Диана Дуэйн - To Visit the Queen
– and then suddenly light broke through again, the watery gray light of the morning he had just left: a few spits and spatters of rain reached him even here in the tunnel, blown in on that chilly wind. Some part of Patel's mind had now begun to go round and round with thoughts like How the heck is there daylight down here, I must be fifty feet underground and The smell, what is that smell?? – but that part of him felt strangely far away, like a mind belonging to someone else, in the face of what he saw before him. A street, and the gray day above it, those made sense: buildings pressing close on either side, yes, and the enamelled metal sign set high in the brick wall of the building opposite him, saying Coopers' Row, that was fine too: the math/business building of the University was up past the end of the Row, in Jewry Street, and he would have been heading there after meeting Sasha. But there was no pavement to be seen. There was hardly any road visible, either: it was covered ankle deep in thick brown mud, the source of the godawful smell. Must have been a sewer break, said some hopeful part of his mind, steadfastly ignoring the basic issue of how he was suddenly standing at ground level.
Patel walked forward slowly, trying not to sink into the mud, and failing – it came up over the tops of his shoes: boy, these trainers are going to be a loss after this, and they were only three weeks old, how am I going to explain this to Mum … ? Squelch, squelch, he walked forward, and came to the corner of Cooper's Row and George Street, looked down toward Great Tower Street in the direction of the Monument Tube station –It was not there. The road was lined with old buildings, three– or four-story brick edifices all crowded together where multi-story office buildings should have been. The traffic was gone, too. Or rather, it was all replaced by carriages, carriages pulled by horses, their hooves making a strangled wet clopping noise as they pounded through the mud, up and down Great Tower Street. Patel staggered, changed the bag mechanically from the right hand to the left, and took a few more steps forward, looking away from the traffic, don't want to see that, doesn't make sense, and across to the Tower.
It at least was still there: the great square outer walls defining the contours of Tower Hill stood up unchanged, the lesser corner towers reached upward as always, "the windvanes on them wheeling and whirling in the gusts of wind off the river – the wind that bore the stink forcefully into Patel's nostrils and the rain, now falling a little harder, into his face, cold and insistent. That wind got into his hair and tried to find its way under his jacket collar; and around him, the few trees sprouting from the unseen pavement rocked in the wind, their bare branches rubbing and ratcheting together. Bare. That was wrong. It was September. And other things were moving, rocking too –Momentarily distracted by the motion, he looked past the Tower, down toward Lower Thames Street and the great bend of the river which began there. A forest, he thought at first, and then rejected the thought as idiotic. No trees would be so straight and bare, with no branches but one or two sets each, wide crosspieces set well up the trunk: nor would trees be crowded so close together, or rock together so unnervingly, practically from the root. The "trees" were masts … masts of ships, fifty or seventy or a hundred of them all anchored there together, the wind and the water pushing at the ships from which the masts grew; and the bare shapes silhouetted against the morning gray were all rocking, rocking slightly out of phase, making faint uneasy groaning noises that he could hear even at this distance, for they were perhaps a quarter of a mile down the river from where he stood. From that direction too came a mutter of human voices, people shouting, going about their business, the sound muted by the wind that rose around him and rocked the groaning masts together –That groan got down inside Patel, went up in pitch and began to shake him until he rocked like the masts, staggering, falling, the world receding from him. The bag fell from Patel's hand, unnoticed.
A man came round 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 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 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 which 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 which 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 bright 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 5:00 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 nine 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, Giappaqua … " 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 backwards 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 trainspotter, 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 which hung 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 Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four 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 mere 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 at herself 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 the 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 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 torn, 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 which 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 you feel your way along among the uncertainties – and the way you try to push your paw just a little further 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 pre-established 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 backwards 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 which 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 off-planet 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 gates, 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?"
"Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said.
Arhu reached out a paw and hooked one claw into one of the glowing control strings of the gate. The visible gate-locus vanished, leaving nothing behind it but the intricate, faint traces of hyperstring structure in the air.
And he's right about them not being little, Rhiow said privately, from her mind to Urruah's.
When even you notice that, oh spayed one, Urruah said, it suggests that we may shortly have a problem on our hands.
Rhiow stifled a laugh, keeping her eye on Arhu as he studied the gate matrix, then sat up again and started slowly hooking strings out of the air to "reweave' the visible matrix. It surprises me that you
would describe the concept of approaching sexual maturity as a problem.
Oh, it's not, not as his affects me anyway, Urruah said. We're in– pride now: he's safe with me – it helps that the relationship between you and me isn't physical. Though I do feel sorry for you, Urruah said, magnanimously.
Rhiow simply put her whiskers forward and accepted the implied compliment without comment. But for him, Urruah said, there's likely to be trouble coming. Hormonal surges don't sort well with the normal flow of wizardly practice.
I'm not sure there's going to be anything normal about his practice for a while, Rhiow said, dry, as they watched the structure of the gate reassert itself in the air, rippling and flowing, wrinkling as if someone was pulling it out of shape from the edges. Arhu had not actually started his task on the gate yet, but he was thinking about it, and the gates were susceptible to the thoughts of the technicians who worked with them.
