“Well,” S’reee said, adopting a fairly diplomatic tone, “you have to admit, it is hard not to find it exciting—”
“Especially when he’s up there with Ronan and Darryl,” Nita said.
“I know,” Carmela said. “That was going to be my first stop before I hit the Crossings. I was hoping Neets would come along with me so we could give them a good joint tease before moving on to more interesting things.”
“No way, Mela!” Nita said. “Not a good idea! All the signs point to this being some obscure boy thing. The note Kit left me had ‘Keep Out, Male-Bonding Road Trip’ stamped all over it.”
“All the more reason to crash the party!”
Nita began to sweat, realizing how much aggravation she was going to catch from Kit if she turned up on Mars with Carmela in tow. “No, seriously. You’re right about how many times you’ve asked me to go. Why don’t we let them get on with it and go shopping instead?”
“Too late, Neets,” Carmela said, and stood up. “I’ll go without you.”
“To Mars??” Nita said, now becoming seriously concerned.
Carmela smiled slightly and reached into one deep pocket of her jumpsuit. From it she pulled not the curling-ironish laser dissociator that Nita was expecting but a TV remote. This she flipped expertly in the air and caught.
“I had a word with my closet,” Carmela said. “Actually, I had a word with the TV remote that Kit did his magic tweaking on, and it had a word with my closet. And then, so I could have control of the worldgate in the closet when I’m away from home, the remote talked to Dairine’s sweet little Spot, and cloned itself for me. Took no time at all.” She smiled delightedly.
“Wait,” S’reee said. “‘Your closet’? Is that inside a house here?”
“Yup. It’s in my bedroom.”
S’reee looked puzzled. “You have a worldgate in your house? What does it run on? Besides wizardry, I mean. The necessary ‘hard’ power outlay would be considerable.”
“I’m told I have a parasitic virtual catenary conduit from one of the nondenominated gates at the Crossings,” Carmela said, and laughed. “Whatever that means! Sker’ret’s got it plugged into something or other; that’s all that matters. My closet even has a Crossings gate number, though it’s unlisted. Like a real classy Zip code.” Carmela juggled the remote from hand to hand. “So now I don’t need to bother anybody else to give me rides ...and if I want to go to Mars, the boys can’t stop me. Come to think of it,” and she grinned at Nita, “you can’t stop me! Because you don’t really want to. Do you?”
“Uh—”
“Oh, Juanita Louise, don’t look so stricken!”
Nita clutched her head. “Carmela. Do ...not ...say ...the L word!”
Carmela laughed. After a moment, to Nita’s horror, so did S’reee. “hNii’t,” S’reee said, “I think she’s got us both in the drift net at the moment. We may as well give in gracefully.”
“‘Us’? You want to go, too?”
“Why not? I’m not all that busy this morning. If she’s supplying free transport—”
“Not free,” Carmela said promptly. “This interspatial transport is supplied to you on a promotional basis courtesy of the Planetary Government of Rirhath B and Crossings Properties HyperIncorporated.” She produced a very prim and proper expression. “Because I know that in wizardry there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Then Carmela grinned. “But I can take as many people as I like whenever I like to, because Sker’ret said I could... and what the Stationmaster of Rirhath B says, goes.”
Nita sighed. “She’s got us there.”
“So it’s settled then. Where exactly on Mars are we going?”
Nita pulled out her manual. “Wait a sec, ’cause I have no idea exactly what he’s been up to—”
After a few moments Nita found the spot where Kit had filed his précis. “Uh-oh.”
“What?” S’reee and Carmela said in unison, but Carmela with much more relish.
Nita tsk-tsked softly. “He just couldn’t leave that egg alone,” she said. “Looks like it hatched! And sent out some signals.”
S’reee, partially submerged again, listened to what the Sea had to tell her about this. “Odd. Four signals went out from the artifact. But I’m seeing five hot spots on Mars where wizardry is either working or waiting to start.”
Carmela looked confused. “So where are the guys?”
