Диана Дуэйн - To Visit the Queen

• Название: To Visit the Queen
• Автор: Диана Дуэйн
• Жанр: Фэнтези

---

– and she was through, into what looked like a much older area, a brick-lined hallway on the far side of the door, lit by bare bulbs hanging .from the ceiling, all very much different from the clean shining fluorescent-lit station platform outside.

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, and Urruah came through after her. From the far side of the door, there were a couple of soft bumping noises.

Urruah put his whiskers forward and looked ahead of them at Huff, who had paused to see where they were. "He has a little trouble with this one sometimes," Urruah said. Bump, and Arhu abruptly came blooming through the metal, spitting and growling softly to himself. "Vhai'd stuff, why doesn't it get out of the way when I tell it – "

"Language," Rhiow said, rather hopelessly: but for the moment, Urruah just laughed. "Telling it won't help," he said: "you've got to ask nicely. Most things in the Universe react positively to that. Sass them, and they get stubborn."

Arhu threw Urruah an unconvinced look as he padded by him in Huff's wake. Old wooden doors opened into side rooms off this hallway: storerooms, Rhiow thought – a smell of electrical equipment and tools hung about the place. "There are workshops down here," Huff said: "and there's an access to the tunnel junction where the Tower Hill station's tracks run near the access stairs to the Fenchurch Street railway station. That's where the number-four gate is – "

He led them down one more stairway, a spiral one this time. It let out onto a small, dimly-lit platform which ran for maybe ten yards along a double line of track, the track stretching away into darkness on both sides. Above the platform hung the faintly glimmering oval of an active gate matrix. In front of it sat three People, one of them up on his haunches and working with the gate's control strings: a youngish tabby torn who, except that his tabbying was marmalade rather than silver and gray, would have reminded Rhiow somewhat of Urruah.

One of the other two turned their heads to look at the new arrivals. She was a slender gray shorthair queen, about Rhiow's own size but slimmer, with the most beautiful eyes Rhiow thought she had ever seen: they were a blue as deep as the skies on one of those perfect autumn days you sometimes got in the City, and the set of them was both indolent and kind. As she looked at Huff, the expression got kinder, and Rhiow knew immediately that the two of them were mates. The fourth Person, apparently concentrating on what the young tabby was doing, didn't move.

"Has it failed again?" Huff said, as they walked toward the others.
"It tiling well has not," said the tabby, sounding very annoyed. "But that's what you'd expect, isn't it, since People are coming to look at it?"
Well, so much for any concerns about Arhu's language, Rhiow thought with resignation.
The handsome queen chuckled. "Huff, you weren't really expecting this gate to oblige you, were you? The cranky thing."
"No, I suppose not … Rhiow," Huff said over his shoulder, "come meet Auhlae, my mate."
"You're very welcome," Auhlae said, touching noses delicately with Rhiow, "and well met on the errand. And this is – "
"My older partner Urruah," Rhiow said: "my younger partner Arhu."
Noses were bumped all round: Rhiow was privately amused to note how shyly Arhu did it. He was apparently not immune to physical beauty in a queen. "And this is Fhrio – " Auhlae said.
"Rrrrh," Fhrio said, a sound of general disgust, and dropped back down to all fours again, turning to the others. "Yeah, hunt's luck to you, hello there, well met." He bumped noses peremptorily, then sat down and started in on a serious bout of composure-washing, the action of a Person so annoyed that he didn't trust his reactions with others for the moment.
"And Siffha'h," said Auhlae.
The smallest of the London team got up, turned away from her single– minded concentration on the gate, and looked at Rhiow and the others. This little queen was maybe a couple of months younger than Arhu, Rhiow thought, and like him, was a huw-rhiw, though a paler one: her coat had much more white than black, and two black "eyebrow' marks over her eyes gave her a humorous look. Her eyes were large, golden and thoughtful, and the look she gave Rhiow was surprisingly mature and measuring for someone who still had most of her milk teeth.
"I greet you," Rhiow said, "and hunt's luck to you."
"You too," said Siffha'h, and stepped over to touch noses, first with Rhiow, then with Urruah. Arhu, coming back from nosing Fhrio, met her last: they bumped noses cordially enough, and then, slightly to Rhiow's surprise, Siffha'h repeated the touch. She looked up at Arhu and said, "What's that?"
"Uh, chilli pickle," Arhu said.
"Hhehhh," Siffha'h said scornfully, nose wrinkled and lips pulled back – the feline equivalent of an ehhif of tender years saying Euuuu. She turned away, leaving Arhu looking rather stricken.
