Dairine stared at the polished floor. “I don’t know,” she said at last, looking toward the simulation. “This has kind of a Big Brother sound to it...”
“Or Big Sister?” Nita said. “Yeah, it does. But it’s the best deal we’re going to get from Dad right now. And since Bobo is wizardry, and the Powers That Be run him, he can’t do anything bad to you or Spot.” Nita glanced around. “Where is he, anyway?”
Dairine gestured with her head toward the star simulator. To Nita’s considerable surprise, a small shadow, like a rectangular sunspot, materialized near the bottom of the slowly rotating globe: and then a dark oblong shape extruded itself from the shadow and dropped toward the shining floor. The shape put out legs in midair and landed on them, bouncing slightly as it came down. Then it came spidering over to Dairine and Nita.
“Has he had another upgrade?” Nita said. When she’d seen Spot only that morning, he’d looked as he had for the last couple of months—shining black and wearing, set into the back of the closed lid, what could at first glance have been mistaken for the fruity logo of a large computer company, except that this apple had no bite out of it Now, though, he looked significantly thinner, and the black of his carapace had gone matte.
“Scheduled molt,” Dairine said. “He was installing some new firmware and thought while he was at it he’d try one of the new nonreflective coatings on his shell.”
“Sharp look, guy!” Nita said to him. “Suits you.”
Thanks, Spot said. As usual, he was no more verbally forthcoming with Nita than with anyone else but Dairine. But he did sound faintly pleased.
Dairine let out a long breath. “I don’t know about this,” she said under her breath. “Bobo’s kind of your tool.”
Nita burst out laughing. Dairine looked at her strangely. “What? What’s so funny?”
It took Nita a few moments to get the laughter under control. “My tool! Oh, please. Like I can order wizardry around and tell it what to do! Please let that happen.” She got down on one knee. “Spot,” she said, “have you been following this?”
Yes.
“Will this solution work for you? You’re the one who’ll be the source of the raw data. Bobo’ll just be managing the spinoff for Dad: he’ll feed the massaged data to the computer at home.”
Maybe with text-message alerts and tweets when something new comes in, Bobo said at the back of Nita’s mind. And copied to e-mail, of course...
Nita rolled her eyes. Not only do I have the spirit of wizardry living in my head, but it’s a geek spirit. She turned her attention back to Spot.
He turned one eye up to look at Dairine. Okay with you?
She shrugged. “If we’re going to stay on track with what we’re doing here, sounds like it has to be.”
All right, Spot said, and trundled off back under the simulator. There he levitated up into the body of the surrogate sun, vanishing in the glare of its chromosphere.
Nita shook her head. “How hot does it get in there?”
“Not too bad,” Dairine said, and sighed. “A couple thousand degrees K. The temperature’s scaled down, like the exterior, for practice. Wizards here usually scale themselves way up in apparent size to work with Thahit. Seems it perceives us better that way.”
Nita nodded. “Okay. Look... thanks for working with me on this. Why don’t you go get changed and we’ll head home and deal with Dad before he gets too crazy. The sooner we disarm him, the sooner life gets back to what passes for normal.”
Dairine nodded, moved away. Then suddenly she stopped and turned: and the strange, hard look on her face made Nita wonder if she was going to have to do this bout of persuasion all over again.
“One thing,” Dairine said.
Nita tried to stay calm. “Yeah?”
Dairine came back to Nita almost reluctantly. “When you came after me just now,” Dairine said, “you checked your manual first, didn’t you? To see what happened to Roshaun.”
Nita froze. Dairine’s voice had gone expressionless and flat, and hearing it sound that way scared Nita: the last time she’d heard that tone from her sister had been just after their mom had died. How do I handle this? What do I say?
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I did.”
Dairine stared at her. Then she whispered, “What did it say?”
Oh, God, I was afraid of this! Either she hasn’t looked, or she has and doesn’t believe what she saw. And if whatever I say is the wrong answer, now I get blamed for whatever I found. “Uh. It was something weird. Something really— vague.”
