A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (50 page)

Kit was tempted to do the same, except there was no time: in the driveway, his dad was beeping for him to hurry up. After locking the front door, Kit headed around the side of the house to close the side door, then got into the car. His dad pulled out of the driveway, and everybody rode to the restaurant in that tight-faced fake good humor that means the whole family’s trying to avoid taking out their annoyance on a single transgressor.

The mood had broken by the time they got to the restaurant, but Kit found that he couldn’t enjoy the evening. His mama had picked a place by the water in Bay Shore that had been in the same location for nearly a hundred years. The food was terrific, and the conversation loosened up and became positively fun, and Kit strained hard to not bring the others down by letting them notice how he was feeling at the moment. At this he succeeded pretty well. But all the time he kept imagining how his name was going to look in the manual with the notation 
DISCIPLINARY TRAVEL RESTRICTION
 against it, and then he would blush with fury and embarrassment and have to work at covering it up all over again.

Finally it was over and they went home, and Kit found that he was developing a case of indigestion. It was a big relief to get back up to his room and change out of his dinner clothes into some sweats. As he headed downstairs to see if there was Alka-Seltzer in the downstairs bathroom, Kit passed Carmela heading downstairs for something, too. She had her earphones in and was bopping to something inaudible on her iPod. As she met up with Kit, she paused and said, more loudly than he liked, “What’s the matter? You look like somebody just stole your wand.”

“You have no idea,” Kit said as he headed down the stairs. For some reason, Carmela’s good mood infuriated him. He made and drank the Alka-Seltzer, then stomped back to his room, didn’t quite slam the door shut behind him, and threw himself down on the bed.

That was when the idea hit him, complete from beginning to end. Kit got up again, opened his door very softly, and made his way as quickly and silently as he could down the hall to Carmela’s room.

It wasn’t someplace he usually ventured— not so much because of privacy issues as because it was his sister’s room and therefore usually void of interest for him. However, there was something in there that, though he normally tended to ignore it, was now very much of interest indeed.

The room was very tidy. This was yet another relatively recent development which Kit found peculiar; teenage girls’ rooms were supposed to be a morass of clutter. But Carmela had become compulsive about putting everything in its drawer or on its hanger or shelf without fail. Sometimes he made fun of her for this. But today, just this once, it was useful.

He crossed softly to the closet and opened it. It was full of clothes—much fuller than it had used to be: Carmela had caught the clothes bug only recently. Everything here was on its hanger, all perfectly neat. But there was also something else in this closet.

Kit reached over to the bookshelf next to the closet and found there what he’d known would be there: a clone of the downstairs TV remote. At least it had begun its life that way, but now it had a lot more buttons on it than the original remote had. Kit knew what every one was for, as he had programmed them himself. Now he studied the various buttons, chose one, pointed at the back of Carmela’s closet, and punched the remote.

The back of the closet instantly went black, then flickered into light again— the random rainbowy moiré pattern of a commercial worldgate not yet patent but ready to be activated. At the forefront of the carrier pattern was the identifying brand of the Crossings’ worldgate system, its famous logo of linked gate hexes prominently displayed with the notation in the Speech and several other languages, CROSSINGS INTERCONTINUAL WORLDGATING FACILITY, RIRHATH B— DESTINATION ONE.

Kit grinned and began punching coordinates into the remote. He knew what he was planning would fly in the face of the spirit of the ban Tom had imposed on him. 
But he’ll have to see,
 Kit thought. 
When I show him, when he understands what’s at stake, he’ll have to see why I can’t leave this to anybody else. Nobody else has my perspective—

He punched the button again. The Crossings logo vanished, replaced by a long spill of coordinates. Under them appeared a single word in the Speech: 
Confirm?

Kit punched the “go” button on the remote. The gate went patent. A second later he found himself looking at red-brown soil again, the cratered landscape, the hazy pink horizon, and, silhouetted against it, in the light of local sunset, a city of spires and gleaming metal.

All right,
 Kit thought. He punched another set of buttons on the remote, locking the coordinates in storage for later. Then he hit the remote’s off button.

The gate flickered out, leaving nothing but the back of a closet full of clothes. Kit quietly put the remote back on the shelf, slipped out of the room, and shut the door.

*** 

Later that evening, Nita was lying upstairs in bed with a throw over her, trying to relax and get some reading done, but finding it impossible. She had Mars on her mind.

For about the twelfth time that evening, she pulled her manual over to her and had a look at her messaging section, but there was no answer yet to the note she’d sent Kit. 
What is going on with him?
 she thought. Idly she flipped back to the previous page of the messaging section, and her glance fell on Darryl’s listing there.

I wonder,
 she thought. She reached out and touched Darryl’s listing: it blinked.

“Yeah?”
 his voice said from the page. 
“Oh, it’s you, Neets! Hi.”

“Hey, Darryl. How’re you doing?”

“Pooped,”
 Darryl said. 
“And bruised. What a day.”

“Bruised? What, did you take a spill up there while you were running away from the movie monsters?”

His laugh was rueful. 
“Wish I had,”
 Darryl said. 
“It might ache less. I had a little visit from Tom a while ago.”

Nita blinked. “What?”

