A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (36 page)

Nita turned back toward them. “
Was
 okay?” she said. “You mean you’re not in touch with him now?”

Ronan stood up and dusted himself off. “No,” he said. “We’ve been trying to reach him since just before you turned up.”

She stared at them in concern and surprise. “Well, if you can’t reach him,” Nita said, “why the heck haven’t you gone over there to find out what’s going on?”

“Because we can’t,” Ronan said, sounding annoyed. “The site’s blocked for transit.”

Nita let out a long breath as annoyed as Ronan’s. “Dammit,” she said, “this keeps happening...” And she didn’t like the sound of it. “Okay,” she said under her breath, “we’ll see about that. Bobo?”

But that was when her phone went off, loudly starting to sing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” from deep in her jeans pocket. “
Now
 what?” Nita muttered, pulling the phone out and hitting the “answer” button. “Yeah?”

“Neets?” Carmela’s voice said. “I dropped S’reee off in Great South Bay, and I’m back home now. But I find that we have a little situation going on here...”

“Here, too,” Nita said. “You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”

“Three words,” Carmela said. “Helena’s home early.”

“Oh
God,” Nita said.

“I’ve been trying to get through to Kit,” Carmela said, “but I can’t reach his phone. Neither can Mama or Pop. I tried using the closet to get over there, but it won’t let me: keeps blathering about some kind of local limitation. And the Aged Parents are going to throw some kind of non-tasteful fit if he doesn’t turn up pretty soon, because we’re supposed to be having a big happy family reunion right about now, and we are, as you might say, missing an element. You have any luck reaching him yet?”

“Working on that right now,” Nita said. “Give me ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Okay,” Carmela said. “Just tell him this is not negotiable, and he needs to hurry.”

“Gotcha,” Nita said. She hung up and stuffed the phone in her pocket, then turned to Darryl and Ronan. “You two coming?” she said.

Darryl jumped up, dusting himself off. “Now, where were we?” Nita said.

You were about to let me do what I do best,
 Bobo said. 
Handle the fiddly stuff for you.

Nita briefly made a wry face at the concept of wizardry itself wanting her to view it as a laborsaving device. “Okay,” she said, “get handling. But what’s going on over there? Why’s that site blocked?”

The wizardry running over there is personality-keyed,
 Bobo said after a moment. 
It has been built to exclude intrusions until it has run its course.

“Oh, great,” Nita said.

“Problem?” Darryl said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “You might say that. Bobo, do you mind allowing these two to hear you as well? Just so they’ll stop staring at me as if I’ve gone insane.”

Ronan and Darryl suddenly acquired extremely innocent expressions. 
That’s not a problem,
 the peridexis said in a pleasant tenor, like that of a very high-end television announcer.

“Good,” Nita said. “Bobo, we need to get over there, anyway— check out the ground; see what we can find out about what’s going on. Because Kit has business on Earth.”

I should be able to inject you three into the space where the wizardry is running,
 Bobo said. But it sounded dubious.

“I know that tone,” Nita said. “Are you suggesting that doing this might be dangerous for Kit?”

I have insufficient data for such a suggestion. But the wizardry running in the vicinity of Hutton crater is already under some strain. There’s a possibility that it might fail completely if too much stress is put on it— which attempting to inject you into the structure of the wizardry itself might cause. And
should
it fail, it is difficult to predict what the effects would be on Kit, as the spell presently running is doing so under a structure cloak.

That made Nita stop and think. Such cloaks were used by wizards who were working spells in a competitive environment— one where they were concerned about other wizards discovering and possibly appropriating parts of their spells. It wasn’t a mode that Earth wizards usually found themselves working in these days. WIzardry as practiced on the planet in this day and age was routinely seen as a cooperative effort. But it hadn’t always been this way, and Nita knew that on many other planets it still wasn’t so, for cultural or psychological reasons.

Ronan was frowning. “So even you can’t see the details of what the spell is that’s working inside the cloak,” he said.

No,
 the peridexis said.

Nita shook her head. “A spell always works,” she said. “Even wizardry itself can’t stop a spell that’s running, or break the rules it’s running under.” And she got a sly look. “But if we can change the conditions of the area where it’s running—”

By simply forcing the issue and presenting your transit into that area as a
 fait accompli,
which would cause the spell to lapse without actually failing. Normally the structure of wizardry itself would not allow such a transit.
And Bobo sounded momentarily smug. 
But since I
 am 
wizardry—

Darryl was looking confused. “You said that spell was personality-keyed?” he said. “To 
Kit?
”

There is another personality named in the key as well,
 Bobo said. 
But I cannot determine anything further about it due to the cloak.

Nita shook her head. “Don’t know what to make of that. We can ask Kit after we get him out of there. Meanwhile—” She grinned. “Let’s get down there, find out what the rules of the game are, and change ’em. You two ready?”

Ronan and Darryl nodded.

They all vanished.

 ***

In front of the gates of the mythical Barsoomian city of Helium, Kit was looking with amazement into the eyes of the girl who was holding his hand. “Uh,” he said, “...hi!”

She burst out laughing at him, caught his free hand in her other one, and squeezed them both. The laughter was so delighted and overjoyed that Kit wasn’t made at all uncomfortable by it. What threw him, though, was the look in the stranger’s eyes. It was absolute certainty, comfortable recognition, and a strange sort of unspoken relief at his presence— a sense that now that he was here, everything would be okay. Kit stood there gazing at her and trying to figure out where he normally saw a look like that. Then he realized: Nita looked at him that way.

But Nita wasn’t here... and this was somebody Kit had never met.

She was laughing again. “Oh, Khretef,” she said, “what’s this strange look you’re wearing? You’d think you had never stood here before!” But then she paused, looking at him more closely. “Is there something I’m missing? A long time you’ve been gone, yes, a long journey, but maybe something else needs saying between us?”

