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 offplanet 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 help 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…