And, way down in the pocket of her jeans, Nita’s cell phone rang.
Kit looked over his shoulder, his expression surprised and annoyed. Nita said a word that was not one she’d heard Mamvish using earlier and pulled her phone out, checking the ID on its display. It was her home number. If it’s Dairine, I swear when I catch her I’m gonna grab her and shove her head down the— But the phone, having had its caller ID tweaked with wizardry, helpfully added: DAD CALLING.
“Oh, no,” Nita moaned, for she suspected she knew what he was calling about. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, I have to take this...”
She flipped the phone open, acutely aware of everyone watching her, and flushed with embarrassment. “Hello?”
“Nita,” her dad said: and that was an immediate sign of trouble— both in terms of his tone of voice, which was annoyed, and the fact that he’d called her by her name rather than one of the usual nicknames or pet names he used. “Where are you?”
“I’m on Mars, Dad. Please, can this wait a little while? Because I—”
“No. I need you home right now.”
“Daddy, I—”
“Five minutes.”
She knew that tone of voice, and there was no arguing with it, not if you wanted life to continue in anything like a normal way. “Okay,” Nita said.
Her dad simply hung up.
Oh, he sounds so steamed about something, what can have him so mad...?
I bet I know.
She started to get mad herself as she folded up the phone and put it away. “This is so unfair!” she said.
Mamvish gave her one of those amused Senior-like looks that suggested that the concept of “fairness” was something Nita should have gotten past by now. Nita sighed. “I have to go,” she said to Carmela. “I’m really sorry—”
“Don’t be,” Carmela said. “It’s no problem. I’m sure Kit will drop me off as soon as he’s done here. Won’t you?” And Carmela turned on Kit one of those bright of-course-you-will looks that dared him to say anything different.
Nita saw Kit’s face work through annoyance, frustration, and an imposed calm that suggested he didn’t want to look like an idiot by protesting too much. Behind him, Ronan was gazing innocently at nothing in particular, and Darryl was watching all this with acute interest. “Sure,” Kit said.
Nita reached for her charm bracelet, feeling for the single charm, like a thin ring or empty circle, that held the preset transit spell that would take her home in a hurry. She said the few words in the Speech that took the “safety” off the spell, and as she pulled the bright line of light that was the transit spell out of the charm, Kit threw her an apologetic look. “I’ll log everything we do,” he said. “Get back as soon as you can—”
“Depend on it,” Nita said, dropped the transit circle glowing on the dusty brown-green ground around her, and vanished.
***
Kit let out another long breath as the others gathered around to look more closely at what he held. He looked up at Mamvish and Irina. “What is it?” he said.
“Well, as far as the shape goes,” Irina said, peering at the object, “it’s a superellipsoid. A superegg, some people used to call it, or a Lamé solid: the three-dimensional object you get when you rotate a superellipse around its axis. Not as resistant to force as a sphere, but it’s less likely to be mistaken for something natural.” She reached out a hand, touched it.
Bizarrely, Kit flinched, even though he’d touched the object already. But nothing happened. “It’s weird,” he said. “It looks like metal, but it’s not cold. Even with Mamvish’s environment field covering everything here now, it should still be cold...”
Ronan and Darryl and Carmela all came to crouch down around Kit and carefully touch the superegg. Kit got a sudden image of cautious ape relatives reaching out to a tall black monolith, and had to smile.
“Seems like it’s in no hurry to crack open,” Mamvish said. “But then some of these bottles have long-duration time locks on them, or routines that analyze the finders as carefully as they’d like to analyze the find.”
Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket, hanging near him in the air as it always was, and pulled out his manual, putting it down on the ground beside him and flipping to one of the sensing-routine pages in the rear section. He was shaking and couldn’t understand why. It’s not as if I’ve never seen anything alien before! Kit thought. But this is different. This is stranger. Isn’t that weird? The closer to home an alien thing is, the harder it hits—
He looked at the manual. It showed him a diagram of the superegg, but very little data appeared beside the image, and no information about whatever might be inside it. “It is made of metal,” Kit said. “But there’s plastic in it, too. And wizardry...”