"I had wondered," Huff said genially to Arhu. "Remind me to take you along some night when I do Indian."
"Huff has been telling us about your problem," Rhiow said to Auhlae. "I take it there's been no improvement."
Fhrio looked up from his he'ihh. "I've been trying to get it to fail all morning," he said, "and I might as well have saved my time. The logs don't give us enough data about what the strictly physical conditions were doing when the last failures occurred. I'm going to have to sit down with the Whisperer and get Her to make me a list."
"That won't stop the problem, though," Siffha'h said. "You're going to have to shut the gate."
"I would rather not do that," Fhrio said, and began washing furiously again.
Auhlae looked over at Rhiow and Urruah with a sympathetic expression. "Fhrio is our gating specialist," she said softly. "He tends to take these things rather personally."
"I know the feeling," Urruah said. "Well, do you have any specific recommendations for us? Or should we just start running some diagnostics and see if there's any data we can add to what you've got already?"
"The only recommendation we have on which we're all in agreement," said Huff, "is that the gate has to stop functioning as a timeslide: and probably the simplest way to make it do that is to shut it down. But since we don't know how the gate's failing in the first place, we can't guarantee that this will work. It might make our problem worse, by forcing the malfunction to "migrate" to another gate in the cluster … you know how they get "sympathetic" malfunctions, like organs in a body … That would be pretty serious, if it happened. We're having enough trouble with just one of these gates presently out of use for transit: a lot of the Northern European wizards depend on transfers through our cluster for access to the big long-range facilities in Rome and Tokyo. If the difficulty should spread by contagion to one of the others – "
Rhiow nodded. "I see your problem. Well, probably diagnostics are the way to go at the moment. Any help you might want to give us would be welcome: or if you prefer to leave us to get on with it – "
Fhrio looked up from his washing. "No one messes with my gates unless I'm here," he said, and there was a touch of growl in his voice.
"I would hope you'd stay and clue us in on the fine points," Urruah said. "Gates have a lot more personality than a lot of wizards would give them credit for … and no one knows a gate like its own technician."
"You sound just like Fhrio," Siffha'h said, sounding amused. "Are you the best in the business, too?"
Urruah was purring, and trying not to do it too loudly. Rhiow and Auhlae exchanged a look of amusement of their own.
"This is the point at which Urruah makes noises of shy agreement," Rhiow said, "and the safest thing to do under the circumstances is to make him get to work. Huff, we're entirely at your disposal. Tell us where you want us to start."
"The diagnostics sound like a good idea," Huff said, and then yawned, a prodigious yawn that showed every one of his teeth and made Rhiow reassess her idea that Urruah had the biggest ones she'd ever seen. "I'm sorry … it's late for me. Fhrio, if you want to stay with them and keep them from duplicating routines you've already run – "
Fhrio straightened up from his washing again. "Absolutely. Maybe the gate'll surprise us by failing in the middle of something. At this point, I wouldn't care if it did it in mid-transit."
"Oh yes you would," Siffha'h said. "You should try it and see. You want me to stay and put the claw in it for you?"
"Sure. She's our power source," Fhrio said to Rhiow and the others. "The best in the business". "
"This I want to see," Urruah said mildly. Rhiow shot him a sidewise glance, trying to keep it from being too obviously a warning look. True, queens rarely worked as power sources in team spelling, but there was nothing sex-linked about it – it seemed to be a preference grounded in the basic nature of the work, which (Urruah had occasionally admitted to Rhiow) was boring by comparison with building the spells themselves. There was a general tendency among People for the females to show more initiative than the males, and to go out of their way to get their paws on the most interesting work.
"You'll excuse me for a moment, then," Huff said, and headed up the stairs.
Urruah padded over and started examining the gate matrix in detail, with Fhrio looking over his shoulder and making mostly monosyllabic comments. Rhiow watched them, and watched Arhu watching them: being, for the moment, excessively well behaved. It was hard to believe the same youngster had been busy falling down the stairs not twenty minutes ago.
Auhlae came over to sit down beside Rhiow. "When it comes to diagnostics," Auhlae said, sounding weary, "there's no point in me watching what's happening. I spent all yesterday morning at them, with my teeth clenched so full of strings that they buzzed for the rest of the day … " She shook her head.
Rhiow waved her tail in agreement. "I feel a bit like a sixth claw myself, at the moment," she said, and strolled over to the edge of the platform, looking down the tracks into the darkness. From here she could still keep a general eye on what was going on, as Huff headed up the stairs again, and Fhrio turned his attentions back to the gate – Urruah and Arhu looking over his shoulder, and Siffha'h slipping one foreleg shoulder-deep into the gate matrix to hook her claws into the strings and the spell, supplying the power it would need. "Are most of you denned near here?" Rhiow said, noticing the interested looks that Arhu was throwing in Siffha'h's direction, which Siffha'h was ignoring.
