A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (57 page)

The image of that dark splotch on the Korean peninsula, where the light suddenly stopped, was flaring at the back of Kit’s mind: and Khretef saw it, too, laid out before them in the darkness as Kit had seen it while sitting on his Earthwatching rock on the Moon. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, Khretef! 
Break the pattern and poke the Lone One in the eye!
”

There was a long silence. “They’ll say I’m a traitor to both sides,” Khretef whispered. “Again! And I’ll be betraying Aurilelde, too—”

“Brother, you’ve got to do 
something!
” Kit said. “You can’t just sit here and let this go on! It’s not just your world, and your people—all of them, the Eilitt and the Shamaska. It’s Earth, too, billions of people whose lives are going to get completely screwed up because of what’s happening here if it’s not stopped! You’re a wizard. You know how it has to go! You can love Aurilelde all you like, but if you don’t act now, the Lone Power’s just going to sit there laughing at how you gave It just what It wanted while you were sure you were doing the only thing you could.”

Another long and desperate silence. “What do I do?” Khretef said finally.

“Let me go!”
 Kit said. “I’ll do what I can for you and Aurilelde, I promise, but right now we’ve got two whole worlds to worry about. 
Let me out of here!
”

The silence continued. Then the pressure against which Kit had been straining started to let up. From deep inside the darkness, Kit felt a shift in the power underlying the place. The feeling started slowly transmuting into a weird stretching, as if something was fastened to Kit’s skin and his bones, pulling him painfully out of shape. Kit set his teeth, tried to deal with the pain as it worsened, became intolerable—

It stopped.

It’s not working,
 Khretef said silently, as if inside Kit’s head again. 
It’s too late. For both of us...

***

Nita tried to blink, couldn’t. She gasped for air, shivering with the frost that had formed on her skin in just a few seconds of airless darkness. 
Bobo?

She hit you with a chunk of hardened atmosphere,
 the peridexis said. 
I was just able to keep your shields in force at minimum, because you weren’t entirely unconscious. You got lucky. Stay conscious, or I can’t be of any use to you!

Nita brushed away ice, blinked until her eyes worked again, and turned to face Aurilelde, who was hanging there in the darkness and laughing. “You see?” she said. “You have no 
idea
 what I can do. With the kernel, and the power of a wizard whose will is in abeyance, I can do things you can’t imagine!”

Nita was starting to get really steamed now. “What, hitting somebody with a brick? 
That’s
 unimaginable? Heaven forbid I should get really creative with you, then. Let’s keep it simple.” 
Because all that bluffing down there aside, I really don’t want to run the risk of killing you and maybe screwing up the kernel forever!

She reached her hands out into the space around her. 
Dust,
 she thought. The space around the planet was full of it. Nita called it to her, whispering in the Speech. 
Dust, come help your mother-world, because if this space case has her way, there won’t be a solid place for you to fall back on: you’ll be left floating out around here by yourself forever in the dark till Jupiter eats you or you fall into the Sun! Come lend me a hand here, get solid, get real—

Seconds later Nita was almost obscured by a cloud of it. Aurilelde laughed at her. “You think you can hide that way?” she cried, and came at Nita. “Watch this—”

“By all means,” Nita said, turning the spell loose, and swept one hand down at Aurilelde. The dust followed, clumping together, solidifying, and striking Aurilelde hard in the chest. The impact of the blow sent her plummeting toward the planet as if a giant hand had swatted her there.

Nita dived after her, intent on the kernel. 
Have to work out how to do this. Don’t want to hurt her, just have to get that kernel out of her! Got them out of walls and floors and planetary cores before: but those weren’t alive. How do I do this without—

Something struck Nita hard in the head. She jerked sideways, dazed for a moment, and just got a glimpse of the thing as it floated away on the rebound. It was a nickel-iron meteorite about the size of a walnut. Aurilelde, recovering too quickly from Nita’s blow, had snagged it in passing and slung it at her.

Nita put her hand up to her head, pulled it back and saw the blood, and went queasy. 
Better quit being so nice and put a stop to this real quick before she hits you with something bigger. Like Deimos!

Fortunately Mars’s lesser satellite wasn’t in the neighborhood, but there were other asteroid fragments nearby, and Aurilelde threw a number of those at Nita, missing as Nita dodged. Then she started using the weak Martian magnetic field itself on Nita. Strange lights started sparking at the back of Nita’s eyes, and her ears started ringing as her nervous system complained about the abuse by the locally accelerated fields—

Would you please cut that out?!
 Nita said to the magnetic field: and as usual, preferring courteous wizardly persuasion to the crass ordering-around that Aurilelde was inflicting on it, the knots of magnetic flux assailing her dissolved.

But by the time Nita’s vision and sense of balance were back to normal, Aurilelde was trying the hardened-air exploit on her again, this time simply sliding a block of it up under Nita and accelerating it. 
Whoa!
 Nita thought as the acceleration sharply increased. 
Not good, we’re heading for escape velocity here— !

Nita angrily pushed sideways off the block to drift free again in the microgravity: then spoke the phrase that would undo several vital strands of the antigrav spell she was wearing. 
I’m trying to help you out here!
 she said in the Speech to Mars’s gravity well. 
A little pull here, please? You’ve got some gravitational anomalies to spare—

Her acceleration away from the planet slowed, ceased, then reversed direction. Nita dropped toward the planet’s surface with increasing speed; she doubled over into a dive, straightening as she fell faster. 
Doing end-runs around the kernel by sweet-talking local forces isn’t going to stop this,
 she thought. 
Got to get my hands on that thing fast!
“Bobo, how’re her energy levels holding up?”

She’s strong,
 Bobo said. 
She’s got a whole planet to draw on.

