Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Kit pulled his arms out of the stone, stood up, and dusted his hands on his pants. As usual, the gesture was fruitless: there always seemed to be more dust to get rid of. “Yeah,” Carmela said, “and when you get home, make sure you stay away from the DVDs until you’ve washed up…”

Kit silently gritted his teeth. I can’t wait to dump her, he thought. And then we have to find a way to keep her from tagging along everywhere we go, or this thing’s gonna turn into a disaster…

“So,” Mamvish said. “Keep doing what you’re doing, cousins: and keep me informed. I’ll leave the shield here to protect what we’ve found. Dai stihó!”

And she was gone, without the slightest movement of the air inside the shield.

“Now there goes a professional,” Ronan said, shaking his head in admiration. “Irina’s right: we’re lucky to have her around.” He stretched, glanced around. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back myself. Conference call tonight?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Put a note in my manual— we’ll set a time. Big D?” He glanced at Darryl.

“Any time after dinner’s fine,” Darryl said. He waved and vanished, making a careless pop in the air.

Ronan rolled his eyes again. “Sloppy,” he said. “See you later—”

A second later Ronan, too, was gone, more silently. Kit looked at Carmela. “Well,” he said, “let’s get you back.” He reached into his otherspace pocket and pulled out the ready-set transit spell he used to get back to his bedroom from Mars. Uncoiling the long sentence in the Speech, he ran the glowing line of light through his hands until he found the part he was looking for. “We need to put your personal info in this,” he said. “Now, how much do you weigh this week?”

His sister glared at him. “Could you start with a more tactless question?”

“Sure. Your IQ?”

Carmela glowered. Kit grinned as he dropped the spell to the ground, and it stretched into a circle around the two of them and joined one end to another like a snake biting its tail. His hands were still tingling slightly as he started reciting the first part of the transit spell and the world started to go silent around them. It was strange that even as the silence built and the universe leaned in to listen to what Kit wanted, he could still hear that hissing, the dust whirling by…

4: Wellakh

Nita appeared as quietly as she could in the shade of the sassafras trees at the “wild” rear of her backyard. In between the bigger trees were tall thickets of smaller sassafras and wild mulberry scrub, screening the space from any possible view from the houses behind or to either side: but right now, the possibility of any neighbors noticing her was the least of her worries. Nita glanced up through the leaves at the late afternoon light, letting out a long, annoyed breath. Since when do I appear out here like someone who’s afraid to go in the house?

She slipped out from under the trees, heading up between the flower beds of the garden. Close to the house, not far from the chain-link fence and its gate, a tall, broad-crowned rowan tree stood in the middle of the yard, all covered with white flowers: an old rope swing hung from one branch. As she walked under the rowan, a long, leafy twig dropped down toward her: she put up a hand absent-mindedly and highfived it. “Liused…” she said in the Speech.

Sounding a little under the weather, the tree said.

“Ask me in an hour or so and I’ll give you a more detailed weather report.”

She opened the gate to the driveway. Her home life had once seemed so much more casual. Where’s your sister, dear? She’s on one of Jupiter’s moons, Mom… Oh, well. I guess that’s all right. Just as long as she’s not creating life again. After the shock of discovering that their daughters were wizards, Nita’s mom and dad had eventually become almost relaxed about it all. But along with Nita’s mother, those days were now gone. Her dad had become much more the heavy parent in the last six months.

You have to expect some changes, her counselor Mr. Millman had said. People handle their love and their loss in a hundred different ways. The results can be annoying until you understand what’s going on. Though Nita was starting to understand, the annoyance was a long way from abating. In Nita’s dad’s case, she suspected his new sternness about wizardly doings was because he knew the tendency toward wizardry had come down to his kids through his side of the family, and he was feeling as if this was somehow all his fault.

If only I could brainfix my dad and make him think that everything was just fine with Dairine. Well, Nita could brainfix him, but it would be the wrong thing to do, would be in complete contravention of the Wizard’s Oath, and would make her feel like a criminal. Nor was it any consolation that psychotropic spellings, the wizardries that could be used to change people’s minds about things, were such a nuisance to work, had such a horrible backlash on the wizard who worked them, and worked for so short a time before everything went back to the way it had been before. The irony wasn’t lost on Nita that a wizard could so easily change concrete physical matter, but practically had to sweat blood to change something as immaterial as someone else’s thought.

Or if I could only clone my sister. Make an extra one who’d stay home and behave, so Dad wouldn’t notice what was going on with the real one…

Then Nita groaned, not believing she was seriously having this idea. The last time there’d been a cloned Dairine around, during her sister’s Ordeal, the complications had been nearly endless.One of her’s enough for any universe! Or the whole sheaf of them. Besides, a Dairine that hangs around behaving all the time? Instantly identifiable as a fake.

She paused on the back doorstep, trying to devise some kind of strategy for handling her dad. His stern moods could be hard to derail—

“You could come in, you know,” said a voice from the kitchen, through the screen door. “It’s not you I’m going to ground.”

That sounded promising, but it didn’t seem smart to relax just yet. Nita went in.

Her dad was rooting around in a cupboard next to the stove; a full coffee cup stood on the counter. “Are we out of sugar?”

“We just got a whole bag last week,” Nita said, leaning against the counter. “Is sugar why I came all the way back from Mars? We were just getting to the good part!”

“And you can go back,” her dad said, coming down with a crumpled up, near-empty bag of store-brand sugar, “as soon as you sort things out here at home.”

“What ‘things’?”

“Your sister,” her father said, “was missing from school today.”

Thought so. Nita rolled her eyes. “Daddy, there’s only two days of school left before summer. You know that she—”

“I don’t know that she,” her dad said, sounding annoyed, letting the cupboard door fall shut and pulling a spoon out of the silverware drawer, which he hip-slammed shut. “And I really dislike getting these calls from school telling me she’s nowhere to be found, after she promised she’d stop cutting classes to run all over the galaxy!”

Nita went into the dining room and flopped down in a chair. This is not my fault, why am I having to deal with this?

“So where is she?” her dad said. “Did she mention to you where she was headed?”

“No. I have no idea.”

“It’s not just that she wasn’t at school,” her dad said. “She also hasn’t done her chores. The kitchen was a mess when I came in, and the garbage didn’t go out this morning for the guys to pick up, after it was already a pickup late because of her ‘forgetting’ it last week. The thing’s nearly overflowing! And this happens even after I had a big thing with her after that about not leaving the planet before she’s done her work at home! For a few days it looked like she was going with the program. But now…”