Kit went over to the egg, knelt down beside it, almost scared to touch it. Finally he swore at his own nervousness, reached out and put one hand on the superegg. Nothing happened. The sense of latent energy within it was completely gone.
The sweat that had broken out on Kit was going cold: he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his life-support spell, and his breath was smoking as the air around him chilled down. Kit more or less collapsed onto the dark sand and sat there trying to recover, staring at the egg. Okay, he thought, I’ve broken it. And I’m now in the most trouble I’ve ever been in my life. But there’s no point in freezing myself solid.
Kit picked up his manual, flipped through it to check some spell syntax, and then spoke to the life support spell’s parameters, telling them to pull some energy from under the planet’s crust, where a little residual heat lay stored. Then Kit rubbed his face, flinching at the grit, which as usual was getting everyplace, and stared at the egg. Those were signals. But to what, or who—?
He flipped pages in the manual, turning to the place where local changes in the environment would have been logged. “What were those signals about?” he said to the manual. “Where were they headed?”
A long spill of characters in the Speech appeared all down the glowing page, filling it: the technical description of what the scorpion had done. Kit read down it, turned the page, and found it filling up with description, too— a bewildering amount of it. “Whoa, whoa! Save that. And just give me a graphic for now, okay?”
The page dimmed the Speech-charactery down to near invisibility and drew him a simple outline map of the Martian surface in a cylindrical projection, a wide rectangle. Four glowing arcs drew themselves outward from Kit’s location in Nili Patera, each a slightly different curve heading in a different direction: northeast, northwest, southeast, and much more deeply south. At each arc’s end, the map labeled itself with the English-language names of the targeted features and their equivalents in the Speech.
“All craters,” Kit said under his breath, noting their names: Stokes, Cassini, de Vaucouleurs, and Hutton. “Any response from anything there?”
The page blanked. Then a single character appeared, the Speech-symbol that could stand for either the number zero or a null response.
Kit let out a breath: his manual wasn’t normally so terse. “Okay,” he said. “Alert me if anything comes up…”
He closed the manual and put it aside, looking down at the superegg. “Might as well put you back…” Once more he hunkered down in front of the outcropping where it had been secreted. There was no point in leaving this out where one of the satellites orbiting Mars could see it.
What I’m really wishing, Kit thought as he put a hand out to the egg again, is that there was some way to cover what I just did. Or some really good excuse for it. But this wasn’t one of those situations where you could just tell the local authority figure the equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” and expect to get away with it. And as he thought that, a small pain struck Kit somewhere in his midsection. It’s not like I can claim my dog is eating much of anything anymore…
Kit made an unhappy face. His manual had been open and logging when this happened. Hiding anything of what had happened would be impossible. I just wish I wasn’t about to get yelled at for doing something wrong, and maybe get kicked off the whole project—
It then occurred to Kit that telling just one aspect of the truth might be enough to keep him out of trouble. All he’d have to say would be that something had made him do this: some urge he couldn’t resist had come over him. And that was true, Kit thought. Or at least it kind of feels like it was true—
But wait. Am I just talking myself into this because I don’t want to look stupid? And no matter how thoroughly he talked himself into believing this irresistible urge thing, one of the other wizards associated with this— Mamvish, Irina— might be able to tell him that the urge hadn’t been all that overwhelming: that he could’ve resisted if he’d really wanted to…
Then I wind up looking twice as dumb as I am already. And besides… The Speech, the most important part of wizardry, was about describing the universe as it really was. If you started taking liberties with that concept, you were doing the Lone Power’s work for it. And when working with the Speech, trying to describe things the way they weren’t could get very fatal.
Kit picked up the superegg, muttered the necessary syllables of the Mason’s Word, and shoved the egg back into the stone. Never mind. I’m gonna call Mamvish, come clean, and get the yelling over with.
He stood up and flipped the manual open to the contacts section, put a finger on Mamvish’s entry. He had to stop and try to swallow before he could speak: his mouth had gone dry again. “Page her,” he said to his manual. “Ask if she’s got a moment.”
Mamvish’s name dimmed, then blazed again. Under it a one-line phrase traced itself out in the curving characters of the Speech: Unavailable: on intervention. No availability estimate at this time. If the matter is urgent, please leave a message.
Kit stared at the words: somehow they were the last thing he’d expected. Urgent. Is this urgent? How do I tell? And what if it’s not, really? “Uh,” he said. “Mamvish, it’s Kit. I’m on Mars. There’s been a development. The egg went through, I don’t know, some kind of metamorphosis, and it sent out signals. Nothing else has happened yet.” He stopped, tried to think what else he should add that both he knew to be strictly true and wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot. No, just quit while you’re ahead. “Uh, that’s all. I’ll call you back later. Dai stihó.”
Mamvish’s name flashed, confirmation that the message had been saved. A link to a copy of Kit’s message, with a time stamp, appeared down the page.
Kit sighed and slapped the manual shut. The sudden feeling of reprieve was tremendous… And dumb, since I haven’t gotten out of anything yet! Still, she’ll know I tried to call her. That has to count for something.
Kit became aware that his heart was pounding. He glanced around at the silent sands, the dark dune towering over him. Off to the northwest, Deimos was diving toward the horizon. So now what?
He stood watching Deimos’s downward arc while his pulse slowed. Well, now that you’ve got some new data out of this crazy thing you did, do something useful with it. Find out why those signals were sent to those spots! And this time, don’t do it alone.
Deimos twinkled through the atmosphere near the horizon while Kit wondered where that idea had come from. Am I just trying to have someone around to share the blame with if something else goes wrong? A depressing thought. But company would be good for keeping me from screwing up again.
That thought was nearly as depressing. I’m gonna go home and get some breakfast. Maybe Neets—
But she’ll still be asleep. And she said to wait till after lunch to call her…
Well, never mind! Who wants people getting the idea that you can’t do anything without having her along? Or that you can’t handle something unusual by yourself?
Kit glanced back at the outcropping. That strange feeling of the surroundings watching him was gone now. It went away when the egg opened. But why wouldn’t it do that before?
Unless it was waiting for something. And, outrageously, the idea came to him:
It was waiting for me.
After a moment Kit shook his head at the crazy idea. Mamvish had mentioned in the past that some of these “bottles” had timing wizardries attached, routines meant to give the wizardries time to see what conditions in the world around them were like before popping open. Its timer probably just went off after it finished taking its readings. Then it started calling to its buddies. But why aren’t they answering?
In forlorn hope Kit flipped his manual open to the page where those four craters were marked. But there was no sign of anything happening there: no movement, no heat, no unusual energy artifact.