Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Aurilelde’s expression was going back and forth between stricken and furious— and then the horror shifted permanently to rage. Nita, drifting just a little closer, thought again of the good old cartoon idiom about getting an opponent angry so they’d make a mistake. Aurilelde was making it already. Just let me close enough to you to get a good grip and pull that kernel out of you—

But Aurilelde wasn’t angry enough. One last thing was needed. “I wonder, though,” Nita said, “whether someone who died for you once might just see how you’re behaving now and say, ‘Did I die for her, or did she just let me go out and be killed so she could have this? The power to rule the planet?’” For she could feel the tremor down below them starting to grow. “‘And when this poor Kit came along, she used him the same way, and let his soul be lost so she could keep this power for herself—’”

“No!”

“And then he’ll say, ‘How long do I have? When she realizes the truth, she’ll find another way to get rid of me!’” Nita was now staring into Aurilelde’s eyes from only a few feet away—

“No, no, no!” Screaming, Aurilelde lunged at Nita. Nita grabbed for her, but Aurilelde hurled herself backward and away in reaction, raising her arms.

Underneath the two of them, the surface of the planet started going hazy. Dust storm? Nita thought, and then realized the truth. No! Marsquake!

The planet’s crust was beginning to convulse, great ripples starting to spread away from the spot beneath them. Craters were cracking across, water flooding down into the crevasses; elsewhere vast blocks and slabs of stone were jolting upward out of the crust—

Olympus Mons wasn’t affected yet, but Nita had no idea how long that would last. She doesn’t realize what she’s capable of with that thing inside her, Nita thought, horrified. She doesn’t realize that the kernel’s more than just a planet’s physical rules, but its spiritual affiliations too, the myths and stories others wind into it, all tangled up together. Aurilelde didn’t realize what was happening to her. She was becoming Mars itself, a mad Mars: not a god of war, but a goddess, and a goddess scorned—

And in her craziness she’ll pull the whole planet apart, Nita thought, horrified. She could feel the tremors propagating farther down into the crust, the strains in the planet’s mantle increasing. It’ll just shatter! At first the pieces wouldn’t go far: they’d settle into another great asteroid belt. But orbits elsewhere in the system will be destabilized! And Earth’s closest—

Twenty-four minutes, Bobo said.

Nita swallowed and headed directly for Aurilelde. “If you’re trying to get at me that way,” Nita said to her, “you’re going to have to get a lot more personal.”

That was when the blow hit Nita and slammed her tumbling up toward space. “Think so?” Aurilelde said. “Then we’ll just give you your wish.”

Around Nita, now choking in the vacuum, suddenly freezing, the pitiless darkness closed in…

***

In the darkness Khretef’s voice was saying, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. When they’re done, when Aurilelde’s won, we’ll be one forever. Why should this be so bad?” Khretef was almost pleading. “We were so alike, anyway, almost the same…”

Standing there by himself in the dark, holding off its ever-increasing pressure, Kit shook his head. “We have things in common, sure!” he said. “We’re alive! And you and me, we’re in the service of Life: you took the Oath! We’re on the same side! So why are you trying to rub me out? Wizards don’t destroy things without good reason! Wizards keep things going, they fix what’s broken, they don’t throw other living beings out just because they’re in the way!”

“But Aurilelde says—”

“Aurilelde’s not a wizard, Khretef! She’s a seer, yeah, but even seers don’t always see straight. Especially if they’re scared! She’s scared for you, and she’s letting that warp the way she sees what has to happen. You can’t just let her pictures of how the world ought to be erase yours. It’s as bad as what she’s told you that you’ve got to do to me!”

“That’s wrong,” Khretef said. “That has to be wrong. You don’t understand—”

Once again that uncertainty made Kit sure he was right. “She got it backwards, buddy!” Kit said. “She foresaw us, me and Nita, and she saw that we were somehow the answer to Mars’s problem. No news there: every wizard’s the answer to some problem of the universe’s! But she also saw that everything was going to have to change for you guys in some big weird way, and that scared her. She started concentrating on the parts of the vision she could bear to look at, and screened out the rest. She saw she needed a wizard’s power to bring Earth’s wizards into the picture. She saw herself at the center of it, protecting her dad and her people, even protecting you. So you gave her access to your power. And now you just feel like an idiot because you can’t take it back without a fight, and fighting her’s the last thing you want to do!”

The silence in the darkness was anguished.

Finally the voice spoke again, and this time it was far less Kit’s, far more Khretef’s. “She was so sure,” he said. “Even when I started becoming uncomfortable about letting her share my own power…” Kit could feel Khretef’s shame at that remembered discomfort: how could he deny any part of himself to the love of his life? “And then she said, ‘The other’s coming: give me his power if you can’t give me yours! It won’t matter; he’s just another you. And think what it will mean. No more fighting. The end of the other side’s threats, at last and forever—’”

“The old story,” Kit said. “And not Aurilelde’s voice, either. You know who wrote that dialogue! You didn’t invent war: the Lone Power did! One of its favorite tools—because war’s the easy way out of conflict. And not having wars, having enough compassion and smarts to stay out of them, is real hard work! Getting into the other guy’s mindset is real tough to do in the first place, and it’s hard to stay there. Lots easier to decide that the other guy’s so different from you that there’s no hope for him. That he’s going to hate you forever, and for the sake of your peace of mind he’s better off dead.”

The image of that dark splotch on the Korean peninsula, where the light suddenly stopped, was flaring at the back of Kit’s mind: and Khretef saw it, too, laid out before them in the darkness as Kit had seen it while sitting on his Earthwatching rock on the Moon. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, Khretef! Break the pattern and poke the Lone One in the eye!”

There was a long silence. “They’ll say I’m a traitor to both sides,” Khretef whispered. “Again! And I’ll be betraying Aurilelde, too—”

“Brother, you’ve got to do something!” Kit said. “You can’t just sit here and let this go on! It’s not just your world, and your people—all of them, the Eilitt and the Shamaska. It’s Earth, too, billions of people whose lives are going to get completely screwed up because of what’s happening here if it’s not stopped! You’re a wizard. You know how it has to go! You can love Aurilelde all you like, but if you don’t act now, the Lone Power’s just going to sit there laughing at how you gave It just what It wanted while you were sure you were doing the only thing you could.”

Another long and desperate silence. “What do I do?” Khretef said finally.

“Let me go!” Kit said. “I’ll do what I can for you and Aurilelde, I promise, but right now we’ve got two whole worlds to worry about. Let me out of here!”

The silence continued. Then the pressure against which Kit had been straining started to let up. From deep inside the darkness, Kit felt a shift in the power underlying the place. The feeling started slowly transmuting into a weird stretching, as if something was fastened to Kit’s skin and his bones, pulling him painfully out of shape. Kit set his teeth, tried to deal with the pain as it worsened, became intolerable—