A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (6 page)

Carmela sat quiet for a moment. “You know,” she said, “if people here found out there really 
were
 Martians...”

Nita bent down for her sneakers. “They’d freak,” Nita said, heading for the door. “And they’d do it big! Even if the little probes we’ve sent there don’t find anything bigger than germs, some people will still freak, because they think we’re—they’re— the most important things in the universe, all the life there is.” She snorted.

“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Sker’ret would laugh all his legs off at that one.”

Nita put her eyebrows up, leaning against the doorsill. “How 
is
 our favorite centipede?”

“Busy,” Carmela said. “The Rirhath B government’s still cleaning up the Crossings, and Sker’s having himself a party being King of the Alien Worldgates while his Esteemed Ancestor grows in his new legs and claws and brains and things.” She grinned. “Sker’ret says he needs me to come help get their shopping mall cleaned up.”

“Cleaned 
out,
 you mean,” Nita said. The planetary government of Rirhath B had settled a considerable reward on Carmela for “services rendered” in the liberation of the Crossings Worldgating Facility...and Carmela had chosen to take her reward as shopping vouchers. Nita guessed that a whole lot of the Crossings’ shopkeepers were rubbing their hands, claws, or tentacles together at the prospect. “
That
 trip I’m taking with you, no matter 
what
Dairine does. But anyway, the freaking’s gonna happen eventually, no matter what we do...because no matter who goes looking for life, sooner or later they’ll find it. And as far as wizards here go, it looks like the Powers That Be have decided that if we’re old enough to be asking serious questions about the fourth planet, we’re old enough to be told. But only because we didn’t just ask and then run away to play. We started going there and digging around.”

“How long has this been going on?” Carmela said.

“Since the 1770s...”

Carmela banged the side of her head with one hand a couple of times in a my-ears-are-malfunctioning gesture. “Sorry! I thought you said since the Revolutionary War...”

“Melaaaaa...!” Nita said, laughing, and headed out of her bedroom, making for the bathroom just down the hall. “There were wizards here then!” She pushed the bathroom door shut enough to change clothes in privacy.

“What, in New York? And they went to 
Mars?
”

Nita pulled off her school pants and pulled on the jeans. “There were wizards all over the world, just like now. And sure they went to Mars! Everybody here was all hot on Mars around then, not just wizards. William Herschel started it. It was in all the papers. There were drawings and everything.” Nita snickered. “Though most of them were of completely made-up stuff that was never there...”

“Okay,” Carmela said with a sigh, as Nita sat down on the edge of the tub to put on her sneakers. “I am very weirded out now. Not that this is even slightly unusual, but no one has any pity on 
my
 mental health...”

Nita grinned as she pulled off her old top, for Carmela’s mental health was more robust than most people’s. She put on the lighter top, bent down to retie one loose sneaker-lace, then straightened and glanced at herself in the mirror. And paused, startled, for there was another figure behind her, looking at her over her shoulder in the mirror: taller, as slender as she was, but extremely pretty, far more so than—

Nita blinked. The other reflection was gone.

Now what the heck was
 that
?
 Nita thought. 
And who has hair that color?
 For the long, flowing, waving hair of the person she’d thought she’d seen had been the richest and most vivid sky-blue imaginable.

Nita stared into the mirror for a second more. There was nothing to be seen but her and the black and white tiles of the wall on the far side of the bathtub. 
I’ve been watching too much anime,
 she thought.

“You fall 
in,
 in there?” Carmela called.

“No...” Nita said, and reached for the mouthwash, looking suspiciously at the mirror. This was one of the unfortunate aspects of changing wizardly specialties...assuming that she 
was
 actually changing one, not just adding something on. Everything got so unsettled: you saw things, heard things, sensed things that at first didn’t make any sense. 
Later
 they did, but usually too late to help you sort out whatever the present problem was. Nita took a gulp of mouthwash, rinsed, spat, turned the faucet on to rinse the sink, and looked in that mirror again. Nothing but herself, and the memory, the shadow of a shape, fading already. Sapphire-blue hair, black eyes, profoundly deep. A fierce look: uncompromising, alien.

