A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

to being just too chicken to look...
    “And by the way,” Tom said, turning off the faucet and reaching for a dish towel hanging over the door of the cupboard under the sink, “you’re blinking.”
    “Huh?” Nita said, and then glanced to her right. “Oh, yeah, right.”
    There in midair beside her, a little pinpoint of blue light like a star was flashing on and off. “I really should hook up a sound to this,” Nita said, reaching out to the little light and pulling it straight down in the air. “I did this wizardry the other morning real early, and I didn’t want to wake anybody up while I was testing it.”
    A vertical slit of darkness opened in the air, exposing the inside of the otherspace pocket in which Nita kept her wizard’s manual and various other useful objects while she was out and about. She reached into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and then came out with her manual.
    Nita started paging through it while Tom opened the fridge and rummaged around. “Message?” he said, coming out with a couple of cans of cola.
    “Yeah. Uh, got any fizzy water in there?”
    “Sure. Thought you were the big cola fan, though...”
    “I’m off the sugar for a while.”
    “Don’t tell me,” Tom said, coming out with a bottle of mineral water, “that you’re starting to worry about your weight! Completely  inappropriate for you at your age—”
    “Huh? Oh, no, no, it’s just that I keep getting these... Never mind.” Nita trailed off, partly on purpose, as she flipped the manual open to the back pages where the messaging wizardries and messages were stored. No way she was going to get into acne-and body-image issues right now with a wizard of a completely different sex, seniority, and order of importance.
    On the rearmost page of the manual, one block of text was alternately glowing dark and fading. Nita peered at it. Then she snickered. “Kit’s getting ready to go to Mars,” she said, putting down the manual for a moment and opening the mineral water to take a swig. “What a surprise!”
    Tom chuckled as he popped open his can of cola. “Kind of the flavor of the month with him, isn’t it?”
    “More like the flavor of the year.” Nita read down the message and tapped the reference link at the bottom of it: another message, the one that had caused Kit to send her the first, appeared in the first one’s place. “He’s got Mars posters up in his room, and little Mars crawlers on his desk, and half the Mars books in the school library  aren’t there: they’re stacked up on his bed...”
    She grinned. “Hey, this is great. Mamvish got in just now! We’ve been talking to her a lot by manual this last year, but we’ve never seen her in person. Kit’s gonna be buzzed to meet her finally.”
    Nita shut her manual and put it away in the otherspace pocket again, “zipping up” the little blue light to close it again. She pinched the light; it went out. “Which is probably why he ran straight over to Gili Motang without waiting for me.”
    Tom smiled at Nita’s annoyed expression. “Well, maybe it’s understandable,” he said. “Mamvish is heavily in demand all over this side of the galaxy: normally we don’t get to see so senior a wizard out this way unless it’s something to do with worldgates. If the Powers’ own Species Archivist has come out to our neighborhood in person to check up on something, that’s definitely a hot topic. So if Kit wants to go do the fanboy thing, well, so will half the other wizards on the planet.” Tom paused. “And now that I think of it...” He got up and went back to the fridge.
    Puzzled, Nita watched Tom open it again and start rooting around. “I guess there really  are  no accidents,” he said, coming out with a very large plastic bag full of tomatoes. Tom shut the fridge and handed the bag to Nita.
    She looked at the bag, and then at Tom again. Tom grinned at her. “When you catch up with Kit,” he said, “make sure you take that