To Visit the Queen Page 6

  "Look at that, it's half an hour past your dinnertime," Iaehh said, fumbling at the kitchen cabinet where the cat food was, as if he were having trouble seeing it: and he sounded stuffed up. "Come on, let's get you fed. Oh, jeez, look at this bowl, I keep forgetting to wash it— no wonder you didn't want to eat out of it."

  Rhiow jumped down from the chair and went to him.

  If this doesn't get better...

  Sweet Queen about us, what will become of me?

  Note

  *A glossary of words used by the People appears at the back of this book.

  Two

  She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the city's quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning's washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head. "See you later, plumptious— "

  She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him, and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks— their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts might have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell that made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside— the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a nongravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her ehhif's routine, and hers, from being upset.

  Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat door to the hiouh-box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates' operation under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside's gates, the London "bundle" had similarities to them, but being sited a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.

  Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick "stairway," making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof's parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low, soft hhhhhhhhhh of the city all around her was there: the breathing of all the air-conditioning systems, the omnidirectional soft sound of traffic that almost never went away. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low, breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence— and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.

  She looked eastward toward the river. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of New York Hospital and Cornell Medical Center, but she could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Queens on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn't yet see it. Another job, Rhiow thought, another day.

  She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, Rhiow thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: They will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers That Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine, for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work... for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day's end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, "Behold, the world is made new!"

  There was more to the Meditation, of course: it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case, a reminder of priorities, a "mission statement." It was perhaps also, just slightly, what ehhif might term a call to arms: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.

  Rhiow got up, shook herself, and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down. The joke is, she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air, that knowing the Powers are there and listening doesn't really solve that many problems. It seemed to her that ehhif had the same difficulty, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their gods existed or not very sure at all: and those who were most certain seemed no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The city was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which ehhif gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers That Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious— as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).

  She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most ehhif works he heard live in concert in town. He'd gone to one service in the great "cathedral" in Midtown to do some translation of the music's verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the ehhif there to the Powers That Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery that even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors, but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers' countenance—even, amazingly, the One's— and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings who did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some ehhif did.

  Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry cleaner's there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross. They're scared, she thought: they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist, ehhif aren't sure what their role is. They're not even sure what happens to them when they die. There was an unsettling sense of permanence about ehhif death, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. The ehhif themselves seemed to have been told a great many m
utually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her own ehhif was somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least? Not that, certainties aside, it wasn't always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you, too. Rhiow's fur had stood up all over her the first time it had happened, a couple of lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved on a life or so, in new and uncontaminated circumstances.

  She came to Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, against the brightening sky, the last yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: There were always ehhif out walking their houiff before they went to work. But you can't really feel things as clearly when you're sidled, Rhiow thought, and anyway, there's no houff I couldn't handle. If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the "surface streets": more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind, but by taking care of the ehhif, she took care of People, too.

  Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh. Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the terminal's track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four "ingress" tracks into the main two-level array, forty-two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her. From below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads— one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.

  Five twenty-three, Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.

  She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.

  It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so to the gravel in the access tunnel. Rhiow trotted down the cast-cement tunnel, all streaked with old iron stains, to where it joined the main train tunnel underneath Park. There in front of her was the little concrete bunker of Tower U, its lights dark at the moment. To her left were the four tracks, which almost immediately flowered into ten— seven active tracks, three sidings— by the time they reached Fifty-fifth.

  Rhiow looked both ways, listened, then bounded over to the left-paw side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on nighttime configuration, one-quarter of them on and three-quarters off, striping the platforms in horizontal bands of light against the rusty dimness. She trotted toward them, seeing something small move down by the bottom of Track 24: and she caught a glimpse of something that didn't belong down here, a glitter of white or hazy blue light concentrated in one spot.

  Bong, said the ghost-voice of the clock in the main concourse, as Rhiow cut across a few intervening tracks and jumped up onto the platform for 24. There was Urruah, sitting and looking at the dimly seen warp and weft of the worldgate, the oval of its access matrix a little larger than usual.

  " 'Luck, 'Ruah," Rhiow said, and stood by him a moment with her tail laid over his back in greeting. "Where's the wonder child?"

  "Upstairs begging for pastrami from the deli guy."

  Rhiow sighed. "There's one habit of his I wish you wouldn't encourage."

  "Oh, indeed? I seem to remember where he got it. Some one took him upstairs and— "

  "Oh, all right." Rhiow grinned. "We all slip sometimes. Did you open this?"

  "No, he did, while he was waiting for us."

  "For us? You weren't here?"

  "He was early. Got impatient, apparently."

  Rhiow put one ear back. "Not sure I like him doing this by himself, as yet..."

  "How were you planning to stop him? Come on, Rhi, look at it. The synchronization's exact. He would have stayed here to keep an eye on it," Urruah added, forestalling her as she opened her mouth, "but I told him to go on upstairs and get himself a snack. The guy likes him: he won't get in trouble."

  Rhiow put her ear forward again, though she had a definite feeling of being "ganged up on by the toms." It may be something I'm going to have to get used to. "All right," she said, studying the gate. It was open on London, set for nonpatency and a nonvisible matrix on the far side: this side would have been invisible to her too, except that she could see where Arhu had carefully laid in the "graphic" Speech-form of her name, and Urruah's and his own, in the portion of the spell matrix that controlled selective visibility and patency configurations. Beyond the matrix, light glittered off the river that ran by the big old stone building on which the view was centered: a huge square building of massive stone walls, with what appeared to be more buildings inside it, like a little walled city.

  "The Tower of London," Urruah said.

  "Doesn't look like a tower..."

  "There's one inside it," Urruah said, "the original. The gating complex proper is a little to the north: this is a quieter place for a meeting, the Whisperer suggested. Local time's four hours or so after sunrise."

  "Ten thirty," Rhiow said. "Is this a good time for the gating team there?"

  "Don't know how good it is," Urruah said, "but it's what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah— here he comes."

  The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled. "Arhu," Rhiow said as he came up to them, "come on. You know how they are about cats in here— "

  "Not about cats they can't find," Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over, and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. "Sweet Iau in a basket, what's that?"

  "Chili pickle."

  Rhiow turned to Urruah. "You have created a monster," she said.

  Urruah laughed out loud. "Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first."

  "Yes, but you encourage him all the time, and— "

  "Hey, come on, Rhi, it's good," Arhu said. "The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke." Arhu grinned. "Now the joke's on him: I like it. But he's good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chilies for him the other day. He thinks it's cool: he makes other people come and see me eat it."

  "Not the transit police, I hope," Rhiow said.

  "Naah. I wouldn't go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they're down on the tracks," Arhu said.

  Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. "All right. Are you ready?"

  "I was ready an hour before you got here."

  "So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: You did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let's go."

  Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side effect of the patency.

  "Go ahead," Arhu
said. Urruah, already sidled, leaped through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.

  The darkness stripped away behind her as she leaped through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river, which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, busier one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and ehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate that led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on another expanse of cobblestones, which sloped down toward the river.

  As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.

  "That's our tripwire," Arhu said. "Pull it and it activates the gate to open again."

  "And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we're gone?" Rhiow said.

  Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. "It won't interfere— the gate proper's back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string."

  "Very good," Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.