hit the optometrist when I get home, but does that look like it has the head of a bat?”

Kit shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything. There’s a tail, too. Like a rat tail.”

“One of the original inhabitants, maybe,” Ronan said, “coming to say hello?”

Kit shook his head. The approaching thing unsettled him: it looked not just unlikely, but also somehow rickety and badly built. Kit flipped his manual to a bookmarked page where he’d set up a life-sign detector sensitive to all the kinds of life that wizards knew about—which meant quite a few. But the display showed nothing in the area but three dots labeled with the twelve-character code in the Speech that meant Earth-human. “Not alive,” Kit said.

The bat-rat-spider-crab came tottering toward them, only a few hundred yards away now. Ronan shook his head. “Illusion?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Kit. “There’s something physical there that wasn’t there before—”

“A construct,” Ronan said, frowning. “Great. If it’s real enough to get physical, it’s real enough to damage us. But since it’s not alive, if that thing starts getting too cozy, I won’t feel too bad about using this.” Ronan reached sideways into the air, grabbed something invisible, and pulled.

Something long, narrow, and blazingly bright came out of nowhere, following his pull. For a second Kit’s memory flashed back to the Spear of Light that Ronan used to carry: but that was in other hands, or claws, these days. The object Ronan held though, was definitely “of light”— a cylindrical bar of burning golden radiance an inch wide and three feet long. Ronan lifted it up and laid it over his left arm, sighting on the bat-spider thing as it came spidering hugely along toward them.

Kit recognized what Ronan held as one of numerous deadly weapons that a wizard could construct from the universe’s more basic energies. “You sure you want to do that?”

“Not at all sure,” Ronan said, sighting carefully. “Entirely willing not to have to do it if that keeps its distance. But my mam didn’t raise me to be bat chow, so you’re going to have to forgive me if I—”

He broke off short as with a distinctive crack! a bullet flew over them. The head of the bat-rat-crab thing came up, reacting to something off to their right. It stared— then turned and enthusiastically ran off in a different direction entirely.

Confused, Ronan lowered the energy weapon and peered past the fleeing bat-rat-crab thing. “All right, now wait just a fecking minute,” he said. “A rifle? Was that a rifle??”

Darryl started to laugh.

The sound made Kit realize that Darryl had been unusually quiet for the last few minutes. Now, though, he pointed out past where the bat-creature had been. “Will you get a load of that?”

Kit’s eyes went wide as he looked where Darryl pointed. Running toward them across the crimson sand, under the carmine sky, were human beings. They wore space suits, but not modern ones: these looked like crude versions of a jet pilot’s pressure suit. And bizarrely, they didn’t seem to be affected by Mars’s lighter gravity. They ran as if they were still on Earth.

Darryl was still laughing as the spacemen— there was no other way to think of beings so retro-looking— got closer. They slowed, took stance, and fired again, but not at the bat-rat-whatever: at the three astonished wizards. The bullets hit the force field holding in the wizardly air bubble and whined away. Ronan had lowered his weapon, looking perplexed at Darryl’s laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said to Darryl, “but is there something funny I’m missing about this? Those are bullets!”

“Yeah,” Darryl said, “but they’re movie bullets!”

Kit stared at him. “What?”

“This is all out of a movie!” Darryl said. “First time I saw it was when I was really little. It completely freaked me out, because I didn’t understand it was just a story. I thought it was the news from somewhere. Then I saw it again on one of the movie channels a few weeks ago, and when I recognized it, man, I couldn’t stop laughing; it’s so lame! It’s called The Angry Red Planet.”

“Well, somebody’s angry,” Ronan said, as the barrage of bullets continued.

“Somebody’s scared,” Kit said. “Look, let’s go talk to them.”

“They’re constructs!” Ronan said. “Barely a step up from illusions. You really think we’re going to be able to communicate?”

Kit shrugged. “Do I look like an expert in what’s happening here? But they’re something to do with the superegg’s signal. And we’re wizards: communicating’s what we do. Let’s go see if we can find out what this is about.”

“But why are they shooting at us?” Ronan said, glancing around him. “We didn’t do anything!”

Darryl was looking over his shoulder. “Uh, Ronan? Could be they’re shooting at those.”

Behind them Kit saw something moving, but the redness was bothering his eyes enough that he had to stop and rub them. Afterward he looked again, thinking he could make out large leaves and some waving tendrils, maybe a few hundred yards away… and getting closer. “There are—are those some kind of plant?”

Ronan squinted. “Only if plants have tentacles. And octopus faces.”

Kit hadn’t at first believed he was seeing those faces. Now he wished he still didn’t believe it. “Carnivorous,” Darryl said. “Wouldn’t get too close.”

“Seems to be what they have in mind,” Kit said. “Those were in the movie, too?”

Darryl nodded, looking less amused. “Don’t know if I’m wild about plants when they start walking around…”

Kit reached into his otherspace pocket and pulled out the piece of weaponry he’d almost used last night. Held in the hand, it looked like nothing more than a small, dark, shining globe, but it could be a lot more on demand. “You want to stay out of Nita’s basement, then,” Kit said as the plant creatures shambled closer.

“You kidding me? Those things aren’t a bit like our friendly neighborhood walking Christmas tree,” Ronan said, leveling his energy weapon again. “Our wee Filif could never give me the creeps like these. Will you look at the tentacles on them? Do they have hinges? That can’t be right…”

More bullets whined past them. “Come on,” Kit said. “Those things won’t get through our force field, hinges or not. Neither will anything the spacemen have.”

