A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (24 page)

***

It was mid-afternoon on the red-brown southern slopes of the Martian volcano where two girls and a humpback whale appeared a second later. Away to the east, under the thin, filmy clouds of a windy day, the vast shadows and chasms of the westernmost end of Valles Marineris cut away from them in dust and haze toward the edge of the world, where a thin veil of pink-tinted sky hid the canyon’s far end.

Carmela looked at the long, gentle slope of the worn old mountain behind them. “You know what you could build here? The universe’s biggest ski jump. What’s this place called, anyway?”

Nita had to smile as she and S’reee looked around. “Arsia Mons.”

Carmela snickered. “Sounds like one of Ronan’s rude Irish words...”

“Not this time,” Nita said, pulling out her manual to cross-reference between the map and the downslope terrain. “In the old days, people saw this was a bright spot that got dark sometimes. They couldn’t see the cause— this big spiral of dust that updrafts from the volcano’s side every winter.” She looked up the long, shallow curve of the volcano’s slope, where many dark-colored rocks were whitened on top by the last winter’s dustfall. “But the astronomers back then thought maybe there were trees here, growing leaves and losing them again. So they called it Arsia Silva, the Arsine Forest, after someplace in Italy. Later when the telescopes were better they got rid of the word for forest and put in ‘mons’ for mountain, but they kept the ‘Arsia.’”

Carmela stared at Nita. “Have you been secretly studying this stuff?”

Nita laughed. “I have been 
not
 so secretly listening to Kit’s lectures on Martian stuff every five minutes! For months! So some of it I remember.” She shook her head. “That pillar of dust is famous: it gets twenty miles high, sometimes. These, though... these got found later.” They looked down at the side of the volcano, all spotted with deep black holes.

“They call them skylights,” Nita said, bouncing down toward the closest of them. “Don’t ask me why, but they gave them all girls’ names. Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Nikki—” She stopped. “Can’t remember the others.”

Abbey and Jeanne,
 said Bobo.

Nita nodded. “Seven of them, anyway.”

“But there’s another one,” Carmela said. “Is that where we’re going?”

Nita looked at the manual, looked at S’reee, nodded. “That’s the one.”

“I shall call it Louise,” Carmela said, and bounced off that way as if everything was settled.

Nita made a strangled growling noise.

The more you do that,
 Bobo said, 
the more she’s going to keep saying it. I’d let it pass, if I were you.

Nita went after Carmela. S’reee glided along beside her. “What’s the problem with the name, hNii’t?” she said.

Nita shook her head. “Long story. It’ll keep.” She pulled the atmosphere spell out of her charm bracelet to make sure it would hold up under the extra distance that Carmela had bounced ahead.

“My air shell’s much bigger than yours,” S’reee said. “Don’t worry; it’ll cover us all.”

They caught up with Carmela at the edge of the further skylight. All three paused to look down into the darkness. “Deep,” S’reee said. “Thirty or forty of my lengths...”

“At least,” Nita said. She unzipped her otherspace pocket and pulled out one of the little wizard-lights she carried for such circumstances— just a long sentence in the Speech made virtually physical, then rolled up and compressed to about the size of a pea.

She pinched it and said the trigger word. The spell came alive in her hand, a clear white light about as bright at the moment as a sixty-watt bulb. This she dropped down into the cave. It floated down about as fast as a large leaf might fall from a tree.

“Look at the top level of that,” S’reee said, peering down into the darkness. “It’s almost perfectly spherical.”

“Like a bubble,” Nita said. “You think that’s what happened here? Some old volcanic eruption. The gases built up in the lava; a bubble formed real near the surface. Then cooled off really fast—”

“And then the top blew off it,” Carmela said. She kicked gently at the stone at the very edge of the skylight. A fragment flew off, fell gently down into the huge hole after the wizard-light. “Yeah. Look how thin that was. If you had a bubble half a mile wide...”

