Shadow fled outward from Mamvish and ran swift as a blast wave across the ground, past the rocks on which they were all sitting, out toward the sea and up the face of the cliff. In that shadow, Mamvish glowed. The green-gold shimmer under her hide was replaced by darkness in which burned a great complexity of characters and sentences in the Speech, writhing and coiling about one another, flowing out onto the darkened ground. The shadow beneath them now filled with those words and characters, and as Mamvish stretched her head upward into the air, the sound of the surf behind them was drowned out by what seemed a whole chorus of voices chanting in the Speech, like a great concord of wind instruments: Mamvish’s voice, but seemingly multiplied many times over, as if she was somehow reciting all the different parts of the spell at the same time.
Nita tried to breathe and found she couldn’t. The spell held her in place, and she couldn’t move a muscle, not even to look sideways to see how Kit was taking it. All around them, instead of the inward-leaning, listening silence that normally meant a wizardry was starting to work, Nita started to hear something astonishing— more voices, seeming to join in with Mamvish’s fluting one, all speaking the Speech together with her from out of some great echoing depth, a great chorus of intention, elation, even excitement—
Then the silence fell, abrupt, unexpected: and the sea was gone, and the sky was a dark hazy russet-golden color rather than blue. Nita let go the awed breath she’d been forced to hold, looking around her at a world that had gone a dusty ochre, shading to rusty charcoal at the edges.
Nita slid down off the boulder, took another breath. Since her eyes weren’t boiling out of her head in the hyperthin air, and she hadn’t half frozen since they got there, it was plain that Mamvish had taken care of the group’s atmosphere needs. But Nita still felt wobbly. That huge wash of Speech and wizardly power left her feeling like she’d been run over by a truck, and as if all the spells she’d ever cast by herself or just in company with Kit were weak little things by comparison. She leaned against the boulder, gulping, and tried to get her composure back.
Kit, still up on the boulder, was gasping and trying to hide it: Ronan was shaking his head like someone who’d been punched. Carmela, sitting beside him, had unbraided her hair and was braiding it up again— a sign that Nita had learned to read as meaning that Mela was unnerved. Only Darryl was standing there casually looking around him, seemingly unaffected.
Nita saw Mamvish, noting this, rotate one eye toward Irina, who was fanning herself with one hand like someone who’d broken out in a sweat. Irina said nothing, but Nita suspected that a few thoughts were passing between them concerning why so young and relatively inexperienced a wizard should be untroubled by what had just happened.
Good, Nita thought. Something we don’t have to warn her about. Nita had been concerned about the appropriateness of one of Earth’s precious few abdals getting involved in off-planet wizardly work: but if Irina didn’t do anything about it, then it definitely had to be all right. Nita let out a long breath and looked up at that strange butterscotch-colored daytime sky, which shaded down toward deeper tints of apricot and warm brick red at the horizon. Southward of where they stood, the dust was thick in the sky, softening a horizon that would normally have been much sharper, and hiding the view of the distant foothills.
Nita swallowed, smiled. It had always been wonder enough just to step out of a gating circle onto this ancient and alien soil, to stand gazing up into this unearthly sky and see that smaller, cooler, pinker sun. Nita had been here often enough, over the last year or so, to almost get used to that marvel. But today there was something new that sharpened this view, lent an edge to the feel of the place. The clue they’d been hunting had finally been found. Now every shadow, every rock, seemed to be hiding a secret.
Life…!
3: Syrtis Major
“What time is it here?” Irina said.
“About halfway through the sol,” Mamvish said, glancing around. “Am I right— that’s the name your people use for the Martian day? Excellent. Anyway, it’s late autumn here: we’re just north of the planet’s equator.”
Looking around, Nita smiled wryly. The only way to tell that fall was here was by the angle of the Sun and the slight warmth remaining in the atmosphere— meaning that the outside temperature was only about thirty degrees below zero. Feeling less shaky now, she pushed away from the chilly boulder she’d been leaning against and peered south toward the highlands.
