A Wizard of Mars New Millennium Edition, Page 2

  The silence was nearly as profound as the one that had leaned in around Kit earlier, but this one was far more unnerving. Kit felt eyes all around the room resting on him in scared or amused conjecture.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Raoul hunched his tall, blond, gangly self down against his desk and rolled his eyes at the others’ reaction. The look he threw Kit was sympathetic. Raoul, too, had had a grade slump earlier in the year, and his own dad and mom had taken turns tearing strips off him about it ever since, invoking not getting into college and “a ruined résumé” and other dire threats if he didn’t shape up. Ever since, he and Kit had been studying together, and they’d both thought they had the course material down pat. Well, one of us did, anyway...

  Mr. Mack glanced at the clock. It suddenly said two forty-three, and now Kit found himself wishing desperately that time would slow down again. “Well,” Mr. Mack said, “I’m sure you’re all thinking we’ve all seen enough of each other for one year. For the moment, I’m inclined to agree with you. So all of you just get yourselves the heck out of here!”

  This invitation was immediately followed by a muted cheer and the concerted shriek of chairs being pushed back as the bell went. Everybody who hadn’t already leapt to his feet did so now and plunged toward the door: the classroom emptied as if it had been turned upside down and shaken. Kit stood there and watched everyone go... then finished stuffing his manual and other books into his book bag and went up to Mr. Mack’s desk.

  “Well,” Mr. Mack said, glancing up from Kit’s notebook. “Any thoughts?”

  This gambit was one of the Mack’s favorite ways to get a student to say something dumb, allowing him scope to verbally torture the unfortunate victim for many minutes thereafter. Kit was determined not to let this happen. “Okay, I shouldn’t have been drawing,” he said. “I should have been paying attention.”

  Mr. Mack put his eyebrows up as if resigned at so quick a surrender. Kit had seen this maneuver, too, and what came of it: he refused to rise to the bait. For a few moments there was silence as each of them concentrated on outwaiting the other.

  Then Mr. Mack glanced at the notebook. “It’s a thoat, isn’t it,” he said.

  Kit followed his glance, surprised. “Uh, yeah.”

  “Not a lot of people still read those books,” Mr. Mack said. “Burroughs’s style has to seem antiquated these days. But you can’t fault his imagination.” He looked down at Kit’s sketch of what had to be a very large creature, to gauge by the scale of the humanoid being standing next to it. “What made him decide to put so many legs on these things, I can’t imagine. I could never assemble a clear picture of a thoat in my head no matter how I tried.”

  “If you sort of divide the legs into two sets—” Kit said.

  “Six and two, huh?” Mr. Mack said, studying the drawing. “With the six in the back grouped for better traction? You may have a point.” Mr. Mack glanced up at him again. “But it’s possibly still an effort that might better have been saved for your art class.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  He glanced across the page. “And that would be the calot, I guess. Another nice solution for the multiple legs. Nice tusks, too. You wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of that thing. And as for her…” Mr. Mack said, glancing down at the sketch again with a critical eye. “Well, you’ve put more clothes on her than Burroughs did. This rendition owes more to Victoria’s Secret than the descriptions in the original... so let’s let the inappropriateness issue ride for the moment.”

  Kit blushed fiercely. “Now about your test,” Mr. Mack said. “You and Mr. Eschemeling have been working together. Pretty hard, I believe. So I was curious about... let’s call it a discrepancy in your performance on the final.”

  What have I done to deserve this? Kit thought in despair. I worked so hard! I really studied for this, it should have been all right, I should at least have passed—

  “Especially since there’s nothing wrong with your ability to discuss the material, even in front of your admittedly unsympathetic classmates,” Mr. Mack said. “That was a nice touch, by the way— that bit about being able to see the border from space. Saw that picture myself, some months back. It brings you up short.”

  Kit didn’t feel inclined to mention that he hadn’t seen the image as a picture: the difference was clearly visible from the surface of the Moon when the weather on Earth was right. “The light on one side, and the darkness on the other...” Mr. Mack said. “A striking image. Too bad things aren’t usually quite so simple, especially over there. Anyway, no question that your work’s improved the last couple of months. You’ve been trying a whole lot harder than you were before.”

