A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (16 page)

Kit sighed. 
Ponch,
 he thought. But his dog’s midnight snore was a sound he would not hear again. He turned his head on the pillow, fumbled for his smartphone and peered at the digital clock on its display.
3:38.

Which is what time on Mars?
 He closed his eyes again for a moment, trying to do the math for the time at Nili Patera. But math was no match for the image of the green-brown sandy soil under his knees, and the strange shining blue-green superegg in his lap. He could just feel the faint sense of some quiet power running under the surface of it, mute, waiting. 

That was it,
 he thought, pushing himself up on his elbows. 
It wasn’t ready. It was waiting for something.

And what if it’s ready
 now
?

Kit sat up in the quiet, gazing into the darkness, his heart pounding as if he’d been running somewhere. It was weird. Then, 
No, it’s not,
 he thought. Kit had had a lot of trouble getting to sleep when he’d finally gotten home and turned in. He’d been as wired as if he was seven years old and the next day was going to be Christmas. 
Well, what do I expect? I was on
 Mars. 
I actually touched an alien artifact that someone left there. I felt that it was
 alive—

And waiting.

He looked again at the phone.
Mamvish said we should do some analysis first,
 Kit thought. 
Irina said, take your time...

Kit sat there for a few moments, listening to his heart pound. Then he threw the covers off, got up, and went to the desk by the window.

The manual was there where he usually left it when he was home. 
Analysis
... Kit thought. He flipped the manual’s cover open and paged through to the Mars project section, then tapped the open pages so they’d glow in the dark.

The only new things on the main project page were the manual-generated précis of what the group who went up to Mars yesterday had found, and beside it, a few “read, noted” symbols from research team members who’d flagged the entry to let other team members know they’d seen it. Kit shook his head, unbelieving. 
Twenty-six other wizards working on this project and
 nobody 
has anything interesting to say?
 Kit thought, frowning. 
Even just ‘Hey,
 wow
’? Come
 on, 
people...!

He let out a frustrated breath and flipped on through to the part of the master directory he’d bookmarked. 
I wonder, is Mamvish around?

He found her name halfway down the page, as usual, with that astonishing power level noted next to it— a four-digit level, when even the most powerful wizards on Earth usually only went as high as three. Even Irina’s level wasn’t as high. Yet at the same time, the level of respect Mamvish had been showing Irina suggested that, at the more elevated levels of practice, sheer power wasn’t everything. 
Even if you could blow up a whole planet all by yourself…

It was a creepy thought. Wizardry was usually about keeping things alive, or at least in one piece. 
And
 why 
would the Powers That Be want someone to blow a planet up?
 Kit thought. 
Especially their own?
 A sudden image came to him of Irina, standing alone in some desert place, terrible power building around her, while her face held still and cold, and her eyes—

Kit shivered. 
Now, where’d
 that 
come from?
 he thought. 
Catching something from Neets, maybe.
 He shook his head, glanced down at Mamvish’s listing again. Next to the short version of her name flashed a small knotted symbol that was Speech-shorthand for 
Occupied: on assignment.
 Next to it was a long string of symbols indicating that Mamvish wasn’t anywhere near this solar system, since the light-years-from your-location symbol had a tens-of-thousands augmentor suffix on it. 
Halfway across the galaxy, it looks like. And busy. Dammit...

Kit leaned back in his chair, tipping it back on its back legs and rocking for a moment in thought: then sat forward and turned some more pages in the manual. 
It’s quarter of nine where Ronan is,
 he thought. 
He must be up by now!
But the “status” part of Ronan’s listing, when he came to it, was grayed out, a sign that the person was unavailable for some routine reason, usually sleep. 
I can’t believe it. How can any sane person
sleep late
after what we were doing yesterday?

Kit folded his arms on top of his manual and put his head down sideways on them, frustrated. Again he found himself gazing at the oval braided rug where Ponch could always be found between bedtime and morning, lying on his back, snoring, waiting for Kit to get up and feed him. 
I wish he was here,
 Kit thought. 
I’d just say, ‘Come on, Ponch, let’s go to Mars!’ And he’d jump up and spin around a few times and run out the door, ready to go...

