TWO

She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the City’s quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning’s washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head.

“See you later, plumptious—“

She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks—their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts would have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell which made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside, the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a non-gravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her ehhif’s routine, and hers, from being upset.

Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat-door to the hiouh-box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information which the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside’s gates, the London “bundle” had similarities to them ... but being a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.

Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick “stairway”, making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof’s parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low soft hhhhhhhhhh of the City all around her was there: the breathing of all the air-conditioning systems, the omni-directional soft sound of traffic. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence ... and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.

She looked eastward toward the River. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of Cornell Medical Center and New York Hospital: but she could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Brooklyn on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn’t yet see it. Another job, Rhiow thought, another day ...

She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to clearly see more and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, Rhiow thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers that Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine: for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work ... for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can -- ? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day’s end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, “behold, the world is made new ... !”

There was more to the Meditation, of course; it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case ... a reminder of priorities, a “mission statement’. It was perhaps also, just slightly, what ehhif might term “a call to arms”: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.

Rhiow got up, shook herself and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down. The joke is, she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air, that knowing the Powers are there, and listening, doesn’t really solve that many problems. It seemed to her that ehhif had the same problem, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their Gods existed, or not very sure at all: and those who were most certain seemed to be no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The City was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which ehhif gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers that Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious—as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).

She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most ehhif works he heard live in concert in town. He’d gone to one service in the great “cathedral’ in midtown to do some translation of the music’s verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the ehhif there to the Powers that Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery which even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors—but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers’ countenance—even, amazingly, the One’s—and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings which did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some ehhif did ...

Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry-cleaners’ there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross. They’re scared, she thought: they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist, ehhif aren’t even sure what happens to them when they die. There was an unsettling sense of permanence about ehhif death, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. The ehhif themselves seemed to have been told a great many mutually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her own ehhif was somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least ... ? Not that—certainties aside—it wasn’t always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you too. Rhiow’s fur had stood up all over her, the first time it had happened, a couple of lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved a life or so on, in new and uncontaminated circumstances ...

She crossed Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, the last against the brightening sky, yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-Seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: there were always ehhif out walking their houiff before they went to work. But you can’t really feel things as clearly when you’re sidled, Rhiow thought, and anyway, there’s no houff I couldn’t handle ... If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the “surface streets”: more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind ... but by taking care of the ehhif, she took care of People too.

Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-Seventh ... Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the Terminal’s track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four “ingress” tracks into the main two-level array, forty-two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-Seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her: from below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads—one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.

Five twenty-three, Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.

She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.

It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so to the gravel in the access tunnel. Rhiow trotted down the cast-cement tunnel, all streaked with old iron-stains, to where it joined the main train tunnel underneath Park. There in front of her was the little concrete bunker of Tower U, its lights dark at the moment. To her left were the four tracks which almost immediately flowered into ten—seven active tracks, three sidings—by the time they reached Fifty-Fifth.

Rhiow looked both ways, listened, then bounded over to the left-hand side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on night-time configuration, one-quarter of them on and three-quarters off, striping the platforms in horizontal bands of light against the rusty dimness. She trotted toward them, seeing something small move down by the bottom of Track Twenty-Four: and she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t belong down here, a glitter of white or hazy blue light concentrated in one spot ...

Bong, said the ghost-voice of the clock in the Main Concourse, as Rhiow cut across a few intervening tracks and jumped up onto the platform for Twenty-Four. There was Urruah, sitting and looking at the dimly-seen warp and weft of the worldgate, the oval of its access matrix a little larger than usual.

“Luck, Ruah,” Rhiow said, and stood by him a moment with her tail laid over his back in greeting. “Where’s the wonder child?”

“Upstairs ‘begging’ for pastrami from the deli guy.”

Rhiow sighed. “There’s one habit of his I wish you wouldn’t encourage.”

“Oh, indeed? I seem to remember where he got it. Someone took him upstairs and—“

“Oh, all right.” Rhiow grinned. “We all slip sometimes. Did you open this?”

“No, he did, while he was ‘waiting for us’.”

“For us? You weren’t here?”

“He was early. Got impatient, apparently.”

Rhiow put one ear back. “Not sure I like him doing this by himself, as yet ... “

“How were you planning to stop him? Come on, Rhi, look at it. The synchronization’s exact. He would have stayed here to keep an eye on it,” Urruah added, forestalling her as she opened her mouth, “but I told him to go on upstairs and get himself a snack. The guy likes him: he won’t get in trouble,”

Rhiow put her ear forward again, though she had a definite feeling of being “ganged up on by the toms”. It may be something I’m going to have to get used to ... “All right,” she said, studying the gate. It was open on London, set for nonpatency and a nonvisible matrix on the far side: this side would have been invisible to her, too, except that she could see where Arhu had carefully laid in the “graphic” Speech-form of her name, and Urruah’s and his own, in the portion of the spell matrix which controlled selective visibility and patency configurations. Beyond the matrix, light glittered off the river that ran by the big old stone building on which the view was centered: a huge square building of massive stone walls, with what appeared to be more buildings inside it, like a little walled city.

“The Tower of London,” Urruah said.

“Doesn’t look like a tower ... “

“There’s one inside it,” Urruah said, “the original. The gating complex proper is a little to the north: this is a quieter place for a meeting, the Whisperer suggested. Local time’s four hours or so after sunrise.”

“Ten thirty ... “ Rhiow said. “Is this a good time for the gating team there?”

“Don’t know how good it is,” Urruah said, “but it’s what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah, here he comes.”

The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled. “Arhu,” Rhiow said as he came up to them, “come on. You know how they are about cats in here—“

“Not about cats they can’t find,” Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. “Sweet Iau in a basket, what’s that?”

“Chilli pickle.”

Rhiow turned to Urruah. “You have created a monster,” she said.

Urruah laughed out loud. “Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first.”

“Yes, but you encourage him all the time, and—“

“Hey, come on, Rhi, it’s good,” Arhu said. “The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke.” Arhu grinned. “Now the joke’s on him: I like it. But he’s good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chillies for him the other day. He thinks it’s cool: he makes other people come and see me eat it.”

“Not the transit police, I hope,” Rhiow said.

“Naah. I wouldn’t go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they’re down on the tracks,” Arhu said.

Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. “All right. Are you ready?”

“I was ready an hour before you got here.”

“So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: you did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let’s go.”

Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side-effect of the patency.

“Go ahead,” Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leapt through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.

The darkness stripped away behind her as she leapt through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, more busy, one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and ehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate which led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on to another expanse of cobblestones which sloped down toward the river.

As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him, and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.

“That’s our tripwire,” Arhu said. “Pull it and it activates the gate to open again.”

“And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we’re gone?” Rhiow said.

Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. “It won’t interfere ... the gate proper’s back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string of the selective-memory ‘woof’.”

“Very good,” Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.

They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship which was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or the ehhif passing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.

“It’s old here,” Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he was was trying to listen to a lot of things at once ... things that made him nervous.

“It’s old in New York, too,” Urruah said.

“Yeah, but not like this ... “

“It’s the ehhif,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been here so long ... first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and more ... “

“There’s more to it than that,” Arhu said. He was staring at the Tower. “I smell blood ... “

“Yes,” said a big deep voice behind them. “So do we ... “

They turned in some surprise, for he had come up behind them very quietly, even for a Person. Rhiow, taking him in at first glance, decided that she should revise her ideas about bigger cats being needed in the world: they were already here. This was without any question one of the biggest cats she had ever seen, not to mention the fluffiest. His fur, mostly black on his back, shaded to a blended silver-brown and then to white on his underparts, with four white feet and a white bib making the dark colors more striking. He had a broad, slightly tabby-striped face with surprisingly delicate-looking slanted green eyes in it, and a nose with a smudge: the splendid plume of gray-black tail held up confidently behind him looked a third the thickness of his body, which was considerable. If this Person was lacking for anything, it wasn’t food.

“We are on errantry,” Rhiow said, “and we greet you.”

“Well met on the errand,” said the Person. “I’m Huff: I lead the London gating team. And you would be Rhiow?”

“So I would. Hunt’s luck to you, cousin.” They bumped noses in meeting-courtesy. “And here is Urruah, my older teammate: and Arhu, who’s just joined us.”

Noses were bumped all around: Arhu was a little hesitant about it at first. “I won’t bite,” Huff said, and indeed it seemed unlikely. Rhiow got an almost immediate impression from him that this was one of those jovial and easy-going souls who regret biting even mice.

“I’m sorry to meet you without the rest of the team,” Huff said, “but we had another emergency this morning, and they’re in the middle of handling it. I’ll bring you down to them, if you’ll come with me. Anyway, I thought you might like to see something of the “outside” of the gating complex before we got down into the heart of the trouble.”

“It’s good of you,” Urruah said, falling into step on one side of him, Rhiow pacing along on the other: Arhu brought up the rear, still looking thoughtfully at the Tower. “Did I see right from the history in the Whispering, that the gates actually used to be above ground here, and were relocated?”

“That’s right,” Huff said as he plodded along. He led Rhiow and her team through an iron gate in a nearby hedge, and down onto a sunken paved walk which made its way behind that hedge around the busy-street side of the Tower, and into an underpass leading away under that street. “See this grassy area over to the right, the other side of the railings? That was the moat ... but much earlier, before the Imperial people were here, it was a swamp with a cave nearby that led into the old hillside. That was where the first gate formed, when this was just a village of a few mud-and-wattle huts.”

“How come a gate spawned here, then,” Arhu said, “if there were so few ehhif around?”

“Because they were around for two thousand years before the Imperials turned up,” Huff said, “or maybe three. There’s some argument about the dates. It’s not certain what kept them here at first: some people think the fishing was good.” Huff put his whiskers forward, and Rhiow got, with some amusement, the immediate sense that Huff approved of fish. “Whatever the reason, they stayed, and a gate came, as they tended to do near permanent settlements when the Earth was younger.” He flicked his ears thoughtfully as they all stepped to one side to avoid a crowd of ehhif making their way up to the admission counters near the gateway they’d come in.

“It’s had a rocky history, though,” Rhiow said, “this gating complex. So Urruah tells me.”

“That’s right,” Huff said, as they turned the corner and now walked parallel to the main street with all the traffic. “This has always been the heart of London, this hill ... not that there’s that much left of the hill any more. And the heart has had its share of seizures and arrests, I fear, and nearly stopped once or twice. Nonetheless ... everything is still functioning.”

“What exactly is the problem with the gates at the moment?” Rhiow said.

Huff got a pained look. “One of them is intermittently converting itself into an unstable timeslide,” he said. “The other end seems to be anchoring somewhere nearby in the past—it has to, after all, you can’t have a slide without an anchor—but the times at which it’s anchoring seem to be changing without any cause that we can understand.”

“How long has it been doing this?” Urruah said. His eyes had gone rather wide at the mention of the timeslide.

“We’re not absolutely sure,” Huff said. “Possibly for a long time, though only for micro-periods too small to allow anyone to pass through. In any case, none of the normal monitoring spells caught the gate at it. We only found out last week when Auhlae, that’s my mate, was working on one of the neighboring gates ... and something came out.”

“Something?” Arhu said, looking scared.

“Someone, actually,” Huff said, glancing over at the Tower as a shriek of children’s laughter came from somewhere inside it. “It was an ehhif ... and not a wizardly one. Very frightened ... very confused. He ran through the gate and up and out into the Tube station—that’s where our number-four gate is anchored, in the Tower Hill Underground station—and out into the night. Right over the turnstiles he went,” Huff added, “and the Queen only knows what the poor ehhif who work there made of it all.”

“Have you made any more headway in understanding why this is happening since our meeting was set up?” Rhiow said. She very much hoped so: this all sounded completely bizarre.

But Huff flirted his tail “no”, a slightly annoyed gesture. “Nothing would please me better than to tell you that that was the case,” he said.

Rhiow licked her nose. “Huff,” she said, “believe me when I tell you that we’re sorry for your trouble, and we wish we didn’t need to be here in the first place.”

“That’s very kindly said,” Huff said, turning those green eyes on her: they were somber. “My team are—well, they’re annoyed, as you might imagine. I appreciate your concern a great deal, indeed I do.”

Huff and Rhiow’s team turned leftwards into the underpass, which was full of ehhif heading in various directions, and one ehhif who was tending a small mobile installation festooned with colored scarves and T-shirts: numerous prints of the Tower and other pictures of what Rhiow assumed were tourist attractions were taped to the walls, and some of what Rhiow assumed were tourists were studying them. “Huff,” Urruah said, “what did the gate’s logs look like after this ingress?”

“Muddled,” Huff said, as they walked through the underpass, up the ramp on its for side, and fumed toward a set of stairs leading downwards into what Rhiow saw was the ticketing area of the Underground station: above the stairway was the circle-and-bar Underground logo, emblazoned with the words tower hill. “We found evidence of multiple ingresses of this kind, from different times into ours ... and egresses from ours back to those times. The worst part of it is that only one of those egresses was a “return”: all the others were “singles”. The ehhif went through, in one direction or another, but they never made it back to their home times ... “

Urruah’s eyes went wide. “This way,” Huff said, and led them under one of the turnstiles and off to the right.

Rhiow followed him closely, but Urruah’s shocked look was on her mind. “What?” she said to him, as Huff leaped up onto the stainless-steel divider between two stairways.

“Single trips,” Urruah said, following her up. “You know what that means—“

Rhiow flirted her tail in acquiescence. It was an uncomfortable image, the poor ehhif trapped in a time not their own, confused, possibly driven mad by the awful turn of events, and certainly thought mad by anyone who ran into them—But then she started having other things to think about as she followed Huff steeply down. The steel was slippery: the only way you could control your descent was by jumping from one to another of the upthrust steel wedges fastened at intervals to the middle of the divider, almost certainly to keep ehhif in a hurry from using the thing as a slide. Rhiow started to get into the rhythm of this, then almost lost it again as Arhu came down past her, yelling in delight. Various ehhif walking up on one side and down on the other looked curiously for the source of the happy yowling in the middle of the air.

“Arhu, look out,” Rhiow said, “oh, look out, for the Queen’s sake look—“

It was too late: Arhu had jumped right over the surprised Huff, but had built up so much speed that he couldn’t stop himself at the next wedge: he hit it, shot into the air, fell and rolled for several yards, and shot off the end of the divider to fall to the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Rhiow sighed. He was so good there, she thought: ... for about ten minutes ...

She caught up with Huff as he jumped down. “Huff, I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, watching Arhu do an impromptu dance as he tried to avoid crowds of ehhif stepping on him. It was something of a challenge: they were coming at him and making for the stairs from three directions at once. “He’s a little new to all this, and as for being part of a team—“

“Oh, it’s all right,” Huff said, unconcerned. “Our team has one his age: younger, even. She’s left us all wondering whether we aren’t too old for this kind of work. With any luck, they’ll run each other down and give us some peace. Come on, over this way ... “

Huff led them from one hallway into another, where several stainless-steel doors were let into the tiled wall. “In here,” said Huff, and vanished through the door: “through it” in the literal sense, passing straight into the metal with a casual whisk of his tail.

It was a spell that any feline wizard knew, and even some non-wizardly People could do the trick under extreme stress. Rhiow drew the spell-circle in her mind, knotted it closed. Then inside it she sketched out the graphic form of her name, and the temporary set of parameters which reminded her body that it was mostly empty space, and so was the door, and requested them to avoid one another. Then she walked through after Huff. It was an odd sensation, like feeling the wind ruffling your fur the wrong way: except the fur seemed to be on the inside—

and she was through, into what looked like a much older area, a brick-lined hallway on the far side of the door, lit by bare bulbs hanging .from the ceiling, all very much different from the clean shining fluorescent-lit station platform outside.

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, and Urruah came through after her. From the far side of the door, there were a couple of soft bumping noises.

Urruah put his whiskers forward and looked ahead of them at Huff, who had paused to see where they were. “He has a little trouble with this one sometimes,” Urruah said. Bump, and Arhu abruptly came blooming through the metal, spitting and growling softly to himself. “Vhai’d stuff, why doesn’t it get out of the way when I tell it—“

“Language,” Rhiow said, rather hopelessly: but for the moment, Urruah just laughed. “Telling it won’t help,” he said: “you’ve got to ask nicely. Most things in the Universe react positively to that. Sass them, and they get stubborn.”

