Kit lost the thought as little round, pebbly eyes suddenly bumped their way up out of the bug’s blunt head. They were opaque, featureless... but they were all looking at him. And then the back end of the bug lengthened out, got long and sharp, and curved up over its back.
Oh, no. Not a bug.
It was a scorpion.
At least it doesn’t have claws yet, Kit thought, still backing up. And then the creature reared up, starlight sheening down it, and the many legs consolidated, getting thicker, sharper, more angular. Six legs, three and three, in the back: four legs, two and two, in the front, upraised, each of these splitting down the middle near the ends, the razory vee of newly created claws starting to scissor together. The clawed forelegs lifted, pointing at him as the claws worked against each other. Those eyes fixed on Kit more determinedly as the scorpion-thing came at him, faster now, on the point of breaking into a run—
Kit tried to gulp, and failed, dry-mouthed. “I am on errantry, and I greet you!” he said, probably a lot more loudly than he needed to. Still backing up, he reached behind him to zip open his otherspace pocket. He’d taken to keeping a little surprise in there if he ran into a situation like this.
Barely six feet away, the metal scorpion stopped short. The unsettling gaze of all those little eyes was still fixed on Kit, and it suddenly seemed as if the creature or machine was waiting for something specific from him, or not seeing something it expected. Kit, too, froze. What does it want? What am I supposed to—?
It lifted its claws. Too late! Kit thought, pushing his hand into the otherspace pocket and gripping the small, fizzing wizardry that lay there, ready and waiting—
The claws angled up and out, not at Kit, but in four different directions, and light burst up from them— not true beams of light, but curving arcs of a thin, pale blue-green radiance. They leaped into the air fluidly, like water from a fountain, curving in to twist together high above the motionless scorpion. There they knotted together, then separated and streaked toward the dark horizon, sending Kit’s and the scorpion’s shadows reeling and stretching across the dark sand. Kit spun around, trying to see where all the streaks of light were going.
He had only enough time to make out general directions before the streaks faded and were gone. The scorpion lowered its claws, folding them across its front in a strange gesture, almost formal. The eyes dissolved back into the creature’s blunt head. It rolled up, the long, curved spine of the tail vanishing, the legs slipping into the body; the whole shape collapsed into itself, smoothed, solidified—
The superegg lay rocking gently on the sand, and finally came to rest on one end, perfectly still in the starlight.
Kit went over to the egg, knelt down beside it, almost scared to touch it. Finally he swore at his own nervousness, reached out and put one hand on the superegg. Nothing happened. The sense of latent energy within it was completely gone.
The sweat that had broken out on Kit was going cold: he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his life-support spell, and his breath was smoking as the air around him chilled down. Kit more or less collapsed onto the dark sand and sat there trying to recover, staring at the egg. Okay, he thought, I’ve broken it. And I’m now in the most trouble I’ve ever been in my life. But there’s no point in freezing myself solid.
Kit picked up his manual, flipped through it to check some spell syntax, and then spoke to the life support spell’s parameters, telling them to pull some energy from under the planet’s crust, where a little residual heat lay stored. Then Kit rubbed his face, flinching at the grit, which as usual was getting everyplace, and stared at the egg. Those were signals. But to what, or who—?
He flipped pages in the manual, turning to the place where local changes in the environment would have been logged. “What were those signals about?” he said to the manual. “Where were they headed?”
A long spill of characters in the Speech appeared all down the glowing page, filling it: the technical description of what the scorpion had done. Kit read down it, turned the page, and found it filling up with description, too— a bewildering amount of it. “Whoa, whoa! Save that. And just give me a graphic for now, okay?”
The page dimmed the Speech-charactery down to near invisibility and drew him a simple outline map of the Martian surface in a cylindrical projection, a wide rectangle. Four glowing arcs drew themselves outward from Kit’s location in Nili Patera, each a slightly different curve heading in a different direction: northeast, northwest, southeast, and much more deeply south. At each arc’s end, the map labeled itself with the English-language names of the targeted features and their equivalents in the Speech.
“All craters,” Kit said under his breath, noting their names: Stokes, Cassini, de Vaucouleurs, and Hutton. “Any response from anything there?”
The page blanked. Then a single character appeared, the Speech-symbol that could stand for either the number zero or a null response.
Kit let out a breath: his manual wasn’t normally so terse. “Okay,” he said. “Alert me if anything comes up...”
He closed the manual and put it aside, looking down at the superegg. “Might as well put you back...” Once more he hunkered down in front of the outcropping where it had been secreted. There was no point in leaving this out where one of the satellites orbiting Mars could see it.
What I’m really wishing, Kit thought as he put a hand out to the egg again, is that there was some way to cover what I just did. Or some really good excuse for it. But this wasn’t one of those situations where you could just tell the local authority figure the equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” and expect to get away with it. And as he thought that, a small pain struck Kit somewhere in his midsection. It’s not like I can claim my dog is eating much of anything anymore...
