A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (5 page)

Nita perched briefly on the arm of her dad’s easy chair behind Carmela and looked at the TV. It wasn’t nearly as fancy or new a model as Kit’s new entertainment-center TV was, but all the same it was showing a channel-listing page as sleek and modern as anything Kit’s set could boast. And as Carmela punched the “scroll” button, the online guide shifted through page after page after page of channels that didn’t exist anywhere on 
this
 planet. The entries on the scrolling pages were all in the curving, curling characters of the wizardly Speech, which many worlds used as a common language of discourse. “Wait a minute,” Nita said. “
What
 visitors?”

“Ooh,” Carmela said, “you mean you haven’t heard? Guess who’s coming home from college!”

“No, I did hear,” Nita said, easing herself down off the easy chair to flop down among the cushions, “but I thought that wasn’t till July...”

Carmela shook her head until her braid flopped around. She punched the remote, which immediately changed the TV Guide channel to one of the many thousands of alien shopping channels available to users of GalacTrans or whatever other unearthly “cable” provider Carmela had hooked them into. “Nope,” she said, watching absently as some alien being apparently made entirely of wreathing chartreuse smoke did its best to demonstrate the virtues of what Nita thought was some kind of household appliance, maybe a food processor. It picked up one indecipherable “accessory” after another with tendrils of green smoke, waving them around. “That whole thing blew up,” Carmela said, leaning back and briefly looking at Nita upside down. “Helena had a fight with her boyfriend, so no Paris for
them!
 She’s already cashed in the plane tickets. She’s going to come back next week and stay here until her college choir’s trip to Romania or wherever they’re going...”

“Slovenia, Kit said,” Nita said.

“Whatever. At least she’ll have fun with the vampires!”

Nita shook her head. “No vampires,” she said. “Some undead, yeah, and some confused Goth wannabes. But there haven’t been real turn-into-a-bat-and-flap-around vampires since 1652.”

“Really? What happened in 1652?”

“Some other time, okay?” Nita said, increasingly distracted by the chartreuse-smoke creature, which was now pouring itself rapidly into what looked like the container of the food processor and pulling a lid down over it. A second later, a tentacle of green smoke came curling out of the container and punched one of the buttons on the processor’s front. The tendril was abruptly sucked back into the main mass of the creature as many peculiar things started happening inside the container at that point, including small lights flashing like sparks inside an outraged microwave.

“So when’s Helena’s trip?”

“August the first,” Carmela said, shaking her head.

“Gonna be tough at home till then, Neets.” She raised her eyebrows, looking at Nita out of the corner of her eye. “
I
know,” Carmela said. “Let’s do a road trip. Let’s go over to Ireland and see your buddy Ronan!”

Nita rolled her eyes. “He is 
not
 my buddy!”

“Yeah, and isn’t it wonderful,” Carmela said. Her real intentions, Nita thought, couldn’t possibly be as predatory as her smile made them appear. 
I hope!
 “But isn’t it August when everything gets crazy in Ireland? It did last time...”

“Believe me,” Nita said, “what happened then is 
not
 a regularly scheduled event.” She sat there for a moment more watching the TV, where the “blender” seemed to have stopped— at least the flashing and smoking going on inside it had. The mist creature came out, not yellow-green now, but pink, and waved its tendrils around: a long line of number-characters in the Speech, probably the “food processor’s” details, started flashing on the screen. Nita shook her head. “I came in late,” she said. “What’s this about?”

“It’s a portable wanjaxer,” Carmela said. “On sale, it looks like. Which is all right, except I don’t know if I really want to get into wanjaxing. I mean, I’m as broad-minded and tolerant as the next girl, but there are all these 
hue
 issues...”

Nita rolled her eyes. Carmela had been spending a lot of time lately studying alien lifestyles, and her attempts to explain some of the finer points could take hours. “Forget it,” Nita said. “You see Kit before he left?”

