A Wizard Of Mars

Carmela didn’t look up, just nodded. “Neets, whatever you did is just helping. I’m getting a lot more of this now…”

“Great. What kind of people were they? Much further out from the Sun and you’d expect something that wasn’t based on carbon.”

“There’s not much about that here,” Carmela said, standing up to move along down the pattern, as around them the shadowy landscape became less obscure. The mountains becoming visible all around them seemed to cover all of a vast landscape stretching away in all directions. It was as if the pattern-disc was at the top of some peak supereminent above the others. All around, in endless shades of navy and sky blue and violet, the narrow, spearlike mountains cast long fingers of indigo shadow away behind them in the light of a Sun that made Nita blink, for— considering the distance they were discussing— it shouldn’t have been so bright.

“Not a friendly-looking place,” S’reee said, “to our eyes, at least.”

Nita had to agree. In this vista, at least, there didn’t seem to be any flat land: it was all ups and downs. A haze of atmosphere was visible, hanging low, completely covering some peaks, reaching only partway up others. On those lower peaks, Nita could make out the glitter of lights, scattered down from the pinnacles like snow. On some of the nearer mountains, she thought she could make out buildings partially mimicking the structure of the peaks to which they clung— upward-jutting crowns of stony thorns, artificial spires spearing up from the passes or saddles between peaks. Here and there, dartlike shapes soared or arrowed between the city-mountains, but it was impossible at this distance to tell whether the moving shapes were creatures or machines.

In the imagery surrounding the pattern-circle, time sped up, fled by. The world changed with the passage of thousands of years. Mountains eroded and crumbled, pinnacles shattered and fractured to sharper points; on those heights where the Sun reached best, low-domed cities now clung to the ancient cliffs. Like glassy nodules of some exotic gemstone, by night the cities gleamed and glowed from within; by day the Sun glanced from them, blinding. “It’s brighter than it should be,” Nita said.

“The Sun’s much younger,” S’reee said. “And it did have a variable period early in its history. This is a long, long time ago.”

The machines that rode the violet-dark sky grew, changing shape, as more cities budded from the peaks their view included. “Those people were there for a long time,” Carmela said, looking over more of the writing. “And they got really technologically advanced. Antigravity, ion tech, a lot of fancy stuff. But no worldgates.” She left the long curve of pattern she’d been reading and stepped to another. “Isn’t that strange?”

“Not always,” S’reee said. “The technology’s not universal, as Mamvish could tell you. There are worlds that can’t conceive of other planets or dimensions, or even other ways of life: yet they still have wizardry.”

“Mela, you see anything about what they called this planet?” Nita said.

Carmela shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There were lots of names for it, at the beginning. Probably as many names as we have for Earth. But then they start to get fewer. In all this later stuff, there are just two left, and I don’t know which one to use. One of the two groups that dominated the planet called it Shamask. The other called it Eilith.”

“What do the words mean?” S’reee said.

Carmela looked up then, and her expression was grim. “‘Ours.’”

Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance.

“They don’t seem to have liked each other a whole lot, the Shamaska and the Eilitt,” Carmela said, getting down on her knees to look at the writing embedded in that part of the pattern. “All along here, it’s descriptions of things that one side did, or the other side did—” She shook her head. “I don’t understand most of it. But the tone’s never friendly. Then it gets angry. Then—”

Nita started in surprise, and so did S’reee, as the first flashes and impacts of energy weapons erupted among the spires of the First World. Mountains fell and buildings crumbled in a newer and deadlier sort of erosion. “Surprised it took that long,” Carmela said, getting up again to head farther down that stroke of the pattern. “Their first really big war…”

“Why were they fighting?” Nita said.

Carmela stood where she was and looked all along that stroke of the scorpion pattern with her hands on her hips, hunting an answer. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There are so many reasons and excuses here. A lot of them don’t make sense. I think each side thought the other had cheated them out of something, or stolen something, that they needed to survive.” She shook her head, annoyed. “So they started having wars. This one went on for—” She hunkered down to trace out, with one finger, a specific sequence of the long, curved characters. “Twelve or thirteen thousand years.”

Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance. “This one??” Nita said.

S’reee blew out an unhappy breath. “There are species,” she said, “that are very advanced at science and technology …but the technologies of being in harmony with one another just elude them. They tend to have more wizards than most.”

“You’d think species like that would blow themselves up quicker,” Nita said.

S’reee flipped a fin, resigned. “In such cases, the Lone One can have Itself a long, ugly playtime. Often It tries to keep the combatants from ever destroying each other completely, so the ‘fun’ can go on for as long as possible.”

“I’d believe that was happening here,” Carmela said, getting up to walk along another long, tangled chain of symbols buried in the design. “You’d have trouble finding any time when these guys weren’t fighting. Though here they seem to have taken a breather…”

Carmela straightened up. Nita could feel that slight draining sensation that said the wizardry needed more power. She sat down where she was and closed her eyes, concentrating on breathing more power into it. But even with her eyes closed, she could sense a cooling and darkening around her. “That would be why,” S’reee sang, sounding somewhat troubled. “The Sun is dimming. And so quickly.”

Bobo, Nita said, will this much power hold the spell for now?

Yes. But it won’t run much longer. If there’s anything to be learned, better do it with your eyes open—

She opened them, stood up, staggered. “hNii’t,” S’reee said, “are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, looking toward the Sun. No wonder that S’reee had been taken aback: it was getting fainter by the second, as if someone was turning down a dimmer. The elapsed time was passing by at thousands of years per second, but the speed of the Sun’s fading still seemed uncomfortably swift. In the precipitous valleys between the needle-sharp peaks, the atmosphere was freezing out, dusting itself down as dry ice and oxygen snow.

“They started doming their cities over,” Carmela said, “and trying to change their climate. But the Sun just cooled too fast. All the changes they made weren’t enough.”

Nita watched the Sun’s light keep on fading. It had struck her hard, some time back, how dim the Martian day seemed compared to Earth’s, even at such a small increase in the distance from the Sun. And Shamask-Eilith would have been maybe sixty or eighty million miles farther out, getting even less light and heat than Mars. A cold world, getting colder, she thought, as she watched the Sun far off in the deeps of space slowly settling into what would be its future normal magnitude.

“And still their wars went on,” S’reee said, turning gently in the air to watch yet another swath of nuclear explosions and massive energy-weapon fire scorch its way across the planet’s increasingly ravaged surface.

“Oh, yeah,” Carmela said, sounding resigned. “They weren’t going to stop fighting just because of a little thing like the Sun going cool…”

“You’d think if they had a technology like this, they’d have considered moving everybody to a warmer world,” Nita said. “There weren’t all that many Shamaska or Eilitt by then. They’d already killed so many of each other.”

S’reee swung her tail in agreement. “The Sun’s behavior could even have been a hint,” S’reee said. “The Powers That Be have been known to make Their suggestions indirectly— usually with some hope that the peoples involved will come to some greater good that way than just by being told right out what to do. Or maybe this was just an attempt to break their cycle of destruction when other hints had failed.”

“‘Those who will, the Powers lead,’” Nita said, quoting a line from the manual, “‘and those who won’t, They drag…’”

“If you guys are right,” Carmela said, “this might be where the dragging started.” She gazed down at the floor in a slightly unfocused way as she walked around, pausing at one particular spot. “Listen to this,” Carmela said. “‘Then from the darkness… came the fate and the death which had long been promised. And all the folk looked up into the night and cried out in rage and fear that all their striving against each other was wasted—’”

They looked toward Shamask-Eilith’s spiny curvature and saw, distant but enhanced by the wizardry, the incoming shadow of “the death long promised.” From high above the plane of the ecliptic—the orbital zone in which all the other worlds of the Solar System except Pluto rode—a dark rogue planet, ensnared by the Sun’s gravity who-knew-how many years before, was diving slowly and inexorably into the system. There could have been no possible error about its path, which was taking it straight toward where Shamask-Eilith would be in its orbit in only a matter of decades.

“I don’t suppose this possibly means that they saw sense and stopped fighting with each other?” Nita said.

From the look S’reee gave Nita, she had her doubts. “I wonder,” S’reee said, “how quickly did they see it?”

“Pretty quickly,” Carmela said, walking along and looking down at the pattern. “The scientists on both sides worked out that it wouldn’t hit them. But it would come close enough to destroy their world, even if it didn’t actually hit. Just the tidal forces of the bigger body as it passed by would break the First World up. So they started making plans to save as many of their own people and life forms as they could, and make their way to the next planet in. But it looks like both sides did it secretly.”

“What?” Nita said. “Why? Are you trying to tell me—?”

Carmela looked at Nita and S’reee with an expression both annoyed and completely unsurprised. “You got it,” she said. “Each side figured that if it didn’t tell the other one, their enemies might not have enough time to evacuate their populations. Then the ones who escaped successfully would have the whole new world to themselves.”

S’reee blew softly, a sound of sorrow and disgust. “And when it all came out in the open and both sides started accusing each other of attempted genocide,” Nita said, “gee, I wonder what happened then?”

Carmela merely raised her eyebrows as the image of those ancient jagged mountains erupted in unprecedented violence. “They all got right to work reducing the number of people their enemies would be moving off the planet…”

Nita scowled. “And these were the first intelligent life forms in our solar system? Theoretically intelligent, more like! They’re embarrassing me.”

“Hard to believe they wasted precious time on more slaughter,” S’reee said sadly. “And their wizardly talent probably didn’t have power enough to move the planet. Or maybe there were too few of them.”

“It says here they did try to push the incoming planet off course,” Carmela said, walking along and reading more of the inlay of the central pattern. “But they failed. A whole lot of their wizards died trying. Finally some people on each side realized that whether they liked it or not, they had to help each other get out and resettle closer to the Sun. They’d also have to change themselves physically to fit into whatever world they wound up on. So…”

Glints of movement above the dark peaks caught all their eyes: small shapes, leaping upward. One glittering round shape came closer to their point of view, closer yet, swelled until it seemed to fill half the huge dome: then flashed past them, gone. But it didn’t move so quickly that they couldn’t see the glitter of interior lights stellated all over some more complex shape, spiky, angular. “Cities,” Nita said. “They got a few whole cities off the world—”

But very few of those tiny desperate city-seeds escaped as the terrible wanderer from outside the Solar System plunged in, growing in the First World’s sky, a terrible pale shadow. As it filled the sky, the upward-jutting needles and precipices of the ancient mountains trembled as the two planets’ interacting tidal forces strove together, and the First World started to shatter—

They saw only a few moments of that massive destruction. The incoming rogue planet, so much bigger and more massive than Shamask-Eilith, stayed in one piece. But Shamask-Eilith simply tore itself apart in the intruder’s gravitational field. Vast yawning crevasses stitched themselves along Shamask’s surface, ripping open the crust. The planet’s molten mantle burst outward through the tears in all directions, fountaining countless millions of tons of magma into space. The suddenly exposed planetary core plunged away through the no-longer-confining mass of the rest of the planet like a bullet through flesh, tumbling into the darkness of space as the planet disintegrated—

In the dome, the shadows faded, the imagery failed; the dome dimmed down again. The wizardry failed, Bobo said in the back of Nita’s mind. It couldn’t cope with the extra power feed from outside.

Carmela and Nita and S’reee were gazing at one another in silent horror. After a moment, Carmela said, “You know, I was watching some documentary about the Moon the other day. It said a lot of scientists think the Moon was formed by some big piece of a planet or something hitting the Earth while it was still molten and splashing a lot of stuff out. Was this it, I wonder? Did the rogue planet do it? Or maybe Shamask’s core…”

Nita considered. “That was a real long time ago that happened, Mela. Four billion years and change.” She looked around. “And however old this place is, it’s not anything like billions of years.”

Carmela sighed. “I take it the playback’s broken?”

“Yeah. My manual will have a copy of what we saw, though.”

“And I’ve kept a copy in the Telling,” S’reee said. “We may want to compare them later for perceptual differences.”

Nita nodded. “But for the moment,” she said to Carmela, “looks like you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you.”

“Well, yeah, because what happened next?” Carmela said, waving her arms. “Where were they going to go? Not Mercury: it was way too hot. And not Venus or Earth, if they were still molten. Nobody could change themselves enough to cope with that—”

“With wizardry,” S’reee said, “maybe they could have, if everyone involved in the change was sufficiently committed. But that kind of complete agreement is rare. That’s one of the reasons the Troptic Stipulation is in the Oath— the part about not changing a creature that doesn’t desire the change. The rule goes double, triple, for a whole species.”

“Then it has to be Mars,” Carmela said. “Why else would all this be here for us to find?” She waved an arm at the dome full of writing around them. “I really doubt anybody said, ‘Oh, let’s spend weeks and months writing the whole history of our species in here, and then go off somewhere else …!’ So where are they?”

Nita shook her head. Carmela was plainly fascinated by the mystery of where the inhabitants of the lost planet had gone: but Nita was thinking, And what if this is the species that Kit and his team are so excited about waking up? These people, who went thousands of years without having any time they weren’t having a war, might wind up being our new next-door neighbors?

Oh, boy.

“Mela,” Nita said after a moment, “you saw how they were with each other on their original world. Maybe the ones who made it here didn’t learn the lesson. Maybe they finally wiped each other out… and this is all that’s left.” But as soon as she said it, Nita somehow knew right down in her bones that this was not the case, and the situation wasn’t going to be anything like that simple. She frowned. I hate feelings like this, Nita thought. Even though they’re going to be useful later…

“There’s something else that strikes me as strange,” S’reee said. “All through that, we never saw an image of what they looked like, the people of the First World.” She swung her tail. “It’s true enough that there are species that don’t or won’t make images of themselves. But they’re in the minority.” Her voice went wry. “Most species can’t get enough of looking at themselves.”

Carmela shook her head. “Maybe they were making a clean break?” she said. “If they did actually change themselves to suit another planet— this planet— maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of what they had to abandon? Seems like they thought it was a failure to have to change at all.”

She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking around her at the dome, at all that unread writing. Then Carmela turned back to Nita and S’reee. “I’ve got to work on this,” she said. “It’s gonna drive me nuts. I need to go get a notebook. Do you want me to give you guys a lift back home?”

“You might take me back with you,” S’reee said. “But does this mean that you’re not going shopping?”

“It can wait.” Carmela turned back to gaze around the dome with an odd look on her face. “There’s something going on here.”

Another one gets bit by the bug! Nita thought. She glanced at S’reee. “You just may have heard history in the making,” she said, “whatever kind’s recorded here. Carmela said she was not going shopping somewhere.”

S’reee whistled with laughter. Carmela ignored them both as she looked down at the design under their feet, following one long, tangled thread of writing. She pointed at it. “That bit,” Carmela said, “that’s a poem. Can you see it?”

Nita and S’reee looked at each other. “No,” they said in unison.

“Well, I can. And I want to see what it says!”

Nita sighed. So much for getting her safely out of here and off to the Crossings! “I’m not sure I’m wild about you being by yourself up here…”

Carmela gave Nita a look. “Even Mamvish said there was no reason I should be excluded from this stuff. What’re you worried about— our little scorpion buddies? They let me alone before when they came through. If they were interested in chewing on me, they’d have done it then. And they haven’t been back.”

“As far as I can tell,” S’reee said, glancing around the vast round chamber, “that wizardry’s now defunct. A one-time assessment, I think.”

“See that?” Carmela said. “Neets, when I come back, I’ll have the remote. And I’ve got my ‘curling iron.’ If anything jumps out at me, it’s not going to get anything for its trouble but a real big hole straight through it, and I’ll be gone before it can do anything else.”

Nita looked over at S’reee. S’reee just shrugged her tail. “Recent events suggest that K!aarmii’lha can take care of herself. She’s armed, she can get away quickly if she must, and if she has a cell phone, she can call you for help if she needs it, yes?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. Bobo, is the wizardry here really done running?

Yes. I doubt it could be reactivated now no matter how we tried.

“Okay,” Nita said. “I’m gonna try again to get at that spot where Kit and the guys are working… or at least try to find out why we couldn’t transport there.”

Carmela pulled out her remote and got busy punching its buttons. “And you, cousin?” S’reee said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right without backup?”

Nita nodded. Unsettling as her experience with the scorpions had been, it had left her with a sense that she had been examined and found nonthreatening: she was safe enough on Mars. Until some new weird thing happens. But the moment of foresight Nita had had, and correctly read, now left her feeling less concerned about coming up against something completely unexpected. As long as the universe keeps those helpful hints coming…

“Go on,” Nita said, patting S’reee’s side and pulling out her manual again. She flipped it to the page describing wizardries ongoing in the area, glanced down it to the description of the life-support spell that S’reee was running, and laid a finger on the written version: it glowed as Nita took over its management. “I’ll be in touch if I find anything.”

She looked past S’reee to Carmela. Mela waved the remote at her, punched a button. She and S’reee vanished. The air inside the support spell imploded in a brief, sharp breeze toward where they’d been, then settled again.

Nita stood there in the silence, the rowan wand in her free hand now the only light. “Okay, Bobo,” she said. “You have Kit’s first set of coordinates? This crater—” She peered at the manual. “Stokes—”

Got them.

“Are they still blocked?”

Not precisely. Conditions there are …peculiar.

It wasn’t the most reassuring thing to hear wizardry itself saying to you. Nevertheless, Nita shrugged. “Let’s go find out how peculiar,” she said.

The transit circle laid itself out glowing around her. Transiting now.

Around Nita, the world went dark again.

9: Gusev

Pale peach-colored dust fluffed away in the gust of wind that accompanied the three human forms who appeared atop the low, rounded ridge. It wasn’t a particularly sharp or edgy piece of terrain— just a rough escarpment of beige and cream-colored rock, with dust and sand spilling down in little rills, almost like water, from cracks in the low cliff’s edge. To the south and west spread a vast, shallow, circular depression, itself dimpled and cratered with the remnants of newer, lesser impacts. Level with the old crater’s rim, the surrounding landscape to the north and east, more brown than red, was strewn with nondescript boulders well into the distance.

“Here we are,” Kit said, glancing around to get his bearings.

“Wahoo,” Darryl said, ironic.

“Nope. De Vaucouleurs.”

“Pedant,” said Ronan, looking around with the expression of someone eager not to see any more giant bat-crab-spider creatures.

Kit rolled his eyes. “We’re in the right spot, anyway. There’s Kayne, over that way.” He pointed: another crater’s low rim was just visible, looking like a low line of hills maybe ten miles away. “Shawnee, Bok…” He peered further away to the south. “Hamelin—”

“I take back what I said before,” Ronan said, concerned. “You don’t need a social life later. You need one now. How long have you been staying home nights memorizing crater names? They’re holes in the ground, Kit! There’s nothing but rocks in them! Set yourself free! Life’s too short!”

Kit turned to Darryl. “Doesn’t seem to be much going on here at the moment. What’ve we got?”

Darryl brought out his WizPod and pulled out a wide, semitransparent page that he studied for a moment. He shook his head, holding it up for Ronan and Kit to see. “Okay, look. The wizardry you triggered is getting ready to spike here. Two or three minutes. But before it goes off, you can still see some indications of how old it is and where it came from. Look quick—” He pointed at one long line of symbols. “See that? The power to fuel this wizardry wasn’t locally sourced.”

Kit shook his head. “What?”

“The energy didn’t come from this planet, originally! It came from—” Darryl looked up, pointed. “Somewhere up there.”

