Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (28 page)

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 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.

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 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.”

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…