A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (49 page)

She laughed a lot harder at the thought. “Bobo being funny in there?” her dad said.

Nita couldn’t stop laughing to answer him.

“Stress,” Dairine said, sounding dry. “She’s got that hysterical sound.”

This was possibly true, but Nita was still laughing so hard she could barely breathe. Finally she choked herself back into some kind of control, wiping her eyes and snickering, even though the thoughts behind it were pretty serious. 
Yeah,
 
I’ll have to watch out... keep an eye on how I’m thinking. This is a really big deal we’re involved in here, and It’ll move in the first second It catches somebody getting careless.
 Nonetheless, the thought of ultimate Evil coming after her in the shape of a duck was strangely reassuring. 
Lone One or not, a duck I could handle.

Nita caught the laughter trying to start again, and stopped it. 
But what a way to get up the Lone One’s nose,
 she thought
... Or beak.
 She allowed herself a last giggle. 
It’s so hung up on being taken dead seriously. Pull that line on It, and who knows, It might do that cartoon thing: get so mad, It’ll make a mistake...

Finally Nita sighed and got up to get a sponge so that she could clean the tea off the table before it dried sticky. She picked up the mug and wiped up wet tea from underneath it, and put the mug down again, and then froze as the room abruptly blanked out around her.

Behind her eyes, Nita saw some city’s streets full of screaming, plunging crowds. She saw Mars, Mars, Mars, a hundred times, on a hundred TV screens. There was something wrong with that Mars: it was turning blue. She saw Kit skywalking precariously over a pit of giant green metal scorpions. She saw a line of fierce light stretching from dawn into darkness, pulling and pulling at something with great force, singing like a plucked string with unbearable tension. And she saw a huge wave that was slowly, slowly leaning up over her. The Sun was caught in it, faint, pale, fluttering weakly in the water like a drowning bug.

Then she found herself looking at the tea mug again.

What was
 that
?!

She was breathing hard. The images had come fast but were entirely clear, and they
scared
her.

Okay,
 she thought. “Bobo? Did you see those?”

It would have been difficult to
 avoid 
seeing them.

“Take notes!”

Consider it done.

Nita stared at the mug, then went back into the kitchen for more tea. As she turned on the heat under the kettle again, she had a sudden thought. She dug around in her pocket for her phone, pulled it out, and dialed.

“
Hola
 Nita!” said the voice on the other end.

“Hey, you’re back already. I thought you’d still be up there.”

“Nope,” Nita said. “Got bored, came home.”

“What, didn’t you find Kit?”

“Oh, he’s up there all right,” Nita said, “with a big Do Not Disturb sign hung around his neck.”

Carmela snorted. “Counting craters again,” she said. “Never mind. He’ll be back here pretty soon for dinner. I’ll tell him you called.”

“Oh, I wasn’t calling for him! Thought you might have something else on your poem.”

“Turns out it has a name!” Carmela said. “It’s called the 
Red Rede.”

“So it is a big deal, then,” Nita said.

“I think so. Anyway, I think I’ve got that last verse translated. Though it’s vague.”

“Par for the course at the moment, isn’t it?” Nita said. “Shoot.”

“Here’s the whole thing,” Carmela said. And she recited:

“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. Yet to wreak aright,

She must slay her rival | and the First World spurn

Lest the one departed | no more return.”

Nita sat there for a moment and felt again, in full force, that sense of impending doom that had taken her by the throat during those strange moments when the imageries of crowds and water and scorpions and Kit had flickered behind her eyes, like shots from an unusually eclectic movie trailer. Now, as Carmela spoke the words, Nita heard the rhythm of them behind the images like a drumbeat, slow, threatening, and she could almost feel a physical pressure building up in her head as the beat went on. 

When the blue star rises.
 She saw Mars lowering overhead, in TV screens, in views from telescopes, going suddenly and scarily blue. 
When the water burns.
 She saw the struggling Sun caught in that bizarre wave, dimmed down and out after a moment by dirt in the water, then lost in a greater shadow that came crashing down. 
The lost one found.
 She saw the princess come dancing up to Kit and take his hand with a look on her face that said she’d been waiting for him for a long time. 
She must slay her rival.
Nita seemed to be hanging high above a vista of cloud-streaked terrain, glinting with water; and somewhere between her and the Sun, blocking away its light, hung a dark and furious female shape with near-invisible energies flowing about its hands—

“Neets?”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not sure. Are you pretty clear about the translation?”

“Oh, yeah,” Carmela said. “I took my time. You have any ideas about this?”

The kettle started whistling softly. Nita pulled it off the heat and got herself another tea bag out of the canister. “Some,” she said. “I need to touch base with Kit first.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll tell him to call you.”

“Yeah. Thanks! And hey, you did a great job.”

“I hope so. Let me know.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Later.” She hung up and found herself staring out the kitchen window, where the morning glories that climbed up the chimney every year were as usual making a bid to climb in through the screen. They suddenly struck Nita as looking bizarre and alien, and the color of them made her think immediately of the too-blue Mars.

Kit,
 she thought, 
get your butt home. Because we really need to talk!

*** 

Kit straightened up from where he’d been hunched over on the rock at the top of Olympus Mons. For a second or so he just let his eyes rest in that astonishing view. Then he slowly realized that something was wrong with the view.
It should be much darker. Why’s it so light?

And then he realized that out there, at the edge of things, the Sun was about to come up.

