At the other end, the saurian’s long, oval head peered down at the smaller one of the Komodo dragon sitting between her huge forefeet. The massive jaws in that huger head opened, exhibiting teeth that gleamed like pale metal, and a broad, black tongue. Around the words that she spoke, like the breath behind them, came a low, moaning hiss like a house’s central heating system complaining of too much pressure in the radiators. But the voice itself spoke the Speech in a surprisingly high register, like a flute’s or clarinet’s.
As Nita got closer, she could see how subtly changing colors ran and shimmered underneath the gemmy bumps and pebbles of the hide, shifting slightly with the words and the volume at which they were spoken. “Let me put it again in a way you can understand,” the voice said... while sounding as if its owner wasn’t sure this could be done. “There’s nowhere else for you to live in these seas! The two-leggers are encroaching on your territory. No matter how well the ones who come here right now are treating you, sooner or later some will come who don’t mean you anything like as well. You’ll have nowhere else to go! And there are much better places for you to be, with no two-leggers, with nothing but people like you—people who’re interested in you and want you to live somewhere safe! If you’ll just let me show you—”
The Komodo dragon between Mamvish’s feet looked up at her and opened its mouth, emitting a similar hiss, though a much smaller one. By way of the Speech, Nita heard it say, I’m hungry.
Mamvish rolled her eyes in frustration. This was worth seeing, since it wasn’t just the eyeballs that rolled; the entire socket containing each one went around in a large and wobbly circle. “You can eat any time,” she said. “Please pay attention. We’re talking about something important here—”
A juicy little deer would be nice right about now, said the Komodo dragon ...and it turned ponderously around and lurched away out of Mamvish’s shadow and up the beach, toward the underbrush that sprang up under the eaves of the forest.
Mamvish watched it go. “You stupid, stupid things,” she hissed, “why do I keep wasting my time?” She stamped all her feet in annoyance. “It’s your lives I’m trying to save here! Your whole rijakh’d species’ lives! ...And all you can ever think about is food! If you came home with me, you’d be superstars; your species would be comfortable and safe forever! And now I wonder why I’m bothering trying to take creatures home who’re so merthakte dumb! Powers that Be in a bucket, have you ever seen the like of these people? Time after time you come umpteen thousand light-years to make them the offer of a lifetime, and every time they ignore you. They don’t have the brains to come in out of the Sun; they—”
The tirade went on. Somewhat distractedly— for Mamvish was using a completely new and interesting subset of words in the Speech— Nita made her way over to the boulder where Kit was perching. As she scrambled up beside him, Nita found herself wondering whether there was a separate “bad language” section of the wizard’s manual, and why she’d never thought to go looking for it. Am I really that much of a geek? Oh, god. Kit was looking elsewhere, as if embarrassed. Darryl was listening with fascination: Ronan had leaned all the way back on his boulder with his hands under his head, his eyes closed. Because of Mamvish, or Carmela?— for Kit’s sister was sitting there, trying to keep her attention evenly divided between Mamvish and Ronan. For the moment, Mamvish was winning.
“What took you so long?” Kit said under his breath. “You missed everybody. Half the wizards we know have been here, and a lot we don’t.”
“Want to understate some more? Half the wizards on the planet have been here!” Darryl said from the next boulder over. “A real mob scene. And some real heavy hitters. Check this out!” He scrambled over toward them, holding out the WizPod he used these days to carry his wizard’s manual. “Jarrah Corowa was here, and she even gave me her autograph!” He pulled a glowing page sideways out of the WizPod and into the air, showing Nita the tracery of Speech characters there.
“Wow!” Nita said, for a wizard’s autograph, depending on how much of the wizard’s personal information it contained, could be worth a lot more than just a keepsake of meeting someone who was famous for their way with a spell. “Nice going!”
Kit rolled his eyes in a good-natured way at Darryl’s excitement. “Fang was here, too,” he said. Nita let out a breath, sorry to have missed an old friend in wizardry, the orca who’d sung the part of the Killer in the Song of the Twelve. “How is he? He came way out of his way to get here.”