Kit made an unhappy face. His manual had been open and logging when this happened. Hiding anything of what had happened would be impossible. I just wish I wasn’t about to get yelled at for doing something wrong, and maybe get kicked off the whole project—
It then occurred to Kit that telling just one aspect of the truth might be enough to keep him out of trouble. All he’d have to say would be that something had made him do this: some urge he couldn’t resist had come over him. And that was true, Kit thought. Or at least it kind of feels like it was true—
But wait. Am I just talking myself into this because I don’t want to look stupid? And no matter how thoroughly he talked himself into believing this irresistible urge thing, one of the other wizards associated with this— Mamvish, Irina— might be able to tell him that the urge hadn’t been all that overwhelming: that he could’ve resisted if he’d really wanted to...
Then I wind up looking twice as dumb as I am already. And besides… The Speech, the most important part of wizardry, was about describing the universe as it really was. If you started taking liberties with that concept, you were doing the Lone Power’s work for it. And when working with the Speech, trying to describe things the way they weren’t could get very fatal.
Kit picked up the superegg, muttered the necessary syllables of the Mason’s Word, and shoved the egg back into the stone. Never mind. I’m gonna call Mamvish, come clean, and get the yelling over with.
He stood up and flipped the manual open to the contacts section, put a finger on Mamvish’s entry. He had to stop and try to swallow before he could speak: his mouth had gone dry again. “Page her,” he said to his manual. “Ask if she’s got a moment.”
Mamvish’s name dimmed, then blazed again. Under it a one-line phrase traced itself out in the curving characters of the Speech: Unavailable: on intervention. No availability estimate at this time. If the matter is urgent, please leave a message.
Kit stared at the words: somehow they were the last thing he’d expected. Urgent. Is this urgent? How do I tell? And what if it’s not, really? “Uh,” he said. “Mamvish, it’s Kit. I’m on Mars. There’s been a development. The egg went through, I don’t know, some kind of metamorphosis, and it sent
out signals. Nothing else has happened yet.” He stopped, tried to think what else he should add that both he knew to be strictly true and wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot. No, just quit while you’re ahead. “Uh, that’s all. I’ll call you back later. Dai stihó.”
Mamvish’s name flashed, confirmation that the message had been saved. A link to a copy of Kit’s message, with a time stamp, appeared down the page.
Kit sighed and slapped the manual shut. The sudden feeling of reprieve was tremendous... And dumb, since I haven’t gotten out of anything yet! Still, she’ll know I tried to call her. That has to count for something.
Kit became aware that his heart was pounding. He glanced around at the silent sands, the dark dune towering over him. Off to the northwest, Deimos was diving toward the horizon. So now what?
He stood watching Deimos’s downward arc while his pulse slowed. Well, now that you’ve got some new data out of this crazy thing you did, do something useful with it. Find out why those signals were sent to those spots! And this time, don’t do it alone.
Deimos twinkled through the atmosphere near the horizon while Kit wondered where that idea had come from. Am I just trying to have someone around to share the blame with if something else goes wrong? A depressing thought. But company would be good for keeping me from screwing up again.
That thought was nearly as depressing. I’m gonna go home and get some breakfast. Maybe Neets—
But she’ll still be asleep. And she said to wait till after lunch to call her...
Well, never mind! Who wants people getting the idea that you can’t do anything without having her along? Or that you can’t handle something unusual by yourself?
Kit glanced back at the outcropping. That strange feeling of the surroundings watching him was gone now. It went away when the egg opened. But why wouldn’t it do that before?
Unless it was waiting for something. And, outrageously, the idea came to him:
It was waiting for me.
After a moment Kit shook his head at the crazy idea. Mamvish had mentioned in the past that some of these “bottles” had timing wizardries attached, routines meant to give the wizardries time to see what conditions in the world around them were like before popping open. Its timer probably just went off after it finished taking its readings. Then it started calling to its buddies. But why aren’t they answering?
In forlorn hope Kit flipped his manual open to the page where those four craters were marked. But there was no sign of anything happening there: no movement, no heat, no unusual energy artifact.
Then again, it was how long before this egg hatched, after we took it out the first time? Eight hours? Maybe the other eggs, or whatever it was signaling to, have time delays set, too. The thought of another eight hours of waiting for something to happen seemed almost unbearable. But wait. If there’s going to be a delay, that’s okay: it gives us time to put extra monitoring wizardries in place nearby.
“Us.” This time he felt better about the idea of someone else being there with him. And a little weird, wasn’t it, to be wanting to keep this all to myself? Where was that coming from? Kit shrugged. Probably the suddenness of the egg’s hatching had freaked him out.
He reached sideways, unzipped the air, and started to stick the manual into his otherspace pocket— then paused. Better deactivate my last-defense gadget first.
With care Kit reached into the pocket, felt for the single thread of characters in the Speech hanging out of the compact little wizardry— its tripwire— and pinched it. The wizardry went inactive like a stick of cartoon dynamite that had had its burning fuse pinched out.
Kit tucked the manual into the pocket, zipped it closed, and glanced west, seeing Deimos’s dimming spark vanish below the horizon: then looked the other way. Blue, bright, growing stronger and brighter by the moment, Earth rose in the east—Mars’s northern hemisphere morning star, this time of year, the herald of the dawn.
Kit’s stomach growled. He grinned. Home, he thought, and vanished.
