A Wizard Of Mars

Irina raised her eyebrows. “Or,” she said, “if a majority of your people have come to agree with this being, then you may elect to be locked again into the same state of stasis in which you lay until your recent revival. Your dormancy site will be guarded and spell-locked until all other species in this system for whom your discovery would be an issue have reached a sufficient level of cultural maturity for the discovery of your presence no longer to be problematic. At that time your stasis will be broken and your suitability for settlement on this planet will be reevaluated.”

The silence in the room, if possible, grew even more deadly. “Even the first option will require that you return to stasis for a while,” said Mamvish, “because though there are thousands of planets that might suit you, coming up with the best match will take time— and there’s no chance whatsoever that we’ll leave your species at large on this planet or anywhere in this system until your new home is found and prepped.”

Iskard stood quiet for some time, considering. Finally, still looking pale, he lifted up his head. “We cannot and will not leave this system,” he said. “We are the First People, and you have no right to force us to leave for some strange new home elsewhere.”

“It may not seem that way to you,” said Mamvish. “But the Powers That Be see it differently. Primacy of development doesn’t imply either moral or spiritual primacy in any species, in any system. I’ve seen many come and go. And rarely, I’m sad to say, have I seen a people less considerate of other species, or more hate-filled toward its own, as you folk. By your recent actions you’ve forfeited the right to live your lives as you’ve been living them. You will therefore continue them somewhere else, or you will not continue them at all until far into the future.”

Nita was watching Iskard’s face, waiting for him to see sense. But no change showed there at all. “Do what the Powers command you,” he said at last. “But never hope to get us to agree to it.”

Irina glanced over at Mamvish and exchanged a long look with her. Nita felt something itching at the back of her mind, but the sensation passed. To Kit, she said silently, You getting the same feeling from these guys that I am?

They’d sooner be dead than do it anybody else’s way, Kit said. So sad.

Nita looked at him with some surprise. They just did to you what they did, she said, and you can still be sorry for them?

Kit shrugged. It’s not so much them, he said. I was one of them for a little. Maybe I get it…

He stepped out into the middle of the gathering. “Irina,” Kit said.

She looked at him in surprise.

“They can’t help it,” he said. “The stasis was terrible for them; I could feel it when I was inside Khretef. It wasn’t just like being asleep and not dreaming: they could feel it all. Time didn’t go by faster to them: it went slower. They could feel every minute, every second.” He looked over at Khretef.

The Eilitt wizard bowed his head. “It made them worse,” Kit said. “They were angry before, and when they came out now, they were a little crazy, too. I caught some of that, maybe.” Kit looked embarrassed. “But it’s not entirely their fault. And…” He looked more embarrassed still. “They still know how to love each other. But being scared about whether they’re going to survive at all can really get in the way.”

Irina was watching Kit with some perplexity. “Kit,” she said, unfolding her arms enough to shift the baby-sling, “they can’t stay in the system as it’s now constituted while they’re free and able to act. The Powers have withdrawn that right from them. And they won’t accept rafting out, or stasis until the situation changes—”

“I know,” Kit said. “But there’s another way.”

Irina and Mamvish looked at each other, then back at Kit. “What?”

“Timeslide,” he said. “Into the past.”

Irina gave him an odd look, then glanced over at Mamvish. Mamvish’s eyes on both sides were going around.

“To reposition a sanctioned species far enough back not to be a threat to the timelines of associated planets,” Mamvish said, “would take a tremendous amount of power. Even for a Planetary and a Species Archivist.”

“What if the power wasn’t so much of a problem?” Kit said.

He looked, not at Iskard or Rorsik, but at Khretef. “What if you were here,” Kit said, “but long, long ago, before anybody on Earth was able to notice you? Millions of years back? No carbon-based species lasts that long.” He looked at Mamvish: one eye fixed on him in a way that suggested he was right. “And nobody would have to go into stasis. Your cities could be relocated here on the planet in real time.”

Khretef looked at Kit oddly. “But the Eilitt would still try to attack us…”

“Not if your relocation was in time as well as space,” Kit said. “Put one city down in one spot …And the other one, five hundred thousand years away…”

Irina was looking at him now, and the expression was more thoughtful. Once again she glanced over at Mamvish, and Nita felt that odd itching at the back of her mind.

It ceased. Iskard now was looking at Kit as if he couldn’t understand why Kit was being so helpful. “If this could be done…” Iskard said. “We would accept it.”

Irina turned to Kit, looking troubled. “I’m a Planetary, Kit,” she said, “not one of the Powers That Be. The problem with this is finding enough energy to fuel the spell. Pushing thousands of living beings and the mass of two ancient cities back a million years or two would require—” She shook her head.

