Feline Wizards - To Visit The Queen Part 1

To Visit the Queen.

by Diane Duane.

Feline Wizards.

p.u.s.s.y-cat, p.u.s.s.y-cat, where have you been?

Iave been to London to look at the Queen.

p.u.s.s.y-cat, p.u.s.s.y-cat, what did you there?

I frightened a little mouse under her chair.

Childrenas rhyme.

In Lifeas name, and for Lifeas sake, I a.s.sert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Lifeas service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fitting to do soa"looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded ...

the Wizardas Oath, species-nonspecific recension

PROLOGUE.

Patel went slowly up the gray concrete stairs to the elevated Docklands Light Railway station at Island Gardens; he took them one at a time, rather than two or three at once as he usually did. Nothing was wrong with him: it was morning, he felt energetic enougha"a good breakfast inside him, everything OK at home, the weather steady enough, cool and gray but not raining. However, the package he was carrying was heavy enough to pull a prizefighteras arms out of their sockets.

He had made the mistake of putting the book in a plastic shopping bag from the superstore down the street. Now the thingas sharp corners were punching through the bag, and the bagas handles, such as they were, were stretching thinner and thinner under the bookas weight, cutting into his hands like cheesewire and leaving red marks. He had to stop and transfer the bag from right hand to left, left hand to right, as he went up the stairs, hauling himself along by the chipped blue-painted handrail. When he finally reached the platform, Patel set the bag down gratefully on the concrete with a grunt, and rubbed his hands, looking up at the red LEDs of the train status sign to see when the next one would be along. I, the sign said, BANK, 2 minutes.

He leaned against the wall of the gla.s.s-sided station-platform shelter, out of reach of the light chill east wind, and put the bag down at his feet, sighing and gazing out over the bottom half of the Isle of Dogs.

Mostly what Patel was looking at, under the morningas featureless overcast sky, was a vast construction site: the new tunnels for the extension of the Jubilee Line of the Underground were being driven through here, amid a welter of orange-painted cranes, lifters and mechanical digging machines with exotic foreign names, all of which made it almost impossible to see Island Gardens on the far side of the construction.

Patel sighed and thought about the morningas cla.s.s schedule. This was his second year of a putative three years at London Guildhall University, up in the City. He was well on his way toward a degree in mathematics with business applications, though what good that was really going to do him, at the end of the day, he wasnat certain. There would be time to start worrying about jobhunting, though, next year. Right now, Patel was doing well enough, his student grant was safe, and whatever attention he wasnat spending on his studies was mostly directed toward making sure he had enough money to get by. Though at least he didnat have to worry about rent as yeta"courtesy of his folksa"there were other serious matters at hand. Clothes ... textbooks ... partying.

From down the track came a demure hum and a thrum of rails as the little three-car red-and-blue Docklands train slid toward the station. Patel picked up the book in his armsa"he had had enough of the bagas b.l.o.o.d.y handlesa"satisfied that at least this would be the last time he would have to carry the huge G.o.dawful thing anywhere. One of the jewelry students, of all people, had seen the For Sale ad on Patelas Web page, and had decided that the metallurgical information in the book would make it more than worth the twenty quid that Patel was asking for it. For his own part, Patel was glad enough to let it go. He had bought the book originally for its mathematical and statistical content, and found to his annoyance within about a month of starting his second semester that it was more technical than he needed for the courses he was taking, which by and large did not involve metallurgy or engineering. He had put the book aside, and after that, most of the use it had seen involved Patelas mother using it to press flowers.

The train pulled up in front of him, stopped and chimed: the doors opened, and people emptied out in a rush of briefcases and schoolbags going by, and here and there a few white uniforms showing from under jackets and coatsa"people heading to the hospital in town. Patel got on the last car, which would be the first one out, and sat in what would have been the driveras seat, if there had been a driver: there was none. These trains were handled by a trio of straightforwardly-programmed PCs based somewhere in the Canary Wharf complex. The innovation left the first seats in the front car open, and gave the lucky pa.s.senger a beautiful view of the ride into town.

