A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (20 page)

Ronan was shaking his head as they headed into the backyard. “Leaving words about 
her
 out of it,” Darryl said to Ronan, “they have any words where you come from for the expression on your face when she said that?”

“Probably they do,” Ronan said as they made their way down through the yard. “‘Gobsmacked’ would be one. Carmela”— Ronan shook his head— “is a whole bucket of gobsmack.”

Kit grinned. “Cousin, I hear you 
there!
”

“When’s she going away to college?” said Darryl as they came to the weedy, tree-screened rear of Kit’s backyard.

“Not a second too soon for me,” Kit said. “No— that’s not true. I don’t know...” He and Carmela had always gotten along better than he and Helena did. And it wasn’t just that Carmela hadn’t completely blown a gasket when she found out he was a wizard, or that later she’d started indepedently picking up the Speech. 
There’s something else going on. Maybe we’re just closer in age...

In among the trees, Kit had a spell circle laid into the ground under the carpet of leaf mold. “I need to make a couple of changes to this before we go,” he said to the others. “I don’t want her tracking us.”

“We don’t need that,” Darryl said. “I’ll transit us the way I brought Ronan in from Dublin. I doubt she can track my kind of transit: it’s real atypical.”

“If you can go transatlantic on a personal transit without even breaking a sweat,” Kit said, “‘atypical’ would be the word.”

“It’s to do with that bilocation stunt I stumbled onto during my Ordeal,” Darryl said. “Seems I don’t need the usual spells to gate around in the neighborhood. I can go a long way without needing a spell, as long as I leave one of me on Earth and have coordinates to work with.” He rolled his eyes. “Tom said he didn’t understand it, and shoved me off on Carl. Carl gave me five different theories and then wound up saying he thinks I’m bypassing string-structure issues by selectively shredding the interstitial structure of local space-time.” Darryl grinned. “Whatever that means! I don’t think he understands it, either. Shredding—” He shrugged. “He wants to call it that, it’s fine by me.”

“Okay, shred-guy,” Kit said. “Does the ground suit?” It was the question you asked another wizard when he or she was going to be responsible for a spell.

Darryl glanced around. “Yeah, it’s fine. Where on Mars are we going, exactly?”

Kit flipped opened his manual. “A little crater called Stokes.”

“Show me. Carl says I need to be careful about coordinates while I’m still getting the hang of this.”

Kit nodded, thinking that Tom and Carl were wisely covering all the angles with Darryl. While they wanted him to be cautious about what he was doing, they also didn’t want him thinking too hard about whether his ability to do it might be unusual. 
Making it sound like something normal is smart...

Kit found his marked map and tapped on it to bring it into higher definition, zooming in on the spot he wanted. “Right there.”

Darryl studied the map. “Okay. And about— one second from now,” he said. “They said I needed to specify temporal coordinates, too. Guess they’re nervous I might overshoot.”

“Probably something to do with you just being hot off your Ordeal,” Ronan said. “You young superpowered hotshots, you want keeping an eye on until you settle down into more realistic power levels...”

Darryl nodded as he took a last look at the map. Kit shot Ronan a quick approving look over Darryl’s head. Ronan raised an eyebrow in response, eyed the map in turn. “Not far from the north pole. We need to bring any extra heat with us?”

“No, I factored plenty into the spell,” Kit said.

“Okay,” Darryl said, “we’re good to go. You guys ready? Life support’s set? Don’t make me come all the way back here for more air, now. It’s fifty-four million miles to Mars...”

“We’ve got air for three people for four hours,” Kit said, “and a heavy-duty force-field bubble.”

Ronan suddenly got a wicked look on his face. “And since it’s got to be dark there 
somewhere...
” He pulled out a pair of black-lensed aviator sunglasses and put them on.

Darryl snickered. “Some of us,” he said, “have been watching too many old movies.”

“Old? That movie was young when I was!”

“So were the dinosaurs. Ready to shred?” And Darryl reached up and put a hand each on Kit’s and Ronan’s shoulders.

“Hit it,” Ronan said.

Between one blink and the next, Earth went away.

Nita was standing near the edge of a gigantic lake, looking out across the still water, waiting for someone.

Where is he?
 she thought. 
He’s so late.

The strange many-legged creature sitting off to one side on the gravelly red ground at her feet looked up at her.
You’ve always known he might be someday,
 it said.

Nita scowled. 
Not
 that 
way,
 she said in her mind.  
Not funny
... She peered out across the lake, shading her eyes from the low sun and the pinkish glitter dancing on the water in the crater. 
I don’t like the way that looks,
 she said as the speed of the ripples out on the water increased. 
There has to be a lot more of that coming—

The creature sitting next to her shrugged. 
He won’t notice it where he is,
 it said. 
The water would have to rise a lot higher to bother him there.

The usual place?
 Nita said.

The creature nodded. 
Up on his mountain.

Nita turned and walked a few steps over to the transit circle she had left ready to go, blazing on the ground. 
What about the other one you were supposed to be meeting here?
 said the creature that still sat by the lake’s edge, unmoving, gazing back at her with ironic golden eyes.

Can’t wait,
 Nita said. 
Come on, let’s go.

She stepped into the circle. It blazed up around her; the transit was instantaneous. Nita emerged barely a blink later from a flicker of darkness to a spot near the edge of the broad, dish-shaped depression on top of that ancient volcano. The view was amazing; she could understand why Kit loved this place so much. But she looked all around the crater and couldn’t see him anywhere. There was no question of Kit being hidden behind anything. There were no big boulders, large objects, or outcroppings: just pebbles, sand, fist-sized stones, and cracks and crevasses caused by the contrast between the day’s relative warmth and the night’s ferocious cold.

