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glass. His breath fogged the glass almost immediately, but through the rents his fingertips had torn in the edge of the world, he saw what he had suspected, what he had hoped, that his search for a past and a future was not confined to the small and tightly bounded universe into which he had been born; that there was a new universe of huge, possibly infinite, extent beyond, in which an infinity of questions might be asked.

Communing With the Rain
    M INIPAIN EDUSERVE C LIMATOS : AN interactive variable response environmental/meteorological educational program for age groups 10–16, conceptual levels 4 through 6 Breeden Compensated Scale, Literacy Ratings 1a to 7b illiterate.
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    CLIMATOS: Hello, I’m CLIMATOS ; your domestic education program has accessed me because you have some queries about the environment. Please key in, or recite, your psychofile code number, name, and caste, so I can help you.
    STUDENT : 103@5/B*4X7/26A26D£19: Lux Jonathon Eternuum, Soulchild of the Chone Michiganseng Chapter of the Sygmati.
    CLIMATOS: Thank you … Lux Jonathon. If you’ll just wait a second while I adjust my program parameters for your caste, illiteracy level, and religious affiliation … there.
    STUDENT : Hold on, I won’t have to read anything, will I? I’m not allowed to look at words, reading’s sinful.
    CLIMATOS: No worries, Lux Jonathon. I’ve taken care of everything. You can trust the MiniPain Eduserve to respect your religious doctrines. So, what is it you want to know?
    STUDENT : Well, what I really want to know is why it rains so much.
    CLIMATOS: That’s a good question, Lux Jonathon. A lot of people ask me that one. Well, as with most things environmental and climatological, the answer’s kind of complicated and has its roots way deep in the past. So, I’d like you to settle back into the Logrus position and open your Third Eye to the Panversal Radiance and we’ll go back together. Back to the world at the time of the Break. Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt you, and I’ll be with you all the time. What I want you to do is imagine the way the world was back then, with big companies and corporations and state monopolies, all fighting each other, tearing the mother earth open to loot her precious treasures so they could make more, sell more, make more, sell more, and so destroy their enemies. Imagine their factories, imagine kilometer after kilometer of great dark machines working away in the darkness, imagine the roaring furnaces, the burning tail-gases flaring into the night, imagine the chimneys billowing smoke. Concentrate on those chimneys, can you see them?
    STUDENT : I can see them.
    CLIMATOS: Now, multiply them a thousand times, a million times, ten million times. Imagine the smoke, pluming up into the sky, a great pall of smoke, so thick it hides the sun.
    STUDENT: Smoke, choking smoke, smothering smoke, smoke, smoke …
    CLIMATOS: And why is there so much smoke? Because in those days people had to burn things to make energy. They burned nonrenewable fuels, like coal, and oil, burned them as if they were going to last forever, which of course they couldn’t, and didn’t. So today we don’t have any coal or oil, Lux Jonathon, and a good thing, too. But we’re getting a little off the subject. As well as smoke, the combustion of these fossil fuels gave off immense amounts of a gas called carbon dioxide. Imagine that, if you can, a dense, invisible blanket spreading over the earth, year by year growing bigger and bigger, and thicker and thicker. Got it in your head?
    STUDENT : Sort of like fog?
    CLIMATOS: That will do, even though, strictly speaking, carbon dioxide gas is invisible. Invisible to your eyes, invisible to the light spectrum that enables you to see. But not so invisible to infrared light, or, to put it another, more familiar way, heat waves, all of which are …
    STUDENT : I know, I know, all facets of the Panversal Radiance Herself.
    CLIMATOS : Precisely, Lux Jonathon. Imagine