A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (27 page)

“If that’s true,” said Ronan, “then the planet needs its head felt!”

“Seriously!” Darryl said. “It was trying to get through to us. It took something from inside our heads—”

“
Your
 head maybe,” Ronan said. “Got better things going on inside 
mine
 than bat-rat-crab puppety thingies where you can still see the strings hanging off them! Not to mention man-eating broccoli with tentacles.” He rolled his eyes. “Tentacles held together with eyelets and wire!”

“I can’t help the details,” Darryl said. “
I
 didn’t make the movie! Which I said was dire! But something here felt it, or got into my head and saw it, and tried using it to get through to us.”

“To say what?” Ronan said. “‘Bugger off’?”

“Language, guy,” Darryl said. “But yeah. And it’d make sense for them to be trying to scare casual visitors off! If Mamvish is right, if the people who lived here managed to store some way to wake them up, then they don’t want it trashed. They want to make sure anybody who comes poking around isn’t just going to run away, and knows what they’re doing. If they can scare you away, so much the better for them and you.”

Kit and Ronan sat thinking about that for a moment. “Yeah,” Kit said. “I mean, if you were a normal astronaut and you landed here and found these bat-rat-crab things running around and giant amoebas sliming all over the place, what would you do?”

“Seek professional help,” Ronan said.

“On Earth,”
 said Darryl. “In a hurry! And not come back any time soon.”

“But if you’re 
not
 scared off,” Kit said, “that means you can see through the illusion. Which also means you’re probably a wizard, and you’ll be able to figure out what the planet’s trying to tell you.”

“And it’s going crazy doing that right now because you broke that egg,” Ronan said.

Kit glared at him. “No, you dummy,” Ronan said, sounding a bit exasperated, “not broke as in ‘caused to stop functioning.’ Broke as in ‘you have to break a few to make an omelet.’ You don’t leave a message-capsule wizardry around for nothing, right? You 
want
it broken! And maybe it’s not about 
just
 messaging.”

“Maybe it’s a test?” Darryl said.

Ronan shrugged. “Makes sense. And the same forces that busted loose out of the egg, and made this weirdness happen, are watching to see what we do.”

“Well, great,” Kit said, “but if this was a test, how do we know if we passed or failed?”

The other two shook their heads. “Keep going, I guess,” Darryl said. “Visit the other places where the signal went. Maybe one thing being tested is whether we give up when nothing seems to happen.”

Kit nodded. “And also nobody gives you a test if they don’t care what result you produce! If we finally pass, then something should pop up and tell us what all this has been about.”

“You hope,” Ronan said. He sighed and stood up again, dusting the omnipresent beige-y dust off him. “At least we can see all right again. Why did everything go that weird shade of red?”

“That was in the movie,” Darryl said. “Some effect they put in to make the puppets and the cheap background paintings look less cheap.”

“Well, cheap or not,” Ronan said, looking back toward the crater, “I wouldn’t have liked to meet those things without a force field.”

“No argument,” Darryl said. “Now, while we’re all feeling good about how competent we are, I have a question.” He turned to Kit. “And since you are, as our overly tall cousin here says, Mars Uber-Geek Boy, you should have the answer. How many satellites are in orbit around Mars right now, and when’s the next one due over?”

Kit’s eyes went wide. He started paging hurriedly through his manual.

“And if one’s been over already,” Ronan said, “did it see anything? And if it did, what? And how can we keep the imagery from getting back to Earth? Because I think that the poor guys at NASA are going to have big trouble with the giant amoebas.”

“
Space
 amoebas—” Darryl said.

“And finny rocket ships and bat-rat-crab things,” Ronan said, “and wizards shooting at them...”

“We’ve got two satellites right now,” Kit said. “Odyssey and Mars Express. Here are the orbits—” He held out the manual, touched the open pages: they produced a double-page spread of sine curves spreading themselves across the rectangular whole-planet map. He studied the diagram, then let loose the breath he’d been holding. “We got lucky,” Kit said. “Odyssey’s on the other side of the planet: Express is a third of the way around. Both out of range.” He glanced out at where the giant amoeba and the rocket had been.

“Any residual heat from that, you think?” Ronan said.

Darryl was pulling another page out of his WizPod and examining it. Over a map of the area, a few nested blobs of various colors were displaying. “Some,” he said. “The heat was real. Those constructs were able to affect their surroundings, even though themselves they were only temporary.”

“We’d better go cool down the places where they were, then,” Ronan said.

“Don’t think we’ll need to,” Kit said. He looked over Darryl’s shoulder at the notations under the graph showing the heat readings. They were already sinking toward baseline. “The crust here doesn’t hold heat real well: that’s why the surface erosion’s so aggressive. By the time the satellites come around again, the heat’ll be gone. It’s not a big worry right now.”

Darryl looked alarmed. “Got something worse?”

“Kind of a worry,” Kit said. “What if we didn’t just trigger this one site by turning up here? What if we triggered the others, too, and they’re doing something right now? Something important that we shouldn’t miss?”

“You’re not going to suggest that we split up to investigate them separately, I hope!” Ronan said.

Kit rolled his eyes. “A recipe for trouble,” he said. “In weird other-planet horror movies, or out of them.”

Darryl shoved his WizPod into a pocket. “
I
 could split up,” he said.

Kit and Ronan exchanged a glance, and Ronan looked at Darryl with some concern. “You sure that’s a good idea? You’re here twice already. I mean, here 
and
 on Earth, so that’s twice—”

“I think I could do three,” Darryl said, “one after another. I did three at once back home, last week. Wouldn’t want to push it much further, though. All of me kept walking into things. Too much data to process, or else my brain doesn’t like working in triplicate.”

Darryl glanced around. “So let’s get busy. Where do you want me?”

