A Wizard of Mars New Millennium Edition Read online

  “August the first,” Carmela said, shaking her head.

  “Gonna be tough at home till then, Neets.” She raised her eyebrows, looking at Nita out of the corner of her eye. “I know,” Carmela said. “Let’s do a road trip. Let’s go over to Ireland and see your buddy Ronan!”

  Nita rolled her eyes. “He is not my buddy!”

  “Yeah, and isn’t it wonderful,” Carmela said. Her real intentions, Nita thought, couldn’t possibly be as predatory as her smile made them appear. I hope! “But isn’t it August when everything gets crazy in Ireland? It did last time...”

  “Believe me,” Nita said, “what happened then is not a regularly scheduled event.” She sat there for a moment more watching the TV, where the “blender” seemed to have stopped— at least the flashing and smoking going on inside it had. The mist creature came out, not yellow-green now, but pink, and waved its tendrils around: a long line of number-characters in the Speech, probably the “food processor’s” details, started flashing on the screen. Nita shook her head. “I came in late,” she said. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s a portable wanjaxer,” Carmela said. “On sale, it looks like. Which is all right, except I don’t know if I really want to get into wanjaxing. I mean, I’m as broad-minded and tolerant as the next girl, but there are all these hue issues...”

  Nita rolled her eyes. Carmela had been spending a lot of time lately studying alien lifestyles, and her attempts to explain some of the finer points could take hours. “Forget it,” Nita said. “You see Kit before he left?”

  Carmela looked at Nita in shock. “You didn’t? You mean he just ditched you and ran off halfway around the world?” She paused. “Is it halfway?”

  Nita frowned, considering. “I’d have to look it up. How’d you know where he went?”

  “The remote told me,” Carmela said. “It loves Kit, but it’s no good at keeping a secret. Are you, cutie-bunny?” She reached down to the remote on the cushion beside her and tickled it under its infrared emitter. Nita was startled to see it arch its little “back” and emit a small electronic purr. She thought back to her conversation with Tom, and then put aside the thought that Kit’s original specialty had been getting inanimate objects and mechanical things to do what he wanted.

  And now Carmela... Naah, it’s probably still just something to do with Ponch. Everything here got really strange because he was getting really strange. It’ll take a while for things to calm down.

  “Anyway,” Carmela said, “he’s kinda forgetting his manners, if you ask me.” She leaned back among the cushions. “You two’ve been working on this Mars thing for months and months now.”

  “Well,” Nita said, “it’s really been more him. Not that I’m not interested. But I have stuff of my own to take care of.” She stretched her legs out.

  “Yeah,” Carmela said, “I’ve noticed. And not your water-based project that you’ve been so sneaky about, either. Oh, yeah, I noticed... don’t give me that look. All those magic conference calls all of a sudden with you and Miss Thunder-Fins the Humpback! But this is how many times now that you were ‘too busy’ to come shopping with me? Three? Four? And you looked cranky, not happy like when you’ve been working with S’reee.”

  Nita looked briefly morose. “Dairine...” she said. “She’s been out a lot lately, and my dad’s been giving me grief about keeping tabs on her. Suddenly I’m supposed to be my sister’s keeper.”

  “You’ll need a whip and a chair for that,” Carmela said.

  Nita made a face, since this was true. “How much did Kit tell you about the Mars thing?”

  Carmela rolled her eyes most expressively. “Nothing, as usual. He’s started acting like he owns all the wizardy stuff in the world, Neets! You’d think there wasn’t enough to go around.”

  Nita laughed, maybe just a little evilly. “Don’t think that could have anything to do with you, could it?”

  “Me?” Carmela actually batted her eyelashes. “However could that be? He’s just jealous because he never got a chance to blow up a worldgating facility. First Dairine, now me— he’s just feeling like he’s missed an opportunity.”

  Nita grinned, for that thought had crossed her mind. “Come on,” she said, getting up. “I need to change.”

  She headed up the stairs: Carmela came after her. “But anyway,” Nita said at the top of the stairs, turning down the hall toward her bedroom, “you know how he keeps going up there.”