 
Then Kit let out a long breath. He was a wizard, not a magician: and in a wizard’s world, there was no use wasting your time wishing for things you couldn’t have. You went on to the next option— by getting up off your butt and doing the necessary work. 
Even if there’s no one else to do it with.

Kit stood up, glancing down at the manual. 
Neets
... But he could just imagine what she’d say if he woke her up at four in the morning, especially after the afternoon and evening she’d had. Kit flipped over to the fast-messaging area in the back of the manual and had another look at the terse message she’d left him about the results of the phone call from her father, and her annoyance on coming back to Mars when everything was settled to find that everyone else had left. 
Talk to you tomorrow AFTER LUNCH,
 the note ended. He could practically see her scowling.

Well, she’ll be over it after she’s had some breakfast and some time to relax.
 Kit straightened up, shivering: it was a while since the central heating had been on, and the room was chilly. 
I’ll jump up to my usual spot, then go check on the superegg from there. It’ll take less energy than doing a whole new custom transit.

Very quietly he pulled clothes on— jeans, sweatshirt, down vest— and then the hiking boots his pop had given him for his last birthday, when the family had driven upstate for the weekend and walked the Appalachian Trail through Bear Mountain State Park. Those boots had been getting more than Earth dirt on them the last few weeks, and the abrasive sand and dust of the much-eroded Martian surface was in the process of wearing the leather down to a nice beat-up patina.

Kit finished lacing up the right-hand boot, rubbing the leather thoughtfully: it was dry. Even though Kit always took enough air with him to Mars for a given visit, plus twenty percent in case of emergencies, that air tended to get very dried out while it was there. So did anything else inside the air bubble with him. 
Better find the neat’s-foot oil and leather wax for these things when I get back. Don’t want them to start cracking.

He picked up the manual and paged through it again, then whispered the thirty-eight words of a spell macro he used when he wanted to get in and out of the house quietly: one small subroutine that put an inch-thick layer of hardened air between him and the stairs, as a cushion for his footsteps, and another subroutine to ask the downstairs back door if it would please unlock itself in absolute silence.

Kit made his way quietly downstairs, through the living room and into the kitchen. Just a faint line of light showed by the back door where it had eased itself open— a little crack showing Kit that the dimness outside was paling toward dawn. There, just behind the door, Kit paused for a moment, looking at something hanging on one of the coat hooks behind the door— a long, slim, faintly blue-glowing cord with a loop at each end, dangling down half-hidden behind one of Kit’s winter jackets. It was a spell made of fishes’ breath and other hard-to-source ingredients: Ponch’s wizardly leash, the only leash that had been able to stay on his dog and keep whoever was walking him connected to him when he’d started walking between universes. 
I really should roll that up and put it away
... But he hadn’t been able to do that just yet. It would have been an admission of how completely his dog was gone. Kit sighed, touched the doorknob. 
Thanks,
 he said to the door and its locks.

No problem,
 they said in chorus. 
Know when you’re coming back?

“Not just yet,” Kit said in the Speech. “Go ahead, lock up again, but real quiet.” He stepped out, pulled the door closed behind him; both locks snicked back into place.

Kit went down the stairs into the carport and paused by his dad’s pet project, the ancient Edsel Pacer that he’d been restoring forever. Part of the problem was that parts for a car made in 1958 were getting hard to come by. But more to the point, Kit’s pop was in the habit of taking a lot of overtime at work so that the family could afford things he thought they needed to have, like the new entertainment center; so mostly the Edsel sat here waiting patiently for him to summon up the energy to work on it. Every now and then his pop came out and waxed it, or oiled whatever metal was exposed so that it wouldn’t suffer, or installed some long-sought part that had finally come in from somewhere around the country. The relationship was becoming a guilty one on Kit’s pop’s side, no matter how often Kit explained to his pop that the Edsel didn’t really mind.

