Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Nita was still down on one knee as the scorpions kept pouring past her and into the chamber previous to the one they were in now. “They might have listened to me somehow. But I didn’t say anything.”

“You did,” Carmela said. “You got down on their level. That’s saying ‘hi.’ Actually, you said ‘hi’ first.”

Nita slowly stood up, pausing to rub her knee: it was sore. “Maybe. But I just saw myself doing that, and it seemed like the thing to do.” Better than the other thing, anyway!

“You’ve been doing envisioning work with T’hom, haven’t you?” S’reee said, turning all the way around to watch the last of the scorpions vanish into the next chamber. “I’d say it’s paying off.”

“I don’t know. What if there was something else I was supposed to do?”

“Like what?” Carmela said.

Nita shook her head. She was sweating, but feeling less panic-stricken as the last scorpions passed out of the chamber, the sound of metallic feet tapping on the stone now ticking away into silence. “Ree, where are they going?”

S’reee drifted up to the door, peered through. “That I can’t tell you,” she said, “because they’re gone. Vanished.”

Carmela turned and went to the doorway to join S’reee. “Just passing through?”

“I don’t think so,” Nita said, lifting her wand again and heading toward the next chamber. “They were guarding something. And they decided we were okay. That was their whole job, and when it was done, they went away.” She looked over her shoulder at the other two. “S’reee, can you feel it? That hot-spot wizardry’s shut down.”

S’reee turned, finned back through the air toward Nita and Carmela. “You’re right,” she sang. “And if they were guarding something…”

Nita was heading toward the next chamber, holding the wand high. The rowan wood, soaked in moonlight from fifty million miles away, made a sphere of silver radiance around her as she stepped through the wide, round portal into the next chamber.

For several seconds she saw nothing at all in the darkness. Nita turned leftward to see what was inside the chamber near the left edge of the portal. At first it seemed to be a straight wall. She went to it, holding up the wand for a better view. On closer inspection, she found that the wall wasn’t straight after all, but curved like all the others. The curve was just very, very slight, because this was by far the biggest room they had come to as yet. And as far as the halo of light from the rowan wand spread, from side to side and high up into where the light was lost in the gloom, nearly every inch of the wall was covered with writing.

Nita reached out and touched the wall. The writing was engraved in long, thin columns in the stone, not very deeply, the characters just a few shades paler than the darker, redder surface. “It’s warm,” Nita said. “How can it be warm? The volcano here hasn’t been live for thousands of years.”

Nita turned to look out across the chamber. It was massive, easily a thousand feet across. S’reee and Carmela came in behind her, Carmela with a flashlight and S’reee bringing her own wizard-light with her— several sources of it hovering around her like a little school of pilot fish. The three of them gazed across the huge space.

“One about us,” S’reee sang softly, waving her fins gently to turn and look at the vast expanse of the dome, “what have we found here? This must fill half the mountain.” She tilted all of herself back at an angle, gazing up into the dark; her wizard-lights swam up through the dark above as if through water, looking for something like a surface and for a long time not finding it. It was many moments before their radiance made several small diffuse circles against the uppermost curve of that immense bubble.

“I don’t think this is natural,” Nita said, walking along the wall. “It might have started out as a bubble in the stone once. But this—” She touched the writing again. It was nothing like the graceful curvatures and ligatures of the Speech, but angular and sharp, line after line of strung-together structures like little trees with branches growing out of them at strange angles. “This has all been smoothed down. And isn’t this weird?”

She moved on, puzzled, for she wasn’t able to make anything of the writing. “What?” Carmela said, leaning over Nita’s shoulder to gaze at the engraved characters.

“They were running up and down before. Now they’re going side to side.”

Carmela reached out past Nita to touch the letters, the light of the rowan wand catching in her eyes. “Look, the characters flip. Mirror images.” She peered at them more closely. “Boustrophedon…”

It wasn’t a word in the Speech. “What?”

“Boustrophedon,” Carmela said, tracing the characters with one finger. “When the words in a sentence go in one direction to the end of the line, and then the next line goes back in the direction it came from. You read from right to left, then left to right. Or up to down, then down to up.” Carmela walked along to the next section of writing. There were panels of it, separated by thin engraved borders or sometimes just by empty space. “People used to plow their fields that way. That’s where the word comes from.”

Nita went after her, looking across the dome. “More light?” she said to the rowan wand.

It brightened until it was as blinding as an arc light, and Nita winced from the brilliance, looking away and across the great floor as she held up the wand. It took that much light to enable her to see all the way across the chamber and to be sure that there were no more visible entrances or exits: the portal they’d come in by, the one the scorpions had guarded, was the only way in. “This must have been important,” Nita said. “Could this be a history? Mars’s history?”

“Or the Martians’,” S’reee said. She drifted closer to one wall, peered at it. “No way to tell. I can’t make fin or fluke of it. You?”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Usually knowing the Speech lets you understand any writing you see.”

“Not always,” S’reee said, drifting down the wall to look at another patch of writing. “That condition obtains when the manual can find live members of the species to contribute the underlying context from which content can be understood. But when a race has died out, you may only get content with no context, which isn’t a lot of use. And there are recensions of the Speech that have been completely lost over time, because all other information about the species for which they were intended has also been lost…”

“Even for the manual? Is that possible?” Nita said.

“Entropy’s running,” S’reee said. “And the medium it runs in is time. Even the manual’s subject to that, in its merely physical manifestations.” She let out a long, hissing breath.

“Neets,” Carmela said, “S’reee, look. Pictures—”

They came over to look at part of the wall in front of which Carmela stood, deeper into the chamber. Here, arranged in a column stretching up the curve toward the ceiling, there were images, mostly geometric shapes, precisely scribed into the dark red stone. But it was hard to be sure what their relationship was: some of them seemed to run into one another. Nita reached up to touch one, a series of concentric circles with a single small circle inside them. She took a long breath. “Is that supposed to be the Sun?”

S’reee, looking over Nita’s shoulder, leaned in very close, until her nose almost touched the stone. “If it is, we may have a problem,” she sang softly. “Because we’ve got a couple of extra planets.”

Nita, too, leaned in, looking closely at the diagram. Four smallish worlds, and then a slightly larger one, and beyond that, four great worlds, and five tiny planets out in the farthest orbits.