To Visit The Queen

FOUR

“They have nuclear weapons??” Huff said.

“Whether they’re exactly weapons the way we would define them, I don’t know,” Rhiow said. “We were hardly there long enough to guess anything about their delivery systems. Do they have missiles? I haven’t a clue. But do they know how to produce large nuclear explosions? You’d best believe it.”

Relative silence fell in the corner of the pub where the London and New York gating teams sat that evening: the only other sound was the occasional dinging and idiot music played by what the London team referred to as the “fruit machines”. Rhiow much wished the machines, ranged around the back wall of this room of the pub, would emit something as innocent as fruit, instead of the deafening shower and clatter of one-pound coins that came out of them every now and then when ehhif played with them. As evening drew on and The Mint started to fill up, the hope of a pile of those coins was starting to keep the machines busy with ehhif who drifted in, fed the machines money, and then shook and banged them when they didn’t give it back again, with dividends. It was, in its way, a charming illustration of some ehhif faith in the truism that what you gave the universe, it would give back: but they were plainly a little confused about the timing of such returns, or the percentages involved.

“But just the idea of them blowing up the Moon,” Siffha’h said. “It’s awful. It’ll be themselves, next …”

Rhiow, tucked down in the “meatloaf configuration”, twitched her tail in agreement. “It was always a favorite tactic of the Lone One’s,” she said. “Tricking life into undoing itself. And so doing, mocking the Powers, which tend to let life take care of itself, by and large.”

“They were lucky not to bring the whole thing down on top of them,” Fhrio said. “Imagine if they had hit one of those deep lunar ‘mantle faults’ and blown it apart. Just think of the tidal effects on the Earth … and then the fragment impacts later.”

“I’m sure sa’Rrahh would have been delighted,” Huff said. He was lying on his side, finishing one more wash after acting as courier for yet another round of snacks for the assembled group. “I wouldn’t say that was her main intent in this case, as Lone Power, but it would have been entirely acceptable. As it is, it looks like the poor ehhif back then have been given the quickest way for an unprepared or immature species to kill itself off … tried and tested in other parts of this Galaxy and others. And if that universe settles fully into place before we can dislodge it, we’ll find ourselves living on the Earth that’s a direct historical successor to that one. If ‘living’ is the word I’m looking for … because we’ll be in the middle of the nuclear winter.”

“Well, all we have to do now,” Siffha’h said, “is figure out what to do about this.”

“Oh, yes, that’s all,” Fhrio said.

Rhiow paid no more attention to this remark than the others seemed to be doing, instead glancing over toward the corner. Half-hidden by the arrangement of a couple of the fruit machines, Arhu’s newspaper was spread out on the floor, and he was bent over it, carefully puzzling out the words. Rhiow had always found it useful that understanding of the Speech let a wizard understand other written languages as well as all spoken ones. Normally she didn’t get too carried away by this advantage: but Arhu had been turning into a voracious reader of ehhif printed material of all kinds, everything from the big advertisements posted up here and there in Grand Central to scraps of newspaper and magazines that people dropped on the platforms, or the complete papers that Urruah fished out of the garbage bins at regular intervals. Urruah had claimed, with some pride, that Arhu was taking after him in his erudition. Rhiow agreed, but was clearer about the reasons for it. Arhu was nosy … nearly as nosy as Urruah, and with a taste for gossip and scandal nearly as profound. She couldn’t really complain: that insatiable curiosity was part of what made them good at being wizards. At the same time, sometimes the habit drove Rhiow nearly crazy. Urruah’s endlessly relayed tales about the sexual peculiarities and mishaps of ehhif made her wish very much that Urruah would read more of the kind of newspapers which did not feature headlines like HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.

What had become immediately plain was that, in 1875 at least, The Times of London was not that kind of newspaper. There was hardly anything to it. A front page which was almost entirely classified ads, both commercial and private: then interior pages which reported what seemed to the publishers to be important news—most of it having to do with ehhif from the pride-of-prides “Britain”, or other prides closely associated with it—and then long reports about what was going on in the place where the pride-rulers sat, the “Houses of Parliament”.

“This is mostly a lot of small stuff,” Arhu said, glancing up at the others in the momentary quiet. “Ehhif buying and selling dens to live in, and renting them out: or asking other ehhif to come and work with them: or buying and selling little things, or asking other ehhif to help them find things they’ve lost. Some other news about shows and plays they want ehhif to go to: and then news about the pride-ruler and what he does all day. That’s the interesting part: it’s not a Queen. It’s a King.”

Huff breathed out heavily. “Then the old Queen is dead in that eighteen seventy-five,” he said. “There’s a major change. In our world she lived on almost into the next century.”

“But the world’s different, that’s for sure,” Arhu said. “They have all kinds of things that the Whispering says weren’t there in our world’s eighteen seventy-five. A lot of machines like our time’s ehhif have: even computers, though I don’t think they’re as smart as the ones in our time. And they’ve definitely got space travel, though it’s as it is in our world: only the pride-rulers use it. I think it’s for weapons too, mostly.”

“Orbital?” Fhrio said.

“I don’t know,” Arhu said. “They don’t seem eager to talk about it in here. They talk a lot about war, though …” He ran one paw down the page. “See. Here’s the bombing that the Illingworth ehhif was talking about.

“ ‘The Continental powers have once again defied the King-Emperor’s edict by using mechanical flying bombs based at Calais and Dieppe to strike at civilian targets in the south of Sussex and Essex. The Royal Air Force, led by units of His Majesty’s 8th Flying Hussars, succeeded in destroying nearly all elements of the attack, but several flying bombs were knocked off course by the defending forces and exploded in suburban areas of Brighton and Hove, causing civilian casualties and destruction to a large area. The Ministry of War has announced that these attacks will be the cause of the most severe reprisal at a time of the Government’s choosing—’ ”

Arhu stopped, his tail twitching slowly. Fhrio was growling under his breath. “This island has not been bombed since the second of the great ehhif wars in this century,” Huff said. “That they should have been doing such things then … Does it say what they mean by ‘the Continental powers’?”

Arhu looked at the paper, reached out and carefully turned the middle leaf of it over with his paw. “I don’t see any specific pride names,” he said. “Maybe they expect everybody to know what they’re talking about.”

Huff sighed. “There’s no question that this is useful,” he said, “but it’s not nearly enough to base an intervention on. How I wish the Whispering could throw some light on this …”

Rhiow shook her head. “She seems unable to discuss what’s happening in an alternate universe,” she said. “Is it possibly outside the Whisperer’s brief? Would it be speculation, even for her?—which as we know is something she won’t indulge in. Or is this simply something we’re supposed to have to find out for ourselves … ?”

“Whichever,” Urruah said, stretching, “the result is the same. But I wouldn’t take too long about it. That other universe has ‘become real’ … and now it and ours are going to be starting to fight it out for primacy between them, though we can’t feel the effects at the moment.”

“We will soon enough,” Fhrio growled. “The gates will be the first symptom. When something starts going wrong with them—”

“You mean, besides what’s going wrong already,” Arhu said.

Fhrio sat up, glaring at Arhu, and lifted one paw. Urruah looked over at Fhrio.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “Anybody gets to shred his ears for tactlessness, it’s me. Arhu, don’t you think your tone was a little snide?”

“Sorry,” Arhu said, not sounding very much so. Rhiow sighed.

Arhu had gone back to reading the back page of his paper. Rhiow watched this process with amusement that she hoped was well concealed. Besides being useful, the paper had given him an excuse not to try to speak or even to look at Siffha’h for the whole early evening so far. “Hey, listen to this,” he said, and began reading aloud with some difficulty: not so much because of the words themselves, as because of how odd some of them seemed in context. “If its what Mr… Illingworth was talking about.”

“What?” Rhiow said. Even Siffha’h sat up at that.

“I think it is, anyway.

“ ‘Maskelyne and Cook—Dark Seance. The latest novelty and most startling performance ever presented to the public … the seance includes the floating of Luminous Instruments, distribution of flowers with dew, appearance of materialized spirit forms, spirit hands, spirit arms, strange and apparently unearthly voices, music extraordinary, the inexplicable Coat Feat, all accomplished by Messrs. Maskelyne and Cook while bound hand and foot, the ropes secured with knots executed by the most perfect adepts in the art of rope-tying, elected by the audience.’ ”

He paused and looked up. “But that doesn’t sound like such a big deal.”

“It does if you’re an ehhif and not a wizard,” Urruah said. “We have ehhif like that at home: they do shows where they pretend to be wizards. Without the ethical element, anyway. It’s ‘magic’ rather than wizardry: mostly they pretend to do things that would normally kill them, and make things disappear.”

Fhrio muttered something under his breath. Rhiow, having occasionally shared what she suspected was Fhrio’s sentiment, had to put her whiskers forward just a little. “ ‘In addition to the great sensation the Dark Seance and exposes of so-called spiritualism,’ ” Arhu said, “ ‘the following leading features amuse the audience at the present program: Mr… Maskelyne’s extraordinary comical illusions, extraordinary Chinese plate-spinning, lady floating in air, the animated walking-stick, the Tell Tale Hat, etc. The original and inexplicable Corded Box Feat is performed at every representation. Every afternoon at three, every evening at eight.’ ”

Arhu looked up again. “ ‘Spiritualism?’ ”

Rhiow shook her head and started to tilt her head sideways to listen to what the Whisperer might have to say: but Siffha’h said suddenly, “It’s where ehhif used to think that their dead still stayed around to speak to them after they were gone. The live ehhif would try to get advice from their dead ones, and ask them what was going to happen in the world … things like that.”