What?? It was— where was— what time is it?!
 He stared at his watch. 
Oh, my god, it’s five thirty; dinner’s at six!

Kit frantically paged through his manual to the bookmarked area, where he kept his pre-prepared spells, pulled the transit spell off his page, dropped it to the icy dirt, and jumped through. A second later he was in his bedroom, and he could hear a lot of voices talking underneath him in the living room. He ran down the stairs.

The whole family was standing in there, dressed up and ready to go. Now they turned to Kit and looked at him with a broad assortment of expressions— annoyance, confusion, resignation, curiosity.

“Kit,” his papa said. And Pop was the one doing annoyance.

Kit immediately panicked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m really sorry, I— I— just sort of lost track of the time. I’ll be dressed in five minutes—”

“We’ll go wait in the car,” said his mama, who was handling the resignation end of things. Kit fled up the stairs before Helena would have a chance to get really started on the curiosity, now that she had a reason to think it was safe to be curious.

Kit plunged around in his room getting undressed and redressed, hearing people head out the back door, hearing the car start. 
What happened? How did I do that?
 Why 
did I do that? Since when do I fall asleep on Mars? What if my wizardry had failed?
 But he didn’t have answers for any of those questions. 
This is so bizarre!

Dressed in cords and a shirt and the really nice jacket his mama had gotten him— which he hated but which he was hoping would confuse her out of being annoyed with him for the evening— Kit paused just long enough to return Carmela’s hotcurler weapon to its usual place. Then he pounded down the stairs and was just heading out of the living room when the front doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” he yelled, and ran to the door. 
Probably one of Helena’s crowd. Who knew there would be so many of them?
 He unlocked the door, pulled it open—

— to find himself looking at Tom Swale. “Kit,” Tom said. “We need to have a word.”

He looked grim. Sweat burst out all over Kit. “Uh, sure,” he said, and went outside, pulling the front door closed behind him.

“I was really expecting you to get in touch with me,” Tom said, “or at least with Mamvish—”

Kit flushed hot, then cold. “I left her a message. At least, I tried to. Her manual wasn’t taking messages—”

Tom stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and looked at Kit with an expression of disappointment. “And then you went ahead,” he said, “and called Ronan and Darryl, and went off to Mars. And there—” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can specifically characterize what you did as damage: it’s too soon to tell. But you got involved with things that you actively should 
not
 have gotten involved with. At the very least, not without expert assistance! The 
minute
that superegg sent out signals to those four other sites, you should have backed off and called for backup. You know that this has been a team effort from the start! There’s too much riding on this for any one wizard to go off in some novel direction, no matter how good an idea he thinks it is, without consulting everyone else.”

He fell silent. Kit couldn’t do anything but stand there in terrible embarrassment and wonder what he was going to hear next.

“It’s true what Irina told you the other day,” Tom said. “Mostly, in the past, you’ve been able to depend on the sheer power of a relatively new wizard, and a certain talent for riding unfolding events, to get you out of Dutch. But this time, unfortunately, you’ve gone a little bit too far. The power that was let loose on Mars last night went right off the scale. And unfortunately, you and Ronan and Darryl don’t seem to be good influences on each other as regards, well, exercising restraint in team situations. You’re all too far into the loner column for that kind of thing to be easy for you.”

Tom rubbed his eyes. “Now locally, when small-scale personal wizardries are involved— all right, we can find ways to make exceptions for when circumstances allow. But when I have my supervisory levels come down on me and inquire why I’m allowing new wizards to plunge around unsupervised in an off-planet wizardry that could theoretically affect the viability of an entire species, I’m afraid I have to pass some of the pain around.”

He looked at Kit with a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. “I hate having to be in this position,” he said, “but for the time being I’m going to have to ground you. I’m pulling your ability to transit off the planet. And I’ve specifically instructed Darryl not to assist you in this matter. When you’re under supervision, when you come up with other more senior members of the team, that’ll be a different issue. Your sympathy for the planet, your resonance with it, are unquestionably valuable to the project. And they’ll make a big difference in the way we handle the situation as it unfolds. But for the time being, you’re not going to be allowed up there alone.”

Kit couldn’t do anything but nod glumly. “I understand,” he whispered. But he didn’t, really. An unrepentant something in the rear of his mind was shouting, 
Not fair! It’s just not fair!

“I have a lot on my plate today,” Tom said, “so let’s call this discussion complete for the moment. Just—” He looked hard at Kit. “Use this upcoming time to think, all right? I’m not suggesting that you go stand in the corner. You have other things to do here on Earth, and you can get into your manual and annotate the précis we got back of the events of yesterday. Will you do that?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “I’ll do it when we get back.”

“Right,” Tom said. “I’ll see you later.” And he walked off down the street, vanishing into the early dusk.

Kit stood there, staring down the street after him and burning with embarrassment. The restriction would show up in the manual next to his name: he could just imagine what Nita would think when she saw it. 
And she doesn’t understand,
 he thought. 
Not the way that Aurilelde would—

Then he stopped. 
What?
 Kit thought. 
What’s going on in my head?

There was no way to find out. The answer was on Mars, and now he couldn’t get there. Even trying would be hopeless. Kit remembered how hard Dairine had tried to break her ban, the time she’d been restricted to staying inside the Solar System for misbehavior. She’d come back furious, describing it “like hitting your head on a stone wall again and again. Except not just your head:
all
of you.” And then she’d gone off to sulk.