Then Kit let out a long breath. He was a wizard, not a magician: and in a wizard’s world, there was no use wasting your time wishing for things you couldn’t have. You went on to the next option— by getting up off your butt and doing the necessary work. Even if there’s no one else to do it with.
Kit stood up, glancing down at the manual. Neets... But he could just imagine what she’d say if he woke her up at four in the morning, especially after the afternoon and evening she’d had. Kit flipped over to the fast-messaging area in the back of the manual and had another look at the terse message she’d left him about the results of the phone call from her father, and her annoyance on coming back to Mars when everything was settled to find that everyone else had left. Talk to you tomorrow AFTER LUNCH, the note ended. He could practically see her scowling.
Well, she’ll be over it after she’s had some breakfast and some time to relax. Kit straightened up, shivering: it was a while since the central heating had been on, and the room was chilly. I’ll jump up to my usual spot, then go check on the superegg from there. It’ll take less energy than doing a whole new custom transit.
Very quietly he pulled clothes on— jeans, sweatshirt, down vest— and then the hiking boots his pop had given him for his last birthday, when the family had driven upstate for the weekend and walked the Appalachian Trail through Bear Mountain State Park. Those boots had been getting more than Earth dirt on them the last few weeks, and the abrasive sand and dust of the much-eroded Martian surface was in the process of wearing the leather down to a nice beat-up patina.
Kit finished lacing up the right-hand boot, rubbing the leather thoughtfully: it was dry. Even though Kit always took enough air with him to Mars for a given visit, plus twenty percent in case of emergencies, that air tended to get very dried out while it was there. So did anything else inside the air bubble with him. Better find the neat’s-foot oil and leather wax for these things when I get back. Don’t want them to start cracking.
He picked up the manual and paged through it again, then whispered the thirty-eight words of a spell macro he used when he wanted to get in and out of the house quietly: one small subroutine that put an inch-thick layer of hardened air between him and the stairs, as a cushion for his footsteps, and another subroutine to ask the downstairs back door if it would please unlock itself in absolute silence.
Kit made his way quietly downstairs, through the living room and into the kitchen. Just a faint line of light showed by the back door where it had eased itself open— a little crack showing Kit that the dimness outside was paling toward dawn. There, just behind the door, Kit paused for a moment, looking at something hanging on one of the coat hooks behind the door— a long, slim, faintly blue-glowing cord with a loop at each end, dangling down half-hidden behind one of Kit’s winter jackets. It was a spell made of fishes’ breath and other hard-to-source ingredients: Ponch’s wizardly leash, the only leash that had been able to stay on his dog and keep whoever was walking him connected to him when he’d started walking between universes. I really should roll that up and put it away... But he hadn’t been able to do that just yet. It would have been an admission of how completely his dog was gone. Kit sighed, touched the doorknob. Thanks, he said to the door and its locks.
No problem, they said in chorus. Know when you’re coming back?
“Not just yet,” Kit said in the Speech. “Go ahead, lock up again, but real quiet.” He stepped out, pulled the door closed behind him; both locks snicked back into place.
Kit went down the stairs into the carport and paused by his dad’s pet project, the ancient Edsel Pacer that he’d been restoring forever. Part of the problem was that parts for a car made in 1958 were getting hard to come by. But more to the point, Kit’s pop was in the habit of taking a lot of overtime at work so that the family could afford things he thought they needed to have, like the new entertainment center; so mostly the Edsel sat here waiting patiently for him to summon up the energy to work on it. Every now and then his pop came out and waxed it, or oiled whatever metal was exposed so that it wouldn’t suffer, or installed some long-sought part that had finally come in from somewhere around the country. The relationship was becoming a guilty one on Kit’s pop’s side, no matter how often Kit explained to his pop that the Edsel didn’t really mind.
“Hey, guy,” Kit said, leaning against the right front fender and looking down into the headlight on that side. “You doing okay?”
I’m fine. Any news on the replacement taillights yet?