Arhu threw Urruah an unconvinced look as he padded by him in Huff’s wake. Old wooden doors opened into side rooms off this hallway: storerooms, Rhiow thought—a smell of electrical equipment and tools hung about the place. “There are workshops down here,” Huff said: “and there’s an access to the tunnel junction where the Tower Hill station’s tracks run near the access stairs to the Fenchurch Street railway station. That’s where the number-four gate is—“

He led them down one more stairway, a spiral one this time. It let out onto a small, dimly-lit platform which ran for maybe ten yards along a double line of track, the track stretching away into darkness on both sides. Above the platform hung the faintly glimmering oval of an active gate matrix. In front of it sat three People, one of them up on his haunches and working with the gate’s control strings: a youngish tabby torn who, except that his tabbying was marmalade rather than silver and gray, would have reminded Rhiow somewhat of Urruah.

One of the other two turned their heads to look at the new arrivals. She was a slender gray shorthair queen, about Rhiow’s own size but slimmer, with the most beautiful eyes Rhiow thought she had ever seen: they were a blue as deep as the skies on one of those perfect autumn days you sometimes got in the City, and the set of them was both indolent and kind. As she looked at Huff, the expression got kinder, and Rhiow knew immediately that the two of them were mates. The fourth Person, apparently concentrating on what the young tabby was doing, didn’t move.

“Has it failed again?” Huff said, as they walked toward the others.

“It tiling well has not,” said the tabby, sounding very annoyed. “But that’s what you’d expect, isn’t it, since People are coming to look at it?”

Well, so much for any concerns about Arhu’s language, Rhiow thought with resignation.

The handsome queen chuckled. “Huff, you weren’t really expecting this gate to oblige you, were you? The cranky thing.”

“No, I suppose not ... Rhiow,” Huff said over his shoulder, “come meet Auhlae, my mate.”

“You’re very welcome,” Auhlae said, touching noses delicately with Rhiow, “and well met on the errand. And this is—“

“My older partner Urruah,” Rhiow said: “my younger partner Arhu.”

Noses were bumped all round: Rhiow was privately amused to note how shyly Arhu did it. He was apparently not immune to physical beauty in a queen. “And this is Fhrio—“ Auhlae said.

“Rrrrh,” Fhrio said, a sound of general disgust, and dropped back down to all fours again, turning to the others. “Yeah, hunt’s luck to you, hello there, well met.” He bumped noses peremptorily, then sat down and started in on a serious bout of composure-washing, the action of a Person so annoyed that he didn’t trust his reactions with others for the moment.

“And Siffha’h,” said Auhlae.

The smallest of the London team got up, turned away from her single-minded concentration on the gate, and looked at Rhiow and the others. This little queen was maybe a couple of months younger than Arhu, Rhiow thought, and like him, was a huw-rhiw, though a paler one: her coat had much more white than black, and two black “eyebrow’ marks over her eyes gave her a humorous look. Her eyes were large, golden and thoughtful, and the look she gave Rhiow was surprisingly mature and measuring for someone who still had most of her milk teeth.

“I greet you,” Rhiow said, “and hunt’s luck to you.”

“You too,” said Siffha’h, and stepped over to touch noses, first with Rhiow, then with Urruah. Arhu, coming back from nosing Fhrio, met her last: they bumped noses cordially enough, and then, slightly to Rhiow’s surprise, Siffha’h repeated the touch. She looked up at Arhu and said, “What’s that?”

“Uh, chilli pickle,” Arhu said.

“Hhehhh,” Siffha’h said scornfully, nose wrinkled and lips pulled back—the feline equivalent of an ehhif of tender years saying Euuuu. She turned away, leaving Arhu looking rather stricken.

“I had wondered,” Huff said genially to Arhu. “Remind me to take you along some night when I do Indian.”

“Huff has been telling us about your problem,” Rhiow said to Auhlae. “I take it there’s been no improvement.”

Fhrio looked up from his he’ihh. “I’ve been trying to get it to fail all morning,” he said, “and I might as well have saved my time. The logs don’t give us enough data about what the strictly physical conditions were doing when the last failures occurred. I’m going to have to sit down with the Whisperer and get Her to make me a list.”

“That won’t stop the problem, though,” Siffha’h said. “You’re going to have to shut the gate.”

“I would rather not do that,” Fhrio said, and began washing furiously again.

Auhlae looked over at Rhiow and Urruah with a sympathetic expression. “Fhrio is our gating specialist,” she said softly. “He tends to take these things rather personally.”

“I know the feeling,” Urruah said. “Well, do you have any specific recommendations for us? Or should we just start running some diagnostics and see if there’s any data we can add to what you’ve got already?”

“The only recommendation we have on which we’re all in agreement,” said Huff, “is that the gate has to stop functioning as a timeslide: and probably the simplest way to make it do that is to shut it down. But since we don’t know how the gate’s failing in the first place, we can’t guarantee that this will work. It might make our problem worse, by forcing the malfunction to “migrate” to another gate in the cluster ... you know how they get “sympathetic” malfunctions, like organs in a body ... That would be pretty serious, if it happened. We’re having enough trouble with just one of these gates presently out of use for transit: a lot of the Northern European wizards depend on transfers through our cluster for access to the big long-range facilities in Rome and Tokyo. If the difficulty should spread by contagion to one of the others—“

Rhiow nodded. “I see your problem. Well, probably diagnostics are the way to go at the moment. Any help you might want to give us would be welcome: or if you prefer to leave us to get on with it—“

Fhrio looked up from his washing. “No one messes with my gates unless I’m here,” he said, and there was a touch of growl in his voice.

“I would hope you’d stay and clue us in on the fine points,” Urruah said. “Gates have a lot more personality than a lot of wizards would give them credit for ... and no one knows a gate like its own technician.”

“You sound just like Fhrio,” Siffha’h said, sounding amused. “Are you the best in the business, too?”

Urruah was purring, and trying not to do it too loudly. Rhiow and Auhlae exchanged a look of amusement of their own.

“This is the point at which Urruah makes noises of shy agreement,” Rhiow said, “and the safest thing to do under the circumstances is to make him get to work. Huff, we’re entirely at your disposal. Tell us where you want us to start.”

“The diagnostics sound like a good idea,” Huff said, and then yawned, a prodigious yawn that showed every one of his teeth and made Rhiow reassess her idea that Urruah had the biggest ones she’d ever seen. “I’m sorry ... it’s late for me. Fhrio, if you want to stay with them and keep them from duplicating routines you’ve already run—“

Fhrio straightened up from his washing again. “Absolutely. Maybe the gate’ll surprise us by failing in the middle of something. At this point, I wouldn’t care if it did it in mid-transit.”

“Oh yes you would,” Siffha’h said. “You should try it and see. You want me to stay and put the claw in it for you?”

“Sure. She’s our power source,” Fhrio said to Rhiow and the others. “The best in the business”. “

“This I want to see,” Urruah said mildly. Rhiow shot him a sidewise glance, trying to keep it from being too obviously a warning look. True, queens rarely worked as power sources in team spelling, but there was nothing sex-linked about it—it seemed to be a preference grounded in the basic nature of the work, which (Urruah had occasionally admitted to Rhiow) was boring by comparison with building the spells themselves. There was a general tendency among People for the females to show more initiative than the males, and to go out of their way to get their paws on the most interesting work.

“You’ll excuse me for a moment, then,” Huff said, and headed up the stairs.

Urruah padded over and started examining the gate matrix in detail, with Fhrio looking over his shoulder and making mostly monosyllabic comments. Rhiow watched them, and watched Arhu watching them: being, for the moment, excessively well behaved. It was hard to believe the same youngster had been busy falling down the stairs not twenty minutes ago.

Auhlae came over to sit down beside Rhiow. “When it comes to diagnostics,” Auhlae said, sounding weary, “there’s no point in me watching what’s happening. I spent all yesterday morning at them, with my teeth clenched so full of strings that they buzzed for the rest of the day ... “ She shook her head.

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement. “I feel a bit like a sixth claw myself, at the moment,” she said, and strolled over to the edge of the platform, looking down the tracks into the darkness. From here she could still keep a general eye on what was going on, as Huff headed up the stairs again, and Fhrio turned his attentions back to the gate—Urruah and Arhu looking over his shoulder, and Siffha’h slipping one foreleg shoulder-deep into the gate matrix to hook her claws into the strings and the spell, supplying the power it would need. “Are most of you denned near here?” Rhiow said, noticing the interested looks that Arhu was throwing in Siffha’h’s direction, which Siffha’h was ignoring.

“Not all of us,” Auhlae said, following Rhiow’s glance. She put her whiskers forward in a smile. “But when you’re a gating team, there are certain prerequisites ... the Whisperer is hardly going to cavil if we need to use the gates to get to work. Anyway, it keeps us alert to their condition: it’s hard to miss something wrong with them, when you use them every day.”

Rhiow did not say out loud that someone seemed to have missed something about the “number-four’ gate, repeatedly, no matter how often it was used. But then, if the failure was happening a fraction of a second here, another fraction there, and nothing was actually passing through the gate, how was anyone going to notice? It would have taken an obsessively thorough review of the logs to find the occurrences—

Which there should have been. That was something else Rhiow was not going to say out loud. Saash had routinely reviewed the complete logs for each of the Grand Central gates once every week, and Rhiow had gotten used to that kind of thoroughness from her teammates. Still, she thought, different teams, different management techniques ... And Huff seemed to run his team more casually than Rhiow did hers. She was in no position to complain: if the Powers that Be didn’t care for the way his team was working, Huff would have been relieved long ago.

“I see your point,” Rhiow said after a moment, and lifted one paw to lick at it reflectively. “Do you have a long way to come?”

“Not I, thank the Dam,” Auhlae said. “Fhrio commutes in from Haling, some miles away—he’s with a family pride there, one that lives on gardening land that some ehhif keep, what’s called an “allotment”. Siffha’h, on the other hand, is local, very local in fact—she was born just across the river, in an outdoor den not far from HMS Belfast, that big ship anchored there. She’s nonaligned, and undenned so far. Huff and I aren’t so close, but we’re nowhere near as far as Fhrio is. Huff has a den with an ehhif who owns a pub in the City and lives in a flat above it: I’m denned just around the corner with a futures trader who works at the Securities Exchange. Huff’s ehhif is used to him coming and going as he pleases, and that kind of thing isn’t a problem for me either, fortunately. My Rrhalf keeps such weird hours that he hardly notices that I’m there.”

Then why on Earth do you stay with him! Rhiow was tempted to ask, and didn’t. She couldn’t imagine a Person who was also a wizard going through the inconvenience of denning with an ehhif if it wasn’t because you liked him or her. “Did you two meet locally, then?” Rhiow said.

“Oh, yes, the usual thing. A friend of his is one of the big hauissh players in the area: we ran into each other during a tournament, got friendly. Then I went into heat, and ... “ She waved her tail, a graceful and amused gesture.

“Kittens?”

“Oh, plenty. My ehhif is very good about finding them good places to live: otherwise I wouldn’t let the heat happen.”

That brought Rhiow’s ears forward. “I used to wonder how a wizard managed when she was in heat,” she said. “I never had the chance, myself: my ehhif took me and had me unqueened before I started.”

“Oh, how terrible for you!’ Auhlae said.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t that bad ... Afterwards I tended to see it as an advantage. No interruptions ... no toms fighting over me. It looked like a release.”

Auhlae was silent for a moment, and started to wash one ear. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I can see your point of view. But truly, I haven’t found it to be all that much of a problem. You can always use wizardry to adjust your own hormones a little, and delay the onset. But of course it’s not too good to do much of that kind of thing ... Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be necessary very often. Only very rarely have I had to be on call while I was in heat ... and never while I was kittening. The Whisperer seems to keep track of such things.” Auhlae put her whiskers forward, a demure smile with a slightly wicked edge to it. “I suppose we should be grateful that it’s the Queen running the Universe, and not the Tom: who knows if we’d ever get any rest?”

Rhiow chuckled. “I think you’re right there ... in all possible senses of the word.”

“But anyway,” Auhlae said, “Huff and I usually come down in the early evenings and troubleshoot the gates. There’s always trouble,” she said, sounding very resigned. “You know how even inanimate objects can start betraying evidence of personalities, over time—“

“Oh, yes,” Rhiow said.

“Well, the gates have been here a lot longer than we have ... and believe me, they have personalities. Mostly annoyed and suspicious ones. I think it may have had to do with their ‘upbringing’, their history. Populations would rise here and then be swept away without warning ... and to a certain extent, the gate “learns” to adapt to the pressure of the population around it. Take that population away suddenly, and it must be like suddenly being thrown off something that you’ve always slept on safely before. The shock makes you stop trusting ... you don’t know whether things will be the same from one day to the next. So the gates act fairly “calmly” for a period of time—a week, a month—and then—pfft! Auhlae made a soft spitting hiss of the kind that an annoyed Person would use to warn another away. “It can take endless time to calm them down. Do you have the same problem?”

Rhiow flicked her tail “no”. “Oh, they’re alive enough, all right,” she said. “Aaurh Herself made them, after all: I’m not sure anything with that level of wizardry incorporated into it could avoid being alive, to some degree. But fortunately New York grew very steadily, and our gates behave themselves ... Except when they don’t,” she added, wry. “Often enough ... “

Auhlae purred in amusement. “You must run into the personality problem with other things, though. You sounded pretty definite

“Well, it crops up from time to time ... “ And glancing over at Arhu again (who was still gazing thoughtfully at Siffha’h, apparently without effect) and at Urruah and Fhrio (now leaning right into the gate’s matrix structure again, with their heads bent close together and almost invisible among the tangle of strings), Rhiow began to tell Auhlae about the diesel locomotives that ran the trains in and out of Grand Central. Theoretically they should have been just great complex hunks of metal and wiring. But they were not, as the ehhif who drove them and took care of them loudly attested. The engines had noticeable personalities which manifested in the ways they worked (or didn’t): some good-natured and easy-going, some spiteful and annoying, some lazy, some overtly hostile. Rhiow had wondered whether she and the engineers and mechanics were all projecting the traits of life onto dead things for which, admittedly, they all felt affection. But finally she had realized that that wasn’t it. She started wondering whether this acquisition of personality might be caused by something specific about the way the locomotives’ complicated shapes and structures affected the local shape of spacetime—the way the atomic and molecular structure of water, for example, manifested itself as wetness. The Whisperer had no answers for her, or none that made sense: and when Rhiow had taken the problem casually to the ehhif Advisory wizards for New York, Tom and Carl, they had shaken their heads and confessed an ignorance on which even their wizards’ Manuals could not shed light. Finally Rhiow had simply given up and started talking to the locomotives in the course of her rounds, despite being unable to tell whether it was making any difference. But certainly something with a personality, no matter how undeveloped, deserves to be talked to as if it exists ...

Auhlae looked bemused at that, for a moment. “Now there’s something I hadn’t given much thought to,” she said. “The Underground trains ... you get a faint sense of personality off them, but nothing like that. Or is it just because I haven’t been looking ... ?”

“Hard to say,” Rhiow said. “But beware. Do you really need another area of interest? The one we share is trouble enough ... “

Auhlae laughed softly. “Tell me about it,” she said, as Huff came back down the stairs again.

He came padding toward them. “Problems, hrr’t?” she said.

“Oh, I wanted a look at number three,” Huff said, “since this one’s being worked on.” He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. “You know how they tend to interfere with each other—their catenary links are close together in the power-feed “bundle” from their linkage to your gates—“ he waved his tail at Rhiow—“and to the Downside.” He paused a moment, then said, “Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right at the roots of things?”

“We were there,” Rhiow said, “but it’s not a memory I’d call up willingly just now. For one thing, we lost a partner of my age there: if we had her here now, I’d bet we’d have solved your problem already. As it is, we’re all learning new jobs, and everything is so confused ... “

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” said Huff: and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.

“Oh, it wasn’t all sad,” Rhiow said: “not at all. A great many things changed for the better; and the Downside has new guardians ... “

“The great cats live there,” Auhlae said, “don’t they? ... our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People ... “

“Yes,” Rhiow said, “and nothing will remove them from where they have been since the Beginning. But there are two Peoples there now.” Maybe this was not the time to start that particular story: but the facts still made Rhiow wake up in the middle of the night, wondering. For all the years there had been dry-land creatures in this world, cat and serpent had expressed in a specific symbolism the two sides of an ancient enmity: creatures of the sun and light against creatures of earth and the dark beneath the earth, warm blood against cold blood, the Powers that Be against the Lone Power that went rogue, both sides battling for the world. But suddenly Rhiow found herself running across new concepts, in which at least some of the great saurians were warm-blooded, and images in which serpent was born of cat (despite the older mythologies which suggested that cat had been born of serpent) -- all too predictable a development, since Arhu had become “father” to the Father of the new serpent-kind, the great saurians who had become the new guardians of the Old Downside.