Patel, though, had seen it all a hundred times, and paid little attention until the train swung round the big curve near South Quay and headed across the water. There was something about the quality of the rail sound that changed there, probably to do with the way the water reflected it, and the increased noise level caught his attention. He gazed up briefly at the ma.s.sive blue-sheened gla.s.s-clad tower of One Canada Place, what most people called athe Canary Wharf towera, with its distinctive pyramidal top and the brilliant white double strobe flas.h.i.+ng at the peak of the pyramid, then glanced down again at the building site just across the water from the tower and underneath the train, the new buildings rising on Heron Quays. Even though he knew a little about the placeas history, Patel found it hard to imagine this landscape, not full of construction gear and scaffolding, but jostling with the hulls of close-berthed s.h.i.+ps, the air black with smoke from a thousand smokestacks, cranes loading and unloading goods: the s.h.i.+pping of an empire filling these man-made harbors and lagoons that had been dredged out of oxbows of the Thames. It had all vanished a long time ago, when Britain stopped being an empire and the mistress of the seas. This whole area had undergone a terrible decline after the war, during which it had been bombed nearly flat, and whatever was left had fallen into decrepitude or ruin. Now it was growing again, office s.p.a.ce abruptly mushrooming on the waterside sites where the s.h.i.+ps had docked to disgorge their cargoes. Only the street names, and the names of the Docklands stations, preserved the nautical memories: some of the old loading cranes still stood ... but the warehouses behind them had been converted to expensive loft apartments. Slim black cormorants fished off Heron Quays, though the quays themselves were gone, slowly being replaced by more apartments and office s.p.a.ce: and s.h.i.+ning hotels and still more office buildings looked down on waters which were no longer so polluted that it would catch fire if you dropped a match in them.

The train pulled out of Canary Wharf station and headed northwestward away from the towers toward humbler real estate, the aless fortunatea parts of East London which had yet to benefit from the real estate boom in the Docklands. The names of the DLR stations grew less nautical, older: Limehouse, Shadwell ... Patel got out at Shadwell to change for the little spur line to Tower Gateway, and stood there waiting for a few minutes. All around were four- or five-story brick buildings, their brick all leached and streaked with many yearsa weather, tired-looking: scattered among them were council housing, ten-story blocks of flats done in pebble-dash and painted concrete, looking just as weary. These were not slums any more: not quite ... though his father never tired of telling Patel and his mother how lucky they were to be able to afford someplace better. It was true enough, though it meant Patel had a three-quarter-hour commute to school every morning instead of a fifteen-minute walk.

No matter: today he was grateful enough not to have to walk more than a few minutes carrying the Book From h.e.l.l. The train for Tower Gateway came rumbling along, stopped and opened its doors. It was crowded, and Patel slipped in through the door and put the book down on the floor, bracing it between his s.h.i.+ns lest it fall on someoneas foot and get him involved in what would probably be a completely justified lawsuit for grievous bodily harm.

The train swung south the few blocks to Tower Gateway. There Patel got out with his burden, walked along the platform and took the escalator up through the tubelike corridor that led to the overpa.s.s which avoided the mainline BR tracks: then down the other side again, and out across the open concrete plaza from which jutted several large slabs of ancient wall, not much more than fieldstones mortared togethera"a remnant of the old days when the City of London was all the London there was, and that tiny square mileage had a proper defensive wall of its own. Nothing to do, of course, with the other walled edifice just this side of the river ...

As he went down the stairs to the underpa.s.s tunnel which dove under the traffic stream of Minories Street, Patel glanced up and caught a glimpse of crenellated tower against the clouds: one of the metal windvane-banners mounted on a pinnacle of the Toweras outer wall stood frozen in mid-swing against the wind, then spun suddenly to point west in a gust off the Thames. Skyas getting nasty, Patel thought. Might rain. Hope it stops by the time Iam above ground again ...

He headed through the underpa.s.s, breathing a little harder now from the weight he was carrying: am I getting out of shape? I canat wait to get rid of this thing ... and up the stairs on the far side: past some more aislandsa of old preserved City wall, and then down again into the Tower Hill Underground station.