Irina looked over Kit’s shoulder at his manual. She reached down to touch it, and a few extra lines of information appeared in the Speech, but nothing more. She looked surprised. As Mamvish, too, gazed down at the manual, her huge tongue flicked out, wavering over the superegg as if tasting the air around it. “This object’s cloaked,” Mamvish said.
“Even against someone with our authorizations?” Irina said. “That would take some doing.”
“So it would,” Mamvish said. “But we have little data on how powerful the wizards were who worked on this world.” Her tail lashed. “At least I don’t get any sense of this interference being something of the Lone Power’s doing...”
Irina frowned. “That’s an impression that could be faked.”
“Yes,” Mamvish said, “but as you say, against one of us? What are the odds?”
Irina raised her eyebrows, shrugged. “Admittedly, low. But there’s a first time for everything...”
“I can feel something,” Kit said, turning the superegg over in his hands. “Like there’s just a little fragment of power in there— a splinter.”
Mamvish put her tongue down against the superegg, let the tip of it rest there for a moment. Symbols in the Speech once again whirled and glowed in her hide, but they were faint and vague. “Yes,” she said. “I feel it, too. A fragment of a spell, or a collapsed and compacted sequence of a wizardry, no more. And it’s not active.”
“Like it’s on standby,” Darryl said.
Mamvish tilted her head sideways, a “maybe” gesture. “It could be. If there’s a complete spell held inside, it may have been set to stay dormant for a while after this artifact was found.”
“In any case, I can confirm your surveyors’ results,” Irina said. “This object’s very old indeed, and nothing like the kind of spell that Earth wizards were doing half a million years ago, even at what were then their highest levels of organization. Structurally, and in terms of the complexity of the outer shell alone, this is completely different. It feels alien to me.”
“Aren’t you going to try to get it open?” Carmela said.
“We’d have to have a clue as to how,” Irina said. Once more she reached down to touch the superegg, running her hand slowly across its surface. “To use wizardry to operate on an object, you have to know what it is, what it’s made of ...and working that out may take us a while. Come on,” Irina said in the Speech, and the sudden burst of power in the words her soft voice spoke shook Kit as if someone had struck him. But the power was all persuasiveness.“Tell us your secret. You’ve been alone so long already— isn’t telling about yourself what you want to do, what you’re all about? Who set you here? What are you for? We’re here to listen!”
Nothing. Kit shook his head, wondering how anything inanimate or otherwise could be unmoved by such power directed at it. But the egg just sat there in his lap, mute.
“Plainly this is going to take more analysis,” Mamvish said with a sigh. “Well, it’s the usual thing: nothing worth finding out about comes easy.”
“What’s that?” Ronan said suddenly.
Everybody looked at him. “That sound,” he said.
Kit realized he, too, had been hearing something in the background, a l
ow, hissing noise like static from a radio in the next room. But now it was sounding closer, or as if someone was turning that radio up. Everyone looked in all directions.
“There,” Mamvish said, both her eyes swiveling to look almost directly back the way they’d come.
Kit’s view was blocked by her bulk: he stood up to see. Then his eyes went wide. In the distance, maybe half a mile away, a tall, dark, twisting shape was wobbling across the landscape toward them, kicking up dust as it came. It was vague, soft-featured, amorphous— but it was getting less vague every moment as that hissing noise got louder.
“Dust devil,” Ronan said, peering past Mamvish. Beside him, Carmela watched its approach openmouthed, her attention distracted from Ronan at least for the moment.
“Saw one of those on the TV news the other night,” Darryl said. “It looked smaller...”
“They can be a mile high,” Kit said, for the moment almost oblivious to the superegg he was holding. “The winds inside are almost as fast as an Earth tornado’s...”
“Now there’s a question,” Darryl said. “If a tornado hits you here and picks you up, what happens then? Does Mars have an Oz?”