Kit and Ronan looked up into the empty Martian sky. “Nearby?” Ronan said. “One of the moons, maybe?”

“Don’t think so,” Darryl said, studying his readout. “Nope. Much further. Maybe thirty million miles. Actually, make that fifty.”

Ronan and Kit stared at each other. “What’s out that far?” Ronan said.

“The asteroids?” Kit said. “I mean, I’m not sure about the distances.”

Darryl was still looking at the wide page of manual that he’d pulled out of the WizPod. He shook his head, looking perplexed. “There’s something wrong with the timing, too,” he said. “I can’t get a clean read on it. But, look, if the wizardry’s running and about to go off, it’d make more sense for us to deal with what it’s about to do right now than get too hung up about who emplaced it and when…”

“Yeah. Meanwhile,” Ronan said, glancing around him, “what’s the satellite situation? That last jump was biggish, to judge by how high the Sun’s up now.” He had a point: Kit glanced up and saw that it was almost noon. “The schedule’s got to be pretty different here. And where exactly is this wizardry going to go off? Not right underneath us this time, I hope—”

“No way,” Darryl said. “I factored in a nice big offset. Off that way.” He looked east and south. “In the middle of the next big crater over. About fifty miles, as the wizard jumps.”

“Uh,” Ronan said softly, “maybe time to jump, then—”

They looked where he was looking. Kit gulped. From beyond the low crater rim to the east, a pale green glow was rising.

Darryl grabbed them each by an arm. “I’ll put us down on the far side,” he said. “The view’ll be better.” He took a deep breath.

As the momentary darkness of a bilocation transit shut down around him, Kit was trying to visualize the orbit of the Mars Express orbiter in his head. But something else was niggling at him. The name of the crater they’d come down on the edge of meant something besides being just the site of one of the active wizardries. De Vaucouleurs, he thought. De Vaucouleurs. There was something special about that area, I could have sworn—

The darkness gave way once more to daylit Martian landscape. They were standing on the rim of yet another crater, but this rim was far higher and better defined than the last, and the crater seemed much bigger: the two arms of it ran straight to the foreshortened horizon and vanished. For it to look this big, it’d have to be a hundred miles across, Kit thought. And the surface down there is maybe two miles deep. Or so it seemed where it wasn’t being rapidly overrun by the green glow of a working alien wizardry. That emerald light was flooding outward from a spot off to their right and about halfway across the visible portion of the crater, making the whole area look bizarrely like a reverse-action film of water going down a drain.

“If the action this time’s going to be anything like it was back at Stokes,” Ronan said, “I think I prefer the view from up here.” He looked down at the outward-spreading light. “Look at it go!” He shook his head. “What about the satellites?”

“Yeah,” Darryl said. “If something comes over now, it’s not just going to see our infrared signatures. At night the guys back at NASA or ESA might think we were just a transient hot spot, a meteorite impact or some such. But in the daytime, when they have something overhead that can see us in visible light, too? And not just us. That!”

Kit was going through his manual in a hurry. “Obviously we can spoof them,” Ronan said. “Mess with their machinery somehow.”

“If it can figure out the right way!” Kit said. “Spoof ’em, sure, it’s easy to say. But how do you do it so the rocket-science guys don’t notice? They’re not dumb! Take one of the satellite’s cameras out of commission? Sure, but how? Make a piece of the machinery fail? Better make sure you’re not failing out something you can’t fix right away when you don’t need the fault anymore. And you’ve got to pick something to interfere with that’ll seem to make sense when it stops working and when it just starts up again for no good reason—”

“You’ll figure something out!” Darryl said. “This is your specialty. You haven’t done anything but think about this stuff for weeks now!”

Kit held his manual up right in front of Darryl’s face to show him the orbital diagram he’d been looking for. “But not this exact situation! Here comes the Mars Express orbiter. Eighteen minutes and ten seconds from now. Either we stop that—” and Kit pointed at the spreading green glow— “or the Express sees a lot more than just our own hot spots. Those we can hide, sure. Put a stealth shell over us that mimics the local temperature. But what about that?” He nodded at the oncoming tide of green light. “No way they’re going to believe that’s a dust storm! We can’t let them see it; it’ll screw up their science! And we don’t have enough power to hide it even at the size it is now. If it spreads much further…”

Darryl glanced up from his WizPod to peer down into the crater. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Got some kind of secondary locus popping up.”

“Where?” Kit said, trying to see what Darryl was looking at.

“Crap, it’s gone.” Then Darryl pointed. “No, there it is again. See it? No, more to the right. Maybe five miles to the right of the green zone. It flashed. There it goes again—!”

They all peered down at the spark of fire Darryl had spotted. It was a small, hard, bright light, faintly pinkish. And as Kit looked at it, it moved just slightly, a tiny jitter.

And he realized what it was. He looked over his shoulder to judge the Sun’s angle, and then back down at the little sharp light. “That’s not the wizardry!” Kit said.

Ronan stared at him. “What?”

“It’s a reflection!”

“From what??”

“Solar panels!”

Now it was Darryl’s turn to stare. “What would there be to— Oh my God!”

Kit nodded, sweat popping out on him. “I never come at it from this side,” he said. “Or from all the way up here on the edge! I always just transit straight in. That’s why the name de Vaucouleurs didn’t remind me of anything in particular at first. But now it does. It’s the next crater over from Gusev!”

Ronan’s eyes went wide. “What, you mean that’s one of the wee rovers down there? Opportunity?”

“No,” Kit said. “Spirit!”

Ronan said something in Irish that didn’t sound like a compliment. “Could this get any fecking worse?” he said. “It can’t see us, can it?”

“Not at this range,” Kit said. “It’s what else she might see that worries me now. If the same kind of stuff starts happening here as happened back at Stokes—”

“NASA’ll start seeing things they shouldn’t,” Darryl said. “Come on, we’ve gotta get down there and protect the rover. Blind it somehow, block its vision—”

“Vision won’t be enough,” Kit said. “It’s got other sensors. Either way, we can’t sit this one out up here.”

Ronan said something else in very annoyed Irish. Darryl grabbed his arm. “How close do you want us?” he said to Kit.

“Not in the green,” Kit said. “We need a few minutes to work something out. A hundred yards away or so.”

Darryl grabbed Kit’s upper arm. Things went black—

—then went beige. Kit took a long breath: though he knew Darryl was careful about making sure their air and spells came with them all when they jumped, there was always the chance that some day he might get overexcited and slip.

“You know,” Darryl said as they came out in the middle of more beige, rubbly ground, “I can just hear you thinking sometimes, your Kitness. I like breathing, too, you know? I’m real used to it. So cut me some slack. Where’s your little friend?” He stared around him. “And I keep meaning to ask: why isn’t this place red when it always looks that way in the pictures?”

Ronan snickered. “It’s not that red in those,” he said, while Kit tried to get his bearings. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if they adjust the images just a wee tiny bit. People don’t like the Red Planet being beige. Gotta give the public what it wants.”

Kit glanced around, finding his landmarks. The spot where Darryl had landed them wasn’t so far from his own usual transit spot: as he looked around, the landmarks started falling into place one by one. The Apollo 1 hills off northward, the Columbia hills to the west told him that they were standing on the elevated ground called Home Plate, with its many eclectically named pits and rocks and rises—Missoula, Palanque, Lutefisk, Clovis, Larry’s Lookout, McCool Hill. And not far from McCool, still close to the north-facing crater wall where she’d spent the last winter—

“There,” Kit said. He headed straight off across the rocky landscape at the bounce. Even without the high angle of a few moments ago to give the Sun something to reflect from, there was no mistaking the small, angular shape hunkered down against the rising ground in the near distance, its little camera pole sticking up just above the line of the little sand dune in which the rover was presently stuck. Good thing she’s too small to be carrying seismic sensors, Kit thought as Ronan and Darryl came hurrying along in his wake. Otherwise there’s no telling what they might think was going on up here once they get the data to download…

As Kit got closer, he slowed. There was no use kicking up more dust on the hardworking little machine— it had more than enough trouble with what the winter dust storms left layered on its solar panels. The scientists at NASA had for the past couple of years been surprised and pleased that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers had managed to keep working for so long: mostly, they theorized, because of passing dust devils that blew the accumulated storm dust off them. The wizards who came up here every now and then with cans of compressed air and puffer brushes while the probes were asleep were delighted to let the scientists think that—and careful not to remove enough dust at any one time as to make them suspicious.

Kit, having occasionally done this duty when there was the “excuse” of dust devils in the neighborhood, waved at the others to drop back and wait where they were. He looked carefully to make sure that the main camera hadn’t moved while they were approaching it. Then Kit hunkered down quietly on Spirit’s blind side and put his manual on the ground, paging along to a two-page spread that showed him a list of the rover’s diagnostics.

After glancing down it to see what was working and what wasn’t, he waved at Ronan and Darryl; they came quietly up to join him. Ronan raised his eyebrows, tapped one ear: Can it hear?

Kit shook his head. “Look at all the dust and dents,” Darryl said. “Poor beat-up baby.”

Kit nodded. “She’s had a bad time. The front right wheel got stuck a couple years ago, so they had to drive her backwards after that, dragging the bad wheel. Then the dust storms came. She almost died altogether: they had to shut her down, wait out the dark time for a few months …Things kept breaking. The dust started scouring off the protective coating on the solar panels. They got covered so often that her batteries started draining too fast and her software started glitching. One instrument had to be shut down, it got so much dust in it. She got stuck in soft dirt or sand a bunch of times, and this last time they couldn’t get her out. But she just wouldn’t stop working.” He shook his head. “Even now, when she’s out of communication: still doing her job. Tough girl…”

He reached out a hand, then stopped; there were too many things he might break or mess up. “Not to cut short a touching moment,” Ronan said, “but the green’s getting close. You’re the machine specialist: just tell her to close down for a little while.”

Kit shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”

“Why not? She’s full of computers. Should be fairly smart as machines go.”

“That’s the problem,” Kit said, looking at the oncoming flow of green. “The more complex a machine gets, the harder it is to persuade to do something unusual. It’s not like you’re trying to talk, say, an electric can opener into doing stuff. A can opener’s life isn’t long on excitement, so it’s glad to do something strange! But a machine with a lot of complex programming grows a sense of purpose. Even loyalty.”

Kit frowned. “And when you try to get it to do something weird all of a sudden, it wants reasons. Especially if it’s got much security built into it. Machines can get suspicious of your motives, whether they understand what wizardry’s about or not.”

“I don’t think we’re gonna have any time for a prolonged conversation,” Darryl said, looking east. The tide of green light was running toward them fast. “Look, if she’s not in communication with Earth right now, what’s the problem?”

“She might be later,” Kit said. “They’re still trying to fix her by remote. For all I know, they’re doing it right now—the manual diagnostics show a few attempted contacts just within the last six hours. If they do manage to get through, then all the data associated with us will get uplinked too. Not what we want!”

Ronan looked up from his manual. “That stealth shell you were talking about?” he said. “I’d say this is the moment. We can’t hide the whole crater from space. But we can hide it from the rover if we put the shell over it—”

Kit nodded. That green light was only a hundred or so feet away now, and there was still the Mars Orbiter satellite to think about. “Right,” he said. “Get that set up.” Kit picked up his manual and stood up. “But right now I just want to make real sure nobody on Earth gets lucky with the comms somehow and screws this up—”

He pulled out his antenna-wand, thought about the wizardry he needed. Even though she looks pretty stuck, best to add a quick wheel-freeze. Both rovers have had that happen sometimes if there’s been a temperature fluctuation. “Half a sec,” Kit said, pointing the wand at Spirit’s left front wheel. It took only a few words’ worth of the Speech to heat the joint up just enough for it to swell a few microns thicker than usual, locking the wheel in place. Kit backed away. “Sorry, baby. Okay, go!”

Ronan began reading hurriedly in the Speech.

Seconds later a shimmering hemispherical dome-shell about three meters wide appeared over Spirit, swirling with a soap-bubble light of working wizardry. “Okay,” Ronan said, wiping sweat off his brow and breathing hard as he finished the spell. “While that lasts, it won’t see or sense anything it hasn’t seen for the last few minutes.”

“Good,” Kit said, turning to face what approached. “Because here comes trouble!”

The green light washed over them, turning everything as verdant now as it had been red in Stokes. Then darkness fell.

***

But not complete darkness. It was more a dusk light, the last embers of local sunset burning at the bottom of it, and the surroundings were beyond peculiar, bearing in mind what “local” should have been. The sunset was peach and golden, not blue. And Kit and Darryl and Ronan were now standing, not amid Martian rocks and dirt, but on a sidewalk next to what looked like a somewhat rural street with a double yellow stripe painted down the middle of it, and down the length of the road, streetlights were coming on, burning yellow against the oncoming evening.

Kit stared around him. The twilight slowly falling around them was indisputably earthly. Scattered down their side of the street were some very normal and suburban-looking houses; across the road were more of the same. Nearby, a smaller street met this one. A street sign stood at the corner.

Ronan looked around him suspiciously, then made his way over to the sign, looked up at it. “Cranbury Road?” he said. “I’m no cooking expert, but don’t you usually spell that with an e and two r’s?”

Darryl was meanwhile turning slowly around, examining the houses and front yards and driveways of the surroundings with an expression of utter astonishment. Then he stopped, staring at the biggest of the nearby structures. It was a red clapboard building with white-painted windows and a side door of the kind you might see on a barn, painted white on the doorsills and crossbars, red on the main panels. At one end of the building, among various enameled metal signs advertising the makers of farm equipment and power tools, was a set of concrete stairs leading up to a door. Over the door hung a sign that said: GROVERS MILL CO.

At the sight of the sign, Darryl’s eyes went wide. Then he burst out laughing and turned back to Ronan. “Now I get it!” he said. “I am impressed with you!”

Startled, Ronan looked around as if expecting the person Darryl was really addressing to be standing behind him. “Why me?!”

“Because this is your fault!”

“What?”

“You were the one who was singing the If-anything-was-going-to-come-from-Mars music!”

Ronan suddenly looked very defensive. “But— Well, why shouldn’t I? It’s good music, and anyway, it’s famous. Anybody might have thought about it when they came to Mars! Besides, how was I supposed to know this would happen—?”

“Too late for excuses now!” Laughing, Darryl salaamed before Ronan, though with a total lack of respect. “Seriously, we are not worthy to hang out with an adept like you! You are the wizard’s wizard, man! You have turned Mars into New Jersey!”

Even in the general alarm of the moment, Kit had to snicker. Ronan stood there looking as cool as usual, but something in his eyes betrayed the fact that he wasn’t sure he was being complimented. “Could have been worse,” Ronan said under his breath as he looked around. “Could have done it the other way round.”

“This is the place where that old radio version of War of the Worlds happened, isn’t it?” Kit said. “The one they did on Halloween way back whenever it was, and they pretended it was happening in New Jersey somewhere, instead of England.”

“And it’s not even the right New Jersey!” Darryl said. “It’s New Jersey now! Look over there.” He pointed. Off to their right, across the street, was a big handsome blue building with a long, peaked roof. On the opposite side of the road in front of it stood a pole with road signs that said ROUTE 629 and TO NJ TURNPIKE. Farther down the pole were posted a laserprinted ad for an Internet café and a faded picture of somebody’s lost dog.

Darryl was looking at the big blue building. “Bet you that was the mill once,” Darryl said. “Look, I was right! There’s the old millstones. They’ve got ’em sunk into the ground so cars won’t ruin their lawn when they turn the corner. There’s where the water came out past the mill. But no Martians!” He started laughing again.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Ronan said, very quietly.

There was something about the way he said it that stopped Darryl’s laughter. He and Kit both looked up at where Ronan was pointing among the trees behind the old mill building. Half-obscured by a stand of big old trees that surrounded it stood what looked like some kind of elderly, jury-rigged water tower. The part that had held the water, like an upended bucket, was suspended between four narrow iron uprights, all rusty with time.

Darryl peered at the vessel, which had individual wooden staves like an old bucket, held together with rusty iron hoops. “Are those bullet holes in that?” Darryl said, still amused: but now there was some unease to the amusement. “Can’t you just see it? People around here were listening to that radio broadcast, the night before Halloween, and some of them really bought into it, and they ran outside with their guns when they heard that Martian war machines were landing in their town, and some of them saw that thing in the dark, looking all tripod-y, and they shot it up—”

“Darryl,” Kit said.

With a long, low moan of bending metal, the water tower moved.

“Bad,” Ronan said, sounding utterly conversational, “this is very bad. We had TV shows like this back home on Saturday afternoons when I was little. This is the part where I always hid behind the couch.”

Against the cold, hard stars of the Martian sky, among the trees of a suburban New Jersey that had no business being where it was, the water tower lurched to one side, then lurched the other way, hard. It shook itself like a creature trying to rid itself of some kind of impediment: and the fourth upright fell away, leaving it standing on three. The water tower shook itself again, picked up one of those legs and jerked it back and around somehow until it was balanced evenly on all three of them. Then the water tower started getting taller against that blackness, rearing up past the tops of the highest trees. Up near its top, a red glow started to develop into an eye that Kit felt was looking right at him.

“Anybody got an idea that doesn’t involve us all bailing out of here and completely disgracing ourselves as wizards?” Kit said.

“Uh…” Darryl’s head tilted back as that red glow slowly grew a stalk that raised it higher and higher above the trees, and those legs got longer and thicker, and the water vessel started to develop itself into something far more massive. “Who was it said ‘discretion is the better part of valor’?”

“Doesn’t matter, ’cause we’ve got no time for it now,” Ronan said, and pulled out his light-rod weapon. Kit heard the soft singing sound it started to make. “Running won’t help. What about Spirit? Poor beastie’s gonna get stomped if we don’t stick around and do something. And what’ll NASA think if that happens?”

“Or Irina,” Darryl said.

Kit’s sweat went cold on him at the thought.

“You carrying?” Ronan said to Darryl as he lifted the light-rod.

“Don’t be hasty! Got a couple of things handy,” Darryl said. He pulled the WizPod out. “Need to concentrate on this, guys, so if someone wants to buy us a moment—”

Ronan leveled his light-weapon, fired. A narrow line of blinding yellow-white light ravened out of it and struck the still-forming war machine in its underbody.

The stalk on which that red light had formed was now stretching toward them entirely too flexibly, and the light was going a far deeper and deadlier red. “No, you dope,” Darryl shouted, “I meant something passive, like a force field!”

“Leave it with me,” Ronan said, and held up one hand. The air above them shimmered as the force field went into effect. Kit was relieved to see it, as away above the force field, the Martian war machine took its completely realized form. Gleaming in the rusty light, the bronzy body hoisted high up over them on its cabled tripod legs, metal groaning ominously as the great mass paused, the roving eye deadly red at the end of a long, gooseneck stalk as it sought them out, focused on them—

“Here it comes!” Ronan shouted. Above them, the sunset was washed out by a wall of fire as the heat ray hit the force field and splashed away like water. By that awful light Darryl pulled out a page from his WizPod, muttered under his breath, threw it glowing to the ground, and pulled out another one—

The ray stopped: the war machine above them wailed, an earsplitting howl of rage and frustration. Out beyond it, over the suburban New Jersey rooftops, a second red eye appeared, and then a third.

“You want to hurry up with that!” Ronan shouted at Darryl. “The force field was already starting to give just then—”

“What, do we need to kick the power up?” Kit said, reaching into memory for a different force-field spell of his own. He hurriedly recited the words in the Speech that brought it shimmering into operation above the three of them, then stood there panting for a moment with the reaction.