He pushed his train ticket into the turnstile before him, waited for the machine to spit it out again. The turnstileas oblong vertical pads snapped open before him as he plucked the ticket out of the machineas steel mouth, and Patel pushed through, along with about a hundred other people, making his way toward the stairs leading to the Circle Line and District Line platforms. There he would catch the last leg of his trip, the Tube train to Monument, and meet Sasha at the coffee shop at Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street: and she would take this thing off his hands ... And arms, and shoulders, but particularly the hands, Patel thought, and headed down the stairs, stepping a little to one side so as not to be trampled by the people behind him. A direction sign just ahead of him said, Platforms 2 and 3, District and Circle Lines, west.

He headed for the sign, changing the bag again from left hand to right hand with a slight grimace as he went, and turned the left corner, toward the Tube platforma"

Dark. Why was it dark all of a sudden? Power failure, Patel thought. Though whereas the light behind me? He turneda"

The smell was what hit him first. My G.o.d, what is that ? Did the sewer break through in here or somethinga"But there was no way to tell. He couldnat see. Patel turned again, took a few hesitant steps forward. There was something wrong with the ground. It felt mushya"

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 Patelas 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 Coopersa 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 G.o.dawful 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 failinga"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 Cooperas Row and George Street, looked down toward Great Tower Street in the direction of the Monument Tube stationa"

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, donat want to see that, doesnat 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, athe windvanes on them wheeling and whirling in the gusts of wind off the rivera"the wind that bore the stink forcefully into Patelas 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 tooa"

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 atreesa were masts ... masts of s.h.i.+ps, fifty or seventy or a hundred of them all anch.o.r.ed there together, the wind and the water pus.h.i.+ng at the s.h.i.+ps 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 togethera"

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 Patelas 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 fella"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 splas.h.i.+ng 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 Nostrandas Scientific Encyclopedia. Mostly his family and friends thought he had been robbed and a.s.saulted, 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 Cooperas 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 winteras 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 platformsa near ends. The commutersa 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: a ... 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 ... a And over it all, effortlessly drowning everything out, comes the ma.s.sive ba.s.so 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 noticeda"not that the rus.h.i.+ng 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 hadnat been invisible.

Bong, said the clock again. Rhiow sighed and looked up at the elliptical multicolored s.h.i.+mmer 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 todayas 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. aThese endless dumb drills,a it said, alick b.u.t.t.a WHAM! -- and Arhu fell over on the platform, while above him Urruah leaned down, one paw still raised, wearing an expression that was surprisingly milda"for the moment. aLanguage,a he said.

aWhaddaya mean?! Thereas no one here but you and Rhiow, and you use worse stuff than that all thea"a WHAM! Arhu fell over again. aCourtesy,a Urruah said, ais 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 youall find if you survive that long. Which seems unlikely at the moment. My language isnat at question here, and even if it were, I donat use it on my fellow team members, or to them, even by implication.a aBut I only saida"a 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 weare going to get nine of them. Some of us get complacent ...

aLetas be clear about this,a Urruah said. aOur job is to keep the worldgates down here functioning. Human wizards canat do this kind of work, or not nearly as well as we can, anyway, since we can see hyperstrings, and ehhif canat 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 ayesa again when we took you in-pride and you agreed to stay with us. That means youare 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 afigure outa what youare 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 modic.u.m of effectiveness, which may be several lives on, not that it matters to me. You got that?a aUh huh.a aUh huh what?a aUh huh, I got it.a aRight. So letas start in again from the top.a 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 worldgateas control matrix, and muttered under his breath, very softly, aIt still licks b.u.t.t.a 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 hairb.a.l.l.s 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 paradigma"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 b.a.l.l.s and swagger, wearing the cachet of his few well-placed scars with an insouciant, good-natured aira"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 head had this kind of supervision? But then, who among us wouldnat see ourselves in him? The way you feel your way along among the uncertaintiesa"and the way you try to push your paw just a little further through the hole, trying to get at whatas 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. aIave given the gate some parameters to work with already, though Iam not going to tell you what they are,a Urruah said. aI want you to find locations that match the parameters, and open the gate for visual patency, not physical.a aWhy not? If I cana"a aVisual-only is harder,a Rhiow said. aPhysical patency is easy, when youare 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 ... thatas what weare after, here.a Arhu started hooking the control strings with his claws, slowly pulling each one out with carea"which was as well: the gates were nearly alive, in some ways, and if misused or maltreated, they could bite. aI wish Saash was here,a Arhu muttered. aShe was better at explaining this ... a aThan we are? Almost certainly,a Rhiow said. aAnd I wish she was here too, but sheas not.a Their friend and fellow team-member Saash had pa.s.sed through and beyond her ninth life within the past couple of months, under unusual circ.u.mstances: though none of our circ.u.mstances 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 s.h.i.+ning through her various mild neuroses with unusual brilliance. But Rhiow found herself just as lonely for her old partneras 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.