"Not all of us," Auhlae said, following Rhiow's glance. She put her whiskers forward in a smile. "But when you're a gating team, there are certain prerequisites … the Whisperer is hardly going to cavil if we need to use the gates to get to work. Anyway, it keeps us alert to their condition: it's hard to miss something wrong with them, when you use them every day."
Rhiow did not say out loud that someone seemed to have missed something about the "number-four' gate, repeatedly, no matter how often it was used. But then, if the failure was happening a fraction of a second here, another fraction there, and nothing was actually passing through the gate, how was anyone going to notice? It would
have taken an obsessively thorough review of the logs to find the occurrences –
Which there should have been. That was something else Rhiow was not going to say out loud. Saash had routinely reviewed the complete logs for each of the Grand Central gates once every week, and Rhiow had gotten used to that kind of thoroughness from her teammates. Still, she thought, different teams, different management techniques … And Huff seemed to run his team more casually than Rhiow did hers. She was in no position to complain: if the Powers that Be didn't care for the way his team was working, Huff would have been relieved long ago.
"I see your point," Rhiow said after a moment, and lifted one paw to lick at it reflectively. "Do you have a long way to come?"
"Not I, thank the Dam," Auhlae said. "Fhrio commutes in from Haling, some miles away – he's with a family pride there, one that lives on gardening land that some ehhif keep, what's called an "allotment". Siffha'h, on the other hand, is local, very local in fact – she was born just across the river, in an outdoor den not far from HMS Belfast, that big ship anchored there. She's nonaligned, and undenned so far. Huff and I aren't so close, but we're nowhere near as far as Fhrio is. Huff has a den with an ehhif who owns a pub in the City and lives in a flat above it: I'm denned just around the corner with a futures trader who works at the Securities Exchange. Huff's ehhif is used to him coming and going as he pleases, and that kind of thing isn't a problem for me either, fortunately. My Rrhalf keeps such weird hours that he hardly notices that I'm there."
Then why on Earth do you stay with him! Rhiow was tempted to ask, and didn't. She couldn't imagine a Person who was also a wizard going through the inconvenience of denning with an ehhif if it wasn't because you liked him or her. "Did you two meet locally, then?" Rhiow said.
"Oh, yes, the usual thing. A friend of his is one of the big hauissh players in the area: we ran into each other during a tournament, got friendly. Then I went into heat, and … " She waved her tail, a graceful and amused gesture.
"Kittens?"
"Oh, plenty. My ehhif is very good about finding them good places to live: otherwise I wouldn't let the heat happen."
That brought Rhiow's ears forward. "I used to wonder how a wizard managed when she was in heat," she said. "I never had the chance, myself: my ehhif took me and had me unqueened before I started."
"Oh, how terrible for you!' Auhlae said.
"Oh, no, it wasn't that bad … Afterwards I tended to see it as an advantage. No interruptions … no toms fighting over me. It looked like a release."
Auhlae was silent for a moment, and started to wash one ear. "Well," she said, "I suppose I can see your point of view. But truly, I haven't found it to be all that much of a problem. You can always use wizardry to adjust your own hormones a little, and delay the onset. But of course it's not too good to do much of that kind of thing … Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be necessary very often. Only very rarely have I had to be on call while I was in heat … and never while I was kittening. The Whisperer seems to keep track of such things." Auhlae put her whiskers forward, a demure smile with a
slightly wicked edge to it. "I suppose we should be grateful that it's the Queen running the Universe, and not the Tom: who knows if we'd ever get any rest?"
Rhiow chuckled. "I think you're right there … in all possible senses of the word."
"But anyway," Auhlae said, "Huff and I usually come down in the early evenings and troubleshoot the gates. There's always trouble," she said, sounding very resigned. "You know how even inanimate objects can start betraying evidence of personalities, over time – "
"Oh, yes," Rhiow said.
"Well, the gates have been here a lot longer than we have … and believe me, they have personalities. Mostly annoyed and suspicious ones. I think it may have had to do with their 'upbringing', their history. Populations would rise here and then be swept away without warning … and to a certain extent, the gate "learns" to adapt to the pressure of the population around it. Take that population away suddenly, and it must be like suddenly being thrown off something that you've always slept on safely before. The shock makes you stop trusting … you don't know whether things will be the same from one day to the next. So the gates act fairly "calmly" for a period of time – a week, a month – and then – pfft! Auhlae made a soft spitting hiss of the kind that an annoyed Person would use to warn another away. "It can take endless time to calm them down. Do you have the same problem?"
