The living room was empty, but from the dining room she heard a voice, Tom’s voice. Nita froze only a few steps from the stairs.
“It’s something we just have to deal with,” Tom was saying. “Sometimes you hit—When we speak of them in English, we call them ‘cardinal events,’ which is a vague equivalent to a word in the Speech that’s derived from the Speech’s root word for ‘hinge.’ There are moments in the lives of people, of nations, of cultures, of worlds, on which everything to come afterward hangs, or turns—like the hinge of a door. If intervention comes at one moment, the door swings one way. If it comes a moment early, a moment late, the hinge swings another. And sometimes no intervention, regardless of its size, is enough to change the way the door swings. There are some changes that simply have so much impetus behind them, driven by the force of earlier events—the way in which other ‘hinges’ have swung—that there’s no stopping them, no matter what you do. As a result, a life changes, or ends…or a thousand lives do, or three thousand…and whole avalanches of change come tumbling down through the opening left by the way that door swung. All a wizard can do, in the face of one of these avalanches of chance and change, is pick a spot to intervene in the consequences and try to clean up afterward.” And Tom sighed. “No matter what we do,” he said, “entropy is still running.”
There was a long silence. “I’m so sorry,” Nita heard her dad say.
“Not half as sorry as we were,” Tom said, “that we couldn’t stop it.” Another painful breath. “But day by day, in the aftermath, we do what we can, and try to be ready for the next ‘hinge’… try to recognize it when it comes. It’s all we can do. And we have to keep reminding ourselves, because we know it’s true, that what comes of what we do will eventually make a difference; and the Powers That Be will find a way through even our species’ worst cruelties to something better, if we just don’t give up.”
There was a silence. “The way you look,” her dad said, “you haven’t been
getting a lot of rest lately.”
“No,” Tom said. For a moment or so there was silence. “There’s trouble coming.”
“Worse than what we’ve got now?”
“Unless we can stop it,” Tom said, “much, much worse. But we’ve got a head start: a fighting chance. Actually, a lot better than just a chance. We can’t do anything now but see how it goes.”
A chill ran down Nita’s back. “Let me know if I can help,” her dad said.
“This is help,” Tom said after a moment. “And I appreciate it.”
Nita breathed in, breathed out, unnerved, then turned softly and went back upstairs. I’ll come see Daddy tomorrow. This isn’t the time.
Once upstairs, she put her head into Dairine’s door again, on the off chance that she might have come back from wherever she was.
“She’s out,” said a scratchy little voice from Dairine’s desk.
Spot was sitting there, looking strangely forlorn under Dairine’s desk lamp. Nita went quietly in, thought about sitting on the bed, then decided against it; it would creak.
“You okay, big guy?” Nita said.
“Okay,” Spot said.
Nita shook her head and stroked his case a little. He was such a one-person machine. “Tell Dairine I was here, all right?” she said. “I didn’t talk to Dad…He was busy. But there’s some stuff I want her to check into for me. I’ll talk to her about it tomorrow.”
“All right,” Spot said.
“Thanks.”
Nita went back to her room. As she came in, the worldgate came alive enough to display a faint shadow of itself, a circle hanging in midair, through which the rest of her room appeared grayed out. Nita ducked a little, stepped through it again.
On the far side of the bedroom, Ponch was still snoring. Nita sat down on the edge of her bed-couch, suddenly feeling very tired, even though she’d spent no energy whatever on the worldgating. It was strange to hear Tom, someone on whose strength and expertise Nita depended, sounding like he needed to lean on someone else in turn. But why wouldn’t he, sometimes? she thought. He’s just a wizard like the rest of us…
And, “Trouble coming,” he’d said. Nita was going to get Dairine to look into that and report back to her.
In the meantime…maybe I could sleep a little.
She got undressed and crawled in under the light covers. It was not one of those nights when it “rained stars” in a periodic fall of dust and small fragments from the moonbelt. The darkness remained quiet except for the whisper of the sea, and the softer whispers of the voices in the air, untroubled by anything Nita might have seen or heard in some other world far away. Here everything was fine; here the world was going the way it was supposed to go.
That soft insistence itself troubled her for a while. But, eventually, Nita did sleep.
At dawn, Nita woke up from a completely irrational dream of ice and icebergs and snow.
She sat up on her long couch and felt the back of her neck, rather gingerly. At least I won’t burn any worse now, she thought, but this still bothers me…
There were things she could do now, of course. She could talk the nerves in her skin out of feeling the pain…though that would cost her some energy and, afterward, the pain would come back. Or she could use a different kind of wizardry to speak to the nerve endings and trim back their connection to the damaged skin. That would cost her, too—rather more than the first wizardry—but it would heal the burn.
She stretched, and winced. Or, alternately, she thought, I could just get up and go in the water, which is nice and cool and won’t cost me anything…and put off dealing with the problem until later.
Nita found her bathing suit and pulled it on—she wasn’t quite yet as comfortable as Quelt was with skinny-dipping—then shrugged into a linen sun smock, hissing once or twice in irritation as the rough texture dragged across her sunburn.
But the memory of cold came back to her. She sat back down on the couch for a moment, grasping at the memory before she should be awake too long and it should fade.
Ice, she thought. There had been a lot of it. She had seen her share of cold planets, both “solid” ones, where the ice was made from water, and gas giants, where the ice was made from methane or helium, and the snow was that strange metallic, pale blue color. What she’d seen in her dream had been water ice, though. Her memory came up with a pattern suddenly—parallel lines and striations that ran curving down like a river between jagged stone walls all slicked with newer, clearer ice. But the oldest stuff, colder, deeper, discolored with the powdery, dark scrapings of ancient stone, ran like a fissured twelve-lane highway through the pass between old mountains rearing up on either side. A glacier. Nothing had happened in that dream, unless the slow, cold progress of the glacier down its valley, a tenth of an inch a day, would count as something happening.
Nita shivered, and then laughed to herself. Typical body reaction: get burned, dream of cold. Yet when she thought of that glacier again, another image from the dream surfaced. The ice spreading from the glacier, spreading up the mountain walls as more snow fell, as the cold grew. An ice age, Nita thought. Glaciers sheeting up and over everything, the contours of landscape being swallowed by them and the incessant snow that fell on them and fed them—everything happening slowly in real time, but with an ugly relentless speed in her dream, where the progression of events was compressed. “The heart of the world is frozen,” something had said to her. The voice was slow, cold, as if buried in snow itself. And it was not entirely sorry about the ice.