And afraid...

File it away,
 Nita thought. 
Stick it in Nita’s Big Book of Odd Oracular Imagery, and have a good long look at it later. Bobo?

Got it,
 said the voice she was only slowly getting used to hearing in the back of her head, and even then not every time she spoke to it. There were unnerving, ambivalent silences sometimes when Nita spoke to the peridexis, her own personal “online” version of the wizard’s manual. It didn’t always answer. Nita wondered if this was because it knew she wasn’t entirely happy with it being inside her... though she’d been happy enough a month or so ago, when for a little while it was all the evidence of wizardry she’d had left. 
And if I don’t trust it completely... does it trust
 me
? And if not,
 why 
not? This is all so bizarre.

“You 
did
 fall in!” Carmela said from the bedroom.

“No!”
 Nita said, briefly annoyed, and put the cap back on the mouthwash. She smoothed her top down and went out of the bathroom, leaning against her bedroom’s doorsill again.

“Come on,” Nita said. “I’ll show you. Anyway, Kit’s over there, and you know you want to go make him crazy.”

“It’s what I live for!” Carmela said. “Let’s go.” She stood up and stretched. “What’s summer wear for Mars look like?”

“A force field. But that’s my problem. Anyway, we have another stop first.” She eyed the sweater Carmela was still wearing, a leftover from an unusually cool morning. “Better dump the angora,” Nita said, pulling open one more drawer, rummaging again, and coming up with a T-shirt that was too big for her, but about the right size for Carmela. She grinned and waved it like a flag. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”

Carmela gave her a look, got up off the bed, and grabbed the T-shirt out of her hand. She vanished into the bathroom: a few moments later she was back in Nita’s room again, though she was still fussing with the T-shirt in a dissatisfied way. “So now what?”

“Just come stand over here by the window.” Nita snapped her fingers, and her otherspace pocket popped open in the air beside her. She reached into it and felt around.

Oh, you don’t need that
... said the voice in her head.

Let’s just say I like to check my figures,
 Nita said silently to the peridexis, riffling through the manual. 
Besides, I like to be extra certain, because it’s Carmela I’m transiting as well as me. Kit would be cranky if I got his sister stuck in the Earth’s core.
 Then she snickered. 
Then again, maybe he wouldn’t...

“And what is so funny?” Carmela said. “Besides the way this tent fits?”

“Everybody should have a few floppy shirts,” Nita said. “Don’t distract me.” She flipped through a few pages and found what she was looking for, the manual’s “persona” utility. “What’s your birthday again?”

“November sixth,” Carmela said, knotting up the T-shirt into a more fashion-conscious configuration above the waist of her jeans. She peered over Nita’s shoulder, watching the way the Speech-characters on the manual page shifted and changed as she spoke. “Look at them jump around! Is that analyzing my voice?”

“And your brainwaves, and a lot of other things,” Nita said. “It makes a shorthand version of your name in the Speech: that gets pasted into the spell. What was the last book you read?”

“Gulliver’s Travels,”
 Carmela said, watching a new layer of characters appear and nest themselves in among the first group, shoving them around in various directions and changing the colors in which they appeared on the page. “The uncensored one. Hey, what do you mean ‘shorthand’? Is it safe to put shorthand 
anything
 in a spell?”

“Safe enough for this,” Nita said, watching the Speech-characters knit themselves into a little thorny circlet on the page, bristling with attachment-spurs that would hook into the larger spell. “We’re not going out of atmosphere, and less than fifty-eight thousand miles total. Not enough for significant error to build up.” Then Nita wrinkled her nose. “Wasn’t that kind of gross?”

“What, the book? Come on. I don’t know why that parents’ group keeps trying to ban it. You’d think school kids had never heard that people pee.” Carmela snickered. “Maybe the grownups are just trying to keep word from getting out.”