This part of Mars’s northern hemisphere was dominated by flat country, the crater-pitted remnant of old lava flows. Southward the highlands would start to pile up into far more spectacular and mountainous terrain, dotted with terrible crevasses and ancient volcanic peaks. But all that was well over the horizon. Here everything was relatively flat, darkened by the local green-brown sand and dust— except for the features lowering over the site to which Mamvish had brought them. On every side, immense charcoal-dark dunes of windblown basalt sand had piled up— stretched out serpentlike across the plain, half a mile or a mile long, as sharp-edged as any desert dune on Earth. But in the lower gravity, these dunes towered nearly five hundred feet high, casting long, cold shadows across the plain in the light of early morning.
The others were getting down from where they’d been sitting. Nita threw a glance at Kit, saw that he was all right, and went over to where Carmela was standing, gazing around with her hair braided up again, a look of astonishment on her face. “Aren’t we inside a force field or something?” Carmela said. “How come I can feel the wind?”
“I told you,” Nita said, “Mamvish has power to burn...” Whenever Nita and Kit had come here on their own, or to work with the other wizards involved in this effort, they’d both worn personal force fields that hugged them close, keeping the Martian atmosphere out and their own carefully calculated air supplies in. But Mamvish had built her wizardry very differently, so that it matched the temperature and oxygen content of Earth’s air exactly but still transmitted the forces of the thin exterior atmosphere as if they were one and the same. It would have been an incredibly difficult wizardry to structure, and Nita could imagine the kind of power necessary to run it. The same kind of power that can pick you up off one planet and drop you on another between one breath and the next without it even looking hard...
“Why’s everything this khaki color?” Carmela said, as she and Ronan and Darryl came over to join Nita and Kit near where Mamvish and Irina were looking around. “I thought this was supposed to be the red planet.”
“Because we’re in the middle of Syrtis Major,” Kit said. “That big dark eastern-hemisphere blotch that everybody used to think was a sea, with canals running into it. There were a lot of volcanoes here, so the ground’s full of this green stuff, olivine, that formed when the lava cooled.” Kit looked around like someone who just needed to see a few landmarks to be sure where he was. “This isn’t really a crater we’re in: it’s what’s left of one of the calderas where the lava came out. It’s called Nili Patera.” He looked over at Mamvish. “And the bottle is—”
“A few hundred meters south,” Mamvish said. “Síle and Markus get the credit for finding it. They were working this site all this week...”
“Who’re Síle and Markus?” Carmela said, bouncing up and down in place to get the feel of the gravity, which was only about a third of the Earth’s. Each bounce took her several times higher than she’d intended, and Nita kept having to reach up and grab her and pull her back down.
“A couple of the other wizards on the project,” Kit said. “Síle’s from Ronan’s part of the world— she’s at college studying computer science in Paris. Markus is in the German army: he drives tanks.”
“They’re not tanks,” Ronan muttered. “They’re armored personnel carriers, and if he hears you call them tanks one more time...”
Kit gave Ronan a “whatever” shrug. “They were the ones who called me in,” Mamvish said. “Markus’s unit had to go on active service yesterday morning to hel
p with the floods in the south of his country. Síle stayed here and kept running the spell routines that she and Markus had been working on, till something came up that required her to head home and go out on errantry yesterday evening. She called me in just before she went on active status.”
“It’s a shame they can’t be here,” Kit said. “They’ve been working so hard on this for so long...”
“As have about twenty other people from your planet for whom this is a special interest,” Mamvish said. “But they don’t grudge missing the action, as long as there is action.” Her tail swished with excitement. “The rest of your team will get here when work and errantry leave them time. Meanwhile—”
“Where is it?” Kit said. “What is it?”
“It’s where you said you thought it might be,” Mamvish said. “Hidden under one of these dunes. But time passed, the wind blew, the dune moved ...and now it’s not hidden anymore. As for the what— now we’ll find out. Over this way...”