The car’s resigned tone made Kit grin. “I hear they actually shipped,” he said, walking around to the far side of the car and carefully opening the front door. He slipped in and sat down on the broad bench-style front seat, bracing the door so that it would fall closed quietly. “Should be here next week.”
Great! Where you going today?
“The usual place,” Kit said. He reached out and punched one of the radio buttons on the Edsel’s dashboard. In immediate response, the transit spell he’d installed inside the car a couple of months back came alive around him, a glowing tracery of Speech-characters seemingly shining up from just underneath the surface of the seat’s leather. The closed environment of the car did a good job of muffling the air-implosion noise that went with a teleport, and it was hard enough to see into the Edsel that Kit felt comfortable vanishing in there without adding the energy outlay of an invisibility spell on top of the transit. “We all clear?”
He could feel the Edsel looking around it, though as with most inanimate objects, Kit wasn’t sure what it was using to do the looking. All clear. Be careful!
“All the time,” Kit said. He reached down to the glowing lines of the transit spell, braced himself, and said the word to activate it.
The next moment was never entirely comfortable. No one travels a hundred fifty million miles in a breath without his or her body complaining about the stresses and strains of bypassing lightspeed and numerous other natural laws. Kit felt, as usual, as if he was being squeezed unbearably tight on all sides, and the pressure got worse and worse— until all the pressure abruptly went away, and almost all the breath whooshed out of his lungs. That too was typical for a private transit to Mars. It took a fraction of a second for his life-support wizardry to analyze its new coordinates, recognize them, and kick in.
Kit swallowed and opened his eyes, starting to gasp as the usual reaction to doing a biggish spell set in. He was right where he was supposed to be, sitting on his usual “landing rock,” perched on the rim of the ancient caldera-crater of the extinct volcano Elysium Mons. Kit sat there waiting for the breathlessness to pass, and concentrated on blinking until his eyes worked right again.
He’d originally chosen this spot for its spectacular view. Though not as high or huge as its more famous cousin Olympus Mons, Elysium Mons stood up steep and splendidly isolated in the northern hemisphere lowland plains of Elysium Planitia. The cone of the old volcano alone was taller than Mount Everest. But underneath the mountain proper lay a great uplift plateau that ancient stresses had pushed some three kilometers up out of the crust; so the spot where Kit now sat towered at least forty thousand feet above the dark-sanded plain.
Off to his left, twenty miles south and east at the edge of the pedestal, the little crater-topped mountain Albor Tholus rose up, its concave top whitened with dry-ice snow. Beyond it, the underlying uplift pedestal fell away in dark narrow rilles to the surrounding plain, charcoal-colored in the night. Away into the dark distance the plains stretched to a horizon just faintly hazed on their southwest edge with a thin line of silver light: the last remnant of sunset. Between Kit and that distant, shadowy edge of the world, craters dotted the ashy darkness, here and there shining pale at their bottoms with thin gleaming skins of starlit water ice or carbon dioxide frost.
It was clear tonight—a frigid pre-winter midnight in Mars’s northern hemisphere, through which stars unimpeded by the thin atmosphere burned fierce and still. Kit shivered. Even with an aggressive force field
and in a hemisphere where it was summer, Mars wasn’t somewhere you wanted to spend much time at night. And in the winter— Has to be a hundred below, Kit thought. Maybe a hundred fifty. He glanced down around the low boulder where he sat, then bent over and picked up a little stone about the size of a golf ball. Even though it had soaked up some considerable heat from the bubble of air his life-support spell was holding in place around him, the stone was still so cold it burned his hand. Kit had to juggle it to keep it from sticking to his skin. “How cold, fella?” he said in the Speech.