Nita smiled slightly as the diagnostic fitted another level of meaning into the long sentence-acronym it was assembling from the data that came with Carmela’s physical presence. A broad spectrum of information about her was being summed up and pulled into the construct: it’d be interesting to analyze it all in detail later on, though some of the information was already giving Nita second thoughts. “Your favorite color is 
this
 shade of yellow?” Nita said, putting her finger on one part of the Speech construct and pulling that set of characters off to one side, out into the air. She had to wince at the little bead of light that came to life at the tail end of the character chain. It was a particularly eye-watering shade of citrus yellow-green.

“This week, yeah,” Carmela said. “Next week, who knows?”

Nita shrugged: at least the routine was picking up its data correctly. “Okay,” she said, and let go of the character string: it snapped back into the circlet where it belonged. “Great— we’re set. Two seconds...”

Nita turned back to the center of the manual. “Gating circles, please?” she said in the Speech. The manual fell open at the place where she stored her transit circles. “Thank you.” She reached into the page and pulled one out, an on-Earth transit routine that had her own Speech-name and the transit’s starting location, her bedroom, woven into it already. With a flick of her wrist she dropped it to the floor around the spot near the window where the two of them stood. Then Nita turned back to the page where she’d generated Carmela’s shorthand name. Carefully she lifted the long string of glowing characters out of the page and dropped it near Carmela, where there was a receptor socket ready to take it in the larger transit circle.

Carmela looked down at it all suspiciously. “Are you sure this is safe?” she said.

Nita gave Carmela an amused look. “
This
 from somebody who let a 
TV remote
 install a worldgate in her bedroom closet? Come on. You should really have Sker’ret check that, anyway. He’s the expert.”

Nita shut the manual, looked at the spell that lay burning on the floor around them, and started to say the words of the Wizard’s Knot that would fasten the spell closed and start it going.

You’re forgetting something...

Nita’s jaw dropped. “Oh, wow, you’re right!” she said. “Mela, wait right here. Don’t touch anything!”

She jumped over the edge of the spell-circle and ran downstairs. Nita trotted through the kitchen, shut and locked the back door— something else she’d forgotten— and then picked up the plastic shopping bag of tomatoes from beside the sink. 
You’re welcome,
said the peridexis.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Everybody gives me a hard time,” she said, heading back upstairs. “Thanks, Bobo.”

In Nita’s bedroom, Carmela was standing there with her arms folded and an 
I’m-waiting-patiently,- what-do-you-
mean-
don’t-touch-anything?
 expression on her face. “Does your invisible friend possibly have a secret identity?” she said. “A 
cute
 one?”

Nita gave Carmela a look. “You behave,” she said, “or I’m going to let your mama and pop know just what they’re trying to turn loose on the poor unsuspecting nerdboys of CalTech.”

“Please,”
 Carmela said, sounding unusually fervent even for her. “Just do that, and I’ll fall at your feet and kiss them forever.”

“Yet another image I didn’t need,” Nita said. She looked down at the transit spell and began, once more, to speak the words in the Speech.

The world always seems to press in all around to hear a spell being spoken. As Nita said the words, and heard the merely audible sounds of the everyday world go quiet under the pressure of that larger regard, she started to become strangely aware of something else: the sense that the spell itself was reacting strangely to something else in the circle. 
The peridexis,
 she thought. She’d noticed this before, recently, when heading out for off-planet work— Carmela’s presence in the spell merely added an unusual edge to the effect, as the peridexis shifted its presence to adapt to her. As the spell pressed in with more force around them, Nita wondered for the umpteenth time how she was going to get used to having what seemed to be wizardry itself in her head with her. It wasn’t all a bad thing: she’d kept a little of the increase in power which all Earth’s younger wizards had experienced during the recent crisis, when others had lost theirs much sooner. But she couldn’t get rid of the idea that there was something about all this she wasn’t understanding yet, and she needed to get to grips with it pretty quick...