"Uh," Arhu said.
"Don't just pull it in all directions like a dead rat, for Iau's sake," Rhiow said, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. "Take time to get your visualization sorted out first."
"Remember what I told you about visualizing the entire interweave of the gate's string structure as organized into five-stranded structures and groups of five," Urruah said. "Simplest that way: there are five major groupings of forces involved in worldgates, and besides, we have five claws on each paw, and these things are never accidental – "
"Wait a minute," Arhu said, sitting back again, but with a slightly suspicious look this time. "Are you trying to tell me that the whole species of People was built the way we are just so that we could be gate technicians – ?"
"Maybe not just for that purpose, no. But don't you find it a little strange that we're perfectly set up to handle strings physically, and that we can see them naturally, when no other species can?"
"The saurians can."
"That's a recent development," Rhiow said wearily. It was one of many "recent developments" which they were all slowly digesting. "Never mind that for now. No other species could. Meantime, do something before the thing defaults again … "
"All right," Arhu said. "Group one is for phase relationships." He plucked that control string out as he named it, held it hooked behind one claw, and a series of strings in the matrix ran bright golden as he activated them. Two is for the main hyperstring "junction weave" to four-dimensional space, and the "emphatic" forces: three is for the fifth-dimensional interweave, four is for dimensions six through ten and the lower electromagnetic spectrum, five is for the upper electromagnetic and the strong– and weak-force plena. And then – " He paused, licked his nose.
"Then comes motion," Urruah said, " – field nutation, sideslip, tesseral, cistemporal, cishyperspatial." He paused as Arhu leaned in to bite the strings that he was having trouble managing with his paws, " – and then the five strictly physical fields of motion. The planet rotates, it's inclined on its axis and precesses, it's also describing a large ellipse around the Sun, and the Sun is moving on the inward leg of a hyperbola with the galactic core at one focus, and the Galaxy – "
" – is rotating, yes, I think we would have heard if it had stopped ii
Urruah made a face. "Just be glad that's all the kinetics you have to worry about at the moment. Once we get up into second-order stuff, your head will hurt a lot worse than if I'd hit you for your rude mouth, which may come later. And don't think I can't hear you thinking, with your teeth and claws full of hyperstrings: you think the laws of science are broken, or I'm deaf? Thought runs down those things like water: that's partly what they're built for … All you have to worry about now is the path this piece of Earth is describing through space at the moment, and the path that the piece you're trying to gate to is describing. You keep them in synch while the gate's open, and that'll be more than a lot of wizards can do. It's a complex helical locus in motion, but no more complex than a trained Person can handle. Let's see how you do."
Rhiow sat and wondered how Urruah could sound so casual about the management of forces which, if Arhu let them slip, could peel the whole mass of Grand Central Terminal off its track-tunneled lower layers and toss it up into the stratosphere the way you would toss a new-killed rat. That was Urruah's teaching style, though, and it seemed to work with Arhu. Tom stuff, Rhiow thought, and kept her whiskers still: unwise to let the amusement show. For toms, it all comes down to blows and ragged ears in the end. Never mind: whatever works for them …
The weave of the gate before them suddenly shimmered and misted away to invisibility. They got a glimpse of light streaming golden through rustling green leaves, a bustle and rush of ehhif along a checkered black-and-white pavement before them: and suddenly, with a huge clangor of bells, a huge boxy blue-and-white shape turned a corner in front of them and came rushing directly at the gate.
Arhu's eyes went wide: he yowled and threw himself backwards, dropping the mouthful and double pawful of strings. The view through the gate vanished, leaving nothing but the snapped-back rainbow weave of the hyperstrings, buzzing slightly like strummed guitar strings in the dark air as they resonated off the energy that had built up in them while the gate was open.
Arhu lay on the cinders and panted. "What did I – I didn't – "
Rhiow yawned. "It was a tram."
"What?"
"A kind of bus," Rhiow said. "It runs on electricity: some ehhif cities use them. Don't ask me where that was, though."
"Blue-and-white tram," Urruah said. "Combined with that smell? That was Zurich."
"Urruah – "
"No, seriously. There's a butcher just down the road from there, on the Bahnhofstrasse, and they have this sausage that – "
"Urruah." "What? What's the matter?"
Rhiow sighed. Urruah had four ruling passions: wizardry, food, sex, and oh'ra. They jostled one another for precedence, but you could guarantee in any discussion with Urruah that at least one of them would come up, usually repeatedly. "We don't need to hear about the sausage," Rhiow said. "Was that the location you had set into the gate?"
"I didn't set a specific location. Just told it to hunt for population centers in the three hundred to five hundred thousand range with gating affinities."
"Then you did good," Rhiow said to Arhu, "even if you did panic. You had 'here' and 'there' perfectly synchronized."
"Until I panicked." Arhu was washing now, with the quick sullen movements of someone both embarrassed and angry.