Rhiow flicked her tail "no". "Oh, they're alive enough, all right," she said. "Aaurh Herself made them, after all: I'm not sure anything with that level of wizardry incorporated into it could avoid being alive, to some degree. But fortunately New York grew very steadily, and our gates behave themselves … Except when they don't," she added, wry. "Often enough … "
Auhlae purred in amusement. "You must run into the personality problem with other things, though. You sounded pretty definite
"Well, it crops up from time to time … " And glancing over at Arhu again (who was still gazing thoughtfully at Siffha'h, apparently without effect) and at Urruah and Fhrio (now leaning right into the gate's matrix structure again, with their heads bent close together and almost invisible among the tangle of strings), Rhiow began to tell Auhlae about the diesel locomotives that ran the trains in and out of Grand Central. Theoretically they should have been just great complex hunks of metal and wiring. But they were not, as the ehhif who drove them and took care of them loudly attested. The engines had noticeable personalities which manifested in the ways they worked (or didn't): some good-natured and easy-going, some spiteful and annoying, some lazy, some overtly hostile. Rhiow had wondered whether she and the engineers and mechanics were all projecting the traits of life onto dead things for which, admittedly, they all felt affection. But finally she had realized that that wasn't it. She started wondering whether this acquisition of personality might be caused by something specific about the way the locomotives' complicated shapes and structures affected the local shape of spacetime – the way the atomic and molecular structure of water, for example, manifested itself as wetness. The Whisperer had no answers for her, or none that made sense: and when Rhiow had taken the problem casually to the ehhif Advisory wizards for New York, Tom and Carl, they had shaken their heads and confessed an ignorance on which even their wizards' Manuals could not shed light. Finally Rhiow had simply given up and started talking to the locomotives in the course of her rounds,
despite being unable to tell whether it was making any difference. But certainly something with a personality, no matter how undeveloped, deserves to be talked to as if it exists …
Auhlae looked bemused at that, for a moment. "Now there's something I hadn't given much thought to," she said. "The Underground trains … you get a faint sense of personality off them, but nothing like that. Or is it just because I haven't been looking … ?"
"Hard to say," Rhiow said. "But beware. Do you really need another area of interest? The one we share is trouble enough … "
Auhlae laughed softly. "Tell me about it," she said, as Huff came back down the stairs again.
He came padding toward them. "Problems, hrr't?" she said.
"Oh, I wanted a look at number three," Huff said, "since this one's being worked on." He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. "You know how they tend to interfere with each other –­their catenary links are close together in the power-feed "bundle" from their linkage to your gates – " he waved his tail at Rhiow –­"and to the Downside." He paused a moment, then said, "Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right at the roots of things?"
"We were there," Rhiow said, "but it's not a memory I'd call up willingly just now. For one thing, we lost a partner of my age there: if we had her here now, I'd bet we'd have solved your problem already. As it is, we're all learning new jobs, and everything is so confused … "
"I'm sorry for your trouble," said Huff: and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.
"Oh, it wasn't all sad," Rhiow said: "not at all. A great many things changed for the better; and the Downside has new guardians … "
"The great cats live there," Auhlae said, "don't they? … our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People … "
"Yes," Rhiow said, "and nothing will remove them from where they have been since the Beginning. But there are two Peoples there now." Maybe this was not the time to start that particular story: but the facts still made Rhiow wake up in the middle of the night, wondering. For all the years there had been dry-land creatures in this world, cat and serpent had expressed in a specific symbolism the two sides of an ancient enmity: creatures of the sun and light against creatures of earth and the dark beneath the earth, warm blood against cold blood, the Powers that Be against the Lone Power that went rogue, both sides battling for the world. But suddenly Rhiow found herself running across new concepts, in which at least some of the great saurians were warm-blooded, and images in which serpent was born of cat (despite the older mythologies which suggested that cat had been born of serpent) – all too predictable a development, since Arhu had become "father" to the Father of the new serpent-kind, the great saurians who had become the new guardians of the Old Downside.
