"Maybe later," she said, "if you're good." And we're all still in one piece…
A train from Rye had just come in, and the last of its passengers were filtering off. Far down the platform, off to one side, stood two ehhif watching the others get off the train: a boy and a girl. They were young; Rhiow was no expert on ages, but she thought perhaps the young queen-ehhif was fourteenish, the tom a year or so younger. They looked like anyone else who might have come off the train— both wearing shorts and oversized T-shirts and beat-up running shoes, the queen wearing a fanny pack: a couple of suburban kids, apparently fresh in from up Westchester for a good day's hanging out. But these two had something none of the other commuters had— the shift and tangle of hyperstrings about them, which meant that they too were sidled.
"Prompt," Saash said, as they walked down the platform toward the two.
"Har'lh's plainly been keeping an eye on things," Rhiow said. Good. Because if we need help, I'd prefer it to be the kind that an Advisory would send…
As the team came up to them, the two young ehhif hunkered down to a level more comfortable for conversation. "We're on errantry," said the young queen, "and we greet you."
"You're well met on the errand," Rhiow said. "We can definitely use some help on this one."
"Yeah, that's what Carl said. I'm Nita; this is Kit."
"Rhiow; and Urruah there, and Saash; and Arhu—"
The young queen-ehhif looked at Arhu with interest. "You're new to this, aren't you," she said.
He gave her a look. "So what?"
"Hey, take it easy," she said. "You just reminded me a little of my sister, that's all."
"The day I look like any ehhif 's sister—"
Nita smiled, a little crookedly. "Sounds like her, too," she said, under her breath, to her partner.
"She meant only," said the young tom-ehhif, "that her sister just passed Ordeal a little while ago."
Arhu blinked at that. Rhiow said to him, "It happens sometimes that you get littermates who're wizards. Not so often as it used to: the tendency is for the trait to skip a couple of generations between occurrences in a family."
"Yeah," Kit said. "My dad says he thinks it's so your parents won't be too scared to have more kids… and so that you won't, either."
"I thought ehhif wizards usually kept their business secret from nonwizards," Saash said, curious. "Supposedly humans don't believe in wizardry… is that right?"
"Mostly they don't. Oh, we keep it private from everybody but family. It's the wizard's choice, in our species. Hide it or spill it, you can get in nearly as much trouble either way. But I guess we're lucky… our parents coped pretty well after the initial shock, though we still have a little trouble with them every now and then." Kit looked around him. "It's been pretty noisy down here this morning— they were pulling up a piece of track down there. Had to have jackhammers used on it: the guys said it had been melted right into the concrete. I take it that means this gate is the busted one."
Rhiow flirted her tail in agreement. "Yes. We'll be using a different one for our access, though: the Lexington Avenue local gate— it's had the least use lately. Har'lh tells me you've worked with it before?"
"Yeah," Nita said, "when its locus was still anchored upstairs. We used it for a rapid-transit jump when it was dislocated, some years ago. It was the usual thing— someone was digging up the potholes on Forty-second and messing with the high-tension power cables during a sunspot maximum. The combined structural and electromagnetic disruptions made the gate's stabilizer strings pop out of the anchor stratum, and the portal locus came loose and jumped sixty stories straight up." She smiled a small, dry smile. "Tom and Carl said that getting it back where it belonged, afterward, was interesting. That was you, was it?"
"Not me," Rhiow said, "my predecessor, Ffairh. He told me about it, though."
"And then after all that, you had to move it over to Lex, didn't you? But they'd moved the deli it was in back of when the construction started here."
"That's right, when they started renovating the Hyatt passageway. Everything's been pretty ripped up lately…." Rhiow looked around her. "Well, your expertise will be welcome… we're going a long way down on this run, and keeping the gate anchored and patent is going to be important."
"Shouldn't be a problem," Kit said. "Carl says you took a lot of care last time to fasten the gate down good and tight. We'll make sure it stays stuck open for you while you're down there. There shouldn't be any way a patent gate can be dislocated or interfered with."