  “Kind of hard to ignore,” Carmela said, following Nita into her bedroom and flopping down on her bed while Nita went to her dresser and started pulling open drawers. “He sheds all this beige dust all over the place when he comes back. It’s all staticky: it gets all over the CDs and the DVDs. They get scratched. And he’s always wrecked the next day. He’s started using it as an excuse not to do his chores.”

  “Tell me about it,” Nita said, rolling her eyes. She came out with a pair of very worn and faded floppy jeans, and then with a short-sleeved pink top that she held up against her while looking in the mirror. “Dairine again?”

  “Same problem, different story,” Nita said, chucking the pink top back into the drawer: it was the wrong shade to work with what little was left of her spring tan. “Those big transport wizardries really take it out of you unless you can get somebody to go halves with you on the energy debt. Anyway, Mars— Kit’s not the only one who’s had Mars on the brain for a long time.” She picked up another top, a white one, and held it up against her.

  “Why? Are they going to invade us?” Then Carmela paused for a moment, getting a curious look. “Now that you mention it— who lives there?”

  “Nobody,” Nita said, shaking her head and dumping the white top back in the drawer. “So isn’t it funny that you think somebody there might invade you?”

  Carmela looked surprised. “Well, you know how it is. All the movies and old stories and stuff about invaders...”

  “‘From Mars,’” Nita said, looking over her shoulder. “The words almost seem to go together for a lot of Earth people. Weird, huh?”

  “I guess,” Carmela said. “Are you saying it shouldn’t be weird?”

  Nita shrugged, turning back to the drawer and rummaging through it. “Well, think about it. ‘Invaders from Venus’? ‘Invaders from Jupiter’? You don’t take them seriously. The language itself is giving you some kind of hint.” She came upon another top, a light green one, and held it up against her. “And it’s not just because Mars is the most Earthlike planet in our solar system, either. There’s just something about Mars. People have been interested in it for a long time, because of that. So wizards have been interested in it for a long time, too. There are all kinds of things about it that’re weird.” She picked another top out of the drawer, another pink one, and held it up against her, too. “For one thing, it doesn’t have a kernel.”

  Carmela blinked. “What?”

  “A kernel. Everything’s supposed to have one. People, things, atoms, planets. It’s like, if a body’s or a thing’s the hardware, the kernel’s the software: the rules for how it runs.”

  Carmela considered this. “So a kernel’s kind of like a soul?”

  “No. But souls can get hooked up to them. Anyway, a planet’s kernel usually just bops around inside the planet, doing its own thing and keeping the gravity and such working right. If there are wizards on the planet, one of the strongest ones gets told to keep an eye on the kernel and make sure it keeps working right.” Nita dropped the pink top back in the drawer.

  “But there’s no people there, you said. So no wizards—”

  “Not now,” Nita said. She put the green top down on the dresser and shut the drawer. “But once upon a time...”

  “There were people?”

  “We don’t know,” Nita said. “But everybody feels like there should have been.”

  “Whoa!” Carmela said, sounding both amused and skeptical. “Sounds kind of vague for you, Miss Neets. You’re usually Hard Science Girl.”

&
nbsp; “Yeah, well, everybody’s vague about this,” Nita said, sitting down on her desk chair and pulling off her shoes. “Mysterious stuff, and nothing in the manual to tell us what happened.” Then she wrinkled her nose and got up again, opening a different dresser drawer to get at the socks. “But when a species feels the effect of a neighboring planet this strongly, it usually means they’ve got past history.”

  “What? Like somebody there invaded us before?”

  Nita pulled off her old socks, put on a new pair. “Not necessarily. Maybe they could have ...or they meant to. But it never happened.” Then she grinned, looking up. “Or else it did happen ...and we’re all Martians.”

  Carmela gave Nita a very wide-eyed look. “¿Que?”