“You sure about that?” Ronan said as one of the larger spacemen, getting within maybe a hundred yards, lifted a heavy-looking weapon and aimed it at one of the plant-octopi. A bright, hot stab of light leaped from it and hit the plant creature right between its bulbous eyes. After a few moments of theatrical thrashing and screaming, it fell to the scarlet dust. Its companions, seemingly oblivious, kept on advancing toward the spacemen.

Kit was now much more in a mood to pay attention to the weaponry of the approaching people. “Okay, they have lasers…” he said.

Ronan shrugged. “Your common-or-garden-variety ray gun,” he said. “The beam didn’t look all that coherent. It can’t get through our shields.”

“Oh, we are in a movie,” Darryl said, and started laughing again. “Did you hear those things? Since when do energy weapons make a noise like that?!”

“Restrain yourself, laughing boy,” Ronan said. “We’re representing our species here. If all this craziness is Mars trying to talk to us, don’t make fun of it just because somebody underfunded its special-effects budget five hundred thousand years ago.” He sighed and laid the long, bright rod of light over his shoulder.

“Your idea’s the best I’ve heard so far,” Ronan said to Kit. “Let’s go communicate.”

The three of them headed toward the approaching spacemen, now only a few hundred feet away. “Maybe we should all hold up one hand,” Darryl said. “That old ‘we come in peace’ gesture.”

“Maybe I’d feel better about that if they hadn’t started the unpeaceful part of this conversation,” Ronan said under his breath. “And now that I think of it, look at their heads. Is there something wrong with their space suits?”

“You mean besides the fact that there’s no glass in the helmets?” Kit said. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

The two groups got within about fifty feet of each other, at which point the spacemen stopped, and four out of five of them pointed their rifles or ray guns at Darryl and Ronan and Kit. The three of them stopped, too. Kit cleared his throat.

“We’re on errantry,” Kit said in the Speech, “and we greet you.”

All of the spacemen stared at them, the four weapons not moving an inch; and, piercingly, the fifth spaceman screamed.

Kit and Darryl and Ronan looked at one another. And you’re ragging me about my favorite movies being old? Ronan said silently to Darryl. At least in mine, woman astronauts are made of sterner stuff. To the spacemen, Ronan said, “Please excuse us. We didn’t mean to upset you. We’re here to investigate the sites targeted by the messages that the superegg transmitter sent out. Are you here to speak to us on behalf of the planet or some other instrumentality that’s been operating here?”

The spacemen looked at one another nervously. “They look human,” said one of them. “It’s impossible! Humans can’t survive in these conditions!”

Oh, yeah? We’re not the ones wearing the helmets without faceplates, Darryl said silently.

“They must be illusions,” said another of the spacemen.

“Or more monsters like those things—” said the single spacewoman, looking fearfully past them toward where the plant-octopi were still shambling closer.

“Please, believe me, we’re human,” Kit said. “We just have a force field protecting us. We’re here looking for indications of past life on this planet, and we—”

“Those plant things are getting closer!” another of the men shouted. “I don’t care how human these things look! This is a trap to keep us here while those plants surround us! We have to get back to the ship!”

Ship? Kit thought.

Darryl nodded off to one side. That just appeared, he said silently. Wondered when it’d turn up.

And indeed there it was, maybe a quarter mile away, gleaming metallically red in this weird lighting— a long cigar-shaped rocket ship very much in the old style, with a pointy nose and little fins down at the bottom. “Is that a lake over there?” Kit said, peering past the rocket.

“Looks like it,” Ronan said. “This is getting weirder all the time.” He turned back to the spacemen. “Come on, people,” he said in the Speech, “would you ever just tell us what you’re doing here on Mars? All we want to do is—”

“It’s in my mind again!” the woman shrieked, and fainted. Kit winced: this lady had the screaming part of her performance honed to a fine edge.

Ronan shook his head. “Fainting,” he said as one of the men hurriedly picked the woman up and carried her away. “You don’t see a lot of that these days.”

The other men started shooting at them again, ostensibly to cover their retreat. Bullets and ray-gun blasts splashed harmlessly off the force field as the spacemen hurried back toward their rocket ship.

“If there’s a list of Least Effective First Contacts in the manual,” Darryl said as the spacemen fled, “I think we’re on it now.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “As a definition of the phrase ‘talking at cross-purposes,’ this scenario works pretty well.” He ran a hand through his longish dark hair, looking exasperated.

Darryl shoved his hands in his pockets and stood admiring that very retro spacecraft, while behind the three of them the man-eating plants bumped into their force field, tried to push through it, couldn’t, and then blundered on around it in pursuit of their original prey. “Doesn’t look real stable,” Darryl said, watching the spacemen and once-more-conscious spacewoman clamber up the rocket’s fragile-looking ladder in desperate haste. “Hard to believe those could even fly.”

“That old V-2 design worked just fine in World War Two,” Ronan said, looking grim. “Those things blew half of London to smithereens. But they’re the granddaddy of every rocket since.”

Darryl shrugged. “Well, okay, in atmosphere they worked. But they’d never have made it to Mars.”

“The concept was right, though,” Ronan said. “Thrust comes out the back end, pushes the rest of the craft forward: got us to the Moon, didn’t it? Granted, this thing wouldn’t have made it forty million miles, but—”

“Guys?” Kit said. “Something else that I wouldn’t have thought could make it to Mars?”

They looked at him.

“The giant amoeba??” Kit said, pointing.

Darryl and Ronan both looked shocked. But there was no arguing the presence of the gigantic green blob that had appeared from nowhere in particular and was now oozing its way up the side of the rocket …and, incidentally, out toward them as well.

Ronan looked annoyed. “Oh, come on, that’s never an amoeba! Lookit there, it’s got a couple effing great eyes stuck in the middle of it!”

“Three,” Kit said, peering at it. “Might be more.”

