A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (44 page)

Nita shook her head. “Mela,” she said, “school’s out, nearly! Cut yourself some slack!”

“But this isn’t school,” Carmela said, looking up at Nita, and Nita noticed that there were actually circles under her eyes. “And slack’s not what we need right now, is it? My little brother’s acting slightly weird, and this has something to do with it.”

Nita made a sideways smile— not at Carmela’s concern for Kit, which was always there: but for the sudden memory of S’reee saying to her, 
Oh, hNii’t, middle-aged so soon! You’ve hit the part of your wizardry where you can’t stop working!
—and of what Nelaid had said about Dairine. It hadn’t occurred to Nita that something similar might happen to Carmela: falling in love with the serious part of wizardry, as you realized this wasn’t anything like a lot of the stuff they gave you to do in school— well-meant busywork that had nothing to do with what your life was going to be about. This was important work, work on
reality—
stuff you had to get right. And when you first realized that, it was hard to do anything else for a while.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. But what’s been taking you so long with this?”

Carmela made a fake-pouting face. “Oh, Juanita L—”

“Don’t say it!”
 Nita said. Then she grinned. “I’m teasing! You know I’d never rush you. But you were cruising right along there when we were in the library cavern.”

“Yeah,” Carmela said, “I know.” She slumped back among the cushions she’d been lying on. “The wizardry was helping me. Now I’m running slower. Still, something started coming up. You know how it is when you’re reading something, and you can see that whoever wrote it has been really picking the words so that you’ll feel the way they want you to feel about something? Whether that’s the right way or not.”

Nita nodded, remembering one morning when one of her English teachers, Mr. Neary, had gone on about this at length. “Loading the adjectives?”

“That’s part of it.” Carmela scowled at her notebooks, and the TV, and the world in general. “When I was looking at most of the stuff written there— and I’ve been back a couple of times to check this, just to make sure that the invasion of the giant scorpion guys hadn’t messed up how I was seeing things right afterwards— a lot of it was like that. All loaded. ‘We are right; they were wrong; they started it; we had no choice!’ And that was making me suspicious. But then I found this thing. Stumbled on it, really. It was off by itself with some stuff I couldn’t read at all.”

Carmela dropped the remote, then flipped through the notepad to the symbols she had copied out there in red ink, and handed the pad to Nita. “This was the only material I could find there that 
wasn’t
 loaded like everything else. It was very, I don’t know, very 
dry.
 Very matter-of-fact. Not like the other stuff, where they want you to think the way they were thinking. It wants you to figure out what it means by yourself.” She scowled down at it. “I think it’s important. But don’t ask me why.”

“You have to follow your hunches,” Nita said. “And the sooner you figure it out—”

“Believe me,” Carmela said, “you’ll be the first to know.”

“Not Kit?” Nita said.

Carmela gave her an amused, sideways look. “Don’t know if he’s listening to me at the moment. I gave him some advice yesterday that he might have had trouble taking.”

“Oh,” Nita said. “Helena?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’ve got about half of it now,” Carmela said, flipping through the notepad’s pages. Nita could see that they were completely covered with a combination of blocky or scrawly Shamaska-Eilitt characters, notes in English and the Speech, and the aimless arrow-ended curlicues that she’d previously seen Carmela make all over a page when she was trying to figure something out. But finally Carmela came to one page that had a neat block of the Shamaska characters on it in red ink: and underneath it, also in red, a number of lines in English. She handed the pad to Nita.

She gazed down at what Carmela had written. “It has a meter,” Carmela said, “though it’s a weird one: real short lines. You can see where I broke them. The rhyme is there most of the time in the original, so I kept it. It’s weird, too: they don’t rhyme the way we do...”

Nita nodded and read.

The one departed | is the one who returns

From the straitened circle | and the shortened night,

When the blue star rises | and the water burns:

Then the word long-lost | comes again to light

To be spoke by the watcher | who silent yearns

For the lost one found.

 Carmela fell silent, scowling at the page. Nita looked at her. “And?”

“That’s all I’ve got so far,” Carmela said. “There are some weird verbs in the rest that I don’t understand yet. This—” She pointed at one line near the end of the Shamaska block. “That’s the word for the First World. And there’s ‘departed’ again.” She indicated the last line. “But the rest of it I don’t get yet.” Carmela looked uncharacteristically annoyed.

“You shouldn’t be so tough on yourself,” Nita said. “This is more than I could ever have gotten out of what we saw.”

“Yeah, well.” Carmela was frowning. “It’s just that this is something important; I
know
it is.” She leaned back among the pillows again, staring at the pad. “You know how everything looked in there? Green, green, green?”

“Yeah—”

“This was all by itself, in red. Completely different from all the other stuff. Even the font looks more serious somehow.”

Nita shook her head, uncertain how a font could be serious. But Carmela was much more attuned to that kind of thing than she was, and it was probably smart to take her word for it. She turned her attention back to the verse. “Did you misspell ‘straightened’ here?”

Carmela shook her head. “Nope. Different word. The Shamaska word means something that’s been made narrower or smaller...”

“Oh.” Nita looked at the rest of the verse. “A smaller circle... A shortened night.” She let out a breath. “Could that have something to do with Mars’s orbit? It’s a lot narrower than Shamask-Eilith’s would have been.”

“Might be. But what’s ‘the blue star’? And since when does water burn?”

Nita shook her head. “There are a lot of bluish stars that would stand out if you saw them from Mars. Sirius, Rigel, Deneb... And water burning? That can happen, when the conditions are right. It did that down by Caryn Peak during the Song of the Twelve: under enough pressure, when the heat’s high enough, it doesn’t have a choice. It just catches fire.”