“Wait,” Kit said. “Just wait, okay? I need to transit back to my house.” And then he looked annoyed. “By the way, since these guys were doing hwanthaet or whatever it is on me to make me so crazy to be back here, can I please be ungrounded?”

Irina gave him a dry look. “Go,” she said, and waved a hand.

Kit vanished.

***

He appeared in his kitchen and turned to head toward the back door— and found that standing there, looking at him wide-eyed, with yet another armful of laundry, was Helena.

“Uh—” Kit said.

To his great relief, the look with which his sister was favoring him was more bemused than scared or angry. “So that noise is traditional, then,” she said.

“Huh?”

“When you appear,” Helena said. “It’s in the mutant comic books, too. ‘Bamf!’” And she then started looking even more bemused. “Does this mean the comics people actually know mutants?”

“Uh, they might,” Kit said.

Helena nodded, apparently pleased at having worked this out for herself. She started heading toward the cellar stairs with her laundry, then paused as something occurred to her. “When you appear out of nowhere like that,” she said, “there’s no chance you could appear where somebody else already is, is there? Like, you know, a transporter accident?”

Kit was briefly annoyed, then realized it was a fair question. “No. There’s an automatic offset, it—” He stopped, as there was no point in explaining the safeguards built into the spell: Helena was thinking in a different idiom now, and he was just going to have to get used to it. “It can’t happen. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.” Helena headed for the stairs and was halfway down them as Kit stepped down onto the landing and reached in among the coats and so forth to pull out what he’d come back for. Helena stopped on the stairs, looked up at the glowing thing that Kit was carefully unwinding from the hook where it had been hanging.

“What’s that? Oh, don’t tell me!” Helena said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Wonder Woman’s magic lasso? Is that real, too?” And then she paused. “I thought it was supposed to be gold.”

Not for the first time when dealing with one of his sisters, Kit was left briefly speechless.

Helena got a musing look. “And if that can be real, maybe other stuff from the comics could be real, too? Like… I can’t remember: what are those guys called who have the green glowy rings? Like them. Wouldn’t it be great if there was this interplanetary brotherhood with all kinds of creatures, you know, banding together and using their powers to fight evil?”

She sighed, then smiled at Kit. “Never mind, I know, it’s probably more secret stuff,” Helena said, turning and heading down the stairs again. “Guess I’ve just got to get used to it. What a world.” She moved out of sight, and Kit heard the clunk of the washer’s lid being opened. “I should really start getting back into comics. My brother the mutant…”

Kit stared down at her, dumbfounded: then heaved a sigh and vanished again.

Back on Mars, Kit went to Irina and handed her what he’d brought from home.

Irina took the long, slender, pale cord from him. Then she started, her eyes going wide. In its sling, the baby woke up. On her head, the parakeet was shocked into the air and fluttered there for several moments before settling again and staring down at what she held.

Irina ran the cord through her hands, noting, as did everyone else, the way the faint bluish glow about it overrode every other light in that great room. As she moved her hands apart while holding it, the cord stretched: the glow got brighter.

“It was my dog’s,” Kit said. “Before he, well, graduated, he really used to get around. Other universes, other times. Sometimes a lot further. This leash was the only way I could keep up with him. Anchor one end of it in one reality, fasten it to something in another— and it’ll pull the other thing through.”

Mamvish came over to look at Ponch’s old leash. It had been powerful enough when Kit had used it for doggie-walking before the affair with the Pullulus earlier in the year. What it would be able to do now, after having been even briefly affiliated with the canine version of the One, even Kit could only guess.

But apparently Irina had some idea. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, letting out a long, surprised breath and glancing over at Mamvish. “This artifact,” she said, “has a power rating even higher than yours. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

Mamvish swung her tail. “And it’s built for transits,” she said. “With this, and your power and mine, we can pull it off. I’d say the solution suits.”

Irina turned back to Kit. “You understand that probably it won’t survive this wizardry.”

Kit nodded. “I don’t need it anymore. And Ponch sure doesn’t. If it can do some good here, then let’s go.”

***

After that it seemed to Nita that things happened nearly as quickly as her decommissioning of the passthrough wizardry had. There was a brief consultation about temporospatial coordinates, and then a transit out to the city limits, past the farthest buildings, at the end of the white road. Mamvish and Irina stood there conferring to resolve the last few issues, while Iskard watched from the road.

Kit had taken Khretef off to one side, and together the two of them stood for a good while looking down at Kit’s manual while Kit turned the pages, shifting from section to section as he constructed a spell. After a few moments he pulled a long glowing string of speech-characters out of the manual—a deactivated spell, set for storage and later use by another wizard.

Nita watched Kit checking the center section of the spell one last time before passing it to Khretef, and knew what it was. Her mouth went dry at the prospect of handing another being so much personal information. But it’s his business. And Khretef, too, looked at the spell with some disquiet: but also, Nita thought, with a touch of guilt. He and Kit exchanged a long glance before Khretef took the spell and made it vanish into his own unseen version of the manual: and he bowed to Kit, quite deeply.

