A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition

  Kit stopped right where he was and stared at her.

  “Kit?” said Ronan’s voice from the dining room table. “We’re all set.”

  Carmela’s head snapped around. “Is that who I think it is?” She pushed past Kit into the dining room.

  “No, wait a minute! I mean, yeah—” Kit went after her. “Carmela, wait! What do you mean, ‘Helena does’? She’s not going to be here until next week!”

  Carmela was leaning over his wizard’s manual. “Hiiiii, Ronaaaaaan!”

  There was a pause at the other end. “Uh. Carmela, hi. Kit?”

  “Yeah, give me a minute! What did your ride say? When can you get here?”

  “Whenever you want. I’m in Baldwin now.”

  “What? Already?”

  “Yeah. Darryl fetched me over. How long do you need?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Right. Cheers.”

  “Byeeeeeee!!” Carmela shouted at the manual as Kit slapped it shut. “Hey, that was rude. I wasn’t done!”

  “You can go all gooey over him when he gets here,” Kit muttered, pushing past her to get his vest and jacket off one of the dining room chairs. “It was supposed to be Wednesday she was coming! When did everything get changed?”

  “Last night,” Carmela said. “You were asleep. Helena e-mailed Pop: the airline screwed up her flights. She had to either fly today or wait another week. She’ll be here this afternoon.”

  Kit groaned as he zipped up his vest. “I do not need this right now!”

  Carmela leaned on the chair opposite. “Kit, give her a chance. You’ve talked to her on the phone lately. You’ve heard her. She’s a lot mellower.”

  “You mean she no longer comes right out and says she thinks I sold my soul to the devil?” Kit said. He laughed. “Forgive me if I’m not convinced.” He put on his jacket. “If I’m lucky, she’ll be too busy running around socializing with her old friends to want to spend much time thinking about her weird little brother.”

  “Ooh, bitter...”

  Kit sighed and picked up the manual, eyeing Carmela’s nightshirt. “You plan to be wearing that when Ronan shows up?”

  Her eyes went wide. “Ohmigosh,” Carmela said, and fled upstairs.

  Kit leaned against the chair at the end of the table and sighed. When he’d realized he had to tell his mama and pop that he was a wizard, they hadn’t had incredible trouble coping with the concept— at least after they got over the initial shock. Carmela had actually been delighted. But Helena had been horrified, and as upset by the rest of the family’s relatively ready acceptance as by the idea that Kit could do wizardry in the first place.

  Though the whole family was churchgoing, Helena had always struck Kit as more religious than all the rest of them put together; and until she started getting used to the situation, Kit had been really annoyed by the scared or worried looks Helena gave him every time their paths crossed. When she finally went off to college and put some time and distance between herself and what her little brother had become, Helena had calmed down a little... or so Kit had thought.Oh, please, don’t let her get all freaked out all over again, he said to the universe in general. The stuff that’s going on right now is so important. It’d be a nuisance to have to sneak around and hide what’s happening so she won’t drive everyone crazy—

  Ronan appeared at the other end of the table in a muted bang! of displaced air that rattled the dining room’s venetian blinds. Like that kind of thing, for example, Kit thought. I was being discreet about wizardry when Helena was getting all nuts. What’s she going to do when stuff like this happens out in the open?

  Ronan was all in black, as usual: though this morning the black was heavy black jeans and hiking boots, and a black parka better suited to January than June. He glanced around, then pulled a chair out and flopped down on it. “Where’s the Mouth that Roared? Thought she’d be right here.”

  “She was. I told her to go put on some clothes.”

  “Thanks for that,” Ronan said. He sounded actively grateful: but he gave Kit a peculiar look. “You okay? You look pale.”

  “I believe you.” Kit laughed, rueful. “Family stuff. My older sister’s coming home for a few weeks. She’s not so clear about who we work for.”

  “Uh oh. Going to lie low? Or try to talk sense to her?”

  “No idea. Depends on how she is.”

  “And you’re not eager to find out.”