"It didn't do any harm. You should always brace yourself, though, when opening a gate into a new location, even on visual-only. It's another good reason to make sure the gate defaults to invisible/intangible until you've got your coordinates solidified."
"Take a break," Urruah said: but Arhu turned back to the gateweave and began hooking his claws into it again, in careful sequence.
Stubborn, Rhiow said silently to Urruah.
This isn't a bad thing, Urruah said. Stubborn can keep you alive, in our line of work, at times when smart may not be enough.
Rhiow switched her tail in agreement. They watched Arhu reconstruct the active matrix, and pull out the strings again, two pawsful of them: then he leaned in and carefully began taking hold of the next groups with his teeth, pulling them down one by one to join the ones already in his claws. The gate shimmered –Traffic flowed by in both directions right before them, cars and buses in a steady stream: but there was something odd about the sight, regardless. In the background, beyond some lower buildings, two great square towers with pointed pyramidal tops stuck up: a roadway ran between them, and some kind of catwalk, high up.
"The cars are on the wrong side," Arhu said suddenly.
"Not wrong," Rhiow said, "just different. There are places on the planet where they don't drive the way ehhif here do."
"No one on the planet drives the way ehhif here do," Urruah muttered.
Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. "No argument."
People were walking back and forth before what would be the aperture of the gate, were it physically to open. "Look at them all," Arhu said, somewhat bemused. "It keeps coming up cities."
"It would whether Urruah had set the parameters that way or not," Rhiow said to Arhu. "Worldgates inhere to population centers."
Make it a little dryer for him, why don't you? Urruah said good– humoredly into her mind as he looked out at the ehhif hurrying by. "See, Arhu, if you pack enough people of whatever species into a
tight enough space, the fabric of physicality starts fraying from the pressure of all their minds intent on getting what they want. Pack even more of them in, up to the threshold number, and odd things start to happen routinely in that area as the spacetime continuum rubs thinner – places get a reputation for anything being available there, or at least possible. Go over the threshold number, and gates start forming spontaneously."
"Much smaller populations can produce gates if they're there for long enough," Rhiow said. "The piled-up-population effect can be cumulative over time: there are settlements of ehhif that have been established for many thousands of years, and therefore have gates even though only a small population lives there at any one time."
"Catal Huyuk," Urruah said, "and Chur, places like that. Those old gates can be tricky, though: idiosyncratic … and over thousands of years, they pick up a lot of strange memories, not all of them good. The newer high-population-locus gates can be a lot safer to work with."
"What's the threshold number you were talking about?" Arhu said, studying the gate.
"A variable, not a constant," Rhiow said. "It varies by species. For ehhif, it's around ten million. For People, eight hundred thousand, give or take a tail."
Arhu flirted his own tail, a gesture of disbelief. "Where would you get that many People?"
"Right here in this city, for one place," Rhiow said. "All those 'pets', all those 'strays' – " The words she used were rhao 'ehhih'h and aihlhih, 'human-denned' and 'nonaligned'. "There might be as many as a million of us just in this island. Either way, there's more than enough of us to sustain a gating complex without ehhif being involved … and they're here too. With such big joint populations, it's no surprise that this complex is the most senior one in the planet."
"And besides, there's the 'master' gating connection to the old Downside," Urruah said. "Every worldgate on the planet has 'affectional' connections to it: for all we know, its presence made it possible for all the other gates to spawn."
Arhu shook his head. "What's this city, then?"
"London," Urruah said.
"Don't tell me … you can smell the local butcher."
Urruah took a swipe at Rhiow, which she ducked with her whiskers forward, amused to have successfully put a claw into his near– impervious ego. "As it happens," Urruah said, "I recognize the landscape. That's Tower Bridge back there."
Rhiow looked at the bridge between the two towers: it was starting to rise in two pieces, to let a ship past. "Isn't that the one the ehhif have a rhyme about? It fell down … "
"Wrong bridge. The location it serves started developing gates around the beginning of the last millennium, when the last batch of ehhif with a big empire came through."
"The 'Hrromh'ans'." "That's right."
"Not a very old complex, then?" Rhiow said.
"Nope. A little finicky, this one. The population pressure built up around it in fits and starts rather than steadily, and it kept losing population abruptly – the city kept getting sacked, having plagues and fires, things like that. The matrices formed under touchy circumstances. But the Tower Bridge complex is good for long-range transits: better than ours, even. No one's sure why. Convergence of ley lines, gravitic anomalies under that hill close to the bridge, who knows?" Urruah waved his tail. "Leave it to the theorists."
"Like you, now."
He put his whiskers forward, but the expression in his eyes was ironic. "Well, we're all diversifying a little at the moment, aren't we? Not that we have much choice."
"You miss her too," Rhiow said softly.
Urruah watched Arhu for a little, and then said, "She used to go on and on about these little details. Now I wonder whether she had a hint of what was going to happen … "
The interesting thing," Rhiow said, "is that you remembered all this."
