A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (3 page)

Kit stuffed the paper hurriedly into his book bag and shouldered it. Mr. Mack closed his briefcase with the air of a man shutting a whole year into it, and good riddance. Then he glanced up. “Unless there was something else? Of course there was.”

Kit gave up any hope of ever being able to put anything over this particular teacher. “Yeah. Uh— 
How do you not sweat like that?”

Mr. Mack looked briefly surprised, and then laughed out loud. “The phrasing’s unusual,” Mr. Mack said. “I take it you mean, how do I not sweat? And the answer is, I 
don’t
 not sweat.”

Kit raised his eyebrows.

“But I 
do
 waterproof the insides of my clothes,” Mr. Mack said.

Kit stared at him. Mr. Mack laughed again, then, the sound of a sneaky magician giving away the secret to a really good trick. “It’s a Marine thing,” Mr. Mack said. “We used to do it on parade. We spray our shirts with that anti-stain waterproofing stuff you use on upholstery. It’s good for giving other people the impression that you’re not quite human.”

His voice as he said this was so dry that Kit burst out laughing. But a moment later he stopped. “You were in the Marines?” Kit said, suddenly seeing Mr. Mack with entirely new eyes. This little guy, just barely taller than Kit’s mama, with his bald head and his red tie with little blue galloping ponies on it, a different tie every day
—“Korea?”

Mr. Mack shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “A lot of other places. But Korea was well before my time.”

Kit looked at him; this time it was his turn to look thoughtful. “The way you talked about it, though. The dark, the light—”

Mr. Mack shook his head. “If a historian needs anything,” he said, “it’s an imagination. The dates, the place names, the battles... they’re not what’s most important. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them— their sky, their sea. Their tools. Their houses. Their troubles. That’s how what they did starts to make sense. Along with what we do in the same situations...”

He paused, looking surprised at himself. “Sorry. It’s a passion,” Mr. Mack said. “But I can recognize the signs in someone else. Watch out: it’ll eat you alive. Other lives, other minds ...there’s no getting enough of them.” He gave Kit a cockeyed look. “Why are you still here? Go away before I give you a quiz.”

Kit grinned and left with as much dignity as he could manage. The dignity broke down about three yards down the hall, as he caught sight of Raoul, trying to look like he was leaning casually against a locker, waiting for Kit. Kit didn’t know whether to try to look cool or to scream out loud. Screaming won. He pulled the paper out again, waved it in Raoul’s face.

Raoul snatched it out of Kit’s hand. “Do you believe this, Pirate?” Kit yelled. 
“Do you believe this?!”

They started jumping up and down together like the acrobatically insane. “Ninety-nine! Ninety-nine!” Raoul promptly turned it into something like a sports chant. “Nine-ty-
nine!
 Nine-ty-
nine!”

People wandering down the hall that crossed this one stared at them, vaguely interested by the actions of the certifiably mad— meaning anyone who would still willingly be in the building after the end of the last period. “But what did 
you
 get?” Kit said as they headed toward the doors at the end of the hall.

“Eighty,” Raoul said.

Kit suddenly felt bizarrely disappointed. “How’d 
that
 happen?”

“I messed up the essay,” Raoul said. “But I did okay on everything else. It’s not a bad grade. My mom’ll get off my case now.”

“Mine, too,” Kit said, “I hope. But wow, what a relief. I thought I was dead!”

“I
 thought you were dead!” Raoul laughed that crazed laugh of his as they went down the hall to the paired doors that led to the parking lot. They each hit one door and burst out into the hot, humid summer air, laughing.

“This day could not 
possibly
 get any better,” Kit said.

“Oh, come on,” Raoul said, “stretch your brains. Anything could happen...”

They saw Raoul’s mom’s slightly beat-up red station wagon come swinging in through the parking lot gates. “So listen,” Raoul said, “my dad says we’re having a big barbecue next week, for his birthday. Next Thursday. You and your folks and your sister, you’re all invited. Can you make it?”

“I’ll find out.”

“Okay,” Raoul said, as his own mom pulled up. “Text me later!”

Kit nodded, waving at Raoul’s little blond mom as he got into the car. The first thing Raoul did was fish around in his pack and show his mom the test paper: she grinned, and Raoul flashed a grin of his own at Kit as his mom drove away.

Kit let out a long breath as he glanced down at his own paper one more time, then put it away. His nerves were finally settling down, which was a good thing, as he was also still tired from doing that spell. He wasn’t so tired, though, that he wasn’t going to immediately call the wizard with whom he worked most closely and do a little gloating.

He pulled his wizard’s manual out of his back-pack, flipping it open to the rearmost pages, the messaging area. Some pages were covered with stored messages, all seemingly printed in the graceful curvilinear characters of the wizardly Speech; but any one Kit touched with a finger would seem to rise up out of the page, the writing increasing in size for easier reading. He flipped through the back pages until he found one that was blank, ready to take a message— and then stopped. In the middle of a page that had been blank earlier in the afternoon was a single line of text, and it was glowing fiercely blue and pulsing alternately brighter and fainter— the sign of a message that had just come in and hadn’t yet been read.  

Kit peered at it. There was nothing there but a time stamp— JD 2455367.11685— and these words:

We’ve found the bottle. Meeting this afternoon. M.

The breath went right out of Kit.

Holy cow ...Raoul was right!!

“Yes!”
 Kit shouted. He slapped the manual shut, shoved it back in the book bag, and jumped up and punched the air some more. And then, because right in front of the school would have been a bad place to do a teleport, he ran off across the parking lot, grinning, to find a more private spot.

Nita Callahan sat on the flat, warm stones at the edge of the koi pond, her eyes closed, looking for something.