Uh— how about ‘Who the heck are you and what’s going on here?’
 Kit thought. But aloud he said, “Well, just that I’m on errantry, and I greet you—”

Her eyes didn’t leave his: but some of the joy ebbed out of her expression, and Kit found himself very sorry to see it go. “Well, of course,” she said, her voice trying hard to keep its certainty, “of course you’re a wizard, Khretef; how else could we be here? How else would you have won me? And my father is waiting for you, he’ll have no choice now but to admit that you were right! But what’s the matter? Has something happened on the way—?”

Kit blinked. This was not at all like being shot at by war machines or rubber-suited spacemen: and as those pretty dark eyes searched his for some clue as to what was wrong with him, Kit started wondering whether he preferred the more impersonal style of interaction with these scenarios. He had to work hard to remember the superegg, to keep reminding himself that what was happening here was a key to what had really happened on Mars in the ancient days— something he had to be as tough in handling as he had been with the metal scorpion-beasts.

“My name’s not Khretef,” he said finally, trying not to say it in a way that would hurt her. “It’s Kit.”

She looked actively confused. “Is this some quest-name you’ve taken along the way?” she said softly. “Something wizardly? Of course I don’t understand all the things you have to do in your art, not the way my father would—”

“No,” Kit said. “It’s just my name.” He paused: she knew him and there was no way he was going to be able to ask her this without hurting her, so he just said it. “What’s yours?”

She took a long breath. All this while her eyes had never left his; now at last they glanced away toward the distant, hazy horizon, as if for a moment she couldn’t bear what was happening. But then she steeled herself, looked back at him. She dropped his hands, straightened up, tilted her chin up.

“Perhaps I see,” she said. “This is some matter of spelling that you’re forbidden to describe to me: forbidden even to hint at. Well enough. It won’t be said that Iskard’s daughter is less able for the challenge than the warrior-wizard who went out to save us and now returns.” And without warning, that smile came back to her face and her eyes: though this time there was a little edge of wry challenge on it, something that said, 
When you’re finished with this game, I’m going to take it out of your hide!

She tossed her head, and that wonderful hair rippled lightly around her. “Aurilelde I am,” she said, and suddenly she seemed significantly taller than Kit, and unquestionably far more regal. “Iskard Tawan Shamaska is my father: the en-Tawa Shamaska are my people, and this is our city Prevek.” She glanced over her shoulder at the walls and the towers, then back to Kit. “And you,” she said, that glint of challenge catching fire in her eye again, “are Khretef Radrahla Eilithen, son of the Ardat Eilittri, whose name is not spoken—” Then she grinned at him. “But Kit we’ll call you, since you say that’s who you are today.”

Kit had to smile back. The difference between this encounter with another Mars and the previous two was getting more pronounced all the time: he had half expected Aurilelde to name herself after a princess of Mars, or rather of Burroughs’s Mars, old Barsoom. But the reconstruction seemed not to be going quite that far this time. “Aurilelde,” he said.

“Kit,” she said. She gave him a level look. “Well, let’s go in and see my father, since you’ve returned,” she said. “But Father will wonder if we’ve fallen out, when he sees the set of your face, and of mine. And so much rides on this. Can you tell me nothing about why you won’t avouch your right name?”

Kit was wondering where to go from here: but since he was inside this scenario, and it wasn’t trying to kill him, it seemed smartest to play along. “I can’t,” he said as they turned toward the city gates. “Maybe it would be simplest just to say that there’s a lot I don’t remember—”

“Well,” Aurilelde said, “what would be so different about that?” They passed in through the gates together, and as they did, Aurilelde threw Kit an amused look. “You’ve been forgetting things since we met. Though perhaps that’s not something I’d say in front of my father.”

Her expression was still serene enough, but there was a sound to her voice as if Aurilelde was thinking of some old trouble that she didn’t want to revive.

Now, what’s that about?
 Kit thought as they came out into the wide plaza inside the gates. 
This is so weird. She really thinks she knows me. Where do I go with this? What’s Mars trying to use all this stuff to tell me? Nothing I can do but keep my eyes open, try to pick up on the message, see what the imagery has to tell me—

Kit craned his neck up to look at the spearing towers and the little bronze-and-gilt airships veering and darting among them. Seen close up, their design looked handsomely retro, with spiky fins and a surprising number of rivets.
Late Marillan,
 something whispered in his ear. 
The last of the technology to be preserved from the Great Flight. And there will be no more—

Kit blinked. Aurilelde followed his glance. “Yes, it’s busy, isn’t it?” she said as they crossed the plaza. “People have been coming in from the outmarch towns all morning.” She laughed, and for the first time that laughter was uneasy: from the sound of it, Kit thought there was something at the back of her mind that Aurilelde didn’t care to be thinking of right now. “Very many thought that someone else would come to the gates first this morning—”

The nervousness in her voice came through much more clearly just then, and as Kit looked over at her, Aurilelde fell silent. The two of them continued across the plaza, and Kit became aware that the two of them were becoming the focus of attention for the many other people there, men and women dressed as Aurilelde was—
Or somewhat dressed,
Kit thought— who watched them pass. Many of those people bowed as Aurilelde and Kit went by, though in some cases those who bowed were wearing slightly dubious expressions, and looked at their neighbors as if unsure what
their
opinions might be of the two who walked through the middle of it all.

They were making for a high archway across the plaza, one that apparently led into the bottom levels of the Scarlet Tower. Aurilelde, catching Kit’s glance at the bowing people of the city, said softly, “The usual doubts. Rorsik’s party in the Chambers has been stirring up what trouble it can, though they’ve suspected that he’d never be able to find the prize you set out to bring us.”