Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

I told you not to wait so long, said the creature crouching at her feet.

That’s a lot of help now! Nita turned southward again, afraid of what she’d see.

Between her and the pale, pinky sun, something rose up to filter and dim the sky. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, now taller than the mountain, leaning over Nita, leaning farther out. The great sparkling arch of it stretched out over the top of the mountain-crater like a vast, downward-curving, smoked glass roof. The distant sun, caught in it, flickered and struggled to shine.

It was no use. The thickness of the water was putting it out. And Nita couldn’t transit. She was trapped unless she found the right words to say, figured out what to do. But she was never going to figure it out. There wasn’t going to be time. The wave arched, curved more deeply above her, then finally and immensely broke—

Nita had what felt like a lifetime’s leisure to watch the water fall slowly toward her in a massive, incompressible, high-curved slab. Gravity or no gravity, when that wave came down on her, its mass would crush her just as flat as if it was stone and not water. Too much mass at this speed, some dry and terrified part of her brain said in the background, didactic to the end. After all, g equals G times the mass of Mars over the square of the radius, so that would be at least three hundred seventy-two centimeters per second squared, and that means—

The roaring and the blackness smashed down onto Nita.

The world ended.

Nita sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath. It took some moments for her to register, as she stared around her, that everything was all right, that she was in her bedroom and all the usual safe, sane, familiar things were there. The posters on the wall, the library books piled up on the desk, the magazines stacked on her dresser, the shopping voucher plaques for the Crossings that Carmela had given her, saying, “I’ve only got about sixty of them; let me know when you need more…”

Nita worked on slowing her breathing down. After that, her first somewhat panicked impulse was to try to completely forget what she’d just seen and try to go back to sleep. But then she thought What, and find myself back in that dream again? Not a chance!

She got up, pulled down her nightdress, and went over to the desk, where she flipped her manual open. “Bobo,” she said, “boy, have I got one for the dream journal today!”

The manual’s pages riffled under her hands, laying themselves open to the section into which she dictated her dreams. General theme? said the voice in the back of her head.

Nita shook her head, sighed. “Water again.” You’ve been getting a lot of that lately.

Nita shrugged. “Probably something to do with the project at hand.” But an echo of an old memory said, Fear death by water…

She shook her head. Picchu had just been quoting some poet at the time. And that had been such a long while ago.Yet Peach’s prophecies were always reliable. Who knows how long they might have been good for?

Unfortunately, prophecy rarely came stamped with a sell-by date. Nita took the manual back to the bed, sat down cross-legged on top of the covers, and hurriedly dictated everything she could remember about the dream. “…And the wave,” she said at last. “I can’t believe I was standing there working out the acceleration of a falling mass on Mars.” She laughed. “And that all mixed up with the water… Kit’s thing is starting to get to me.”

Well, after yesterday, possibly that’s understandable.

“Might be right,” Nita said. She stretched and glanced at the clock. “Where is he?”

Where do you think?

Nita laughed. “Don’t know why I even bother asking.” She got up, tossing the manual to one side. “Did he leave me any messages?”

Just a routine notification of where he was going.

She let out a breath and pulled a dresser drawer open, pulling out a big sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. These Nita held up against her, looking down to check the length, then paused: the act brought back that strange image of the transit circle that wouldn’t flame to life. She let out a perplexed breath. Wizardry, she thought, not working…

That’s something that’s happened recently, the peridexis said.

Nita pulled the pants on. “Yeah. But I’ve dreamed that before.” She considered as she finished dressing. “Maybe it’s the wizard’s version of those horrible dreams people have where you forgot to study and there’s a test. Then you wake up in a cold sweat and find there’s nothing to it…”

The peridexis offered no opinion. Nita shrugged and headed downstairs.

Her dad was sitting at the dining room table, staring at the screen of his cell phone. “Morning,” Nita said, heading into the kitchen to make some tea.

“Fresh pot’s on the counter,” her dad said.

“Thank you.” Nita poured a cup, got a spoon and the sugar bowl from the counter, and put what were probably too many sugars in the tea, then left it there while she went rooting through one of the cupboards over the counter for cereal. “You playing around with your address book again?”

“No,” her dad said from the dining room, “it’s Dairine’s information coming through on the phone. The live feed of what she’s doing today. What was it you called it? A spinoff?”

“Secondary spin,” Nita said, reaching into the fridge for milk. “At least that’s what it’s called when we’re just excerpting nonwizardly stuff that’s also in the manual. We might need to invent another word for this.”

She brought in a bowl and a spoon and the cornflakes box, and sat down by her dad. “She’s gone already?”

“Yup,” her father said. He looked more resigned than annoyed. “She did her chores first, though.”

“Good.” Nita poured cereal into the bowl, reached for the milk, and then realized her tea was still in the kitchen. “Oops…”

She went back for it. When she came back, her dad was fiddling with the little joystick under the phone’s screen. “What are you getting?” Nita said. “Text, or—” She looked over his shoulder. “Oh, no, there she is! Hey, that’s pretty good.”

The screen wasn’t the best for this kind of work, but it showed clearly enough an image of the simulator hall in the palace at Wellakh, with Dairine standing in front of the slowly rotating Thahit-mirroring sunglobe. “Where are they, exactly?” her dad said.

Nita squinted at the screen. “See that icon over there on the left? If you hit that, it’ll bring up subtitles. There you go. It’s Roshaun’s home planet, Daddy. About twenty-three thousand light-years from here.”

Another figure moved into view on the phone’s screen. “And that’s— who? His dad?”

Nita nodded as she sat down and poured milk on her cereal. “Nelaid ke Seriv.”

Her dad studied Nelaid for a moment. “Tall guy.”

“Yeah, Wellakhit usually are. Their gravity’s a little less than ours, so their bones grow longer…”

Nita ate some cereal, then paused. “Oh, yeah— he wants to talk to you. At your convenience, he said. About Dairine.”

Her dad glanced up. “She’s not making some kind of trouble for him, is she?”

“Oh, no! I think—” Nita munched for a moment more. “I think he considers her a challenge. His family’s big on that kind of thing.” She wondered how much of the political situation it would be safe to get into with her dad, then decided to leave that to Nelaid. “I think he just wants to talk dad-to-dad stuff with you. To let you know he’s keeping an eye on her.”

Her father looked concerned. “Is fatherhood on other planets really that much like fatherhood here?”