A Wizard of Mars New Millennium Edition Read online

  “Gulliver’s Travels,” Carmela said, watching a new layer of characters appear and nest themselves in among the first group, shoving them around in various directions and changing the colors in which they appeared on the page. “The uncensored one. Hey, what do you mean ‘shorthand’? Is it safe to put shorthand anything in a spell?”

  “Safe enough for this,” Nita said, watching the Speech-characters knit themselves into a little thorny circlet on the page, bristling with attachment-spurs that would hook into the larger spell. “We’re not going out of atmosphere, and less than fifty-eight thousand miles total. Not enough for significant error to build up.” Then Nita wrinkled her nose. “Wasn’t that kind of gross?”

  “What, the book? Come on. I don’t know why that parents’ group keeps trying to ban it. You’d think school kids had never heard that people pee.” Carmela snickered. “Maybe the grownups are just trying to keep word from getting out.”

  Nita smiled slightly as the diagnostic fitted another level of meaning into the long sentence-acronym it was assembling from the data that came with Carmela’s physical presence. A broad spectrum of information about her was being summed up and pulled into the construct: it’d be interesting to analyze it all in detail later on, though some of the information was already giving Nita second thoughts. “Your favorite color is this shade of yellow?” Nita said, putting her finger on one part of the Speech construct and pulling that set of characters off to one side, out into the air. She had to wince at the little bead of light that came to life at the tail end of the character chain. It was a particularly eye-watering shade of citrus yellow-green.

  “This week, yeah,” Carmela said. “Next week, who knows?”

  Nita shrugged: at least the routine was picking up its data correctly. “Okay,” she said, and let go of the character string: it snapped back into the circlet where it belonged. “Great— we’re set. Two seconds...”

  Nita turned back to the center of the manual. “Gating circles, please?” she said in the Speech. The manual fell open at the place where she stored her transit circles. “Thank you.” She reached into the page and pulled one out, an on-Earth transit routine that had her own Speech-name and the transit’s starting location, her bedroom, woven into it already. With a flick of her wrist she dropped it to the floor around the spot near the window where the two of them stood. Then Nita turned back to the page where she’d generated Carmela’s shorthand name. Carefully she lifted the long string of glowing characters out of the page and dropped it near Carmela, where there was a receptor socket ready to take it in the larger transit circle.

  Carmela looked down at it all suspiciously. “Are you sure this is safe?” she said.

  Nita gave Carmela an amused look. “This from somebody who let a TV remote install a worldgate in her bedroom closet? Come on. You should really have Sker’ret check that, anyway. He’s the expert.”

  Nita shut the manual, looked at the spell that lay burning on the floor around them, and started to say the words of the Wizard’s Knot that would fasten the spell closed and start it going.

  You’re forgetting something...

  Nita’s jaw dropped. “Oh, wow, you’re right!” she said. “Mela, wait right here. Don’t touch anything!”

  She jumped over the edge of the spell-circle and ran downstairs. Nita trotted through the kitchen, shut and locked the back door— something else she’d forgotten— and then picked up the plastic shopping bag of tomatoes from beside the sink. You’re welcome, said the peridexis.

  Nita rolled her eyes. “Everybody gives me a hard time,” she said, heading back upstairs. “Thanks, Bobo.”

  In Nita’s bedroom, Carmela was standing there with her arms folded and an I’m-waiting-patiently,- what-do-you-mean-don’t-touch-anything? expression on her face. “Does your invisible friend possibly have a secret identity?” she said. “A cute one?”

  Nita gave Carmela a look. “You behave,” she said, “or I’m going to let your mama and pop know just what they’re trying to turn loose on the poor unsuspecting nerdboys of CalTech.”

  “Please,” Carmela said, sounding unusually fervent even for her. “Just do that, and I’ll fall at your feet and kiss them forever.”

  “Yet another image I didn’t need,” Nita said. She looked down at the transit spell and began, once more, to speak the words in the Speech.