“No!” Ronan yelled as a second war machine started to move toward them. “Whatever’s making these things appear is learning from what we do. I could feel the war-machine spell solving the shield while I was holding it—”

Another furiously concentrated line of fire came splashing down from the first machine and its approaching compatriot. Kit, looking up, saw Ronan’s shield fail while his own held: but now he, too, could feel what Ronan had described, that sense of his own wizardry being frayed at, pulled apart, with dreadful energy and persistence. “He’s right!” Kit shouted at Darryl. “What have you got?”

“Gonna trip this closest one,” Darryl said. “Watch out for which way it falls—”

“One is what you’re gonna get,” Kit said, feeling his force field continuing to fray. “Dammit! Ronan?”

“Might not be able to trip one,” Ronan said, pulling his light wand out to full length, almost five feet. “But chop one down, yeah—”

“Save it for a moment!” Kit said.

Darryl was muttering under his breath in the Speech. Then he made a huge, expansive gesture with both arms, and from them sprang what at first looked like a jet of white mist. It wrapped itself around the legs of the closest war machine as it was rearing that flexible neck back for another attack on the force field. Then with another groan of metal the mist knotted itself tight, yanking the legs together at their “knees.” The first machine leaned, tottered, and fell even as it fired. The bolt it shot went high over their heads, but as it went down, Kit felt his force field fail.

The second machine targeting them strode closer. Darryl threw another jet of mist at it, but this time as it knotted tight, the machine broke through it and strode on. “Bad, bad, bad…” Kit muttered, reaching into his otherspace pocket and pulling out the little shining sphere he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to use, especially as once he used it, no second one would work. “Darryl?”

He was backing away, along with Kit and Ronan. “This is getting us nowhere!” he said. “Stay close if we have to jump out of here—”

“Don’t want to jump!” Ronan said. “If we do, we’ll fail this test!”

“Yeah, well, how do we ace it?” Darryl said.

“What kills these things?”

“Germs!” Kit said.

“That took a while in the original!” Ronan said, backing up and looking thoughtfully up at the legs of the walker that was stalking closer by the moment. “Couple of weeks, wasn’t it?”

“I think what we’ve got is a couple of minutes,” Darryl said. “And to buy us a little time—?”

He pulled another page out of his WizPod and started reading hurriedly. Kit kept backing up, in tandem with Ronan, as above them the walker peered around, looking for its prey. Darryl stood right where he was and kept on reading. Then, in what seemed mid-sentence, he stopped, took a deep breath, and shouted one last word, making a sweeping downward gesture with one hand.

Then he paused, looked behind him. Hold still! Darryl said silently. Don’t move!!

Above them, the walker loomed up, stepped down toward them. Kit saw the great trilobed metallic foot come down at them, right on top of them— and then through them, past them. Fleetingly he saw the interior of the foot, the biocabling and mechanisms of its interior, as they slid down past his eyes like too-solid ghosts and stopped against the ground.

Ronan and Kit stared. What was that, exactly? Kit said silently as the great foot lifted again, and the creature stalked away.

Micro-bilocation, Darryl said. I might not be able to move us away from here, but I could stay here and bilocate it. I just let it slip through the empty spaces in our atoms. It thinks it stomped us, so keep quiet!

They watched the walker stalk away across the suburban darkness, toward the green-scummed pond. “And this,” Ronan whispered to Kit, looking at Darryl approvingly, “is why it’s fun to play with the little kids every now and then. You never know what they’re going to pull.”

“Oh,” Darryl said, very soft, “so all of a sudden I’m not the superpowered brat anymore?” He chuckled. “Well, good, because I’m gonna yell at you now. If you hadn’t lost it and started shooting—”

“Yeah, well if you’d just tell people when you—”

“If you two would please just shut up?” Kit whispered.

Astonished, Darryl and Ronan both fell silent.

“This is not the moment,” Kit said. “Okay?” Because yet another war machine was now coming toward them, and in the distance Kit could see yet another. “Brute force and random wizardries aren’t gonna solve this! We have to do this by the book. Literally.” He pulled out his manual, looking up nervously at the machines approaching.

“Which book?”

“The one they came from,” Kit said, starting to flip through his manual. “So there’s only one thing we can do. Mess around with time.”

“What? A timeslide? Have you gone spare?” Ronan shouted, for mind-talk plainly wasn’t going to fool the machines now bearing down on them: they were already being targeted. “We can’t do that! We’d need ten million kinds of authorization—”

“Not for this!” Kit said, frantically hunting the page he needed. “I’m not talking about a slide! This isn’t about going backwards! What we want is a local acceleration, forwards. Not changing what’s going to happen, just making it happen a whole lot faster. There’s no way to damage previous causality, so you don’t need an authorization—”

Finally he found the page. “How long have you had this one under your hat?” Ronan said.

“Found it when I was doing some research a few months ago,” Kit said. “I was going to use it to age some metal under Martian conditions to see what kind of remains I’d be looking for from stuff left over from ancient times. But it was all long-duration aging. Didn’t occur to me it might be useful for this until you and the Squirt here reminded me.” He glanced at Darryl, grinned. “‘Took a few weeks in the original?’ It won’t take anything like that this time!”

Kit reached into his manual page and pulled the spell template out of it, a long elastic ellipse which he dropped to the dusty ground in front of them. “Hurry up, get in here,” he said, stepping into the center of it. “Stick your personal info into the empty circles! There— and there—”

Darryl and Ronan both jumped into the interior ellipse and got to work inserting their personal information into the vacant templates in the spell circle. “This’ll keep the altered flow clear of us,” Kit said, watching the machines as they slowly stalked toward them, howling. “Now all we have to do is wait for them to get close enough—”

Darryl had his eye on the war machines. “Uh, your Kitness— just how close is close?”

“This is gonna take a lot of energy,” Kit said. “Can’t kick the outer circle out too far. But once they’re inside, we’ll be good. They’ve been breathing the same air we have, and we’ve been breathing out lots of lovely germs and viruses—”

The secondary circle laid itself out as Kit spoke, maybe a few hundred yards distant all around them, glowing against the ground. “Is this safe?” Ronan said, sounding nervous. “If something slips and our personal space-time gets deranged somehow because these things stumble into the circle—”

“We’ll be fine!” Kit said. “The spell puts a stasis on everything in the area but the ‘forward arrow’ of time itself—”

“You sure physics lets you do that?” Darryl said, sounding twitchy, too.

“The manual says so,” Kit said, glancing up at the war machines, which were now unsettlingly close, “and I think so does Stephen Hawking. That’s good enough for me!”

He ran one finger down the manual page and found the words he needed to recite. “You two ready?” Kit said. “Dar, better grab hold of us. The spell won’t mind, and if we do have to jump—”

Darryl reached out to Ronan and Kit, grabbed one shoulder of each. “All set!”

The war machines lowered over them, stepping into the outer circle. Their long necks reached down. As Kit began to read in the Speech, fire spat from the two terrible eyes—

—slowed in midair, slid to a halt, and hung there right above them, frozen in place.

The machines froze, too, held still by the spell. All around them, kicked-up dust in the air was holding its position: smoke, billowing from where the machines had burned trees or buildings while heading toward Kit and Darryl and Ronan, lay unmoving on the air as if painted there. Inside the shell of space around the war machines, though, Kit could feel time speeding up, faster and faster: could hear its rising whine inside his head, scaling up, nearly unbearable, as the spell circle inevitably passed back to him the neural side effects of the abuse he was inflicting on the time trapped inside the circle. All Kit could do was finish reading, squeeze his eyes shut, and try to bear up under the screech of pain of the space itself, miserable at having to endure being pushed into the future faster than the normally mandated one second per second—

The spell ran out: the circle went dark. Dust started to move again; smoke started to drift. “That way,” Kit said to Darryl, “quick!!”

The world blacked out, went bright again as the war machines’ beams hit the ground where they had all been standing until a moment ago. But then, slowly, one of the machines started to sag forward, the other one sideways toward them—

They scattered as the machines fell with a tremendous crash: one of them onto a frame house nearby, a second right onto the hapless Grover’s Mill Company building, which flew up in a little storm of timber and roof shingles as the machine crashed into it. Both machines cracked open as they came down, and the smell that poured from them afterward was truly impressive.

The three of them drew together again, breathing hard. “Wow,” Ronan said. Kit bent half over, trying to get his breath back: the spell was still taking its toll on him. Around them, though, the New Jersey suburbs were already fading away, leaving the cratered Martian landscape again. Last to go were the shattered war machines, dead from the microorganisms for which their inhabitants were no more prepared on this planet than they would have been on Earth.

“Now that,” Darryl said, “was great thinking.”

“Thank you,” Ronan said.

“I meant Kit,” Darryl said, as Kit managed to straighten up enough to look around.

“Oh, really. If you remember, he said that I—”

“Some more of the shutting up, please?!” Kit yelled at them. “Because we have another problem now!”

Darryl and Ronan stared at him again. “What? Spirit?” Ronan said. “What now? I thought you said you could—”

Kit pointed across the crater, not at Spirit. Boiling up out of the sand all around them were what looked like streamers and ribbons of green metal.

Darryl’s eyes widened. “Those are the exact same color as—”

“The superegg,” Kit said. “Yes, they are. And if they do what the superegg did—”

“Uh-oh,” Darryl said.

“You’d better pull out some more wizardries you haven’t used yet,” Kit said as the ribbons of metal started writhing and knotting together. “Because I don’t think you’re gonna be able to do your micro-bilocation trick again.”

Darryl frowned. “I could try—”

“If it doesn’t work,” Ronan said, “we’re going to find out about that just as something new stomps us flat! So don’t bother! We need something else—”

Low shadowy shapes were starting to form all around them, out in the dust and sand, surrounding them in a triple ring. They hurriedly placed themselves back to back. “What about the rover?” Ronan said.

“She can’t see this,” Darryl said.

“I wish I couldn’t,” Kit muttered as the metallic shapes twined and conjoined into their final shapes, gleaming in the dull sunlight.

“Bloody ’ell,” Ronan said, disgusted. “Giant robot scorpions. Why is it always giant robot scorpions?”

Kit rolled his eyes. “You sure they’re not alive?” he said to Darryl.

“Not even slightly.” Darryl raised his hands and said one quick sentence in the Speech.

Four or five of the nearest scorpions blew up. “Don’t let them get near the rover!” Kit shouted to Ronan as the fighting heated up. “We don’t have time to spend repairing her right now if something happens!”

“Got that,” Ronan said. He threw his bar of light into the air, spinning: as it came down, he caught it by one end and waded into the scorpions, using the dissociator like a sword.

But he wasn’t able to cut down more than a few of them. Within a few strokes, his light-rod was simply bouncing off them, and though Darryl threw another destructive bolt at another gaggle of the scorpions, it had no effect. Ronan was backing up, and as he did one of the scorpions got behind him: he tripped over it, went down—

The dome of wizardry over Spirit wavered and went down at the same moment. Oh, no, Kit thought. He started holding the wizardry in place by direct intent, from moment to moment! It was one of a number of ways a wizard could save energy when doing a spell, but it required you to have your attention on it to keep the spell running. Falling over was one thing too many—

“Darryl,” Kit yelled, “grab him, we’re gonna jump!” He turned his back on Spirit. Sorry, baby, we’ll brainwash you or something later, but right this minute—

“But if we fail the test—”

“We won’t. We’re not jumping that far! We need to get them away from the rover, draw them off—”

“Using what?” Darryl said as he helped Ronan back onto his feet and the three of them backed away from the scorpions now advancing with raised claws.

“Us!” Kit said. “It’s us they’re attracted to.”

Darryl and Ronan exchanged a glance. “Got a point there,” Ronan said. “Where’d you have in mind for our heroic last stand?”

“Don’t say ‘last’!” Darryl said.

Kit pointed. “The far wall of the crater, on the south side. The rover’s been there already: even if NASA manages to wake it up again and make it look back there, it won’t see the fine detail of what’s going to happen to the rocks. I’ll freeze the rotor gear on the camera pod for the next few minutes. If they do someday see the data, that won’t raise any red flags—they’re always having these little movement glitches.”

“Let’s go,” Ronan said.

Kit pulled his wand out and froze Spirit’s gear. “Okay,” he said to Darryl, “jump us over there—”

Darryl grabbed him and Ronan: things went dark, then late-daylight dim again. Within seconds the scorpions were already boiling up out of the ground around them again, closing in—

Kit pulled out the little spherical wizardry he’d been hoarding and put it down at his feet. Very carefully he said the sixteen words that armed it. “Dar,” he said, “wait till the last minute. We need to take them all out.”

“I hate this!” Darryl said as the scorpions poured toward them.

“Wouldn’t be a big fan myself,” Kit said under his breath. “Just hang on!”

Ronan’s hands were clenching on his light-rod. “Now, yeah?”

“No,” Kit said as the scorpions ran closer. The foremost ones were scissoring their claws together in a way he found really upsetting, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off them.

“Now?” Darryl said, twitching. “Come on, your Kitship, how sure do you have to be?”

“Really, really sure,” Kit said. “Put us down on the other side of Spirit, okay? About the same distance. No, not yet!! Just be ready to—”

“I don’t want to look,” Ronan groaned.

“Don’t,” Kit said. “But I’m gonna rag you about it forever if you close your eyes.”

Eyes were foremost in Kit’s thoughts at the moment: the hard, cold glint of the Martian day on the eyes of the approaching scorpions was unnerving. They were twenty feet away— ten— six—

“Go!” Kit said to Darryl. And as things went dark, he said the word that set off the exception grenade.

When things went bright again, Kit turned to look back the way they had come. Many, many tiny sparkling bits of metal were turning and glittering high in the air, and the ground was completely obscured by a huge cloud of dun-colored dust, from which shot more shards and fragments of scorpion every second. And more, and more, as the explosion seemed to go on forever in the light gravity.

Ronan was staring at the results of the detonation of Kit’s toy. “Janey mack,” he said, “what did you make that out of?”

“A pinhead’s worth of strange matter,” Kit gasped, doubling over as the completed spell finished pulling its energy price out of him. “And three syllables of the Denaturation Fraction.”

“Whoa,” Darryl said.

“Can we sit down for a moment?” Ronan didn’t wait, just picked a nearby boulder. “I have to get my breath…”

Kit needed to get his, too, and for a moment couldn’t find any and just shook his head. Finally he managed to say, “Can’t wait. Got one more problem—”

The other two stared at him: unbelieving in Darryl’s case, slightly wounded in Ronan’s. “You’re really enjoying being the bad-news boy today, aren’t you?” Darryl said. “What now?”

Kit pointed up into the sky, still gasping. “What?” Darryl said. “You said there weren’t any satellites due—”

Kit pointed at Spirit, shaking his head.

Ronan stared at it, then at Kit. “What? What’s the problem?”

After another moment or so, Kit was able to straighten up again. “Everything that happened here just now,” Kit said, and took a long breath, “everything visible, is being transmitted back to Earth!”

Ronan looked at him in bemusement. “But if there aren’t any satellites—”

“There weren’t then. There is now. As of a minute and a half ago, we’re in Odyssey’s camera envelope! And if we tripped any situational triggers in Spirit’s programming, it’ll have sent that to Odyssey for relay, and Odyssey’ll have passed the data back immediately. Either way, a data burst’s on its way back to Earth right now!”

“Okay,” Ronan said, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s just mess with the antennas back on Earth or something—”

Kit shook his head. “Won’t work. There are three Deep Space Network antennas spaced around the planet, and we’d have to waste time figuring out which one’s aimed this way. Our best bet’s probably to interfere with the transmission while it’s on its way. It takes about fifteen minutes for a signal to get to the DSN from Mars.” He looked at Darryl. “If you can jump back to, say, the Moon, and catch the wavefront on the way in, scatter it—?”

“Then it’d just look like there’d been a hole in transmission,” Darryl said. “Got it. How big a hole do you need?”

Kit turned to Ronan. “When did this whole ruckus start?”

Ronan cocked an eye at the sky. “About twenty minutes ago?” he said.

“Okay,” Kit said, and turned to Darryl. “Take it all out, to be safe. You can just beat the wavefront back.”

Darryl nodded and vanished. “Now sit down,” Ronan said to Kit, “before you fall down!” He glanced around him, plainly not convinced that the excitement was over. “I’ll keep an eye on things…”

Kit sat down and tried to breathe more easily. It was tough: the grenade spell had not been cheap as wizardries went. “Thanks.”

“And that really was smart of you, the speeding-up-time bit,” Ronan said in a low voice. “Had to fight with Dar about that: he expects it.”

Kit laughed under his breath. “You two should do standup,” he said. “Only thing that’s bothering me now—”

Darryl reappeared a few yards away from them, moseyed over to them. “Done,” he said. “I caught the whole last twenty minutes’ worth of Odyssey’s transmissions and dissolved them to white noise.” He sat down on the rock and looked with concern at Kit. “So what were you bothered about?”

“Why Mars is playing back our imageries like this,” Kit said. “We need to find out. Because if this is going to keep happening every time a human being shows up on the planet from now on, it’s going to have repercussions back on Earth!”

“And not just with NASA or ESA,” Darryl said. “Mamvish’ll be beyond cranky.”

“Forget Mamvish,” Kit said. “And even forget Irina—”

“I wouldn’t,” Ronan said.

Kit rolled his eyes at Ronan. “What I’m trying to say is that the Powers That Be aren’t going to take it kindly if we’ve made one of the planets in our solar system uninhabitable! Humans may need Mars for something one of these days. And even if we don’t, it has a right to be an empty planet at peace. Not one where another species’ weird fantasies are playing themselves out all over it every time a living thing sets foot or tentacle or whatever here!”

“May be too late for that now,” Darryl said.

“Gee, that never occurred to me— thanks for the helpful comment,” Kit said, and looked over at Spirit. “But as for this test, I think we’ve passed. We didn’t run away from the machines and the scorpions. We stayed here and defended our little buddy.”

“So what’s the next move?” Ronan said.

“We go on to the next site,” Kit said. “Or I do.”

Ronan and Darryl looked strangely at him. “What?” said Ronan.

Kit stood up, dusted the usual rusty grit off his pants. “Think about it. Each time, we saw a Mars that one of us brought with him. First time, Darryl’s crazy, scary Mars movie. Second time, Ronan’s rock-opera Orson Welles war machines. We aced both those scenarios—”

“You mean they just barely didn’t kill us,” Ronan said.

“Whatever,” Kit said. “But I think the trouble was that we overloaded the scenarios that the old buried spells were producing. Each of them was based on one wizard’s imagery. But when three wizards responded— or more than three there, for a moment”— and he gave Darryl an amused look—“something went wrong and everything got all hostile. The spells read it as an attack, maybe, instead of a test.”

Kit glanced over at Spirit, sitting sedate in its crater. “Logically,” he said, “the next scenario that comes real should be mine. So let’s try it differently this time. I’ll do this next jump by myself.”

“Whoa, now,” Darryl said, “a while ago you were all about us not splitting up!”

“If I can’t come up with a new plan when the old one starts looking dumb,” Kit said, “I don’t think I’ll last long in this business.” He pulled his wand out of his belt. “Look, you can eavesdrop on me. No problem with that. But let me go investigate this one by myself for just a few minutes. If I need help, believe me, I’ll yell for it fast.”