Nita nodded. She and Carmela stood, and S’reee hung, watching the light drift downward. “It looks a lot lighter down at the bottom,” Carmela said after a few moments.

“That’s dust, I think,” Nita said as the light came to rest in a little halo of its own reflected glow, far down at the bottom of that huge empty space. “Let’s go down. ‘Ree, is it safe to spell inside your air bubble?”

“Absolutely—the spell structure’s on the outside.”

Nita spoke a few words to the air inside S’reee’s bubble. From where she and Carmela stood, a near-transparent stairway of hardened air, like glass, built itself down into the darkness. Nita reached into her backpack for the latest in a long series of rowan wands. As she stepped down into the darkness, the wand began to glow with its charge of absorbed moonlight, lighting the stairway. “Just walk down behind me,” Nita said to Carmela. “This’ll build itself in front of us and unbuild behind.”

“And if we need to run away in a hurry,” Carmela said, sounding for the first time slightly nervous, “we’re going to have to run upstairs??”

Nita snorted. “If we have to get out 
that
 fast, I won’t waste time skywalking! And neither should you. If there’s trouble, just transport out.”

They walked down to Nita’s little light-spell. It was a long walk. Beside them, S’reee drifted down through the huge, dark, empty space, fins hanging motionless: but Nita noticed that there was a faint glow about them and about S’reee’s tail, some wizardry in abeyance but ready to use in a hurry.

“I forgot to ask you,” Carmela said, walking in sync with Nita. “Where’s Dairine? I thought she’d be here, too. She was the one who was all hot for Mars, originally.”

“Just on the first day of her Ordeal,” Nita said. “This was a pit stop. She wanted to see Olympus Mons. Such a tourist destination.” She smiled. “This morning she headed for Wellakh first thing. Our dad’s watching her— he’s got his own Dairine Cam.”

Carmela’s smile had a sad edge to it. “She’s been out on the High Road a lot, hasn’t she?” She used the Speech-word 
allaire-nai
 for the concept; it implied that the person being described wasn’t just offplanet, but well away from one’s usual mindset or psychology.

Nita nodded. “And treating the house like a bed-and- breakfast, my dad’s been saying.”

“But always looking for Roshaun...”

“Yeah.”

Carmela nodded. “I can understand that. I may have given him a hard time, but I’d never want him to vanish forever.”

“If anyone can find him,” Nita said, “I’m betting she can.”

At floor level, the last of Nita’s hardened-air steps vanished behind her as she and Carmela came down to bounce on the slightly curved floor. Puffs of pale dust rose. Nita held the rowan wand up, and she and S’reee and Carmela looked around.

“There’s another room through there,” Carmela said, pointing off to their left. “See it? Like another bubble bumped into this one.”

They moved forward. It was warmer down here than up on the surface, but still plenty cold enough. The next chamber was indeed another bubble, smaller than the last: out of it opened numerous other circular portals, leading into more huge stone bubbles, each full of darkness.

“Look at that,” Carmela said, peering away into the dark as they moved into yet another spherical chamber. “They just go on and on. Probably for miles...”

“The whole volcano must be honeycombed with these,” Nita said, listening nervously to the way her voice echoed in the present chamber, which was small enough for S’reee’s air bubble to reach right to the edges. The cold, the dark around them were unnerving.  Yet Nita found that she didn’t feel precisely afraid or as if something was going to jump out of the shadows at her. There was just a growing sense of being—

“Not in the wrong place,” she said aloud. “Just in a place no one was really expecting us to be.”

“Expecting,” S’reee said. “You have a foresight about this, hNii’t?”

Nita shook her head. “Even hindsight would make me happy right now,” she said. “How much further in do you make the hot spot where the wizardry’s live?”

“Maybe five of my lengths,” S’reee said.  “Not far.”

Carmela craned her neck back to try to see the ceiling of the next chamber they entered, a much larger one. “Honeycombed isn’t the word,” she said. “It’s froth. A million bubbles, big ones, little ones, that all got stuck in the lava, way back when...”

