“Darryl,” Kit yelled, “grab him, we’re gonna jump!” He turned his back on Spirit. Sorry, baby, we’ll brainwash you or something later, but right this minute—
“But if we fail the test—”
“We won’t. We’re not jumping that far! We need to get them away from the rover, draw them off—”
“Using what?” Darryl said as he helped Ronan back onto his feet and the three of them backed away from the scorpions now advancing with raised claws.
“Us!” Kit said. “It’s us they’re attracted to.”
Darryl and Ronan exchanged a glance. “Got a point there,” Ronan said. “Where’d you have in mind for our heroic last stand?”
“Don’t say ‘last’!” Darryl said.
Kit pointed. “The far wall of the crater, on the south side. The rover’s been there already: even if NASA manages to wake it up again and make it look back there, it won’t see the fine detail of what’s going to happen to the rocks. I’ll freeze the rotor gear on the camera pod for the next few minutes. If they do someday see the data, that won’t raise any red flags—they’re always having these little movement glitches.”
“Let’s go,” Ronan said.
Kit pulled his wand out and froze Spirit’s gear. “Okay,” he said to Darryl, “jump us over there—”
Darryl grabbed him and Ronan: things went dark, then late-daylight dim again. Within seconds the scorpions were already boiling up out of the ground around them again, closing in—
Kit pulled out the little spherical wizardry he’d been hoarding and put it down at his feet. Very carefully he said the sixteen words that armed it. “Dar,” he said, “wait till the last minute. We need to take them all out.”
“I hate this!” Darryl said as the scorpions poured toward them.
“Wouldn’t be a big fan myself,” Kit said under his breath. “Just hang on!”
Ronan’s hands were clenching on his light-rod. “Now, yeah?”
“No,” Kit said as the scorpions ran closer. The foremost ones were scissoring their claws together in a way he found really upsetting, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off them.
“Now?” Darryl said, twitching. “Come on, your Kitship, how sure do you have to be?”
“Really, really sure,” Kit said. “Put us down on the other side of Spirit, okay? About the same distance. No, not yet!! Just be ready to—”
“I don’t want to look,” Ronan groaned.
“Don’t,” Kit said. “But I’m gonna rag you about it forever if you close your eyes.”
Eyes were foremost in Kit’s thoughts at the moment: the hard, cold glint of the Martian day on the eyes of the approaching scorpions was unnerving. They were twenty feet away— ten— six—
“Go!” Kit said to Darryl. And as things went dark, he said the word that set off the exception grenade.
When things went bright again, Kit turned to look back the way they had come. Many, many tiny sparkling bits of metal were turning and glittering high in the air, and the ground was completely obscured by a huge cloud of dun-colored dust, from which shot more shards and fragments of scorpion every second. And more, and more, as the explosion seemed to go on forever in the light gravity.
Ronan was staring at the results of the detonation of Kit’s toy. “Janey mack,” he said, “what did you make that out of?”
“A pinhead’s worth of strange matter,” Kit gasped, doubling over as the completed spell finished pulling its energy price out of him. “And three syllables of the Denaturation Fraction.”
“Whoa,” Darryl said.
“Can we sit down for a moment?” Ronan didn’t wait, just picked a nearby boulder. “I have to get my breath...”
Kit needed to get his, too, and for a moment couldn’t find any and just shook his head. Finally he managed to say, “Can’t wait. Got one more problem—”
The other two stared at him: unbelieving in Darryl’s case, slightly wounded in Ronan’s. “You’re really enjoying being the bad-news boy today, aren’t you?” Darryl said. “What now?”
Kit pointed up into the sky, still gasping. “What?” Darryl said. “You said there weren’t any satellites due—”
Kit pointed at Spirit, shaking his head.
Ronan stared at it, then at Kit. “What? What’s the problem?”
After another moment or so, Kit was able to straighten up again. “Everything that happened here just now,” Kit said, and took a long breath, “everything visible, is being transmitted back to Earth!”