Ronan looked at Kit dubiously. “Another hunch?”

Kit thought about that. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes. If things go okay, you two can follow me in a few minutes.”

He pulled out his manual, paged through to the spot where his beam-me-up spell was written down, and added the fourth set of coordinates to which the superegg had sent its signal. It was down near the south pole, at about longitude 240. There was a long, high scarp there, Thyles Rupes, angling northeast to southwest, and around it a scatter of craters named after notable science-fiction people who had worked with Mars: Heinlein, Weinbaum, Campbell. Hutton, the target crater, was west of them.

“Let’s go,” he said to the manual.

The brief night of an on-planet transit spell fell around him.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, day—

***

Hutton was a big crater, something like a hundred kilometers across. Kit had known that its walls wouldn’t be visible from where he was planning to come out in the midst of the crater proper. What was visible, and caught him by surprise for a few seconds, was the thick haze lying low all around on the horizon as he turned and took in his surroundings.

“Yeah,” Kit said softly. “I should have expected this…” For the crater was full of air: not the normal thin and freezing-cold Martian atmosphere, but thicker air, as full of oxygen as Earth’s, and no colder than an average spring day. A soft haze overlay the horizon near the crater walls. And near the center of the crater, where he stood—

—lay a city.

The center of it bristled with spires that shone in a summer sunlight that would last, unbroken, for some months: for this close to either Martian pole would be midnight-sun country. The high towers of polished metal glinted green, and chief among them, more than a mile high, a tower armored in brilliant metallic scarlet speared up against the rusty-red landscape.

Nor was this the desolate red-brown stone and dirt vista of the Mars from which Kit had just jumped. Spread out all around the high city walls were thousands of smaller buildings, metallic and gleaming like the greater ones. Beyond them stretched dark blotches against the ground—some kind of wiry, rugged plant. Forestry, Kit thought. And above the landscape, the air was alive with airships darting here and there about their business, glinting when the high pink sun caught them. An uneducated observer might have thought he was looking at a Mars of the future, a terraformed place, especially when they caught sight of the slender streams of liquid water meandering here and there across the rugged countryside.

But Kit knew the ancient Barsoomian city of Greater Helium when he saw it— even if no such place had ever existed. A long while back, it seemed now, he’d been drawing it in his notebook at school. Now here it was, no smudgy pencil rendering, but the city he’d seen in his imagination, his dreams. I was right, Kit thought. We’ve each brought our own favorite Mars with us. The real one, whatever it is, is underneath what we’re seeing. All we have to do is break through… if we can.

And can I? This one’s tailored to me. Whatever’s running these scenarios has been in my head and knows it’s one I won’t want to break.

Kit frowned. Cool as this was, it was only a substitute or standin for the truth that underlay it— the Mars that Kit had been looking for all these months. That lost history was calling out to him now in this peculiar idiom, and Kit shivered all over at the sense of ancient secrecy looming over the scene before him. It was what Mr. Mack had warned him about: You’ll want to get into their heads, into their lives, and you won’t be able to get enough of it… Kit gulped with the excitement of it. Someone, or something, is using this to try to tell me something important. So let’s find out what that is.

He started walking, or rather bouncing, toward the gates of the city. They were huge slabs of sheer green-tinged metal, like the city’s outer walls and as tall as they were: even from his starting point, maybe a half mile away, the gates were impressive. A hundred feet high? Maybe higher—Kit had the Scarlet Tower to judge by, so he started doing simple fractions in his head as he got closer, passing among the lesser buildings. As he went, tall and handsome red-skinned humanoid people wearing beautifully wrought, art deco–looking ornaments of silver and gold and green—and very little clothing— looked curiously at him. Let’s say a hundred and fifty feet high. Think of the machinery it takes to move those—

So what?? Darryl said in his head. What’s going on?

“I’m fine,” Kit said under his breath as he made his way onto a broad white-paved roadway that led toward the city gates.

And nobody’s shooting at you? Ronan said.

“No!” Kit said. “You just want an excuse to start shooting somebody up yourself. Can you just chill for a little and let me see what’s going on here?”

It took them a while to get started with the shooting last time… Ronan said.

Kit rolled his eyes as he got closer to the gates. “You are genuinely a hopeless case,” he said. “Having the One’s Champion in your head has taught you all kinds of bad habits! Always looking to pick a fight with somebody—”

Kit paused, then, bouncing in place for a moment in the midst of the wide boulevard. The shining, unbroken expanse of the huge gates before him had suddenly developed a dark seam. They’re opening—

He headed toward the gates again, picking up the pace. Ahead of him the gates continued to open, revealing an interior at first shadowed by the walls, then glinting in the sunlight that the opening was letting in, so that Kit got a slowly broadening view of the massive bases of the towers inside.

Down at ground level, tiny against the gates, a single form slipped out through the widening opening and made its way toward him. It was bouncing along as Kit was, but so gracefully that the motion was more like a dance. Something dark was waving along behind it. What is that, some kind of veil—?

But as the two of them drew closer together, Kit realized that what he was seeing was long, long dark hair, rippling as easily as water or smoke in the morning breeze and the lighter gravity. The figure approaching him was just slightly taller than he was, coppery-skinned like everyone else here, and wearing the same kind of handsome ornaments around throat and wrists and ankles and waist, flashing blindingly pink-white where the clear sunlight caught them—

She slowed down as she got closer. Kit became aware that he was staring …and he didn’t care. Here was someone who’d also been a drawing in the margin of his notebook, and once again this unexpected and stunningly fleshed-out reality far surpassed the uncertain, much-corrected sketch.

She couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than he was. Wide, dark eyes; a heartshaped face; long, long slender legs— and besides the gorgeous jewelry, she wasn’t wearing a whole lot. This is definitely not exactly Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Kit thought, wavering between embarrassment and a slightly hungry fascination, because she’s actually got some clothes on …though calling a few wisps and drifts of something like blue smoke “clothes” might be stretching the point. Kit started wondering whether the inaccuracy was due to the power running this illusion, or some backstage piece of his mind chickening out on him. But then the thought went out of his head as the girl approaching him got close enough to see his face clearly.

Her whole face changed. Her expression had been merely hopeful before: now it became one of unalloyed joy. She hurried to him, exerting such perfect control over her movements in the light gravity that she came to an effortless, bounceless halt right in front of Kit, close enough to reach out and take his hand— which she did.

Kit blushed all over. What is this? said one part of his mind: while the rest of him, mind and body together, said Wow, look at her, she’s— just wow…!

That was when she spoke, in a soft, small voice that was almost inaudible with astonishment. “You are here at last!” the girl said. “I cannot believe it. You’re here at last.”

She stood there holding Kit’s hand as if she never wanted to let go of it, gazing into his eyes, and put up her other hand to touch his face.

“Welcome home, my warrior,” she said. “Oh, welcome home!”

10: Burroughs

Nita appeared in a puff of browny-beige dust and came down on the ground with a slight jar. She glanced around the stony red landscape, taking it all in; the little Spirit rover off to one side, and the still-settling smoke from what appeared to be a recent explosion. What the heck have they been doing here? she thought. “Kit?”

“You just missed him,” said a voice from behind her.

She turned. Sitting there on a large sandstony-looking rock were Ronan and Darryl, looking at her with amusement. Darryl turned to Ronan. “You owe me a fiver,” he said.

Ronan rolled his eyes, dug around in his pocket for a moment, and came up with a bill, which he stuffed into Darryl’s held-out hand. Darryl accepted it with a smirk, then stared at it as he unrolled it. “Wait a minute,” Darryl said, annoyed, “this isn’t even from Earth!”

“So stop whinging,” Ronan said, “and go get it changed!” He gave Nita an ironical look. “You’d think he couldn’t even get off the planet, the way he carries on.”

Nita gave them a look and stepped away for a moment, as they were plainly in one of those boy moods that involved being as unhelpful as possible. The rover was sitting quietly by itself, for all the world as if it was having a perfectly ordinary day; whatever had been going on around here, it seemed unaffected. “Where’d he go?”

“A crater called Hutton,” Ronan said. “About five minutes ago.”

“He was okay when we talked to him last,” Darryl said.

Nita turned back toward them. “Was okay?” she said. “You mean you’re not in touch with him now?”

Ronan stood up and dusted himself off. “No,” he said. “We’ve been trying to reach him since just before you turned up.”

She stared at them in concern and surprise. “Well, if you can’t reach him,” Nita said, “why the heck haven’t you gone over there to find out what’s going on?”

“Because we can’t,” Ronan said, sounding annoyed. “The site’s blocked for transit.”

Nita let out a long breath as annoyed as Ronan’s. “Dammit,” she said, “this keeps happening…” And she didn’t like the sound of it. “Okay,” she said under her breath, “we’ll see about that. Bobo?”

But that was when her phone went off, loudly starting to sing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” from deep in her jeans pocket. “Now what?” Nita muttered, pulling the phone out and hitting the “answer” button. “Yeah?”

“Neets?” Carmela’s voice said. “I dropped S’reee off in Great South Bay, and I’m back home now. But I find that we have a little situation going on here…”

“Here, too,” Nita said. “You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”

“Three words,” Carmela said. “Helena’s home early.”

“Oh God,” Nita said.

“I’ve been trying to get through to Kit,” Carmela said, “but I can’t reach his phone. Neither can Mama or Pop. I tried using the closet to get over there, but it won’t let me: keeps blathering about some kind of local limitation. And the Aged Parents are going to throw some kind of non-tasteful fit if he doesn’t turn up pretty soon, because we’re supposed to be having a big happy family reunion right about now, and we are, as you might say, missing an element. You have any luck reaching him yet?”

“Working on that right now,” Nita said. “Give me ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Okay,” Carmela said. “Just tell him this is not negotiable, and he needs to hurry.”

“Gotcha,” Nita said. She hung up and stuffed the phone in her pocket, then turned to Darryl and Ronan. “You two coming?” she said.

Darryl jumped up, dusting himself off. “Now, where were we?” Nita said.

You were about to let me do what I do best, Bobo said. Handle the fiddly stuff for you.

Nita briefly made a wry face at the concept of wizardry itself wanting her to view it as a laborsaving device. “Okay,” she said, “get handling. But what’s going on over there? Why’s that site blocked?”

The wizardry running over there is personality-keyed, Bobo said after a moment. It has been built to exclude intrusions until it has run its course.

“Oh, great,” Nita said.

“Problem?” Darryl said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “You might say that. Bobo, do you mind allowing these two to hear you as well? Just so they’ll stop staring at me as if I’ve gone insane.”

Ronan and Darryl suddenly acquired extremely innocent expressions. That’s not a problem, the peridexis said in a pleasant tenor, like that of a very high-end television announcer.

“Good,” Nita said. “Bobo, we need to get over there, anyway— check out the ground; see what we can find out about what’s going on. Because Kit has business on Earth.”

I should be able to inject you three into the space where the wizardry is running, Bobo said. But it sounded dubious.

“I know that tone,” Nita said. “Are you suggesting that doing this might be dangerous for Kit?”

I have insufficient data for such a suggestion. But the wizardry running in the vicinity of Hutton crater is already under some strain. There’s a possibility that it might fail completely if too much stress is put on it— which attempting to inject you into the structure of the wizardry itself might cause. And should it fail, it is difficult to predict what the effects would be on Kit, as the spell presently running is doing so under a structure cloak.

That made Nita stop and think. Such cloaks were used by wizards who were working spells in a competitive environment— one where they were concerned about other wizards discovering and possibly appropriating parts of their spells. It wasn’t a mode that Earth wizards usually found themselves working in these days. WIzardry as practiced on the planet in this day and age was routinely seen as a cooperative effort. But it hadn’t always been this way, and Nita knew that on many other planets it still wasn’t so, for cultural or psychological reasons.

Ronan was frowning. “So even you can’t see the details of what the spell is that’s working inside the cloak,” he said.

No, the peridexis said.

Nita shook her head. “A spell always works,” she said. “Even wizardry itself can’t stop a spell that’s running, or break the rules it’s running under.” And she got a sly look. “But if we can change the conditions of the area where it’s running—”

By simply forcing the issue and presenting your transit into that area as a fait accompli, which would cause the spell to lapse without actually failing. Normally the structure of wizardry itself would not allow such a transit. And Bobo sounded momentarily smug. But since I am wizardry—

Darryl was looking confused. “You said that spell was personality-keyed?” he said. “To Kit?”

There is another personality named in the key as well, Bobo said. But I cannot determine anything further about it due to the cloak.

Nita shook her head. “Don’t know what to make of that. We can ask Kit after we get him out of there. Meanwhile—” She grinned. “Let’s get down there, find out what the rules of the game are, and change ’em. You two ready?”

Ronan and Darryl nodded.

They all vanished.

***

In front of the gates of the mythical Barsoomian city of Helium, Kit was looking with amazement into the eyes of the girl who was holding his hand. “Uh,” he said, “…hi!”

She burst out laughing at him, caught his free hand in her other one, and squeezed them both. The laughter was so delighted and overjoyed that Kit wasn’t made at all uncomfortable by it. What threw him, though, was the look in the stranger’s eyes. It was absolute certainty, comfortable recognition, and a strange sort of unspoken relief at his presence— a sense that now that he was here, everything would be okay. Kit stood there gazing at her and trying to figure out where he normally saw a look like that. Then he realized: Nita looked at him that way.

But Nita wasn’t here… and this was somebody Kit had never met.

She was laughing again. “Oh, Khretef,” she said, “what’s this strange look you’re wearing? You’d think you had never stood here before!” But then she paused, looking at him more closely. “Is there something I’m missing? A long time you’ve been gone, yes, a long journey, but maybe something else needs saying between us?”

Uh— how about ‘Who the heck are you and what’s going on here?’ Kit thought. But aloud he said, “Well, just that I’m on errantry, and I greet you—”

Her eyes didn’t leave his: but some of the joy ebbed out of her expression, and Kit found himself very sorry to see it go. “Well, of course,” she said, her voice trying hard to keep its certainty, “of course you’re a wizard, Khretef; how else could we be here? How else would you have won me? And my father is waiting for you, he’ll have no choice now but to admit that you were right! But what’s the matter? Has something happened on the way—?”

Kit blinked. This was not at all like being shot at by war machines or rubber-suited spacemen: and as those pretty dark eyes searched his for some clue as to what was wrong with him, Kit started wondering whether he preferred the more impersonal style of interaction with these scenarios. He had to work hard to remember the superegg, to keep reminding himself that what was happening here was a key to what had really happened on Mars in the ancient days— something he had to be as tough in handling as he had been with the metal scorpion-beasts.

“My name’s not Khretef,” he said finally, trying not to say it in a way that would hurt her. “It’s Kit.”

She looked actively confused. “Is this some quest-name you’ve taken along the way?” she said softly. “Something wizardly? Of course I don’t understand all the things you have to do in your art, not the way my father would—”

“No,” Kit said. “It’s just my name.” He paused: she knew him and there was no way he was going to be able to ask her this without hurting her, so he just said it. “What’s yours?”

She took a long breath. All this while her eyes had never left his; now at last they glanced away toward the distant, hazy horizon, as if for a moment she couldn’t bear what was happening. But then she steeled herself, looked back at him. She dropped his hands, straightened up, tilted her chin up.

“Perhaps I see,” she said. “This is some matter of spelling that you’re forbidden to describe to me: forbidden even to hint at. Well enough. It won’t be said that Iskard’s daughter is less able for the challenge than the warrior-wizard who went out to save us and now returns.” And without warning, that smile came back to her face and her eyes: though this time there was a little edge of wry challenge on it, something that said, When you’re finished with this game, I’m going to take it out of your hide!

She tossed her head, and that wonderful hair rippled lightly around her. “Aurilelde I am,” she said, and suddenly she seemed significantly taller than Kit, and unquestionably far more regal. “Iskard Tawan Shamaska is my father: the en-Tawa Shamaska are my people, and this is our city Prevek.” She glanced over her shoulder at the walls and the towers, then back to Kit. “And you,” she said, that glint of challenge catching fire in her eye again, “are Khretef Radrahla Eilithen, son of the Ardat Eilittri, whose name is not spoken—” Then she grinned at him. “But Kit we’ll call you, since you say that’s who you are today.”

Kit had to smile back. The difference between this encounter with another Mars and the previous two was getting more pronounced all the time: he had half expected Aurilelde to name herself after a princess of Mars, or rather of Burroughs’s Mars, old Barsoom. But the reconstruction seemed not to be going quite that far this time. “Aurilelde,” he said.

“Kit,” she said. She gave him a level look. “Well, let’s go in and see my father, since you’ve returned,” she said. “But Father will wonder if we’ve fallen out, when he sees the set of your face, and of mine. And so much rides on this. Can you tell me nothing about why you won’t avouch your right name?”

Kit was wondering where to go from here: but since he was inside this scenario, and it wasn’t trying to kill him, it seemed smartest to play along. “I can’t,” he said as they turned toward the city gates. “Maybe it would be simplest just to say that there’s a lot I don’t remember—”

“Well,” Aurilelde said, “what would be so different about that?” They passed in through the gates together, and as they did, Aurilelde threw Kit an amused look. “You’ve been forgetting things since we met. Though perhaps that’s not something I’d say in front of my father.”

Her expression was still serene enough, but there was a sound to her voice as if Aurilelde was thinking of some old trouble that she didn’t want to revive.

Now, what’s that about? Kit thought as they came out into the wide plaza inside the gates. This is so weird. She really thinks she knows me. Where do I go with this? What’s Mars trying to use all this stuff to tell me? Nothing I can do but keep my eyes open, try to pick up on the message, see what the imagery has to tell me—

Kit craned his neck up to look at the spearing towers and the little bronze-and-gilt airships veering and darting among them. Seen close up, their design looked handsomely retro, with spiky fins and a surprising number of rivets. Late Marillan, something whispered in his ear. The last of the technology to be preserved from the Great Flight. And there will be no more—

Kit blinked. Aurilelde followed his glance. “Yes, it’s busy, isn’t it?” she said as they crossed the plaza. “People have been coming in from the outmarch towns all morning.” She laughed, and for the first time that laughter was uneasy: from the sound of it, Kit thought there was something at the back of her mind that Aurilelde didn’t care to be thinking of right now. “Very many thought that someone else would come to the gates first this morning—”

The nervousness in her voice came through much more clearly just then, and as Kit looked over at her, Aurilelde fell silent. The two of them continued across the plaza, and Kit became aware that the two of them were becoming the focus of attention for the many other people there, men and women dressed as Aurilelde was— Or somewhat dressed, Kit thought— who watched them pass. Many of those people bowed as Aurilelde and Kit went by, though in some cases those who bowed were wearing slightly dubious expressions, and looked at their neighbors as if unsure what their opinions might be of the two who walked through the middle of it all.

They were making for a high archway across the plaza, one that apparently led into the bottom levels of the Scarlet Tower. Aurilelde, catching Kit’s glance at the bowing people of the city, said softly, “The usual doubts. Rorsik’s party in the Chambers has been stirring up what trouble it can, though they’ve suspected that he’d never be able to find the prize you set out to bring us.”

He wouldn’t have had the courage to find it on his own, anyway, the back of Kit’s brain whispered to him.

Kit blinked again: but then he realized that this was what he had been half hoping would happen— that the spell itself would clue him in as to what was going on here, what tack he should take. I wanted it to tell me what was going on.