aSaash,a Urruah said to Arhu, aknowing her, is probably explaining to Queen Iau that she thinks the entire structure of physical reality needs a serious reweave: so youad 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.a aI canat figure out where that is! Itas not the way I left it, now.a aThatas because itas returned to its default configuration,a Urruah said, awhile you were recovering from sa.s.sing me.a aStart from the beginning,a Rhiow said. aAnd 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.a Arhu sat there, narrow-eyed, with his ears back. aTwo choices,a Urruah said, after a moment. aYou 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.a Arhu glanced back down the station at the other platforms, which were boiling with ehhif commuters rus.h.i.+ng up and down and in some cases nearly pus.h.i.+ng one another onto the tracks. aDoesnat look perfect to me. I know weare sidled, but what if one of them sees what weare doing?a There wonat be much for them to see at the rate youare going,a Urruah said.

aEhhif donat see wizardry half the time, even when itas hanging right in front of their weak little noses,a Rhiow said. aThe odds against having anyone notice anything, down here in the dark and the noise, are well in your favora"if you ever get on with it. If youare really all that concerned, rotate the gate matrix a hundred and eighty degrees and specify one-side-only visual patency. But I donat 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.a aNot a bad idea,a 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. aNo gatings into vacuum,a he said. aOr under water, or below ground level, or into any other environment which would be bad if mixed freely with this one.a Arhu got to his feet, shook himself and glared at Urruah. aAw, I was just thinking ... a , aYes, and I heard you. No off-planet work for you until youare better with handling the structural spells for these gates.a aBut other wizards can just get the spell from their manuals, or the Whispering, or whatever way they access wizardry, and goa"a aYouare not aother wizardsa,a Rhiow said, pacing over to sit down beside Urruah as a more obvious gesture of support. aYou 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, youave got to be able to fix them when they breaka"take them apart and put them back together againa"not just use them for rapid transit like aother wizardsa. Yes, itas 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 youave got to know this information from the inside, without having to consult the Whisperer every thirty seconds for advice. What if Sheas busy?a aHow busy can G.o.ds get?a Arhu muttered, turning his attention back to the gate.

aYouad be surprised,a Urruah said. aQueen Iauas 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.a aTheyare not little,a Arhu said, and then fell silent for a moment. a ... All right, should I just collapse this and start over?a aSure, go ahead,a 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 heas right about them not being little, Rhiow said privately, from her mind to Urruahas.

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 areweavea the visible matrix. It surprises me that you would describe the concept of approaching s.e.xual maturity as a problem.

Oh, itas not, not as his affects me anyway, Urruah said. Weare in-pride now: heas safe with mea"it helps that the relations.h.i.+p between you and me isnat 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, thereas likely to be trouble coming. Hormonal surges donat sort well with the normal flow of wizardly practice.

Iam not sure thereas going to be anything normal about his practice for a while, Rhiow said, dry, as they watched the structure of the gate rea.s.sert 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.

aUh,a Arhu said.

aDonat just pull it in all directions like a dead rat, for Iauas sake,a Rhiow said, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. aTake time to get your visualization sorted out first.a aRemember what I told you about visualizing the entire interweave of the gateas string structure as organized into five-stranded structures and groups of five,a Urruah said. aSimplest 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 accidentala"a aWait a minute,a Arhu said, sitting back again, but with a slightly suspicious look this time. aAre 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 -- ?a aMaybe not just for that purpose, no. But donat you find it a little strange that weare perfectly set up to handle strings physically, and that we can see them naturally, when no other species can?a aThe saurians can.a aThatas a recent development,a Rhiow said wearily. It was one of many arecent developmentsa which they were all slowly digesting. aNever mind that for now. No other species could. Meantime, do something before the thing defaults again ... a aAll right,a Arhu said. aGroup one is for phase relations.h.i.+ps.a 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 ajunction weavea to four-dimensional s.p.a.ce, and the aemphatica 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 thena"a He paused, licked his nose.

