Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Behind Dairine, Ronan and Darryl were utterly failing to control their snickering. Dairine glared over her shoulder at them; and they both immediately got extremely interested in Darryl’s WizPod.

Carmela was scowling. “Mela, you did a great job on that,” Carl said, “but we may never know exactly what it meant.” He stretched his legs out. “Oracular utterances all over this galaxy have at their heart the need to be able to stretch to a lot of different interpretations, so that as temporospatial conditions change around them, they’ll still be suitable.”

“And whatever the prophecy might have meant,” Kit’s pop said, “there’ll be Martians after all.” He paused, trying to sort the tenses out. “Will have been Martians?”

Irina sighed. “Were Martians,” she said. “But not anymore.”

That made Kit look up. “What?”

Mamvish exchanged a one-eyed look with Irina, then glanced back to Kit. “Well, naturally we checked the backtime history once the relocation was completed,” she said. “But they didn’t last very long, as it happens: only seventy thousand years.”

Nita thought suddenly of the odd itching she’d felt in the back of her brain. “You were discussing that possibility right then. When we were setting the timeslide. And you already suspected things were going to turn out this way.”

Irina sighed. “Yes,” she said. “The Shamaska-Eilitt may indeed have been the system’s oldest species, which meant it was no surprise that they were also showing signs of being uvseith. A diagnosis which this outcome has confirmed.”

Carmela frowned. “‘Moribund’?”

Irina cocked an eye at her. “Yes,” she said. “The word’s far more emphatic in the Speech, of course.” She glanced over at the parents. “It says a species has only a short time to survive.”

“Some species simply can’t live long off the planet that engendered them,” Mamvish said. “Their own personal kernels are wound up too closely with the planet’s. In the case of the Shamaska-Eilitt, their own bodies’ kernels were irreparably damaged when their planet was destroyed. Long-lived as they were, they were already doomed.”

“And they were in denial about it,” Irina said, “which happens all too frequently in such cases. The problem with their body change after the destruction of Shamask-Eilith wasn’t that the Martian climate changed; though of course it did. The real trouble was that they were never really suited to live anywhere but on their own world, and any change would have killed them in time. Moving to a new world only made the problem worse, speeding up the damage they were doing themselves. And as Kit confirmed, the stasis made it worse still. Some of the irrationality we saw from them would definitely have been a result of holding themselves in their already-damaged state for so long. Had they succeeded in moving to Earth, they wouldn’t have lasted long there, either.”

“So they would have invaded Earth eventually,” said Nita’s dad, “and Earth would have killed them.” He took a drink of his iced tea. “Sounds familiar, somehow. Archetype?”

Irina nodded slightly. “Hints and warnings of what would have been or may yet be do slip into myth and popular culture from the deep past and the possible future,” she said. “It’s a hall of mirrors, the universe: in the spiritual sense, anyway. And sometimes it’s hard to tell which end of time the images and reflections belong to.”

She glanced over at Kit. “That’s the cause of the hwanthaet you were caught up in— the timeloop proximity syndrome. To be repeatedly positioned near the effect end of a timeloop when you were also involved in the cause, but before the cause has happened, or when it’s just starting to execute— well, the human brain’s circuitry doesn’t take well to that. You got off pretty lightly, though, in the physical sense. It helps to be young. And the Powers wouldn’t come down on you too hard for infractions that you committed due to the aftereffects of the good deed you were about to do in the past.”

Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Sounds like you need a whole different language for this kind of thing.”

“It’s a subset of the Speech,” Mamvish said. “Intratemporal syntax takes a while to learn. But some species pick it up entirely too quickly.” She looked with amusement at Nita and Kit.

Nita, now sitting cross-legged on the ground in jeans and a tank top and feeling very relieved to be that way again instead of in filmy, glittery Shamaska women’s wear, was paging through her manual, looking at the revisions that had been made over the last day. Now she looked up at the more senior wizards. “Irina,” Nita said, frowning, “this is weird. When I checked the manual before, it said the kernel had been missing for half a million years. But now it says it hasn’t been missing after all.”

Irina looked over Nita’s shoulder at her manual. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Tom, you didn’t enable her need-to-know updates.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “It has been busy around here lately, what with recovering from the Pullulus and so forth.”

Irina gave him an amused look. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “That wasn’t a critique. Anyway, you’ve just had your end-of-decade evaluation: you know where you stand.”

She glanced up from the page to Nita again, and Nita saw that the open page had already changed its content. Now she was looking at a comment box that said, Temporal adjustment emendation: timeline shift. Previous timeline details archived, viewable on need-to- know basis.

She shook her head and smiled. “When everything settles down, Time’s arrow is always seen to run straight,” Irina said. “After the solution you three came up with yesterday, the kernel’s always been present on Mars in real time—”

“Though blocked away from the inhabitants’ use,” Mamvish said. “Jupiter’s Planetary kept a lightpatch on it while the Shamaska-Eilitt were there.”

Irina nodded. “But the manual still remembers the previous timeline.”

“As well as the solution you and Khretef arrived at,” Mamvish said. “The binding power inherent in Ponch’s leash let us set aside, in the timeslide, the additional power to build the superegg, to lock the Cities’ stasis so that it couldn’t be interfered with, and for Khretef to encode the Nascence with the personal data that would be needed to lead you to Mars, and impel you to bring the future about. And the past.”

“A past that worked,” Nita said. “One where Aurilelde wouldn’t be afraid anymore, and would be able to have the Red Rede written in a way that would produce this result. Instead of the one her fear of losing Khretef had been showing her.”

She glanced over at Irina, who was gazing at her with a strangely assessing expression. “And it actually worked,” Nita said.

Irina nodded and had a drink of her iced tea, finishing it. “Yes, it did,” she said. “Since we’re all sitting here, and the world’s more or less as we left it… and we’re not all speaking Martian.” She smiled.

“So she really became Nita— or like Nita— in a way,” Kit’s pop said. “The way Kit’s counterpart became like him.”

“That’s right.”

“Smart choice,” Nita’s dad said, and got up to stir the charcoal.

Kit was looking thoughtful. “But which really came first?” he said. “What we did, or what they did?”

“Oh, please,” Ronan said, rubbing his face. “It’s the chicken-or-egg thing again. And you get completely different answers depending on whether you ask the chicken or the egg.”

“Let it go, your Kitness,” Darryl said, stretching. “Life’s too short. Let’s stick to playing with the future. Soooo much more malleable.”