A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (61 page)

“And they were in denial about it,” Irina said, “which happens all too frequently in such cases. The problem with their body change after the destruction of Shamask-Eilith wasn’t that the Martian climate changed; though of course it did. The real trouble was that they were never really suited to live anywhere but on their own world, and 
any
 change would have killed them in time. Moving to a new world only made the problem worse, speeding up the damage they were doing themselves. And as Kit confirmed, the stasis made it worse still. Some of the irrationality we saw from them would definitely have been a result of holding themselves in their already-damaged state for so long. Had they succeeded in moving to Earth, they wouldn’t have lasted long there, either.”

“So they 
would
 have invaded Earth eventually,” said Nita’s dad, “and Earth would have killed them.” He took a drink of his iced tea. “Sounds familiar, somehow. Archetype?”

Irina nodded slightly. “Hints and warnings of what would have been or may yet be
do
slip into myth and popular culture from the deep past and the possible future,” she said. “It’s a hall of mirrors, the universe: in the spiritual sense, anyway. And sometimes it’s hard to tell which end of time the images and reflections belong to.”

She glanced over at Kit. “That’s the cause of the 
hwanthaet
 you were caught up in— the timeloop proximity syndrome. To be repeatedly positioned near the effect end of a timeloop when you were also involved in the cause, but before the cause has happened, or when it’s just starting to execute— well, the human brain’s circuitry doesn’t take well to that. You got off pretty lightly, though, in the physical sense. It helps to be young. And the Powers wouldn’t come down on you too hard for infractions that you committed due to the aftereffects of the good deed you were about to do in the past.”

Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Sounds like you need a whole different language for this kind of thing.”

“It’s a subset of the Speech,” Mamvish said. “Intratemporal syntax takes a while to learn. But some species pick it up entirely too quickly.” She looked with amusement at Nita and Kit.

Nita, now sitting cross-legged on the ground in jeans and a tank top and feeling very relieved to be that way again instead of in filmy, glittery Shamaska women’s wear, was paging through her manual, looking at the revisions that had been made over the last day. Now she looked up at the more senior wizards. “Irina,” Nita said, frowning, “this is weird. When I checked the manual before, it said the kernel had been missing for half a million years. But now it says it hasn’t been missing after all.”

Irina looked over Nita’s shoulder at her manual. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Tom, you didn’t enable her need-to-know updates.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “It 
has
 been busy around here lately, what with recovering from the Pullulus and so forth.”

Irina gave him an amused look. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “That wasn’t a critique. Anyway, you’ve just had your end-of-decade evaluation: you know where you stand.”

She glanced up from the page to Nita again, and Nita saw that the open page had already changed its content. Now she was looking at a comment box that said, 
Temporal adjustment emendation: timeline shift. Previous timeline details archived, viewable on need-to- know basis.

She shook her head and smiled. “When everything settles down, Time’s arrow is always seen to run straight,” Irina said. “After the solution you three came up with yesterday, the kernel’s
always
been present on Mars in real time—”

“Though blocked away from the inhabitants’ use,” Mamvish said. “Jupiter’s Planetary kept a lightpatch on it while the Shamaska-Eilitt were there.”

Irina nodded. “But the manual still remembers the previous timeline.”

“As well as the solution you and Khretef arrived at,” Mamvish said. “The binding power inherent in Ponch’s leash let us set aside, in the timeslide, the additional power to build the superegg, to lock the Cities’ stasis so that it couldn’t be interfered with, and for Khretef to encode the Nascence with the personal data that would be needed to lead you to Mars, and impel you to bring the future about. And the past.”

“A past that worked,” Nita said. “One where Aurilelde wouldn’t be afraid anymore, and would be able to have the Red Rede written in a way that would produce 
this
 result. Instead of the one her fear of losing Khretef had been showing her.”

She glanced over at Irina, who was gazing at her with a strangely assessing expression. “And it actually worked,” Nita said.

Irina nodded and had a drink of her iced tea, finishing it. “Yes, it did,” she said. “Since we’re all sitting here, and the world’s more or less as we left it... and we’re not all speaking Martian.” She smiled.

“So she really became Nita— or like Nita— in a way,” Kit’s pop said. “The way Kit’s counterpart became like him.”

“That’s right.”

“Smart choice,” Nita’s dad said, and got up to stir the charcoal.

Kit was looking thoughtful. “But which really came first?” he said. “What we did, or what they did?”

“Oh, please,” Ronan said, rubbing his face. “It’s the chicken-or-egg thing again. And you get completely different answers depending on whether you ask the chicken or the egg.”

“Let it go, your Kitness,” Darryl said, stretching. “Life’s too short. Let’s stick to playing with the future. 
Soooo
 much more malleable.”

“What happens to the kernel now?” Nita said. “There are still no Martians to manage it. Or no Martians
again.”

“The kernel’s at large in the body of the planet. But I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” Irina said.

“One more thing for you to do,” Mamvish said. “As if you don’t already have enough!”

Irina shrugged and smiled more broadly; the parakeet started idly nibbling her hair. “It’ll be easy enough to keep in tune until Mars gets new tenants, some of whom will be wizards and can take on the job. People from here, or from somewhere else— who knows? Earth won’t be 
astahfrith
 forever.”

She sighed. “But for the moment it is, and there are problems that need to be tended to.” Irina stood up, smiling at Nita’s father. “Mr. Callahan— thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.” She picked up her baby, which was lying nearby snoozing in a carrier seat: the parakeet on Irina’s shoulder ruffled its feathers up and made a few little scratchy noises. “
Dai,
 cousins,” she said, and vanished without so much as a breath of breeze.