Rhiow had her doubts this week. "That's what conventional wisdom would say," she said, "but the gates' behavior lately hasn't been conventional."
Nita shook her head. "We'll do the best we can for you," she said. "If we need help, we'll yell for Carl."
"Right. Let's get started," Saash said, and headed over for the gate.
It was as they had left it the other day: hanging there, the warp and weft of the hyperstrings glowing a slightly duller red than before, token of a lack of extension in the last day. Once more Saash sat up on her haunches, reached in, and plucked at the gate's diagnostic strings: they followed her claw outward, and light sheened down them, violet in the darkness. "Same as yesterday," she said to the two young wizards.
"Looks perfectly normal," Kit said.
"Yes, well, watch." Saash reached in again for the activation strings, pulled, and again came out with a double pawful of nothing.
Nita whistled softly. "Weird."
"Yes. I was kind of hoping it might have corrected itself," Saash said, sounding wry and slightly amused, "but fat chance."
Rhiow looked at her and was silently impressed, not for the first time, at the way Saash could hold such a casual tone when she was shivering inside. But that was her way, at work. Later, after this was done— assuming everything went all right— she would complain neurotically about her terror for days. But at the moment, she sounded like she was going for a nice sleep in the sun, followed by cream. I wish I could sound that confident….
Saash let go of the strings, settled back to all fours again, and glanced around. "So here's what we'll do," she said. "I'm going to pull the Lexington Avenue local gate's locus out of its present location and tether it over here temporarily so that you can keep an eye on both the bum gate and the one we've used. Theoretically we should be able to use the broken one to come back after we've fixed it; then the Lex gate can have the temporary tethers broken and it'll just snap back into place."
"Sounds sensible," Nita said. "One of us can stay over by Lex and redirect any wizards who turn up there to use it before the change in the gate's location shows up in their manuals."
"Fine," Saash said, "let's go, then." She trotted off, and the young queen-ehhif went after her, looking carefully down-track as she followed.
Arhu looked after the two of them, while the young tom-ehhif sat down on the edge of the platform, looking at the gate. "It must be an interesting line of work," Kit said. "I bet you get to travel a lot."
Rhiow laughed softly. "I wish! No, we're here mostly. The New York gates get nearly as much use as the ones at Tower Bridge or Alexandria. Not as much usage as the complex at Tokyo, maybe… but those would be the only ones to beat us. As a result, we're always having to fix something that's busted." She put her whiskers forward, slightly amused at a memory. "Last time I was scheduled for a weekend off, I got all the way to the big Crossings worldgating facility on Rirhath B before one of their gates broke, and I found myself helping them service it…." She made the extra-large smile that an ehhif would understand. " 'Wizard's holiday.' "
The young tom chuckled. "Yeah," he said, "I've had a couple of those myself—"
The darkness in front of them suddenly had another gate hanging in it: more oval than the first one, hanging closer to the cinders and concrete of the floor, almost in contact with the rails. It hyperextended as they watched, the bright lines of its curvature pulling inward and apparently away to vanishing-point eternity before
disappearing altogether, replaced by the oval image of the end of the Lexington Avenue local platform, and Nita standing there, looking through the aperture with an interested expression. Saash leaped neatly through, and the image vanished in lines of bright fire as the curvature snapped back flat again behind her. Numerous unnaturally bright "tether" lines could be seen stretching from equidistant points around the edges of the gate-weave, up into "empty" air or down into the ground, radiating outward in an array corresponding roughly (as it would have to, in a space with one dimension too few) to the vertices of a tesseract.
"Everything's set," Saash said. "Khi-t, I would strongly recommend that you put a general-warding circle around both of these when we're out of your way and down there working. I don't know that anything from that side might try to come through a patent gate, if it should stumble across one; but there are creatures in that part of Downside that, though they're just animals by both our standards, could cause a lot of trouble if they got loose in here."
"I'll take care of it," the young ehhif-tom said. He opened the book he was carrying, leafed through it for a moment and ran his finger down one page. "These personal-description parameters look right to you?"
