To Visit the Queen (29 page)

"Absolutely. But there are a few other things we need to look into as well," Urruah said. "Like the small matter of the logs on the nonfunctioning gate."

Fhrio looked at Urruah sharply. "What's the matter with them?"

"They're not the way they were when we disconnected the gate from the catenary," Urruah said. "The coordinates for the Illingworth access have been changed, and I don't know how, or why. Any ideas?"

Fhrio stared at Urruah as if he were out of his mind. "They can't change. You're crazy."

Urruah glanced over at Huff: Huff looked back at him, bemused. "All right then," Urruah said, "I'm crazy." Rhiow looked with great care at his tail. It was quite still. She licked her nose, twice, very fast. "But I think you should lock that gate in a stasis, Huff, and make sure no one gets at it again. If it can manage to alter itself again while it's got a stasis on it, then obviously no cause based
here
is at fault."

Huff stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up and said, "I'll take care of it. Rhiow..."

She looked over at him. "Our next move?" Huff asked.

She was not used to being so obviously deferred to: it made her a little uncomfortable. After a moment's pause, she said, "Overall, I think at the moment that I have to agree with Fhrio. While I agree it's important to make sure that our home-timeline's Victoria is safe, the other one is in greater danger at the moment— or so it seems to me— and her assassination is what seems likeliest to trigger the derangement of our own timeline. I think we must therefore try to get into the 'altered eighteen seventy-four' timeline as quickly as we can: tomorrow, I think, since a lot of us are short on sleep at the moment. We'll try to find out exactly when the assassination was, and find out what we need to do to stop it. After that we can worry about the book and, last of all, about the stranded pastlings in our own time. Huff?"

He put his ears forward in agreement. "That makes sense to me. Let's do so."

"I am going to fuel Urruah's timeslide tomorrow," Siffha'h said, as if expecting an argument.

"Fine," said Huff. "Urruah had some questions about the catenary's behavior as a power source: this will resolve them. Auhlae and I will be doing general gate duty tomorrow, but we'll be on call if something else comes up. When should we all meet?"

"About this time?" Urruah said.

"Good enough."

The group broke up. Fhrio threw a very annoyed look at Urruah as he went out, and Urruah sat down and started washing, while the others, glancing at him, left.

Rhiow touched cheeks with Auhlae and Huff as they went out, then sat down by Urruah while he scrubbed his face. "Well, you seem to have managed to attract a lot of someone's annoyance today," she said softly, when the others, except for Arhu, were gone. "What was all that about?"

"Well, I spent a late night working with Auhlae a couple of nights ago," Urruah said, "and he seems to have taken issue with that."

"Fhrio? What business is that of his?"

"I'm not sure."

Rhiow sighed. "It doesn't take much to get him going in any case," she said. "Probably it means nothing. Are you all right, though?"

"Oh, I'm fine. It's just that— " He shrugged his tail, started washing his ears.
Rhi, usually there's a certain level of good humor about these joint jobs. It seems to be missing in this one.

It's the level of stress, I'd imagine,
Rhiow said.
This is not your usual joint job.

"No," he said, "I suppose not." He stopped washing, and sighed, putting his ears forward as Huff came back in. "Huff," he said, "do you want any help with that stasis?"

"No," Huff said, "I'll manage it." He sat down and looked around him a little disconsolately.

"All right then," Urruah said. "Rhi, I'll see you in the morning. Go well, Huff." He headed out toward the cat door in the back of the pub.

Rhiow looked at Huff for a moment, then got up and went to sit by him. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Oh— yes, I suppose so," he said, sounding a little distracted. "It's just that... I don't know... I'm not used to coping with these stress levels, and everyone around me seems to be losing their temper half the time. My team's unhappy and I don't know why, and there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it."

Rhiow put one ear back: it was a feeling she'd had occasionally. "Oh, Huff, it'll sort itself out... you'll see. It
is
the stress, truly: this problem isn't the kind of thing any of us would normally have to handle in the course of work. And to be suddenly thrown together with strangers, no matter how well intentioned they are, and then try to deal with something like this... it isn't going to be easy for anyone." She put her whiskers forward a little. "You're such an easygoing type anyway," Rhiow said, "that it must be difficult for you to deal with the frictions: they must seem kind of foolish to you."

He gave her a rueful look. "Sometimes," he said, "yes. Yes, you're right." He sighed. "Stranger or not," he said, "it's nice to have someone around who understands. But then you're not exactly a stranger anymore."

"No, of course not. When we get all this solved, Huff, you should come visit us in New York. We'll show you and your team around the gates at Grand Central, 'do the town' a little. Urruah knows some extremely good places to eat."

"I know," Huff said, sounding a little more amused. "I keep hearing about them." His whiskers were right forward now.

"I bet," Rhiow said, resigned. "Look... we've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow. I should get home. You try to get some rest, Huff, and we'll see you later on."

He waved his tail in agreement. "Go well," he said. They touched cheeks: and Rhiow went out the back, through the cat door, and down the alley, heading for the Tower Hill Underground station, thinking, a little absently, how nice it was that it no longer felt strange to rub cheeks with Huff at all.

She got home very late, by New York time, and found Iaehh in bed and snoring. As quietly as she could, Rhiow curled up with him, too tired even to care whether he would roll over on top of her in the middle of the night, as he often did while feeling for someone else who should have been in the bed, but wasn't. She sighed at the thought of what now seemed about a hundred years ago: a time when both her
ehhif
were here and happy, and her life managing a gating team had seemed relatively simple and uncomplicated...