Mamvish, too, stood up, a process which took several moments, and which Kit’s mom and pop watched in fascination. “I too have a few things to deal with,” she said. “Friends, cousins—”

“Oh, goodness, I almost forgot. Wait a moment,” Nita’s dad said, and got up, heading for the house. A minute or so later he was back with a plastic carrier bag from one of the local supermarkets, looking to be stuffed very full of something heavy.

Mamvish’s eyes started to go around in her head as she looked toward Nita’s father. Nita, seeing this, poked Kit and Dairine and gestured for them to get out of the way.

“Oh, cousin!” Mamvish said. Nita’s father held up the bag to her, and Mamvish took it from him with some haste. “You are my 
friend!
”

“Stop by again in a couple of weeks,” Nita’s dad said. “The new crop will need some thinning.”

Mamvish’s grin went right around her face. A moment later she, too, was gone.

Nita shut her manual and put it away, looking over at Tom. “So,” she said.

“So that’s it,” Tom said. “Nice job, you two.” And he gave Kit an amused look. “Even the part when you went around the bend. Not entirely your fault, and not nearly as far as you might have gone. So all is forgiven, and we’re all done.”

Nita reached out for her own iced tea. “
Are
 we done?” Nita said. “The Lone Power hasn’t turned up yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “It hasn’t? You sure about that?”

Nita sat still and considered for a moment.

“Uh-huh,” Tom said. He pushed back in his chair and looked down into his iced tea as if something might jump out of it. “Far be it from me to generalize about wizardry,” he said, “or the way it affects people. But it’s not uncommon for the younger wizard to see the Art, in the early part of his or her practice, as a very stratified thing: all blacks and whites, instead of the shades of gray that start to manifest themselves later in the way you see the world.”

“It’s not that we’re 
not
 in a massive battle of good against evil,”  Carl said. “Of course we are! But that’s just one of many ways to characterize the fight. When you’re getting started, there’s a tendency to simplify things while you’re trying to work out how to classify all the weird new data you have to handle. And when you’re simplifying everything that way, and fueling that perception with the considerable power of a new wizard, very often you wind up forcing that kind of very straightforward, in-your-face, physically obvious role on the Lone Power.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute!” Nita stared at him. “
We’re
 forcing 
It?
”

Tom nodded. “The youngest wizards really don’t have any sense of how tremendous their power is, right out of the gate, and maybe that’s for the best. They just 
use
 it. And a surprising amount of the time, they win, even though they’ve compelled the Lone One to come out of hiding and confront them in the only way that gives It a chance of success when they’re at such power levels: direct physical intervention. That’s where it’s always weakest; for to manifest so directly, you need matter. And the Lone Power, being hung up on what It considers the essential superiority of spirit, really
hates
matter.”

Tom smiled slightly, glancing at the various parents, who were listening with interest. “Later on, as a wizard’s power decreases and his mastery of the complexities of the Art increases, the Lone One’s able to make more inroads into his life in the way it does with nonwizardly people: using a lot less power, but also being a lot more subtle.”

He looked at Nita and Kit and the other younger wizards. “Don’t think this makes It any less dangerous! You see how close It came to getting a result on Mars that would have absolutely delighted It, just by working underhandedly and using people’s own habits and weaknesses against them—sometimes even their strengths. Death and destruction on two worlds: the poor dupes doing the Lone One’s work for It, while It sits back and laughs.”

Carl shook his head. “This time, just in time, Kit got smart. So did you.” Carl looked at Nita from under his brows, his eyes glinting. “And so did Khretef. Together you found your way past the pitfalls the Lone Power hoped you’d be blind to, because you’d dug them yourselves. That’s always one of our great strengths, as wizards: we’re committed to looking out for each other, each seeing the thing the other is blind to. The tricky part is convincing each other that ‘blind’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stupid.’”

Tom sighed and finished his iced tea. “But sometimes we get lucky,” he said. “This last time, we all did. You kids especially. So now we get to relax.”

Nita’s dad reached down by the chair and picked up the iced-tea jug, filled Tom’s glass again. “Even you?”

Tom laughed. “I’ve got enough time off next weekend to want to talk to you about some landscaping.”

Nita got up and headed toward the house. Kit came along after her, catching up with her where she had paused to look at the spark of red light hanging low in the sky.

Nita glanced at it as he came up behind, then went back to gazing at Mars. “I’m not sure I got smart,” she said under her breath. “It felt completely like luck to me.”

Kit stared at her. “Neets, are you kidding? Think what you did with that passthrough—”

“If I hadn’t had Bobo to help, I could never have done it. You should’ve seen the size of that spell—”

Kit shrugged. “So? You used what you had. You used what you 
remembered
 you had. And what you had enough power to pull off. Every wizard does that every day with their manual or whatever they use...”

Nita thought about that. “I was the one who was kind of late about getting smart,” Kit said then. “Seemed like it took me forever to figure out that not only was Aurilelde’s take on everything all wrong, but so was Khretef’s. Even a wizard’s perceptions of wizardry can get screwed up under the right circumstances. Khretef was too busy believing everything Aurilelde told him. Aurilelde was too busy believing what her father told her.”

“And
he
was busy believing what Rorsik told him.” Nita shook her head. “And with that whole Shamaska-versus-Eilitt thing going on, nobody was thinking straight about anything. Except you, eventually.”

“They were too busy believing in stuff to look at what was true,” Kit said. “I just hadn’t been stuck in the middle of it for as long as they had.”

Nita nodded, leaning back against the fence. “So, no Martians after all? That’s got to come as a letdown.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. But he didn’t look away from the red star burning up there. “Still, it’s a neat place, and it needs taking care of. I’m not going to dump it just because its backstory’s changed.”