A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (9 page)

“Well,” Mamvish said, swinging one eye in his direction, “that’s the question we’ll be examining. Local catastrophes have killed too many species in the past— peoples we could ill afford to lose. My job’s to prevent the loss of worlds that have something special to offer the universe, to keep species or planets that have made unusual contributions from being completely lost—and, occasionally, to get back lost worlds that aren’t as lost as we think they are.”

“Like Mars…” Nita said.

“Yes,” Mamvish said. “And sometimes, as seems to have happened in this case, we get a little help from the species in question: they leave us data about what happened to them.”

“A message in a bottle,” Ronan said.

“Yes. In this case, the ‘bottle’ we’ve located seems to have been emplaced some five hundred sixty thousand years ago.”

Nita blinked at that. “Wow. There were just human ancestors around then. It was— what, the really early Stone Age?”

“The Lower Paleolithic, as I understand your usage,” Mamvish said. “Any knowledge or memory your most distant ancestors had of Mars is lost. But worlds have different kinds of memory than the beings that move on their surfaces. Whatever humans know about Mars, the outer worlds have different knowledge about it: troubled recollections. We have to go carefully at first.” The eyes rotated again in the head. “But the risk may be worth it. Some of the most dangerous ‘lost’ species have brought us some of the greatest gifts once they’ve been revived.”

Carmela was looking dubious. “Am I completely misunderstanding you, or are you actually talking about bringing them back from the dead?”

“Well, there’s dead and there’s
really
dead,” Mamvish said. “Of course we couldn’t do anything about the second kind. However, there are a hundred different kinds of stasis, soulfreeze, matter seizure, and wait-just-a-minute that species across the galaxy have invented to stave off entropy’s Last Word. Many species have seen a catastrophe coming and found ways to archive or preserve not just the news about what happened to them but themselves as well. In Mars’s case, the first steps have been toward finding out whether there were ever Martians—because your whole species seems to have some kind of unfinished business, or unstarted business, with Mars. If Martians
did
exist, the next step would then be to find out what happened to them. Once we know that, we can start working out how to re-evoke them—in a limited way, just to find out firsthand what happened to them. From there we can make the determination as to whether it’s wise to revive them wholly. And then—”

“We bring them back,” Kit said softly.

“Maybe,” Mamvish said. “We’ve got a lot of steps to go through before that. And the first one will be to—”

Nita suddenly felt as if something had kicked her in the chest. The breath went right out of her, for no reason she could understand, and she gasped in reaction. At the same moment, “I’m so sorry I’m late,” said another voice, a female one, out of nothing. “What did I miss?”

They all turned— Nita last: she was still having trouble finding her breath—and stared. Standing there among the rocks of the beach was what looked like a slender little housewife in her thirties, wearing a flowered housedress and flip-flops. She had boldly highlighted shaggy blond hair, a blinking, placid baby in a patchwork-patterned shoulder sling, and a yellow parakeet sitting on her shoulder.

Mamvish hurriedly put down the scratching foot, stood up, and inclined her head to the woman. “Irina,” she said, “this is more than a pleasure!”

Nita and Kit stared at each other, and Darryl’s eyes went wide, and even Ronan, for all his usual overlay of unconcerned coolness, sat up straight.
Is that who I think it is?
Nita said silently to Kit.

Look at the way Mamvish’s acting. It has to be—!

“I’m just passing through,” said the Planetary Wizard for Earth, and the baby chuckled and reached up to pull on her hair as she smiled around at them all, then at Mamvish again. “I heard you were going to be in the neighborhood, Archivist. I thought I’d wait until the excitement died down, and then drop by and pay my respects.”

“Planetary,” said Mamvish, bowing her head more deeply, “don’t be respecting
me
. I’m just migrant labor.”