Nita paged back to Kit’s précis, found the map he’d labeled with the signal targets, and tapped the page: it updated. “Looks like the northernmost of the targets. Some crater called Stokes. Yeah, there are their life signs— S’reee, you seeing this?”
S’reee’s eyes were unfocused. “Yes. There’s no missing Darryl’s life sign, in particular; it’s unique.” She flipped a fin, looked up at Nita.
Nita nodded, not looking up from the manual: there was something strange about the diagram she was examining. Not knowing what to make of it, she flipped back to the messaging page and touched Kit’s note to bring the contact up to live status. “Hey,” she said in the Speech. “What’s going on up there?” And she waited.
Nothing.
She looked up. Carmela was giving her an odd look. “Is there a delay?” she said. “Mars is a long way off.”
Nita shook her head. “Lightspeed isn’t an issue for the manuals.” She turned back to the map on Kit’s précis page, scrutinized it. “I don’t like this. The manual says we can’t go there.”
“What?” S’reee said.
“The manual says the sites are ‘Unavailable, blocked by previous declaration, investigation ongoing, comm functions blocked during evaluation.’”
“Whose previous declaration?” Carmela said, “and whose investigation? Blocked by who? And what—?” The rest of what she was saying got lost in the splash of S’reee submerging again.
“What?” Carmela said. “Did I say something wrong? What freaked her?”
Nita shook her head. “She’s looking it up in detail. She gets her wizardry data from the Sea. She’s more senior than me— she may be able to find out more.”
Some moments later, S’reee surfaced and blew. “All I get is what you’re getting,” she said to Nita. “Definitely something to do with the superegg’s transmission this morning— there are multiple delayed wizardries working. But don’t ask me what they’re doing, I can’t get an analysis. Because what I’m getting makes no sense. The Sea can’t give me enough context for a translation.”
“Alien wizardry,” Nita said, getting more unnerved by the second. “Dangerous, you think?”
“No telling. But that fifth site isn’t blocked. There’s some kind of wizardry there that’s alive and running, but not doing anything ...just waiting.”
“And transit’s not prevented?” Carmela said.
Nita shook her head, showed Carmela the manual page. “There. Get the coordinates and do the honors. We can have a look at that hot spot: and when we’re actually on the planet, we might be able to reach the guys. Or get a better idea of what’s going on with them.”
Carmela looked at the manual page and spent a moment tapping numbers into the remote. Nita was surprised to hear it make a little series of electronic beeps, at which Carmela’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, you can do that?” she said in the Speech. “Sorry.” She pointed the remote at the manual, pressed a button.
The remote chirped; Carmela looked up at Nita. “It can take a scan. I didn’t realize.”
“hNii’t,” S’reee said, “you had a cloaking routine ready? Putting it up around us might be good. About a twenty-meter radius—”
Nita tucked the manual away, pulled the spell out of the charm bracelet, and said the words that kicked the spell into action. As she did, S’reee levitated gracefully out of the water, keeping just an inch-thick shell of it around her so her skin wouldn’t dry out. “I’ve got all the air we’ll need. K!aarmii’lha?”
Carmela raised the remote, hit what would normally be the channel-change button.
/>
They vanished.
***
It was mid-afternoon on the red-brown southern slopes of the Martian volcano where two girls and a humpback whale appeared a second later. Away to the east, under the thin, filmy clouds of a windy day, the vast shadows and chasms of the westernmost end of Valles Marineris cut away from them in dust and haze toward the edge of the world, where a thin veil of pink-tinted sky hid the canyon’s far end.
Carmela looked at the long, gentle slope of the worn old mountain behind them. “You know what you could build here? The universe’s biggest ski jump. What’s this place called, anyway?”
Nita had to smile as she and S’reee looked around. “Arsia Mons.”
Carmela snickered. “Sounds like one of Ronan’s rude Irish words...”
