Nita snickered, wandering over to the door of her room and chucking the used socks out at the laundry basket in the hall. They bounced off the wall and went in. “But lots of people would be bothered,” Nita said. “Worldview stuff, religious stuff… Hey, look, even wizards are only human. We’re not all perfect at having both the real and the true in our heads at the same time without them blowing each other up! Especially since both the real and the true keep changing all the time.” She headed back to the dresser to pick up the jeans and the top she’d decided on. “But some people think that finding the truth for themselves is cooler than just sitting around with what people tell them is true. They think it’s okay to find out where you really came from, even if at first it gets you upset.”
Carmela sat quiet for a moment. “You know,” she said, “if people here found out there really were Martians…”
Nita bent down for her sneakers. “They’d freak,” Nita said, heading for the door. “And they’d do it big! Even if the little probes we’ve sent there don’t find anything bigger than germs, some people will still freak, because they think we’re—they’re— the most important things in the universe, all the life there is.” She snorted.
“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Sker’ret would laugh all his legs off at that one.”
Nita put her eyebrows up, leaning against the doorsill. “How is our favorite centipede?”
“Busy,” Carmela said. “The Rirhath B government’s still cleaning up the Crossings, and Sker’s having himself a party being King of the Alien Worldgates while his Esteemed Ancestor grows in his new legs and claws and brains and things.” She grinned. “Sker’ret says he needs me to come help get their shopping mall cleaned up.”
“Cleaned out, you mean,” Nita said. The planetary government of Rirhath B had settled a considerable reward on Carmela for “services rendered” in the liberation of the Crossings Worldgating Facility…and Carmela had chosen to take her reward as shopping vouchers. Nita guessed that a whole lot of the Crossings’ shopkeepers were rubbing their hands, claws, or tentacles together at the prospect. “That trip I’m taking with you, no matter what Dairine does. But anyway, the freaking’s gonna happen eventually, no matter what we do…because no matter who goes looking for life, sooner or later they’ll find it. And as far as wizards here go, it looks like the Powers That Be have decided that if we’re old enough to be asking serious questions about the fourth planet, we’re old enough to be told. But only because we didn’t just ask and then run away to play. We started going there and digging around.”
“How long has this been going on?” Carmela said.
“Since the 1770s…”
Carmela banged the side of her head with one hand a couple of times in a my-ears-are-malfunctioning gesture. “Sorry! I thought you said since the Revolutionary War…”
“Melaaaaa…!” Nita said, laughing, and headed out of her bedroom, making for the bathroom just down the hall. “There were wizards here then!” She pushed the bathroom door shut enough to change clothes in privacy.
“What, in New York? And they went to Mars?”
Nita pulled off her school pants and pulled on the jeans. “There were wizards all over the world, just like now. And sure they went to Mars! Everybody here was all hot on Mars around then, not just wizards. William Herschel started it. It was in all the papers. There were drawings and everything.” Nita snickered. “Though most of them were of completely made-up stuff that was never there…”
“Okay,” Carmela said with a sigh, as Nita sat down on the edge of the tub to put on her sneakers. “I am very weirded out now. Not that this is even slightly unusual, but no one has any pity on my mental health…”
Nita grinned as she pulled off her old top, for Carmela’s mental health was more robust than most people’s. She put on the lighter top, bent down to retie one loose sneaker-lace, then straightened and glanced at herself in the mirror. And paused, startled, for there was another figure behind her, looking at her over her shoulder in the mirror: taller, as slender as she was, but extremely pretty, far more so than—
Nita blinked. The other reflection was gone.
Now what the heck was that? Nita thought. And who has hair that color? For the long, flowing, waving hair of the person she’d thought she’d seen had been the richest and most vivid sky-blue imaginable.
Nita stared into the mirror for a second more. There was nothing to be seen but her and the black and white tiles of the wall on the far side of the bathtub. I’ve been watching too much anime, she thought.
“You fall in, in there?” Carmela called.
“No…” Nita said, and reached for the mouthwash, looking suspiciously at the mirror. This was one of the unfortunate aspects of changing wizardly specialties…assuming that she was actually changing one, not just adding something on. Everything got so unsettled: you saw things, heard things, sensed things that at first didn’t make any sense. Later they did, but usually too late to help you sort out whatever the present problem was. Nita took a gulp of mouthwash, rinsed, spat, turned the faucet on to rinse the sink, and looked in that mirror again. Nothing but herself, and the memory, the shadow of a shape, fading already. Sapphire-blue hair, black eyes, profoundly deep. A fierce look: uncompromising, alien.
And afraid…
File it away, Nita thought. Stick it in Nita’s Big Book of Odd Oracular Imagery, and have a good long look at it later. Bobo?
Got it, said the voice she was only slowly getting used to hearing in the back of her head, and even then not every time she spoke to it. There were unnerving, ambivalent silences sometimes when Nita spoke to the peridexis, her own personal “online” version of the wizard’s manual. It didn’t always answer. Nita wondered if this was because it knew she wasn’t entirely happy with it being inside her… though she’d been happy enough a month or so ago, when for a little while it was all the evidence of wizardry she’d had left. And if I don’t trust it completely… does it trust me? And if not, why not? This is all so bizarre.
“You did fall in!” Carmela said from the bedroom.
“No!” Nita said, briefly annoyed, and put the cap back on the mouthwash. She smoothed her top down and went out of the bathroom, leaning against her bedroom’s doorsill again.
“Come on,” Nita said. “I’ll show you. Anyway, Kit’s over there, and you know you want to go make him crazy.”
“It’s what I live for!” Carmela said. “Let’s go.” She stood up and stretched. “What’s summer wear for Mars look like?”
“A force field. But that’s my problem. Anyway, we have another stop first.” She eyed the sweater Carmela was still wearing, a leftover from an unusually cool morning. “Better dump the angora,” Nita said, pulling open one more drawer, rummaging again, and coming up with a T-shirt that was too big for her, but about the right size for Carmela. She grinned and waved it like a flag. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”
Carmela gave her a look, got up off the bed, and grabbed the T-shirt out of her hand. She vanished into the bathroom: a few moments later she was back in Nita’s room again, though she was still fussing with the T-shirt in a dissatisfied way. “So now what?”
“Just come stand over here by the window.” Nita snapped her fingers, and her otherspace pocket popped open in the air beside her. She reached into it and felt around.
Oh, you don’t need that… said the voice in her head.
Let’s just say I like to check my figures, Nita said silently to the peridexis, riffling through the manual. Besides, I like to be extra certain, because it’s Carmela I’m transiting as well as me. Kit would be cranky if I got his sister stuck in the Earth’s core. Then she snickered. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t…
“And what is so funny?” Carmela said. “Besides the way this tent fits?”