Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

S’reee’s eyes were unfocused. “Yes. There’s no missing Darryl’s life sign, in particular; it’s unique.” She flipped a fin, looked up at Nita.

Nita nodded, not looking up from the manual: there was something strange about the diagram she was examining. Not knowing what to make of it, she flipped back to the messaging page and touched Kit’s note to bring the contact up to live status. “Hey,” she said in the Speech. “What’s going on up there?” And she waited.

Nothing.

She looked up. Carmela was giving her an odd look. “Is there a delay?” she said. “Mars is a long way off.”

Nita shook her head. “Lightspeed isn’t an issue for the manuals.” She turned back to the map on Kit’s précis page, scrutinized it. “I don’t like this. The manual says we can’t go there.”

“What?” S’reee said.

“The manual says the sites are ‘Unavailable, blocked by previous declaration, investigation ongoing, comm functions blocked during evaluation.’”

“Whose previous declaration?” Carmela said, “and whose investigation? Blocked by who? And what—?” The rest of what she was saying got lost in the splash of S’reee submerging again.

“What?” Carmela said. “Did I say something wrong? What freaked her?”

Nita shook her head. “She’s looking it up in detail. She gets her wizardry data from the Sea. She’s more senior than me— she may be able to find out more.”

Some moments later, S’reee surfaced and blew. “All I get is what you’re getting,” she said to Nita. “Definitely something to do with the superegg’s transmission this morning— there are multiple delayed wizardries working. But don’t ask me what they’re doing, I can’t get an analysis. Because what I’m getting makes no sense. The Sea can’t give me enough context for a translation.”

“Alien wizardry,” Nita said, getting more unnerved by the second. “Dangerous, you think?”

“No telling. But that fifth site isn’t blocked. There’s some kind of wizardry there that’s alive and running, but not doing anything …just waiting.”

“And transit’s not prevented?” Carmela said.

Nita shook her head, showed Carmela the manual page. “There. Get the coordinates and do the honors. We can have a look at that hot spot: and when we’re actually on the planet, we might be able to reach the guys. Or get a better idea of what’s going on with them.”

Carmela looked at the manual page and spent a moment tapping numbers into the remote. Nita was surprised to hear it make a little series of electronic beeps, at which Carmela’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, you can do that?” she said in the Speech. “Sorry.” She pointed the remote at the manual, pressed a button.

The remote chirped; Carmela looked up at Nita. “It can take a scan. I didn’t realize.”

“hNii’t,” S’reee said, “you had a cloaking routine ready? Putting it up around us might be good. About a twenty-meter radius—”

Nita tucked the manual away, pulled the spell out of the charm bracelet, and said the words that kicked the spell into action. As she did, S’reee levitated gracefully out of the water, keeping just an inch-thick shell of it around her so her skin wouldn’t dry out. “I’ve got all the air we’ll need. K!aarmii’lha?”

Carmela raised the remote, hit what would normally be the channel-change button.

They vanished.

***

It was mid-afternoon on the red-brown southern slopes of the Martian volcano where two girls and a humpback whale appeared a second later. Away to the east, under the thin, filmy clouds of a windy day, the vast shadows and chasms of the westernmost end of Valles Marineris cut away from them in dust and haze toward the edge of the world, where a thin veil of pink-tinted sky hid the canyon’s far end.

Carmela looked at the long, gentle slope of the worn old mountain behind them. “You know what you could build here? The universe’s biggest ski jump. What’s this place called, anyway?”

Nita had to smile as she and S’reee looked around. “Arsia Mons.”

Carmela snickered. “Sounds like one of Ronan’s rude Irish words…”

“Not this time,” Nita said, pulling out her manual to cross-reference between the map and the downslope terrain. “In the old days, people saw this was a bright spot that got dark sometimes. They couldn’t see the cause— this big spiral of dust that updrafts from the volcano’s side every winter.” She looked up the long, shallow curve of the volcano’s slope, where many dark-colored rocks were whitened on top by the last winter’s dustfall. “But the astronomers back then thought maybe there were trees here, growing leaves and losing them again. So they called it Arsia Silva, the Arsine Forest, after someplace in Italy. Later when the telescopes were better they got rid of the word for forest and put in ‘mons’ for mountain, but they kept the ‘Arsia.’”

Carmela stared at Nita. “Have you been secretly studying this stuff?”

Nita laughed. “I have been not so secretly listening to Kit’s lectures on Martian stuff every five minutes! For months! So some of it I remember.” She shook her head. “That pillar of dust is famous: it gets twenty miles high, sometimes. These, though… these got found later.” They looked down at the side of the volcano, all spotted with deep black holes.

“They call them skylights,” Nita said, bouncing down toward the closest of them. “Don’t ask me why, but they gave them all girls’ names. Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Nikki—” She stopped. “Can’t remember the others.”

Abbey and Jeanne, said Bobo.

Nita nodded. “Seven of them, anyway.”

“But there’s another one,” Carmela said. “Is that where we’re going?”

Nita looked at the manual, looked at S’reee, nodded. “That’s the one.”

“I shall call it Louise,” Carmela said, and bounced off that way as if everything was settled.

Nita made a strangled growling noise.

The more you do that, Bobo said, the more she’s going to keep saying it. I’d let it pass, if I were you.

Nita went after Carmela. S’reee glided along beside her. “What’s the problem with the name, hNii’t?” she said.

Nita shook her head. “Long story. It’ll keep.” She pulled the atmosphere spell out of her charm bracelet to make sure it would hold up under the extra distance that Carmela had bounced ahead.

“My air shell’s much bigger than yours,” S’reee said. “Don’t worry; it’ll cover us all.”

They caught up with Carmela at the edge of the further skylight. All three paused to look down into the darkness. “Deep,” S’reee said. “Thirty or forty of my lengths…”

“At least,” Nita said. She unzipped her otherspace pocket and pulled out one of the little wizard-lights she carried for such circumstances— just a long sentence in the Speech made virtually physical, then rolled up and compressed to about the size of a pea.

She pinched it and said the trigger word. The spell came alive in her hand, a clear white light about as bright at the moment as a sixty-watt bulb. This she dropped down into the cave. It floated down about as fast as a large leaf might fall from a tree.

“Look at the top level of that,” S’reee said, peering down into the darkness. “It’s almost perfectly spherical.”

“Like a bubble,” Nita said. “You think that’s what happened here? Some old volcanic eruption. The gases built up in the lava; a bubble formed real near the surface. Then cooled off really fast—”

“And then the top blew off it,” Carmela said. She kicked gently at the stone at the very edge of the skylight. A fragment flew off, fell gently down into the huge hole after the wizard-light. “Yeah. Look how thin that was. If you had a bubble half a mile wide…”