  And this was true... which was why Kit couldn’t understand why he was standing here alone without a test paper in his hand. Mama’s going to go so ballistic with me, we’ll be able to use her to launch satellites! I can’t believe I—

  “The problem might lie in the way your concentration comes and goes without warning, kind of like it did just then,” Mr. Mack said. “But we’ll chalk that up to end-of-term antsies, huh?” Then he grinned— an expression that Kit had rarely seen on Mr. Mack’s face before. Kit didn’t know if this was cause for alarm, but he was alarmed enough already. “Now, then—”

  Mr. Mack popped his briefcase open and pulled out one last test paper. Kit instantly recognized his own handwriting on it.

  “I thought I’d spare you the embarrassment of dealing with this in front of the class...” Mr. Mack said softly. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that some of our older participants have issues.”

  If Kit thought he’d been sweating before, he now found that his pores had been holding out on him. Mr. Mack looked at him with a thoughtful expression.

  “And so,” he said, “because for all I know you may see some of them socially, I didn’t really want to give them a chance to make your life uncomfortable all summer because of—” and he held up the test paper— “this.”

  Kit gulped and reached for the paper, shaking slightly. At the bottom of the front page, circled, was a number: 99%.

  Kit’s eyes went wide. “Ninety-nine?” he said. “Ninety-nine!”

  “Best mark in the class,” Mr. Mack said. “Congratulations.”

  Then it hit Kit. “Ninety-nine??” he said, flipping the pages to look at them one after another. “Why not a hundred!?”

  Mr. Mack looked at his watch. “Possibly one of the shortest bursts of gratitude on record,” he said. “Kit, I had no choice. You misspelled ‘Pyongyang.’”

  Kit was so torn between relief and completely unreasonable disappointment that all he could do was say “Oh.”

  “One ‘o,’ one ‘a,’” Mr. Mack said. “I checked. Sorry about that. But your essay was terrific. Best I’ve seen in a long while. You’re showing at least a few of the warning signs of falling in love with history.”

  Kit said nothing, partly from embarrassment at being praised, and partly because he suspected Mr. Mack was right, and he didn’t know what to make of that.

  “So you can tell your mother, who I know was giving you grief,” Mr. Mack said, “that whatever else you’ve done in your other subjects this spring, you’ve passed history with flying colors, and I’m really pleased with you. She should be, too. Tell her to get in touch if she wants any more details.”

  “She will,” Kit said.

  Mr. Mack smiled slightly. “So did mine,” he said. “Mothers. What can you do?... Go on, get out of here. And enjoy your summer.”

  Kit stuffed the paper hurriedly into his book bag and shouldered it. Mr. Mack closed his briefcase with the air of a man shutting a whole year into it, and good riddance. Then he glanced up. “Unless there was something else? Of course there was.”

  Kit gave up any hope of ever being able to put anything over this particular teacher. “Yeah. Uh— How do you not sweat like that?”

  Mr. Mack looked briefly surprised, and then laughed out loud. “The phrasing’s unusual,” Mr. Mack said.
“I take it you mean, how do I not sweat? And the answer is, I don’t not sweat.”

  Kit raised his eyebrows.

  “But I do waterproof the insides of my clothes,” Mr. Mack said.

  Kit stared at him. Mr. Mack laughed again, then, the sound of a sneaky magician giving away the secret to a really good trick. “It’s a Marine thing,” Mr. Mack said. “We used to do it on parade. We spray our shirts with that anti-stain waterproofing stuff you use on upholstery. It’s good for giving other people the impression that you’re not quite human.”

  His voice as he said this was so dry that Kit burst out laughing. But a moment later he stopped. “You were in the Marines?” Kit said, suddenly seeing Mr. Mack with entirely new eyes. This little guy, just barely taller than Kit’s mama, with his bald head and his red tie with little blue galloping ponies on it, a different tie every day—“Korea?”

