A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (41 page)

“But you know why,” Nita said. “She’s looking for Roshaun.”  

“And about that,” her father said, looking actively troubled now. “There is— let’s just say there’s a certain age difference between them. I know what you’re going to say: he’s from another planet, there are cultural differences—”  

Nita waved a hand. “Daddy, you’re reading too much into it. Sometimes a girl can have a best friend who’s a boy.”  

Her father’s eyes dwelt on her, thoughtful.

Nita started to sweat, but decided that it was too late to stop now. “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. But besides that—”  

“And that you’re both wizards—”  

Nita laughed one helpless laugh at a dad who could both tease her and be serious at the same time. “Besides that— she’s not 
like
 me.”  

“Somehow,” her father said, “over the years, I’ve picked up on that.”  

“And she’s never going to be. She’s not that much like you or Mom, either. And she doesn’t fit any of the family stereotypes. Sometimes it’s like she’s from another planet—”  

There Nita stopped, astonished at what had fallen out of her mouth.  

“It is, isn’t it?” her dad said.  

Though Nita heard what he said, she didn’t really have time to react to it, because of the completely bizarre idea suddenly occupying her entire mind.  

Did she take a wrong turn?
  

From a casual conversation with Carl and some follow-up reading in the manual, Nita knew that there were always a certain number of wizards who cropped up on one world and seemed to spend their whole lives yearning for, and dealing with, some other one. The Powers That Be were notably silent on such subjects: privacy issues were a big deal with Them, and They didn’t go into detail on what made a wizard uniquely him- or herself. But there was an unspoken understanding among those out on errantry that some wizards who were born in one place but mostly lived and worked in another were meant to be bridge builders... or, more simply, to 
themselves
 be the bridges, with a foothold in each world, bearing a most unusual burden— sometimes consciously.

There was an abbreviated word-phrase in the Speech for this kind of profound involvement with another place and people: 
taraenshlev’.
 It didn’t translate well, like many words in the Speech: but there were curious and uncomfortable resonances with English words like 
expatriate
 and 
exile.
 “Took a wrong turn” was one shorthand phrase that attempted to express the tension: as if someone originally “supposed” to be born in one place had hung a left instead of a right and wound up somewhere else.  

Nita stood up straight, aware that her dad was looking curiously at her. 
Kit,
 she was thinking. 
I never thought about him this way. But I never had reason to. Could it be that this is more than just some thing with Mars? Could it be that
 Mars 
has a thing with
 him
? And
 why 
in the world..?
  

“What?” her dad said.  

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Thinking. Maybe thinking dumb things.”  

Her dad gave her a dismissive look. “Whatever my daughters do,” he said, “and whatever planet they do it on, they do 
not
 think dumb things.” And then he regarded her with concern. “Have you had lunch?”  

“No,” Nita said. “Gonna have that now. But I need a shower first. Jeez, Dad, when you go to Mars, wear a coat or something, because if you don’t the dust gets everywhere!”  

“Okay,” he said, as she started up the stairs. “So when am I going?”  

Nita paused. “Where?”

“To Mars!” He laughed. “What’s the point of being a wizard’s dad if I don’t get some perks out of it?”

“Uh—” She laughed. “I’ll set it up. Maybe in the next few days, okay?”  

“Fine,” her dad said.  

And Nita went up the stairs with something itching at her mind that was more than Mars dust.  

***

To Kit, dinner seemed to take forever. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy it—he was starving—and the conversation over dinner had been innocuous, even fun. It only became boring when Helena started telling stories about the now-history boyfriend who’d dumped her.  

But even during the more interesting parts of the conversation, Kit had trouble concentrating. The things he’d experienced on Mars today kept coming back to haunt him. And something else was bothering him that seemed to have gotten stronger since he’d come home: a sense of someone whispering in his ear, words he couldn’t quite make out against the ongoing conversation.  

It wasn’t a new sensation. He’d noticed it a few times over the past couple of months. He’d even mentioned it to Nita once, and had then been surprised when she got a panicked look and said, “
Tell me you’re not hearing Bobo!
”  

He’d been glad to tell her that whatever else was going on, no, he wasn’t hearing Bobo. Nita had looked bizarrely relieved. Kit had wondered about that at the time, and wondered again now. 
Did she think Bobo was going to start telling me Secret Girl Stuff?
  

Now, though, Kit found himself repeatedly straining to hear the voice that seemed to be whispering in reaction to things it heard other people say— or trying to get his attention during the silences. The experience made for a peculiar dinner, and Kit was relieved to get home and back to his room where he could shut the door and relax.  

He checked his manual for anything from Nita, but she’d left no notes for him. On inquiring about her location, the listing next to her name merely said, 
Sunplace, Wellakh: transport flagged as family business: please do not contact except in emergency.
  

Dairine again,
 Kit thought. 
Never mind, I’ll catch up with Neets in the morning. I’m bushed.
 But he had reason to be. Spending the better part of a day being chased around Mars by various peculiar wildlife, not to mention visiting the ancient city of Helium, could kind of take it out of you.  

He wrote Nita a note about getting together to exchange notes after the family got back from church in the morning, and then nervously took a look to see if there was any answer to his previous message from Mamvish. But there was none. He felt strangely relieved.  

Okay,
 Kit thought. 
Either she read what I sent her and it wasn’t a big enough deal to get right back to me, or she’s really busy and hasn’t had time to answer at all. Whatever. I’ll check again in the morning.
  