“But it doesn’t work that way for ehhif, surely,” Auhlae said, sounding dubious. “When they go, they’re gone, aren’t they?”

A pang went through Rhiow. She stared at the floor for a moment while trying to manage it, aware of Urruah looking at her but not saying anything, just being there.

“And no matter what happens to them, I wouldn’t think the advice of the dead would do the living much good in any case,” Auhlae said. “Surely that must have occurred to even ehhif. Their priorities would be very much different …”

“Nonetheless, some of them wouldn’t care,” Rhiow said. “Some of them miss each other very much, and they don’t have the kind of knowledge we have, it would seem, about what happens to them afterwards. All they have are a lot of different stories that mostly disagree with one another.” She swallowed. “It makes them feel very afraid, and very alone …”

Auhlae was looking at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My apologies, Rhiow. I hadn’t realized …”

“It’s all right,” Rhiow said, though how long this statement would stay true, she wasn’t sure: she tried to keep a grip on herself. “She’s somewhere safe, my ehhif: though I haven’t any idea of what she does there, how she is or what she knows … probably any more than she would normally have had of what awaited me after any given life. Maybe it’s a privacy thing that the Powers preserve between species. Our paths cross, we live together, we part … is it really our business where ehhif go? Or theirs, what happens to us?”

Auhlae said nothing, merely looked at Rhiow with eyes thoughtful and a little sad. Rhiow sat still for a moment and did her best to master herself, while the back of her mind shouted Yes it is, yes! She held very still and concentrated on her breathing, and on not looking like an idiot in front of the others.

“Well,” Huff said after a moment, “we still have a fair number of problems to deal with.”

“You’re not kidding,” Urruah said. “I’m still trying to work out what in the worlds ‘The Tell Tale Hat’ might be.”

“Besides that,” said Huff. “Mr. Illingworth, who has been to see Maskelyne and Cook, is one of them. You said you didn’t find any trace of him in that universe.”

“No,” Urruah said, “and I’m at a loss to know why. The most likely possibility that occurs to me is that that wasn’t the universe we were heading for, but a close congener.”

“An alternate alternate universe?” Siffha’h said.

“You might as well call it that,” Urruah said. “When you start messing with timelines, altering them, whole sheaves of new universes are created from each branching point—some of them very likely, some of them less likely, some of them hardly there at all. The more likely they are, the more likely you are to come across them. Think of them as ‘waves’ in a wave tank which is chiefly populated by the two universes which are trying to achieve equilibrium. You get troughs and crests of probability and possibility as the two universes attempt to absorb one another’s energy—and matter, though that’s a more problematic process. The sheaves of alternates don’t persist for long. As one universe or the other starts winning the argument, the other’s ‘alternates’ vanish. Then, last of all, the universe that spawned them vanishes too: dissolves into the other one, all its energy absorbed. I think Illingworth came from the sheaf of ‘possibles’ surrounding the main one.”

“So you’re going to have to alter your timeslide’s settings to find the ‘core universe’, the one which engendered all these others,” Fhrio said.

“Yes,” Urruah said, “and as yet, I don’t know how they’re going to have to be altered, or how to construct a spell to tell it how to manage the alteration. Also, I don’t understand why the ‘settings’ I saved from Illingworth’s gating didn’t lead us straight back to his home universe. Add that to your list of problems …”

“You seem to know more about timeslide theory than the rest of us,” Huff said to Urruah. “Do you have any sense of how much time we might have to work in, at this end of things, before that other reality starts to supersede ours?”

“Maybe as long as a month … but I wouldn’t care to bet on it,” Urruah said. “My guess would be more like days … at least, I think it’d be safest to play it that way.”

“But, but it’s just dumb!’ Siffha’h burst out. “The Powers wouldn’t just let an entire reality be wiped out! They’d send some kind of help!”

“They did,” Rhiow said. “They sent us.”

Siffha’h opened her mouth and shut it again. “But if we can’t do anything about it, They’ll help: They have to—”

“Do they?” Huff said. “Where does it say that in the Whispering? Listen hard.”

She did … and her mouth dropped open one more time.

“You need to understand it,” Rhiow said. “We are all the help there is. The seven of us are, apparently, the best answer which the Powers that Be can offer up to this particular problem. If we fail, we fail, and our timeline fails with us. It would be nice to assume that if something goes wrong, one of the Powers will drop down out of the depths of reality to pull us up out of trouble by the tail. But such things don’t normally happen: the Powers have too little power to waste. There is nothing particularly special about our timeline, except to us, because we live in it: it has no particular primacy among the millions or billions of others. For all we know, other timelines have been wiped out because of such attacks, and because their native wizards couldn’t act correctly to save them. Myself, I wouldn’t much care to ask the Whisperer about that at the moment: the answer might depress me. Let’s just assume we must do the job ourselves, and get it right. Huff … ?”

He thumped his tail once or twice on the floor in disturbed agreement. “There’s nothing I can add to that.”

For a few moments everyone looked in every possible direction but at each other, unnerved. Then Arhu sat upright and stared toward the front room of the pub. “Oh, no, here he comes—”

Rhiow looked around to see what he was talking about: but no one but their own two groups was anywhere near them. “What?” she said.

“I see him a few minutes ago,” Arhu said, sounding slightly put out. “I was hoping he might change his mind, or the seeing might turn out to be inaccurate … but no such luck. Get sidled—”

They all did but Huff, who looked curiously at Arhu, then turned his head, distracted. A young ehhif was heading over toward the fruit machines. He was one of a type which seemed common in that part of the City, a suit-and-tie sort with a loud voice and his tie thrown over his shoulder. As he came, he was suddenly distracted by the presence on the floor of a sheet of paper … The Times. He bent down to pick it up.

“Oh, for Iau’s sake,” Arhu growled, and put one invisible paw down on the paper. Rhiow watched with interest as the ehhif failed to get the paper to come up off the floor: tried to pick it up again, and failed, and failed again. He got really frustrated about it, trying to get even just a fingernail under one of the newspaper’s corners and peel it up, and failed at that as well, managing only to break a couple of nails. The ehhif straightened up again and walked off swearing softly to himself.

“Nice one,” Auhlae said. “How’d you do that?”

“Made it heavy for a moment, that’s all,” Arhu said. “It was part of a tree once, after all. I just suggested that it was actually the whole tree.” He put his whiskers forward. “Paper fantasizes pretty well.”

“You’d better make it invisible as well,” Huff said mildly: “he’ll be back here with my ehhif in a moment. I know what that kind gets like when they’re confused, or balked.”

Arhu shrugged his tail. A moment later, when Huff’s tall dark-haired ehhif came back, there was no paper there, or seemed to be none, and only Huff, lying at his ease and finishing his wash. Huff’s ehhif took one look at the floor, and saw nothing there but his cat lying there and looking at him with big innocent green eyes. Huff blinked, then threw his rear right leg over his shoulder and began to wash. His ehhif raised his eyebrows, and headed back to the bar.

Huff finished the second bit of washing, which had been purely for effect, and glanced over at Arhu. “Does that happen to you often?” Huff said.

“You mean, seeing? Once a day or so … sometimes more. I wish it was always about important things,” Arhu said, looking rather annoyed, “but usually it’s not. Or I can’t tell if they’re important, anyway, till they happen. The trouble is, they all feel important … until it turns out they’re not.”

“How very appropriate,” Siffha’h murmured, and looked away.

Arhu gave her a look that had precious little lovesickness about it: it smelled more of claws in someone’s ears. He opened his mouth, probably to emit something unforgivable, and Rhiow, concerned, opened her mouth to interrupt him: but at the same moment, Huff said, “Arhu, have you thought of going to see the Ravens?”

“Who?”

The Ravens over at the Tower. They have a problem rather similar to yours.”

“Are they wizards?” Rhiow said, curious.

“No,” Huff said, “but they have abilities of their own which are related to wizardry, though I’d be lying if I said I understood the details. They are visionaries of a kind … though I wouldn’t know if they describe the talent to themselves in precisely those terms. In any case, the few times I’ve talked to them, they’ve sounded very like Arhu. Rather confused about their tenses.” He put his whiskers forward to show he didn’t mean the remark to be insulting. “They might be of use to you … or to us, possibly, with this problem.”

Arhu looked thoughtful. “OK,” he said. “It can’t hurt.”

“No, I would think not. Now, Urruah will be working on resetting his timeslide, recalibrating it—”

“It’ll take me a day or so,” Urruah said. “I want to explore as many of the possibilities as I can, as many of the universes in the ‘sheaf’, when we do our next run.”

“And meanwhile there are a couple of other things we’re going to need to find out,” Rhiow said. “First, if there’s any way to manage it at all, we must find the original contaminating event or events. If it happened using your gates, the logs may give us some hints … if we can ever get them to yield that data, which Urruah hasn’t yet been able to do. If we can’t find evidence from the gates, then we’re going to have to go back to that alternate time again, much as I dislike the prospect, and search for information there. The other thing we must discover is the nature of this attack on the ehhif-Queen, Victoria—” Rhiow went out of her way to try to get her pronunciation as close to the ehhif word as she could—“and also discover whether this great change in the past-world we saw would have happened anyway, or has something specific to do with her death or life.”