  Mr. Mack shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “A lot of other places. But Korea was well before my time.”

  Kit looked at him; this time it was his turn to look thoughtful. “The way you talked about it, though. The dark, the light—”

  Mr. Mack shook his head. “If a historian needs anything,” he said, “it’s an imagination. The dates, the place names, the battles... they’re not what’s most important. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them— their sky, their sea. Their tools. Their houses. Their troubles. That’s how what they did starts to make sense. Along with what we do in the same situations...”

  He paused, looking surprised at himself. “Sorry. It’s a passion,” Mr. Mack said. “But I can recognize the signs in someone else. Watch out: it’ll eat you alive. Other lives, other minds ...there’s no getting enough of them.” He gave Kit a cockeyed look. “Why are you still here? Go away before I give you a quiz.”

  Kit grinned and left with as much dignity as he could manage. The dignity broke down about three yards down the hall, as he caught sight of Raoul, trying to look like he was leaning casually against a locker, waiting for Kit. Kit didn’t know whether to try to look cool or to scream out loud. Screaming won. He pulled the paper out again, waved it in Raoul’s face.

  Raoul snatched it out of Kit’s hand. “Do you believe this, Pirate?” Kit yelled. “Do you believe this?!”

  They started jumping up and down together like the acrobatically insane. “Ninety-nine! Ninety-nine!” Raoul promptly turned it into something like a sports chant. “Nine-ty-nine! Nine-ty-nine!”

  People wandering down the hall that crossed this one stared at them, vaguely interested by the actions of the certifiably mad— meaning anyone who would still willingly be in the building after the end of the last period. “But what did you get?” Kit said as they headed toward the doors at the end of the hall.

  “Eighty,” Raoul said.

  Kit suddenly felt bizarrely disappointed. “How’d that happen?”

  “I messed up the essay,” Raoul said. “But I did okay on everything else. It’s not a bad grade. My mom’ll get off my case now.”

  “Mine, too,” Kit said, “I hope. But wow, what a relief. I thought I was dead!”

  “I thought you were dead!” Raoul laughed that crazed laugh of his as they went down the hall to the paired doors that led to the parking lot. They each hit one door and burst out into the hot, humid summer air, laughing.

  “This day could not possibly get any better,” Kit said.

  “Oh, come on,” Raoul said, “stretch your brains. Anything could happen...”

  They saw Raoul’s mom’s slightly beat-up red station wagon come swinging in through the parking lot gates. “So listen,” Raoul said, “my dad says we’re having a big barbecue next week, for his birthday. Next Thursday. You and your folks and your sister, you’re all invited. Can you make it?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “Okay,” Raoul said, as his own mom pulled up. “Text me later!”

  Kit nodded, waving at Raoul’s little blond mom as he got into the car. The first thing Raoul did was fish around in his pack and show his mom the test paper: she grinned, and Raoul flashed a grin of his own at Kit as his mom drove away.

  Kit let out a long breath as he glanced down at his own paper one more time, then put it away. His nerves were finally settling down, which was a good thing, as he was also still tired from doing that spell. He wasn’t so tired, though, that he wasn’t going to immediately call the wizard with whom he worked most closely and do a little gloating.

  He pulled his wizard’s manual out of his back-pack, flipping it open to the rearmost pages, the messaging area. Some pages were covered with stored messages, all seemingly printed in the graceful curvilinear characters of the wizardly Speech; but any one Kit touched with a finger would seem to rise up out of the page, the writing increasing in size for easier reading. He flipped through the back pages until he found one that was blank, ready to take a message— and then stopped. In the middle of a page that had been blank earlier in the afternoon was a single line of text, and it was glowing fiercely blue and pulsing alternately brighter and fainter— the sign of a message that had just come in and hadn’t yet been read.

  Kit peered at it. There was nothing there but a time stamp— JD 2455367.11685— and these words:

  We’ve found the bottle. Meeting this afternoon. M.

  The breath went right out of Kit.

  Holy cow ...Raoul was right!!

