She pointed to a large calfskin map of the New World that lay pinned to the wooden table. Scattered over the map and making odd patterns across it were piles of sand—black, nut brown, and white. Toward the southern tip of the continent, a handful of white sand blanketed all of the unknown territory still referred to by cartologers as Tierra del Fuego. It reached upward into Late Patagonia. “Do you know what Age lies here—at the very edge of the hemisphere?”
Shadrack shook his head tiredly. “No explorer has succeeded in reaching it.”
“It is another Ice Age, like the Prehistoric Snows that lie north of here.”
He was suddenly alert. “How do you know this?”
“I have been there.”
“How did you reach it? I know many who try and cannot succeed in traveling south of Xela.”
“That is not important at the moment,” she said. “Believe me; the Ice Age is there. What is important is this: the Great Disruption did not occur as you believe it did. You believe the physical earth came loose from time and then came together again, coalesced along fault lines that separated the Ages.”
“More or less, yes.”
“It did begin that way,” she said, tracing her gloved finger along the calfskin map. “But it did not end that way. For decades the fault lines have been still. Now, once again, they are moving.”
Shadrack stared at her in an undisguised mixture of astonishment and skepticism. “Explain what you mean.”
“It is simply this—the borders of the Ages are shifting.” She pointed to New Occident. “Perhaps you have not been far enough north before to realize that in some places the Prehistoric Snows are melting away before the advance of New Occident. Yes,” she said, before he could speak. “This very site was once bound in ice. But the ice has melted, and trees have sprung up everywhere. Now the air is warmer, and there are people native to your Age. Here, the change is piecemeal and decisive. The snows disappear and new states, contemporaries of New Occident, take their place.”
Shadrack gazed at the sand, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. Suddenly a set of images, like a scattering of impressions from a memory map, flashed through his mind. But the memories were not from a map; they were his own. He recalled the letter sent so many years ago by the explorer Casavetti, whom his sister and brother-in-law had set out to find: “In this place I thought I knew so well, I have discovered a new Age.” It was this discovery of a new, hostile Age that had led to his capture, which had prompted Minna and Bronson’s journey halfway across the globe.
In his mind’s eye Shadrack saw Sophia poring over the two maps of the Indies, only a few days earlier. She had asked how a convent could have been replaced, in only a decade, by a wasteland. She had seen the evidence of a similar change. And he had been too blind to recognize the significance of her discovery. With all of his training, experience, and intuition, how had he failed to see it? After a moment of stunned silence, he spoke. “Are all the borders in flux?”
She shook her head. “Not all—but many,” she said, with a note of satisfaction at Shadrack’s dismay. “And they are shifting at different paces. The border changing most quickly is this one.” She pointed again to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Western Hemisphere. “The border of this Ice Age is the Southern Snows. It has been moving unevenly but consistently northward through Late Patagonia for the last year. Mile by mile, it is shifting toward the Baldlands, and every Age it touches disappears beneath the ice. I believe,” Blanca continued quietly, “your niece is traveling south, is she not?”
Shadrack felt the blood rush to his temples; in sending Sophia to the safest place he could think of, he had mistakenly sent her into terrible danger. “But then,” he asked slowly, “the people who are there now . . . ?”
“They will vanish,” Blanca said. “Or—I should be precise. The advance of the border is rather more . . . damaging. The glaciers do not approach quietly. Everything they touch is destroyed.”
“They must know of it—the people will flee the advancing border,” Shadrack said desperately.
“In fact, they have already been told that a powerful force is moving northward. But they believe it to be a weirwind—a destructive weather system and nothing more.”
Shadrack stared at her a moment, trying to comprehend. “You planted this belief yourself?”
Blanca shrugged. “I could not have the entire mass of humanity that inhabits the Baldlands rushing north like a torrent of scurrying ants. Princess Justa Canuto, whom I know well, is a typical monarch: she wants most what is best for her, not what is best for her kingdom. It was a simple matter to persuade her that Nochtland would survive the weirwind by staying put. Besides, it will make no difference whether they run or not.”
“How quickly are the Southern Snows moving?” Shadrack demanded.
“They began slowly, but the rate seems to be exponential. What began as an imperceptible shift, inch by inch, is now mile by mile.”
“There must still be some way,” he insisted. “Some way to stop it. What is causing it?”
“I believe we are causing it.”
Shadrack stared at her. “How?”
“The cause is unknown. You, with your spirit of empiricism, will doubtlessly dispute my theory, which is more speculative. I have come to the conclusion that we have caused it by failing to live according to a single time. Do you know how many forms of time-keeping currently exist in the world? More than two thousand. The world can no longer hold such disparate Ages. Time is quite literally being torn apart before our eyes.” She paused, seemingly weighing the effect of her words. “I knew you would be persuaded. Now you understand: unless we move quickly, the entire world will be engulfed by the Southern Snows.”
“Move quickly where?”
Blanca gestured at the map in frustration. “I do not know, Shadrack. This is what you must tell me. We have to reach the carta mayor before it, too, is encased in ice. Then you, the only living cartologer who can write water maps, must revise it. You must restore the world as it was before the Disruption.”
“But there is no such thing as a world before the Disruption! You are plagued by the same delusions as your Nihilismians. There can be no restoration of a lost past. Assuming there were a carta mayor, and assuming we found it, and assuming I could revise it in time, how would I determine the proper age of the globe? We do not know when the Disruption occurred. In our Age? Four hundred years after it? To what Age would I restore the world?”
When Blanca spoke, Shadrack could hear her smiling. “To mine.”
“That is pure hubris,” he replied impatiently. “We cannot know that our Age—”
“To mine. Not yours.”
“To yours? What do you mean?”
“We are not from the same Age, you and I,” she said. “What your Age is to man’s prehistoric past, my Age is to yours.” She paused. “Imagine an Age where peace holds sway over every corner of the globe; where there is perfect comprehension of the natural world and its science; where humankind has reached the apex of its endeavors. This is where I come from. You have not heard of it, Shadrack. It is called the Glacine Age.”
Shadrack listened to the fervor in her voice with astonishment. “Forgive me if I fail to be impressed. If the Disruption has taught us anything, it has taught us that no Age is perfect or inviolable.”
Blanca planted her gloved fingertips in the sand. “I don’t believe you understand, Shadrack—the Glacine Age is superior to all other Ages in every way.” She shook her head, and when she spoke her voice was pained. “Do you have any idea of the mistakes that humankind has made over the Ages? The terrible acts of destruction, the missed opportunities, the inane cruelties—the Glacine Age is entirely beyond them. Imagine a world without those horrors. In the Glacine Age, all of the world’s terrible mistakes lie in the past. They will vanish like specks of sand in the sea. It will be as if they never existed.” She paused and gave a little sigh of pleasure. “You will revise the water map, Shadrack, just as you would a paper map: erasing it carefully, line by line, to redraw a completely new map. You and I will draw the Glacine Age, whole and intact, so that it covers the world.”