Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

He fell silent. Kit couldn’t do anything but stand there in terrible embarrassment and wonder what he was going to hear next.

“It’s true what Irina told you the other day,” Tom said. “Mostly, in the past, you’ve been able to depend on the sheer power of a relatively new wizard, and a certain talent for riding unfolding events, to get you out of Dutch. But this time, unfortunately, you’ve gone a little bit too far. The power that was let loose on Mars last night went right off the scale. And unfortunately, you and Ronan and Darryl don’t seem to be good influences on each other as regards, well, exercising restraint in team situations. You’re all too far into the loner column for that kind of thing to be easy for you.”

Tom rubbed his eyes. “Now locally, when small-scale personal wizardries are involved— all right, we can find ways to make exceptions for when circumstances allow. But when I have my supervisory levels come down on me and inquire why I’m allowing new wizards to plunge around unsupervised in an offplanet wizardry that could theoretically affect the viability of an entire species, I’m afraid I have to pass some of the pain around.”

He looked at Kit with a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. “I hate having to be in this position,” he said, “but for the time being I’m going to have to ground you. I’m pulling your ability to transit off the planet. And I’ve specifically instructed Darryl not to assist you in this matter. When you’re under supervision, when you come up with other more senior members of the team, that’ll be a different issue. Your sympathy for the planet, your resonance with it, are unquestionably valuable to the project. And they’ll make a big difference in the way we handle the situation as it unfolds. But for the time being, you’re not going to be allowed up there alone.”

Kit couldn’t do anything but nod glumly. “I understand,” he whispered. But he didn’t, really. An unrepentant something in the rear of his mind was shouting, Not fair! It’s just not fair!

“I have a lot on my plate today,” Tom said, “so let’s call this discussion complete for the moment. Just—” He looked hard at Kit. “Use this upcoming time to think, all right? I’m not suggesting that you go stand in the corner. You have other things to do here on Earth, and you can get into your manual and annotate the précis we got back of the events of yesterday. Will you do that?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “I’ll do it when we get back.”

“Right,” Tom said. “I’ll see you later.” And he walked off down the street, vanishing into the early dusk.

Kit stood there, staring down the street after him and burning with embarrassment. The restriction would show up in the manual next to his name: he could just imagine what Nita would think when she saw it. And she doesn’t understand, he thought. Not the way that Aurilelde would—

Then he stopped. What? Kit thought. What’s going on in my head?

There was no way to find out. The answer was on Mars, and now he couldn’t get there. Even trying would be hopeless. Kit remembered how hard Dairine had tried to break her ban, the time she’d been restricted to staying inside the Solar System for misbehavior. She’d come back furious, describing it “like hitting your head on a stone wall again and again. Except not just your head: all of you.” And then she’d gone off to sulk.

Kit was tempted to do the same, except there was no time: in the driveway, his dad was beeping for him to hurry up. After locking the front door, Kit headed around the side of the house to close the side door, then got into the car. His dad pulled out of the driveway, and everybody rode to the restaurant in that tight-faced fake good humor that means the whole family’s trying to avoid taking out their annoyance on a single transgressor.

The mood had broken by the time they got to the restaurant, but Kit found that he couldn’t enjoy the evening. His mama had picked a place by the water in Bay Shore that had been in the same location for nearly a hundred years. The food was terrific, and the conversation loosened up and became positively fun, and Kit strained hard to not bring the others down by letting them notice how he was feeling at the moment. At this he succeeded pretty well. But all the time he kept imagining how his name was going to look in the manual with the notation DISCIPLINARY TRAVEL RESTRICTION against it, and then he would blush with fury and embarrassment and have to work at covering it up all over again.

Finally it was over and they went home, and Kit found that he was developing a case of indigestion. It was a big relief to get back up to his room and change out of his dinner clothes into some sweats. As he headed downstairs to see if there was Alka-Seltzer in the downstairs bathroom, Kit passed Carmela heading downstairs for something, too. She had her earphones in and was bopping to something inaudible on her iPod. As she met up with Kit, she paused and said, more loudly than he liked, “What’s the matter? You look like somebody just stole your wand.”

“You have no idea,” Kit said as he headed down the stairs. For some reason, Carmela’s good mood infuriated him. He made and drank the Alka-Seltzer, then stomped back to his room, didn’t quite slam the door shut behind him, and threw himself down on the bed.

That was when the idea hit him, complete from beginning to end. Kit got up again, opened his door very softly, and made his way as quickly and silently as he could down the hall to Carmela’s room.

It wasn’t someplace he usually ventured— not so much because of privacy issues as because it was his sister’s room and therefore usually void of interest for him. However, there was something in there that, though he normally tended to ignore it, was now very much of interest indeed.

The room was very tidy. This was yet another relatively recent development which Kit found peculiar; teenage girls’ rooms were supposed to be a morass of clutter. But Carmela had become compulsive about putting everything in its drawer or on its hanger or shelf without fail. Sometimes he made fun of her for this. But today, just this once, it was useful.

He crossed softly to the closet and opened it. It was full of clothes—much fuller than it had used to be: Carmela had caught the clothes bug only recently. Everything here was on its hanger, all perfectly neat. But there was also something else in this closet.

Kit reached over to the bookshelf next to the closet and found there what he’d known would be there: a clone of the downstairs TV remote. At least it had begun its life that way, but now it had a lot more buttons on it than the original remote had. Kit knew what every one was for, as he had programmed them himself. Now he studied the various buttons, chose one, pointed at the back of Carmela’s closet, and punched the remote.

The back of the closet instantly went black, then flickered into light again— the random rainbowy moiré pattern of a commercial worldgate not yet patent but ready to be activated. At the forefront of the carrier pattern was the identifying brand of the Crossings’ worldgate system, its famous logo of linked gate hexes prominently displayed with the notation in the Speech and several other languages, CROSSINGS INTERCONTINUAL WORLDGATING FACILITY, RIRHATH B— DESTINATION ONE.

Kit grinned and began punching coordinates into the remote. He knew what he was planning would fly in the face of the spirit of the ban Tom had imposed on him. But he’ll have to see, Kit thought. When I show him, when he understands what’s at stake, he’ll have to see why I can’t leave this to anybody else. Nobody else has my perspective—

He punched the button again. The Crossings logo vanished, replaced by a long spill of coordinates. Under them appeared a single word in the Speech: Confirm?