“It very well could,” Auhlae said. “She was a tremendous power in her time, though she had very little direct power—compared to some of the pride-leaders who went before her, anyway. Certainly they would have gone to war had she been assassinated, and if they were able to prove that some other pride they knew of had been involved. There was fierce rivalry between them for a long time: the shadows of it remain, though most of the ehhif powers in Europe are supposed to be working together now …”

“Huff,” Rhiow said, “how much do you know about ehhif history of that time? The eighteen seventies, say?”

“Very little,” he said. “It’s hardly my speciality: like most of us, if I need to know something I go to the Whispering.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “But you know,” he said, “there are People for whom it is a speciality. And they don’t live far from here. In fact, there’s one in particular who’s famous for it. He used to live at Whitehall, but now he’s out in the suburbs. You should go to see him. I’ll show you the coordinates, and you can lay them into one of the other gates.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Rhiow said. “Would he be available today, do you think?”

“More than likely. Probably your best bet is simply to go out there and meet with him.”

“All right. What’s his name?”

“Humphrey.”

Rhiow blinked. “That’s not a Person’s name …”

“It is now,” Huff said, amused. “Wait till you meet him.”

“Meanwhile, I think the rest of us will be minding the other gates,” Fhrio said, “and watching to see if they start betraying any sign of instability. If they start acting up, we’ll know we have less time to deal with our troubles than we thought.”

Rhiow nodded. “And as for the rest of it,” she said, “we’ll meet again when it’s dark, and see who’s best sharpened their claws on the problem before us.”

The others agreed, then got up and shook themselves, preparatory to heading off in their various directions.

“Now look at this,” Arhu said, crouched down again, and oblivious. “ ‘Princess Christiana of Schleswig-Holstein visited His Majesty and remained to lunch—’ ”

Urruah looked up. “Does it say what they had?” he said, coming to gaze at the paper over Arhu’s shoulder.

Rhiow glanced over at Huff and wandered over to him. “You look tired,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m well enough,” he said. “Rhiow, we’re all too old for this! Except for them—” and he indicated Arhu, and off on the other side of the room, already heading for the back door, Siffha’h. “But no matter … we’ll cope.” He sighed, looked at her, as Auhlae came wandering over and laid her tail gently over his back. “It’s just hard, sometimes, discovering that after a long period of steady and not terribly dangerous work, your reward for getting it right is that you get to save the universe …” His look was dry.

“It’s always dangerous to demonstrate talent,” Auhlae said. “Least of all to Them. But that’s our job: we accepted it when it was offered us .… and what can we do now?”

“Do it the best we can,” Rhiow said. “There’s nothing else.” She rubbed cheeks with Huff, when he offered, and did the same, a little more tentatively, with Auhlae. The two of them headed off toward the front of the pub: and Rhiow made her way out toward the back, and the cat-door, thinking thoughts of quiet desperation … but determined not to give in to them.

Half an hour or so later, Rhiow was padding down a street in one of the northern suburbs of London, looking for a specific house in one small street. She had a description of the house, and a name for a Person: or rather, that peculiar ehhif nickname which Huff had given her. According to the Knowledge, the nickname (bizarrely) came from an ehhif television show, and was a reference to an astute but extremely twisty-minded politician. Rhiow was uncertain whether any Person, no matter how jovial, would really want to be called by such a name.

She found the house, at last. It was actually bumped sideways into another house, in a configuration which the ehhif here called “semidetached.” There was a narrow wall of decorative concrete blocks about four feet high separating the two houses’ front yards and driveways. Rhiow jumped up onto this and made her way back to where it met another wall, taller, one which divided the houses’ two back gardens from one another. This was actually less a wall than a series of screens of interwoven wood, fastened end to end. Rhiow jumped up onto the nearest of them and paced along it and the subsequent screens carefully, looking down on the left-hand side, as she had been instructed.

The right-hand garden was less a garden than a tangle of weeds and rosebushes run amuck. The left-hand one, though, had a lawn with stepping-stones in it, and carefully trimmed shrubs, and small trees making a shady place down at the far end. There was a birdbath standing in the shade, but no bird was fool enough to use it: for lying near the birdbath, upside down in the sun, was a black-and-white Person with long fluffy fur.

Rhiow paused there for a moment looking at him as he dozed, wondering how to proceed. From a tree nearby, a small bird appeared, perched on a nearby branch, and began yelling, “Cat! Cat! Cat!’ at Rhiow.

She rolled her eyes. One of the great annoyances associated with becoming a wizard was, oddly, identical with one of its great joys: learning enough of the Speech to readily understand the creatures around her. It was very hard to eat, with a clean conscience, anything you could talk to and get an intelligible answer back. “In your case, though,” she said to the small bird, “I’m willing to make an exception …”

Except that she wasn’t, really. Rhiow sighed and turned her attention away from the bird, to find that the black-and-white Person’s eyes had opened, at least partially, and he was looking at her, upside down.

“Hunt’s luck to you!’ she said. “I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”

He looked at her curiously, and rolled over so that he was right side up again. “You’re a long way from home, by your accent,” he said. “Come on down, make yourself comfortable.”

Rhiow jumped down form the wall and walked over to the respectable-looking Person, breathed breaths with him, and then said, “Please forgive me: I don’t know quite what to call you …”

“Which means you know the nickname,” he said, and put his whiskers forward. “Go ahead and use it: everyone else does, at this point, and there’s no real point in me trying to avoid it.”

“Hhuhm’hri, then. I’m Rhiow.”

“Hunt’s luck to you, Rhiow, and welcome to London. What brings you all this way?”

She sat down and explained, trying to keep the explanation brief and non-technical. But Hhuhm’hri was nodding a long time before she finished, and Rhiow realized that this was one of the more acute People she had met in a while, with a quick and deep grasp of issues for all his slightly ditzy, wide-eyed looks.

“Well, that’s certainly a different sort of problem,” Hhuhm’hri said. “At first I’d thought perhaps you were one of the People who’s just been added to the standing committee on rat control.”

Rhiow restrained herself from laughing. “No, the problem’s a little different from that …”

“Certainly a little more interesting. I must say I wouldn’t want our timeline to be wiped out, either, so I’m at your disposal. Though I must admit that the temptation to alter just one piece here or there, with an eye to improving things, must be very strong …”

“By and large it doesn’t work,” Rhiow said. “There are conservation laws for history as well as for energy. Remove one pivotal event without due consideration, and another is likely to slip in to take its place—often one that’s worse than the one you were trying to prevent.”

“Conservation of history …” Hhuhm’hri mused for a moment. “That’s the only odd thing about this, to me: if such a principle exists, why isn’t it protecting you in this case?”

“Because of the nature of the Power which has intervened to cause the change,” Rhiow said. “Mostly time heals itself over without a scar if the change is small, or made by a mortal. But when the Powers that Be become directly involved … and in this case, one of the oldest and greatest of them—the fabric of time is entirely too amenable to Their will. It’s unavoidable: They built time, after all …”

Hhuhm’hri blinked. “Yes,” he said. And then he added, “You’ll forgive me a second’s skepticism, I hope. One doesn’t often expect to run into one of Them, or Their direct deeds, in the normal course of the business day.”

“Of course,” Rhiow said, at the same time thinking that, from the wizard’s point of view, that was all anyone ever ran into: but this was not the moment for abstract philosophy.

“Sa’Rrahh, eh,” Hhuhm’hri said after a moment. “So the bad-tempered old queen’s at it again. Well, I’ll help you any way I can: we’ll play the Old Tom to her Great Serpent, and put a knife or two into her coils before we’re done. I may not be walking the corridors of power any more, but all my contacts are still live … in fact, I have rather more of them since I came out to the green leafy confines of suburbia.”

Rhiow cocked her head. “I’d heard something about your retirement,” she said, “from the Knowledge: but even the ehhif in New York noticed it. A lot of talk about you being thrown out of Downing Street—and then maybe murdered—”

Hhuhm’hri put his whiskers right forward and sprawled out, blinking at Rhiow like a politician after a three-mouse lunch followed by unlimited cream: and he smiled like someone who could say a lot more on the subject than he was willing to. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said. “At least, as far as political scandals go …”

Though a lot of ehhif had thought it was. The new Prime Minister’s wife, a suspected ailurophobe, had dropped a few remarks on moving into Number Ten which indicated that she thought cats were, of all things, “unsanitary”. The remarks had provoked so massive an outbreak of ehhif public concern for “Humphrey” that an official statement from the government had been required to put matters right—making it plain that Humphrey’s normal “beat” was the Cabinet Office and Number Eleven, and his position was not threatened. Shortly after that had come the photo opportunity. Rhiow had been looking over Iaehh’s shoulder at the television one night and had chanced to catch some of those images: the lady in question looking conciliatory, but also rather as if she very much wished she was elsewhere, or holding something besides a cat: while “Humphrey” gazed out at the cameras, as big-eyed in the storm of strobe-flashes as a kitten seeing a ball of yarn for the first time. “Glad it wasn’t me,” Rhiow said. “I wouldn’t have known what to do in a situation like that.”

