People walked past them, some well dressed, some seemingly poor but clean though somewhat threadbare, some practically in rags: and no one seemed to notice the mud. A few heads turned when one of the motor vehicles passed, though. Rhiow couldn't tell whether it was because they were unusual, or simply because of the noise they made. Apparently the muffler had not yet been invented.
"Now what are those doing here?" Urruah said. "Internal combustion engines aren't until the turn of the century."
"Neither is the word for smog," Rhiow said, looking up at the dingy, near-opaque sky, "but that doesn't seem to have stopped these people: they've got that, too."
"What time would you say this is?" Rhiow said. "The light is so peculiar."
Urruah shook his head. "Late afternoon? Not even smog could make it this dim."
"I wouldn't be too sure," Rhiow said.
"Everything here feels wrong," Arhu said. "All of it." His face had lost the disgusted expression it had worn a moment before: his eyes looked slightly unfocused.
"You're not kidding," Urruah said. "Something's happened to history... and I don't like the look of it. Or the smell of it."
Rhiow curled her lip at the smell from the street. "This would have been here anyway," she said, picking up one forefoot out of the mud. "The kind of sanitation we take for granted in our own time was something these ehhif were only beginning to see the need for. And their technology's not up to it, even if they did see the need. There are more people in this city than in almost any other in the world, and all they've got are brooms and dustpans... and four million ehhif and a quarter million horses inside the city limits." She smiled grimly. "Work it out for yourself. How many cubic miles of— "
"Please," Urruah said, and sneezed.
They started to walk, looking for someplace clean. They found no such place, at least in the public roads. Only the moat surrounding the Tower led up to patches of green grass beneath the old stone walls. Their structure was unchanged from what Rhiow had seen in modern London, but they were stained black by who knew how many years of air pollution. Slowly the three of them made their way around toward the river, looking down it from a spot that would have been close to where Rhiow and Arhu had stood only a few hours before.
"This is all wrong," Arhu whispered. Across the river was a great palisade of buildings, all of which were taller than architecture of the ehhif-queen Victoria's time could possibly have been.
"This stuff shouldn't be here," Arhu said. "And look at that."
They looked at the great bridge, crowned with its pyramidal towers and boasting its high cross-walkway, which appeared on so many of the postcards and T-shirts the ehhif sold near Tower Hill Underground station. "That's wrong too," Arhu said.
Rhiow looked at him. "Are you sure? Even in our world, it's pretty old— "
Urruah stared off into the distance for a moment as he cocked an ear to listen to the Whisperer. "He's right, though," he said presently. "She says that in our world, this wasn't built until eighteen eighty-six. No matter what year this is in the spread we're heading for, that's still too soon."
"Interesting," Rhiow said, and shook herself to abort a beginning shiver. "Something to do with the technology, maybe?"
"They've got a whole lot too much of it, if you ask me," Urruah said.
"Of technology?" Rhiow said, and looked around her. Overhead, something very like a helicopter went by in a loud chatter of rotors. What she couldn't understand was why a helicopter needed flapping wings as well.
"Of the wrong kind of technology," Urruah said. "Rhi, this timeline has been contaminated... seriously contaminated."
"And you don't think it's an accident."
"Do you? Really?"
She looked around her at the vista down the river, of cranes standing up and erecting new buildings of steel and plate glass, but still somehow in a style that was essentially Victorian, complicated and, to her eye, overdecorated. She looked down the face of the river, which was full of shipping— not sail, as at least some of that shipping still should have been, but metal ships, running on internal combustion or (in just a very few cases, as in a technology that was rapidly being left behind) steam. She saw the design of many of those ships that were making their way to and from the Pool of London: lean, low, forward-thrust, angular shapes such as she had seen often enough in New York Harbor— battleships and cruisers in the modern mold, all fanged with guns and other weapons she couldn't recognize. There were a lot of those warships: they came and went as regularly, it seemed, as the tour ships that ran up and down the Thames in Rhiow's native time. For all its bustle of business and its aura of ehhif success and power, this London also had a grim air about it.
"No," Rhiow said. "This contamination is purposeful. The Lone One has been busy here."
"Very busy, I'd say," said Urruah. "And the contamination has to have happened a good while ago: not even ehhif can make changes like this overnight. We've got to find out when this alternate timeline was seeded."
Rhiow looked around her and lashed her tail in frustration. "We're going to have a good time finding that out," she said. "We can't just ask the ehhif."
"We can ask People," Arhu said.
"Yes," said Rhiow, "but which ones? We could waste a lot of time talking to the wrong sources... and I have a feeling time isn't something we dare waste here."
They walked down to the edge of the river, looking up and down its length. The water was olive-colored and filthy, and it stank. A few desultory seabirds floated on it, or fished optimistically among the weeds and garbage for something to eat. Above it all, the dirty air billowed, unpleasantly visible.
"For all their technology, they've been oddly selective about how they use it," Urruah said. "They obviously have electricity, but why are they still burning coal in their dens? There's internal combustion being used out on the water, but why so little in the streets— why all the horses and dirt?"
"It looks like some of the ehhif have access to this technology, but not all that many," Rhiow said. It was a problem that their own world shared, though not quite in this way.
