“On my way,” Darryl said.
And he flickered. There was no other way to describe it. Darryl was still there: there had been none of the usual air movement that was so hard to avoid when doing a physical transit. “You set that spell up wrong or something?” Kit said.
“Oh, no, it worked fine,” Darryl said. “For that one of me.” He swallowed hard.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Just a little more effort than usual to offset the fact that I wasn’t all here to start with. Cassini next—”
The flicker happened again. Darryl was still standing there, and this time he looked pale, and his eyes seemed unfocused.
“Darryl?” Ronan said.
“Don’t joggle my elbow, Ro,” Darryl said: and his voice was strange. It sounded as if there were several of him, even though there seemed to be only one standing there. He flickered around the edges again, once, twice—
—and crumpled straight down to sit crookedly on the dusty red ground, holding his head. Ronan caught him on the way down, easing the collapse, and started patting his face. “Darryl, hey, look up! Come on—”
“Will you stop whacking me, man, do I look like I need the smelling salts?” Darryl pushed Ronan’s hand away. “I’m fine. Let me breathe. Too much going on, gotta process a little, okay?”
Kit hunkered down in front of Darryl. His autism made it necessary sometimes for him to “sit down and take a moment”, as he called it. He had problems with dealing with too much sensory data all at once, and had to go through some mental exercises to get his coping mechanisms back in play. “What happened out there?”
Darryl shook his head, rubbed his face for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s harder to do that stunt here than on Earth, that’s all. Or I need more practice. Important thing, though, is that nothing’s happening at two of the other sites.Yet, anyway. But your friend over by Wahoo, de-whatchamacallit—”
“Vaucouleurs,” Kit said.
“Right. It’s warming up: I could feel the wizardry getting ready to execute. We’d better get over there.”
Kit and Ronan got up: Darryl did, too, without help. “Better,” he said. “See, I just needed a second. You guys gotta stop treating me like I’m Fragile Boy.” He reached up to put a hand on each of their shoulders. “You ready?”
Ronan picked up his long rod of light and laid it over his shoulder: it blazed, then died down, subdued but ready. Kit glanced at him, reached for his little silvery sphere and juggled it in one hand.
“Hit it,” he said.
They vanished.
8: Shamask-Eilith
In the great dark dome under Arsia Mons, Nita watched the giant green metal scorpions pour toward her, claws uplifted. On one side, S’reee drifted closer, a hard-to-see fire dancing about her fins; on the other, Carmela moved in until she was touching shoulders with Nita, her “hot curler” ready. “What are they?” Carmela said. “Are they alive?”
S’reee cocked an ear, listening to the distant whisper of another planet’s Sea. “No. Not the way we think of life, anyway. They’re recordings, reconstructions of something that was alive before.”
Nita gulped as they kept coming. The foremost of the scorpions were only ten feet away now, and right back to the dark doorway the whole space was filling with more and more. Where are they all coming from? Even if we start blowing them up, we won’t be able to deal with them all before they deal with us.
Nita stopped, blinked, suddenly blind in the darkness. Or not blind. As if it was happening to someone else, she saw herself step hesitantly forward, go down on one knee, look into the head scorpion’s cold, dark eyes. And the scorpion just looked back at her, and then after a moment walked around her, passed her by. But the image flickered. Once again she walked up to the scorpion, went down on one knee. And the claws flashed out—
Nita shook her head. The tide of scorpions was scurrying closer. I have to do something! But there was nothing to choose between the two moments she’d glimpsed, no way to tell how to make one happen or keep the other from happening.
Except that one of them turned out okay, she thought. I’ve got at least two chances that I’ve seen. If I just stand here, something different is going to happen that I won’t have had time to see—
She stepped forward.
“Neets?!” Carmela whispered in shock. Behind Nita, S’reee started to surge forward. With her free hand, Nita waved her back, went down on one knee as the foremost scorpion came up to meet her. It stopped, and stared up into her eyes.
The strangest sensation followed, like little tickly feet walking around on the surface of her brain. Nita shivered one big shiver all over, but didn’t move otherwise.
And the scorpion swung its eyes and its body away from Nita— walked around her and then off past Carmela. Carmela swiveled with a panicky expression as the scorpions headed after their leader, back the way she and Nita and S’reee had come.
S’reee turned in the air, watching the scorpions pour past. “Now, what was that?” she said. “hNii’t? Did you speak to them? Or they to you?”
Nita was still down on one knee as the scorpions kept pouring past her and into the chamber previous to the one they were in now. “They might have listened to me somehow. But I didn’t say anything.”
“You did,” Carmela said. “You got down on their level. That’s saying ‘hi.’ Actually, you said ‘hi’ first.”
Nita slowly stood up, pausing to rub her knee: it was sore. “Maybe. But I just saw myself doing that, and it seemed like the thing to do.” Better than the other thing, anyway!
“You’ve been doing envisioning work with T’hom, haven’t you?” S’reee said, turning all the way around to watch the last of the scorpions vanish into the next chamber. “I’d say it’s paying off.”
“I don’t know. What if there was something else I was supposed to do?”