  Kit shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. As sisters go, she’s okay. More than okay. But as soon as she found out about wizardry...” He shrugged a helpless shrug. “It’s like... I don’t know. Not just that she thought it was a bad thing. Almost as if my being a wizard embarrassed her.”

  “Best reason to keep it quiet,” Ronan said. “I feel for you. Glad I don’t have to deal with that stuff.”

  “You never told your family?”

  Ronan shook his head. “Tried it once or twice,” he said. “It never felt right. Might have been something to do with the classified stuff the Champion was up to when he was stuck in my head. But now that he’s gone, I’m not sure I want to rock the boat...”

  Bang! Darryl appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing loose savannah-camo baggies, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and one of those many-pocketed vests favored by photographers. “Sorry I kept you waiting,” he said. “I had to feed my turtle.”

  Ronan eyed him with amusement. “Looks more like you were feeding the lions. What, are we going on safari? I should get you a pith helmet and an elephant gun.”

  “Stop envying my style,” Darryl said.

  “Envying?” Ronan snorted. “It is to laugh.”

  “You’re not fooling anybody.” Darryl grinned at Kit, then looked around. “We all set? Where’s Miss Neets?”

  Despite how eager he was to see her, this kind of question from the others was beginning to grate on Kit’s nerves. “Sleeping in,” he said. “She had a long day dealing with her dad. And she was muttering about something she was doing with Carmela, probably some girl thing...”

  Darryl’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Kit, don’t let her hear you say stuff like that! She’ll pull your head right off and beat you over the shoulders with it.”

  Ronan rolled his eyes in agreement. “Miss Tough-Mouth Neets doing girly stuff?” he said. “Not usually on her program.”

  “Can we worry less about her program and more about ours?” Kit said.

  “Right away, O mighty one,” Darryl said, wandering over to the bowl of fruit off to one side and picking up an apple. “Hey, these look nice—” He glanced at Kit.

  “Go ahead. Why should a little errantry keep you from eating?”

  “I assume you’ve got a plan ready,” Ronan said.

  Kit nodded. “Darryl, did he tell you about the signals to the other craters?”

  Already three bites into the apple, Darryl paused long enough to give Kit a look. “I read your précis between the second and third bowls of sugar bombs,” he said. “You want to keep up with me, Your Kitness, ‘cause I may be autistic but I’m not dyslexic. You have a preferred target we should investigate first, or should we just flip for it?”

  “If there’s any flipping-for to be done,” said a voice from the living room, “it’s going to be by Ronan over me.”

  All heads turned as Carmela walked in. She was wearing a short blue dress with a peach-colored tank top underneath it, leggings, and little high heels of the kind Kit had heard her call “kitten heels.” The clothes were the same kind of thing you might see a lot of girls her age wearing somewhere casually, say to the mall. But there was nothing casual about the way Carmela wore any of her clothes anymore—not since last year, when she suddenly discovered she had a figure. The pigtails of ten minutes ago were gone. She had pulled her long hair off to one side, so that it flowed down in a raven sweep over one shoulder, and she carried herself with the gracious queenly condescension of a supermodel who had descended for a time from her usual starry height to walk among the lowly papa
razzi. What Kit found strange was that this lofty carriage didn’t look preposterous on her. “Good morning, Darryl,” Carmela said, smiling sweetly at him; then turned her head. “And Ronannnn...”

  Kit could only roll his eyes as Carmela stalked over to Ronan with that smile turned right up. It’s got to be an act,was all he could think. She’s just messing with him because he thinks he’s hot—! For Kit had seen her pull this stunt with egotistical alien royalty in the past. After he worked out what was being done to him, the prince in question had eventually recovered sufficiently to take nourishment and walk around. For a while...

  “Carmela,” Ronan said in what Kit was beginning to think of as the Tone of Great Forbearance, “don’t you think I’m a little— old for you?”

  His tone of voice suggested that Ronan expected no answer but “yes.” Carmela, however, just looked at him brightly and said, “That’s okay. In ten years you won’t be.”

  Ronan opened his mouth and closed it again.

  Kit didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But right now the laughter was threatening to win. “Ronan, don’t we have places to be?”