“Okay, give me a break, so it’s a space amoeba,” Darryl said. “They could have eyes, maybe.”

“People of Earth!” a gigantic voice shouted from somewhere or other.

They all jumped. “Okay,” Ronan said, unlimbering his weapon again. “Here we go…”

“Do not return to Mars!” the great voice cried. “We can and will destroy you if you do not heed our warning!”

“Not just a space amoeba, but a cranky space amoeba,” Kit said, hurriedly flipping his manual open, as boosting the force field surrounding their air bubble struck him as a good idea.

From across the crater came a roar and shudder, and the ground under their feet shook as the rocket ship took off. Or, rather, it tried to. The space amoeba was hanging on to it as tenaciously as a baby unwilling to let go of a favorite toy. In a great cloud of smoke, slowly and with difficulty the rocket pulled up out of the amoeba’s grip— then blasted free, leaping away from the surface in a great flare of fire. The giant amoeba slumped back to the surface to lie in a sulky, gelatinous heap.

“Is that thing going to come after us now?” Ronan muttered.

“I’d be more concerned about the green leafy octopi,” Darryl said.

“Wait,” Kit said, glancing around. All around, the color was draining out of the landscape. It took some moments for Kit to realize that the vista around them had actually resumed its proper colors, which now looked bizarrely pallid in contrast with the previous unnatural redness.

The carnivorous octopus-plants disappeared, along with the giant space amoeba, the bat-rat-crab-spider thing, and everything else that had pertained to that other and much more peculiar Mars. Darryl was standing there blinking. “Everything’s green,” he said.

“It’s what your eyes do after staring at red for too long,” Ronan said. “It’ll go away.” He sat down on a nearby rock, gazing up into the Martian sky, now sedate and empty of anything but some passing clouds. “So is it just me… or was that unusual?”

Kit laughed. “Not just you, no.”

“But no question,” Darryl said, “the planet was trying to communicate with us!”

“If that’s true,” said Ronan, “then the planet needs its head felt!”

“Seriously!” Darryl said. “It was trying to get through to us. It took something from inside our heads—”

“Your head maybe,” Ronan said. “Got better things going on inside mine than bat-rat-crab puppety thingies where you can still see the strings hanging off them! Not to mention man-eating broccoli with tentacles.” He rolled his eyes. “Tentacles held together with eyelets and wire!”

“I can’t help the details,” Darryl said. “I didn’t make the movie! Which I said was dire! But something here felt it, or got into my head and saw it, and tried using it to get through to us.”

“To say what?” Ronan said. “‘Bugger off’?”

“Language, guy,” Darryl said. “But yeah. And it’d make sense for them to be trying to scare casual visitors off! If Mamvish is right, if the people who lived here managed to store some way to wake them up, then they don’t want it trashed. They want to make sure anybody who comes poking around isn’t just going to run away, and knows what they’re doing. If they can scare you away, so much the better for them and you.”

Kit and Ronan sat thinking about that for a moment. “Yeah,” Kit said. “I mean, if you were a normal astronaut and you landed here and found these bat-rat-crab things running around and giant amoebas sliming all over the place, what would you do?”

“Seek professional help,” Ronan said.

“On Earth,” said Darryl. “In a hurry! And not come back any time soon.”

“But if you’re not scared off,” Kit said, “that means you can see through the illusion. Which also means you’re probably a wizard, and you’ll be able to figure out what the planet’s trying to tell you.”

“And it’s going crazy doing that right now because you broke that egg,” Ronan said.

Kit glared at him. “No, you dummy,” Ronan said, sounding a bit exasperated, “not broke as in ‘caused to stop functioning.’ Broke as in ‘you have to break a few to make an omelet.’ You don’t leave a message-capsule wizardry around for nothing, right? You want it broken! And maybe it’s not about just messaging.”

“Maybe it’s a test?” Darryl said.

Ronan shrugged. “Makes sense. And the same forces that busted loose out of the egg, and made this weirdness happen, are watching to see what we do.”

“Well, great,” Kit said, “but if this was a test, how do we know if we passed or failed?”

The other two shook their heads. “Keep going, I guess,” Darryl said. “Visit the other places where the signal went. Maybe one thing being tested is whether we give up when nothing seems to happen.”

Kit nodded. “And also nobody gives you a test if they don’t care what result you produce! If we finally pass, then something should pop up and tell us what all this has been about.”

“You hope,” Ronan said. He sighed and stood up again, dusting the omnipresent beige-y dust off him. “At least we can see all right again. Why did everything go that weird shade of red?”

“That was in the movie,” Darryl said. “Some effect they put in to make the puppets and the cheap background paintings look less cheap.”

“Well, cheap or not,” Ronan said, looking back toward the crater, “I wouldn’t have liked to meet those things without a force field.”

“No argument,” Darryl said. “Now, while we’re all feeling good about how competent we are, I have a question.” He turned to Kit. “And since you are, as our overly tall cousin here says, Mars Uber-Geek Boy, you should have the answer. How many satellites are in orbit around Mars right now, and when’s the next one due over?”

Kit’s eyes went wide. He started paging hurriedly through his manual.

“And if one’s been over already,” Ronan said, “did it see anything? And if it did, what? And how can we keep the imagery from getting back to Earth? Because I think that the poor guys at NASA are going to have big trouble with the giant amoebas.”

“Space amoebas—” Darryl said.

“And finny rocket ships and bat-rat-crab things,” Ronan said, “and wizards shooting at them…”

“We’ve got two satellites right now,” Kit said. “Odyssey and Mars Express. Here are the orbits—” He held out the manual, touched the open pages: they produced a double-page spread of sine curves spreading themselves across the rectangular whole-planet map. He studied the diagram, then let loose the breath he’d been holding. “We got lucky,” Kit said. “Odyssey’s on the other side of the planet: Express is a third of the way around. Both out of range.” He glanced out at where the giant amoeba and the rocket had been.

