A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition

  He crossed softly to the closet and opened it. It was full of clothes—much fuller than it had used to be: Carmela had caught the clothes bug only recently. Everything here was on its hanger, all perfectly neat. But there was also something else in this closet.

  Kit reached over to the bookshelf next to the closet and found there what he’d known would be there: a clone of the downstairs TV remote. At least it had begun its life that way, but now it had a lot more buttons on it than the original remote had. Kit knew what every one was for, as he had programmed them himself. Now he studied the various buttons, chose one, pointed at the back of Carmela’s closet, and punched the remote.

  The back of the closet instantly went black, then flickered into light again— the random rainbowy moiré pattern of a commercial worldgate not yet patent but ready to be activated. At the forefront of the carrier pattern was the identifying brand of the Crossings’ worldgate system, its famous logo of linked gate hexes prominently displayed with the notation in the Speech and several other languages, CROSSINGS INTERCONTINUAL WORLDGATING FACILITY, RIRHATH B— DESTINATION ONE.

  Kit grinned and began punching coordinates into the remote. He knew what he was planning would fly in the face of the spirit of the ban Tom had imposed on him. But he’ll have to see, Kit thought. When I show him, when he understands what’s at stake, he’ll have to see why I can’t leave this to anybody else. Nobody else has my perspective—

  He punched the button again. The Crossings logo vanished, replaced by a long spill of coordinates. Under them appeared a single word in the Speech: Confirm?

  Kit punched the “go” button on the remote. The gate went patent. A second later he found himself looking at red-brown soil again, the cratered landscape, the hazy pink horizon, and, silhouetted against it, in the light of local sunset, a city of spires and gleaming metal.

  All right, Kit thought. He punched another set of buttons on the remote, locking the coordinates in storage for later. Then he hit the remote’s off button.

  The gate flickered out, leaving nothing but the back of a closet full of clothes. Kit quietly put the remote back on the shelf, slipped out of the room, and shut the door.

  ***

  Later that evening, Nita was lying upstairs in bed with a throw over her, trying to relax and get some reading done, but finding it impossible. She had Mars on her mind.

  For about the twelfth time that evening, she pulled her manual over to her and had a look at her messaging section, but there was no answer yet to the note she’d sent Kit. What is going on with him? she thought. Idly she flipped back to the previous page of the messaging section, and her glance fell on Darryl’s listing there.

  I wonder, she thought. She reached out and touched Darryl’s listing: it blinked.

  “Yeah?” his voice said from the page. “Oh, it’s you, Neets! Hi.”

  “Hey, Darryl. How’re you doing?”

  “Pooped,” Darryl said. “And bruised. What a day.”

  “Bruised? What, did you take a spill up there while you were running away from the movie monsters?”

  His laugh was rueful. “Wish I had,” Darryl said. “It might ache less. I had a little visit from Tom a while ago.”

  Nita blinked. “What?”

  “Yeah,” Darryl said. “Looks like he and Mamvish and some of the Upper Ups weren’t real pleased with what we were doing up there. I guess I can understand why, after the fact. But he was really steamed. I don’t get to go up there again without other team members along, he says. Neither does Ronan. And he grounded Kit.”

  Nita’s mouth fell open. “No way!”

  “Oh yeah,” Darryl said. “Escorted visits only, and no other travel off the planet for the moment—”

  But Nita was already paging through the manual to Kit’s listing, and sure enough, there was the red no-travel access flag. She was shocked. “Wow! He must be crushed—”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Darryl said. “I sure feel like an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t think it through while we were up there. Though there didn’t seem to be a lot of time to think; everything kept happening so fast...”

  Nita was still shaking her head in disbelief. “Have you talked to him? How is he?”

  “No, he wasn’t home. Didn’t he have to go out or something?”

  “Yeah. They must still be out.” She rubbed her eyes. “Poor Kit! This is gonna make him crazy.”