Ronan looked at him in bemusement. “But if there aren’t any satellites—”
“There weren’t then. There is now. As of a minute and a half ago, we’re in Odyssey’s camera envelope! And if we tripped any situational triggers in Spirit’s programming, it’ll have sent that to Odyssey for relay, and Odyssey’ll have passed the data back immediately. Either way, a data burst’s on its way back to Earth right now!”
“Okay,” Ronan said, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s just mess with the antennas back on Earth or something—”
Kit shook his head. “Won’t work. There are three Deep Space Network antennas spaced around the planet, and we’d have to waste time figuring out which one’s aimed this way. Our best bet’s probably to interfere with the transmission while it’s on its way. It takes about fifteen minutes for a signal to get to the DSN from Mars.” He looked at Darryl. “If you can jump back to, say, the Moon, and catch the wavefront on the way in, scatter it—?”
“Then it’d just look like there’d been a hole in transmission,” Darryl said. “Got it. How big a hole do you need?”
Kit turned to Ronan. “When did this whole ruckus start?”
Ronan cocked an eye at the sky. “About twenty minutes ago?” he said.
“Okay,” Kit said, and turned to Darryl. “Take it all out, to be safe. You can just beat the wavefront back.”
Darryl nodded and vanished. “Now sit down,” Ronan said to Kit, “before you fall down!” He glanced around him, plainly not convinced that the excitement was over. “I’ll keep an eye on things...”
Kit sat down and tried to breathe more easily. It was tough: the grenade spell had not been cheap as wizardries went. “Thanks.”
“And that really was smart of you, the speeding-up-time bit,” Ronan said in a low voice. “Had to fight with Dar about that: he expects it.”
Kit laughed under his breath. “You two should do standup,” he said. “Only thing that’s bothering me now—”
Darryl reappeared a few yards away from them, moseyed over to them. “Done,” he said. “I caught the whole last twenty minutes’ worth of Odyssey’s transmissions and dissolved them to white noise.” He sat down on the rock and looked with concern at Kit. “So what were you bothered about?”
“Why Mars is playing back our imageries like this,” Kit said. “We need to find out. Because if this is going to keep happening every time a human being shows up on the planet from now on, it’s going to have repercussions back on Earth!”
“And not just with NASA or ESA,” Darryl said. “Mamvish’ll be beyond cranky.”
“Forget Mamvish,” Kit said. “And even forget Irina—”
“I wouldn’t,” Ronan said.
Kit rolled his eyes at Ronan. “What I’m trying to say is that the Powers That Be aren’t going to take it kindly if we’ve made one of the planets in our solar system uninhabitable! Humans may need Mars for something one of these days. And even if we don’t, it has a right to be an empty planet at peace. Not one where another species’ weird fantasies are playing themselves out all over it every time a living thing sets foot or tentacle or whatever here!”
“May be too late for that now,” Darryl said.
“Gee, that never occurred to me— thanks for the helpful comment,” Kit said, and looked over at Spirit. “But as for this test, I think we’ve passed. We didn’t run away from the machines and the scorpions. We stayed here and defended our little buddy.”
“So what’s the next mo
ve?” Ronan said.
“We go on to the next site,” Kit said. “Or I do.”
Ronan and Darryl looked strangely at him. “What?” said Ronan.
Kit stood up, dusted the usual rusty grit off his pants. “Think about it. Each time, we saw a Mars that one of us brought with him. First time, Darryl’s crazy, scary Mars movie. Second time, Ronan’s rock-opera Orson Welles war machines. We aced both those scenarios—”
“You mean they just barely didn’t kill us,” Ronan said.
“Whatever,” Kit said. “But I think the trouble was that we overloaded the scenarios that the old buried spells were producing. Each of them was based on one wizard’s imagery. But when three wizards responded— or more than three there, for a moment”— and he gave Darryl an amused look—“something went wrong and everything got all hostile. The spells read it as an attack, maybe, instead of a test.”
