A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (45 page)

A breath of cold wind went past Kit’s ear, raising the hair on his neck again. 
I need to see to this force field,
 he thought. 
What’s going on? Is it leaking a little?

He pulled out his manual and checked the status on the spell that was managing his air and temperature control. It was fine. Kit sighed, shut the manual, put it down, and ran his hands through his hair, finally hiding his face in them. He let out a breath—

And saw something. Darkness: and in it, a tiny faint light, distant, shining. The light was a deep, vivid blue-violet.

That’s it,
 said the voice in his ear. 
The thing that’s needed.
 And it was his own voice—

Kit shivered, opened his eyes.

Everything was as it should be: the mountain, the snow, the falling night. “This is really creepy...” Kit said aloud.

Possibly because you’re too hung up on the connotations of the word ‘dead,’
 said the voice in his ear. 
You’re a wizard! You know other species don’t necessarily handle ‘dead’ the way your species does.

Kit swallowed. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll grant you that. But you get to explain how this is happening.”

He could feel that the owner of the voice was grinning at him— a strange amusement born of seeing how like itself Kit was. 
The whole planet is awash in newly released wizardry now,
 it said, 
hunting for an outlet or a purpose the way lightning looks for something tall to strike. But you caused that. You broke open the Nascence.

“The superegg,” Kit said.

That’s right. You’ve turned loose a series of events like the series I set free long ago. That was when enemies of Aurilelde’s city, the Shamaska City, stole something she and her father needed to master the planet. A tool: a weapon. Or a key to both. People from the Eilitt City stole it, and hid it. So I went to find it. The Nascence held the wizardry that would show the location of what was stolen, and it did reveal that to me. But when I went looking...

“You got killed,” Kit said.

The voice sighed. 
It was kind of unavoidable,
 he said. 
Our enemies knew me too well. They laid enough traps that sooner or later I was likely to fall afoul of one of them. And eventually I did. But this time, when you set out to complete the task, you have an advantage.

Kit looked out toward the sunset. “That being?”

Me. I know where the traps are. There’s no need for me, for
us,
to fall into them this time! We can go straight to the place where the Shard is hidden, find it, escape with it, and put it in Aurilelde’s hands. After that... everything changes.

Kit swallowed. “That’s what’s needed to make it possible to wake the Martians up?”

If this is Mars,
 said Khretef, 
and we are the Martians... then yes.

Kit hesitated. Then he stood up and got out his wand. “Let’s go,” he said.

***

Some four thousand miles away, Nita stood in the basin of Argyre Planitia and looked around her. A phrase that had crossed her mind many times recently in terms of the landscapes of the Solar System now came up for consideration again: 
magnificent desolation.

It was well past midnight, local time: morning would be coming along in a while, but not soon. Snow had fallen here recently, but after that had come a dust storm, and snow and dust had been all whipped up together. Now a combination of powder-fine dry ice and pale gritty dust lay drifted between a foot and two feet deep over everything, glowing faintly with starlight.

Through this pallid emptiness Nita slowly made her way, her force field brushing the dust and snow aside as she passed. 
How beautiful this is,
 she thought. 
But not a place where you’d ever really want to live.

She breathed out then, annoyed at her own Earth-centric viewpoint. In its ancient state, this wilderness had looked like an untouched paradise to the people from Shamask-Eilith when they arrived: close to the sun, better provided with atmosphere at that point— that much the manual had confirmed, suggesting an overactive younger Sun had later on torn much of a too-light atmosphere away—and flowing with liquid surface water. This spot, for example: the manual had said that a lot of the stone fragments scattered around were sedimentary. 
So there were rivers here: maybe even a lake.
This place must have seemed energy-rich and hospitable to the Shamaska and Eilitt, especially once they’d finished tailoring their new bodies to the world that would be their home.

But then things went wrong for them,
 Nita thought, stopping and looking out across the pale, rippling dunes of dust and snow. 
And after coming such a long way.

We had such high hopes for the new world,
 she heard a faraway voice saying. 
We changed our bodies. We changed our minds. We thought that surely we had now left the old troubles behind and could have peace. And for a while it seemed so. But we couldn’t change our souls. And so it turned out that not only were the same old troubles with us, but now they were even worse...

Nita paused, listening as the voice faded away. Her visionary tendencies were taking unusual forms in this environment: normally she saw things rather than hearing them. “Bobo,” she said, feeling unnerved, “is this going to get to be a habit?”

It was a moment before she got an answer back. 
There is a lot of wizardry loose on this planet at the moment,
 he said. 
When Kit broke the superegg open, the first effect of the breakage was to send out those signals to the various sites around Mars. But since then, levels of available power—unfocused, unassigned power, which any running wizardry might access—have been slowly rising all over the planet. It’s as if the wizards who came with the Shamaska and the Eilitt stored great reservoirs of power in the fabric of the planet itself, ready to be used when that resource was broken open. And now it’s welling up. You want to be careful about any wizardry you start under these conditions.

Nita shivered inadvertently. “It’d be like dropping a match in gasoline,” she said.

It could be. You must take care.

She started walking on slowly again. “They must have had some really big wizardry in mind,” Nita said, “to lay in that much power.”

That would seem like a reasonable assessment.

“Great,” Nita muttered. “Terraforming, maybe?”

Possibly.