“Any residual heat from that, you think?” Ronan said.

Darryl was pulling another page out of his WizPod and examining it. Over a map of the area, a few nested blobs of various colors were displaying. “Some,” he said. “The heat was real. Those constructs were able to affect their surroundings, even though themselves they were only temporary.”

“We’d better go cool down the places where they were, then,” Ronan said.

“Don’t think we’ll need to,” Kit said. He looked over Darryl’s shoulder at the notations under the graph showing the heat readings. They were already sinking toward baseline. “The crust here doesn’t hold heat real well: that’s why the surface erosion’s so aggressive. By the time the satellites come around again, the heat’ll be gone. It’s not a big worry right now.”

Darryl looked alarmed. “Got something worse?”

“Kind of a worry,” Kit said. “What if we didn’t just trigger this one site by turning up here? What if we triggered the others, too, and they’re doing something right now? Something important that we shouldn’t miss?”

“You’re not going to suggest that we split up to investigate them separately, I hope!” Ronan said.

Kit rolled his eyes. “A recipe for trouble,” he said. “In weird other-planet horror movies, or out of them.”

Darryl shoved his WizPod into a pocket. “I could split up,” he said.

Kit and Ronan exchanged a glance, and Ronan looked at Darryl with some concern. “You sure that’s a good idea? You’re here twice already. I mean, here and on Earth, so that’s twice—”

“I think I could do three,” Darryl said, “one after another. I did three at once back home, last week. Wouldn’t want to push it much further, though. All of me kept walking into things. Too much data to process, or else my brain doesn’t like working in triplicate.”

Darryl glanced around. “So let’s get busy. Where do you want me?”

Kit showed him his manual. “These three spots. They’re all near largish craters. De Vaucouleurs— Cassini— Hutton.”

“What are the names for? Famous people or something?”

“Yeah, or places on Earth.”

“Okay. Which is closest?”

“This one.” Kit pointed at de Vaucouleurs. “A couple of hundred miles south, right by Wahoo.”

Ronan gave Kit an incredulous look. “You’re just yanking our chains. There’s never any crater called Wahoo!”

Kit scowled, pointed at the map. “Right here, next to Yuty.”

“You didn’t even need to look at the map just then,” Ronan said in wonder. “I’ll decide whether to be impressed or horrified later. Darryl?”

“On my way,” Darryl said.

And he flickered. There was no other way to describe it. Darryl was still there: there had been none of the usual air movement that was so hard to avoid when doing a physical transit. “You set that spell up wrong or something?” Kit said.

“Oh, no, it worked fine,” Darryl said. “For that one of me.” He swallowed hard.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Just a little more effort than usual to offset the fact that I wasn’t all here to start with. Cassini next—”

The flicker happened again. Darryl was still standing there, and this time he looked pale, and his eyes seemed unfocused.

“Darryl?” Ronan said.

“Don’t joggle my elbow, Ro,” Darryl said: and his voice was strange. It sounded as if there were several of him, even though there seemed to be only one standing there. He flickered around the edges again, once, twice—

—and crumpled straight down to sit crookedly on the dusty red ground, holding his head. Ronan caught him on the way down, easing the collapse, and started patting his face. “Darryl, hey, look up! Come on—”

“Will you stop whacking me, man, do I look like I need the smelling salts?” Darryl pushed Ronan’s hand away. “I’m fine. Let me breathe. Too much going on, gotta process a little, okay?”

Kit hunkered down in front of Darryl. His autism made it necessary sometimes for him to “sit down and take a moment”, as he called it. He had problems with dealing with too much sensory data all at once, and had to go through some mental exercises to get his coping mechanisms back in play. “What happened out there?”

Darryl shook his head, rubbed his face for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s harder to do that stunt here than on Earth, that’s all. Or I need more practice. Important thing, though, is that nothing’s happening at two of the other sites.Yet, anyway. But your friend over by Wahoo, de-whatchamacallit—”

“Vaucouleurs,” Kit said.

“Right. It’s warming up: I could feel the wizardry getting ready to execute. We’d better get over there.”

Kit and Ronan got up: Darryl did, too, without help. “Better,” he said. “See, I just needed a second. You guys gotta stop treating me like I’m Fragile Boy.” He reached up to put a hand on each of their shoulders. “You ready?”

Ronan picked up his long rod of light and laid it over his shoulder: it blazed, then died down, subdued but ready. Kit glanced at him, reached for his little silvery sphere and juggled it in one hand.

“Hit it,” he said.

They vanished.

8: Shamask-Eilith

In the great dark dome under Arsia Mons, Nita watched the giant green metal scorpions pour toward her, claws uplifted. On one side, S’reee drifted closer, a hard-to-see fire dancing about her fins; on the other, Carmela moved in until she was touching shoulders with Nita, her “hot curler” ready. “What are they?” Carmela said. “Are they alive?”

S’reee cocked an ear, listening to the distant whisper of another planet’s Sea. “No. Not the way we think of life, anyway. They’re recordings, reconstructions of something that was alive before.”

Nita gulped as they kept coming. The foremost of the scorpions were only ten feet away now, and right back to the dark doorway the whole space was filling with more and more. Where are they all coming from? Even if we start blowing them up, we won’t be able to deal with them all before they deal with us.