Kit showed him his manual. “These three spots. They’re all near largish craters. De Vaucouleurs— Cassini— Hutton.”

“What are the names for? Famous people or something?”

“Yeah, or places on Earth.”

“Okay. Which is closest?”

“This one.” Kit pointed at de Vaucouleurs. “A couple of hundred miles south, right by Wahoo.”

Ronan gave Kit an incredulous look. “You’re just yanking our chains. There’s never any crater called Wahoo!”

Kit scowled, pointed at the map. “Right here, next to Yuty.”

“You didn’t even need to 
look
 at the map just then,” Ronan said in wonder. “I’ll decide whether to be impressed or horrified later. Darryl?”

“On my way,” Darryl said.

And he flickered. There was no other way to describe it. Darryl was still there: there had been none of the usual air movement that was so hard to avoid when doing a physical transit. “You set that spell up wrong or something?” Kit said.

“Oh, no, it worked fine,” Darryl said. “For that one of me.” He swallowed hard.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Just a little more effort than usual to offset the fact that I wasn’t all here to start with. Cassini next—”

The flicker happened again. Darryl was still standing there, and this time he looked pale, and his eyes seemed unfocused.

“Darryl?” Ronan said.

“Don’t joggle my elbow, Ro,” Darryl said: and his voice was strange. It sounded as if there were several of him, even though there seemed to be only one standing there. He flickered around the edges again, once, twice—

—and crumpled straight down to sit crookedly on the dusty red ground, holding his head. Ronan caught him on the way down, easing the collapse, and started patting his face. “Darryl, hey, look up! Come on—”

“Will you stop whacking me, man, do I look like I need the smelling salts?” Darryl pushed Ronan’s hand away. “I’m fine. Let me breathe. Too much going on, gotta process a little, okay?”

Kit hunkered down in front of Darryl. His autism made it necessary sometimes for him to “sit down and take a moment”, as he called it. He had problems with dealing with too much sensory data all at once, and had to go through some mental exercises to get his coping mechanisms back in play. “What happened out there?”

Darryl shook his head, rubbed his face for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s harder to do that stunt here than on Earth, that’s all. Or I need more practice. Important thing, though, is that nothing’s happening at two of the other sites.
Yet,
 anyway. But your friend over by Wahoo, de-whatchamacallit—”

“Vaucouleurs,” Kit said.

“Right. It’s warming up: I could feel the wizardry getting ready to execute. We’d better get over there.”

Kit and Ronan got up: Darryl did, too, without help. “Better,” he said. “See, I just needed a second. You guys gotta stop treating me like I’m Fragile Boy.” He reached up to put a hand on each of their shoulders. “You ready?”

Ronan picked up his long rod of light and laid it over his shoulder: it blazed, then died down, subdued but ready. Kit glanced at him, reached for his little silvery sphere and juggled it in one hand.

“Hit it,” he said.

They vanished.

In the great dark dome under Arsia Mons, Nita watched the giant green metal scorpions pour toward her, claws uplifted. On one side, S’reee drifted closer, a hard-to-see fire dancing about her fins; on the other, Carmela moved in until she was touching shoulders with Nita, her “hot curler” ready. “What are they?” Carmela said. “Are they alive?”

 S’reee cocked an ear, listening to the distant whisper of another planet’s Sea. “No. Not the way we think of life, anyway. They’re recordings, reconstructions of something that was alive before.”

Nita gulped as they kept coming. The foremost of the scorpions were only ten feet away now, and right back to the dark doorway the whole space was filling with more and more. 
Where are they all coming from? Even if we start blowing them up, we won’t be able to deal with them all before
they
deal with
us.

Nita stopped, blinked, suddenly blind in the darkness. Or not blind. As if it was happening to someone else, she saw herself step hesitantly forward, go down on one knee, look into the head scorpion’s cold, dark eyes. And the scorpion just looked back at her, and then after a moment walked around her, passed her by. But the image flickered. Once again she walked up to the scorpion, went down on one knee. And the claws flashed out—

Nita shook her head. The tide of scorpions was scurrying closer. 
I have to do something!
 But there was nothing to choose between the two moments she’d glimpsed, no way to tell how to make one happen or keep the other from happening.

Except that one of them turned out okay,
 she thought. 
I’ve got at least two chances that I’ve
 seen. 
If I just stand here, something different is going to happen that I won’t have had
 time 
to see—

She stepped forward.

“Neets?!”
 Carmela whispered in shock. Behind Nita, S’reee started to surge forward. With her free hand, Nita waved her back, went down on one knee as the foremost scorpion came up to meet her. It stopped, and stared up into her eyes.

The strangest sensation followed, like little tickly feet walking around on the surface of her brain. Nita shivered one big shiver all over, but didn’t move otherwise.

And the scorpion swung its eyes and its body away from Nita— walked around her and then off past Carmela. Carmela swiveled with a panicky expression as the scorpions headed after their leader, back the way she and Nita and S’reee had come.

S’reee turned in the air, watching the scorpions pour past. “Now, what was that?” she said. “hNii’t? Did you speak to them? Or they to you?”

Nita was still down on one knee as the scorpions kept pouring past her and into the chamber previous to the one they were in now. “They might have listened to me somehow. But I didn’t say anything.”

“You did,” Carmela said. “You got down on their level. That’s saying ‘hi.’ Actually, you said ‘hi’ first.”

Nita slowly stood up, pausing to rub her knee: it was sore. “Maybe. But I just saw myself doing that, and it seemed like the thing to do.” 
Better than the other thing, anyway!

“You’ve been doing envisioning work with T’hom, haven’t you?” S’reee said, turning all the way around to watch the last of the scorpions vanish into the next chamber. “I’d say it’s paying off.”