***
The next two hours were torture for Kit. He forced himself to have breakfast, though his insides were roiling with excitement and anxiety. But every minute that his manual didn’t start flashing with an annoyed message from Mamvish, or worse, Irina, felt like a small triumph. Eventually, as the Sun started coming in the dining room windows around seven, Kit began feeling as if maybe he wasn’t in incredible trouble after all.
His attention was presently divided evenly between two pages in the directory. He had a paper napkin stuck in each one, and he flipped back and forth between them about once every minute as the dining room filled with sunlight. What surprised him was on which one the gray print of unavailability first flashed dark.
Kit pushed his third bowl of cornflakes aside and pounced on the page. “How soon can you be ready to go out?”
There was a pause. “Am I allowed to eat first?” Darryl’s voice said from the page.
Kit grinned. “No.”
“You’re cruel to me, you know that?” Darryl said. “Gonna stunt my growth. Don’t you think I have enough brain issues going on without you messing with my metabolism, too?”
Kit snickered. The only thing wrong with Darryl’s metabolism was that it seemed bent on getting ahead of everyone else’s. The way he ate and drank, Kit routinely expected to see Darryl turn up at a meeting three feet taller than at the last one.
“I am going to sit right here for the next fifteen minutes and finish eating my chocolate-frosted sugar bombs” Darryl said. “Part of my nutritious breakfast. And no, I’m not gonna go sugar-hyper on you, that’s nothing I’ve ever had trouble with and I can just hear you thinking, so don’t start! And then I’m going to put some clothes on, if that’s okay with you. Not gonna go running around Mars in my bathrobe!”
“Okay, okay!” Kit said. “As soon as you can.”
“Fine. Thank you.” There was a pause filled with noisy crunching. “And what’re you doing up so early? Thought I was the only one who liked this time of day.”
Kit wondered how to start explaining. He might as well have saved the effort. “Uh-oh,” Darryl said, “you were up there messing, weren’t you? What did you do, Kit-boy? You broke something, didn’t you.”
Kit rolled his eyes. Darryl could be annoyingly acute, and could hear more about what was going on with you in a moment’s silence than some people could hear in a whole paragraph. “Seriously, you should be kept in a cage,” Darryl said. “Never mind, I’m not gonna make you all bad and wrong for whatever you did. At least not till I help you clean it up.”
“Thanks a heap,” Kit said. “Finish being nutritious and then get your butt over here.” He glanced down at the directory and saw another name go dark. “Aha. Later.”
He touched Ronan’s name; it glowed under his finger. “Hey,” Kit said, “good morning.”
“Oh, listen, Rodriguez attempts to score on irony,” Ronan’s voice came back. He yawned. “But no! It bounces off the goalpost! What a shame.”
“Why is it always sports with you?” Kit said. “Football, rugby, that thing with the weird sticks—”
“Hurling.”
“Yeah, the only sport with a mandatory body count.” Kit had seen the game played once and was glad he didn’t go to school in Ireland: hurling came across like lacrosse on crack, but Ronan loved it and would blather about it for hours. “Forget the playing field for now, okay? We need to go to Mars.”
“Oh, really. What have you blown up now?”
Kit was tempted to bang his head on the table. “Nothing blew up!”
You don’t fool me,” Ronan said. “You went off to be with your friend the superegg in the middle of the night.” He laughed. “The Martian night! You know, some day you may want to reproduce, but you’re never gonna do it if you freeze off your—”
“Ronan,” Kit said. “I can either shoot you a précis from my manual, or you can force me to embarrass myself directly...”
“Always much more fun,?
?? Ronan said, and yawned. “Go.”
Kit spent five minutes or so describing what had happened. Ronan stayed quiet during the explanation, then simply said, “Creepy.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “But that thing’s yelled for its friends. I don’t think we’re gonna have to wait for long before something happens up there.”
“And when it does,” Ronan said, “it makes sense for there to be wizards there. Okay, sit tight and I’ll have a word with my ride.”
Kit’s eyebrows went up. Irish wizards were restricted from casual long-distance transport due to the buildup of ancient spell residue on the island. Normally they had to go a considerable distance to get to a city-based rapid-transit worldgate, unless they were on active errantry and entitled to a personal transport dispensation. “What kind of ride?”
“Five minutes.”
Ronan’s listing in the manual faded down to gray again, while beside it an annotation came up: In consultation; please wait. Kit pushed his chair back and got up to take his bowl and spoon into the kitchen.
While he was putting them in the dishwasher, he heard someone coming down the stairs. Moments later Carmela wandered in, wearing one of her super-long striped nightshirts. She made for the refrigerator, stuck her head in, and just stood there yawning.
Kit shut the dishwasher and looked with mild interest at his sister, who was still contemplating the fridge’s interior— morosely, he thought. “Looking for something?”
Carmela yawned again and straightened up. “Just thinking that this is the last morning for the next two weeks when I can be sure that if I leave a strawberry smoothie in here when I go to bed, it’ll still be there the next morning.”
Kit headed back for the dining room. “Why? I don’t like your smoothies.”
“I know,” Carmela said. “But Helena does.”