Of course the Universe was full of these jokes and ironies, mostly born of the misapprehension, native to beings living serially in time, that time itself was serial. Naturally, it was not. Time was at least Riemannian, and tended to run both in circles and cycles: outward—reaching spirals which repeated previous tendencies and archetypes reminiscent of earlier ones, but the repetitions came in “bigger’ forms, and with unexpected ramifications. Now time bit its own tail one more time, and in the process of that biting pulled off the old skin, revealing the new shiny skin and the bigger body underneath: more beautifully scaled and intricately patterned, more muscular, and, as usual, harder to understand. Rhiow had seen these hints before the last months’ troubles began, but hadn’t been able to make much of them at the time. Now, with the events and the history behind her, the myth was easier to understand. But it still made her blink, sometimes, and wonder what happened to the good old days, when things were simpler: when cats were cats, and snakes were snakes, and never the twain would meet ...

Of course, for most cats, they never would. But as a wizard, Rhiow came of a bigger worldview, one which held that cats were equal, under the One, to any other sentient species—say, whales, or humans, or some dogs or birds of prey, or various other creatures intelligent enough to have emotional lives and to understand the existence of a world outside their own selves. Most People would have trouble with the idea that ehhif were equal to them. And dogs? Birds? They would hiss with indignation at the very idea. Rhiow knew better ... but was glad she did not often have to indulge in explanations to her less tolerant kindred.

“It’s been a very strange time,” Rhiow said at last, “and I look forward to telling you about it in detail: for, truly, there are parts of it I don’t understand myself. Ruah ... any news?”

Urruah had strolled over to where they sat, and now threw a look over his shoulder at the gate. “I really hate to admit it,” he said, “but at first glance, I’m stumped. Rhi, Huff, I’ll want to examine the logs in detail, of course—‘ He looked over his shoulder at Fhrio for approval: Fhrio waved his tail in a “don’t-care” way. “Good. I’ll do that later this evening. I need a break.”

Urruah did sound tired, but that was no surprise: even though the gates had their diagnostic procedures built in, there were other more sophisticated ones that Rhiow’s team routinely used to make sure that a given gate’s own diagnostics were “honest”. It had always seemed a wise precaution to Rhiow, since a deranged gate might conceivably lose the ability to diagnose itself correctly.

“You’ll want to sort your schedule out with Fhrio, perhaps,” Huff said.

“Yes,” said Urruah, “I’ll do that.” He headed back over to the gate, where Fhrio and Siffha’h were withdrawing themselves from the gate matrix and letting the strings snap back into place.

Huff sighed. “We’ll leave it shut down for another day,” he said, “and come and tackle it afresh tomorrow. Rhiow, I think we’ve made a good start.”

“I hope so too,” she said. “I have a feeling that this won’t be one of those quickly solved problems, but we won’t be out of your fur until it’s handled.”

“Then we’ll see Urruah later this evening,” said Auhlae: “and you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow let it be,” Rhiow said, and bumped noses with their hosts ... though she threw a look over her shoulder first. Urruah and Fhrio had their heads together again: but Arhu was looking in one direction, and Siffha’h in another, as if they were on opposite sides of the same planet.

Rhiow smiled slightly. “Dai stihó,” she said, the non-species-specific greeting- and parting-words of one wizard to another: go well. “Come on, Arhu, Ruah,” she said, getting up, “let’s call it a day ... “

“Very nice People,” Urruah said, as they came out on the Grand Central side of their own gate. “Competent.”

That assessment surprised Rhiow slightly. “You’re satisfied with their inspection routines?” she said.

“They’re much like what I’d be doing if I were stuck with their gate complex,” Urruah said. “I mean, Rhi, look at their transit figures. Three or maybe four times the number of wizards and unaffiliated outworlders use their gates every day as use ours, or the ones at Perm. London is a major on-planet transit center for western Europe, and if you tried to read all the gate logs here once a week, the way Saash did for ours, you’d never have time to do anything else ... such as fix the gates when they broke. I’m going to take some time to read those logs in more detail, as I said. But I don’t know what I’m looking for as yet, and I’m hoping the tracers we’ve left in place will pick something up to give me a hint. Without a specific event track to follow, a signature attached to the kind of access we’re looking for, we’re walking in the dark without whiskers.”

Rhiow waved her tail slowly in agreement. “All right,” she said.

“But one thing, Rhi ... and this may be more important, even, than the problem with the gate itself. Remember when Huff was telling us about the ‘single’ egresses?”

“Uh, yes—“ She paused. “He was telling us that people were going one way, not ‘round trip’.”

“That’s right. Rhi, do you realize how big a problem that is? Times can get imbalanced, just as spaces can: the ‘pressure’ of times against one another has to be kept equal. Those people from other times have to be recovered and put back where they belong, or the gates will become more unstable than they are already. Not just Huff’s gates: all the gates.”

“Ours too,” Rhiow said under her breath.

“Ours would take longest to imbalance,” Urruah said. They’re ‘senior’, and their connection to the Old Downside and the power sources there is direct: that lends them some immunity. But, inevitably, the imbalance will spread. Gating around the planet will start failing without warning and without reason. The rapid-transit system that wizards use so as not to have to waste their powers on minor business like travel spells will go down. The Universe will start dying faster ... I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Thank you,” Rhiow said, and her stomach turned over inside her. “What’s your estimate of the time when these imbalances will begin to affect other gates?”

“If there have been only a few imbalanced egresses,” Urruah said, “it would take some weeks. If there have been, say, as many as ten or more, I would expect them within ten to fourteen days. Twenty or so—well, we would already be seeing random failures. So it’s not that bad. But we have to help the London team track down the ehhif from backtime and restore them to their proper periods.”

“And how much diagnosis is that going to take?”

“A fair amount, the longer the ehhif have been loose in a non-native time. There’s a temporal signature you can search for, like a target scent, in someone out of their proper time ... but first you need to know exactly which time they’re native to, and the longer they’re in a non-native period, the less detectable it is. A fresh ingress through the malfunctioning gate would be the best thing we could hope for. All ingresses through a given gate would have a similar ‘signature’, like DNA from different members of the same family, and others could be tracked using it.”

Oh gods, Rhiow thought: and I thought things were going fairly well ... “All right,” she said: “we’ll take it up with Huff tomorrow.—Arhu? You?”

“Huh?” He was walking along in an unusual state of self-absorption. “Me what?”

“What do you think of the London team,” Rhiow said, “and their gates?” It wasn’t as if he was likely to have a terribly sophisticated assessment at this point, but Rhiow was always careful to make sure everyone had their say after coming back from an “outcall” job.

“Huff and Auhlae are nice,” Arhu said, still looking somewhat distracted. “Fhrio’s a snot: he thinks he knows everything.” And there Arhu fell silent.

Aha, Urruah said privately to Rhiow.

She was inclined to agree. “And Siffha’h?” Rhiow said.

There was a long pause. “I think maybe she doesn’t like me,” Arhu said, “and I don’t know why.”

“Well,” Rhiow said, “it’s early to tell that, yet. You can’t have exchanged more than ten words the whole time we were there.”

“I know,” Arhu said, dejected. That’s the trouble ... “

“Give it time,” Urruah said. “It’ll come right in the end. You can’t rush the queens, Arhu, especially the young ones: they have their whole lives ahead of them, maybe as many as nine of them, and they don’t impress easily. Take your time, talk to them ... “

“That’s just the problem. She won’t talk to me.”

“So let actions say what words won’t. She probably hears all kinds of bragging these days, if she’s just coming into her day ... isn’t she?”

Arhu looked up at Urruah with a kind of heartsick hope that made Rhiow’s heart turn over at the sight of it. “I think so,” Arhu said. “That’s how it smells ... “

Rhiow turned her attention away from the conversation and let the toms gain some walking-space in front of her. It was at times like this that she missed Saash most ... her slightly sardonic turn of phrase that could make anything, even something as serious as non-round-trip time travel, seem less crucial until you were actually able to get around to handling it. But Saash was out on the One’s errantry now: Rhiow would just have to manage without her, and hold her own against the boys as well as she could. Fortunately, she said to the Whisperer with a pride-queen’s arrogance, it isn’t hard ...

From the depths of reality came the feeling of divine whiskers being put forward, and the sound of tolerant laughter.

The whole team made the commute to London the next morning to check the diagnostics and the logs, and found nothing: and they did so the next morning, and the morning after that ... with no sign of any unusual ingresses or egresses at all. On the fourth day of this, Rhiow began to wonder whether the Powers had sent her team on one of those useful but temper-fraying jobs which her old mentor and teacher Ffairh would have described as “trying to herd mice at a crossroads”: a lot of trouble to very little effect for a long, long time ... until you lost patience and started eating the mice, which might be what the Powers had in mind in the first place. Urruah was beginning to feel the strain, and was getting short with everybody, especially Arhu. Arhu, for his own part, was getting bored.

“He won’t let me do anything,” he said to Rhiow one morning as they went in to work together.

“That’s possibly because he’s not sure of your level of mastery as such,” Rhiow said, “and possibly because it’s other People’s gates we’re working with, not our own. No, Arhu, listen: don’t look that way. If you want to get a job done—that being the whole reason we have to keep going to London—sometimes you have to do it a little more slowly, a little more cautiously, than you otherwise would. At home, with our own gates, it’s usually no big deal. If one of us makes a mistake, she gets her head smacked, we clean up the mess, and the matter stays in the family. But when you’re dealing with other People’s territory, things slow down. And this is their territory ... be sure of that.”

“I thought you told me ‘we are guardians and nothing more’,” Arhu said with some annoyance.

“That’s as true of the London team as it is of us. But it’s Her business to tell them that, not ours.”

They paused in front of the number-three gate, which was anchored over by the Waldorf Yard again because of track maintenance going on near its usual location. “Territory,” Rhiow said, “it’s a problem ... “

“Yeah. Oh, Urruah said he might be late this morning. Something about the dumpster.”

“I wish he’d tell me these things,” Rhiow said, and sat down in front of the gate. “How late did he think?”

“He didn’t say.”

She waved her tail, resigned. Toms ... “You’d better take care of the gating, then,” she said. “They’re going to be wondering where we are.”

“Probably not,” Arhu said, sitting up and slipping his forepaws into the control weave. “I don’t think Fhrio cares one way or the other.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” Rhiow said. “He’s likely enough to care ... but not to show it ... “

Arhu was busy with the weave, pulling strings out and hooking them under and through one another with his claws. He was getting quick at this work, whatever Urruah might think: after a few days’ practice with the London configuration, the pattern had become second nature to him. Or else the gate itself was beginning to answer his requirements, falling into “heart-configuration” with Arhu—a development very much to be hoped for. It was the kind of sympathy, not quite a symbiosis, which Saash had had with the Grand Central gates: a sort of mutual understanding of what needed to be done, based to be sure on a sound theoretical knowledge, but on something much more in execution. It was as if the gates had liked Saash, and wanted to cooperate with her because she liked them. If Arhu was acquiring that kind of almost-affection, Rhiow thought, there would be little limit to what he could do as a gate technician later in life, or in other lives to come, if the wizardry followed him.

And we could use someone with that kind of basic affinity, she thought. For all my theoretical work, I don’t have it: and for all Urruah’s, he’s more an engineer than a technician. Probably it comes of being a power source: of seeing the gate as something to be done to, rather than someone to be done with ...

Arhu stopped. “Does that look right?” he said suddenly, sounding rather confused.

Rhiow looked over the gate-weft. The colors were running correctly, the hyperstrings all seemed to be making the correct “itch” in the air, the resonances of sound and texture were all in place. “It looks fine—“

“It doesn’t feel fine. It feels like something’s come unsnagged.”

Arhu was blinking, looking a little vague. Rhiow had learned to recognize that particular danger sign. “Now,” Rhiow said, “or later?”

“I think—‘ Arhu’s eyes narrowed, a look of abrupt and uncomfortable concentration. This was always the most difficult part of the work for a visionary, the matter of learning to “ride” the vision rather than simply being ridden by it: though the question of which was finally master, the seer or the seen, was always one which caused most seers a certain amount of unease over their careers. “I think later. But not much later. Short term ... “

Oh wonderful, Rhiow thought. “Today? Tomorrow?”

“What am I, some ehhif weather forecaster?” Arhu said, still squinting, with his paws all tangled up with hyperstrings. “Do you want percentages of probability too?”

“Whatever you can come up with,” Rhiow said. “And whatever idiom works for you. I’m not picky.”

“I can see the sun,” Arhu said after a moment, “but I’m not sure which one it is, which day. Just a sense of things ... unraveling. Something unsnags, and then everything sorts itself out. Though it smells really bad at first—“

He blinked again, shook his ears until they rattled, and looked at Rhiow. “Gone. I hate it when it does that!”

“Calm down, Arhu, take it easy, don’t let the strings go—“

“I wasn’t going to, do you think I want the whole place to jump off into space ... ?” But his ears were flat back, and he hissed softly. “Rhiow,” Arhu said, sitting up still with that unkittenish perfect balance of his, “I can hear Her. I can see what She sees ... just for a second. Everything together: images, thoughts in minds, lots of minds all together, a hundred paws’ worth of places all at once ... But all broken, like light in water when the wind blows. My brains won’t hold a whisker’s worth of it ... and then it’s gone. What’s the use, this becoming one of the Powers, but not enough of one to be any good to anybody, or for long enough to figure it out, long enough to make a difference -- !”

Rhiow sighed and paced over to him, balanced on her hindquarters just long enough to bump her head against his. “You know it’s going to be hard at first,” she said, settling down again. “It’s going to take so much practice, and it’s going to be hard for a long time yet. The seer’s talent is one of the worst ones in its way ... tough to manage. But if you can stay with it ... “

“Do I have a choice?” Arhu said, and the edge of bitterness and sadness was impossible to miss. “If I don’t learn it, I’ll lose it ... “

He sat back on his haunches then and said, “Never mind. At least I can still gate.”

He gave one sidewise glance at Rhiow, and gave the strings a quick pull.

The other side of the gate flickered abruptly into black night over a white land—pale silver-and-white dust and stone with every stone’s shadow laid out long and black and razorlike behind it. Over everything hung a shape that burned at first so blue that the eye refused it: then you saw the white swirls, and the shades of green and haze-brown, but the main color was blue, shining down pale on that white desolation, and Rhiow’s abrupt first thought was of the shade of Auhlae’s eyes.

She gave Arhu a look. “Very cute,” she said. “If you’re demonstrating that you’ve learned to keep a gate patent when there’s vacuum on the other side, I take your point. Otherwise ... you know what I told you.”

“And what Urruah keeps telling me,” Arhu says. “Yeah, I know ... “

Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again, remembering what Urruah had said about Arhu’s early morning gate work the other day. And slowly she put her whiskers forward. If he was going to go, she thought, how would we stop him? And: Not so long ago, this was the kitling we were worried wasn’t doing enough wizardry. He’s finding his way. Let him be ...

“We’ve no business there today,” Rhiow said, working to sound lazy about it. “Maybe later this week, we’ll go. I’ll see you off, in fact, if you’d rather do it on your own. Meanwhile, let’s get going: they’ll be waiting for us. Urruah will catch up.”

The look Arhu threw her was a little odd: but very featly he flipped his paws and changed the configuration of the strings again, and the view through the gate shifted to that of darkness again, but this time it was the unstarred darkness of the Underground tunnels near Tower Bridge.

“I’ll let it snap back into its default settings afterwards,” Arhu said. “Urruah’ll be able to pull this setting out of memory and alter it for changed time with no problem.”

“Right,” Rhiow said, and stepped through: Arhu followed her.

They made their way over to the platform where the malfunctioning London gate hung, shimmering dully in a non-patient configuration. Only Fhrio was with it at the moment, sitting by it and yawning.

“Luck, Fhrio,” Rhiow said. “Have you been waiting long?”

“Half the night, but don’t let that bother you,” the orange tabby said, and tucked himself down into what Rhiow’s ehhif called the “meat loaf shape.