About a second later, she woke up.
Oh, unfair,
she thought. It was typical that, on a night when you most needed the sense of being asleep for a long time, you instead got that "cheated" feeling of having been asleep almost no time at all.

It was, however, nearly six in the evening. Iaehh wasn't back from work yet, but he would be soon, and if she didn't get out fairly quickly, he would turn up and delay her. Rhiow sighed and got right up, stretching hard fore and aft: ate (finding the bowls washed and filled again), then washed and used the box, and headed out for Grand Central. Half an hour later Rhiow was in London, on the platform in the Underground station, watching Urruah reconstructing his timeslide. Auhlae was there, and Siffha'h: Arhu was sitting off to one side, ostensibly watching Urruah fine-tuning his spell, but (to Rhiow's eyes) actually staying rather pointedly out of Siffha'h's way.

"Perfect timing," Urruah said, looking up. "I'm just about set here."

"You have all those extra coordinate-sets that you wanted to test laid in as well?" Rhiow asked, strolling over to the "hedge" of burning lines that was the spell diagram. It looked taller than it had been before.

"Yes indeed," Urruah said. "We'll take them in order after we check out the main one, the 'scarred' timeline. Everybody, come and check your names. We're ready to rock and roll."

Rhiow jumped into the circle to reexamine her name. Auhlae jumped in after her, remarking, "I would have thought you were more interested in the classical line of things, Urruah."

His whiskers went forward. "Always. But I believe one's interest in music should be balanced."

"If it's
ehhif
music you're talking about," Siffha'h said as she jumped into the circle as well, "you're too balanced by half. All that screeching."

Urruah chuckled. "Wait till you're older and you have more leisure to develop your tastes."

"Older," Siffha'h said. "I'm sick of hearing about it. And I'm getting older right now waiting for you People to get your acts together!" She glared at Arhu.

Arhu, taking no apparent notice, made a small, elegant jump, which landed him precisely on the spot Urruah had laid out for him inside the circle. He bent down, checked his name, and then turned his back to Siffha'h, yawning, and sat down with his tail wrapped around his toes.

"Huh," said Siffha'h, glancing at Arhu and planting her forepaws in the power-feed area of the spell. She looked over at Urruah.

"Everybody sidled?" he said. "Good. First set of coordinates is ready," he said. "The spell's on standby. Feed it!"

"Consider it fed," Siffha'h said.

The world vanished in a blast of light and power so vehement that Rhiow was glad she had been sitting down: otherwise she would have fallen over. This was not anything like Urruah's style of power-feed, decorous and smooth like a limo starting and stopping. This was a crash of power and pressure, happening all at once from all around, like being at the center of a lightning strike. In the middle of it all she thought she heard something like a yowl of frustration, but she couldn't be sure. When the light cleared away again, Rhiow half expected to smell ozone: she had to sit there for a moment or so and shake her head, waiting for her eyes to work again. After a few moments they did, but she still saw a residual blur of green light at the edges of vision for a little while, the remnant of the image of the first flash of the spell-circle as it came up to power.

She looked around and saw that they were all once more sitting in a muddy street: and Rhiow sighed at the thought of what getting clean again was likely to taste like. The sky above them was that of early morning, clear and blue: a surprising contrast to the last time. "All right," Urruah said, "there's the tripwire. I've closed the gate." Then Urruah looked up and around, and said suddenly, "And we've got a problem."

"What?" said Rhiow.

He was looking up at the Moon, which stood high in the southern sky at third quarter. They all looked too.

The Moon was white, with only the faintest blue shadows.

"Oh,
vhai,
" Auhlae said,
"this isn't the contaminated timeline!"
She turned to Urruah. "This is the predecessor to
our
London! Our world! For pity's sake, Urruah, how did that happen?"

Urruah was dumbfounded. "Auhlae, you saw the settings, we worked on them together— you tell
me!"

"I'll tell you how it happened," Siffha'h said, staggering to her feet. "We were being blocked. Couldn't you feel it? Urruah?"

"I'm not sure."

"Nice excuse," Arhu muttered.

"Oh, go swallow your tail!" Siffha'h spat. "Who asked you for anything like an opinion? As if you could produce one out your front end instead of your rear for a change.
We were being blocked!
Something knocked us sideways. Something
vhai
'd well doesn't want us in the alternate timeline! Like the Lone One!"

She was bristling with fury, as much from winding up in the wrong place, Rhiow thought, as for having her competence called into question. But there was another possibility that had occurred to Rhiow: that the other timeline was becoming stronger, strong enough now to begin interfering with
any
temporal gating.
But there's no evidence of that... yet.

"It could happen," Rhiow said. "For the meantime, we shouldn't stand here arguing." She glanced over at Urruah. "It's not a wasted trip, 'Ruah. We still have some things to check on, and some sources who would be helpful to talk to here. Among other things, would you say this is at least the right year?"

Urruah blinked. "Let's send Arhu to steal a newspaper."

"There's no need to steal anything," Arhu muttered. "These
ehhif
drop their newspapers all over the place, besides pasting them up on boards near the newsstands."

They walked out onto George Street, sidled, and glanced around them with a little more sense of leisure than they had felt the last time, for this was after all their home universe: there was no reason to rush away from it. Rhiow looked across the street and saw that the Tower Hill Underground station did not exist as yet. She listened, and the Whisperer told her that the worldgate complex was, at this point in its development, housed a little behind them, somewhere under the Fenchurch Street railway station.

"Maybe we should try to look up the local gating team," Siffha'h said, glancing around her.

"Much as I wouldn't mind being social with them," Rhiow said, "I think we have other things to concentrate on at the moment. Is that one of your 'newsagents' down there, Arhu?"

"Yeah. Come on."