He looked at her sidewise. "Shouldn't surprise you. 'He lives in a dumpster, he's got a brain like a dumpster', isn't that what you always say?"
"I never say that," Rhiow said, scandalized, having often thought that very thing.
"Huh," Urruah said, and his whiskers went further forward. "Anyway, this complex handles a lot of off-planet work – emergency interventions, and the routine training and cultural exchange transits involving wizards here and elsewhere in the Local Group of galaxies. Bigger scheduled transits than that tend to go to Chur or Alexandria or Beijing, to keep Tower Bridge from getting overloaded, Saash told me. It overloads easily – something to do with the forces tangled around that hill with the old castle on it."
"Should I try somewhere else?" Arhu said, now bored with looking at the traffic.
"Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said, waving her tail in casual assent, and Arhu sat up on his haunches again and hooked his claws into the control matrix, while Rhiow looked thoughtfully for a moment more at that old tower. There were a lot of physical places associated with ehhif that acquired personality artifact over many years, probably as a result of the ehhif tendency to stay in one place for generations. People didn't do that, as a rule, and found the prospect slightly pathological: but there was no use judging one species by another's standards – the One doubtless had Her reasons for designing them differently. Ten lives on, maybe we'll all be told …
"It's stuck," Arhu said suddenly.
"What? Stuck how?"
"I don't know. It's just stuck."
Urruah got up and stalked over to look the gate-web up and down. To a Person's eyes, its underweave, the warp and woof of interwoven hyperstrings which produced the gating effect, were still plainly visible through the image of sunshine on that other landscape, the tangle of buildings and traffic beyond. Arhu was sitting up with the brilliant strings of the "control weave" now stretched again between his paws, pulled taut and in the correct configuration for viewing. "Look," Arhu said, and twisted his paws so that the weave changed configuration, went much more "open", a maneuver that should have shut down the gate to the bare matrix again.
The gate just hung there, untroubled and unmoved, and showed the bridge and the traffic, and the ehhif hurrying by.
Rhiow came up beside Urruah. "Do it again."
"I can't, not from this configuration, anyway."
"I mean take that last move back, then re-execute."
Arhu did.
Nothing changed. The morning was bright, and shone on the Bridge and the river …
"Let me try," Urruah said.
"Why?" Rhiow said. "He did it right."
Urruah looked at her in astonishment. "Well, he … "
"He did it right. Let's not rush to judgment: let's have a look at this."
They all did. The strings looked all right … but something else was the matter: nothing that they could see. As she peered at the view, and the gate, Rhiow started to get the feeling that someone was looking over her shoulder …
… and then realized that Someone was. She did not have to look to see: she knew Who it was.
There's a problem, the voice whispered in her ear.
Urruah's ears flicked: nothing to do with the ambient noise. Arhu's eyes went wide. He was still getting used to hearing the Whisperer. It took some getting used to, for the voice in your mind sounded like your own thought … except that it was not. It plainly came from somewhere else, and at first the feeling could be as bizarre as feeling someone else switch your tail.
Rhiow's was switching now, without help. Well, madam, she thought, do You know what this problem is?
The gate with which yours is presently in affinity is malfunctioning, said the silent voice inside their heads. The London gating team requires your assistance – they will be expecting you. You should leave as soon as you can make arrangements for covering your own territory during your absence.
And that was it: the voice was silent, the presence gone, as suddenly as it had come.
Arhu blinked, though this time he didn't drop the strings. "What did
She mean?" he said. "Where's London?"
The place we've been looking at," Rhiow said, glancing at the Bridge again. "About a third of the way around the planet. Look in that fourth group of strings and you'll see the coordinates."
"You mean we have to go away?"
"That's what she said," said Urruah, dismayed. To London, yet."
"I would have thought you'd be happy, Ruah," Rhiow said, slightly amused despite her own surprise and concern. The butchers and all …
"When you're visiting, that's one thing," Urruah said, sitting down and licking his nose. "Working … that's something else. It wasn't so much fun the last time."
"We have to go work on someone else's gates?" Arhu said, letting the strings go, carefully, one at a time. "And you did this before?"
"We had to go help a team in Tokyo," said Rhiow, "halfway around the planet: it was about a sunround and a half ago. We were there for nearly three weeks. It was something of a logistical nightmare … but we got the job done."
" 'Something' of a nightmare – !" Urruah muttered, and lay down on the platform, looking across at the commuters as they came and went. "You have a talent for understatement."
"There's no telling how long we'll be gone on one of these consultational trips," Rhiow said, "but they're not normally brief. Usually we're only called in for consultation when the local team has exhausted all its other options and still hasn't solved the problem."
"Why us, though?" Arhu said.
"We're the senior gating team on the planet," Urruah said, "because we work with Grand Central. It's not that we're all that much better at the job than anyone else – " and Rhiow blinked at this sudden access of humility from Urruah – "but the main gating matrices in the Old Downside, 'under' the Terminal, are the oldest functioning worldgate complex on the planet. All the other gating complexes which have since come into being have 'affinity' links through Grand Central to the Downside matrices."
