To Visit the Queen Read online

  "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 midtransit."

  "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 compared 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 interesting 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 the 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 asked, 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 perquisites— 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 have taken an obsessively thorough review of the logs to find the occurrences—

  Which there should have been. That was something else Rhiow was not going to say out loud. Saash had routinely reviewed the complete logs for each of the Grand Central gates once every week, and Rhiow had gotten used to that kind of thoroughness from her teammates. Still, she thought, different teams, different management techniques... And Huff seemed to run his team more casually than Rhiow did hers. She was in no position to complain: if the Powers That Be didn't care for the way his team was working, Huff would have been relieved long ago.

  "I see your point," Rhiow said after a moment, and lifted one paw to lick at it reflectively. "Do you have a long way to come?"

  "Not I, thank the Dam," Auhlae said. "Fhrio commutes in from Ealing, some miles away— he's with a family pride there, one that lives on gardening-land that some ehhif keep, what's called an allotment. Siffha'h, on the other hand, is local, very local in fact— she was born just across the river, in an outdoor den not far from HMS Belfast, that big ship anchored there. She's nonaligned, and undenned so far. Huff and I aren't so close, but we're nowhere near as far away as Fhrio is. Huff has a den with an ehhif who owns a pub in the City and lives in a flat above it: I'm denned just around the corner with a futures trader who works at the securities exchange. Huff's ehhif is used to him coming and going as he pleases, and that kind of thing isn't a problem for me either, fortunately. My Rrhalf keeps such weird hours that he hardly notices that I'm there."

  Then why on Earth do you stay with him? Rhiow was tempted to ask, and didn't. She couldn't imagine a Person who was also a wizard going through the inconvenience of denning with an ehhif if it wasn't because you liked him or her. "Did you two meet locally, then?" Rhiow said.

  "Oh, yes, the usual thing. A friend of his is one of the big hauissh players in the area: we ran into each other during a tournament, got friendly. Then I went into heat, and..." She waved her tail, a graceful and amused gesture.

  "Kittens?"

  "Oh, plenty. My ehhif is very good about finding them good places to live: otherwise I wouldn't let the heat happen."

  That brought Rhiow's ears forward. "I used to wonder how a wizard managed when she was in heat," she said. "I never had the chance, myself: my ehhif took me and had me unqueened before I started."

  "Oh, how terrible for you!" Auhlae said.

  "Oh, no, it wasn't that bad. Afterwards I tended to see it as an advantage. No interruptions... no toms fighting over me. It looked like a release."

  Auhlae was silent for a moment, and started to wash one ear. "Well," she said, "I suppose I can see your point of view. But truly, I haven't found it to be all that much of a problem. You can always use wizardry to adjust your own hormones a little, and delay the onset. But of course it's not too good to do much of that kind of thing. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be necessary very often. Only very rarely have I had to be on call while I was in heat, and never while I was kittening. The Whisperer seems to keep track of such things." Auhlae put her whiskers forward, a demure smile with a slightly wicked edge to it. "I suppose we should be grateful that it's the Queen running the Universe and not the Tom: who knows if we'd ever get any rest?"

  Rhiow chuckled. "I think you're right there... in all possible senses of the word."

  "But anyway," Auhlae said, "Huff and I usually come down in the early evenings and troubleshoot the gates. There's always trouble," she said, sounding very resigned. "You know how even inanimate objects can start betraying evidence of personalities, over time— "

  "Oh, yes," Rhiow said.

  "Well, the gates have been here a lot longer than we have, and believe me, they have personalities. Mostly annoyed and suspicious ones. I think it may have had to do with their 'upbringing,' their history. Populations would rise here and then be swept away without warning... and to a certain extent, the gate 'learns' to adapt to the pressure of the population around it. Take that population away suddenly, and it must be like suddenly being thrown off something that you've always slept on safely before. The shock makes you stop trusting... you don't know whether things will be the same from one day to the next. So the gates act fairly 'calmly' for a period of time— a week, a month— and then—pff!" Auhlae made a soft spitting hiss of the kind that an annoyed Person would use to warn another away. "It can take endless time to calm them down. Do you have the same problem?"