Rhiow threw an amused glance at Arhu, who was looking off into the darkness to avoid having Fhrio see him rolling his eyes. She felt a little sorry for him on his first outcall, having half the team they were working with turn out to be such difficult cases: but this kind of thing happened occasionally. She still thought often of one of the Brasilia team who, though a wizard of tremendous talent, was also so scarred by some old trauma that he would jump up in the air hissing any time you spoke to him before he could see you, and would come down with claws out and fur standing on end, ready to murder anyone who was standing too close. Working with him had driven her nearly insane, and as for Urruah, it had been all Rhiow could do to keep him from walking off that job every day, at the occurrence of the first jump-and-hiss. At least Fhrio wasn’t quite so unnerving to work with, but Rhiow was increasingly wondering what his problem was, or, if there was no problem, why he was this way all the time.

“No incursions, I take it,” Rhiow said, sitting down in front of the gate and eyeing it thoughtfully.

“Nothing,” Fhrio said. “I almost wish for one: at least it would make sitting here a little less boring.”

She twitched her tail in agreement. “Have Auhlae or Huff been along yet today?”

“Auhlae’s home with her ehhif,” Fhrio said. “He’s sick or something. Huff was here earlier and then went off.” Fhrio yawned. “I think probably to take a nap: he was up watching the gate all night.”

Arhu was standing behind Rhiow now, looking over her shoulder at the shimmer of light in the gate-web. She wasn’t sure how much he was able to make out of its function as yet just from the configuration of the light-patterns and the juxtaposition of the various braids and bundles of hyperstrings. Reading a gate that way took time to learn.

“It’s changed since yesterday,” Arhu said.

“Of course it’s changed,” Fhrio said, and yawned again. “The Earth’s not where it was yesterday, is it? Basic changes in spacetime coordinates show in the web as a matter of course—“

“I don’t mean that. I mean the sideslip and tesseral string bundles in the control weft have changed position slightly. And one of the sideslip sub-arrays has a string loose.”

“What?” Fhrio sat up, looked at the part of the gate-web that Arhu was staring at. “Where are you—oh. No, that’s all right, this gate does that sometimes. It’s a locational thing—I think it has to do with the gravitational anomaly in the substrate under the Hill. The loose ends always weave themselves back in after a few minutes: this isn’t a static construct, after all, it ‘breathes’ a little.”

“I know, our gates do that too. But look at the way the sideslip bundle is interweaving with the hyperextensor braid—“

Fhrio was beginning to look confused. “Yes, as I say, it does that. I don’t see what the—“

“Well, look,” Arhu said, padding forward, and Rhiow gave him a Now-you-be-careful look, which he ignored. “See the way this is hanging out—shouldn’t it be tucked in? I mean, it has no anchor. If you just—“

“No, don’t pull that!”

It was too late. Arhu had already snagged a claw around the string in question, and pulled.

The gate shimmered: a brief storm of many-colored light ran down it—

and someone stumbled out of it. An ehhif.

The two teams sprang back in horror as the man crashed to the concrete almost on top of them. He lay there moaning, then grew quiet.

“Well,” Arhu said, his eyes big with surprise and his voice full of badly hidden satisfaction, “you wanted it to fail the same way? There you go.”

Fhrio gave Arhu a look suggesting that he would be seeing him later, outside the line of business.

“He’s got a point, Fhrio,” Rhiow said hurriedly. “You said you wished for an incursion ... and a wizard has to watch what he wishes for. The Universe is listening ... “

Fhrio gave her an annoyed look, but then almost visibly let the mood go, aware that they had more important issues to deal with. They all bent down together over the sprawled ehhif: Fhrio patted him gently on the face with one paw. There was no response. “Unconscious ... “

“Not for long, I think.”

“But, great Queen of us all, where did he spring from?” Fhrio said.

“From his clothes, I’d say not our time, that much is certain,” Rhiow said. “And no time close to it. I’m no expert on ehhif styles, but this looks more like what tom-ehhif wear for formal wear in our time. It used to be everyday clothing once, though, so Urruah told me—“

The ehhif was mostly in black: long narrow trousers, a white shirt with a peculiar cloth wrapped around the neck and tucked into the shirt’s collar: then a sort of short close coat that came down only to the waist, and over that a bigger coat, dark again. The ehhif himself was tall, and fair-furred, and had a lot more fur around the face than was popular these days: he might have been in middle age.

“He’s stopped breathing—“ Fhrio said suddenly.

Rhiow looked at him more closely. “It might just be a sigh,” she said. “But just in case, we’d better spell-fence him. He’s going to need support spelling anyway when he wakes up—“

She started walking the beginning of a wizard’s circle around the ehhif and the gate together. Arhu had dropped the string he had pulled and was looking off down the old train runnel. “Now what in the Dam’s name,” said a voice from a little distance down the tunnel, and a second later Auhlae jumped up onto the platform, with Siffha’h in tow. Arhu looked at her, then turned and sat down hurriedly and began to wash.

“Auhlae,” Fhrio said, “where’s Huff?”

“He’ll be along shortly,” she said, walking along to the ehhif and peering at him. “Iau’s name,” Auhlae said, “it’s another one.”

“Yes,” Fhrio said, and said nothing more for the moment: but Rhiow could hear trouble in his voice. She ignored it for the moment. “Has he started breathing again?”

Auhlae looked closely at him, and put her face down close to the ehhif s, feeling for breath. “None at the moment. Siffha’h,” she said. “When Rhiow finishes, put some power into her circle, this poor ehhif is going to need it. I think he’s in shock.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Siffha’h said, coming over to look at the circle Rhiow was building as she paced and assembled the spell in her mind. “Pretty standard,” she said. “Which part do you want me to fuel first?”

“The main strand and the life-support part,” Rhiow said. “I want to feel if there’s anything actually wrong with his body before we start interfering.” She completed the circle, tying the “wizard’s knot” in the air with a flirt of her tail: pale fire followed it briefly and died away—normally she would have preferred to see her guidelines in visible light, but the appearance of strange fires from nowhere was not likely to do this poor ehhif any good when he became conscious.

“Now then—“ she said. The basic spell-circle lay traced in ghost lines on the concrete around the ehhif. Rhiow now made one more turn around it, her paws pressing into the circle the graphic forms of those words of the Speech which Rhiow was assembling in her mind, the words which would control the function of the spell. One by one they appeared in graceful ghost curves and arabesques interwoven around the main curve of the circle, like vines twining around a support, until the last few words rooted themselves into the wizard’s knot and became one with it.

“Ready,” she said. Siffha’h looked the circle over, found the power-supply access point and stood on it: the circle flared for just a second with power, then damped down again.

Rhiow, still standing on the control point of the circle at the wizard’s knot, nearly jumped off it at the abrupt access of power into the spell, and secondarily, into her. It was partly the suddenness of its inrush, and partly the sheer volume of it, and the unusual taste of it when it came—mostly the taste of Siffha’h’s mind: young and fierce and bold, surprisingly so for such a young queen, with a great sense of potential unused and potential still developing, and behind everything, driving it all, some huge and dimly-perceived desire. Rhiow shied away from any attempt to look more closely at that—it was none of her business—but was impressed by it all the same. This young queen was going to be quite something as she grew into more certainty about her work and her life.

“That enough to work with for the moment?” Siffha’h said.

“For several hours, if you ask me,” Rhiow said, impressed: “Thanks, cousin!” She turned her attention to the spell. She had no proper name for the ehhif, and so had used one of the species-generic terms and an indicator for his gender: now her mind ran down through that connection to his, and felt about gingerly in the ehhif’s mind. The part of his brain that ran breathing and blood pressure and other functions was undamaged: but the emotional shock had thrown his blood chemistry badly out of kilter, and left him in a “sigh” that was much more prolonged than the usual fifteen seconds. That chemistry was getting worse as she watched, but fortunately the problem was a simple one, already partially rectified. Rhiow cured it by increasing the acidity of his blood ever so slightly, a process already under way, and the automatic response to such an increase took over, so that the ehhif gasped, and then started to breathe normally again.

“Nothing too serious, then,” Auhlae said, putting her ears forward in relief.

“No, just the kind of thing that causes hiccups, but a little more severe,” Rhiow said, relieved, and shook herself a little to get rid of the peculiar cramped narrow feeling of an ehhif’s mind. “It’s his emotional state that I’m more worried about, when he becomes conscious again. He may need quieting. Let’s see how he does ... “

The ehhif was stirring a little already. “Hey, sorry I’m late,” said another voice from down the tunnel, and Urruah leapt up onto the platform. “There were some things I had to take care—“ He broke off, going wide-eyed as he took in the whole scene in a second. “Hey,” he said then. “So wishing works after all.”

“Whether it does or not, we’d better shut this gate down,” Fhrio said. “The last thing we need at the moment is another access, especially one into a spell-circle when whoever might come through isn’t named in the spell—“

Urruah stared at him. “Are you kidding? Lock it open!”

“What?”

“If we don’t lock it open I won’t be able to get a reading on where the other end is anchored,” Urruah said, “and that’s information we badly need. Are you set up to do it? Then let me.”

Fhrio bristled at that, but Auhlae bumped him from one side, distracting him. “He’s right,” she said. “Rhiow, you’ll want to put his personal information into the spell so that he can step through. Just make sure you lock it in nonpatent configuration, Urruah. Come on, Fhrio, we have other things to attend to. Poor ehhif, look at him, he’s in a state.”

The ehhif’s eyes were open now. He lay there staring around him at the darkness, and tried to sit up once: failed, and slumped back again.

“Where—“ he said, and then trailed off at the sound of his own voice in the close darkness of the tunnel.

The wizards exchanged glances. “If this isn’t errantry,” Auhlae said, “what is?”

She padded over to the edge of the circle and sat down where the ehhif could see her. Once again he tried to sit up, and did a little better this time, managing at least to hitch himself up one elbow and look around. The light here was not good, even by feline standards: it was questionable how much he could see.

“Don’t be afraid,” Auhlae said to him in the Speech. “You’ve had a fall. Are you hurt?”

“No, I-I mean, I think not, but where—where is this?” He tried to sit up again. “Where are you?”

“Here in front of you,” Auhlae said, with a look at Rhiow.

She was ready. The ehhif looked around him, and saw Auhlae ... then looked past her. “Where?”

“Right here, in front of you,” she said, and even in the rather dire circumstances, Rhiow could hear the sound of slight amusement in Auhlae’s voice. “The cat,” she added, and this time the amusement was genuine.

The ehhif looked at Auhlae, and then actually laughed out loud, though the laughter was shaky. “Oh surely not,” he said. “Some kind of ventriloquism. I’ve seen illusionists’ shows; I know what kind of tricks may be played on an unsuspecting audience—“

Auhlae sighed a little. “In front of an audience, a skilled stage magician can produce all kinds of illusions, I know,” she said, “but this isn’t that kind of thing. Rhiow, maybe you’d better let the light of the circle come up a little.”

She waved her tail in agreement, meanwhile watching the ehhif closely for any signs that he was about to go shocky again.

“Mr..—Illingworth,” said Auhlae after a moment, as the light of the circle grew and the ehhif looked around him, “please don’t believe this a trick. It is something out of your experience, though. Perhaps you would prefer to think of it as a dream. Do you mind if we ask you some questions?”

The ehhif looked around at the circle, and the cat inside it with him, its paws thrust into the glowing webwork which the circle surrounded, and the four other cats outside: and he blinked. “I suppose not, but where are you? And how do you know my name?”

“Please don’t bother looking for any other humans, because you’ll see none here,” Auhlae said. “Just pretend, if you will, that the cats are speaking to you.”

“But how do you know my name?” the ehhif demanded, more urgently now. “Is it—is this some kind of plot—“

Through the spell, Rhiow could feel the ehhif’s blood pressure beginning to spike. She watched it carefully, and felt down the spell for indications of any sudden physical movement: there were too many ways he could damage himself, physically and nonphysically, if he tried to break out of the circle before it was correctly disassembled.

“It’s no plot,” Auhlae said, “though I wouldn’t mind hearing why you would think it was one.”

The ehhif looked around him, still trying to find the source of the voice which spoke to him: and now he started to look suspicious. “There are plots everywhere these days,” he said, and his voice sounded unusually troubled. “Everything used to seem so safe once ... but now nothing is what it seems—“

His blood pressure spiked again with his anxiety, and Rhiow could feel his muscles getting ready for a jump. Better not, she thought, and spoke briefly to his adrenal glands through the spell. They obligingly stopped the chemical process which was already producing adrenaline, and instead produced a quick jolt of endorphins that left Mr. Illingworth blinking in slightly buzzed bemusement, and much less prepared to get up and run anywhere. Rhiow was ready to lock his muscles immobile if she had to, but she preferred less invasive and energy-intensive measures to start with.

“How do you mean?” Auhlae said.

“The war,” said Mr.. Illingworth, and now his voice started to sound mournful. “What use in being the mightiest nation on the globe when we must be bombed for the privilege? There was a time when no one dared lift a hand to us. But now our enemies have gathered together and grown bold, and London itself is prey ... “

At that Auhlae looked sharply at Fhrio. Fhrio’s eyes were wide. Bombed? he said silently, to her and the others. London hasn’t been bombed for fifty years.

“When did this start?” Auhlae said, and for all her attempts to keep her voice soothing, her alarm came through.

“A year or so ago,” said Mr.. Illingworth wearily. “There were troubles before then ... but nothing like the crisis we face now.” And much to Rhiow’s surprise, the ehhif put his face down in his hands. “Not since the Queen died ... “

The Queen? Urruah said then, pausing in his work with the gate. What’s he talking about?

“ ‘The Queen’? Which queen?” Auhlae said.

The ehhiflooked up again, and looked around him with a much less fuzzy air: Rhiow felt his blood pressure start spiking again. “How can you not know about the great tragedy,” Mr.. Illingworth said, “for which a whole nation mourns, and at which the whole world looked on amazed? Only spies would pretend not to know how the Queen-Empress was assassinated, treacherously killed by—“ He started to struggle to his feet.

Rhiow clamped the spell down on him, shorting out the neurotransmitter chemistry servicing his voluntary musculature, but being careful to avoid his lungs. Still the ehhif gasped, though he couldn’t struggle, and his fear began to grow. “Let me go!’ he said loudly, and then started to shout, “Spies! Traitors! Let me go! Police!”

The sound of that cry could be kept from being heard, of course, but Rhiow had other concerns. Auhlae, she said silently, there’s no point in this. It takes doing for an ehhif to frighten itself to death, but this one’s pretty emotionally labile: he might be able to do it. And he’s been under a lot of stress—

You’re right, Auhlae said. Better put him to sleep.

Rhiow reached into the spell and spoke to the ehhif’s brain chemistry. A moment later his eyes closed, and his head sagged slightly, though he did not move otherwise: she kept the hold on his muscles, just for safety’s sake.

“ ‘Bombed’?” Urruah said then.

“One moment,” Rhiow said. “Urruah, how’s the gate?”

“Locked open but nonpatent, like Auhlae said.”

“Have you got a time fix on the opening?”

“Not yet. The congruency with our present timeframe is not one-to-one, Rhi. The spatiotemporal coordinate readings I’m getting at the moment are not meshing in direct line with our own.” Rhiow twitched at the sound of that, for she thought she knew what he meant ... and she didn’t like it. “Additionally, I think something’s been fretting at the gate from the other side while it’s been doing these ‘rogue’ openings ... unraveling it. The unraveling’s been starting to manifest itself on this side now ... “ He put his whiskers back. “And I’m almost afraid to fix it. That might warn whoever’s doing the unraveling, send them under cover ... “

I’d wait and talk to Huff about it, Rhiow said silently to him. This is getting to be a jurisdictional matter, and I don’t want to ... She glanced in Fhrio’s direction.

Understood, Urruah said. But if something sudden happens, we’re going to have to intervene in the situation’s best interest, no matter what local opinion might be ...

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement, though the prospect made her nervous: Urruah went back to “reading” the gate, letting the information in the string configuration sing down through his claws and into his nerves and brain. “Auhlae,” Rhiow said aloud, “you managed enough rapport with him to get a name: could you get in there and find out more?”

