To Visit the Queen (35 page)

"That may or may not be," Huff said, "but in any case, it's still very good of you to come and help us. I mean..." He sounded slightly flustered. "We are, after all, People... and you are, after all..."

"A snake?" Ith dropped his jaw amiably. "Well, People have in the past taken a certain amount of interest in the welfare of another people's universe: mine. We could have been left to die in the dark, or to live out our lives as slaves, under the Lone Power's influence. But others risked themselves for us. Perhaps there is no 'payback,' but paying forward is certainly an option open to us. So let us not speak of it anymore."

He rocked a little on his haunches, reaching back in mind again to the interview with Wallis that Arhu had shown him, and looking down at the fragmentary spell again. " 'A person of Power,' " said Ith, "must enact the spell. Does that mean, perhaps, a Person? One of your People? Or could it be just any wizard?"

"It depends if they call themselves persons or not, I suppose," Rhiow said. "Ith, your guess is as good as mine, but I think we're going to need the rest of the spell before we can draw any conclusions about that."

"Well enough, then: I will go."

"I want to go too!" Artie said suddenly, jumping up. "I haven't seen any magic practically since I got here. I want to see some more!"

Rhiow glanced at Ith, about to object: then she stopped herself.
Cousin, if you can take charge of him for a while, it would take a worry off our minds. He's at the wrong end of time, and it's not good for an
ehhif
to know too much about its own future without preparation... for which we've had no time. The museum will be a controllable environment, one not too strange to him.

Consider it done.

"Well, Ith," Rhiow said out loud, "if you take Artie with you, he can help you look for the spell, while you keep him invisible. You should have fun with that," Rhiow said to Artie. "You're going to keep walking into things, though, so be warned."

"I will bring him gladly," said Ith. "Artie, are you willing?"

"I should say so!"

"All right. Artie," Rhiow said, "who are you staying with in London?"

"My uncle and aunt," he said, suddenly looking rather concerned. "They were expecting me back for teatime."

"Well," Urruah said, "if we can get the timeslide to work properly, there'll be no problem returning him to just a few seconds before or after we found him, or he found us."
And if we can't get the slide to work properly, then shortly it won't matter one way or the other.

Rhiow made a face at the thought.
And what happens to us then?
she thought.
We become refugees to some other timeline that hasn't been ruined. If we can find any such. And Artie will share the same fate.

No,
she thought.
No need to give up just yet. There's a lot more work to be done.

"Very well," Ith said, and stood up. "Artie, prepare yourself: we will go to the British Museum and walk invisible among the displays. Or perhaps"—and that little golden eye glinted— "late tonight, when none but the night watchmen are about, perhaps one of them will look into the Prehistoric Saloon and wonder if he saw one of the displays move, and wink its eye."

He winked, and Artie burst out laughing as he dusted himself off, which was about all the preparation he could make. "Ith, you wouldn't," Rhiow said, trying to sound severe. Ith seemed to have picked up some of Arhu's taste for mischief along with the taste for deli food. Unfortunately, it was difficult to scold someone who was so old and grave, and at the same time so young, and whose wickednesses were of such a small and genteel sort.

"Perhaps I would not," Ith said, bowing to Rhiow. She put her whiskers forward in ironic amusement at the phrasing. "In any case, I will take care of him," Ith said. "If nothing else, when he needs to rest, I can take him to the Old Downside, where he will see all the 'thunder lizards' his heart desires."

"How are your people doing?" Urruah asked. "Settling in nicely?"

"They love the life under the sky," Ith said. "For some of them, it is as if the old life in the caves never happened. And truly, for some of them, it is better that way. For others... they remember, and they look up at the Sun and rejoice."

"Have there been any problems with our own people?" Rhiow said. The only other intelligent species populating that ancient ancestor-dimension of Earth were the Great Cats of whom
Felis domesticus
and its many cousins were the descendants: sabertooths and dire-lions, who had taken refuge in that paradisial otherworld many ages before.

"Oh, no," Ith said mildly, and flexed his claws. "None that have been serious. They were unsure whether we were predators or prey, at first. They are sure now." He grinned, showing all those very sharp teeth.

Rhiow chuckled. "Get out of here," she said. "And go well. Artie, be nice to him. He bites."

"He wouldn't bite
me,"
said Artie.

"No, I would not," Ith said. "Though perhaps in future you should wait for more data before you theorize, Artie; there are other creatures where we are going who might be less willing to give you the benefit of the doubt." Ith grinned. "Now come stand by me. Watch, and take care; when the air tears, it does so raggedly, and the boundaries between here and there are sharp."

They stepped into the air together and were gone, the tear in it healed up behind them.

Huff stared after them. "How does he
do
that?" he said. "There wasn't even any noise from the displacement of the air."

Rhiow shook her head. "In some ways, he's become a gate himself," she said. "Otherwise, I don't understand it. Ask Her. Meanwhile— what about that timeslide?"

It took several more hours to get it working to both Urruah's and Fhrio's liking. Rhiow tried to catch a nap while this was going on, but her anxiety kept waking her up, so that when Urruah finally came to rouse her, she was awake anyway.

"Is the slide ready?" Rhiow asked, stretching fore and aft.

"As far as I can tell. For all Fhrio's rotten temper," he added very softly, "he's a good gating tech, and there's nothing wrong with his understanding of timeslide spells. He rearranged some subroutines I'd thought looked pretty good, and I have to admit that now they look better."

"Annoyed?" Rhiow said.

"Me? Nothing wrong with me that a pizza won't cure," Urruah said, "and the end of this job. We can jump again in fifteen or twenty minutes. Fhrio is doing the last fine-tuning: Siffha'h says she's ready to go again, and Auhlae concurs."