Finally Kit headed back to where Nita waited. “He’s got what he needs to build into the Nascence,” Kit said as they joined her. “So the superegg’ll recognize me and behave the way it ought to, and start all this going.” He glanced over at Irina, who nodded at him. “Irina and Mamvish have stoked the Nascence wizardry up so it can’t be cracked by any amount of brute-force wizardry in backtime …and they’ve stuck a heavy-duty cloaking routine on it so they won’t recognize the presence of their own spell routines in the superegg when we find it on the uptime leg.”

Nita realized that Irina was looking at her. For a moment she didn’t understand— and then she realized what was needed. “I have to give her what you did, don’t I?” she said. “Enough of my personal information for Aurilelde to link to her own. So that the congruency between us is complete, and all this works out the way it should…”

Kit didn’t say anything.

But why wouldn’t I? Nita thought. To make all this come out all right. She nodded at Irina. Irina nodded back, turned away as Khretef headed over to join Kit again.

And only then did it occur to Nita, with a shock, that this would mean it hadn’t actually been Aurilelde who Kit had been so attracted to. It was me…

Khretef looked at her apologetically as he came up beside Kit. “It is a great gift you give us,” Khretef said to both of them. “We will not forget you—who helped us when you had little reason to.”

“I had the same reason any wizard had,” Kit said. “You just had, well, a little memory lapse. With some assistance.”

From a little distance away, where she’d been standing looking rather forlorn, Aurilelde now came over to clutch Khretef’s hand. For a long time it seemed as if she wouldn’t look at Kit or Nita. But finally she stole a glance at them. “You know that I had to—” she said: and then she fell silent.

Nita sighed and shook her head. “It all worked out in the end,” she said. “You were scared. At times like that it’s hard to think straight. Don’t be afraid anymore, okay? And you two be happy together.”

Khretef and Kit were exchanging glances. “Cousin,” Khretef said holding a hand out, “brother— I’m sorry.”

Kit took his arm. “You think you screwed up?” he said. “You should’ve seen some of mine. Go on. And take care of her.”

“Time, Kit,” Irina said.

Kit stepped back. Khretef and Aurilelde and Iskard stepped back as well, in the direction of the city.

Irina raised her hands; in them was the leash, knotted into a circle. She threw the leash into the air. It hovered there and began to stretch into a circular line of light, widening, growing—

The leash ascended, growing with astonishing speed, becoming a circle yards wide, tens of yards, hundreds: finally nearly a mile in diameter, still stretching as it rose. Then, high above the City of the Shamaska, centered over it, the burning circle began to fall. As it did, the space that it enclosed began to go misty. It fell farther, and the uppermost towers of the City were no longer there, vanishing as if some invisible shade were being drawn down over them, obscuring the view. Then the city proper vanished; next the buildings around them. Finally Nita saw Aurilelde turn to Khretef, and the circle dropped to the ground only a few feet away—

Everything was gone. The shoulder of Olympus Mons stood bare in the afternoon: and slowly, from high clouds up in the dusty sky, a little snow started to fall.

Mamvish and Irina stood there watching the snow come down. After a moment, Irina turned to them and let out a long breath. “It took,” she said. “And at the other city site as well. They’re positioned where we intended… far from each other in time and space.”

Mamvish flourished her tail, looking around. “Well,” she said, “we have a lot of work to do. We’re going to have to do extensive time-patching on this whole environment to get rid of the seismic damage and the water…”

“You’ll be wanting to call in all your Mars teams, then,” Irina said. And she looked at Kit. “I’d suggest, though, that for the moment you sit this out. The wizardry that connected you and Khretef will need some time to fade.”

“And that was why he was so crazy?” Nita said, starting to feel wobbly again.

“Yes,” Irina said. “Among other things. Which is why I’ve arranged for the energy outlay for the normally rather illegal thing you did to his manual to be subsidized, and for you to be forgiven.”

Kit stared at Nita. “What did you do to my manual?”

Nita rubbed her eyes. “Later,” she said. “Right now, I really, really need a nap.”

Together, they vanished.

16: Elysium

It took more than a nap before Nita was ready to do much of anything the next day. Her dad had gotten her off the final day of school, citing family business; which was true enough. But once she got home, she slept straight through into the next morning. It was mid-evening before she and Kit had a chance to get together with Irina and Mamvish to review the events of the weekend.

Her father set out the lawn chairs and the barbecue kettle in the shielded part of the backyard, and sat there drinking iced tea with Kit’s mama and pop and Tom and Carl. Across from them, the Powers’ Archivist (too large to do anything but sprawl near the lawn chairs) and Earth’s Planetary relaxed with Nita, Kit, Dairine, Carmela, Ronan, and Darryl, debriefing them on the fine details of the last few days and filling in missing ones.