Kit glanced over at Spirit, sitting sedate in its crater. “Logically,” he said, “the next scenario that comes real should be mine. So let’s try it differently this time. I’ll do this next jump by myself.”
“Whoa, now,” Darryl said, “a while ago you were all about us not splitting up!”
“If I can’t come up with a new plan when the old one starts looking dumb,” Kit said, “I don’t think I’ll last long in this business.” He pulled his wand out of his belt. “Look, you can eavesdrop on me. No problem with that. But let me go investigate this one by myself for just a few minutes. If I need help, believe me, I’ll yell for it fast.”
Ronan looked at Kit dubiously. “Another hunch?”
Kit thought about that. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes. If things go okay, you two can follow me in a few minutes.”
He pulled out his manual, paged through to the spot where his beam-me-up spell was written down, and added the fourth set of coordinates to which the superegg had sent its signal. It was down near the south pole, at about longitude 240. There was a long, high scarp there, Thyles Rupes, angling northeast to southwest, and around it a scatter of craters named after notable science-fiction people who had worked with Mars: Heinlein, Weinbaum, Campbell. Hutton, the target crater, was west of them.
“Let’s go,” he said to the manual.
The brief night of an on-planet transit spell fell around him.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, day—
***
Hutton was a big crater, something like a hundred kilometers across. Kit had known that its walls wouldn’t be visible from where he was planning to come out in the midst of the crater proper. What was visible, and caught him by surprise for a few seconds, was the thick haze lying low all around on the horizon as he turned and took in his surroundings.
“Yeah,” Kit said softly. “I should have expected this...” For the crater was full of air: not the normal thin and freezing-cold Martian atmosphere, but thicker air, as full of oxygen as Earth’s, and no colder than an average spring day. A soft haze overlay the horizon near the crater walls. And near the center of the crater, where he stood—
—lay a city.
The center of it bristled with spires that shone in a summer sunlight that would last, unbroken, for some months: for this close to either Martian pole would be midnight-sun country. The high towers of polished metal glinted green, and chief among them, more than a mile high, a tower armored in brilliant metallic scarlet speared up against the rusty-red landscape.
Nor was this the desolate red-brown stone and dirt vista of the Mars from which Kit had just jumped. Spread out all around the high city walls were thousands of smaller buildings, metallic and gleaming like the greater ones. Beyond them stretched dark blotches against the ground—some kind of wiry, rugged plant. Forestry, Kit thought. And above the landscape, the air was alive with airships darting here and there about their business, glinting when the high pink sun caught them. An uneducated observer might have thought he was looking at a Mars of the future, a terraformed place, especially when they caught sight of the slender streams of liquid water meandering here and there across the rugged countryside.
But Kit knew the ancient Barsoomian city of Greater Helium when he saw it— even if no such place had ever existed. A long while back, it seemed now, he’d been drawing it in his notebook at school. Now here it was, no smudgy pencil rendering, but the city he’d seen in his imagination, his dreams. I was right, Kit thought. We’ve each brought our own favorite Mars with us. The real one, whatever it is, is underneath what we’re seeing. All we have to do is break through... if we can.
And can I? This one’s tailored to me. Whatever’s running these scenarios has been in my head and knows it’s one I won’t want to break.
Kit frowned. Cool as this was, it was only a substitute or stand-in for the truth that underlay it— the Mars that Kit had been looking for all these months. That lost history was calling out to him now in this peculiar idiom, and Kit shivered all over at the sense of ancient secrecy looming over the scene before him. It was what Mr. Mack had warned him about: You’ll want to get into their heads, into their lives, and you won’t be able to get enough of it... Kit gulped with the excitement of it. Someone, or something, is using this to try to tell me something important. So let’s find out what that is.