Nita stopped, blinked, suddenly blind in the darkness. Or not blind. As if it was happening to someone else, she saw herself step hesitantly forward, go down on one knee, look into the head scorpion’s cold, dark eyes. And the scorpion just looked back at her, and then after a moment walked around her, passed her by. But the image flickered. Once again she walked up to the scorpion, went down on one knee. And the claws flashed out—

Nita shook her head. The tide of scorpions was scurrying closer. I have to do something! But there was nothing to choose between the two moments she’d glimpsed, no way to tell how to make one happen or keep the other from happening.

Except that one of them turned out okay, she thought. I’ve got at least two chances that I’ve seen. If I just stand here, something different is going to happen that I won’t have had time to see—

She stepped forward.

“Neets?!” Carmela whispered in shock. Behind Nita, S’reee started to surge forward. With her free hand, Nita waved her back, went down on one knee as the foremost scorpion came up to meet her. It stopped, and stared up into her eyes.

The strangest sensation followed, like little tickly feet walking around on the surface of her brain. Nita shivered one big shiver all over, but didn’t move otherwise.

And the scorpion swung its eyes and its body away from Nita— walked around her and then off past Carmela. Carmela swiveled with a panicky expression as the scorpions headed after their leader, back the way she and Nita and S’reee had come.

S’reee turned in the air, watching the scorpions pour past. “Now, what was that?” she said. “hNii’t? Did you speak to them? Or they to you?”

Nita was still down on one knee as the scorpions kept pouring past her and into the chamber previous to the one they were in now. “They might have listened to me somehow. But I didn’t say anything.”

“You did,” Carmela said. “You got down on their level. That’s saying ‘hi.’ Actually, you said ‘hi’ first.”

Nita slowly stood up, pausing to rub her knee: it was sore. “Maybe. But I just saw myself doing that, and it seemed like the thing to do.” Better than the other thing, anyway!

“You’ve been doing envisioning work with T’hom, haven’t you?” S’reee said, turning all the way around to watch the last of the scorpions vanish into the next chamber. “I’d say it’s paying off.”

“I don’t know. What if there was something else I was supposed to do?”

“Like what?” Carmela said.

Nita shook her head. She was sweating, but feeling less panic-stricken as the last scorpions passed out of the chamber, the sound of metallic feet tapping on the stone now ticking away into silence. “Ree, where are they going?”

S’reee drifted up to the door, peered through. “That I can’t tell you,” she said, “because they’re gone. Vanished.”

Carmela turned and went to the doorway to join S’reee. “Just passing through?”

“I don’t think so,” Nita said, lifting her wand again and heading toward the next chamber. “They were guarding something. And they decided we were okay. That was their whole job, and when it was done, they went away.” She looked over her shoulder at the other two. “S’reee, can you feel it? That hot-spot wizardry’s shut down.”

S’reee turned, finned back through the air toward Nita and Carmela. “You’re right,” she sang. “And if they were guarding something…”

Nita was heading toward the next chamber, holding the wand high. The rowan wood, soaked in moonlight from fifty million miles away, made a sphere of silver radiance around her as she stepped through the wide, round portal into the next chamber.

For several seconds she saw nothing at all in the darkness. Nita turned leftward to see what was inside the chamber near the left edge of the portal. At first it seemed to be a straight wall. She went to it, holding up the wand for a better view. On closer inspection, she found that the wall wasn’t straight after all, but curved like all the others. The curve was just very, very slight, because this was by far the biggest room they had come to as yet. And as far as the halo of light from the rowan wand spread, from side to side and high up into where the light was lost in the gloom, nearly every inch of the wall was covered with writing.

Nita reached out and touched the wall. The writing was engraved in long, thin columns in the stone, not very deeply, the characters just a few shades paler than the darker, redder surface. “It’s warm,” Nita said. “How can it be warm? The volcano here hasn’t been live for thousands of years.”

Nita turned to look out across the chamber. It was massive, easily a thousand feet across. S’reee and Carmela came in behind her, Carmela with a flashlight and S’reee bringing her own wizard-light with her— several sources of it hovering around her like a little school of pilot fish. The three of them gazed across the huge space.

“One about us,” S’reee sang softly, waving her fins gently to turn and look at the vast expanse of the dome, “what have we found here? This must fill half the mountain.” She tilted all of herself back at an angle, gazing up into the dark; her wizard-lights swam up through the dark above as if through water, looking for something like a surface and for a long time not finding it. It was many moments before their radiance made several small diffuse circles against the uppermost curve of that immense bubble.

“I don’t think this is natural,” Nita said, walking along the wall. “It might have started out as a bubble in the stone once. But this—” She touched the writing again. It was nothing like the graceful curvatures and ligatures of the Speech, but angular and sharp, line after line of strung-together structures like little trees with branches growing out of them at strange angles. “This has all been smoothed down. And isn’t this weird?”

She moved on, puzzled, for she wasn’t able to make anything of the writing. “What?” Carmela said, leaning over Nita’s shoulder to gaze at the engraved characters.

“They were running up and down before. Now they’re going side to side.”

Carmela reached out past Nita to touch the letters, the light of the rowan wand catching in her eyes. “Look, the characters flip. Mirror images.” She peered at them more closely. “Boustrophedon…”

It wasn’t a word in the Speech. “What?”

“Boustrophedon,” Carmela said, tracing the characters with one finger. “When the words in a sentence go in one direction to the end of the line, and then the next line goes back in the direction it came from. You read from right to left, then left to right. Or up to down, then down to up.” Carmela walked along to the next section of writing. There were panels of it, separated by thin engraved borders or sometimes just by empty space. “People used to plow their fields that way. That’s where the word comes from.”

Nita went after her, looking across the dome. “More light?” she said to the rowan wand.