  “Oh,” Ronan said, “uh, yes.”

  Carmela just smiled. “Nice save, Kit,” she said, “but it’s just temporary.” She waved the fingers of one hand at them in a toodle-oo gesture as she wandered back into the living room.

  Kit watched her go with slight relief. Then again, why am I relieved? She’s got a worldgate in her closet. The sooner we’re out of here, the better. “Let’s go out back,” Kit said. “It’s shielded there; the neighbors won’t see us.”

  They headed out the back door together. Under his breath, Ronan said, “Your sister—” He shook his head. “We have a word for her where I come from—”

  “Maybe I don’t want to hear it,” Kit said. “She is my sister.” Not that Kit wasn’t finding it peculiar to suddenly be concerned about how Carmela dressed or acted around other people. He wasn’t used to thinking about how girls looked in their clothes— except what about Janie Lowell in chemistry the other day? said one eager and interested part of his brain from the background. That skirt she was wearing, it hardly even covered her—

  Kit made a face. Other girls were a different matter. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be seeing his sister that way, and he wasn’t sure he wanted anybody else seeing her that way, either. And just a few months ago, I wouldn’t have cared one way or another. This is so weird...

  Ronan was shaking his head as they headed into the backyard. “Leaving words about her out of it,” Darryl said to Ronan, “they have any words where you come from for the expression on your face when she said that?”

  “Probably they do,” Ronan said as they made their way down through the yard. “‘Gobsmacked’ would be one. Carmela”— Ronan shook his head— “is a whole bucket of gobsmack.”

  Kit grinned. “Cousin, I hear you there!”

  “When’s she going away to college?” said Darryl as they came to the weedy, tree-screened rear of Kit’s backyard.

  “Not a second too soon for me,” Kit said. “No— that’s not true. I don’t know...” He and Carmela had always gotten along better than he and Helena did. And it wasn’t just that Carmela hadn’t completely blown a gasket when she found out he was a wizard, or that later she’d started indepedently picking up the Speech. There’s something else going on. Maybe we’re just closer in age...

  In among the trees, Kit had a spell circle laid into the ground under the carpet of leaf mold. “I need to make a couple of changes to this before we go,” he said to the others. “I don’t want her tracking us.”

  “We don’t need that,” Darryl said. “I’ll transit us the way I brought Ronan in from Dublin. I doubt she can track my kind of transit: it’s real atypical.”

  “If you can go transatlantic on a personal transit without even breaking a sweat,” Kit said, “‘atypical’ would be the word.”

  “It’s to do with that bilocation stunt I stumbled onto during my Ordeal,” Darryl said. “Seems I don’t need the usual spells to gate around in the neighborhood. I can go a long way without needing a spell, as long as I leave one of me on Earth and have coordinates to work with.” He rolled his eyes. “Tom said he didn’t understand it, and shoved me off on Carl. Carl gave me five different theories and then wound up saying he thinks I’m bypassing string-structure issues by selectively shredding the interstitial structure of local space-time.” Darryl grinned. “Whatever that means! I don’t think he understands it, either. Shredding—” He shrugged. “He wants to call it that, it’s fine by me.”

  “Okay, shred-guy,” Kit said. “Does the ground suit?” It was the question you asked another wizard when he or she was going to be responsible for a spell.

  Darryl glanced around. “Yeah, it’s fine. Where on Mars are we going, exactly?”

  Kit flipped opened his manual. “A little crater called Stokes.”

  “Show me. Carl says I need to be careful about coordinates while I’m still getting the hang of this.”

  Kit nodded, thinking that Tom and Carl were wisely covering all the angles with Darryl. While they wanted him to be cautious about what he was doing, they also didn’t want him thinking too hard about whether his ability to do it might be unusual. Making it sound like something normal is smart...

  Kit found his marked map and tapped on it to bring it into higher definition, zooming in on the spot he wanted. “Right there.”

  Darryl studied the map. “Okay. And about— one second from now,” he said. “They said I needed to specify temporal coordinates, too. Guess they’re nervous I might overshoot.”

