Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Now to get this back to her, he thought, and put everything right. Finally, finally we’ll be free!

And he vanished.

13: Oceanidum Mons

“Indeterminate?” Nita said to the peridexis. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The peridexis paused for a moment. No, it said, that was an error: sorry. He’s now showing in the neighborhood of Olympus Mons. There was a momentary difficulty in reading his status.

“Not usual for you,” Nita said. “Well, everything else has been crazy here…” She let out a long breath, which actually froze out of the air and started drifting down as tiny flakes of snow.

You want to be paying more attention to your life support, Bobo said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “You’re always saying you want to handle that for me,” she said. “You deal with it.”

Immediately she started feeling the air warming up around her, and started to smell the odd gunpowdery smell of Mars dust. “Thanks,” she said. Kit? she said inside her head.

No answer.

Once again she started to wonder if he was annoyed with her for breaking in on his boy-trip the day before. Nita pulled out her manual, flipped it open to the messaging section. There on her contacts list his name appeared as usual. Location: Olympus Mons— and a set of coordinates. Mission status: independent investigation; occupied; please do not disturb. “Well, fine,” she said under her breath, starting to feel annoyed. “Messaging, please?”

The space under Kit’s name cleared. “Kit,” she said to the manual, “sorry about yesterday. Give me a call or drop me a note when you’re done.” She tapped the page: the message inserted itself and began to flash bright and dark, with the notation appearing beside it, Holding for delivery.

Nita shut the manual and put it away. No point in getting all cranky about this. He wants to be too busy for me? Fine. “Okay,” she said, “might as well head home. Want to handle the gating?”

No problem. Off to one side, dust and snow whirled away from a flat place among the stones; a circle of light appeared there. Nita stepped through—

— and came out in her bedroom as usual. She sighed and tossed her manual onto the desk while she pulled off her outdoor clothes, then grabbed it again and headed downstairs.

Her dad was in the living room, reading the Sunday paper. Dairine was actually in the same room with him, stretched out on the floor and paging through the travel section, while Spot looked over her shoulder with stalked eyes. All of them glanced up as Nita came in. “You hungry?” her dad said. “I’ll make you something.”

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said. She dropped her manual on the dining room table and wandered into the kitchen, glancing at the clock. Two thirty. Okay, I’ll give him till five. He has to be back then, anyway, Carmela says. And I want lunch.

She rummaged around in the fridge for the makings of a chicken sandwich, put the kettle on, assembled the sandwich—all except the mustard she wanted, which Dairine had apparently finished, so that Nita had to make do with mayonnaise— and then wandered back into the dining room and sat down, staring morosely at the manual while she ate half the sandwich.

What is it with him? she thought.

But Nita had her suspicions. Right there as if in front of her, she could just see the Martian princess. It’s not fair, she thought. She was pretty. She was stacked. Nita squirmed uneasily in the chair. She had nothing on. Almost. And it looked good on her!

“Dammit!” Nita said under her breath.

She scowled at the rest of her sandwich, then picked it up and ate it, annoyed. How am I supposed to compete with that?

Are you crazy? You’re not in a competition, said some part of her brain that was taking desperate refuge in rationality. She was a hallucination. She was a character in a book that the wizardry used to communicate with him…

Yeah, and I know just what she was communicating! answered back another part of Nita’s mind, one that had no intention of being thrown off the track by logic, especially as logic when used on boys lately seemed to produce only indifferent results. You saw him looking at Janie Lowell the other morning. Her and that alleged skirt.

Nita dropped the rest of the sandwich on the plate and put her head in her hands. This is dumb. I don’t want to wear that kind of skirt, anyway. If “skirt” is the word we’re looking for, and not “belt”! I just want— She groaned. I don’t know what I want.

Kit, you’re an idiot!

And this statement embarrassed Nit profoundly, since it both flowed naturally from what she was feeling right now and made no sense whatsoever.

“Aaaaaagh,” she said under her breath after a moment, which also made no sense, but at least discharged some tension. Nita picked up the rest of the sandwich, ate it while glowering at the table, and then noticed that the kettle was screaming for her attention.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, and scrambled up to turn off the stove and get the kettle off the hot ring and find herself a tea bag. “Sorry…”

The kettle regarded her with mute accusation. She picked it up and poured hot water onto the tea bag in her mug. “Maybe I’m the idiot,” she muttered, putting the kettle down.

It didn’t respond. She immediately felt somehow inadequate, as Kit always got immediate responses out of the household appliances: they were very forthcoming with him. “Never mind,” she said, and patted it on the handle as she went out. “Different wizards, different specialties…” But she still felt it watching her as she went out.

Nita sighed and went back into the dining room, where she sat down at the end of the table and drank the tea. Finally she reached out to her manual again and opened it, going back to the Mars data for the previous day. In particular, the reports on the meetings with the scorpion creatures were now in there, both the encounter in the Cavern and those that had happened out in the Martian terrain, and Nita read them both over with interest. So weird, though, she thought. The encounters were so different.

Across the table, Dairine had left a pad and a few pens from something else she’d been doing. On impulse Nita reached out and pulled them over as she looked over the details of power levels and personnel, topography and coordinates. What a crowd of us, she thought. But our two groups got such different results.

Did one group have a higher aggregate power level or something? But the groups’ power levels weren’t really all that different, when you averaged things out. Okay, Carmela’s not a wizard. But she has her own specialties. And S’reee and I were there: a more senior talent and a lesser one. And on the other side there were Kit and Ronan, and Darryl, who’s not an older talent, but in his own way as powerful as a Senior: maybe more so.

She picked up the pen and started making a list on the top page of the pad, comparing power levels and matching them off against one another: Kit, Nita, Ronan, Carmela, Darryl, S’reee. Nita shook her head and tapped the names idly with her pen, looking for some other factor that could be operating: ages, origins, wizardly specialties. Newer wizard, older one. Younger person, older one. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy…

Nita stopped. She stared at the lists.

Our team was all girls. Theirs was all guys.

Her first thought was that this was just a coincidence. But the scorpions walked right past us! And we didn’t get what the guys got, this weird re-creation of somebody else’s Mars. We got what had actually been left there. We identified ourselves as wizards and they let us right in. Almost ignored us, even. Whereas the guys had all these hoops to jump through. Something to prove.

Nita stared at the manual page, shaking her head. Why? Just because they were guys? It doesn’t make sense. There has to be something else going on.