  “There are lots of meteorites from Mars lying around on Earth,” Nita said, getting up and feeling around under her dresser for her favorite beat-up sneakers. “Some people think that life here might have been started by some little bug on a shooting star that survived the ride in through the atmosphere. Splashed down into a nice warm sea... and then umpty million years later...” She grinned, gestured around her: her bedroom, her clothes, her teen magazines. “Us.”

  “And what do wizards say about that?” Carmela said.

  Nita shook her head. “Jury’s out,” she said. “The manual doesn’t normally tell much about a species’ origins until the species has already discovered a lot of the truth itself. Culture-shock issues.”

  “I wouldn’t be shocked,” Carmela said, sitting up and folding her legs under her. “As far as I’m concerned, half the people in school act like Martians already.”

  Nita snickered, wandering over to the door of her room and chucking the used socks out at the laundry basket in the hall. They bounced off the wall and went in. “But lots of people would be bothered,” Nita said. “Worldview stuff, religious stuff... Hey, look, even wizards are only human. We’re not all perfect at having both the real and the true in our heads at the same time without them blowing each other up! Especially since both the real and the true keep changing all the time.” She headed back to the dresser to pick up the jeans and the top she’d decided on. “But some people think that finding the truth for themselves is cooler than just sitting around with what people tell them is true. They think it’s okay to find out where you really came from, even if at first it gets you upset.”

  Carmela sat quiet for a moment. “You know,” she said, “if people here found out there really were Martians...”

  Nita bent down for her sneakers. “They’d freak,” Nita said, heading for the door. “And they’d do it big! Even if the little probes we’ve sent there don’t find anything bigger than germs, some people will still freak, because they think we’re—they’re— the most important things in the universe, all the life there is.” She snorted.

  “Yeah,” Carmela said. “Sker’ret would laugh all his legs off at that one.”

  Nita put her eyebrows up, leaning against the doorsill. “How is our favorite centipede?”

  “Busy,” Carmela said. “The Rirhath B government’s still cleaning up the Crossings, and Sker’s having himself a party being King of the Alien Worldgates while his Esteemed Ancestor grows in his new legs and claws and brains and things.” She grinned. “Sker’ret says he needs me to come help get their shopping mall cleaned up.”

  “Cleaned out, you mean,” Nita said. The planetary government of Rirhath B had settled a considerable reward on Carmela for “services rendered” in the liberation of the Crossings Worldgating Facility...and Carmela had chosen to take her reward as shopping vouchers. Nita guessed that a whole lot of the Crossings’ shopkeepers were rubbing their hands, claws, or tentacles together at the prospect. “That trip I’m taking with you, no matter what Dairine does. But anyway, the freaking’s gonna happen eventually, no matter what we do...because no matter who goes looking for life, sooner or later they’ll find it. And as far as wizards here go, it looks like the Powers That Be have decided that if we’re old enough to be asking serious questions about the fourth planet, we’re old enough to be told. But only because we didn’t just ask and then run away to play. We started going there and digging around.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Carmela said.

  “Since the 1770s...”

  Carmela banged the side of her head with one hand a couple of times in a my-ears-are-malfunctioning gesture. “Sorry! I thought you said since the Revolutionary War...”

  “Melaaaaa...!” Nita said, laughing, and headed out of her bedroom, making for the bathroom just down the hall. “There were wizards here then!” She pushed the bathroom door shut enough to change clothes in privacy.

  “What, in New York? And they went to Mars?”

  Nita pulled off her school pants and pulled on the jeans. “There were wizards all over the world, just like now. And sure they went to Mars! Everybody here was all hot on Mars around then, not just wizards. William Herschel started it. It was in all the papers. There were drawings and everything.” Nita snickered. “Though most of them were of completely made-up stuff that was never there...”

  “Okay,” Carmela said with a sigh, as Nita sat down on the edge of the tub to put on her sneakers. “I am very weirded out now. Not that this is even slightly unusual, but no one has any pity on my mental health...”

  Nita grinned as she pulled off her old top, for Carmela’s mental health was more robust than most people’s. She put on the lighter top, bent down to retie one loose sneaker-lace, then straightened and glanced at herself in the mirror. And paused, startled, for there was another figure behind her, looking at her over her shoulder in the mirror: taller, as slender as she was, but extremely pretty, far more so than—

  Nita blinked. The other reflection was gone.

