To Visit the Queen (27 page)

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 that could have smiled but does not. The coach turns a corner in 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
, unarmed, 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 clouds 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 that 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,
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 that 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 leaped 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 anymore: 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 that became a plume, a plume that 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.
Eighteen sixteen
, 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-complected 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, the 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 that 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 that 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 afterward, 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'Rráhh as the People knew her, the disaffected and ambivalent Power that 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, Lyons, 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 that 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...."