Mars had been fairly quickly repaired, since the necessary timeline-patching started almost immediately after the Cities were gone. The power requirements of the patching spells had meant that a lot of wizards had to be called in to assist, but now everything was once again dry except for carbon dioxide snow, and all the planet’s water was back where it belonged, frozen under the crust or at the poles. However, there were still endless minor details to sort out.

“So the ‘blue star’ was Earth,” Carmela was saying to Dairine, while making notes on the spiral notebook in her lap. “That was these guys getting involved. And ‘the word long lost,’ that was the Shard—”

“How’s that a word?” Dairine said, unconvinced.

“It’s a pun in the Speech. One term for a single word in the Speech is shafath, a fragment of a longer expression, get it?”

“Yeah, but what about the ‘spoke by the watcher’ thing? How can you ‘speak’ a fragment of anything?”

Carmela sighed, looked up at Mamvish. “It’s true,” Mamvish said, “there is a verb form of shafath as well: shafait’, to use a fragment or split one off—”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “Forget it,” she said. “It’s just another of these symbolic poems that can mean anything. Give me the concrete stuff any day.”

Carmela was starting to look annoyed. “Okay, I’ll give you this,” Dairine said. “This stuff about the watcher, the silent yearning for the lost one found, blah de blah de blah de blah. Fine: that was Aurilelde and Khretef. He was dead while everybody else was in stasis. Then when Kit showed up, he got unlost and started looking for the Shard again. But ‘she must slay her rival’? Just who was her rival? Because nobody got slain! You should find somebody to complain to, because this prophecy is substandard.”

Behind Dairine, Ronan and Darryl were utterly failing to control their snickering. Dairine glared over her shoulder at them; and they both immediately got extremely interested in Darryl’s WizPod.

Carmela was scowling. “Mela, you did a great job on that,” Carl said, “but we may never know exactly what it meant.” He stretched his legs out. “Oracular utterances all over this galaxy have at their heart the need to be able to stretch to a lot of different interpretations, so that as temporospatial conditions change around them, they’ll still be suitable.”

“And whatever the prophecy might have meant,” Kit’s pop said, “there’ll be Martians after all.” He paused, trying to sort the tenses out. “Will have been Martians?”

Irina sighed. “Were Martians,” she said. “But not anymore.”

That made Kit look up. “What?”

Mamvish exchanged a one-eyed look with Irina, then glanced back to Kit. “Well, naturally we checked the backtime history once the relocation was completed,” she said. “But they didn’t last very long, as it happens: only seventy thousand years.”

Nita thought suddenly of the odd itching she’d felt in the back of her brain. “You were discussing that possibility right then. When we were setting the timeslide. And you already suspected things were going to turn out this way.”

Irina sighed. “Yes,” she said. “The Shamaska-Eilitt may indeed have been the system’s oldest species, which meant it was no surprise that they were also showing signs of being uvseith. A diagnosis which this outcome has confirmed.”

Carmela frowned. “‘Moribund’?”

Irina cocked an eye at her. “Yes,” she said. “The word’s far more emphatic in the Speech, of course.” She glanced over at the parents. “It says a species has only a short time to survive.”

“Some species simply can’t live long off the planet that engendered them,” Mamvish said. “Their own personal kernels are wound up too closely with the planet’s. In the case of the Shamaska-Eilitt, their own bodies’ kernels were irreparably damaged when their planet was destroyed. Long-lived as they were, they were already doomed.”

“And they were in denial about it,” Irina said, “which happens all too frequently in such cases. The problem with their body change after the destruction of Shamask-Eilith wasn’t that the Martian climate changed; though of course it did. The real trouble was that they were never really suited to live anywhere but on their own world, and any change would have killed them in time. Moving to a new world only made the problem worse, speeding up the damage they were doing themselves. And as Kit confirmed, the stasis made it worse still. Some of the irrationality we saw from them would definitely have been a result of holding themselves in their already-damaged state for so long. Had they succeeded in moving to Earth, they wouldn’t have lasted long there, either.”

“So they would have invaded Earth eventually,” said Nita’s dad, “and Earth would have killed them.” He took a drink of his iced tea. “Sounds familiar, somehow. Archetype?”

Irina nodded slightly. “Hints and warnings of what would have been or may yet be do slip into myth and popular culture from the deep past and the possible future,” she said. “It’s a hall of mirrors, the universe: in the spiritual sense, anyway. And sometimes it’s hard to tell which end of time the images and reflections belong to.”