“It’s not very likely to hit us,” Mamvish said... and then trailed off as the dust devil swerved and headed right toward them.
To Kit’s slight satisfaction, Carmela gulped. “Mamvish, your shield thingy’ll keep that out, won’t it?”
“Wouldn’t matter much if it didn’t,” Kit said. “You might get some dust in your hair. The air here’s so thin, it could hit you square on and not hurt you.”
The dust devil was still running right at them, as unerringly as if it was on invisible tracks. Mamvish half turned, lifting her head, and her hide darkened: under it, symbols and phrases in the Speech began to twist and flow. Kit sucked in a breath and held it at the feel of the power building around her. She’s really something, he thought, once more frozen in place as all the others were. But no, not all the others— Irina straightened up and came around Mamvish’s side. The parakeet fluttered away to perch on top of the stone outcropping, and Irina’s baby looked up into her face with a strange, silent composure, as Irina went up to stand by Mamvish’s head. She hadn’t said a word out loud in the Speech, but Kit could see the air around her hands trembling with some force that rippled the air like heat.
The hissing grew louder; the dust devil wobbled only a little from side to side as it came at them, blocking half the horizon away with a whirling russet wall of dust. The Speech-symbols under Mamvish’s hide blazed as she reinforced her shield-spell, but she didn’t otherwise move. Then the whirlwind of dust blew right over them.
For a moment they were caught right in the center of the vortex. The hiss became deafening. Kit, standing there with the superegg in his hands, tilted his head back and found himself looking up at a view that even few wizards would ever have seen—the dark golden radiance of the Martian noontime sky, but just a circle of it, completely walled around by the upward-widening, brick-colored cone of a dust devil’s heart. The breath went out of him in wonder. But he was feeling something else as well, and couldn’t understand where it was coming from. I’ve seen this before! But that’s crazy. Where could I ever have seen this?
The moment passed as the dust devil did. A second later it was behind them, wobbling away across the Martian landscape again. Mamvish’s wizardry released them, and they all turned to watch it go.
“What a mess,” Carmela said. Kit had to admit that she had a point. The outcropping and the ground around it, which had been fairly clean after the dune had been blown back, were now almost entirely buried in the finest possible brown-red dust. Much more of it was piled nearly ten feet up the face of the black dune. Darryl whistled softly. Irina, the air around her hands gone quiet again now, clucked softly to her parakeet, which had taken to the air. It flew back to her, sat on her head, and shook its feathers out, raising a small red dust cloud of its own.
“Well,” Mamvish said, looking after the dust devil as it wandered away toward the horizon, “that was unusual...”
“You really think so?” Irina said. “You’ll be telling me you believe in coincidences next.”
Mamvish tilted an eye back toward Irina. “Not as such,” she said, “of course not. It’s safe to say that we’ve been noticed. But by what?”
“The planet?” Ronan said.
Irina threw a thoughtful look at him. “If Mars had a Planetary, we could ask him, her, or it,” she said, “but it doesn’t.” She sighed. “One more mystery.”
“Best we take them one at a time,” Mamvish said.
Kit hefted the superegg, which was getting heavy. “Let’s start with this one,” he said. “What do we do with it?”
“Well, we’ll have to keep trying to find a way to get it open,” Mamvish said. “Bottles like these usually lead to more of the same: the more of them you can open, the more you can find out about the species that left them for you, and why they left them. Some of them are just memorials. Some are cries for help. And some species foresee their own demise and leave you information about how they tried to stop it. If you can make sense of those, you can start working on a way to bring them back.”
“Assuming,” Irina said, giving Mamvish a wry look, “that bringing them back is a good idea.”
“Well, of course!” Mamvish said. “It’s not a course of action anyone rushes into. You need a lot of information before you reconstitute a lost species. Some of them are lost for good reasons. And you have to think about the effects of a reconstitution on the nearby planets.” She looked at Kit and the others. “Your world’s now technologically of an age to notice what’s happening here. If a new species suddenly turned up here, humans would be asking why.”
