To Visit the Queen (34 page)

"I know," Rhiow said. "If she only— "

"What's that?" Siffha'h said suddenly from the other side of the platform, pushing herself up again. "Something's coming."

Everyone looked up in alarm. Mostly they did it just in time to see the air in the middle of the platform stretch and sheen like pulled plastic wrap, then peel apart.

A dinosaur stepped out.

A casual viewer could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a dinosaur, at any rate. It stood about six feet high at the shoulder, and its long neck arched up another couple of feet to terminate in a long, lean, toothy muzzle: a pair of well-made and delicate forelegs with six claws each were folded decorously in front of the creature's chest. It stood mostly upright on its long-clawed hind legs, and a tail about five feet long lashed out behind it, helping it keep its balance. The shadowy lighting down here did not show off to best advantage the subtly patterned hide patched in red and orange, but somehow the small golden eye found the light, and kept it.

The London team stared at this apparition in astonishment: the saurian bowed to them gracefully, bobbing forward and back. "I am on errantry," it said in a soft, hissing voice, "and I greet you."

"You're well met on the errand," Huff said, still very wide-eyed. "Rhiow, is this the help you said you were sending for?"

"Indeed so. Ith, let me make you known to the London team."

She strolled over and took him around, making the introductions. Huff and Auhlae recovered their composure quickly: Fhrio, caught in the middle of doing something technical to the timeslide, simply stood for some moments with his mouth hanging open. Siffha'h gazed at Ith too, and spoke to him politely enough when introduced, but Rhiow couldn't help noticing her expression, a peculiar look of half-recognition, as if she had seen him before sometime, but couldn't place where.

Finally she brought Ith over to Artie. "And this is our 'pet'
ehhif,"
Rhiow said, with some amusement. "Artie, this is Ith."

"Oh, ra
ther
," said Artie, very impressed indeed. "Are you a thunder lizard?"

Ith dropped his lower jaw and flickered his long, blunt tongue slightly in what Rhiow had come to recognize as a smile. "I have not thundered at anything very recently," he said, "but in the past I have occasionally done so."

He crouched down on his back legs next to Arhu, who leaned against him companionably. "Your summons was opportune," Ith said to Rhiow, "for I was thinking of coming to see you anyway. The master gate matrices in the Old Downside, the ones that service Grand Central and many other gating complexes, have been showing signs of strain, these last few days. Gatings have not been progressing as they normally do."

"It's not just strain," Arhu said. "Let me show you."

For a few seconds they were silent together. It was not vision, Rhiow thought, but rather something to do with their old history together; they had been in one another's minds in extremely harrowing circumstances, involving their jointly completed Ordeals, and there were times when the communication between them seemed so complete and effortless that Rhiow wondered whether some kind of permanent connection between them had been wrought by the anguish and triumph they'd shared.

Ith looked up, then, and said, "You
have
been having a busy time." He clenched his claws together, interlacing them. "And now this business of the Longest Winter. Very interesting indeed."

He looked up over at the London team. "That was what killed my people in the ancient days," he said to Huff. "The Lone One, the Old Serpent, brought that fate down on us when we made our first Choice as a species. It said if we accepted Its gift, we would rule the Earth so long as the Sun shone on it. And so we did: until the blow fell burning from the sky, and the dust and the smoke of its impact rose up and hid the sun. It killed all my ancestors except the very few who, by accident or by grace of the Powers, managed to find their way into the Old Downside and take refuge in the caves there, down where the catenaries spring up from their ultimate power source. There we lived for ages, and there the Lone One ruled us, saying that someday It would lead us up into the Sun again, and we would conquer all the puny creatures that lived there and take the Earth for our own once more." He smiled, showing most of his teeth. "Well, they conquered us instead, to our great good, and my people lost their old false Father, and gained a new one.
*
Mostly due to my brother, my father here." He glanced down at Arhu. Arhu looked away, and purred.

