“I’d believe that was happening here,” Carmela said, getting up to walk along another long, tangled chain of symbols buried in the design. “You’d have trouble finding any time when these guys weren’t fighting. Though here they seem to have taken a breather...”
Carmela straightened up. Nita could feel that slight draining sensation that said the wizardry needed more power. She sat down where she was and closed her eyes, concentrating on breathing more power into it. But even with her eyes closed, she could sense a cooling and darkening around her. “That would be why,” S’reee sang, sounding somewhat troubled. “The Sun is dimming. And so quickly.”
Bobo, Nita said, will this much power hold the spell for now?
Yes. But it won’t run much longer. If there’s anything to be learned, better do it with your eyes open—
She opened them, stood up, staggered. “hNii’t,” S’reee said, “are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Nita said, looking toward the Sun. No wonder that S’reee had been taken aback: it was getting fainter by the second, as if someone was turning down a dimmer. The elapsed time was passing by at thousands of years per second, but the speed of the Sun’s fading still seemed uncomfortably swift. In the precipitous valleys between the needle-sharp peaks, the atmosphere was freezing out, dusting itself down as dry ice and oxygen snow.
“They started doming their cities over,” Carmela said, “and trying to change their climate. But the Sun just cooled too fast. All the changes they made weren’t enough.”
Nita watched the Sun’s light keep on fading. It had struck her hard, some time back, how dim the Martian day seemed compared to Earth’s, even at such a small increase in the distance from the Sun. And Shamask-Eilith would have been maybe sixty or eighty million miles farther out, getting even less light and heat than Mars. A cold world, getting colder, she thought, as she watched the Sun far off in the deeps of space slowly settling into what would be its future normal magnitude.
“And still their wars went on,” S’reee said, turning gently in the air to watch yet another swath of nuclear explosions and massive energy-weapon fire scorch its way across the planet’s increasingly ravaged surface.
“Oh, yeah,” Carmela said, sounding resigned. “They weren’t going to stop fighting just because of a little thing like the Sun going cool...”
“You’d think if they had a technology like this, they’d have considered moving everybody to a warmer world,” Nita said. “There weren’t all that many Shamaska or Eilitt by then. They’d already killed so many of each other.”
S’reee swung her tail in agreement. “The Sun’s behavior could even have been a hint,” S’reee said. “The Powers That Be have been known to make Their suggestions indirectly— usually with some hope that the peoples involved will come to some greater good that way than just by being told right out what to do. Or maybe this was just an attempt to break their cycle of destruction when other hints had failed.”
“‘Those who will, the Powers lead,’” Nita said, quoting a line from the manual, “‘and those who won’t, They drag...’”
“If you guys are right,” Carmela said, “this might be where the dragging started.” She gazed down at the floor in a slightly unfocused way as she walked around, pausing at one particular spot. “Listen to this,” Carmela said. “‘Then from the darkness... came the fate and the death which had long been promised. And all the folk looked up into the night and cried out in rage and fear that all their striving against each other was wasted—’”
They looked toward Shamask-Eilith’s spiny curvature and saw, distant but enhanced by the wizardry, the incoming shadow of “the death long promised.” From high above the plane of the ecliptic—the orbital zone in which all the other worlds of the Solar System except Pluto rode—a dark rogue planet, ensnared by the Sun’s gravity who-knew-how many years before, was diving slowly and inexorably into the system. There could have been no possible error about its path, which was taking it straight toward where Shamask-Eilith would be in its orbit in only a matter of decades.
“I don’t suppose this possibly means that they saw sense and stopped fighting with each other?” Nita said.
From the look S’reee gave Nita, she had her doubts. “I wonder,” S’reee said, “how quickly did they see it?”