Dairine’s face was simply frozen. Nita didn’t dare move. Oh, no, I’m dead now...
But suddenly her sister was hugging her hard, her face buried in Nita’s vest. “Oh, wow,” Dairine was saying, “oh, wow, I was so scared, I thought that he— and then I thought I was crazy; it didn’t make any sense. But if you saw it, too, then it’s true, he’s not, not dead, he’s not—”
Nita was bemused, but for the moment the safest course seemed to be to just hang on to Dairine while her sister got herself under control. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay!” —while very much hoping it actually was.
After a moment Dairine pushed her away, turning her back to wipe her eyes. “Come on,” Nita said, “let’s get moving. Go change.”
Dairine nodded and vanished.
Nita turned away from the slowly rotating star— then jumped. In complete silence, Nelaid had reappeared behind her and was standing with hands clasped behind his back, looking past Nita at the simulator.
That ironic gaze shifted to her now. Nita popped out in a sweat. The effect was similar to being in the principal’s office, except that in this case she hadn’t been called: she’d walked in and told the principal to his face that whatever he was doing, he needed to stop it while she dealt with business. “I’m really, really sorry,” Nita said. “If I could have, I’d have waited till she got home. But my dad—”
Nelaid held up a hand, closed his eyes. It was a gesture Nita had seen other humanoid species use as the equivalent of a headshake. When Nelaid opened his eyes again, his expression was milder, if no less ironic. “She is, I take it, a trial to you.”
Nita rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”
“I might,” Nelaid said. “I had a younger brother once. He should have been Sunlord when our father left the body. But others had different plans for him. And my father, and me.”
In the précis on Wellakh, Nita had seen references to the political instability of the world: but the phrase “frequent assassinations” can sound merely remotely troubling until you find yourself discussing the reality of it with one of the targets. Not certain how to respond, Nita kept quiet.
“She reminds me of him,” Nelaid said, looking at the simulation of the Wellakhit homestar as it gently rotated. As they watched, a single loop of prominence arched up out of the leftward limb of the star, strained away from it, snapped in two; the ends frayed away and the separate jets fell back to the sun’s surface in a splash of plasma.
“Of your brother?” Nita said.
Nelaid closed his eyes again. When they opened, Nita was sorry she’d said anything: the grief and pain in Nelaid’s eyes flared as the prominence had, brief and fierce. Then the look was swallowed back into that look of carefully controlled irony, and might never have been there at all. “Is she in difficulty at home?” Nelaid said.
“Some. It’ll be okay when we get back. Our dad just needs to know what Dairine’s doing.”
And then the idea hit her. “I wonder—” Nita said, and stopped. Where do I go from here? There are too many ways this can go wrong—
Too late: Nelaid was waiting. “It might make our father happier,” Nita said, “if he knew for sure that she had someone keeping an eye on her. Someone—”
“Older?” Nelaid said. “More responsible?” He smiled. Again there was pain in the smile, but it was distant enough, Nita thought, that Nelaid could now also find it funny.
“A father figure?
” Nita said, taking the chance.
After a long moment’s stillness, Nelaid nodded. “Perhaps, when the present problem is settled, he and I might speak. At his convenience.”
Nita bowed to Nelaid, and not one of those all-purpose half-bows, either. In the middle of it, the air went bang! behind her as Dairine reappeared. “You drop something?” her sister said.
Nita straightened, catching a glint of humor in Nelaid’s eyes, but this hid itself as quickly as the pain had. “No. Where’s Spot?”
Spot popped out of the air between the two of them, dropped to the ground. Nelaid looked over Nita’s head and said to Dairine, “You did moderately well with the last exercise, but you have much work to do yet before it’s perfect, and perfection is what’s required. Let me know when you’re at liberty to deal with the situation.”
