"Excuse me, Bob," said Gregory Lutenist, "are you leading this discussion or am I?"
Bob waved a hand. "Sorry, Greg. Go ahead." In a near-whisper, "Gordon, it's a cycle. Fusion stops, the sun cools a bit, shrinks a bit, the core gets denser and hotter, fusion starts again, the new warmth inflates the sun. See? Is that a relief, or what?"
"Maunder Minimum!" someone shouted.
Lutenist beamed. "The sun goes through sunspot cycles. Lots of sunspots, it gets warm here. Few sunspots, colder weather. An astronomer named Maunder recorded sunspots and found that the last time there weren't any the planet went through what was known as the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum." He paused dramatically. "And in the 1980s it became certain that the planet was going into a new Maunder Minimum period."
"Yes, yes, we know this," Gordon said. "Sunspots are important to us. But if so important to Earth, why do they not know cold is coming?"
"Bastards did," the man in the bush jacket growled. "But they said Global Warming."
"Grants," Bob said. "There's money in climate studies. All the Ph.D. theses. All that would go if things were so simple--"
A short blond woman, slender by local standards, came in with a large tray. She carried it up to the piano as if thinking to set it down there, looked at the clutter, turned helplessly-- "Ah. You're Gabe?"
He smiled and nodded. She said, "Laurie. Hold this while we get a table." She set the tray across the arms of his wheelchair and was gone.
It was covered with small dishes, each with a couple of slices of vegetables. Cucumber, carrot, a bit of lettuce, some cabbage. A stalk of broccoli. Alex felt his mouth begin to water. Fresh vegetables! Of course the people here would be used to them--
Bob Needleton stopped talking about neutrinos and stared at the tray. He gave a long, low whistle. "Dibs on a carrot stick!"
Gregory Lutenist said, "Broccoli for me. Now. It is important to realize that the sun has always burned hotter or cooler during different eras of our planet's history. Greenhouse or Icehouse."
A fan spoke up. "Carrot for me, too. The dinosaurs lived during a greenhouse era, didn't they?"
A voice spoke from the doorway. "Pros get first choice. This is the Meet the Readers Party, right?"
Lutenist nodded as if there had been no interruption. "Dinosaurs, and the Great Mammals, too. In fact, prior to the Pleistocene the world was quite warm. Hippopotami wallowed in the Thames."
He paused a moment. When he continued, half a dozen voices spoke in unison with him. "Then, in the blink of a geological eye, they were replaced by polar bears."
Lutenist beamed.
Alex looked to Sherrine. "What--"
She laughed. "Some of us have heard Gregory before."
Cucumbers, celery, carrots, luxuries beyond his wildest dreams were cradled in Alex's arms. He couldn't eat; he had to share this with the whole room; and he couldn't get his hands on any of it without dropping the tray. Little dark red spheres, little bright red spheres with white inside, were displayed on big green leaves. Where were they with that damn table?
Badges were showing on various chests. Here were tiny oil paintings of alien creatures and landscapes and starscapes, or wheel-shaped and band-shaped artificial habitats infinitely more sophisticated than Mir and Freedom. A few badges bore angular cartoon faces and elegant calligraphy: CLOSET MUNDANE. KNOWS HARLAN ELLISON (evil smirk. HAS READ MUCH OF DHALGREN (bewilderment).
Lutenist continued. "Human history is so short that, living between the hippopotamus and the polar bear, we thought those conditions were 'normal.'
"After the sun went out, the interglacial ended and the world grew colder and drier. The Saraha rivers dried up, one by one, until only the Nile was left. By 1500 BC, the Scandinavian tree line had dropped to six thousand feet, and broad-leaf trees had disappeared from the Arctic.
"The weather changed. The North African coast was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. It began to dry up. Great migrations began, Huns, Arabs, Navajos, Mongols. There were Viking colonies on Greenland, but the Greenland Glacier began to move south, until it covered them all."
"Tell you another one," the man in the bush jacket said.
"Go ahead, Wade," Lutenist said.
Sherrine looked around. "Wade Curtis. A pro."
"Writer?" Gordon asked. She nodded.
Curtis's voice boomed even in the large room. "In the American Revolutionary War, Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought cannon captured by Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga down to assist General Washington in Haarlem Heights. He brought them across the ice on the frozen Hudson River. By the twentieth century, the Hudson didn't freeze at all, let alone hard enough to carry cannon on!"
Lutenist smiled agreement. "Right! The Little Ice Age was coming to an end! In fact, a warming trend had started around 1200, and lasted for eight centuries. Anyone know why?"
"Hey, let's eat!" someone called.
"Let him finish," Curtis growled. He drained his beer. A bearded man behind him silently handed him another.
Lutenist stabbed a hand into the air. "Why?"
Someone in the audience responded. "Because a farmer doesn't give up his land."
"That's right, Beth. Farmers! Hunters run, which is what our ancestors did during the Thirty-Fifth Ice Age. But the five hundred million settled and civilized humans of the thirteenth century were not going to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. London, Copenhagen, even Moscow were too valuable to abandon. So what did they do?" He used and stared around the audience.
Several responded in unison. "They threw another log on the fire!"
Lutenist beamed. "Exactly! They fought the cold with heat, soot and CO2. Air pollution!"
"Smudge pots," Curtis growled.
Right, Lutenist shouted. "Smudge pots! Greenhouse effect!"
"Pollution, poll-ooo-tion," someone sang.
Everyone shouted. "Jenny! And Harry!"
"The moonbeam's here!"
Alex painfully twisted around to see. The two people who came in through the archway were matched in clothes and height, but in nothing else. The man was enormous, broad of shoulders, large of chest, and much larger of belly. He wore a battered slouch hat, and an oil-stained denim jacket. His boots clumped on the floor. Over one shoulder was slung a huge guitar case. In his hands he carried two nylon bags that clinked as he walked. He set the bags down and opened one, took out a jar, opened it and sipped at the clear liquid. "Finest corn squeezin's Kansas ever produced!" He handed the jar to Curtis.
The woman called Jenny was as tall as Harry, but thin. Her skin might have been leather. Her hair was long and straight, and dead silver-gray. The eyes burned brightly out of the wrinkles. She carried a guitar, but she wasn't playing it. "Don't drink the water, and don't breathe the air!" she sang.
Mike got up from his place on the floor. "We'd given upon you two," he said.
"Bike broke down in Wyoming," Jenny said. "Had to sing for our suppers. Some things you can't sing, though…"
Harry struck a chord. "It's minus ten and counting, and time is passing fast, it's minus ten and counting-"
"O God, don't," Curtis said. The room was still for a moment.
"Yeah," Jenny said. "And you can't sing 'A Fire in the Sky'--"
An older man went over to her and eyed her belligerently. "I know you. Jenny Trout."
"We do NOT use real names," Jenny said.
"You're a goddamned feminist," the man insisted. "What the hell are you doing here--"
He was interrupted by Wade Curtis, who roared with laughter. "Adams, you know Jenny! Sure, the feminists won, they're running the government along with--God almighty. But think about it, she's too damn much anarchist to be inside the government! Any government. Even a Green-Feminist government."