“I really doubt that,” Dairine said. “Tom’s too good at this kind of wizardry. But you know what, I heard something on the news this morning. Let me check—”
She turned to Spot, who was sitting on the counter. “Get me a weather report? The SOHO satellite’ll do.”
Spot flipped up his lid and showed Dairine the manual’s version of the live feed from the SOHO solar-orbiter satellite, with a selection of pictures of the Sun taken in various wavelengths of light—red, green, blue. “There you are,” Dairine said, pointing to the blue version, where one particular detail was clearest. “We’re having a little bad weather.”
Dairine’s dad peered over her shoulder at the image of something like a big bump or bulge of light on the side of the Sun. “That happened last night,” Dairine said. “It’s a CME, a coronal mass ejection.”
“In English, please?” her dad said.
Dairine grinned. “Think of it as a solar zit that just popped.”
Her dad made a face. “Honey, do you think you could possibly have put that more indelicately?”
“Gives you the right impression of what’s happening, though,” Dairine said. “Every now and then the Sun shoots out a big splat of plasma into space. No one really knows why. But if the splat’s aimed toward Earth, when the front of the plasma wave gets here, there’s all kinds of trouble with satellites because of the ionized radiation. Radio gets messed up for a day or so, phone connections get screwed up until the wave front passes.” She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. These guys make sure everybody gets enough warning to turn their satellites’ sensors away from the wave front before it hits.” She put Spot’s lid down. “Probably the phones’ll come back up later today or tomorrow.”
Her father sighed, reaching again for the cordless phone in its cradle. “It’s a nuisance,” he said as he started to dial.
“Yeah,” Dairine said.
Sker’ret came in from the living room. “So where are you three off to?” Dairine’s dad said.
“Mount Everest,” Dairine said.
Her father looked at her. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts: it was more like summer than spring outside, at the moment. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you to dress warm?”
“We’ve all got force fields,” Dairine said. “We’ll be fine.”
Her dad watched her and hit a key on the phone’s dialing pad. “Voice mail,” he muttered. “I hate this. Mount Everest, though? Why?”
“We’re taking Sker’ret out to lunch,” Dairine said, grinning a wicked grin. “Nepalese food… sort of. See you later.”
They vanished.
***
It was much later that evening, after latemeal, when lamps were lit and Nita had gone down to the beach again for one last swim, when Kit finally had time to sit down in private on his bed-couch with his manual and page through it for some more detail.
Much of what Quelt had shown them and told them was there, and more information about the way of death on Alaalu. Entropy might have its way with the bodies of the people who lived there, but not with their spirits. Those lingered on. And Kit saw from the manual that this Choice had, in fact, not taken place as quickly as it had seemed at first glance.
In particular, the wizards making this Choice had understood that without entropy, there was no passage of time, no way to live or be. They’d seen that any bargain they might have struck with the Lone Power in an attempt to eliminate entropy completely would’ve been a cheat. Naturally, the Power that had invented entropy had some control over it; the exemption It had been offering the Alaalids would have been real enough, a kind of eternal life. But Kit knew enough about the Lone Power’s intentions to understand that whatever advantage over death they purchased by accepting the bargain It offered them, they’d eventually have paid for in some other coin, and dearly.
Still, he thought, the way they’ve got it here… they’re lucky. At the end of their lives, Alaalids experienced a passing, but it was nothing to be afraid of. And afterward, the one who died became simply one more part of a world full of whispers, all friendly… the relatives and cousins of an elder time, passed along but not passed away, at peace after life as their people were at peace in life. She’s been hearing them, he thought, remembering what Nita had said earlier.
He looked down at the manual again. “And as for the Lone One, now the Relegate, and defeated, the new way of the world meant she was part of the world, though made new. So they gave her a new name,” the manual said, translating the local version of the Choice story, “which was Esemeli, the Daughter of the Daughter of Light; and she did them no more harm, nor can do again. She went into the place prepared for her, the Relegate’s Naos, and there she dwells still, in peace, as all things are at peace. And the world goes its way, and its wind speaks the One’s name, and all things are well, forever… ”
Kit closed the manual and looked out through the window on his side of the room, out to the twilit sea.
The Lone One defeated, he thought. This is weird… but I’m not sure I like the sound of that. It wasn’t that such defeats were impossible: they weren’t. But they were difficult to maintain, and to defend. Death might be thrown out of a scenario, but It had ways of sneaking back in if you weren’t very, very careful.
Kit tucked his manual away under his pillow, pulled the light covers up over himself, and lay there looking out the window. She’ll be back soon, he thought. It’s almost crab time. Nita won’t be swimming then.
At the end of Kit’s couch, Ponch lay with his chin on the covers, his eyes shifting occasionally out to the twilight, as Kit fell asleep, considering…
***
Nita was walking far down the beach, well above the waterline, watching the keks and trying to distract herself from the stinging of her neck and shoulders.
This always happens when I get distracted, she thought, feeling her neck and then stopping, because it just made the stinging get worse. First I forget the sunblock, then I forget the wizardry that’s supposed to do what the sunblock would have done if I’d remembered it.
She sighed, watching the hurly-burly down on the sand as the keks bustled around and climbed over and under each other, building their strange little sand castles. Besides her sunburn, the main problem for Nita at the moment was Alaalu’s thirty-two-hour day, which was making her experience something like jet lag without the jets. Kit, for some reason, seemed to have snapped very quickly into the local rhythm and seemed to be having no trouble sleeping for sixteen hours and waking for sixteen, as the Peliaens did. But Nita’s body stubbornly insisted on hanging on to its own ideas about when morning was. And when 7:30 A.M. rolled around back home, it woke Nita up with a snap and wouldn’t let her go back to sleep. She could have done a wizardry on herself to force the issue, but she found herself resisting that option. This place is so super, why do I want to waste hours sleeping? And no one here minds if I’m up in the middle of the night.
Nita looked over the whispering water as a small flock of moons started to come sailing up over the eastern horizon. Because of the size of the planet, there 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 précis 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. I 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 standing 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.
Nita 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 still 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 was a long pause. “There are some changes,” Tom said, “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 had in the last decade or so?”
“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.”
Unnerved, Nita turned and softly went back up the stairs. 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 on Alaalu, 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 w
as 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 afterwards 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.