"You were right," Arhu said suddenly, "about it being late afternoon."
"Oh?" Rhiow said.
"Yeah. Look, the Moon's coming up."
They looked eastward down the river. Through the dirty haze, a dim round source of light had managed to rise above the buildings cluttering that end of the Thames basin. She looked at it, irrationally relieved that at least something was performing as expected around here.
But then she heard Urruah gulp. Rhiow took another look as the Moon lifted a little higher above the thickest of the murk.
"That's not our Moon," Urruah said softly.
The shape was right. The phase was gibbous. But the face, the face was blotted with darkness, its surface scarred: not with the usual dark maria, but with massive craters and fissures, and great plumes and patches of dark dust.
Urruah sat down. Rhiow was too shocked to move at all.
"What in Iau's name has happened here?" she whispered.
"It's sure not the Moon we started with," Urruah said.
Rhiow couldn't take her eyes off it. "Well, even our moon at home isn't the one we started with. Things happened to it after it was born."
"But there are stories about that," Urruah said. "Not the things you mean. It was pure white, once, without a mark. Then the Lone Power in her feline form came, and saw it, and hated it. Sa'Rráhh blotted it with Her paw that was all newly stained with night, with the death she had invented. She could never bear that anything should remain the way the One made it, if She had anything to say about the matter."
"I thought the Moon was supposed to be the Old Tom's eye," Arhu said.
"Of course it is," Rhiow said. "And it's also just a big piece of rock splashed out of the Earth in its formative stages. It'd be a poor kind of world where there was just one explanation for things."
Urruah looked away from that terrible Moon to give Rhiow a wry look.
"Think of it as a conditional hyperquadratic equation," he said to Arhu. "Depending on conditions and context, the same equation gives you different answers at different times. But all the answers are correct. Mythology, philosophy, and science are just three different modalities used to assess the same data, and they can coexist just fine, if you let them. In fact, they'll do it just fine whether you let them or not: they have other business than sitting around waiting to see whether you approve."
Arhu looked up at the smudged Moon and shivered. "I don't like it," he said.
"Believe me, you're not alone there," Rhiow said softly. Written there dark above them was a blunt, nasty restatement of the reason why there were wizards. The world, which should have been perfect, was marred: marred with and by malice long aforethought. The shadow-smudged, crater-scarred Moon of their own world was evidence enough of the Lone Power's effect in both symbolic and "real" modes. The terrible destructive force that had struck the Earth very young, in what looked like one of the earliest attempts by the Lone One to prevent the rise of life and intelligence there, had not missed. Rhiow still wondered sometimes whether It had slightly miscalculated Its aim, or whether the Powers That Be had Themselves interfered, interposing Their power just enough to help the huge mass of magma splashed out of the planet's still-molten body to draw itself together and congeal in near orbit. Even when mending the marred, They never overexerted Themselves, all too aware of the energy needed for the long battle lying ahead of them through this universe's lifetime. No attempt would have been made to fly in the face of natural law and try to get life to arise on the second world. It would have been left to cool at its own pace, its low mass mandating the loss of the sparse store of atmospheric elements that arose from it during the cooling: and all the while the fury of the frustrated Lone One would have been allowed to mark itself on the barren Moon in storm after storm of meteoric impacts, eons of merciless cratering, and the punctured crust flooding the Moon's surface with the last flows of lifeblood-lava that hardened dark into the great maria, the lighter elements at last all boiled away into the freezing dark of space. A dead world, now, with the mark of the Devastatrix's dark paw pressed on it, livid and chill— a clear message: I missed, this time. But I will never rest until I finish what I began.
The message seemed to have been much more forcefully stated in this universe, though. I am much closer to finishing, it seemed to say. Though Iau only knew what It had been up to.
"I think going home would be a good idea," Arhu said.
"Believe me, I'm with you," Urruah said, "but we have a few things to do first. We need to find out what year this is, if we can— "
"No," Rhiow said. "No, I think Arhu's idea is a good one."
"What?"
"Listen to me," Rhiow said. "Every minute we stay here makes it worse. Potentially, anyway. No, listen! Urruah, there's no question that this contamination has happened. Our being here has confirmed it... has made it real for us. And you know what that means. What's happened at our end of time?"
She watched Urruah start to look a lot more concerned. There was a variant of what some ehhif called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that pertained to alternate universes. While you might postulate the existence of an alternate, even be faced by evidence of its existence— as Rhiow's team and the London team had been— that universe did not really "exist" for you until you visited it. Once you did, and its reality had become part of your own— not by consensus, but by direct experience— your own universe also then began to change as a result. This was one of the principles that made wizards so chary of indulging in pleasure trips outside their own universe. For one thing, there was usually plenty of pleasure to be found locally... and for another, once you came back from an alternate-universe jaunt, there might be no "locally" left: or not one you would recognize.
Arhu was looking from Rhiow to Urruah and back again with some confusion. "What's the matter? Is something wrong back home?"