  “Yeah.” Darryl sighed. “Look, Neets, I’m having some trouble with my own peeps right now. I should get off—”

  “Sure,” Nita said. “Darryl, thanks for letting me know. I hadn’t even noticed.”

  “Knowing Kit, he might be grateful for that ...Don’t beat him up too much, Miss Neets.”

  “I won’t. Talk to you later—”

  “Yeah,” Darryl said. And his listing grayed out.

  Nita closed the manual. Wow, she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. Kit?

  It was several moments before the answer came back. What?

  Her insides clenched. He sounded sullen and hugely hurt, and there was something else hanging over the back of his mind that Nita couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she wanted to— a strange sense of mingled frustration and fear.

  Listen, I heard—

  Of course you did, he said. The entire planet has to have heard. Other planets, too. Every wizard who can read, anyway. His anger was simply sizzling under his skin.

  Look, Nita said, try not to take it so hard! You’ve been in situations like this before and you’ve come out okay—

  Oh, really? When have I ever been banned? Kit nearly shouted. And this is the worst time, the worst possible time. We didn’t hurt anything. Nothing bad happened. I don’t get why I have to be banned now!

  Kit, look—

  Yeah, but I’m sure you’ve got some good reason. Why don’t you enlighten me?

  Nita blinked at the nasty tone. Kit, she said, I don’t have any reasons. I don’t know that much about what happened up there. You’re the one who knows—

  Oh, yeah? You know about some stuff, all right. You know about Aurilelde. I saw you looking. I could feel it—

  She had half been afraid of that: but she couldn’t let herself be ashamed of what she’d done. Kit, I was just worried about you. I had to make sure that you—

  —Weren’t in some kind of trouble I couldn’t get myself out of, is that the excuse? Well, I wasn’t! I was fine! But I can’t do anything by myself without you getting involved, can I? Watchdogging me all the time. Spying on me! Like you’re jealous!

  Nita’s mouth dropped open. Kit, she said, no way I would spy on you, I just—

  It just sort of turned out that way, huh? Sure, I believe that. You just can’t cope with the idea that there might be somebody else in my life, somebody who’s not a wizard, somebody you can’t control—

  She took a long breath, and another long breath, before saying anything further. But Kit said, So just do me a favor and butt out, all right? Now that I’m nice and safe and grounded on Earth, you won’t have to worry about me getting myself in trouble and needing to be rescued! So take a break, all right? Just let me alone!

  And he cut the connection.

  Nita stared at the manual in complete astonishment.

  What... was...that?

  It almost didn’t even sound like Kit there in the middle.

  Well, like him, yeah.

  But not like him saying it. Not really him.

  She lay there for some time, in shock. Other thoughts were roiling in her head: ideas that she’d previously dismissed as bad ones were starting to look not only good but necessary.

  Yet if I do this, it will be exactly what he’s accusing me of. I’ll be spying on him.

  Nita lay there for some moments more. After a while, almost reluctantly, the peridexis said, I have the results of that persona analysis of Kit’s experience with Aurilelde.

  Nita raised her eyebrows. “Took you long enough!”

  I warned you it wou
ld take some while. Even now some of the extrapolation is dubious.

  Nita sighed. “Never mind. Show me what you’ve got.” She closed her eyes.

  In the dark behind her eyelids, the analysis displayed, laid out like a sector of a spell diagram— not the full circle, but the chord and arc that expressed and described the important physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the subject of the analysis. It was the person’s wizardly signature, expressed in the Speech so that a spell into which it was inserted would include that person properly. Normally working this out could take quite a while: the utility was handy for last-minute work.

  Nita looked the signature over. The curved ribbon of it was spotted with dark empty patches, but the main structure was plain enough to read. As she looked it over, Nita felt some puzzlement. “This looks familiar,” she said. “Why does this look so familiar?”

  She peered more closely at the particular structure she thought she recognized, an intricately knotted string of Speech-characters. Look at that, it looks just like—

  —just like the one in my signature—

  Nita stared. The longer she looked, the more obvious it became that there were a lot of parts to this signature that looked like hers.