So let’s have it, Kit said silently to the magic. Who’s Rorsik? What’s going on here? Are these people the original Martians? And what happened to them? Tell me!

The archway before them was guarded by men in leather crossbelts and more utilitarian-looking clothing than Kit had seen so far—loincloths of some shimmering metallic material. The guards blocked the way with long, crossed lances that appeared to be tipped with something like diamond. Not Barsoomian weapons, Kit thought. Something else is seeping through the spell’s appearance now, the way Aurilelde’s name did.

“Aurilelde—” Kit said as they made for the archway, and the guards there, seeing them, came to attention and pulled the weapons out of their way, raising them to the salute. “What exactly is your father going to be expecting me to do?”

She shot him a slightly surprised look as they entered the Scarlet Tower. “Well, of course you’ve brought the Nascence—”

Kit didn’t say anything for a moment, having been thrown off slightly by the discovery that the metal of the Scarlet Tower was transparent: the Sun falling on its outer surface poured straight through and splashed to the white floor like blood. He paused, seeing that they had stepped into the heart of a great atrium. All around the inner skin of the Tower, platforms and floors reached up for more than three-quarters of a mile, ceasing only in one final floor near the one-mile mark that took the Tower’s whole width at that height.

Aurilelde had kept on walking for a moment: now, though, she paused, looking over her shoulder, surprised that he hadn’t answered her. “Kit,” she said, very quietly, like someone saying a strange word and fearing to be overheard saying it. “The Nascence. You do have it, don’t you?”

Kit looked at her and felt a sudden terrible wash of embarrassment and fear. “No,” he said. “But I know where it is.”

Then he blinked again. I do?

But the whisper inside Kit’s head was coaching him now, and things were starting to come back into focus— slowly, as if he’d been waking up from a long sleep, these last few minutes. It was like that time when he’d been away with the family on vacation, and they’d changed motels three or four nights in a row. The fourth morning he’d awakened and stared at the ceiling, absolutely unable to work out where he was or how he’d gotten there. Now once again he’d been seeing everything around him with that same traveler’s confusion, uncertain where or when he was—

Aurilelde retraced her steps to him, reached out to him, and took him by the arms. It was an urgent gesture, a frightened one. “If you don’t have it,” she whispered, “why did you come? You know what they’ll do! Rorsik especially! He’ll claim forfeiture! He’ll say you’ve proven unable to defend the city from its enemies, to free us to take our rightful place in this world. He’ll accuse you of treason! You know he’s always wanted an excuse to do that. And if my father agrees—”

“He won’t.” The whisper in his head was certain now. “Rorsik is the only man in the New Lands that your father wants in the Tower even less than he wants me.”

Aurilelde’s face went pained at that, and she opened her mouth to say something. But then from across the huge interior of the Tower, a crazy, yodeling yelling went up. Aurilelde turned, and so did Kit—

Running at them from one of many doors right across the atrium came a glinting green shape, many-legged, all its claws clacking on the polished floor as it came howling toward them. Kit saw the two raised pairs of claws in front, realized what he was seeing, and snatched the wand out of his belt and got it ready—

Aurilelde grabbed his arm. “Khr— Kit!” she said. “No, don’t—”

But there was no need. One second Kit had believed himself to be looking at a monster, another example of the things that had just attacked him. Just? said the voice in his head. But now it seemed a month ago, a year. And the horrible thing running toward him was suddenly harmless, even funny, as the hind claws scrabbled for purchase on the floor, as it hurled itself toward him. “Takaf!” he said, and started laughing: he couldn’t help it. He got down on one knee.

The sathak flung itself at him, howling in inane greeting. Kit shoved the wand back into his belt and batted the claws away in the usual way. Then he grabbed the bizarre body, flipped it onto its back, and started rubbing the soft underbelly plating in all the right places, while Takaf squirmed and waved his claws around and made the usual idiot of himself.

Some other part of Kit stared at the strange thing on the floor, obsessed by a dream-memory of glinting green claws and deadly, empty metal eyes. But his waking mind now knew that the cold-hearted mechanical mav-sathakti were just imitations of the sathak, the few remaining companion-creatures from the First World to have survived here: and Takaf was probably the friendliest, most faithful, and dimmest of them all.

It took some minutes before Takaf had had enough reassurance that his master had returned for him to stop howling his relief and delight to the uttermost heights of the Tower. Then Kit stood up and looked over at Aurilelde, smiling slightly. “I couldn’t go up there without him,” he said. “Last time it was the three of us. This time it had to be the three of us again.”

Aurilelde looked at him, and a small, relieved smile started to creep across her face. “You are you again,” she whispered. “It’s truly you, come back as you promised. Even from so far, from so long! You had me frightened there for a while—”

Kit shook his head. “Let’s go up,” he said. “Let Rorsik bring on anything he likes. When we’re together, we can take on anything he’s got. Even the Darkness and the Doom—”

Aurilelde shivered. But she took Kit’s arm, and they headed across the Tower together to the transit cluster at the heart of the ground floor, with Takaf scuttling along behind.

The centermost pad in the cluster was empty. The three of them stepped on it together, and under them the circle of white stone lifted and began levitating into the Tower space, heading for the topmost floor and the tiny opening in it. “How many of them are up there, do you think?” Kit said.

Aurilelde shook her head. “Hundreds,” she said as they rose upward more and more quickly. “Rorsik has been whispering in a lot of ears that he’d take Father’s place if you don’t prove his trust in you to be wise. No one dares to be absent: everyone wants to prove they’re on the right side when the trouble starts…”

Kit swallowed, hearing that. But at the back of his mind, something odd was going on. The stranger-soul, the one who had been looking through his eyes and finding everything so weird and frightening, was now settling itself into a peculiar armed readiness, alert and waiting to see what would happen next. It was ready to intervene. Its heart was a wizard’s heart, and it seemed to be saying to him, I’ve come up against the Darkness every now and then, and It hasn’t done all that well. Let’s see what It’s got this time—

The pad of stone was drawing near the upper level now, and the aperture that would admit it was growing bigger and bigger above them. “’Lelde,” Kit said, while Takaf stood staring up at the many eyes gazing down at them through the nearing, glassy floor, “are you ready?”

“By myself?” She shivered. “But if you are— then I can be ready with you.”

He hugged Aurilelde’s arm to his side for a moment, then stood free of her as they ascended through the floor, concentrating on standing straight and tall beside her, trying to match a Daughter’s proud dignity with his own. As the pad locked into place, he heard the rustle and mutter of the crowd about them, felt the pressure of the hundreds of eyes on them: the fear, the unease, and in some cases the hate, bizarrely paired with hope. They hate it that they need an enemy to save them, Kit thought. They wish it could be any other way—

The two of them stepped out onto the ruby floor and headed for the Throne. Takaf came clacking along behind them, glancing nervously from side to side, for he could feel the threat as clearly as the two in front of him. Here, at the top of the Tower, the metal had been altered to let the clear uncolored light of day pour in; and under it, alone on that plain red sandstone bench, Iskard sat awaiting them, arrayed in the robes of the Master of the City, with a short lightgoad in his hand.

As they approached, he rose. Kit looked up at him—a man big and tall even for a Shamaska; the red-skinned face cold, set, and chiseled; the dark eyes cold, too. Only on his daughter did those eyes rest with any affection, and even then only for a moment. There were other influences in the room that mattered more.

Coming closer, Kit tried to keep his face set, too, trying not to betray any response that might upset what was happening. It had taken Iskard long enough to come to some kind of interior accommodation as regarded the relationship between the Daughter of the Shamaska and the son of the man who would have been the Eilith Master had their ancient rivalry followed the normal course. But no courses were normal anymore, nor could they be until both sides were freed to follow their separate fates in the New World—

They came to a halt before the Throne, and Takaf crouched behind them. “Welcome, young Khretef—”

Kit bowed. Aurilelde stood straight. “The Son of the Eilitt has returned,” she said, “bringing with him news of the prize the Master of the City requires.”

“News?” came a harsh voice from the crowd, and within a moment there was movement there, the expected shape forcing itself out into the open.

“My daughter always said you would return,” said Iskard, ignoring the interruption. “Many others had given you up for lost, Khretef. When you ventured out into lands filled with the creatures loosed on us by our ancient enemies, we feared you lost forever. Some there were—” and he looked toward the source of the interruption— “who even said you had betrayed us. But the Daughter spoke for you, and Aurilelde has always been wiser than fear: one who’s been able to see what others couldn’t, a seeress of the Old Light as well as one who sees into the Dark left behind us.”

The people gathered around the Throne rustled and muttered approval, some laying fists to chests and bowing in Aurilelde’s direction. She smiled at her father, and at the reaction of her people, but the expression had an absent-minded quality to it: it was Kit she was watching.

“She has seen nothing,” said the Shamaska man who was now approaching the Throne, “if this child of traitors and murderers has not brought back the Nascence with him! But he has nothing. Otherwise the City would not now still be trapped behind walls that cannot be broken, hemmed in by command of its enemies!”

Kit looked over at the owner of the angry voice now approaching them. He wore robes that were meant to recall the ones worn by the Master of the City, and he carried a lightgoad like the Master’s— through prudently unkindled: the city guards and warriors in the room would not have taken kindly to such a gesture, an overt challenge to the Master’s power. For his own part, Kit, now aware that his own clothes had somewhere along the line transformed themselves to a warrior’s proper harness, simply touched the firesword hanging at his belt and was reassured to hear the metal speak back to him in his mind as usual. That at least was normal, in this time when nothing else was.

“Rorsik,” said Aurilelde’s father in a dreadfully level and quiet voice, “be still. Your time to speak will come all too soon, I fear.” He turned to Kit. “So, Son of Eilitt: where is the Nascence, then?”

“Found, Master of the City,” Kit said, “in the green dunes halfway around the planet, where the enemies of Shamask once hid it.”

“And you should know, traitor, son of traitors,” cried Rorsik, “for it was your people who—”

“Rorsik,” said Iskard, and the lightgoad blazed up in his hand.

Rorsik fell silent.

“You have not brought it, however,” said Iskard.

“No, Master of the City,” Kit said.

The people gathered around muttered in distress. “Then your life is forfeit,” said Rorsik, and his face twisted up in a dreadful smile.

“I can’t produce it,” said Kit, “because it’s been sealed against us. Wizardries greater than ours have been used to render it dormant. It can’t be used to free us until the New World’s soul is found and mated to it. And this we cannot do without the help of the wizards of the Blue Star.”

A mutter of concern went among all those who were gathered to listen. But Rorsik only laughed. “This is mythology!” he shouted. “Just more tales of mysterious unknown magics from one who has everything to gain from spinning out his time among you until you actually start to believe his stories. What else would you expect from a child of the other side, one of those who watched the Darkness and the Doom come down on us, and laughed to see it come, and plotted to leave us to die as our world tore itself apart—”

“The wizards are here now!” Aurilelde said, and every eye in that great room turned to her. “They’ve found the Nascence in the dunes; they released its power; they triggered the tests, even the one that called for the manipulation of time. One has even invoked the Kinship upon himself! Soon we’ll be able to go among them and show them what we need. Then they’ll help us as I foretold, and there’ll be peace at last—”

Rorsik laughed again. “We all know why you want peace, Master’s Daughter! You and your traitor lover. You will sell us all to the Eilitt and destroy your own people. You are nothing but a tool of the ancient Power that sent the Darkness and the Doom upon us to begin with—”

A growl of anger started to go up from around the room. In the back of Kit’s mind, something said, quite clearly, Uh-oh— here we go! I was wondering when that name would come up.

He shivered at the sudden clarity of that voice, and Aurilelde, almost as if she’d heard something, too, glanced at him, worried. Undeterred by the anger of the crowd, Rorsik was shouting, “We can do nothing to make ourselves safe until the Dark Ones are destroyed— until their cities are dust, and the New World is cleansed of them! Only then can we spread safely through this world, make it our own, and resume our place in the light of the Sun as the First Ones, untroubled, in mastery over our world and our system again! And until the Nascence is ours, and the Dark Ones’ cities are revived and wiped out, none of us can be safe—”

Our worlds and our system? There was something about the phrasing that got the uneasy attention of the stranger-soul at the back of Kit’s mind. And something else was happening as well. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck. At his feet, Takaf was hissing, glancing about him with all his eyes, uncertain.

Above them, the sunlight was wavering, looking suddenly strangely faint. Almost everybody standing in that great assemblage under the Tower’s peak stared upward, even Iskard and Rorsik.

But Aurilelde did not. She turned to Kit. “It’s breaking,” she whispered. “It’s breaking too soon. There’s someone else here!”

Kit blinked— and suddenly he was Kit again, not Khretef with Kit watching from the background. It was strange, though, that now he could look at Aurilelde and see her as Khretef did. “It’s all right,” he said. “If it’s breaking, I can guess why. My friends have followed me. The other wizards. No, don’t be afraid! They’re really smart. They can help you! It’s what we came for, to help you—”

But Aurilelde was shaking her head, and her expression was frightened. “One of them is here already,” she said, gazing up into the sky, then looking nervously around her as if she was expecting something sudden to happen. “You can’t stay!”

“It’s okay,” Kit said, “they’re nice guys; you should meet them! One of them in particular is kind of special. Actually, they both are, but I should warn you about this one—”

“I know,” Aurilelde said, looking more alarmed by the moment. Her expression began to darken. “That one cannot come here. It would be dangerous— the City’s protection will break prematurely. You have to go!”

“Huh?”

“Khretef, listen to me. I don’t want you to go but you must!” She was staring around her now in real fright, and Kit started to get frightened himself, besides wanting to calm her down. “If the spell breaks before the right safeguards are in place and there’s enough power present to back them up, everything will be ruined. I won’t be able to stay.You won’t be able to stay! Please, Khr— Kit; I’m sorry, Kit; you have to go before anyone else comes. Please go!”

“All right,” Kit said. “But you have to try to let us help you, and if we can’t come here, how’re we supposed to—”

“I can’t tell you now. Later, later I’ll tell you, but this is a bad time, the wrong time!” Aurilelde was looking pale and scared. “It’s like it was before—when all the times were bad times, when it went cold and the Darkness was coming. We can’t let it come again—not after so long, not after all the time we waited!” She looked like she was about to burst into tears. “Please, Khretef; please go before the spell breaks!”

And now she was actually pushing Kit away, pushing him back toward the pad that had brought them up into the great throne room.

“Okay,” Kit said, backing away, “sure, no problem—” He glanced down and noticed that his clothes had shifted back to jeans and shirt and down vest: the sword that had been hanging at his side was a wand stuck in his belt again. And then as he looked at Aurilelde, he saw that her shape was wavering, too, and the long dark hair vanished and came back again, the beautiful face flickered and went smooth and gray, then came back; the eyes went pale, went dark—

Around him, the sunlight went weak; the Tower itself started to waver, to shimmer—

—was gone. Kit fell.

Just for a second he had a glimpse of the bare red ground, far far beneath. Skywalk! was his first thought, and he felt around in his head with desperate haste for the spell that would make the air go solid under him—

WHAM!

Kit came down on his face much too soon, as if he’d only fallen a few feet. All the same, the impact jarred the breath right out of him. He lay there gasping.

“Whoa,” he heard Darryl say. “Kit, you okay?”

Kit groaned and rolled over.

“If he can make that noise,” said a voice he wasn’t expecting, “he’s fine.”

He opened his eyes. There was a girl looking down at him: dark-haired, but the hair was strangely short. It was odd how much she reminded him of Aurilelde—

He blinked. Nita was looking down at him. Of course it was Nita.

“Where’ve you been?” she said, reaching down to help him up.

Kit staggered as he got to his feet. “Uh,” he said, “in the middle of a really strange experience.”

“Stranger than what we’ve been having?” Ronan said as Kit looked around him. They were near the edge of Hutton crater, and Kit looked southeastward from the crater’s edge to glimpse the edge of the next one over. Then Kit grinned a small crooked grin, for that crater’s name was Burroughs.

“You have no idea,” Kit said. “Come on and I’ll tell you—”

“You’ll tell us later,” Nita said. “You have to go home.”

“What? Why?”

“Helena’s back.”

For a second the name meant absolutely nothing to him… but only for a second. “Oh, no,” Kit said. “Better get it over with…”

“Like you have a choice,” Nita said. “Darryl, can you do the honors? We can all meet up tonight or something and go over the details of what just happened here.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Kit thought. But privately it occurred to him, as Darryl laid a hand on his shoulder, that the details might take considerably longer to sort out.

And as he and Ronan and Darryl all vanished, it seemed to Kit that there was somebody else inside his head who was agreeing with him.

11: Olympus Mons

Nita stood there looking out across the crater called Hutton. It was late in the sol, and the light here would start failing in a while. But a glow of residual wizardry lay over the whole crater, sheening the surface with a thin skin of greenish light, as if with water.

In the midst of it all, Nita could still glimpse something that wasn’t really there anymore. A memory of gleaming towers and spires towered up into the Martian afternoon, the red tower at the heart of it all glancing back light at the setting Sun like a beacon.

She shook her head. Nita didn’t know the planet’s satellite schedule the way Kit did, but she knew that every inch of its surface got covered sooner or later. “Bobo,” she said under her breath, “we’d better stick a shield-spell over this until it fades out. It’s going to have to cover a whole lot of real estate…”

For how long? Bobo said.

Nita shook her head. There was no telling how long this effect might linger: the wizardry that had initially fueled it had surprising staying power. “Maybe a couple of hours?” she said, but it was a guess at best. “Can you get any sense of how much oomph is left in the original spell?”

A fair amount, the peridexis said. You could parasitize it, if you wanted to .

“You mean tell the illusion to hide itself?”

Yes. That will save you having to make the energy outlay for the shield yourself. And it’ll run the spell down faster.

“I’m all for that,” Nita said. “Let’s do it.”

A moment later the heat-shimmer of the simplest kind of visual shield came alive in the air above the city and spread itself downward toward her in an expanding dome. Seconds later, nothing was visible but a duplication of the rock-tumble and cratery landscape directly beyond the city’s limits. “Okay,” Nita said under her breath, “that should keep the neighbors from getting too crazy…” For there were already enough people on Earth who got all overexcited about rock formations that they insisted as seeing as faces and pyramids and whatnot—people who also insisted these “carvings” were proof that the doings of alien civilizations were being covered up by one government or another. Sometimes I wish wizards could just come out and tell them how hard it’s been to find out anything on the subject, even when you’re right down here walking around on the planet!

But that wasn’t likely to happen for a long time. Nita glanced around, seeing nothing outside the shield but the usual scatter of reddish stones and sand. “Everything behaving itself at the other spell sites?” she said.

Yes; those wizardries have run their course. Just as well— they were potentially quite dangerous, especially the second one.

Nita blinked as the peridexis showed her a few glimpses of the previous visitations. “Yeah,” she said, and shivered: she’d never been wild about the whole war-machine concept.

But certainly elegant in that the wizardries were built with the expectation that each triggering wizard would set the parameters of his own test… and then be required to understand the trigger in order to defuse the attack.

Nita stood looking southward for a moment. “Sounds almost like you approve, Bobo.”

I can hardly fail to appreciate good workmanship in a spell, that’s all, Bobo said, sounding a little hurt.

She snickered a little as she turned, looking southeastward toward Burroughs crater. “Well,” Nita said, “maybe it’s just as well I wasn’t on site when one of those other spells was live. No telling what might have turned up.”