It brightened until it was as blinding as an arc light, and Nita winced from the brilliance, looking away and across the great floor as she held up the wand. It took that much light to enable her to see all the way across the chamber and to be sure that there were no more visible entrances or exits: the portal they’d come in by, the one the scorpions had guarded, was the only way in. “This must have been important,” Nita said. “Could this be a history? Mars’s history?”

“Or the Martians’,” S’reee said. She drifted closer to one wall, peered at it. “No way to tell. I can’t make fin or fluke of it. You?”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Usually knowing the Speech lets you understand any writing you see.”

“Not always,” S’reee said, drifting down the wall to look at another patch of writing. “That condition obtains when the manual can find live members of the species to contribute the underlying context from which content can be understood. But when a race has died out, you may only get content with no context, which isn’t a lot of use. And there are recensions of the Speech that have been completely lost over time, because all other information about the species for which they were intended has also been lost…”

“Even for the manual? Is that possible?” Nita said.

“Entropy’s running,” S’reee said. “And the medium it runs in is time. Even the manual’s subject to that, in its merely physical manifestations.” She let out a long, hissing breath.

“Neets,” Carmela said, “S’reee, look. Pictures—”

They came over to look at part of the wall in front of which Carmela stood, deeper into the chamber. Here, arranged in a column stretching up the curve toward the ceiling, there were images, mostly geometric shapes, precisely scribed into the dark red stone. But it was hard to be sure what their relationship was: some of them seemed to run into one another. Nita reached up to touch one, a series of concentric circles with a single small circle inside them. She took a long breath. “Is that supposed to be the Sun?”

S’reee, looking over Nita’s shoulder, leaned in very close, until her nose almost touched the stone. “If it is, we may have a problem,” she sang softly. “Because we’ve got a couple of extra planets.”

Nita, too, leaned in, looking closely at the diagram. Four smallish worlds, and then a slightly larger one, and beyond that, four great worlds, and five tiny planets out in the farthest orbits.

“It can’t be,” Nita said to herself. “Can’t be…”

Carmela was shaking her head as she peered at the smallest markings, furthest from the engraved Sun. “They keep finding these little bitty ones way out at the edge. I can never keep track of how many there are.”

“Dwarf planets,” Nita said. “Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.”

Carmela glanced at Nita, picking up on something in her voice. “What’s the matter with them?”

Nita made a face. “Pluto’s still a planet to me,” she said. “Call me stubborn. But there’s another problem. Look at that fifth one. It’s further out than the others, and not in line. Like it doesn’t belong here…”

“There’s another diagram over here, in this next column,” Carmela said. “This one’s got twelve.”

Nita went over to look at the second diagram. This one showed an empty place where the fifth world’s orbit had been: a gap. “So that’s where the asteroid belt would be?” Carmela said.

“It looks like this gap would match their orbit…” Nita said.

“And the furthest worldlet is missing,” S’reee said. “A captured world that got lost again, perhaps?”

“It happens,” Nita said. “That far out in the system, the Sun’s gravity’s not so big a deal as it is closer in.” But her main attention was on the empty space between Mars and Jupiter.

Carmela was looking at that, too. “So the asteroids are actually from this fifth planet blowing up?”

Nita shook her head. “Mela, a lot of people have had that idea, but it doesn’t work, because all the stuff in the asteroid belt put together isn’t enough to make a planet, even a small one. Definitely not enough to make a planet the size of the one in that picture.”

Carmela glanced over to the right of the second image, where there was another column full of writing. After a second she shrugged and started to walk away— then paused and turned back, giving the column a strange look. “That was weird. Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw something.” She put up a hand to touch the characters, squinting.

“More light?” Nita said, lifting the wand.

Carmela waved her away. “Less might be better.”

Nita shook the rowan wand down to a fainter light. “Yeah,” Carmela said. She tilted her head to one side, looking at the characters. “Something— went, went to the—” She paused again. “It found the— something or other. I don’t know what that is. Then— but the sword—” Carmela grimaced in annoyance. “Dammit, it won’t hold still—”

“Can you actually read this stuff?” Nita said.

Carmela’s annoyance was fading into perplexity. “Some of it. Most of it looks like nonsense marks.” She shook her head. “Until it jumps, somehow, and parts make sense. I don’t get it.”

“I wonder,” S’reee said, drifting over to peer over Carmela’s shoulder. “K!aarmii’lha, you came to understand the Speech pretty quickly, didn’t you, for someone who’s not a wizard? Were you studying other languages first?”

“Yeah,” Carmela said, looking over her shoulder at her. “I did German in school, and then I started picking up Japanese, for manga and anime. And Italian, and some French. And when I started hearing Kit using the Speech, I started seeing it on the alien cable channels, and I don’t know, I just—” She shrugged. “Started picking it up.”

“You know,” S’reee said, “you may have some version of the steganographic gift.”

Nita glanced over at S’reee. “Is that good?”

“Possibly good for us,” S’reee said as Carmela worked her way down the graven wall, her lips moving as she traced the symbols with one finger. “Other linguistic gifts can come with it. But mostly it implies the ability to pull context out of writings when the writers’ culture has left no other trace. It’s an intuition rather than a skill. K!aarmii’lha, do you mind donating what you see to the manual system?”

“Huh?” She was peering more closely at some of the characters. “No, sure. What do I need to do?”

“Nothing,” S’reee said. “I’ll have a word with the Sea—”

Tell her there’s no need, the peridexis said in Nita’s head. I’ll have the data assumed into the system as she works.

“Bobo’s on it, S’reee,” Nita said. “He’ll handle it the same way the manuals pull in data off TV and the Web on demand.” She went over to stand by Carmela, reaching out to the incised characters again: but they had nothing to say to her.

“What do you see, K!aarmii’lha?” S’reee said.

