Ages of Wonder

Sheela shrugged off the memory. Really, what else had she expected him to say? His faction had been against elves revealing their presence to humans in the first place, years before Sheela had been born. She’d thought he had come to terms with it, watching her grow up with human friends and human interests. If his old separatist attitudes still lurked beneath the surface, there was nothing she could do about it. Besides, she’d made up with him before she’d left.

He had hesitated only a moment before nodding. How could he not understand? The human space program, especially Mars, was all she’d talked about as a child. Of course, he’d teased her about it, making a great show of checking her ears to see if the tips were pointed. “Are you sure you’re an elf?” he’d ask, while she giggled at his silliness.

She’d tried to lighten his mood by promising to come straight home when she got back, and tell him all about her Martian adventure . . . yes, every single detail, no matter how small. “It’ll probably take weeks,” she’d added with a mischievous grin.

He’d laughed, then, gathered her into a hug, and tickled the tips of her ears. “Just checking,” he’d murmured, before he turned away—but not fast enough that she’d missed the fear haunting his liquid-silver eyes.

Left unsaid was the reason for his fear: Elves were creatures of magic, and the source of that magic was earth. No elf had ever left earth, nor wanted to. Some of the older Loremasters thought that she would die, and she suspected that her father was among that number. Sheela threw in her lot with those who thought that she would merely become mortal, like humans. She had always thought the older elves were too dependent on magic anyway. They didn’t know how to live without it, and therefore didn’t believe it was possible. But she did—growing up with human friends had taught her that she didn’t need magic to do most of the things she’d wanted to do.

Even so, during the training, she’d been surprised to discover how often she called on magic without thinking. She was just as bad as the older elves when it came to small things. Need a tool on the other side of the room? Reach for it, and the magic would place it in your hand. Have to catch something when both hands were busy? Tell the magic to do it. She’d learned to control those impulses in the year since she’d been accepted for the training. Mostly.

The rumble of the engines turned into a roar. Earth clutched at her, no more willing to let her go than her father had been. The g-forces pressing her into the couch masked the draining away of the magic . . . at first. By the time the shuttle reached the Christa McAuliffe, waiting in orbit, there was a curiously debilitating void in her senses where magic used to be. She cast about for an analogy . . . maybe like an old sailor, staggering about on land as his muscles betrayed him by making the constant, unconscious adjustments so necessary on the rolling deck of a ship. No, she rejected the comparison, not quite. Magic was more than an impersonal force of nature, like the sea. It had a presence. Less than a consciousness, but . . . an awareness that responded to the wielder.

Loremasters disagreed about that, too. Some of them thought that magic itself was aware, others thought that the “presence” was just the remnant of elves who had dissolved into the magic. To Sheela, it didn’t matter anyway. Magic was what it was.

By the time the crew had gone through their preflight checks, Sheela had almost gotten used to the absence of magic. She couldn’t get over how bland everybody looked, though. She’d never really been conscious of the fact that she saw people with magic as well as with her eyes. It was just another of the elements that made up how a person looked, like the color of their hair or their height. Now she realized that the magic gathered around elves and some humans had always made them seem more there to her, more solid, more real. Her best friend in the crew, Cameron Saunders, in particular, had been among those ‘solid’ humans. It was disturbing to see him looking like everybody else.

The entire crew gathered in the Hab One wardroom for the send-off ’cast. When they finished here, the attitude thrusters would fire to orient them for Mars, then the big fusion engines would shove them out of Earth’s orbit, accelerating halfway to Mars, then decelerating the rest of the way. At least then they’d have gravity, even if it was only one-third of earth-normal, and her stomach would settle down. She hoped.

Sheela wormed her way through the crowd to Cam. It wasn’t easy. Cam was the poster boy for tall, dark, and handsome and most of the female crew members vied for his attention. But she used her elbows, and the purchase offered by her Velcro booties, to good effect, and made it in time to talk to him before the ’cast started. Keeping an eye on Mission Commander Levitt, she leaned toward him and asked, “Do you feel different?”