She turned back toward were the city was hidden and abruptly realized that something was standing between her and the slight waver of the force field. It was a small red-suited alien creature wearing what looked like oversize white sneakers, white gloves, a green metal tutu, and a shiny green helmet that appeared to have a scrub brush attached to the top of it. Out of a dark and otherwise featureless face, large oval eyes regarded Nita with mild alarm.

“What happened to the kaboom?” the creature said. “There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!” And he scuttled through the force field and vanished.

Nita just stood there for a second. “Bobo …?!”

Just a flicker of residual spell artifact, Bobo said, unconcerned. Nothing to worry about.

Oh yeah? Not sure I want to know what this says about my relationship with Mars. “Do me a favor?” Nita said as she headed for the force field herself.

Speak, demand: I’ll answer.

“If there’s a spell against the use of an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, get it ready. Just in case…”

Nita stepped through the shield, looking cautiously around her. To her relief, there was no further sign of her own brief Martian moment. But the city was there: a handsome place, futuristic-looking in a charming and retro way— doubtless accurately reflecting Kit’s take on the Burroughs Martian books. Nita had read them years previously, but for some reason their vision hadn’t really appealed to her. She’d had too much trouble syncing the writer’s ideas about the Martian climate and terrain with what people now knew to be true about the place. And the concept of egg-laying humanoids and green-skinned, multi-armed tusky guys riding ten-legged lizard creatures all over the landscape and shooting at each other with radium guns simply struck her as funny.

He likes it, though, Nita thought. Just what makes it so interesting for him? The whole place lay still and quiet now, the wizardry running down. But… I wonder. I should still be able to see what he saw, if I work at it. It’s just the recent past, after all, and the imagery was wizardry-based to begin with. I might be able to use the visionary talent a little to patch into it.

It would be like the viewing she’d been doing in the library cavern a while ago, though she would have to power it herself. Nita closed her eyes. Let’s see—

The proper state of mind took a few minutes to achieve. As she’d been discovering more and more often lately, this kind of vision was usually more about letting go than about staring at something and willing yourself to see the reality behind it. Realities were shy, Nita was discovering. To get a good look at them up close, you had to tempt them out by holding still and letting them get curious about you— the way a nonwizardly person might pique the curiosity of a wild bird by standing still for a long time with an outstretched handful of birdseed.

When she started getting that sense that things outside were becoming curious about her, she opened her eyes and looked around casually. The city was alive now, as Kit had seen it. Little ships were streaking around among the towers, and Nita noted that some of them looked a lot like those she’d seen as part of the exodus from Shamask-Eilith. Interesting …And then she caught sight of the gates of the city starting to open.

Hmm, she thought. Let’s have a look at that.

Instantly Nita was down there, standing on the wide white roadway outside the gates. So was Kit— or the Kit of a while ago. And as the gates opened, out came something that Nita hadn’t quite been expecting …

Would you get a load of that, Nita thought. A genuine Martian princess. Well, sort of genuine.

Nita walked around them, observing, as Kit and the stranger met. God, Nita thought, she’s really pretty. Though did Kit even notice, the way she’s dressed? Or not dressed.

Her smile was more wistful than annoyed. There was nothing wrong with Nita’s figure: it was average for her age. But she couldn’t help but feel scrawny and non-toned next to this interplanetary pinup girl. And the way the princess moved, and the way her hair floated in the air, made Nita feel clumsy and inelegant. But this isn’t about elegance,Nita thought. There’s something else going on here. Specifically— that spell was personality-locked. Whoever designed this piece of work wasn’t looking for just anybody. They were looking for Kit.

But why?

Nita watched that beautiful shape come close to Kit, taking his hand, looking into his eyes with real emotion. But as she watched, she caught a glimpse of something else under the red-Martian illusion. Something dark—

Now what the—? But the glimpse was gone, and she was looking at the beautiful girl and Kit again.

Nita frowned, then let out a long breath and shut her eyes again. Don’t try to force it, she thought. Doitsu and the other koi had said it often enough. Vision comes in its own time. Pushing won’t help, but intention will. Be patient: wait. But wait with purpose.

She stood quiet and waited, thinking of the sun on the water on the koi pond in back of Tom’s house: the ripple and the flicker of it, coexisting with what lay under the surface, only hiding what was under there when you looked at it from the wrong angle. There was no rush: what she needed to see wanted to be seen, would be waiting for her when…

…she opened her eyes again. Standing in front of Kit was a tall, slender young girl, not red-skinned, but gray— as gray as polished stone. Around her head, smooth as a sculpture’s, clung and wavered a long rippling cloud of hair that was more like smoke than anything else and was a deep twilight blue. Her clothing did not change, and under its light veiling and the glint of her ornaments, her body merely hinted at female contours without showing the anatomical details that would have been normal for humans on Earth.

So, Nita thought, this is what the people of the First World made themselves into after they came. This is someone from Shamask-Eilith …and now, by location anyway, a Martian.

The eyes looking into Kit’s were pupilless and solid, and their depths were that same vivid dark blue, almost black: but they were expressive— hopeful and, yes, overjoyed, but also frightened. It’s as if whoever lives behind those eyes is scared this can’t be true, Nita thought. As if she sees something else happening: something much worse than this.

For just a second those indigo eyes glanced in Nita’s direction. Then immediately they looked away again, disturbed and afraid. A sense of déjà vu promptly caught hold of Nita, disturbing and dissolving the vision— but not before she remembered what it had reminded her of. That glimpse in the mirror the other morning: instead of seeing herself, seeing this stranger, with the strange implication that they were somehow connected. Somehow the same.

“Bobo,” Nita said.

At your command, imperious leader.

Nita began to wonder whether Bobo had been spending too much data-grab time slumming on the local nostalgia-TV cable channels. “That name-development and analysis utility I was using on Carmela?”

What about it?

“Run it on Kit’s welcoming committee. Save the analysis for me. I’ll look at it later.”

Running. Power deduction will be deferred until the end of the run.

“Fine.”

Nita scowled as the more accessible illusion of the Martian princess re-manifested itself—copper-skinned, doe-eyed, the perfect humanoid alien, physically gorgeous: a genuine fantasy heroine and a teenage boy’s dream. But younger than she is in the books, Nita thought, walking around the Martian princess figure and Kit as they looked into each other’s eyes and spoke words she couldn’t hear. Someone’s designed this particular apparition just for Kit. How? And why?

She stopped, folded her arms, and stood there for a few moments, trying hard to think straight and not be thrown off by her own feelings, especially when she had no information to go on. Yet suddenly it came back to Nita what that stone had said to her up on top of Elysium Mons. No one’s been here. Just him, and her. The other one.

The other one.

Nita scowled. What’s going on between them? she thought. It wasn’t like she was jealous or anything. But she knew Kit, and this sudden out-of-nowhere relationship made no sense to her. Also, there was no missing the sexy-looking component to this meeting. It was being used on Kit as some kind of way of getting at him, she was sure.

Nita frowned harder. Though she’d occasionally been curious about it, Kit’s fantasy life wasn’t her business. But someone else, someone or something associated with the Shamask-Eilith presence here on Mars, was not above exploiting it for its own purposes. And that was worrying Nita.

Especially now that she thought she knew why Mars had so long been associated with war in human thought. Nita knew from her reading in the manual that all living thought was connected—though the connections could take strange twists and turnings through space-time. Whatever the mechanism, some distant whisper of the ancient conflicts obsessing those who fled here from the First World had over the millennia filtered through into the dreams and imaginings of the beings on the next planet over. We’ve always known, Nita thought, maybe since we started writing things down. Maybe even longer.

Kit had come here looking for the romance and mystery of lost ancient life, and the possibility of resurrecting it, making contact with it, learning its secrets, helping an empty world find its life again. Nita wondered what he’d think when he found out that the Martians weren’t indigenous, but immigrants.

And based on the past behavior of the species that, it now seemed, had lain hidden on Mars for so long— assuming that the history that she and Carmela and S’reee had read or experienced in the cavern was true— the thought of having any close dealings with the Shamaska-Eilitt was making Nita nervous. To these guys, Nita thought, all was fair in war. But what about love?

She let out a long breath. The information in the Cavern of Writings had been short on details about the personal lives of the Shamaska-Eilitt. They might be very nice people, for all I know. But their behavior as a species made her think otherwise.

Still. Nita let out a breath. It’s too soon to judge. And what Kit’s been interacting with here is basically a recording: a wizardry set up to talk to someone who triggers it, and then get them to do …

…what?

Nita watched Kit and the princess start toward the gates together. Let’s just go have a look …she thought, and started to follow them. But as she did, the whole scene started to go hazy.

Uh-oh! she thought. Bobo, wait, we need to pump some energy into this thing! Shift the payout to me. I don’t mind—

But it was too late. The whole view— city, Kit, princess, and all— faded away to bare Martian landscape in a matter of just a few seconds.

Sorry, Bobo said. There wasn’t time: the illusion’s power reserve exhausted itself in something of a rush.

Nita made a face. Almost as if somebody didn’t want me to see something.

No, that’s just paranoid… “Never mind: I can get the details from Kit.”

Of course.

“Do you have that persona analysis for me?”

A pause. Unfortunately, no. The outer spell ran out of power before the full analysis could complete.

Nita let out an annoyed breath. “Can you keep working on whatever you got before the playback went down?”

Of course. Just note that it may take some time to extrapolate the missing data.

“Go for it.”

She turned away and looked toward the Sun. Down low, near the horizon, she could see that little spark of blue-white fire twinkling slightly in the troubled air. “Dust storm coming up,” she said under her breath. “Well, I want some lunch, and I can catch up with Kit afterwards. Let’s get back.”

***

The Rodriguez household was not exactly in an uproar when he got back, but a sense of disruption was clear when Kit came in the back door. There were suitcases in the back hall and in the kitchen, and voices in the living room, laughing and talking very fast: Kit’s mama— the deeper of the two voices, more of a contralto— and Helena’s soprano.

Kit swallowed and headed into the living room. His mama was in scrubs, having apparently come from work over her lunch hour. Carmela was there, too, sprawled on the couch. And in the midst of everything, sitting on the floor and going through the contents of another suitcase and dividing them between two piles destined for the laundry, was Helena.

Kit had always considered her as more or less a larger version of Carmela: a little taller, a little longer-faced, with darker, bigger eyes; broader across the shoulders and in the chest, definitely bigger in the hips. But Helena had dropped some weight since she’d gone away in September, which surprised him—and the new haircut, level with her jawline but short in back, left Kit wondering whether Helena had decided that she wanted to look as little like her little sister as possible.

Whatever the case, here she was, sitting in the middle of the living room, talking a mile a minute and dominating everything, the way she liked to do. “And I told him that he wasn’t going to take me by surprise like that,” she was saying to Kit’s mama, “and he said to me, ‘Oh, really? Well, we’ll see how you do on the exam.’ And I just laughed at him! I mean, he never—”

Kit leaned over the chair nearest the dining room, And Helena caught the motion: her head turned, and she took him in. “Kit!” she said. “My god, Kit, look at you!”

She jumped up and practically leaped on him to hug him. Then she held him away from her. “You are six inches taller!”

“Seven,” Kit said. “Making up for lost time.”

Helena laughed and mussed his hair, then let him go and collapsed into the middle of the floor again. Kit tried to put his hair in order without making too much of an issue out of it, as there were few things he hated more than this particular gesture of sisterly affection. “How’ve you been doing?” Helena said. “You done with school yet?”

“On Tuesday.”

“That’s so great!” Helena said. And she glanced around. “Hey, where’s—” Then she stopped herself, and her face fell. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “I was going to ask you where Ponch was.”

“It’s okay,” Kit said.

“I’m so sorry about him,” Helena said, the laundry she was sorting momentarily forgotten in her hands. “It’s like he was here forever. It’s so weird with him gone…”

“I know,” Kit said. His mother hadn’t given Helena all the details, simply telling her that Ponch had “been in an accident,” which was true as far as it went.

“How are you doing?” Helena looked into his eyes as if that would be enough to tell her what she wanted to know.

Kit flashed briefly on the princess’s eyes, then turned his mind purposefully away from that subject. “I’m okay. Getting ready to kick back a little over the summertime.”

“Yeah,” Helena said, and paused, as if there was something else she could have said but was having second thoughts about. “So am I. You heard about the craziness, I guess…”

“Mela told me a little.”

Helena sighed. “Yeah,” she said, “so much for my poor broken heart.” But to Kit it didn’t sound all that broken. “Back to playing the field.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Carmela said, “considering the twelve million phone calls you’ve had this morning…”

“Oh, you know how it is,” Helena said. “Everybody wants to be in touch all of a sudden when they hear you’ve been dumped! It’s nice of them, but they’re all ‘Oh, my god, why aren’t you crushed?’ And I just have to keep saying, ‘It’s all right; I saw it coming; it’s not like I’ve been run over by a truck! There are a million other fish in the sea, yada yada yada…’”

Kit’s mama glanced at him with a resigned expression as Helena kept talking. There had been some joking in the family when mama had complained about the house getting “too quiet” when Helena went off to school. It’s not that Mela’s not talkative, Kit thought. But at least when she talks, she says something.

“Let me get rid of these before they pile up,” Kit’s mama said, coming into the middle of the room to pick up some of the laundry. “You want me to start these up?”

“Sure, mama. On delicate!” Helena shouted after her as she left the room.

“Delicate, sure…”

“You ever do any laundry at school?” Kit said. “Or have you been saving it up till you got back?”

Helena sniffed, that specific sound of scorn that made Kit realize suddenly how long it had been since he’d heard it. “Huh,” Helena said, amused. She craned her neck, looking up and past him, hearing the sound of Kit’s mama going downstairs to put the laundry in the washer.

“Look,” she said, in a lower tone. “While you’re here, there’s just something I wanted to clear up.”

Kit swung around and sat down in the chair he’d been leaning on. He thought he knew what was coming and was now wondering whether it would be smarter to just cut and run. But this was his sister, not some monster from another world. Theoretically.

“When I was home last, I was giving you a hard time about, you know.” Helena winced. “The weird things you were doing.”

Kit wasn’t sure where she was going with this and didn’t want to accidentally help her in the wrong direction. “And?”

“Well.” She straightened up, let go of the present piece of laundry, and sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, staring down at them as if they were unusually interesting. “For a while, before I went off to school, I was really worried about you, Kit. Seriously worried. I thought you were… you know.”

The Spawn of Satan? Kit thought. In league with the Forces of Darkness? But he said nothing out loud. If Helena was finally seeing sense, he wasn’t going to derail her.

“But I spent a while thinking about it, and finally I started to understand. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did, but you know how it can be, you hit something that you can’t really get to grips with, and you back away and dance all around it? Till you realize that maybe you misunderstood the situation from the very beginning. And once I understood that you weren’t doing anything, you know, evil, then it was all right. I just didn’t understand. I do now.”

And Helena looked at him with an expression of not just understanding, but— bizarrely— pity. “Why didn’t you just tell me that you’re a mutant?”

Kit sat perfectly still.

That… I’m… a what??

He turned slowly to Carmela, who was still sprawled on the couch, though she’d now propped herself up on one elbow to observe the proceedings. “Please tell her I am not a mutant,” Kit said, a lot more calmly than he needed to.

Carmela’s eyes glittered with mischief. “I don’t know,” she said. “It would explain a lot.”

It was more than Kit could bear, as it always had been when his sisters ganged up on him. There was something intrinsically unfair in having two of them who were older and more in control than he was. He still had the photo of the time when he was four and they’d all been playing soldiers, and Carmela had stuck a saucepan on his head, telling him it was a helmet. Then Helena had snuck up on them to take the photo, one Kit’s mom thought was incredibly cute and refused to get rid of. No one seemed to care that Kit winced every time he saw the thing, and the thought of some friend from school somehow seeing it occasionally kept him up at night. Unfortunately, even with extensive usage of wizardry, he had never been able to locate the negative.

And now here again was one of his sisters trying to saddle him with another image that was going to stick for years if he didn’t do something now. “I,” Kit said, “am not… a mutant!!”

“But you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Helena said with some compassion as she grabbed an armload of the laundry scattered around her and stood up. “It’s all right: I understand now.” As she headed out of the room, Helena paused by the chair, looking down at him affectionately, and mussed his hair again. “I can cope with you being a mutant,” Helena said. “Actually, it’s kind of cool. So don’t worry: your secret’s safe with me.”

And she went after their mama. “Mama? Did you start it yet? Don’t start it yet!”

Kit stood staring after her, openmouthed and fuming. Then he rounded on Carmela. “Are you going to let her get away with that?”

“Are you?” Carmela said.

Kit let out a long breath, thinking. Infuriating as Helena’s new attitude was, it was possibly preferable to the way she’d been acting when she thought that Kit’s wizardry meant he’d sold his soul to the devil. He shook his head. “But it’s not true!”

“The more you tell her so,” Carmela said, “the more she’s going to think you’re in denial. And she’s just going to feel more sorry for you. She might even start worrying again.”

Kit rolled his eyes. If worrying were an Olympic event, Helena would have effortlessly qualified for any U.S. team. “You’ve told her the truth now,” Carmela said. “Isn’t that enough? Isn’t honor satisfied?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Kit,” Carmela said. “Let her be. Let her think her life’s actually the way she wishes it was. Don’t make her follow you places she’s just not built to go.” His sister’s voice was suddenly full of not only disappointment, but a pity entirely different from Helena’s.

“But you’re going to follow me there?” Kit said.

Carmela raised her eyebrows. “‘Follow’?” she said, and grinned. “Like I follow people! ‘Chase,’ maybe.” She stretched, then got up off the couch and started picking up more of the scattered laundry.

“Yeah,” Kit said quietly. “Okay.” He got up, too, and started helping her, and a few moments later the two of them followed Helena downstairs.

***

Having spell-transited into the shielded part of her backyard from Mars, Nita came into the house and realized that she was itching all over. Mars dust! she thought, trying to brush it off herself, and failing as usual: the stuff was aggressively static-charged due to the dryness up there. I need to change

She started heading upstairs to her room to do that but was distracted by finding her dad sitting in his lounger in the living room, looking at his phone. “Lunch hour?” she said to him as she passed.

“Yeah,” her dad said. “It’s quiet in town today I’m taking an extra half-hour.” But he looked distracted and didn’t glance up as he spoke.

Nita could guess what he was looking at: Dairine. “What’s she up to?” she said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs.

“That’s actually an artificial sun they’re playing around with,” her dad said. “She keeps getting in and out of it.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “I saw her doing that. It’s a simulator.”

“Something else weird about this—”

He pointed at the screen. Nita went to look over his shoulder. Her dad was indicating a text window on the little screen. Inside it, text— initially in the Speech, but translating itself on the fly— was rolling downward at considerable speed.

She squinted at it. Don’t know what to do about this— oh, wait, now I see— no, that’s all wrong. I wish he wouldn’t stare like that. I can’t concentrate when he’s looking at me all the time; don’t want him to think I’m not in control here! What was that reading? No, back off—

“Wow,” Nita said. “That’s Dairine thinking.” She smiled slightly. “Streaming consciousness…”

Her dad chuckled at the pun. But then he shook his head and put the phone down. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nita, when you said I might get more information than I wanted? I didn’t think that was likely. But now—” Her dad glanced at the phone’s screen. “I don’t know that this is the kind of thing I want to be seeing, no matter how concerned I am about her. I feel like I’ve been going through her diary. Worse than that.”

