Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars
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- Название:A Wizard Of Mars
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No one but you and her, the rock said, the other one. I know day, and night. Water snow and gas snow. That’s about it.
Kit nodded and put the rock down where he’d found it. As he did, the landscape around him lightened ever so slightly, a change he’d never have noticed on Earth: but here, now that his eyes were used to the dark, it made a difference. He looked up and saw the little moon Deimos rising, a planet-bright moving spark against the stars, about as bright as the International Space Station could have been at home when it went over. Deimos, though, moved quicker, almost imperceptibly changing the dark charcoal of the surrounding sands to a lighter shade as it climbed the sky, shifting the angle of the dim shadows in the craters below.
Kit stood up, dusted his pants off, and flipped his manual open to the Mars master project précis. He ran one finger down the entry there, pinpointing the spot where he and Mamvish and the others had been earlier in the day, then tapped the page so the coordinates would load into the on-planet transit spell he already had bookmarked. Another flip of pages brought Kit to the transit spell, its characters glowing under the page and ready to go. He began to read.
Even in this empty silence, you could hear the universe leaning in around you to listen: and for some reason, the listening seemed to Kit unusually acute. He finished reading. The breath went out of his lungs again as things went totally black—
—then lightened again, but not much. Once again, starlight, a clear night, no dust in the upper atmosphere: two in the morning at Syrtis Major. Kit stood in the shadow of that towering black dune and shivered again, though not from the cold. The surroundings were noticing him, watching him… with what underlying reaction, Kit couldn’t tell. All of a sudden Kit began to wish he hadn’t come alone. The watchfulness of the surroundings was feeling increasingly creepy.
He grimaced. Come on, what’s the matter with me? I’ve been here in the dark before. Nothing’s going to happen! Yet he thought of the dust devil earlier. That had taken even Mamvish and Irina by surprise. There’d just been something about the way that whirlwind came straight at them—
Kit shrugged. Just the planet noticing us, like Irina said. It does that all the time. In fact, it probably just noticed us harder because there was such a crowd there. Not to mention a Planetary …Kit glanced around, determined to get down to business and shake the absurd feeling that he had stepped into an early scene of a monster movie.
He went closer to the dune. This hasn’t moved. At least I don’t think it has. The dune’s face looked as it had the afternoon before: but as Kit glanced around, he saw with some disquiet that all the investigative party’s footprints had disappeared— even Mamvish’s. Did somebody clean up? But it seemed unlikely. On Mars, where the wind blew a lot of the time, tidying up evidence of your presence on the surface wasn’t as vital as it was on the Moon, where there was neither wind nor erosion and your sneaker’s footprint would last forever. The wind did it. Or another dust devil…
That moment at its heart had been astonishing. Yet now Kit found himself really unwilling to see another one of those bearing down on him. Why do I keep letting myself get the creeps about it? he thought. Let’s find that egg…
He flipped through the manual again to the detector routine that Síle and Markus had designed. It was a longish spell and hadn’t been set to execute automatically, but reading the whole thing would still take Kit less time than digging around in the dune in the hopes that the stony outcropping concealing the superegg would be easily found.This dune might have moved, after all. Let’s see.
Kit read the spell through—four long sentences in the Speech—and stood gasping again with the exertion, waiting for the spell to take. Gradually a wireframe of glowing lines superimposed itself across one spot on the dune low down and to the right, describing the outcropping’s humped-up appearance. Kit went over and checked the spell’s glowing Speech-symbols to see how deeply the outcropping was buried. Only a couple of feet. I was right; the dune hasn’t moved—
Yet still the uneasiness wouldn’t leave him. Kit shook his head and hunkered down in front of the slope of near-black sand, whispering the syllables of the Mason’s Word as he’d done the afternoon before. Then he reached in through the surface of the dune, then the surface of the stone, until he felt the odd smooth coolness under his hands again. He made sure of his hold on it, and pulled.
This time there was less resistance. Seconds later the cold stars above Kit were gleaming on the superegg’s dark surface, their reflections trembling in its mirrory sheen: and the tremor’s source was Kit. He stood up with the superegg in his hands, shivering all over with the utter strangeness of where he was and what he held. The age of this thing. Here it’s been for five hundred thousand years. And not by accident. Who left you? Why won’t you open up and let us find out what you’re meant to tell us?
He tried to stop his hands from shaking, and couldn’t. But after a few seconds, Kit realized that it wasn’t just his hands that were shivering. It was the egg.
In the first shock of realization, he almost dropped it— then stopped himself just in time. Who knows what a hard bounce could do to it, even in this gravity? And if I break it, I’m going to be in so much trouble—! The memory of Mamvish’s eye cocked at him flashed before Kit as he tried to steady the vibrating superegg: he thought of Irina’s level gaze as she eyed him like someone wondering if he was really as trustworthy as she’d been told. And I’m not. I shouldn’t be doing this. Why did I do this when I knew that I— Whoa!
Kit braced the shaking superegg against his chest, trying to steady it, but to no effect. Now it was lurching from side to side in his grasp, more and more violently every moment, until the thing actually vibrated right out of his grip and into the air. Kit clutched at the egg and just managed to get hold of it again before it gave one shake more violent than anything that had preceded it—
And split in three. Kit tried to keep hold of all the wedge-shaped pieces, but they struggled out of his hands like live things desperate to escape, bobbling up into the air in front of him. He made a grab at one, caught it, and pinned it under his arm while reaching for the second. But he couldn’t get a good grip on that wedge because of the way hugging the first one between arm and body was limiting his movement. The second wedge wrenched itself out of his one-handed grip and into the air again. The third wedge hit the ground, bounced in a puff of dark dust, and rebounded into the second—
And stuck to it. Kit stared as the two adhering wedges began, from the edges inward, to shred apart in midair, shattering into shining fragments that thinned to ribbons, then started tangling together like a nest of snakes. The third wedge tore itself away from Kit, leaped into the air, and shattered like its counterparts, then began stretching itself into ribbons and tangling itself up with the others. Seconds later they were melding together again, writhing and changing in a shimmer of consolidating metal—
The shrinking shape was still amorphous, like a bubble of water floating and wobbling in weightlessness. Then it put out projections, hurriedly, one after another—and fell. When it came down on the surface in another cloud of dust, it stretched itself out, long and sinuous, went flat like a steamrollered snake—
Now what?! Kit thought, panicked. The long, shining shape moved, twitched, and all at once sprouted from its sides what he initially mistook for long tufts of fur. The fur moved, though, waving, writhing—and the hair stood up all over Kit as the long, flat, blunt-ended shape stood up and slowly started moving toward him on entirely too many legs.
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