“No, I mean . . .” she hesitated. She’d tried to talk with Cam about magic during the training. He’d insisted he couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, and didn’t want to talk about it, so she’d dropped it. But she wondered if its absence had affected him. “There’s no magic here,” she said finally. “I was wondering if you’d noticed any difference.”

“Hmm. Well, I do feel a bit odd, but that’s just the weightlessness.” He looked at her and added, “But, you know, you look a little strange. And . . .” He paused for a thoughtful moment, “it’s interesting that . . .” Levitt gave the “quiet” sign, and Cam stopped, then whispered, “later,” out of the side of his mouth.

Levitt made his little speech about this colony effort being a new chapter in human—and elven, he added belatedly, nodding at Sheela—history, threw in some “next frontier” stuff, and finished up with thanks for all the nations who had contributed funds and personnel. Pretty boilerplate, in Sheela’s estimation. Well, there probably weren’t many people watching anyway, so what did it matter? This was the Christa’s third trip to Mars. The public’s attention was all wrapped up in the colony ship being built in orbit.

She waved with the others when Mission Commander Levitt said goodbye, then headed for her bunk, along with the rest of the non-flight crew, to get strapped in for maneuvers. She and Cam were both assigned to Hab Two quarters, so they had a chance to talk on the way.

“Huh? Oh, well . . . hard to explain.” He handed her through the hatch to the tube that connected the cores of the two habs. Cam pulled himself through the hatch, and they shoved off together to float down the tube before he continued. “Have to back up a bit, I guess. I was remembering what you’d said about why you couldn’t do magic tricks, and . . . well, you know I’m handy with machines.”

“Handy” was understating it by a couple of orders of magnitude, in Sheela’s opinion. She didn’t think there’d been a machine built that he couldn’t fix. It was a good quality for the mission’s primary equipment maintenance engineer to have. She nodded for him to continue.

“Well, the thing is,” Cam shrugged, “I never really had to work at it. I’ve just always seemed to know what was going on with a piece of equipment. I mean, I had to look, but still, I had an idea of where to look. Just now, though, going through the pre-flight, there was a glitch in one of the compressors, and you know, I didn’t have a clue.” He shook his head, “Not a clue.” He shrugged again. “Anyway, it was a weird thing. I thought it might relate.”

“Maybe. I’ve told you that magic hangs around you, even if you say you can’t sense it.” He made a face at her, and she laughed. “I know, I know, you don’t believe me, but I think that the ‘knowledge’ of what’s going on with a machine is how magic communicates with you. And it does relate to what I said about magic tricks. After all, you need to know what’s going on with a machine.”

Early in the training, about the third or fourth time somebody asked her to do a “trick,” she’d tried to explain that magic didn’t work like that. Magic responded to need, and intent, and purpose. She’d had a hard time coming up with an analogy that humans might understand. “It’s like, oh . . . like asking a horse to jump a fence when there isn’t any fence. Or asking a sheepdog to round up the flock when there aren’t any sheep. It can’t figure out what you need it to do, because there’s nothing that needs doing.”

That had satisfied them, so she’d left it at that. Even though it was really only part of it. There were some mages who could fool magic into doing tricks, but it was frowned on. Sheela more than frowned on it—she detested anyone who would do such a thing. It was a betrayal of the relationship between magic and mages. Magic sought the company of those who could sense it, use it, direct it. It wanted that connection. Even more, it wanted to be useful. To take advantage of that to trick it into doing something purposeless, was just . . . wrong.

Sheela started out of her reverie at his touch and looked around. Somehow, they’d made it to Hab Two’s core without her noticing. She grinned at him as he pushed off toward his quarters. “Sorry. Day-dreaming. See you later, and we’ll talk more.” She grabbed a handhold and launched herself in the opposite direction, toward her own quarters.

The crew had been assigned quarters within the two habs without regard to mission function, but Sheela suspected that the crew would sort themselves out into the “lab coats” and the “hard hats” before they passed the moon’s orbit. That’s what they’d done during the mission training, anyway. Not that the hard hats were really “grunts,” though they called themselves that, too. They all had advanced degrees and a record of accomplishments to prove their abilities. It was just that, with a primary mission of building a settlement capable of supporting 3,000 humans in two years, there would indeed be a lot of grunting going on.

