Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“What happens to the kernel now?” Nita said. “There are still no Martians to manage it. Or no Martians again.”

“The kernel’s at large in the body of the planet. But I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” Irina said.

“One more thing for you to do,” Mamvish said. “As if you don’t already have enough!”

Irina shrugged and smiled more broadly; the parakeet started idly nibbling her hair. “It’ll be easy enough to keep in tune until Mars gets new tenants, some of whom will be wizards and can take on the job. People from here, or from somewhere else— who knows? Earth won’t be astahfrith forever.”

She sighed. “But for the moment it is, and there are problems that need to be tended to.” Irina stood up, smiling at Nita’s father. “Mr. Callahan— thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.” She picked up her baby, which was lying nearby snoozing in a carrier seat: the parakeet on Irina’s shoulder ruffled its feathers up and made a few little scratchy noises. “Dai, cousins,” she said, and vanished without so much as a breath of breeze.

Mamvish, too, stood up, a process which took several moments, and which Kit’s mom and pop watched in fascination. “I too have a few things to deal with,” she said. “Friends, cousins—”

“Oh, goodness, I almost forgot. Wait a moment,” Nita’s dad said, and got up, heading for the house. A minute or so later he was back with a plastic carrier bag from one of the local supermarkets, looking to be stuffed very full of something heavy.

Mamvish’s eyes started to go around in her head as she looked toward Nita’s father. Nita, seeing this, poked Kit and Dairine and gestured for them to get out of the way.

“Oh, cousin!” Mamvish said. Nita’s father held up the bag to her, and Mamvish took it from him with some haste. “You are my friend!”

“Stop by again in a couple of weeks,” Nita’s dad said. “The new crop will need some thinning.”

Mamvish’s grin went right around her face. A moment later she, too, was gone.

Nita shut her manual and put it away, looking over at Tom. “So,” she said.

“So that’s it,” Tom said. “Nice job, you two.” And he gave Kit an amused look. “Even the part when you went around the bend. Not entirely your fault, and not nearly as far as you might have gone. So all is forgiven, and we’re all done.”

Nita reached out for her own iced tea. “Are we done?” Nita said. “The Lone Power hasn’t turned up yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “It hasn’t? You sure about that?”

Nita sat still and considered for a moment.

“Uh-huh,” Tom said. He pushed back in his chair and looked down into his iced tea as if something might jump out of it. “Far be it from me to generalize about wizardry,” he said, “or the way it affects people. But it’s not uncommon for the younger wizard to see the Art, in the early part of his or her practice, as a very stratified thing: all blacks and whites, instead of the shades of gray that start to manifest themselves later in the way you see the world.”

“It’s not that we’re not in a massive battle of good against evil,” Carl said. “Of course we are! But that’s just one of many ways to characterize the fight. When you’re getting started, there’s a tendency to simplify things while you’re trying to work out how to classify all the weird new data you have to handle. And when you’re simplifying everything that way, and fueling that perception with the considerable power of a new wizard, very often you wind up forcing that kind of very straightforward, in-your-face, physically obvious role on the Lone Power.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute!” Nita stared at him. “We’re forcing It?”

Tom nodded. “The youngest wizards really don’t have any sense of how tremendous their power is, right out of the gate, and maybe that’s for the best. They just use it. And a surprising amount of the time, they win, even though they’ve compelled the Lone One to come out of hiding and confront them in the only way that gives It a chance of success when they’re at such power levels: direct physical intervention. That’s where it’s always weakest; for to manifest so directly, you need matter. And the Lone Power, being hung up on what It considers the essential superiority of spirit, really hates matter.”

Tom smiled slightly, glancing at the various parents, who were listening with interest. “Later on, as a wizard’s power decreases and his mastery of the complexities of the Art increases, the Lone One’s able to make more inroads into his life in the way it does with nonwizardly people: using a lot less power, but also being a lot more subtle.”

He looked at Nita and Kit and the other younger wizards. “Don’t think this makes It any less dangerous! You see how close It came to getting a result on Mars that would have absolutely delighted It, just by working underhandedly and using people’s own habits and weaknesses against them—sometimes even their strengths. Death and destruction on two worlds: the poor dupes doing the Lone One’s work for It, while It sits back and laughs.”

Carl shook his head. “This time, just in time, Kit got smart. So did you.” Carl looked at Nita from under his brows, his eyes glinting. “And so did Khretef. Together you found your way past the pitfalls the Lone Power hoped you’d be blind to, because you’d dug them yourselves. That’s always one of our great strengths, as wizards: we’re committed to looking out for each other, each seeing the thing the other is blind to. The tricky part is convincing each other that ‘blind’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stupid.’”

Tom sighed and finished his iced tea. “But sometimes we get lucky,” he said. “This last time, we all did. You kids especially. So now we get to relax.”

Nita’s dad reached down by the chair and picked up the iced-tea jug, filled Tom’s glass again. “Even you?”

Tom laughed. “I’ve got enough time off next weekend to want to talk to you about some landscaping.”

Nita got up and headed toward the house. Kit came along after her, catching up with her where she had paused to look at the spark of red light hanging low in the sky.

Nita glanced at it as he came up behind, then went back to gazing at Mars. “I’m not sure I got smart,” she said under her breath. “It felt completely like luck to me.”

Kit stared at her. “Neets, are you kidding? Think what you did with that passthrough—”

“If I hadn’t had Bobo to help, I could never have done it. You should’ve seen the size of that spell—”

Kit shrugged. “So? You used what you had. You used what you remembered you had. And what you had enough power to pull off. Every wizard does that every day with their manual or whatever they use…”

Nita thought about that. “I was the one who was kind of late about getting smart,” Kit said then. “Seemed like it took me forever to figure out that not only was Aurilelde’s take on everything all wrong, but so was Khretef’s. Even a wizard’s perceptions of wizardry can get screwed up under the right circumstances. Khretef was too busy believing everything Aurilelde told him. Aurilelde was too busy believing what her father told her.”

“And he was busy believing what Rorsik told him.” Nita shook her head. “And with that whole Shamaska-versus-Eilitt thing going on, nobody was thinking straight about anything. Except you, eventually.”

“They were too busy believing in stuff to look at what was true,” Kit said. “I just hadn’t been stuck in the middle of it for as long as they had.”

Nita nodded, leaning back against the fence. “So, no Martians after all? That’s got to come as a letdown.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. But he didn’t look away from the red star burning up there. “Still, it’s a neat place, and it needs taking care of. I’m not going to dump it just because its backstory’s changed.”