“It’s not that we’re not in a massive battle of good against evil,” Carl said. “Of course we are! But that’s just one of many ways to characterize the fight. When you’re getting started, there’s a tendency to simplify things while you’re trying to work out how to classify all the weird new data you have to handle. And when you’re simplifying everything that way, and fueling that perception with the considerable power of a new wizard, very often you wind up forcing that kind of very straightforward, in-your-face, physically obvious role on the Lone Power.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute!” Nita stared at him. “We’re forcing It?”
Tom nodded. “The youngest wizards really don’t have any sense of how tremendous their power is, right out of the gate, and maybe that’s for the best. They just use it. And a surprising amount of the time, they win, even though they’ve compelled the Lone One to come out of hiding and confront them in the only way that gives It a chance of success when they’re at such power levels: direct physical intervention. That’s where it’s always weakest; for to manifest so directly, you need matter. And the Lone Power, being hung up on what It considers the essential superiority of spirit, really hates matter.”
Tom smiled slightly, glancing at the various parents, who were listening with interest. “Later on, as a wizard’s power decreases and his mastery of the complexities of the Art increases, the Lone One’s able to make more inroads into his life in the way it does with nonwizardly people: using a lot less power, but also being a lot more subtle.”
He looked at Nita and Kit and the other younger wizards. “Don’t think this makes It any less dangerous! You see how close It came to getting a result on Mars that would have absolutely delighted It, just by working underhandedly and using people’s own habits and weaknesses against them—sometimes even their strengths. Death and destruction on two worlds: the poor dupes doing the Lone One’s work for It, while It sits back and laughs.”
Carl shook his head. “This time, just in time, Kit got smart. So did you.” Carl looked at Nita from under his brows, his eyes glinting. “And so did Khretef. Together you found your way past the pitfalls the Lone Power hoped you’d be blind to, because you’d dug them yourselves. That’s always one of our great strengths, as wizards: we’re committed to looking out for each other, each seeing the thing the other is blind to. The tricky part is convincing each other that ‘blind’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stupid.’”
Tom sighed and finished his iced tea. “But sometimes we get lucky,” he said. “This last time, we all did. You kids especially. So now we get to relax.”
Nita’s dad reached down by the chair and picked up the iced-tea jug, filled Tom’s glass again. “Even you?”
Tom laughed. “I’ve got enough time off next weekend to want to talk to you about some landscaping.”
Nita got up and headed toward the house. Kit came along after her, catching up with her where she had paused to look at the spark of red light hanging low in the sky.
Nita glanced at it as he came up behind, then went back to gazing at Mars. “I’m not sure I got smart,” she said under her breath. “It felt completely like luck to me.”
Kit stared at her. “Neets, are you kidding? Think what you did with that passthrough—”
“If I hadn’t had Bobo to help, I could never have done it. You should’ve seen the size of that spell—”
Kit shrugged. “So? You used what you had. You used what you remembered you had. And what you had enough power to pull off. Every wizard does that every day with their manual or whatever they use…”
Nita thought about that. “I was the one who was kind of late about getting smart,” Kit said then. “Seemed like it took me forever to figure out that not only was Aurilelde’s take on everything all wrong, but so was Khretef’s. Even a wizard’s perceptions of wizardry can get screwed up under the right circumstances. Khretef was too busy believing everything Aurilelde told him. Aurilelde was too busy believing what her father told her.”
“And he was busy believing what Rorsik told him.” Nita shook her head. “And with that whole Shamaska-versus-Eilitt thing going on, nobody was thinking straight about anything. Except you, eventually.”
“They were too busy believing in stuff to look at what was true,” Kit said. “I just hadn’t been stuck in the middle of it for as long as they had.”
Nita nodded, leaning back against the fence. “So, no Martians after all? That’s got to come as a letdown.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. But he didn’t look away from the red star burning up there. “Still, it’s a neat place, and it needs taking care of. I’m not going to dump it just because its backstory’s changed.”
Looking up at it, Nita nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Besides, there are still some craters up there that don’t have names…”
She was expecting a snicker, but none came. After a moment she got a strange feeling and turned to find Kit watching her. “What?” she said.
“Charcoal’s ready,” Kit said. “Don’t you want a burger?” And he headed back to the group at the rear of the backyard.
Nita smiled slightly and followed him.
***
Much later, in the dark, someone spoke Nita’s name.
She woke up in the middle of the night and turned over, eyes open in the dark. What?
But no one was there to have said anything. Nita sighed. Just another of those dreams, she thought. She closed her eyes again, completely worn out but for the moment also completely happy. Nothing to do tomorrow, she thought. School’s over. This is so great! I can sleep as late as I want. And I’m going to start that all over again right now…
But perversely, it didn’t happen. Outside her closed eyes, she could tell that there was light. I hate this, Nita thought, resigned. This has been one of those sleeps where you wake up and you don’t feel like you’ve been to sleep at all. She felt vaguely cheated, but there was no point in trying to go back to sleep under these circumstances. She sighed and opened her eyes again.
Red dirt all around, and stones and rust-beige rubble, and a light dusting of snow—
Nita sat up and stared around her. Her first thought was that Dairine had finally gotten around to getting revenge on her for sending her bed to Pluto that time. But as Nita looked around, she started getting the slightly rainbowy, shivery feeling around the edges of things, what Tom called “temporal aberration,” that told her this wasn’t a real physical experience: it was vision. Oh, okay, she thought, and got up. Let’s see what this is about.
There was no mistaking the view; this was Kit’s preferred landing spot on Mars, at the top of Elysium Mons. Nita stood there feeling under her bare feet the cool gritty dust of another world. This is what visions are really good for,she thought, not having to worry about force fields, or the real temperature, or whether you brought enough air. For the morning around her felt no chillier than an early spring morning on Earth.
The Sun was just up and actually felt warm on her skin. Overhead the sky was lightening, swiftly going from violet to blue. Silhouetted against it, a couple of hundred yards away where the tableland dropped off, Kit was standing, looking southward across the plains of Elysium Planitia. Nita just watched him for a moment, then felt a draft and looked down at herself.
Oh, no, she thought, seeing the gossamer draperies again, and the gleaming wrought and gemmed metal of the bodice. I have got to talk him out of this look for me: it does not work!!
But second thoughts did intrude, and surreptitiously Nita glanced down. Well, okay, maybe the top isn’t bad—
Down by her foot she saw a small rock that she recognized. Nita reached down to pick it up. “So,” she said to it, “what’s new up here?”
Water snow and gas snow, said the rock. And then some changes in the terrain. It sounded bemused.