  The world always seems to press in all around to hear a spell being spoken. As Nita said the words, and heard the merely audible sounds of the everyday world go quiet under the pressure of that larger regard, she started to become strangely aware of something else: the sense that the spell itself was reacting strangely to something else in the circle. The peridexis, she thought. She’d noticed this before, recently, when heading out for off-planet work— Carmela’s presence in the spell merely added an unusual edge to the effect, as the peridexis shifted its presence to adapt to her. As the spell pressed in with more force around them, Nita wondered for the umpteenth time how she was going to get used to having what seemed to be wizardry itself in her head with her. It wasn’t all a bad thing: she’d kept a little of the increase in power which all Earth’s younger wizards had experienced during the recent crisis, when others had lost theirs much sooner. But she couldn’t get rid of the idea that there was something about all this she wasn’t understanding yet, and she needed to get to grips with it pretty quick...

  The silence leaned in around them, becoming total. Light started fading as well, leaving the two of them, for the long, strange stretch between one breath and the next, marooned in an odd daylight darkness. For that little time, Nita and Carmela were all that seemed to exist: and of the two of them, Carmela seemed much less concerned about it all, standing as casually there in the spell-circle as someone waiting for a bus. Nita turned slightly to read and say the last words of the spell, feeling the world resisting them. It always resisted a little at the end of a gating: no matter how sweetly you persuaded a place to let you stop being where you were while it stayed the same, the local physicality hung onto you and complained to the last. What’s funny, Nita thought, is that I never really noticed it until now. Was I always in too much of a rush? Am I just hypersensitive because of this change-of-specialty thing? Or is it the peridexis? Whatever—

  She pushed through the resistance, said the spell’s last word, and added the final syllables of the Wizard’s Knot to make it all come real. Reality, finally becoming resigned to the wizardry, surrendered. Everything went black: then not quite black, but the deepest possible blue—

  ***

  Heat: that was the first thing that made an impression— heat that even at dawn still pressed in all around and briefly took your breath. Nita glanced around to make sure that Carmela was all right, for in the direction they’d been facing, the sky was still fairly dark. Then Nita groaned and put the tomato bag down on the indefinite-colored, sandy ground, massaging the arm that had been holding it for what now felt like about a century.

  They were standing on an elevated outcropping of land near the edge of an island in a sea that, in the growing dawn light, was already a surprisingly vivid deep blue. Ahead and to their right, the black basalt cliffs of the island’s northern peninsula dropped sheer down into the water. In those cliffs’ shadow lay a kind of patchy, glowing pallor— the bioluminescence associated with the offshore coral growth. Soon enough, Nita knew, that glow would fade as daylight grew and the native reds and violets of the corals asserted themselves. As she watched, a delta-winged shadow slid across the green-white glow— some passing giant manta, out hunting early.

  “Whooo,” Carmela said, turning around very carefully, for they were a good way up from the stony beach below.

  “Hold still,” Nita said. “I’ll make a light.” She held out a hand and said the sixteen words of a wizard-light spell. The light popped out of nothing in the air, burning small and hot and blue, and Nita got out her manual. “I need to check that everybody’s where I think they are...”

  She
glanced at the messaging page in the back of the manual, comparing the coordinates laid into one message to the terrain below. A map came swimming up out of the glowing text, showing the cliffside, the path leading down from it, and the beach on the island’s northwest tip. There Nita saw a little cluster of blue-light pinpricks, one circled in red. “Yup,” she said, and shut the manual, shoving it back in its otherspace pocket. “There he is. Let’s go.”

  Nita made a downward-pressing gesture with one hand, and the little sphere of light sank down to shin level, illuminating the path before them. “Down this way. Take your time: you wouldn’t want to slip...”

  They made their way down the path, the light going before them and growing paler as the dawn light all around them grew stronger. North of the cliffs, the island’s slope to the water grew gentler, creating a spot that more resembled a beach, though not the kind that would have been pleasant for sunbathers. It was strewn with boulders of every size, though they were smallest down by the water. Here and there some small scraggly tree, scrub tamarind or beechpine, pushed its crooked, wind-twisted way up between the boulders.

