Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Behind her eyes, Nita saw some city’s streets full of screaming, plunging crowds. She saw Mars, Mars, Mars, a hundred times, on a hundred TV screens. There was something wrong with that Mars: it was turning blue. She saw Kit skywalking precariously over a pit of giant green metal scorpions. She saw a line of fierce light stretching from dawn into darkness, pulling and pulling at something with great force, singing like a plucked string with unbearable tension. And she saw a huge wave that was slowly, slowly leaning up over her. The Sun was caught in it, faint, pale, fluttering weakly in the water like a drowning bug.

Then she found herself looking at the tea mug again.

What was that?!

She was breathing hard. The images had come fast but were entirely clear, and they scared her.

Okay, she thought. “Bobo? Did you see those?”

It would have been difficult to avoid seeing them.

“Take notes!”

Consider it done.

Nita stared at the mug, then went back into the kitchen for more tea. As she turned on the heat under the kettle again, she had a sudden thought. She dug around in her pocket for her phone, pulled it out, and dialed.

“Hola Nita!” said the voice on the other end.

“Hey, you’re back already. I thought you’d still be up there.”

“Nope,” Nita said. “Got bored, came home.”

“What, didn’t you find Kit?”

“Oh, he’s up there all right,” Nita said, “with a big Do Not Disturb sign hung around his neck.”

Carmela snorted. “Counting craters again,” she said. “Never mind. He’ll be back here pretty soon for dinner. I’ll tell him you called.”

“Oh, I wasn’t calling for him! Thought you might have something else on your poem.”

“Turns out it has a name!” Carmela said. “It’s called the Red Rede.”

“So it is a big deal, then,” Nita said.

“I think so. Anyway, I think I’ve got that last verse translated. Though it’s vague.”

“Par for the course at the moment, isn’t it?” Nita said. “Shoot.”

“Here’s the whole thing,” Carmela said. And she recited:

“The one departed | is the one who returns

From the straitened circle | and the shortened night,

When the blue star rises | and the water burns:

Then the word long-lost | comes again to light

To be spoke by the watcher | who silent yearns

For the lost one found. Yet to wreak aright,

She must slay her rival | and the First World spurn

Lest the one departed | no more return.”

Nita sat there for a moment and felt again, in full force, that sense of impending doom that had taken her by the throat during those strange moments when the imageries of crowds and water and scorpions and Kit had flickered behind her eyes, like shots from an unusually eclectic movie trailer. Now, as Carmela spoke the words, Nita heard the rhythm of them behind the images like a drumbeat, slow, threatening, and she could almost feel a physical pressure building up in her head as the beat went on.

When the blue star rises. She saw Mars lowering overhead, in TV screens, in views from telescopes, going suddenly and scarily blue. When the water burns. She saw the struggling Sun caught in that bizarre wave, dimmed down and out after a moment by dirt in the water, then lost in a greater shadow that came crashing down. The lost one found. She saw the princess come dancing up to Kit and take his hand with a look on her face that said she’d been waiting for him for a long time. She must slay her rival. Nita seemed to be hanging high above a vista of cloud-streaked terrain, glinting with water; and somewhere between her and the Sun, blocking away its light, hung a dark and furious female shape with near-invisible energies flowing about its hands—

“Neets?”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not sure. Are you pretty clear about the translation?”

“Oh, yeah,” Carmela said. “I took my time. You have any ideas about this?”

The kettle started whistling softly. Nita pulled it off the heat and got herself another tea bag out of the canister. “Some,” she said. “I need to touch base with Kit first.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll tell him to call you.”

“Yeah. Thanks! And hey, you did a great job.”

“I hope so. Let me know.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Later.” She hung up and found herself staring out the kitchen window, where the morning glories that climbed up the chimney every year were as usual making a bid to climb in through the screen. They suddenly struck Nita as looking bizarre and alien, and the color of them made her think immediately of the too-blue Mars.

Kit, she thought, get your butt home. Because we really need to talk!

***

Kit straightened up from where he’d been hunched over on the rock at the top of Olympus Mons. For a second or so he just let his eyes rest in that astonishing view. Then he slowly realized that something was wrong with the view. It should be much darker. Why’s it so light?

And then he realized that out there, at the edge of things, the Sun was about to come up.

What?? It was— where was— what time is it?! He stared at his watch. Oh, my god, it’s five thirty; dinner’s at six!

Kit frantically paged through his manual to the bookmarked area, where he kept his pre-prepared spells, pulled the transit spell off his page, dropped it to the icy dirt, and jumped through. A second later he was in his bedroom, and he could hear a lot of voices talking underneath him in the living room. He ran down the stairs.

The whole family was standing in there, dressed up and ready to go. Now they turned to Kit and looked at him with a broad assortment of expressions— annoyance, confusion, resignation, curiosity.

“Kit,” his papa said. And Pop was the one doing annoyance.

Kit immediately panicked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m really sorry, I— I— just sort of lost track of the time. I’ll be dressed in five minutes—”

“We’ll go wait in the car,” said his mama, who was handling the resignation end of things. Kit fled up the stairs before Helena would have a chance to get really started on the curiosity, now that she had a reason to think it was safe to be curious.

Kit plunged around in his room getting undressed and redressed, hearing people head out the back door, hearing the car start. What happened? How did I do that? Why did I do that? Since when do I fall asleep on Mars? What if my wizardry had failed? But he didn’t have answers for any of those questions. This is so bizarre!

Dressed in cords and a shirt and the really nice jacket his mama had gotten him— which he hated but which he was hoping would confuse her out of being annoyed with him for the evening— Kit paused just long enough to return Carmela’s hotcurler weapon to its usual place. Then he pounded down the stairs and was just heading out of the living room when the front doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” he yelled, and ran to the door. Probably one of Helena’s crowd. Who knew there would be so many of them? He unlocked the door, pulled it open—

— to find himself looking at Tom Swale. “Kit,” Tom said. “We need to have a word.”

He looked grim. Sweat burst out all over Kit. “Uh, sure,” he said, and went outside, pulling the front door closed behind him.

“I was really expecting you to get in touch with me,” Tom said, “or at least with Mamvish—”

Kit flushed hot, then cold. “I left her a message. At least, I tried to. Her manual wasn’t taking messages—”

Tom stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and looked at Kit with an expression of disappointment. “And then you went ahead,” he said, “and called Ronan and Darryl, and went off to Mars. And there—” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can specifically characterize what you did as damage: it’s too soon to tell. But you got involved with things that you actively should not have gotten involved with. At the very least, not without expert assistance! The minute that superegg sent out signals to those four other sites, you should have backed off and called for backup. You know that this has been a team effort from the start! There’s too much riding on this for any one wizard to go off in some novel direction, no matter how good an idea he thinks it is, without consulting everyone else.”