“So they would have invaded Earth eventually,” said Nita’s dad, “and Earth would have killed them.” He took a drink of his iced tea. “Sounds familiar, somehow. Archetype?”
Irina nodded slightly. “Hints and warnings of what would have been or may yet be do slip into myth and popular culture from the deep past and the possible future,” she said. “It’s a hall of mirrors, the universe: in the spiritual sense, anyway. And sometimes it’s hard to tell which end of time the images and reflections belong to.”
She glanced over at Kit. “That’s the cause of the hwanthaet you were caught up in— the timeloop proximity syndrome. To be repeatedly positioned near the effect end of a timeloop when you were also involved in the cause, but before the cause has happened, or when it’s just starting to execute— well, the human brain’s circuitry doesn’t take well to that. You got off pretty lightly, though, in the physical sense. It helps to be young. And the Powers wouldn’t come down on you too hard for infractions that you committed due to the aftereffects of the good deed you were about to do in the past.”
Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Sounds like you need a whole different language for this kind of thing.”
“It’s a subset of the Speech,” Mamvish said. “Intratemporal syntax takes a while to learn. But some species pick it up entirely too quickly.” She looked with amusement at Nita and Kit.
Nita, now sitting cross-legged on the ground in jeans and a tank top and feeling very relieved to be that way again instead of in filmy, glittery Shamaska women’s wear, was paging through her manual, looking at the revisions that had been made over the last day. Now she looked up at the more senior wizards. “Irina,” Nita said, frowning, “this is weird. When I checked the manual before, it said the kernel had been missing for half a million years. But now it says it hasn’t been missing after all.”
Irina looked over Nita’s shoulder at her manual. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Tom, you didn’t enable her need-to-know updates.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “It has been busy around here lately, what with recovering from the Pullulus and so forth.”
Irina gave him an amused look. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “That wasn’t a critique. Anyway, you’ve just had your end-of-decade evaluation: you know where you stand.”
She glanced up from the page to Nita again, and Nita saw that the open page had already changed its content. Now she was looking at a comment box that said, Temporal adjustment emendation: timeline shift. Previous timeline details archived, viewable on need-to- know basis.
She shook her head and smiled. “When everything settles down, Time’s arrow is always seen to run straight,” Irina said. “After the solution you three came up with yesterday, the kernel’s always been present on Mars in real time—”
“Though blocked away from the inhabitants’ use,” Mamvish said. “Jupiter’s Planetary kept a lightpatch on it while the Shamaska-Eilitt were there.”
Irina nodded. “But the manual still remembers the previous timeline.”
“As well as the solution you and Khretef arrived at,” Mamvish said. “The binding power inherent in Ponch’s leash let us set aside, in the timeslide, the additional power to build the superegg, to lock the Cities’ stasis so that it couldn’t be interfered with, and for Khretef to encode the Nascence with the personal data that would be needed to lead you to Mars, and impel you to bring the future about. And the past.”
“A past that worked,” Nita said. “One where Aurilelde wouldn’t be afraid anymore, and would be able to have the Red Rede written in a way that would produce this result. Instead of the one her fear of losing Khretef had been showing her.”
She glanced over at Irina, who was gazing at her with a strangely assessing expression. “And it actually worked,” Nita said.
Irina nodded and had a drink of her iced tea, finishing it. “Yes, it did,” she said. “Since we’re all sitting here, and the world’s more or less as we left it… and we’re not all speaking Martian.” She smiled.
“So she really became Nita— or like Nita— in a way,” Kit’s pop said. “The way Kit’s counterpart became like him.”
“That’s right.”
“Smart choice,” Nita’s dad said, and got up to stir the charcoal.
Kit was looking thoughtful. “But which really came first?” he said. “What we did, or what they did?”
“Oh, please,” Ronan said, rubbing his face. “It’s the chicken-or-egg thing again. And you get completely different answers depending on whether you ask the chicken or the egg.”
“Let it go, your Kitness,” Darryl said, stretching. “Life’s too short. Let’s stick to playing with the future. Soooo much more malleable.”
“What happens to the kernel now?” Nita said. “There are still no Martians to manage it. Or no Martians again.”
“The kernel’s at large in the body of the planet. But I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” Irina said.
“One more thing for you to do,” Mamvish said. “As if you don’t already have enough!”
Irina shrugged and smiled more broadly; the parakeet started idly nibbling her hair. “It’ll be easy enough to keep in tune until Mars gets new tenants, some of whom will be wizards and can take on the job. People from here, or from somewhere else— who knows? Earth won’t be astahfrith forever.”
She sighed. “But for the moment it is, and there are problems that need to be tended to.” Irina stood up, smiling at Nita’s father. “Mr. Callahan— thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.” She picked up her baby, which was lying nearby snoozing in a carrier seat: the parakeet on Irina’s shoulder ruffled its feathers up and made a few little scratchy noises. “Dai, cousins,” she said, and vanished without so much as a breath of breeze.
Mamvish, too, stood up, a process which took several moments, and which Kit’s mom and pop watched in fascination. “I too have a few things to deal with,” she said. “Friends, cousins—”
“Oh, goodness, I almost forgot. Wait a moment,” Nita’s dad said, and got up, heading for the house. A minute or so later he was back with a plastic carrier bag from one of the local supermarkets, looking to be stuffed very full of something heavy.
Mamvish’s eyes started to go around in her head as she looked toward Nita’s father. Nita, seeing this, poked Kit and Dairine and gestured for them to get out of the way.
“Oh, cousin!” Mamvish said. Nita’s father held up the bag to her, and Mamvish took it from him with some haste. “You are my friend!”
“Stop by again in a couple of weeks,” Nita’s dad said. “The new crop will need some thinning.”
Mamvish’s grin went right around her face. A moment later she, too, was gone.
Nita shut her manual and put it away, looking over at Tom. “So,” she said.
“So that’s it,” Tom said. “Nice job, you two.” And he gave Kit an amused look. “Even the part when you went around the bend. Not entirely your fault, and not nearly as far as you might have gone. So all is forgiven, and we’re all done.”
Nita reached out for her own iced tea. “Are we done?” Nita said. “The Lone Power hasn’t turned up yet.”
Tom smiled slightly. “It hasn’t? You sure about that?”
Nita sat still and considered for a moment.
“Uh-huh,” Tom said. He pushed back in his chair and looked down into his iced tea as if something might jump out of it. “Far be it from me to generalize about wizardry,” he said, “or the way it affects people. But it’s not uncommon for the younger wizard to see the Art, in the early part of his or her practice, as a very stratified thing: all blacks and whites, instead of the shades of gray that start to manifest themselves later in the way you see the world.”