He stretched out on his bed and lay looking for a while at the twin discs of the Mars map hanging on the wall. Full with a good dinner, tired, he never really realized when he fell asleep.  

***

What took him by surprise was to find himself sitting in the Scarlet Tower, side by side with Aurilelde on the red sandstone bench at the center of it all.  

“You saved us before,” she said. “And then you saved us again. You’ll do it a third time now: I see it.” She looked at him with a slight smile. “And anyway,” she said, “you promised you would— and that you would come back for me. And you always kept your promises.”  

Kit looked around, somewhat in panic. But they were alone, and Aurilelde’s father was nowhere to be seen. As for Aurilelde—as she turned to Kit, he got something of a shock. The Martian princess he had seen was gone. Now he found himself looking at a slender young female figure, still not much older than him or Nita, but all gray; a handsome, polished-steel gray like stone come to life. Her eyes were dark—that much persisted at least from the previous vision. But the hair, the beautiful flowing dark hair, was hair no longer. It was a waist-length flow of deep sapphire-blue smoke. Kit thought for a moment of the filmy draperies she’d worn before and smiled.  

She had been watching him with concern. Now, seeing his smile, Aurilelde smiled back. It was altogether like having a statue smile at you— but a vital one, with life in the eyes, and on the smooth features a look of intense life— made still more intense by an edge of fear.  

“You’ve changed,” Kit said.  

She gave him an amused look. “Of course I had to change. We all changed. We had no choice. The new world wasn’t going to suit our old bodies...”  

Something else was different now: the light. Kit got up from that bench and walked over toward the side of the Tower, where he could get a clearer view of what was outside. It took no more than a few steps for him to realize that the city was no longer sitting in a flatland crater but under a mighty shadow. Looking out through the walls of the Tower, he looked a long way up indeed before he could see the top of the vast shape shutting away that whole side of the sky. The city was sitting on the shoulder of the highest mountain in the Solar System. The wide flat rust-colored cone of Olympus Mons loomed behind the spire of the Scarlet Tower, utterly dwarfing it.  

Kit gazed at this in amazement ...then made his way back to Aurilelde and sat down again. “Maybe you want to start from the beginning,” Kit said. “And tell me about this as if I don’t know anything. Because I don’t—”  

She looked at him thoughtfully. “No,” she said, “I understand that. A lot of us had trouble remembering, when we woke up from the long sleep.” She shook her head. “It was a hard time. Everyone was afraid. Everyone was horrified, and in grief. Nobody wants to see their planet destroyed...” She reached out to his face: then paused. “May I?”  

Kit looked at her, perplexed. “May you what?”

“I can’t let you see what I see without asking leave first. I may not be a wizard—” and her eyes glinted at him, amused— “but that much I know is the law. The mind is the outer fastness of the soul, and access to another’s mind must be requested.”  

Kit nodded. Aurilelde reached out, simply touched the side of his head, then looked away.  All around them the view of the Tower washed out in a wave of dark. 

We lived on the first world for a long time,
Aurilelde said as they looked down on a distant world in Earth’s solar system. 
We were all alone in this system. That aloneness gave some of us— ideas. And those ideas were possibly fed by the one you know, the one all wizards know: the one who lies in the darkness, waiting.
  

The Lone Power.

Yes,
 Aurilelde said. 
Because we were the first ones to come to life in this system, at the bottom of all our lives, and all our joys, there was always a shadow of fear. We knew we would bear the weight of the Darkness’s enmity: it would come for us and try to destroy us. Even the
 Red Rede 
spoke of it.
  

The
 Red Rede
?
  

One of my ancestors wrote it,
 Aurilelde said. Then she laughed. 
Or I did! Some people say we’re all the same person, the Seers in the Dark. They say we come back, again and again, to get it right— to stop making the mistakes we made the last time. So after our world was destroyed, it was hard to know how that could still happen… how the Darkness might return and attempt to destroy us once more. You’d have thought once would be enough.
 

Kit saw it as she saw it. Out in the darkness, blocking away the stars, the shadow grew. 
We could not divert the planet,
 Aurilelde said sadly. 
All our wizards tried. It was a mighty effort, in which many died. Even then they could only deflect it enough to avoid a direct impact.
 Through her vision, Kit saw the rogue planet approach. 
And in retrospect,
 she said, 
there are those who said it might have been wiser if we hadn’t. If we’d just let the Doom out of the Darkness end everything, there and then.
  

Together, they watched the rogue world come plunging in through the system. Kit was horrified. 
You couldn’t just sit there and let all your people be doomed!
 he said.  

But look what happened,
 said Aurilelde, as the last-ditch forces crafted by the planet’s wizards lashed out. Shamask-Eilith shattered; the rogue world’s course, perturbed by the forces applied to it by the wizards and by Shamask-Eilith’s fragmented mass, now shifted, heading for the inner worlds. A second later, Kit saw it plunging in toward a new world much closer to the Sun, a world where the surface was still molten. As he watched, the rogue planet struck the edge of that new young world, and a vast gout of magma and barely solidified stone splashed outward in its wake as the rogue planet blundered on. Behind it, the Earth shuddered, nearly disintegrated, and then slowly, painfully began to reform itself.  

See what we almost did to your world?
 Aurilelde said. 
Because of the blow the rogue planet struck yours, the silicon-based life that had just arisen there was all but wiped out. Life found another way, but—
 She sounded sad.
It might have been better if we’d left well enough alone.
  

But you couldn’t have known that,
 Kit said. 
You were trying to save yourselves!