“Like what?” Carmela said.
Nita shook her head. She was sweating, but feeling less panic-stricken as the last scorpions passed out of the chamber, the sound of metallic feet tapping on the stone now ticking away into silence. “Ree, where are they going?”
S’reee drifted up to the door, peered through. “That I can’t tell you,” she said, “because they’re gone. Vanished.”
Carmela turned and went to the doorway to join S’reee. “Just passing through?”
“I don’t think so,” Nita said, lifting her wand again and heading toward the next chamber. “They were guarding something. And they decided we were okay. That was their whole job, and when it was done, they went away.” She looked over her shoulder at the other two. “S’reee, can you feel it? That hot-spot wizardry’s shut down.”
S’reee turned, finned back through the air toward Nita and Carmela. “You’re right,” she sang. “And if they were guarding something...”
Nita was heading toward the next chamber, holding the wand high. The rowan wood, soaked in moonlight from fifty million miles away, made a sphere of silver radiance around her as she stepped through the wide, round portal into the next chamber.
For several seconds she saw nothing at all in the darkness. Nita turned leftward to see what was inside the chamber near the left edge of the portal. At first it seemed to be a straight wall. She went to it, holding up the wand for a better view. On closer inspection, she found that the wall wasn’t straight after all, but curved like all the others. The curve was just very, very slight, because this was by far the biggest room they had come to as yet. And as far as the halo of light from the rowan wand spread, from side to side and high up into where the light was lost in the gloom, nearly every inch of the wall was covered with writing.
Nita reached out and touched the wall. The writing was engraved in long, thin columns in the stone, not very deeply, the characters just a few shades paler than the darker, redder surface. “It’s warm,” Nita said. “How can it be warm? The volcano here hasn’t been live for thousands of years.”
Nita turned to
look out across the chamber. It was massive, easily a thousand feet across. S’reee and Carmela came in behind her, Carmela with a flashlight and S’reee bringing her own wizard-light with her— several sources of it hovering around her like a little school of pilot fish. The three of them gazed across the huge space.
“One about us,” S’reee sang softly, waving her fins gently to turn and look at the vast expanse of the dome, “what have we found here? This must fill half the mountain.” She tilted all of herself back at an angle, gazing up into the dark; her wizard-lights swam up through the dark above as if through water, looking for something like a surface and for a long time not finding it. It was many moments before their radiance made several small diffuse circles against the uppermost curve of that immense bubble.
“I don’t think this is natural,” Nita said, walking along the wall. “It might have started out as a bubble in the stone once. But this—” She touched the writing again. It was nothing like the graceful curvatures and ligatures of the Speech, but angular and sharp, line after line of strung-together structures like little trees with branches growing out of them at strange angles. “This has all been smoothed down. And isn’t this weird?”
She moved on, puzzled, for she wasn’t able to make anything of the writing. “What?” Carmela said, leaning over Nita’s shoulder to gaze at the engraved characters.
“They were running up and down before. Now they’re going side to side.”
Carmela reached out past Nita to touch the letters, the light of the rowan wand catching in her eyes. “Look, the characters flip. Mirror images.” She peered at them more closely. “Boustrophedon...”
It wasn’t a word in the Speech. “What?”
“Boustrophedon,” Carmela said, tracing the characters with one finger. “When the words in a sentence go in one direction to the end of the line, and then the next line goes back in the direction it came from. You read from right to left, then left to right. Or up to down, then down to up.” Carmela walked along to the next section of writing. There were panels of it, separated by thin engraved borders or sometimes just by empty space. “People used to plow their fields that way. That’s where the word comes from.”
Nita went after her, looking across the dome. “More light?” she said to the rowan wand.
It brightened until it was as blinding as an arc light, and Nita winced from the brilliance, looking away and across the great floor as she held up the wand. It took that much light to enable her to see all the way across the chamber and to be sure that there were no more visible entrances or exits: the portal they’d come in by, the one the scorpions had guarded, was the only way in. “This must have been important,” Nita said. “Could this be a history? Mars’s history?”
“Or the Martians’,” S’reee said. She drifted closer to one wall, peered at it. “No way to tell. I can’t make fin or fluke of it. You?”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Usually knowing the Speech lets you understand any writing you see.”
“Not always,” S’reee said, drifting down the wall to look at another patch of writing. “That condition obtains when the manual can find live members of the species to contribute the underlying context from which content can be understood. But when a race has died out, you may only get content with no context, which isn’t a lot of use. And there are recensions of the Speech that have been completely lost over time, because all other information about the species for which they were intended has also been lost...”
“Even for the manual? Is that possible?” Nita said.
“Entropy’s running,” S’reee said. “And the medium it runs in is time. Even the manual’s subject to that, in its merely physical manifestations.” She let out a long, hissing breath.
“Neets,” Carmela said, “S’reee, look. Pictures—”
They came over to look at part of the wall in front of which Carmela stood, deeper into the chamber. Here, arranged in a column stretching up the curve toward the ceiling, there were images, mostly geometric shapes, precisely scribed into the dark red stone. But it was hard to be sure what their relationship was: some of them seemed to run into one another. Nita reached up to touch one, a series of concentric circles with a single small circle inside them. She took a long breath. “Is that supposed to be the Sun?”