“Pretty quickly,” Carmela said, walking along and looking down at the pattern. “The scientists on both sides worked out that it wouldn’t hit them. But it would come close enough to destroy their world, even if it didn’t actually hit. Just the tidal forces of the bigger body as it passed by would break the First World up. So they started making plans to save as many of their own people and life forms as they could, and make their way to the next planet in. But it looks like both sides did it secretly.”
“What?” Nita said. “Why? Are you trying to tell me—?”
Carmela looked at Nita and S’reee with an expression both annoyed and completely unsurprised. “You got it,” she said. “Each side figured that if it didn’t tell the other one, their enemies might not have enough time to evacuate their populations. Then the ones who escaped successfully would have the whole new world to themselves.”
S’reee blew softly, a sound of sorrow and disgust. “And when it all came out in the open and both sides started accusing each other of attempted genocide,” Nita said, “gee, I wonder what happened then?”
Carmela merely raised her eyebrows as the image of those ancient jagged mountains erupted in unprecedented violence. “They all got right to work reducing the number of people their enemies would be moving off the planet...”
Nita scowled. “And these were the first intelligent life forms in our solar system? Theoretically intelligent, more like! They’re embarrassing me.”
“Hard to believe they wasted precious time on more slaughter,” S’reee said sadly. “And their wizardly talent probably didn’t have power enough to move the planet. Or maybe there were too few of them.”
“It says here they did try to push the incoming planet off course,” Carmela said, walking along and reading more of the inlay of the central pattern. “But they failed. A whole lot of their wizards died trying. Finally some people on each side realized that whether they liked it or not, they had to help each other get out and resettle closer to the Sun. They’d also have to change themselves physically to fit into whatever world they wound up on. So...”
Glints of movement above the dark peaks caught all their eyes: small shapes, leaping upward. One glittering round shape came closer to their point of view, closer yet, swelled until it seemed to fill half the huge dome: then flashed past them, gone. But it didn’t move so quickly that they couldn’t see the glitter of interior lights stellated all over some more complex shape, spiky, angular. “Cities,” Nita said. “They got a few whole cities off the world—”
But very few of those tiny desperate city-seeds escaped as the terrible wanderer from outside the Solar System plunged in, growing in the First World’s sky, a terrible pale shadow. As it filled the sky, the upward-jutting needles and precipices of the ancient mountains trembled as the two planets’ interacting tidal forces strove together, and the First World started to shatter—
They saw only a few moments of that massive destruction. The incoming rogue planet, so much bigger and more massive than Shamask-Eilith, stayed in one piece. But Shamask-Eilith simply tore itself apart in the intruder’s gravitational field. Vast yawning crevasses stitched themselves along Shamask’s surface, ripping open the crust. The planet’s molten mantle burst outward through the tears in all directions, fountaining countless millions of tons of magma into space. The suddenly exposed planetary core plunged away through the no-longer-confining mass of the rest of the planet like a bullet through flesh, tumbling into the darkness of space as the planet disintegrated—
In the dome, the shadows faded, the imagery failed; the dome dimmed down again. The wizardry failed, Bobo said in the back of Nita’s mind. It couldn’t cope with the extra power feed from outside.
br /> Carmela and Nita and S’reee were gazing at one another in silent horror. After a moment, Carmela said, “You know, I was watching some documentary about the Moon the other day. It said a lot of scientists think the Moon was formed by some big piece of a planet or something hitting the Earth while it was still molten and splashing a lot of stuff out. Was this it, I wonder? Did the rogue planet do it? Or maybe Shamask’s core...”
Nita considered. “That was a real long time ago that happened, Mela. Four billion years and change.” She looked around. “And however old this place is, it’s not anything like billions of years.”
Carmela sighed. “I take it the playback’s broken?”
“Yeah. My manual will have a copy of what we saw, though.”
“And I’ve kept a copy in the Telling,” S’reee said. “We may want to compare them later for perceptual differences.”
Nita nodded. “But for the moment,” she said to Carmela, “looks like you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you.”
