Nita sat in the dawn stillness and thought about that a little. On the other side of the screen, Kit was still asleep, but one sound she couldn’t hear was Ponch snoring. Nita slipped out the reed-screened door into the dimness of early morning.
She made her way out of the cluster of the Peliaens’ household buildings and down onto the beach. There Nita stood just breathing for a while in the immense
stillness, a silence broken only by the tideless sea slipping softly up and down the sand. All around her, the world sloped up to the sky at an impossible distance, to an impossible height, but Nita was getting used to it now. Its largeness now seemed to enlarge her in turn, rather than crushing her down into insignificance.
Away down the curve of the beach, she saw, two small, dark shapes were also looking out at the water, at the dawn, neither of them moving.
She walked toward them, not hurrying, for that dawn was worth looking at. In fact, every one Nita had seen so far had been worth looking at, and no two of them were the same. This one featured vast stretches of crimson and gold and peach, streaked and speckled with smaller clouds in dark gray and pale gray, edged with burning orange, and with blue showing in the spaces in between them until the sky looked like one huge fire opal. In that light, fierce but still cool, Quelt and Ponch sat on the dune-rise, looking out over the water. Nita sat down next to Quelt. “Were you up early seeing your tapi off?” she said. “He was going to follow the ceiff when they flew today…”
“No, he was gone before I got up. I came out to talk to Ponsh.”
Nita glanced over at Ponch, who was lying there with his chin on his forefeet, gazing out at the sea. “About what?”
“All kinds of things. He’s good to talk to,” Quelt said. “He knows a lot.”
Nita had to smile at that. This was a dog whose vocabulary, not so long ago, had consisted almost entirely of words for food. “Not when he’s got a stick in his mouth,” she said, to tease him.
Ponch rolled over, gave her a look, and then, as if not deigning to respond, rolled onto his belly again.
They sat there like that for a while. “Do you ever have times,” Quelt said eventually, “when you think there’s something important you should know that you don’t know?”
Nita let out a long breath, leaned back against the sand dune. “The question’s more like, are there ever any times when I don’t think that?” she said. “And when I think I know all the stuff I need to, I’m almost always wrong.”
They sat quiet for a few moments more, looking at the water. “Why?” Nita said.
“I don’t know,” Quelt said. “It’s only the last, oh, hundred years or so. I’ll be in the middle of something, fixing the weather or something like that, and—” She stopped, looked at Nita. “What?” Quelt said. “What’s so funny?”
Nita was having trouble restraining her laughter. Finally, she managed to get some control over herself. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just cultural. ‘The last hundred years or so.’ That’s a whole lifetime where I come from.”
Quelt shook her head in wonder. “It sounds strange thinking of a life that short,” she said. “It doesn’t really seem that short for your people, though, does it?”
Nita looked out at the water as it lapped at the shore, turning slowly peach-colored under the growing glow of the dawn. “Not really,” she said, “if you get the whole thing, or close to it. Seventy, eighty years…” She trailed off. “A human life span’s getting longer these days, I guess. We’re better at curing sick people than we used to be, and we eat better, and all that kind of thing. But for Earth humans, yeah, around eighty or ninety, a lot of people start getting tired. Their bodies don’t
work terribly well. Things start breaking down. Sometimes their memory starts going.”
“It seems so soon.”
“I don’t know,” Nita said. She idly grabbed the end of Ponch’s tail and started playing with it; Ponch looked over his shoulder at her, made a grumbly growmf noise, pretended to snap at Nita, and then rolled over on his back and started to squirm around in the sand. “It’s as if a time comes when even if your body does stay pretty healthy, the rest of you is ready for something else.” She looked at the white tip of Ponch’s tail, considering it, and then let it go again.
“My nana,” Nita said, “that was my dad’s grandmother—she got that way when I was small. I can just remember it. At the time, I didn’t know what was the matter with her. She wasn’t sick, and she could get around all right. But she slept most of the time, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she just sat in a chair and watched television, and smiled. Everybody was always trying to get her up and get her to go out, be more active. I tried to do it, too. And once I remember trying to get her to play ball with me…something like that…and she said, ‘Juanita, dear, I’m ninety-three, and I’m tired of running around and doing things. The time’s come for me to just sit here and see what it’s like to be ninety-three. It’s part of getting ready for what comes after.’”
Nita smiled. The memory had no pain about it; it seemed a long, long time ago. “Then, I thought it was kind of funny. Now, though, I wonder sometimes whether it’s such a bad thing that after a while you should want to go on to the next thing. Even though there’s a lot of argument on my world about what the ‘next thing’ is…”
She trailed off again. “Hey, I interrupted you,” Nita said. “Sorry about that. You were talking about fixing the weather.” She grinned. “That’s funny, too, but for different reasons. We have a saying, ‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ Except that whoever made up the saying didn’t know there were wizards.”
“Do you do weather, too?”
“Kit and I did a hurricane last year,” Nita said. “With a consortium of other wizards. It looked like it was going to cause a lot of trouble if it came ashore, so the North American Regional Wizards did a risk assessment on it with the Western Europe group, and when it turned out it wouldn’t go anywhere else if we were careful, we pushed it out to sea—”
They discussed storms for a while, the wizardries of wind management and heat exchange, of what to do with the leftover kinetic energy after you’ve pushed ten million tons of relentlessly cycling wind and water off its intended course. Alaalu was sedate enough in terms of weather—its star was quiet and predictable, its orbit very nearly exactly circular, and its seasonal tilt very small. But there were still biggish tropical storms in the equatorial belt, twice each year, and dealing with those made up a surprising amount of Quelt’s steady work.
“It seems so strange that that’s all there is for you to do,” Nita said. “Or mostly that.”
“It didn’t always seem strange to me,” Quelt said. “When I was younger, anyway. But now I keep getting this feeling, like I said, that there’s something else
that’s supposed to be happening, something I haven’t noticed. I’d notice it if I stopped and looked around…that’s the feeling I get. And I do stop and look. But so far…” She shrugged.
“I know another wizard,” Nita said, “a cat—that’s another of the sentient species on our planet—who told me once that sometimes the Powers have a message for you, but it’s like a spell that you’re building: You have to put it together piece by piece over time, and the rest of the time you just leave the bits and pieces scattered around in your head and give them a chance to come together.”
“That’s what I’m doing, I suppose,” Quelt said. And then she flashed Nita one of those grins. “But I’m impatient, I think! Something our people aren’t, usually …” She stretched her legs out on the sand. “Still, it nibbles at me. Like the keks if you stay around after they start work…”
“It’ll come together eventually,” Nita said. She yawned and stretched. “I’m surprised to see you out here,” she said to Ponch, “when the boss isn’t up yet.”