  “Okay,” Carmela said as the path switched back again, and for a little while they walked more or less toward the swiftly brightening eastern sky. “So geography was never my big thing. I give. Where on Earth are we?”

  Nita snickered. “Half the clues are right in front of you,” she said. “I should make you guess.”

  “Juanita Louise,” Carmela said, “you are a real pain in the gnaester sometimes...”

  “Carmela, what did I tell you about the ‘L’ word?” Nita said, as they turned another switchback curve in the hillside trail. Nita hated her middle name and was still trying to figure out how Carmela had discovered it, as Carmela wouldn’t tell her. “It was Dairine, wasn’t it?” she said. “That little—”

  “Not her, Miss Neets,” Carmela said, looking smug. They turned another switchback curve, and Nita, paying too much attention to Carmela’s expression, banged her left sneaker-toe against an unexpected rock. “Ow, ow, ow!” she said, putting down the tomato bag hurriedly and hopping briefly on the other foot.

  “See that,” Carmela said. “The world’s punishing you for being cute with me. Ooooh...”

  Nita stopped hopping, grinning at Carmela’s reaction to something Nita had seen before when wizardly work had taken her and Kit close enough to the equator— the shortness of the twilight before dawn and after sunset, and the bizarre way that sunrise and sunset just seemed to happen, bang, all at once. The Sun didn’t quite leap up over the horizon, but it seemed a very short time between the moment the first burning splinter of the Sun’s upper limb broke the water and the one when the whole blinding disc, veiled in furiously silver-burning clouds, rose over the eastern sea. The water of the bay beneath them came alive in a storm of glitter.

  “Welcome to Gili Motang,” Nita said.

  “This is really cool,” said Carmela. “Except for the temperature.”

  “It’ll get worse, but I don’t think we’re gonna have time to care.”

  The last turn in the path had brought them around to look back the way they’d come, so that they were now gazing straight down into the hot, blue waters of the Molo Strait. From that direction the dry southwest wind was blowing hard, and big waves rolled up the southerly-facing beaches; the crash of the surf could be much more clearly heard when you were facing into it. “Pretty,” Carmela said. “So where is Gili Motang exactly?”

  “Indonesia,” Nita said as she put her stubbed foot down, wriggling her toes inside her sneaker. She picked up the bag of tomatoes again. “Our visitor has a project going here. Or not going, and she keeps coming in to work on it. Did Kit tell you who he was coming to see?”

  “Some important wizard,” Carmela said. “Kit’s really impressed with her; that’s all I know. ‘Manfish’?”

  “Mamvish,” Nita said as they negotiated one last switchback on their way down the hillside. “She’s really old; in our years, anyway. She’s spent three thousand years or so saving species that’re about to be destroyed— getting rid of what’s threatening them, or else moving them to new homes. ‘Rafting,’ it’s called. Some species she’s even been able to save after they’ve been destroyed.”

  “That must take some work!”

  “She’s got the power to pull it off,” Nita said. “Tons of it. What’s fun is that even though she’s such a big deal, she’s still kind of a goof.”

  They came down onto the stony, broken ground at the bottom of the hill. Carmela tsk-tsked at the rocky beach as they made their way along the base of the hillside. “Not much good for swimming...”

  “No,” Nita said. “Especially not if you have trouble with sharks.”

  Carmela laughed. “Like you wouldn’t!”

  “Not these days,” Nita said, smiling. “No.” She changed the tomato bag over to the other hand as they came around the pointy end of the hillside where it dropped to the water.

  Another small, half-circle rocky bay was revealed on the right as they made their way down among the fractured sandstone boulders that had rolled down the cliff. The strand of the bay was boulder-strewn too, and small dark shapes— human figures— sat on the biggest rocks near the water. Near the base of the cliff, not far away, stood a long green-golden shape that had to be fifty feet long.

  “What is that?” Carmela said. “Hey, it’s a dinosaur!” And she started to head straight downslope toward it.

  “Uh, no,” Nita said. Then she caught a motion out of the corner of her eye. “Mela, watch out!”