“Well, yeah, because what happened next?” Carmela said, waving her arms. “Where were they going to go? Not Mercury: it was way too hot. And not Venus or Earth, if they were still molten. Nobody could change themselves enough to cope with that—”
“With wizardry,” S’reee said, “maybe they could have, if everyone involved in the change was sufficiently committed. But that kind of complete agreement is rare. That’s one of the reasons the Troptic Stipulation is in the Oath— the part about not changing a creature that doesn’t desire the change. The rule goes double, triple, for a whole species.”
“Then it has to be Mars,” Carmela said. “Why else would all this be here for us to find?” She waved an arm at the dome full of writing around them. “I really doubt anybody said, ‘Oh, let’s spend weeks and months writing the whole history of our species in here, and then go off somewhere else ...!’ So where are they?”
Nita shook her head. Carmela was plainly fascinated by the mystery of where the inhabitants of the lost planet had gone: but Nita was thinking, And what if this is the species that Kit and his team are so excited about waking up? These people, who went thousands of years without having any time they weren’t having a war, might wind up being our new next-door neighbors?
Oh, boy.
“Mela,” Nita said after a moment, “you saw how they were with each other on their original world. Maybe the ones who made it here didn’t learn the lesson. Maybe they finally wiped each other out... and this is all that’s left.” But as soon as she said it, Nita somehow knew right down in her bones that this was not the case, and the situation wasn’t going to be anything like that simple. She frowned. I hate feelings like this, Nita thought. Even though they’re going to be useful later...
“There’s something else that strikes me as strange,” S’reee said. “All through that, we never saw an image of what they looked like, the people of the First World.” She swung her tail. “It’s true enough that there are species that don’t or won’t make images of themselves. But they’re in the minority.” Her voice went wry. “Most species can’t get enough of looking at themselves.”
Carmela shook her head. “Maybe they were making a clean break?” she said. “If they did actually change themselves to suit another planet— this planet— maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of what they had to abandon? Seems like they thought it was a failure to have to change at all.”
She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking around her at the dome, at all that unread writing. Then Carmela turned back to Nita and S’reee. “I’ve got to work on this,” she said. “It’s gonna drive me nuts. I need to go get a notebook. Do you want me to give you guys a lift back home?”
“You might take me back with you,” S’reee said. “But does this mean that you’re not going shopping?”
“It can wait.” Carmela turned back to gaze around the dome with an odd look on her face. “There’s something going on here.”
Another one gets bit by the bug! Nita thought. She glanced at S’reee. “You just may have heard history in the making,” she said, “whatever kind’s recorded here. Carmela said she was not going shopping somewhere.”
S’reee whistled with laughter. Carmela ignored them both as she looked down at the design under their feet, following one long, tangled thread of writing. She pointed at it. “That bit,” Carmela said, “that’s a poem. Can you see it?”
Nita and S’reee looked at each other. “No,” they said in unison.
“Well, I can. And I want to see what it says!”
Nita sighed. So much for getting her safely out of here and off to the Crossings! “I’m not sure I’m wild about you being by yourself up here...”
Carmela gave Nita a look. “Even Mamvish said there was no reason I should be excluded from this stuff. What’re you worried about— our little scorpion buddies? They let me alone before when they came through. If they were interested in chewing on me, they’d have done it then. And they haven’t been back.”
“As far as I can tell,” S’reee said, glancing around the vast round chamber, “that wizardry’s now defunct. A one-time assessment, I think.”
“See that?” Carmela said. “Neets, when I come back, I’ll have the remote. And I’ve got my ‘curling iron.’ If anything jumps out at me, it’s not going to get anything for its trouble but a real big hole straight through it, and I’ll be gone before it can do anything else.”
Nita looked over at S’reee. S’reee just shrugged her tail. “Recent events suggest that K!aarmii’lha can take care of herself. She’s armed, she can get away quickly if she must, and if she has a cell phone, she can call you for help if she needs it, yes?”
