Free A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page A

excluded from this. Especially since you came with the bearer of the tomatoes.” She beamed at Nita, then turned back to Carmela again. “From your own world’s point of view, Mars is a ‘situational location of interest.’ Wizards here have been trying to find out why for some centuries now. And even the outer worlds feel echoes of something that happened… and have nothing further to say.” She tilted her head, looking thoughtful. “So plainly there’s something going on here that we need to know about before we move forward.”
    “And what are we moving toward?” Carmela said.
    We. Nita could just feel Kit start fuming quietly. “Waking up the Martians, dummy!” Kit said.
    “Well,” Mamvish said, swinging one eye in his direction, “that’s the question we’ll be examining. Local catastrophes have killed too many species in the past— peoples we could ill afford to lose. My job’s to prevent the loss of worlds that have something special to offer the universe, to keep species or planets that have made unusual contributions from being completely lost—and, occasionally, to get back lost worlds that aren’t as lost as we think they are.”
    “Like Mars…” Nita said.
    “Yes,” Mamvish said. “And sometimes, as seems to have happened in this case, we get a little help from the species in question: they leave us data about what happened to them.”
    “A message in a bottle,” Ronan said.
    “Yes. In this case, the ‘bottle’ we’ve located seems to have been emplaced some five hundred sixty thousand years ago.”
    Nita blinked at that. “Wow. There were just human ancestors around then. It was— what, the really early Stone Age?”
    “The Lower Paleolithic, as I understand your usage,” Mamvish said. “Any knowledge or memory your most distant ancestors had of Mars is lost. But worlds have different kinds of memory than the beings that move on their surfaces. Whatever humans know about Mars, the outer worlds have different knowledge about it: troubled recollections. We have to go carefully at first.” The eyes rotated again in the head. “But the risk may be worth it. Some of the most dangerous ‘lost’ species have brought us some of the greatest gifts once they’ve been revived.”
    Carmela was looking dubious. “Am I completely misunderstanding you, or are you actually talking about bringing them back from the dead?”
    “Well, there’s dead and there’s really dead,” Mamvish said. “Of course we couldn’t do anything about the second kind. However, there are a hundred different kinds of stasis, soulfreeze, matter seizure, and wait-just-a-minute that species across the galaxy have invented to stave off entropy’s Last Word. Many species have seen a catastrophe coming and found ways to archive or preserve not just the news about what happened to them but themselves as well. In Mars’s case, the first steps have been toward finding out whether there were ever Martians—because your whole species seems to have some kind of unfinished business, or unstarted business, with Mars. If Martians did exist, the next step would then be to find out what happened to them. Once we know that, we can start working out how to re-evoke them—in a limited way, just to find out firsthand what happened to them. From there we can make the determination as to whether it’s wise to revive them wholly. And then—”
    “We bring them back,” Kit said softly.
    “Maybe,” Mamvish said. “We’ve got a lot of steps to go through before that. And the first one will be to—”
    Nita suddenly felt as if something had kicked her in the chest. The breath went right out of her, for no reason she could understand, and she gasped in reaction. At the same moment, “I’m so sorry I’m late,” said another voice, a female one, out of nothing. “What did I miss?”
    They all turned— Nita last: she was still having trouble finding her breath—and stared. Standing there among the rocks of the beach