"But the thought of the Winter has not been far from my mind, or my people's," Ith said to Rhiow. "It is a charged subject for us, as charged in its way as humankind's old story that you told me about the apple and the garden: and there is a serpent in that story too, though I am afraid it is not the Bright One Who is a shape I wear these days sometimes, or Who wears me— whichever. In any case, we are eager that the Winter should not come back, from whatever cause, for if it returns to the upper world, that will eventually affect the Old Downside as well. Since we have no guarantees from the Powers that this fate would never befall us again, I thought that we might seek to put guarantees of our own in place."

"You could get caught up in that kind of thing to the exclusion of everything else," Auhlae said, "if you weren't careful."

"Oh, indeed. We know well enough that every race dies," Ith said. "That alone has become obvious enough from studying other species' history. Entropy is running." The young-old, wise eyes looked a little tired already. "We cannot stop it. But this does not mean we need instantly to enter into a suicide pact with the Universe. We may forestall the event as long as possible... indeed the Powers would prefer that we do."

"Getting familiar with Them, are you?" Urruah said.

"No less than you," Ith said mildly. "Your good friend, Saash of the unending itch, now herself walks the floor of Heaven about the One's business, and the depths of reality echo to the thumping when she sits down to scratch. And she thought of herself as 'nothing special.' I am nothing special either, but I am also Father of my people now, and so I find myself chatting often enough with my people's Grandparents as I try to make some sense out of this terrible mass of data They've wished on me, and try to claw it into some shape that our new wizards will be able to handle."

"New wizards
already?"
said Arhu.

"They are hatching out even as we speak," Ith said. "Some seem to have been trying to be born for a long time, some say they have tried many times, but were always killed in the ongoing
hethhhiiihhh.
" Rhiow blinked at the word: the Speech said
holocaust
in her ear, but there were even more terrible implications in the word, speaking of a people who for many generations had simply been born to be killed, almost all new hatchlings being destined to feed the chosen warriors of the Lone Power's planned army.

"Now, though," Ith said, "there are more than twenty already. Our latency period is fairly short, and besides, there is the time difference between the Upworld and the Downside to consider. We are, in any case, making up for much lost time, which is a good thing, considering the importance of the gates we guard. The Downside will be alive with wizardry before very long, and all the better for it: it is not good for a world to go unmanaged. But our 'wizard's manual' is still in its early stages, and I have been kept very busy trying to codify it."

"I would have thought it would have just appeared," Urruah said. "As if it had always been there, now that your people's Choice is properly made. I mean, the information's all in the Speech after all, so your people won't have trouble understanding it."

"Yes, but first there's the question of what information a wizard of our people will routinely have access to," Ith said, "and what they'll have to ask for authorization from Higher Up to get."

"I would have thought the Powers would make that distinction themselves."

"No," Ith said. "We— upper-level field operatives— are given more autonomy than you might suspect. Surprising amounts of it." He opened his mouth to grin slightly, the amiable saurian smile that showed all those teeth. "The Powers' attitude is plainly, 'You're living in this universe: why would you be so dumb as to pull down the ceiling of the cavern on yourself? Be cautious running the place, but take what risks you think need to be taken.' And does it not say in the Estivations, 'I shall walk Your worlds as You do, as if they are mine... for so indeed they are'? So I find
I
must make these decisions, the Powers apparently feeling that one from inside a native 'psychology' will be best fitted to understand wizardry's best implementation for that psychology. Then there's the matter of how Seniors and Advisories will be chosen, and a very basic one: how the wizardry itself will manifest to my people. We've had all kinds of different modalities— voices heard, visions seen— but they've been haphazard, and I've been told that we should try to keep it to one or two modalities for the whole species, so that legend and tradition regarding their handling will have time to build up around them. At least we don't have to try to keep wizardry secret, the way the poor
ehhif
do. My wizardly children will lead normal lives... as far as any wizard's life can be considered normal."

"You're getting pretty organized," Arhu said.