“Not this time,” Nita said, pulling out her manual to cross-reference between the map and the downslope terrain. “In the old days, people saw this was a bright spot that got dark sometimes. They couldn’t see the cause— this big spiral of dust that updrafts from the volcano’s side every winter.” She looked up the long, shallow curve of the volcano’s slope, where many dark-colored rocks were whitened on top by the last winter’s dustfall. “But the astronomers back then thought maybe there were trees here, growing leaves and losing them again. So they called it Arsia Silva, the Arsine Forest, after someplace in Italy. Later when the telescopes were better they got rid of the word for forest and put in ‘mons’ for mountain, but they kept the ‘Arsia.’”
Carmela stared at Nita. “Have you been secretly studying this stuff?”
Nita laughed. “I have been not so secretly listening to Kit’s lectures on Martian stuff every five minutes! For months! So some of it I remember.” She shook her head. “That pillar of dust is famous: it gets twenty miles high, sometimes. These, though... these got found later.” They looked down at the side of the volcano, all spotted with deep black holes.
“They call them skylights,” Nita said, bouncing down toward the closest of them. “Don’t ask me why, but they gave them all girls’ names. Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Nikki—” She stopped. “Can’t remember the others.”
Abbey and Jeanne, said Bobo.
Nita nodded. “Seven of them, anyway.”
“But there’s another one,” Carmela said. “Is that where we’re going?”
Nita looked at the manual, looked at S’reee, nodded. “That’s the one.”
“I shall call it Louise,” Carmela said, and bounced off that way as if everything was settled.
Nita made a strangled growling noise.
The more you do that, Bobo said, the more she’s going to keep saying it. I’d let it pass, if I were you.
Nita went after Carmela. S’reee glided along beside her. “What’s the problem with the name, hNii’t?” she said.
Nita shook her head. “Long story. It’ll keep.” She pulled the atmosphere spell out of her charm bracelet to make sure it would hold up under the extra distance that Carmela had bounced ahead.
“My air shell’s much bigger than yours,” S’reee said. “Don’t worry; it’ll cover us all.”
They caught up with Carmela at the edge of the further skylight. All three paused to look down into the darkness. “Deep,” S’reee said. “Thirty or forty of my lengths...”
“At least,” Nita said. She unzipped her otherspace pocket and pulled out one of the little wizard-lights she carried for such circumstances— just a long sentence in the Speech made virtually physical, then rolled up and compressed to about the size of a pea.
She pinched it and said the trigger word. The spell came alive in her hand, a clear white light about as bright at the moment as a sixty-watt bulb. This she dropped down into the cave. It floated down about as fast as a large leaf might fall from a tree.
“Look at the top level of that,” S’reee said, peering down into the darkness. “It’s almost perfectly spherical.”
“Like a bubble,” Nita said. “You think that’s what happened here? Some old volcanic eruption. The gases built up in the lava; a bubble formed real near the surface. Then cooled off really fast—”
“And then the top blew off it,” Carmela said. She kicked gently at the stone at the very edge of the skylight. A fragment flew off, fell gently down into the huge hole after the wizard-light. “Yeah. Look how thin that was. If you had a bubble half a mile wide...”
Nita nodded. She and Carmela stood, and S’reee hung, watching the light drift downward. “It looks a lot lighter down at the bottom,” Carmela said after a few moments.
“That’s dust, I think,” Nita said as the light came to rest in a little halo of its own reflected glow, far down at the bottom of that huge empty space. “Let’s go down. ‘Ree, is it safe to spell inside your air bubble?”
“Absolutely—the spell structure’s on the outside.”
Nita spoke a few words to the air inside S’reee’s bubble. From where she and Carmela stood, a near-transparent stairway of hardened air, like glass, built itself down into the darkness. Nita reached into her backpack for the latest in a long series of rowan wands. As she stepped down into the darkness, the wand began to glow with its charge of absorbed moonlight, lighting the stairway. “Just walk down behind me,” Nita said to Carmela. “This’ll build itself in front of us and unbuild behind.”
“And if we need to run away in a hurry,” Carmela said, sounding for the first time slightly nervous, “we’re going to have to run upstairs??”
Nita snorted. “If we have to get out that fast, I won’t waste time skywalking! And neither should you. If there’s trouble, just transport out.”