Sheela’s problem was, she didn’t know which group she belonged to. Although she had PhDs in several of the life sciences—elves took a long time to mature, and she was nearly twice as old as most of her fellow crew members—her primary assignment was agronomy. She was basically the gardener, in charge of setting up and running the greenhouse. Of course, first they had to build the greenhouse. So that put her in the hard hat category. But she was also secondary for medical services, which was more like lab coat territory. Well, she’d just stick with Cam. That decided, she suited up, SOP during maneuvers, tapped the com button on the side of the helmet to open—also SOP—and set the bunk into its acceleration couch configuration.

It didn’t take long to settle into shipboard routine. Most of the crew members had no real flight duties. Their time was spent training for their backup positions and training their own backups. Thus it was that Sheela spent far less time with Cam than she’d have liked, and far more time than she’d have liked with Violet Mandel—“Shrieking Violet,” in the privacy of Sheela’s mind. Vi had been needling her since the training started, more than a year ago now. Nothing overt, that she could be called on. Just constant little digs. Maybe she just hated elves. Some humans did. But Violet was also a backup for Medical Services, so they trained together most of the time. Sheela was quite fond of Avasa Dalal, the primary doctor, and another one of those magic-attracting solid humans. But, since most of her time with Ava included Vi, that wasn’t as pleasant as it could have been. Nor did it help that Vi was better than she was. Sheela still had to fight that momentary impulse to use magic. It slowed down her reaction time, a bad thing in situations where speed counted.

They’d only been out a week when the first radiation warning came. Six hours in the close quarters of the core with Vi and six other people—none of whom were Cam; he’d been up in Hab One when the alarm sounded—hadn’t helped Sheela’s temper. When the all-clear sounded, Sheela went to her quarters with a damp towel and wiped down, then she headed for the wardroom for a bite. She heard Vi’s grating voice before she got there.

“I bet she used magic to get on the mission,” Vi was saying. She was sitting at one of the tables, with her back to the entry, talking to Ava. “You know, messed with their minds,” Vi added, making a flicking “woo-woo” gesture with one hand. Ava looked up and saw Sheela standing there, and made a shushing sound, nodding her head at the door. Vi turned around, and then smirked at Sheela’s glare, unrepentant.

The last, thin thread of her control snapped at Vi’s sneering dismissal of Sheela’s years of studying human sciences and the past year of struggling not to use magic. Two long strides brought her to Vi’s side. She grabbed Vi’s shirt and hauled her to her feet. “I didn’t need magic to earn a place on this mission, and I certainly don’t need magic to deal with you,” she ground out, her other hand closing into a fist. But her intention to throw the punch that would wipe that smirk off Vi’s face got lost in the sudden realization that it was true. She didn’t need magic. Of course, she’d joined the mission on the assumption that she could live without magic, but she’d never really believed it until this moment.

Sheela carefully unwound her fingers from Vi’s shirt, noting with a small satisfaction that the smirk was gone anyway. “Ah, you’re not worth it.” She turned around to leave, and found Cam standing in the doorway, grinning at her. “What?” she demanded.

Sheela suited up and cycled into the unpressurized bay to check the pods containing her seeds one more time before she had to strap in for the orbital insertion maneuvers. Most of the bay’s floor space was taken up by the ship-to-surface shuttle that would ferry the crew assigned to Hab Two down to the surface, while Hab One was flown down to join the other two Habs left from previous missions. Pods of supplies that couldn’t be sent in advance—including, most important to her, the seedstocks for the greenhouse—lined the walls, held in place by thick cables. As she came around the nose of the shuttle, movement over by the launch tube caught her attention. Cam’s bright red suit was inside it, up to the waist. No doubt Cam was making his own last minute checks.

There was no air to carry the sound of the snapping cable; it was the jerk of the pod directly above the launch tube breaking loose that drew Sheela’s eye. It dropped slowly in the low gravity, but it massed enough to crush Cam. In a panic, she thrust out her hand and reached for it before overriding the impulse and tapping the com button on her helmet.

She heard a “clunk” over the com as her shout startled him, then he clumsily backed out of the tube and looked around. She pointed up at the pod, nearly upon him now, and shouted, “Move!” He looked up, and reacted instantly, diving to the side to get out of its way.

