Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Nita buried her head in her arms. This is a disaster. I can see it coming now: here goes my whole summer…

In the kitchen, the spoon clinked in the cup for a few moments: then her dad followed Nita in and sat down beside her. He turned the mug around and around on the table between his hands. “Honey, your mom was always better than I was at knowing what was going on in Dairine’s head. Or at least having a clue.” She could hear from his voice that it cost her father something to make this admission. “I don’t have her to help me out now. So you’re going to have to step into the gap and give me a hand.”

Nita wanted to laugh helplessly, but this didn’t seem to be the moment. “I can check the manual to find out where she is, sure. But as for figuring out why she does what she does day by day, by reading her mind or something, it’s not going to happen, Daddy! It’s easy to keep someone out of your head if you know they’re trying to listen. And even when you can hear somebody’s thoughts, you can’t always tell what the thoughts mean to them.”

Her dad looked frustrated. “Then what use is mind reading?”

“Not a lot,” Nita said. “Talking still works best. Which is what wizardry’s about to begin with.”

“Well, talking’s not working real well with Dairine at the moment,” Nita’s dad said. “She keeps telling me she’ll stay in touch, be back home for meals, and then it doesn’t happen. This has to stop. And you’re going to see that it does.”

“Me? How? I can’t do anything about—”

“Oh yes you can. To begin with, you can find her and get her back here. And then you can find a way to make sure she behaves.” Nita’s father frowned. “I don’t want to play the bad guy here, but I can’t spend every day of the summer wondering where she is and what trouble she’s getting into! I have a right to some time off, too—an afternoon or an evening when I don’t have to be worrying about her. This kind of behavior isn’t fair to me!”

He looked at Nita. She let out a breath. “No,” she said, “guess it’s not.”

“Thank you. So I want to know from you every day where Dairine is, until I can start depending on her to let me know. And you go nowhere on any given day until you’ve satisfied me as to where she’s going to be and whether she’s okay.”

Nita heaved a heavy, exasperated sigh and stood up. “You want her back here right now?”

“Yes.”

“And then I can get back to what I was doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have to do something first,” Nita said.

“Do it. Then bring her home for dinner.”

Nita went slowly up the stairs, wearing a frown that she suspected looked much like her dad’s. I hate this. And it’s not fair to me. But there’s no way out. And he’s kind of right—

At the top of the stairs, she paused, looking out the window that overlooked the next-door neighbor’s front yard. So treat it like a challenge from the Powers… because maybe it is. Figure out what to do, and maybe the rest of the summer won’t turn into a horror story. Nita let out a breath. Think of Dairine as just another intervention, one more problem to be solved.

Then Nita swallowed—because whether she liked it or not, there was one step she had to take before she could start solving this particular problem.

In her bedroom she sat down on the bed and pulled her manual out of her otherspace pocket. For a long moment Nita sat hunched over, holding the closed book in her hands, looking at the scuffed blue buckram cover, then flipped the book open and paged through to the directory that listed wizards and their status.

She didn’t have a bookmark for the page she wanted, but then she’d never had cause to look up information about the world of the wizard in question: he’d just turned up in her basement while she was off on exchange. “I need the pages for the star system containing the planet Wellakh…”

The book in her hands riffled its own pages hastily from right to left, kicking up a little cool breeze. Nita smiled. “Can I get you to do this all the time when it’s hot out?”

The pages instantly laid themselves out extremely flat, open and still. “Okay, don’t get all annoyed,” Nita said under her breath, amused, and glanced at the open pages.

Wellakh’s golden-yellow star displayed in the first of a set of images on the left-hand page. The right-hand page filled with data about the system and its one inhabited planet: a précis of local system history, details about the species inhabiting the one inhabited world, and other general information. Nita read quickly through it, shaking her head; the planet’s history had been difficult. Not that anyone couldn’t tell that from clear out in space, she thought, looking at the image of the planet. Half of Wellakh was dappled with blue seas and lakes, much of its terrain red-golden with the planet’s idiosyncratic vegetation. There were even snowy mountains here and there. But the other half of that world was flat and scorched-looking, a slagged-down desolation. What would it have been like growing up there—knowing that anytime, your sun might get cranky and pull the same stunt again?

Nita touched the listing again. “Show me all wizards native to the planet for the last hundred Wellakhit years.”

The picture of the planet dissolved, replaced by a couple of columns’ worth of listing. Nita glanced down it, turned the page to see two more columns there. But that was all. Just a few hundred wizards. Not a lot for a world with a population of over a billion: mostly a pretty peaceful place. But the troubles they’ve got are big ones. And for the worst ones, they need a very special kind of wizard…

Nita started running down the list. Ke Nelaid, ROSHAUN… ‘See det Nuiiliat’? Oh, I get it, that’s the clan name the whole family’s listed under.

Under det Nuiiliat, a long list of wizards in that wizards in that family went right down the page. In fact, half the wizards on the planet were either in this family or related to it. Nita swallowed as she came to “Nelaid”… then realized this wasn’t the wizard she was looking for, but his father. Ke Seriv, NELAID. Residence— The address initially displayed in the Wellakhit language, then re-rendered itself in the Speech. Sunplace, the Borders, the Scorched Zone, Old Continent. Position: Sunlord-in-Abeyance. Power rating: 28.8 +/-.5. Nita’s eyebrows went up: that was a very high rating, certainly higher than Tom’s or Carl’s. Physical status: Corporate. Mission status: Presently unassigned; political considerations.

But this wasn’t the name Nita was looking for. I missed it: on Wellakh they change their names depending on who their father was. She glanced farther up the column, and a little shiver of pain went through her as she found the name she’d resisted looking up for so long.

Ke Nelaid, ROSHAUN. Former residence: Sunplace, the Borders, the Scorched Zone, Old Continent. Position: Son of the Sunlord, son of the Great King, descendant of the Inheritors of the Great Land, the Throne-Destined. Nita grimaced at the string of weighty titles that Dairine had immediately and somewhat scornfully reduced to “prince.” Then Nita looked down at what she had been avoiding, the single line underneath the description.

Physical status:

And she stared at the blank space after the words. There was nothing else there.

But that doesn’t make any sense—!

Nita scanned up the column again to other older names. The majority of their physical status listings showed the single long, curved-back streak of Speech charactery that meant one thing: Recall. Nita had seen it often enough in the listings of wizards from Earth, both those whose lives had been lost in the line of duty and those who had died in other circumstances. The implication seemed to be that once you were a wizard, maybe you never stopped being one unless you really wanted to— and even after you were dead, or what passed for dead in the Real World, the Powers That Be nonetheless considered you to still be on some kind of duty. It was, in a strange way, reassuring.