"Think of all those other gating complexes as branches of a tree," Rhiow said, "and Grand Central as the last of the really big complexes that branched out closest to the trunk. There have been others that were bigger or older, but for one reason or another they're gone now … so Grand Central is the last of the 'firstborn' gating complexes, the ones that Aaurh the Maker set in place Herself when the world was young. Since we routinely work with Grand Central, and less routinely with the Downside matrices, we're expected to be competent to troubleshoot gates further up the 'tree' as well."
"Wow!" Arhu said.
"Wow," said Urruah, rather sourly.
Rhiow was inclined to agree with him. Who needs this now?? she thought. Life had just begun to be getting a little settled again, after the craziness of the late summer, after the desperate intervention in which they had all been involved in the Old Downside,
in which Arhu gained his wizardry and Saash lost hers, or rather took it up in a more profound version after her ninth death – though either way she was lost to the team now. Arhu had filled her spot, though not precisely. Saash had been a gate technician of great skill, and Arhu was primarily a visionary, gifted at seeing beyond present realities into those past or yet to come. That talent was still steadying down, as it might take some years yet to do: and it would take a lot of training yet before Arhu was anything like the gating technician that Saash had been. Since they got back, Rhiow and Urruah had been spending almost all their free time coaching him and wondering when life would get back to anything like "normal". So much for that! Rhiow thought.
"What are we going to do about our regular maintenance rounds?" Urruah said.
Rhiow flirted her tail. "The Perm Station team will have to handle them."
"Oh, they're going to just love that."
"We can't help it, and they'll know that perfectly well. All of us wind up subbing for People on other teams every now and then. Sometimes it's fun."
"They won't think so," Urruah said. "How long is this going to go on?"
Rhiow sighed. The human school year was just starting, and ehhif businesses were swinging back into full operation after the last of their people came back from vacation … The City was sliding back into fully operative mode, which meant increased pressure on the normal rapid transit. That in turn meant more stress on the gates, for the increased numbers of ehhif moving in and out of the City meant more stress on the fabric of reality, especially in the areas where large numbers of people flowed in and out in the vicinity of the gate matrices themselves. String structure got finicky, matrices got warped and gates went down without warning at such times: hardly a day went by without a malfunction. The Pennsylvania Station gating team had their paws full just with their normal work. Having the Grand Central gates added to their workload, at their busiest time
"Ruah, it can't be helped," Rhiow said. "They can take it up with the Powers themselves, if they like, but the Whisperer will send them off with fleas in their ears and nothing more. These things happen."
"Yeah, well, what about you?"
"Me?"
"You know. Your ehhif."
Rhiow sighed at that. Urruah was "nonaligned" – without a permanent den and not part of a pride-by-blood, but most specifically uncompanioned by ehhif, and therefore what they would call a "stray": mostly at the moment he lived in a dumpster outside a construction site in the East Sixties. Arhu had inherited Saash's position as mouser-in-chief at the underground parking garage where she had lived, and had nothing to do to keep in good odor with his "employers" except, at regular intervals, to drop something impressively dead in front of the garage office, and to appear fairly regularly at mealtimes. Rhiow, however, was denned with an ehhif in an twentieth-story apartment between First and Second in the
Seventies. Her comings and goings during his workday were nothing which bothered Iaehh, since he didn't see them: but in the evenings, if he didn't know where she was, he got concerned. Rhiow had no taste for upsetting him – between the two of them, since the sudden loss of her "own' ehhif, Hhuha, there had been more than enough upset to go around.
"I'll have to work around him the best I can," she said. "He's been doing a lot of overtime lately: that'll probably help me." Though as she said it, once again Rhiow found herself wondering about all that overtime. Was it happening because the loss of the household's second income had been making the apartment harder to afford, or because the less time Iaehh spent there, being reminded of Hhuha in the too-quiet evenings, the happier he was … ? "And besides," she said, ready enough to change the subject, "it can't be any better for you … "
Urruah made a hmf sound. "Well, it's annoying," he said. "They're starting H'la Houheme at the end of the week."
"I don't mean that. I had in mind your ongoing business with the 'Somali' lady you've been seeing over at the Met. The diva-ehhifs 'pet'."
Urruah shook his head hard enough that his ears rattled slightly. It was a gesture Rhiow had been seeing more often than usual from him, lately, and he had picked up a couple more scars about the head. "Yes, well," he said.
Rhiow looked away and began innocently to wash. Urruah's interest in the artform known to ehhif as "opera" continued to strike her as a little kinky, despite Rhiow's recognition that this was simply a slightly idiosyncratic personal manifestation of all toms' fascination with song in its many forms. However, lately Urruah had been discoursing less in the abstract mode as regarded oh'ra, and more about the star dressing room and the goings-on therein. Urruah's interest in Hwith was apparently less than abstract, and appeared mutual, though most of what Rhiow heard of Hwith's discourse had to do with the juicier gossip about her "mistress"s' steadily intensifying encounters with the oh'ra's present guest conductor.
