A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (48 page)

No problem.
 Off to one side, dust and snow whirled away from a flat place among the stones; a circle of light appeared there. Nita stepped through—

— and came out in her bedroom as usual. She sighed and tossed her manual onto the desk while she pulled off her outdoor clothes, then grabbed it again and headed downstairs.

Her dad was in the living room, reading the Sunday paper. Dairine was actually in the same room with him, stretched out on the floor and paging through the travel section, while Spot looked over her shoulder with stalked eyes. All of them glanced up as Nita came in. “You hungry?” her dad said. “I’ll make you something.”

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said. She dropped her manual on the dining room table and wandered into the kitchen, glancing at the clock. 
Two thirty. Okay, I’ll give him till five. He has to be back then, anyway, Carmela says. And I want lunch.

She rummaged around in the fridge for the makings of a chicken sandwich, put the kettle on, assembled the sandwich—all except the mustard she wanted, which Dairine had apparently finished, so that Nita had to make do with mayonnaise— and then wandered back into the dining room and sat down, staring morosely at the manual while she ate half the sandwich.

What is it with him?
 she thought.

But Nita had her suspicions. Right there as if in front of her, she could just see the Martian princess. 
It’s not fair,
 she thought. 
She was pretty. She was stacked.
 Nita squirmed uneasily in the chair. 
She had
 nothing on. 
Almost. And it looked
 good 
on her!

“Dammit!” Nita said under her breath.

She scowled at the rest of her sandwich, then picked it up and ate it, annoyed. 
How am I supposed to compete with that?

Are you crazy? You’re not in a competition,
 said some part of her brain that was taking desperate refuge in rationality. 
She was a hallucination. She was a character in a book that the wizardry used to communicate with him...

Yeah, and I know just what she was communicating!
 answered back another part of Nita’s mind, one that had no intention of being thrown off the track by logic, especially as logic when used on boys lately seemed to produce only indifferent results. 
You saw him looking at Janie Lowell the other morning. Her and that alleged skirt.

Nita dropped the rest of the sandwich on the plate and put her head in her hands. 
This is dumb. I don’t want to wear that kind of skirt, anyway. If “skirt” is the word we’re looking for, and not “belt”! I just want—
She groaned. 
I don’t know what I want.

Kit, you’re an idiot!

And this statement embarrassed Nit profoundly, since it both flowed naturally from what she was feeling right now and made no sense whatsoever.

“Aaaaaagh,”
 she said under her breath after a moment, which also made no sense, but at least discharged some tension. Nita picked up the rest of the sandwich, ate it while glowering at the table, and then noticed that the kettle was screaming for her attention.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, and scrambled up to turn off the stove and get the kettle off the hot ring and find herself a tea bag. “Sorry...”

The kettle regarded her with mute accusation. She picked it up and poured hot water onto the tea bag in her mug. “Maybe I’m the idiot,” she muttered, putting the kettle down.

It didn’t respond. She immediately felt somehow inadequate, as Kit always got immediate responses out of the household appliances: they were very forthcoming with him. “Never mind,” she said, and patted it on the handle as she went out. “Different wizards, different specialties...” But she still felt it watching her as she went out.

Nita sighed and went back into the dining room, where she sat down at the end of the table and drank the tea. Finally she reached out to her manual again and opened it, going back to the Mars data for the previous day. In particular, the reports on the meetings with the scorpion creatures were now in there, both the encounter in the Cavern and those that had happened out in the Martian terrain, and Nita read them both over with interest. 
So weird, though,
 she thought. 
The encounters were so different.

Across the table, Dairine had left a pad and a few pens from something else she’d been doing. On impulse Nita reached out and pulled them over as she looked over the details of power levels and personnel, topography and coordinates. 
What a crowd of us,
 she thought. 
But our two groups got such different results.

Did one group have a higher aggregate power level or something?
 But the groups’ power levels weren’t really all that different, when you averaged things out. 
Okay, Carmela’s not a wizard. But she has her own specialties. And S’reee and I were there: a more senior talent and a lesser one. And on the other side there were Kit and Ronan, and Darryl, who’s not an older talent, but in his own way as powerful as a Senior: maybe more so.

She picked up the pen and started making a list on the top page of the pad, comparing power levels and matching them off against one another: Kit, Nita, Ronan, Carmela, Darryl, S’reee
.
 Nita shook her head and tapped the names idly with her pen, looking for some other factor that could be operating: ages, origins, wizardly specialties. 
Newer wizard, older one. Younger person, older one. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy...

Nita stopped. She stared at the lists.

Our team was all girls. Theirs was all guys.

Her first thought was that this was just a coincidence. 
But the scorpions walked right past us! And we didn’t get what the guys got, this weird re-creation of somebody else’s Mars. We got what had actually been
left
there. We identified ourselves as wizards and they let us right in. Almost ignored us, even. Whereas the guys had all these hoops to jump through. Something to prove.

Nita stared at the manual page, shaking her head. 
Why? Just because they were guys? It doesn’t make sense. There has to be something else going on.

She sat back in the chair. 
Even the guys were clear they were being tested for something. At the very least, that they were wizards. But maybe something else, too. Possibly to see whose mindview was closest to the Martians’?

