'Yes.'
'And what then?'
'I shall leave. Or rather, I shall leave some time before it occurs.'
I felt a surge of irrational anger, the same emotion I had sometimes known as a boy when I could not make Master Malrubius understand my questions. 'I meant, what of Urth?'
He shrugged. 'Nothing. What you see is the last glacia-tion. The surface of the sun is dull now; soon it will grow bright with heat, but the sun itself will shrink, giving less energy to its worlds. Eventually, should anyone come and stand upon the ice, he will see it only as a bright star. The ice he stands upon will not be that which you see but the atmosphere of this world. And so it will remain for a very long time. Perhaps until the close of the universal day.'
I went to another window and looked out again on the expanse of ice. 'Will this happen soon?'
'The scene you see is many thousands of years in your future.'
'But before this, the ice must have come from the south.'
Master Ash nodded. 'And down from the mountaintops. Come with me.'
We descended to the second level of the house, which I had scarcely noticed when I had come upstairs the night before. The windows were far fewer there, but Master Ash placed chairs before one and indicated that we would sit and look out. It was as he had said ice, lovely in its purity, crept down the mountainsides to war with the pines. I asked if this too were far in the future, and he nodded once more. 'You will not live to see it again.'
'But so near that the life of a man will nearly reach it?'
He twitched his shoulders and smiled beneath his beard. 'Let us say it is a thing of degree. You will not see this. Nor will your children, nor theirs. But the process has already begun. It began long before you were born.'
I knew nothing of the south, but I found myself thinking of the island people of Hallvard's story, the precious little sheltered places with a growing season, the hunting of the seals. Those islands would not hold men and their families much longer. The boats would scrape over their stony beaches for the last time.
'My wife, my children, my children, my wife.'
'At this time, many of your people are already gone,' Master Ash continued.
'Those you call the cacogens have mercifully carried them to fairer worlds. Many more will leave before the final victory of the ice. I am myself, you see, descended from those refugees.'
I asked if everyone would escape.
He shook his head. 'No, not everyone. Some would not go, some could not be found. No home could be found for others.'
For some time I sat looking out at the beleaguered valley and trying to order my thoughts. At last I said, 'I have always found that men of religion tell comforting things that are not true, while men of science recount hideous truths. The Chatelaine Mannea said you were a holy man, but you appear to be a man of science, and you said your people had sent you to our dead Urth to study the ice.'
'The distinction you mention no longer holds. Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something.
It is the same something. You are yourself what you call a man of science, so I talk of science to you. If Mannea were here with her priestesses, I would talk differently.'
I have so many memories that I often become lost among them. Now as I looked at the pines, waving in a wind I could not feel, I seemed to hear the beating of a drum. 'I met another man who said he was from the future once,' I said. 'He was green nearly as green as those trees and he told me that his time was a time of brighter sun.'
Master Ash nodded. 'No doubt he spoke truly.'
'But you tell me that what I see now is but a few lifetimes away, that it is part of a process already begun, and that this will be the last glaciation.
Either you are a false prophet or he was.'
'I am not a prophet,' answered Master Ash, 'nor was he. No one can know the future. We are speaking of the past.'
I was angry again. 'You told me this was only a few lifetimes away.'
'I did. But you, and this scene, are past events for me.'
'I am not a thing of the past! I belong to the present.'
'From your own viewpoint you are correct. But you forget I cannot see you from your viewpoint. This is my house. It is through my windows that you have looked.
My house strikes its roots into the past. Without that I should go mad here. As it is, I read these old centuries like books. I hear the voices of the long dead, yours among them. You think that time is a single thread. It is a weaving, a tapestry that extends forever in all directions. I follow a thread backward.
You will trace a color forward, what color I cannot know. White may lead you to me, green to your green man.'
Not knowing what to say, I could only mutter that I had conceived of time as a river.
'Yes you came from Nessus, did you not? And that was a city built about a river.
But it was once a city by the sea, and you would do better to think of time as a sea. The waves ebb and flow, and currents run beneath them.'
