A wizard of Mars – Chapter Fourteen

A Wizard of Mars chapter index.

Okay, so, when we last left Nita Callahan, she was up against the Waters of Mars, as the Martian seer Aurirelde melted the icecaps, and blocked Nita’s shield or transit spells, figuring that that would leave her for dead. After talking over her options with her invisible friend Bobo, the essence of all wizardry, she decides that the only option is a big water wizardry that S’reee was telling her about way back in chapter six – the Gibraltar Passthrough. It’s a tough spell, with a high cost in energy that Nita has to pay and a complicated enough spell diagram that she could never draw it herself in time, but with Bobo’s help in that department, she just manages to pull it off and save herself.

Then she lets herself get mad, (which is when Nita usually gets seriously bad-ass,) and opens up a visual communication wizardry to the Shamaska headquarters, issuing Aurirelde a duel arcane challenge. If Aurirelde wants to prove that she can use the kernel to dominate her, then Nita will meet her face to face for the confrontation. And if not, Nita threatens to use her wizardry to take the Shamaska and Eilitt cities and leave the survivors to fend for themselves in the Martian badlands. Then she starts flying up through the Martian atmosphere, to get some distance from the surface, where Aurirelde’s influence over her wizardry will be greatest, because the kernel has the most power near the planet it controls. Nita’s under a time limit at this point – if she can’t settle with Aurirelde before the backlash of the energy she spent on the Passthrough hits, she’ll be helpless – and every big spell she uses in the meantime will bring that reckoning closer.

We cut away from Nita for just a few pages to get Kit’s point of view, trapped inside his old body by the re-emerged personality of his Martian doppleganger, Khretef. Kit can’t see and hear much of what Khretef’s been doing, but he caught a brief glimpse of Nita, when she came to the Shamaska throne room with Mamvish to confront the Shamaska leaders for the first time – and he comes to the belated realization that Nita is really hot when she’s pissed off. This gives him the motivation to fight for his freedom, and he starts a debate with Khretef, trying to argue him into giving up on Aurirelde’s crazy scheme and letting Kit help Nita. At the end, Khretef gives up, but tells Kit that he’s too late anyway.

Young Wizards

Y is for…
Well, I thought that today I’d talk more about ‘Young Wizards’, one of my favorite fantasy book series, and return to my chapter-by-chapter review of Diane Duane’s book ‘A Wizard of Mars.’ In the last week of March, I got up to chapter twelve, so now we have a new chapter, ‘Oceanidum Mons.’

It opens with Nita alone out on Mars with her invisible friend, Bobo the essence of Wizardry – and Bobo tells her that he’s found Kit, but his status is flagged as occupied. Nita sends him a text message via her Wizard’s manual, which gets held for delivery later, and Nita has Bobo transit her back home to Earth for lunch. While preparing a chicken sandwich, Nita obsesses a little over the image she saw of the Martian girl, Aurirelde, in her Victoria’s Secret-esque outfit, and also how Kit had been paying attention to Janie Lowell at school in ‘that alleged skirt.’ But she shies away from dwelling on jealous topics for too long, and moves on to all of the Martian encounters that had taken place the day before, especially how different the ones Kit and his team were involved in versus Nita and her friends.

Looking for a reason for those differences, she starts to do some simple analyses based on power levels, ages, origins, and specialties, before hitting on the most obvious difference – the gender gap. Nita isn’t sure what that means, but it doesn’t give her a good feeling. Wondering if somebody from Mars might be trying to take advantage of Kit, she considers asking Bobo to plant a spy routine in his manual, the same way he did with Dairine’s manual computer, but isn’t sure what to make of the morals of violating his privacy, even if she’s motivated by concern for him. It seems too much like something the Evil Lone power would want her to do, and she holds off for the time being. Then Nita has a precognitive flash of Mars turning blue, and people on Earth panicking, and talks to Carmela again, finding out more about the strange Martian poem that Carmela had recorded in the library cave, the Red Rede, which seems to have some similarities with her visions, and possibly be a prophecy in itself.

A Wizard of Mars – Chapter Eleven

A Wizard of Mars chapter index.

