Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

The Eilitt wizard bowed his head. “It made them worse,” Kit said. “They were angry before, and when they came out now, they were a little crazy, too. I caught some of that, maybe.” Kit looked embarrassed. “But it’s not entirely their fault. And…” He looked more embarrassed still. “They still know how to love each other. But being scared about whether they’re going to survive at all can really get in the way.”

Irina was watching Kit with some perplexity. “Kit,” she said, unfolding her arms enough to shift the baby-sling, “they can’t stay in the system as it’s now constituted while they’re free and able to act. The Powers have withdrawn that right from them. And they won’t accept rafting out, or stasis until the situation changes—”

“I know,” Kit said. “But there’s another way.”

Irina and Mamvish looked at each other, then back at Kit. “What?”

“Timeslide,” he said. “Into the past.”

Irina gave him an odd look, then glanced over at Mamvish. Mamvish’s eyes on both sides were going around.

“To reposition a sanctioned species far enough back not to be a threat to the timelines of associated planets,” Mamvish said, “would take a tremendous amount of power. Even for a Planetary and a Species Archivist.”

“What if the power wasn’t so much of a problem?” Kit said.

He looked, not at Iskard or Rorsik, but at Khretef. “What if you were here,” Kit said, “but long, long ago, before anybody on Earth was able to notice you? Millions of years back? No carbon-based species lasts that long.” He looked at Mamvish: one eye fixed on him in a way that suggested he was right. “And nobody would have to go into stasis. Your cities could be relocated here on the planet in real time.”

Khretef looked at Kit oddly. “But the Eilitt would still try to attack us…”

“Not if your relocation was in time as well as space,” Kit said. “Put one city down in one spot …And the other one, five hundred thousand years away…”

Irina was looking at him now, and the expression was more thoughtful. Once again she glanced over at Mamvish, and Nita felt that odd itching at the back of her mind.

It ceased. Iskard now was looking at Kit as if he couldn’t understand why Kit was being so helpful. “If this could be done…” Iskard said. “We would accept it.”

Irina turned to Kit, looking troubled. “I’m a Planetary, Kit,” she said, “not one of the Powers That Be. The problem with this is finding enough energy to fuel the spell. Pushing thousands of living beings and the mass of two ancient cities back a million years or two would require—” She shook her head.

“Wait,” Kit said. “Just wait, okay? I need to transit back to my house.” And then he looked annoyed. “By the way, since these guys were doing hwanthaet or whatever it is on me to make me so crazy to be back here, can I please be ungrounded?”

Irina gave him a dry look. “Go,” she said, and waved a hand.

Kit vanished.

***

He appeared in his kitchen and turned to head toward the back door— and found that standing there, looking at him wide-eyed, with yet another armful of laundry, was Helena.

“Uh—” Kit said.

To his great relief, the look with which his sister was favoring him was more bemused than scared or angry. “So that noise is traditional, then,” she said.

“Huh?”

“When you appear,” Helena said. “It’s in the mutant comic books, too. ‘Bamf!’” And she then started looking even more bemused. “Does this mean the comics people actually know mutants?”

“Uh, they might,” Kit said.

Helena nodded, apparently pleased at having worked this out for herself. She started heading toward the cellar stairs with her laundry, then paused as something occurred to her. “When you appear out of nowhere like that,” she said, “there’s no chance you could appear where somebody else already is, is there? Like, you know, a transporter accident?”

Kit was briefly annoyed, then realized it was a fair question. “No. There’s an automatic offset, it—” He stopped, as there was no point in explaining the safeguards built into the spell: Helena was thinking in a different idiom now, and he was just going to have to get used to it. “It can’t happen. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.” Helena headed for the stairs and was halfway down them as Kit stepped down onto the landing and reached in among the coats and so forth to pull out what he’d come back for. Helena stopped on the stairs, looked up at the glowing thing that Kit was carefully unwinding from the hook where it had been hanging.

“What’s that? Oh, don’t tell me!” Helena said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Wonder Woman’s magic lasso? Is that real, too?” And then she paused. “I thought it was supposed to be gold.”

Not for the first time when dealing with one of his sisters, Kit was left briefly speechless.

Helena got a musing look. “And if that can be real, maybe other stuff from the comics could be real, too? Like… I can’t remember: what are those guys called who have the green glowy rings? Like them. Wouldn’t it be great if there was this interplanetary brotherhood with all kinds of creatures, you know, banding together and using their powers to fight evil?”

She sighed, then smiled at Kit. “Never mind, I know, it’s probably more secret stuff,” Helena said, turning and heading down the stairs again. “Guess I’ve just got to get used to it. What a world.” She moved out of sight, and Kit heard the clunk of the washer’s lid being opened. “I should really start getting back into comics. My brother the mutant…”

Kit stared down at her, dumbfounded: then heaved a sigh and vanished again.

Back on Mars, Kit went to Irina and handed her what he’d brought from home.

Irina took the long, slender, pale cord from him. Then she started, her eyes going wide. In its sling, the baby woke up. On her head, the parakeet was shocked into the air and fluttered there for several moments before settling again and staring down at what she held.

Irina ran the cord through her hands, noting, as did everyone else, the way the faint bluish glow about it overrode every other light in that great room. As she moved her hands apart while holding it, the cord stretched: the glow got brighter.

“It was my dog’s,” Kit said. “Before he, well, graduated, he really used to get around. Other universes, other times. Sometimes a lot further. This leash was the only way I could keep up with him. Anchor one end of it in one reality, fasten it to something in another— and it’ll pull the other thing through.”

Mamvish came over to look at Ponch’s old leash. It had been powerful enough when Kit had used it for doggie-walking before the affair with the Pullulus earlier in the year. What it would be able to do now, after having been even briefly affiliated with the canine version of the One, even Kit could only guess.

But apparently Irina had some idea. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, letting out a long, surprised breath and glancing over at Mamvish. “This artifact,” she said, “has a power rating even higher than yours. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

Mamvish swung her tail. “And it’s built for transits,” she said. “With this, and your power and mine, we can pull it off. I’d say the solution suits.”

Irina turned back to Kit. “You understand that probably it won’t survive this wizardry.”

Kit nodded. “I don’t need it anymore. And Ponch sure doesn’t. If it can do some good here, then let’s go.”

***

After that it seemed to Nita that things happened nearly as quickly as her decommissioning of the passthrough wizardry had. There was a brief consultation about temporospatial coordinates, and then a transit out to the city limits, past the farthest buildings, at the end of the white road. Mamvish and Irina stood there conferring to resolve the last few issues, while Iskard watched from the road.