“Weird stuff…”

S’reee made a long, bubbling moan of laughter. “More detail, please?”

Carmela stood with hands on hips, staring at the wall. “This part is something about food,” she said. “For all I know, I’m looking at somebody’s shopping list.” She turned away. “This thing needs an index. Or a table of contents. If I were an index, where would I be?”

“By the door?” Nita said.

Carmela headed back to the doorway, where she began studying its edges. After a moment, she said, “Nope. If there is an index, they’re not thinking about it the way we do.”

“Let me go topside and see if there’s anything different from what’s here,” S’reee said. She angled her body up and swam upward through the darkness toward the zenith of the bubble-dome, her little school of lightfish darting upward with her.

Carmela leaned against the wall, gazing into the darkness, thinking. “Maybe they wouldn’t put an index out at the edges,” she said, “but in the middle?”

“Makes sense to run with your hunches on this one,” Nita said. Together they walked across the great expanse of dark floor. Nita pulled out her manual, holding the wand underneath it to light the floor where they were walking, and started paging through the book in search of “steganography.”

Carmela craned her neck up to see where S’reee was headed. “How high do you think that is?”

Nita paused, glanced up. “Two hundred feet?”

“Might be.”

Nita shook her head and kept walking, her attention on the manual. “Well,” Carmela said, “I guess the shopping can wait a while longer.”

Nita snickered. “You sure? Don’t let us keep you. We’ve only stumbled into some kind of alien library thousands of years old. You really sure you wouldn’t rather be trying on designer exoskeletons or something at the Crossings?”

“Oh, Juanita Louise…” Carmela said, shaking her head as they made their way through the darkness. “You are mean to tease me.”

“Carmela, you just keep on saying that word!”

“Yup. And I’ll say it again unless you appease me,” Carmela said, peering through the dimness at the floor ahead of them.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. Every time you say my middle name, I’ll say yours!”

“Like I care!” Carmela laughed, glancing around them. “Go on! I’ll help you. Emeda! Emeda, Emeda, Emeda!”

Nita shook her head, the irritation passing; it was hard to think petty, mundane thoughts for long when surrounded by such massive and ancient strangeness. “Mine’s just a pain, but yours is weird,” Nita said.

“Why did they hang that on you?”

“It’s my aunts’ and uncle’s fault,” Carmela said. “Mama said they were fighting so much over which one was going to be my middle name, she took all their initials and made a new name out of them.”

Nita cracked up. “I bet that shut them up.”

“Nope,” Carmela said. “Auntie Emma and Tante Elle are still arguing over which of them is the first E. And I won’t tell them, because it’s too much fun listening to them fight.” She paused, looking ahead. “Neets, you see that?”

“What?”

“Look at the floor over there. Is something shining?”

Nita looked where Carmela pointed. “Something green,” she said. “Come on—”

They broke into a trot, heading for the center of the huge floor space. It took a while to get there, but as they drew closer, the glint of green grew stronger and stronger in the light of Nita’s upheld wand, spreading more widely across the floor. By the time they were still a hundred feet or so away, they could see that they were heading into a circle of green designs nearly that wide— a tangle of broad curves or ribbons of verdant color against the paler stone. Some of these green ribbons arced away from the central design, ending in sharp points: some of them seemed to twist back on themselves, narrowing, broadening out again, dividing and sharpening to points again.

At the edge of the design they stopped, Nita holding her wand out over it. The color wasn’t flat: it gleamed, metallic. And there were subtle changes in its color and in the way it reflected the light when Nita moved the wand slightly. “Mela,” she said, “it’s not solid.”

They both got down on their knees to look at one of the broad strokes of the design. “It’s all inlaid,” Nita said. “Little thin pieces of metal…” They bent over it together. It was surprising to Nita how closely she had to look to see the separate elements in the delicate tangle of inlaid metal. “How in the worlds did they do this?”

“Wizardry?” Carmela said. “Are there wizards who’re artists?”

“Sure. And if a wizard did this, no question, he or she or it was an artist.” Nita looked more closely at the end of the nearest ribbon, a sharp point. “But look how this line starts, and then it starts weaving back and forth in the main design …It’s like the letters on the walls.”

“But curved, not straight,” Carmela said, putting out a finger to touch one long, curving letter or character. “A different font. Don’t know if it’s more formal or less. But this is soooo detailed…” She bent close, squinting at the long, delicate thin-and-thick strokes of the alien lettering as they tangled among many others, all making their way like twining plant fronds toward the center of the design. “This part is— I think it’s just names. Nouns, but no verbs.”

After a moment Carmela shook her head, got up, and stood with her hands on her hips, looking over the design. Nita realized that Carmela was trying to get to grips with the whole pattern. But it was hard, from way over at one side like this: and if you ventured into the design, it made even less sense, or you got caught up in the fine detail—

Hmm, Nita thought. Bobo?

You rang?

Got the stair-making routine on tap?

Right here.

Nita watched the air beside her harden into an almost invisible flight of steps up over the design. She felt for the first one, found it, made sure of the width and the depth of the treads, and then trotted steadily up about two storeys into the air. Carmela watched her go. This high enough? the peridexis said.

Just fine, Nita said, looking down at the great design. From up here, her sudden suspicion was instantly confirmed. The design wasn’t random. Up here you could see the larger shapes—the four uplifted claws, the six rear legs, the long tail with its fierce spine. Is it really a sting, or something else? But the whole creature had been designed as if in calligraphic pen strokes, thicks and thins, and was bent back on itself almost into a spiral: the head and foremost claws in the middle of the design, the rear legs and finally the tail defining the outside of a circle or disc. “Mela,” Nita said, “it’s one of our scorpion guards. The design’s stylized, but you couldn’t miss it.”