After a moment, she saw it. 
Shadow,
 she thought. 
A shadow across the Sun. Just for a few seconds. But when?

She waited: and then she knew.

“Now,” she said, and opened her eyes.

The water rippled at her in the summer breeze, the surface of it dazzling in the bright and uninterrupted sunlight. Nita winced.

“Oh, come on,” she said under her breath. “Come 
on!
” She looked up at the sky overhead. It remained stubbornly clear.

“That won’t help,” said a small voice from the water.

She frowned and refused to answer. Above and beyond the trees that surrounded Tom Swale’s yard, very slowly, a single little puffy cloud could be seen cruising toward the low, late-afternoon Sun. It seemed to be in no hurry. If clouds had feet, it would have been dragging them.

Nita scowled harder. 
Hurry up!
 she thought in the Speech. 
Come on, get a move on!

But merely thinking something in the Speech doesn’t turn the idea into a spell... especially since wizardry is mostly about persuading creatures and things to do what you want, not ordering them around.

The cloud actually seemed to slow up. Then, finally, almost reluctantly, it started to pass in front of the sun.

Nita grinned. “Aw
right!”
 she said, looking down into the fishpond. “That’s the best one yet! I only missed it by half a minute.”

One of the koi, the one with the silver-coin scales, looked up out of the pond at her. “Fifty seconds,” Doitsu said.

“Or about fifty-five seconds too long,” said another voice, a human one, from behind her. “Doesn’t count. Try it again.”

Nita let out an annoyed breath and turned. “You guys are just being mean!”

“An oracular who predicts the future a minute late is possibly even less effective than one who gets it wrong all the time,” Tom Swale said, straightening up with a groan from the flower bed where he’d been working. “And will probably get a lot more frustrated.”

“Hey, thanks loads,” Nita said, and slumped against the fishpond’s rockwork.

“You’d hardly expect me to start lying to you at this late date,” Tom said, amused.

Nita gave him an annoyed look. “Let’s see 
you
 do any better!”

“Me? Why should I?” Tom frowned down at the next flower bed. “This is 
your
 gift we’re trying to sharpen up.”

“And, anyway, it’s too hot!”

“True,” Tom said, “but nothing to do with the business at hand. Come on, give it another try.”

Nita wiped her forehead; she was sweating. “It’s no use. I need a break.”

Another koi, a marmalade-colored one, put its head up out of the water. “You need to concentrate harder,” said Akagane. “You can’t be in that moment unless you’re in 
this
 one.”

“Blank your mind out first,” said Doitsu.

A third head came up, splotched in red and black on silver-white. “Pay more attention to the news,” said Showa.

Nita rolled her eyes. “None of you are helping!”

“It’s not help you need,” Tom said. “It’s practice. You think anybody learns to see futurity overnight?”

“Forget the future!” Nita said. “I can barely see the present!” She leaned back against the rocks behind the koi pond, rubbing her eyes: beams from the low sun piercing through the trees were glancing off the pond’s surface, and the glitter of them made her eyes water.

“The news’ll help with that, too,” Tom said. He was sweating; even in a T-shirt, the humidity that day was enough to make anybody miserable.

“And it’s not 
the
 future,” said Showa, backfinning toward where the rocks overhanging the pond made a small waterfall. “
A
 future.”

Nita sighed. “But how can you tell you’ve got the right one?”

“You can’t,” said Akagane as she rose to the surface in Showa’s wake. “At least, you can’t tell for sure, or very clearly.”

“You can get a feeling,” said Doitsu, just hanging there in the water and fanning his fins. “Or a hunch.”

“But what if you’re wrong?”

Doitsu made a kind of shrug with his fins. “You try again. Assuming you haven’t blown up the world or something in the meantime...” And he submerged.

The other two koi sank down into the water as well. Nita sighed and leaned back, watching Tom as he walked over to another of the plant beds, squatted down beside it, and then let out a long, annoyed breath. He reached down in among some of the plants, pushed broad green leaves aside, and sighed.

“Guys,” Tom said in the Speech, “how many times do we have to have this conversation?” He picked something up, looked at it. It was a slug. He shook his head and tossed it off to one side, into another leafy bed. “Those are 
your
strawberries—”
fling
— “over 
there!
 These are 
my
 strawberries—” 
fling
— “over 
here!
”

Nita gave him a crooked smile. “That can’t be real good for them.”

“Slugs are resilient,” Tom said.

Nita watched another one fly through the air. “Yeah. I see how they bounce...”

“Do I hear a criticism coming?”

Nita restrained herself, but wasn’t quite ready to stop teasing Tom yet. “Isn’t it weird that a Senior Wizard can talk the sky into hitting things with lightning but can’t talk a bunch of slugs out of eating his strawberries?”

Tom sighed. “Lightning’s a lot easier to talk to than slugs,” he said. “Not that you’re so much talking to the slug as to its DNA... which has been the way it is for about a hundred million years. Strawberries are a relatively recent development, to a slug. But then, so are human beings.” He grinned. “Anyway, I live in hope that they’ll get it eventually. But enough of you being on my case. Or just you. Kit’s running late. Where’s he gotten to?”

Nita rolled her eyes. “That’d be the question, the last couple weeks.”

Tom glanced up. “He’s missing Ponch, huh?”

Nita shrugged, not sure how to describe what was going on. Kit’s dog had been getting increasingly strange for a long time, but in the complex and disruptive events of the last month he had gone way beyond strange, right out of life and into something far greater. Kit wasn’t exactly sad about what had happened, but he was definitely sad at not having his dog around anymore. “It’s complicated,” Nita said. “I don’t think it’s just about Ponch. But he’s been away from home a lot.”