  “Yes!” Kit shouted. He slapped the manual shut, shoved it back in the book bag, and jumped up and punched the air some more. And then, because right in front of the school would have been a bad place to do a teleport, he ran off across the parking lot, grinning, to find a more private spot.

  2: Gili Motang

  Nita Callahan sat on the flat, warm stones at the edge of the koi pond, her eyes closed, looking for something.

  After a moment, she saw it. Shadow, she thought. A shadow across the Sun. Just for a few seconds. But when?

  She waited: and then she knew.

  “Now,” she said, and opened her eyes.

  The water rippled at her in the summer breeze, the surface of it dazzling in the bright and uninterrupted sunlight. Nita winced.

  “Oh, come on,” she said under her breath. “Come on!” She looked up at the sky overhead. It remained stubbornly clear.

  “That won’t help,” said a small voice from the water.

  She frowned and refused to answer. Above and beyond the trees that surrounded Tom Swale’s yard, very slowly, a single little puffy cloud could be seen cruising toward the low, late-afternoon Sun. It seemed to be in no hurry. If clouds had feet, it would have been dragging them.

  Nita scowled harder. Hurry up! she thought in the Speech. Come on, get a move on!

  But merely thinking something in the Speech doesn’t turn the idea into a spell... especially since wizardry is mostly about persuading creatures and things to do what you want, not ordering them around.

  The cloud actually seemed to slow up. Then, finally, almost reluctantly, it started to pass in front of the sun.

  Nita grinned. “Awright!” she said, looking down into the fishpond. “That’s the best one yet! I only missed it by half a minute.”

  One of the koi, the one with the silver-coin scales, looked up out of the pond at her. “Fifty seconds,” Doitsu said.

  “Or about fifty-five seconds too long,” said another voice, a human one, from behind her. “Doesn’t count. Try it again.”

  Nita let out an annoyed breath and turned. “You guys are just being mean!”

  “An oracular who predicts the future a minute late is possibly even less effective than one who gets it wrong all the time,” Tom Swale said, straightening up with a groan from the flower bed where he’d been working. “And will probably get a lot more frustrated.”

  “Hey, thanks loads,” Nita said, and slumped against the fishpond’s rockwork.

  “You’d hardly expect me to start lying to you at this late date,” Tom said,
amused.

  Nita gave him an annoyed look. “Let’s see you do any better!”

  “Me? Why should I?” Tom frowned down at the next flower bed. “This is your gift we’re trying to sharpen up.”

  “And, anyway, it’s too hot!”

  “True,” Tom said, “but nothing to do with the business at hand. Come on, give it another try.”

  Nita wiped her forehead; she was sweating. “It’s no use. I need a break.”

  Another koi, a marmalade-colored one, put its head up out of the water. “You need to concentrate harder,” said Akagane. “You can’t be in that moment unless you’re in this one.”

  “Blank your mind out first,” said Doitsu.

  A third head came up, splotched in red and black on silver-white. “Pay more attention to the news,” said Showa.

  Nita rolled her eyes. “None of you are helping!”

  “It’s not help you need,” Tom said. “It’s practice. You think anybody learns to see futurity overnight?”

  “Forget the future!” Nita said. “I can barely see the present!” She leaned back against the rocks behind the koi pond, rubbing her eyes: beams from the low sun piercing through the trees were glancing off the pond’s surface, and the glitter of them made her eyes water.

  “The news’ll help with that, too,” Tom said. He was sweating; even in a T-shirt, the humidity that day was enough to make anybody miserable.

  “And it’s not the future,” said Showa, backfinning toward where the rocks overhanging the pond made a small waterfall. “A future.”

  Nita sighed. “But how can you tell you’ve got the right one?”

  “You can’t,” said Akagane as she rose to the surface in Showa’s wake. “At least, you can’t tell for sure, or very clearly.”

  “You can get a feeling,” said Doitsu, just hanging there in the water and fanning his fins. “Or a hunch.”

  “But what if you’re wrong?”

  Doitsu made a kind of shrug with his fins. “You try again. Assuming you haven’t blown up the world or something in the meantime...” And he submerged.