“Yeah,”
 Darryl said. 
“Looks like he and Mamvish and some of the Upper Ups weren’t real pleased with what we were doing up there. I guess I can understand why, after the fact. But he was really steamed. I don’t get to go up there again without other team members along, he says. Neither does Ronan. And he
 grounded 
Kit.”

Nita’s mouth fell open. “No way!”

“Oh yeah,”
 Darryl said. 
“Escorted visits only, and no other travel off the planet for the moment—”

But Nita was already paging through the manual to Kit’s listing, and sure enough, there was the red no-travel access flag. She was shocked. “Wow! He must be crushed—”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,”
 Darryl said. 
“
I 
sure feel like an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t think it through while we were up there. Though there didn’t seem to be a lot of time to think; everything kept happening so fast...”

Nita was still shaking her head in disbelief. “Have you talked to him? How is he?”

“No, he wasn’t home. Didn’t he have to go out or something?”

“Yeah. They must still be out.” She rubbed her eyes. “Poor Kit! This is gonna make him crazy.”

“Yeah.”
 Darryl sighed. 
“Look, Neets, I’m having some trouble with my own peeps right now. I should get off—”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Darryl, thanks for letting me know. I hadn’t even noticed.”

“Knowing Kit, he might be grateful for that ...Don’t beat him up too much, Miss Neets.”

“I won’t. Talk to you later—”

“Yeah,”
 Darryl said. And his listing grayed out.

Nita closed the manual. 
Wow,
 she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. 
Kit?

It was several moments before the answer came back. 
What?

Her insides clenched. He sounded sullen and hugely hurt, and there was something else hanging over the back of his mind that Nita couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she wanted to— a strange sense of mingled frustration and fear.

Listen, I heard—

Of course you did,
 he said. 
The entire planet has to have heard. Other planets, too. Every wizard who can read, anyway.
 
 
His anger was simply sizzling under his skin.

Look,
 Nita said, 
try not to take it so hard! You’ve been in situations like this before and you’ve come out
 
okay—

Oh, really? When have I ever been banned?
 Kit nearly shouted. 
And this is the worst time, the
 worst 
possible time. We didn’t hurt anything. Nothing bad happened. I don’t get why I have to be banned now!

Kit, look—

Yeah, but I’m sure
 you’ve 
got some good reason. Why don’t you enlighten me?

Nita blinked at the nasty tone. 
Kit,
 she said, 
I don’t have any reasons. I don’t know that much about what happened up there. You’re the one who knows—

Oh, yeah? You know about
 some 
stuff, all right. You know about Aurilelde. I saw you looking. I could feel it—

She had half been afraid of that: but she couldn’t let herself be ashamed of what she’d done. 
Kit, I was just worried about you. I had to make sure that you—

—Weren’t in some kind of trouble I couldn’t get myself out of, is that the excuse? Well, I wasn’t! I was fine! But I can’t do anything by myself without you getting involved, can I? Watchdogging me all the time. Spying on me! Like you’re jealous!

Nita’s mouth dropped open. 
Kit,
 she said, 
no way I would spy on you, I just—

It just sort of turned out that way, huh? Sure, I believe that. You just can’t cope with the idea that there might be somebody else in my life, somebody who’s not a wizard, somebody you can’t control—

She took a long breath, and another long breath, before saying anything further. But Kit said, 
So just do me a favor and butt out, all right? Now that I’m nice and safe and grounded on Earth, you won’t have to worry about me getting myself in trouble and needing to be rescued! So take a break, all right?
 Just let me alone!

And he cut the connection.

Nita stared at the manual in complete astonishment.

What... was
...that
?

It almost didn’t even sound like Kit there in the middle.

Well,
 like 
him, yeah.

But not like him
saying
it. Not
 really 
him.

She lay there for some time, in shock. Other thoughts were roiling in her head: ideas that she’d previously dismissed as bad ones were starting to look not only good but necessary.

Yet if I do this, it will be exactly what he’s accusing me of. I’ll be spying on him.

Nita lay there for some moments more. After a while, almost reluctantly, the peridexis said, 
I have the results of that persona analysis of Kit’s experience with Aurilelde.

Nita raised her eyebrows. “Took you long enough!”

I warned you it would take some while. Even now some of the extrapolation is dubious.

Nita sighed. “Never mind. Show me what you’ve got.” She closed her eyes.

In the dark behind her eyelids, the analysis displayed, laid out like a sector of a spell diagram— not the full circle, but the chord and arc that expressed and described the important physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the subject of the analysis. It was the person’s wizardly signature, expressed in the Speech so that a spell into which it was inserted would include that person properly. Normally working this out could take quite a while: the utility was handy for last-minute work.

Nita looked the signature over. The curved ribbon of it was spotted with dark empty patches, but the main structure was plain enough to read. As she looked it over, Nita felt some puzzlement. “This looks familiar,” she said. “Why does this look so familiar?”

She peered more closely at the particular structure she thought she recognized, an intricately knotted string of Speech-characters. 
Look at that, it looks just like—

—just like the one in
 my 
signature—

Nita stared. The longer she looked, the more obvious it became that there were a 
lot
 of parts to this signature that looked like hers.

I would say perhaps forty percent,
 the peridexis said.

Nita opened her eyes and sat up. “How does that happen?” she whispered.

And the thought came into her head: 
Somebody’s using things they found out about me to trap Kit.