To Visit the Queen (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fhrio straightened up from his washing again. "Absolutely. Maybe the gate'll surprise us by failing in the middle of something. At this point, I wouldn't care if it did it in midtransit."

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

"Sure. She's our power source," Fhrio said to Rhiow and the others. " 'The best in the business.' "

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

"You'll excuse me for a moment, then," Huff said, and headed up the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Kittens?"

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

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

"Oh, how terrible for you!" Auhlae said.

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

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

Rhiow chuckled. "I think you're right there... in all possible senses of the word."

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

"
Oh,
yes," Rhiow said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auhlae laughed softly. "Tell me about it," she said as Huff came back down the stairs again and padded toward them.

"Problems,
hrr't?"
Auhlae said.

"Oh, I wanted a look at number three," Huff said, "since this one's being worked on." He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. "You know how they tend to interfere with each other— their catenary links are close together." He paused a moment, then said, "Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right where the catenaries meet, at the roots of things?"

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

"I'm sorry for your trouble," said Huff, and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.

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

"The great cats live there," Auhlae said, "don't they? Our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People..."

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