To Visit the Queen (4 page)

"
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 backward 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 that 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 offplanet 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, o 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, magnanimous.

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, dryly, as they watched the structure of the gate reassert itself in the air, rippling and flowing, wrinkling as if someone were 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..." He continued reciting the basics of string activation as Urruah listened, alert to any errors.

Arhu leaned in to bite the strings that he was having trouble managing with his paws. "Just be glad this is all you have to worry about at the moment," Urruah said. "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 sync 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 that, 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 backward, 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 Zürich."

"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
o'hra.
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 gate-weave 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 pawfuls 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 to open physically. "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 drier 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 asked, 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 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."