Khretef and Kit were exchanging glances. “Cousin,” Khretef said holding a hand out, “brother— I’m sorry.”
Kit took his arm. “You think you screwed up?” he said. “You should’ve seen some of mine. Go on. And take care of her.”
“Time, Kit,” Irina said.
Kit stepped back. Khretef and Aurilelde and Iskard stepped back as well, in the direction of the city.
Irina raised her hands; in them was the leash, knotted into a circle. She threw the leash into the air. It hovered there and began to stretch into a circular line of light, widening, growing—
The leash ascended, growing with astonishing speed, becoming a circle yards wide, tens of yards, hundreds: finally nearly a mile in diameter, still stretching as it rose. Then, high above the City of the Shamaska, centered over it, the burning circle began to fall. As it did, the space that it enclosed began to go misty. It fell farther, and the uppermost towers of the City were no longer there, vanishing as if some invisible shade were being drawn down over them, obscuring the view. Then the city proper vanished; next the buildings around them. Finally Nita saw Aurilelde turn to Khretef, and the circle dropped to the ground only a few feet away—
Everything was gone. The shoulder of Olympus Mons stood bare in the afternoon: and slowly, from high clouds up in the dusty sky, a little snow started to fall.
Mamvish and Irina stood there watching the snow come down. After a moment, Irina turned to them and let out a long breath. “It took,” she said. “And at the other city site as well. They’re positioned where we intended… far from each other in time and space.”
Mamvish flourished her tail, looking around. “Well,” she said, “we have a lot of work to do. We’re going to have to do extensive time-patching on this whole environment to get rid of the seismic damage and the water…”
“You’ll be wanting to call in all your Mars teams, then,” Irina said. And she looked at Kit. “I’d suggest, though, that for the moment you sit this out. The wizardry that connected you and Khretef will need some time to fade.”
“And that was why he was so crazy?” Nita said, starting to feel wobbly again.
“Yes,” Irina said. “Among other things. Which is why I’ve arranged for the energy outlay for the normally rather illegal thing you did to his manual to be subsidized, and for you to be forgiven.”
Kit stared at Nita. “What did you do to my manual?”
Nita rubbed her eyes. “Later,” she said. “Right now, I really, really need a nap.”
Together, they vanished.
16: Elysium
It took more than a nap before Nita was ready to do much of anything the next day. Her dad had gotten her off the final day of school, citing family business; which was true enough. But once she got home, she slept straight through into the next morning. It was mid-evening before she and Kit had a chance to get together with Irina and Mamvish to review the events of the weekend.
Her father set out the lawn chairs and the barbecue kettle in the shielded part of the backyard, and sat there drinking iced tea with Kit’s mama and pop and Tom and Carl. Across from them, the Powers’ Archivist (too large to do anything but sprawl near the lawn chairs) and Earth’s Planetary relaxed with Nita, Kit, Dairine, Carmela, Ronan, and Darryl, debriefing them on the fine details of the last few days and filling in missing ones.
Mars had been fairly quickly repaired, since the necessary timeline-patching started almost immediately after the Cities were gone. The power requirements of the patching spells had meant that a lot of wizards had to be called in to assist, but now everything was once again dry except for carbon dioxide snow, and all the planet’s water was back where it belonged, frozen under the crust or at the poles. However, there were still endless minor details to sort out.
“So the ‘blue star’ was Earth,” Carmela was saying to Dairine, while making notes on the spiral notebook in her lap. “That was these guys getting involved. And ‘the word long lost,’ that was the Shard—”
“How’s that a word?” Dairine said, unconvinced.
“It’s a pun in the Speech. One term for a single word in the Speech is shafath, a fragment of a longer expression, get it?”
“Yeah, but what about the ‘spoke by the watcher’ thing? How can you ‘speak’ a fragment of anything?”
Carmela sighed, looked up at Mamvish. “It’s true,” Mamvish said, “there is a verb form of shafath as welclass="underline" shafait’, to use a fragment or split one off—”
Dairine rolled her eyes. “Forget it,” she said. “It’s just another of these symbolic poems that can mean anything. Give me the concrete stuff any day.”
Carmela was starting to look annoyed. “Okay, I’ll give you this,” Dairine said. “This stuff about the watcher, the silent yearning for the lost one found, blah de blah de blah de blah. Fine: that was Aurilelde and Khretef. He was dead while everybody else was in stasis. Then when Kit showed up, he got unlost and started looking for the Shard again. But ‘she must slay her rival’? Just who was her rival? Because nobody got slain! You should find somebody to complain to, because this prophecy is substandard.”
Behind Dairine, Ronan and Darryl were utterly failing to control their snickering. Dairine glared over her shoulder at them; and they both immediately got extremely interested in Darryl’s WizPod.
Carmela was scowling. “Mela, you did a great job on that,” Carl said, “but we may never know exactly what it meant.” He stretched his legs out. “Oracular utterances all over this galaxy have at their heart the need to be able to stretch to a lot of different interpretations, so that as temporospatial conditions change around them, they’ll still be suitable.”
“And whatever the prophecy might have meant,” Kit’s pop said, “there’ll be Martians after all.” He paused, trying to sort the tenses out. “Will have been Martians?”
Irina sighed. “Were Martians,” she said. “But not anymore.”
That made Kit look up. “What?”
Mamvish exchanged a one-eyed look with Irina, then glanced back to Kit. “Well, naturally we checked the backtime history once the relocation was completed,” she said. “But they didn’t last very long, as it happens: only seventy thousand years.”
Nita thought suddenly of the odd itching she’d felt in the back of her brain. “You were discussing that possibility right then. When we were setting the timeslide. And you already suspected things were going to turn out this way.”
Irina sighed. “Yes,” she said. “The Shamaska-Eilitt may indeed have been the system’s oldest species, which meant it was no surprise that they were also showing signs of being uvseith. A diagnosis which this outcome has confirmed.”
Carmela frowned. “‘Moribund’?”
Irina cocked an eye at her. “Yes,” she said. “The word’s far more emphatic in the Speech, of course.” She glanced over at the parents. “It says a species has only a short time to survive.”
“Some species simply can’t live long off the planet that engendered them,” Mamvish said. “Their own personal kernels are wound up too closely with the planet’s. In the case of the Shamaska-Eilitt, their own bodies’ kernels were irreparably damaged when their planet was destroyed. Long-lived as they were, they were already doomed.”
“And they were in denial about it,” Irina said, “which happens all too frequently in such cases. The problem with their body change after the destruction of Shamask-Eilith wasn’t that the Martian climate changed; though of course it did. The real trouble was that they were never really suited to live anywhere but on their own world, and any change would have killed them in time. Moving to a new world only made the problem worse, speeding up the damage they were doing themselves. And as Kit confirmed, the stasis made it worse still. Some of the irrationality we saw from them would definitely have been a result of holding themselves in their already-damaged state for so long. Had they succeeded in moving to Earth, they wouldn’t have lasted long there, either.”