A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (15 page)

“Has he had another upgrade?” Nita said. When she’d seen Spot only that morning, he’d looked as he had for the last couple of months—shining black and wearing, set into the back of the closed lid, what could at first glance have been mistaken for the fruity logo of a large computer company, except that this apple had no bite out of it Now, though, he looked significantly thinner, and the black of his carapace had gone matte.

“Scheduled molt,” Dairine said. “He was installing some new firmware and thought while he was at it he’d try one of the new nonreflective coatings on his shell.”

“Sharp look, guy!” Nita said to him. “Suits you.”

Thanks,
 Spot said. As usual, he was no more verbally forthcoming with Nita than with anyone else but Dairine. But he did sound faintly pleased.

Dairine let out a long breath. “I don’t know about this,” she said under her breath. “Bobo’s kind of your tool.”

Nita burst out laughing. Dairine looked at her strangely. “What? What’s so funny?”

It took Nita a few moments to get the laughter under control. “My tool! Oh, please. Like I can order wizardry around and tell it what to do! Please let 
that
 happen.” She got down on one knee. “Spot,” she said, “have you been following this?”

Yes.

“Will this solution work for you? You’re the one who’ll be the source of the raw data. Bobo’ll just be managing the spinoff for Dad: he’ll feed the massaged data to the computer at home.”

Maybe with text-message alerts and tweets when something new comes in,
 Bobo said at the back of Nita’s mind. 
And copied to e-mail, of course...

Nita rolled her eyes. 
Not only do I have the spirit of wizardry living in my head, but it’s a
 geek 
spirit.
 She turned her attention back to Spot.

He turned one eye up to look at Dairine. 
Okay with you?
 

She shrugged. “If we’re going to stay on track with what we’re doing here, sounds like it has to be.”

All right,
Spot said, and trundled off back under the simulator. There he levitated up into the body of the surrogate sun, vanishing in the glare of its chromosphere.

Nita shook her head. “How hot does it get in there?”

“Not too bad,” Dairine said, and sighed. “A couple thousand degrees K. The temperature’s scaled down, like the exterior, for practice. Wizards here usually scale themselves way up in apparent size to work with Thahit. Seems it perceives us better that way.”

Nita nodded. “Okay. Look... thanks for working with me on this. Why don’t you go get changed and we’ll head home and deal with Dad before he gets too crazy. The sooner we disarm him, the sooner life gets back to what passes for normal.”

Dairine nodded, moved away. Then suddenly she stopped and turned: and the strange, hard look on her face made Nita wonder if she was going to have to do this bout of persuasion all over again.

“One thing,” Dairine said.

Nita tried to stay calm. “Yeah?”

Dairine came back to Nita almost reluctantly. “When you came after me just now,” Dairine said, “you checked your manual first, didn’t you? To see what happened to Roshaun.”

Nita froze. Dairine’s voice had gone expressionless and flat, and hearing it sound that way scared Nita: the last time she’d heard that tone from her sister had been just after their mom had died. 
How do I handle this? What do I say?

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I did.”

Dairine stared at her. Then she whispered, “What did it say?”

Oh, God, I was afraid of this! Either she hasn’t looked, or she has and doesn’t believe what she saw. And if whatever I say is the wrong answer, now I get blamed for whatever I found.
 “Uh. It was something weird. Something really— vague.”

Dairine’s face was simply frozen. Nita didn’t dare move. 
Oh, no, I’m dead now...

But suddenly her sister was hugging her hard, her face buried in Nita’s vest. “Oh, wow,” Dairine was saying, “oh,
wow,
 I was so scared, I thought that he— and then I thought I was crazy; it didn’t make any sense. But if you saw it, too, then it’s true, he’s not, 
not
 dead, he’s 
not
—”

Nita was bemused, but for the moment the safest course seemed to be to just hang on to Dairine while her sister got herself under control. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay!” —while very much hoping it actually was.

After a moment Dairine pushed her away, turning her back to wipe her eyes. “Come on,” Nita said, “let’s get moving. Go change.”

Dairine nodded and vanished.

Nita turned away from the slowly rotating star— then jumped. In complete silence, Nelaid had reappeared behind her and was standing with hands clasped behind his back, looking past Nita at the simulator.

That ironic gaze shifted to her now. Nita popped out in a sweat. The effect was similar to being in the principal’s office, except that in this case she hadn’t been called: she’d walked in and told the principal to his face that whatever he was doing, he needed to stop it while she dealt with business. “I’m really, really sorry,” Nita said. “If I could have, I’d have waited till she got home. But my dad—”

Nelaid held up a hand, closed his eyes. It was a gesture Nita had seen other humanoid species use as the equivalent of a headshake. When Nelaid opened his eyes again, his expression was milder, if no less ironic. “She is, I take it, a trial to you.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”

“I might,” Nelaid said. “I had a younger brother once. He should have been Sunlord when our father left the body. But others had different plans for him. And my father, and me.”

In the précis on Wellakh, Nita had seen references to the political instability of the world: but the phrase “frequent assassinations” can sound merely remotely troubling until you find yourself discussing the reality of it with one of the targets. Not certain how to respond, Nita kept quiet.

“She reminds me of him,” Nelaid said, looking at the simulation of the Wellakhit homestar as it gently rotated. As they watched, a single loop of prominence arched up out of the leftward limb of the star, strained away from it, snapped in two; the ends frayed away and the separate jets fell back to the sun’s surface in a splash of plasma.

“Of your brother?” Nita said.