They all headed southward. Nita saw that Carmela seemed to have recovered her composure and had gravitated back toward Ronan, who was gliding along a foot or so above the surface, with only the occasional very practiced and casual bounce: he looked as unconcerned as if he were walking across some park back home. Looks like he and Kit have been up here working in one-third g an awful lot. Maybe more than I thought ...But projects of her own had been keeping Nita busy lately, and what she told Carmela had been true: the Martian project had been far more Kit’s passion than hers for some months. Not that she hadn’t come up every now and then to see how things were going. But mostly they hadn’t been. Until now, Kit and all the other wizards he’d been working with had found nothing at all...
He and Darryl and Ronan were now bouncing along together, talking hard as they came up beside Mamvish. Carmela had dropped back, succumbing to the fascination of where she was and looking intently at the sandy ground, the dusty rocks, the alien dune-vista between her and the horizon. Irina, too, had paused to pick up a rough dark-green stone and look closely at it. The baby hanging in front of her patted the rock with one hand and crowed as Nita came up next to the two of them. “Irina—” she said very quietly.
“It’s about Darryl, isn’t it?”
Nita went hot with embarrassment. “It’s all right,” Irina said softly, turning the rock over in her hands. “He can be away from Earth for short periods, and his function as a channel of the One’s power into the world won’t suffer. But I think you’ll find that he won’t care to be away much longer. For those of us who’ve become important at the planetary level, the Earth whispers in our ears when it’s uneasy at our absence. And the whisper’s impossible to ignore.”
Irina tossed the rock to the ground and gestured with her head toward the others. She and Nita started to bounce after them, and the baby shouted with delight as they went, while the yellow parakeet scolded them noisily, finally taking off and flying on ahead, quick as an arrow-shot in the low gravity. “Besides,” Irina said, “while Mamvish is here, nothing’s going to dare interfere with him, or you, or anything else that’s going on.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I couldn’t believe that spell. And she did it so casually. What her power levels must be like—”
“Well, yes, but it’s not just that,” Irina said, even more softly than she’d spoken about Darryl. “She’s unusual even as wizards go. It wouldn’t be in the manuals, but it might be useful for you to know: she’s an Abstainee.”
Nita’s eyes went wide. “She had her Ordeal and the Lone Power didn’t show up?”
Irina nodded, smiled. “It even sent her a message saying It wasn’t going to turn up. She told me once,” Irina said, with a somewhat cockeyed look, “that It said It had a headache.”
Nita shook her head, not knowing what to make of this. “I bet that doesn’t happen often.”
“Galaxy-wide? Eleven times in the last five centuries,” Irina said. She looked ahead toward where the others had stopped in the shadow of one more black-sand dune, a very perfect crescent with the open side toward them. “And as usual, the question is: do her power levels come from being an Abstainee, or did the Lone One decide not to get involved because of her power levels...?” Irina shook her head. “It may not matter. But she’s good to have around for backup... and no wizard alive knows more about this particular kind of work than she does. I’m glad she’s here. Especially since this is such an odd place, some ways...”
Irina gazed toward the northern horizon for a moment as they went. “I have to come up here two or three times a year to make sure the planet’s operating correctly in the absence of a kernel, and afterwards I always go away wondering why the manual’s so short of information about exactly what’s happened here. Now, though, what the Mars team has found may mean the silence is finally about to break a little.”
Shortly they caught up with the others, who were all standing around a little irregular outcropping or bump of dark olive-colored stone, just four feet or so high. It jutted up deep in the shadow of the crescent dune, and just a foot or two clear of where the steep, smooth sweep of dark, gritty sand on the dune’s inner side came down to the ground. “It’s under that?” Kit said as Nita and Irina caught up with the others.
“Inside it,” said Mamvish.
“And you’re sure whatever’s in there isn’t something contemporary?” Ronan said. “Like that alien tourist beacon Nita’s sister found up on Olympus Mons when she passed through on her Ordeal? Not some practical joke?”
