A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (17 page)

The rock took a moment about answering. Things made of stone tended not to understand the idea that cold and heat might be different: it was all just temperature to them. 
A hundred and twenty-three point five degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Kit nodded and kept tossing the rock gently in his hand until it came up to a more bearable temperature. After a few moments he was able to hold on to it. He rubbed it gently between finger and thumb: charcoal-colored grit came off on his fingers as Kit looked south toward that acutely curved, silver-edged horizon. For a long time now, whenever he’d felt the need for a little quiet in his life, or a little mystery, he’d come here to sit and look out at this silent, uncommunicative terrain in perplexed wonder—for it was rare for a planet’s landscape to have so little to say to a wizard. Wherever life had been for any length of time, the structure of the world tended to remember, and to be willing enough to “talk” about it. Here the ground seemed only to know its own strictly geological history. Yet there was also a strange sense of something being withheld: as if some dark tide of silence and secrecy had risen, submerging everything, and never receded...

“What about it?”
 Kit said to the rock. In this starlit midnight, it was dark matte-gray, with here and there a fleck of mica embedded in its gritty sandstone. 
“What do you know about the world? Who’s been here?”

No one but you and her,
 the rock said, 
the other one. I know day, and night. Water snow and gas snow. That’s about it.

Kit nodded and put the rock down where he’d found it. As he did, the landscape around him lightened ever so slightly, a change he’d never have noticed on Earth: but here, now that his eyes were used to the dark, it made a difference. He looked up and saw the little moon Deimos rising, a planet-bright moving spark against the stars, about as bright as the International Space Station could have been at home when it went over. Deimos, though, moved quicker, almost imperceptibly changing the dark charcoal of the surrounding sands to a lighter shade as it climbed the sky, shifting the angle of the dim shadows in the craters below.

Kit stood up, dusted his pants off, and flipped his manual open to the Mars master project précis. He ran one finger down the entry there, pinpointing the spot where he and Mamvish and the others had been earlier in the day, then tapped the page so the coordinates would load into the on-planet transit spell he already had bookmarked. Another flip of pages brought Kit to the transit spell, its characters glowing under the page and ready to go. He began to read.

Even in this empty silence, you could hear the universe leaning in around you to listen: and for some reason, the listening seemed to Kit unusually acute. He finished reading. The breath went out of his lungs again as things went totally black—

—then lightened again, but not much. Once again, starlight, a clear night, no dust in the upper atmosphere: two in the morning at Syrtis Major. Kit stood in the shadow of that towering black dune and shivered again, though not from the cold. The surroundings were noticing him, watching him... with what underlying reaction, Kit couldn’t tell. All of a sudden Kit began to wish he hadn’t come alone. The watchfulness of the surroundings was feeling increasingly creepy.

He grimaced. 
Come on, what’s the matter with me? I’ve been here in the dark before. Nothing’s going to happen!
Yet he thought of the dust devil earlier. That had taken even Mamvish and Irina by surprise. There’d just been something about the way that whirlwind came straight at them—

Kit shrugged. 
Just the planet noticing us, like Irina said. It does that all the time. In fact, it probably just noticed us harder because there was such a crowd there. Not to mention a Planetary
...Kit glanced around, determined to get down to business and shake the absurd feeling that he had stepped into an early scene of a monster movie.

He went closer to the dune. 
This hasn’t moved. At least I don’t think it has.
The dune’s face looked as it had the afternoon before: but as Kit glanced around, he saw with some disquiet that all the investigative party’s footprints had disappeared— even Mamvish’s. 
Did somebody clean up?
 But it seemed unlikely. On Mars, where the wind blew a lot of the time, tidying up evidence of your presence on the surface wasn’t as vital as it was on the Moon, where there was neither wind nor erosion and your sneaker’s footprint would last forever. 
The wind did it. Or another dust devil...

That moment at its heart had been astonishing. Yet now Kit found himself really unwilling to see another one of those bearing down on him. 
Why do I keep letting myself get the creeps about it?
 he thought. 
Let’s find that egg...

He flipped through the manual again to the detector routine that Síle and Markus had designed. It was a longish spell and hadn’t been set to execute automatically, but reading the whole thing would still take Kit less time than digging around in the dune in the hopes that the stony outcropping concealing the superegg would be easily found.
This dune might have moved, after all. Let’s see.

Kit read the spell through—four long sentences in the Speech—and stood gasping again with the exertion, waiting for the spell to take. Gradually a wireframe of glowing lines superimposed itself across one spot on the dune low down and to the right, describing the outcropping’s humped-up appearance. Kit went over and checked the spell’s glowing Speech-symbols to see how deeply the outcropping was buried. 
Only a couple of feet. I was right; the dune hasn’t moved—

Yet still the uneasiness wouldn’t leave him. Kit shook his head and hunkered down in front of the slope of near-black sand, whispering the syllables of the Mason’s Word as he’d done the afternoon before. Then he reached in through the surface of the dune, then the surface of the stone, until he felt the odd smooth coolness under his hands again. He made sure of his hold on it, and pulled.

This time there was less resistance. Seconds later the cold stars above Kit were gleaming on the superegg’s dark surface, their reflections trembling in its mirrory sheen: and the tremor’s source was Kit. He stood up with the superegg in his hands, shivering all over with the utter strangeness of where he was and what he held. 
The
 age 
of this thing. Here it’s been for five hundred thousand years. And not by accident. Who left you? Why won’t you open up and let us find out what you’re meant to tell us?

He tried to stop his hands from shaking, and couldn’t. But after a few seconds, Kit realized that it wasn’t just his hands that were shivering. It was the egg.