Auhlae shook herself. “Names are easy,” she said, somewhat distressed. “They’re so near the surface, in any sentient being. But abstract information is a lot harder to get at, out of species. You know how ehhif minds look and feel inside: the imagery’s all wrong, the language is bizarre and the mindset is stranger still ... I’m no expert in ehhif psychologies: I’ll get lost in there as readily as anyone else. And anyway, I can’t do anything useful while our Mr.. Illingworth’s unconscious. If he was conscious, I could go in, all right, but I couldn’t be sure I was getting the information absolutely correct. And if we’re hearing from this ehhif what I think we’re hearing—“

“If you think you’re hearing evidence of an alternate timeline,” Urruah said, “then I think you’re right. Leaving aside all the other things he mentioned, most of which I don’t understand, I do know that London hasn’t been bombed recently ... and it certainly was never bombed when ehhif wore clothes like that.”

Rhiow suddenly became aware of Arhu looking over her shoulder, most intently, at Illingworth. “He’s the unravelling,” Arhu said softly. “Or a symptom of it: concrete rather than abstract. It’s not a process that’s finished yet. But if something’s not done soon ... “

“Hold that thought,” Rhiow said. “Don’t lose it, whatever you do.”

“Oh, certainly,” Fhrio said suddenly, sounding very annoyed. “Encourage him. He’s been enough trouble already.”

“Look,” Arhu said, turning, “I tried to tell you—“

“No, you look.” Fhrio leaned close to Arhu and stared at him straight on: leaned over him stiff-necked and tall, the classic posture of the threatening tom. “You may think that you’ve done us a favor by causing this incursion, but who knows if it’s anything to do with the problems we’ve been having? All I see is that you’ve made a sweet mess of things. Don’t you ever touch my gate again unless I specifically tell you to. You hear me? You come in here thinking you’re so vhai’d smart, and you tamper with things that you don’t—“

Arhu was staring right back at Fhrio, and his ears were back: he hadn’t given an inch, and his lips were beginning to wrinkle away from his teeth. Urruah was looking on dispassionately. Oh, dear Dam around us, Rhiow thought, please don’t let Arhu—

“Now what in the worlds,” said another voice down the tunnel. Heads turned. A moment later Huff jumped up onto the platform, and looked at the bizarre tableau before him: the half-sitting, frozen ehhif, Urruah once again up to his armpits in the hyperstrings of the gate, Siffha’h sitting on the power junction and washing nonchalantly, Auhlae and Rhiow looking on in bemusement and distress: and Fhrio and Arhu.

Fhrio turned and glared at Huff, his ears still back. “Well, about time you got back here! While you’ve been off having one of your little catnaps, your precious imported vhai’d ‘senior gating team’ has—“

“Fhrio,” said Huff. Fhrio subsided, and sat down, though his ears stayed flat.

Huff sat down too. “For one thing, I was not having a catnap, much as I would have liked to be. I was off having a talk about this gate with Hni’hho.” Rhiow immediately recognized this as the name of the present Senior Wizard for Western Europe, an ehhif living just across the water in one of the low countries near the sea. “And for another, I think you may owe Rhiow and her team an apology. They were brought here to produce the results. They are apparently producing them—“ and he flicked a glance over at the wretched unconscious ehhif—“whether you like them or not. We were specifically instructed to expect a ‘somewhat unorthodox technique’. Or weren’t you listening to Her?”

“Oh, I heard Her, it’s just—“

“It isn’t ‘just’. If you’re feeling obstructive, take it up with Herself ... but you’ve got to resolve whatever conflicts you have about this work before you do anything further.”

Fhrio turned away and began to wash. So did Arhu, with great intensity and at speed.

Rhiow breathed out in relief. “Somewhat unorthodox technique”, she thought then, slightly amused. Well, Arhu’s off the sharp end of the claw for the moment. But what if “unorthodox” means me and Urruah too ... ?

Huff got up and walked to the edge of the circle, looking at the sleeping ehhif half-sitting there. “He’s a long way from home,” he said.

“I’d say he’s from the middle of the century before last, as ehhif count time,” said Urruah. “The location is nearly congruent with this one, at least: but the exact time is proving elusive. It’s somewhere within the spread of the previous micro-openings, though. No guarantee of whether it coincides with any of them.”

“He spoke of bombings,” Auhlae said, going over to stand by her mate.

“He was talking about the Queen, too,” Arhu said, looking up from his own composure-washing and sounding a little bemused. “I wouldn’t have thought ehhif knew about Iau—“

“With him wearing those clothes, I would say he probably meant the ehhif Queen who was ruling then,” Huff said. “A different usage of the same word we use for Her, and for shes. Hffich’horia, this Queen’s name was. A lot of the ehhif on this island count themselves as of the same pride, though they’re not blood-related except distantly: and they have a kind of hwio-rrhi’theh, a ‘pride of prides’ who’re supposed to care for all the other ehhif, help them find food and do justice among them and so forth ... though as usual for ehhif, it’s never quite that simple. This ehhif-Queen was a daughter of that chief-pride ... which the ehhif then apparently found a little unusual: for a long time toms had run that chief-pride, not queens.”

“Peculiar,” Rhiow said. “Even among ehhif, queens still run things a lot of the time, no matter that the toms say otherwise ... “

Huff grinned at that. “I’ve never understood that, myself. You’d think they’d be glad to have someone relieve them of the responsibility ... “ He threw an affectionate look at Auhlae: she half-closed her eyes in amusement. “Anyway, this ehhif-Queen is still famous for the things done by her pride and the great ones of the prides under her: today’s ehhif call that whole time period after her.”

“He said she was assassinated, though,” Urruah said.

Huff twitched his tail back and forth. “Certainly other ehhif tried to kill her several times,” he said, “but none of them ever succeeded. She died of age and illness ... in our world. But in his—“ Huff looked at the ehhif.

“We really need to know when he comes from,” Siffha’h said, “if this is going to make any sense.”

“Yes, but if you’ve already had to tranquilize him, I don’t think he’s going to be much more help,” Huff said. “If we try to get more information out of him, we might damage him, which contravenes the Oath, no matter how much we think may ride on what he knows.”

“I’d have to agree,” Rhiow said. “He was getting very distressed indeed.”

“Well, at least we have other ways to get this information ... since now we have a positive lock on where this particular ehhif came from. We can put him back where he belongs, and we can compare the gate’s present configuration to the older gate logs ... then see if we can find out how or why they’ve been malfunctioning and giving us less than useful records of these transits. Any other thoughts on this? Hlae?”

Auhlae waved her tail in negation. “Let’s do it.”

“Thrio? Siffha’h?”

Fhrio said, “I don’t like this gate being locked open ... and even less do I like it when the other end may be anchored in an alternative reality. One gate stuck in the open position can begin to affect all the others in odd ways ... and our sheaf of gates is sensitive enough in that regard.”

“I understand your concern,” Huff said, “and you’re right. But in this particular case, we’re going to have to take the chance. As soon as we can put someone through to confirm the temporal coordinates at the other end, and get them home again, we can close it down again. Sif?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Siffha’h said.

Huff turned to Rhiow. “Do you concur?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“All right,” Huff said. “Let’s send this pastling home, then. Do you think you need to alter his memories, Rhiow?”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” she said, “for the same reason Auhlae wasn’t willing to go after abstract information. I might mess something up, and leave him worse off than he would have been if I hadn’t meddled. But from the way he was answering us, I think it’s likely enough that he will dismiss all this as a dream.”

“All right. Siffha’h, you like the big showy physical spells—“

“This isn’t showy,” Siffha’h said, and without twitching so much as a whisker, or making any alteration to the “physical” spell-circle she sat on, Mr. Illingworth levitated gently into the air and toward the gate.

“Would you make it patent, and give me visual?” Siffha’h said. “I don’t want to drop the guy ... “

Urruah, looking over his shoulder at her, grinned a little and slipped one claw behind into the patency bundle, pulling gently.

A moment later they were looking into a dark vista which might have been a street: walls were visible not too far away, and a faint yellow wobbling light came off from one side.

“Gaslight ... “ Auhlae said softly, waving her tail in fascination. The ehhif drifted slowly through the gate, into the darkness on the other side: Urruah edged sideways a little to let him pass unhindered. “How far down is the ground?” Siffha’h said.

“About your body’s length.”

The ehhif dropped down below the boundary of the gate, out of Rhiow’s sight: Urruah craned his neck to see. “All right,” he said, “he’s down. I’m going to turn this nonpatent again and leave it locked.” He started pulling strings again. “If we can—“

The gate shimmered and rippled—and all the length of it heaved, a bizarre sight like some huge beast’s skin shivering convulsively to get rid of a biting fly. Even the boundaries of the gate, which should have remained unaffected, twisted and warped. Urruah threw himself backwards, twisted and came down on his feet—just. Behind him, color drained from the warp and weft of the gate, and it steadied: after a moment it hung in the air in its default configuration again, nonpatent, in “standby”—though its colors looked very muted, almost drained.

“What in the Queen’s name was that?” Huff said, staring.

No one had any answers. Fhrio padded up to the gate, looked at it ... then looked angrily over at Urruah. “What did you do to it?!”

“Nothing that you didn’t see,” Urruah said, getting up and shaking himself. “I’ve seen catastrophic closures before, but they didn’t look anything like that. I wonder, though, if that was some kind of reaction to Mr.. Illingworth being put back where he belonged all of a sudden ... ?”

“You mean you don’t think these gatings are accidental,” Siffha’h said. “So it was like whatever engineered the opening, from way back then, didn’t want him back ... “

“Meaning that he was meant to increase whatever imbalance in our universe is already present,” said Auhlae, “from the pastlings who’ve come through and not yet been found again ... “

There’s another nasty possibility,” Rhiow said. “That transit might have been balanced for him alone ... and when someone else either tried to accompany him through it, or follow him to source using the same “settings”, they could have been damaged. Or possibly even killed.”

“You’re suggesting that it was a trap?” Huff said.

There would be no way to be sure of that with the data we have. But I am suggesting that Siffha’h’s right. This was not a malfunction ... or not a very likely one. There was someone at the other end managing it ... or someone who programmed it and walked away.”

“But how do you open a gate forward in time?” Siffha’h said, her eyes big.

Huff looked at her somberly. “Unless you’ve mastered contemporal existence,” Huff said, “you don’t. But the only ones who have done so, who simultaneously live in all times and none, are the Powers that Be.”

“Including that one other Power,” said Auhlae, “who gives us so much trouble ... “

Glances were exchanged all around.

“Well, the circle’s served its purpose,” Rhiow said. She flirted her tail at the “wizard’s knot”: it unraveled, and the rest of the circle vanished with it. “Thanks, Siffha’h. That was nicely done.”

She looked smug. “Any time.”

Fhrio went over to the gate and put one paw into the control weave, hooking out first one string, then another. He hissed softly. “There’s no telling what happened now,” he said. “Those ‘settings’ wiped themselves from the logs when the gate collapsed ... that doubtless being the ‘operator’s’ intention. We’re no further along than we were before.”

Urruah, who had stepped away to sit down and have a brief wash while Fhrio was looking the gate over, now glanced up. “Well,” he said, “it’s not that bad. I wove them into the gate’s ‘hard’ memory, stacked underneath your standard default routines, while I was locking the gate open. Just a precaution: I was afraid I might drop something vital when things got busy. But at least that way we could be sure of finding the settings again if something went wrong.”

Fhrio blinked. “How did you get into my hard routines that fast ... ?” “

Urruah smiled one of those smug-tom smiles, and Rhiow said hurriedly, “Huff, I wouldn’t mind taking a break for a little while, if it suits you.”

“Certainly. Let’s go up and get some fresh air ... see if we can find some lunch. After that,” and Huff looked grim, “we must plan. If the Lone Power is behind what we just saw ... and I can’t think what else could be ... then we’ve a nasty job ahead of us. Food first: but then the council of war ... “

The food took less time than Rhiow had thought, most of it provided by ehhif whom she found astonishingly willing. Huff had simply led them around to The Mint, the pub where he lived with his ehhif, the pub’s manager. Rhiow was not sure what to expect from a pub, except for thinking that perhaps, like many other things she had glimpsed so far in London, it might be fairly old: but this one was as much like a New York uptown bar as anything else, all plate glass and polished brass and hanging plants. Huff made his way through the pub’s “lounge” area, graciously accepting bits of sausage and burger and sandwich and other treats from the patrons and bringing this food back to the others, who stayed discreetly sidled in one out-of-the-way corner of the pub otherwise populated only by a group of mindlessly dinging and hooting small-stakes gambling machines.

“You’re very popular here,” Urruah said, after Huff came back with a rather large piece of fried fish.

“Oh yes,” Huff said, watching with amusement as Arhu fell on the piece of fish and devoured it almost without stopping to breathe. “They’re a nice enough bunch, by and large: and my ehhif doesn’t mind. He describes it as “good will” ... says it helps business. It’s my pleasure, I’m sure.” Huff looked around the place with a satisfied air. “Always nice to be part of a successful undertaking. I just have to watch myself, sometimes: it would be too easy to get fat ... “

Rhiow, busy washing her face after finishing a greasy but delectable half of a sausage, was glad of the excuse not to be looking at Huff when he said that. He had already achieved at least “portly” status, but he was not genuinely overweight ... yet.

And who am I to stare at him in this regard? If I had unlimited access to food like this, who knows what I’d look like in a few months ... All the same, she wished she had the opportunity to find out.

Everyone was washing now but Fhrio: he had finished first and was hunkered down with his eyes half-closed, perhaps consulting with the Whisperer about the status of his gates ... or perhaps, Rhiow thought, wondering how much face he’s lost, and how to get it back ... She sighed, and scrubbed her face harder.

Urruah was in comfort: after a chunk of burger, two fish sticks from someone’s finicky child, and a big piece of gravy-soaked crust from someone’s steak and kidney pie, he was lying on one side and putting his stomach fur in order. “So, Huff,” he said, pausing and looking up, “let’s consider options.”

“I don’t know that we have many,” Huff said. He was taking his time about putting his broad snow-white bib in order: it had somehow gotten some ketchup on it after that last piece of hamburger, and Rhiow suspected that he would be pinkish there for a day or two. “We’ve got to try to trace back along the same path that Mr.. Illingworth came by. But the modality is going to be difficult, considering how our problem gate is behaving ... “ He sounded meditative.

“I think we’re going to have to construct a timeslide,” Urruah said. “To access what the ehhif wizards call a ‘piece of time’.”

“You started to tell me about that once,” Arhu said suddenly to Urruah. “And then you yelled at him,” he said, turning to Rhiow. “And me.”

“With reason,” Rhiow said. “It wasn’t germane to the problem at hand: and messing around with time without a specific goal, and approval from the Powers, is like playing in traffic. Worse, actually. But temporal claudication theory’s been a hobby of Urruah’s for a long time.”

Urruah shook himself, then sat up and licked a paw as meditatively as Huff started rubbing behind one ear, even though he had already washed there. “I started getting interested in it when I was still freelance,” he said to Arhu. “Sometimes the Whisperer will talk about it, for whatever reasons. Can’t be boredom, I wouldn’t think: maybe it’s her sneaky way of encouraging research ... or just curiosity. She’s sneaky that way.”

“Temporal claudication ... “ Arhu said. “I thought it was supposed to be ‘temporospatial’.”

“It is,” Urruah said. “Oh, there’s no way you can ever completely lose the spatial coordinate-set on any temporospatial transit spell, no matter how still you try to hold it: not a planet-based one, anyway. But a timeslide’s emphasis is always mainly on temporal change. You can either mount it “freestanding”, by bending space locally and temporarily with spells and equipment tailored to that specific spot: or you can start a timeslide in ‘parasitic’ relationship to an existing worldgate, using the gate’s power source to run the slide. There are more involved ‘half and half’ implementations for use when you want some of the gate’s own functions to augment those of the timeslide: but that kind of implementation is kind of fiddly.”

“A claudication is a squeezing, a constriction,” Huff said to Arhu. “Squeeze space, and you enable things to pop from one side of the ‘squeezed’ area to another: that’s worldgating at its simplest. Squeeze time as well—or squeeze the temporal component of the time/space pair harder than the spatial one—and you pop from one time to another. Present to past ... and back again. That’s a timeslide.”

“You still have to control the spatial component very exactly,” Urruah said, “or else you pop out at the right time, all right, but somewhere very different in the planet’s orbit ... not forgetting that the planet’s primary has moved too, and taken its whole solar system with it, since the time you’re aiming for. Hanging out there in the cold dark vacuum and feeling very silly ... assuming you remembered to bring some air with you.” Urruah put his whiskers forward, amused by the image. Arhu licked his nose, twice, very fast. “You must choose a spot at one ‘end’ of the timeslide,” Urruah said, “ideally your ‘present’ end, as de facto anchor, and the other as the spot to which the anchor chain is fastened ... and not lose control of either of them, despite their individual movements through space which continue through the duration of the slide. There has to be enough ‘flex’ in the connection to cope with unpredictable movements of the body ... or ‘bodies’, since the temporal element means you have to treat this as a two-body problem. Then when you’re done, you have to unhook both ends of the timeslide without causing temporal backlash at either insertion point. It’s delicate work, my kit: you’ll break a few claws on this one, if it’s what we go for.”

