Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Darryl glanced up from his WizPod to peer down into the crater. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Got some kind of secondary locus popping up.”

“Where?” Kit said, trying to see what Darryl was looking at.

“Crap, it’s gone.” Then Darryl pointed. “No, there it is again. See it? No, more to the right. Maybe five miles to the right of the green zone. It flashed. There it goes again—!”

They all peered down at the spark of fire Darryl had spotted. It was a small, hard, bright light, faintly pinkish. And as Kit looked at it, it moved just slightly, a tiny jitter.

And he realized what it was. He looked over his shoulder to judge the Sun’s angle, and then back down at the little sharp light. “That’s not the wizardry!” Kit said.

Ronan stared at him. “What?”

“It’s a reflection!”

“From what??”

“Solar panels!”

Now it was Darryl’s turn to stare. “What would there be to— Oh my God!”

Kit nodded, sweat popping out on him. “I never come at it from this side,” he said. “Or from all the way up here on the edge! I always just transit straight in. That’s why the name de Vaucouleurs didn’t remind me of anything in particular at first. But now it does. It’s the next crater over from Gusev!”

Ronan’s eyes went wide. “What, you mean that’s one of the wee rovers down there? Opportunity?”

“No,” Kit said. “Spirit!”

Ronan said something in Irish that didn’t sound like a compliment. “Could this get any fecking worse?” he said. “It can’t see us, can it?”

“Not at this range,” Kit said. “It’s what else she might see that worries me now. If the same kind of stuff starts happening here as happened back at Stokes—”

“NASA’ll start seeing things they shouldn’t,” Darryl said. “Come on, we’ve gotta get down there and protect the rover. Blind it somehow, block its vision—”

“Vision won’t be enough,” Kit said. “It’s got other sensors. Either way, we can’t sit this one out up here.”

Ronan said something else in very annoyed Irish. Darryl grabbed his arm. “How close do you want us?” he said to Kit.

“Not in the green,” Kit said. “We need a few minutes to work something out. A hundred yards away or so.”

Darryl grabbed Kit’s upper arm. Things went black—

—then went beige. Kit took a long breath: though he knew Darryl was careful about making sure their air and spells came with them all when they jumped, there was always the chance that some day he might get overexcited and slip.

“You know,” Darryl said as they came out in the middle of more beige, rubbly ground, “I can just hear you thinking sometimes, your Kitness. I like breathing, too, you know? I’m real used to it. So cut me some slack. Where’s your little friend?” He stared around him. “And I keep meaning to ask: why isn’t this place red when it always looks that way in the pictures?”

Ronan snickered. “It’s not that red in those,” he said, while Kit tried to get his bearings. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if they adjust the images just a wee tiny bit. People don’t like the Red Planet being beige. Gotta give the public what it wants.”

Kit glanced around, finding his landmarks. The spot where Darryl had landed them wasn’t so far from his own usual transit spot: as he looked around, the landmarks started falling into place one by one. The Apollo 1 hills off northward, the Columbia hills to the west told him that they were standing on the elevated ground called Home Plate, with its many eclectically named pits and rocks and rises—Missoula, Palanque, Lutefisk, Clovis, Larry’s Lookout, McCool Hill. And not far from McCool, still close to the north-facing crater wall where she’d spent the last winter—

“There,” Kit said. He headed straight off across the rocky landscape at the bounce. Even without the high angle of a few moments ago to give the Sun something to reflect from, there was no mistaking the small, angular shape hunkered down against the rising ground in the near distance, its little camera pole sticking up just above the line of the little sand dune in which the rover was presently stuck. Good thing she’s too small to be carrying seismic sensors, Kit thought as Ronan and Darryl came hurrying along in his wake. Otherwise there’s no telling what they might think was going on up here once they get the data to download…

As Kit got closer, he slowed. There was no use kicking up more dust on the hardworking little machine— it had more than enough trouble with what the winter dust storms left layered on its solar panels. The scientists at NASA had for the past couple of years been surprised and pleased that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers had managed to keep working for so long: mostly, they theorized, because of passing dust devils that blew the accumulated storm dust off them. The wizards who came up here every now and then with cans of compressed air and puffer brushes while the probes were asleep were delighted to let the scientists think that—and careful not to remove enough dust at any one time as to make them suspicious.

Kit, having occasionally done this duty when there was the “excuse” of dust devils in the neighborhood, waved at the others to drop back and wait where they were. He looked carefully to make sure that the main camera hadn’t moved while they were approaching it. Then Kit hunkered down quietly on Spirit’s blind side and put his manual on the ground, paging along to a two-page spread that showed him a list of the rover’s diagnostics.

After glancing down it to see what was working and what wasn’t, he waved at Ronan and Darryl; they came quietly up to join him. Ronan raised his eyebrows, tapped one ear: Can it hear?

Kit shook his head. “Look at all the dust and dents,” Darryl said. “Poor beat-up baby.”

Kit nodded. “She’s had a bad time. The front right wheel got stuck a couple years ago, so they had to drive her backwards after that, dragging the bad wheel. Then the dust storms came. She almost died altogether: they had to shut her down, wait out the dark time for a few months …Things kept breaking. The dust started scouring off the protective coating on the solar panels. They got covered so often that her batteries started draining too fast and her software started glitching. One instrument had to be shut down, it got so much dust in it. She got stuck in soft dirt or sand a bunch of times, and this last time they couldn’t get her out. But she just wouldn’t stop working.” He shook his head. “Even now, when she’s out of communication: still doing her job. Tough girl…”

He reached out a hand, then stopped; there were too many things he might break or mess up. “Not to cut short a touching moment,” Ronan said, “but the green’s getting close. You’re the machine specialist: just tell her to close down for a little while.”

Kit shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”

“Why not? She’s full of computers. Should be fairly smart as machines go.”

“That’s the problem,” Kit said, looking at the oncoming flow of green. “The more complex a machine gets, the harder it is to persuade to do something unusual. It’s not like you’re trying to talk, say, an electric can opener into doing stuff. A can opener’s life isn’t long on excitement, so it’s glad to do something strange! But a machine with a lot of complex programming grows a sense of purpose. Even loyalty.”

Kit frowned. “And when you try to get it to do something weird all of a sudden, it wants reasons. Especially if it’s got much security built into it. Machines can get suspicious of your motives, whether they understand what wizardry’s about or not.”

“I don’t think we’re gonna have any time for a prolonged conversation,” Darryl said, looking east. The tide of green light was running toward them fast. “Look, if she’s not in communication with Earth right now, what’s the problem?”