  “Probably something to do with you just being hot off your Ordeal,” Ronan said. “You young superpowered hotshots, you want keeping an eye on until you settle down into more realistic power levels...”

  Darryl nodded as he took a last look at the map. Kit shot Ronan a quick approving look over Darryl’s head. Ronan raised an eyebrow in response, eyed the map in turn. “Not far from the north pole. We need to bring any extra heat with us?”

  “No, I factored plenty into the spell,” Kit said.

  “Okay,” Darryl said, “we’re good to go. You guys ready? Life support’s set? Don’t make me come all the way back here for more air, now. It’s fifty-four million miles to Mars...”

  “We’ve got air for three people for four hours,” Kit said, “and a heavy-duty force-field bubble.”

  Ronan suddenly got a wicked look on his face. “And since it’s got to be dark there somewhere...” He pulled out a pair of black-lensed aviator sunglasses and put them on.

  Darryl snickered. “Some of us,” he said, “have been watching too many old movies.”

  “Old? That movie was young when I was!”

  “So were the dinosaurs. Ready to shred?” And Darryl reached up and put a hand each on Kit’s and Ronan’s shoulders.

  “Hit it,” Ronan said.

  Between one blink and the next, Earth went away.

  6: Arsia Mons

  Nita was standing near the edge of a gigantic lake, looking out across the still water, waiting for someone.

  Where is he? she thought. He’s so late.

  The strange many-legged creature sitting off to one side on the gravelly red ground at her feet looked up at her.You’ve always known he might be someday, it said.

  Nita scowled. Not that way, she said in her mind. Not funny... She peered out across the lake, shading her eyes from the low sun and the pinkish glitter dancing on the water in the crater. I don’t like the way that looks, she said as the speed of the ripples out on the water increased. There has to be a lot more of that coming—

  The creature sitting next to her shrugged. He won’t notice it where he is, it said. The water would have to rise a lot higher to bother him there.

  The usual place? Nita said.

  The creature nodded. Up on his mountain.

  Nita turned and walked a few steps over to the transit circle she had left ready to go, bl
azing on the ground. What about the other one you were supposed to be meeting here? said the creature that still sat by the lake’s edge, unmoving, gazing back at her with ironic golden eyes.

  Can’t wait, Nita said. Come on, let’s go.

  She stepped into the circle. It blazed up around her; the transit was instantaneous. Nita emerged barely a blink later from a flicker of darkness to a spot near the edge of the broad, dish-shaped depression on top of that ancient volcano. The view was amazing; she could understand why Kit loved this place so much. But she looked all around the crater and couldn’t see him anywhere. There was no question of Kit being hidden behind anything. There were no big boulders, large objects, or outcroppings: just pebbles, sand, fist-sized stones, and cracks and crevasses caused by the contrast between the day’s relative warmth and the night’s ferocious cold.

  Nita transited across the crater a couple more times, effortlessly, the way she’d seen Darryl do, but found no trace of Kit. The transits, though, were enjoyable for their own sake. Pity this is a dream, she thought. It’d be great to be able to do this without having to do a spell and pay the price. The third time, she came out near the ridge at the crater’s edge, where the dust and sand still held some trace of someone’s sneaker prints. She dropped to one knee, touched one print, then reached over beside it to pick up a little stone that lay there. What about it, guy? she said. Who’s been up here recently?

  Nobody, the stone said. Just him, and her. The other one.

  Nita blinked at that, confused. Well, rocks tended to think of time in the geological sense; they could get confused about shorter periods. I haven’t been up here, though. This is the first time.

  No, the rock said. But the last time you came, he had been thinking of her; and he didn’t want to stay. He ran away. And so did you...

  Nita shook her head, uncertain what to make of this. An odd feeling of dread was beginning to gather at the back of her mind. Uncertain, she dropped the stone gently to the sandy ground and climbed further up the ridge.

  There on the crater’s edge, Nita paused, looking out across the dusty red afternoon toward where the low sun swung. At the edge of that sharply curved, foreshortened horizon, something moved and glittered. You did say you didn’t like the look of that, said the creature crouching at her feet.