aThen comes motion,a Urruah said, aa"field nutation, sideslip, tesseral, cistemporal, cishyperspatial.a He paused as Arhu leaned in to bite the strings that he was having trouble managing with his paws, aa"and then the five strictly physical fields of motion. The planet rotates, itas inclined on its axis and precesses, itas 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 Galaxya"a aa"is rotating, yes, I think we would have heard if it had stoppeda"a Urruah made a face. aJust be glad thatas 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 Iad hit you for your rude mouth, which may come later. And donat think I canat hear you thinking, with your teeth and claws full of hyperstrings: you think the laws of science are broken, or Iam deaf? Thought runs down those things like water: thatas partly what theyare built for ... All you have to worry about now is the path this piece of Earth is describing through s.p.a.ce at the moment, and the path that the piece youare trying to gate to is describing. You keep them in synch while the gateas open, and thatall be more than a lot of wizards can do. Itas a complex helical locus in motion, but no more complex than a trained Person can handle. Letas see how you do.a 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 ma.s.s 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 Urruahas teaching style, though, and it seemed to work with Arhu. Tom stuff, Rhiow thought, and kept her whiskers still: unwise to let the amus.e.m.e.nt 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 s.h.i.+mmered 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 rus.h.i.+ng directly at the gate.

Arhuas 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. aWhat did Ia"I didnata"a Rhiow yawned. aIt was a tram.a aWhat?a aA kind of bus,a Rhiow said. aIt runs on electricity: some ehhif cities use them. Donat ask me where that was, though.a aBlue-and-white tram,a Urruah said. aCombined with that smell? That was Zurich.a aUrruaha"a aNo, seriously. Thereas a butcher just down the road from there, on the Bahnhofstra.s.se, and they have this sausage thata"a aUrruah.a aWhat? Whatas the matter?a Rhiow sighed. Urruah had four ruling pa.s.sions: wizardry, food, s.e.x, and ohara. 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. aWe donat need to hear about the sausage,a Rhiow said. aWas that the location you had set into the gate?a aI didnat set a specific location. Just told it to hunt for population centers in the three hundred to five hundred thousand range with gating affinities.a aThen you did good,a Rhiow said to Arhu, aeven if you did panic. You had aherea and atherea perfectly synchronized.a aUntil I panicked.a Arhu was was.h.i.+ng now, with the quick sullen movements of someone both embarra.s.sed and angry.

aIt didnat do any harm. You should always brace yourself, though, when opening a gate into a new location, even on visual-only. Itas another good reason to make sure the gate defaults to invisible/intangible until youave got your coordinates solidified.a aTake a break,a 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 isnat 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 s.h.i.+mmereda"

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.

aThe cars are on the wrong side,a Arhu said suddenly.

aNot wrong,a Rhiow said, ajust different. There are places on the planet where they donat drive the way ehhif here do.a aNo one on the planet drives the way ehhif here do,a Urruah muttered.

Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. aNo argument.a People were walking back and forth before what would be the aperture of the gate, were it physically to open. aLook at them all,a Arhu said, somewhat bemused. aIt keeps coming up cities.a aIt would whether Urruah had set the parameters that way or not,a Rhiow said to Arhu. aWorldgates inhere to population centers.a Make it a little dryer for him, why donat you? Urruah said good-humoredly into her mind as he looked out at the ehhif hurrying by. aSee, Arhu, if you pack enough people of whatever species into a tight enough s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.cetime continuum rubs thinnera"places get a reputation for anything being available there, or at least possible. Go over the threshold number, and gates start forming spontaneously.a aMuch smaller populations can produce gates if theyare there for long enough,a Rhiow said. aThe piled-up-population effect can be c.u.mulative 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.a aCatal Huyuk,a Urruah said, aand 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.a aWhatas the threshold number you were talking about?a Arhu said, studying the gate.