Arhu gave Urruah a look which suggested the usage of claws might be more imminent. “I can handle it,” he said.

“We’ll see,” said Rhiow. “You’re good with static worldgates, for a beginner. Whether you’ll do as well with a timeslide is another question.”

“In any case,” Urruah said, “I think options one and three are closed to us.”

Fhrio looked up from his ruminations at that. “Why?”

“Well,” said Urruah, flicking his tail, “for one thing, how often are we going to have to do this? Does anyone want to give me odds that we’ll find out what’s causing the trouble—from solving the original gate malfunction, to finding out what in Iau’s name Mr.. Illingworth was talking about—and fix it all, with just one trip?”

Everyone looked at each other. No one looked willing to suggest they were witless enough to believe that this might happen.

“Right.” Urruah said. “So there’s no sense in running around trying to acquire three or four or five sets of the specialized equipment we’d need to execute a freestanding timeslide repeatedly from the same spot. We’d only waste huge amounts of energy, which the Powers hate, and drive ourselves crazy, which we would hate. Type three, the ‘half and half’ timeslide implementations, are a nuisance to maintain, they get out of kilter at the drop of a whisker, and they fail without warning, which we do not need in these circumstances. This leaves us with type two ... which has certain advantages in our case.”

“A parasitic linkage has advantages?” Auhlae said, sounding dubious. “With a malfunctioning gate?”

“It does if you’re trying to fix the malfunction,” Urruah said. “It’ll function as a diagnostic, for the power source, anyway. A clumsy one, but rugged. Nor will it be liable to the same kinds of failures that the malfunctioning gate is having.”

“No ... just different ones,” Fhrio said.

Urruah shrugged his tail. “Who wants all mice to taste the same? Variety keeps you young. We parasitize the gate’s power source and use it to power the slide. That at least we’ll be able to control precisely. It’s a simple structure to build and troubleshoot: anything goes wrong with it, we’ll know about it in seconds, and be able to fix it in minutes. You try doing that with one of these gates. They’re complex.”

“Tell me about it,” Huff said wearily. “The others have been failing sporadically because of the extra strain due to this troublesome one being taken offline. They’re just not built for larger access numbers than they’re carrying at the moment.”

“We can get you some help for that,” Rhiow said. “We have authorizations to get assistance from the other congener gates in this bundle. The teams at Chur and its daughter-complex at Samnaun will take some of the strain until we’ve resolved this: we can install a couple of direct access portals in the near neighborhood of the functioning gates.”

“They may have to stay there a while,” Huff said. “We have all these incursions to resolve as well ... “

“The Whisperer says we’ll have as much support time from the other gates as we need,” Rhiow said. “It’ll be all right.”

“And meanwhile, at least we have one ‘illicit’ gate transit that we caught live and can use for its coordinates,” Urruah said. “More than that: Mr.. Illingworth, whenever he is, will still be carrying some hint of wizardly ‘transit residue’ about him that we can isolate and track ... and possibly get a better sense of who or what pushed him through that gate. Maybe even why, if we’re lucky.”

“The oldest lostlings’ residue will have already worn off, though,” Auhlae said. “Even after all the other problems are solved, we’re still going to have to find them somehow. And when we do ... are they native to the same universe Mr. Illingworth is?”

It was a problem which had been nagging at Rhiow. Theoretically, the number of potential alternate universes was almost infinite. Even postulating a completely cooperative ehhif, once found—and that itself was none too likely—the two teams would then have to identify correctly which universe was that ehhif’s home. If they accidentally sent the ehhif “back” to the wrong world, their own home universe’s problem would be solved, but the same problem of growing instability would be created for some other world ...

“It’s something we’re going to have to sort out,” Rhiow said, “but at the far end of this process, not the near end. I’d say what we must now do is construct Urruah’s ‘parasitic’ timeslide, plug into it the coordinates he saved from Mr.. Illingworth’s transit, and see where it takes us: then find out what we can about that universe ... especially about this Queen of theirs, and what happened to her. You said there had been other attempts on her life,” she said to Huff.

“At least three or four,” Huff said. “We’ve got to discover whether this assassination is one of the attempts which, in our world, failed: or if it’s a new one, never recorded ... “

“Perhaps never recorded,” Urruah said, “because in the past someone else has already stopped it ... Us, perhaps?”

“That would be reassuring,” Auhlae said. “But somehow I don’t think we can count on it ... “

There was quiet for a moment. Huff sat gazing thoughtfully at the floor, a weary reddish carpet which over much time had become an amalgam of stomped-in chewing gum, spilled beer, and other substances that Rhiow’s nose flatly refused to identify, this far along in their evolution. “Well,” Huff said finally, “I concur. It only remains to decide exactly who makes the first incursion into the past.”

“Assuming that none of you are particularly eager,” Urruah said, “I think it should be us.”

The London team looked at him with expressions varying from Huff’s thoughtful interest to Auhlae’s surprise to Siffha’h’s faint confusion: Fhrio put his whiskers forward, positively (and to Rhiow’s mind, oddly) amused.

“Why?” Huff said. “Though I think probably none of us are all that eager ... “

“I am!’ Siffha’h said.

“Hush,” Auhlae said. “You’re young for this kind of work yet, Siffha’h.”

“I am not! I’ve got all my teeth—“

“No.”

“Why not?!”

“Not now.”

“As for the ‘why’—“ Urruah said.

“We’re more expendable than you are,” Arhu said dryly.

“Arhu!” Rhiow said.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite that way,” Urruah said, putting his whiskers forward, “but in a way he’s right. When it comes down to the feet and the tail of it, Huff, these are your gates, and you know them better than we do. If something goes wrong with a timeslide anchored to one of your gates’ power sources, you have a better chance to successfully troubleshoot the situation than we would. And another matter: the Powers sent us to intervene. Implicit in that, to my mind, is the suggestion that we may be best equipped, one way or another, to deal with whatever problems we uncover while working with you.”

“Or it might just be ego,” Fhrio said, one ear forward and one ear back. It was a joke, Rhiow thought ... just.

“Urruah? Ego?” Rhiow said, and then stopped herself from saying “Perish the thought”, since that could have implied that it wasn’t ego. “Well, Fhrio, if you want to relieve him of the glory, I’m sure you’re welcome to change places with him, and he’ll stay here and mind your gates for you.”

Huff threw Rhiow a very covert and very amused look as Fhrio put his other ear forward. “Oh, no indeed,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to deprive him ... “

“All right, then,” Rhiow said to Huff. “I think we’ll need some hours to put together what spells we want to carry with us, and to make sure things back at home are all right before we set out. If you can keep the gate in inactive mode until we get back, that’ll probably be best.”

“No problem with that,” Fhrio said. “I’ll just disconnect it from the power source entirely until you get back—when? tomorrow? -- to set up the parasitic timeslide.”

“Tomorrow let it be,” Rhiow said, “about this time, if that suits you all.”

They all got up. “And meanwhile, thanks for the work you’ve done,” Huff said. “We’re further along than we were, though the problem looks worse than it did: at least there’s been a change in status, which you were begging for, Fhrio, as I remember. So you may owe Arhu one after all.”

“Though, Fhrio, I must admit that he overstepped the bounds,” Rhiow said. “And my apologies to you for that.”

Fhrio took a not entirely ceremonial swipe at Arhu’s ear. “Let him behave himself after this, then.”

“I will do so,” Arhu said with abrupt and brittle clarity, “insofar as you so do as well, when we come into the dark and you cannot find the way: when others see the path that you do not, and you rebel ... “

Rhiow blinked. It was not anything like Arhu’s usual turn of phrase: she heard foretelling in it, and her fur stood up on her. She hoped Fhrio’s was doing the same, for there was no mistaking the Whisperer’s Dam when She chose to speak out loud ... as she sometimes did, using Arhu as Her throat.

The resonances trembling around his words faded themselves out on the air, leaving the London team looking at one another. “I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, “but it’s another recent development. Arhu is a visionary, though the talent is still training. When it comes out so forcefully, though, we’ve learned to listen ... “

Fhrio shrugged his tail. “We’ll see what happens,” he said, sounding skeptical, but cheerfully so. “Are we all done? Then I’ve got a gate to see to, and a pride to go home to. See you all tomorrow ... “

He stalked out, leaving them all looking after him. Auhlae looked after him with some concern and said, “He goes my way home, for a little distance: I’ll go with him. Siffha’h, come with me?”

“Sure,” said the youngster. Auhlae rubbed faces quickly with Huff, saluted the others with a flirt of her tail, and headed off after Fhrio. Siffha’h trotted off after Auhlae, leaving Arhu gazing after her.

Rhiow lashed her tail once or twice, then said to Huff, “Truly, I am sorry if we’ve caused any trouble—“

“If the way he acts makes you think so,” Huff said, giving her an amused look out of those big green eyes, “don’t. Fhrio’s always like the one flea down in your ear that you can’t get at. But for all that, he’s good at his job. Come on ... “

They all made their way out, slipping behind the bar and down a corridor behind it to a heavy metal door with a small cat-door installed in the bottom of it: then out into a small untidy yard stacked high with steel beer barrels and plastic soft-drink crates. At the back of the yard, a corrugated steel gateway in a high wall had a small improvised cat-door cut into the steel and hinged. “Convenient,” Urruah said.

“It is, isn’t it?” said Huff. “But one thing. Urruah, thank you for volunteering.”

Urruah looked at him in surprise. “Well, as I said, it seems appropriate. Doesn’t it, Rhi?”

“It does. Accusations of ego aside.”

Huff laughed at that. “Don’t take him seriously, cousins: please don’t. He’s got ego enough of his own and to spare. But I do thank you.”

“You’re worried about Auhlae,” Arhu said suddenly.

Rhiow sighed, thinking that vision was not Arhu’s only problem: he was perceptive as well, but not about how to use the perception. He needs a tact transplant, she thought, but she suspected that this was something not even wizardry could handle. She and Urruah were just going to have to beat it into him over time ... hopefully before he got so big that the corrective administration of educational whackings was no longer a viable option.

Huff looked for a long moment at Arhu before saying, “Yes, I am. I don’t think you’re too young to understand the situation. We’ve been together a while, and she’s dear to me: the thought of her in danger upsets me. If we needed to do something dangerous in the Powers’ service, of course we would ... and doubtless will. But I don’t like to think of her anywhere near trouble.”

Rhiow understood completely, though at the same time it seemed to her that for partners who were wizards, and who might be in trouble at the drop of a whisker, such an attitude was likely to cause one or both of them pain sooner or later.

“I know what you mean,” Arhu said, and suddenly looked very young, and painfully dignified, and profoundly troubled, all at once. Oh, dear, Rhiow said privately to Urruah, he has been bitten badly, hasn’t he ...

The claw in the ear is the claw through the heart, Urruah said, quoting the old proverb. I just hope she doesn’t rip him ragged before she’s through ...

“Yes,” Huff said. “I thought you might. Thank you, anyway: thank you all for volunteering.” And he leaned over and rubbed cheeks with Rhiow.

She was oddly moved. “Cousin, you’re more than welcome. It’s our job, after all. Meanwhile, we’d better get going to prepare what we need. We’ll see you down by the gate, about this time tomorrow.”

They made their way out through the little steel door, into the alley behind the pub, and headed for the gate, and home: and all the way home Rhiow’s fur felt strange to her where Huff’s cheek had brushed it ...

THREE

They parted at Grand Central—Urruah to make his way off to his dumpster, Arhu to the garage. Rhiow went home by one of the “high road” routes, over roofs and ‘tween-building walls, rather than by the surface streets. She was already thinking about the spells she would want to bring with her the next day, the preparations she would have to make, and she was in no mood to deal with the traffic at street level. Yet at the same time Huff’s touch was on her mind: nor could she stop thinking about poor Arhu’s adolescent suffering over Siffha’h. I wonder why she dislikes him, Rhiow thought, as she jumped up on a high dividing wall at the end of Seventieth Street and looked down through the maze of tiny cramped alleys which would finally lead to her own alleyway and the road up her own apartment’s wall. I hope they can sort something out. It would be nice if Arhu had another wizard more or less of his own age to be around, instead of just us old fossils ...

Iaehh hadn’t seen Rhiow the night before: so when she came in the cat-door now, an hour or so after he would have returned from work, Iaehh swept her up and carried her around the apartment for about ten minutes, alternately scolding her for being missing, and hugging her for having come back. Rhiow put up with it, even though she didn’t normally much care for being carried around. Finally she patted his face with her paw, which she knew he thought was very “cute”: but she left her claws just the tiniest bit out, and he felt them, and laughed.

“You’re a good puss,” he said, and put her down by the cat-food dish. He had washed it again. “You’re learning,” she said, and purred approval as he fed her. When he finally sat down in his reading chair (having had his dinner some time ago: pizza, to judge by the smells), she jumped up into his lap and sat there washing for a good while. Iaehh picked up the remote control and turned on the living-room TV, and for a good long time he sat quiet and watched the local news channel intone its litany of who had been robbed or shot in the City, what politicians were saying what cutting and possibly true things about other politicians, and what the weather was going to be like the next day.

When the weather report came around for the second time, Rhiow looked up at Iaehh and saw that he was dozing. She put her whiskers forward: why else would he have been sitting still so long? she thought. Even Iaehh sometimes ran out of that nervous energy that kept him running all day and made him sleep poorly at night. At least, sometimes that’s why he sleeps badly. Other times, when he wept himself asleep after lying awake a long time, Rhiow knew quite well that there were other reasons. At such times she sometimes wished she could speak to his neurochemistry, as she had done with Mr.. Illingworth, and spare him the pain: but Rhiow knew that that would not have been within the right use of her powers ... To ease pain, the Oath said, indeed: but when pain was what led to the growth that wizardry was also supposed to guard, one did not tamper. Her ehhif’s pain was difficult for her to bear, but Rhiow was not such a youngster in the exercise of the Art as to mistake the comforting of her own hurt for the salving of Iaehh’s.

Now, though, he sat with his mouth slightly open, snoring very softly, while on the TV the Mayor of New York complained about one of the City Commissioners: and Rhiow let her eyes half-close and let the sound wash over her like running water or wind or any other noise which might have content, but not any content that she needed to pay attention to at the moment. There were more important things on her mind than City politics.

Time travel bothered her, as it bothered many wizards whose work sometimes necessitated it. For one thing, it was rarely quite so simple or straightforward as “going back in time”. Even the phrase “back in time” was deceptive: the directionality of time was a variable, though the relationship of the past to the present was nominally a constant. No matter how careful you were, the possibility of careless action setting up unwelcome paradoxes was all too obvious ... and unraveling such tangles was worse, inevitably involving more backtiming and the possibility of making things worse still.

The complications had fascinated Arhu all the way home: he had delightedly plagued Urruah with questions about a subject which until now had been off limits, about everything from what you fastened a timeslide to, to that ancient imponderable, the “grandfather paradox’. Urruah had mentioned it, and Arhu had actually had to stop walking while he figured it out, or tried to. “It’s weird,” he said. “I can’t see what would happen. Or, I mean, I can see two ways it would go—“

“What? You mean, if you went back in time and killed your grandfather?” Urruah had said. “Well, one way, if you’re still there afterwards, it means you’re a by-blow. A ‘bastard’, as the ehhif would say. But then how else would you describe someone who would go back in time and kill their own grandfather? I ask you. And if you go the other way, and you succeed, then you’re not there at all. And serves you right for being a bastard ... “

At that, Arhu had become so confused that he actually became quiet: and shortly thereafter they were at Grand Central, and Arhu went off to his dinner, ending the day’s questioning. Rhiow had smiled somewhat wearily at that as she and Urruah parted, for the “grandfather paradox” served well enough to illuminate how difficult it could be to alter history, especially if you viewed it linearly. But in this line of work you would eventually have to deal with the question of what happened when events in some original timestream had actually been altered. Then you would have alternate universes to deal with. By themselves, they were bad enough. But they also brought with them the possibility that, in dealing with them, you would find yourself going back in place ... which was more complex than merely backtiming, and potentially more dangerous.