“You hold still and pray you won’t walk into anything when she finally puts you down,” Hhuhm’hri said, amused. “Sweet Queen above us, ten minutes straight of flash photography … ! I was half-blind at the end of it. But other than that, I did what I had to. I shed on her.” He put his whiskers forward in a good-natured way. “What else could I do? What kind of PR advice was she getting, to take a photo call with a black and white cat in a black suit? Did they expect me to stop shedding in one color? She should have worn a print, or tweed … Well, she was only new to the job. She’s learned better since. While I stayed there, I steered clear of the children, by and large, which is mostly what she was worried about. No point in tormenting the poor woman. Then my kidneys began to kick up, and I thought, why should I hang about and distract these poor ehhif? They’ve got enough problems, and my replacement’s trained. So I took early retirement—and there was a press scandal about that too, unavoidable I suppose—but I was happy enough to let “Harold” move in at Number Ten, and go off to get the kidneys sorted out and settle into domestic life. I still have more than enough to do.”

“Not just the rats, in other words.”

“Oh, dear me, no. As I said, now that I’m quartered out here, People who might otherwise attract notice if they came to see me in Downing Street don’t feel shy about it any more. No more cameramen hanging about all hours of the day and night …” He yawned. “Sorry, I was up late this morning. Tell me what kind of help you need from me, specifically.”

“Advice on personalities,” Rhiow said. “I need to know what People can best help us in that time, in the eighteen seventies … ideally, in the target year itself, where their intervention will do most good. We think it’s eighteen seventy-five. The possible error, my colleague thinks, is a couple of years on either side.”

“Eighteen seventy-five,” Hhuhm’hri said. “Or between eighteen seventy-three and eighteen seventy-six. Not a quiet time …”

He mostly-closed his eyes, thinking, and for a few minutes he lay there in the warm dappled shade and said nothing. Rhiow waited, while above a growing chorus of small birds scolded at them, and her mouth began to water slightly at the thought of foreign food, whether she could talk to it or not.

“Well,” Hhuhm’hri said suddenly, as Rhiow was beginning to concentrate on one small bird in particular, a greenish-yellow creature with banded dark wings and a bright blue cap which was hanging temptingly close on a branch of a dwarf willow. There are certainly a fair number of resources: though the Old Cats’ Network was really only getting started, then. One in particular should be of best use to you, though. ‘Wilberforce’ told me about something that had come down to him from ‘George’, or maybe it was ‘Tiddles’, the one who owned Nelson … something concerning the British Museum’s cat at that point. ‘Black Jack’, the ehhif called him. An outstanding character: he worked at the Museum for something like twenty years, and what he didn’t know about the place, or about things going on in the Capital in general, wasn’t worth knowing. He passed everything he knew down to his replacement, ‘young Jack’—and it’s through that youngster that a lot of information about that time comes down to us. Either one of them would be the one you’d want to talk to: but I can give you a fair amount of the information which has come down from them, so that you’ll start to get a sense of what questions you need to ask. How much background do you need?”

“All you can give me.”

“Is your memory that good?” Hhuhm’hri said, looking thoughtful.

“It can be when it has to be,” Rhiow said. “I can emplace everything you say to me in the Whispering, as I hear it. I won’t be much good for conversation while you’re at it, but it’ll be accessible to me and the rest of my team afterwards, and any other wizards who need the information.”

“That’s very convenient.”

“It is,” Rhiow said, though privately she thought that what would not be convenient was the headache she would have afterwards. “If you’ll give me a moment to set up the spell, we can get started.”

It was nearly five hours later that she made her way out of Hhuhm’hri’s back garden: the sun was going down, and even the dimming sunset light made Rhiow’s eyes hurt. Her whole head was clanging inside as if someone was banging a cat-food can with a spoon. And I’m ravenous, too, she thought, heading back to the vacant lot into which she had originally gated. Parts or no parts, if I go straight home after this, I’m eating whatever Iaehh gives me.

It had been worth it, though. Her brains felt so crammed full of ehhif political and non-political history of the 1870s that she could barely think: and after a sleep, she would be able to access it through the Knowledge, as if taking counsel with the Whisperer, and sort it for the specific threads and personalities they needed. It helped, too, that Hhuhm’hri’s point of view was such a lucid one, carefully kept clear of uninformed opinion or personal agendas. It had apparently been an article of honor for the long line of Downing Street cats to make sure that the information they passed down the line was reliable and as free from bias as it could be, while still having an essentially feline point of view. They counted themselves as chroniclers, both of public information and of the words spoken in silence behind the closed doors of power, in Downing Street and elsewhere: and they suffered the amused way that ehhif treated them, put up with the cute names and the often condescending attention, for the sake of making sure someone knew the truth about what was going on, and preserved it. Not that there hadn’t been affection involved, as well: Hhuhm’hri had been quite close to the Prime Minister before the present one, and Churchill’s affection for the People he lived with had been famous—Rhiow could not get rid of the image of the great ehhif sitting up in bed with a brandy and a cigar, dictating his memoirs and pausing occasionally to growl, “Isn’t that right, Cat Darling?” to the redoubtable orange-striped “Cat’, veteran of the Blitz, who had worked so hard to keep his ehhif’s emotions stable through that terrible time.

They were an unusual group, the Downing Street cats: genuine civil servants, and talented ones. Over the many, many years they had been in residence, they had learned to understand clearly ehhif speech of various kinds—the first “cabinet’ cats, dating back to the pride-ruler Henry VI, had been ehhif-bilingual in English and French—and they were assiduous about training their replacements to make sure the talent wasn’t lost in this most special of the branches of the Civil Service. Not quite wizards, Rhiow thought: though there may be wizardly blood in their line somewhere, or occasional infusions of it from outside -for not all the Downing Street group were related. They were a rrai’theh, a working pride without blood affinities, part of the much larger pride which referred to itself as “the Old Cats’ Network”. Rhiow wondered if, as in other non-wizardly cats, another talent to “spill over” from wizardly stock had been the one for passing through closed doors unnoticed. She suspected it had: in their line of work, such an ability would have been invaluable.

She made her way down to the Tower Hill Underground station with her head still buzzing with Hhuhm’hri’s briefing. It was unnerving, the way thinking about ehhif affairs for four or five hours straight could make you start looking at the world the way they did. Rhiow wasn’t sure she liked it. Oh well … an occupational hazard. But the one word which seemed to have come up most frequently in Hhuhm’hri’s reminiscences was “war”. Try as she might, Rhiow could not understand why ehhif could kill each other in such large numbers for what seemed to her completely useless purposes. Fighting for land to live on, for a territory that would provide food to eat, that she could understand. All People who ran in prides, from the microfelids to the great cats of this world, did the same. But they usually didn’t kill each other: a fight that resulted in the other pride running away was more than sufficient. If they tried to come back, you just drove them away again.

Ehhif, though, seemed not to find this kind of fighting sufficient. What troubled Rhiow most severely was tales of ehhif killing one another in large numbers for the sake of land that was nearly worthless—going to war simply because they had said that a given piece of land was theirs, and some other ehhif had disputed the claim. Or when they went to war for the sake of prestige or injured pride: that was strangest to her of all. And it seemed to her, from what Hhuhm’hri had told her, that the pride-of-prides, which its ehhif called Britain, had gone to war for all these reasons, and for numerous other ones, over the past couple of centuries. Granted, they had done so genuinely to preserve their own people from being killed as well: the second of the great conflicts of this century had been one of that kind, and the British had defended themselves with courage and cleverness at least equal to their enemies’. Nevertheless, Rhiow was beginning to think she knew who most likely would have blown up atomic weapons on the Moon in 1875, if they’d had access to them.

And how did they get them? And how can we undo it?

It was going to take time to work that out. At least they had a little time to work with … but not much.

She made her way among the ehhif at the Underground ticket machines and past them, under the gates and down to the platform where the malfunctioning gate and its power source were being held. Hhuhm’hri had told Rhiow that thousands of ehhif had hidden in tunnels and basements near here during the bombings of London in that second great war. That had resolved, for Rhiow, the question of something she had been feeling since she came down here first—a faint buzzing in the walls, as if at the edge of hearing: the ghost-memory in the tunnels and the stones of ehhif not just passing through here, but staying, and sleeping near here in the faintly electric-lit darkness. Their troubled and frightened dreams still saturated the bricks and mortar and tile of the tunnels—and “behind” them, if you were sensitive to such things and you listened very hard, you could just catch the faintest sound of the shudder and rumble of falling bombs. That un-sound, intruding at the very edge of a sensitive’s consciousness, could easily get lost in or confused with the rumble of present-day trains through the stone.

At least I know what it is now, Rhiow thought, making her way to the platform, and jumping up. A relief. I thought I was going a little strange…

Only Urruah and Arhu were there just now. “Luck,” Rhiow said, going over to breathe breaths with Urruah, who was sitting and looking at his timeslide-spell, apparently taking a break after having doing an afternoon’s worth of troubleshooting. The timeslide was presently lying quiescent on the platform floor, in a tangle of barely-seen lines. “How’s it going?”

“Slow,” he said. “I wanted to have another look at the disconnected gate’s logs before I started changing my own settings around.”

“Find anything useful?” Rhiow said, glancing over at Arhu. He was tucked down in “meatloaf” configuration with his eyes half-closed, unmoving.

“No,” Urruah said, following her glance and looking thoughtful. “But, Rhi, I think the logs are being tampered with.”

She sat down, surprised. “By whom?”

“Or what,” Urruah said. “I can’t say. Normally when a gate’s offline, its logs are ‘frozen’ in the state they were in when the gate was taken off. I hooked the gate up again briefly to the catenary to have a look at the way the source has been feeding it power—and found that some of the logs weren’t the way I remembered them. In particular, the logs pertaining to Mr. Illingworth’s access were in a different state than they were when I left them. Specifically, temporal coordinates were not the same.”

