“I had a word with my closet,” Carmela said. “Actually, I had a word with the TV remote that Kit did his magic tweaking on, and it had a word with my closet. And then, so I could have control of the worldgate in the closet when I’m away from home, the remote talked to Dairine’s sweet little Spot, and cloned itself for me. Took no time at all.” She smiled delightedly.
“Wait,” S’reee said. “‘Your closet’? Is that inside a house here?”
“Yup. It’s in my bedroom.”
S’reee looked puzzled. “You have a worldgate in your house? What does it run on? Besides wizardry, I mean. The necessary ‘hard’ power outlay would be considerable.”
“I’m told I have a parasitic virtual catenary conduit from one of the nondenominated gates at the Crossings,” Carmela said, and laughed. “Whatever that means! Sker’ret’s got it plugged into something or other; that’s all that matters. My closet even has a Crossings gate number, though it’s unlisted. Like a real classy Zip code.” Carmela juggled the remote from hand to hand. “So now I don’t need to bother anybody else to give me rides …and if I want to go to Mars, the boys can’t stop me. Come to think of it,” and she grinned at Nita, “you can’t stop me! Because you don’t really want to. Do you?”
“Uh—”
“Oh, Juanita Louise, don’t look so stricken!”
Nita clutched her head. “Carmela. Do …not …say …the L word!”
Carmela laughed. After a moment, to Nita’s horror, so did S’reee. “hNii’t,” S’reee said, “I think she’s got us both in the drift net at the moment. We may as well give in gracefully.”
“‘Us’? You want to go, too?”
“Why not? I’m not all that busy this morning. If she’s supplying free transport—”
“Not free,” Carmela said promptly. “This interspatial transport is supplied to you on a promotional basis courtesy of the Planetary Government of Rirhath B and Crossings Properties HyperIncorporated.” She produced a very prim and proper expression. “Because I know that in wizardry there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Then Carmela grinned. “But I can take as many people as I like whenever I like to, because Sker’ret said I could… and what the Stationmaster of Rirhath B says, goes.”
Nita sighed. “She’s got us there.”
“So it’s settled then. Where exactly on Mars are we going?”
Nita pulled out her manual. “Wait a sec, ’cause I have no idea exactly what he’s been up to—”
After a few moments Nita found the spot where Kit had filed his précis. “Uh-oh.”
“What?” S’reee and Carmela said in unison, but Carmela with much more relish.
Nita tsk-tsked softly. “He just couldn’t leave that egg alone,” she said. “Looks like it hatched! And sent out some signals.”
S’reee, partially submerged again, listened to what the Sea had to tell her about this. “Odd. Four signals went out from the artifact. But I’m seeing five hot spots on Mars where wizardry is either working or waiting to start.”
Carmela looked confused. “So where are the guys?”
Nita paged back to Kit’s précis, found the map he’d labeled with the signal targets, and tapped the page: it updated. “Looks like the northernmost of the targets. Some crater called Stokes. Yeah, there are their life signs— S’reee, you seeing this?”
S’reee’s eyes were unfocused. “Yes. There’s no missing Darryl’s life sign, in particular; it’s unique.” She flipped a fin, looked up at Nita.
Nita nodded, not looking up from the manuaclass="underline" there was something strange about the diagram she was examining. Not knowing what to make of it, she flipped back to the messaging page and touched Kit’s note to bring the contact up to live status. “Hey,” she said in the Speech. “What’s going on up there?” And she waited.
Nothing.
She looked up. Carmela was giving her an odd look. “Is there a delay?” she said. “Mars is a long way off.”
Nita shook her head. “Lightspeed isn’t an issue for the manuals.” She turned back to the map on Kit’s précis page, scrutinized it. “I don’t like this. The manual says we can’t go there.”
“What?” S’reee said.
“The manual says the sites are ‘Unavailable, blocked by previous declaration, investigation ongoing, comm functions blocked during evaluation.’”
“Whose previous declaration?” Carmela said, “and whose investigation? Blocked by who? And what—?” The rest of what she was saying got lost in the splash of S’reee submerging again.
“What?” Carmela said. “Did I say something wrong? What freaked her?”
Nita shook her head. “She’s looking it up in detail. She gets her wizardry data from the Sea. She’s more senior than me— she may be able to find out more.”
Some moments later, S’reee surfaced and blew. “All I get is what you’re getting,” she said to Nita. “Definitely something to do with the superegg’s transmission this morning— there are multiple delayed wizardries working. But don’t ask me what they’re doing, I can’t get an analysis. Because what I’m getting makes no sense. The Sea can’t give me enough context for a translation.”
“Alien wizardry,” Nita said, getting more unnerved by the second. “Dangerous, you think?”
“No telling. But that fifth site isn’t blocked. There’s some kind of wizardry there that’s alive and running, but not doing anything …just waiting.”
“And transit’s not prevented?” Carmela said.
Nita shook her head, showed Carmela the manual page. “There. Get the coordinates and do the honors. We can have a look at that hot spot: and when we’re actually on the planet, we might be able to reach the guys. Or get a better idea of what’s going on with them.”
Carmela looked at the manual page and spent a moment tapping numbers into the remote. Nita was surprised to hear it make a little series of electronic beeps, at which Carmela’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, you can do that?” she said in the Speech. “Sorry.” She pointed the remote at the manual, pressed a button.
The remote chirped; Carmela looked up at Nita. “It can take a scan. I didn’t realize.”
“hNii’t,” S’reee said, “you had a cloaking routine ready? Putting it up around us might be good. About a twenty-meter radius—”
Nita tucked the manual away, pulled the spell out of the charm bracelet, and said the words that kicked the spell into action. As she did, S’reee levitated gracefully out of the water, keeping just an inch-thick shell of it around her so her skin wouldn’t dry out. “I’ve got all the air we’ll need. K!aarmii’lha?”
Carmela raised the remote, hit what would normally be the channel-change button.
They vanished.
***
It was mid-afternoon on the red-brown southern slopes of the Martian volcano where two girls and a humpback whale appeared a second later. Away to the east, under the thin, filmy clouds of a windy day, the vast shadows and chasms of the westernmost end of Valles Marineris cut away from them in dust and haze toward the edge of the world, where a thin veil of pink-tinted sky hid the canyon’s far end.
Carmela looked at the long, gentle slope of the worn old mountain behind them. “You know what you could build here? The universe’s biggest ski jump. What’s this place called, anyway?”
Nita had to smile as she and S’reee looked around. “Arsia Mons.”
Carmela snickered. “Sounds like one of Ronan’s rude Irish words…”
“Not this time,” Nita said, pulling out her manual to cross-reference between the map and the downslope terrain. “In the old days, people saw this was a bright spot that got dark sometimes. They couldn’t see the cause— this big spiral of dust that updrafts from the volcano’s side every winter.” She looked up the long, shallow curve of the volcano’s slope, where many dark-colored rocks were whitened on top by the last winter’s dustfall. “But the astronomers back then thought maybe there were trees here, growing leaves and losing them again. So they called it Arsia Silva, the Arsine Forest, after someplace in Italy. Later when the telescopes were better they got rid of the word for forest and put in ‘mons’ for mountain, but they kept the ‘Arsia.’”