Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Kit backed away a step. Though he’d long since conquered his childhood nightmares about being attacked by giant bugs under his bed, he still wasn’t wild about them, especially when he met them all alone in the dark on other planets. It’s not really a bug, he thought, taking another step backward as the shining thing kept moving toward him.It’s not alive. It’s some kind of machine. A weird, alien machine, yeah, but machines are a lot of what I do. I really should be able to—

Kit lost the thought as little round, pebbly eyes suddenly bumped their way up out of the bug’s blunt head. They were opaque, featureless… but they were all looking at him. And then the back end of the bug lengthened out, got long and sharp, and curved up over its back.

Oh, no. Not a bug.

It was a scorpion.

At least it doesn’t have claws yet, Kit thought, still backing up. And then the creature reared up, starlight sheening down it, and the many legs consolidated, getting thicker, sharper, more angular. Six legs, three and three, in the back: four legs, two and two, in the front, upraised, each of these splitting down the middle near the ends, the razory vee of newly created claws starting to scissor together. The clawed forelegs lifted, pointing at him as the claws worked against each other. Those eyes fixed on Kit more determinedly as the scorpion-thing came at him, faster now, on the point of breaking into a run—

Kit tried to gulp, and failed, dry-mouthed. “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” he said, probably a lot more loudly than he needed to. Still backing up, he reached behind him to zip open his otherspace pocket. He’d taken to keeping a little surprise in there if he ran into a situation like this.

Barely six feet away, the metal scorpion stopped short. The unsettling gaze of all those little eyes was still fixed on Kit, and it suddenly seemed as if the creature or machine was waiting for something specific from him, or not seeing something it expected. Kit, too, froze. What does it want? What am I supposed to—?

It lifted its claws. Too late! Kit thought, pushing his hand into the otherspace pocket and gripping the small, fizzing wizardry that lay there, ready and waiting—

The claws angled up and out, not at Kit, but in four different directions, and light burst up from them— not true beams of light, but curving arcs of a thin, pale blue-green radiance. They leaped into the air fluidly, like water from a fountain, curving in to twist together high above the motionless scorpion. There they knotted together, then separated and streaked toward the dark horizon, sending Kit’s and the scorpion’s shadows reeling and stretching across the dark sand. Kit spun around, trying to see where all the streaks of light were going.

He had only enough time to make out general directions before the streaks faded and were gone. The scorpion lowered its claws, folding them across its front in a strange gesture, almost formal. The eyes dissolved back into the creature’s blunt head. It rolled up, the long, curved spine of the tail vanishing, the legs slipping into the body; the whole shape collapsed into itself, smoothed, solidified—

The superegg lay rocking gently on the sand, and finally came to rest on one end, perfectly still in the starlight.

Kit went over to the egg, knelt down beside it, almost scared to touch it. Finally he swore at his own nervousness, reached out and put one hand on the superegg. Nothing happened. The sense of latent energy within it was completely gone.

The sweat that had broken out on Kit was going cold: he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his life-support spell, and his breath was smoking as the air around him chilled down. Kit more or less collapsed onto the dark sand and sat there trying to recover, staring at the egg. Okay, he thought, I’ve broken it. And I’m now in the most trouble I’ve ever been in my life. But there’s no point in freezing myself solid.

Kit picked up his manual, flipped through it to check some spell syntax, and then spoke to the life support spell’s parameters, telling them to pull some energy from under the planet’s crust, where a little residual heat lay stored. Then Kit rubbed his face, flinching at the grit, which as usual was getting everyplace, and stared at the egg. Those were signals. But to what, or who—?

He flipped pages in the manual, turning to the place where local changes in the environment would have been logged. “What were those signals about?” he said to the manual. “Where were they headed?”

A long spill of characters in the Speech appeared all down the glowing page, filling it: the technical description of what the scorpion had done. Kit read down it, turned the page, and found it filling up with description, too— a bewildering amount of it. “Whoa, whoa! Save that. And just give me a graphic for now, okay?”

The page dimmed the Speech-charactery down to near invisibility and drew him a simple outline map of the Martian surface in a cylindrical projection, a wide rectangle. Four glowing arcs drew themselves outward from Kit’s location in Nili Patera, each a slightly different curve heading in a different direction: northeast, northwest, southeast, and much more deeply south. At each arc’s end, the map labeled itself with the English-language names of the targeted features and their equivalents in the Speech.

“All craters,” Kit said under his breath, noting their names: Stokes, Cassini, de Vaucouleurs, and Hutton. “Any response from anything there?”

The page blanked. Then a single character appeared, the Speech-symbol that could stand for either the number zero or a null response.

Kit let out a breath: his manual wasn’t normally so terse. “Okay,” he said. “Alert me if anything comes up…”

He closed the manual and put it aside, looking down at the superegg. “Might as well put you back…” Once more he hunkered down in front of the outcropping where it had been secreted. There was no point in leaving this out where one of the satellites orbiting Mars could see it.

What I’m really wishing, Kit thought as he put a hand out to the egg again, is that there was some way to cover what I just did. Or some really good excuse for it. But this wasn’t one of those situations where you could just tell the local authority figure the equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” and expect to get away with it. And as he thought that, a small pain struck Kit somewhere in his midsection. It’s not like I can claim my dog is eating much of anything anymore…

Kit made an unhappy face. His manual had been open and logging when this happened. Hiding anything of what had happened would be impossible. I just wish I wasn’t about to get yelled at for doing something wrong, and maybe get kicked off the whole project—

It then occurred to Kit that telling just one aspect of the truth might be enough to keep him out of trouble. All he’d have to say would be that something had made him do this: some urge he couldn’t resist had come over him. And that was true, Kit thought. Or at least it kind of feels like it was true—

But wait. Am I just talking myself into this because I don’t want to look stupid? And no matter how thoroughly he talked himself into believing this irresistible urge thing, one of the other wizards associated with this— Mamvish, Irina— might be able to tell him that the urge hadn’t been all that overwhelming: that he could’ve resisted if he’d really wanted to…

Then I wind up looking twice as dumb as I am already. And besides… The Speech, the most important part of wizardry, was about describing the universe as it really was. If you started taking liberties with that concept, you were doing the Lone Power’s work for it. And when working with the Speech, trying to describe things the way they weren’t could get very fatal.