“Yeah,” Nita said. Bobo, is the wizardry here really done running?
Yes. I doubt it could be reactivated now no matter how we tried.
“Okay,” Nita said. “I’m gonna try again to get at that spot where Kit and the guys are working... or at least try to find out why we couldn’t transport there.”
Carmela pulled out her remote and got busy punching its buttons. “And you, cousin?” S’reee said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right without backup?”
Nita nodded. Unsettling as her experience with the scorpions had been, it had left her with a sense that she had been examined and found nonthreatening: she was safe enough on Mars. Until some new weird thing happens. But the moment of foresight Nita had had, and correctly read, now left her feeling less concerned about coming up against something completely unexpected. As long as the universe keeps those helpful hints coming...
“Go on,” Nita said, patting S’reee’s side and pulling out her manual again. She flipped it to the page describing wizardries ongoing in the area, glanced down it to the description of the life-support spell that S’reee was running, and laid a finger on the written version: it glowed as Nita took over its management. “I’ll be in touch if I find anything.”
She looked past S’reee to Carmela. Mela waved the remote at her, punched a button. She and S’reee vanished. The air inside the support spell imploded in a brief, sharp breeze toward where they’d been, then settled again.
Nita stood there in the silence, the rowan wand in her free hand now the only light. “Okay, Bobo,” she said. “You have Kit’s first set of coordinates? This crater—” She peered at the manual. “Stokes—”
Got them.
“Are they still blocked?”
Not precisely. Conditions there are ...peculiar.
It wasn’t the most reassuring thing to hear wizardry itself saying to you. Nevertheless, Nita shrugged. “Let’s go find out how peculiar,” she said.
The transit circle laid itself out glowing around her. Transiting now.
Around Nita, the world went dark again.
9: Gusev
Pale peach-colored dust fluffed away in the gust of wind that accompanied the three human forms who appeared atop the low, rounded ridge. It wasn’t a particularly sharp or edgy piece of terrain— just a rough escarpmen
t of beige and cream-colored rock, with dust and sand spilling down in little rills, almost like water, from cracks in the low cliff’s edge. To the south and west spread a vast, shallow, circular depression, itself dimpled and cratered with the remnants of newer, lesser impacts. Level with the old crater’s rim, the surrounding landscape to the north and east, more brown than red, was strewn with nondescript boulders well into the distance.
“Here we are,” Kit said, glancing around to get his bearings.
“Wahoo,” Darryl said, ironic.
“Nope. De Vaucouleurs.”
“Pedant,” said Ronan, looking around with the expression of someone eager not to see any more giant bat-crab-spider creatures.
Kit rolled his eyes. “We’re in the right spot, anyway. There’s Kayne, over that way.” He pointed: another crater’s low rim was just visible, looking like a low line of hills maybe ten miles away. “Shawnee, Bok...” He peered further away to the south. “Hamelin—”
“I take back what I said before,” Ronan said, concerned. “You don’t need a social life later. You need one now. How long have you been staying home nights memorizing crater names? They’re holes in the ground, Kit! There’s nothing but rocks in them! Set yourself free! Life’s too short!”
Kit turned to Darryl. “Doesn’t seem to be much going on here at the moment. What’ve we got?”
Darryl brought out his WizPod and pulled out a wide, semitransparent page that he studied for a moment. He shook his head, holding it up for Ronan and Kit to see. “Okay, look. The wizardry you triggered is getting ready to spike here. Two or three minutes. But before it goes off, you can still see some indications of how old it is and where it came from. Look quick—” He pointed at one long line of symbols. “See that? The power to fuel this wizardry wasn’t locally sourced.”
Kit shook his head. “What?”
“The energy didn’t come from this planet, originally! It came from—” Darryl looked up, pointed. “Somewhere up there.”
Kit and Ronan looked up into the empty Martian sky. “Nearby?” Ronan said. “One of the moons, maybe?”