“They’d be doing a lot more than that!” Ronan said. “They’d be going completely spare.”
“Whether aliens would be reconstituted here is an entirely different question,” Mamvish said, waving her tail. “We’ve got a big galaxy, and plenty of completely uninhabited systems with suitable planets. Relocation is always a possibility. But that’s a question for later in the process.”
“Which you’ll need to continue without me, unfortunately,” Irina said, “as I need to get back to what I was doing at home. Let me know how you do with your analysis on that.” She nodded at the superegg. “What’ll you do with it?”
“Re-emplace it for the time being,” Mamvish said, looking at the outcropping. “If there seems to have been some kind of local reaction to its removal, better to minimize the effect for now.”
Irina nodded. “As for you folks,” she said, glancing at Kit and Ronan and Darryl, “just a word. Our cousin Mamvish is as busy as any Planetary would be, and her expertise is in demand. So you want to pay careful attention to whatever advice she gives you in this intervention. If there’s the slightest chance that you don’t understand or can’t handle any problem that comes up, call her right away.” She looked thoughtfully at Kit. “I’ve been watching this project for some time, from a distance. Tom and Carl have told me that you were to be trusted with it... that you were possibly even vital to it, if only for your commitment and all the time you’ve been spending on it. This development suggests they’re right.”
Kit tried to keep the grin of pride off his face. He was only partly successful. Irina smiled, too, but her look was still serious. “Naturally I trust my Seniors’ judgment,” she said. “But, regardless, since Mamvish seems to think you should be taking a leading role in what starts happening here now, I want you to be very, very careful what you do.” Irina gave Kit a look that suddenly had a slight edge of frown on it. “When Tom and Carl briefed me on what you’ve been working on here, I naturally took a long look at your history as a wizard. All your histories,” she said, glancing at Ronan and at Darryl. Then she turned her attention back to Kit. “So far in your career you’ve shown a certain talent for gambling successfully with your own skin in crisis situations. But this work won’t be like that. This
is likely to be one of those extended projects where when things go wrong, they start so small that you miss the early warning signs. Whatever happens here will inevitably affect Earth sooner or later... so I expect you’ll behave accordingly.”
“Yes ma’am,” Kit said, sounding very subdued.
“All right,” Irina said. “And now that all that’s said—” The sudden grin that flashed out was as excited as Kit’s would have been. “You’re on the cutting edge of something very unusual, very special. Enjoy it! And keep us posted.”
She turned away and strolled back over to Mamvish. “Don’t forget, now,” Irina said, “let me know right away if there’s anything you need.”
“Cousin, I’ll do that,” Mamvish said, and bowed her head again. Kit put his eyebrows up, for the word wasn’t quite the casually friendly relationship-word hrasht that one wizard used to another in the ordinary course of business. It still spoke of a close kinship, but it was more nuanced, and echoes of the overshadowing attention of the Powers That Be hung over it.
Irina patted Mamvish on the flank, waved to the rest of them, and then she was gone.
A leading role! Kit thought. A leading role!
“Yeah, well, you heard her reading you the pre-riot version of the Riot Act,” Ronan said under his breath. “So don’t get cocky.”
Kit threw Ronan a smug look that suggested the advice might already be a bit late. Ronan rolled his eyes.
“Is she really the most senior wizard on Earth?” Carmela said. “She doesn’t look old enough.”
Kit winced in embarrassment at someone as sketchily informed about wizardry as Carmela making such judgments... even though the thought had crossed his mind as well. Mamvish, though, cocked an indulgent eye at her. “Seniority,” Mamvish said, “takes many forms. Irina is quite special. No one understands the Earth the way she does: and as a result, it listens to her.” She waved her tail in a way that to Kit somehow communicated a strange level of concern. “If for some reason the Earth needed to be destroyed in a hurry, she’d be the one that the Powers would talk to.”