Okay, so last week, we left off with Kit transiting back home after his weird flashback experience of the not-really-native Martian people from hundreds of thousands of years ago. In this chapter, as it seems to me, the plot gets a lot more complicated, partly because Nita’s POV and Kit’s start to alternate faster.

Nita stays behind on Mars to cover up the site from Earth-orignating artificial satellites, after the boys leave. She gets a very brief vision of a Martian pop culture character from her own childhood – Marvin the Martian from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, though he isn’t named as such, but uses his catchphrase. Nita suggests to Bobo that he should prepare any available counterspell for an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.

Nita also uses Bobo to get a replay of Kit’s experiences with Aurirelde, or at least the beginning of them. She’s able to figure out that though the appearance of Aurirelde was based on Kit’s fantasies of the Barsoom books, she’s based on a Shamask-Eilith person, and penetrates the illusion to perceive Aurirelde’s true appearance, which has gray skin and isn’t as exotically pretty by human standards, but still humanoid and relatable. She has Bobo try to run the name-analysis ‘wizard’ on Aurirelde to learn more about her – and the replay wizardry, which was running off the stored wizardry at the site, crashes partway through. Bobo tells Nita that he’ll keep working on analyzing the incomplete data.

A Wizard of Mars – Chapter Four

A Wizard of Mars chapter index.

Well, this chapter is Nita’s side plot, and it’s not as long a deviation as I thought it might be, though hopefully we get some payoff later on in the book. First, Nita goes home and talks with her Dad. Dad is upset that little sister Dairine is blowing off school, traipsing around the galaxy or whatever, and demands that Nita ‘do something’ about it. Nita complains that Dairine misbehaving isn’t her fault, but Dad makes it her problem, pointing out that he didn’t ask for this either, but he needs to know that his kids are safe, and that Nita has access to skills that he doesn’t have himself when it comes to keeping up with little sister.

So Nita agrees, grudgingly, and heads off to her room to make preparations. Step one is finally checking the manual listings for info on Roshaun, which she was too chicken to do back in chapter two, and she talked with Tom about that. The manual has a blank in Roshaun’s long-term status field, which is where you’d usually see information on if a wizard is alive or dead, (or in some cases in between,) and from this, Nita concludes that Dairine’s quest to find him might have some value to it – if even the sources of the manual don’t know his fate, then there’s a chance that he’s alive.

So Nita transits over to Roshaun’s homeworld, Wellakh, to talk to Dairine there, (with another side conversation with invisible Bobo the peridexis,) and finds her training in how to manage stars with Roshaun’s father, Neleid the ex-Sunlord of Wellakh, who Dairine met in ‘Wizards at War.’ Once Neleid understands that there’s a family crisis, he scrams so that Nita and Dairine can have it out, and Nita lays out her proposal – she’s going to put a tap into Dairine’s wizardly computer, Spot, so that whatever she does and wherever she is, Dad can get the details on his computer or the cell phone, and ask her for clarification when she comes home at night. Dairine is initially furious at the idea, but caves when Nita pointedly reminds her that Dad and Tom are very close, and that if Dad gets upset about her jaunts off planet and complains to Tom, Tom has the authority to ground Dairine. (Which he’s done, to a limited extent, in Wizard’s Holiday.)

A Wizard of Mars – Chapter Two

A Wizard of Mars chapter index

This is a big one, fifty-six pages, so I might be going a little quick. We open with Nita POV – I think that around two thirds of the chapters in the book start with Nita POV, though the number that end on Kit POV may be close to half.

Nita is learning to be an Oracle, which makes some sense, as she’s shown a rough talent for premonition in the past few books. She’s over at Tom and Carl’s house – taking lessons from the koi who pronounce prophetic haiku. Nita predicts a cloud passing over the sun – but she calls ‘now’ nearly a minute early, which is apparently not good enough in the Oracle trade.

Nita chats with Tom for a while, talking about how Dairine is still out looking for Roshaun. Nita asks if Tom’s manual has any status info on Roshaun, and Tom just asks Nita if she’s checked her own manual and says that anything he reads in his might not be relevant information for her – but says that if she does look in hers, he’d like to know.