To Visit The Queen

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 …”