"Well, what the hiouh," Urruah said after a moment, "this is what we became wizards for, anyway, isn't it? Travel. Adventure. Going to strange and wonderful places … "
And getting into trouble in them, Rhiow thought. "Absolutely," she said. "Come on … let's start getting the logistics sorted out."
She turned and walked back up the platform, jumped down onto the tracks and started to make her way over the iron-stained gravel to the platform for Track Twenty-Four. Urruah followed at his own pace: Arhu leapt and ran to catch up with her. "Why're you so down about it?" he said. "This is gonna be great!"
"It will if you don't act up," Rhiow said, and almost immediately regretted it.
"Whaddaya mean, 'act up'? I'm very well behaved."
Rhiow gave Urruah a sidewise look as he came up from behind them. "Compared to the Old Tom on a rampage," she said, "or the Devastatrix in heat, doubtless you are. As People go, though, we have some work to do on you yet."
"Listen to me, Arhu," Urruah said, as they jumped up onto Track
Twenty-Four and started weaving their way down it toward the entrance to the Main Concourse. "We're going into other People's territory. That's always ticklish business. Not only that: we're going there because there's something going on that they couldn't handle by themselves. They have to have feelings about that … and that we're now going to come strolling in there with our tails up to fix things, supposedly, can't make them overjoyed either. It makes them look bad to themselves. You get it?"
"Well, if they are bad – "
Arhu broke off and ducked out of the way of the swipe Rhiow aimed at his head. "Arhu," Rhiow said, "that's not your judgment to make. Certainly not of another wizard: not of regular People, either. Queen Iau has built us all with different abilities, and just because they don't always work perfectly right now doesn't mean they won't later. As for their effectiveness: sometimes a wizard comes up against a job he can't handle. When that happens, and we're called to assist, we do just that … knowing that someday we may be in the same position."
They came out of the gateway to Twenty-Four, squeezing hard to the left to avoid being trampled by the ehhif who were streaming in toward the waiting train, and came out into the Concourse. "We're a kinship, not a group of competitors," Urruah said, as they began making their way toward the Graybar Building entrance, hugging the wall. "We don't go out of our way to make our brothers and sisters feel that they're failing at their jobs. We fail at enough of our own."
"So," Rhiow said. "We've got a day or so to sort out our own business. Urruah, fortunately, doesn't have an abode shared with ehhif, so his arrangements will be simplest – "
"Hey, listen," Urruah said, "if I go away and they take my dumpster somewhere, you think that isn't going to be a problem? I'll have to drop back here every couple of days to make sure things stay the way I left them."
Rhiow restrained herself mightily from asking what Urruah could possibly keep in a dumpster that was of such importance. "Arhu, at the garage, have any of them been paying particular attention to you?"
"Yeah, the tall one," he said, "Ah'hah, they call him. He was Saash's ehhif, he seems to think he's mine now." Arhu looked a little abashed. "He's nice to me."
"OK. You're going to have to come back from London every couple of days to make sure that he sees you and knows you're all right."
"By myself?" Arhu said, very suddenly.
"Yes," Rhiow said. "And Arhu – if I find, that in the process you've gated off-planet, your ears and my claws are going to meet! Remember what Urruah told you."
"I never get to have any fun with wizardry!' Arhu said, the complaining acquiring a little yowl around the edges, and he fluffed up slightly at Rhiow. "It's all work and dull stuff!"
"Oh really?" Urruah said. "What about that cute little marmalade tabby I saw you with the other night?"
"Uh … Oh," Arhu said, and abruptly sat down right by the wall and became very quiet.
"Yes indeed," Urruah said. "Naughty business, that, stealing groceries out of an ehhif's trunk. That's why you fell down the manhole afterwards. The Universe notices when wizards misbehave. And sometimes … other wizards do too."
Arhu sat staring at Urruah wide-eyed, and didn't say anything. This by itself was so bizarre an event that Rhiow nearly broke up laughing. "Boy's got taste, if nothing else," Urruah said to her, and sat down himself for a moment. "He was up on Broadway and raided some ehhifs shopping bags after they'd been to Zabar's. Caviar, it was, and smoked salmon and sour cream: supposed to be someone's brunch the next day, I guess. He did a particulate bypass spell on a section of the trunk lid and pulled the stuff out piece by piece … then gave every bit of it to this little marmalade creature with big green eyes."
Arhu was now half-turned away from them while hurriedly washing his back. It was he'ihh, composure-washing: and it wasn't working – the fur bristled again as fast as he washed it down. "Never even set the car alarm off," Urruah said, wrapping his tail demurely around his toes. "Did it in full sight. None of the ehhif passing by believed what they were seeing, as usual."
