by Diane Duane
The long black equipage winds away toward London through the brassy sunset light. The raven flashes overhead, passing them, dodging through cloud again, coming out over the City, and veering close to a shopfront in a street that is almost empty. This, in its way, shocks Rhiow more badly than anything else she has seen. She is a city Person: she is used to streets that always have someone walking or driving on them, no matter what time of day or night it is. But this place looks like it has died, or like the heart has been torn out of it. Few ehhif are abroad, and almost all of them are dressed in black or have black armbands, even black rags, tied about their arms. All their faces are grim: many are tearstained.
The raven perches for a moment on a folding board which is set up outside the shopfront. The shop itself is dark and its door is shut. But outside, the piece of paper pasted to the board says, in large black letters, HER MAJESTY’S FUNERAL. It is the front page of The Times of London, and it has no other words on it except the newspaper’s masthead, and the date: JULY 14, 1874.
The raven takes wing again before anyone should see it; vaults up into the safety of the silvery twilight again. That is the core which you sought, Odin says. We have just time to see the beginning, and the end.
The tense changed once more: now became then again, at least while Odin and Arhu were in transit. They saw more, much more, as the raven flashed in and out through the cloud that always seemed about to break into day. Rhiow could not make sense of most of what she was sensing, and hoped Arhu would be able to do better, or that perhaps the raven Odin could: for occasionally, like a sudden ray of light through the cloud, there would come an image so overladen with context that it was as if a thousand ehhif stood around her, every one of them shouting some piece of information that it was important for her to hear. A group of ehhif, ranged in a big room, facing each other in rows: and all shouting at one another, a terrible noise of rage and confusion, while one ehhif at the front of one group, in the bottom row of the benches, cried out, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay—!” and all the others shouted him down in a crescendo of fury, as another one leapt up and shouted, “Mr. Speaker, they say the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. I can do the same: and I say, ‘They have sown the storm, and they shall reap the whirlwind—!’ ” A roar of approval—and from that, abruptly, to a white-walled room where a broad, squat machine of some kind was being built by ehhif wearing protective suits. Then a bright, blue-skied day, and a missile or rocket leaping up on a tongue of fire from a launch pad bizarrely adorned in the curlicues of the Victorian decorative style. Then a huge aircraft passing over a city landscape, so big that it shadowed the ground, and ehhif looked up and pointed. Then—
—the images were gone again. The twilight returned … and went sinister. It was not silvery any more: it was leaden. The sun could not come through it. Arhu and Odin spun up together on raven’s wings, catching an updraft, or what passed for one in vision. This was no normal wind: the air was too thin for wind as high as they were going, as the Earth yielded up her curvature below them. Far down, away in the blue sea, Arhu could see the plume of darkness wafting up from one small point. A volcano, a mother of volcanoes, belching out great clouds of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere: a thin line which became a plume, a plume which became a pall, thin and dark and gloomy, right around the globe of the world. What was bright, and normally gleamed like polished metal where the Sun touched it, now was dull and tarnished: and clouds that should have burned white, were all filmed gray. 1816, said Odin’s voice, dry, noticing rather than reacting. He had seen it before: he had seen all this before. The difference, he said, is that I never had to look. Looking is what makes the difference, in vision. Looking makes it so…
They dived again, were briefly lost in the silvery twilight, the billow of possibility. When they came out, they looked down into a muddy street and saw a young dark-complexioned man in casual clothing of the late twentieth century come lurching out of the middle of the air, carrying something heavy in a bag. He came staggering through the darkness, out into the street: another ehhif came along and frightened him. He dropped the bag, turned and fled once more into the darkness. A few moments later, other ehhif came along and picked up the bag, peeled it away from what it contained. A book, a very large book. The ehhif stared at the cover. Another one took the book from the one who held it: opened it, turned the pages, looking at the equations and the delicately drawn diagrams, and the dense small print.
One of them glanced up into the cloudy sky, with that thin layer of darkness streaming along above everything, as a brief welcome ray of sun shot down through the dull day. The light fell on the book. Arhu looked at the silver ehhif letters on the book’s cover. It said Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia.
Arhu looked down at the ehhif and heard, very softly, all about them, the laughter: the quiet amusement of Something which had given the world, just now, a brief foretaste of what was waiting for it later, in far greater intensity, when the seed it had just planted finally came to fruit. This darkness would fall again, but many times magnified: this cold would come … but would be permanent. By the time it passed, and the planet warmed again, all its intelligent life would be long dead.
