To Visit the Queen (5 page)

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. This is a younger one; the location it serves started developing gates around the beginning of the last millennium, when the last bunch 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 farther forward. "Anyway, this complex handles a lot of offplanet 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 that produced the gating effect, was 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 reexecute."

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 adjusting 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. "And where
is
London exactly?"

"About a tenth of the way around the planet," Rhiow said, glancing at the bridge again. "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 are the oldest functioning worldgate complex on the planet. All the other gating complexes that 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 farther 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 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 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 Penn 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 humans 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 a twentieth-story apartment between First and Second in the Seventies. Her comings and goings during his workday were nothing that 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 Houhème
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-ehhif
's '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 art form 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 mostly in the abstract mode as regarded
oh'ra
proper, and a lot more about one of the Met's star dressing rooms and the goings-on therein. Urruah's interest in Hwith, the Somali, 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 the steadily intensifying encounters between her "mistress" and the
oh'ra
's present guest conductor.

"Well, what the
houff,
" Urruah said after a moment. "This is what we became wizards for, anyway, isn't it? Travel. Adventure. Going to strange and wonderful places..."