Nelaid closed his eyes again. When they opened, Nita was sorry she’d said anything: the grief and pain in Nelaid’s eyes flared as the prominence had, brief and fierce. Then the look was swallowed back into that look of carefully controlled irony, and might never have been there at all. “Is she in difficulty at home?” Nelaid said.

“Some. It’ll be okay when we get back. Our dad just needs to know what Dairine’s doing.”

And then the idea hit her. “I wonder—” Nita said, and stopped. 
Where do I go from here? There are too many ways this can go wrong—

Too late: Nelaid was waiting. “It might make our father happier,” Nita said, “if he knew for sure that she had someone keeping an eye on her. Someone—”

“Older?” Nelaid said. “More responsible?” He smiled. Again there was pain in the smile, but it was distant enough, Nita thought, that Nelaid could now also find it funny.

“A father figure?” Nita said, taking the chance.

After a long moment’s stillness, Nelaid nodded. “Perhaps, when the present problem is settled, he and I might speak. At his convenience.”

Nita bowed to Nelaid, and not one of those all-purpose half-bows, either. In the middle of it, the air went 
bang!
behind her as Dairine reappeared. “You drop something?” her sister said.

Nita straightened, catching a glint of humor in Nelaid’s eyes, but this hid itself as quickly as the pain had. “No. Where’s Spot?”

Spot popped out of the air between the two of them, dropped to the ground. Nelaid looked over Nita’s head and said to Dairine, “You did moderately well with the last exercise, but you have much work to do yet before it’s perfect, and perfection is what’s required. Let me know when you’re at liberty to deal with the situation.”

Dairine bowed, too: a somewhat cursory gesture, but more than most entities would get from her, no matter how many planets they virtually ruled. Nita pulled the transit circle out of her charm bracelet, dropped it to the floor, nodded goodbye to Nelaid, and activated the spell.

 A few blinks later they were standing in their backyard. The long afternoon shadows were not too far along from where Nita had left them. “Go upstairs and sort yourself out,” Nita said as they headed toward the house. “Be quiet about it. Then come down. Don’t make him come up after you. Okay?”

“Will you cut it out? It’s not like I don’t know how to handle him!”

Nita caught her sister by the shoulder. “Handling’s not what he needs right now. Just play it straight, so we can both get back to business. Please?”

Dairine gave her a quick look of rebellion— but that was all, a moment’s indulgence of habit— and vanished.

Nita sighed and headed through the gate, up the driveway, and into the house. Her dad was still at the dining room table, working on another cup of coffee: he looked surprised to see Nita come in the door. “She’ll be down in a minute,” Nita said, and flopped into a chair.

Her dad blinked. “Just like that?”

Nita shrugged.

Her dad stared down into his cup, looked up again after a few moments. “You think I was a little abrupt with you before?”

Nita said nothing, just gave him back one of his favorite expressions, a wide-eyed look with the eyebrows right up.

Her dad laughed, a brief, embarrassed sound. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay.”

He was looking at the table again, a little unfocused. “Roshaun,” her father said, sounding reluctant. “Just what happened with him up there on the Moon?”

Nita shook her head, wishing she had more clarity on the subject. “He vanished.”

“But wizards vanish all the time.”

“Not like this,” Nita said. “It was a lot more ...final.”

“But not final enough for Dairine.”

“No. Dad—” There was no way to say this that wasn’t going to pain both of them, so she just said it. “Even for humans, there’s dead, and then there’s 
dead
 dead. Other species handle mortality other ways. They have to. Their souls are different shapes from ours. But no matter what shape your soul is, when you’re a wizard, weird things can happen to change the way things work...” She shook her head. “The only thing I’m sure of is that Roshaun’s not dead the way 
we
 think about dead.”

“And so Dairine actually has some chance of finding him?”

Nita nodded. “If anyone can, yeah. But he’s still lost. And all this time she’s been spending on his home planet…  I think she feels like she owes a debt to his mom and dad. Like she got Roshaun involved with our planet ...and then Nelaid and Miril lost their son because of what she did.”

Her dad sat silent for a moment. “It’s honorable, what she’s doing,” he said at last. “But at the same time— Nita, she’s just
thirteen!”

“And I was
how
old when I started?”

Her father rolled his eyes. “She needs way more watching than you ever did.”

“So that’s just what you’ll be doing, whenever you want,” Nita said. “And she’s going to explain everything you see. It’ll be the next best thing to standing over her shoulder, watching.” And Nita grinned. “Might be more data than you want.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” her dad said. But as he leaned back in the chair, he looked more relaxed.

Nita stood up. “So am I off the hook?”

Her dad’s look was meant to be stern, but Nita wasn’t fooled. “For the moment. We’ll see how this works out.”

Nita went over and hugged and kissed him, because he was really being very good. Then she headed for the back door before he changed his mind. “By the way—”

In the kitchen doorway, hearing the stairs creak as Dairine came down them, Nita paused. “Yeah?”

“I keep meaning to ask you. What 
is
 on Mars?”

“Besides a rock with your cell phone number carved on it?” Nita grinned. “We’re not sure. But we’re gonna find out.”

“Well, all right. But don’t get us invaded, now.”

“Daddy!”

He gave her a mischievous look. “Well, you can’t blame me. It’s kind of the first thing that comes to mind, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.” And she vanished.

It was dark. Kit found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling, his eyes wide open. He was wide awake, but he couldn’t think why.

He lay there on his back under the covers for a few seconds, listening to the house. It was still, devoid of any of the little middle-of-the-night sounds that it made as the weather got warmer. And one other sound was missing, from the braided rug by the side of his bed: a small, faint whistling snore.