To Visit the Queen Read online

  That groan got down inside Patel, went up in pitch and began to shake him until he rocked like the masts, staggering, failing, the world receding from him. The bag fell from Patel's hand, unnoticed.

  A man came around the corner right in front of Patel and looked at him, then opened his mouth to say something.

  Patel jumped, meaning to run away, but his raw nerves misfired and sent him blundering straight into the man. As Patel came at him, the strangely dressed man staggered hurriedly backward, panic-stricken, tripped, and fell— then scrambled himself up out of the mud with an unintelligible shout and ran crazily away. Patel, too, turned to flee, this time getting it right and going back the way he had come. He ran splashing through the stinking mud and, for all the screaming in his head, ran mute: ran pell-mell back toward sanity, toward the light, and (without knowing how he did it) finally out into the bare-bulb brilliance of the white-tiled Underground station, where he collapsed, still silent, but with the screaming ringing unending in his mind, insistently expressing what the shocked and gasping lungs could not.

  Later those screams would burst out at odd times: in the middle of the night, or in the gray hour before dawn when dreams are true, startling his mother and father awake and leaving Patel sitting frozen, bolt upright in bed, sweating and shaking, mute again. After several years, some cursory psychotherapy, which did nothing to reveal the promptly and thoroughly buried memory causing the distress, and a course of a somewhat overprescribed mood elevator, the screaming stopped. But when he and his wife and new family moved up to the country, later in his life, Patel was never easy about being in any wooded place in the wintertime, at dusk. The naked limbs of the trees, all held out stiff against the falling night and moving, moving slightly, would speak to some buried memory that would leave him silent and shaking for hours. Nor was he ever able to explain, to Sasha, or to his parents, or anyone else, exactly what had happened to his copy of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. Mostly his family and friends thought he had been robbed and assaulted, perhaps indecently; they left the matter alone. They were right, though as regarded the nature of the indecency, they could not have been more wrong.

  Patel fled too soon ever to see the men who came down along Cooper's Row after a little while, talking among themselves: men who paused curiously at the sight of the dropped book, then stooped to pick it up. One of them produced a kerchief and wiped the worst of the mud away from the strange material that covered the contents. Another reached out and slowly, carefully, peeled the slick, thin white stuff away, revealing the big heavy book. A third took the book from the second man and turned the pages, marveling at the paper, the quality of the printing, the embossing on the cover. They moved a little down the street to where it met Great Tower Street, where the light was better. As they paused there, a ray of sun suddenly pierced down through the bleak sky above them, that atypical winter's sky here at the thin end of summer. One of the men looked up at this in surprise, for sun had been a rare sight of late. In that brief light the other two men leaned over the pages, read the words there, and became increasingly excited.

  Shortly the three of them hurried away with the book, unsure whether they held in their hands an elaborate fraud or some kind of miracle. Behind and above them, the clouds shut again, and a gloom like premature night once more fell over the Thames estuary, a darkness in which those who had ears to hear could detect, at the very fringes of comprehension, the sound of a slowly stirring laughter.

  One

  At just before 5 P.M. on a weekday, the upper-track level of Grand Central Terminal looks much as it does at any other time of day: a striped gray landscape of long concrete islands stretching away from you into a dry, iron-smelling night, under the relentless fluorescent glow of the long lines of overhead lighting. Much of the view across the landscape will be occluded by the thirteen Metro-North trains whose business it is to be there at that time, and by the rush and flow of commuters through the many doors leading from the echoing main concourse to the twelve accessible platforms' near ends. The commuters' thousands of voices on the platforms and out in the concourse mingle into a restless, undecipherable roar, above which the amplified voice of the station announcer desperately attempts to rise, reciting the cyclic poetry of the hour: "Now boarding, the five-oh-two departure of Metro-North train number nine-five-three, stopping at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, Scarsdale, Hartsdale, White Plains, North White Plains, Valhalla, Hawthorne, Pleasantville, Chappaqua..." And over it all, effortlessly drowning everything out, comes the massive basso B-flat bong of the Accurist clock, echoing out there under the blue-painted backward heaven, two hundred feet above the terrazzo floor.

  Down on the tracks, even that huge note falls somewhat muted, having as it does to fight with the more immediate roar and thunder of the electric diesel locomotives clearing their throats and getting ready to go. By now Rhiow knew them all better than any train spotter, knew every engine by name and voice and (in a few specialized cases) by temperament, for she saw them every day in the line of work. Right now they were all behaving themselves, which was just as well: she had other work in hand. It was no work that any of the other users of the Terminal would have noticed— not that the rushing commuters would in any case have paid much attention to a small black cat, a patchy black-and-white one, and a big gray tabby sitting down in the relative dimness at the near end of Adams Platform— even if the cats hadn't been invisible.

