re were a lot of them even the smallest of them the size of Earth s moon, but all out at a distance that made them look a third or a quarter the size. The planet s gravitation held all these little moons in a very large and vaguely defined ring pattern, like a skinny doughnut stretched around the world. Inside that doughnut, or torus, the individual moons gravities caused them to speed each other up and slow each other down and generally behave in ways that were impossible to predict. Like more flying sheep, Nita thought, as the present flock rose and sailed across the night sky, throwing shifting silvery lights down on the water. In the light, the keks seemed to be working faster, though this was probably an illusion. Nita wandered down to the waterline and stood just out of the keks way, peering down at the little structures they were building in the sand. None of the structures lasted long: The keks would clamber over them, knock them down, start over again. Or else a chance wave would come up higher than normal and wash everything away. The keks response was always the same: Start building again. What are you guys doing Nita said in the Speech. What we must, one of them, or all of them, said, and kept right on building. Nita shook her head, amused. It was exactly the kind of purposeful but unilluminating answer you tended to get from ants when you asked them where they were going, or from a mosquito when you asked it why it had bitten you. Bugs had very limited agendas and had trouble talking about anything else. Why Nita said. Because. She shook her head and smiled…then winced as the motion of the headshake made her neck sting. It s nice to have a purpose in life, she said to the keks. Yes, it is, they said, and started working faster, as if trying to make up time for having been distracted by her. Nita smiled and let them be. She walked off up the beach again, thinking, I really should just go back and get the sunblock. Her dad would be annoyed with her when he saw the burn, but all the same, she wanted to see him. The precis that her manual had been passing on to her, via Dairine, were too dry to give her any sense of what was really going on at home. Slowly she walked back to the Peliaens place. The absolute peace of it, as she came within sight of the house and its outbuildings in the moons light and starlight, impressed itself on Nita once again. Yet, also, at the same time, up came that strange something-wrong, something-missing feeling that she d started to experience more and more often as she and Kit settled in. I think I m just not used to things being so peaceful, she thought. I ve got to let myself get used to it. She smiled ruefully as she made her way quietly to the outbuilding that was her and Kit s bedroom. With my luck, I ll get used to it just around the time we have to go home. From the other side of the big room s dividing screen, as she went in, she could just hear Ponch snoring softly. / wonder if the dogs have started acting normally back home, Nita thought. Or if they re behaving worse. Well, I ll let Kit find out about that. Very quietly, she went over to the darkness against the far wall of her side of the room, the worldgate that led back to her house. Being careful of the edges, she stepped through. Without any fuss, she was in her mostly empty bedroom. Maybe I should put the desk back in here, she thought, because I don t think it s going to get a lot of use where we are. With her schoolwork done, she was determined not to think another thought about school for at least a week, if she could help it. Nita glanced out the window. It was midafternoon. The bedroom s wall clock said 3:30. I thought it would be earlier, she thought. My time sense is so screwed up. She looked at her bed, saw no sunblock there. Either her dad had forgotten to put it out for her, or he just hadn t gotten around to it yet. She went out of her room and paused by Dairine s door and looked in: No one was there. Out with her new buddies, Nita thought. Or visiting them in their pup tents, possibly. She went on down to the bathroom and rummaged among the various sun creams, sunblocks, and tanning oils in the cupboard under the sink. Finally, she came up with a bottle of high-factor stuff only a few months past its use-by date. This should be okay, Nita thought, and went quietly down the stairs. 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. 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. I