"I had to do it in full sight," Arhu said, starting to wash further down his back. "You can't sidle when you're – "
" – stealing things, no," Rhiow said, as she sat down too. She sighed. The child had come to them with a lot of bad habits. Yet much of his value as a Person and a wizard had to do with his unquenchable, sometimes unbearable spirit and verve, which even a truly awful kittenhood had not been able to crush. Had his tendencies as a visionary not already revealed themselves, Rhiow would have thought that Arhu was destined to be like Urruah, a "power source", the battery or engine of a spell which others might construct and work, but which he would fuel and drive. Either way, the visionary talent too used that verve to fuel it. It was Arhu's inescapable curiosity, notable even for a cat, which kept his wizardry fretting and fraying at the fabric of linear time until it "wore through" and some image from future or past leaked out.
"If nothing else," Rhiow said finally, "you've got a quick grasp of the fundamentals … as they apply to implementation, anyway. I can see the ethics end of things is going to take longer." Arhu turned, opened his mouth to say something. "Don't start with me," Rhiow said. "Talk to the Whisperer about it, if you don't believe us: but stealing is only going to be trouble for you eventually. Meanwhile, where shall we meet in the morning?"
Urruah looked around him as Arhu got up again, looking a little recovered. "I guess here is as good a place as any. Five thirty?"
That was opening time for the station, and would be fairly calm, if any time of the day in a place as big and busy as Grand Central could accurately be described as calm. "Good enough," Rhiow said.
They started to walk out down the Graybar Passage again, to the Lexington Avenue doors. "Arhu?" Rhiow said to him as they came out and slide sideways to hug the wall, heading for the corner of Forty– Third. "An hour before first twilight, two hours before the Old Tom's Eye sets."
"I know when five thirty is," Arhu said, sounding slightly affronted.
They do shift change at the garage a moonwidth after that."
"All right," Urruah said. "Anything else you need to take care of, like telling the little marmalade number – "
"Her name's Hffeu," Arhu said.
"Hffeu it is," Rhiow said. "She excited to be going out with a wizard?"
Arhu gave Rhiow a look of pure pleasure: if his whiskers had gone any further forward, they would have fallen off in the street.
She had to smile back: there were moods in which this kit was, unfortunately, irresistible. "Go on, then – tell her goodbye for a few days: you're going to be busy. And Arhu – "
"I know, 'be careful'." He was laughing at her. "Luck, Rhiow."
"Luck," she said, as he bounded off across the traffic running down Forty-Third, narrowly being missed by a taxi taking the corner. She breathed out. Next to her, Urruah laughed softly as they slipped into the door of the post office to sidle, then waited for the light to change. "You worry too much about that kit. He'll be all right."
"Oh, his survival is between him and the Powers now," she said, "I know. But still … "
" … you still feel responsible for him," Urruah said as the light turned and they trotted out to cross the street, "because for a while he was our responsibility. Well, he's passed his Ordeal, and we're off that hook. But now we have to teach him teamwork."
"It's going to make the last month look like ten dead birds and no one to share them with," Rhiow said. She peered up Lexington, trying to see past the hurrying ehhif. Humans could not see into that neighboring universe where cats went when sidled and in which string structure was obvious, but she could just make out Arhu's little black-and-white shape, trailing radiance from passing resonated hyperstrings as he ran.
"At least he's willing," Urruah said. "More than he was before."
"Well, we owe a lot of that to you … your good example."
Urruah put his whiskers forward, pleased, as they came to the next corner and went across the side street at a trot. "Feels a little odd sometimes," he said.
"What," Rhiow said, putting hers forward too, "that the original
breaker of every available rule should now be the big, stern, tough ii
"I didn't break that many rules." "Oh? What about that dog, last month?" "Come on, that was just a little fun."
"Not for the dog. And the sausage guy on Thirty-Third – "
"That was an intervention. Those sausages were terrible."
"As you found after tricking him into dropping one. And last year, the lady with the – "
"All right, all right!' Urruah was laughing as they came to Fifty– Fifth. "So I like the occasional practical joke. Rhi, I don't break any of the real rules. I do my job."
She sighed, and then bumped her head against his as they stood by the corner of the building at Forty-Fifth and Lex, waiting for the light to change. "You do," she said. "You are a wizard's wizard, for all your jokes. Now get out of here and do whatever you have to do with your dumpster."
"I thought you weren't going to mention that," Urruah said, and grinned. "Luck, Rhi – "
He galloped off across the street and down Forty-Fifth as the light changed, leaving her looking after him in mild bemusement.
He heard me thinking.
Well, wizards did occasionally overhear one another's private thought when they had worked closely together for long enough. She and Saash had sometimes "underheard" each other this way: usually without warning, but not always at times of stress. It had been happening a little more frequently since Arhu came. Something to do with the change in the make-up of the team? … she thought. There was no way to tell.
And no time to spend worrying about it now. But even as Rhiow set off for her own lair, trotting on up Lex toward the upper East Side, she had to smile ironically at that. It was precisely because she was so good at worrying that she was the leader of this particular team. Losing the habit could mean losing the team … or worse.
For the time being, she would stick to worrying.