“Not all that far. He and his family swim the Pacific this time of year: he’s over here working on typhoon steering or something. He’s fine, and he was asking about you. And her.” Kit threw an annoyed glance in Carmela’s direction. “On another subject, is it just barely possible that we can go anywhere on this planet these days, or any other, without her coming along?”
“Funny,” Nita said. “I was going to ask whether it was possible you might go anywhere that I could come along.”
Kit stared at her. “What?”
“I was late because I was waiting for you! I hung around Tom and Carl’s for half the afternoon!”
Kit looked stricken, as if this had never occurred to him. “But you said you were going to talk to the fish.”
“I was!” Nita said. “But I didn’t go there to talk to the fish! I went there to blow some time until you were going to turn up after school— which you never did! Oh, no, you just heard the word ‘Mars’ and forgot all about everything else, and ran straight off here!”
“Come on, Neets, you know I—”
Would you two ever just take it to telepathy, Ronan said silently, or else save it for later? She’s starting to run out of steam again.
At least the hissing was dying down. “Why?” Mamvish was saying to the sky and the Earth and whatever else might have been listening. “Why do I keep coming out to this dust speck of a not-particularly-interesting world out at the farthest possible edge of all that’s bright and beautiful to talk to these idiotic creatures who make a pt!walnath look assertive and a Zabriskan fontema look smart? I ask you.”
Then she fell silent. Mamvish looked around her, a little guiltily. “I’m sorry,” she said, “very sorry. They’re just so—”
“Clueless?” said Darryl. “Lackwitted? Like you called them the last time you lost it?”
“Dim?” said Ronan. “Pitiful? Like you called them half an hour before that?”
“All right, it’s not kind to describe them so,” Mamvish said, sounding contrite. “They’re as the One made them. If they won’t be saved, they won’t. I just keep hoping they’ll change their minds. Though I’m starting to wonder why I bother.”
“Because you’re a wizard?” Nita said. “And it’s what wizards do?”
Mamvish swung her huge head in Nita’s direction... and then froze. Both those eyes suddenly went forward and trained on Nita with tremendous directness, and Mamvish’s nostrils flared. “Cousin,” she said. “Are you carrying what I think you’re carrying?”
Nita held up the plastic bag. “You mean these?”
Mamvish suddenly lurched toward Nita as singlemindedly as the Komodo dragon had. Nita hurriedly scrambled down off the boulder, headed for Mamvish, and started to carefully empty out the tomato bag onto the stones. “No, no, it’s quite all right,” Mamvish said. “I don’t mind a little roughage...”
Nita dropped the bag and the tomatoes as Mamvish lumbered forward. A second later, the tomatoes and the bag were gone. So were some of the stones— deafeningly crunched up, shattering and splintering. Everyone stared. Mamvish’s eyes rotated in her head in opposite directions in what Nita very much hoped was delight, and the shimmer under her skin ran suddenly tomato-red.
“You are my friend!” Mamvish said, using the Speech-word thelefeh, which was a much closer and cozier usage than hrasht, or “cousin.” Nita was charmed, and began to see some use in having carried that bag halfway across the planet. “And this is unquestionably one of the best worlds in this wh
ole part of the galaxy,” Mamvish said, straightening up after a moment. The place where her jaw jointed pulled back and back into what her species apparently used for a smile; Nita started wondering if Mamvish’s head might actually come apart. “Thank you so much for bringing those: I didn’t think I was going to have time to get any, this trip. Do forgive me; I missed your name—”
“You didn’t miss it,” said a voice from behind her. “She was late.”
“Stow it, Ronan,” Nita said. To Mamvish she said, “I’m Nita.”
“And of course I know you, thelef’,” Mamvish said, lowering her head so that one of her eyes could look into both of Nita’s. “We’ve spoken often enough via manual. I’m sorry if I moved quickly, there! It’s really hard for me to help myself around these things. It’s something to do with the bioflavinoids.”
“You should grow them at home!” Nita said.