“Okay. Where’s the head, and where’s the tail?”

“The head’s near the middle. No, more to your right. The tail’s at the edge, on your left.”

Carmela headed for the center of the design. From above, more light came dropping slowly down in S’reee’s wake, her near eye glinting in the silver light of Nita’s wand. “Nothing different,” S’reee said. “More words that I can’t read, all the way up.” She cocked that eye down at what lay below her and Nita. “But you two seem to have found something.”

Together they made their way down to floor level. Carmela had come to the scorpion’s head and was kneeling on the densely inlaid metal. As Nita walked over, Carmela looked up with an expression of absolute excitement. “This is it!” she said.

“What?” Nita said.

“Where it starts,” Carmela said. “Not an index. It’s the start of a story. The words are simpler here. I can see them like I couldn’t right away on the walls.”

Nita went down on one knee again and touched the green metal of the design. From within it she got a faint, faint sense of some power stirring. “It may be helping you,” she said.

“I can use some help,” Carmela said, without looking up. “This isn’t easy…” She put a finger on a spot that was a shade of green darker than the rest of the design, in the right position to be an eye.

“‘First there is the Old World,’” Carmela read. She leaned in to look more closely at the long, twisting line of alien charactery. “The tenses in this are all present tense, as if it’s happening now for them. Does that make sense?”

Nita shrugged. S’reee flipped her tail. “There are any number of species who see the present and past as one. Go on.”

Carmela squinted at the writing, tracing it with a finger, occasionally shuffling along a little way on her knees to pick up the next part. “‘And the Old World has swung in its— old orbit?’ Mmm, no, it’s more formal: make that ‘its ancient round’— ‘since the First People awoke in the heart of the worlds.’ No— ‘in the centermost of the Circles.’”

Carmela paused, then went on with increased certainty. “‘So that when the World awoke, life and thought at last— were company for?— companioned with the star which for long had burned alone in the night at the Circles’ heart.’” Carmela scooted along as the sentence stretched away from the scorpion’s head, then picked up the thread again as it twisted and coiled among many others. “‘Yet’—Wait a minute. No, I see it. ‘Yet with the new life came the promise of a death that should come out of the darkness, as the light and life had done.’” She paused, and scowled at the next sentence for a moment as if perplexed, before translating it: “‘And the First People swore that it might be so for others, but should not be so for them.’”

“Huh,” Nita said. “Is that a species having its Choice, or fighting it? Or just refusing it?”

“No telling.” Carmela scooted farther along in the diagram on her knees, then sat back on her heels for a moment as she looked down at it. “But I think maybe they had different ideas about how to keep this death from happening.” She bent down to look more closely at the long, inlaid sentences, seeming to read them more quickly now. “Let me just paraphrase; the straight translating is tough to do fast. The people here— or the countries? Maybe the cities. It doesn’t say anything about how many people we’re talking about— Anyway, it looks like they split up in a lot of different ways.” Carmela paused, frowned. “It might mean in terms of distance, or mentally. Or both. But it looks like the biggest and strongest groups swallowed up the smaller ones, or stamped them out. Finally there were only two big groups left. All the clans or cities ended up either in one camp or the other…”

As Carmela spoke, Nita felt herself coming up in goosebumps. A twitch, a tingle that wouldn’t go away along the skin and the nerves: the feeling of little feet scurrying, scurrying over her brain. And out at the edge of things, a sense of darkness leaning in from those walls, the world going quiet to listen…

“hNii’t,” S’reee sang very softly. “Look—”

The darkness of the space out past the edge of the scorpion pattern was becoming less complete. Shadowy shapes were forming between them and the distant walls: transparent shadows on the dark air, almost impossible to see. “It’s such an old wizardry, I hardly felt it start,” S’reee said. “Whatever was set to power it is very weak now.”

“And this is part of the hot-spot wizardry that brought the scorpions in?” Nita said.

“Probably,” S’reee said. “If the scorpions were the defensive part of the wizardry, they might have been activated often enough to siphon a lot of power away from this part of the spell. Now it’s using whatever other power it can find to do its job. And even our sensitivity to the fact that there’s a story here could be helping.” She glanced around at the almost-unseen, multitudinous engravings in the distant walls. “The Speech isn’t the only language with power. If a story hasn’t been heard in a long time, much power can lie in it, tightly compressed until it’s told again…”

Nita nodded. Bobo, she said silently, this might be important. Can you add some power to the equation?

Some, the peridexis said. But this wizardry is fragile. I’m limited in how much I can help without interfering, maybe even destroying what it’s trying to do. Also, the power must be paid for.

That was no surprise. Okay, let’s do what we can— “Mela,” Nita said, sitting down, “Bobo and I will try sticking a little juice into this.”

Carmela nodded, absorbed. Nita closed her eyes and started a little exercise that Tom had taught her: concentrating on her breathing, and then imagining herself breathing a little of her power as a wizard out into the spell around her with every outward breath. It was one of many ways a wizard could manage the way he or she paid the energy price for a spell— a gradual, steady outflow of intention, rather than a single unmanaged moment of payment that left you limp. Nita imagined that she could see it, a hazy cloud of light surrounding her, more visible with each breath. Shortly it seemed that out at the edges, that cloud was thinning, being drawn away. We getting some uptake? she said to Bobo.

Some. It’s slow. Take a break for a moment; don’t feed it too fast…

Nita opened her eyes again, feeling faintly fatigued, the normal result of this kind of power outlay. Out past the edges of the pattern, those shadows in the dark air were more substantial. She tried to see more detail. There were spiky shapes, jagged, rearing up against deeper darkness. “Mountains?” Nita said.