The way home was straightforward, this time of day: up Lex to Seventieth, then eastward to the block between First and Second. The street was fairly quiet for a change. Mostly it was old converted brownstones, though the corner apartment buildings were newer ones, and a few small cafes and stores were scattered along the block. She paused at the corner of Seventieth and Second to greet the big stocky duffel-coated doorman there, who always stooped to pet her. He was opening the door for one of the tenants: now he turned, bent down to her. "Hey there, Midnight, how ya doing?"
"No problems today, Ffran'kh," Rhiow said, rearing up to rub against him: he might not hear or understand her spoken language any more than any other ehhif, but body language he understood just fine. Ffran'kh was a nice man, not above slipping Rhiow the occasional piece of baloney from a sandwich, and also not above slipping some of the harder-up homeless people in the area a five– or ten-dollar bill on the sly. Carers were hard enough to come by in this world, wizardly or not, and Rhiow could hardly fail to appreciate one who was also in the neighborhood.
Having said hello in passing, she went on her way down the block, not bothering to sidle even this close to home. Iaehh rarely came down the block this way anyhow, preferring for some reason to approach from the First Avenue side, possibly because of the deli down on that corner. She strolled down the sidewalk, glancing around her idly at the brownstones, the garbage, the trees and the weeds growing up around them; more or less effortlessly she avoided the ehhif who came walking past her with shopping bags or briefcases or baby strollers.
Halfway down was a browner brownstone than usual, with the usual stairway up to the front door and a side stairway to the basement apartment. On one of the squared-off tops of the stone balusters flanking the stairway sat a rather grungy looking white-furred shape, washing. He was always washing, Rhiow thought, not that it did him any good. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
"Hunt's luck, Yafh!"
He looked down at her and blinked for a moment. Green eyes in a face as round as a saucer full of cream, and almost as big: big shoulders, huge paws, and an overall scarred and beat-up look, as if he had had an abortive argument with a meat grinder: that was Yafh. However, you got the impression that the meat grinder had lost the argument. "Luck, Rhi," he said cheerfully. "I've had mine for today. Care for a rat?"
"That's very kind of you," she said, "but I'm on my way to dinner, and if I spoil my appetite, my ehhif will notice. Bite its head off on my behalf, if you would … "
"My pleasure." Yafh bent down and suited the action to the word.
She trotted up the steps and sat down beside Yafh for a moment, looking down the street while he crunched. Yafh was one of those People who, while ostensibly denned with ehhif, was neglected totally by them. He subsisted on stolen scraps scavenged from the neighborhood garbage bags, and on rats and mice and bugs – not difficult in this particular building, its landlord apparently not having had the exterminators in since early in the century.
"You off for the day?" Yafh said, when he finished crunching.
"The day, yes," she said, "but tomorrow early we have to go to Hlon'hohn."
"That's right across the East River, isn't it?"
"Uh, yes, all the way across." Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. So did Yafh.
"They're making you work again, 'Rioh," Yafh said. The name was a pun on her name and on an Ailurin word for "beast of burden', though you could also use it for a wheelbarrow or a grocery cart or anything else that ehhif pushed around. "It's all a plot. People shouldn't work. People should lie on cushions and be fed cream, and filleted fish, and ragout of free-range crunchy mouse in a rich gravy."
"Oh," Rhiow said. "The way you are … "
Yafh laughed that rough, buttery laugh of his: he leaned back and hit the headless body of the rat a couple of times in a pleased and absent way. "Exactly. But at least I'm my own boss. Are you?"
"This isn't slavery, if that's what you're asking," Rhiow said, bristling very slightly. "It's service. There is a difference."
"Oh, I know," Yafh said. "What wizards do is important, regardless of what some People think." He picked the rat up one more time, dangled it from a razory claw, flipped it in the air and caught it expertly. "And at least from what you tell me you have it better than the poor ehhif wizards do: your own kind at least know about you … But Rhi, it's just that you never seem to have much time to yourself. When do you lie around and just be People?"
"I get some time off, every now and then … "
"Uh huh," Yafh said, and smiled slightly: that scarred, beat-up, amiable look that had fooled various of the other cats (and some dogs) in the neighborhood into thinking that he was no particular threat. "Not enough, I think. And things have been tough for you lately … "
"Yes," Rhiow said, and sighed. "Well, we all have bad times occasionally: not even wizardry can stop that."
"It stops other People's bad times, maybe," Yafh said, "but not your own … It just seems hard, that's all."
"It is," Rhiow said after a moment, gazing up toward her ehhif's apartment building near the corner. Sometimes lately she had dreaded going home to the familiar den that suddenly had gone unfamiliar without Hhuha in it. But Iaehh was still there, and he expected her to be there on a regular basis. As far as he knew, she was only able to get out onto the apartment's terrace and from there to the roof of the building next door, from which Iaehh supposed there was no way down … and if she didn't come in every day or so, he worried.
"You sure you don't want the rest of this rat?" Yafh said quietly.
Rhiow turned toward him, apologetic. "Oh, Yafh, I appreciate it, but food won't help. Work will … though I hate to admit it. You go ahead and have that, now. Look at the size of it! It's a meal by itself."
"They're getting bigger all th