She glanced over at Kit. “That’s the cause of the hwanthaet you were caught up in— the timeloop proximity syndrome. To be repeatedly positioned near the effect end of a timeloop when you were also involved in the cause, but before the cause has happened, or when it’s just starting to execute— well, the human brain’s circuitry doesn’t take well to that. You got off pretty lightly, though, in the physical sense. It helps to be young. And the Powers wouldn’t come down on you too hard for infractions that you committed due to the aftereffects of the good deed you were about to do in the past.”

Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Sounds like you need a whole different language for this kind of thing.”

“It’s a subset of the Speech,” Mamvish said. “Intratemporal syntax takes a while to learn. But some species pick it up entirely too quickly.” She looked with amusement at Nita and Kit.

Nita, now sitting cross-legged on the ground in jeans and a tank top and feeling very relieved to be that way again instead of in filmy, glittery Shamaska women’s wear, was paging through her manual, looking at the revisions that had been made over the last day. Now she looked up at the more senior wizards. “Irina,” Nita said, frowning, “this is weird. When I checked the manual before, it said the kernel had been missing for half a million years. But now it says it hasn’t been missing after all.”

Irina looked over Nita’s shoulder at her manual. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Tom, you didn’t enable her need-to-know updates.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “It has been busy around here lately, what with recovering from the Pullulus and so forth.”

Irina gave him an amused look. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “That wasn’t a critique. Anyway, you’ve just had your end-of-decade evaluation: you know where you stand.”

She glanced up from the page to Nita again, and Nita saw that the open page had already changed its content. Now she was looking at a comment box that said, Temporal adjustment emendation: timeline shift. Previous timeline details archived, viewable on need-to- know basis.

She shook her head and smiled. “When everything settles down, Time’s arrow is always seen to run straight,” Irina said. “After the solution you three came up with yesterday, the kernel’s always been present on Mars in real time—”

“Though blocked away from the inhabitants’ use,” Mamvish said. “Jupiter’s Planetary kept a lightpatch on it while the Shamaska-Eilitt were there.”

Irina nodded. “But the manual still remembers the previous timeline.”

“As well as the solution you and Khretef arrived at,” Mamvish said. “The binding power inherent in Ponch’s leash let us set aside, in the timeslide, the additional power to build the superegg, to lock the Cities’ stasis so that it couldn’t be interfered with, and for Khretef to encode the Nascence with the personal data that would be needed to lead you to Mars, and impel you to bring the future about. And the past.”

“A past that worked,” Nita said. “One where Aurilelde wouldn’t be afraid anymore, and would be able to have the Red Rede written in a way that would produce this result. Instead of the one her fear of losing Khretef had been showing her.”

She glanced over at Irina, who was gazing at her with a strangely assessing expression. “And it actually worked,” Nita said.

Irina nodded and had a drink of her iced tea, finishing it. “Yes, it did,” she said. “Since we’re all sitting here, and the world’s more or less as we left it… and we’re not all speaking Martian.” She smiled.

“So she really became Nita— or like Nita— in a way,” Kit’s pop said. “The way Kit’s counterpart became like him.”

“That’s right.”

“Smart choice,” Nita’s dad said, and got up to stir the charcoal.

Kit was looking thoughtful. “But which really came first?” he said. “What we did, or what they did?”

“Oh, please,” Ronan said, rubbing his face. “It’s the chicken-or-egg thing again. And you get completely different answers depending on whether you ask the chicken or the egg.”

“Let it go, your Kitness,” Darryl said, stretching. “Life’s too short. Let’s stick to playing with the future. Soooo much more malleable.”

“What happens to the kernel now?” Nita said. “There are still no Martians to manage it. Or no Martians again.”

“The kernel’s at large in the body of the planet. But I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” Irina said.

“One more thing for you to do,” Mamvish said. “As if you don’t already have enough!”

Irina shrugged and smiled more broadly; the parakeet started idly nibbling her hair. “It’ll be easy enough to keep in tune until Mars gets new tenants, some of whom will be wizards and can take on the job. People from here, or from somewhere else— who knows? Earth won’t be astahfrith forever.”

She sighed. “But for the moment it is, and there are problems that need to be tended to.” Irina stood up, smiling at Nita’s father. “Mr. Callahan— thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.” She picked up her baby, which was lying nearby snoozing in a carrier seat: the parakeet on Irina’s shoulder ruffled its feathers up and made a few little scratchy noises. “Dai, cousins,” she said, and vanished without so much as a breath of breeze.

Mamvish, too, stood up, a process which took several moments, and which Kit’s mom and pop watched in fascination. “I too have a few things to deal with,” she said. “Friends, cousins—”

“Oh, goodness, I almost forgot. Wait a moment,” Nita’s dad said, and got up, heading for the house. A minute or so later he was back with a plastic carrier bag from one of the local supermarkets, looking to be stuffed very full of something heavy.

Mamvish’s eyes started to go around in her head as she looked toward Nita’s father. Nita, seeing this, poked Kit and Dairine and gestured for them to get out of the way.