“Can’t you do anything about it?” 

Not without getting the kernel dissociated from her,
 Bobo said. 
For the time being, she
 is 
Mars—

Don’t remind me,
 Nita thought, for down on the surface the dust was kicking up. 
So how the heck do I get her to
stop 
being Mars? If only for a few minutes…
Another of those blocks of hardened air hit Nita and clouted her hard up into the borders of the atmosphere again.

As she recovered and plunged downward once more, Nita could see the destruction continuing, the desolation spreading as some old volcanoes woke up and new ones broke out like a fiery rash as the crust ripped and lava thrust up from the depths. Fueled by the power Aurilelde’s kernel-connected rage was feeding to the wizardry running loose on the planet, whole oceans were coming real out of the past; even Valles Marineris was running over with ancient water beyond its ability to drain out into the northern ocean basins. Mars was tearing itself apart in fire and water. “Stop it, Aurilelde!” Nita shouted at her as she got close to Aurilelde again. “You can’t do this!”

“I can!” Aurilelde yelled back. “And I will! If only to teach you what I can do and 
you
 can’t. What I can have and 
you
can’t! Khretef is 
mine!
 He was always mine! We don’t need this world! Yours will do just as well. When this world’s gone, and we’ve taken yours, we’ll live there and he’ll be mine again, mine forever—”

Nita kept heading toward her. 
Angry isn’t working! Just tell her the truth—
 
“Nothing’s
forever, Aurilelde!” she shouted. “You may not be a wizard, but Kit is, and Khretef is, and they both know that entropy’s running, and sooner or later, everything dies.” Nita’s eyes started to sting. “The people you love die, and love may be enough to slow down the death sometimes, or even reverse it for a while— but not every time, and not forever!”

She thought of her mother, of Ponch, and had to wipe her eyes. 
Oh, damn it, I thought I was through with this! I guess not for a while yet.
 “It won’t work. Kit will die someday, yeah! I may be there to see it: I’ve already almost seen it once or twice.” She wiped her eyes again, but anger was getting the better of her now. “But that’s more than you can say. Because where were 
you
 when Khretef died? Off somewhere safe. Let him handle the danger, huh? Not your business, Princess? That’s not how love works!”

Aurilelde laughed scornfully as she arrowed toward Nita again. “As if 
you
 know anything about love! Your idea of physical intimacy is punching Kit in the arm.”

Nita flushed hot. “Well, looks like I know more than you do, because I don’t have to keep 
my
 boyfriend in a cage! That’s what you’re trying to build for Khretef. You’ll stamp out all your enemies, meaning his people, mostly, and then rule Mars or Earth or whatever with him at your side. 
Chained
 there! Because the life you’re awake in now scares you too much to ever let him go. He’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. It’s not love holding you to him now: it’s fear! And Khretef knows that! But he means to stay with you anyway, because he’s sorry for what the fear’s turned you into—”

The completely stricken look spreading across Aurilelde’s face told Nita that this was all the truth, her visionary talent perhaps picking up on something Kit knew. Nita shivered.

“No! He stays with me because he loves me—”

“Oh, he’ll let you think that,” Nita said, angry. “Because Khretef’s a hero, like Kit, he’s willing to be locked up in that cage with you forever. He wants to be there? Then that’s your boyfriend’s business. But I’m not gonna let
mine
stay locked up in there with him!”

Aurilelde slowly dropped her hands and just hung there on the borders of space, a look of increasing horror spreading across her face. Nita, watching, hardly dared to breathe, even to move.

It was hard to just wait and give Aurilelde this one last chance to get it right, even with the memory of that voice screaming, 
I don’t need this world: yours will do as well!
 It was so easy to think, 
You’re a hopeless case: nothing to do with you but throw you out of the game!
 

But the 
Rede
 had said, 
To wreak aright | she must slay her rival—
 And that had to mean the scared and angry Aurilelde who was ready to tear a planet apart to get her way. 
She
has
to have the chance to reject that option, or this won’t work.

The moment stretched as Aurilelde drifted, and the back of Nita’s mind became an uproar of her own fears, for Earth, for Kit. 
We’re wasting time. She’ll never turn! Just put her out of her misery while she’s off balance and get on with saving one world if not two!

Nita swallowed. 
Bobo
, she said silently, 
this is it. Let’s have that routine for getting a kernel out of a living matrix against its will.

The peridexis showed Nita the structure of the spell. And as it did, Aurilelde raised her arms, her face shifting into a mask of fury, and launched herself toward Nita. A moment later her hands were around Nita’s throat, squeezing.

Nita reeled back in shock bizarrely tinged with embarrassment, since her personal force field was presently keyed toward protecting her from vast impersonal forces, not the kind of playground stuff that she might have expected from Joanne and her crowd back in the bad old days.

But Nita had learned some techniques back then that still worked fine. She reached out and snaked her right arm over one of Aurilelde’s and under the other, then angled the arm up to twist her attacker’s arms free. Aurilelde tried to get another grip, but before she had a chance, Nita grabbed both her wrists in one hand, then described a quick line of hard light around them with one index finger. The thin strand of force field knotted itself tight.

That second was all Nita needed. Frozen in it, the visionary gift showed NIta the tangle of light inside Aurilelde that was what she wanted. As Aurilelde struggled and screamed, 
“No!,”
 Nita finished saying the spell the peridexis had passed her, and plunged her hand straight into Aurilelde’s chest.

Aurilelde screamed. So did Nita, so close to the pain and so much in sync with it: for the kernel she gripped was all tangled up with Aurilelde’s soul. She could even hear Kit scream, too: through Khretef he was as caught up in this as Nita.