  She flung an arm out in front of Carmela. Carmela stopped so suddenly she nearly fell over forward onto the seven-foot-long Komodo dragon that was suddenly blocking their path.

  “Whoa!” Carmela said, and stumbled back. Nita grabbed Carmela’s arm to steady her as that blunt, oblong head swung toward them.

  Yum, the Komodo dragon said. Its tongue went out and waved around in the air, tasting it for their scent.

  “You really wouldn’t like eating us!” Nita said in the Speech.

  “Yeah,” Carmela said, also in the Speech. “We’re probably both full of additives.”

  The dragon looked from Carmela to Nita and back again. Its tongue went in and out a few more times. What’s an additive? the Komodo dragon said. Is it nice?

  Very carefully, Nita handed Carmela the bag of tomatoes, acutely conscious of how the dragon was following her every move. “No, they’re really unhealthy...” The moment she had both hands free, Nita took hold of one of the charms on her bracelet, the one with her shield spell set up in it. Komodo dragons could move like lightning when they wanted to, and could rip an arm or a leg off you before you knew what was happening. If this guy tries something cute, I’m gonna have to adjust this spell on the fly so it works for two of us—

  “You should really go inland,” Nita said. “There are all kinds of nice goats and things for you to eat up there, much nicer tasting than us.”

  “Seriously,” Carmela said. “Just go on back there in the forest and take a seat, and your server will be with you shortly!”

  The dragon looked peculiarly at Carmela, and its tongue went in and out several times more. Nita held her breath.

  Finally the Komodo dragon turned and lurched away, uphill, toward the scraggly forest above the beach. Nita let out a long breath and shot Carmela a look. “You’ve been spending too much time in those restaurants at the Crossings.”

  Carmela shrugged. “Being nice never hurts...”

  “You’ve got that right, anyway,” Nita said. “Let’s get down there before we have to have that conversation with one of Mister Dragon’s buddies.”

  The two of them headed downslope to where the track gave out. Shortly they were picking their way among the cracked yellow boulders toward the group on the beach. “Neets,” Carmela said, “I hate to tell you this, but there’s another dragon down there.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the dinosaur.”
>
  Nita peered ahead. “It’s okay. Too busy to notice us, I think. Anyway, don’t you see someone familiar?” She took back the bag of tomatoes.

  “Who?” Now it was Carmela’s turn to peer.

  “Where do you— Ronan!” Carmela took off toward where that tall, slim shape was lounging on top of a big boulder in black jeans and a black T-shirt, and doubtless paying the price for it in this weather; but he looked as casual as if he were sitting on a block of ice.

  Nita grinned as she negotiated the rocky stretch between herself and the wizards sitting on the rocks by the edge of the bay. Kit was there in T-shirt and baggies, perched on an even bigger boulder than the one where Ronan Nolan had stretched himself out. Nearby, on a lower, flatter stone, a smaller shape sat cross-legged— younger, much darker, wiry, in swim trunks and a floppy white tank top: Darryl McAllister, one of the newer wizards of Nita’s acquaintance, a neighbor from over in Baldwin. The three of them were watching yet another Komodo dragon, bigger than the one Nita had spoken to, and also keeping an eye on the huge, shimmering, golden-green shape bending down over the dragon: one that, to Nita’s way of thinking, seemed much worthier of the name.

  If someone had stood an African elephant next to that great shape, the elephant would have been taller, but the saurian, sheathed in a handsome, pebbly, gleaming hide, would have been much bigger. Though Mamvish’s shoulders stood no more than twenty feet from the ground, they were nearly ten feet apart, and each leg was as thick as the trunk of the forty-year-old maple in front of Nita’s house. Those legs bent twice, in a double elbow— one of them bending backward about eight feet from the ground, and the second one about four feet above it. Each leg ended in a six-toed paw, as broad compared to the leg as the foot of a cat, and each toe had a massive, metallically glinting claw retracted partly into it. The hind legs were like the front ones, though the hip joints were higher than the shoulders, and the tail that trailed away behind them lashed and coiled, gesturing more expressively than any Komodo dragon’s tail could.