A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (10 page)

“It’s a shame they can’t be here,” Kit said. “They’ve been working so hard on this for so long...”

“As have about twenty other people from your planet for whom this is a special interest,” Mamvish said. “But they don’t grudge missing the action, as long as there 
is
 action.” Her tail swished with excitement. “The rest of your team will get here when work and errantry leave them time. Meanwhile—”

“Where is it?” Kit said. “
What
 is it?”

“It’s where you said you thought it might be,” Mamvish said. “Hidden under one of these dunes. But time passed, the wind blew, the dune moved ...and now it’s not hidden anymore. As for the what— now we’ll find out. Over this way...”

They all headed southward. Nita saw that Carmela seemed to have recovered her composure and had gravitated back toward Ronan, who was gliding along a foot or so above the surface, with only the occasional very practiced and casual bounce: he looked as unconcerned as if he were walking across some park back home. 
Looks like he and Kit have been up here working in one-third
 g 
an awful lot. Maybe more than I thought
...But projects of her own had been keeping Nita busy lately, and what she told Carmela had been true: the Martian project had been far more Kit’s passion than hers for some months. Not that she hadn’t come up every now and then to see how things were going. But mostly they 
hadn’t
 been. Until now, Kit and all the other wizards he’d been working with had found nothing at all...

He and Darryl and Ronan were now bouncing along together, talking hard as they came up beside Mamvish. Carmela had dropped back, succumbing to the fascination of where she was and looking intently at the sandy ground, the dusty rocks, the alien dune-vista between her and the horizon. Irina, too, had paused to pick up a rough dark-green stone and look closely at it. The baby hanging in front of her patted the rock with one hand and crowed as Nita came up next to the two of them. “Irina—” she said very quietly.

“It’s about Darryl, isn’t it?”

Nita went hot with embarrassment. “It’s all right,” Irina said softly, turning the rock over in her hands. “He can be away from Earth for short periods, and his function as a channel of the One’s power into the world won’t suffer. But I think you’ll find that he won’t care to be away much longer. For those of us who’ve become important at the planetary level, the Earth whispers in our ears when it’s uneasy at our absence. And the whisper’s impossible to ignore.”

Irina tossed the rock to the ground and gestured with her head toward the others. She and Nita started to bounce after them, and the baby shouted with delight as they went, while the yellow parakeet scolded them noisily, finally taking off and flying on ahead, quick as an arrow-shot in the low gravity. “Besides,” Irina said, “while Mamvish is here, nothing’s going to dare interfere with him, or you, or anything else that’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I couldn’t believe that spell. And she did it so casually. What her power levels must be like—”

“Well, yes, but it’s not just that,” Irina said, even more softly than she’d spoken about Darryl. “She’s unusual even as wizards go. It wouldn’t be in the manuals, but it might be useful for you to know: she’s an Abstainee.”

Nita’s eyes went wide. “She had her Ordeal and the Lone Power 
didn’t show up?
”

Irina nodded, smiled. “It even sent her a message saying It wasn’t 
going
 to turn up. She told me once,” Irina said, with a somewhat cockeyed look, “that It said It had a headache.”

Nita shook her head, not knowing what to make of this. “I bet 
that
 doesn’t happen often.”

“Galaxy-wide? Eleven times in the last five centuries,” Irina said. She looked ahead toward where the others had stopped in the shadow of one more black-sand dune, a very perfect crescent with the open side toward them. “And as usual, the question is: do her power levels come from being an Abstainee, or did the Lone One decide not to get involved because of her power levels...?” Irina shook her head. “It may not matter. But she’s good to have around for backup... and no wizard alive knows more about this particular kind of work than she does. I’m glad she’s here. Especially since this is such an odd place, some ways...”

Irina gazed toward the northern horizon for a moment as they went. “I have to come up here two or three times a year to make sure the planet’s operating correctly in the absence of a kernel, and afterwards I always go away wondering why the manual’s so short of information about exactly what’s happened here. Now, though, what the Mars team has found may mean the silence is finally about to break a little.”

Shortly they caught up with the others, who were all standing around a little irregular outcropping or bump of dark olive-colored stone, just four feet or so high. It jutted up deep in the shadow of the crescent dune, and just a foot or two clear of where the steep, smooth sweep of dark, gritty sand on the dune’s inner side came down to the ground. “It’s under that?” Kit said as Nita and Irina caught up with the others.

“Inside it,” said Mamvish.

“And you’re sure whatever’s in there isn’t something contemporary?” Ronan said. “Like that alien tourist beacon Nita’s sister found up on Olympus Mons when she passed through on her Ordeal? Not some practical joke?”

Mamvish tilted her head one way and the other, the gesture her people apparently used for “no.” “Many sites that wizards have investigated here over the last three centuries have had a scent of old wizardry about them, but never anything this concrete. And the survey spell identifies what’s emplaced here as being at least five hundred and forty thousand years old. Even Earth’s earliest wizards didn’t venture this far for many thousands of years after that. So I think we’re safe enough from practical jokes. Anyway—” She gestured with her tail at Kit. “Kit is probably the most Mars-crazed of the whole team, and he’s the one who’s always been after everybody to keep on looking here, even after previous searches came up blank.”

“Why, Kit?” Irina said. “What seemed so special about Syrtis?”

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know. It was just a hunch to start with.” He looked around him. “But Syrtis Major was the first feature on Mars that anyone on Earth really
noticed,
the thing that’s most obvious from space. It just seemed like a good place to start.”

“Hunch or no hunch, Kit seems to have a feel for this place,” Mamvish said. “Why argue the point? No one knows why any wizard’s good at any particular specialty. The Powers may know, but it’s not information They seem interested in sharing.” She shrugged her tail.

“How come all the sensor spells the team was using before didn’t turn this up until now?” Nita said.