Dairine bowed, too: a somewhat cursory gesture, but more than most entities would get from her, no matter how many planets they virtually ruled. Nita pulled the transit circle out of her charm bracelet, dropped it to the floor, nodded goodbye to Nelaid, and activated the spell.
A few blinks later they were standing in their backyard. The long afternoon shadows were not too far along from where Nita had left them. “Go upstairs and sort yourself out,” Nita said as they headed toward the house. “Be quiet about it. Then come down. Don’t make him come up after you. Okay?”
“Will you cut it out? It’s not like I don’t know how to handle him!”
Nita caught her sister by the shoulder. “Handling’s not what he needs right now. Just play it straight, so we can both get back to business. Please?”
Dairine gave her a quick look of rebellion— but that was all, a moment’s indulgence of habit— and vanished.
Nita sighed and headed through the gate, up the driveway, and into the house. Her dad was still at the dining room table, working on another cup of coffee: he looked surprised to see Nita come in the door. “She’ll be down in a minute,” Nita said, and flopped into a chair.
Her dad blinked. “Just like that?”
Nita shrugged.
Her dad stared down into his cup, looked up again after a few moments. “You think I was a little abrupt with you before?”
Nita said nothing, just gave him back one of his favorite expressions, a wide-eyed look with the eyebrows right up.
Her dad laughed, a brief, embarrassed sound. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay.”
He was looking at the table again, a little unfocused. “Roshaun,” her father said, sounding reluctant. “Just what happened with him up there on the Moon?”
Nita shook her head, wishing she had more clarity on the subject. “He vanished.”
“But wizards vanish all the time.”
“Not like this,” Nita said. “It was a lot more ...final.”
“But not final enough for Dairine.”
“No. Dad—” There was no way to say this that wasn’t going to pain both of them, so she just said it. “Even for humans, there’s dead, and then there’s dead dead. Other species handle mortality other ways. They have to. Their souls are different shapes from ours. But no matter what shape your soul is, when you’re a wizard, weird things can happen to change the way things work...” She shook her head. “The only thing I’m sure of is that Roshaun’s not dead the way we think about dead.”
“And so Dairine actually has some chance of finding him?”
Nita nodded. “If anyone can, yeah. But he’s still lost. And all this time she’s been spending on his home planet… I think she feels like she owes a debt to his mom and dad. Like she got Roshaun involved with our planet ...and then Nelaid and Miril lost their son because of what she did.”
Her dad sat silent for a moment. “It’s honorable, what she’s doing,” he said at last. “But at the same time— Nita, she’s just thirteen!”
“And I was how old when I started?”
Her father rolled his eyes. “She needs way more watching than you ever did.”
“So that’s just what you’ll be doing, whenever you want,” Nita said. “And she’s going to explain everything you see. It’ll be the next best thing to standing over her shoulder, watching.” And Nita grinned. “Might be more data than you want.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” her dad said. But as he leaned back in the chair, he looked more relaxed.
Nita stood up. “So am I off the hook?”
Her dad’s look was meant to be stern, but Nita wasn’t fooled. “For the moment. We’ll see how this works out.”
Nita went over and hugged and kissed him, because he was really being very good. Then she headed for the back door before he changed his mind. “By the way—”
In the kitchen doorway, hearing the stairs creak as Dairine came down them, Nita paused. “Yeah?”
“I keep meaning to ask you. What is on Mars?”
“Besides a rock with your cell phone number carved on it?” Nita grinned. “We’re not sure. But we’re gonna find out.”
“Well, all right. But don’t get us invaded, now.”
“Daddy!”
He gave her a mischievous look. “Well, you can’t blame me. It’s kind of the first thing that comes to mind, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.” And she vanished.
5: Nili Patera
It was dark. Kit found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling, his eyes wide open. He was wide awake, but he couldn’t think why.
He lay there on his back under the covers for a few seconds, listening to the house. It was still, devoid of any of the little middle-of-the-night sounds that it made as the weather got warmer. And one other sound was missing, from the braided rug by the side of his bed: a small, faint whistling snore.