Carmela looked at Nita in shock. “
You
 didn’t? You mean he just ditched you and ran off halfway around the world?” She paused. “
Is
 it halfway?”

Nita frowned, considering. “I’d have to look it up. How’d you know where he went?”

“The remote told me,” Carmela said. “It loves Kit, but it’s no good at keeping a secret. Are you, cutie-bunny?” She reached down to the remote on the cushion beside her and tickled it under its infrared emitter. Nita was startled to see it arch its little “back” and emit a small electronic purr. She thought back to her conversation with Tom, and then put aside the thought that Kit’s original specialty had been getting inanimate objects and mechanical things to do what he wanted.

And now Carmela...
Naah, it’s probably still just something to do with Ponch. Everything here got really strange because
 he 
was getting really strange. It’ll take a while for things to calm down.

“Anyway,” Carmela said, “he’s kinda forgetting his manners, if you ask me.” She leaned back among the cushions. “You two’ve been working on this Mars thing for months and months now.”

“Well,” Nita said, “it’s really been more him. Not that I’m not interested. But I have stuff of my own to take care of.” She stretched her legs out.

“Yeah,” Carmela said, “I’ve noticed. And not your water-based project that you’ve been so sneaky about, either. Oh, yeah, I noticed... don’t give me that look. All those magic conference calls all of a sudden with you and Miss Thunder-Fins the Humpback! But this is how many times now that you were ‘too busy’ to come shopping with me? Three? Four? And you looked cranky, not happy like when you’ve been working with S’reee.”

Nita looked briefly morose. “Dairine...” she said. “She’s been out a lot lately, and my dad’s been giving me grief about keeping tabs on her. Suddenly I’m supposed to be my sister’s keeper.”

“You’ll need a whip and a chair for that,” Carmela said.

Nita made a face, since this was true. “How much did Kit tell you about the Mars thing?”

Carmela rolled her eyes most expressively. “Nothing, as usual. He’s started acting like he owns all the wizardy stuff in the world, Neets! You’d think there wasn’t enough to go around.”

Nita laughed, maybe just a little evilly. “Don’t think that could have anything to do with 
you,
 could it?”

“Me?” Carmela actually batted her eyelashes. “However could that be? He’s just jealous because 
he
 never got a chance to blow up a worldgating facility. First Dairine, now me— he’s just feeling like he’s missed an opportunity.”

Nita grinned, for that thought had crossed her mind. “Come on,” she said, getting up. “I need to change.”

She headed up the stairs: Carmela came after her. “But anyway,” Nita said at the top of the stairs, turning down the hall toward her bedroom, “you know how he keeps going up there.”

“Kind of hard to ignore,” Carmela said, following Nita into her bedroom and flopping down on her bed while Nita went to her dresser and started pulling open drawers. “He sheds all this beige dust all over the place when he comes back. It’s all staticky: it gets all over the CDs and the DVDs. They get scratched. And he’s always wrecked the next day. He’s started using it as an excuse not to do his chores.”

“Tell me about it,” Nita said, rolling her eyes. She came out with a pair of very worn and faded floppy jeans, and then with a short-sleeved pink top that she held up against her while looking in the mirror. “Dairine again?”

“Same problem, different story,” Nita said, chucking the pink top back into the drawer: it was the wrong shade to work with what little was left of her spring tan. “Those big transport wizardries really take it out of you unless you can get somebody to go halves with you on the energy debt. Anyway, Mars— Kit’s not the only one who’s had Mars on the brain for a long time.” She picked up another top, a white one, and held it up against her.

“Why? Are they going to invade us?” Then Carmela paused for a moment, getting a curious look. “Now that you mention it— who lives there?”

“Nobody,” Nita said, shaking her head and dumping the white top back in the drawer. “So isn’t it funny that you think somebody there might invade you?”

Carmela looked surprised. “Well, you know how it is. All the movies and old stories and stuff about invaders...”