They walked down to Nita’s little light-spell. It was a long walk. Beside them, S’reee drifted down through the huge, dark, empty space, fins hanging motionless: but Nita noticed that there was a faint glow about them and about S’reee’s tail, some wizardry in abeyance but ready to use in a hurry.
“I forgot to ask you,” Carmela said, walking in sync with Nita. “Where’s Dairine? I thought she’d be here, too. She was the one who was all hot for Mars, originally.”
“Just on the first day of her Ordeal,” Nita said. “This was a pit stop. She wanted to see Olympus Mons. Such a tourist destination.” She smiled. “This morning she headed for Wellakh first thing. Our dad’s watching her— he’s got his own Dairine Cam.”
Carmela’s smile had a sad edge to it. “She’s been out on the High Road a lot, hasn’t she?” She used the Speech-word allaire-nai for the concept; it implied that the person being described wasn’t just offplanet, but well away from one’s usual mindset or psychology.
Nita nodded. “And treating the house like a bed-and- breakfast, my dad’s been saying.”
“But always looking for Roshaun...”
“Yeah.”
Carmela nodded. “I can understand that. I may have given him a hard time, but I’d never want him to vanish forever.”
“If anyone can find him,” Nita said, “I’m betting she can.”
At floor level, the last of Nita’s hardened-air steps vanished behind her as she and Carmela came down to bounce on the slightly curved floor. Puffs of pale dust rose. Nita held the rowan wand up, and she and S’reee and Carmela looked around.
“There’s another room through there,” Carmela said, pointing off to their left. “See it? Like another bubble bumped into this one.”
They moved forward. It was warmer down here than up on the surface, but still plenty cold enough. The next chamber was indeed another bubble, smaller than the last: out of it opened numerous other circular portals, leading into more huge stone bubbles, each full of darkness.
“Look at that,” Carmela said, peering away into the dark as they moved into yet another spherical chamber. “They just go on and on. Probably for miles...”
“The whole volcano must be honeycombed with these,” Nita said, listening nervously to the way her voice echoed in the present chamber, which was small enough for S’reee’s air bubble to reach right to the edges. The
cold, the dark around them were unnerving. Yet Nita found that she didn’t feel precisely afraid or as if something was going to jump out of the shadows at her. There was just a growing sense of being—
“Not in the wrong place,” she said aloud. “Just in a place no one was really expecting us to be.”
“Expecting,” S’reee said. “You have a foresight about this, hNii’t?”
Nita shook her head. “Even hindsight would make me happy right now,” she said. “How much further in do you make the hot spot where the wizardry’s live?”
“Maybe five of my lengths,” S’reee said. “Not far.”
Carmela craned her neck back to try to see the ceiling of the next chamber they entered, a much larger one. “Honeycombed isn’t the word,” she said. “It’s froth. A million bubbles, big ones, little ones, that all got stuck in the lava, way back when...”
They continued across that chamber, toward the dimly seen entrance to the next. “Neets,” Carmela said, “the floor in here—”
For some reason she was whispering. “What?” Nita whispered back.
“It’s clean. But there was a lot of dust, back where we came in— stuff that must have come down through the skylight from the winter dust storm. Why wouldn’t there be some in here? There should have been some air movement down here. Enough to blow at least some dust in over the years—”
S’reee stopped her glide forward. Nita and Carmela looked at her.
“What?” Nita whispered.
When S’reee answered, she didn’t do it vocally. Did you hear that?
Hear what? Nita said, as silently.
Something moved—
Something about S’reee’s tone of thought left Nita more nervous than before. She held still, listening.
Carmela quietly reached into her jumpsuit pocket and came out with what could have been mistaken, by the uninitiated, for a curling iron. She glanced over at Nita.
Nita swallowed and held up the rowan wand, looking toward S’reee. The whale’s attention was on something that moved and gleamed in the shadows of the doorway into the next chamber. As Nita followed S’reee’s glance, the thing she was watching moved into the light.