  I would say perhaps forty percent, the peridexis said.

  Nita opened her eyes and sat up. “How does that happen?” she whispered.

  And the thought came into her head: Somebody’s using things they found out about me to trap Kit.

  “Bobo,” Nita said after a few moments, “I hate this.”

  That, the peridexis said, closely reflects the sound of all wizards everywhere when making difficult but closely considered ethical choices.

  “But I don’t see that I have a choice,” Nita said. “Too many lives depend on it. People on Earth, wizards who might get involved. Even the Shamaska-Eilitt! If this goes wrong somehow, they’re all in danger. At the very least there’s going to be a lot of disruption on Earth. There could be riots. People could get hurt or killed. And there could be other effects I can’t foresee.”

  You do have a choice, Bobo said, and you’re about to tell me what it is.

  Nita took a deep breath. “Bug him,” she said. “Put a spinoff on Kit’s manual’s log like the one on Dairine’s. I want the same kind of readout on his thought processes that Spot was giving Dad— the streaming consciousness.”

  There was a silence. I am required to remind you that there will be a ‘final reckoning’ payment when you decommission this wizardry, and the payment may be personally damaging if oversight determines the wizardry was not successful, or successful in the wrong ways.

  “I understand,” Nita said. And she swallowed. “Do it.”

  Done, the peridexis said.

  She looked at the manual, ready to pick it up right away and see what it revealed. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow morning. Wait for some content to build up and I’ll look at it then.

  But she knew that she wouldn’t be eager to look at it in the morning, either...

  ***

  It was two thirty-three in the morning when Kit finally worked up the courage to open his bedroom door and sneak down the hall toward Carmela’s room. He knew it was two thirty-three because every minute, from about half past midnight on, he had been looking at his propped-up smartphone pn the bedside table and thinking, Now. Now I’m going to do it. No, I’ll wait a few minutes more. Somebody might hear me...

  Kit was heartsore. He was angry at Nita and knew that it was wrong for him to be angry at her, but he didn’t want to stop. His guilt at what he was about to do was also terrible, though he hadn’t done it yet. But stronger by far than either of these feelings was the sense that he had to get back to Mars: that if he didn’t, terrible things were going to happen: that the fate of a people rested on what he did or didn’t do.

  And even more important than that was the expectation of what he would do to a single heart up there, the imploring look in those eyes. I can’t let her down. I can’t fail her. Not after all this time— And though that thought seemed wrong somehow, he didn’t care.

  In any case, sweat was trickling down Kit’s back as he made his way down the hall to Carmela’s bedroom door. I am going to get in so much trouble for this, he thought. But there was simply too great a compulsion to go through with this, to get back up to Mars and find out...

  Find out what, exactly?

  Well, among other things, where did three hours of my life just go!? He could remember the brief battle with the scorpions under the mountain, all right. The only thing Kit regretted about that was that he wouldn’t be able to use the “curling iron” at any later date: the scorpions would be armored against it. Then he’d gone down into the pit and picked up the Shard, and then— what?

  He had awakened by himself on the cold mountainside, with a strange feeling that somewhere else, in a world or a time more real than this one, something more important than anything else was going on. But even as he regarded that, he got a sense that there were parts of Khretef’s story, or their joint one, that Khretef hadn’t been telling him. Something he was having trouble with— something he didn’t want to come to grips with. And it was important—

  Maybe something to do with him dying, Kit thought, as he crept cautiously step by step down the hall. Well, that would make me nervous, too. But there was something else going on, he was sure. Part of it had to do with the Nascence, as Khretef had called it. The Nascence was part of the key to this world. With it properly awakened and energized, the City could make itself safe. And once they were safe, they could turn this world into a paradise—

  Kit stopped at that point in the hallway and stepped close to the wall between the door of Carmela’s room and the bathroom. There was a board here that, if you stepped on it, would go off like a gunshot as soon as you lifted your weight off it again. Kit was intent on missing it. Carefully he edged down the hall, trying not to bear his weight too heavily on the floor. Once he was past the dangerous spot, Kit put a hand on Carmela’s bedroom doorknob and very slowly and softly turned it.