Saash and Rhiow both looked down at the wizard's manual, which obligingly shifted the color of its printing so that they could more easily read the graceful curves of the printed version of the Speech; and Rhiow cocked her head to one side, hearing at the same time the Whisperer's translation of the printed material. "That's fine," she said. "Just one thing—" She put a paw out to the small block of print containing the symbols that, in wizardly shorthand, described Arhu. There were a lot of blank spaces in the equation that summed him up for spelling purposes. "That configuration," she said, "is changing rapidly. And in unexpected ways. Keep an eye on it…."
"Will do," Kit said.
"Let's go," said Saash. She reared up, slipped her paws into the weave of the second gate, and pulled the lines of light outward, wove them together—
The gate hyperextended again, this time the lines of its intraspatial contours seeming to be pulled to a much farther-out infinity than last time— impossible, but so it seemed, regardless. The lines stretched and stretched outward, and there was almost a feeling of the watcher being pulled outward as well, drawn thin, almost to nonexistence. Odd, Rhiow thought. Possibly something to do with this locus being so close to one that's malfunctioning—
—then snap, the feeling was gone: and through the gate came the golden light of somewhere else's summer afternoon…
Urruah leapt through without apparent hesitation, though Rhiow knew he had gone first so that no one should know how nervous he had been. "Just jump through," Rhiow said to Arhu. "At all costs, stay clear of the edges: even though there are safeties on the locus boundaries, if one of them goes wrong somehow, you could lose a tail, or leg, or something you'd miss more. You'll feel heavy on the other side. Be prepared for it…."
She purposely hadn't told him what else he was going to need to be prepared for, as Ffairh hadn't told her, all that time ago. Better not to create impressions about the desirability of one's state Downside… there would be enough temptations later. Arhu swallowed, crouched and tensed, and jumped through, almost as neatly as Urruah had.
There was a thump on the other side, and a yowl… but much deeper than a cat's yowl would have been. Kit craned his neck to see through, looking slightly concerned. "He okay?"
Rhiow laughed softly. "That's the question of the week. He's not hurt, anyway."
More yowling, this time tinged with surprise, was coming through the open gate. "Rhi," Saash said, "let's go, shall we, before our wonder child restarts those legends about giant demon cats in the tunnels…?"
Rhiow chuckled. "You've got a point."
"Dai stihó," Kit said, the wizard's casual greeting and goodbye in the Speech to another one: go well.
"Thanks," Rhiow said. She jumped through the gate: Saash let go the control strings, took aim, and followed her.
* * *
There was the usual moment's worth of disorientation as Rhiow felt her body adjust to its new status; then her vision cleared, and everything was fine again. Rhiow shook herself all over, settling the pelt— it was so close and short, compared to her usual fur, that she always felt slightly naked for the first few seconds. Saash, true to form, was sitting down and having a good scratch, watching Arhu with amusement.
"—Look at me! Look at me! I'm huge!" Arhu was going around and around in a circle, trying to get a good look at himself, but mostly looking as if he were chasing his tail. It was an amusing sight: the white patch at the tail's end was now nearly as long by itself as the whole tail had been. Rhiow thought privately that, if he survived to come here to hunt later, he was going to have to do it by speed, for camouflage wasn't going to be one of his strong points, not splashed all over with black and white the way he was. Though, then again, she thought, on moonlit nights, in broken country, it might work…. "And look at you!" Arhu said, staring at Saash. She smiled a little crookedly, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward in amusement. Saash was certainly worth looking at: a tortoiseshell lioness, almost a ton of muscle. "And you!" Arhu said to Rhiow. "And, oh wow," he said, seeing Urruah, whose tabby patterning had kept its color but gone much more tigerish, to suit his shape and size; he was nearly a taxicab high at the shoulder.
"What happened? Can we do this at home?"
"No," Urruah said. "Cats' bodies are the same size as their souls, here. Your soul remembers our ancient history, even if your body doesn't…."