Of course the Universe was full of these jokes and ironies, mostly born of the misapprehension, native to beings living serially in time, that time itself was serial. Naturally, it was not. Time was at least Riemannian, and tended to run both in circles and cycles: outward – reaching spirals which repeated previous tendencies and archetypes reminiscent of earlier ones, but the repetitions came in "bigger' forms, and with unexpected ramifications. Now time bit its own tail one more time, and in the process of that biting pulled off the old skin, revealing the new shiny skin and the bigger body underneath: more beautifully scaled and intricately patterned, more muscular, and, as usual, harder to understand. Rhiow had seen these hints before the last months' troubles began, but hadn't been able to make much of them at the time. Now, with the events and the history behind her, the myth was easier to understand. But it still made her blink, sometimes, and wonder what happened to the good old days, when things were simpler: when cats were cats, and snakes were snakes, and never the twain would meet …
Of course, for most cats, they never would. But as a wizard, Rhiow came of a bigger worldview, one which held that cats were equal, under the One, to any other sentient species – say, whales, or humans, or some dogs or birds of prey, or various other creatures intelligent enough to have emotional lives and to understand the existence of a world outside their own selves. Most People would have trouble with the idea that ehhif were equal to them. And dogs? Birds? They would hiss with indignation at the very idea. Rhiow knew better … but was glad she did not often have to indulge in explanations to her less tolerant kindred.
"It's been a very strange time," Rhiow said at last, "and I look forward to telling you about it in detail: for, truly, there are parts of it I don't understand myself. Ruah … any news?"
Urruah had strolled over to where they sat, and now threw a look over his shoulder at the gate. "I really hate to admit it," he said, "but at first glance, I'm stumped. Rhi, Huff, I'll want to examine the logs in detail, of course – ' He looked over his shoulder at Fhrio for approval: Fhrio waved his tail in a "don't-care" way. "Good. I'll do that later this evening. I need a break."
Urruah did sound tired, but that was no surprise: even though the gates had their diagnostic procedures built in, there were other more sophisticated ones that Rhiow's team routinely used to make sure that a given gate's own diagnostics were "honest". It had always seemed a wise precaution to Rhiow, since a deranged gate might conceivably lose the ability to diagnose itself correctly.
"You'll want to sort your schedule out with Fhrio, perhaps," Huff said.
"Yes," said Urruah, "I'll do that." He headed back over to the gate, where Fhrio and Siffha'h were withdrawing themselves from the gate matrix and letting the strings snap back into place.
Huff sighed. "We'll leave it shut down for another day," he said, "and come and tackle it afresh tomorrow. Rhiow, I think we've made a good start."
"I hope so too," she said. "I have a feeling that this won't be one of those quickly solved problems, but we won't be out of your fur until it's handled."
"Then we'll see Urruah later this evening," said Auhlae: "and you tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow let it be," Rhiow said, and bumped noses with their hosts … though she threw a look over her shoulder first. Urruah and Fhrio had their heads together again: but Arhu was looking in one direction, and Siffha'h in another, as if they were on opposite sides of the same planet.
Rhiow smiled slightly. "Dai stiho," she said, the non-species– specific greeting– and parting-words of one wizard to another: go well. "Come on, Arhu, Ruah," she said, getting up, "let's call it a day … "
"Very nice People," Urruah said, as they came out on the Grand Central side of their own gate. "Competent."
That assessment surprised Rhiow slightly. "You're satisfied with their inspection routines?" she said.
"They're much like what I'd be doing if I were stuck with their gate complex," Urruah said. "I mean, Rhi, look at their transit figures. Three or maybe four times the number of wizards and unaffiliated outworlders use their gates every day as use ours, or the ones at Perm. London is a major on-planet transit center for western Europe, and if you tried to read all the gate logs here once a week, the way Saash did for ours, you'd never have time to do anything else … such as fix the gates when they broke. I'm going to take some time to read those logs in more detail, as I said. But I don't know what I'm looking for as yet, and I'm hoping the tracers we've left in place will pick something up to give me a hint. Without a specific event track to follow, a signature attached to the kind of access we're looking for, we're walking in the dark without whiskers."
Rhiow waved her tail slowly in agreement. "All right," she said.
"But one thing, Rhi … and this may be more important, even, than the problem with the gate itself. Remember when Huff was telling us about the 'single' egresses?"
"Uh, yes – " She paused. "He was telling us that people were going one way, not 'round trip'."
"That's right. Rhi, do you realize how big a problem that is? Times can get imbalanced, just as spaces can: the 'pressure' of times against one another has to be kept equal. Those people from other times have to be recovered and put back where they belong, or the gates will become more unstable than they are already. Not just Huff's gates: all the gates."
"Ours too," Rhiow said under her breath.
"Ours would take longest to imbalance," Urruah said. They're 'senior', and their connection to the Old Downside and the power sources there is direct: that lends them some immunity. But, inevitably, the imbalance will spread. Gating around the planet will start failing without warning and without reason. The rapid-transit system that wizards use so as not to have to waste their powers on minor business like travel spells will go down. The Universe will start dying faster … I just thought I'd mention it."