The rock took a moment about answering. Things made of stone tended not to understand the idea that cold and heat might be different: it was all just temperature to them. A hundred and twenty-three point five degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Kit nodded and kept tossing the rock gently in his hand until it came up to a more bearable temperature. After a few moments he was able to hold on to it. He rubbed it gently between finger and thumb: charcoal-colored grit came off on his fingers as Kit looked south toward that acutely curved, silver-edged horizon. For a long time now, whenever he’d felt the need for a little quiet in his life, or a little mystery, he’d come here to sit and look out at this silent, uncommunicative terrain in perplexed wonder—for it was rare for a planet’s landscape to have so little to say to a wizard. Wherever life had been for any length of time, the structure of the world tended to remember, and to be willing enough to “talk” about it. Here the ground seemed only to know its own strictly geological history. Yet there was also a strange sense of something being withheld: as if some dark tide of silence and secrecy had risen, submerging everything, and never receded...
“What about it?” Kit said to the rock. In this starlit midnight, it was dark matte-gray, with here and there a fleck of mica embedded in its gritty sandstone. “What do you know about the world? Who’s been here?”
No one but you and her, the rock said, the other one. I know day, and night. Water snow and gas snow. That’s about it.
Kit nodded and put the rock down where he’d found it. As he did, the landscape around him lightened ever so slightly, a change he’d never have noticed on Earth: but here, now that his eyes were used to the dark, it made a difference. He looked up and saw the little moon Deimos rising, a planet-bright moving spark against the stars, about as bright as the International Space Station could have been at home when it went over. Deimos, though, moved quicker, almost imperceptibly changing the dark charcoal of the surrounding sands to a lighter shade as it climbed the sky, shifting the angle of the dim shadows in the craters below.
Kit stood up, dusted his pants off, and flipped his manual open to the Mars master project précis. He ran one finger down the entry there, pinpointing the spot where he and Mamvish and the others had been earlier in the day, then tapped the page so the coordinates would load into the on-planet transit spell he already had bookmarked. Another flip of pages brought Kit to the transit spell, its characters glowing under the page and ready to go. He began to read.
Even in this empty silence, you could hear the universe leaning in around you to listen: and for some reason, the listening seemed to Kit unusually acute. He finished reading. The breath went out of his lungs again as things went totally black—
—then lightened again, but not much. Once again, starlight, a clear night, no dust in the upper atmosphere: two in the morning at Syrtis Major. Kit stood in the shadow of that towering black dune and shivered again, though not from the cold. The surroundings were noticing him, watching him... with what underlying reaction, Kit couldn’t tell. All of a sudden Kit began to wish he hadn’t come alone. The watchfulness of the surroundings was feeling increasingly creepy.
He grimaced. Come on, what’s the matter with me? I’ve been here in the dark before. Nothing’s going to happen! Yet he thought of the dust devil earlier. That had taken even Mamvish and Irina by surprise. There’d just been something about the way that whirlwind came straight at them—
Kit shrugged. Just the planet noticing us, like Irina said. It does that all the time. In fact, it probably just noticed us harder because there was such a crowd there. Not to mention a Planetary ...Kit glanced around, determined to get down to business and shake the absurd feeling that he had stepped into an early scene of a monster movie.
He went closer to the dune. This hasn’t moved. At least I don’t think it has. The dune’s face looked as it had the afternoon before: but as Kit glanced around, he saw with some disquiet that all the investigative party’s footprints had disappeared— even Mamvish’s. Did somebody clean up? But it seemed unlikely. On Mars, where the wind blew a lot of the time, tidying up evidence of your presence on the surface wasn’t as vital as it was on the Moon, where there was neither wind nor erosion and your sneaker’s footprint would last forever. The wind did it. Or another dust devil...
That moment at its heart had been astonishing. Yet now Kit found himself really unwilling to see another one of those bearing down on him. Why do I keep letting myself get the creeps about it? he thought. Let’s find that egg...
He flipped through the manual again to the detector routine that Síle and Markus had designed. It was a longish spell and hadn’t been set to execute automatically, but reading the whole thing would still take Kit less time than digging around in the dune in the hopes that the stony outcropping concealing the superegg would be easily found.This dune might have moved, after all. Let’s see.