aA variable, not a constant,a Rhiow said. aIt varies by species. For ehhif, itas around ten million. For People, eight hundred thousand, give or take a tail.a Arhu flirted his own tail, a gesture of disbelief. aWhere would you get that many People?a aRight here in this city, for one place,a Rhiow said. aAll those apetsa, all those astraysaa"a The words she used were rhao aehhihah and aihlhih, ahuman-denneda and anonaligneda. aThere might be as many as a million of us just in this island. Either way, thereas more than enough of us to sustain a gating complex without ehhif being involved ... and theyare here too. With such big joint populations, itas no surprise that this complex is the most senior one in the planet.a aAnd besides, thereas the amastera gating connection to the old Downside,a Urruah said. aEvery worldgate on the planet has aaffectionala connections to it: for all we know, its presence made it possible for all the other gates to sp.a.w.n.a Arhu shook his head. aWhatas this city, then?a aLondon,a Urruah said.

aDonat tell me ... you can smell the local butcher.a 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. aAs it happens,a Urruah said, aI recognize the landscape. Thatas Tower Bridge back there.a Rhiow looked at the bridge between the two towers: it was starting to rise in two pieces, to let a s.h.i.+p past. aIsnat that the one the ehhif have a rhyme about? It fell down ... a aWrong 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.a aThe aHrromhaansa.a aThatas right.a aNot a very old complex, then?a Rhiow said.

aNope. A little finicky, this one. The population pressure built up around it in fits and starts rather than steadily, and it kept losing population abruptlya"the city kept getting sacked, having plagues and fires, things like that. The matrices formed under touchy circ.u.mstances. But the Tower Bridge complex is good for long-range transits: better than ours, even. No oneas sure why. Convergence of ley lines, gravitic anomalies under that hill close to the bridge, who knows?a Urruah waved his tail. aLeave it to the theorists.a aLike you, now.a He put his whiskers forward, but the expression in his eyes was ironic. aWell, weare all diversifying a little at the moment, arenat we? Not that we have much choice.a aYou miss her too,a Rhiow said softly.

Urruah watched Arhu for a little, and then said, aShe used to go on and on about these little details. Now I wonder whether she had a hint of what was going to happen ... a The interesting thing,a Rhiow said, ais that you remembered all this.a He looked at her sidewise. aShouldnat surprise you. aHe lives in a dumpster, heas got a brain like a dumpstera, isnat that what you always say?a aI never say that,a Rhiow said, scandalized, having often thought that very thing.

aHuh,a Urruah said, and his whiskers went further forward. aAnyway, this complex handles a lot of off-planet worka"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 easilya"something to do with the forces tangled around that hill with the old castle on it.a aShould I try somewhere else?a Arhu said, now bored with looking at the traffic.

aSure, go ahead,a Rhiow said, waving her tail in casual a.s.sent, 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 a.s.sociated 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 didnat do that, as a rule, and found the prospect slightly pathological: but there was no use judging one species by anotheras standardsa"the One doubtless had Her reasons for designing them differently. Ten lives on, maybe weall all be told ...

aItas stuck,a Arhu said suddenly.

aWhat? Stuck how?a aI donat know. Itas just stuck.a Urruah got up and stalked over to look the gate-web up and down. To a Personas eyes, its underweave, the warp and woof of interwoven hyperstrings which produced the gating effect, were still plainly visible through the image of suns.h.i.+ne on that other landscape, the tangle of buildings and traffic beyond. Arhu was sitting up with the brilliant strings of the acontrol weavea now stretched again between his paws, pulled taut and in the correct configuration for viewing. aLook,a Arhu said, and twisted his paws so that the weave changed configuration, went much more aopena, 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. aDo it again.a aI canat, not from this configuration, anyway.a aI mean take that last move back, then re-execute.a Arhu did.

Nothing changed. The morning was bright, and shone on the Bridge and the river ...

aLet me try,a Urruah said.

aWhy?a Rhiow said. aHe did it right.a Urruah looked at her in astonishment. aWell, he ... a aHe did it right. Letas not rush to judgment: letas have a look at this.a 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.

Thereas a problem, the voice whispered in her ear.

Urruahas ears flicked: nothing to do with the ambient noise. Arhuas 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.

Rhiowas 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 a.s.sistancea"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.