“Hey, guy,” Kit said, leaning against the right front fender and looking down into the headlight on that side. “You doing okay?”

I’m fine. Any news on the replacement taillights yet?

The car’s resigned tone made Kit grin. “I hear they actually shipped,” he said, walking around to the far side of the car and carefully opening the front door. He slipped in and sat down on the broad bench-style front seat, bracing the door so that it would fall closed quietly. “Should be here next week.”

Great! Where you going today?

“The usual place,” Kit said. He reached out and punched one of the radio buttons on the Edsel’s dashboard. In immediate response, the transit spell he’d installed inside the car a couple of months back came alive around him, a glowing tracery of Speech-characters seemingly shining up from just underneath the surface of the seat’s leather. The closed environment of the car did a good job of muffling the air-implosion noise that went with a teleport, and it was hard enough to see into the Edsel that Kit felt comfortable vanishing in there without adding the energy outlay of an invisibility spell on top of the transit. “We all clear?”

He could feel the Edsel looking around it, though as with most inanimate objects, Kit wasn’t sure what it was using to do the looking. 
All clear. Be careful!

“All the time,” Kit said. He reached down to the glowing lines of the transit spell, braced himself, and said the word to activate it.

The next moment was never entirely comfortable. No one travels a hundred fifty million miles in a breath without his or her body complaining about the stresses and strains of bypassing lightspeed and numerous other natural laws. Kit felt, as usual, as if he was being squeezed unbearably tight on all sides, and the pressure got worse and worse— until all the pressure abruptly went away, and almost all the breath whooshed out of his lungs. That too was typical for a private transit to Mars. It took a fraction of a second for his life-support wizardry to analyze its new coordinates, recognize them, and kick in.

Kit swallowed and opened his eyes, starting to gasp as the usual reaction to doing a biggish spell set in. He was right where he was supposed to be, sitting on his usual “landing rock,” perched on the rim of the ancient caldera-crater of the extinct volcano Elysium Mons. Kit sat there waiting for the breathlessness to pass, and concentrated on blinking until his eyes worked right again.

He’d originally chosen this spot for its spectacular view. Though not as high or huge as its more famous cousin Olympus Mons, Elysium Mons stood up steep and splendidly isolated in the northern hemisphere lowland plains of Elysium Planitia. The cone of the old volcano alone was taller than Mount Everest. But underneath the mountain proper lay a great uplift plateau that ancient stresses had pushed some three kilometers up out of the crust; so the spot where Kit now sat towered at least forty thousand feet above the dark-sanded plain.

Off to his left, twenty miles south and east at the edge of the pedestal, the little crater-topped mountain Albor Tholus rose up, its concave top whitened with dry-ice snow. Beyond it, the underlying uplift pedestal fell away in dark narrow rilles to the surrounding plain, charcoal-colored in the night. Away into the dark distance the plains stretched to a horizon just faintly hazed on their southwest edge with a thin line of silver light: the last remnant of sunset. Between Kit and that distant, shadowy edge of the world, craters dotted the ashy darkness, here and there shining pale at their bottoms with thin gleaming skins of starlit water ice or carbon dioxide frost.

It was clear tonight—a frigid pre-winter midnight in Mars’s northern hemisphere, through which stars unimpeded by the thin atmosphere burned fierce and still. Kit shivered. Even with an aggressive force field and in a hemisphere where it was summer, Mars wasn’t somewhere you wanted to spend much time at night. And in the winter— 
Has to be a hundred below,
 Kit thought. 
Maybe a hundred fifty.
 He glanced down around the low boulder where he sat, then bent over and picked up a little stone about the size of a golf ball. Even though it had soaked up some considerable heat from the bubble of air his life-support spell was holding in place around him, the stone was still so cold it burned his hand. Kit had to juggle it to keep it from sticking to his skin. 
“How cold, fella?”
 he said in the Speech.