Kit read the spell through—four long sentences in the Speech—and stood gasping again with the exertion, waiting for the spell to take. Gradually a wireframe of glowing lines superimposed itself across one spot on the dune low down and to the right, describing the outcropping’s humped-up appearance. Kit went over and checked the spell’s glowing Speech-symbols to see how deeply the outcropping was buried. Only a couple of feet. I was right; the dune hasn’t moved—
Yet still the uneasiness wouldn’t leave him. Kit shook his head and hunkered down in front of the slope of near-black sand, whispering the syllables of the Mason’s Word as he’d done the afternoon before. Then he reached in through the surface of the dune, then the surface of the stone, until he felt the odd smooth coolness under his hands again. He made sure of his hold on it, and pulled.
This time there was less resistance. Seconds later the cold stars above Kit were gleaming on the superegg’s dark surface, their reflections trembling in its mirrory sheen: and the tremor’s source was Kit. He stood up with the superegg in his hands, shivering all over with the utter strangeness of where he was and what he held. The age of this thing. Here it’s been for five hundred thousand years. And not by accident. Who left you? Why won’t you open up and let us find out what you’re meant to tell us?
He tried to stop his hands from shaking, and couldn’t. But after a few seconds, Kit realized that it wasn’t just his hands that were shivering. It was the egg.
In the first shock of realization, he almost dropped it— then stopped himself just in time. Who knows what a hard bounce could do to it, even in this gravity? And if I break it, I’m going to be in so much trouble—! The memory of Mamvish’s eye cocked at him flashed before Kit as he tried to steady the vibrating superegg: he thought of Irina’s level gaze as she eyed him like someone wondering if he was really as trustworthy as she’d been told. And I’m not. I shouldn’t be doing this. Why did I do this when I knew that I— Whoa!
Kit braced the shaking superegg against his chest, trying to steady it, but to no effect. Now it was lurching from side to side in his grasp, more and more violently every moment, until the thing actually vibrated right out of his grip and into the air. Kit clutched at the egg and just managed to get hold of it again before it gave one shake more violent than anything that had preceded it—
And split in three. Kit tried to keep hold of all the wedge-shaped pieces, but they struggled out of his hands like live things desperate to escape, bobbling up into the air in front of him. He made a grab at one, caught it, and pinned it under his arm while reachin
g for the second. But he couldn’t get a good grip on that wedge because of the way hugging the first one between arm and body was limiting his movement. The second wedge wrenched itself out of his one-handed grip and into the air again. The third wedge hit the ground, bounced in a puff of dark dust, and rebounded into the second—
And stuck to it. Kit stared as the two adhering wedges began, from the edges inward, to shred apart in midair, shattering into shining fragments that thinned to ribbons, then started tangling together like a nest of snakes. The third wedge tore itself away from Kit, leaped into the air, and shattered like its counterparts, then began stretching itself into ribbons and tangling itself up with the others. Seconds later they were melding together again, writhing and changing in a shimmer of consolidating metal—
The shrinking shape was still amorphous, like a bubble of water floating and wobbling in weightlessness. Then it put out projections, hurriedly, one after another—and fell. When it came down on the surface in another cloud of dust, it stretched itself out, long and sinuous, went flat like a steamrollered snake—
Now what?! Kit thought, panicked. The long, shining shape moved, twitched, and all at once sprouted from its sides what he initially mistook for long tufts of fur. The fur moved, though, waving, writhing—and the hair stood up all over Kit as the long, flat, blunt-ended shape stood up and slowly started moving toward him on entirely too many legs.
Kit backed away a step. Though he’d long since conquered his childhood nightmares about being attacked by giant bugs under his bed, he still wasn’t wild about them, especially when he met them all alone in the dark on other planets. It’s not really a bug, he thought, taking another step backward as the shining thing kept moving toward him.It’s not alive. It’s some kind of machine. A weird, alien machine, yeah, but machines are a lot of what I do. I really should be able to—