  It wasn’t locked, but then it wasn’t usually. Kit eased the door open, just a crack, and peered inside, letting his eyes get used to the slightly darker conditions in her bedroom. He knew its layout quite well. The foot of Carmela’s bed was near the door, which swung open to the left. All he had to do was edge in and close the door, then very softly move over to the closet door, feel just to his left for the shelf where the remote was, open the closet door, step in, and close it. Then he could use the remote to wake up the worldgate, and be gone.

  Kit slipped in through the door, then quickly and quietly closed it behind him so the light from the nightlight out in the hall wouldn’t disturb Carmela. Once again he stood still, making sure he knew where he was and where everything else was. He looked toward Carmela’s bed. From somewhere in the tangled lump of covers on top of it, a tiny snore emerged.

  Kit was suddenly, bizarrely reminded of Ponch, and he couldn’t keep himself from letting out a soft sigh. This would be so much simpler if he was still here, Kit thought. All I’d have to do is put his leash on, say ‘Ponch? Let’s go to Mars!’ And three steps later, we’d be there. But that couldn’t happen now. Kit shook his head and silently tiptoed over to the bedroom closet.

  He put his hand up to the shelf on the left, felt around... and froze.

  Where’s the remote?!

  From the bed came a rustle of someone turning over, covers moving and shifting. Oh, please don’t wake up right now!! Kit thought. But it was easily thirty seconds before the rustling stopped coming from the bed, and the little snore resumed.

  Kit breathed again, though with difficulty. Once more he put his hand up to the shelf, felt around more carefully. Then he let out another breath, of relief this time, as he felt the cool plastic of the remote under his hand. She just moved it further down the shelf, that’s all. He grabbed it, held it close to him, and reached for the closet door.
/>
  It took him a moment to find the doorknob. Very softly Kit turned it and opened the closet door, slipped in, and eased the closet door closed behind him. It was a matter of a few seconds to wake the remote up, punch in the macro settings he’d laid into it earlier, and wake up the gateway to Mars.

  A few seconds later he was looking through the back of the closet at the gleaming city standing in the midst of that red-brown desolation. Just the sight of it suddenly left him feeling less like Kit. Suddenly he felt as if he was in a strange, closed-in place, being kept away from the one place that mattered to him most in the world, because Aurilelde was there.

  Hang on, guy, Kit thought, don’t get all fired up just yet. We’ll have you there in a moment. And then you can start explaining to me what the heck is going on up there! And he stepped into the gate—

  And found that he was still standing in front of it. Now what the— ! Kit thought.

  He stepped forward again. Again he was prevented from going through the gate. Oh, no, he thought. They’ve blocked this, too!

  Frustrated, Kit reached out and put his hand up against the gate. But it went through. Okay, Kit thought, so that’s not the problem—

  He pressed himself forward against the worldgate interface, very slowly. His face went through; his arms went through; he could see what was on the other side, feel the cold of the Martian atmosphere against his face. But he couldn’t go farther. Something about chest-level was stopping him.

  Kit backed up, realizing what it was. His manual wouldn’t pass. It knew he was banned, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Kit cursed under his breath. There was nothing he could do for the moment but reach into his jacket pocket, take out the manual, and very slowly and carefully bend down to leave it leaned up against the inside wall of Carmela’s closet, where it would be unlikely to get kicked through the gate by accident. It’ll be safe enough here. He pulled out his antenna-wand, stuck it experimentally into the gate: it at least passed. So I won’t be unarmed. And I’m still a wizard— it’s not like the manual is required on the road. But all the same Kit felt unnerved at the thought of going to another planet equipped only with the very basic set of spells he had memorized: life support and so forth.