Arhu had heard that laughter before. Once upon a time, when he was a kitten, he had found himself in a garbage bag in the East River, one which slowly filled with water, while he and his brothers and sisters clawed and scrabbled desperately on top of each other, trying to stay above the terrible cold stuff that was slowly climbing high enough around them that they would have no choice but to breathe it, and die. Only Arhu lived, saved by chance—some ehhif coming along and seeing the sinking bag in the water, and hearing the last faint cries of despair from inside, had fished it out, torn it open, and dumped the sodden bodies of the kittens out onto the bike path. All the while he had been in that bag, and even afterwards, all the while the ehhif warmed him in his coat while taking the last small survivor to the local animal shelter, Arhu had sensed that laughter all around him. It was Entropy in Its personified form, the One Who invented death, sa’Rrahh as the People knew Her, the disaffected and ambivalent Power which wizards called “Lone”: and It had laughed at the prospect of his one small death as It was now laughing at this far greater one. The fury Arhu had felt when first he recognized that laughter’s source, he felt now, and it roared up in him like the voice of one of the Old Cats from the Downside, a blast of pure rage that sent Odin tumbling through the silvery twilight as if blown off course by a gust of wind.
They were not off course, though. They came out of the twilight more quickly than even Odin had expected, so that for a moment he almost lost control, dropping some hundreds of feet before he could get his wings under him again. As they tumbled, Arhu had a brief confusion of which way was up and which was down. They were high above the Earth again, but as they tumbled the lights blurred, and there seemed to be stars in the dark side of the Earth as well as in the sky—
Odin fought for stability, found it. Arhu looked down, through the raven’s Eye, and saw that there were lights on the dark side of the Earth, indeed, but they were not stars.
Europe was in shadow. London was dark. But on the Continent, from north to south, eye-hurtingly bright lights had broken out, a rash of points of fire. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, every one was a point of light. Others blossomed as Arhu watched—Hanover, Lyon, Geneva, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and many more: seeds of fire growing, paling, each one with its tiny pale growth above it. Arhu did not need to dive any closer to see the mushroom clouds. The seeds were planted. It would be no spring that came with their growth, but a winter that would last an age…
Arhu closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them again, he was crouched down on the ground, on the green grass near the bush in the Ravens’ Enclosure, and beside him, Odin was standing up and shaking his feathers into place. Hardy was sitting down on the nearby tree, now, near Hugin.
“The beginning and the end,�
�� Arhu breathed, and had to stop and try to catch his breath, for he was finding it hard just to be here and now again.
“It will pass,” said Hardy. “Meanwhile, be assured: you did a good job. You see strangely, but your way might be something that we could learn in time, if you could teach us.”
“Me teach you?” Arhu said, and gulped for air again. “Uh—I’ll have to ask.”
“Ask Her by all means,” said Hardy. “In the meantime, I see the nature of your problem. She was the core of that whole time, the old Queen, Victoria: the events of that whole period crystallized out around her personality, and the qualities which her people projected onto her. Any universe in which she was successfully assassinated would be a threat to all the others anywhere near it in its probability sheaf. And I would suggest to you,” Hardy said, bending down a little closer to Arhu, “that if the Lone One wished to make doubly sure of your universe’s demise, that it would see to it that she died in your universe as well.”
Arhu stared at him. “By making the ehhif here assassinate this Queen Victoria?”
“Indeed. It might well happen anyway, for as the two universes begin the process of exchanging energy and achieving homeostasis, that ‘core event’ will be one of the first things that will try to happen in your universe.” Hardy blinked and looked thoughtful. “If I were in your position, I would be sure that this world’s Victoria is protected from the fate you have seen befall her counterpart. Otherwise, with two universes with dead Queens, the alternate universe will gain a great entropy advantage over the other. Should both Queens die, I doubt very much whether this world would long survive …”
“Oh, great, another problem,” Arhu said, rather bitterly. “And how can you be so calm about it?”
“Well, for one thing, it has already happened,” said Hardy mildly. “For another thing, you are the ones who will cause it not to happen … if indeed you do. How should I not be calm, when I know I am giving my advice to the right person?”
Arhu blinked and turned to Odin. “Can you translate that for me?” he said, rather helplessly.
Odin blinked too. “It made perfect sense to me,” he said. “Which part of it specifically did you need translated?”
Arhu hissed softly. “Never mind.”
“When I say ‘it has already happened’,” Hardy said, “I speak of the entire chain of events from first to last: from your arrival here to work on the gates, to your final departure. Not that I know the details of that: you will soon know them better than we ever could. But I think that, in this timeline, this universe, Queen Victoria has ‘not yet’ been assassinated. I would suspect that fact of being what has so far kept this timeline in place, and as yet largely undamaged … and it may also be that the difficulty you were experiencing with the oscillation of the far end of your colleague’s timeslide also has to do with the unusual stability, under the circumstances, of this one. You must complete whatever consultations you have planned with speed. And at all times, the Queens must be your great care. Whatever happens, protect them.”
Arhu waved his tail in agreement, and stood up. He was surprisingly wobbly on his feet. “Look … I want to thank you. I’ve got to get back to the others and tell them about this: as much as I can, anyway.”
“Do so. Go well, young wizard: and come back again.”
“He will anyway,” Odin said, and poked Arhu in a friendly way with his beak, at the back of his neck.
Arhu took a swipe at him, with the claws out, and missed on purpose. It seemed wise. He liked Odin: and anyway, that beak was awfully big. “Dai,” he said. “Later—”
He headed off out the gateway under the Bloody Tower with as much dignity as he could muster, while desperately wanting to fall down somewhere and go straight to sleep: and as he went out, all the stones around him were quiet … for the moment.