“Oh, cousin!” Mamvish said. Nita’s father held up the bag to her, and Mamvish took it from him with some haste. “You are my friend!”

“Stop by again in a couple of weeks,” Nita’s dad said. “The new crop will need some thinning.”

Mamvish’s grin went right around her face. A moment later she, too, was gone.

Nita shut her manual and put it away, looking over at Tom. “So,” she said.

“So that’s it,” Tom said. “Nice job, you two.” And he gave Kit an amused look. “Even the part when you went around the bend. Not entirely your fault, and not nearly as far as you might have gone. So all is forgiven, and we’re all done.”

Nita reached out for her own iced tea. “Are we done?” Nita said. “The Lone Power hasn’t turned up yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “It hasn’t? You sure about that?”

Nita sat still and considered for a moment.

“Uh-huh,” Tom said. He pushed back in his chair and looked down into his iced tea as if something might jump out of it. “Far be it from me to generalize about wizardry,” he said, “or the way it affects people. But it’s not uncommon for the younger wizard to see the Art, in the early part of his or her practice, as a very stratified thing: all blacks and whites, instead of the shades of gray that start to manifest themselves later in the way you see the world.”

“It’s not that we’re not in a massive battle of good against evil,” Carl said. “Of course we are! But that’s just one of many ways to characterize the fight. When you’re getting started, there’s a tendency to simplify things while you’re trying to work out how to classify all the weird new data you have to handle. And when you’re simplifying everything that way, and fueling that perception with the considerable power of a new wizard, very often you wind up forcing that kind of very straightforward, in-your-face, physically obvious role on the Lone Power.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute!” Nita stared at him. “We’re forcing It?”

Tom nodded. “The youngest wizards really don’t have any sense of how tremendous their power is, right out of the gate, and maybe that’s for the best. They just use it. And a surprising amount of the time, they win, even though they’ve compelled the Lone One to come out of hiding and confront them in the only way that gives It a chance of success when they’re at such power levels: direct physical intervention. That’s where it’s always weakest; for to manifest so directly, you need matter. And the Lone Power, being hung up on what It considers the essential superiority of spirit, really hates matter.”

Tom smiled slightly, glancing at the various parents, who were listening with interest. “Later on, as a wizard’s power decreases and his mastery of the complexities of the Art increases, the Lone One’s able to make more inroads into his life in the way it does with nonwizardly people: using a lot less power, but also being a lot more subtle.”

He looked at Nita and Kit and the other younger wizards. “Don’t think this makes It any less dangerous! You see how close It came to getting a result on Mars that would have absolutely delighted It, just by working underhandedly and using people’s own habits and weaknesses against them—sometimes even their strengths. Death and destruction on two worlds: the poor dupes doing the Lone One’s work for It, while It sits back and laughs.”

Carl shook his head. “This time, just in time, Kit got smart. So did you.” Carl looked at Nita from under his brows, his eyes glinting. “And so did Khretef. Together you found your way past the pitfalls the Lone Power hoped you’d be blind to, because you’d dug them yourselves. That’s always one of our great strengths, as wizards: we’re committed to looking out for each other, each seeing the thing the other is blind to. The tricky part is convincing each other that ‘blind’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stupid.’”

Tom sighed and finished his iced tea. “But sometimes we get lucky,” he said. “This last time, we all did. You kids especially. So now we get to relax.”

Nita’s dad reached down by the chair and picked up the iced-tea jug, filled Tom’s glass again. “Even you?”

Tom laughed. “I’ve got enough time off next weekend to want to talk to you about some landscaping.”

Nita got up and headed toward the house. Kit came along after her, catching up with her where she had paused to look at the spark of red light hanging low in the sky.

Nita glanced at it as he came up behind, then went back to gazing at Mars. “I’m not sure I got smart,” she said under her breath. “It felt completely like luck to me.”

Kit stared at her. “Neets, are you kidding? Think what you did with that passthrough—”

“If I hadn’t had Bobo to help, I could never have done it. You should’ve seen the size of that spell—”

Kit shrugged. “So? You used what you had. You used what you remembered you had. And what you had enough power to pull off. Every wizard does that every day with their manual or whatever they use…”

Nita thought about that. “I was the one who was kind of late about getting smart,” Kit said then. “Seemed like it took me forever to figure out that not only was Aurilelde’s take on everything all wrong, but so was Khretef’s. Even a wizard’s perceptions of wizardry can get screwed up under the right circumstances. Khretef was too busy believing everything Aurilelde told him. Aurilelde was too busy believing what her father told her.”

“And he was busy believing what Rorsik told him.” Nita shook her head. “And with that whole Shamaska-versus-Eilitt thing going on, nobody was thinking straight about anything. Except you, eventually.”

