A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (21 page)

Nita shook her head, sighed. “Water again.”  
You’ve been getting a lot of that lately.

Nita shrugged. “Probably something to do with the project at hand.” But an echo of an old memory said, 
Fear death by water...

She shook her head. Picchu had just been quoting some poet at the time. And that had been such a long while ago.
Yet Peach’s prophecies were always reliable. Who knows how long they might have been good for?

Unfortunately, prophecy rarely came stamped with a sell-by date. Nita took the manual back to the bed, sat down cross-legged on top of the covers, and hurriedly dictated everything she could remember about the dream. “...And the wave,” she said at last. “I can’t believe I was standing there working out the acceleration of a falling mass on Mars.” She laughed. “And that all mixed up with the water... Kit’s thing is starting to get to me.”

Well, after yesterday, possibly that’s understandable.

“Might be right,” Nita said. She stretched and glanced at the clock. “Where is he?”

Where do you think?

Nita laughed. “Don’t know why I even bother asking.” She got up, tossing the manual to one side. “Did he leave me any messages?”

Just a routine notification of where he was going.

She let out a breath and pulled a dresser drawer open, pulling out a big sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. These Nita held up against her, looking down to check the length, then paused: the act brought back that strange image of the transit circle that wouldn’t flame to life. She let out a perplexed breath. 
Wizardry,
 she thought, 
not working...

That’s something that’s happened recently,
 the peridexis said.

Nita pulled the pants on. “Yeah. But I’ve dreamed that before.” She considered as she finished dressing. “Maybe it’s the wizard’s version of those horrible dreams people have where you forgot to study and there’s a test. Then you wake up in a cold sweat and find there’s nothing to it...”

The peridexis offered no opinion. Nita shrugged and headed downstairs.

Her dad was sitting at the dining room table, staring at the screen of his cell phone. “Morning,” Nita said, heading into the kitchen to make some tea.

“Fresh pot’s on the counter,” her dad said.

“Thank you.” Nita poured a cup, got a spoon and the sugar bowl from the counter, and put what were probably too many sugars in the tea, then left it there while she went rooting through one of the cupboards over the counter for cereal. “You playing around with your address book again?”

“No,” her dad said from the dining room, “it’s Dairine’s information coming through on the phone. The live feed of what she’s doing today. What was it you called it? A spinoff?”

“Secondary spin,” Nita said, reaching into the fridge for milk. “At least that’s what it’s called when we’re just excerpting nonwizardly stuff that’s also in the manual. We might need to invent another word for this.”

She brought in a bowl and a spoon and the cornflakes box, and sat down by her dad. “She’s gone already?”

“Yup,” her father said. He looked more resigned than annoyed. “She did her chores first, though.”

“Good.” Nita poured cereal into the bowl, reached for the milk, and then realized her tea was still in the kitchen. “Oops...”

She went back for it. When she came back, her dad was fiddling with the little joystick under the phone’s screen. “What are you getting?” Nita said. “Text, or—” She looked over his shoulder. “Oh, no, there she is! Hey, that’s pretty good.”

The screen wasn’t the best for this kind of work, but it showed clearly enough an image of the simulator hall in the palace at Wellakh, with Dairine standing in front of the slowly rotating Thahit-mirroring sunglobe. “Where are they, exactly?” her dad said.

Nita squinted at the screen. “See that icon over there on the left? If you hit that, it’ll bring up subtitles. There you go. It’s Roshaun’s home planet, Daddy. About twenty-three thousand light-years from here.”

Another figure moved into view on the phone’s screen. “And that’s— who? His dad?”

Nita nodded as she sat down and poured milk on her cereal. “Nelaid ke Seriv.”

Her dad studied Nelaid for a moment. “Tall guy.”

“Yeah, Wellakhit usually are. Their gravity’s a little less than ours, so their bones grow longer...”

Nita ate some cereal, then paused. “Oh, yeah— he wants to talk to you. At your convenience, he said. About Dairine.”

Her dad glanced up. “She’s not making some kind of trouble for him, is she?”

“Oh, no! I think—” Nita munched for a moment more. “I think he considers her a challenge. His family’s big on that kind of thing.” She wondered how much of the political situation it would be safe to get into with her dad, then decided to leave that to Nelaid. “I think he just wants to talk dad-to-dad stuff with you. To let you know he’s keeping an eye on her.”

Her father looked concerned. “Is fatherhood on other planets really that much like fatherhood here?”

“Some places, no. But in this case, yeah. Hominid species can have a lot in common, depending on how their biologies work. There are always cultural variations, but—” Nita held out her hand for the phone, took it, and played briefly with the joystick, then handed the phone back. “Go through that section, and you can get a species-to-species and culture-to-culture values comparison. Have it generate you a matching-features chart.”

“Like one of those compare-before-you-buy websites?”

Nita grinned. “Close. But let me know when you’re ready to talk to Nelaid, and I’ll send him word.” She went back to her cereal, eating faster so it wouldn’t have a chance to go soggy. “He was real gracious about this. Which he doesn’t have to be: he’s sort of a king. He’s used to having people jump when 
he
 says, not the other way around.”

Her dad nodded, went back to watching Dairine and Nelaid while Nita finished her cereal. Shortly he said, “What exactly are they doing?”

“It’s complicated,” Nita said. “Nelaid’s family are responsible for keeping their planet’s star from acting up. It’s not the kind of wizardry it’s easy to do from a distance. Sometimes you have to get in there under the hood and fix things.”

“‘Get in’?” her dad said. “Into a 
sun?
”

Nita nodded, eating the last of the cereal, then reaching for the mug of tea. “It’s pretty specialized work. Roshaun did it for our Sun while he was here.”

