To Visit the Queen (20 page)

"For all their technology, they've been oddly selective about how they use it," Urruah said. "They obviously have electricity, but why are they still burning coal in their dens? There's internal combustion being used out on the water, but why so little in the streets— why all the horses and dirt?"

"It looks like some of the
ehhif
have access to this technology, but not all that many," Rhiow said. It was a problem that their own world shared, though not quite in this way.

"You were right," Arhu said suddenly, "about it being late afternoon."

"Oh?" Rhiow said.

"Yeah. Look, the Moon's coming up."

They looked eastward down the river. Through the dirty haze, a dim round source of light had managed to rise above the buildings cluttering that end of the Thames basin. She looked at it, irrationally relieved that at least something was performing as expected around here.

But then she heard Urruah gulp. Rhiow took another look as the Moon lifted a little higher above the thickest of the murk.

"That's not our Moon," Urruah said softly.

The shape was right. The phase was gibbous. But the face, the face was blotted with darkness, its surface scarred: not with the usual dark
maria,
but with massive craters and fissures, and great plumes and patches of dark dust.

Urruah sat down. Rhiow was too shocked to move at all.

"What in Iau's name has happened here?"
she whispered.

"It's sure not the Moon we started with," Urruah said.

Rhiow couldn't take her eyes off it. "Well, even our moon at home isn't the one we started with. Things happened to it after it was born."

"But there are stories about that," Urruah said. "Not the things you mean. It was pure white, once, without a mark. Then the Lone Power in her feline form came, and saw it, and hated it. Sa'Rráhh blotted it with Her paw that was all newly stained with night, with the death she had invented. She could never bear that anything should remain the way the One made it, if She had anything to say about the matter."

"I thought the Moon was supposed to be the Old Tom's eye," Arhu said.

"Of course it is," Rhiow said. "And it's also just a big piece of rock splashed out of the Earth in its formative stages. It'd be a poor kind of world where there was just one explanation for things."

Urruah looked away from that terrible Moon to give Rhiow a wry look. "Think of it as a conditional hyperquadratic equation," he said to Arhu. "Depending on conditions and context, the same equation gives you different answers at different times. But all the answers are correct. Mythology, philosophy, and science are just three different modalities used to assess the same data, and they can coexist just fine, if you let them. In fact, they'll do it just fine whether you let them or not: they have other business than sitting around waiting to see whether
you
approve."

Arhu looked up at the smudged Moon and shivered. "I don't like it," he said.

"Believe me, you're not alone there," Rhiow said softly. Written there dark above them was a blunt, nasty restatement of the reason why there were wizards. The world, which should have been perfect, was marred: marred with and by malice long aforethought. The shadow-smudged, crater-scarred Moon of their own world was evidence enough of the Lone Power's effect in both symbolic and "real" modes. The terrible destructive force that had struck the Earth very young, in what looked like one of the earliest attempts by the Lone One to prevent the rise of life and intelligence there, had not missed. Rhiow still wondered sometimes whether It had slightly miscalculated Its aim, or whether the Powers That Be had Themselves interfered, interposing Their power just enough to help the huge mass of magma splashed out of the planet's still-molten body to draw itself together and congeal in near orbit. Even when mending the marred, They never overexerted Themselves, all too aware of the energy needed for the long battle lying ahead of them through this universe's lifetime. No attempt would have been made to fly in the face of natural law and try to get life to arise on the second world. It would have been left to cool at its own pace, its low mass mandating the loss of the sparse store of atmospheric elements that arose from it during the cooling: and all the while the fury of the frustrated Lone One would have been allowed to mark itself on the barren Moon in storm after storm of meteoric impacts, eons of merciless cratering, and the punctured crust flooding the Moon's surface with the last flows of lifeblood-lava that hardened dark into the great
maria,
the lighter elements at last all boiled away into the freezing dark of space. A dead world, now, with the mark of the Devastatrix's dark paw pressed on it, livid and chill— a clear message:
I missed, this time. But I will never rest until I finish what I began.

The message seemed to have been much more forcefully stated in
this
universe, though.
I am much closer to finishing,
it seemed to say. Though Iau only knew what It had been up to.

"I think going home would be a good idea," Arhu said.

"Believe me, I'm with you," Urruah said, "but we have a few things to do first. We need to find out what year this is, if we can— "

"No," Rhiow said. "No, I think Arhu's idea is a good one."

"What?"

"Listen to me," Rhiow said. "Every minute we stay here makes it worse. Potentially, anyway. No, listen! Urruah, there's no question that this contamination has happened. Our being here has confirmed it... has made it real for us. And you know what
that
means. What's happened at
our
end of time?"

She watched Urruah start to look a lot more concerned. There was a variant of what some
ehhif
called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that pertained to alternate universes. While you might postulate the existence of an alternate, even be faced by evidence of its existence— as Rhiow's team and the London team had been— that universe did not really "exist" for you until you visited it. Once you did, and its reality had become part of your own— not by consensus, but by direct experience— your own universe also then began to change as a result. This was one of the principles that made wizards so chary of indulging in pleasure trips outside their own universe. For one thing, there was usually plenty of pleasure to be found locally... and for another, once you came back from an alternate-universe jaunt, there might be no "locally" left: or not one you would recognize.

Arhu was looking from Rhiow to Urruah and back again with some confusion. "What's the matter? Is something wrong back home?"

"She's saying there might
be
no more home," Urruah said, glancing around him, "the longer we stay here. Fortunately, timelines don't wipe themselves out in a matter of seconds, the way people think, when there's a change. Causality is robust, and it tries hard to stay the way it is to begin with: the variables in the equation will slosh around for a good while before an alternate universe settles fully into place. As a rule," Urruah said. "Unless the change is so big that causality just can't resist it at all."