Nita picked up her tea mug and had a swig. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there was something about this situation that Kit was hiding specifically from her. The hurt this was creating in her at the moment was all out of proportion to any real reason for it, but that didn’t make it easier for Nita to bear. And she kept trying to reason his behavior away, and failing.

We’ve been through a lot together. All kinds of crap. But we’ve never gone out of our way to
hide
stuff from each other.

There could be something bad going on with him and this connection to Miss Martian Princess,
 Nita thought.
Some bad influence. It’s happened before. Sometimes it’s taken some work to get him out of trouble.

Big deal, though! He’s done the same for me.

But why doesn’t it feel like that’s what’s happening this time? It’s something else. I just know it. Something he doesn’t want me to know about.

And what could it
 be
?!
 She banged her mug down on the table, and tea splashed out of it. Nita didn’t care, just sat staring at the splashed droplets. 
Crap! Crap, crap, crap
 
!

“You drop something?” her dad said from the living room.

“Huh? Oh no, sorry.”

Nita scowled. 
If only there was some way to get at what he was
really
thinking. Something like the live stuff coming out of Dairine’s manual, the “streaming consciousness...

And then she stopped as the idea came into her head.

If it worked on Dairine’s manual,
 she thought, 
it would work on Kit’s.

She held still for some moments longer. Then she said, “Bobo?”

You rang?

“You say something, honey?”

“Just talking to Bobo, Daddy.”

“Oh, okay.” And a snort, as if this was now just another amusing part of day-to-day life.

Nita took another drink of her tea. “The thing you did to Spot,” she said. “Or to his manual functions—” She stopped again.

Yes?

“Could you do that to Kit’s manual?”

It was some moments before Bobo said anything. 
Spot gave consent.

Nita swallowed. That was the point, of course. And Bobo hadn’t actually answered her question. “But you 
could
 do it.”

If a wizard feels that a wizardry is not in contravention of the Oath,
 Bobo said, 
or is certain beyond any reasonable doubt that a given spell is required to fulfill the conditions of the Oath, then that wizardry can be implemented and will execute.

Nita sat there and just thought for a minute, then two.

She found that she was trembling. 
Certain beyond any reasonable doubt.

The problem was that doubt was all she had at the moment. 
It is impossible to serve the Lone Power directly:
 that was one of the most basic tenets of wizardry. The power itself would refuse to be used in such ways. But there were lots of ways the Lone One could get you to do Its will 
indirectly.
 In fact, It preferred those. It liked, whenever It could, to get wizards into situations where they felt that the only way to do right was by doing something that would later turn out to be wrong.

Am I sure I’m
really
wanting to do this because it’s right? And not just because I’m scared that she’s really the one that he— that Kit and I— that I have to know if he—

She swallowed. “It’s all about the situation you’re in, isn’t it?” Nita said under her breath. “It all comes down to how it looks to 
you.
” She took a long breath. “Free will.”

The Worlds are based on it,
 Bobo said. 
The One has no interest in inhabiting a universe full of puppets.

“Even though we get it wrong a whole lot?”

Apparently the benefits are felt to offset the dangers,
 the peridexis said. 
Or counterbalance them.

“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” Nita muttered. “Because I’m not sure which side I’m coming down on.”

Yet she did know. It was wrong, 
wrong
 to tamper with the private insides of someone’s brain. This was why the psychotropic wizardries tended to backlash so violently on the user. And this would be only a step away from that. It was like stealing Dairine’s diary and reading it, that time.

But I can’t get rid of the feeling that if I don’t stop him from what he’s doing, bad things are going to happen. I think he’s in danger somehow. And I don’t know if it’s just me thinking that because I want to think that... or because it’s
real.

Nita hid her face in her hands. 
If this is what adult wizardry is going to be like,
 she thought, 
I prefer the kid kind. More clean-cut. More obvious.

But she had the horrible feeling that her preferences weren’t at all the issue here. And worse, the fact that Bobo still hadn’t clearly answered her question told Nita something she didn’t want to know: that if she told him to bug Kit’s manual— or his brain— and she was convinced that this was the right thing to do, 
then Bobo would do it.

Nita’s mouth was dry. It suddenly seemed to her that, from the time she took the Oath until now, she had been using some kind of wizardry that had kiddie-gates installed at the top of the stairs. But now she had a way to get the gate off. Now it was entirely up to her what she did with the power. 
All I have to do is convince myself that what I’m doing is right.

And it would be so easy to do that. Too easy.

Nita put her head down on the table and was tempted to moan, except that in the living room they might have heard her. In there she could hear her dad quietly talking to Dairine: actually talking to her, not angrily, just a normal conversation, despite the uncomfortable way things had been going just a few days ago.

And that’s because of what I did to her manual. Or is it because of what Dad saw there, and it bothered him so much that he didn’t want to see any more?

Oh God, I don’t know what to do about
 any 
of this!!

But she did. Right now, at least, Nita was sure that what she was considering was wrong. 
If it sounds like something the Lone Power would suggest... if it walks like the Lone Power, and quacks like the Lone Power...

And she was suddenly caught completely off guard by the image of the Lone One as an evil duck— a black duck in a shiny black helmet, and maybe even a cape, waddling along to ominous movie music. Nita burst out laughing at the image. She could just hear the noise Its breathing would make, a dreadful asthmatic 
snerk
ing—