Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Nita shivered inadvertently. “It’d be like dropping a match in gasoline,” she said.

It could be. You must take care.

She started walking on slowly again. “They must have had some really big wizardry in mind,” Nita said, “to lay in that much power.”

That would seem like a reasonable assessment.

“Great,” Nita muttered. “Terraforming, maybe?”

Possibly.

Nita shook her head and walked on. Despite the difference and strangeness of this landscape, that reminded her strongly of the rest of Mars in feeling not just empty, but sad: not just like a deserted house, but like one where all the furniture’s been moved out and no one ever intends to live there again. The other kind of desolation, Nita thought.Not just physically empty, but empty of soul. Maybe that was why she’d never been as keen on Mars as Kit was.

Nostalgia seemed to be part of the appeal for Kit, and for some of the wizards working with him on the greater Martian project: that wistful longing for a time when water ran here and the air had been dense enough for the sky to be really blue. It would never have been a warm place by Earth’s standards. Its orbit was all wrong for that. But Mars would nonetheless have had a chance to come by its own kind of life eventually. That had all gone wrong, though. Nothing was left but this sad emptiness, this hollowness.

It’s the missing kernel, of course. Probably its absence was so much more noticeable now because she was here alone, instead of in the company of Kit and his Mars-team buddies, as she’d often been in the past. Nita stood there considering the bizarre lack all over again, wondering what could have caused it.

When she’d still been desperately trying to find ways to save her mother’s life by manipulating her body’s kernel, Nita had worked closely with all kinds of kernels, even planetary ones, and with wizards expert at handling them. A wizard with the right training and enough power could manipulate a world’s kernel into doing all kinds of amazing things— offsetting climate change, shifting the planet’s interior structure, even changing elements of its orbit if they knew what they were doing.

Which is always the problem, Nita thought. You have to be absolutely sure you do know what you’re doing. Kernels were so sensitive and risky to work with that there was a whole practice universe equipped with test kernels where you were sent to train before you ever touched a real one.

Nita had never bothered looking into the issue of Mars’s kernel herself. Seniors and Planetaries hadn’t found it over many years of looking, and she’d had her own projects to think about; but now her curiosity was getting the better of her. Where exactly was Mars’s kernel? What had happened to it? Kernels didn’t just get lost or fall off into space. And no wizard in his or her or its right mind would have considered removing one from where it belonged. The whole structure of the planet could have been deranged. But maybe it was hidden? Somebody went to a lot of trouble to hide the superegg. And on some planets, wizards do hide kernels to keep them from being tampered with.

Standing in the midst of that snowy, dusty wilderness, Nita got out her manual and paged through it to one prominently bookmarked section, a line of light in the closed pages: the Kernel Tactics and Management section for which she’d been cleared for access months ago. The page that itemized local kernel presences confirmed that no planetary kernel was present anywhere in the areosphere, though there certainly had been one here once. In the distant past, the kernel had even been present right here in Argyre Planitia for a while.

No big surprise there, Nita thought: unsupervised planetary kernels had a tendency to wander around freely in the bodies they inhabited. Only if a planet had a resident wizard operating actively as a Planetary did a kernel tend to stay in one place, mostly because the wizard working with it wanted to be able to get his, her, or its hands, fins, or tentacles on it quickly in an emergency. But there hasn’t been a kernel here for… She frowned as she deciphered the Speech-character suffix after the number she was looking at. Half a million years!

Nita shook her head. The manual confirmed that no other Planetary in the system had interfered with Mars’s kernel. So where’d it go? What happened to it?

She looked again at the page for Mars. It showed the date of the original establishment of the kernel, shortly after the coalescence of the planet— a date coordinate with a negative powers-of-ten suffix far, far bigger than the first one— and after that came a long, long period of uneventful tenancy during which Mars’s kernel oscillated gently about inside the planet’s bulk in the normal way, until half a million years ago.

And after that— nothing. Nita scanned up the page again, and after the word STATUS there appeared only the notation: Indeterminate.

Nita put her manual away and looked around at the silent, frigid night in complete bemusement. “Bobo,” she said after a moment, “what the heck does ‘indeterminate’ mean?”

It means that the kernel disappeared with no documented cause, said the peridexis after a moment.

“How come you don’t know where it went?”

The peridexis sounded almost embarrassed now. I may be wizardry, it said, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have access to all the universe’s knowledge. And data, or even just the ability to understand it, can be lost over time, as you saw in the Cavern: or misplaced.

Nita frowned. “Or hidden.”

Redacted, yes. Sometimes by the Powers, of course, or those acting for Them—

“And the Lone Power?” Nita said.

There was a longish silence. It cannot interfere with manual content directly, the peridexis said. But it remains one of the Powers, and has enough strength to range about interfering with matter and spirit— out of sight, as it were. At which point the manual will find no data to store or relay.

Nita was beginning to wonder if what she was starting to think of as the Case of the Purloined Kernel was going to reveal, lurking at the bottom of it, every wizard’s oldest adversary. But why? It doesn’t make sense. Right next door to Mars you’ve got a planet full of nosy wizards. There’s much too much chance that one of them would notice. Even though, all right, none of them did. But they could have. And anyway, why would the Lone One come sneaking in here and run off with Mars’s kernel?

Nita stood there for some moments, running various scenarios in her head. Finally she stopped. “Bobo,” she said, “it’s not good for a planet not to have a kernel. They get run down, like a house that’s not maintained when it’s empty. And the matter gets lonely.”

It would, yes.

Nita shoved her manual into her otherspace pocket. “Somebody needs to look into this again,” she said. “But first things first. Where’s Kit?”

There was a long pause.

Indeterminate… said Bobo.

***

Kit stood there on the shoulder of Olympus Mons and looked out into the falling night. “So listen,” he said, glancing around him and wishing there was something to fix his attention on: this talking to the empty air was extremely hard to get used to. “Before I start running around just doing errands for you, I need some questions answered.”

That makes sense, his voice said to him.

“What exactly is it we need to do next?” Kit said. “Where do we need to go?” He paused. “And would you please explain why I should be helping you in the first place?! You’re trying to take over my mind! Or my life. Or something.”

It’s nothing to do with taking anything over, Khretef said. We’re the same. I’m you… just earlier. And Kit could feel his shrug.