Nita shivered, 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 now 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. Its largeness now seemed to enlarge her in turn, rather than crushing her down into insignificance. Away down the curve of the beach, 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 lately 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. “I’m sorry. 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. 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, the problem 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 t
hem 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.”
Ponch, upside down, looked at Nita with one eye. He’s lazy.
“He’s lazy? You should talk. You sleep all day!”
I’ve been doing my job, Ponch said. I don’t have to hunt. I don’t have any puppies to guard. So I sleep, and the rest of the time I have fun.
Nita chuckled. “Sensible,” she said. “Okay, I take it back.” She stretched again, ran her hands through her hair. “You know what I love about this place? No bugs.”
“Bugs?”
“Insects. Little life-forms that come and bite you.”
“The keks would do that.”
“Yeah, but the keks you can get up and walk away from. These things fly after you in the air and sit on you and bite you. Some of them are so small you can hardly see them. They’re a real pain.”
“But you can talk them out of biting you, surely… ”
“I’ve tried. It’s an uphill battle, believe me. You get better reactions out of walls and rocks than you do out of most bugs.”
Quelt laughed, and got up, and stretched. “I should go put the laundry in to run,” she said. “I told my ‘mom’ I would.”
Nita laughed. “We’re corrupting you with all these strange foreign words.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I hear what you call my tapi…”
Nita and Quelt smiled at each other. “Go on,” Nita said. “Ponch, go on and kick the boss out of bed. It’s a sin for him to miss this.”
Quelt and Ponch went back toward the house, and Nita watched them go with a slight smile. Chores on this world didn’t seem as onerous as chores did at home, somehow. And even less so when I don’t have to do them, she thought. But Quelt didn’t seem to mind doing them, either.
Nita sat there a while longer, looking out at the sea and watching the tiny waves slide lazily up the sand, so unlike the energetic surf of the South Shore. But then the Great South Bay has tides, because Earth has a Moon. That’s the only thing I miss here: a really big moon.
Still, this is gorgeous…
Very slowly, the east started to turn a fiercer orange red than before. Nita sat in that fiery light and soaked it up with endless appreciation. But the dream would not quite go away. The heart of the world is frozen, and so there is no heart.
Nita blinked, and then she shivered, her sunburn briefly forgotten.
***
Dairine and Filif and Sker’ret got back from Mount Everest late that afternoon to find that Roshaun had arrived while they were gone. Carmela was sitting in front of the TV with him, discussing clothes once more. Annoyed as Dairine was with the prince, she had to be amused: at least Carmela had found someone as interested in personal adornment as she was. Didn’t think it was possible, Dairine thought. And at least Roshaun had come back. Though not because of anything I said…
Filif, wanting some relaxation, joined Roshaun and Carmela in the living room. Dairine’s dad was sitting at the dining room table, making some notes on a pad about supplies for the store. As Dairine and Sker’ret came in, his head jerked up, a little guiltily, Dairine thought, to make sure Filif wasn’t in sight. “You okay, Daddy?” she said, bending over to hug him and give him a kiss.
“Huh? Oh, fine,” he said. “How was your day? You guys have a nice lunch?”
Sker’ret looked most satisfied. “Very filling.”
“Oxygen bottles, mostly,” Dairine said.
Her dad glanced up at that, amused. “Nothing wrong with a little roughage in the diet. Where are you off to?”
“Just down to Sker’ret’s pup-tent. He’s going to lend me some music. Stick your head in and yell if you need me.”
“Okay.”
They went down the basement stairs more or less together—it always being a question, when Sker’ret was on forty legs and she was on two, who was ahead and who was behind at any one time, if not both at once. On the mountain, Dairine and Sker’ret had started discussing popular music while Sker’ret ingested carefully chosen chunks of garbage—including some climbing expedition’s ancient and very broken tape recorder—and Sker’ret had suggested that when they got back, they could use one of the manual’s data transfer options to pass some favorite selections back and forth. Dairine promptly had Spot grab a wide and peculiar assortment from her desktop computer at home—everything from boy bands to Beethoven—and was curious to see what Sker’ret was going to pass to her in return.
