A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (43 page)

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 low-lying 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.”