They all looked up at the scarred Moon again. Rhiow shuddered, then she said, "Remember when we were talking about gating offplanet? Personal small-scale gating, I mean: via a spell-circle of your own construction..."

Arhu looked at Rhiow.

"I think this would be a good time for you to go ahead and do it," she said to Arhu. "Mind the radiation: there's a fair amount of it, once you're out of the atmosphere's protection. All you need is a standard forcefield spell, the one we were working with last month. You can build the defense against the ionizing radiation into the forcefield at the same time you're loading in enough air to last you for the visit."

Arhu looked at her and licked his nose. "You have to wonder," Urruah said, looking away from the Moon with difficulty, "what could cause that kind of effect. I think we need to find out."

There was a long silence. "Would you come with me?" Arhu said.

Urruah glanced at Rhiow. "I'm sure he could handle it himself," he said. "But just this once..." And he glanced up at the Moon again. "That is so bizarre."

They walked a little farther down the riverbank to find a place where there was less mud, just under the shadow of the Tower's walls. There was an old disused dock there, leading a little way out into the water. Gratefully enough they stepped up onto it, and Arhu headed down toward the end of it, where recent weather or wavewash had mostly scoured the rotting planks clean. Here he started to walk the circle they would need, leaving the pale tracery of graphics in the Speech behind him as he walked and muttered.

Urruah watched him with an expert's eye. "He's been practicing that one for a while," he said.

Rattled as she was, Rhiow couldn't help but smile. "The way you've been practicing that timeslide?"

"Uh, well." Urruah sat down and started to wash his face, then made a face at the taste of his paw, and stopped. "Rhi, you know I wouldn't step out of bounds. Not on this kind of stuff. It scares me."

"It's sure scaring
me,
" Rhiow said. "I can't wait to get back— it's like fleas under the skin, the fear. But it can't be helped. We need to do this first."

Arhu had finished the first layer of his circle and had tied the wizard's knot: now he was laying in the coordinates for the Moon and the pockets that would trap and hold adequate air inside the spell for the three of them. "It was a nice piece of work, regardless," Rhiow said. "That slide."

"Thanks," Urruah said. "It didn't get much approval in some quarters, though."

"Oh?"

"Fhrio."

"Just what the Snake
is
his problem?" Rhiow muttered.

"I don't know. Just generalized jealousy, I think. Or else he just really is territorial about anything to do with 'his' gates. I never thought I'd see a Person so territorial. I swear, he's like an
ehhif
that way."

"Maybe he was one in his last life," Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. There were numerous jokes among People about how such an accident might happen, mostly suggesting that it was a step up on the scale of things for the
ehhif.

"Please," Urruah said. "It makes my head hurt just thinking about it."

Arhu stopped, looked up at them. "You want to come check your names?"

They walked over to the circle and jumped into it. Rhiow examined her name and found everything represented as it should be, but there was something odd about one of the symbols that was normally a constant. It was a personality factor, something to do with relationships: it was suggesting a change in the future, though whether near or far, Rhiow couldn't tell.

"Where did you get this?" she asked, prodding the symbol with one paw.

Arhu shrugged. "It came out of the Knowledge: ask the Whisperer."

Rhiow waved her tail gently at that. Sometimes such things happened to a wizard who routinely did a lot of spelling: you saw a change in the symbology before it had reflected itself in your own person, or before it seemed to have so reflected itself. Then you were faced with the question of changing it back to a more familiar form— and wondering whether you were thereby keeping yourself stuck in some situation that was meant to change gradually— or leaving it the way it was, and wondering what in the worlds it might mean. Rhiow took a long breath, looking at it, and left it alone.

Urruah straightened up, apparently having found nothing untoward in his own name, and said, "It looks fine. Is everything else ready?"

Arhu stared at him. "You're not going to check it?"

"Why should I?" Urruah said. "You passed your Ordeal: you're a wizard. You're not going to get us killed." He sat down and started washing again, making faces again, but this time persisting.

Rhiow sat down too, there being no reason to stand. "Go on," she said to Arhu, "let's see what we see."

Arhu looked around him a little nervously, then stepped to the center of the spell and half closed his eyes, a concentrating look. Rhiow watched with some interest. Spelling styles varied widely among wizards of whatever species: there were some who simply "read" the words of a spell out of the Whispering, and others who liked to memorize large chunks; some who preferred the sound of the words of the Speech spoken aloud, and some who felt embarrassed to be talking out loud to the universe and preferred to keep their contracts with it silent. Arhu was apparently one of these, for without a word spoken— though Rhiow could feel, as if through her fur, that words in the Speech were being thought— she felt the spell starting to take: checking for her presence and Urruah's, sealing the air in around them, and then the transit—— abrupt, quicker than she was used to, but that was very much in Arhu's style. One moment they were looking at the dirty river flowing between its sludgy banks, and the foul air snuggling down against it: then everything went black and white.

And brown. She had not been prepared for the brown: it was a strange note. They were standing on a high place, one of the Lunar Carpathians, she thought, a fairly level spot scattered with small, grainy rocks and the powdery pumice dust typical of even this area, which had suffered its share of meteoric impacts, exclusive of impacts of other types. The sphere of air held around them by the spell shed frozen oxygen and nitrogen snow around them at the interface between it and vacuum: the snow sifted out and down a little harder, sliding down the outside of the invisible sphere invoked by the spell, when any of them moved slightly and changed the way the wizardry compensated for their presence.

The brown lay streaked over the white and gray-black of the craters around them. It was ejecta from another impact, a much larger one, some miles away if Rhiow was any judge. She looked all around them for its source, but the crater was well over the short lunar horizon.

More than six miles away, anyway,
she thought, glancing over at Arhu. He was licking his nose repeatedly. "Are you all right?" Rhiow asked.