  Rhiow flicked her tail no. "Oh, they're alive enough, all right," she said. "Aaurh Herself made them, after all: I'm not sure anything with that level of wizardry incorporated into it could avoid being alive, to some degree. But, fortunately, New York grew very steadily, and our gates behave themselves... except when they don't," she added, wryly. "Often enough..." />
  Auhlae purred in amusement. "You must run into the personality problem with other things, though. You sounded pretty definite."

  "Well, it crops up from time to time." And glancing over at Arhu again (who was still gazing thoughtfully at Siffha'h, apparently without effect) and at Urruah and Fhrio (now leaning right into the gate's matrix structure again, with their heads bent close together and almost invisible among the tangle of strings), Rhiow began to tell Auhlae about the diesel locomotives that ran the trains in and out of Grand Central. Theoretically, they should have been just great complex hunks of metal and wiring. But they were not, as the ehhif who drove them and took care of them loudly attested. The engines had noticeable personalities, which manifested in the ways they worked (or didn't): some good-natured and easygoing, some spiteful and annoying, some lazy, some overtly hostile. Rhiow had wondered whether she and the engineers and mechanics were all projecting the traits of life onto dead things for which, admittedly, they all felt affection. But finally she had realized that that wasn't it. She started wondering whether this acquisition of personality might be caused by something specific about the way the locomotives' complicated shapes and structures affected the local shape of spacetime— the way the atomic and molecular structure of water, for example, manifested itself as wetness. The Whisperer had no answers for her, or none that made sense: and when Rhiow had taken the problem casually to the ehhif advisory wizards for New York, Tom and Carl, they had shaken their heads and confessed an ignorance on which even their wizard's manuals could not shed light. Finally Rhiow had simply given up and started talking to the locomotives in the course of her rounds, despite being unable to tell whether it was making any difference. But certainly something with a personality, no matter how undeveloped, deserves to be talked to as if it exists.

  Auhlae looked bemused at that, for a moment. "Now there's something I hadn't given much thought to," she said. "The Underground trains... you get a faint sense of personality off them, but nothing like that. Or is it just because I haven't been looking?"

  "Hard to say," Rhiow said. "But beware. Do you really need another area of interest? The one we share is trouble enough."

  Auhlae laughed softly. "Tell me about it," she said as Huff came back down the stairs again and padded toward them.

  "Problems, hrr't?" Auhlae said.

  "Oh, I wanted a look at number three," Huff said, "since this one's being worked on." He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. "You know how they tend to interfere with each other— their catenary links are close together." He paused a moment, then said, "Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right where the catenaries meet, at the roots of things?"

  "We were there," Rhiow said, "but it's not a memory I'd call up willingly just now. For one thing, we lost a partner of my age there: if we had her here now, I'd bet we'd have solved your problem already. As it is, we're all learning new jobs, and everything is so confused."

  "I'm sorry for your trouble," said Huff, and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.

  "Oh, it wasn't all sad," Rhiow said, "not at all. A great many things changed for the better; and the Downside has new guardians."

  "The great cats live there," Auhlae said, "don't they? Our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People..."

  "Yes," Rhiow said, "and nothing will remove them from where they have been since the Beginning. But there are two peoples there now." Maybe this was not the time to start that particular story, but the facts still made Rhiow wake up in the middle of the night, wondering. For all the years there had been dry-land creatures in this world, cat and serpent had expressed in a specific symbolism the two sides of an ancient enmity: creatures of the Sun and light against creatures of Earth and the dark beneath the Earth, warm blood against cold blood, the Powers That Be against the Lone Power that went rogue, both sides battling for the world. But suddenly Rhiow found herself running across new concepts, in which at least some of the great saurians were warmblooded, and images in which serpent was born of cat (despite the older mythologies, which suggested that cat had been born of serpent)—all too predictable a development, since Arhu had become "father" to the new serpent-kind, the great saurians who had become the new guardians of the Old Downside.

  Of course the Universe was full of these jokes and ironies, mostly born of the misapprehension, native to beings living serially in time, that time itself was serial. Naturally, it was not. Time was at least Riemannian, and tended to run both in circles and cycles: outward-reaching spirals that repeated previous tendencies and archetypes reminiscent of earlier ones, but the repetitions came in "bigger" forms, and with unexpected ramifications. Now time bit its own tail one more time, and in the process of that biting pulled off the old skin, revealing the new shiny skin and the bigger body underneath: more beautifully scaled and intricately patterned, more muscular, and, as usual, harder to understand. Rhiow had seen these hints before the last months' troubles began, but hadn't been able to make much of them at the time. Now, with the events and the history behind her, the myth was easier to understand. But it still made her blink, sometimes, and wonder what happened to the good old days, when things were simpler: when cats were cats, and snakes were snakes, and never the twain would meet.