They slipped in through his pup-tent access. Dairine looked around and saw several of the sitting/lying racks Sker’ret’s people preferred, sort of a cross between a giant step stool and monkey bars. Dairine looked around at the stacks and racks of storage. “Very organized,” she said.
“Not what my parent says,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine snickered. “None of us is ever neat enough for our parents. One of those universal traits.” Sker’ret laughed and started rummaging around for his own version of the manual, a little flat data pad.
Dairine sat partly down on one of the racks—it was impossible for a human to get really comfortable on one of them, no matter how she tried—and perched there, swinging her leg, while Spot spidered around, peering into everything. “You told me before that they wouldn’t let you into the restaurants in the Crossings,” Dairine said. “Why not? Did you misbehave in there or something?”
Sker’ret’s laugh acquired something of an edge. Dairine heard a hint of bitterness about it. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s just that families of employees aren’t expected to use the same facilities as the patrons.”
Dairine stared at him a moment. Abruptly, the data slipped into place. “Oh no,” she said. “You’re not just some Rirhait, are you? You’re related to the Stationmaster … ”
“I’m the youngest of his first brood,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine breathed out. “That means you inherit management of the whole place when he retires, doesn’t it?”
“It would mean that if I were normal,” Sker’ret said. “But I’m not, am I? I’m a wizard.” Now there was no mistaking the bitterness. “I’m supposed to run the Crossings, and become one of the most powerful beings for light-years around. It’s as much a political position as anything else: control worldgates and you control so much else. No one argues with the Stationmasters.”
“But you can do that and be a wizard,” Dairine said. “Can’t you?”
Sker’ret looked at her with several eyes. “I want to!” he said. “But they don’t want me to. As far as my parent’s concerned, to be a wizard is a distraction from what I’m supposed to be doing, from the business of life, and the ‘real world.’” He snorted, a most peculiar, rather metallic sound. “Not precisely a waste of time— we know as well as anybody else how useful wizards are. But my parent is furious with me. He wants me to reject the wizardry, to give it up. And I can’t!”
Dairine drew a deep breath. Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart. That was one of the first laws of the Art. You could give it up, if you were unwilling or unable to hold by the strictures embodied in the Wizard’s Oath. It could leave you of its own volition, if pain or illness or changes in your life made it impossible for you to keep the Oath any longer. But the prospect was horrible to imagine, at least for Dairine. To actually have the people around you trying to force you to give up wizardry, to give up that most intimate connection with the universe and What had made it—
She shuddered. “You go your own way,” she said to Sker’ret. “You do what your heart tells you.”
“Hearts,” Sker’ret sa
id.
“Whatever. You do that! That’s how They talk to you. Don’t let anyone push you around.”
“That’s easy to say,” Sker’ret said, “when your ‘father’s’ not the Stationmaster of the Crossings.”
Dairine gave Sker’ret a look. “I have news for you,” she said. “I think you’re tougher than he thinks you are. I think there’s room in the universe for you to be exactly what you want to be. Your father—sorry, your parent—may be the most powerful entity for light-years around, but if he was sure of that, he wouldn’t be pressuring you so hard. So I think you still may have some bargaining room left.”
He looked at her, all those stalked eyes weaving in a gesture of uncertainty.
“There’s no harm in trying,” Dairine said. “Dig your feet in. There are enough of those to make anybody think twice. Anyway, what’s the worst the family can do?”
“Disown me,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine swallowed. “So what?” she said. “You’ll always be a wizard. You have a bigger family than just your family. And you’ll always have a place to stay. You can sleep in my basement anytime.”
They locked eyes for a few moments. Shortly Dairine said, “Sker’, really need to stop moving all those eyes around like that. You’re making me seasick.”
Sker’ret laughed. So did Dairine.
They spent half an hour or so swapping music between Spot and Sker’ret’s manual, and after checking the sound quality they headed upstairs again, where Sker’ret wandered into the living room to see what the others were doing. Dairine got the urge for some milk and opened the fridge, pouring herself a glass. Then, hearing laughter coming from the living room, she leaned in through the door to the dining room to see what was happening in there.