  Now what the heck was that? Nita thought. And who has hair that color? For the long, flowing, waving hair of the person she’d thought she’d seen had been the richest and most vivid sky-blue imaginable.

  Nita stared into the mirror for a second more. There was nothing to be seen but her and the black and white tiles of the wall on the far side of the bathtub. I’ve been watching too much anime, she thought.

  “You fall in, in there?” Carmela called.

  “No...” Nita said, and reached for the mouthwash, looking suspiciously at the mirror. This was one of the unfortunate aspects of changing wizardly specialties...assuming that she was actually changing one, not just adding something on. Everything got so unsettled: you saw things, heard things, sensed things that at first didn’t make any sense. Later they did, but usually too late to help you sort out whatever the present problem was. Nita took a gulp of mouthwash, rinsed, spat, turned the faucet on to rinse the sink, and looked in that mirror again. Nothing but herself, and the memory, the shadow of a shape, fading already. Sapphire-blue hair, black eyes, profoundly deep. A fierce look: uncompromising, alien.

  And afraid...

  File it away, Nita thought. Stick it in Nita’s Big Book of Odd Oracular Imagery, and have a good long look at it later. Bobo?

  Got it, said the voice she was only slowly getting used to hearing in the back of her head, and even then not every time she spoke to it. There were unnerving, ambivalent silences sometimes when Nita spoke to the peridexis, her own personal “online” version of the wizard’s manual. It didn’t always answer. Nita wondered if this was because it knew she wasn’t entirely happy with it being inside her... though she’d been happy enough a month or so ago, when for a little while it was all the evidence of wizardry she’d had left. And if I don’t trust it completely... does it trust me? And if not, why not? This is all so bizarre.

  “You did fall in!” Carmela said from the bedroom.

  “No!” Nita said, briefly annoyed, and put the cap back on the mouthwash. She smoothed her top down and went out of the bathroom, leaning against her bedroom’s doorsill again.

  “Come on,” Nita said. “I’ll show you. Anyway, Kit’s over there, and you know you want to go make him crazy.”
r />   “It’s what I live for!” Carmela said. “Let’s go.” She stood up and stretched. “What’s summer wear for Mars look like?”

  “A force field. But that’s my problem. Anyway, we have another stop first.” She eyed the sweater Carmela was still wearing, a leftover from an unusually cool morning. “Better dump the angora,” Nita said, pulling open one more drawer, rummaging again, and coming up with a T-shirt that was too big for her, but about the right size for Carmela. She grinned and waved it like a flag. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”

  Carmela gave her a look, got up off the bed, and grabbed the T-shirt out of her hand. She vanished into the bathroom: a few moments later she was back in Nita’s room again, though she was still fussing with the T-shirt in a dissatisfied way. “So now what?”

  “Just come stand over here by the window.” Nita snapped her fingers, and her otherspace pocket popped open in the air beside her. She reached into it and felt around.

  Oh, you don’t need that... said the voice in her head.

  Let’s just say I like to check my figures, Nita said silently to the peridexis, riffling through the manual. Besides, I like to be extra certain, because it’s Carmela I’m transiting as well as me. Kit would be cranky if I got his sister stuck in the Earth’s core. Then she snickered. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t...

  “And what is so funny?” Carmela said. “Besides the way this tent fits?”

  “Everybody should have a few floppy shirts,” Nita said. “Don’t distract me.” She flipped through a few pages and found what she was looking for, the manual’s “persona” utility. “What’s your birthday again?”

  “November sixth,” Carmela said, knotting up the T-shirt into a more fashion-conscious configuration above the waist of her jeans. She peered over Nita’s shoulder, watching the way the Speech-characters on the manual page shifted and changed as she spoke. “Look at them jump around! Is that analyzing my voice?”

  “And your brainwaves, and a lot of other things,” Nita said. “It makes a shorthand version of your name in the Speech: that gets pasted into the spell. What was the last book you read?”