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 stubborn 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 beachball 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.