Irina laughed; the parakeet fluttered its wings and scolded her, a little scratchy noise on the hot, sunny air. “And I’m just a housekeeper!” Irina said, reaching up a finger to the parakeet: it nibbled her nail. “Sure, the house is bigger than some. But it’s the empty house next door that’s really got me interested. I hear you’ve finally found what you were looking for—”

“We were about to go up to the site to look at the find,” Mamvish said. “Do you have time to accompany us?”

“For a few minutes, surely.”

Mamvish put her head up and cocked one eye at the Sun. The other stayed trained on the ground, as if she was looking for something. Nita watched this with interest, suspecting that Mamvish was about to cast some kind of transit circle—

Shadow fled outward from Mamvish and ran swift as a blast wave across the ground, past the rocks on which they were all sitting, out toward the sea and up the face of the cliff. In that shadow, Mamvish glowed. The green-gold shimmer under her hide was replaced by darkness in which burned a great complexity of characters and sentences in the Speech, writhing and coiling about one another, flowing out onto the darkened ground. The shadow beneath them now filled with those words and characters, and as Mamvish stretched her head upward into the air, the sound of the surf behind them was drowned out by what seemed a whole chorus of voices chanting in the Speech, like a great concord of wind instruments: Mamvish’s voice, but seemingly multiplied many times over, as if she was somehow reciting all the different parts of the spell at the same time.

Nita tried to breathe and found she couldn’t. The spell held her in place, and she couldn’t move a muscle, not even to look sideways to see how Kit was taking it. All around them, instead of the inward-leaning, listening silence that normally meant a wizardry was starting to work, Nita started to hear something astonishing— more voices, seeming to join in with Mamvish’s fluting one, all speaking the Speech together with her from out of some great echoing depth, a great chorus of intention, elation, even excitement—

Then the silence fell, abrupt, unexpected: and the sea was gone, and the sky was a dark hazy russet-golden color rather than blue. Nita let go the awed breath she’d been forced to hold, looking around her at a world that had gone a dusty ochre, shading to rusty charcoal at the edges.

Nita slid down off the boulder, took another breath. Since her eyes weren’t boiling out of her head in the hyperthin air, and she hadn’t half frozen since they got there, it was plain that Mamvish had taken care of the group’s atmosphere needs. But Nita still felt wobbly. That huge wash of Speech and wizardly power left her feeling like she’d been run over by a truck, and as if all the spells she’d ever cast by herself or just in company with Kit were weak little things by comparison. She leaned against the boulder, gulping, and tried to get her composure back.

Kit, still up on the boulder, was gasping and trying to hide it: Ronan was shaking his head like someone who’d been punched. Carmela, sitting beside him, had unbraided her hair and was braiding it up again— a sign that Nita had learned to read as meaning that Mela was unnerved. Only Darryl was standing there casually looking around him, seemingly unaffected.

Nita saw Mamvish, noting this, rotate one eye toward Irina, who was fanning herself with one hand like someone who’d broken out in a sweat. Irina said nothing, but Nita suspected that a few thoughts were passing between them concerning why so young and relatively inexperienced a wizard should be untroubled by what had just happened.

Good,
Nita thought.
Something we don’t have to warn her about.
Nita had been concerned about the appropriateness of one of Earth’s precious few
abdals
getting involved in off-planet wizardly work: but if Irina didn’t do anything about it, then it definitely had to be all right. Nita let out a long breath and looked up at that strange butterscotch-colored daytime sky, which shaded down toward deeper tints of apricot and warm brick red at the horizon. Southward of where they stood, the dust was thick in the sky, softening a horizon that would normally have been much sharper, and hiding the view of the distant foothills.

Nita swallowed, smiled. It had always been wonder enough just to step out of a gating circle onto this ancient and alien soil, to stand gazing up into this unearthly sky and see that smaller, cooler, pinker sun. Nita had been here often enough, over the last year or so, to almost get used to that marvel. But today there was something new that sharpened this view, lent an edge to the feel of the place. The clue they’d been hunting had finally been found. Now every shadow, every rock, seemed to be hiding a secret.

