A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (35 page)

“Why Mars is playing back our imageries like this,” Kit said. “We need to find out. Because if this is going to keep happening every time a human being shows up on the planet from now on, it’s going to have repercussions back on Earth!” 

“And not just with NASA or ESA,” Darryl said. “Mamvish’ll be beyond cranky.” 

“Forget Mamvish,” Kit said. “And even forget Irina—” 

“
I
 wouldn’t,” Ronan said. 

Kit rolled his eyes at Ronan. “What I’m trying to say is that the 
Powers That Be
 aren’t going to take it kindly if we’ve made one of the planets in our solar system uninhabitable! Humans may need Mars for something one of these days. And even if we don’t, it has a right to be an empty planet at peace. Not one where another species’ weird fantasies are playing themselves out all over it every time a living thing sets foot or tentacle or whatever here!” 

“May be too late for that now,” Darryl said. 

“Gee, that never occurred to me— thanks for the helpful comment,” Kit said, and looked over at 
Spirit.
 “But as for this test, I think we’ve passed. We didn’t run away from the machines and the scorpions. We stayed here and defended our little buddy.” 

“So what’s the next move?” Ronan said. 

“We go on to the next site,” Kit said. “Or I do.” 

Ronan and Darryl looked strangely at him. “What?” said Ronan. 

Kit stood up, dusted the usual rusty grit off his pants. “Think about it. Each time, we saw a Mars that one of us brought with him. First time, Darryl’s crazy, scary Mars movie. Second time, Ronan’s rock-opera Orson Welles war machines. We aced both those scenarios—” 

“You mean they just barely didn’t kill us,” Ronan said. 

“Whatever,” Kit said. “But I think the trouble was that we overloaded the scenarios that the old buried spells were producing. Each of them was based on one wizard’s imagery. But when three wizards responded— or more than three there, for a moment”— and he gave Darryl an amused look—“something went wrong and everything got all hostile. The spells read it as an attack, maybe, instead of a test.” 

Kit glanced over at 
Spirit,
 sitting sedate in its crater. “Logically,” he said, “the next scenario that comes real should be mine. So let’s try it differently this time. I’ll do this next jump by myself.” 

“Whoa, now,” Darryl said, “a while ago you were all about us not splitting up!” 

“If I can’t come up with a new plan when the old one starts looking dumb,” Kit said, “I don’t think I’ll last long in this business.” He pulled his wand out of his belt. “Look, you can eavesdrop on me. No problem with that. But let me go investigate this one by myself for just a few minutes. If I need help, believe me, I’ll yell for it fast.” 

Ronan looked at Kit dubiously. “Another hunch?”

Kit thought about that. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes. If things go okay, you two can follow me in a few minutes.” 

He pulled out his manual, paged through to the spot where his beam-me-up spell was written down, and added the fourth set of coordinates to which the superegg had sent its signal. It was down near the south pole, at about longitude 240. There was a long, high scarp there, Thyles Rupes, angling northeast to southwest, and around it a scatter of craters named after notable science-fiction people who had worked with Mars: Heinlein, Weinbaum, Campbell. Hutton, the target crater, was west of them. 

“Let’s go,” he said to the manual. 

The brief night of an on-planet transit spell fell around him. 

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, 
day
— 

***

Hutton was a big crater, something like a hundred kilometers across. Kit had known that its walls wouldn’t be visible from where he was planning to come out in the midst of the crater proper. What
was
visible, and caught him by surprise for a few seconds, was the thick haze lying low all around on the horizon as he turned and took in his surroundings. 

“Yeah,” Kit said softly. “I should have expected this...” For the crater was full of air: not the normal thin and freezing-cold Martian atmosphere, but thicker air, as full of oxygen as Earth’s, and no colder than an average spring day. A soft haze overlay the horizon near the crater walls. And near the center of the crater, where he stood— 

—lay a city.

The center of it bristled with spires that shone in a summer sunlight that would last, unbroken, for some months: for this close to either Martian pole would be midnight-sun country. The high towers of polished metal glinted green, and chief among them, more than a mile high, a tower armored in brilliant metallic scarlet speared up against the rusty-red landscape.

Nor was this the desolate red-brown stone and dirt vista of the Mars from which Kit had just jumped. Spread out all around the high city walls were thousands of smaller buildings, metallic and gleaming like the greater ones. Beyond them stretched dark blotches against the ground—some kind of wiry, rugged plant. 
Forestry,
 Kit thought. And above the landscape, the air was alive with airships darting here and there about their business, glinting when the high pink sun caught them. An uneducated observer might have thought he was looking at a Mars of the future, a terraformed place, especially when they caught sight of the slender streams of liquid water meandering here and there across the rugged countryside. 

But Kit knew the ancient Barsoomian city of Greater Helium when he saw it— even if no such place had ever existed. A long while back, it seemed now, he’d been drawing it in his notebook at school. Now here it was, no smudgy pencil rendering, but the city he’d seen in his imagination, his dreams. 
I was right,
 Kit thought. 
We’ve each brought our own favorite Mars with us. The real one, whatever it is, is underneath what we’re seeing.
 
All we have to do is break through... if we can.

And can I? This one’s tailored to me. Whatever’s running these scenarios has been in my head and knows it’s one I won’t want to break.
 

Kit frowned. Cool as this was, it was only a substitute or stand-in for the truth that underlay it— the Mars that Kit had been looking for all these months. That lost history was calling out to him now in this peculiar idiom, and Kit shivered all over at the sense of ancient secrecy looming over the scene before him. It was what Mr. Mack had warned him about: 
You’ll want to get into their heads, into their lives, and you won’t be able to get enough of it
... Kit gulped with the excitement of it. 
Someone, or something, is using this to try to tell me something important. So let’s find out what that is.
 