Mamvish tilted her head one way and the other, the gesture her people apparently used for “no.” “Many sites that wizards have investigated here over the last three centuries have had a scent of old wizardry about them, but never anything this concrete. And the survey spell identifies what’s emplaced here as being at least five hundred and forty thousand years old. Even Earth’s earliest wizards didn’t venture this far for many thousands of years after that. So I think we’re safe enough from practical jokes. Anyway—” She gestured with her tail at Kit. “Kit is probably the most Mars-crazed of the whole team, and he’s the one who’s always been after everybody to keep on looking here, even after previous searches came up blank.”
“Why, Kit?” Irina said. “What seemed so special about Syrtis?”
Kit shook his head. “I don’t know. It was just a hunch to start with.” He looked around him. “But Syrtis Major was the first feature on Mars that anyone on Earth really noticed, the thing that’s most obvious from space. It just seemed like a good place to start.”
“Hunch or no hunch, Kit seems to have a feel for this place,” Mamvish said. “Why argue the point? No one knows why any wizard’s good at any particular specialty. The Powers may know, but it’s not information They seem interested in sharing.” She shrugged her tail.
“How come all the sensor spells the team was using before didn’t turn this up until now?” Nita said.
“Because it was built to hide its nature,” Mamvish said. “An extremely elegant piece of wizardry, exactly mimicking the structure and composition of its surroundings. For a long time, before the dunes advanced into the crater, all the spell had to pretend to be was this chunk of rock ...and it did that perfectly. But then the dunes came in, and the wizardry had to adapt itself to mimicking not only rock, but dust and sand of a different composition and structure. The adjustment took a while, since the spell had only limited running power available to it. And when the dune moved away again, the spell had to adjust again.”
She glanced around. “A dust storm moved through here the other night: in the wind, the dune moved just far enough westward to reveal the outcropping, and the wizardry started to adapt again. But Síle was still here, up north by the canyon valley you call Huo Hsing Vallis, running the new survey spell she and Markus had designed. She detected the chameleon spell and what it was protecting before the wizardry had time to reset and hide it all again.”
“Well done, that woman,” Ronan said. “She always was the stubb
orn type.”
“Sometimes stubbornness pays better dividends than high power levels,” Irina said. “Well, shouldn’t we take a look at it?”
“This is your job, I think,” Mamvish said to Kit.
Kit suddenly looked abashed and shy. Nita had to hide her smile.
“Go on,” Mamvish said. “You’re the one who predicted the location. Pull it out of there and let’s see what it is.”
Kit nodded, knelt down in front of the outcropping, put his hands up against it, and very slowly and carefully recited the fourteen syllables of the Mason’s Word, which has power over stone and the mineral elements. Then he leaned inward. Slowly Kit’s hands sank in through the surface of the brown stone, up to the wrists, then up to the elbows. He looked absently upward, like anyone feeling around for something he can’t see, and then his eyes widened.
“It’s pretty big,” he said. “Round, I think. Kind of beach-ball sized...”
Very slowly he pulled his arms back. His face tensed. “It doesn’t want to come,” he said.
“The spell would resist,” Mamvish said. “That’s its job. Keep pulling.”
Nita watched as the sweat popped out on Kit’s forehead. She could feel his nervousness, catch a flicker of stressed-out thought: Please don’t let me drop it, don’t let anything bad happen to this thing, we’ve been looking for so long—!
Then Kit sat back on his heels, hard, gazing down at what he held. For a few seconds the ancient chameleon spell refused to entirely let go, so that what Kit held looked like nothing but a rounded, gritty, green-brown boulder. Then, gradually, the seeming fell away. Revealed in his hands was a shining blue-green metallic object, strangely shaped: a sort of blunt-ended capsule or stretched sphere, about two feet long.
“Wow...” Nita said, and then realized that her heart was pounding. All the others let out breaths of surprise and satisfaction as they peered over Kit’s shoulder. Only Kit was completely silent, kneeling there with the thing braced on his knees and staring at it in wonder.