"Look at all this! Where are we?"
"IAh'hah." Saash used the Ailurin slang that was as close as the average cat could come to pronouncing "New York."
He stared at Saash. "You're crazy!"
"This is New York, all right," Urruah said. "Five hundred thousand years ago, maybe… and ten or twenty worlds over."
"But this isn't our world," Arhu said, not entirely as a question.
"No," Rhiow said, looking up and around through the golden air. "Ours is related to it… but this one is older… or it's simply still the way ours was, long ago. Hard to tell: time differs, from world to world."
"And things that happen here… happen at home too?"
"Yes. Often in different shapes, ones you might not expect at first. Know how when you look in a puddle, you see yourself? But the image is twisted: the wind touches it, it wrinkles…"
"Yeah."
"Like that. Except this world would be the real you… and our world would be the image in the puddle, the mirror."
Arhu opened his mouth, shut it again. "You mean… this is the real world? This is the way we're supposed to look?"
"I didn't say that." Now it was getting tricky. It had taken Rhiow a good couple of years' study to fully understand the implications of interdimensional relations between worlds. "This world is… in some ways… realer than ours. Closer to the center of things. But, Arhu, there are other worlds a lot more central than this one… and you can go sshai-sau trying to define reality merely in terms of centrality. I wouldn't suggest you start working on a definition at this early stage. Let's just say that this is a place where you can be different… but you take care not to do it for too long."
"Why not? I like this! It would be great to be this way all the time!"
The paw came down on him, heavy, from behind, and pushed Arhu down flat. Arhu twisted his head around to gaze up into the huge, silver-gray face that loomed over him, narrow-eyed, fangs showing just a little. Though Urruah's markings always went tigerish when he was Downside, he always looked, to Rhiow, more leopardlike. But in this form he was also still the biggest of them: and for all the lions' fearful reputation, leopards are known even by ehhif to be the more dangerous and terrible hunters, wily and fearfully powerful.
"You wouldn't like it," Urruah said, "if you didn't have a mind."
Arhu just lay there and looked at him.
"Oh, sure," Urruah said, "hunt big game, conquer a terri
tory miles long, be big, be strong, eat anything you like, have trees fall over at the sound of your roar: sounds great, doesn't it? But there's a price, because none of us are supposed to stay out of our proper worlds for very long. Little by little you start to forget who you are. You forget your other lives if you've had any. You lose your wizardry, assuming you've achieved it. You lose your history. Finally you lose your name. And then it's as if you never existed at all, since when you die and Iau calls your name to issue you with your next life, no one answers…." Urruah shrugged.
Arhu lay there looking rather stunned. "Okay, okay," he said, "I guess I see your point. I like being me."
Urruah stood back and let him up. Arhu shook himself off, sat down, and took a moment's he'ihh to correct his slightly rumpled head fur. "But that stuff only happens if you stay here a long time?" he said.
"As far as we know, yes," Rhiow said.
He looked rather sharply at her. "So what happens if you die Downside before you forget?"
It was the crucial question, the one that had made it harder than usual for Rhiow to get to sleep last night. "I don't know," she said.
"You mean… even if you have more lives… you still might not come back." He was wide-eyed. "You mean you just die dead… like a bug or an ehhif?"
"Maybe," Rhiow said. The Whisperer was silent about this possibility… and the concept that Hrau'f the Silent herself had no information on this subject was not one that filled Rhiow with joy. Moreover, she had absolutely no desire to be one of those who would supply the information….
Arhu shook his head until his ears rattled, then craned his neck to look up, gazing at the rank above rank of gigantic trees, vanishing above them into the mist of a passing cloud. "It's a mountain…" he said.
"It's the Mountain," Saash said. "This is the center of everything."
"What's that tall thing up at the top…" His voice trailed off, his ears twitching, as the Whisperer had a word with him.
"Oh," he said then, and sat down with a thump.
"Yes," Rhiow said. "And down among the Tree's roots, into the caverns, is where we're going."