“Because it was built to hide its nature,” Mamvish said. “An extremely elegant piece of wizardry, exactly mimicking the structure and composition of its surroundings. For a long time, before the dunes advanced into the crater, all the spell had to pretend to be was this chunk of rock ...and it did that perfectly. But then the dunes came in, and the wizardry had to adapt itself to mimicking not only rock, but dust and sand of a different composition and structure. The adjustment took a while, since the spell had only limited running power available to it. And when the dune moved away again, the spell had to adjust again.”

She glanced around. “A dust storm moved through here the other night: in the wind, the dune moved just far enough westward to reveal the outcropping, and the wizardry started to adapt again. But Síle was still here, up north by the canyon valley you call Huo Hsing Vallis, running the new survey spell she and Markus had designed. She detected the chameleon spell and what it was protecting before the wizardry had time to reset and hide it all again.”

“Well done, that woman,” Ronan said. “She always was the stubborn type.”

“Sometimes stubbornness pays better dividends than high power levels,” Irina said. “Well, shouldn’t we take a look at it?”

“This is your job, I think,” Mamvish said to Kit.

Kit suddenly looked abashed and shy. Nita had to hide her smile.

“Go on,” Mamvish said. “You’re the one who predicted the location. Pull it out of there and let’s see what it is.”

Kit nodded, knelt down in front of the outcropping, put his hands up against it, and very slowly and carefully recited the fourteen syllables of the Mason’s Word, which has power over stone and the mineral elements. Then he leaned inward. Slowly Kit’s hands sank in through the surface of the brown stone, up to the wrists, then up to the elbows. He looked absently upward, like anyone feeling around for something he can’t see, and then his eyes widened.

“It’s pretty big,” he said. “Round, I think. Kind of beach-ball sized...”

Very slowly he pulled his arms back. His face tensed. “It doesn’t want to come,” he said.

“The spell would resist,” Mamvish said. “That’s its job. Keep pulling.”

Nita watched as the sweat popped out on Kit’s forehead. She could feel his nervousness, catch a flicker of stressed-out thought: 
Please don’t let me drop it, don’t let anything bad happen to this thing, we’ve been looking for so long—!

Then Kit sat back on his heels, hard, gazing down at what he held. For a few seconds the ancient chameleon spell refused to entirely let go, so that what Kit held looked like nothing but a rounded, gritty, green-brown boulder. Then, gradually, the seeming fell away. Revealed in his hands was a shining blue-green metallic object, strangely shaped: a sort of blunt-ended capsule or stretched sphere, about two feet long.

“Wow...” Nita said, and then realized that her heart was pounding. All the others let out breaths of surprise and satisfaction as they peered over Kit’s shoulder. Only Kit was completely silent, kneeling there with the thing braced on his knees and staring at it in wonder.

And, way down in the pocket of her jeans, Nita’s cell phone rang.

Kit looked over his shoulder, his expression surprised and annoyed. Nita said a word that was 
not
 one she’d heard Mamvish using earlier and pulled her phone out, checking the ID on its display. It was her home number. 
If it’s Dairine, I swear when I catch her I’m gonna grab her and shove her head down the—
But the phone, having had its caller ID tweaked with wizardry, helpfully added: DAD CALLING.

“Oh, no,” Nita moaned, for she suspected she knew what he was calling about. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, I have to take this...”

She flipped the phone open, acutely aware of everyone watching her, and flushed with embarrassment. “Hello?”

“Nita,” her dad said: and that was an immediate sign of trouble— both in terms of his tone of voice, which was annoyed, and the fact that he’d called her by her name rather than one of the usual nicknames or pet names he used. “Where are you?”

“I’m on Mars, Dad. Please, can this wait a little while? Because I—”

“No. I need you home right now.”

“Daddy, I—”

“Five minutes.”

She knew that tone of voice, and there was no arguing with it, not if you wanted life to continue in anything like a normal way. “Okay,” Nita said.

Her dad simply hung up.

Oh, he sounds so steamed about something, what can have him so mad...?

I bet I know.

She started to get mad herself as she folded up the phone and put it away. “This is so 
unfair!
” she said.

Mamvish gave her one of those amused Senior-like looks that suggested that the concept of “fairness” was something Nita should have gotten past by now. Nita sighed. “I have to go,” she said to Carmela. “I’m really sorry—”

“Don’t be,” Carmela said. “It’s no problem. I’m sure Kit will drop me off as soon as he’s done here. Won’t you?” And Carmela turned on Kit one of those bright of-course-you-will looks that dared him to say anything different.

Nita saw Kit’s face work through annoyance, frustration, and an imposed calm that suggested he didn’t want to look like an idiot by protesting too much. Behind him, Ronan was gazing innocently at nothing in particular, and Darryl was watching all this with acute interest. “Sure,” Kit said.

Nita reached for her charm bracelet, feeling for the single charm, like a thin ring or empty circle, that held the preset transit spell that would take her home in a hurry. She said the few words in the Speech that took the “safety” off the spell, and as she pulled the bright line of light that was the transit spell out of the charm, Kit threw her an apologetic look. “I’ll log everything we do,” he said. “Get back as soon as you can—”

“Depend on it,” Nita said, dropped the transit circle glowing on the dusty brown-green ground around her, and vanished.

*** 

Kit let out another long breath as the others gathered around to look more closely at what he held. He looked up at Mamvish and Irina. “What is it?” he said.

“Well, as far as the shape goes,” Irina said, peering at the object, “it’s a superellipsoid. A superegg, some people used to call it, or a Lamé solid: the three-dimensional object you get when you rotate a superellipse around its axis. Not as resistant to force as a sphere, but it’s less likely to be mistaken for something natural.” She reached out a hand, touched it.