“They’re not the same,” Mamvish said, sounding sorrowful as she hunkered down on the rocky beach again. “There’s something in the water here. Or the air. Or the spectrum of this particular sunlight. Tomatoes are just happiest on Earth...” She sighed. “But it doesn’t matter. They’re a tremendous compensation for other slight annoyances.” One eye glanced back toward the Komodo dragon, which was disappearing into the brush up near the cliff. “And, after all, who knows if I’d ever have found out about Mars at all without the tomatoes?”
“Tomatoes are all very well,” Ronan said, sitting up and stretching himself in the sunshine, “but as for these folks, you should just move them. If they don’t have the smarts to agree to leave on their own, then change their minds for them—”
“Don’t tempt me,” Mamvish said, waving her tail in annoyance. “Unfortunately this issue goes right to the heart of the Wizard’s Oath: ‘I shall change no creature unless it, or the system of which it is a part, is threatened.’” She looked around her. “And they are. These are the only ones left of these creatures, except for the few hundred on the other island, and those few others scattered about the planet in zoos. But if I change their minds for them, will they still be the creatures they are?” A long, deep fluting sigh came out of her. “Never mind. They’re a problem for another day… though one that has its resonances with what we’re about to start.”
Nita opened her mouth, but Carmela, sitting up on that boulder, put up her hand and starting waving it around like some back-of-the-classroom kid desperate to be called on. “Excuse me,” she said in the Speech, “but what are we about to start?”
Nita threw a glance sidewise at Kit. He was covering his face and groaning softly. One of Mamvish’s eyes was suddenly regarding Carmela; the other one was looking in what seemed mild confusion from Nita, to Kit, to Darryl, to Ronan. “Has this planet gone astahfrith without my noticing?” she said. “I have been busy…”
Nita snickered, for this was probably an understatement. “No,” she said. “We still have to hide our wizardry, mostly. But there are people who’re in on the secret and aren’t freaked by it. Mamvish, this is Kit’s sister Carmela. Mela, this is Mamvish fsh Wimsih fsh Mentaff.”
“Hey,” Carmela said in the Speech, “Life says, ‘hi there.’”
Mamvish’s eye actually tried to lean farther out of her skull in Carmela’s direction. “And It greets you by me as well. You’re not a wizard, though . . .”
“Don’t need to be,” Carmela said, sounding utterly certain. “Too much work. I’m just a tourist training to be a galactic personal shopper.”
This was all news to Nita, but she tried to keep her grin restrained and out of Kit’s sight: his reaction to Carmela’s ever-growing ability with the Speech had been becoming increasingly pained. Mamvish looked unfocused for a moment, or as much more unfocused as one could be expected to look when her eyes were already pointing in different directions. Then she said, “Oh! You’re the one who shot up the Crossings during the intervention last month.”
“That would be me,” Carmela said. “But Neets was there first. And our colleague with all the legs.”
“Sker’ret is a great talent,” Mamvish said, “and an invaluable resource. His people have been instrumental in your world’s development, you know that? At least as far as worldgates go. It’s good to see that you’re so well connected.”
One of Mamvish’s rear legs came up to scratch behind where one of her ears might have been, had she had any on the outside. “Meanwhile, I don’t see why you’d need to be excluded from this. Especially since you came with the bearer of the tomatoes.” She beamed at Nita, then turned back to Carmela again. “From your own world’s point of view, Mars is a ‘situational location of interest.’ Wizards here have been trying to find out why for some centuries now. And even the outer worlds feel echoes of something that happened… and have nothing further to say.” She tilted her head, looking thoughtful. “So plainly there’s something going on here that we need to know about before we move forward.”
“And what are we moving toward?” Carmela said.
We. Nita could just feel Kit start fuming quietly. “Waking up the Martians, dummy!” Kit said.
“Well,” Mamvish said, swinging one eye in his direction, “that’s the question we’ll be examining. Local catastrophes have killed too many species in the past— peoples we could ill afford to lose. My job’s to prevent the loss of worlds that have something special to offer the universe, to keep species or planets that have made unusual contributions from being completely lost—and, occasionally, to get back lost worlds that aren’t as lost as we think they are.”