  Bong, said the clock again. Rhiow sighed and looked up at the elliptical multicolored shimmer of the worldgate matrix hanging in the air before them, the colors that presently ran through its warp and woof indicating a waiting state, no patency, no pending transits. Normally this particular gate resided between Tracks 23 and 24 at the end of Platform K; but for today's session they had untied the hyperstrings holding it in that spot, and relocated the gate temporarily on Adams Platform. This lay between the Waldorf Yard and the Back Yard, away off to the right of Tower C, the engine inspection pit, and the power substation. It was the easternmost platform on the upper level, and well away from the routine trains and the commuters, though not from their noise. Rhiow glanced over at big, gray-tabby Urruah, her colleague of several years now, who was flicking his ears in irritation every few seconds at the racket. Rhiow felt like doing the same: this was her least favorite time to be here. Nevertheless, work sometimes made it necessary. Bong, said the clock: and clearly audible through it, through the voices and the diesel thunder and the sound of the slightly desperate-sounding train announcer, a small, clear voice spoke. "These endless dumb drills," it said, "lick butt."

  WHAM!—and Arhu fell over on the platform, while above him Urruah leaned down, one paw still raised, wearing an expression that was surprisingly mild— for the moment. "Language," he said.

  "Whaddaya mean? There's no one here but you and Rhiow, and you use worse stuff than that all the— "

  WHAM! Arhu fell over again. "Courtesy," Urruah said, "is an important commodity among wizards, especially wizards working together as a team. Not to mention more ordinary People working as teams or in-pride, as you'll find if you survive that long. Which seems unlikely at the moment. My language isn't at question here, and even if it were, I don't use it on my fellow team members, or to them, even by implication."

  "But I only said— " Arhu suddenly fell silent again at the sight of that upraised paw.

  Dumb drills, Rhiow thought, and breathed out, resigned. This is not a drill, life is not a drill, when will he get the message? Lives... She sighed again. Sometimes I think the One made a mistake telling our people that we're going to get nine of them. Some of us get complacent....

  "Let's be clear about this," Urruah said. "Our job is to keep the worldgates down here functioning. Human wizards can't do this kind of work, or not nearly as well as we can, anyway, since we can see hyperstrings, and ehhif* can't without really working at it. That being the case, the Powers That Be asked us very politely if we would do this job, and we said yes. You said yes
, too, when They offered you wizardry and you took it, and you said yes again when we took you in-pride and you agreed to stay with us. That means you're stuck with the job. So you may as well learn how to do it right, and part of that involves working smoothly with your teammates. Another part of it is practicing managing these gates until you can do it quickly, in crisis situations, without having to stop to think and worry and 'figure out' what you're doing. And this is what we are teaching you to do, and will continue teaching you to do, until you can exhibit at least a modicum of effectiveness, which may be several lives on, not that it matters to me. You got that?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Uh-huh what?"

  "Uh-huh, I got it."

  "Right. So let's start in again from the top."

  Rhiow sighed and licked her nose as the small black-and-white cat sat up on his haunches again and thrust his forepaws into the faintly glowing warp and woof of the worldgate's control matrix, and muttered under his breath, very softly, "It still licks butt."

  WHAM!

  Rhiow closed her eyes and wondered where she and Urruah would ever find enough patience for this job. Inside her, some annoyed part of her mind was mocking the Meditation: I will meet the terminally clueless today, it said piously: idiots, and those with hairballs for brains, and those whose ears need a good shredding before you can even get their attention. I do not have to be like them, even though I would dearly love to hit them hard enough to make the empty places in their heads echo....

  She turned away from that line of thought in mild annoyance as Arhu picked himself up off the platform one more time. This late on in this life, Rhiow had not anticipated being thrust into the role of nursing-dam for a youngster barely finished losing his milk teeth, and certainly not into the role of trainer of a new-made wizard. She had gained her own wizardry in a different paradigm— acquiring it solo, and not becoming part of a team until she had proven herself expert enough to survive past the first flush of power. Arhu, though, had broken the rules, coming to them halfway through his Ordeal and dragging them all through it with him. He was still breaking every rule he could find, having apparently decided that since the tactic had worked once, it would probably keep on working.

  Urruah, however, was slowly breaking him of this idea, though getting anything through that resilient young skull was plainly going to take a while. Urruah, too, was playing out of role. Here he was, the very emblem of hardy individuality and independence, a big, muscular, broad-striped tom, all balls and swagger, wearing the cachet of his few well-placed scars with an insouciant, good-natured air— but now he leaned over the kitten-becoming-cat the Powers had wished upon them, and acted very much the hard-pawed pride-father. It was a job to which Urruah had taken with entirely too much relish, Rhiow thought privately, and she was at pains never to mention to him how much he seemed to be enjoying the responsibility. Does he see himself in this youngster, Rhiow thought, does he see the wizard he might have been if he'd had this kind of supervision? But then, who among us wouldn't see ourselves in him? The way one feels one's way along among the uncertainties— and the way you try to push your paw just a little farther through the hole, trying to get at what's squeaking on the other side. Even if it bites you...