"Good." She glanced around. "Where are they?"

"They've gone off to relieve themselves first. Huff went off too, just for a snack of something."

"Right."

They went over together to look at the timeslide. Rhiow walked around it thoughtfully, trying to see what Fhrio had done. He was sitting, gazing at the whole structure with his eyes half-shut, a little unfocused: a technique Rhiow used herself, sometimes, to see the one bit of a spell or a routine that was out of place.

She stopped at one point and looked to see where a whole group of subroutines had been added, a thick tangle of interwoven branchings in the "hedge." There were numerous calls on spatial locations that were not far from this one, as far as Rhiow could tell, and all of which were in this time. "What are these?" Rhiow said curiously.

Fhrio glanced up. "I found myself wondering," he said, "whether we were sending a lion to kill a mouse. I mean, by looking for our pastlings one at a time by tracing specific accesses one at a time. I thought, since the
ehhif
here have support systems that are supposed to be picking up their lost and sick people from the city area, at least, why don't we let it work for us? So this set of routines visits every
ehhif
-hospital in the greater London area, and scans it for a few seconds for anyone in that facility who wasn't born within the last hundred years. If it finds anyone like that, it picks them up and brings them along with us, in stasis. Then we get back here and analyze their temporal tendencies in situ, with the gate to help, if we can get the online gate logs to cooperate."

Rhiow looked the construction over. It was elegant, compact, and looked like it ought to work, but many constructs of this kind looked like they should, and the only way you could find out was by testing them live. "Fhrio," she said, "it's handsome-looking, and beautifully made. Let's run it and see what it does." She paced around to the other side of the timeslide, checked her name in passing, then leaped into the circle and looked thoughtfully at the other sets of coordinates stacked up in the routines to be examined: mostly derived from microtransits of the malfunctioning gate. "If Siffha'h can push us through to all of these," Rhiow said, "we're going to be in great shape."

"I hoped you'd think so," Fhrio said. And he looked over at Urruah, and bared his teeth in amusement. "Pity you weren't smart enough to manage something like this, O 'expert one.' Even your own team leader admits it."

Urruah blinked and opened his mouth.

"Urruah," Rhiow said softly, "would you excuse us?"

His eyes went wide. "Uh, sure," he said.

He went away with great speed, Rhiow didn't know where; nor did she care at the moment. "All right, Fhrio," Rhiow said. "I'm tired of hearing it in the background, or unsaid. Get on with it and say what you have to say."

He stared at her, his ears back. "I don't like him around here," Fhrio said after a moment. "Or the other one. There are too many toms around here as it is. Huff and I have about worked things out. We're all right together, if not precisely in-pride. But
those
two! Him, with his big balls hanging out, leering at Auhlae. And him, with his little balls hanging out, just a furry little bundle of drool and hope and hormones, leering at Siffha'h. They both give me the pip, and the sooner they're out of here the better I'll like it."

"Well," Rhiow said, and nearly bit her tongue, she could think of so many things to say, and so few of them appropriate. "Thank you for letting me know. In Urruah's case, he's always been one for appreciating the queens, though in Auhlae's case, he knows she's mated and happy so, and you're completely mistaken about his intentions toward her. If you don't believe another wizard telling you so, then you'll have to go have it out with him— after
I
finish with you. For the second time, that is, after I extract from your hide the price of calling the competence of one of my teammates into question, and for openly suggesting that I might agree with you in your assessment. And as for Arhu, whatever business he has with Siffha'h is theirs to determine, not yours or mine: she's her own queen now, no matter what your opinions on the matter may be. What you think of that stance is your business, but if you meddle with a young wizard under my protection, I will shred your hide myself, and see if you have the nerve to do anything about it. So beware how you conduct yourself."

Fhrio stared at her as if she had suddenly appeared out of the air from another planet. "Meanwhile," Rhiow said, "I intend to do my job to the best of my ability, no matter how pointlessly annoying I find you. You seem to be doing your job... marginally. But if you can't manage your reactions to my team a little more completely, I'll require Huff to remove you from this intervention, which is within my rights as leader of a senior gating team sent on consultation. Then we'll bring in as a replacement someone less talented, perhaps, but a little more committed to not damaging the other wizards whom the Powers have sent to save this situation... and entirely incidentally,
you.
Now take yourself away until Huff comes back, and be glad I've left your ears where Iau put them, instead of so far down your throat they'll make bumps in your tail."

He stared at her without a word, and after a long moment he turned away.

Rhiow sat down and licked her nose four times in a row, feeling hot under her fur: furious with herself, furious with Fhrio, and just generally very upset. She was bristling, and her claws itched, and she was mortified.
I hate being this way,
she thought.
I hate
having
to be this way. I hate having to pull rank. Oh, Iau, did I do wrong?

The Queen was silent on this subject, as on so many others. Rhiow breathed out and tried to get control of herself again. She was so busy concentrating on this that she didn't notice when Siffha'h came in and jumped into the circle beside her.

"I said, are you all right?" Siffha'h said.

"Oh. I will be shortly," Rhiow said. "Thanks for checking." Siffha'h had straightened up and was now staring across the platform. Rhiow glanced that way to see what was there. It was Arhu. He was staring back. For a long few moments it held: then, to Rhiow's surprise, it was Arhu who lowered his eyes first and looked away.

Rhiow jumped out of the circle and meandered over to where Arhu was, sat down by him, and started composure-washing with a vengeance. Under cover of this, she said very quietly to Arhu, a little exasperated, "What
is
it with you two?"