“And she was there for that?”

Nita nodded. “She had to be. I mean, it’s 
our
 star. It wouldn’t have mattered if Roshaun’d been a specialist at the galactic level: he still would’ve needed a local rep on hand to explain things to the star. A system’s primary has a really deep connection with creatures born in its system. If an alien wizard tried to do anything significant to the Sun without an Earth-born wizard there, the star might think somebody was trying to tamper with it who didn’t have permission.” Nita shook her head. “Could’ve gotten real ugly.”

Her father gave Nita a slightly cockeyed look. “The 
star
 might think?”

Nita sighed. “Daddy, I know how it sounds, but believe me, sometimes it’s safer to treat inanimate things as if they were animate! Awareness levels in matter can be real situational. Anyway, I think Nelaid’s teaching Dairine how to get into a relationship with stars besides her own. Seems like a good addition to her skill set. She always did like the high-powered stuff.” 
And the way her power levels have been dropping off, she may start needing finesse to keep doing that work. She’s not going to have brute new-wizard strength to fall back on now
... Nita got up to put her bowl in the kitchen.

“So you’re going off, too, now?” her dad said. “Whereabouts? Mars?”

“What, just because you think Kit’s there?”

“Well, that’d be the normal assumption, wouldn’t it?”

Nita had to laugh. Even her dad knew the score.

“Yeah, I’d say.” She washed her bowl and put it in the dish drainer. “Well, guess what? Unlike just about every other wizard you know, I’m actually doing something close to home. Got to go to the beach and talk to S’reee. I had an idea last night before I went to sleep about something we’ve been talking about for a while.” She came back into the dining room, bent down, and kissed her dad on the cheek. “You okay with this now?” She glanced at the phone.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Good. I’ll be back later.”

“Before you go to Mars, or afterwards?”

“Maybe before. It’s not like he doesn’t deserve his own private time up there.”

“‘Boys are from Mars,’ huh?”

Nita snorted. “Believe me, I’ve been starting to wonder.”

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

Nita headed for the stairs again, smiling slightly. 
This is working pretty well so far,
 she thought. 
If I’m real lucky, he won’t get the bright idea that it’d be fun to watch
 me 
the same way he’s watching Dairine.

Well, you know,
 the peridexis said in the back of her mind, 
if it came to that, you could always tell him I refused to do it.

She snickered as she headed up the stairs. “Bobo,” she said, “I know I can count on you. But let’s not worry about it right now.”

“You say something, sweetie?” her dad said from down in the dining room.

“Just talking to my invisible friend, Daddy...”

There was a pause. “Why do I even bother asking anymore?”

Nita laughed under her breath. She went into her room, threw some things into her backpack— a magazine or two, an extra sweater. Then she put out a hand and whistled for her wizard’s manual.

You’re really going to bring that with you? Such a crutch.

“We’ve had this discussion before, Bobo,” Nita said, opening it and paging through to the messaging area to see what Kit might have left in response to her note of the previous day. “I kept my little blue baby-blankie for a real long time, too...”

The peridexis fell silent, possibly confused. Nita grinned and looked at the messaging pages. The note she’d left Kit the previous day was grayed out: his response was underneath.

Headed out to check things out with Darryl and Ronan. Didn’t want to bother you so early. Probably back around the middle of the afternoon. Take a look at my précis when you have a moment. K.

Nita raised her eyebrows as she closed the manual. 
Kind of terse for him,
 she thought. 
Maybe he’s realized how annoyed I was about him dumping me yesterday, and now he’s feeling guilty? Good. But I’ll take a look at the précis as soon as S’reee and I handle business, and then go see what he’s up to. No point in making him suffer all day if he’s learned his lesson.

She shoved the manual into her backpack, then slipped one strap over her shoulder and pulled a preset transit circle out of her charm bracelet. Nita dropped it to the floor, where it came alive in the proper blaze of fiery characters in the Speech. Nita looked at it with unnecessary relief. 
Just a dream, before,
 Nita thought. 
Just a dream...

She stepped through the circle.

***

The boulder-built breakwater jetty that sticks out into  the water on the east side of Jones Inlet once had a U.S. Coast Guard station associated with it. The station was gone now, the old low building at the jetty’s landward end demolished: no structure remained but the tower at the bayside end that still held the light and horn. The horn was silent, since the morning was bright and clear. The light blinked as usual, making a faint 
tink, tink, tink
 noise that could be heard by anyone within twenty feet of the tower, even over the wash and rush of water where it ran up against the stones of the jetty’s base.

Nita came out under eye level, from the landward point of view, on one of the big guano-streaked stones nearest to the end of the jetty. She had a low-energy visual shield-spell around her—a simple wizardly cloaking surface that redirected the images of objects behind her so that they appeared in front of her, making it seem as if she wasn’t there. Nita held the slide-around cloaking spell in place while she glanced around to make sure no one in the area could see her. Fishing boats came in and out of the Inlet all the time, so this was something of an issue: but at this time of morning, the commercial boats were already out in the bay, and the small casual boats— charters that took parties of game fishermen out after sailfin and swordfish— were either well away or not yet ready to go to sea.

No person or craft was anywhere near enough to see her even with binoculars. Nita killed the shield-spell, then sat down on the stone and stared down into the murky water, where long, silky green weed attached to the big gray-black rocks swayed and rippled rhythmically as the water washed and splashed against the jetty. The image from her dream, that impossibly high wave with the pale struggling sun caught in it, rose before her mind’s eye again.
Water, water everywhere,
 Nita thought. 
Why does it keep turning up in my dreams?
 But not even the koi had any answers to that question.