“Like Mars…” Nita said.
“Yes,” Mamvish said. “And sometimes, as seems to have happened in this case, we get a little help from the species in question: they leave us data about what happened to them.”
“A message in a bottle,” Ronan said.
“Yes. In this case, the ‘bottle’ we’ve located seems to have been emplaced some five hundred sixty thousand years ago.”
Nita blinked at that. “Wow. There were just human ancestors around then. It was— what, the really early Stone Age?”
“The Lower Paleolithic, as I understand your usage,” Mamvish said. “Any knowledge or memory your most distant ancestors had of Mars is lost. But worlds have different kinds of memory than the beings that move on their surfaces. Whatever humans know about Mars, the outer worlds have different knowledge about it: troubled recollections. We have to go carefully at first.” The eyes rotated again in the head. “But the risk may be worth it. Some of the most dangerous ‘lost’ species have brought us some of the greatest gifts once they’ve been revived.”
Carmela was looking dubious. “Am I completely misunderstanding you, or are you actually talking about bringing them back from the dead?”
“Well, there’s dead and there’s really dead,” Mamvish said. “Of course we couldn’t do anything about the second kind. However, there are a hundred different kinds of stasis, soulfreeze, matter seizure, and wait-just-a-minute that species across the galaxy have invented to stave off entropy’s Last Word. Many species have seen a catastrophe coming and found ways to archive or preserve not just the news about what happened to them but themselves as well. In Mars’s case, the first steps have been toward finding out whether there were ever Martians—because your whole species seems to have some kind of unfinished business, or unstarted business, with Mars. If Martians did exist, the next step would then be to find out what happened to them. Once we know that, we can start working out how to re-evoke them—in a limited way, just to find out firsthand what happened to them. From there we can make the determination as to whether it’s wise to revive them wholly. And then—”
“We bring them back,” Kit said softly.
“Maybe,” Mamvish said. “We’ve got a lot of steps to go through before that. And the first one will be to—”
Nita suddenly felt as if something had kicked her in the chest. The breath went right out of her, for no reason she could understand, and she gasped in reaction. At t
he same moment, “I’m so sorry I’m late,” said another voice, a female one, out of nothing. “What did I miss?”
They all turned— Nita last: she was still having trouble finding her breath—and stared. Standing there among the rocks of the beach was what looked like a slender little housewife in her thirties, wearing a flowered housedress and flip-flops. She had boldly highlighted shaggy blond hair, a blinking, placid baby in a patchwork-patterned shoulder sling, and a yellow parakeet sitting on her shoulder.
Mamvish hurriedly put down the scratching foot, stood up, and inclined her head to the woman. “Irina,” she said, “this is more than a pleasure!”
Nita and Kit stared at each other, and Darryl’s eyes went wide, and even Ronan, for all his usual overlay of unconcerned coolness, sat up straight. Is that who I think it is? Nita said silently to Kit.
Look at the way Mamvish’s acting. It has to be—!
“I’m just passing through,” said the Planetary Wizard for Earth, and the baby chuckled and reached up to pull on her hair as she smiled around at them all, then at Mamvish again. “I heard you were going to be in the neighborhood, Archivist. I thought I’d wait until the excitement died down, and then drop by and pay my respects.”
“Planetary,” said Mamvish, bowing her head more deeply, “don’t be respecting me. I’m just migrant labor.”
Irina laughed; the parakeet fluttered its wings and scolded her, a little scratchy noise on the hot, sunny air. “And I’m just a housekeeper!” Irina said, reaching up a finger to the parakeet: it nibbled her nail. “Sure, the house is bigger than some. But it’s the empty house next door that’s really got me interested. I hear you’ve finally found what you were looking for—”
“We were about to go up to the site to look at the find,” Mamvish said. “Do you have time to accompany us?”
“For a few minutes, surely.”
Mamvish put her head up and cocked one eye at the Sun. The other stayed trained on the ground, as if she was looking for something. Nita watched this with interest, suspecting that Mamvish was about to cast some kind of transit circle—