Rhiow looked around her and then said privately, Fhrio?

I don’t think so. For one of us to tamper with a gate’s logs would normally leave “marks” that an expert can see … alterations in the relationships between the hyperstrings of the gate. Now, I’m an expert … and I can’t find any “marks”.

The Lone Power … Rhiow thought.

Urruah hissed softly. Rhi, I know It’s been meddling in the larger sense. The contamination of the 1875-or-thereabouts timeline is certainly Its doing. But by and large It’s not going to do something like this. It’s still one of the Powers that Be, and has Their tendency not to waste effort Itself when It can get someone closer to the problem to do the dirty work.

She had to agree with him there. “So what are you going to do?”

He shrugged his tail. “Try the altered coordinates,” he said. “Or at least lay them into my timeslide and see what happens when we try to access them.”

“It could very well be a trap of some kind …” Rhiow said.

“Yes, but we don’t have to put our foot right into it,” Urruah said. “We can look before we jump. A habit of mine.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “All right. Anything else?”

“Well, one other possibility,” Urruah said. “I think our problem in finding Mr. Illingworth’s home universe, or not finding it, may have to do with the timeslide still being powered out of the malfunctioning gate’s power source. We noted from what few logs were left from the “microtransits” earlier that the far end of the gate-timeslide was lashing around in backtime, like the end of some ehhif’s garden hose when they let it go with the water running at full pressure. The end whiplashes around, coming down first here, then there … never the same place twice. I think the fault for that could possibly lie in the power source rather than the gate.”

Rhiow blinked at that. “I can’t see how. The power source isn’t supposed to have any coordinate information in it, or anything like that …”

“I’m not sure how either,” Urruah said, “but what else am I supposed to think at this point? The gate itself wasn’t connected to the power source, but we still had a failure in my timeslide, although it was a small one. Big enough, though, in terms of what we were trying to do.” He sighed. “I think the next time we try this, we should keep the timeslide off the gate’s power source and power it ourselves.”

“That’s going to be hard on you,” Rhiow said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t see that we have the option,” Urruah said.

“Excuse me,” someone said pointedly from behind them.

They both looked over their shoulders. Siffha’h was sitting there behind them.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” she said. “But you do have a power source. What about me?”

Urruah blinked. “Uh. I hadn’t—”

“—thought about it? Or maybe you just don’t trust me, because I’m young yet.” Her tone was very annoyed.

“Siffha’h,” Rhiow said, “give us the benefit of the doubt, please. We’re very aware that our being here at all imposes on your team somewhat. We’re unwilling to impose further when there’s any way that—”

“Look,” Siffha’h said, “our whole reality is going to be rubbed out if we can’t stop what’s happening, and you’re telling me you don’t want to impose? Come on.”

Rhiow glanced at Urruah, rueful but still somewhat amused. “Well,” she said, “you’ve got a point there. Ruah?”

He looked at her with his tail twitching slowly. “You are unquestionably hot stuff,” he said, “and any time you want to power a timeslide of mine, you’re welcome.”

“You build it,” Siffha’h said, “and I’ll see that it takes you where you want to go. When’ll you be ready?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, I think.”

“Good. I’ll be here.”

She strolled off, tail in the air. Rhiow glanced over at Urruah. She really does remind me of Arhu sometimes.

Yeah, Urruah said. In the tact department as well.

Rhiow put her whiskers forward. You know how it is when you’re young, she said. Life seems short, and all the other lives a long way away … You want to be doing things.

So do I, Urruah said. Preferably things that’ll solve this problem. He looked rather glumly at the spell diagram for the timeslide.

“All right,” Rhiow said. “Anything else that needs to be handled?”

“He said he wanted you to see what he saw,” Urruah said, glancing over at Arhu, who was still crouched down in meditative mode. “I’m going to look at it later: right now this is more of a priority.”

“Right …”

Rhiow went softly over to Arhu: then, as he didn’t react, she sat down by him and began to wash—not only because she didn’t want to interrupt him in whatever he was doing, but because she felt she badly needed it. She was tired, and needed to do something to keep herself from falling asleep. Rhiow had just finished her face and was starting on one ear when she felt something thumping against her tail. It was Arhu’s tail: he had come out of his study and had rolled over on his side to look up at her.

“You wash more than anybody I know,” he said. “Are you nervous or something?”

She looked at him, then laughed. “Nervous? I’m terrified. If you had a flea’s brain’s worth of sense, you would be too.”

“I’m scared enough for all of us,” he said. “Especially after what I saw today.”

“You went to see the ravens,” Rhiow said. “How was it?”

“Weird.” He put his ears back. “I’m not sure I understood most of it … but I put it all in the Whispering, the way you showed me.”

“Good,” Rhiow said. “I’ll have a listen, then.” She crouched down, tucking her paws under her in the position which Arhu had been using: comfortable enough to let go of the world around and concentrate on the inner one, not so comfortable that she would fall asleep. Well, she said silently to the Whisperer, what has he got for me?

This…

Normally the voice you heard whispering was Hers, the familiar, steady, quiet persona, ageless, deathless and serene. But material the source of which was a mortal being would come to you strongly flavored with the taste of its originator’s mind. Knowing Arhu as well as Rhiow did, this was a taste with which she was also familiar. But now, as the point of view changed to early afternoon on the riverbank, suddenly Rhiow found herself immersed in the full-strength version of it—a quick, excitable, excited turn of mind, by turns cheerful and annoyed at a moment’s notice, interested in everything and with a taste for mischief … though also with a very serious side that would come out without warning. Rhiow actually had to gasp for a moment to catch her breath as she bounded, with Arhu, down the walkway that led to the main gateway to the Tower: past the ehhif who were lined up at the gate, letting the security guards there check their bags and parcels: through the gateway, looking up at the old, old stones of the arch, and through into a cobbled “street” which Arhu’s memory identified as “Water Lane”.

This little street ran parallel to the river inside the main outer wall. To the left, as Arhu went, was another wall studded down its length with several broad circular towers: this ran on for about an eighth of a mile, to where the outer wall came to a corner and bent leftwards. The stones in the left-hand wall were mostly rounded, as if they had come out of a river, but some had been cut down roughly into squarish shape, and they looked and smelled ancient. From them, as Rhiow had from the bricks and stones of the Underground, Arhu caught a faint sense of much contact with ehhif, but the flavor was strange, a compendium of old, faded triumph, and equally old abject fear. Arhu paused for a moment, feeling it on his fur, feeling it especially strongly from the right side where he passed a latticework gateway of metal that let out onto an archway leading down to the river. Traitor’s Gate, the Whispering said in his mind: and just briefly, as he did then, Rhiow saw, in a flicker, the way Arhu saw with the Eye.

A flicker, there and gone. Ehhif standing up, ehhif lying down and being brought up to the gate in boats, ehhif dying and in fear of dying coming in, ehhif dead going out: queen-ehhif and tom-ehhif, proud, dejected, defiant, afraid, bitter, reluctant, confident, desperate: plots and schemes, offended innocence, furious determination, all rolled together in a moment of vision, all spread out over long years of history, circumstance, and confusion; the conflicting needs and desires, the long-planned machinations of the powerful and the requirements of the moment, terror-horror-resignation-life-death-brightness-sickness-cold-blood-release-darkness—

—gone. The Eye closed, and Arhu stood and shook his head, trying to clear it: and an ehhif, not seeing him since he was sidled, tripped over Arhu, caught himself, and went on, looking behind him to try to see the cobblestone he thought he had stumbled on.

“Ow ow ow ow,” Arhu spat, and took himself over to the left-hand wall to recover himself a little. From inside the left-hand wall came a harsh cawing, a little like ehhif laughter, as if someone thought it was funny.

While he stood there and panted, Rhiow shivered all over at the thought of the burden Arhu was bearing. Better him than me, she said, somewhat ungraciously, to the Whisperer. The vision Arhu had been trying to describe to her turned out to be more like half-vision, and all the more maddening for it. For Arhu was looking, just briefly, through the eyes of Someone Who saw everything in the world as whole and seamless: thoughts, actions, past causes and present effects, the concrete and the abstract all welded into a single staggering completion. Rhiow understood a little of Arhu’s confusion and anger now, for trying to extract one piece of information from the all-surrounding vastness of the Whisperer’s perception seemed impossible, like trying to fish one drop of water out of your water bowl with your claw. You would always get a little bit of something else along with it: or a lot of something else. Rhiow thought with embarrassment of the facile way she had been telling him to concentrate, and grab hold of one part of it…

More, she now understood much better his confusion about tenses: for in the Whisperer’s mind, the world was finished, a made thing, a completed thing … though one that was constantly changing. It was a harrowing point of view for a Person to try to assimilate, or for any mortal being who lived in linear time and generally thought that one thing happened after another, and that the future was still indeterminate. It was not, to Her. The Whisperer, in Her mastery, saw it all laid out. The only place where Her uncertainties lay was in what you would do to change the future … in which case everything you did also became part of the ongoing completion, a law of the universe, as if it had been laid down so from the very beginning. The two visions of the future did not exclude one another, from Her point of view: they actually complemented one another, and made sense. To Rhiow, that was the most frightening concept of all.

She breathed out, wondering how she would apologize to Arhu for so completely misunderstanding what he had been dealing with, while Arhu got back his breath and his composure, and headed on down Water Lane again. Just across from Traitor’s Gate was an opening into the central part of the Tower complex, through a building called the Bloody Tower. He went under this archway as well, and turned immediately left.