  Of course, for most cats and serpents, they never would. But as a wizard, Rhiow came of a bigger worldview, one that held that cats were equal, under the One, to any other sentient species— say, whales, or humans, or some dogs or birds of prey, or various other creatures intelligent enough to have emotional lives and to understand the existence of a world outside their own selves. Most People would have trouble with the idea that ehhif were equal to them. And dogs? Birds? They would hiss with indignation at the very idea. Rhiow knew better, but was glad she did not often have to indulge in explanations to her less tolerant kindred.

  "It's been a very strange time," Rhiow said at last, "and I look forward to telling you about it in detail: for, truly, there are parts of it I don't understand myself. 'Ruah... any news?"

  Urruah had strolled over to where they sat, and now threw a look over his shoulder at the gate. "I really hate to admit it," he said, "but at first glance, I'm stumped. Rhi, Huff, I'll want to examine the logs in detail, of course." He looked over his shoulder at Fhrio for approval: Fhrio waved his tail in a "don't-care" way. "Good. I'll do that later this evening. I need a break."

  Urruah did sound tired, but that was no surprise: even though the gates had their diagnostic procedures built in, there were other, more sophisticated ones that Rhiow's team routinely used to make sure that a given gate's own diagnostics were "honest." It had always seemed a wise precaution to Rhiow, since a deranged gate might conceivably lose the ability to diagnose itself correctly.

  "You'll want to sort your schedule out with Fhrio, perhaps," Huff said.

  "Yes," said Urruah, "I'll do that." He headed back over to the gate, where Fhrio and Siffha'h were withdrawing themselves from the gate matrix and letting the strings snap back into place.

  Huff sighed. "We'll leave it shut down for another day," he said, "and come and tackle it afresh tomorrow. Rhiow, I think we've made a good start."

  "I hope so too," she said. "I have a feeling that this won't be one of those quickly solved problems, but we won't be out of your fur until it's handled."

  "Then we'll see Urruah later this evening," said Auhlae, "and you tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow let it be," Rhiow said, and bumped noses with their hosts, though she threw a look over her shoulder first. Urruah and Fhrio had their heads together again: but Arhu was looking in one direction, and Siffha'h in another, as if they were on opposite sides of the same planet.

  Rhiow smiled slightly "Dai stihó," she said, the non-species-specific greeting and parting words of one wizard to another: Go well. "Come on, Arhu, 'Ruah," she said, getting up, "let's call it a day."

  "Very nice People," Urruah said as they came out on the Grand Central side of their own gate. "Competent."


  That assessment surprised Rhiow slightly. "You're satisfied with their inspection routines?" she asked.

  "They're much like what I'd be doing if I were stuck with their gate complex," Urruah said. "I mean, Rhi, look at their transit figures. Three or maybe four times the number of wizards and unaffiliated outworlders use their gates every day as use ours, or the ones at Penn. London is a major onplanet transit center for western Europe, and if you tried to read all the gate logs there once a week, the way Saash did for ours, you'd never have time to do anything else, such as fix the gates when they broke. I'm going to take some time to read those logs in more detail, as I said. But I don't know what I'm looking for as yet, and I'm hoping the tracers we've left in place will pick something up to give me a hint. Without a specific event track to follow, a signature attached to the kind of access we're looking for, we're walking in the dark without whiskers."

  Rhiow waved her tail slowly in agreement. "All right," she said.

  "But one thing, Rhi— and this may be more important, even, than the problem with the gate itself. Remember when Huff was telling us about the 'single' egresses?"

  "Uh, yes." She paused. "He was telling us that people were going one way, not 'round trip.' "

  "That's right. Rhi, do you realize how big a problem that is? Times can get imbalanced, just as spaces can: the 'pressure' of times against one another has to be kept equal, and lives displaced from their proper times can seriously skew that balance. Those people from other times have to be recovered and put back where they belong, or the gates will become more unstable than they are already. Not just Huff's gates: all the gates."

  "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."