“‘From Mars,’” Nita said, looking over her shoulder. “The words almost seem to go together for a lot of Earth people. Weird, huh?”

“I guess,” Carmela said. “Are you saying it shouldn’t be weird?”

Nita shrugged, turning back to the drawer and rummaging through it. “Well, think about it. ‘Invaders from Venus’? ‘Invaders from Jupiter’? You don’t take them seriously. The language itself is giving you some kind of hint.” She came upon another top, a light green one, and held it up against her. “And it’s not just because Mars is the most Earthlike planet in our solar system, either. There’s just something 
about
 Mars. People have been interested in it for a long time, because of that. So wizards have been interested in it for a long time, too. There are all kinds of things about it that’re weird.” She picked another top out of the drawer, another pink one, and held it up against her, too. “For one thing, it doesn’t have a kernel.”

Carmela blinked. “What?”

“A kernel. Everything’s supposed to have one. People, things, atoms, planets. It’s like, if a body’s or a thing’s the hardware, the kernel’s the software: the rules for how it runs.”

Carmela considered this. “So a kernel’s kind of like a soul?”

“No. But souls can get hooked up to them. Anyway, a planet’s kernel usually just bops around inside the planet, doing its own thing and keeping the gravity and such working right. If there are wizards on the planet, one of the strongest ones gets told to keep an eye on the kernel and make sure it keeps working right.” Nita dropped the pink top back in the drawer.

“But there’s no people there, you said. So no wizards—”

“Not now,” Nita said. She put the green top down on the dresser and shut the drawer. “But once upon a time...”

“There 
were
 people?”

“We don’t know,” Nita said. “But everybody 
feels
 like there should have been.”

“Whoa!” Carmela said, sounding both amused and skeptical. “Sounds kind of vague for you, Miss Neets. You’re usually Hard Science Girl.”

“Yeah, well, everybody’s vague about this,” Nita said, sitting down on her desk chair and pulling off her shoes. “Mysterious stuff, and nothing in the manual to tell us what happened.” Then she wrinkled her nose and got up again, opening a different dresser drawer to get at the socks. “But when a species feels the effect of a neighboring planet this strongly, it usually means they’ve got past history.”

“What? Like somebody there invaded us before?”

Nita pulled off her old socks, put on a new pair. “Not necessarily. Maybe they could have ...or they meant to. But it never happened.” Then she grinned, looking up. “Or else it 
did
 happen ...and we’re all Martians.”

Carmela gave Nita a very wide-eyed look. 
“¿Que?”

“There are lots of meteorites from Mars lying around on Earth,” Nita said, getting up and feeling around under her dresser for her favorite beat-up sneakers. “Some people think that life here might have been started by some little bug on a shooting star that survived the ride in through the atmosphere. Splashed down into a nice warm sea... and then umpty million years later...” She grinned, gestured around her: her bedroom, her clothes, her teen magazines. “Us.”

“And what do wizards say about that?” Carmela said.

Nita shook her head. “Jury’s out,” she said. “The manual doesn’t normally tell much about a species’ origins until the species has already discovered a lot of the truth itself. Culture-shock issues.”

“
I
 wouldn’t be shocked,” Carmela said, sitting up and folding her legs under her. “As far as I’m concerned, half the people in school act like Martians already.”

Nita snickered, wandering over to the door of her room and chucking the used socks out at the laundry basket in the hall. They bounced off the wall and went in. “But lots of people 
would
 be bothered,” Nita said. “Worldview stuff, religious stuff... Hey, look, even wizards are only human. We’re not all perfect at having both the real 
and
 the true in our heads at the same time without them blowing each other up! Especially since both the real and the true keep changing all the time.” She headed back to the dresser to pick up the jeans and the top she’d decided on. “But some people think that finding the truth for themselves is cooler than just sitting around with what people tell them is true. They think it’s okay to find out where you really came from, even if at first it gets you upset.”