Built into the wall here was a house with many long peaked roofs, the Queen’s House: and in front of it were arches with iron bars set in them. Behind those arches were some low, wizened trees and shrubs … and in the trees, and under at least one of the shrubs, sat the ravens.

Arhu had known they would be large, but he hadn’t thought they would be as large as a Person. Most of them were, though, and at least one of them which perched on that stone wall, above the bars, was as big as Huff: as big as a small houff. They were all resplendently glossy black, and they looked down at him and, to Arhu’s astonishment, saw him perfectly well, even though he was sidled.

“Look,” one of them said. “A kitty.”

“Oh, shut up, Cedric,” said another of them. “You had breakfast.”

Arhu licked his nose and sat down, trying to preserve some dignity in the face of so many small, black, intelligent, completely unafraid eyes staring at him. “I, uh, I’m on errantry. Hi,” Arhu said.

“And we greet you too, young wizard,” said one of the ravens. There was a muffled noise of cawing from the far side of Tower Green: Arhu looked over his shoulder.

“How many of you are there here?” he said. “Should I go over and say hi to them too?”

“No, they’re minding their territories at the moment,” said the raven. “After all, the place is full of tourists. Later in the day, when the warders chuck them all out and lock the place up, we can all get together in the quiet and the dark and have a chat. Meanwhile, anything you say to me, they’ll know. They can see it, after all.”

“I’m sorry,” Arhu said, “but I don’t know what to call you. There are ehhif names on the sign over there, but—”

“No, it’s all right: we use their names,” said the biggest of the ravens. “It’s a courtesy to them, and from them: they’ve made us officers in their army, after all.” She chuckled. “Even if we’re only noncoms. So I’m ‘Hugin’, and that’s ‘Hardy’.” She pointed with her beak at the raven sitting below her. “We have other names that we tell to no one, that come down from the Old Ones … but we can’t give you those. Sorry.”

“Uh, it’s OK. But look, is it right what the sign says, over there? That the ehhif think this place would ‘fall’ without you? Fall down?”

“Cease to exist,” said Hugin.

“Of course the place would fall without us,” said another of the ravens. “We’ve always been here. It doesn’t know how to be here without us.”

“How long is always?” Arhu said.

“How long does it have to be?” Hardy said. He was a little thinner than the others, a little smaller, which might have been deceptive: but the eye, that black, wise eye, seemed to say that this was the eldest of them. “Since there were buildings. And before that: since there were humans, what you call ehhif. We saw your People come, too: we saw them go, when the city first was burned … We stayed, and the dead … no others.”

Arhu controlled his desire to shudder. With their great ax-like beaks, there was no mistaking these birds for anything but what they were—meat-eaters—and there was no mistaking what they would have eaten, from time to time, in this city where there had so often been large numbers of dead ehhif. Or People, for that matter … Arhu thought.

“It’s all right,” another of the ravens said. “By the time we eat somebody, they don’t mind any more. And these days we mostly don’t, anyway. The Wingless Raven gives us chicken breast.” The raven clattered its beak with pleasure. “Very nice …”

“If you’ve been here that long,” Arhu said, “you must have seen a lot …”

“Even if we hadn’t been,” Hugin said, “we would still be seeing it now. William the Conqueror: I see him walk by a puddle, right over there, and a cart goes through it and gets his hose wet, and he swears at the man driving the cart and pulls him out of his seat … throws him down into the water, too. The Romans: I see them walking their city wall, looking at the cloud of dust as Boudicca and her chariots come riding. Over there.” She gestured with her beak at the remains of the wall, like a bumpy sidewalk, that stretched from past the Wardrobe Tower to the Lanthorn Tower, along the green that had once been the site of the Great Hall. “And poor Ann Boleyn. There she goes, over to the block. Over there.” She turned and pointed with her beak in the other direction, over toward Tower Green. “Very dignified, she was. That used to be a great concern for them. And there he goes running by, one of them who didn’t care about dignity so much.” She pointed over to the little corner building which was presently the Tower gift shop, but which once was the home of the Keeper of the Jewels. “Colonel Blood, with the Crown stomped flat and hidden under his wig, and the Rod with the Dove down one boot. He almost gets away with that, too …”

“And it was you saw that then?” Arhu said. “You must be pretty old.” He let the skepticism show in his voice a little.

“Oh, not us,” said Hardy. “Our ancestors. Though we see what they see: that’s our job. And eventually the humans noticed that we were always here, and for once they came to the right conclusion, that the place needed us. They started trying to protect us … very self-enlightened, that. Though there have been times when the population has dropped very low.” He glanced up at the sky. “During the war—the last big one here—almost all of us died except old Grip. The humans got very worried. And well they might have, with the V2s and the buzz-bombs coming down all around them. But we knew it would be all right. We saw it then, as we see it now …”

“That’s why I’ve come,” Arhu said. “It may not be all right, soon, in a very large-scale sort of way. We need help to find out how to stop what we thing is happening from happening.” He looked around him. “All this could be gone …”

“No,” said Hardy, “of course it won’t. This will still be here.” He squinted up at the pale stones of the Tower. “It will be dead, of course. No people … and eventually, even no ravens. No nothing, just the dark and the cold, and the thin black cloud high up that the Sun can’t come through. The wind crying out for loneliness … and nothing else.”

“You mean it’s going to happen,” Arhu whispered, shocked.

“I mean it already has happened,” said Hardy. “Now it’s just a matter of seeing how it happens otherwise. You know that: for you have the Eye too, don’t you?”

“Yes. I’m not very good at it yet,” Arhu said, suddenly feeling a little humble in the face of what was plainly another kind of mastery than his own.

“Oh, you will be, if you live,” said another of the ravens. “Give it time.”

“I’m not so sure I’m going to have a lot of time to give it,” Arhu said.

“Of course you will,” Hardy said. “We’re here in strength now, after all. Nothing will fall that we don’t see fall first. And the more of us there are, the more certain the vision. When there was only one to see … that was a dangerous time.”

“But there are a lot of you now.”

“Oh, after this century’s second war, all fortunes turned, if slowly,” said Hardy. “Certainties returned. Also, we felt like breeding again. It’s not like it is with your People … we don’t do it unless we feel like it. And also, some of us came from other places to live here. The humans thought they brought us, of course: but we knew where we were going. We chose to come: we chose to stay.”

Arhu wondered if this wasn’t possibly slightly self-deluding. “But your wings are clipped,” he said, rather diffidently, not knowing whether they might be insulted. “You couldn’t fly away if you wanted to.”

The ravens looked at each other in silence for a fraction of a second … then burst out in loud, cawing laughter, so that some of the tourists on the other side of the Tower grounds turned to stare. “Oh, come on now,” said Hugin, “surely you don’t believe that, do you?”

“Uh,” Arhu said. “I’m not sure I know what to believe.”

“Then you’re a wise young wizard,” said another of the ravens. “Why, youngster, we can go anywhere we please. We’re the ‘messengers of the gods’, of the Powers that Be, don’t you know that? Even the humans know it. They’re confused about which god, of course: they’re confused about most things. But they still managed to give us use-names that are the same as the ravens they think served one of their gods, and went between heaven and Earth carrying messages. Hugin—” That raven pointed at Hugin with its beak. “Actually she’s Hugin II, after another one who went before her. And there’s Munin II over there.” The raven speaking pointed at a third one.

“We go where we please,” said Hugin. “You’ve been working with the People who manage the gate under the Tower, so you must know how we do it.”

“You worldgate?” Arhu said.

“We transit. And we don’t need spells for it, if that’s what you mean,” said another of the ravens. “We don’t need to use a gate that’s been woven ahead of time and put in place, either. We see where to go … and we go. We find out what’s happened … and we bring the news back. That’s all.”

Arhu sat down and licked his nose. “A long time now we have served Them,” said Hardy. “We come and go at Their behest. That would be why you are here: for you’re Their messenger, as we are.”

“Uh,” Arhu said.

Cawing came from further up the wall: a noise of laughter. “Oh, come on, Hardy,” said another raven-voice, “less of the oracular crap. Cut him some slack.”

One more raven flapped down beside Arhu, rustled his wings back into place, and paced calmly over to Arhu, looking him up and down. “No rest for the weary,” it said. “But it’s about time you got here. I got tired of waiting.”

Arhu wasn’t sure what to make of this, or of the amused way the other ravens looked at the newcomer. “Odin,” said Hardy, “have you been in the pub again?”

Odin snapped his beak. “The Guinness over there is improving,” he said. They’ve cleaned out the pipes since last month.”

There was much muffled caw-laughter from some of the other ravens. “Odin,” said Hardy a little wearily, “is our local representative of the forces of chaos.”

“You mean the Lone Power?” Arhu said, looking at Odin rather dubiously.

“No, just chaos.” Hardy sighed. “Well, we all act up while we’re still in our first decade, I suppose. Odin thinks it’s fun to upset the Wingless Raven by getting up on the outer wall and gliding off across the road to The Queen’s Head, when everybody knows perfectly well that none of us should be able to fly or glide that far at all. He walks in there and scares the landlord’s dog into fits, and then the humans feed him hamburgers and try to get him drunk.”