  Arhu had picked himself up one more time, with no further mutters, and was putting his paws into the glowing weave again. You have to give him that, Rhiow thought: he always gets back up. "I've given the gate some parameters to work with already, though I'm not going to tell you what they are," Urruah said. "I want you to find locations that match the parameters, and open the gate for visual patency, not physical."

  "Why not? If I can— "

  "Visual-only is harder," Rhiow said. "Physical patency is easy, when you're using a preestablished gate: anyway, in a lot of them, the physical opening mechanism has become automated over time. Restricting the patency, refining control... that's what we're after here."

  Arhu started hooking the control strings with his claws, slowly, pulling each one out with care— which was as well: the gates were nearly alive, in some ways, and if misused or maltreated, they could bite. "I wish Saash was here," Arhu muttered. "She was better at explaining this...."

  "Than we are? Almost certainly," Rhiow said. "And I wish she was here too, but she's not." Their friend and fellow team-member Saash had passed through and beyond her ninth life within the past couple of months, under unusual circumstances. Though none of our circumstances have actually been terribly usual lately, Rhiow thought with some resignation. They all missed Saash in her role as gating technician, where her expertise at handling the matrices had come shining through her various mild neuroses with unusual brilliance. But Rhiow found herself just as lonely for her old partner's rather acerbic tongue, and even for her endless scratching, the often-misread symptom of a soul long grown too large for the body that held it.

  "Saash," Urruah said to Arhu, "knowing her, is probably explaining to Queen Iau that she thinks the entire structure of physical reality needs a serious reweave: so you'd better get on with this before she talks the One into it and the Universe dissolves out from under us. Quit your complaining and pick up where you left off."

  "I can't figure out where that is! It's not the way I left it, now."

  "That's because it's returned to its default configuration," Urruah said, "while you were recovering from sassing me."

  "Start from the beginning," Rhiow said. "And just thank the Queen that gate structures are as robust as they are, and as forgiving, because those qualities are likely to save your pelt more than once, in this business."

  Arhu sat there, narrow-eyed, with his ears back. "Two choices," Urruah said, after a moment. "You can sulk and I can hit you, or you can get on with your work with your ears unshredded. Look at you, sitting here wasting all this perfectly good gating time."

  Arhu glanced back down the station at the other platforms, which were boiling with ehhif commuters rushing up and down and in some cases nearly pushing one another onto the tracks. "Doesn't look perfect to me. I know we're sidled, but what if one of them sees what we're doing?"

  "There won't be much for them to see at the rate you're going," Urruah said.

  "Ehhif don't see wizardry half the time, even when it's hanging right in front of their weak little noses," Rhiow said. "The odds against having anyone notice anything, down here in the dark and the noise, are well in your favor— if you ever get on with it. If you're really all that concerned, rotate the gate matrix a hundred and eighty degrees and specify one-side-only visual patency. But I don't think you need to bother. These are New Yorkers, and no trains of interest to them are due on these side tracks, so for all that it matters, we and the gate and this whole side of the station might as well be on the Moon."

  "Not a bad idea," Arhu muttered, putting his whiskers forward in the slightest smile, and reached more deeply into the weft of the gate matrix.

  He fell over backward as Urruah clouted him upside the head. "No gatings into vacuum," he said. "Or under water, or below ground level, or into any other environment that would be bad if mixed freely with this one."

  Arhu got to his feet, shook himself, and glared at Urruah. "Aw, I was just thinking..."

  "Yes, and I heard you. No offplanet work for you until you're better with handling the structural spells for these gates."

  "But other wizards can just get the spell from their manuals, or the Whispering, or whatever way they access wizardry, and go— "

  "You're not 'other wizards,' " Rhiow said, pacing over to sit down beside Urruah as a more obvious gesture of support. "You are part of a gating team. You have to understand the theory and nature of these structures from the bottom up. And as regards the established gates like this one, you've got to be able to fix them when they break— take them apart and put them back together again— not just use them for rapid transit like 'other wizards.' Yes, it's specialized work, and the details are a nuisance to learn. And yes, the structure is incredibly complex: Aaurh Herself made the ga
tes, Iau only knows how long ago— what do you expect? But you've got to know this information from the inside, without having to consult the Whisperer every thirty seconds for advice. What if She's busy?"

  "How busy can gods get?" Arhu muttered, turning his attention back to the gate.

  "You'd be surprised," Urruah said. "Queen Iau's daughters have their own lives to lead. You think the Silent One has all day to sit around waiting to see if you need help? Get off those little thaith of yours and do something."

  "They're not little," Arhu said, and then fell silent for a moment. "All right, should I just collapse this and start over?"