They continued across that chamber, toward the dimly seen entrance to the next. “Neets,” Carmela said, “the floor in here—”

For some reason she was whispering. “What?” Nita whispered back.

“It’s clean. But there was a lot of dust, back where we came in— stuff that must have come down through the skylight from the winter dust storm. Why wouldn’t there be some in here? There should have been 
some
 air movement down here. Enough to blow at least some dust in over the years—”

S’reee stopped her glide forward. Nita and Carmela looked at her.

“What?” Nita whispered.

When S’reee answered, she didn’t do it vocally. 
Did you hear that?

Hear what?
 Nita said, as silently.

Something moved—

Something about S’reee’s tone of thought left Nita more nervous than before. She held still, listening.

Carmela quietly reached into her jumpsuit pocket and came out with what could have been mistaken, by the uninitiated, for a curling iron. She glanced over at Nita.

Nita swallowed and held up the rowan wand, looking toward S’reee. The whale’s attention was on something that moved and gleamed in the shadows of the doorway into the next chamber. As Nita followed S’reee’s glance, the thing she was watching moved into the light.

The wand’s silver fire gleamed and slid down skin like green metal as the creature moved forward. It looked very like a scorpion: but it was almost the size of a Shetland pony. It had entirely too many legs and claws, and blank, cold polished-jade eyes.

The scorpion moved slowly out of the darkness toward the three of them, the front two pairs of its claws lifted. Pouring along behind it out of the shadows came about fifty more like it, all their front claws scissoring together softly, making a grating, echoing whisper in the room of stone.

“We are on errantry,” Nita said, trying to keep any tremor out of her voice, “and we greet you!”

The scorpions did not pause, did not slow: they came on, cold-eyed, claws working.

Nita lifted the wand…

Kit, Ronan, and Darryl came out of transit to find themselves standing at the dark far edge of a distant blue dawn. In a gauzy wrapping of atmosphere just above the edge of the world, a blue-white Sun hung still and small under a dome of pale blue haze, not yet too bright to be dangerous to look at. All around, under a sky only a few shades of violet from black, lay the flat, dark rock-scattered surface of the little crater called Stokes. Away to the east, the shadow of the crater’s rim lay in a sharp black crescent between the three of them and the morning; and from every least rock and pebble, a pointed finger of cold, dark shadow lay long against the ground.

 First Darryl, then Ronan, stepped to the edge of the force-field bubble that surrounded them and gazed out, not speaking. Kit knew why. Full day on Mars can seem matter-of-fact once you get used to it; just another panorama full of beige-brown sand and rubble, just another dusty amber sky, sunlight seeming as dimmed by the blowing dust as by a Sun that’s fifty million miles farther away and twenty percent dimmer than it ought to be. But there was no making the same mistake at dawn or sunset, when because of the dust and lack of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere the light went blue instead of red. Then the surroundings became both bleak and beautiful in a way that was possible only here. That faint, thin hiss of wind, hardly to be heard; that sense of absolute, pristine barrenness, empty, but not in any of the usual ways— it all got under your skin, made you hold still and listen for some hint of the secret that was hiding from you, the real reason why this landscape seemed so studiedly unconcerned about your presence. It seemed to be saying, “This isn’t your place: you have no business here. Do whatever you like. It doesn’t matter.” 
But it does. It
 does. 
All we have to do now is find out
 why
...

Ronan turned away from the sunrise and looked toward the northwestern horizon, where the crater wall was closer and the cracks and ravines running down it glowed a dull dusty cyan in the blue fire of dawn. He glanced back at Kit, the sunglasses gleaming indigo. “Like it’s whispering to itself about us,” Ronan said. “Not so easy to hear when there are a lot of other people around—”

“Yeah,” Kit said.

Ronan looked over at Darryl, who was still gazing at the brightening dawn. “As for you, don’t know how you’re doing that.”