"She's saying there might be no more home," Urruah said, glancing around him, "the longer we stay here. Fortunately, timelines don't wipe themselves out in a matter of seconds, the way people think, when there's a change. Causality is robust, and it tries hard to stay the way it is to begin with: the variables in the equation will slosh around for a good while before an alternate universe settles fully into place. As a rule," Urruah said. "Unless the change is so big that causality just can't resist it at all."
They all looked up at the scarred Moon again. Rhiow shuddered, then she said, "Remember when we were talking about gating offplanet? Personal small-scale gating, I mean: via a spell-circle of your own construction..."
Arhu looked at Rhiow.
"I think this would be a good time for you to go ahead and do it," she said to Arhu. "Mind the radiation: there's a fair amount of it, once you're out of the atmosphere's protection. All you need is a standard forcefield spell, the one we were working with last month. You can build the defense against the ionizing radiation into the forcefield at the same time you're loading in enough air to last you for the visit."
Arhu looked at her and licked his nose. "You have to wonder," Urruah said, looking away from the Moon with difficulty, "what could cause that kind of effect. I think we need to find out."
There was a long silence. "Would you come with me?" Arhu said.
Urruah glanced at Rhiow. "I'm sure he could handle it himself," he said. "But just this once..." And he glanced up at the Moon again. "That is so bizarre."
They walked a little farther down the riverbank to find a place where there was less mud, just under the shadow of the Tower's walls. There was an old disused dock there, leading a little way out into the water. Gratefully enough they stepped up onto it, and Arhu headed down toward the end of it, where recent weather or wavewash had mostly scoured the rotting planks clean. Here he started to walk the circle they would need, leaving the pale tracery of graphics in the Speech behind him as he walked and muttered.
Urruah watched him with an expert's eye. "He's been practicing that one for a while," he said.
Rattled as she was, Rhiow couldn't help but smile. "The way you've been practicing that timeslide?"
"Uh, well." Urruah sat down and started to wash his face, then made a face at the taste of his paw, and stopped. "Rhi, you know I wouldn't step out of bounds. Not on this kind of stuff. It scares me."
"It's sure scaring me," Rhiow said. "I can't wait to get back— it's like fleas under the skin, the fear. But it can't be helped. We need to do this first."
Arhu had finished the first layer of his circle and had tied the wizard's knot: now he was laying in the coordinates for the Moon and the pockets that would trap and hold adequate air inside the spell for the three of them. "It was a nice piece of work, regardless," Rhiow said. "That slide."
"Thanks," Urruah said. "It didn't get much approval in some quarters, though."
"Oh?"
"Fhrio."
"Just what the Snake is his problem?" Rhiow muttered.
"I don't know. Just generalized jealousy, I think. Or else he just really is territorial about anything to do with 'his' gates. I never thought I'd see a Person so territorial. I swear, he's like an ehhif that way."
"Maybe he was one in his last life," Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. There were numerous jokes among People about how such an accident might happen, mostly suggesting that it was a step up on the scale of things for the ehhif.
"Please," Urruah said. "It makes my head hurt just thinking about it."
Arhu stopped, looked up at them. "You want to come check your names?"
They walked over to the circle and jumped into it. Rhiow examined her name and found everything represented as it should be, but there was something odd about one of the symbols that was normally a constant. It was a personality factor, something to do with relationships: it was suggesting a change in the future, though whether near or far, Rhiow couldn't tell.
"Where did you get this?" she asked, prodding the symbol with o
ne paw.
Arhu shrugged. "It came out of the Knowledge: ask the Whisperer."
Rhiow waved her tail gently at that. Sometimes such things happened to a wizard who routinely did a lot of spelling: you saw a change in the symbology before it had reflected itself in your own person, or before it seemed to have so reflected itself. Then you were faced with the question of changing it back to a more familiar form— and wondering whether you were thereby keeping yourself stuck in some situation that was meant to change gradually— or leaving it the way it was, and wondering what in the worlds it might mean. Rhiow took a long breath, looking at it, and left it alone.
Urruah straightened up, apparently having found nothing untoward in his own name, and said, "It looks fine. Is everything else ready?"
Arhu stared at him. "You're not going to check it?"
"Why should I?" Urruah said. "You passed your Ordeal: you're a wizard. You're not going to get us killed." He sat down and started washing again, making faces again, but this time persisting.
Rhiow sat down too, there being no reason to stand. "Go on," she said to Arhu, "let's see what we see."
Arhu looked around him a little nervously, then stepped to the center of the spell and half closed his eyes, a concentrating look. Rhiow watched with some interest. Spelling styles varied widely among wizards of whatever species: there were some who simply "read" the words of a spell out of the Whispering, and others who liked to memorize large chunks; some who preferred the sound of the words of the Speech spoken aloud, and some who felt embarrassed to be talking out loud to the universe and preferred to keep their contracts with it silent. Arhu was apparently one of these, for without a word spoken— though Rhiow could feel, as if through her fur, that words in the Speech were being thought— she felt the spell starting to take: checking for her presence and Urruah's, sealing the air in around them, and then the transit—— abrupt, quicker than she was used to, but that was very much in Arhu's style. One moment they were looking at the dirty river flowing between its sludgy banks, and the foul air snuggling down against it: then everything went black and white.