Nita stepped back behind her dad to lean against the nearby breakfront dresser, attempting to hide the fact that she was blushing red-hot with guilt. There had been a time, years before she’d become a wizard, when after a fight with her sister, Nita had found out where Dairine’s diary was hidden. Still furious enough that she didn’t care what Dairine or anyone else would think about what she was doing, Nita stole the diary and read it cover to cover. There hadn’t been anything in the diary that had been all that interesting …which at the time had made Nita even angrier.

Understanding that this new anger wasn’t at Dairine, but at herself, had taken Nita a while. And then the anger had turned to shame. She could now never think of that horrible episode—hunkered down in the corner of her bedroom before Dairine got home from school, turning the pages of the little pink-plastic-covered Barbie-splashed book—without feeling a hard, hot stab of shame and disgust with herself. And now she was stuck in it again.

But her dad didn’t notice. He was staring at the phone. “I had no idea what the inside of her head was like,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting something that was both so—adult—and so—” He stopped, shook his head. “So, I don’t know, fierce. And so absolutely focused. I keep thinking, have I just forgotten how it is to be thirteen? How immediate everything seems, how life-or-death? Or is it that Dairine’s just different? The inside of my brain was never anything like that, as far as I can remember. The only kind of thirteen-year-old I’ve ever been was a boy. Thirteen-year-old girls—”

He shook his head again. “When you’re a dad, you see them one way. Your baby daughter. But when I was thirteen, if I thought about them at all, I thought maybe they were some other kind of species. They didn’t do the things I did, act the way I did. They were a nuisance, mostly. Good for getting me in trouble.”

“Who, your sisters?”

Her dad smiled. “Them and their friends,” he said. “Funny how you never think about such things when you’re older. Like when your aunt Annie fell out of the tree when she was six, and told your grandpa I pushed her.”

Nita was still recovering from her own embarrassment, and wasn’t able to give this all the attention she would have at some less unnerved moment. “She didn’t?”

Her dad laughed, rueful. “She was the one with the Superman towel around her neck, not me! Grandpa was sure I did it, but your Gran made him see reason. Always her specialty.”

He sighed, looking back at the phone. “But… I don’t know. I don’t want to be seeing the inside of Dairine’s head. That’s just wrong. You need to find a way to turn that off.”

“I’ll have a word with Bobo,” Nita said. “He and Spot set it up. They can filter it.”

“And I’ve been seeing how Nelaid is with her,” her father said. “He’s stern. Maybe better at ‘stern’ than I am. I might be able to pick up a trick or two from him.”

Nita didn’t say anything, though inside she felt like smiling. It was not the kind of admission you usually expected to hear from your dad, and was all the more sweet because of it. “Aw, you do good stern!” Nita said. “Don’t knock yourself.” And she reached around to scratch her back. The Mars dust was getting to her again. I don’t just need to change: I need a shower.

“I wonder if that’s true,” her dad said, looking vague for a moment. “I wonder if I’ve done too much of the wrong kind of stern in the past, and now she’s looking for the right kind. Because…” He trailed off for a moment, then looked up at Nita again. “Sweetie, she’s away all the time.”

“But you know why,” Nita said. “She’s looking for Roshaun.”

“And about that,” her father said, looking actively troubled now. “There is— let’s just say there’s a certain age difference between them. I know what you’re going to say: he’s from another planet, there are cultural differences—”

Nita waved a hand. “Daddy, you’re reading too much into it. Sometimes a girl can have a best friend who’s a boy.”

Her father’s eyes dwelt on her, thoughtful.

Nita started to sweat, but decided that it was too late to stop now. “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. But besides that—”

“And that you’re both wizards—”

Nita laughed one helpless laugh at a dad who could both tease her and be serious at the same time. “Besides that— she’s not like me.”

“Somehow,” her father said, “over the years, I’ve picked up on that.”

“And she’s never going to be. She’s not that much like you or Mom, either. And she doesn’t fit any of the family stereotypes. Sometimes it’s like she’s from another planet—”

There Nita stopped, astonished at what had fallen out of her mouth.

“It is, isn’t it?” her dad said.

Though Nita heard what he said, she didn’t really have time to react to it, because of the completely bizarre idea suddenly occupying her entire mind.

Did she take a wrong turn?

From a casual conversation with Carl and some follow-up reading in the manual, Nita knew that there were always a certain number of wizards who cropped up on one world and seemed to spend their whole lives yearning for, and dealing with, some other one. The Powers That Be were notably silent on such subjects: privacy issues were a big deal with Them, and They didn’t go into detail on what made a wizard uniquely him-or herself. But there was an unspoken understanding among those out on errantry that some wizards who were born in one place but mostly lived and worked in another were meant to be bridge builders… or, more simply, to themselves be the bridges, with a foothold in each world, bearing a most unusual burden— sometimes consciously.

There was an abbreviated word-phrase in the Speech for this kind of profound involvement with another place and people: taraenshlev’. It didn’t translate well, like many words in the Speech: but there were curious and uncomfortable resonances with English words like expatriate and exile. “Took a wrong turn” was one shorthand phrase that attempted to express the tension: as if someone originally “supposed” to be born in one place had hung a left instead of a right and wound up somewhere else.

Nita stood up straight, aware that her dad was looking curiously at her. Kit, she was thinking. I never thought about him this way. But I never had reason to. Could it be that this is more than just some thing with Mars? Could it be that Mars has a thing with him? And why in the world..?

“What?” her dad said.

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Thinking. Maybe thinking dumb things.”

Her dad gave her a dismissive look. “Whatever my daughters do,” he said, “and whatever planet they do it on, they do not think dumb things.” And then he regarded her with concern. “Have you had lunch?”

“No,” Nita said. “Gonna have that now. But I need a shower first. Jeez, Dad, when you go to Mars, wear a coat or something, because if you don’t the dust gets everywhere!”

“Okay,” he said, as she started up the stairs. “So when am I going?”

Nita paused. “Where?”

“To Mars!” He laughed. “What’s the point of being a wizard’s dad if I don’t get some perks out of it?”

“Uh—” She laughed. “I’ll set it up. Maybe in the next few days, okay?”

“Fine,” her dad said.

And Nita went up the stairs with something itching at her mind that was more than Mars dust.

***

To Kit, dinner seemed to take forever. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy it—he was starving—and the conversation over dinner had been innocuous, even fun. It only became boring when Helena started telling stories about the now-history boyfriend who’d dumped her.

But even during the more interesting parts of the conversation, Kit had trouble concentrating. The things he’d experienced on Mars today kept coming back to haunt him. And something else was bothering him that seemed to have gotten stronger since he’d come home: a sense of someone whispering in his ear, words he couldn’t quite make out against the ongoing conversation.

It wasn’t a new sensation. He’d noticed it a few times over the past couple of months. He’d even mentioned it to Nita once, and had then been surprised when she got a panicked look and said, “Tell me you’re not hearing Bobo!”

He’d been glad to tell her that whatever else was going on, no, he wasn’t hearing Bobo. Nita had looked bizarrely relieved. Kit had wondered about that at the time, and wondered again now. Did she think Bobo was going to start telling me Secret Girl Stuff?

Now, though, Kit found himself repeatedly straining to hear the voice that seemed to be whispering in reaction to things it heard other people say— or trying to get his attention during the silences. The experience made for a peculiar dinner, and Kit was relieved to get home and back to his room where he could shut the door and relax.

He checked his manual for anything from Nita, but she’d left no notes for him. On inquiring about her location, the listing next to her name merely said, Sunplace, Wellakh: transport flagged as family business: please do not contact except in emergency.

Dairine again, Kit thought. Never mind, I’ll catch up with Neets in the morning. I’m bushed. But he had reason to be. Spending the better part of a day being chased around Mars by various peculiar wildlife, not to mention visiting the ancient city of Helium, could kind of take it out of you.

He wrote Nita a note about getting together to exchange notes after the family got back from church in the morning, and then nervously took a look to see if there was any answer to his previous message from Mamvish. But there was none. He felt strangely relieved.

Okay, Kit thought. Either she read what I sent her and it wasn’t a big enough deal to get right back to me, or she’s really busy and hasn’t had time to answer at all. Whatever. I’ll check again in the morning.

He stretched out on his bed and lay looking for a while at the twin discs of the Mars map hanging on the wall. Full with a good dinner, tired, he never really realized when he fell asleep.

***

What took him by surprise was to find himself sitting in the Scarlet Tower, side by side with Aurilelde on the red sandstone bench at the center of it all.

“You saved us before,” she said. “And then you saved us again. You’ll do it a third time now: I see it.” She looked at him with a slight smile. “And anyway,” she said, “you promised you would— and that you would come back for me. And you always kept your promises.”

Kit looked around, somewhat in panic. But they were alone, and Aurilelde’s father was nowhere to be seen. As for Aurilelde—as she turned to Kit, he got something of a shock. The Martian princess he had seen was gone. Now he found himself looking at a slender young female figure, still not much older than him or Nita, but all gray; a handsome, polished-steel gray like stone come to life. Her eyes were dark—that much persisted at least from the previous vision. But the hair, the beautiful flowing dark hair, was hair no longer. It was a waist-length flow of deep sapphire-blue smoke. Kit thought for a moment of the filmy draperies she’d worn before and smiled.

She had been watching him with concern. Now, seeing his smile, Aurilelde smiled back. It was altogether like having a statue smile at you— but a vital one, with life in the eyes, and on the smooth features a look of intense life— made still more intense by an edge of fear.

“You’ve changed,” Kit said.

She gave him an amused look. “Of course I had to change. We all changed. We had no choice. The new world wasn’t going to suit our old bodies…”

Something else was different now: the light. Kit got up from that bench and walked over toward the side of the Tower, where he could get a clearer view of what was outside. It took no more than a few steps for him to realize that the city was no longer sitting in a flatland crater but under a mighty shadow. Looking out through the walls of the Tower, he looked a long way up indeed before he could see the top of the vast shape shutting away that whole side of the sky. The city was sitting on the shoulder of the highest mountain in the Solar System. The wide flat rust-colored cone of Olympus Mons loomed behind the spire of the Scarlet Tower, utterly dwarfing it.

Kit gazed at this in amazement …then made his way back to Aurilelde and sat down again. “Maybe you want to start from the beginning,” Kit said. “And tell me about this as if I don’t know anything. Because I don’t—”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “No,” she said, “I understand that. A lot of us had trouble remembering, when we woke up from the long sleep.” She shook her head. “It was a hard time. Everyone was afraid. Everyone was horrified, and in grief. Nobody wants to see their planet destroyed…” She reached out to his face: then paused. “May I?”

Kit looked at her, perplexed. “May you what?”

“I can’t let you see what I see without asking leave first. I may not be a wizard—” and her eyes glinted at him, amused— “but that much I know is the law. The mind is the outer fastness of the soul, and access to another’s mind must be requested.”

Kit nodded. Aurilelde reached out, simply touched the side of his head, then looked away. All around them the view of the Tower washed out in a wave of dark.

We lived on the first world for a long time,Aurilelde said as they looked down on a distant world in Earth’s solar system. We were all alone in this system. That aloneness gave some of us— ideas. And those ideas were possibly fed by the one you know, the one all wizards know: the one who lies in the darkness, waiting.

The Lone Power.

Yes, Aurilelde said. Because we were the first ones to come to life in this system, at the bottom of all our lives, and all our joys, there was always a shadow of fear. We knew we would bear the weight of the Darkness’s enmity: it would come for us and try to destroy us. Even the Red Rede spoke of it.

The Red Rede?

One of my ancestors wrote it, Aurilelde said. Then she laughed. Or I did! Some people say we’re all the same person, the Seers in the Dark. They say we come back, again and again, to get it right— to stop making the mistakes we made the last time. So after our world was destroyed, it was hard to know how that could still happen… how the Darkness might return and attempt to destroy us once more. You’d have thought once would be enough.

Kit saw it as she saw it. Out in the darkness, blocking away the stars, the shadow grew. We could not divert the planet, Aurilelde said sadly. All our wizards tried. It was a mighty effort, in which many died. Even then they could only deflect it enough to avoid a direct impact. Through her vision, Kit saw the rogue planet approach. And in retrospect, she said, there are those who said it might have been wiser if we hadn’t. If we’d just let the Doom out of the Darkness end everything, there and then.

Together, they watched the rogue world come plunging in through the system. Kit was horrified. You couldn’t just sit there and let all your people be doomed! he said.

But look what happened, said Aurilelde, as the last-ditch forces crafted by the planet’s wizards lashed out. Shamask-Eilith shattered; the rogue world’s course, perturbed by the forces applied to it by the wizards and by Shamask-Eilith’s fragmented mass, now shifted, heading for the inner worlds. A second later, Kit saw it plunging in toward a new world much closer to the Sun, a world where the surface was still molten. As he watched, the rogue planet struck the edge of that new young world, and a vast gout of magma and barely solidified stone splashed outward in its wake as the rogue planet blundered on. Behind it, the Earth shuddered, nearly disintegrated, and then slowly, painfully began to reform itself.

See what we almost did to your world? Aurilelde said. Because of the blow the rogue planet struck yours, the silicon-based life that had just arisen there was all but wiped out. Life found another way, but— She sounded sad. It might have been better if we’d left well enough alone.

But you couldn’t have known that, Kit said. You were trying to save yourselves!

She looked at him sadly. That’s what you said the last time, she said. You were always the pragmatist.

Kit looked at her and shook his head. Aurilelde, he said, you can’t be sure it was me. I don’t remember any of that! Of being— what’s-his-name, Khretef—

I am sure, she said. And she looked at him sadly. I understand. You’ve been a long time in your present life; the old one must seem like a dream, if that. She fell silent.

Kit, watching the young Earth slowly coalesce, and watching the splashed-out rock gradually form itself into the Moon, shook his head at himself. How come I never used the manual to take a look at this moment in time myself? he wondered. How come I had to wait for someone else to show it to me? Considering how much Kit liked the Moon, it seemed like a missed opportunity. But then again, in recent months, Mars had come to occupy the forefront of his mind—

Kit let out a breath, looked over at Aurilelde again. How come you showed yourself to me that other way first? he said. This way is prettier—

Even as Kit spoke, he was surprised that something like that had come out of his mouth. But it was true. This shape had a fitness about it that the sultry look of the previous Aurilelde had not.

She just looked at him, though, and smiled sadly. It was the way best suited to you right then, she said. I knew that as soon as you were ready, you would want to see me as I was again. You were never one for false seemings.

The sorrow of her expression was painful to see. When we were ready to settle in the New World, you were the first one to come and tell me that you liked my new form even better than my old one. And Aurilelde smiled. Even my father didn’t think to do that.

She sighed, looking at the scattering fragments of the First World as the ships and the two surviving cities, one from Shamask, one from Eilith, fled it. But there was so much ambivalence about having to change our shape, our way of living. Many of us said that if we changed our form, it would change our minds, the way we thought: we’d no longer be the people we were. Others said— she looked down— that maybe that would be a good thing. That since our people awakened in the First World, we’d done nothing but cause each other grief. And truly, we were never a peaceful species. Some people said that was because we were in the wrong shape: that when we took the new one, things would settle down. We would find the way of life the One had always meant for us.

She shook her head. But no one wanted to decide on the new forms right away, so soon after the disaster, and not without careful assessment of which other world in the system would be best for us. The refuge-cities and the ships were built so that all the survivors could sleep for many years, allowing the system to settle after the disaster. For none of us wanted to leave the system: this was our home! We were the First Life here. We dared not abandon the place.

Aurilelde looked even sadder, as if touching on a memory that still hurt. The Sun— even at this distance, the Sun cried out to us,‘Don’t go!’ And we couldn’t. But there were no other worlds ready. The other solid ones were too close to the Sun, not yet settled out of the molten state. The outer ones were places where not even we could have lived— and our old forms were used to the cold. So our last wizards swept all but the least fragments of Shamask-Eilith into a nullspace portal to ensure that the new inner worlds, our homes to be, would take no harm from them …

Aurilelde shrugged. And then we slept. A long time, out in the darkness, the ships and the cities slid in long slow orbits far from the Sun, waiting. How many years— She shook her head. If I ever knew the actual count, Aurilelde said, I’ve forgotten. But eventually we woke. The city-ships knew, because the wizardry and science built into them told them, that the system was ready for us again. And so we woke, and looked about us. We saw the beginnings of your kind of life on your world—She looked at Kit with a strange affectionate expression, almost the way someone might look at a pet, some life form not quite up to their standard.

And for a second Kit saw the Earth for a moment as she and her people saw it: a small, new, green world, where the native bipedal life had just begun to look up into the sky and wonder about the little bright lights it saw there, and the two great ones. That looked like a good shape for a life form, she said, the one that rose on the surface of your world. And so we thought, Why not? And for a while there was discussion about whether we too might settle there. But others looked at the further one— the red one in the next orbit out. It was empty. Water it had, and air it had—

Kit saw the young Mars as Aurilelde and her people had seen it: a Mars with huge icecaps and half-blue with seas. He gulped in wonder, for the oceans were of much wider expanse than even the most ambitious Earth scientists’ theories had yet suggested. And so we adapted ourselves into bipedal form like yours, Aurilelde said, but hardier, tailored to that world’s temperatures, ready to make it our own.

Through her eyes he saw the last two great cities settle onto the Martian surface, a very long way from one another— one near Olympus Mons, even then one of the greatest shield volcanoes ever seen on any planet in this galaxy: the other at the far end of Valles Marineris, then a vast channel being carved out by fierce young rivers running down to the sea, untrammeled by the heavy gravity of a world like Earth, and eroding the ancient sandstones with astonishing force. There we settled, and there we lived: and for a while it seemed as if everything would go well …

Aurilelde shook her head sadly. But then we found that the Darkness and the Doom had other plans for us. Our new home’s atmosphere had never been thick. The Sun flared many times over several centuries and stripped much of the red world’s air away. And worse, its orbit seemed to be shifting. We feared it would edge out into the great dark again, perhaps even drift too close to the great banded world in the next orbit out and be torn apart by its tidal forces. Our birth system was beginning to look like a trap. We would be forced to move from world to world and never find a home we could depend on—

Aurilelde looked sadly at the floor of the Throne room. And so many of our wizards had died, she said. There weren’t enough left to change what was happening to us. Khretef was one of the last great wizards among the Eilitt; my father was one of the last among the Shamaska. Of course, there were some others, from the other city— the ones who disagreed with us…

Your enemies, Kit said.

Yes, Aurilelde said. They offered to work together with us to save our whole species. She laughed bitterly. But we didn’t trust them: their people had tried to betray us before. And they didn’t trust us, either, certain that we’d would do the same to them. Even back in the First World, there had always been voices in the City of the Eilitt calling for us to be stamped out—for the world to be cleansed of us so that our race could begin again, have a fresh start.

She shook her head. Again and again my father and others from our city came to me, saying, ‘See the future for us! Tell us what to do; show us how to find peace, stability, an end to the danger and the death!’ She looked into Kit’s eyes, troubled. But I could never see that. You cannot compel vision…

Kit nodded. He’d heard this often enough from Nita, lately. So what did you do?

