Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“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 the 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—

Shadow fled outward from Mamvish and ran swift as a blast wave across the ground, past the rocks on which they were all sitting, out toward the sea and up the face of the cliff. In that shadow, Mamvish glowed. The green-gold shimmer under her hide was replaced by darkness in which burned a great complexity of characters and sentences in the Speech, writhing and coiling about one another, flowing out onto the darkened ground. The shadow beneath them now filled with those words and characters, and as Mamvish stretched her head upward into the air, the sound of the surf behind them was drowned out by what seemed a whole chorus of voices chanting in the Speech, like a great concord of wind instruments: Mamvish’s voice, but seemingly multiplied many times over, as if she was somehow reciting all the different parts of the spell at the same time.