Chuckling, Chard said, “That’s more like my Baby Rainbow! I used to call you that, you know, until you took offense and said it was ridiculous to use the name of Jing’s lady—”
“I still think so!” she interrupted. “Come to the sharp end of the prong!”
“Very well.” Chard settled back comfortably. “My line of reasoning goes this way. We have seen, in the place of the so-called New Star, nothing but a cloud of bright gas for many generations. Yet every now and then we have recorded a sort of wave passing through it, and comparison of notes made recently with those made just after the first proper telescopes were constructed allows us to hypothesize that the sudden addition of a large amount of new fuel to the fire of a star causes an outburst of colossal proportions, as when one drops a boulder into shallow water. There are splashes!”
“You’ve told me this before!” Embery complained.
“Ah—but what about the matter that gets splashed?”
She thought about that for a little. Eventually she said, frowning with concentration, “It must spread out, over huge distances. And it must get thinner as it goes.”
“Correct! Even so…?”
“Even so, when it reaches another star—Oh!” She stared upright in excitement. “You think a splash from the New Star has got this far?”
“It would explain a lot of things,” Chard murmured, looking smugger than an astronomer of his age and distinction had any right to. “Above all, it would explain very well indeed why there are more and more stars falling from heaven—which of course aren’t actually stars—at the same time as the sun is growing warmer.”
“But this could be terrible!” Embery exclaimed. “Because the matter must have spread out very thin on its way here, so if it’s only the first bit that’s got to us, then—”
“There may be more to come,” Chard confirmed. “And we have no way of telling whether there will be so much that it screens out sunlight, or enough to heat up the sun so that ice will melt again, or as much as we’ve had already with nothing to follow. Whatever happens, though, the Wego are due for the most appalling trouble. So could we be if the ice melted after forming, all at once. We’d need their help to rescue us if the level of the sea rose. Who knows how much water has already been frozen up? But we keep hearing from the fisherfolk that they have to go further and further every year to cast their nets deep … Oh, every way it makes sense to ally ourselves with the Wego! Whether they agree is another matter. I mean, they may be as ignorant of the effects of a polar melting as most of our own folk are of the effects of freezing! When I climbed the Snowcap Range…”
Embery sighed. Her uncle was about to launch into one of his self-congratulatory reminiscences. There was no hope of hearing more, as yet, about his new theory, so it would be best to distract him.
“Isn’t it time for me to look through the telescope?” she offered.
“Of course! Of course! And I want you particularly to take note of—”
He bustled about, issuing orders to the apprentices, but they were superfluous; all her life, Embery had been accustomed to sighting and using a telescope. She applied her eye.
And tensed. The tropical night had not yet fallen; the sun, behind a patch of western cloud, still turned the sky to blue. In a few moments it would vanish, but for the time being its rays slanted across the ocean.
“That’s not the New Star rising, or the moon either!” she exclaimed.
“Patience, my dear!” said Chard indulgently. “Wait for nightfall. Then, just above the horizon—”
“Not above! On!”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, don’t be so silly! Look, quickly!”
Sliding aside, she almost dragged him into position behind the eyepiece.
After a long pause he said, “My dear, I owe you an apology.”
Upside-down in his field of vision was something like a giant fang, neither white nor blue nor green but a shade between all three.
“I wish them well in the far north,” he muttered. “That’s all I can say.”
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