Life…!

“What time is it here?” Irina said.

“About halfway through the sol,” Mamvish said, glancing around. “Am I right— that’s the name your people use for the Martian day? Excellent. Anyway, it’s late autumn here: we’re just north of the planet’s equator.”

Looking around, Nita smiled wryly. The only way to tell that fall was here was by the angle of the Sun and the slight warmth remaining in the atmosphere— meaning that the outside temperature was only about thirty degrees below zero. Feeling less shaky now, she pushed away from the chilly boulder she’d been leaning against and peered south toward the highlands.

This part of Mars’s northern hemisphere was dominated by flat country, the crater-pitted remnant of old lava flows. Southward the highlands would start to pile up into far more spectacular and mountainous terrain, dotted with terrible crevasses and ancient volcanic peaks. But all that was well over the horizon. Here everything was relatively flat, darkened by the local green-brown sand and dust— except for the features lowering over the site to which Mamvish had brought them. On every side, immense charcoal-dark dunes of windblown basalt sand had piled up— stretched out serpentlike across the plain, half a mile or a mile long, as sharp-edged as any desert dune on Earth. But in the lower gravity, these dunes towered nearly five hundred feet high, casting long, cold shadows across the plain in the light of early morning.

The others were getting down from where they’d been sitting. Nita threw a glance at Kit, saw that he was all right, and went over to where Carmela was standing, gazing around with her hair braided up again, a look of astonishment on her face. “Aren’t we inside a force field or something?” Carmela said. “How come I can feel the wind?”

“I told you,” Nita said, “Mamvish has power to burn...” Whenever Nita and Kit had come here on their own, or to work with the other wizards involved in this effort, they’d both worn personal force fields that hugged them close, keeping the Martian atmosphere out and their own carefully calculated air supplies in. But Mamvish had built her wizardry very differently, so that it matched the temperature and oxygen content of Earth’s air exactly but still transmitted the forces of the thin exterior atmosphere as if they were one and the same. It would have been an incredibly difficult wizardry to structure, and Nita could imagine the kind of power necessary to run it. 
The same kind of power that can pick you up off one planet and drop you on another between one breath and the next without it even looking hard...

“Why’s everything this khaki color?” Carmela said, as she and Ronan and Darryl came over to join Nita and Kit near where Mamvish and Irina were looking around. “I thought this was supposed to be the 
red
 planet.”

“Because we’re in the middle of Syrtis Major,” Kit said. “That big dark eastern-hemisphere blotch that everybody used to think was a sea, with canals running into it. There were a lot of volcanoes here, so the ground’s full of this green stuff, olivine, that formed when the lava cooled.” Kit looked around like someone who just needed to see a few landmarks to be sure where he was. “This isn’t really a crater we’re in: it’s what’s left of one of the calderas where the lava came out. It’s called Nili Patera.” He looked over at Mamvish. “And the bottle is—”

“A few hundred meters south,” Mamvish said. “Síle and Markus get the credit for finding it. They were working this site all this week...”

“Who’re Síle and Markus?” Carmela said, bouncing up and down in place to get the feel of the gravity, which was only about a third of the Earth’s. Each bounce took her several times higher than she’d intended, and Nita kept having to reach up and grab her and pull her back down.

“A couple of the other wizards on the project,” Kit said. “Síle’s from Ronan’s part of the world— she’s at college studying computer science in Paris. Markus is in the German army: he drives tanks.”

“They’re not tanks,” Ronan muttered. “They’re armored personnel carriers, and if he hears you call them tanks one more time...”

Kit gave Ronan a “whatever” shrug. “They were the ones who called me in,” Mamvish said. “Markus’s unit had to go on active service yesterday morning to help with the floods in the south of his country. Síle stayed here and kept running the spell routines that she and Markus had been working on, till something came up that required her to head home and go out on errantry yesterday evening. She called me in just before she went on active status.”