"Thank you," Rhiow said, and her stomach turned over inside her. "What's your estimate of the time when these imbalances will begin to affect other gates?"
"If there have been only a few imbalanced egresses," Urruah said, "it would take some weeks. If there have been, say, as many as ten or more, I would expect them within ten to fourteen days. Twenty or so – well, we would already be seeing random failures. So it's not that bad. But we have to help the London team track down the ehhif from backtime and restore them to their proper periods."
"And how much diagnosis is that going to take?"
"A fair amount, the longer the ehhif have been loose in a non-native time. There's a temporal signature you can search for, like a target scent, in someone out of their proper time … but first you need to know exactly which time they're native to, and the longer they're in a non-native period, the less detectable it is. A fresh ingress through the malfunctioning gate would be the best thing we could hope for. All ingresses through a given gate would have a similar 'signature', like DNA from different members of the same family, and others could be tracked using it."
Oh gods, Rhiow thought: and I thought things were going fairly well … "All right," she said: "we'll take it up with Huff tomorrow. – Arhu? You?"
"Huh?" He was walking along in an unusual state of self-absorption. "Me what?"
"What do you think of the London team," Rhiow said, "and their gates?" It wasn't as if he was likely to have a terribly sophisticated assessment at this point, but Rhiow was always careful to make sure everyone had their say after coming back from an "outcall" job.
"Huff and Auhlae are nice," Arhu said, still looking somewhat distracted. "Fhrio's a snot: he thinks he knows everything." And there Arhu fell silent.
Aha, Urruah said privately to Rhiow.
She was inclined to agree. "And Siffha'h?" Rhiow said.
There was a long pause. "I think maybe she doesn't like me," Arhu said, "and I don't know why."
"Well," Rhiow said, "it's early to tell that, yet. You can't have exchanged more than ten words the whole time we were there."
"I know," Arhu said, dejected. That's the trouble … "
"Give it time," Urruah said. "It'll come right in the end. You can't rush the queens, Arhu, especially the young ones: they have their whole lives ahead of them, maybe as many as nine of them, and they don't impress easily. Take your time, talk to them … "
"That's just the problem. She won't talk to me."
"So let actions say what words won't. She probably hears all kinds of bragging these days, if she's just coming into her day … isn't she?"
Arhu looked up at Urruah with a kind of heartsick hope that made Rhiow's heart turn over at the sight of it. "I think so," Arhu said. "That's how it smells … "
Rhiow turned her attention away from the conversation and let the toms gain some walking-space in front of her. It was at times like this that she missed Saash most … her slightly sardonic turn of phrase that could make anything, even something as serious as non– round-trip time travel, seem less crucial until you were actually able to get around to handling it. But Saash was out on the One's errantry now: Rhiow would just have to manage without her, and hold her own against the boys as well as she could. Fortunately, she said to the Whisperer with a pride-queen's arrogance, it isn't hard …
From the depths of reality came the feeling of divine whiskers being put forward, and the sound of tolerant laughter.
The whole team made the commute to London the next morning to check the diagnostics and the logs, and found nothing: and they did so the next morning, and the morning after that … with no sign of any unusual ingresses or egresses at all. On the fourth day of this, Rhiow began to wonder whether the Powers had sent her team on one of those useful but temper-fraying jobs which her old mentor and teacher Ffairh would have described as "trying to herd mice at a crossroads": a lot of trouble to very little effect for a long, long time … until you lost patience and started eating the mice, which might be what the Powers had in mind in the first place. Urruah was beginning to feel the strain, and was getting short with everybody, especially Arhu. Arhu, for his own part, was getting bored.
"He won't let me do anything," he said to Rhiow one morning as they went in to work together.
"That's possibly because he's not sure of your level of mastery as such," Rhiow said, "and possibly because it's other People's gates we're working with, not our own. No, Arhu, listen: don't look that way. If you want to get a job done – that being the whole reason we have to keep going to London – sometimes you have to do it a little more slowly, a little more cautiously, than you otherwise would. At home, with our own gates, it's usually no big deal. If one of us makes a mistake, she gets her head smacked, we clean up the mess, and the matter stays in the family. But when you're dealing with other People's territory, things slow down. And this is their territory … be sure of that."
"I thought you told me 'we are guardians and nothing more'," Arhu said with some annoyance.
"That's as true of the London team as it is of us. But it's Her business to tell them that, not ours."