Quite a few locations on Earth had a “back in place” as well as “back in time”. There were other downsides than the Old Downside, less central in the hierarchy of universes, perhaps, but no less important to the creatures who loved or hated the realities to which those places were related. History, or the realities of which history is a shadow, was in full flower in these less central “downsides”, fully expressed there no matter how they might be repressed elsewhere—in fact, usually more vigorous in expression in direct proportion to how vigorously they had been repressed in the “real world”.

And going back in place involved an entirely different set of dangers. You ran the risk of somehow altering the basic “mythological” or “archetypal” structure of a place, which could be immensely important in the minds of thousands or millions of sentient beings. Tampering with the mythological essence of a place—a Rubicon or a Valley Forge, in the ehhif metaphor, a Camelot or a Runnymede—could change not just history, but the perception of it as good, bad or indifferent ... a far more perilous business than changing the mere structure of time. Such shifts could create ripples and harmonics through the “noo-string structure” which would be capable of ripping whole worlds apart. The thought of going back in both time and place at once was dangerous enough to make Rhiow shudder.

But they might wind up doing just that, for London was definitely a Place, one of those hinges of ehhif history in this part of the world. Not that the history of place wasn’t mostly an ehhif manifestation, anyway. Humans weighed hard on the world, and imprinted it with history and personality. But People stepped more lightly. Feline history tended to take place within individual cats, who, according to their nature, saw place as merely something they moved over or through: it was rare for one of the People to become attached to one field, one tree. Granted, your den for this season—or this week of this season—was something you would defend, for the sake of the kittens or the local hunting. But sooner or later time or loss or boredom seeped into every den like water, and you moved out, perhaps with mild regret, to escape the creeping damp and find yourself somewhere else more warm or dry. Memories of those dens you took with you, as the worthwhile part of the transaction: but the dens themselves held little interest unless your kill or your kittens were in them.

What kept People in one place, if anything, was the ehhif they companioned: sometimes much to the Person’s embarrassment—and Rhiow glanced up in affectionate amusement at Iaehh, who sat there with his head slightly to one side and his eyes closed, his mouth open, and the tiny snore emitting from it at decorous intervals. The whole business of companionment was a tangled one. Some People felt that the only way the ehhif-People relationship could be viewed was as slavery: others, mostly those already in such a relationship, tended to see it otherwise, in a whole spectrum of aspects from pity (“Someone has to try to teach them better”) to simple affection (“Mine are well enough behaved, and they’re nice to me, what’s the problem?”) to cheerful mercenary exploitation (“If they want to feed us, why shouldn’t we enjoy eating their food? Doesn’t cost anything to purr afterwards, either.”).

The People who raved most about slavery and freedom found all these views despicable: starving in a gutter, they said, but starving free, was far superior to a full belly in the den of the oppressor. Rhiow, ehhif-companioned for a good while now, found such an attitude simplistic at best. Yet there was no denying the existence of People who had no knowledge of themselves as such: taken from their dams too early, perhaps, too soon even to drink in with the first milk and their mother’s tale-purring the truth of what they were or where in the worlds their own kind came from—People who were barely self-aware, merely receptacles for food and excreters of it, dull-brained demanders of strokes and treats, “pets” in the true sense of the word: slaves to their most basic instincts, but in service to nothing any higher at all.

Rhiow shuddered a little. But it’s not that simple, she thought. Even among People who are self-aware, People for that matter living wild and “free”, you’ll find those for whom the gods and the life of the world doesn’t matter at all, or matters far less than their last rat or a warm place to sleep. Which is worse? A cat who doesn’t know she’s a cat—just eats and sleeps and lives? Or one who does know, and doesn’t care ... ?

A tangled issue, and not one which Rhiow would resolve. Meanwhile, there was still the problem of the upcoming intervention. She had spoken to the Whisperer on the way home and had sorted out the spells she felt most likely that she would need. In the morning, before they were ready to set out, she would crosscheck with Urruah to make sure that they weren’t carrying duplicates. And beyond that, there was nothing much she could do, except worry about what the future held for them ... or, rather, the past. And what good would that do ... ?

Rhiow closed her eyes and reduced the world to near-darkness and Iaehh’s tiny snore. When I wake, I will meet my old enemy uncertainty, she thought, and its partners, the shadows that lie at the back of my mind and others: those darknesses which go about hunting for some action of mine to which to fasten themselves. They will lie in my road and say Why bother? or It will never work: or they will lie out long and dark behind me, saying, What difference have you made? It is all for nothing. But I need pay them no mind. They are only the servants of the Lone Power, and against me and Those Whom I serve, they have no strength unless I allow them the same. My commission comes from Those Who Are, the Powers that were before time and will be after it: the Powers Who made time, and to Whom it answers. My paw, lifted to strike the shadows away from the feet of the Event enacted, holds hidden within it Their claw that strikes the Lone One to the heart, day by day. So it was done anciently: so I shall do tomorrow. And for tonight, I admit of no shadow but that of my closed eyes, and I give Their claw the resting time to sharpen itself in dream on the Tree: for at eyes’ opening, together We go to battle again ...

And Iaehh’s snore was the last thing she heard.

When she woke up, Iaehh had already gone off to work, and apparently had carefully moved her off his lap and onto the chair without waking her when he went to bed ... whenever that had been. The food bowls had been washed again, and were full.

Rhiow sighed with the sheer pleasure of having had a good night’s sleep: it was rare enough, in her business. She got up and ate, then washed at leisure, and went out to use the box: and finally she checked the security spell on the apartment’s door before heading downtown to Grand Central again.

Arhu was there early again, sitting in front of the gate. It was patent, showing the view down toward the Thames from near the main entrance to the Tower, and shedding a cool blue light around him. “Luck, Arhu,” she said, jumping up onto the platform. “Where’s Urruah?”

“He went through already,” Arhu said, watching a barge full of ehhif tourists loading up at the dock near HMS Belfast for a tour down the river. “Wanted to go over early to get the timeslide set up with Fhrio: and he wanted to make sure the two Samnaun-based transfer gates were in place and working without messing everything else up.”

Rhiow waved her tail slowly in acknowledgment, looking at the serene vista. It was a sunny morning over there: she had seen few of those so far. “Before we go—‘ she said.

“I’m not going to die of it,” Arhu said, “so don’t worry.”

Rhiow blinked. “Die of what?”

“You know. Siffha’h,” he said, though his voice was so mournful that Rhiow wondered if perhaps he wasn’t all that sure of the outcome.

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask you,” she said, taking a swipe at his left ear, and missing entirely: Arhu ducked without even looking. “You are getting good at that,” Rhiow added, unable to conceal slight admiration.

“I don’t like pain,” Arhu said. “It hurts.”

Which is why it’s such an effective teaching medium for kittens, Rhiow thought, not least among them you. “What I was going to ask you,” she said, “was whether you had had any further insights into what was going to happen on this run.”

His tail lashed. “Nothing that I can describe,” Arhu said. “I keep getting flashes ... but they slip away. Believe me, Rhiow, if I see anything that I can describe—then or afterwards—I’ll tell you. But it doesn’t always come that way. I keep getting stuff that just pops out without warning, and before I can get hold of it to see what it means, it’s gone and taken all the—the meanings, the—“

“Context?”

“Yeah, the context—it all just goes. While the context’s there, everything makes sense—but when I lose that ... “ He sighed. “It’s really frustrating. It makes me want to hit things.”

“Don’t be tempted,” Rhiow said, thinking of Fhrio.

Arhu laughed out loud. “I wouldn’t bother. For one thing, beating him up wouldn’t be any big deal, and for another, it’s not exactly polite, is it?”

She blinked again. Rhiow couldn’t think if she had ever before heard Arhu use the word. If this is the kind of effect that having a crush is going to have on him, she thought, I’m all for it, even if it makes him ache a little ...

“So are you ready?” Arhu said.

“By all means, let’s go,” said Rhiow. They stepped through into the bright London day, and Arhu shut the worldgate behind them. There by the Tower entrance, the two of them sidled. They made their way among the unseeing tourists down into the Tower Hill Underground station, and down to the passages leading to the platform where the London team had confined their unruly worldgate.

The spot was busy, though not so much with wizards as with equipment. The malfunctioning gate itself was disconnected from its power source, only visible to Rhiow as the thinnest ghost oval traced in the air, like a structure woven of smoke. The “catenary”, the insubstantial power conduit which was finally rooted in the Old Downside and which normally served this gate, lay coiling along the floor like some bright serpent: the end of it which would normally have terminated in the gate was now faired into a glowing new spell-circle which had been traced on the floor. If the last one had looked like vines twining amongst one another, this one looked more like a circular hedge. It was complex, for Rhiow could see that Urruah, rather than using specific physical objects to twist local space into the shapes he required, was using the spell structure itself. The “hedge” blazed and flowed with multicolored fire, the radiance of it stuttering here and there as one spell subroutine or another came active, did its job, and deactivated itself. Urruah was pacing around the diagram, checking his spelling, while Fhrio crouched nearby and inspected the connection of the catenary to the diagram: off to one side, Auhlae was sitting with her tail neatly tucked about her forefeet, watching him work.

“Go check your name in that,” Rhiow said to Arhu. He went straight over to the spell to do it. There were few such important aspects of spelling as to make sure you were correctly named in a “written’ spell. Like all the other sciences, wizardry always works: a wizard whose “written” name specified a different nature than the usual in a given spell would come out of that spell changed ... and not always in ways he or she would prefer.

Rhiow turned her attention briefly to the other gate which was hanging at one end of the platform, shimmering in the darkness. This was one of the “transfer” gates which would be taking some of the pressure off the London complex while the malfunctioning gate structure was completely offline. A transiting wizard using one of the London gates would now find themselves briefly under the peak of Muottas Muragl, at the “restored” prehistoric gating facility at Samnaun in the Alps, before finishing at their intended destination. It would be a slight inconvenience: but Rhiow couldn’t believe any wizard in her right mind would grudge the momentary view out of the great transverse crevasse and down the side of the mountain ... and the skiiers above would never notice.

“Luck, Fhrio,” Rhiow said, as she walked over to him. “Everything working satisfactorily?”

“Insofar as anything can be ‘satisfactory’ when it’s all ripped up like this,” Fhrio said, “yes.” For once he sounded merely tired rather than actively quarrelsome.

“You were up all night,” Rhiow said.

“Yes I was,” said Fhrio, and gave her a glance as if looking to see whether she was mocking him.

All Rhiow could do, hoping he wouldn’t misunderstand the gesture, was lower her head and bump his briefly. “I appreciate the effort,” she said: “we all do.” And she moved away before either of them would have a chance to be embarrassed.

She went over to the timeslide spell to have a look at her own name, checking the arabesques and curls of it in the graphic form of the Speech as it and the “personality” stratum to which it was attached wove in and out among the power-management routines and the “entasis” structures which controlled how tightly spacetime was bent back on itself. Everything looked all right, though she checked again just to be certain: she was not about to forget one spell some years ago, worked in haste by Urruah, which had been perfect in ninety-nine per cent of its detail, but in which he had changed the sign on one minor symbol. The spell would have worked all right, but Rhiow would have exited it pure white, blue-eyed, and possibly deaf. She had been teasing Urruah about that one for a long time, but—judging by the intent look on his face—today might not be the best time to do it.

Auhlae got up and came over to greet Rhiow: they breathed breaths for a moment. “Oh, Auhlae,” Rhiow said, “more sausages—I don’t know how you cope with all this rich food. I’d be the size of a houff by now.”

Auhlae put her whiskers forward. “I control myself mostly,” she said, “but since things started to misbehave, my appetite’s been raging ... and I confess I’ve been humoring it. I can always eat grass for a few days, later on ... “

Arhu came over. “You satisfied with the way your name looks?” Rhiow said.

“It looks fine. At least, it looks the way it looks in our gate at home.”

“The way it did yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Always check it frequently. Lives change without warning: names change the same way.”

“Yeah.” He licked his nose. “Auhlae, is Siffha’h going to be here today?”

“No, Arhu, she’s off with Huff making an adjustment to one of the other gates,” Auhlae said. “Fhrio and I will be standing guard over this end of your timeslide while you’re downtime.” She craned her neck a little to look at it. “Does he do this often?” Auhlae said to Rhiow. “He’s very good at it.”

“He’s never done it before, to the best of my knowledge,” Rhiow said, glancing over that way too as Urruah sat down, apparently to take one last overview of the whole structure. T have a feeling he’s been waiting for the chance, though.” The intricacy and tightness of the spell-structure suggested to Rhiow that he had been working on this spell, or something like it, for a long time. There was no disputing its elegance: Urruah was an artist at this kind of thing. Unfortunately, there was also no disputing its dangerousness. It’s a good thing we finally have an excuse to do something like this, Rhiow thought. Otherwise who knows what he might have done some day ...

Then she dismissed the thought. He might sometimes be impatient and reckless, by a queen’s standards anyway, but Urruah was a professional. He would not tamper with time unless and until the Powers sanctioned it ... and then when he does, she thought, as Urruah looked up from the spell with an extremely self-satisfied expression, he’ll have the time of his life ...

“Nice work, huh?” Urruah said, getting up.

“Beautiful as always,” Rhiow said. “Did you get your name right?”

He put one ear back, not quite having an excuse to comment. “Uh, yes, I checked.”

“That being the case,” she said, “hadn’t we better get going? You wouldn’t want to leave a spell like this just sitting around for long: it wants to work. Waste of energy, otherwise ... “

Urruah grinned at her, then turned to Auhlae and Fhrio, who had finished checking the catenary and had strolled over to them.

“I’ve structured this so that, once we pass through, it’ll seal behind us,” Urruah said: “if this is some kind of trap, I don’t want whatever might be waiting on the other side jumping straight back down your throats. The spell will continue running on this side, though, as usual, while sealed. Afterwards, say as soon as ten minutes after opening, there are three ways it can be activated. From this side, by either of you waking up this linkage—“ he patted one outside-twining branch of the “hedge” with one paw—“which will make the slide bilaterally patent. You’ll be able to see through, or to pass through if you need to. You’ll see I’ve left a couple of stems unoccupied on the “personality” stratum for you to add names to. It can also be activated from our side by one of us pulling a “tripwire” strand of the spell which will extend back along the timeline trace—that’s in case we need an early return. Otherwise, it’s programmed to reopen to bilateral patency again in two hours: that’s as long as I prefer to stay, for a first ‘scouting’ visit.”

Auhlae and Fhrio both examined the linkages which Urruah had indicated. “All right,” Auhlae said, “that’s straightforward enough. If you’re not back in two hours -- ?”

“Intervention at that point will have to be your decision,” Urruah said. “Myself, I’d say wait an extra hour before letting anyone come after us. But you may decide against that ... and if you do, I wouldn’t blame you. The slide will remain workable for a full sun’s day, in any case. If we don’t return by then—“ He shrugged his tail. “Better check with the European Supervisory wizard for advice, because my guess is you’ll need to.”

Auhlae and Fhrio nodded.

“Then let’s do it,” Urruah said to Rhiow. She flicked her tail in agreement and leapt into the circle, found the spot which Urruah had marked out for her to occupy in lines of wizardly fire: behind her, Arhu jumped too, a little more clumsily, and found his spot. Nerves. Poor kitting ... she thought: but Rhiow’s fur was not lying entirely smooth, either. She licked her nose, and tried to keep her composure in place.

Urruah jumped into the circle, dead onto his spot, as if he had been practicing for this for years. His whiskers were forward, his tail was straight up with confidence. Disgusting, Rhiow thought, and resisted the urge to lick her nose again.

Urruah reached out for one of the traceries of words and fire laced through the “hedge’, hooked it in both his front paws, and pulled it down to the spell’s activation point, standing on it.

The sensation came instantly: not of passage, as in a normal gating, but of being squeezed. Claudication is right, Rhiow thought, as a feeling of intolerable pressure settled in all around her, seeming to compress her from every direction at once. It was as if giant paws were trying to press her right out of existence. And perhaps they were. This existence, anyway—

She could not swallow, or breathe, or lick her nose, or move any part of her in the slightest. The world reduced itself to that terrible pressure—

which suddenly was gone, and she fell down.

Into the mud—

Rhiow struggled to her feet, opened her eyes enough to register that they were in some kind of street: buildings stood up on either side. Off to one side, Arhu was pulling himself to his feet as well. Beside her, Urruah was standing up, and swearing.