Rhiow opened her eyes and looked at Arhu. He had fallen asleep. With some slight difficulty, for she was stiff, she got up and stretched, and then went over to Urruah.
“We’d better call the others in,” she said. “The problem’s gotten much worse …”
FIVE
The whole group met again late that night in the Mint. Urruah was the last to arrive: he had been doing work on the timeslide until the last minute, having taken a while to look at Arhu’s “record’ in the Whispering of his flight with Odin. All the others, one by one, took time to do the same, and also to look at Rhiow’s discussion with Hhumh’hri: and then, predictably, the argument began.
Fhrio, in particular, was skeptical about the ravens’ suggestion regarding the version of Queen Victoria in their home timeline. “It’s just more work for nothing,” he said. “If she’s the only thing keeping this timeline in place—and the two are congruent, mostly, in terms of timeflow—then why hasn’t she been assassinated already?”
Urruah’s tail was lashing already. “Because someone’s prevented it already,” he said, politely enough. “Probably us, or someone working with us. Either the timelines have been taken out of congruence somehow—difficult—or the attempt on the Queen’s life has already failed. Again, probably because of us. We’re going to have to consider timesliding someone back far enough to guard her—and then block any further slides to positions before our guard is in place, so that we can deal with the assassination attempt proper.”
Fhrio spat. “It’s a waste of time. One, I doubt the Powers will let us. There’s too much temporal gating going on at the moment anyway. Too many ways to screw up past timelines. And secondly, it makes a lot more sense to concentrate on the Victoria who’s in the ‘nuclear’ timeline. It’s that universe that’s the real threat, anyway.”
“I don’t know,” Auhlae said. “I think Hardy might have had a point. If we—”
“Are you crazy?” Fhrio said. “We’ve got enough trouble already. Let’s concentrate on one thing at a time.”
“We may not be able to,” Auhlae said. “We still have to find all the ‘pastlings’ and get them back into their right times: otherwise the instability of the gates is going to continue and increase all through this. We can’t just drop one problem because the other seems more important all of a sudden.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Fhrio said. “I think we have to. Even the Victoria problem will go away if we keep the first contamination, the technological one, from happening. If we could just catch that first guy with the book as he’s going through the gate …”
“If you catch him,” Huff said, “you’ll probably catch what caused the slide in the first place. The Lone Power … in whatever form It’s wearing this time out. Or you’ll catch whatever poor stooge It’s using … and even the stooges are likely to be trouble enough.”
“Not as much trouble as the Earth dying of nuclear winter in 1888 or whenever!”
“If we could even just get the book, and keep it from crossing over …” Huff said.
Urruah lashed his tail in agreement. “I’d say there’s no question that that’s the point of contamination,” he said. “I’ve checked in the Whispering. It’s a very detailed volume, full of basic information on every possible kind of science. And possibly worst of all, it’s full of materials science, and technical information on how to make almost everything it discusses. Manufacturing processes, temperatures, specific chemical reactions, locations of ores and chemical elements—you name it.”
“That time was full of great scientific minds,” Rhiow said. “They were not stupid people. Once they believed what was in that book—which they quickly would have done, once they’d tested a few of the equations in it to see what happened—they would have run wild with it. As we see they’ve done.”
“Again, they seem to have done it somewhat selectively,” Urruah said. “But the worst thing they could have started messing with, atomics, they must have started with right away, in the late ’teens of the century, to have got as far along as they are now. It must have seemed like magic to them, that. Until they started building the necessary centrifuges and
separators for the heavy-metal ores … and found that the metals did what was advertised.” He sighed.
“The details are going to prove fascinating enough, I’m sure,” Huff said. “But now we have to find out exactly when that incursion with the young man and the book happened, and stop it.”
“How?” Arhu said.
“Backtiming, stupid,” said Siffha’h.
Arhu glared at her. “Look, before you start calling names,” he said, “think about it. Do you really think the Lone Power’s going to just let us undo what It went to so much trouble to set up? Just like that? If you do, you’re even stupider than you think I am.”
“That would be fairly difficult,” Siffha’h retorted, “since—”
“Stop it, Siffha’h,” Auhlae said sternly. “There’s enough entropy loose around here at the moment without increasing it.”
“Those accesses are going to be blocked,” Arhu said. “Trust me.”
“Is that a seeing?” Urruah said.
“No, it’s common sense,” Arhu snapped, “which seems to be in short supply around here at the moment.” He threw Siffha’h another annoyed look.
“Anyway,” Urruah said loudly, “at the moment, there is a problem with the idea of stopping the book transfer. It is that we don’t yet have a definite timing or a proper set of coordinates for that transit, even with what Odin was able to show Arhu. Until we can get a timing, we can’t stop the book getting back into the Victorian era: and it will take some time and work yet for us to generate a timing that we can use … even an educated guess at one. So for the time being we should concentrate on what we presently do have a chance to stop, which is the assassination.”