To Visit the Queen (12 page)

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 that 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 and serpents, they never would. But as a wizard, Rhiow came of a bigger worldview, one that 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 asked.

"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 Penn. London is a major onplanet transit center for western Europe, and if you tried to read all the gate logs there 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, and lives displaced from their proper times can seriously skew that balance. 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."

"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 nonnative 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 nonnative 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 that 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."