He started walking, or rather bouncing, toward the gates of the city. They were huge slabs of sheer green-tinged metal, like the city’s outer walls and as tall as they were: even from his starting point, maybe a half mile away, the gates were impressive. A hundred feet high? Maybe higher—Kit had the Scarlet Tower to judge by, so he started doing simple fractions in his head as he got closer, passing among the lesser buildings. As he went, tall and handsome red-skinned humanoid people wearing beautifully wrought, art deco–looking ornaments of silver and gold and green—and very little clothing— looked curiously at him. Let’s say a hundred and fifty feet high. Think of the machinery it takes to move those—
So what?? Darryl said in his head. What’s going on?
“I’m fine,” Kit said under his breath as he made his way onto a broad white-paved roadway that led toward the city gates.
And nobody’s shooting at you? Ronan said.
“No!” Kit said. “You just want an excuse to start shooting somebody up yourself. Can you just chill for a little and let me see what’s going on here?”
It took them a while to get started with the shooting last time... Ronan said.
Kit rolled his eyes as he got closer to the gates. “You are genuinely a hopeless case,” he said. “Having the One’s Champion in your head has taught you all kinds of bad habits! Always looking to pick a fight with somebody—”
Kit paused, then, bouncing in place for a moment in the midst of the wide boulevard. The shining, unbroken expanse of the huge gates before him had suddenly developed a dark seam. They’re opening—
He headed toward the gates again, picking up the pace. Ahead of him the gates continued to open, revealing an interior at first shadowed by the walls, then glinting in the sunlight that the opening was letting in, so that Kit got a slowly broadening view of the massive bases of the towers inside.
Down at ground level, tiny against the gates, a single form slipped out through the widening opening and made its way toward him. It was bouncing along as Kit was, but so gracefully that the motion was more like a dance. Something dark was waving along behind it. What is that, some kind of veil—?
But as the two of them drew closer together, Kit realized that what he was seeing was long, long dark hair, rippling as easily as water or smoke in the morning breeze and the lighter gravity. The figure approaching him was just slightly taller than he was, coppery-skinned like everyone else here, and wearing the same kind of handsome ornaments around throat and wrists and ankles and waist, flashing blindingly pink-white where the clear sunlight caught them—
She slowed down as she got closer. Kit became aware that he was staring ...and he didn’t care. Here was someone who’d also been a drawing in the margin of his notebook,
and once again this unexpected and stunningly fleshed-out reality far surpassed the uncertain, much-corrected sketch.
She couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than he was. Wide, dark eyes; a heartshaped face; long, long slender legs— and besides the gorgeous jewelry, she wasn’t wearing a whole lot. This is definitely not exactly Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Kit thought, wavering between embarrassment and a slightly hungry fascination, because she’s actually got some clothes on ...though calling a few wisps and drifts of something like blue smoke “clothes” might be stretching the point. Kit started wondering whether the inaccuracy was due to the power running this illusion, or some backstage piece of his mind chickening out on him. But then the thought went out of his head as the girl approaching him got close enough to see his face clearly.
Her whole face changed. Her expression had been merely hopeful before: now it became one of unalloyed joy. She hurried to him, exerting such perfect control over her movements in the light gravity that she came to an effortless, bounceless halt right in front of Kit, close enough to reach out and take his hand— which she did.
Kit blushed all over. What is this? said one part of his mind: while the rest of him, mind and body together, said Wow, look at her, she’s— just wow...!
That was when she spoke, in a soft, small voice that was almost inaudible with astonishment. “You are here at last!” the girl said. “I cannot believe it. You’re here at last.”
She stood there holding Kit’s hand as if she never wanted to let go of it, gazing into his eyes, and put up her other hand to touch his face.
“Welcome home, my warrior,” she said. “Oh, welcome home!”
10: Burroughs
Nita appeared in a puff of browny-beige dust and came down on the ground with a slight jar. She glanced around the stony red landscape, taking it all in; the little Spirit rover off to one side, and the still-settling smoke from what appeared to be a recent explosion. What the heck have they been doing here? she thought. “Kit?”