Arhu looked at Odin with new respect: any bird that could scare a houff was worth knowing. “Hey, listen,” Odin said, “sometimes the Yeoman Ravenmaster needs to have his world shaken up a little. This way there’s more to his life than just checking us over every morning and handing out chicken fillets. This way, he wakes up in the middle of the night, every now and then, and thinks, “Now how in the worlds did he do that?” ” The raven chuckled, a rough gravelly arh arh arh sound. “And it keeps him on good terms with the locals, because he has to keep coming over to the pub to get me back. After all, I can’t fly or anything …”

He roused his wings and waved them in the air, managing to make the gesture look rather pitiful and helpless. The other ravens all laughed, though some of them sounded a little annoyed as well as amused.

“You saw me coming here? I mean, you See me coming?” Arhu said.

“How would I not?” Odin said. “You’ve been busy. Worldgating of any kind attracts our attention: it’s our business. Maybe it’s why we’re here. As for you, you were on the Moon recently,” Odin said. “I See you there. Took you a while to manage that, too. I could get there quicker than you could, puss. And without needing spells.”

“Oh yeah,” Arhu said. “Well, maybe you could, birdie. In fact, maybe you’ll show me how right now, because time’s running out of things while we sit here and talk.”

“He’s right,” said Hardy. “Well, Odin, will you make good your boast?”

“Of course I will,” said Odin, sounding genuinely annoyed. “I Saw me doing it this morning, and so did you.”

“You, though, weren’t sure,” said Hardy, “and you said as much at the time. You owe me a chicken breast.”

Odin clattered his beak, and then said, “I’m going to get a bite out of it first … you see that too, don’t you.”

Hardy dropped the lower half of his beak, a gesture that looked to Arhu like a smile. He certainly hoped it was.

The place I need to See,” Arhu said, “it’s an alternate universe. You do know that?”

Odin laughed. “Of course. So was the place where you went to the Moon. It’s not a problem.”

It’s not? thought Arhu. Iau, I hope he’s right … because it would sure make things a lot easier.

“I can tell you the coordinates for the world I’m trying to See,” Arhu said. “If that’s any help to you.”

“You don’t need to,” Odin said. “I know where you’re going, because I can see that we’ve been. All I was waiting for is you.”

Time paradoxes, Arhu thought. I thought they were kinda neat, but these guys don’t seem to think any other way. I hope to Iau I don’t get like this … I like keeping the past and future separate.

“Can you ride me?” said Odin.

“Huh? I think I might fall off,” Arhu said.

“Not that way, puss. In mind.”

“Since you ask, yes I can,” Arhu said, somewhat annoyed. “And my name is Arhu.”

“I knew that,” Odin said. “But I couldn’t know until you told me. Ready?”

The raven huddled down under a nearby bush with his wings slightly spread out—a peculiar-looking pose. Hugin came soaring down from the stone wall, flapping her wings, and came to rest in the bush just above him. “Just a precaution,” she said. “The tourists will come along while you’re in the middle of something and tell their babies to go pet the pretty birdie.” She snapped her beak suggestively. “Sometimes we have to disabuse them of the notion.”

Arhu stepped through the bars and hunkered down not too far from Odin: closed his eyes, and felt around him in mind for the other’s presence—

—and was caught, like a mouse, in a razory beak and claws. He struggled for a moment as something bit his neck, hard: he yowled, turned to get his claws into it—

—and everything settled into a kind of silvery darkness: no more discomfort—he was on the inside of the beak and claws now. He was soaring through what looked like cloud, faintly lit as if with twilight: the sense of day about to dawn, but in no hurry about it. The feeling was unlike skywalking, which Arhu enjoyed well enough: but this was less passive. He had wings, and the wind was in a dialog with them.

Nicely done, something said in his head. We could probably make a raven of you, with about fifty years’ work. Now show me the place you were in. Not the Moon, but the street—

Arhu tried to see it again in mind as he had seen it in reality: but most of what he remembered was the smell. People’s noses are wonderfully accurate and delicate. They can tell where another Person has been, or where an ehhif or houff has passed, for months afterward. But the blunting, smashing, awful weight of the smell in the London they had visited had ruined Arhu’s ability to taste or smell most things for the better part of a day. Now he recalled that smell better than any other part of the experience: sickening, disgusting, like a shout inside your head, horse-bird-houff-ehhif-smoke-soot-garbage-shit-of-every-description … Sorry, Arhu gasped from inside the wings, inside the beak and claws.

Don’t apologize, it’s perfect, said the one who shared the inside-beak-and-claws with him. A tolerant young mind, wry, dry, somewhat disrespectful of form but respectful of talent and wisdom and wit, a fearless seeker of strange new experience like the inside of a cat’s mind, or half a pint of Guinness poured into an ashtray: that was Odin. Arhu put his whiskers forward, or tried to and then discovered he had no whiskers: he dropped the lower half of his beak instead. As he did so, he got the faintest whiff of another name … and carefully turned his nose away from it. At least he still had a nose of sorts.

Now then, said the other, either missing all this, or ignoring it. The path’s clear.

They soared for a good while, circling. Every now and then Arhu would get a glimpse, through the silvery twilight, of a landscape below them: always the features were the same—the oxbowed bends of the river, the great loop of the Thames that held the Isle of Dogs, not quite an isle but a fat and noticeable peninsula. Then the cloud would close in again. Probability, Odin said. Or the lack of it…

And suddenly the cloud cleared, and they dropped from the heavens together like a stone. The city below them was filthy. The Moon above them was scarred.

Keep your eyes open, Odin said then. We can’t stay long. Is this it?

Arhu looked down, trying to find the street in which they had appeared. He found the Tower quickly enough, and the street that ran by it: and there, just visible to a feline wizard’s eye, the tangle of half-seen strings that meant a sidled Person running across the mud, followed by two others. One of them fell as a motorcar rolled toward and over him—

This is it?

This is it!

All right, then. Now we start work. Let us See together—

Rhiow felt the raven close his wings and drop like a stone: and the tense of the vision changed, just that quickly, so that Rhiow found herself wanting to shake her head in confusion. Until this moment, everything happening to Arhu had been in a clearly discernible then. Suddenly, though, it was now, all now: single threads of that seamless whole that the Whisperer saw. But changed—the Eye a bird’s instead of a Person’s, seeing with a more direct and concentrated kind of vision, as if from one side of a brain rather than with the binocular vision of a predator. She was not sure she was seeing everything Arhu had, it all came so quickly. All now, all here, glimpse after glimpse tumbling one after another as the feline/raven mind fell through the cloud of probability—

—one of the London streets opening out below them, suddenly: in the middle of it, being driven along at a sedate pace, a queen-ehhif out for a ride in a coach pulled by horses. Men ride in front of her, and behind her, riding on other horses as guards. The queen-ehhif is a little stocky, plainly dressed in dark clothes. Her face is one which could have smiled, but does not. The coach turns a corner into one of those broad tree-lined avenues. People passing by pause, and bow, as the coach passes. The queen-ehhif waves occasionally, a very reserved gesture. The coach drives on—

An ehhif is standing at a corner nearby. As the coach passes he pulls out a gun, points it at the queen-ehhif in the coach. Shoots.

Heads turn at the sudden crack of sound. In the coach, the queen-ehhif looks over her shoulder, bemused, as the ehhif driving the coach whips up the horses. They clatter away. Others run or ride toward the ehhif who fired the gun. The queen-ehhif, unharmed, looks back, her white face sharply contrasted against the dark bonnet. This has happened to her before, but she can never quite bring herself to believe it when it does.

—Now the same coach again, driving in through gates surrounding a wide green park in the countryside outside London: and then into the courtyard in front of a massive house, turreted with the same kind of great round towers as are found inside the double walls where the Ravens live. The coach drives up to the doors, and the queen-ehhif gets out, with a younger queen-ehhif, her daughter perhaps, beside her. The two of them go in together, through the great front gate, in the broad low sunset light.

Close, Odin thought, but not quite. Now we find the core—

Several more flickers as the raven and his passenger dive through patches of silvery twilight, and out again: and after a few breaths’ time, the yellowy sunset light reasserts itself. But this time everything is very different. A dark carriage comes out of the gates: but its windows are shut, and draped in black. Everything about it is black: the horses, the harness, the clothes of the tom-ehhif who drive. The coach is a long one, long enough to take one of the boxes in which the ehhif put their dead before burying them. The long drive down to the roadway is lined with ehhif, all dressed in black, weeping. Some of them hide their faces in their hands as the coach passes them. Some of them hold ehhif-young up to see the coach as it goes by. Occasionally a cry breaks out from one of the grown ehhif, a terrible sound, as if wrested from a throat that normally would never make such a noise no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise everything is very silent, the only noises the sound of the horses’ hoofs, and far away, the bell of one of the houses where ehhif go to entreat the Powers or the One, tolling very slow, one strike in every minute, like a failing heart.

The long black equipage winds away toward London through the brassy sunset light. The raven flashes overhead, passing them, dodging through cloud again, coming out over the City, and veering close to a shopfront in a street that is almost empty. This, in its way, shocks Rhiow more badly than anything else she has seen. She is a city Person: she is used to streets that always have someone walking or driving on them, no matter what time of day or night it is. But this place looks like it has died, or like the heart has been torn out of it. Few ehhif are abroad, and almost all of them are dressed in black or have black armbands, even black rags, tied about their arms. All their faces are grim: many are tearstained.

The raven perches for a moment on a folding board which is set up outside the shopfront. The shop itself is dark and its door is shut. But outside, the piece of paper pasted to the board says, in large black letters, HER MAJESTY’S FUNERAL. It is the front page of The Times of London, and it has no other words on it except the newspaper’s masthead, and the date: JULY 14, 1874.