Kit sighed. Ponch, he thought. But his dog’s midnight snore was a sound he would not hear again. He turned his head on the pillow, fumbled for his smartphone and peered at the digital clock on its display. 3:38.
Which is what time on Mars? He closed his eyes again for a moment, trying to do the math for the time at Nili Patera. But math was no match for the image of the green-brown sandy soil under his knees, and the strange shining blue-green superegg in his lap. He could just feel the faint sense of some quiet power running under the surface of it, mute, waiting.
That was it, he thought, pushing himself up on his elbows. It wasn’t ready. It was waiting for something.
And what if it’s ready now?
Kit sat up in the quiet, gazing into the darkness, his heart pounding as if he’d been running somewhere. It was weird. Then, No, it’s not, he thought. Kit had had a lot of trouble getting to sleep when he’d finally gotten home and turned in. He’d been as wired as if he was seven years old and the next day was going to be Christmas. Well, what do I expect? I was on Mars. I actually touched an alien artifact that someone left there. I felt that it was alive—
And waiting.
He looked again at the phone. Mamvish said we should do some analysis first, Kit thought. Irina said, take your time...
Kit sat there for a few moments, listening to his heart pound. Then he threw the covers off, got up, and went to the desk by the window.
The manual was there where he usually left it when he was home. Analysis... Kit thought. He flipped the manual’s cover open and paged through to the Mars project section, then tapped the open pages so they’d glow in the dark.
The only new things on the main project page were the manual-generated précis of what the group who went up to Mars yesterday had found, and beside it, a few “read, noted” symbols from research team members who’d flagged the entry to let other team members know they’d seen it. Kit shook his head, unbelieving. Twenty-six other wizards working on this project and nobody has anything interesting to say? Kit thought, frowning. Even just ‘Hey, wow’? Come on, people...!
He let out a frustrated breath and flipped on through to the part of the master directory he’d bookmarked. I wonder, is Mamvish around?
He found he
r name halfway down the page, as usual, with that astonishing power level noted next to it— a four-digit level, when even the most powerful wizards on Earth usually only went as high as three. Even Irina’s level wasn’t as high. Yet at the same time, the level of respect Mamvish had been showing Irina suggested that, at the more elevated levels of practice, sheer power wasn’t everything. Even if you could blow up a whole planet all by yourself…
It was a creepy thought. Wizardry was usually about keeping things alive, or at least in one piece. And why would the Powers That Be want someone to blow a planet up? Kit thought. Especially their own? A sudden image came to him of Irina, standing alone in some desert place, terrible power building around her, while her face held still and cold, and her eyes—
Kit shivered. Now, where’d that come from? he thought. Catching something from Neets, maybe. He shook his head, glanced down at Mamvish’s listing again. Next to the short version of her name flashed a small knotted symbol that was Speech-shorthand for Occupied: on assignment. Next to it was a long string of symbols indicating that Mamvish wasn’t anywhere near this solar system, since the light-years-from your-location symbol had a tens-of-thousands augmentor suffix on it. Halfway across the galaxy, it looks like. And busy. Dammit...
Kit leaned back in his chair, tipping it back on its back legs and rocking for a moment in thought: then sat forward and turned some more pages in the manual. It’s quarter of nine where Ronan is, he thought. He must be up by now!But the “status” part of Ronan’s listing, when he came to it, was grayed out, a sign that the person was unavailable for some routine reason, usually sleep. I can’t believe it. How can any sane person sleep late after what we were doing yesterday?
Kit folded his arms on top of his manual and put his head down sideways on them, frustrated. Again he found himself gazing at the oval braided rug where Ponch could always be found between bedtime and morning, lying on his back, snoring, waiting for Kit to get up and feed him. I wish he was here, Kit thought. I’d just say, ‘Come on, Ponch, let’s go to Mars!’ And he’d jump up and spin around a few times and run out the door, ready to go...