S’reee, looking over Nita’s shoulder, leaned in very close, until her nose almost touched the stone. “If it is, we may have a problem,” she sang softly. “Because we’ve got a couple of extra planets.”
Nita, too, leaned in, looking closely at the diagram. Four smallish worlds, and then a slightly larger one, and beyond that, four great worlds, and five tiny planets out in the farthest orbits.
“It can’t be,” Nita said to herself. “Can’t be...”
Carmela was shaking her head as she peered at the smallest markings, furthest from the engraved Sun. “They keep finding these little bitty ones way out at the edge. I can never keep track of how many there are.”
“Dwarf planets,” Nita said. “Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.”
Carmela glanced at Nita, picking up on something in her voice. “What’s the matter with them?”
Nita made a face. “Pluto’s still a planet to me,” she said. “Call me stubborn. But there’s another problem. Look at that fifth one. It’s further out than the others, and not in line. Like it doesn’t belong here...”
“There’s another diagram over here, in this next column,” Carmela said. “This one’s got twelve.”
Nita went over to look at the second diagram. This one showed an empty place where the fifth world’s orbit had been: a gap. “So that’s where the asteroid belt would be?” Carmela said.
“It looks like this gap would match their orbit...” Nita said.
“And the furthest worldlet is missing,” S’reee said. “A captured world that got lost again, perhaps?”
“It happens,” Nita said. “That far out in the system, the Sun’s gravity’s not so big a deal as it is closer in.” But her main attention was on the empty space between Mars and Jupiter.
Carmela was looking at that, too. “So the asteroids are actually from this fifth planet blowing up?”
Nita shook her head. “Mela, a lot of people have had that idea, but it doesn’t work, because all the stuff in the asteroid belt put together isn’t enough to make a planet, even a small one. Definitely not enough to make a planet the size of the one in that picture.”
Carmela glanced over to the right of the second image, where there was another column full of writing. After a second she shrugged and started to walk away— then paused and turned back, giving the column a strange look. “That was weird. Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw something.” She put up a hand to touch the characters, squinting.
“More light?” Nita said, lifting the wand.
Carmela waved her away. “Less might be better.”
Nita shook the rowan wand down to a fainter light. “Yeah,” Carmela said. She tilted her head to one side, looking at the characters. “Something— went, went to the—” She paused again. “It found the— something or other. I don’t know what that is. Then— but the sword—” Carmela grimaced in annoyance. “Dammit, it won’t hold still—”
“Can you actually read this stuff?” Nita said.
Carmela’s annoyance was fading into perplexity. “Some of it. Most of it looks like nonsense marks.” She shook her head. “Until it jumps, somehow, and parts make sense. I don’t get it.”
“I wonder,” S’reee said, drifting over to peer over Carmela’s shoulder. “K!aarmii’lha, you came to understand the Speech pretty quickly, didn’t you, for someone who’s not a wizard? Were you studying other languages first?”
“Yeah,” Carmela said, looking over her shoulder at her. “I did German in school, and then I started picking up Japanese, for manga and anime. And Italian, and some French. And when I started hearing Kit using the Speech, I started seeing it on the alien cable channels, and
I don’t know, I just—” She shrugged. “Started picking it up.”
“You know,” S’reee said, “you may have some version of the steganographic gift.”
Nita glanced over at S’reee. “Is that good?”
“Possibly good for us,” S’reee said as Carmela worked her way down the graven wall, her lips moving as she traced the symbols with one finger. “Other linguistic gifts can come with it. But mostly it implies the ability to pull context out of writings when the writers’ culture has left no other trace. It’s an intuition rather than a skill. K!aarmii’lha, do you mind donating what you see to the manual system?”
“Huh?” She was peering more closely at some of the characters. “No, sure. What do I need to do?”
“Nothing,” S’reee said. “I’ll have a word with the Sea—”
Tell her there’s no need, the peridexis said in Nita’s head. I’ll have the data assumed into the system as she works.
“Bobo’s on it, S’reee,” Nita said. “He’ll handle it the same way the manuals pull in data off TV and the Web on demand.” She went over to stand by Carmela, reaching out to the incised characters again: but they had nothing to say to her.
“What do you see, K!aarmii’lha?” S’reee said.
“Weird stuff...”
S’reee made a long, bubbling moan of laughter. “More detail, please?”
Carmela stood with hands on hips, staring at the wall. “This part is something about food,” she said. “For all I know, I’m looking at somebody’s shopping list.” She turned away. “This thing needs an index. Or a table of contents. If I were an index, where would I be?”
“By the door?” Nita said.
Carmela headed back to the doorway, where she began studying its edges. After a moment, she said, “Nope. If there is an index, they’re not thinking about it the way we do.”
“Let me go topside and see if there’s anything different from what’s here,” S’reee said. She angled her body up and swam upward through the darkness toward the zenith of the bubble-dome, her little school of lightfish darting upward with her.