by Диана Дуэйн
"How come a gate spawned here, then," Arhu said, "if there were so few ehhif around?"
"Because they were around for two thousand years before the Imperials turned up," Huff said, "or maybe three. There's some argument about the dates. It's not certain what kept them here at first: some people think the fishing was good." Huff put his whiskers forward, and Rhiow got, with some amusement, the immediate sense that Huff approved of fish. "Whatever the reason, they stayed, and a gate came, as they tended to do near permanent settlements when the Earth was younger." He flicked his ears thoughtfully as they all stepped to one side to avoid a crowd of ehhif making their way up to the admission counters near the gateway they'd come in.
"It's had a rocky history, though," Rhiow said, "this gating complex. So Urruah tells me."
"That's right," Huff said, as they turned the corner and now walked parallel to the main street with all the traffic. "This has always been the heart of London, this hill … not that there's that much left of the hill any more. And the heart has had its share of seizures and arrests, I fear, and nearly stopped once or twice. Nonetheless … everything is still functioning."
"What exactly is the problem with the gates at the moment?" Rhiow said.
Huff got a pained look. "One of them is intermittently converting itself into an unstable timeslide," he said. "The other end seems to be anchoring somewhere nearby in the past – it has to, after all, you can't have a slide without an anchor – but the times at which it's anchoring seem to be changing without any cause that we can understand."
"How long has it been doing this?" Urruah said. His eyes had gone rather wide at the mention of the timeslide.
"We're not absolutely sure," Huff said. "Possibly for a long time, though only for micro-periods too small to allow anyone to pass through. In any case, none of the normal monitoring spells caught the gate at it. We only found out last week when Auhlae, that's my mate, was working on one of the neighboring gates … and something came out."
"Something?" Arhu said, looking scared.
"Someone, actually," Huff said, glancing over at the Tower as a shriek of children's laughter came from somewhere inside it. "It was an ehhif … and not a wizardly one. Very frightened … very confused. He ran through the gate and up and out into the Tube station – that's where our number-four gate is anchored, in the Tower Hill Underground station – and out into the night. Right over the turnstiles he went," Huff added, "and the Queen only knows what the poor ehhif who work there made of it all."
"Have you made any more headway in understanding why this is happening since our meeting was set up?" Rhiow said. She very much hoped so: this all sounded completely bizarre.
But Huff flirted his tail "no", a slightly annoyed gesture. "Nothing would please me better than to tell you that that was the case," he said.
Rhiow licked her nose. "Huff," she said, "believe me when I tell you that we're sorry for your trouble, and we wish we didn't need to be here in the first place."
"That's very kindly said," Huff said, turning those green eyes on her: they were somber. "My team are – well, they're annoyed, as you might imagine. I appreciate your concern a great deal, indeed I do."
Huff and Rhiow's team turned leftwards into the underpass, which was full of ehhif heading in various directions, and one ehhif who was tending a small mobile installation festooned with colored scarves and T-shirts: numerous prints of the Tower and other pictures of what Rhiow assumed were tourist attractions were taped to the walls, and some of what Rhiow assumed were tourists were studying them. "Huff," Urruah said, "what did the gate's logs look like after this ingress?"
"Muddled," Huff said, as they walked through the underpass, up the ramp on its for side, and fumed toward a set of stairs leading downwards into what Rhiow saw was the ticketing area of the Underground station: above the stairway was the circle-and-bar Underground logo, emblazoned with the words tower hill. "We found evidence of multiple ingresses of this kind, from different times into ours … and egresses from ours back to those times. The worst part of it is that only one of those egresses was a "return": all the others were "singles". The ehhif went through, in one direction or another, but they never made it back to their home times … "
Urruah's eyes went wide. "This way," Huff said, and led them under one of the turnstiles and off to the right.
Rhiow followed him closely, but Urruah's shocked look was on her mind. "What?" she said to him, as Huff leaped up onto the stainless– steel divider between two stairways.
"Single trips," Urruah said, following her up. "You know what that means – "
Rhiow flirted her tail in acquiescence. It was an uncomfortable image, the poor ehhif trapped in a time not their own, confused, possibly driven mad by the awful turn of events, and certainly thought mad by anyone who ran into them – But then she started having other things to think about as she followed Huff steeply down. The steel was slippery: the only way you could control your descent was by jumping from one to another of the upthrust steel wedges fastened at intervals to the middle of the divider, almost certainly to keep ehhif in a hurry from using the thing as a slide. Rhiow started to get into the rhythm of this, then almost lost it again as Arhu came down past her, yelling in delight. Various ehhif walking up on one side and down on the other looked curiously for the source of the happy yowling in the middle of the air.
"Arhu, look out," Rhiow said, "oh, look out, for the Queen's sake look – "
It was too late: Arhu had jumped right over the surprised Huff, but had built up so much speed that he couldn't stop himself at the next wedge: he hit it, shot into the air, fell and rolled for several yards, and shot off the end of the divider to fall to the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Rhiow sighed. He was so good there, she thought: … for about ten minutes …
She caught up with Huff as he jumped down. "Huff, I'm sorry," Rhiow said, watching Arhu do an impromptu dance as he tried to avoid crowds of ehhif stepping on him. It was something of a challenge: they were coming at him and making for the stairs from three directions at once. "He's a little new to all this, and as for being part of a team "Oh, it's all right," Huff said, unconcerned. "Our team has one his age: younger, even. She's left us all wondering whether we aren't too old for this kind of work. With any luck, they'll run each other down and give us some peace. Come on, over this way … "
Huff led them from one hallway into another, where several stainless– steel doors were let into the tiled wall. "In here," said Huff, and vanished through the door: "through it" in the literal sense, passing straight into the metal with a casual whisk of his tail.
It was a spell that any feline wizard knew, and even some non– wizardly People could do the trick under extreme stress. Rhiow drew the spell-circle in her mind, knotted it closed. Then inside it she sketched out the graphic form of her name, and the temporary set of parameters which reminded her body that it was mostly empty space, and so was the door, and requested them to avoid one another. Then she walked through after Huff. It was an odd sensation, like feeling the wind ruffling your fur the wrong way: except the fur seemed to be on the inside –
– 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 po
sitively 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 in
teresting 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