"Order is a wonderful thing," Ith said, "when it flows from the roots of a matter rather than being imposed from the top down. And organization usually follows, yes, but not so much so that I can't slip out for a pastrami sandwich every now and then." He grinned at Arhu. "And we should try to meet soon in that regard: I've found a good place up on Eighty-sixth between First and Second. Meanwhile, though, I have other business in hand. They tell me you need me," he said to Rhiow. "And to my people's Stepmother I can only say, 'Tell me what you need, and it's yours.' "

Rhiow put her whiskers forward.

"Meanwhile," Ith said, turning his head sideways and giving Artie one of those peculiar looks of his, like a very large bird eyeing a very large worm, "is there any more of that pizza?"

Rhiow laughed. "No! Get your own. There's probably a fairly decent pizza place not too far from where you're getting your pastrami."

"No," Ith said, "I would say Eighty-sixth is something of a desert as regards pizza. Now if you go a little farther uptown— "

"Don't!"
Rhiow said. He and Arhu looked at her, startled. "Just
don't
," she said wearily. "Later. Later I will go and look for pizza with you. If there's still a reality left on Earth that involves pizza."

"All right," Ith said. "Back to the subject. While involved in the codification, I have been eagerly searching for a spell that would prevent a second Winter's fall. Now I see and hear from your interview with Hwallis that there is, or was, such a thing. The Whisperer does not know of it, though. Or if she did, it is lost."

"How would she lose anything?" Siffha'h asked.

"I do not know. But let us see the spell again, what you have of it."

Rhiow showed it to Ith where she had it laid out on the floor. He looked at it for a few moments, and then chuckled, a deep clicking noise in his throat. "Yes," he said, "there is a piece of my name, and another piece. And the Bright Serpent's name, which I would have thought was a new thing; but now it seems it is old, and existed from ancient times. Another piece of information temporarily lost, or submerged under formerly more aggressive archetypes. And see here." He put one claw down on one symbol of the spell, which flared briefly brighter in response. "Yes, this is the Ophidian Word in one of its new variants: my people are certainly involved— either the memory of our old tragedy, or the prophecy of our later intervention against repetitions of it. And here is the symbol for the Winter, and the indicator for the conditional branches of the target designation spell. There are definitely pieces missing: and this"—he tapped another symbol— "seems to indicate how many. Six other major parts. The master structure is hexagonal." He sat back, looking satisfied. "That makes perfect sense, for the universe has a broadly hexagonal bent: things tend to come in sixes." He flexed his claws, giving a little extra wiggle to the sixth claw on each forelimb. "Particle arrays, hyperstring structures..."

Arhu looked accusingly at Rhiow. "I thought you told me everything came in fives."

"Not
everythin
g," Rhiow said, in slight desperation. "Things to do with gates."

Ith gave her that sidewise look. "Possibly we have a paired underlying symmetry here," he said. "Dual symmetries of sixes and fives, conjoined at the functional level as elevens? The even and the odd..."

"Or the like and the unlike," Urruah said, interested. "But together, they make a prime."

Rhiow rolled her eyes. Since coming into his own, Ith sometimes went off into mathematical conjectures that completely lost her— a side effect, she thought, of coming of a species that was only now discovering abstract reasoning for its own sake, after having spent so many millennia in the darkness, thinking about nothing but survival and food. It was perhaps some side-gift of his wizardry: or, like Urruah's never-ending fondness for food and
oh'ra,
it might just be a hobby. Either way, it tended to make her head hurt.

"Ith, you're going to have to take it up with the Powers That Be," Rhiow said, "because I haven't the faintest idea. Right now we need someone to help us look for that spell, for the other parts of it, and to get them welded together. We may need it very badly in a very short time."

"Then I will come and do that for you," Ith said. "I will search everywhere I can think of. The museum here first, as you say: and then the museum in New York as well, and elsewhere, if I must."

Arhu glanced up, looking a little uneasy. "I don't know if I like the idea of taking the Father of his People away from them just now," he said. "This could be a dangerous time."

Ith looked at him with mild surprise. "Do fathers not go out to find food and protect their young, sometimes? The important thing is to come back afterwards.... Besides, events in one universe spread to others, sooner or later. By acting now, perhaps I save myself the need to act more desperately later."