“They were too busy believing in stuff to look at what was true,” Kit said. “I just hadn’t been stuck in the middle of it for as long as they had.”

Nita nodded, leaning back against the fence. “So, no Martians after all? That’s got to come as a letdown.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. But he didn’t look away from the red star burning up there. “Still, it’s a neat place, and it needs taking care of. I’m not going to dump it just because its backstory’s changed.”

Looking up at it, Nita nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Besides, there are still some craters up there that don’t have names…”

She was expecting a snicker, but none came. After a moment she got a strange feeling and turned to find Kit watching her. “What?” she said.

“Charcoal’s ready,” Kit said. “Don’t you want a burger?” And he headed back to the group at the rear of the backyard.

Nita smiled slightly and followed him.

***

Much later, in the dark, someone spoke Nita’s name.

She woke up in the middle of the night and turned over, eyes open in the dark. What?

But no one was there to have said anything. Nita sighed. Just another of those dreams, she thought. She closed her eyes again, completely worn out but for the moment also completely happy. Nothing to do tomorrow, she thought. School’s over. This is so great! I can sleep as late as I want. And I’m going to start that all over again right now…

But perversely, it didn’t happen. Outside her closed eyes, she could tell that there was light. I hate this, Nita thought, resigned. This has been one of those sleeps where you wake up and you don’t feel like you’ve been to sleep at all. She felt vaguely cheated, but there was no point in trying to go back to sleep under these circumstances. She sighed and opened her eyes again.

Red dirt all around, and stones and rust-beige rubble, and a light dusting of snow—

Nita sat up and stared around her. Her first thought was that Dairine had finally gotten around to getting revenge on her for sending her bed to Pluto that time. But as Nita looked around, she started getting the slightly rainbowy, shivery feeling around the edges of things, what Tom called “temporal aberration,” that told her this wasn’t a real physical experience: it was vision. Oh, okay, she thought, and got up. Let’s see what this is about.

There was no mistaking the view; this was Kit’s preferred landing spot on Mars, at the top of Elysium Mons. Nita stood there feeling under her bare feet the cool gritty dust of another world. This is what visions are really good for,she thought, not having to worry about force fields, or the real temperature, or whether you brought enough air. For the morning around her felt no chillier than an early spring morning on Earth.

The Sun was just up and actually felt warm on her skin. Overhead the sky was lightening, swiftly going from violet to blue. Silhouetted against it, a couple of hundred yards away where the tableland dropped off, Kit was standing, looking southward across the plains of Elysium Planitia. Nita just watched him for a moment, then felt a draft and looked down at herself.

Oh, no, she thought, seeing the gossamer draperies again, and the gleaming wrought and gemmed metal of the bodice. I have got to talk him out of this look for me: it does not work!!

But second thoughts did intrude, and surreptitiously Nita glanced down. Well, okay, maybe the top isn’t bad—

Down by her foot she saw a small rock that she recognized. Nita reached down to pick it up. “So,” she said to it, “what’s new up here?”

Water snow and gas snow, said the rock. And then some changes in the terrain. It sounded bemused.

“Yeah, I just bet,” Nita said, and put the rock carefully down. “Later…”

She wandered over to where Kit was standing. He, too, was in “Martian” harness and metallic kilt, his wand stuck in his belt, and he was gazing across at the spires of the city that from this height could just be glimpsed away many miles to the south, where the highlands of Aeolis Mensae ran down to the plains of Elysium. “It’s a nice location,” Kit said. “Pretty close to the equator. The weather’s as good as it’s going to get anywhere on the planet…”

And without warning they were standing up somewhere high in that city, looking down at the proud, calm people in the streets, and the little busy flying craft zipping around among the towers, more of the Shamaska going about their business. Nita looked over her shoulder and saw that the spot where they were standing was a terrace of the Scarlet Tower: and toward them came gracefully bounce-walking two people, a Shamaska female and an Eilitt male. Behind them a multi-legged, many-clawed green lizard creature was scrambling along to keep up on the polished floor.

“We thought we might see you here eventually,” Aurilelde said, smiling at Nita and Kit as they got closer. “We’re so glad you came!”

“Just look at it,” Khretef said to Kit. “It’s grown.” He gestured toward the City’s outskirts. “There have been plenty of raw materials to work with: it’s a rich world. We’ll do well here.”

“You’re running things now?” Kit said to him.

Khretef nodded. “In more ways than one. I’m the Master of the City here now, it seems. Iskard didn’t want the position: he was tired. And happy to pass rule to Aurilelde once we’d moved and were finally safe in our new home, for the stress of the old life had taken its toll. He’s got a place in the uplands now.”