“Weird,” Carmela said. She was still frowning at the pad as Nita handed it back to her. “But I don’t think we’re gonna be able to make any real sense of this till I get the rest of it figured out.”

“Well, do what you can,” Nita said. “Meanwhile—”

“You want to go up there. I’ll set the gate up for you. Take the remote, if you want.”

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said. “You might need it for something. I can come back home with a spell: I’ve got one on my charm bracelet.”

“Fine,” Carmela said. “But seriously, next week when school’s really finished, let’s go up to the Crossings and have Sker’ret do you a favor. It’s not like he doesn’t want to! It probably just didn’t occur to him. He’s so used to having unlimited worldgating available that he forgets other people don’t have it. Anyway, where do you want me to drop you off?”

Nita thought about that for a moment. In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw the map she’d been looking at earlier.

“Argyre Planitia,” she said.

“You got it,” Carmela said. “Come on.”

They headed upstairs.

***

Fifty million miles away, Kit was sitting out on the vast southwestern shoulder of Olympus Mons, where Aurilelde’s city had stood in his dream, staring into the distance and wondering what exactly he was waiting for. From where he sat to the edge of the southern horizon, where the shoulder of the mountain dropped away and out of sight, the fine dust of carbon dioxide snow lay over everything, lightening a vista that normally would have been much darker in the predawn twilight.

He felt strange. For one thing, he’d found it peculiar to come here and not find Aurilelde’s city still standing where he’d seen it last. That was impossible, of course: logically Kit knew that. Logically he knew that his dream, and the image he’d seen during the wizardry at Hutton yesterday, were of things that had happened in the deep past. Yet the feeling that they should be happening here and now was something he couldn’t get rid of—especially since his presence in those visions had seemed to alter them. There was a sense that the landscape of the present that he had moved through coming here was a thin veil over something far stronger, deeper, more real. All it would take would be the right action, the right words, to sweep the veil aside right across the planet and bring the old Mars alive.

Air it had... water it had.
 Aurilelde’s remembered words brought the hair up on the back of Kit’s neck. That living Mars, awash with oceans and the promise of life, was the Mars he wanted to see more than anything. And Aurilelde had all but promised that he could see it again. All he had to do was finish the task that had been his, that had been Khretef’s, before Aurilelde’s people buried their cities on Mars and immersed themselves in their long sleep again, waiting for the help they needed to come from outside.

The only thing that would stop it would be interference from people who didn’t understand. Kit was half afraid what he might hear from Mamvish when she finally finished with whatever business was keeping her away from here. 
She has to see what needs to be done,
 Kit thought. 
She has to understand!
 She was, after all, the Powers’ own Species Archivist. Here was a species that had survived incredible adversity, that had archived itself!

Now all they needed was some help getting reestablished. 
Sure, it’ll be tough, when they have a planet next door that doesn’t believe in aliens yet, a planet covered with telescopes. But it can be done. The right wizardries, the right implementations of power, and you could have another species living here right under the noses of all the nonwizardly observers on Earth.

Misunderstanding, though... that was going to be the great enemy. Even Nita, who normally got the sense of what was going on without too much trouble, seemed to be having trouble understanding why Kit needed to be let alone to work out what to do up here. 
Why was she insisting so hard that she wanted to go with me?
 Kit thought. 
Unless she saw something.

Kit sat there wondering about that for a moment. Nita was working very hard, lately, on the visionary specialty that she’d been developing. There were times when she turned to Kit and finished a sentence for him, or described something that was at the back of his mind that he’d meant to tell her about and had then forgotten. 
What kind of things is she seeing that she’s not telling me about?
 he’d wondered before. And now he was wondering about it harder than usual.

What if she 
had
 seen Aurilelde somehow? Or knew something about her that Kit didn’t? There was no way to be sure she hadn’t. Trouble was, Nita’s visions weren’t always right. He’d heard her himself complaining that sometimes they turned up too late to do her any good: or that they emphasized something that turned out not to be all that important later. All it would take would be for her to get some wrong idea about Aurilelde into her head, and then there would be real trouble.

Better to keep her away from Aurilelde and her issues entirely. ’Lelde had told him candidly enough about what her own fears and hopes were like. And as for Khretef—

Kit let out a long, uncertain breath. There was definitely some connection between them, though he didn’t understand how or why. Early this morning, soon after he woke up, he’d started to consider some of the similarities between Khretef’s and Aurilelde’s life, and his and Nita’s. 
Two wizards, one a visionary— or getting to be that way— one good with machines. And another pair, one a wizard, good with machines and concrete things, the other one not a wizard, but a visionary, definitely...

Am I what I am because I really
 am 
Khretef come back?

He sat there considering that for a while. The manual, as on some other vital subjects, was silent on the subject of reincarnation. There were hints that it could happen under some circumstances, but it seemed to be an elective issue, not necessarily enforced or enforceable. Apparently the One felt you were competent to decide if or when you were ready to come back, or how long a respite you needed from the business of errantry and life.

It doesn’t matter,
 Kit thought at last. 
They’re
 alive, 
her people! Or waiting to be alive again. But there’s something she needs to make it happen, so that they can settle themselves down on Mars and get back to living their lives again. Khretef went to find this thing that Aurilelde needs... whatever it was. And died—

Kit hunched forward on his stone again, thinking about that, scuffing with one foot at the snow lying at his feet. There had been no mistaking the word she’d been using; Aurilelde’s language was one that came through perfectly clearly when you listened to it with a basic knowledge of the Speech—