Nita shook her head and walked on. Despite the difference and strangeness of this landscape, that reminded her strongly of the rest of Mars in feeling not just empty, but sad: not just like a deserted house, but like one where all the furniture’s been moved out and no one ever intends to live there again. 
The other kind of desolation,
 Nita thought.
Not just physically empty, but empty of soul.
 Maybe that was why she’d never been as keen on Mars as Kit was.

Nostalgia seemed to be part of the appeal for Kit, and for some of the wizards working with him on the greater Martian project: that wistful longing for a time when water ran here and the air had been dense enough for the sky to be really blue. It would never have been a warm place by Earth’s standards. Its orbit was all wrong for that. But Mars would nonetheless have had a chance to come by its own kind of life eventually. That had all gone wrong, though. Nothing was left but this sad emptiness, this hollowness.

It’s the missing kernel, of course.
 Probably its absence was so much more noticeable now because she was here alone, instead of in the company of Kit and his Mars-team buddies, as she’d often been in the past. Nita stood there considering the bizarre lack all over again, wondering what could have caused it.

When she’d still been desperately trying to find ways to save her mother’s life by manipulating her body’s kernel, Nita had worked closely with all kinds of kernels, even planetary ones, and with wizards expert at handling them. A wizard with the right training and enough power could manipulate a world’s kernel into doing all kinds of amazing things— offsetting climate change, shifting the planet’s interior structure, even changing elements of its orbit if they knew what they were doing. 

Which is always the problem,
 Nita thought. 
You have to be absolutely sure you
 do
know what you’re doing.
 Kernels were so sensitive and risky to work with that there was a whole practice universe equipped with test kernels where you were sent to train before you ever touched a real one.

Nita had never bothered looking into the issue of Mars’s kernel herself. Seniors and Planetaries hadn’t found it over many years of looking, and she’d had her own projects to think about; but now her curiosity was getting the better of her. Where exactly 
was
 Mars’s kernel? What had happened to it? Kernels didn’t just get lost or fall off into space. And no wizard in his or her or its right mind would have considered removing one from where it belonged. The whole structure of the planet could have been deranged. 
But maybe it was hidden? Somebody went to a lot of trouble to hide the superegg. And on some planets, wizards do hide kernels to keep them from being tampered with.

Standing in the midst of that snowy, dusty wilderness, Nita got out her manual and paged through it to one prominently bookmarked section, a line of light in the closed pages: the Kernel Tactics and Management section for which she’d been cleared for access months ago. The page that itemized local kernel presences confirmed that no planetary kernel was present anywhere in the areosphere, though there certainly had been one here once. In the distant past, the kernel had even been present right here in Argyre Planitia for a while. 

No big surprise there,
 Nita thought: unsupervised planetary kernels had a tendency to wander around freely in the bodies they inhabited. Only if a planet had a resident wizard operating actively as a Planetary did a kernel tend to stay in one place, mostly because the wizard working with it wanted to be able to get his, her, or its hands, fins, or tentacles on it quickly in an emergency.
But there hasn’t been a kernel here for
... She frowned as she deciphered the Speech-character suffix after the number she was looking at. 
Half a million years!

Nita shook her head. The manual confirmed that no other Planetary in the system had interfered with Mars’s kernel.
So where’d it go? What happened to it?
 

She looked again at the page for Mars. It showed the date of the original establishment of the kernel, shortly after the coalescence of the planet— a date coordinate with a negative powers-of-ten suffix far, far bigger than the first one— and after that came a long, long period of uneventful tenancy during which Mars’s kernel oscillated gently about inside the planet’s bulk in the normal way, until half a million years ago.

And after that— nothing. Nita scanned up the page again, and after the word 
STATUS
 there appeared only the notation: 
Indeterminate.

Nita put her manual away and looked around at the silent, frigid night in complete bemusement. “Bobo,” she said after a moment, “what the heck does ‘indeterminate’ mean?”

It means that the kernel disappeared with no documented cause,
 said the peridexis after a moment.

“How come
you
don’t know where it went?”

The peridexis sounded almost embarrassed now. 
I may be wizardry,
 it said, 
but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have access to all the universe’s knowledge. And data, or even just the ability to understand it, can be lost over time, as you saw in the Cavern: or misplaced.

Nita frowned. “Or hidden.”

Redacted, yes. Sometimes by the Powers, of course, or those acting for Them—

“And the Lone Power?” Nita said.

There was a longish silence. 
It cannot interfere with manual content directly,
 the peridexis said. 
But it remains one of the Powers, and has enough strength to range about interfering with matter and spirit— out of sight, as it were. At which point the manual will find no data to store or relay.

Nita was beginning to wonder if what she was starting to think of as the Case of the Purloined Kernel was going to reveal, lurking at the bottom of it, every wizard’s oldest adversary. 
But why? It doesn’t make sense. Right next door to Mars you’ve got a planet full of nosy wizards. There’s much too much chance that one of them would notice. Even though, all right, none of them did. But they
 could 
have. And anyway, why
 would 
the Lone One come sneaking in here and run off with Mars’s kernel?

Nita stood there for some moments, running various scenarios in her head. Finally she stopped. “Bobo,” she said, “it’s not good for a planet not to have a kernel. They get run down, like a house that’s not maintained when it’s empty. And the matter gets lonely.”

It would, yes.