Sheela made her way to her bunk, and suited up for maneuvers in a stupor. Cam’s injury was her fault. If she hadn’t wasted time trying to stop the pod with magic, he might have had time to get out of the way. If she had been able to use magic, she’d have been able to stop the pod. Or at the very least, heal his leg. Her dream—of being the first elf on Mars, of proving that elves could live without magic—that selfish, prideful dream, had both crippled Cam, and made it permanent. She lay in her bunk, paying no attention to the maneuvers and the accompanying com chatter. She was too busy trying to find a bottom to her despair.

Her fog continued while the crew prepped Hab One for its descent to the surface; while she cleaned and locked down her quarters on Hab Two; while she suited up and took her place on the shuttle. She passed Cam’s empty seat on the way to her own. He would be going down on the Hab, instead, missing his right leg from the knee down, and strapped into a med bay bed. Ava had offered to let her assist in the amputation, but . . . Vi was the better scrub nurse. Whatever her personal feelings for the woman, Sheela knew that. And she wanted Cam to have the best.

As the shuttle approached Mars, Sheela’s mental fog lifted as she slowly became aware of . . . something. An insane, alien muttering, disturbing the silence in that space where magic used to be. A moment more, and she was sure: magic. It wasn’t like any magic she’d ever known. This magic was wild, chaotic, unstructured—and it had its own purpose. It wanted her with a need so strong it nearly paralyzed her.

Time slowed. She became hyperaware of everything around her, even as she maintained her focus on mastering the magic, soothing it with her presence without letting it slip from her control. The shuttle rocked and bucked in the magic’s need, throwing her against the restraints. Metal shrieked with strain. Slowly, slowly, she felt the magic begin to respond. The rocking lessened. Metal-shriek turned to relieved groan as the strain eased . . .

Then the magic, in some misunderstanding she couldn’t spare the thought to sort out, altered some vital component of the engines. Sheela was enveloped in sudden quiet, broken by the gasps of the other crew members coming through the com. She didn’t know enough about the engines to direct the magic to fix whatever it had done.

No! Sheela fought to control her own fear; struggled to bind the magic to her purpose. But it was too strong, its need too great, to be controlled that way. Maybe more elves, working in concert, could do it. Here, now, there was only Sheela. And only one way to make her purpose the magic’s own.

Before she could change her mind, Sheela sent her self into the magic. She felt a rushing out of her awareness that was also an infilling of something else, something more . . . then suddenly, she was the magic. But somehow, she was still Sheela, too. She hadn’t expected that. Maybe it wouldn’t last for long. No matter, she had time enough to do what she needed to do. Sheela/Magic cradled the dead weight of the shuttle, and gently lowered it to the Martian surface.

Sheela/Magic kept the little nodes of Other-consciousness within her awareness. They were scant company; she could not truly communicate with them. Still, she tried to make her presence felt. Sometimes, she touched the slightly brighter nodes that were Cam and Ava. Sometimes, she even felt a response. Sometimes she sensed Cam’s fledgling attempts to reach for something with magic, and reached back, to place it in his hand. And if Cam’s stump healed overnight, and if the plants grew a little healthier than expected, and if the oxygen generators worked a little better, and if sandstorms never seemed to come close enough to the domes to damage them . . . well, perhaps the others might believe that it wasn’t just good luck.

And then, a great brilliance flared in Sheela/Magic’s awareness, as the first group of colonists was ferried down. She restrained herself, mindful of the near-disaster of Christa’s shuttle’s descent. The colonists would be even more at risk than her crewmates had been—they wouldn’t be wearing suits. Three hundred lives, with only a thin metal shell protecting them from the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. Sheela/Magic waited, long, endless moments while the colony ship’s shuttle descended; while it touched down and rolled to a stop; while the gangway was extended and pressurized.

The shuttle’s hatch opened. A great gaggle of humans came through, heading for the processing desk. Following them came the source of the brilliance that had dazzled her, a group of about fifty elves. One of them, a kind-faced, silver-eyed elf, stepped to one side to let the others pass him by. A slow smile spread over his features as he cocked his head.