He started walking, or rather bouncing, toward the gates of the city. They were huge slabs of sheer green-tinged metal, like the city’s outer walls and as tall as they were: even from his starting point, maybe a half mile away, the gates were impressive. 
A hundred feet high? Maybe higher—
Kit had the Scarlet Tower to judge by, so he started doing simple fractions in his head as he got closer, passing among the lesser buildings. As he went, tall and handsome red-skinned humanoid people wearing beautifully wrought, art deco–looking ornaments of silver and gold and green—and very little clothing— looked curiously at him. 
Let’s say a hundred and fifty feet high. Think of the machinery it takes to move those—
 

So
 what
??
 Darryl said in his head. 
What’s going on?

“I’m fine,” Kit said under his breath as he made his way onto a broad white-paved roadway that led toward the city gates. 

And nobody’s shooting at you?
 Ronan said.

“No!” Kit said. “You just want an excuse to start shooting somebody up yourself. Can you just chill for a little and let me see what’s going on here?” 

It took them a while to get started with the shooting last time
... Ronan said. 

Kit rolled his eyes as he got closer to the gates. “You are genuinely a hopeless case,” he said. “Having the One’s Champion in your head has taught you all kinds of bad habits! Always looking to pick a fight with somebody—” 

Kit paused, then, bouncing in place for a moment in the midst of the wide boulevard. The shining, unbroken expanse of the huge gates before him had suddenly developed a dark seam. 
They’re opening—
 

He headed toward the gates again, picking up the pace. Ahead of him the gates continued to open, revealing an interior at first shadowed by the walls, then glinting in the sunlight that the opening was letting in, so that Kit got a slowly broadening view of the massive bases of the towers inside. 

Down at ground level, tiny against the gates, a single form slipped out through the widening opening and made its way toward him. It was bouncing along as Kit was, but so gracefully that the motion was more like a dance. Something dark was waving along behind it. 
What
 is 
that, some kind of veil—?
 

But as the two of them drew closer together, Kit realized that what he was seeing was long, long dark hair, rippling as easily as water or smoke in the morning breeze and the lighter gravity. The figure approaching him was just slightly taller than he was, coppery-skinned like everyone else here, and wearing the same kind of handsome ornaments around throat and wrists and ankles and waist, flashing blindingly pink-white where the clear sunlight caught them— 

She slowed down as she got closer. Kit became aware that he was staring ...and he didn’t care. Here was someone who’d also been a drawing in the margin of his notebook, and once again this unexpected and stunningly fleshed-out reality far surpassed the uncertain, much-corrected sketch. 

She couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than he was. Wide, dark eyes; a heartshaped face; long,
long
 slender legs— and besides the gorgeous jewelry, she wasn’t wearing a whole lot. 
This is definitely
 not 
exactly Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars,
 Kit thought, wavering between embarrassment and a slightly hungry fascination,
because she’s actually got some clothes on
 ...though calling a few wisps and drifts of something like blue smoke “clothes” might be stretching the point. Kit started wondering whether the inaccuracy was due to the power running this illusion, or some backstage piece of his mind chickening out on him. But then the thought went out of his head as the girl approaching him got close enough to see his face clearly. 

Her whole face changed. Her expression had been merely hopeful before: now it became one of unalloyed joy. She hurried to him, exerting such perfect control over her movements in the light gravity that she came to an effortless, bounceless halt right in front of Kit, close enough to reach out and take his hand— which she did. 

Kit blushed all over. 
What
 is 
this?
 said one part of his mind: while the rest of him, mind and body together, said
Wow, look at her, she’s— just
 wow
...!
 

That was when she spoke, in a soft, small voice that was almost inaudible with astonishment. “You are here at last!” the girl said. “I cannot believe it. You’re here at last.” 

She stood there holding Kit’s hand as if she never wanted to let go of it, gazing into his eyes, and put up her other hand to touch his face. 

“Welcome home, my warrior,” she said. “Oh, welcome home!”

Nita appeared in a puff of browny-beige dust and came down on the ground with a slight jar. She glanced around the stony red landscape, taking it all in; the little 
Spirit
 rover off to one side, and the still-settling smoke from what appeared to be a recent explosion. 
What the heck have they been
 doing 
here?
 she thought. “Kit?”

“You just missed him,” said a voice from behind her.

She turned. Sitting there on a large sandstony-looking rock were Ronan and Darryl, looking at her with amusement. Darryl turned to Ronan. “You owe me a fiver,” he said.

Ronan rolled his eyes, dug around in his pocket for a moment, and came up with a bill, which he stuffed into Darryl’s held-out hand. Darryl accepted it with a smirk, then stared at it as he unrolled it. “Wait a minute,” Darryl said, annoyed, “this isn’t even from 
Earth!
”

“So stop whinging,” Ronan said, “and go get it changed!” He gave Nita an ironical look. “You’d think he couldn’t even get off the planet, the way he carries on.”

Nita gave them a look and stepped away for a moment, as they were plainly in one of those boy moods that involved being as unhelpful as possible. The rover was sitting quietly by itself, for all the world as if it was having a perfectly ordinary day; whatever had been going on around here, it seemed unaffected. “Where’d he go?”

“A crater called Hutton,” Ronan said. “About five minutes ago.”

“He was okay when we talked to him last,” Darryl said.