They paused in front of the number-three gate, which was anchored over by the Waldorf Yard again because of track maintenance going on near its usual location. "Territory," Rhiow said, "it's a problem …
"Yeah. Oh, Urruah said he might be late this morning. Something about the dumpster."
"I wish he'd tell me these things," Rhiow said, and sat down in front of the gate. "How late did he think?"
"He didn't say."
She waved her tail, resigned. Toms … "You'd better take care of the gating, then," she said. "They're going to be wondering where we are."
"Probably not," Arhu said, sitting up and slipping his forepaws into the control weave. "I don't think Fhrio cares one way or the other."
"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure," Rhiow said. "He's likely enough to care … but not to show it … "
Arhu was busy with the weave, pulling strings out and hooking them under and through one another with his claws. He was getting quick at this work, whatever Urruah might think: after a few days' practice
with the London configuration, the pattern had become second nature to him. Or else the gate itself was beginning to answer his requirements, falling into "heart-configuration" with Arhu – a development very much to be hoped for. It was the kind of sympathy, not quite a symbiosis, which Saash had had with the Grand Central gates: a sort of mutual understanding of what needed to be done, based to be sure on a sound theoretical knowledge, but on something much more in execution. It was as if the gates had liked Saash, and wanted to cooperate with her because she liked them. If Arhu was acquiring that kind of almost-affection, Rhiow thought, there would be little limit to what he could do as a gate technician later in life, or in other lives to come, if the wizardry followed him.
And we could use someone with that kind of basic affinity, she thought. For all my theoretical work, I don't have it: and for all Urruah's, he's more an engineer than a technician. Probably it comes of being a power source: of seeing the gate as something to be done to, rather than someone to be done with …
Arhu stopped. "Does that look right?" he said suddenly, sounding rather confused.
Rhiow looked over the gate-weft. The colors were running correctly, the hyperstrings all seemed to be making the correct "itch" in the air, the resonances of sound and texture were all in place. "It looks fine – "
"It doesn't feel fine. It feels like something's come unsnagged."
Arhu was blinking, looking a little vague. Rhiow had learned to recognize that particular danger sign. "Now," Rhiow said, "or later?"
"I think – ' Arhu's eyes narrowed, a look of abrupt and uncomfortable concentration. This was always the most difficult part of the work for a visionary, the matter of learning to "ride" the vision rather than simply being ridden by it: though the question of which was finally master, the seer or the seen, was always one which caused most seers a certain amount of unease over their careers. "I think later. But not much later. Short term … "
Oh wonderful, Rhiow thought. "Today? Tomorrow?"
"What am I, some ehhif weather forecaster?" Arhu said, still squinting, with his paws all tangled up with hyperstrings. "Do you want percentages of probability too?"
"Whatever you can come up with," Rhiow said. "And whatever idiom works for you. I'm not picky."
"I can see the sun," Arhu said after a moment, "but I'm not sure which one it is, which day. Just a sense of things … unraveling. Something unsnags, and then everything sorts itself out. Though it smells really bad at first – "
He blinked again, shook his ears until they rattled, and looked at Rhiow. "Gone. I hate it when it does that!"
"Calm down, Arhu, take it easy, don't let the strings go – "
"I wasn't going to, do you think I want the whole place to jump off into space … ?" But his ears were flat back, and he hissed softly. "Rhiow," Arhu said, sitting up still with that unkittenish perfect balance of his, "I can hear Her. I can see what She sees … just for a second. Everything together: images, thoughts in minds, lots of
minds all together, a hundred paws' worth of places all at once … But all broken, like light in water when the wind blows. My brains won't hold a whisker's worth of it … and then it's gone. What's the use, this becoming one of the Powers, but not enough of one to be any good to anybody, or for long enough to figure it out, long enough to make a difference – !"
Rhiow sighed and paced over to him, balanced on her hindquarters just long enough to bump her head against his. "You know it's going to be hard at first," she said, settling down again. "It's going to take so much practice, and it's going to be hard for a long time yet. The seer's talent is one of the worst ones in its way … tough to manage. But if you can stay with it … "
"Do I have a choice?" Arhu said, and the edge of bitterness and sadness was impossible to miss. "If I don't learn it, I'll lose it
к
He sat back on his haunches then and said, "Never mind. At least I can still gate."
He gave one sidewise glance at Rhiow, and gave the strings a quick pull.
The other side of the gate flickered abruptly into black night over a white land – pale silver-and-white dust and stone with every stone's shadow laid out long and black and razorlike behind it. Over everything hung a shape that burned at first so blue that the eye refused it: then you saw the white swirls, and the shades of green and haze-brown, but the main color was blue, shining down pale on that white desolation, and Rhiow's abrupt first thought was of the shade of Auhlae's eyes.