We feared we would have to sleep again, she said, as the New World grew colder around us, as the oceans dried and froze and the air fled. We tried to change the world, to preserve the air, the water—

Aurilelde shook her head, suddenly looking miserable. We could not. Nor could we take the cities out to space again: there was not enough of their motive substance to power them. And where once wizardry alone could’ve driven them, we no longer had enough wizards. So we buried the cities, and greatly against our will we slept again, setting protections about us that would warn us when someone came to disturb that sleep. Whoever came would be set tests that would assess whether they had the skills to wake us in a world that was stable at last.

She looked proudly at Kit. And you have the skills, she said. You’ve proved it. Now is the time. Break the spell: let us out into the new life! We’re ready! We’ve been in prison for so long, children of misfortune, the species that has tried and tried again to get its start in the right way, and been foiled again and again by circumstance and the ill will of the Power that walked behind the Darkness, and waits still to be our Doom.

Kit shook his head. I can’t just do that! he said. It’s not up to me. I haven’t been a wizard very long: I don’t have the authority to take a decision like this into my own hands!

Aurilelde looked at him incredulously, took his hands again, and gripped them. Your power gives you the authority! she said. That you’ve come this far, that you’ve done this much, says that this is the will of the One! It’s our time to be awakened! You can’t deny us this!

And she reached up to touch his face again. Especially not you, Aurilelde said. Long ago when you went into the last danger to try to save our world, you said to me, ‘If worse comes to worst, I’ll weave my last wizardry in such a way that you will be the one to whom I return. One way or another, you and I will be the ones to free our people—’

She shook her head again, turning her face away. What’s the matter? Kit said.

Aurilelde seemed once again to be fighting back some emotion that ran deeper than tears— if her species could even shed them. He said to me, ‘The Third World seems the most likely to bring forth civilizations, and wizardry. So I will die so that I may return with a foothold in a soul of that world. I’ll come to you as a wizard of the Third World and help you awaken the children of the First One.’ And then Aurilelde laughed sorrowfully. He said to me, ‘Don’t be afraid! I may look strange and alien to you when I come again, but it will still be me, your Khretef. I’ll set you free, and we’ll be together again, together the way we were always meant to be… but were never able to because the world went wrong.’

She turned away from Kit. The vision came on me then, she said, and I looked forward and saw that it was true: that it was even written in the Rede, and I had never realized it before—

Something came into Kit’s head. ‘The one departed is the one who returns,’ he said, ‘From the straitened circle and the shortened night…’

Then he looked up at her, surprised. How did I know that?

Because you are Khretef, Aurilelde said, smiling. You have come back to me, as you promised …and you always keep your promises.

And Kit sat bolt upright in bed, staring in sudden morning light at the map of Mars.

12: Tharsis Montes

Nita was up early on Sunday morning. She’d gone to Wellakh the previous evening to have a word with Spot, even though Bobo reassured her that he could make the necessary adjustments to Dairine’s “brainfeed” without her doing the extra mileage. But she’d also wanted a chance to see firsthand how Dairine was getting along with Nelaid, for she was starting to have a feeling that things were about to get busy at home.

Dairine had been so busy working with the Thahit simulator that she’d barely had time to even look at Nita. When she did, Dairine just sort of frowned absently at her sister as if not sure what the heck she was doing there. Nita found this entirely acceptable, especially when she stepped aside to talk to Nelaid, who was watching from one side of the simulator hall.

“She has reached that point in the study where the mind starts to catch fire with it,” Nelaid said softly to her. “I hadn’t hoped to see her in this state quite so soon: it is a good sign, though I will admit it may seem slightly disconcerting to you.”

Nita shook her head. “I get this way sometimes. It’s a family thing. Should I tell my dad she might wind up staying here some nights?”

“No need for that, I think,” Nelaid said. “I think she will sleep better on her own couch.”

“Bed, we say.”

“Her own bed, yes. And your father will be relieved to see her do so. He and I will consult at his leisure as to what to do if she wishes her study to become more intense by virtue of having to travel less.”

Nita had nodded and taken herself back home. She’d picked up the note Kit left her late that night and gone happily to bed, grateful that an already busy day had presented her with nothing more challenging.

Now, in early light in the quiet of the dining room— for Dairine had once again left very early— Nita was browsing through the Martian section of her manual, surprised to find that there was already a new section about the Cavern of Writings (as the manual was now calling it), and an early Shamaska-Eilitt syllabary. This is so cool! she thought, turning the pages and looking over some early diagrams and annotations. And there was also imagery from the Cavern, and a replay of the memory spell that had played out for them there.

It had surprised Nita to learn that the manual didn’t have all the answers. But then, she thought, it never claimed to. I just assumed… It turned out, however, that a surprising amount of the information in it came from wizards themselves—as Nita had started discovering during some of her more recent studies, especially just before her mother died, when she had been seeking desperately for ways to save her mom’s life. There were many strange sources of power out there, not least among them the manual itself, which kept the secrets of the universe, new and old, structured and updated so that wizards could find them.

But the strangest and most unpredictable power might very well be wizards themselves: bending the universe to their will, finding solutions where no one had found them before, driven by their own needs. Wizards were making it up as they went along— just as, in Their own time, the Powers That Be had done. And they’re looking to us for the answers as much as we are to them, Nita thought. We’re all helping each other out here, trying to make sense of the universe, trying to make things work. The thought left her feeling both very intimidated and, strangely, much less powerless. What we write in the manual is as important as what we find there already.

Nita flipped back to the general Mars pages, glancing at the maps that were showing the hot spots in the last day’s activity. That side of Mars featured some very striking terrain, and one feature, or set of features, now caught her eye as it had once or twice before. Olympus Mons, of course, was famous, both on Earth and elsewhere among inhabited worlds: as one of the biggest volcanoes anywhere, it drew a fair number of tourists, both Earth-based and alien. But not far from it were three other volcanoes strung along in a line, labeled collectively as Tharsis Montes, the Tharsis Mountains. The features taken all together always reminded Nita of the end-knob of a sword and the sword’s hilt or crosspiece.

There ought to be something marking the point, she thought, letting her gaze run along the line of where the blade would be. It led across the Martian equator, missing the vast irregular crevasse of Mariner Valley, then passing through highland country and ending in a huge lowlying circular splat of a basin—some ancient impact crater that had once filled up with lava, and then probably later with water. Argyre Planitia, said the label on the map.

Should really have been another volcano, Nita thought. She yawned and flipped back to the messaging area in the manual. Kit’s listing there was dark now: he was awake. Nita tapped on his name. “What’s going on over there?” she said.

There was a pause before she got an answer back. “Nothing much,” Kit said. “Just got up. Gotta go to church…”

Nita smiled at that. “I bet. How was Helena?”

There was a short laugh at the other end. “Not as bad as she might have been,” he said. “Just as well. I couldn’t have taken much more excitement yesterday.”

“I hear you there,” Nita said. “But today’s another day. There’s a ton of new stuff in the manual.”

“Yeah, I saw some of that.”

Nita was slightly taken aback at how bored he sounded about it. “So when are you going back?”

“Well, there’s church first. I kind of have to do that to keep Helena calm. Though I may have a different problem with her now.”

“Oh? What?”

“She thinks I’m a mutant.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open. Then she laughed. “Oh, come on, she has to have been joking!”

“Nope.”

Nita got control of herself. “Denial is such a wonderful thing,” she said. “Well, never mind. What time’s Mamvish getting in? She has to want to have a look at what’s been happening.”

“I don’t know. Haven’t heard anything from her.”

That made Nita blink. “Huh. Well, she’s busy, I guess. But you’ll be going over, won’t you?”

“Sometime in the afternoon, maybe,” Kit said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

There was something in his tone of voice, even in this disembodied form, that made Nita think Kit either wasn’t particularly excited about going to Mars today— which was insane—or wasn’t particularly interested in having Nita with him. That by itself wouldn’t normally have rung any alarm bells for her. But today was different, in that Nita had seen exactly who Kit had been talking to in the lost city before heading back to Earth with Darryl and Ronan. She was instantly suspicious, and instantly annoyed with herself for feeling suspicious. It’s not me he wants to be seeing, said that suspicion. It’s her—

“Okay,” Nita said, trying to sound casual. “Well, let me know when you make up your mind. We could save some energy by going together.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, but he sounded noticeably unenthusiastic. “Look, they’re getting ready to head out. I have to go.”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Call me later—”

“Right,” Kit said: and his name grayed out. Unavailable.

Nita felt a small, tight frown forming between her eyebrows. She sat back in her chair, staring at her manual.

This is what I was warning Carmela about, she thought. Did I get so busy warning her that it didn’t occur to me I might be messing up, too? Did I maybe do wrong by going up there at all and horning in on their male-bonding trip?

It was always possible. Nita swore under her breath. Are boys another species? she wondered. And if they are, why do I have so much trouble figuring out what’s going on in their brains? Because I sure don’t have this kind of trouble with the other alien species I deal with, and they have all kinds of legs and tentacles and things…

Nita leaned forward again and put her head down on her arms, the frown deepening at the thought of her beautiful rival. None of this would be bothering me the way it is if it wasn’t for her. What is going on with her? And why’s she coming after my—

There Nita stopped. From what seemed about a thousand years ago came the memory of Dairine’s voice: Nita’s got a boyfriend! Nita’s got a boyfriend! At the time it had been an annoyance, like being accused of having a large and unusually noticeable pimple—especially since there had been much more interesting things going on. Now, though, as she’d occasionally done over the last year or so, Nita held the word up against her and looked at it, the way she might have looked at a new skirt she was thinking about buying. Boyfriend. Is it really that bad?

She tried to consider the word dispassionately. It’s not as if he’s not good-looking. Especially since he hit that growth spurt and got so tall. This in particular had been turning some of the girls’ heads at school, as Kit’s early stockiness had shaken down into a leaner look. And he’s funny. And smart. And he’s a wizard.

Interesting how for a change, instead of coming first, that idea came last. Once again Nita wondered whether the B-word was something she might safely say out loud, one of these days when the moment seemed right. It was a word she’d heard other girls at school use about Kit where Nita was concerned, though some of them meant it mockingly, in the “nerds of a feather flock together” mode. But that thought immediately cast a long shadow of fear across the whole train of thought: the idea that Kit might hear the word …and not agree. Where would Nita be then?

Everything would be ruined. Was it worth chucking years of shared wizardry, a partnership that until now had pretty much worked fine, over a word?

She sighed and mentally put the word back on the rack. Then Nita went back to listlessly flipping pages in the manual. Finally she shut the manual and got up, wandering into the kitchen to find herself a banana.

I’ll give him a couple of hours, Nita thought, and try him again later. There’s always the explosive thing that S’reee and I were discussing: she needs some more data on how fast we could dissolve them.

And on this this she dutifully got to work, researching seawater chemistry until well after noon, and finding out more than she ever wanted to about the unstable nitrates involved in solid explosives. Then she stuffed her manual into her backpack, let her dad know she was going out, and headed over to Kit’s.

The Rodriguezes had not yet returned from church, but Carmela was home: Nita found her and numerous cushions and notebooks strewn all over the living room. “I thought you’d have gone with them!” Nita said, unslinging her backpack.

“No,” Carmela said, “I don’t always go. Today was all about placating Helena, anyway.” She smiled slightly. “I wasn’t needed for that.”

“They having a special service or something today?” Nita said. “Seems like a long time.”

“Oh, no,” Carmela said, “church is over. Mama and Pop and Helena are having brunch at the pancake place. Kit ditched brunch: he hates that place.”

Nita blinked at that. “So he’s been back here?”

“Sure,” Carmela said. “You missed him by about an hour. And you’ll never guess where he’s gone!”

Nita rolled her eyes, exasperated. “So much for splitting the energy costs of getting up there today,” she said. “I’m starting to think we should install some kind of commuter worldgate here. You think you can work out a bulk discount for me with the Crossings?”

Carmela waved her hand, a gesture suggesting that this was no problem at all. “Neets, come on, you didn’t push the Crossings management for a tenth of the perks you could have had for getting rid of the aliens there—”

“I was on errantry,” Nita said, frowning. “Wizards don’t charge for that. I found a problem; I helped solve it.”

“Who said anything about charging? You should just have let them be a little more grateful to you.” Carmela waggled her eyebrows. “I know for a fact that the Stationmaster would give you at least a transit discount for jumps from here to Mars. You wouldn’t even need to hub through the Crossings: Mars is right next door by their standards. The power outlay would be minimal. But meantime, don’t sweat yourself about it— you need your wizardry for other stuff. Mi closet, su closet.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. “Want to set me up? I’ll go see him.”

“Unless it’s something very Mars-based, don’t bother,” Carmela said. “He’ll be back here at six. He has to: we have a Big-Deal Family Dinner tonight at seven, and we’re going out someplace serious, with tablecloths and everything. Besides, I want you to look at something.” She picked up the remote.

Nita looked around, concerned. “Is that smart at the moment?” she said in an undertone. “What if Helena comes back all of a sudden?”

Carmela shrugged. “The question’s more like, will she even notice? She hasn’t been here all that much since she arrived. She keeps going out with all these friends who keep turning up. I never knew she had so many.” And she grinned. “Maybe because she didn’t want to invite them over before, when she thought anybody who got involved with Kit might wind up going to hell.”

Nita had to snicker at that. “You mean they finally got things sorted out? This I have to hear about. He said she thought he was a mutant.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about sorted,” Carmela said. “Might still be a few issues. Mutancy being one of them. But I’d say the worst is over. Meanwhile, take a look at this. I’ve been working on it since we got back.”

Nita had half noticed Carmela rubbing her eyes, and now looked at her with some concern. “What?? You slept, right?”

“Huh? Yeah, a little. But this thing was making me crazy. I got up early to take another run at it.”

Nita shook her head. “Mela,” she said, “school’s out, nearly! Cut yourself some slack!”

“But this isn’t school,” Carmela said, looking up at Nita, and Nita noticed that there were actually circles under her eyes. “And slack’s not what we need right now, is it? My little brother’s acting slightly weird, and this has something to do with it.”

Nita made a sideways smile— not at Carmela’s concern for Kit, which was always there: but for the sudden memory of S’reee saying to her, Oh, hNii’t, middle-aged so soon! You’ve hit the part of your wizardry where you can’t stop working! —and of what Nelaid had said about Dairine. It hadn’t occurred to Nita that something similar might happen to Carmela: falling in love with the serious part of wizardry, as you realized this wasn’t anything like a lot of the stuff they gave you to do in school— well-meant busywork that had nothing to do with what your life was going to be about. This was important work, work on reality— stuff you had to get right. And when you first realized that, it was hard to do anything else for a while.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. But what’s been taking you so long with this?”

Carmela made a fake-pouting face. “Oh, Juanita L—”

“Don’t say it!” Nita said. Then she grinned. “I’m teasing! You know I’d never rush you. But you were cruising right along there when we were in the library cavern.”

“Yeah,” Carmela said, “I know.” She slumped back among the cushions she’d been lying on. “The wizardry was helping me. Now I’m running slower. Still, something started coming up. You know how it is when you’re reading something, and you can see that whoever wrote it has been really picking the words so that you’ll feel the way they want you to feel about something? Whether that’s the right way or not.”

Nita nodded, remembering one morning when one of her English teachers, Mr. Neary, had gone on about this at length. “Loading the adjectives?”

“That’s part of it.” Carmela scowled at her notebooks, and the TV, and the world in general. “When I was looking at most of the stuff written there— and I’ve been back a couple of times to check this, just to make sure that the invasion of the giant scorpion guys hadn’t messed up how I was seeing things right afterwards— a lot of it was like that. All loaded. ‘We are right; they were wrong; they started it; we had no choice!’ And that was making me suspicious. But then I found this thing. Stumbled on it, really. It was off by itself with some stuff I couldn’t read at all.”

Carmela dropped the remote, then flipped through the notepad to the symbols she had copied out there in red ink, and handed the pad to Nita. “This was the only material I could find there that wasn’t loaded like everything else. It was very, I don’t know, very dry. Very matter-of-fact. Not like the other stuff, where they want you to think the way they were thinking. It wants you to figure out what it means by yourself.” She scowled down at it. “I think it’s important. But don’t ask me why.”

“You have to follow your hunches,” Nita said. “And the sooner you figure it out—”

“Believe me,” Carmela said, “you’ll be the first to know.”

“Not Kit?” Nita said.

Carmela gave her an amused, sideways look. “Don’t know if he’s listening to me at the moment. I gave him some advice yesterday that he might have had trouble taking.”

“Oh,” Nita said. “Helena?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’ve got about half of it now,” Carmela said, flipping through the notepad’s pages. Nita could see that they were completely covered with a combination of blocky or scrawly Shamaska-Eilitt characters, notes in English and the Speech, and the aimless arrow-ended curlicues that she’d previously seen Carmela make all over a page when she was trying to figure something out. But finally Carmela came to one page that had a neat block of the Shamaska characters on it in red ink: and underneath it, also in red, a number of lines in English. She handed the pad to Nita.

She gazed down at what Carmela had written. “It has a meter,” Carmela said, “though it’s a weird one: real short lines. You can see where I broke them. The rhyme is there most of the time in the original, so I kept it. It’s weird, too: they don’t rhyme the way we do…”

Nita nodded and read.

The one departed | is the one who returns

From the straitened circle | and the shortened night,

When the blue star rises | and the water burns:

Then the word long-lost | comes again to light

To be spoke by the watcher | who silent yearns

For the lost one found.

Carmela fell silent, scowling at the page. Nita looked at her. “And?”

“That’s all I’ve got so far,” Carmela said. “There are some weird verbs in the rest that I don’t understand yet. This—” She pointed at one line near the end of the Shamaska block. “That’s the word for the First World. And there’s ‘departed’ again.” She indicated the last line. “But the rest of it I don’t get yet.” Carmela looked uncharacteristically annoyed.

“You shouldn’t be so tough on yourself,” Nita said. “This is more than I could ever have gotten out of what we saw.”

“Yeah, well.” Carmela was frowning. “It’s just that this is something important; I know it is.” She leaned back among the pillows again, staring at the pad. “You know how everything looked in there? Green, green, green?”

“Yeah—”

“This was all by itself, in red. Completely different from all the other stuff. Even the font looks more serious somehow.”

Nita shook her head, uncertain how a font could be serious. But Carmela was much more attuned to that kind of thing than she was, and it was probably smart to take her word for it. She turned her attention back to the verse. “Did you misspell ‘straightened’ here?”

Carmela shook her head. “Nope. Different word. The Shamaska word means something that’s been made narrower or smaller…”

“Oh.” Nita looked at the rest of the verse. “A smaller circle… A shortened night.” She let out a breath. “Could that have something to do with Mars’s orbit? It’s a lot narrower than Shamask-Eilith’s would have been.”

“Might be. But what’s ‘the blue star’? And since when does water burn?”

Nita shook her head. “There are a lot of bluish stars that would stand out if you saw them from Mars. Sirius, Rigel, Deneb… And water burning? That can happen, when the conditions are right. It did that down by Caryn Peak during the Song of the Twelve: under enough pressure, when the heat’s high enough, it doesn’t have a choice. It just catches fire.”

“Weird,” Carmela said. She was still frowning at the pad as Nita handed it back to her. “But I don’t think we’re gonna be able to make any real sense of this till I get the rest of it figured out.”

“Well, do what you can,” Nita said. “Meanwhile—”

“You want to go up there. I’ll set the gate up for you. Take the remote, if you want.”

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said. “You might need it for something. I can come back home with a spell: I’ve got one on my charm bracelet.”