Nita transited across the crater a couple more times, effortlessly, the way she’d seen Darryl do, but found no trace of Kit. The transits, though, were enjoyable for their own sake. 
Pity this is a dream,
 she thought
. It’d be great to be able to do this without having to do a spell and pay the price.
The third time, she came out near the ridge at the crater’s edge, where the dust and sand still held some trace of someone’s sneaker prints. She dropped to one knee, touched one print, then reached over beside it to pick up a little stone that lay there. 
What about it, guy?
 she said. 
Who’s been up here recently?

Nobody,
 the stone said. 
Just him, and her. The other one.

Nita blinked at that, confused. Well, rocks tended to think of time in the geological sense; they could get confused about shorter periods. 
I haven’t been up here, though. This is the first time.

No,
 the rock said. 
But the last time you came, he had been thinking of her; and he didn’t want to stay. He ran away. And so did you...

Nita shook her head, uncertain what to make of this. An odd feeling of dread was beginning to gather at the back of her mind. Uncertain, she dropped the stone gently to the sandy ground and climbed further up the ridge.

There on the crater’s edge, Nita paused, looking out across the dusty red afternoon toward where the low sun swung. At the edge of that sharply curved, foreshortened horizon, something moved and glittered. 
You did say you didn’t like the look of that,
said the creature crouching at her feet.

Oh, it can’t possibly—
 Nita said. But then she noticed that the silvery tremor out at the edge of things was getting brighter. It actually seemed to be humping up against the horizon— higher than the hills of the Southern Highlands, impossible though that was. Fear began to rise in Nita, growing more pronounced as a thin, distant sound began to reach her: the rush and roar of water. 

There’s no way I can hear that all this way up here,
 she thought. Her pulse began racing. She stared all around her in growing panic. Where was Kit? He was supposed to be here. But he
couldn’t
 be here. If he was here, and he didn’t get away soon, he’d get caught in this—

All the southern horizon was awash now. Nita could see the foaming onrush of the initial waves, running northward toward her in a flood of ever-increasing speed, over the hills and down into the craters of the lowlands, splashing up around highland hills and making islands of them, rushing inexorably at the mountain where she stood.

The new islands were swiftly drowned as the water raced toward Nita. She stood rooted in horror as the incoming wavefront, hundreds of feet higher in this gravity than an Earth-based tsunami could ever be, came plunging through the southern highlands and down over the edge of their plateau, pouring down into the vast cratery basin of the lowlands at her feet and rushing, uncheckable, toward the mountain where she stood. Within what seemed only moments, the water flowed around her on all sides, splashing up over the immense mesa on which the mountain stood. It drowned it in a matter of a few breaths, began to climb the sides of the mountain—

Nita gulped with fear. She had to get away, fast, before the onrushing water changed the nature of the land where she was standing and made it impossible for her to use her already prepared spell to escape. She raised her hands, the summoning gesture for the transit spell she was carrying.

But no light erupted around her feet. The Speech-characters she was expecting didn’t materialize. Nita began hurriedly speaking the words of an emergency transit spell— and then, shocked, stopped, realizing the words made no sense. 
I don’t understand! It has to work! It’s a spell! A spell always works—

I told you not to wait so long,
 said the creature crouching at her feet.

That’s a lot of help now!
 Nita turned southward again, afraid of what she’d see.

Between her and the pale, pinky sun, something rose up to filter and dim the sky. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, now taller than the mountain, leaning over Nita, leaning farther out. The great sparkling arch of it stretched out over the top of the mountain-crater like a vast, downward-curving, smoked glass roof. The distant sun, caught in it, flickered and struggled to shine.

It was no use. The thickness of the water was putting it out. And Nita couldn’t transit. She was trapped unless she found the right words to say, figured out what to do. But she was never going to figure it out. There wasn’t going to be time. The wave arched, curved more deeply above her, then finally and immensely broke—

Nita had what felt like a lifetime’s leisure to watch the water fall slowly toward her in a massive, incompressible, high-curved slab. Gravity or no gravity, when that wave came down on her, its mass would crush her just as flat as if it was stone and not water. 
Too much mass at this speed,
 some dry and terrified part of her brain said in the background, didactic to the end. 
After all, g equals G times the mass of Mars over the square of the radius, so that would be at least three hundred seventy-two centimeters per second squared, and that means—

The roaring and the blackness smashed down onto Nita.

The world ended.

Nita sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath. It took some moments for her to register, as she stared around her, that everything was all right, that she was in her bedroom and all the usual safe, sane, familiar things were there. The posters on the wall, the library books piled up on the desk, the magazines stacked on her dresser, the shopping voucher plaques for the Crossings that Carmela had given her, saying, “I’ve only got about sixty of them; let me know when you need more...”

Nita worked on slowing her breathing down. After that, her first somewhat panicked impulse was to try to completely forget what she’d just seen and try to go back to sleep. But then she thought 
What, and find myself back in that dream again? Not a chance!

She got up, pulled down her nightdress, and went over to the desk, where she flipped her manual open. “Bobo,” she said, “boy, have I got one for the dream journal today!”

The manual’s pages riffled under her hands, laying themselves open to the section into which she dictated her dreams. 
General theme?
 said the voice in the back of her head.