In the first shock of realization, he almost dropped it— then stopped himself just in time. 
Who knows what a hard bounce could do to it, even in this gravity? And if I break it, I’m going to be in so much trouble—!
 The memory of Mamvish’s eye cocked at him flashed before Kit as he tried to steady the vibrating superegg: he thought of Irina’s level gaze as she eyed him like someone wondering if he was really as trustworthy as she’d been told. 
And I’m not. I shouldn’t be doing this.
 Why 
did I do this when I knew that I—
Whoa!

Kit braced the shaking superegg against his chest, trying to steady it, but to no effect. Now it was lurching from side to side in his grasp, more and more violently every moment, until the thing actually vibrated right out of his grip and into the air. Kit clutched at the egg and just managed to get hold of it again before it gave one shake more violent than anything that had preceded it—

And split in three. Kit tried to keep hold of all the wedge-shaped pieces, but they struggled out of his hands like live things desperate to escape, bobbling up into the air in front of him. He made a grab at one, caught it, and pinned it under his arm while reaching for the second. But he couldn’t get a good grip on that wedge because of the way hugging the first one between arm and body was limiting his movement. The second wedge wrenched itself out of his one-handed grip and into the air again. The third wedge hit the ground, bounced in a puff of dark dust, and rebounded into the second—

And stuck to it. Kit stared as the two adhering wedges began, from the edges inward, to shred apart in midair, shattering into shining fragments that thinned to ribbons, then started tangling together like a nest of snakes. The third wedge tore itself away from Kit, leaped into the air, and shattered like its counterparts, then began stretching itself into ribbons and tangling itself up with the others. Seconds later they were melding together again, writhing and changing in a shimmer of consolidating metal—

The shrinking shape was still amorphous, like a bubble of water floating and wobbling in weightlessness. Then it put out projections, hurriedly, one after another—and fell. When it came down on the surface in another cloud of dust, it stretched itself out, long and sinuous, went flat like a steamrollered snake—

Now what?!
 Kit thought, panicked. The long, shining shape moved, twitched, and all at once sprouted from its sides what he initially mistook for long tufts of fur. The fur 
moved,
 though, waving, writhing—and the hair stood up all over Kit as the long, flat, blunt-ended shape stood up and slowly started moving toward him on entirely too many legs.

Kit backed away a step. Though he’d long since conquered his childhood nightmares about being attacked by giant bugs under his bed, he still wasn’t wild about them, especially when he met them all alone in the dark on other planets. 
It’s not really a bug,
 he thought, taking another step backward as the shining thing kept moving toward him.
It’s not alive. It’s some kind of machine. A weird, alien machine, yeah, but machines are a lot of what I do. I really should be able to—

Kit lost the thought as little round, pebbly eyes suddenly bumped their way up out of the bug’s blunt head. They were opaque, featureless... but they were all looking at 
him.
 And then the back end of the bug lengthened out, got long and sharp, and curved up over its back. 

Oh, no.
 Not 
a bug.

It was a scorpion.

At least it doesn’t have claws yet,
 Kit thought, still backing up. And then the creature reared up, starlight sheening down it, and the many legs consolidated, getting thicker, sharper, more angular. Six legs, three and three, in the back: four legs, two and two, in the front, upraised, each of these splitting down the middle near the ends, the razory vee of newly created claws starting to scissor together. The clawed forelegs lifted, pointing at him as the claws worked against each other. Those eyes fixed on Kit more determinedly as the scorpion-thing came at him, faster now, on the point of breaking into a run—

Kit tried to gulp, and failed, dry-mouthed. 
“I am on errantry, and I greet you!”
 he said, probably a lot more loudly than he needed to. Still backing up, he reached behind him to zip open his otherspace pocket. He’d taken to keeping a little surprise in there if he ran into a situation like this.

Barely six feet away, the metal scorpion stopped short. The unsettling gaze of all those little eyes was still fixed on Kit, and it suddenly seemed as if the creature or machine was waiting for something specific from him, or not seeing something it expected. Kit, too, froze. 
What does it want? What am I supposed to—?

It lifted its claws. 
Too late!
 Kit thought, pushing his hand into the otherspace pocket and gripping the small, fizzing wizardry that lay there, ready and waiting—

The claws angled up and out, not at Kit, but in four different directions, and light burst up from them— not true beams of light, but curving arcs of a thin, pale blue-green radiance. They leaped into the air fluidly, like water from a fountain, curving in to twist together high above the motionless scorpion. There they knotted together, then separated and streaked toward the dark horizon, sending Kit’s and the scorpion’s shadows reeling and stretching across the dark sand. Kit spun around, trying to see where all the streaks of light were going.

He had only enough time to make out general directions before the streaks faded and were gone. The scorpion lowered its claws, folding them across its front in a strange gesture, almost formal. The eyes dissolved back into the creature’s blunt head. It rolled up, the long, curved spine of the tail vanishing, the legs slipping into the body; the whole shape collapsed into itself, smoothed, solidified—

The superegg lay rocking gently on the sand, and finally came to rest on one end, perfectly still in the starlight.

Kit went over to the egg, knelt down beside it, almost scared to touch it. Finally he swore at his own nervousness, reached out and put one hand on the superegg. Nothing happened. The sense of latent energy within it was completely gone.

The sweat that had broken out on Kit was going cold: he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his life-support spell, and his breath was smoking as the air around him chilled down. Kit more or less collapsed onto the dark sand and sat there trying to recover, staring at the egg. 
Okay,
 he thought, 
I’ve broken it. And I’m now in the most trouble I’ve ever been in my life. But there’s no point in freezing myself solid.