The raven takes wing again before anyone should see it; vaults up into the safety of the silvery twilight again. That is the core which you sought, Odin says. We have just time to see the beginning, and the end.

The tense changed once more: now became then again, at least while Odin and Arhu were in transit. They saw more, much more, as the raven flashed in and out through the cloud that always seemed about to break into day. Rhiow could not make sense of most of what she was sensing, and hoped Arhu would be able to do better, or that perhaps the raven Odin could: for occasionally, like a sudden ray of light through the cloud, there would come an image so overladen with context that it was as if a thousand ehhif stood around her, every one of them shouting some piece of information that it was important for her to hear. A group of ehhif, ranged in a big room, facing each other in rows: and all shouting at one another, a terrible noise of rage and confusion, while one ehhif at the front of one group, in the bottom row of the benches, cried out, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay—!” and all the others shouted him down in a crescendo of fury, as another one leapt up and shouted, “Mr. Speaker, they say the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. I can do the same: and I say, ‘They have sown the storm, and they shall reap the whirlwind—!’ ” A roar of approval—and from that, abruptly, to a white-walled room where a broad, squat machine of some kind was being built by ehhif wearing protective suits. Then a bright, blue-skied day, and a missile or rocket leaping up on a tongue of fire from a launch pad bizarrely adorned in the curlicues of the Victorian decorative style. Then a huge aircraft passing over a city landscape, so big that it shadowed the ground, and ehhif looked up and pointed. Then—

—the images were gone again. The twilight returned … and went sinister. It was not silvery any more: it was leaden. The sun could not come through it. Arhu and Odin spun up together on raven’s wings, catching an updraft, or what passed for one in vision. This was no normal wind: the air was too thin for wind as high as they were going, as the Earth yielded up her curvature below them. Far down, away in the blue sea, Arhu could see the plume of darkness wafting up from one small point. A volcano, a mother of volcanoes, belching out great clouds of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere: a thin line which became a plume, a plume which became a pall, thin and dark and gloomy, right around the globe of the world. What was bright, and normally gleamed like polished metal where the Sun touched it, now was dull and tarnished: and clouds that should have burned white, were all filmed gray. 1816, said Odin’s voice, dry, noticing rather than reacting. He had seen it before: he had seen all this before. The difference, he said, is that I never had to look. Looking is what makes the difference, in vision. Looking makes it so…

They dived again, were briefly lost in the silvery twilight, the billow of possibility. When they came out, they looked down into a muddy street and saw a young dark-complexioned man in casual clothing of the late twentieth century come lurching out of the middle of the air, carrying something heavy in a bag. He came staggering through the darkness, out into the street: another ehhif came along and frightened him. He dropped the bag, turned and fled once more into the darkness. A few moments later, other ehhif came along and picked up the bag, peeled it away from what it contained. A book, a very large book. The ehhif stared at the cover. Another one took the book from the one who held it: opened it, turned the pages, looking at the equations and the delicately drawn diagrams, and the dense small print.

One of them glanced up into the cloudy sky, with that thin layer of darkness streaming along above everything, as a brief welcome ray of sun shot down through the dull day. The light fell on the book. Arhu looked at the silver ehhif letters on the book’s cover. It said Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia.

Arhu looked down at the ehhif and heard, very softly, all about them, the laughter: the quiet amusement of Something which had given the world, just now, a brief foretaste of what was waiting for it later, in far greater intensity, when the seed it had just planted finally came to fruit. This darkness would fall again, but many times magnified: this cold would come … but would be permanent. By the time it passed, and the planet warmed again, all its intelligent life would be long dead.

Arhu had heard that laughter before. Once upon a time, when he was a kitten, he had found himself in a garbage bag in the East River, one which slowly filled with water, while he and his brothers and sisters clawed and scrabbled desperately on top of each other, trying to stay above the terrible cold stuff that was slowly climbing high enough around them that they would have no choice but to breathe it, and die. Only Arhu lived, saved by chance—some ehhif coming along and seeing the sinking bag in the water, and hearing the last faint cries of despair from inside, had fished it out, torn it open, and dumped the sodden bodies of the kittens out onto the bike path. All the while he had been in that bag, and even afterwards, all the while the ehhif warmed him in his coat while taking the last small survivor to the local animal shelter, Arhu had sensed that laughter all around him. It was Entropy in Its personified form, the One Who invented death, sa’Rrahh as the People knew Her, the disaffected and ambivalent Power which wizards called “Lone”: and It had laughed at the prospect of his one small death as It was now laughing at this far greater one. The fury Arhu had felt when first he recognized that laughter’s source, he felt now, and it roared up in him like the voice of one of the Old Cats from the Downside, a blast of pure rage that sent Odin tumbling through the silvery twilight as if blown off course by a gust of wind.

They were not off course, though. They came out of the twilight more quickly than even Odin had expected, so that for a moment he almost lost control, dropping some hundreds of feet before he could get his wings under him again. As they tumbled, Arhu had a brief confusion of which way was up and which was down. They were high above the Earth again, but as they tumbled the lights blurred, and there seemed to be stars in the dark side of the Earth as well as in the sky—

Odin fought for stability, found it. Arhu looked down, through the raven’s Eye, and saw that there were lights on the dark side of the Earth, indeed, but they were not stars.

Europe was in shadow. London was dark. But on the Continent, from north to south, eye-hurtingly bright lights had broken out, a rash of points of fire. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, every one was a point of light. Others blossomed as Arhu watched—Hanover, Lyon, Geneva, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and many more: seeds of fire growing, paling, each one with its tiny pale growth above it. Arhu did not need to dive any closer to see the mushroom clouds. The seeds were planted. It would be no spring that came with their growth, but a winter that would last an age…

Arhu closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them again, he was crouched down on the ground, on the green grass near the bush in the Ravens’ Enclosure, and beside him, Odin was standing up and shaking his feathers into place. Hardy was sitting down on the nearby tree, now, near Hugin.

“The beginning and the end,” Arhu breathed, and had to stop and try to catch his breath, for he was finding it hard just to be here and now again.

“It will pass,” said Hardy. “Meanwhile, be assured: you did a good job. You see strangely, but your way might be something that we could learn in time, if you could teach us.”

“Me teach you?” Arhu said, and gulped for air again. “Uh—I’ll have to ask.”

“Ask Her by all means,” said Hardy. “In the meantime, I see the nature of your problem. She was the core of that whole time, the old Queen, Victoria: the events of that whole period crystallized out around her personality, and the qualities which her people projected onto her. Any universe in which she was successfully assassinated would be a threat to all the others anywhere near it in its probability sheaf. And I would suggest to you,” Hardy said, bending down a little closer to Arhu, “that if the Lone One wished to make doubly sure of your universe’s demise, that it would see to it that she died in your universe as well.”

Arhu stared at him. “By making the ehhif here assassinate this Queen Victoria?”

“Indeed. It might well happen anyway, for as the two universes begin the process of exchanging energy and achieving homeostasis, that ‘core event’ will be one of the first things that will try to happen in your universe.” Hardy blinked and looked thoughtful. “If I were in your position, I would be sure that this world’s Victoria is protected from the fate you have seen befall her counterpart. Otherwise, with two universes with dead Queens, the alternate universe will gain a great entropy advantage over the other. Should both Queens die, I doubt very much whether this world would long survive …”

“Oh, great, another problem,” Arhu said, rather bitterly. “And how can you be so calm about it?”

“Well, for one thing, it has already happened,” said Hardy mildly. “For another thing, you are the ones who will cause it not to happen … if indeed you do. How should I not be calm, when I know I am giving my advice to the right person?”

Arhu blinked and turned to Odin. “Can you translate that for me?” he said, rather helplessly.

Odin blinked too. “It made perfect sense to me,” he said. “Which part of it specifically did you need translated?”

Arhu hissed softly. “Never mind.”

“When I say ‘it has already happened’,” Hardy said, “I speak of the entire chain of events from first to last: from your arrival here to work on the gates, to your final departure. Not that I know the details of that: you will soon know them better than we ever could. But I think that, in this timeline, this universe, Queen Victoria has ‘not yet’ been assassinated. I would suspect that fact of being what has so far kept this timeline in place, and as yet largely undamaged … and it may also be that the difficulty you were experiencing with the oscillation of the far end of your colleague’s timeslide also has to do with the unusual stability, under the circumstances, of this one. You must complete whatever consultations you have planned with speed. And at all times, the Queens must be your great care. Whatever happens, protect them.”

Arhu waved his tail in agreement, and stood up. He was surprisingly wobbly on his feet. “Look … I want to thank you. I’ve got to get back to the others and tell them about this: as much as I can, anyway.”

“Do so. Go well, young wizard: and come back again.”

“He will anyway,” Odin said, and poked Arhu in a friendly way with his beak, at the back of his neck.

Arhu took a swipe at him, with the claws out, and missed on purpose. It seemed wise. He liked Odin: and anyway, that beak was awfully big. “Dai,” he said. “Later—”

He headed off out the gateway under the Bloody Tower with as much dignity as he could muster, while desperately wanting to fall down somewhere and go straight to sleep: and as he went out, all the stones around him were quiet … for the moment.

Rhiow opened her eyes and looked at Arhu. He had fallen asleep. With some slight difficulty, for she was stiff, she got up and stretched, and then went over to Urruah.

“We’d better call the others in,” she said. “The problem’s gotten much worse …”