“What?” Rhiow said, “what’s the matter?”

“Is your nose broken?” he said. “Sweet Dam of Everything, this smells like sa’Rrahh’s own litterbox. The mud!”

Rhiow’s face was trying to contort itself right out of shape at the smell: she could only agree. The street was at least four inches deep in a thick black mud that, to judge by the smell, was mostly horse dung: but there was rotten straw in it too, and soot, and garbage of every kind, and a smell that suggested the ehhif’s sewers had discovered a way to back up so thoroughly that they ran uphill. The air was not much better. It was brown, a brown such as Rhiow had not seen since she last visited Los Angeles during a smog alert: but this was far, far worse—the concentrated, inversion-confined smoke from ten thousand chimneys, most of them burning coal. You could see this air in the street with you: it billowed faintly, like smoke from a burning building in the next block. But nothing was burning—or rather, everything was: wood, coal, coke, trash ...

“Is the tripwire here?” Arhu said.

“Of course it’s here,” Urruah said, a little crossly. “I can feel it even through this stuff. Everything’s going according to plan ... so far.” He looked around at the mud. “Though I have to admit my plans did not include this.”

“It’s going to take a while for our noses to get used to this,” Rhiow said, looking around her with some concern. “Meanwhile, there’s no point in standing around waiting for it to happen.”

“You mentioned playing in traffic,” Arhu said, looking across the street as horse carriages plunged by, big drays pulled by huge horses, smaller gigs with neat-looking ponies between the shafts, or tall slender beasts apparently bred for the hackney trade. “I’d give a lot for a nice taxi to run underneath at the moment.”

“I wish you had one too,” Urruah growled, glancing up the road and unwilling to put a paw in the loathsome mud. “I will never complain about New York being dirty again. Never!”

“Yes you will,” Arhu said, more in a tone of resignation than foresight: but he knew Urruah well enough by now to be able to make the statement without resource to prophecy.

Urruah was so disgusted that he didn’t even bother taking a swipe at Arhu. “For someone who lives in a dumpster,” Rhiow said, unable to resist the chance to tease him, “you’re awfully fastidious.”

“My dumpster is cleaner than this,” Urruah said. “A sewage-treatment facility is cleaner than this! If—“

“I get the message,” Rhiow said. “Come on, Ruah, we don’t have a choice. Let’s do it.”

They ran across the street together,

... and Arhu was completely unprepared for the motor roar that came from down the side street. In a cloud of smoke, a four-wheeled vehicle on thin-tired, spindly wheels came charging around the corner and straight at them.

There was no time to jump. Arhu’s eyes rolled in terror, but it was informed terror. He threw himself flat under the vehicle’s chassis: it passed over him and roared on down the street, the ehhif sitting in the contraption either completely unaware that they’d almost run over a cat, or completely unconcerned about it.

Urruah, who had been further into the middle of the road, now ran over to Arhu as he picked himself up and shook himself to get the worst of the muck off. “You have to start being more careful about what you ask for,” Urruah growled. “Clearly someone’s listening ... Are you all right?”

“As long as I don’t have to wash and find out what I taste like,” Arhu muttered, “yes.” He trotted hurriedly for the sidewalk, or what passed for it: in this neighborhood, this meant “where the mud was only an inch thick instead of three or four”.

They crouched against the brick building there and looked up and down the road. It was plainly George Street, running into Great Tower Hill as usual: but the traffic was mostly pulled by horses—not that that made it any slower than modern London traffic: if anything, it looked to be moving a little faster.

People walked past them, some well dressed, some seemingly poor but clean though somewhat threadbare, some practically in rags: and no one seemed to notice the mud. A few heads turned when one of the motor vehicles passed, though. Rhiow couldn’t tell whether it was because they were unusual, or simply because of the noise they made. Apparently the muffler had not yet been invented.

“Now what are those doing here?” Urruah said. “Internal combustion engines aren’t until the turn of the century.”

“Neither is the word for smog,” Rhiow said, looking up at the dingy, near-opaque sky, “but that doesn’t seem to have stopped these people: they’ve got that, too.”

“What time would you say this is?” Rhiow said. “The light is so peculiar ... “

Urruah shook his head. “Late afternoon? Not even smog could make it this dim.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Rhiow said.

“Everything here feels wrong,” Arhu said. “All of it.” His face had lost the disgusted expression it had worn a moment before: his eyes looked slightly unfocused.

“You’re not kidding,” Urruah said. “Something’s happened to history ... and I don’t like the look of it. Or the smell of it.”

Rhiow curled her lip at the smell from the street. “This would have been here anyway,” she said, picking one forefoot up out of the mud. “The kind of sanitation we take for granted in our own time was something these ehhif were only beginning to see the need for. And their technology’s not up to it, even if they did see the need. There are more people in this city than in almost any other in the world, and all they’ve got are brooms and dustpans ... and four million ehhif and a quarter million horses inside the City limits.” She smiled grimly. “Work it out for yourself. How many cubic miles of—“

“Please,” Urruah said, and sneezed.

They started to walk, looking for somewhere clean. They found no such place, at least in the public roads. Only the moat surrounding the Tower led up to patches of green grass beneath the old stone walls. Their structure was unchanged from what Rhiow had seen in modern London: but they were stained black by who knew how many years of air pollution. Slowly the three of them made their way around toward the river, looking down it from a spot which would have been close to where Rhiow and Arhu had stood only a few hours before.

“This is all wrong,” Arhu whispered. Across the river was a great palisade of buildings, all of which were taller than architecture of the ehhif-Queen Victoria’s time could possibly have been.

This stuff shouldn’t be here,” Arhu said. “And look at that—“

They looked at the great bridge, crowned with its pyramidal towers and boasting its high cross-walkway, which appeared on so many of the postcards and T-shirts which the ehhif sold near Tower Hill Underground station. “That’s wrong too,” Arhu said.

Rhiow looked at him. “Are you sure? Even in our world, it’s pretty old—“

Urruah stared off into the distance for a moment as he cocked an ear to listen to the Whisperer. “He’s right, though,” he said presently. “She says that in our world, this wasn’t built until 1886. No matter what year this is in the ‘spread’ we’re heading for, that’s still too soon.”

“Interesting,” Rhiow said, and shook herself to abort a beginning shiver ... “Something to do with the technology, maybe ... ?”

“They’ve got a whole lot too much of it, if you ask me,” Urruah said.

“Of technology?” Rhiow said, and looked around her. Overhead, something very like a helicopter went by in a loud chatter of rotors. What she couldn’t understand was why a helicopter needed wings as well ...

“Of the wrong kind of technology,” Urruah said. “Rhi, this timeline has been contaminated ... seriously contaminated.”

“And you don’t think it’s an accident.”

“Do you? Really?”

She looked around her at the vista down the river, of cranes standing up and erecting new buildings of steel and plate glass, but still somehow in a style that was essentially Victorian, complicated and (to her eye) over-decorated. She looked down the face of the river, which was full of shipping—not sail, as at least some of that shipping still should have been, but metal ships, running on internal combustion or (in just a very few cases, as in a technology that was rapidly being left behind) steam. She saw the design of many of those ships which were making their way to and from the Pool of London: lean, low, forward-thrust, angular shapes such as she had seen often enough in New York Harbor—battleships and cruisers in the modern mold, all fanged with guns and other weapons she couldn’t recognize. There were a lot of those warships: they came and went as regularly, it seemed, as the tour ships that ran up and down the Thames in Rhiow’s own native time. For all its bustle of business and its aura of ehhif success and power, this London also had a grim air about it.

“No,” Rhiow said. “This contamination is purposeful. The Lone One has been busy here.”

“Very busy, I’d say,” said Urruah. “And the contamination has to have happened a good while ago: not even ehhif can make changes like this overnight. We’ve got to find out when this alternate timeline was ‘seeded’.”

Rhiow looked around her and lashed her tail in frustration. “We’re going to have a good time finding that out,” she said. “We can’t just ask the ehhif.”

“We can ask People,” Arhu said.

“Yes,” said Rhiow, “but which ones? We could waste a lot of time talking to the wrong sources ... and I have a feeling time isn’t something we dare waste here.”

They walked down to the edge of the river, looking up and down its length. The water was olive-colored and filthy, and it stank. A few desultory seabirds floated on it, or fished optimistically among the weeds and garbage for something to eat. Above it all, the dirty air billowed, unpleasantly visible.

“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 law’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 clean once, they say ... pure white, without a mark. Then the story says that the Lone Power in her feline form came, and saw it, and hated it. Sa’Rrahh 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 hyper-quadratic 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 which 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 which 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 had plainly been more forcefully stated in this universe, though. I am much closer to finishing, it said: and the technique was a favorite one of the Lone One’s ... tricking life into undoing itself—a mockery of the tendency of the Powers to let life, by and large, take care of itself.

“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 which pertained to alternate universes. While you might postulate the existence of an alternate universe, 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 off-planet?”

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 further 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” which 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 in 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 said, 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 which 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 said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but the spell’s not. Radiation.”

“The problem won’t be the Van Allen belts,” Rhiow said. “We’re well away from them. Solar flare, possibly—“

Urruah gave Rhiow a look. You are an optimist, he said silently.

“I don’t think so,” Arhu said. “I need a better look. Come on—“

He started to walk upwards as if on a stairway: a good trick, Rhiow thought, if he was using the air trapped with them to do it. She got up and carefully went up after him, none too concerned about the actual instrumentality at the moment—and much more concerned that the bubble of air should follow them all up, as Urruah came stepping carefully up behind her. She also took some care with how she went in the low gravity. Falling off Arhu’s invisible stairway, and down and out of the spell, would be unfortunate.

The spell followed them with no problems: its diameter was at least ten meters, and Arhu had apparently designated himself as its center. They walked upward for perhaps a quarter mile before Arhu stopped, standing there in the middle of nothing and looking down on the desolate landscape. Rhiow looked down too, and drew in a long painful breath. The crater off to the northward, the one which had produced the brown ejecta, lay plain before them. It was at least five miles in diameter, and ran all the way to the far horizon northward. Great fissures ran from it, in all directions but mostly toward the north. The bottom of the crater was glazed as if with ice, but it was not ice: it shone with a bitter, brittle gleam under the slanting light of the sun.

“So what would you make it?” Urruah said after a moment’s silence. “A megaton or so? And there are a lot more of these. Some particularly big impacts up in the northern hemisphere ... “

Rhiow’s tail lashed furiously. “The only good thing about this,” she said, “is that they did this up here and not on Earth. But still—what a message.”

“Yes indeed,” Urruah said. “For every other pride of ehhif in the world to see, every time the Moon comes up. “Look what we could do to you, if we wanted to.” The question is—which ehhif down there are doing it?” He glanced at the gibbous-waning Earth hanging above the horizon.

“When we come back,” Rhiow said, “we’re going to have to find out. The Lone One has seen to it somehow that these people have been given the most dangerous technology that they could possibly get their hands on. With the assumption, I’m sure, that they’ll certainly destroy themselves. What we’re going to have to do is fly in the face of that certainty and stop it.”

“If we can,” Urruah said. He sounded rather muted: even his supreme self-confidence was having trouble dealing with this.

“Space travel as well,” Arhu said. “They can come up here and see what’s here ... and then they do this.” He was bristling.

“If we’re very lucky, we may be able to keep them from doing worse,” Rhiow said. “But even here, I don’t want to linger. The longer we stay in this universe ... the more we endanger our own.”

“Let’s get back down then,” Urruah said. The timeslide won’t have self-activated yet, but that doesn’t matter. It functioned: that part of our test is a success. We can come back when we need to. And as for this—“ He too was fluffed up as he looked down around him.

“Arhu,” he said after a moment, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have seen it this way, you first time out.”

“No, it’s all right,” Arhu said. “We needed to do it: you were right. But let’s go home.”

He paused, standing there on nothing, and narrowed his eyes. A second later they were standing on the old dock by the Thames again, and Rhiow’s ears were ringing with the bang! of displaced air which accompanied their appearance. There were ehhif walking by the river, further eastward, but they paid no attention to the sound at all.

“They probably think it’s a car backfiring or something,” Urruah muttered.

“Maybe so,” Rhiow said, “and I’ll be glad to get back where that kind of perception is normal for its time. Come on!”

They made their way as quickly as they dared, sidled, back to Old Jewry, the street where the other end of the timeslide was sited. It was hard to avoid the ehhif, sometimes, they were so crowded together, and Rhiow was bruised or kicked more than once as the team made its way toward the timeslide.

They were about to break into a run across the noise and muck of George Street again, making for Old Jewry, when to Rhiow’s complete astonishment, Arhu, ahead of her, suddenly darted through a thicket of walking legs and westward down George Street. “Arhu!’ she cried. “What are you—“

“Just two blinks -- !’ he said, and dodged around a corner. Rhiow and Urruah crowded against a nearby building, staring after him. Not quite two blinks later—more like two blinks and a quick scrub—he reappeared, dodging among the ehhif. He was unsidled, and had something large and white in his mouth: it flapped as he came. Ehhif pointed and laughed at Arhu as he ran.

He ran straight past Urruah and Rhiow, and straight across George Street, weaving expertly to avoid the traffic. Rhiow and Urruah threw each other a look and went after him at speed. All three made it to the far side together, as more horse carriages and a few more of the antique cars came splashing and rattling down through the mud at them.

Arhu was spattered but triumphant. “I saw an ehhif drop it,” he said, and dropped it himself, going sidled again.

“How could you see him around the corner?” Urruah said, while Rhiow peered curiously at the thing. It said, THE TIMES, AUGUST 18, 1875, and everywhere else it was covered with small fine print in ehhif English. It would hardly have passed for a newspaper in New York: it seemed to have only three pages, no pictures, and no ads.

Arhu wrinkled his nose up. “I mean, I see him,” he said. “I still see him now, even though he did it already. Au, Rhiow, the way we talk about time doesn’t work right for talking about vision. I need new words or something ... “

“One last check,” Urruah said, and held his head up as if sniffing for something. Rhiow looked at him, bemused.

“What?” she said.

“I’ve been feeling around me with a detector spell ever since we got here,” Urruah said. “But to no effect. You remember Mr.. Illingworth? Well, there’s no sign of him.”

“You mean, after all this, he’s not from here?”

“I don’t know what it means,” Urruah said, “and at the moment, I’m not going to hang around to find out. Come on!”

Arhu picked up the paper again, coming unsidled as he did so, and they headed down the little street together, keeping to one side, for there were some ehhif passing up and down it together. Urruah stopped at one point and felt around with his paw in the mud. “All right,” he said, “there’s the “tripwire”. Now if these vhai’d ehhif will just go away—“

It took some minutes: there were several false starts in which the street would look like it was going to be clear, and then another ehhif or two or three would come along from one end or the other. This left Rhiow with nothing to do but watch her own tension increase, and try to reduce it. Oh, please let the world still be there when we get back, our own world, please -- ! Meanwhile, Arhu had to keep dropping the paper and picking it up, to avoid being seen by the ehhif. “It’s all right, isn’t it?” he said suddenly. “Bringing things back?”

“Or forward in this case?” Rhiow said. “Yes. Things are all right. Anything alive, that’s where the complications start ... “

“Quick,” said Urruah. The street was empty, and he had pulled the “tripwire’. The circle of the timeslide spell sprang into being around them. “Ready? Brace yourselves—“

Rhiow tried, but against that awful pressure there was no way you could brace, nothing you could do but endure as everything, light and breath and almost life, was squeezed out of you. Hang on, she thought, it can’t last much longer, hang on—

and suddenly things were dark again, and Auhlae and Fhrio were looking at them, bemused, from outside the circle.

“What’s the matter?” Auhlae said. “Didn’t it work?”

“Perfect!’ Urruah said. “Right to the tenth of a second.” The rest of his pleasure in the accuracy of his spelling got lost for Rhiow in a rush of astonishment and delight that the world seemed, by and large, to be the way they had left it. But the delight didn’t last. She couldn’t get rid of the image of that other world’s Moon, and of the certainty that, unless they could work out what had gone wrong and what to do about it, their own Moon would look that way before long. Urruah was right: reality resisted being changed. But it could not resist such change indefinitely: and the rumbling dark of the Underground tunnels almost immediately looked a lot less welcome, and started to look rather like a trap.

“We should get everyone together,” she said to Auhlae. “If you thought you had trouble with random temporal accesses ... when we show you what we’ve found, you’ll wish a few stray pastlings were all you had ... “