She gave Arhu a look. "Very cute," she said. "If you're demonstrating that you've learned to keep a gate patent when there's vacuum on the other side, I take your point. Otherwise … you know what I told you."
"And what Urruah keeps telling me," Arhu says. "Yeah, I know … "
Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again, remembering what Urruah had said about Arhu's early morning gate work the other day. And slowly she put her whiskers forward. If he was going to go, she thought, how would we stop him? And: Not so long ago, this was the kitling we were worried wasn't doing enough wizardry. He's finding his way. Let him be …
"We've no business there today," Rhiow said, working to sound lazy about it. "Maybe later this week, we'll go. I'll see you off, in fact, if you'd rather do it on your own. Meanwhile, let's get going: they'll be waiting for us. Urruah will catch up."
The look Arhu threw her was a little odd: but very featly he flipped his paws and changed the configuration of the strings again, and the view through the gate shifted to that of darkness again, but this time it was the unstarred darkness of the Underground tunnels near Tower Bridge.
"I'll let it snap back into its default settings afterwards," Arhu said. "Urruah'll be able to pull this setting out of memory and alter it for changed time with no problem."
"Right," Rhiow said, and stepped through: Arhu followed her.
They made their way over to the platform where the malfunctioning London gate hung, shimmering dully in a non-patient configuration. Only Fhrio was with it at the moment, sitting by it and yawning.
"Luck, Fhrio," Rhiow said. "Have you been waiting long?"
"Half the night, but don't let that bother you," the orange tabby said, and tucked himself down into what Rhiow's ehhif called the "meat loaf shape.
Rhiow threw an amused glance at Arhu, who was looking off into the darkness to avoid having Fhrio see him rolling his eyes. She felt a little sorry for him on his first outcall, having half the team they were working with turn out to be such difficult cases: but this kind of thing happened occasionally. She still thought often of one of the Brasilia team who, though a wizard of tremendous talent, was also so scarred by some old trauma that he would jump up in the air hissing any time you spoke to him before he could see you, and would come down with claws out and fur standing on end, ready to murder anyone who was standing too close. Working with him had driven her nearly insane, and as for Urruah, it had been all Rhiow could do to keep him from walking off that job every day, at the occurrence of the first jump-and-hiss. At least Fhrio wasn't quite so unnerving to work with, but Rhiow was increasingly wondering what his problem was, or, if there was no problem, why he was this way all the time.
"No incursions, I take it," Rhiow said, sitting down in front of the gate and eyeing it thoughtfully.
"Nothing," Fhrio said. "I almost wish for one: at least it would make sitting here a little less boring."
She twitched her tail in agreement. "Have Auhlae or Huff been along yet today?"
"Auhlae's home with her ehhif," Fhrio said. "He's sick or something. Huff was here earlier and then went off." Fhrio yawned. "I think probably to take a nap: he was up watching the gate all night."
Arhu was standing behind Rhiow now, looking over her shoulder at the shimmer of light in the gate-web. She wasn't sure how much he was able to make out of its function as yet just from the configuration of the light-patterns and the juxtaposition of the various braids and bundles of hyperstrings. Reading a gate that way took time to learn.
"It's changed since yesterday," Arhu said.
"Of course it's changed," Fhrio said, and yawned again. "The Earth's not where it was yesterday, is it? Basic changes in spacetime coordinates show in the web as a matter of course – "
"I don't mean that. I mean the sideslip and tesseral string bundles in the control weft have changed position slightly. And one of the sideslip sub-arrays has a string loose."
"What?" Fhrio sat up, looked at the part of the gate-web that Arhu was staring at. "Where are you – oh. No, that's all right, this gate does that sometimes. It's a locational thing – I think it has to do with the gravitational anomaly in the substrate under the Hill. The loose ends always weave themselves back in after a few minutes: this isn't a static construct, after all, it 'breathes' a little."
"I know, our gates do that too. But look at the way the sideslip bundle is interweaving with the hyperextensor braid – "
Fhrio was beginning to look confused. "Yes, as I say, it does that. I don't see what the – "
"Well, look," Arhu said, padding forward, and Rhiow gave him a Now– you-be-careful look, which he ignored. "See the way this is hanging out – shouldn't it be tucked in? I mean, it has no anchor. If you just – "
"No, don't pull that!"
It was too late. Arhu had already snagged a claw around the string in question, and pulled.
The gate shimmered: a brief storm of many-colored light ran down it

– and someone stumbled out of it. An ehhif.