Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Interesting how for a change, instead of coming first, that idea came last. Once again Nita wondered whether the B-word was something she might safely say out loud, one of these days when the moment seemed right. It was a word she’d heard other girls at school use about Kit where Nita was concerned, though some of them meant it mockingly, in the “nerds of a feather flock together” mode. But that thought immediately cast a long shadow of fear across the whole train of thought: the idea that Kit might hear the word …and not agree. Where would Nita be then?

Everything would be ruined. Was it worth chucking years of shared wizardry, a partnership that until now had pretty much worked fine, over a word?

She sighed and mentally put the word back on the rack. Then Nita went back to listlessly flipping pages in the manual. Finally she shut the manual and got up, wandering into the kitchen to find herself a banana.

I’ll give him a couple of hours, Nita thought, and try him again later. There’s always the explosive thing that S’reee and I were discussing: she needs some more data on how fast we could dissolve them.

And on this this she dutifully got to work, researching seawater chemistry until well after noon, and finding out more than she ever wanted to about the unstable nitrates involved in solid explosives. Then she stuffed her manual into her backpack, let her dad know she was going out, and headed over to Kit’s.

The Rodriguezes had not yet returned from church, but Carmela was home: Nita found her and numerous cushions and notebooks strewn all over the living room. “I thought you’d have gone with them!” Nita said, unslinging her backpack.

“No,” Carmela said, “I don’t always go. Today was all about placating Helena, anyway.” She smiled slightly. “I wasn’t needed for that.”

“They having a special service or something today?” Nita said. “Seems like a long time.”

“Oh, no,” Carmela said, “church is over. Mama and Pop and Helena are having brunch at the pancake place. Kit ditched brunch: he hates that place.”

Nita blinked at that. “So he’s been back here?”

“Sure,” Carmela said. “You missed him by about an hour. And you’ll never guess where he’s gone!”

Nita rolled her eyes, exasperated. “So much for splitting the energy costs of getting up there today,” she said. “I’m starting to think we should install some kind of commuter worldgate here. You think you can work out a bulk discount for me with the Crossings?”

Carmela waved her hand, a gesture suggesting that this was no problem at all. “Neets, come on, you didn’t push the Crossings management for a tenth of the perks you could have had for getting rid of the aliens there—”

“I was on errantry,” Nita said, frowning. “Wizards don’t charge for that. I found a problem; I helped solve it.”

“Who said anything about charging? You should just have let them be a little more grateful to you.” Carmela waggled her eyebrows. “I know for a fact that the Stationmaster would give you at least a transit discount for jumps from here to Mars. You wouldn’t even need to hub through the Crossings: Mars is right next door by their standards. The power outlay would be minimal. But meantime, don’t sweat yourself about it— you need your wizardry for other stuff. Mi closet, su closet.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. “Want to set me up? I’ll go see him.”

“Unless it’s something very Mars-based, don’t bother,” Carmela said. “He’ll be back here at six. He has to: we have a Big-Deal Family Dinner tonight at seven, and we’re going out someplace serious, with tablecloths and everything. Besides, I want you to look at something.” She picked up the remote.

Nita looked around, concerned. “Is that smart at the moment?” she said in an undertone. “What if Helena comes back all of a sudden?”

Carmela shrugged. “The question’s more like, will she even notice? She hasn’t been here all that much since she arrived. She keeps going out with all these friends who keep turning up. I never knew she had so many.” And she grinned. “Maybe because she didn’t want to invite them over before, when she thought anybody who got involved with Kit might wind up going to hell.”

Nita had to snicker at that. “You mean they finally got things sorted out? This I have to hear about. He said she thought he was a mutant.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about sorted,” Carmela said. “Might still be a few issues. Mutancy being one of them. But I’d say the worst is over. Meanwhile, take a look at this. I’ve been working on it since we got back.”

Nita had half noticed Carmela rubbing her eyes, and now looked at her with some concern. “What?? You slept, right?”

“Huh? Yeah, a little. But this thing was making me crazy. I got up early to take another run at it.”

Nita shook her head. “Mela,” she said, “school’s out, nearly! Cut yourself some slack!”

“But this isn’t school,” Carmela said, looking up at Nita, and Nita noticed that there were actually circles under her eyes. “And slack’s not what we need right now, is it? My little brother’s acting slightly weird, and this has something to do with it.”

Nita made a sideways smile— not at Carmela’s concern for Kit, which was always there: but for the sudden memory of S’reee saying to her, Oh, hNii’t, middle-aged so soon! You’ve hit the part of your wizardry where you can’t stop working! —and of what Nelaid had said about Dairine. It hadn’t occurred to Nita that something similar might happen to Carmela: falling in love with the serious part of wizardry, as you realized this wasn’t anything like a lot of the stuff they gave you to do in school— well-meant busywork that had nothing to do with what your life was going to be about. This was important work, work on reality— stuff you had to get right. And when you first realized that, it was hard to do anything else for a while.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. But what’s been taking you so long with this?”

Carmela made a fake-pouting face. “Oh, Juanita L—”

“Don’t say it!” Nita said. Then she grinned. “I’m teasing! You know I’d never rush you. But you were cruising right along there when we were in the library cavern.”

“Yeah,” Carmela said, “I know.” She slumped back among the cushions she’d been lying on. “The wizardry was helping me. Now I’m running slower. Still, something started coming up. You know how it is when you’re reading something, and you can see that whoever wrote it has been really picking the words so that you’ll feel the way they want you to feel about something? Whether that’s the right way or not.”

Nita nodded, remembering one morning when one of her English teachers, Mr. Neary, had gone on about this at length. “Loading the adjectives?”

“That’s part of it.” Carmela scowled at her notebooks, and the TV, and the world in general. “When I was looking at most of the stuff written there— and I’ve been back a couple of times to check this, just to make sure that the invasion of the giant scorpion guys hadn’t messed up how I was seeing things right afterwards— a lot of it was like that. All loaded. ‘We are right; they were wrong; they started it; we had no choice!’ And that was making me suspicious. But then I found this thing. Stumbled on it, really. It was off by itself with some stuff I couldn’t read at all.”

Carmela dropped the remote, then flipped through the notepad to the symbols she had copied out there in red ink, and handed the pad to Nita. “This was the only material I could find there that wasn’t loaded like everything else. It was very, I don’t know, very dry. Very matter-of-fact. Not like the other stuff, where they want you to think the way they were thinking. It wants you to figure out what it means by yourself.” She scowled down at it. “I think it’s important. But don’t ask me why.”