by Diane Duane
“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, sou
nding 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 …”
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 i
nterweaving 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.
The two teams sprang back in horror as the man crashed to the concrete almost on top of them. He lay there moaning, then grew quiet.
“Well,” Arhu said, his eyes big with surprise and his voice full of badly hidden satisfaction, “you wanted it to fail the same way? There you go.”
Fhrio gave Arhu a look suggesting that he would be seeing him later, outside the line of business.
“He’s got a point, Fhrio,” Rhiow said hurriedly. “You said you wished for an incursion … and a wizard has to watch what he wishes for. The Universe is listening …”
Fhrio gave her an annoyed look, but then almost visibly let the mood go, aware that they had more important issues to deal with. They all bent down together over the sprawled ehhif: Fhrio patted him gently on the face with one paw. There was no response. “Unconscious …”
“Not for long, I think.”
“But, great Queen of us all, where did he spring from?” Fhrio said.
“From his clothes, I’d say not our time, that much is certain,” Rhiow said. “And no time close to it. I’m no expert on ehhif styles, but this looks more like what tom-ehhif wear for formal wear in our time. It used to be everyday clothing once, though, so Urruah told me—”