“And he’s been so glad that there’s no need to fear the Eilitt anymore,” Aurilelde said. “We all have. Now we can be at peace at last.” She looked at Nita with embarrassment. “Fear can make you do such terrible things. I can’t believe the way I was thinking…”

If I was awake, Nita thought, you’d better believe I’d have something to say about that! But this didn’t seem to be the place or the time. “It was all a long time ago,” Nita said. “Or a long time from now. Let’s just forget about it. It turned out okay in the end.”

They looked out across the City. Khretef’s scorpion-pet now caught up with them, put his front end up under one of Kit’s hands, and wriggled like a puppy. Kit looked down at it, grinning, and scratched it on top of the head between the eyes. After a moment it came over to her, and Nita looked down at it, now bemused that she could ever have seen these creatures as strange or threatening. And then she caught something in its eyes, a familiar look—

I get around, said the large Presence behind the odd alien gaze. There are a lot more kinds of dogs in the universe than just the Earth ones.

Nita smiled at him, then looked over at Khretef and Aurilelde. “So the story has a happy ending,” she said.

“Ending? I don’t know that I’d call it that,” Aurilelde said. “We have our whole lives ahead of us.”

Knowing what she now knew, Nita held her smile in place and said nothing. But Khretef, who had been exchanging some silent comment with Kit, now caught her eye. “And besides,” he said, “even a short life would be a good one in this world. Once you find happiness, why sit around worrying that it might not last forever? You make what you can out of it. No point in worrying away the gift.”

He looked out to the horizon. Nita followed his glance, and realized she was not looking at the Mars of half a million years ago. Looking northward, Nita saw that Elysium Planitia was no dry plain any longer, but a mighty sea. Against the vast empty northern horizon, Elysium Mons stood up lone and splendid on its tremendous lowlying pedestal-island, silhouetted against the rose-colored afternoon. To either side of the highlands, great waterfalls poured down through chasms in the upper tablelands, draining the upland lakes around the craters Lasswitz and Wien.

Not our Mars, Nita thought. Not exactly theirs, either. But the one they found together after their time on Mars finally ended…

Kit put out a hand to Khretef. “Dai stihó,” he said. “You found your way through. Good luck with the rest of it.”

“And to you, brother,” Khretef said, clasping Kit’s arm. “Watch over your world.”

Nita looked at Aurilelde’s outheld hand, and took it in the same clasp. “Take good care of him,” she said.

“It was all I ever meant to do,” she said. “I lost my way, but you two helped me find it again.”

Aurilelde and Khretef each raised a hand in farewell and turned away, heading for the Tower, with Khretef’s scorpion-pet scrambling after them. “So there goes the first real wizard of Mars,” Nita said. “But who knows, maybe not the last…”

“Huh?” Kit was startled out of his silence. “Stop listening to me think.”

“I wasn’t!” Nita said. “It’s just kind of funny. For a while there I thought you were going to ask Irina for the position.”

Kit shook his head and grinned, gazing out over the city. “Naah,” he said. “I’ve got a planet. These guys needed a spare. I’m glad it was here for them.”

Nita nodded. “I forgot to ask them what happened to Rorsik.”

Kit shrugged. “He was all about fear. Either he’s gotten himself past that, or he’s found himself some other patch of eternity to be scared in.”

Nita nodded. “Meanwhile,” Kit said, “something I forgot to ask you.”

“What?”

“Just what was it you called me back there?”

She shook her head. “Back there where?”

“You remember. Back at Argyre Planitia, when you were telling Aurilelde you didn’t have to keep yours in a cage.”

Nita stared at him, bewildered— then realized what he was talking about, and took a very deep breath.

“My boyfriend?” she said. And then Nita felt like cursing at herself for the way her voice squeaked with stress on the second word, turning it into a question.

Kit just looked at her. “Took you long enough,” he said. He grinned at her and vanished.

Nita’s eyes went wide: then narrowed with annoyance— and relieved delight.

“I’m gonna get you for that!” she said, and went after him.

By the same author

In the Young Wizards Series

So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry

High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad

The Wizard’s Dilemma • A Wizard Alone

Wizard’s Holiday • Wizards at War

A Wizard of Mars

The Middle Kingdoms Series (for adult readers)

The Door into Fire • The Door into Shadow

The Door into Sunset

Other standalone adult fantasy:

Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South

Stealing The Elf-King’s Roses

In the Star Trek (TM) universe:

The Wounded Sky • My Enemy, My Ally

Spock’s World • Doctor’s Orders

Dark Mirror • Intellivore

The “Rihannsu Quartet”

The Romulan Way • Swordhunt

Honor Blade

(omnibus edtion: Star Trek: The Bloodwing Voyages)

The Empty Chair

Collected short fiction:

Uptown Local and Other Interventions

Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales

***

For ebook editions of many books above

and others not listed here,

please visit

EbooksDirect.dianeduane.com

or the Books page at the author’s site:

DianeDuane.com

***

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